SOURCE: Luckhurst, Roger. “The Signature of J. G. Ballard.” In ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard, pp. 151-81. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997.

This book [‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard] has been concerned with frames and borders throughout, and the strange lapsus in their operations that Ballard's texts produce. Being between science fiction and the ‘mainstream’, modernism and postmodernism, avant-garde (‘high’ texts in advance) and après-garde (‘low’ texts dragging behind), have been positions carefully examined, as have Ballard's explicit thematization of permeability, invagination, the peculiar space between catastrophe and catastrophe, and the uncanny protrusions into the empty spaces of supermodernity, those zones of transit that lie between elsewheres.

Every critic would desire (for wouldn't every reader demand this?) to capture the essence of their chosen texts, squaring possible hermeneutic violence with an advance in understanding. But in some ways, this has been a book about Ballard's means of escaping capture, the ‘lines of flight’ that leave contextual, generic and theoretical frames somehow inadequate. This is not in itself a disaster; rather, it is the nature of my interest in Ballard—a writer of texts that lure theoretical framings only to throw them into question in enlightening ways.

But perhaps this is not enough; one more effort (that is always the lure) might reach the essence, the singular affectivity of Ballard's work, the core of its oscillating fascination/repulsion. If the focus was tightened, could that enigmatic core finally offer itself up? What would it take to render Ballard's texts transparent, finally readable?

UN/READABILITY

In his monograph on Ballard David Pringle lists a series of objects that he considers ‘unforgettably “Ballardian”’: abandoned airfields, sand dunes, half-submerged buildings, advertising hoardings, drained swimming pools. The list continues on and on, carried away by the pleasure of nominalizing the ‘Ballardian’. Pringle then asks:

What do all these heterogeneous properties have in common? They are Ballardian—any reader with more than a passing acquaintance with his work will vouch for that—but what do they mean, and are they interconnected in more than a purely private and autobiographical manner?

(Earth is the Alien Planet, 15-16)

Harlan Ellison also states: ‘Ballard … seems to me to write peculiarly Ballardian stories—tales difficult to pin down as to one style or one theme or one approach but all very personally trademarked Ballard’ (458). Tautology is the only way to determine this object: Ballard writes Ballardian texts. Both of these statements hint, in those phrases ‘purely private and autobiographical’ and ‘very personally trademarked’, at a fear of the fundamental unreadability of the texts, the reader trapped forever in tautology, never getting beyond the surface. Private iconography is one way of opening a reading, determining a singularity; everything returns to the name, even as what is said in that name remains enigmatic, for the ‘purely private’ leads beyond the text into the body of the writer. The other route is into the texts themselves, grouping them, following the structures of repetition of theme, image and character. However, a similar disappearance is affected, for to analyse the style is, in Ellison's words, like looking at ‘[t]he most exquisite Wyeth landscape’ which, ‘when examined more and more minutely, begins to resemble pointillism, and finally nothing but a series of disconnected coloured dots’ (459).

Pringle and Ellison attempt to establish the absolute singularity of Ballard's texts, to isolate the core of their fascination, but both also signal the difficulty of this project, for to project meaning ‘outside’ the text into the signature of Ballard is to close it off from reading; on the other hand, to locate meaning in the innermost recess of the text, is either to witness its disappearance into ‘disconnected coloured dots’ or else to transform the text into private language, one which is equally unavailable for reading. That Pringle's questions are rhetorical, that he begins to elaborate a reading of Ballard's texts, indicates that reading is, of course, possible; even when ‘ultimate’ meaning is projected ‘outside’ or encrypted ‘inside’, the texts partake of general language, of a relative recognizability according to generic codes, of the institution of literature. And yet those forms of access—language, generic code, institution—all situate Ballard's specificity within the general; the ‘uniqueness’ of his work undergoes dispersal once more. For Pringle and Ellison, it might be said, reading is possible, but this impetus to read is driven by the seductiveness of that tautologous core—Ballard's Ballardianism—which either refuses to give itself up, remaining private, or which gives itself up only to disappear in general codifications.

No text, however, is totally ‘private’ or totally ‘public’, in the sense of being dispersed through general language. As Derrida states: ‘A text lives only if it lives on, and it lives on only if it is at once translatable and untranslatable … Totally translatable, it disappears as a text, as writing, as a body of language. Totally untranslatable, even within what is believed to be one language, it dies immediately’ (‘Living On’, 102). In another way, no text is completely ascribable to the signature (for that would situate all meaning in the body of the signer, ‘outside’ the text), and no text is purely idiomatic (for that would be a private, unique language wholly internal to the text and inaccessible to laws of reading). The enigma, the fascination that compels a desire to pin down the specificity of an oeuvre, is in fact generated in the space between readability and unreadability, in the tensions created by this space.

Ballard's work lends itself well to an analysis in terms of signature and idiom, for these two directions, one leading outwards the other inwards, have possessed a certain governance over the critical compulsions to render his fiction readable. Once Ballard published his two ‘autobiographies’, Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women, they were seized on, in effect, as signed confessions, detached from fictional space but working as decoding machines to render autobiographically readable the body of his work. If that produced difficulties, for the operation of the signature is not so straightforward, this is nothing to the tensions of readability and unreadability that complicate the attempt to isolate Ballard's ‘unique’ idiom, his textual signature; a text like Vermilion Sands begins to promise a pure instance, only to find itself bewilderingly disseminated. These are the texts that will be the focus of my one last effort, moving between what is allegedly transparently autobiographical to the frustrations of the opacity of Ballard's peculiar idiom.

THE PARAPH: EMPIRE OF THE SUN AND THE KINDNESS OF WOMEN

J. G. Ballard has been mystifying and embarrassing readers for much of his career. Praise is mixed with comments on the awkwardness of his prose, perplexity at his intent and the impossibility of siting his work within comfortable frames. I have attempted to display the effect in which Ballard is situated within the SF/mainstream binary only as he is projected elsewhere: when science fiction critics praise him, it is for transcending the genre; mainstream critics celebrate his transformation of science fiction tropes as long as they remain inside genre boundaries. This process effectuates a constant double displacement, and the difficulty of siting his work results from this uncertain nonsite between science fiction and the mainstream. Both groupings reacted violently to pieces like The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash, which were left in lengthy suspension outside any frames of readability until very recently.

One way of dealing with such extremity is simply to refuse it, to render it external either to science fiction or the mainstream. An attendant effect of this, however, is Ballard's occupation of the strange space of the ‘cult writer’. The cult can cut a swath through institutional framings of the high/low, serious/popular binary to appeal to an unforseeably admixed sodality of readers. As Umberto Eco notes, ‘cult’ texts are read transgressively: the ‘low’ can be elevated to the ‘high’ or vice versa (‘Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage’, Travels in Hyperreality). However, cults coagulate around secrets, arcana, are performed through private languages, gestures and rituals, and depend for their survival on an uncomprehending exteriority, whose disapprobation merely intensifies the lure of the cult. One way of ‘saving’ Ballard becomes only another form of marginality.

This secrecy has nevertheless been breached on two occasions. In a way that apparently ejected him from the double marginalization of ‘science fiction’ or the ‘cult author’, Ballard has been received and understood, with massive critical and commercial success, in his two ‘autobiographical’ novels, Empire of the Sun (1984) and The Kindness of Women (1991).

The sudden visibility of Ballard and Ballard's work in 1984 (Booker prize nominee, Guardian Fiction Prize) is no less astonishing for the equally sudden disappearance and then repeated ‘discovery’ in 1991 (the week of publication saw major interviews on Radio 3, Radio 4, a documentary on BBC2, serialization in The Independent newspaper, and later, that most English of accolades, Ballard on Desert Island Discs).

The reason for this sudden acceptability—a conjunction of mass audience with critical elevation to ‘serious’ novelist—can be incontravertibly traced to a perceived generic shift: SF to ‘autobiography’. More than this, Empire could be rendered generically safe in another sense: it was a Second World War novel. These terms of acceptance are problematic, however. The logic of the argument proceeds thus: Empire and Kindness can be detached from the oeuvre in their generic shift; both can be read as new additions to an honourable ‘confessional’ mode, thus escaping the derogatory appellation of ‘science fiction’. At the same time these texts can then be re-attached to the oeuvre as the ‘straight’ texts which finally decode the bizarre and perverse aberrations that had gone before, rendering the fiction autobiographically comprehensible.¹ In other words, the autobiographies supposed another contract—one, if not of transparency, then of authentification by a signed confession. To the name that adorns the cover of a fiction is added the paraph, the flourish of the signature, that seemingly guarantees authorial sincerity as a bulwark against the dangers and seductions of the fictive. …

.....

The dominant media reception of these works clearly deployed them as autobiographical decoding machines. Of Empire it was said that it was ‘the key to the rest of an extraordinary oeuvre and central to his project’ (Webb), ‘the first stage in a comprehensive decoding’ (Murray); of Kindness, that it ‘provides a framework for comprehending much that is disturbing in his writing’ (Blow), that it ‘loops together all the strands of a story that, in the course of fictionally processing his life, reveals how and where Ballard acquired his distinct gallery of images for his literature’ (Kemp). It now becomes ‘tempting to see all his earlier fiction as a kind of displacement activity’ (Barber, ‘Alien at Home’).

The logic of this repeated argument is a retrospective rereading of the prior science fiction as encrypted autobiographical performance. Inverting the order of the series, Empire and Kindness become the paradigms that decrypt and displace the science fiction from simple self-identity; a nongeneric ‘secret’ can now be implanted to explain Ballard's perverse attachment to such a juvenile genre.² Peter Brigg detects the model Vonnegut provided for the writing of Slaughterhouse-5 in these proposals, that ‘the authors worked through a series of science fiction novels to develop the style to express the almost inexpressible aspects of their own experiences’ (J. G. Ballard, 106)—something, apparently, that could not be performed within science fiction. This downgrades the science fiction texts to ‘drafts’ of a ‘final’ literary text. However, this move cannot be limited to an attempt to legitimate writers associated with science fiction; it often informs the theory of autobiography in general. The autobiography is ‘the symptomatic key to all else he did’ (Olney, 4); the ‘autobiographical key’ (Gusdorf, 46) unlocks the work, it is ‘the magnifying lens, focusing and intensifying that same peculiar creative vitality that informs all the volumes of his collected works’ (Olney, 3-4). Lejeune suggests that this produces an ‘autobiographical space’ (12), which retrospectively occupies and ‘re-reads’ the fictional work.

Autobiographical readings have a clear explanatory power whose lure cannot be simply rejected, and yet they are dangerous if they reductively claim to establish the correct reading. For Gusdorf, the peculiar force of autobiography is inextricably connected to Western concepts of individualism. It offers the unity of identity across time, interpreting life in its totality, ‘a second reading of experience … truer than the first because it adds to experience itself consciousness of it’ (35). Gusdorf, though, abandons any claim to factual truth in the text, preferring the somewhat religiose ‘theodicy of individual being’ (39).

Olney too dispenses with simple considerations of ‘truth-telling’, as well as genre or historical development, and argues that autobiography comes from the ‘vital impulse to order that has always caused man to create’ (3). Any systematizing knowledge arises from this ‘innate’ patterning. Olney proposes that this ‘vital principle’ is outside any notion of life as linear narrations, outside ‘experience’ or even ‘memory’. Lejeune is more pragmatically concerned with defining the genre: autobiography is a retrospective prose narrative, written in such a way as to clearly identify author, narrator and character as the same person (as distinct from biography and the novel). At this stage, the slightest non-coincidence of terms bars entry to the autobiographical. This is the terms of the pact, signed by the author and countersigned by the reader. The proper name ensures fixity; Lejeune is almost pathologically concerned to counter the problem of the textual ‘I’ as shifter (an empty, non-referential place within the enounced which is filled, every time, by specific contextual factors) by tying it back to the proper name of the author which appears on the cover. Once again, this is a formulation which is not concerned with fact or truth (which can never be textually established, as Mansell states), but with the sincerity of the enunciation, the condition of the signed/countersigned pact.

Autobiography is therefore given a transcendent position, in relation to the oeuvre as a whole and in itself: it accesses ‘deeper being’. A cursory reading of Empire and Kindness can witness a certain conformity to these debates. There is no problem, for example, with their ‘distortions’. The decision to separate Jim from his parents in the Lunghua camp, unlike Ballard's real experience, and the displacement of the manner of his wife's death causes no difficulties. As Ballard states: ‘It's literally true half the time, and psychologically true the whole of the time’ (Barber, ‘Alien at Home’). Kindness is also, far more explicitly than Empire, apparently structured in terms of the retrospective discovery of a patterning which informs the writer's life and work, with ‘Each of my novels … reflected in a section of the book’ (Pickering). So far so good, but there seem to me to be three related problems with this autobiographical theory and the structure of detachment/reattachment to the oeuvre when applied to Ballard.

The first revolves around the terms in which autobiography is delineated: sincerity of the pact. This does not refer to the text itself, but to the edges of the text, the contextual determination which establishes autobiography as autobiography. Since the fictive has a disconcerting ability to mimic the textual appearance of autobiography, ‘our expectations depend heavily upon all sorts of obvious clues to authorial intention such as a preface, autographs, even cover blurbs or literary classifications’ (Stone, 6). Philippe Lejeune's theorization of the pragmatics of the ‘autobiographical pact’ may try to determine genre through retrospection, the identity of the author, narrator and central character, but ultimately Lejeune concludes that ‘the fringe of the printed text … controls the entire reading (author's name, title, subtitle, name of the collection, name of the publisher, even including the ambiguous game of prefaces)’ (29).

John Sutherland has argued for the importance of covers in determining responses and takes as his opening example the hardback edition of Empire of the Sun. He states:

What will condition the reader's experience of the novel are 3 points, all stressed as being important in the jacket material: (1) Empire of the Sun draws on autobiographical experience and therefore carries a more complex, ethical cargo than most fiction; (2) it is a ‘departure’ from Ballard's normal (science fiction) work; (3) it is the crowning achievement of his work in fiction—the point to which all his previous novels tend. It seems clear to me that someone entering Empire of the Sun via the jacket apparatus must have a different set from the reader (particularly the reader new to Ballard) with a bald library copy (4).

Framing devices direct and constitute readings. That both this jacket material and the reviews cited earlier are crucial enframing devices is helpfully theorized by Gérard Genette in the concept of the paratext. For Genette, the paratext is that set of framing apparati which includes the framing on and around the text (peritext) and those at more distance (epitext: reviews, interviews, conversations). Since a text cannot appear in a naked state, unadorned, this edge determines a reading, however ‘auxiliary’ (261) it may appear.

One might expect that this welcome attentiveness to the textual edge would assist in an analysis of the insertion of a generic frame which strategically aims to distance Ballard's ‘autobiographies’ from his science fiction. Genette, however, and in spite of arguing that the paratext is ‘fundamentally heteronomous’ (261), suggests that this frame is ‘always the bearer of an authorial commentary either more or less legitimated by the author’ (262). In proposing that the multiple discourses of the paratext are fully traceable to a singular authority, Genette's foregrounding of the paratext is yet a frame that is marked only to be immediately effaced. In this, it performs according to Jacques Derrida's analysis of the parergon (the frame of the art-work): ‘the parergon is a form which has as its traditional determination not that it stands out but that it disappears … [and] melts away at the moment it deploys its greatest energy’ (The Truth in Painting, 61). It is as if the work generates its own frame, completely and exhaustively determines its own contextual enframing. It is significant in this respect that Genette cites Lejeune on autobiography to assert that the responsibility of the paratext always reverts to the author. For Lejeune it has to if the pact is to be at all functional, if the boundary between fictional oeuvre and autobiographical text is to remain in place. This is exactly the same for Gusdorf, Olney, and others, like Barrett Mandell, who asserts that autobiographies ‘ultimately emanate from the deeper reality of being’ (50). Jonathan Loesberg's comments on such statements are useful here: ‘the problems theorists attribute to writers of autobiography, the problems involved in accurately inscribing consciousness within a text, are actually problems faced by a reader of autobiography unwilling to accept textual indeterminateness as inherent in an autobiographical text’ (169).

In Ballard's case, it is evident that the enframing is not purely self-generated. It is the product in part of a mechanism to detach the ‘autobiographies’ in order to give them the textual sanction to operate as decoding machines for the oeuvre. And yet Empire and Kindness slip the fixity of the division that would render transparent the fictional code because they are, of course, autobiographical novels. Ballard's own epitextual work in interviews and other framing activities is to issue a double injunction that these texts both are and are not autobiographical. They are, in the sense that the Preface to Empire states that it is based ‘for the most part’ on his own experiences, and they are not, because the fictionalizing goes much further than the alteration of a few facts: Kindness often contradicts, rewrites and even erases sections of Empire. No simple identity, either, can be established between J. G. Ballard and the Jamie/Jim figure in the texts. This creates a ‘zone of indetermination’ (Lejeune, 19), in which, as a novel, it belongs too closely to the coincidence of author-protagonist, but the distance between them cannot allow it full autobiographical status. What the initial reviewers believed they had found in these texts—the key to unlock the opacity of his fictions—already founders over the indeterminate zone between fiction and autobiography which Empire and Kindness occupy.

The second problem extends this difficulty since it hinges on the relation between autobiography and oeuvre. The injunction to decode is performed by reading Ballard's oeuvre backwards: the landscape of The Drowned World finds its generation in the Shanghai skyline reflected on the paddy fields beyond the Lunghua camp; the obsession with dreams of flight in much of Ballard's work reverts back to childhood obsession and the ‘liberation’ of Shanghai by the American Air Force, staged in Empire as an almost theatrical performance just beyond the limits of the camp. Kindness accelerates this process of identification: Ballard's brief career as an Air Force pilot ties in to Traven's obsession with nuclear war in ‘The Terminal Beach’; the experience with LSD equates with the visions of The Crystal World no less than the transmogrification of Shepperton in The Unlimited Dream Company.

The separation on which this decoding depends is problematic for reasons which centre on repetition. No simple ‘departure’ comes with Empire; ‘The Dead Time’ is woven out of the ambivalent space between the official ‘end’ of the war and the beginning of ‘peace’ in the zone around Shanghai. Given the peritextual blurbs on each of his books, which always contain reference to his internment in China, this can already be read as generated out of ‘autobiographical’ elements. Secondly, there is the curious paragraph in Atrocity, the longest of the book, which is the T-cell's entry on his early life in Shanghai. It begins: ‘Two weeks after the end of World War II my parents and I left Lunghua internment camp and returned to our house in Shanghai’ (72). This entry is startling not least because it is closer to the facts than the subsequent ‘autobiographies’. The paragraph details the T-cell's attempt to travel to Japan on the invitation of a Captain Tulloch, and the oblique sense that the Japanese prisoners in the hold of the ship are victims of an impending American atrocity. This scene is repeated in Kindness (60-61), but witnessed from the ship on which Jim leaves for England. Tulloch appears in Empire, but as one of the roving bandits who is shot attempting to raid the Olympic stadium (see Chapter 39). A Tulloch is also a river-steamer Captain in The Drought. There is a sense here of a constant permutation of details, weaving between fiction and supposed autobiography.

This oscillation is further emphasized by the relation of Empire to the first part of Kindness, which returns to the Shanghai childhood. Although there is repetition (the same bizarre anecdote of the English driving out to survey battlefields, where, in Empire, ‘the rotting coffins projected from the loose earth like a chest of drawers’ with ‘dead soldiers … as if they had fallen asleep together in a dream of war’ [29, 32], and in Kindness ‘open coffins protruded like drawers in a ransacked wardrobe’ with ‘dead infantrymen … as if asleep in a derelict dormitory’ [25]), Kindness is far from a reprise. Of the three opening chapters, the first predates Empire (which jumps to the end of internment rather than detailing any time between arrival and the weeks before release), and the third at points openly re-writes Empire. There is, for example, a casual reference to the bombs at Nagasaki and Hiroshima: ‘Some of the prisoners even claimed to have seen the bomb-flash’ (42); those prisoners, in Empire, include Jim himself, and this gesture seems to defuse the vital image-chains of apocalyptic light in Empire. Also, the Jim of Kindness only learns from television reports of war crimes that ‘the Japanese had planned to close Lunghua and march us up-country’ (58); this effectively negates fifty or sixty pages of the forced march in Empire, some of its most powerful sequences. This includes the eventual escape from the march by lying amongst the dead, imitating them (272); a scene also in ‘The Dead Time’.

One should also consider the completely different emphasis of Kindness, the centrality of Jamie's relation to Peggy Gardner in the camp, entirely absent from Empire, and the key event which resonates through Kindness; the casual murder of the Chinese prisoner, tortured and asphyxiated on the derelict station platform. This seems to replace the intensity of the identification with and guilt over the youthful Kamikaze pilot in Empire (which itself had resonated with the fictive dialogue between Traven and the Japanese figure at the end of ‘The Terminal Beach’).

These interleavings and rewritings between fiction and perceived autobiography, between Empire and Kindness themselves, undermine the enframings that would separate putative decoder from code. The border of demarcation necessary to allow this model to operate is repeatedly transgressed. And in a complex effect of invagination, Ballard's work draws these ‘external’, parergonal questions into the very ‘inside’ of his texts. Again it has to be noted that the problematic siting of Ballard's work is repeated in the strange spatiality of border effects as a thematic throughout his work; this is no less the case in Empire and Kindness.

Empire continues that obsessive concern of Ballard's work and my reading of it: the permeability and impermeability of boundaries. Strictly speaking, it is a mistake to view Empire as a novel about World War II; the time of the war takes place in the blank space between parts I and II. Rather, it is about the impossibility of determining a clear boundary between beginnings and ends, ends and re-beginnings. Early in the book, Jim's father's joke ‘You might even start the war’ (24) haunts Jim after his torch signals appear to produce the first barrage from the Japanese warships (43). The latter half is full of obsessional conversations attempting to find an end, a closure. As the Japanese guards leave the camp, Jim proclaims ‘the war has ended!’, to which the weary response comes: ‘Ended again, Jim? I don't think we can stand it’ (231), and a few pages later: ‘Sure enough, the war's end proved to be short-lived’ (234). On the forced march, the ending seems more pressing: ‘“The war must end”. “It will”. “It must end soon”. “It has almost ended. Think about your mother and father, Jim. The war has ended”’ (edited, 225-26). If this seems definitive, Jim's immediate question opens a further border: ‘But … when will the next one begin?’ (256). Official endings are meaningless: ‘The whole of Shanghai and the surrounding countryside was locked into a zone where there was neither war nor peace, a vacuum …’ (305). Leaving Shanghai certain that ‘World War II had ended’, but wondering ‘had World War III begun?’ (332), it is unsurprising that only the final part of Kindness, after the 1960s, can be entitled ‘After the War’.

Between these blurred beginnings and endings, Empire moves from one bounded zone to another. ‘Walls of strangeness separated everything’ (50), strange not least because of the inversions that attend these zones. The charmed life of the ex-patriates continues until 1941 because the International Settlement is a peculiar pocket within the colonial landscape. Once overrun, the zone retracts to the ‘sealed worlds’ (86) of the abandoned houses on Amherst Avenue. Jim is constantly on the wrong side of the border: initially misplaced to a Navy hospital (and within that, to a misplaced ward), he misses the round-up of European and American civilians and finds it impossible to surrender (‘Jim had pondered deeply on the question of surrender, which took courage and even a certain amount of guile. How did entire armies manage it?’ [110]). ‘Safe’ as a prisoner, there is the farcical attempt to find a prison camp that will accept him. In Lunghua much of the time is spent strengthening the camp defences in order to keep the Chinese out (the fence, for Jim, is, as ever, permeable—he is sent out by Basie to determine the terrain beyond the edge). With peace as the threat of starvation, liberation as death, the dead providing life (Jim's mimicry), perhaps the most persistent inversion is praise for the Japanese over the dour and apathetic English, that ‘the Japanese, officially his enemies, offered his only protection’ (60).³

Borders stretch and contract, values are inverted, there are zones within zones (Jim's battle for space with the Vincents over the moveable walls of their shared room [172]): this repeats and recalls the infinitely expanding interiors of ‘The Enormous Room’, ‘Report on an Unidentified Space Station’, Concrete Island, and the strange border effects Blake encounters at the limits of Shepperton in The Unlimited Dream Company.

If Empire directs attention to the frame, Kindness introduces difficulties into that which the frame is said to engender: the ‘autobiography’ as decoding machine. It is directed (not least by Ballard's epitextual work) that The Kindness of Women is to be read as a re-tracing of the writer's life. It is strange, given that each chapter ‘reflects’ one of the novels, that no explicit link is ever made to the fiction. These linkages are there, but they are encrypted. Reviewers have insisted on a rigorous division of the ‘autobiographies’ from prior texts; the ‘bullshit apocalyptics’ (Strawson) have been left behind. In terms of image, style and pattern of verbal repetitions between the ‘fiction’ and the ‘autobiographies’, this seems an astonishing claim to make. Although the fiction itself is never mentioned, there is a kind of game of reference-spotting of titles and phrases grafted from prior texts. A drunken publishing agent, touring Soho for prostitutes has his action described thus: ‘The atrocity exhibition was more stirring than the atrocity’ (146). The next page contains an embedded reference to a ‘drowned world’ (147). Phrasal echoes continually appear: in Spain, ‘the peculiar geometry of these overlit apartments’ where ‘stylized’ sex acts are performed (121) immediately keys into Atrocity, whose thesis on ‘the death of affect’ is repeated here (158). Lykiard's likely view of Armageddon as ‘merely the ultimate happening, the audience-storming last act in the theatre of cruelty’ (151) echoes Nathan's view that ‘For us, perhaps, World War III is now little more than a sinister pop art display’ (Atrocity, 12). In the car-crash sequences, the obsessional phrase ‘the jut and rake of the steering wheel’ is repeated (182). Relationships are repeated too: Richard Sutherland tussles for Miriam's affections by taking her flying (just as, in an internal repetition, David Hunter later takes Sally up in the air [221]), recalling any number of erotic triangles in the fiction where the narrator competes with a rogue pilot.

The chapter on LSD takes repetitive phrases from The Crystal World (‘carapace’, ‘coronation armour’ [161]). In the epitextual interviews on the publication of Kindness, Ballard both asserts that ‘The LSD experiences are The Crystal World’ (Pickering) and that ‘I took LSD long after the publication of that book. Crystal was the product of a completely unaided visionary imagination’ (Thomson). The latter has long been Ballard's position in interview; Kindness demonstrates a process of re-jigging elements into ‘mythology’ and possibly (yet who could determine intention from these flatly contradictory statements in supposedly extrafictive utterances?) Ballard's quiet derailment of the attempt to bind text to life.

Also strange is the absence of any but casual and dismissive references to the writer's milieu, so central to the ‘science fiction’ enclave. In fact, the one chapter title that repeats another title is not to his own work. ‘The Final Programme’ details Richard Sutherland's attempt to film his own death, or rather perpetuate life through electronic media. That this final programme is a cure for cancer is an embedded reference to the first two works of Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius quartet. This is so encrypted that it promotes paranoia in the reader; what other cryptic references are missed?

There is no interdiction on reading these repetitions ‘backwards’, that these repetitions, cited in ‘autobiography’, decode the fictional texts. Equally there is no interdiction on reading them ‘forwards’, as further fictions produced out of the obsessive elements that are repeatedly combined and re-combined in the oeuvre. And yet it is clear that the decrypting reading cannot do without the encrypting reading. The detachment of the ‘autobiography’ cannot be too radical; there must be repetitive elements to re-attach, even as that re-attachment threatens their separation. This problem is discussed by Ann Jefferson in her article on the disruptive ‘autobiographies’ of Robbe-Grillet and Barthes. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes toys with the role of autobiography as ‘metatextual commentary’ on prior works, but then sets about destroying the authority of the meta-: ‘my texts are disjointed, no one of them caps any other; the latter is just a further text, the last of the series, not the ultimate in meaning: text upon text, which never illuminates anything’ (Roland Barthes, 120).

Does Kindness occupy the same deliberately enigmatic space as Barthes' teasing (non)autobiography? Is there no authority to the gestures of decryption offered by the text? I emphasize decryption because Kindness repeatedly deploys the image of the crypt. Internment becomes interment; in the constant inversions encountered here, the prison camp becomes a safe and secret tomb from the anarchy on the other side of fence: ‘Far from wanting to escape from the camp, I had been trying to burrow more deeply into its heart’ (41). This begins a chain of tombs and wombs: dissecting his medical school cadaver's womb, it is revelatory, ‘displayed like a miniature stage set’ (81); Jim's decision to leave Canada, to pursue a different mythology, is dictated by the unborn child in a prostitute's womb, which had ‘given me my new compass’ (99). This is followed by a chapter devoted to the inaccessible mysteries of childbirth, Miriam's withdrawal and return, encryption and decryption (111-14). In ‘a secret logic’ (146) Miriam's burial is overcoded with the mourning of Jacqueline Kennedy, the atrocities of the 1960s and the Chinese dead. The book's final movement contains the unearthing of a World War II fighter pilot in the Cambridge fens and a pacifying re-burial; a scene echoed by the rescue of a child from drowning, entombed in a sinking Range Rover.

This set of images could offer a tempting narrative of Kindness as a coming to terms with the melancholic compulsions that have driven the fiction, the ‘autobiography’ as accepting loss and enacting the work of mourning. Indeed, it could be seen as a working through of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's theorization of the ‘cryptophoric subject’. In what Nicholas Rand terms a ‘general theory of psychic concealment’ or a ‘poetics of hiding’ (57), the melancholic erects a crypt in the ego in which the dead are incorporated, kept alive, in secret: ‘Grief that cannot be expressed builds a secret vault within the subject. In this crypt reposes … the objective counterpart of the loss’ (‘Introjection’, 8). What the crypt seals is an absolutely unutterable secret, and yet the living dead within the crypt may find ways of breaking the seal: ‘the phantom of the crypt may come to haunt the keeper of the graveyard, making strange and incomprehensible signs’ (8); this phantom ‘works like a ventriloquist, like a stranger within the subject's own mental topography’ (Abraham, ‘Notes’, 290). That the title of the final section of Kindness, ‘After the War’, ambivalently references the 1960s, its televisual violence, Miriam's death, as well as the haunting remainders of World War II, might invoke a form of melancholic ventriloquizing whose ‘secret logic’ is pacified in the closing moments of decrypting the Air Force pilot and the child in the Range Rover.

It may seem that in invoking this psychoanalytic theorization of the crypt, I am suggesting that Kindness offers a revelation of the ‘secret’, the encrypted ‘primal scene’ that motors the Ballardian oeuvre. This would be the interpretive dream of ascribing to the text the role of decrypting autobiography. But given the complex, obsessional repetitions within the ‘autobiographies’, his work displays rather a textual anatomy of melancholic compulsion. This is to say nothing of any putative psychopathology of Ballard; what is meant is that while a reading of this thematic of decryption may gesture toward an autobiographical decoding, the patterns of textual repetitions maintain the encryption, spinning out the code rather than working to decipher it.

Both ‘autobiographies’ mythologize, which is to say that they take elements of the same compulsively repetitive landscapes, scenarios, and images and recombine them in fictions which yet teasingly and forever undecidably play within the frame of the autobiographical. There is no authenticity here, no revelatory discourse of (in Gusdorf's insistent phrase) ‘deeper being’.

This brings me to the third problem with the autobiographical theory delineated above; I have analysed textual framing and the difficulty of extricating the autobiography from the fiction. The third problem returns to the claims of ‘depth’ ascribed to autobiography, Olney's belief that ‘wholeness and completion’ comes through epiphanic moments where opposites are sublated and a unified pattern is the result (25). In a sense, this has already been considered in terms of the repetition which returns Ballard's ‘autobiographies’ to the level of the code. There is, however, another chain of images that demand attention; a chain that I have already followed in the oeuvre in relation to simulation.

Throughout both Empire and Kindness is a sense of doubling, of an uncanny re-staging that accompanies every significant event. Theatrical and cinematic analogies pervade both texts. The opening page of Empire establishes this immediately:

Jim had begun to dream of wars. At night the same silent films seemed to flicker against the wall of his bedroom in Amherst Avenue, and transformed his sleeping mind into a deserted newsreel theatre. During the winter of 1941 everyone in Shanghai was showing war films. Fragments of his dreams followed Jim around the city …

(11)

This has a confusing circularity. No priority can be established between the dream of war (as both passive residua and active fantasy projection: later Jim is ‘dreaming of the war and yet dreamed of by the war’ [260]), its filmic representation and the reality of the streets. To Jim, ‘the landscape now exposed in many ways resembled a panorama displayed on a cinema screen’ (186), and the prisoners were ‘like a party of film extras under the studio spotlights’ (254) (as the British visiting the battlefields are ‘like a group of investors visiting the stage-set of an uncompleted war film’ in Kindness [25]). Shanghai had always dissolved the boundaries of the cinema: the two hundred hunchbacks hired for the opening of The Hunchback of Notre Dame ensured that ‘the spectacle outside the theatre far exceeded anything shown on its screen’ (37). In war this effect is intensified:

He rested in the padlocked entrance to the Nanking Theatre, where Gone with the Wind had been playing for the past year in a pirated Chinese version. The partly dismantled faces of Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh rose on their scaffolding above an almost life-size replica of burning Atlanta. Chinese carpenters were cutting down the panels of painted smoke that rose high into the Shanghai sky, barely distinguishable from the fires still lifting above the tenements of the Old City.

(59)

Again the interpenetration of the real and representation is profoundly disruptive. It becomes impossible to limit this figure, since it structures both texts: then, vertiginously, Kindness literalizes this blurring of the cinematic and the real by ending with the filming of Empire by Steven Spielberg. This has the strange effect of lending a sense of preprogramming to this figural chain. Everything is doubled and redoubled: filmed in Shepperton, his home town, the sense of a re-staged suburbia, surrounded as it is by the sound stages of the film studios, becomes re-re-staged; his neighbours are recruited as the extras they had always been. Discovering a virtual simulacra of his childhood home just outside Shepperton and reflecting that the film team was ‘working to construct a more convincing reality than the original I had known as a child’ (275), Jim's response is that this is ‘uncanny’. This is itself being filmed, within the film, by a documentary crew. Later, Ballard arrives in a Los Angeles with his own name emblazoned on billboards, television and cinema hoardings (the apotheosis of Atrocity). The text ends with the launch of Heyerdahl's papyrus ship on the Pacific. This is not a replica ship, but a fibreglass replica of the original replica, which had sunk in the Atlantic. The doubles, the repetitions, multiply in a vertiginous spiral. In closing Kindness by enfolding a version of Empire within it, Ballard may create a sense of completion, but this closure comes from a textual incorporation of Empire into Kindness and the literalization of the figural chain of the always already restaged, rather than any sense of ‘deeper being’.

Summarily, then, the double injunction, this is and is not autobiography, problematizes the reading that would lead the signature beyond the text to ground it in the referential body of the signatory. The privileging of autobiography must appeal to the textual frame, of the preface, generic mark and so on—appeal, that is, to a cartouche. This is a term that Derrida introduces in his discussion on Titus-Carmel. Titus-Carmel made 127 drawings of a model coffin and in a written statement, an appended cartouche, Titus-Carmel asserts that the drawings follow the model. The model ‘paradigm’ inspires the series, but is also outside it. But what, in the series, prevents a reversal of this reading, seeing the model as a result of the sketches, or inserted somewhere in the series? What is the status of the appended cartouche?

If I place the cartouche outside the work, as the meta-linguistic or meta-operational truth of the work, its untouchable truth falls to ruins: it becomes external and I can, considering the inside of the work, displace or reverse the order of the series, calmly reinsert the paradigm at any point … If, conversely, I make room for the cartouche on the inside, or on the inside edge of the frame, it is no longer any more than a general performance, it no longer has a value of truth overbearing. This result is the same, the narrative is reinscribed, along with the paradigm, in the series.

(The Truth in Painting, 220)

I am suggesting, then, that Empire and Kindness occupy that uncertain place between paradigm and series in Derrida's de-stabilization of the cartouche. Detachment of the ‘autobiographies’ insists that a new contract has been established; the necessity of re-attachment undermines that contract. But even if it was possible to divide the signature in this way, nothing, according to Derrida, could be guaranteed, for the signature itself is already divided, it already functions like a cartouche, given its uncertain position as an appended mark. Where does the signature take place?

First case: the signature belongs to the inside of that (picture, relievo, discourse and so on) which it is presumed to sign. It is in the text, no longer signs, operates as an effect within the object, has its part to play within that which it claims to appropriate to itself or lead back to its origin. Filiation is lost. The signature deducts itself. Second case: the signature holds itself, as is generally believed, outside the text. It emancipates as well the product, that can get along without the signature, from the name of the father … The filiation again gives itself up, is still betrayed by what remarks it.

(Glas, 4)

Like the relation of ‘autobiographies’ to the fiction, the signature either falls inside the frame of the text, thus losing authority, or falls too far outside, leaving the text to get on very well without the signatory, and thus without finally determinable sanction.

This is not simply to abolish authority, for, as Derrida states elsewhere, literature could not be thought of at all as institution ‘without the development of a positive law implying authors' rights, the identification of the signatory, of the corpus, names, titles’ and so on (‘No Apocalypse’, 26). Of course it is possible to identify an oeuvre and read it under the name of ‘Ballard’—it is the condition of possibility for a book such as this. Nevertheless, as I have insisted so often, the discomfort and uncertain siting of Ballard's work is related to his exposure of the operations of these silent framing devices, a work which, almost, voices these mechanisms.

Where does Ballard's signature take place? Consider Colin Greenland's words: ‘J. G. Ballard is unmistakable. His habit of introducing a story with a tableau, meticulous and stylized, proclaims his hand no less distinctly than a name signed in the bottom right-hand corner of a canvas or flashed in capitals across a screen’ (92). Greenland here elides appended signature with Ballard's ‘unmistakable’ style. But that elision is understandable, for the recognition of a distinctive idiom operates like a textual signature. Perhaps, then, a closer attention to the idiomatic could crack open the tautology of Ballard's Ballardianism.

Vapour trails left by the American reconnaissance planes dissolved over my head, the debris perhaps of gigantic letters spelling out an apocalyptic message. ‘What do they say, Jamie?’

(Kindness, 42)

ALL BY ITSELF?: IDIOM IN VERMILION SANDS

Idiom, that metaphor of the signature conventionally understood, is recognized through its repetitive recurrence in and across texts whose signature piece is performed within the frame. It is the textual trait ‘coming along to sign all by itself, before even the undersigning of the proper name’ (Derrida, The Truth in Painting, 193). Anyone who reads Ballard over a number of texts comes to recognize patterns of repetitions—from reiterated plots, character relations, imagery and syntactical structures. The textual signature of Ballard's texts is indeed immediately recognizable without the need of a confirmatory signature. It is perhaps this demonic repetition-in-difference that ensnares the reader of Ballard's work, seduces him or her. It has become a standard practice of Ballard criticism to arrange and re-arrange these repetitive elements into interpretive structures (Pringle's ‘four-fold symbolism’, for instance, or the narrative of transcendence employed by Wagar and Stephenson to unite the oeuvre), but is the idiomatic trait any less problematic than the waywardness of the signature? For idiom is defined through a nexus of terms that are contradictory. The idiom must be unique, absolutely singular. But in order to be recognized as such, it must be repeatable. This can be summed up in the dictum that a style is inimitable exactly to the extent that it is imitable. And then to rely on the recognition of patterns of repetition need not in itself come to any understanding, either in one element of the series, or across it. Repetition, even with modulation, can be merely additive. Repetitions, that is, whilst being read, are also, in some senses, unreadable in that they give no access to interpretation but merely reinforce the enigma. And curiously, the remarking of obsessional repetition itself becomes obsessive, the reader caught in structures of repetition. Obsessive texts uncomfortably interpellate the reader as obsessional, in the grip of a compulsion that is incomprehensible.

In what follows, I want to concentrate on Vermilion Sands as a text that, dazzlingly and maddeningly, intensifies the problematic of the idiomatic trait. For on the macro level this text exponentially increases the repetitions that are a mark of the oeuvre as a whole: the nine stories virtually repeat the same plot, a plot that is itself about repetition compulsion. On the micro level, Vermilion Sands has perhaps the most extreme concentration of Ballard's idiomatic tic: his use and abuse of the simile.

In idiom, the trait is there like ‘a name signed in the bottom righthand corner of the canvas’ (Greenland, 92), it ‘com[es] along to sign all by itself’ (The Truth in Painting, 193). In Vermilion Sands ‘Studio 5, The Stars’ details a literature generated purely from computer randomizations of a set of permutations: ‘Fifty years ago a few people wrote poetry, but no one read it. Now no one writes it either’. The speaker is ‘one of those people who believed that literature was in essence both unreadable and unwritable’ (169). The stories of Vermilion Sands, with their complex repetitions, appear to be one segment of an otherwise infinite serial chain. ‘Studio 5, The Stars’ might appear to break the chain, to reinscribe the mythoi of inspiration and expressivity (Aurora acting out the legend of Melander and Corydon), but smashing the computers to return to expressive writing is itself a repetition of the myth of Melander, the Muse who demands sacrifice to reinvigorate poetry. This is no less programmed than computers.

Vermilion Sands is a sequence of nine stories linked by setting (an ‘overlit desert resort as an exotic suburb of my mind’ [Preface, 7]) and a repeated plot structure. Introduced as a retrospective narration of events, the narrator, differently named each time, details an entanglement with a desirable, but ultimately murderous femme fatale. Internally, each story is also, very precisely, about repetition compulsion; the narrators or other male characters find themselves, too late, inserted into a sequence of murderous events which has already been enacted previously, and will be re-enacted again. They are only one male in a series, objects apparently of female compulsion.

The women are standardly enigmatic, beautiful and quite insane. Their names are chosen for their powerful iconic resonance: Leonora Chanel (invoking Coco Chanel and Leonora Carrington, surrealist painter, mystic, chronicler of her own insanity and Ernst's partner), Emerelda Garland (an obvious reference to the fated Judy), Hope Cunard (recalling the modernist writer, patron and iconoclast Nancy Cunard), Raine Channing (perhaps an echo of Dorothea Tanning, Max Ernst's wife from 1946), Gloria Tremayne (the atmosphere of ‘Stellavista’, the final story, clearly makes this a reference to Gloria Swanson's role as the egomanical Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard). Nearly all are possessed of a charismatic infamy, resulting from deaths in the past: Leonora Chanel lives in the wake of the ‘mysterious’ death of her husband, ‘officially described as suicide’ (18); Emerelda Garland is married to Van Stratten, whose mother died ‘in circumstances of some mystery’ (51); Lorraine Drexel had a brief affair with a pop-singer ‘later killed in a car crash’ (112); Raine Channing survives after ‘the death of her confidant and impresario’ (132); Howard Talbot hires the house where Gloria Tremayne was alleged to have shot her husband (194).

The stories concern compulsion, but the question is whose compulsions are to be dealt with. In many ways, these narratives are case histories, but ones which have failed to draw the lesson from Freud's conclusion to the incomplete analysis of Dora: ‘I did not succeed in mastering the transference in good time’ (160). In Freud's ‘Papers on Technique’ repetition, in the sense of acting out, re-enaction, is the enemy of analysis, that process of remembering and working through. ‘This struggle between the doctor and patient. … between understanding and seeking to act is played out exclusively in the phenomena of transference’ (‘Dynamics’ 118). Failing to control this transference, the doctor may be inserted into one of the psychical “series” which the patient has already formed' (‘Dora’, 157). In this fictional realm, Freud's textual figure is to be recalled: ‘What are transferences? They are the new editions or facsimiles of the impulses and phantasies which are made conscious during the process of the analysis’ (‘Dynamics’, 100).

In this sense, the narrators' psychoanalytic ‘explanations’ come too late, cannot control the compulsion, as in ‘The Screen Game’ or ‘Stellavista’ [‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’]. What is peculiar, however, is that whilst the (male) narration is in effect a remembering to counter (female) repetition, this remembrance is forgotten each time a story closes, and each narrator must begin again, repeat the remembering. Whose compulsion, then, is it? The women repeat trauma, but the narrators are also compulsive; traumatophiles, perhaps, actively seeking situations of trauma that they cannot control?

The narrators' attempts to master female compulsion come clumsily; they court hilarity. Even if their explanations are to be taken seriously Ballard's later story, ‘A Host of Furious Fancies’, serves as a warning. The deliciously named Dr Charcot⁴ steps in to authoritatively ‘solve’ the Cinderella complex of an orphaned heiress, by repeating the father's incestuous relationship with her. This jargonistically rationalized account, however, is finally revealed as the fantasy of a decrepid old man, utterly controlled by his daughter. The authority of the ‘explanation’ is ruthlessly undercut, enmeshed as it is in the trap of countertransference.

Further, the ‘explanations’ in Vermilion Sands fail to grasp the extent of repetition. In ‘Say Goodbye to the Wind’, Samson is enraptured by a somnambulating woman and discovering her name, he recalls the death of Gavin Kaiser. He becomes unwittingly transferred into repeating Kaiser's role, although he escapes death. Samson proposes that: ‘She had come back to Lagoon West to make a beginning, and instead found that events repeated themselves, trapping her into this grim recapitulation of Kaiser's death’ (143). The reason for Kaiser's paroxysm and death remains unclear: ‘What he saw, God knows, but it killed him’ (142). There is in fact nothing to suggest Kaiser is not himself repeating a prior death, just as Samson nearly repeats his: the sequence is open to extension. To be strictly psychoanalytic, this must be the case: trauma must presuppose two events, the first prepubertal, a sexual event lying unrecognized until a second, postpubertal event, however obliquely or associatively, sparks off and reinscribes the first as sexually traumatic. However, Freud warns that: ‘We must not expect to meet with a single traumatic memory and a single pathogenic idea as its nucleus; we must be prepared for successions of partial traumas and concatenations of pathogenic trains of thought’ (‘Psychotherapy’, 373). Since this lies beyond the purview of the text and the purblind narrators, the repetition cannot be limited or mastered.

Vermilion Sands, however, is not a set of psychologically realist stories; it has strange science fictional elements. It is populated by plants that sing arias, sonic sculptures, psychotropic houses, photosensitive canvases and bio-fabrics, all of which respond to emotional surrounds. These function as the sites on which trauma is written. They become, in effect, objects embodying the psyche, have scored on them the lines of trauma which will be repeated by the next owner. Initially, the women seem to have a calmative effect (there is repetition here: as Jane Cyclacides enters the shop full of neurotically oversensitive screeching plants, they die down: ‘They must like you’ (35); when Raine enters the clothes shop full of neurotically oversensitive bio-fabrics, they are soothed: ‘You've calmed everything down … They must like you’ [133]). Dénouements, however, tend to revolve around the betrayal of their murderous pasts in the evidences left as writing traces on these objects. This version of trauma as writing means that compulsion can continue in the absence of its actors. In ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’ this continues beyond death, with Talbot and his wife repeating the violence between Miles Vanden Starr and Gloria Tremayne. The wife frozen out, Talbot enters into a sole relation, playing Miles to the convulsing, vaginal house. Once the scene of death is recapitulated, however, Talbot stays on: the story (and the text) ends: ‘I know that I shall have to switch the house on again’ (208).

To end on ‘again’ is to disrupt the security of closure; to open with ‘again’ (‘The Singing Statues’, ‘Cry Hope, Cry Fury!’) is to undercut by implying prior, inaccessible repetitions. There is a quite deliberate coding and overcoding involved: it is interesting to compare ‘Venus Smiles’ (a title repeated in or repeated from Atrocity) with its original version, ‘Mobile’, written in 1957. The plot is kept, but ‘Mobile’ was not set in Vermilion Sands and centred on a male sculptor, Lubitsch. The enigma of the furiously self-generating sculpture is coded into female obsession in its revision, as a perverse memorialization of her dead lover.

To say that repetition is a mark of recognition of a signature in the text before the text is undersigned is perhaps not to say anything until what is repeated is considered. However, textual repetition, abstractly and in itself, effectively cuts out the paratextual apparatus. Entering the Ballardian oeuvre is like entering a chain whose seriality severs any visibility of beginning or end. This is repetition understood not as secondary, copying a prior ‘original’, but as primary and instituting: these repetitions are ‘controlled by no centre, origin, or end outside the chain of recurrent elements … Such a sequence is without a source outside the series’ (Hillis Miller, 142). Each text resonates not in itself but in the overdetermined tangle of lines of repetitive elements. This, to emphasize again, is a textual event; just as the male narrators of Vermilion Sands cannot control or bring to termination the sequence, quite beside explaining what instituted it, the reader can immediately recognize, by textual elements, a Ballardian fiction, but can do little to articulate its power or divine its meaning. In that sense, these stories remain unreadable.

So far I have analysed the ‘empty’ form of repetition—repetition itself—in Vermilion Sands. But repetition is also, of course, the condition of recognizability of specific idiomatic traits. The text is repetitive not only at the level of plot and plot-mechanism (compulsion), but it is also the most extreme example of Ballard's overloading of his text with abstruse figurations. Similes, in particular, pile up on page after page.

I want to keep for the moment with that naive view of figuration—of rhetoric as a whole—as an addition, as the detachable ornament to a delimitable ‘literal’ language. Ballard's ‘bijou adjectives—“cerise,” “vermilion”’ (Thomson) have been criticized as ‘descriptive encrustations’ (Strawson) that mar his work. This accords with the still largely pejorative sense of rhetoric: writings which are too ‘rhetorical’ equate with bad writing. ‘Bijou’ is in fact the perfect adjective for Vermilion Sands, because the text is studded with ‘ornamental’ tropes which precisely refer to jewels. Leonora Chanel is persistently referred to as having ‘jewelled eyes’ (16,17,18,19); Hope Cunard has ‘opal hair’ (100,103) and ‘opal hair, like antique silver’ (93); in “Venus Smiles”, Carol's eyes flash ‘like diamonds’ and there is Lorraine Drexel's ‘diamond heel’ (114); Raine Channing has ‘jewelled hands’ (127) and carries ‘a sonic jewel, like a crystal rose’ (134); Emerelda already names a jewel, and has her army of jewelled insects.

Rhetoric is classically coded as feminine: the ‘best dress of thought’, ‘clothing’ language. The allegorical figure of Rhetoric is presented as ‘a beautiful woman, her garments … embellished with all the figures, she carries the weapons intended to wound her adversaries’ (Barthes, ‘The Old Rhetoric’, 32); these figures were also represented as jewels. This allegory combines both the figural and suasive elements of rhetoric, what Derrida in Spurs terms style and stylus (meaning dagger or stiletto). If clusters of figures tend to proliferate around the women in Vermilion Sands in an attempt to catch their truth, the veil of rhetoric is poisonous: ‘Say Goodbye to the Wind’, in which Raine presents the bio-fabric suit to Samson in which Kaiser had died, recalls the myth of Deianira, who give the coat poisoned by Nessus' blood to Hercules. The ‘Muses’ of Vermilion Sands may give a language that could return the narrators from a literature ‘both unreadable and unwritable’ (169), but that language, as will be seen, is also more than occasionally entirely unreadable.

Rhetoric, of course, has been re-established in literary studies, not least by Paul de Man. It is no longer naively perceived as an addition to a zero degree ‘literal’ language: the difficulty of dividing figural and literal levels is exactly the question. Much work can be found on metaphor, but there is little on simile. Simile is the most dominant trope employed in the Ballardian text, and it is alarmingly pervasive in Vermilion Sands. Almost any page will present numerous examples. Only Colin Greenland has attempted to determine its effect, and his comments are excellent. Greenland discovers a Surrealist strategy smuggled into an apparently simple device of explicit analogy: the forcing of a conjunction in a ‘like’ of terms which are entirely unlike. These ‘pseudo-similes’ offer a ‘comparison which mystifies instead of elucidating’, ‘there is no discoverable parity between terms’ (103) and Greenland offers a prime example from ‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’: ‘Laing had not been particularly interested in Melville, this ex-pilot who had turned up here impulsively in his expensive car and was now prowling relentlessly around the solarium as if hunting for a chromium rat’. Greenland lets this example speak for itself, but it is possible to analyse its combination of, in effect, two devices. If the first is a simile that fails to elucidate a comparison, the comparing term ‘chromium rat’ can only be read as hypallage—but from where is this epithet transferred? The nearest candidate is the ‘expensive car’, but this is on the other side of the comparison. Effectively, an initially incomprehensible simile can only have a meaning offered by negating the simile. This is what Greenland means when the device ‘keeps the relation but blurs the distinction, so that the two halves of the simile, the actual and the virtual, can be swapped over’ (103).

Such abuse of tropes and tropes of abuse are consistently encountered in Vermilion Sands. Indeed, finding oneself in the role of the ‘close reader’ can tempt madness, for the closer the text is read the more unreadable it gets, the more bemusing it is that any meaning can ‘leak’ from its dense weave. Take, for example, the description of landscape in the opening pages of ‘The Screen Game’. The mesas rise ‘like the painted cones of a volcano jungle’ (47) (painted?), the reefs are ‘like the tortured demons of medieval cathedrals’ (47) and towers of obsidian are ‘like stone gallows’ (47). The passage continues:

The surrounding peaks and spires shut out the desert plain, and the only sounds were the echoes of the engine growling among the hills and the piercing cry of the sand-rays over the open mouths of the reefs like hieratic birds.

(47-48)

The simile, ‘like hieratic birds’, refers back to the cry of the sand-rays, but this ‘piercing cry’ is confused with the ‘open mouths’ of the reefs. The analogical axis is confused by the metonymic contiguity of ‘cry’ to ‘mouths’. And in what sense can birds be ‘hieratic’? Does this moves back over the sentence as a kind of metatextual comment, hieratic in the sense of ‘the cursive form of hieroglyphs’, declaring its private language? The passage through the landscape continues, following the road (‘like a petrified snake’ [48]) where ‘fragments of light haze hung over the dunes like untethered clouds’ (48). How could a cloud ever be tethered? A few pages later: ‘we barely noticed the strange landscape we were crossing, the great gargoyles of red basalt that uncoiled themselves into the air like the spires of demented cathedrals’ (52). Gargoyles ‘uncoil’ simply because of the euphony of the words, and ‘gargoyles like spires’ imposes an analogy between the terms where there evidently is none; gargoyles may be a synecdoche for spires, but they cannot be compared. The ‘strange landscape’ is more to do with the strangeness of the tropes used to describe it; de Man is right to suggest that ‘there seems no limit to what tropes can get away with’. Another more readable cluster surrounds Emerelda: her face ‘like an exotic flower withdrawing into its foliage’ (61). However, when the narrator suggests that ‘Talking to her was like walking across a floor composed of blocks of different height’ (61), this is meaningless without the immediately following description of the squares of the terrace, once more negating the simile by literalizing it. No wonder that Charles Van Stratten ‘smiled bleakly, as if aware of the slenderness of the analogy’ (64)!

These knots in the text can be found throughout Vermilion Sands. Is it simply bad writing? Is ‘eyes crossed by disappointment’ (93) intentional or just inept? When it comes to simile the issue seems prejudged: in recent discussions simile is posited as the ‘low’ equivalent of the heights of metaphor. Culler states: ‘It is not easy to explain why the idea of a conference on metaphor seems perfectly natural, while the idea of a conference on simile seems distinctly bizarre and unlikely’ (188). This bars simile from consideration as a form of metaphor, which is certainly how De Man (whose analysis Culler is partly glossing) sees it in his reading of Proust. Both work by analogy, but cannot be simply related: Davidson criticizes the view of metaphor as ‘elliptical simile’, which argues that any metaphor can be ‘translated’ back into simile, which reveals, through the ‘like’, the terms of comparison. Metaphor is more complex than the ‘trivial’ analogies of simile.

In what follows—in attempting to say what the Ballardian simile is like—I am aware of Culler's warning: ‘One can never construct a position outside tropology from which to view it; one's terms are always caught up in the processes they attempt to describe’ (209). Flatness is an apt, metaphorical, term to describe the prose. The landscapes of Vermilion Sands are horizontal: wide expanses of sand, infinitely receding horizons like Dali paintings. Flatness also has a pejorative sense, and this has been a consistent criticism of the prose style (of Kindness [The Kindness of Women] it was said the writing was ‘slow, stately, curiously flat’ [Margaret Foster]). Flatness seems to be induced by the rhetorical devices used. There is, in the multiple taxonomies of rhetoric, a distinction sometimes made between figures and tropes. Figures keep the sense of the words, but works effects by distribution, by syntactical devices (anaphora, parallelism, and so on). Tropes alter the meaning of a word of phrase from its ‘proper’ meaning. I want to suggest that simile, as an analogical trope, is used here figurally. In Jakobson's opposition, metaphor is vertical, whilst metonymy is flat, horizontal. When a metaphor is read, the reader has to ‘make a leap’, to discover the basis of comparison; in simile, the terms are laid out, and the reader is lulled by the connecting ‘like’. The grammatical presence of ‘like’ or ‘as’ distributes the terms on either side of it, visibly, in conventionalized form. So pervasive is the simile in Vermilion Sands that it becomes hypnotic; the reader is flattened by its repetition. Lulled by the distributive function of the ‘like’, the abuse of its role, the dissimilarity or negation of the analogy, is all the more jolting.

Simile is not the sole device by which the awkwardness of the text is found. It would be necessary to consider the ‘clumsy’ clause constructions, the clashing of different registers, from hard science to soft conventionalized ‘poeticisms’, and the repetitive vocabulary. But this is to say nothing of another idiomatic chain that, in keeping with the abyssal slides of the text into unreadability, also constantly recurs. If the ‘signature’ and ‘idiom’ are two problematically distinct forms, then Ballard's recourse to the metaphor of the signature effectively elides them: ‘hieroglyphic shadows, signatures of all the strange ciphers of the desert sea’, ‘signatures of a separate subject’, ‘the tomb that enshrined the very signatures of her soul’ (96, 100, 196). Figures of writing pervade the text from the inscriptions in the cloud at Coral D to the writing of trauma that operates throughout.

What holds these together are their encryption, their status as hidden languages—like the ciphers and cryptographics that I have analysed in other texts. To discover their insistence in Vermilion Sands as well is to realize that they refold the text back on itself. Is it possible that so persistent a group of figures, one idiomatic trait, itself concerns the unreadability of pure idiom, a kind of idiom of idiom? It is not the case that these idiomatic figures of writing are simply metafictional moments of self-reflexivity. Rather, attention to their enfolding of the unreadable into the texts operates according to De Man's proposal that ‘any narrative is primarily the allegory of its own reading’ and that ‘the allegory of reading narrates the impossibility of reading’ (76-77).

‘Coming along to sign, all by itself’, idiom operates as a textual signature, the mark of a unique writing. But this has not yet broached the countersignature. Derrida proposes that:

the signature becomes effective—performed and performing—not at the moment it apparently takes place, but only later, when ears will have managed to receive the message. In some way the signature will take place on the addressee's side … it is the ear of the other that signs.

(The Ear of the Other, 50-51)

To read is to countersign; the text's affirmation takes place on the other's side. This structure is open to risk: ‘a countersignature comes both to confirm, repeat and respect the signature of the other, of the ‘original’ work; and to lead it off somewhere, so running the risk of betraying it’ (‘This Strange Institution’, 63). I want to suggest that parody is a form of countersignature that imitates the ‘original’ signature such that it problematizes the latter's authority.

As Hutcheon suggests, parody of its nature steals—even ridicules—but also, of necessity, monumentalizes its sources by dependence on them. For science fiction, parody, homage, collective conventions (forms, concepts, plots) remain vital. Of the New Wave writers, Harry Harrison and Philip José Farmer could be said to have gained their reputations as parodists. With a culture that has parody and self-parody at its heart, Ballard's texts did not survive long before entering this circulation. New Worlds published James Cawthorn's brief ‘Ballard of a Whaler’, playing on the frequent Moby Dick references, and puncturing the familiar elegiac tone. A later New Worlds collection also contained Disch's mock interview with G. G. Allbard, author of Rash (who talks so obsessively about his bodily fluids that the interviewer is incapable of posing any questions). Sladek also wrote a brief parody of the catastrophe novels, ‘The Sublimation World’, which accurately picks up on stylistic tics (‘The whole city was a gibbous dune, once a mercury refinery, now frozen into a single gaseous crystalline chrysalid, depended from what had once been a flaming bloodfruit tree, now gone to iron, ironically’; ‘He was barely visible, a slash of red among the yellow balloons, like a wound’ [105]). Most intriguing, however, are the series of stories published by Fantasy and Science Fiction that were eventually collected under the title Aventine. There is no framing reference anywhere to the fact that they are parodies of Vermilion Sands. This is a delicious opportunity: parody is monumentalization, but equally it is a stealing of the signature from the unique signatory. In that latter sense it is a kind of death. The writer of these stories is Lee Killough. Should that be pronounced ‘killer’ or ‘kill-off’? The kindness of women does not extend to her; when asked by Pringle Ballard tersely refused to read them.

Killough's borrowings are extensive. ‘The Siren Garden’ shifts from the singing plants of Ballard's ‘Prima Belladonna’ to crystals, which, like many of the objects in Vermilion Sands, are sensitive to extremes of emotion. Lorna Dalridian exploits them to ensnare the narrator into a murder of her husband. Lorna's eyes, incidentally, move through the range of silver, violet and obsidian. The garden is borrowed from another Ballard text, ‘The Crystal Garden’. ‘Tropic of Eden’, with psychotropic houses, synthesizes elements of ‘The Singing Statues’ and ‘Venus Smiles’, whilst the series of portrait-sittings before psychically reactive materials recalls ‘Cry Hope, Cry Fury!’. ‘A House Divided’ uses props from ‘Stellavista’, as does ‘Broken Stairways, Walls of Time’. ‘Menage Outré’, meanwhile, has a narrator who writes computer-generated novels and becomes ensnared with a mysterious female neighbour, just as in ‘Studio 5, The Stars’. ‘Menage’ begins: ‘At night the sound of flutes and drums pulsed across the lawns’ (5); ‘Studio 5’ opens: ‘At midnight I heard the music playing from the abandoned nightclub’ (145). Verbal echoes are constant, as is the (less obsessive) use of simile and the opening paragraphs which structure the narrative as retrospection. The women tend to have suitably mysterious and tragic pasts (one narrator remembers reading of Cybele's husband's ‘death in a hovercraft accident’! [‘Broken Stairways’, 51]). A compulsive narrative unleashed by Vermilion Sands cannot be contained between its covers; distorted, perhaps, but with the same compulsion, it arises elsewhere.

That there is no acknowledgment of ‘borrowing’, no obvious sign of homage (although it may be significant that Cas refuses to sign his sculpture [‘Tropic’, 152], or that the objectionable Jason Ward loses his sister by going on a book-signing tour: a book which is computer-generated and thus not, in a loose sense, his? [‘Menage’, 14]) clearly irritates David Pringle. His review of the book with Colin Greenland, however, is written in the form of a parody, a parodying of the parodist.

In a highly complex move, Pringle and Greenland insert Killough's relation to Ballard into the plot of ‘Stellavista’, where parody is figured as the occupation of a psychotropic house inscribed with Ballard's personality. Reversing the gender structure, the femme fatale figure is disempowered and resituated into the psychical series of male victims. But the compulsion is intensified here: Killough is destroyed by the power of the Ballardian psychotrope. Murderous revenge: Killough is killed, the parodist evacuated from her upstart occupation of the text.

It is a strange defence of Vermilion Sands, however, to figure its parody in terms of a compulsion imposed by the personality of Ballard. Why take revenge on Killough when, in this scenario, she is a victim of a repetition that she cannot control? It is even stranger to perform this as a parody itself, for it becomes difficult to separate what is parodistic attack and what is parodistic defence. In effect, what Pringle and Greenland's review demonstrates is how inimitable idiom easily loses its singularity, its guarantee of uniqueness, to become bewilderingly disseminated across any number of imitative texts.

Killough's parody offers a countersigning of Ballard's text; Pringle and Greenland give a reading of that reading. But since they all tend to repeat the text, they perform nothing other than the compulsions set in train by Ballard's stories. Parody as reading is, as repetition, also non-reading: the ensnaring of the reader into structures of the text that cannot get beyond them.

The repetitive predictability of Ballard's texts allowed Martin Amis, in a review of The Day of Creation, to summarise the book through a parodic exchange between two Ballard fans: ‘“I've read the new Ballard.” “And?” “It's like the early stuff.” “Really? What's the element?” “Water.” “Lagoons?” “Some. Mainly a river.” “What's the hero's name? Maitland? Melville?” “Mallory.”’ Amis goes on to adjudge the book ‘boring and frequently ridiculous’. But this conclusion needs to be set in the context of what, in actuality, is a narrative of seduction. In his long career of reviewing Ballard, Amis began by condemning the ‘vicious nonsense’ of Crash (cited, Pringle, Bibliography) and has always sniped at Ballard's sham portentousness. In a television discussion, he dismissed Ballard's claim that science fiction is the literature of the twentieth century by pointing out that science fiction, for all its self-promotion, has remained ‘a minority pursuit—like train-spotting’ (a very English insult). By the time of the review of The Day of Creation, however, his dismissal had modulated. To quote in full: ‘Ballard's novel is occasionally boring and frequently ridiculous … You finish the book with some bafflement and irritation. But this is only half the experience. You then sit around waiting for the novel to come and haunt you. And it does’. In the preface to Einstein's Monsters, Amis even had to admit that he had begun to write like Ballard (x). For all the predictability, for all the endlessly re-rehearsed plotting, it is this, it is precisely this haunting remainder that survives ridicule. Something survives, something remains, no matter how exhaustive an attempt to fix his haunting work is, whether by trying to decode it autobiographically, or by an atomizing analysis of the texts sentence by sentence. The haunting remainder slips between these two approaches: once again, it occupies that strange and impossible angle between two walls.

Vermilion Sands in particular, it seems to me, reveals the way in which Ballard's texts effectuate their seduction. An obsessively repetitive text enchains an obsessively repetitive reading. You open a Ballard text, knowing once again you will be haunted, knowing that the compulsions it fosters will enfold you again, knowing that to read Ballard is to be held by a lure that is generated by an irreducible core of unreadability.

This lure compels critics, as we have seen, to become ensnared in Ballard's cycles of repetition. As I come to conclude, my principal anxiety is to what extent I have managed to evade collapsing into an obsessive reading myself, one which loses all critical distance and merely reiterates textual perversities that have failed to be mastered. This sequence of readings of Ballard's work, which has focused on his disruptions to the distributions of mainstream/science fiction, high/low, modernist/postmodernist, fiction/autobiography, interrogated the ability to discern a final ground to the circulating theories of the catastrophe and apocalypse, and sought ways to read Ballard's most experimental fictions outside the glazed world of postmodern nihilism, ends with an announcement that even by turning away from all of these approaches to adopt the role of the close reader results in the critic being trapped between the fiction of authorial truth and the maddening unreadability of idiom. I hope this is not taken as a fashionable display of critical incapacity. My aim has been to been to describe and analyse, as precisely as possible, the sense of unease generated by a recurrent topography—the weird effects of being left in a space between, a space that insistently erodes, although in a highly productive way, gestures of critical mastery. Jean Baudrillard, closing his discussion of Ballard's novel Crash ends by asking: ‘Is it good or bad? We will never know. It is simply fascinating’ (Simulacra and Simulation, 119). For him, ‘Beyond meaning, there is fascination, which results from the neutralization and imposion of meaning’ (In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, 104). If I too have remained fascinated by Ballard (the flip-side of irritation and rejection), I hope that this book is a testament to the refusal of Baudrillard's ecstatic surrender: fascination should not be the bar to thought. It should, rather, be the very impetus to continue the process of critical thinking and writing, to pursue those peculiar border effects and strange (non-)spaces which generate the very possibility of meaning. May Ballard continue to hover at the edges, haunt the suburbs of our critical thinking; however frustrating, his work forces us to pay attention to the frames in which our literary judgments operate.

Notes

1. This logic of detachment and reattachment might also be related to the anxiety of restitution that Derrida analyses in ‘Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing’, The Truth in Painting. There, Derrida finds a ‘secret correspondence’ in the argument between Martin Heidegger and Meyer Schapiro over the status of Van Gogh's paintings of peasant shoes. Both are anxious to find a proper place, a rightful owner, for the shoes—somewhere, some home, must be pointed to beyond the frame. That the problems of identifying the ‘proper place’ relate to Van Gogh's series of paintings on a theme might also be useful to consider in relation to Ballard's own serial oeuvre.

2. Angela Carter, however, cannily anticipated the logic of such readings in her own review of Empire of the Sun: ‘Ballard's thirty-odd-year career as a cult classic is, however, about to come to an end. He has, in his mid-fifties, produced what they call a ‘breakthrough’ novel. No doubt the ‘literary men’ (and women) will now treat Ballard as the sf writer who came in from the cold. Who finally put away childish things, man-powered flight, landscapes of the flesh, the erotic geometry of the car crash, things like that, and wrote the Big Novel they always knew he'd got in him’ (Expletives Deleted, 47).

3. Once more, Dennis Walder's analysis is a valuable source for a consideration of this element of Empire of the Sun. Perhaps here is the place to regret the absence of any sustained treatment of the novel in the nexus of colonial and post-colonial concerns. The potential for such analysis, hinted at in relation to The Drowned World and The Crystal World in chapter two, and the final reading of Hello America in chapter four, clearly indicates the space for such a reading—one more traversal of the peculiar zones of Ballard's work.

4. For a perverse psychoanalyst, being named after Jean-Martin Charcot, Freud's teacher in 1885-86, is a perfect choice. Charcot, with the sublime confidence of Victorian psychiatry, worked on the assumption of physiological disease as the source of all psychiatric problems; Freud had to break with his teacher in order to found the non-physiological project of psychoanalysis.