an imaginary review (2)
by uzwi
The humanity of the world is maintained only through constant effort. If you learn to grow flowers as a child–if you understand how quickly they die without water–you become a better adult. People think of love as a given. Love is made. Maybe it does come out of nowhere but it can’t support itself here, and it would soon go back there if we let it. To occur at all, festivals, celebrations, civilizations must be constructed; sustained by contribution. The nightmare of this novel is that among its characters nothing is being constructed. The only alternative to inertia, animalism and paranoia is magical thinking. Nothing practical is being done. The curve of humanity bottoms out. From here the only way is up. Where its author sites herself in relation to this understanding is uncertain.
To me this is the chill underlying Gormenghast; the stagnation of culture and the lack of any real moral compass.
Or In Viriconium, perhaps?
Some of Ballard’s novels lept to mind, but his stylized accounts strike me as nihilistic celebrations of artificial collapse rather than laments of real stagnation.
pardon, Mr Harrison, but isn’t this what you were doing with The Course of the Heart? i only ask because i wonder: how exactly does the author site himself in relation to that? and then i wonder whether i haven’t missed the point by wondering at all. and then i wonder, if i missed the point, whether it is my place to wonder about such things. and then i go crosseyed so that it looks as if i’m typing two sets of texts, neither of which are exactly willing to give up their meaning to me without a fight despite consisting entirely of uncomplicated surfaces.
erm. sorry for expelling my Nausea on your blog.
Hi Aaron, hi Chiles. I guess the idea is to make a gap in the text the shape of which can only be filled with the missing qualities. But the shape is complex & shifty; & the content of the above post only describes one set of absent qualities (certainly as far as CotH is concerned). It’s a bit like the answers to the important questions post below.
A big caveat emptor here, of course, is that the imaginary review is a fiction too.
Aaron: I try to remember when I read Ballard that, like Peake, he had direct experience of a large-scale breakdown of humanity. Unlike Peake, he had to live through it for some years–through his formative years in fact. So while his accounts may seem stylized & purely satirical they often emerge from a deeper knowledge–a deeper identification with the genius of collapse–than we can bring to the act of reading them. Looking for Ballard’s humanity in the usual places is always the wrong thing to do. It’s the other side of some event horizon from us.
Oops. I always forget that Ballard knows whereof he speaks. Perhaps it’s not his writing but my attraction to the breakdowns he describes that persuades me to view it as a hoax. How timid of me!