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THE INFLUENCE OF AN AUTHOR’S LIFE ON HIS WRITINGS ON THE BASIS OF J. G. BALLARD’S SHORT STORIES
А.А. КОСАРИНА, филологический ф-т МГУ им. М.В. Ломоносова,
А.Е. ФЕДОТОВА, филологический ф-т МГУ им. М.В. Ломоносова
alexa7979@yandex. ru
119991, Москва, Ленинские горы, ГСП-1, МГУ имени М. В. Ломоносова, 1-й ГУМ, филологический факультет
Дж. Дж. Баллард прожил долгую жизнь, у него был богатый жизненный опыт, включающий войну, насилие, смерть любимой жены. Как мы предполагаем, в этом случае его богатый опыт не мог не быть отражен в работах.
В статье мы анализируем некоторые рассказы (из The Short stories by J. G. Ballard) и, основываясь на интервью с автором и его автобиографии, мы доказываем, что многое в работах Балларда связано с событиями, происходившими в его жизни. Мы решили выделить следующие особенности, логически выделяемые в тексте: хорошего конца не может быть, часты темы, связанные с насилием, сексом и наркотиками, отрицательное отношение к цивилизации, использование специализированных терминов, связанных с медициной, особые отношения с женщинами, замкнутое пространство. На примере рассказа «Единица особой заботы», где видим общество будущего, где люди общаются только с помощью высоких технологий и телевизоров, общества кажущейся утопии (люди не видят проблем других за макияжем и режиссерской работой), мы доказываем наши положения - единственная семья, семья успешного врача, которая пытается встретиться вне телевизионного пространства, самоуничтожается - ее члены убивают друг друга. Цивилизация лишает людей способности жить в реальности, с одной стороны, ослабляя их кажущимся благополучием, с другой стороны, вызывая мысль о насилии (сравните с военным Китаем и благополучной Англией, которые видел Баллард еще в юности).
Ключевые слова: Баллард, биография Балларда, жизнь через работы, антиутопия, короткие рассказы
There is a widely spread opinion, that authors often write about the events and situations they took part in or witnessed. Of course they do not necessarily describe all their experience and express their opinion, though this «method» is popular enough, they can take some part of a real-life situation and for example make it the basis for the plot, authors either can create their characters who reflect real people.
However the most interesting thing in our opinion is to find and highlight the hidden hints ON the life of the author. For example we can come across the repeating symbol or landscape and here comes the time to stop and to think: why does the author like it so much? Why is it so important and meaningful? Maybe it has some hidden sense and is actually a part of author’s life experience he wants to share with the reader.
James G. Ballard is not an exception here. He lived a long life and had rich life experience, including acquaintance with war and violence, death of his beloved wife. As we suppose, in this case his rich life experience had nothing but to be reflected in his works. In our article we are going to analyze some of them and basing on our conclusions together with the interviews with Ballard and on his autobiography we are going to prove that a great number of his works is closely connected with the events that actually took place in his life.
To begin with let us have a look at the interview with Ballard named “Marinaded in war and violence” by Philip Dodd.
According to Philipp Dodd we find out several facts that interest us most of all. He writes: “In his novel, “Empire of the Sun”, he wrote a fictional account of his childhood days living in Shanghai under Japanese occupation. /.../ Reading Miracles of Life, it’s clear that those Shanghai years were the defining ones for the novelist s imagination. Ballard spent some time as a medical student at Cambridge. The book also includes very personally painful subjects, from his alienation from his mother and father, to the death of his young wife. When we met in a wonderfully noisy flat, I suggested that Shanghai, and his experiences there, clearly provided the stage for what would become his preoccupations; spectacle, sex, violence and death. ” [1]
Even this small passage makes it clear to understand that author did not live an easy life. We can doubt, whether it was really so horrible, taking into account the intention of the interviewer to impress readers but here we come across the words of the author himself.
Ballard confirmed Philipp Dodd’s statement: “Death was everywhere, in a way that’s almost impossible to imagine. We lived in a suburban house — beggars died on our doorstep. And it’s im-
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possible to imagine /.../some elderly beggar, leaning against the wall in a drive and quietly dying, without anyone coming to his aid." [1]
So according to this interview the author’s life was not easy at all and if we take the theory that his “Short Stories” and other workings should reflect it, then it is obvious that there must be several specific features. For example, from this extract we can see the headwaters of his attitude towards civilization - for the 20th century Shanghai it was nothing more than cruelty and rudeness of war, the weapons and technologies used to kill, not to save. We have decided to point out some of those features which can logically be found in the text:
- No happy end is ever possible
- The themes related to violence, sex and drugs are popular
- The negative approach towards the civilization
- The author uses some elements connected with medicine
- Specific relations with women
- The closed space
In one of the articles about Ballard the author gives us a bright picture of the author’s life [2]: “James Graham Ballard was born on 15 November 1930 in Shanghai, China, where his father was the managing director of the Shanghai subsidiary of a Manchester firm of textile manufacturers. [...]. From this time, the young Ballard inhabited an environment strewn with the human and mechanical wreckage of war, circumscribed by the restrictions on movement imposed by the Japanese, and charged with expectations of the even greater conflict to come.
/.../In 1942, shortly after the outbreak of war between the Empire of Japan and the Allies, Ballard, his younger sister, and his parents were interned by the Japanese in a civilian prisoner-of-war camp at Lunghua, on the outskirts of Shanghai. They were held there for the remainder of the war, witnessing (and enduring) extremes of hunger, disease, and brutality. " But the family survived and in 1946 Ballard left China for England. This country was unknown to him and it “struck him as absurdly sedate after the violent chaos of wartime Shanghai"". [3]
So Ballard had a chance to experience, as we can say, double cultural shock, on the first
hand, the usual one, because of the difference of the country cultural values, traditions and stereotypes, on the other hand, because of the contrast between the crude reality of the wartime Shanghai and the seeming stability and welfare of England. After being accustomed to people whose main aim was to survive, he moved to see the faces of rich citizens worried by their careers. The first type of civilization was terrible and frightening, the other one was hilarious.
The author’s life was full of many painful events and the theory of the author of the article is that it did have a serious effect on Bollard’s life and narrative manner: “J.G. Ballard sustained some degree of psychological trauma as a result of his incarceration in a Japanese prison camp during World War II. /.../1 want to suggest that there are striking affinities between the changing role played by his wartime experiences in his writing, and the ways in which trauma is registered and “worked through " by its sufferers.” [3]
Paul Crosthwaite writes that in the earlier Ballard’s works there is “an element of conscious intention that is absent from the involuntary mental states typical of trauma.” He analyzes the theory of J. Stephen Murphy [4] that “the writer ofpoetry or fiction might desire to distort reality and conventions of narrative and logic but the survivor [of trauma] is seemingly unable to do anything but". So, permanent mentioning abandoned settlements, empty apartment blocks, drained swimming pools and other such scenes often appear in Ballard’s pre-1980s texts. As Ballard survived this “trauma” we can see that he is a kind of “obsessed” with his memories which he reflects in his stories.
Reflecting, in 1975, on the effects of his wartime incarceration on his writing, Ballard commented: “The whole landscape out there had a tremendously powerful influence on me, as did the whole war experience. All the abandoned cities and towns and beach resorts that I keep returning to in my fiction were there in that huge landscape, the area just around our camp. [...] All of the images I keep using - the abandoned apartment houses and so forth - must have touched something in my mind ” [5]
The start of Ballard’s career is closely connected with the new period, new tendency in
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literature - the ‘New Wave’. With the decay of the ‘pulp’ science fiction, new writers paid much more attention to the human mind. Many borders were lost, and the themes Ballard was writing of that had been forbidden before, now became most relevant. Ursula le Guin [10], who is sometimes described as one of the NW writers, said: “I think it is fair to say that science fiction changed around 1960, and that the change tended toward an increase in the number of writers and readers, the breadth of subject, the depth of treatment, the sophistication of language and technique, and the political and literary consciousness of the writing. The sixties in science fiction were an exciting period for both established and new writers and readers. All the doors seemed to be opening”
So we can suppose that due to quite logical reasons, here we mean the events that actually took place, Ballard’s rich and unique life experience is closely connected to his narrative manner and to the plots he chooses, it is hidden in the descriptions and in the way the characters behave. This statement we are going to prove in the following analysis of an extract from one of
J. G. Ballard’s stories.
Let us turn to the short story “The intensive care unit”. Here we can see the society of the future world, where all the people communicate with the help of TV-sets and everything seems to be perfect. No one bores or disturbs each other.
At the proairetic level (the main units at this level are “actions that can fall into various sequences which should be indicated merely by listing them, since the proairetic sequence is never more than the result of an artifice of reading”
[6]) we can see that there is no happy end, and no happy end could be ever possible.
The main character is living in a fully computerized space and knows no life apart from this space. The progress, the civilization is the only environment the character has seen and therefore the only reality he can live in. As soon as he breaks the cocoon of the computers, he dies from the hands of his own family still loving them and being loved by them. This approach to the civilization is highly traditional to
J. G. Ballard - for him, a man who depends on the computers, can not cope with the real life [8]. Here we can also see the trace of Ballard’s rela-
tions with his own wife that died young - the love mixed with decay. The love does not always give a chance for people to unite as a family.
The main hero is a doctor that has never seen his patients in real life. Ballard pays special attention to describing the process of examining a patient.
“My five years as a medical student passed without my ever needing to see a patient in the flesh. My skills in anatomy and physiology were learned at the computer display terminal. Advanced techniques of diagnosis and surgery eliminated any need for direct contact with an organic illness. The probing camera, with its infra-red and X-ray scanners, its computerized diagnostic aids, revealed far more than any unaided human eye.” [9]
The fact that the main character is a doctor that may use special medical terms like ‘ the probing camera’, ‘ infra-red and X-ray scanners’ is highly characteristic too and can show most clearly the determination of J. G. Ballard to reflect his own life in his writings.
The other feature of Ballard’s experience can be seen in the way the main character got acquainted with his future wife [7]. She was a patient that attached the doctor’s attention to herself by breaking the rules of the society and, at the same time, paying attention to the banned sides of human life - she appeared at the screen with no makeup and showed her breasts. So this woman is a piece of real world in the heart of computerized universe, the hint of freedom which the main character lingered for, but, at the same time, she is also a prisoner that can not provide freedom she promises - they do not create a traditional family. On the one hand, here we can see the influence of J. G. Ballard’s life on his writings; on the other hand, these themes are quite usual for the ‘New Wave’.
Still he is able to choose whether he wants to meet with his wife and children in real life or no. But what happens next? During the private meeting with the dearest people the main hero has a desire to kill them, because he got used to the order and the rules of TV- communication. So, the environment suppressed the natural human instincts, and even if the hero wants to struggle he is not able to do it. He is the part
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of this environment. And he has no other choice that to live according to its’ laws.
Ballard lived not an easy life, and it surely made some influence on his works and his attitudes expressed in the writings, which he did not deny himself. So we think it reasonable to learn more about Ballard’s life in order to understand what actually happened, what was his attitude to the events that took place, what influence have these events had on the author himself and which events are reflected in the writings directly or indirectly.
Библиографический список References
1. Dodd Ph. Marinaded in war and violence (an interview between Philip Dodd and J.G. Ballard Author: Ballardian Feb 7th, 2008. http://www.ballardian. com/marinaded-in-war-and-violence-philip-dodd-interviews-jg-ballard.
2. A Secret Code of Pain and Memory: War Trauma and Narrative Organisation in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard (By Paul Crosthwaite School of English Literature, Language, and Linguistics University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK). http://wwwjgballard.ca/criticism/ jgb_secretcode.html.
3. Stephenson 1991: 9; Ballard, From Shanghai 1984: 113-14; Delville 1998.
4. Murphy, J.S. Past Irony: Trauma and the Historic Turn in Fragments and The Swimming-Pool Library. Literature & History, 2004, № 13(1), pp. 63.
5. Goddard and Pringle, 1975: part 1, par. 4. http://www. jgballard.ca/pringle_news_from_the_sun/news_ from_sun23.html
6. Barthes R. «S/Z». Blackwell Publishing, 1990. pp. 19. ISBN 0631 17607 1 (paperback).
7. Kosarina A., Fedotova A. The madman reality in short stories by J. G. Ballard. Moscow State Forest University Bulletin - Lesnoi Vestnik, 2014, № 2, pp. 157-160. (in Russian).
8. Kosarina A., Fedotova A. Depersonification and impersonation in the writings of english and american writers of the XIX, XX and XXI century with the analysis of Ballard’s «Short stories», «Great expectations» by Dickens and De Lint’s urban tales. Moscow State Forest University Bulletin - Lesnoi Vestnik, 2013, № 5, pp. 143-147. (in Russian).
9. Ballard J.G. The complete Short Stories. 1960. http://biblioklept.org/2013/10/06/the-complete-short-stories-of-j-g-ballard-second-riff-stories-of-1960/
10. Le Guin, Ursula K. Introduction. In Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery (eds.), The Norton Book of Science Fiction, New York, W.W. Norton, 1993. pp. 872.
THE INFLUENCE OF AN AUTHOR’S LIFE ON HIS WRITINGS ON THE BASIS OF J. G. BALLARD’S SHORT STORIES
Kosarina A.A., Faculty of Philology Lomonosov Moscow State University, Fedotova A.E., Faculty of Philology Lomonosov Moscow State University
alexa7979@yandex.ru
MSU, Faculty of Philology, Russia, 119991, Moscow, GSP-1, 1-51 Leninskie Gory, 1 Humanities Building
J. G. Ballard lived a long life and had rich life experience, including acquaintance with war and violence, death of his beloved wife. As we suppose, in this case his rich life experience had nothing but to be reflected in his works. In our article we are going to analyze some of them and basing on our conclusions together with the interviews with Ballard and on his autobiography we are going to prove that a great number of his works is closely connected with the events that actually took place in his life. We have decided to point out some of those features which can logically be found in the text: no happy end is ever possible, the themes related to violence, sex and drugs are popular, the negative approach towards the civilization, the author uses some elements connected with medicine, specific relations with women, the closed space. We turn to the short story "The intensive care unit", where we can see the society of the future world, where all the people communicate with the help of TV-sets and everything seems to be uthopic. No one bores or disturbs each other. No one can see other’s problems due to makeup and director’s cut. But the only family, a doctor’s family, that tried to see each other in real life kills each other.
Key words: Ballard, Ballaard’s biography, life through writings, dystopia, Short Stories
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