[In the following essay, Luckhurst analyses Ballard's “signature” style, as exemplified in the stories of Vermilion Sands. According to Luckhurst, Ballard “seduces” the reader with his distinct idiom, his use of incongruous similes, and textual repetitions which, taken together, comprise the indefinable essence of his work.]

I will begin with a narrative of seduction. Martin Amis, in his long career of reviewing Ballard, began by condemning the “vicious nonsense” of Crash 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 SF, for all its self-promotion, has remained “a minority pursuit—like train-spotting” (a very English insult). By the time he reviewed The Day of Creation, however, this dismissal had modulated: “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.

This trajectory displays a slow seduction of one writer by another. Amis remains irritated, but there is some haunting remainder that survives ridicule: a remainder that is irritating precisely because it is nameless, inarticulable. Something remains, and that something, that irreducible element, does its work of seduction.

Criticism of Ballard seems driven by this mysterious remainder, is obsessed with trying to uncover its secret lure. 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?” (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). In seeking the essence, tautology covers the confusion: 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 reader being forever “outside” the text, never being allowed access to the private iconography that drives them. If this is blocked, the other route is into the texts themselves, grouping them, following the structures of repetition of theme, image, and character. However, a similar difficulty is affected here, for to analyze the style is, in Ellison's words, like looking at “the most exquisite Wyeth landscape” that, “when examined more and more minutely begins to resemble pointillism, and finally nothing but a series of disconnected dots” (459).

In seeking the seductive singularity of Ballard's texts, the two routes offered end at a blank. For Pringle and Ellison, to project meaning “outside” the text into the signing body is to close it off from reading, but to locate meaning in the innermost recess of the text's idiom is to transform it into private language, one that is equally unavailable for reading.

The formulation of this impasse owes much to the work of Derrida on the signature. Derrida discerns two principal modalities. The first is the signature as appended signal of agreement and authentication that leaves the trace of the signatory on the performative staging of the proper name. The second is idiom, understood as that textual trait “coming along to sign all by itself, before even the undersigning of the proper name” (Truth in Painting, 193).

The signature as authenticating mark holds a powerful cultural force, and no less so than in literature. Editorial institutions (both academies and publishing houses) still tend to value the final, authentic, “signed” text. One way of stabilizing texts, eradicating textual anomalies or ambiguities, is by reverting to the authority of the author's signature. This authority, however, rests on a siting of the signature that Derrida rigorously interrogates, for what is the status of the signature as an appendage, where does it 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 or the mother which it no longer needs in order to function. The filiation again gives itself up, is still betrayed by what remarks it.

(Glas 4)

If the signature is part of the literary text, inside it, it no longer has authority, the possible resting point for determining meaning. If it lies outside the text, then its authority over the text is not final, since the text can survive, get on very well, without it.

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). If Greenland fortuitously elides distinctive idiomatic trait with appended signature, confusing inside and outside in this description, this is nothing compared to the transgression of textual edges that occurs throughout the oeuvre. While some critics sighed with relief that Ballard's “autobiographies” had finally arrived to offer “a framework for comprehending much that is disturbing in his writing” (Murray 9), others objected to the “trivializing” of Ballard's “wavering between fact and fiction” (Towers 38), confusing authorial Ballard with an indeterminately fictive Jamie. Inside and outside are also radically blurred with the insertion of a “Ballard” in Crash. Although a fairly standard device, this has resulted in a long-running debate, initiated in part by the uncertain place of the signature. Ballard's famous introduction claiming its admonitory status has been consistently cited in exchanges over the morality of the text,¹ but this ignores both his subsequent retraction of the introduction and the volatilizing of his own relation to its intention: it is a book written with “terminal irony, where not even the writer knows where he stands.”²

To fix meaning by leading it out of the text into the final, authoritative signature is thus blocked by the strategies of the texts themselves. To reverse the direction, seek that seductive singularity in idiom, is equally fraught with problems. Idiom is defined through a nexus of terms that invokes a contradiction. The idiom must be unique, absolutely singular. But in order to be recognized as such, it must be repeatable. Fredric Jameson evinces this in the dictum that a style is inimitable exactly to the extent that it is imitable. Anyone who reads Ballard over a number of texts comes to recognize patterns of repetitions, but to realize that certain stories obsessively rewrite the same scenario is not to come to any understanding, either in one element of the series or across it. This repetition appears to be merely additive. Repetitions, while 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, and the reader becomes snared in the structures of repetition. Obsessive texts uncomfortably interpellate the reader as obsessional, in the grip of a compulsion that is incomprehensible; witness Amis's irritation at being haunted by the inarticulable remainder.

Reading the Ballardian text is thus to be exposed to a gamut of unsettling textual effects. To be unsettled is to be driven to attempts to neutralize disturbance. And yet such effects irrupt precisely at the junctures where neutralization could occur: the signature, the external stamp of authority and terminus for intention, transgresses the textual edge, moves between the inside and the outside; idiom, the textual trait, opens nothing but the condition of its own recognizability: repetition.

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. And on the micro level, Vermilion Sands has perhaps the most extreme concentration of Ballard's distinctive idiomatic tic: his use and abuse of the simile.

In idiom, the trait is there like “a name signed in the bottom right-hand corner of a canvas” (Greenland 92). The signature is within the textual frame, no external hand is required to sign it. 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 almost like permutations of a single master-plot, a potentially open and extendable series. “Studio 5, The Stars” might appear to break the chain, to reinscribe the myths 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 the computers.

Vermilion Sands is a sequence of nine stories linked by setting (an “overlit desert resort as an exotic suburb of my mind” [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 that has already been enacted and may well be reenacted again. The narrators discover that they are only one male in an extended series, objects apparently of a 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, chronicler of her own mental breakdown, and Max Ernst's lover), Emerelda Garland (an obvious reference to the fated Judy), Hope Cunard (recalling modernist writer, patron, and rive gauche iconoclast, Nancy Cunard), Raine Channing (perhaps a reference to another surrealist painter, Dorothea Tanning, wife of Tanguy, who committed suicide soon after his death?), Gloria Tremayne (the atmosphere of “Stellavista,” the final story, clearly makes this a reference to Gloria Swanson's role as the egomaniacal 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 that 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 later “Papers on Technique” repetition, in the sense of acting out, reenaction, is the enemy of the 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” 108). 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 relating this to the narratives of Vermilion Sands, it is worth recalling Freud's textual figure: “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.” What is peculiar, however, is that while 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.

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,” may serve as a warning. The deliciously named Dr. Charcot 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 decrepit 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” fail to grasp the extent of the repetition. In “Say Goodbye to the Wind,” Samson (an iconic name, suggesting the castrating threat of the feminine?) 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, much 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.

Thus far I have kept back the science fictional element of these stories. In Darko Suvin's term, each story introduces a novum: Vermilion Sands 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 sites on which trauma is written. They become, in effect, externalizations of the psyche that bear the marks of trauma that will be repeated by the next owner. Initially the women seem to have a calming effect. (There is repetition here: as Jane Cyclacides enters the shop full of discordantly 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].) Denouements, 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” (as do “The Singing Statues” and “Cry Hope, Cry Fury!”) is to undercut by implying prior, inaccessible repetitions.

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, the framing device through which a text is attached to a name, a genre (Genette). 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. Each text resonates not in itself but in the overdetermined tangle of lines of repetitive elements. This is a textual event: just as the male narrators of Vermilion Sand 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, its core of unreadability.

So far I have analyzed 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 texts with abstruse figurations. Similes, in particular, pile up on page after page with startling frequency.

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” (Thomson) have been criticized as “descriptive encrustations” (Strawson) that mar his work. This accords with the still largely pejorative sense of rhetoric: writings that are too “rhetorical” equate with bad writing. “Bijou” is in fact the perfect adjective for Vermilion Sands, because the text is indeed studded with “ornamental” tropes that precisely refer to jewels. Leonora Chanel is persistently described as having “jeweled 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 “jeweled hands” (127) and carries “a sonic jewel like a crystal rose” (134); Emerelda already names a jewel and has her army of jeweled insects.

Rhetoric is classically coded as feminine. 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”; these figures were also represented as jewels (Barthes 32). This allegory combines both the figural and the suasive elements of rhetoric, what Derrida in Spurs terms “style” and “stylus” (meaning stiletto or dagger). If clusters of figures tend to proliferate around the women of Vermilion Sands in an attempt to catch their truth, the veil of rhetoric is poisonous: “Say Goodbye to the Wind,” in which Raine presents to Samson the bio-fabric suit in which Kaiser died, recalls the myth of Deianira, who gives the coat poisoned by Nessus's 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 rendered entirely unreadable.

Rhetoric, of course, has been reestablished 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. In studies of Ballard, only Colin Greenland has really attempted to determine how Ballard uses the simile, 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 that are entirely unlike. These “pseudo-similes” offer a “comparison which mystifies instead of elucidating”; “there is no discoverable parity between terms,” 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” (in Greenland 103). Greenland lets this example speak for itself, but it is possible to analyze 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” (painted?), the reefs are “like the tortured demons of medieval cathedrals,” and towers of obsidian are “like stone gallows” (47). Following that, “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” (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 move 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]) into a “zone of illusion” 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 to be no limit to what tropes can get away with” (62).

These knots in the text can be found throughout Vermilion Sands. Is it simply bad writing? Is “eyes crossed by disappointment” (93) knowing or 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 exactly 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 and 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. Flatness also has a pejorative sense, and this has been a consistent criticism of the prose style (of The Kindness of Women it was said the writing was “slow, stately, curiously flat” [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 work effects by distribution, by syntactical devices (anaphora, parallelism, and so on). Tropes alter the meaning of a word or phrase from is “proper” meaning. I want to suggest that simile, as an analogical trope, is used here figurally. In Jakobson's opposition, metaphor is vertical while 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. Indeed, this is pervasive throughout the oeuvre—one marked by a bizarre semiotics of hieroglyphs and ciphers.

What holds these together are their encryption, their status as hidden languages, closed and unreadable but to the initiated. To discover their insistence in Vermilion Sands 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 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 text 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).

These strange and unsettling effects concern the signature. To further the analysis, I now turn to 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” (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 danger: “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” (“Strange Institution” 63). I want to suggest that parody is a form of countersignature, one that imitates the “original” signature such that is 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 (“shared worlds,” plots, conventions) remain vital. 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 bodily fluids that the interviewer is incapable of posing any questions). Sladek also wrote “The Sublimation World,” a brief parody of the catastrophe novels that 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” [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; Ballard, when asked, tersely refused to read them (interview 20).

Killough's borrowings are extensive. “The Siren Garden” shifts from the singing plants of Ballard's “Prima Belladonna” to crystals, which like many 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.” “The Tropic of Eden,” with psychotropic houses, synthesizes elements of “The Singing Statues” and “Venus Smiles,” while 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 neighbor, just as in “Studio 5, The Stars.” Verbal echoes are constant, as is the (less obsessive) use of simile and the opening paragraphs that 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 that 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, but it is unnervingly more parodic of Ballard than Killough.

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: “Find your own suburb.”

It is a strange defense of Vermilion Sands, however, to figure its parody in terms of a compulsion imposed by the personality of Ballard. Why revenge 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 defense. Pringle and Greenland's review can only confirm and escalate the complexity of the circulation of a text now detached from Ballard's authenticating signature.

Killough's parody offers a reading of Vermilion Sands; 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 nonreading: the ensnaring of the reader into the structures of the text that cannot get beyond them, that is doomed to a gestural reenaction of its scenarios.

Vermilion Sands, it seems to me, reveals the way in which Ballard's texts effectuate their seduction. The obsessive text enchains obsessive reading. The texts engineer a reading that is compulsive, that cannot close on the inarticulable remainder, particularly as the signature as authenticating mark is put in play inside the texts, and the idiomatic signature effects, as detailed here, a disappearance of its unique signatory into the networks of parody. You open a Ballard text, knowing once again you will be haunted, knowing that the compulsions it fosters will strike you again, knowing that to read Ballard is to be held by a lure that is generated by an irreducible core of unreadability.

Notes

1. See the responses to Jean Baudrillard's essay “Ballard's Crash” by N. Katherine Hayles (321–23) and Vivian Sobchack (327–29), who both cite Ballard's introduction. Science Fiction Studies 18.3 (1991).

2. Ballard's retraction reads: “I felt I was not altogether honest in this introduction because I did imply that there was a sort of moral warning which I don't really think is there.” Perhaps because this quote is so difficult to find, it has failed to register in discussions of Crash. My source is a footnote in Jonathan Benison's “Jean Baudrillard and the Current State of SF.” Foundation 32 (1984): 25–42. Ballard's comment on “terminal irony” comes from a letter to Foundation 10 (1975): 51–52.

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