"Cry Hope, Cry Fury," and the Prose of J. G. Ballard

In 1982, I read this comment by Thomas M. Disch in his collection, THE MAN WHO HAD NO IDEA:

"Though critics rarely examine its nuts and bolts, visualization is as crucial to the craft of story-telling as character, plot, or (in the prosodic sense) style. Often, when prose is praised for being 'poetic', it is not for its aural properties but for its power to project images on the camera obscura of the reading mind."

I agreed, but then Disch went on to baffle me:

"J. G. Ballard, for instance, might as well have been born deaf, but few writers paint so persuasively with a typewriter."

Again, I agreed, but only in part. Ballard was indeed a verbal painter, but did he write as if he were deaf? This made no sense to me.

That was almost four decades ago, but this year, having read again THE UNLIMITED DREAM COMPANY and several of my favourite stories about Vermilion Sands, I believe that Disch had a point:

J. G. Ballard writes with keen eyes and keen intellect, but with weak ears.

His keen eyes are obvious in "Cry Hope, Cry Fury," where every page gives a reader something to watch. Intellect comes through in passages like this one, about the properties of photosensitive paintings that record whatever is placed in front of them:

"As always, they recapitulated in reverse, like some bizarre embryo, a complete phylogeny of modern art, a regression through the principal schools of the twentieth century. After the first liquid ripples and motion of a kinetic phase, they stabilized into the block colours of the hard-edge school, and from there, as a thousand arteries of colour irrigated the canvas, into a brilliant replica of Jackson Pollock. These coalesced into the crude forms of late Picasso, in which Hope appeared as a Junoesque madonna with massive shoulders and concrete face, and then through surrealist fantasies of anatomy into the multiple outlines of futurism and cubism. Ultimately an impressionist period emerged, lasting a few hours, a roseate sea of powdery light in which we seemed like a placid domestic couple in the suburban bowers of Monet and Renoir."

As I have mentioned elsewhere, Ballard writes with an almost Elizabethan genius for metaphor and simile, but I have also begun to notice that he often writes as if unaware of sound. For example, "Cry Hope, Cry Fury" echoes with end rhymes and internal rhymes that litter the story from the first page to the last:

"The dunes gave way to a series of walled plains crossed by quartz veins."

"It flew monotonously around me as I sipped at the last of the lukewarm Martini. Despite its curiosity, the creature showed no signs of wanting to attack me."

"Lifted by the wind, her opal hair, like antique silver, made a chasuble of the air."

"Unsure whether this strange craft and its crew were an apparition, I raised the empty Martini flask to the woman."

"Hope had listened closely, as if unsure of my real identity."

"'Guise?' Hope looked up at him with wary eyes."

"For an hour I read to her, more as a gesture to calm her. For some reason she kept searching the painting which bore my veiled likeness as the Mariner...."

"Once, when she was away, sailing the empty dunes with her white rays, I hobbled up to her studio. There I found a dozen of her paintings mounted on trestles in the windows, looking out on the desert below."

"The portrait showed Hope in a conventional pose, seated like any heiress on a brocaded chair. The eye was drawn to her opal hair lying like a soft harp on her strong shoulders, and to her firm mouth with its slight reflective dip at the corners."

"The watery outline of his figure -- the hands hanging at his sides were pale smudges -- gave him the appearance of a man emerging from a drowned sea, strewn with blanched weeds and algae."

"Five minutes later, as we moved arm in arm along the corridor to her bedroom, we entered an empty room. From a cabinet Hope took a white yachting-jacket."

"Almost exhausted by the time I reached the beach, I walked clumsily across the dark sand, eyes stinging from the paint on my hands."

These are echoes I would expect from an early draft, ones that would be detected and revised afterwards. But for this to happen, a writer would need to hear the prose. Perhaps Ballard never did.

Nor did he seem to notice a repetitive structure that often pollutes lazy, bloated styles like George R. R. Martin's, and that I am shocked to see in Ballard's work, even though Ballard never pushes this method to the point of pain, as Martin does. I find Martin unreadable, I consider Ballard a genius, but I would be untrue to myself if I pointed out the disease in one writer's prose while ignoring the minor symptoms of another's.

In a later work like THE UNLIMITED DREAM COMPANY, Ballard seems to have steered away from unconcious rhymes, but in that book, as in "Cry Hope, Cry Fury," he still falls prey to sentences that feature one clause with an often vague or weak verb in the simple past tense, followed by a present participle afterthought. This repetition crops up in page after page:

"Each morning she sailed off in the schooner, her opal-haired figure with its melancholy gaze scanning the desert sea. The afternoons she spent alone in her studio, working on her paintings."

"When she had gone, hunting across the dunes in her schooner...."

"Hope Cunard stepped through the open window, her white gown shivering around her naked body like a tremulous wraith. She stood beside me, staring at my face on the portrait."

Sentences like these can become worse than insect-whine distractions; they can also reduce meaning. One potential risk of a broken-spine afterthought is the violation of simultaneous action -- a simultaneity that is, after all, the one good reason in the first place to use a present participle:

"She came into the cabin half an hour later. She sat down on the bunk at my feet, touching the white plaster with a curious hand."

A second risk would be a misplaced modifier:

"Coming ashore for cocktails, his stay had lasted for several weeks, a bizarre love-idyll between himself and this shy and beautiful painter that came to a violent end."

A third risk would be a non-sentence of non-sense:

"The paint annealed, the first light of the false dawn touching the sand-blown terrace."

For Ballard, for Martin, for writers good and bad, the best way to avoid these repetitive afterthoughts is to read with ears as well as eyes.

Ears might have also warned Ballard of another tendency. He often avoids useful or even essential prepositions, and this habit can reduce the clarity of a subordinate clause:

"One hand pressed to his heavy mouth, he gestured sceptically at the portraits of Hope and myself."

It can also burden a sentence with two subjects, when one would have offered more unity, concision, or even sense:

"My hands and arms smeared with wet paint, I went down to the bedroom. Hope slept on the crossed pillows, hands clasped over her breasts."

"Standing against the skyline on the terrace behind Hope was the image of a man in a white jacket, his head lowered to reveal the bony plates of his forehead."

"Skirting a wide ravine whose ornamented mouth gaped like the door of a half-submerged cathedral, I felt the yacht slide to one side, a puncture in its starboard tyre."

"Her eyes hidden behind her dark glasses, Miss Quimby nodded promptly."

"I lay back stiffly on the sofa, waiting for the painting to be exposed, when Hope’s half-brother appeared, a second canvas between his outstretched hands."

Why would Ballard remove prepositions from a sentence that needed them? I have no idea, but I can hear a gap in every case, like one chord chopped out of an otherwise haunting melody.

All that I have pointed out, here, should be seen within a context of admiration. For me, Ballard remains a central figure not only of the past, but of the present, and I suspect that if we survive as a species, if we continue to read, then our descendants will read Ballard.

Yet I also feel that admiration must never be deaf, and that prose can appeal through sound as well as through sight. Ballard is a writer for the eye, and for many readers, this will be more than enough to guarantee his greatness. I can only regret, in the smallest of ways, that his keen eye was not matched by a keen ear.