unused notes for an introduction

by uzwi

(1) what is the exact nature of the catastrophe?

Apotheosis of Quilter & Miranda Lomax in the drained city– Inhabitants reduced to Calibanism– The landscape loses its common reference points– Flash forwards to the next phase– Dead sea imagery contorting itself into counter-images of colour and reflected light– Those bland truisms the Ballardian disaster stripped off the popular apocalyptic fictions of the 1950s– Everyone is leaving for the sea–

(2) Shanghai Jim

“The ironies of this statement seem Swiftian and brutal, an attack on everything we might regard as homely or indeed everything we might regard as childhood. At the same time, we can only conclude that they are a kind of mask; perhaps a way of hiding in plain sight, perhaps a way of playing hide and seek not so much with an audience but with a self–or even a set of selves, like the curiously symbolic characters, fractured and partial, which people his early post-apocalyptic novels and stories.”

(3) Uncertain chemistries

Death is a kind of renewal– Equally, renewal is a kind of death– Love affairs with the jargons of science– This is really two novellas, with an absolute tour-de-force of Ballardian writing as pivot–

(4) The appropriation of symbols

Whose governess could hear the voice of God in Amherst Avenue– Whose governess could hear the voice of God in Amherst Avenue– Whose governess could hear the voice of God in Amherst Avenue– Whose governess could hear the voice of God in Amherst Avenue– Whose governess could hear the voice of God in Amherst Avenue–

(5) The legacy of Lunghua Camp.

The exotic as a repository of time– He sees no point in “driving about in a jeep” and fortifying your house against “the Armageddon to come”– This message, confirmation of its own obsolescence, is the city’s last act– The qualifier “failed” ought to be added to all these referential metaphors– Failed Prospero– Failed charismatic– etc– Major Arcana of the new reality–

(6) Things are hotting up

The draining of landscape is complete– Very little remains moving among the dunes– Events sketchy, violent, bare as the salt– Affect bony or invisible, fully converted into the post-catastrophic limbo– If anything can be said to have emerged from the decease of the previous culture, it cannot be described in terms that culture could understand– At the same time we are not looking into a vacuum of meaning– These very short chapters– Each with a theme developed around an encounter– A laboratory of compression– Later used to condense stories like You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe.

7. “Many of the guests had decided not to appear in costume”

Those of us who cut our teeth on Ballard in the mid-to-late 1960s, like puppies gnawing on a chair leg, understood very little but nevertheless elected him as father, map, compass. Later, perhaps, we understood more, but had already gone on to do something different.

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