12 Years Old

1.

I have read several things today. Firstly, I finished Quotes, by J. G. Ballard. Then, there was the short version of Appelfeld’s Badenheim 1939. Finally, Josipovici’s preface to Appelfeld’s The Retreat. The following is a peculiar attempt to tie them together; it is only provisional (well, what post isn’t?).

J. G. Ballard was 12 when he was taken into the prison camps of Shanghai. There, he loses faith in his parents, who were imprisoned with him, and, perhaps, with the adult world altogether. It is all imposture, he thinks to himself, and when later he goes to live in Britain with his family, a country he had not seen before, he finds more imposture. As he begins to write, he understands his role is to articulate upon the new psychopathies which have appeared in the wake of Hiroshima. If the first half of the twentieth century belonged to Surrealism, the second half will belong to science fiction, he thinks to himself.

Graham Greene: The place reminded her of a seedy hotel, yellowing mirrors in the bathrooms, broken toilet bowls and dripping taps, where the chambermaids spoke in impertinent voices and the doormen reached out to them with their big, strong hands.

Ballard admires Greene. Why? Because Greene would have disclosed, for his characters, the latent content of the world. Ballard, of course, is thinking of Freud, certainly, but more especially of Surrealism, for which it is a matter of discovering the path desire lays before us – a difficult task because we have been disenfranchised from our desire by the reign of logic, of rationalism, and by a civilisation which requires we are enchained to the work we do to make a living. Ballard admires Greene as an author who shows how the world is already invested, changed, constituted by our desire.

Josipovici, commenting on the same passage from Greene: ‘A novelist like Greene is always out to make an effect; his eye is on the reader. Appelfeld, by contrast, is trying to catch the truth: his eye is on the object’. For Jospovici, truth is a quality of the world itself, of the disclosedness of the world the novelist can accomplish for the reader. The novelist’s eye would be on that disclosedness and not on the reader; he is not trying to seduce or to flatter; he is not intent upon demonstrating his authorly virtuosity or prowess; what he wants is to tell the truth. And to be truthful is to attend to the solidity of the world, the way it stands beyond what you and I make of it. That is to say, the world resists the measure of the ‘I’; it is not constituted by the protagonist of the story but is there before him; it precedes the entrance of the protagonist on stage and will outlast him.

One might say Josipovici understands the way a protagonist inherits a world, is thrown there, and must make his way there, struggling against everything which resists his powers. Only what resists, ultimately, is the world itself – yes, the stubbornness and opacity of what remains as the world after human beings pass through it. Greene’s fault is to have forgotten this stubbornness. Appelfeld, however, turns to the world, to what remains. Josipovici finds him ‘summing up the world in a gesture which is neither quite internal nor quite external …’; we recognise in his work ‘that the miracle of literary art is that by a fusion of the imaginative and the verbal the entire complex tangle of reality which would otherwise remain forever closed to us is caught and conveyed’. Reality is too complex to be reduced to a subjective impression – this, perhaps, is the kernel of Josipovici’s argument. Greene would remain at the level of the subjective.

What might Ballard reply? That the world is experienceable only in terms of the constituting activity of the psychopathologies which traverse us. There have always been psychopathies; once they were called myth; now, having spread across the world, we need no name for them other than reality. Psychopathies alter. ‘Computer punchtape, old telephone manuals, printed circuitry whose alphabets have died, the luminescent bodies of dead spacemen – all these form part of the astronomy of dreams that full our heads’. Whence Crash, in which the fantasies of its protagonists are a deliberate attempt to remake the world.

‘Crash is about the unconscious marriage which takes place between the human imagination and technology, the way in which modern technology offers us a back-door pass into the realm of psychopathology’. A marriage, then, which a kind of speculative fiction can reveal.

‘Psychopathy is the only engine powerful enough to light our imaginations, to derive the arts, sciences and industries of the world’. This is why, for Ballard, Greene points a way which other realist novels do not. But Greene only points; new psychopathies are the topic of science fiction. Thus it is that science fiction is the literary art of the twentieth century. The twentieth century would have seen only two genuinely artistic movements: Surrealism and science fiction. A claim I found wholly plausible for many years.

2.

I read almost nothing but science fiction until I was 20. What changed? What changed for me? A great deal is at stake in this question. When I reread what I write, I always think: ‘this could have been written in the 1950s’. When I watch the news, I think: ‘why can’t I write about cloning and stem cell research instead of writing?’ When I visit an art gallery, I think: ‘why don’t I write about new media art rather than literature.’ And when I try to write philosophy, I think: ‘why am I fixated on writing, on the infinitive, to-write?’

In a study on science fiction, Thomas M. Disch recalls claim that science fiction is aimed at 12 year olds. Who else but the 12 year old in you enjoys Star Wars? Is there a time to put childish things aside, to turn from science fiction altogether? It would be interesting to construct a reading autobiography – to tell one’s life through the books I read. When I was 12, The Drowned World, at 13, Barefoot in the Head, at 14, The Terminal Beach, at 15 the short stories of James Tiptree Jr. and Robert Zelazny. At 20, Rilke and Stevens, at 21, Pessoa and Proust.

But it is age 22 that is the great turning point. That year, leaving university for unemployment and sporadic temping, I became a re-reader, endlessly returning to those works in which I discovered an acknowledgement of the emptiness of my life and a door leading somewhere else. A door which was not the finely imagined world of the science fiction, but the heaviness of a prose on the edges of poetry, of a writing which answered to stultifying boredom of adult life. At 20, Camus and Sartre disgusted me; I liked Lawrence. By 22, I knew only a kind of impotency, a vast failure. Even Burroughs, whom I discovered at 21, had become dead to me. Soon Beckett’s Trilogy would open to engulf me. I wandered in its labyrinth. Finally, the miraculous year 1993, a time of the greatest despair and the greatest happiness. What did I write in the cover of Inner Experience when I first came across it? I won’t transcribe it here.

What it was to be rescued by books! Of course, I’d long since forgotten science fiction, even Gene Wolfe and John Crowley seemed unimportant to me – yes, even the author of the magnificentBook of the New Sun. Why? I don’t have an answer. I want to return to these books; I will. Then, busy studying, I stopped reading fiction for many years. When I restarted, I wanted plain prose, simplicity. I wanted a sense of the resistance of the world to human desire. This married with my philosophical interest in Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ as he writes of the resistance of earth to world – of the drama of what might be called earthing and worlding – and of course, in Blanchot’s work as it was written in the margins of Heidegger’s. Increasingly, I had a sense of the great catastrophes of the 20^th century, of the wreckage of the dream of reconciling work and freedom.

It was not that I discovered the hell of Auschwitz in Beckett or of Treblinka in Blanchot. It was never that simple! But there was a sense of shame, as Levi might call it, the shame of being human. And I sought a literature that would have acknowledged that shame understanding that the resistance of the world, its stubbornness, its materiality, would also offer a kind of hope. This is what I discovered in Appelfeld, reading The Age of Wonders last year. In Bernhard’s Extinction, too. What could science fiction mean to me now?

3.

Josipovici notes that Appelfeld has no interest in repeating the story of German atrocities. ‘What happened to the Jews in the Second World War is beyond tragic’, says Appelfeld in an interview, ‘It is impossible to understand it. We are not able to think about the death of a single individual, a close person, a single one. How can we think about hundreds and thousands of people?’ Josipovici comments: ‘Instead, he concentrates on those things that can be imagined, on the temptations of the imagination. His theme is the folly of willful blindness and the inability of imagination to face reality’. Thus the Jews of the town of Appelfeld’s Badenheim 1939 imagine the coming war could pass them by.

Freud did not follow the Surrealists in their great confidence at unleashing psychopathology. Perhaps he was too pessimistic regarding the darkness of our desires. After all, it was Hitler the masses wanted in the years he was writing Civilisation and its Discontents. Ballard acknowledges this darkness: ‘Fascism was a virtual psychopathology that served deep unconscious needs. Years of bourgeois conditioning had produced a Europe suffocating in work, commerce and conformity. Its people needed to break out, to invent the hatred that could liberate them’. Still, the same psychopathy can permit other ways of breaking out. It drives science fiction; it drives that fiction which does not turn away from the transformation of our desires.

Ballard’s fiction is a turn to inner space, not outer space. He was despised by fellow science fiction writers for that reason, he remembers. But he insists on what he calls mythologisation: that attempt on the part of his characters to make sense of the world through the construction of a private myth. ‘Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown’: ‘Already he seemed to have decided that she was leaving him only in the sense that she was dying of pancreatic cancer, and that he might save her by constructing a unique flying machine’.

There is always the possibility of meaning, for Bataille. That possibility lies in psychopathy, in the active embrace of mythologisation. How else does Jim survive in the prison camps of Empire of the Sun? But Jim is a child. How old is he? 12? Are we all to become 12 year olds, then? The drama of Ballard’s stories lies in the way his protagonists will attempt to create meaning, to make the world make sense. They run up against non-meaning: massive trauma, nuclear testing in the Pacific, the Shanghai prison camp and impose meaning on their trauma. Ballard focuses on things which cannot be imagined and shows how imagination works nonetheless. The marvel of The Atrocity Exhibition lies in this.

Still, I wonder whether there is something which resists the imaginative transmogrification of the world. Something remains of the untransformed Shepperton in The Unlimited Dream Company. Eniwetok endures even amidst ‘The Terminal Beach’. This ‘what remains’ Josipovici would call it truth. Heidegger would call truth what happens as earth and world struggle each against the other. Truth, he might say, is forged in the relation between meaning and non-meaning. Crucially, for Heidegger, non-meaning presents itself in the work of art. It presses towards us, its viewers. Is this what happens in a story by Ballard? What comes towards us? The words he uses and luxuriates in again and again; favourite sentence structures … yes, all this is there, and we are indulged as his readers.

But I have set a whole swarm of questions in motion: When did my desire to be indulged come to an end?, I ask myself. When did I seek a plainer prose and for what reasons? Why did I leave Ballard’s narrative feast behind? I could write, because I was tired of being 12, but this is unfair. There is a better answer: Ballard tries to organize the economy of meaning and non-meaning in terms of what he calls mythology. He allows his characters to come to dwell in the mythologies they make for themselves from the psychpathies that pass across them. They are not sedentary, living in a version of the Heideggerian polis, but move, drifting across a landscape. Think of Kerans of The Drowned World, forever moving South. But even as they move there is something they do not confront: the bareness of non-meaning itself. They move through a world, but what happens when the world vanishes? What would happen when they confront that bareness upon which they cannot project their dreams? This moment is not marked explicitly in Ballard’s text. It is there implicitly, it is true – but I suppose I wanted to read a fiction where it was more strongly marked.

Ballard was 12 in the Shanghai prison camp. He fantasized; he would continue to do so when he returned to Britain, a country much duller than it is today. He fantasized, he seized upon today’s psychopathies, he wrote, and marked, in his own way, that great voiding of meaning which lies at the heart of the twentieth century. He marked it – but where? In the way the protagonist of The Atrocity Exhibition must always be re-named. He is Travers then Traven, then … And in the rhythm, of the repetition of that book and others like it (Crash). At the hinge, articulating this books, is the experience which opens itself to the reader of Ballard as to the reader of Appelfeld: the void of meaning, the need to mythologise again, and again. Yes, but in Appelfeld this need is expressed as such. It is there and it is present. Perhaps.

Ballard has written a great deal. I detect in the repetition of the same cluster of themes the same repetition we find in Freud’s young grandson flinging a cotton reel into his curtained cot with a sadistic ‘ooo’ and then retrieving it with a satisfied ‘aahh’. The child’s mother is dead; for Freud, his grandson seeks an aesthetic mastery of this loss. He hears ‘fort’ (gone) and ‘da’ (here) in the child’s phonemes and interpets the spool-play as a kind of gambling with loss. Every story Ballard writes sends the spool into the cot. When he purposely fails to complete them, allowing one to overlap with another, what is marked is a loss without recompense. Life is only a detour through which death sends life to itself, Freud muses. So too are Ballard’s stories and that science fiction of inner space as they bring us over and again to the disaster areas of the twentieth century. But there is another way in which those disaster areas ask to be written.