The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

  14. Last, the “postmodernism” consisting simply of what aesthetic means and opportunities modernism and an ascendant popular culture left in their wake (or not their wake, since both, or at least popular culture, are still around). By “means and opportunities” I am alluding to the vastly expanded and recombinant toolbox of strategies, tones, traditions, genres, and forms that a legacy of modernist-style experimentation, as well as a general disintegration of boundaries (between traditions, tones, etc.), has made available to a writer, or to any kind of artist. Luc Menand made this very simple in an essay on how Donald Barthelme’s stories go on stubbornly regenerating their uses and interest for new generations of readers; he suggested that postmodernism, as an artistic movement, represents the democratization of modernism’s impulses and methods. We’ll call this third principle, for the sake of my allegory, Liberty Valance.

  15. I’d like to suggest that the killing of Liberty Valance in order to preserve safety and order in the literary town is a recurrent ritual, a ritual convulsion of literary-critical convention. The chastening of Those Guys, and the replacement of their irresponsible use of Free Power with a more modest and morally serious minimalist aesthetic sometime in the late ’70s, was a kind of Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, a point of inception for the ritual. Who first played the role of Stewart/Stoddard, the true-of-heart citizen shoved into the street to take on the menacing intruder? Was it Raymond Carver? I think Raymond Carver might have been the original Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Who’s played the role recently? A few: Alice Munro, William Trevor, Cormac McCarthy, Marilynne Robinson, Jonathan Franzen.

  16. The worth, or the intentions, of the writer propped up on Main Street as the killer of postmodernism is not the point. The person (or book) in the street is a surrogate. The Wayne/Doniphon figure is the critic in the shadows, maneuvering the writer in question in a contest of the critic’s devising (excepting, I suppose, the John Gardner or Tom Wolfe scenario of self-appointment, where both roles are played by the same actor). According to the critic’s presentation the writer has, at last, killed Liberty Valance on behalf of the terrified populace. Yet the terrified populace is probably a straw man, too, a projection of the critic’s own fear of disreputability or disorder.

  17. The persistence of the ritual disproves the ostensible result: Liberty Valance is shot, but never dies. (“Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial chalices dry; this occurs repeatedly, again and again; finally it can be reckoned upon beforehand and becomes part of the ceremony.”—Kafka.) Books don’t kill other books, nor do literary stances or methods kill, or disqualify, differing sorts, and those—stances and methods—don’t actually originate from moral positions per se. A given book elaborates its own terms, then succeeds or fails according to them, including on the level of morals. None of this ensures the accomplishment of any writer working in any methodology (whether consciously or in merry obliviousness to the range of options available). A book as full of misrule, as seemingly heedless to ethical consequence as Marvin/Valance in John Ford’s film, might be as sacred as any other.

  18. The reason postmodernism doesn’t die isn’t that the man in the shadows has a peashooter instead of a weapon. Critics do kill things: books frequently, careers from time to time (just ask Those Guys). The reason postmodernism doesn’t die is that postmodernism isn’t the figure in the black hat standing out in the street squaring off against the earnest and law-abiding “realist” novel against which it is being opposed. Postmodernism is the street. Postmodernism is the town. It’s where we live, the result of the effects of Liberty Valance’s stubborn versatility and appeal, and the fact of Kaczynski’s Bad Dream.

  19. Yet Liberty Valance and Kaczynski’s Bad Dream aren’t the same “postmodernism.” The freedom and persuasiveness of the full array of contemporary stances and practices available to the literary artist aren’t something to renounce even if the Full Now makes us anxious to the verge of nervous breakdown. At its best, one is a tool for surviving the other—the most advanced radiation suit yet devised for wandering into the toxic future.

  20. Changing metaphors entirely at the last minute: Both Kabuki and Noh theater began as fluid popular forms, licensed to depict their own contemporary reality, before sealing themselves within sacralized pools of approved forms, metaphors, and references. And in the history of twentieth-century popular music there’s a name for the school of jazz that glanced at the innovations of bebop and all the implications and possibilities of what lay beyond, but declined to respond. The name for that school is Dixieland.

  The Claim of Time

  By the time J. G. Ballard died, talk of his years-long struggle with cancer should have prepared his followers (“fans” is too pale a word for the devotion Ballard aroused), yet the news still struck us as a shock. Ballard was, unmistakably, a literary futurist, at ease in the cold ruins of the millennium a lifetime sooner than the rest of us; his passing registered as a disorienting claim of time upon the timeless. Whether you embrace or reject on his behalf the label “science-fiction writer” will indicate whether you regard it as praiseful or damning, but no one reading Ballard could doubt the tidal gravity of his intellect, or the stark visionary consistency of the motifs which earned him that rarest of literary awards, an adjective: Ballardian. Now, and not a moment too soon, comes The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard, a staggering 1,200-page compendium of a lifetime’s labors in the medium in which Ballard was perhaps most at home.

  Each of Ballard’s ninety-two short stories is like a dream more perfectly realized than any of your own. His personal vocabulary of scenarios imprints itself from the very first, each image with the quality of a newly minted archetype. Ballard was the poet of desolate landscapes marked by signs of a withdrawn human presence: drained swimming pools, abandoned lots littered with consumer goods, ruined space stations, sites of forgotten military or vehicular tragedies. Himself trained in medicine, Ballard created protagonists and narrators who are frequently doctors or scientists, yet expertise never spares them from the fates they see overtaking others. If Ballard’s view of the human presence in his landscapes is grimly diagnostic, his scalpel is wielded with tenderness, his bedside manner both dispassionate and abiding.

  Here, the panorama set before one such observer, from 1966’s “The Day of Forever”:

  Despite the almost static light, fixed at this unending dusk, the drained bed of the river seemed to flow with colours. As the sand spilled from the banks, uncovering the veins of quartz and the concrete caissons of the embankment, the evening would flare briefly, illuminated from within like a lava sea. Beyond the dunes the spires of old water towers and the half-completed apartment blocks near the Roman ruins at Leptis Magna emerged from the darkness. To the south, as Halliday followed the winding course of the river, the darkness gave way to the deep indigo tracts of the irrigation project, the lines of canals forming an exquisite bonelike gridwork.

  Ballard in a grain of sand: the visual poetry of ruin; a syntax scientifically precise yet surreally oversaturated; and the convergence of the technological and the natural worlds into a stage where human life flits as a violent, temporary shadow. Yet Ballard at his best never seems to load the dice against humanity. He merely rolls them.

  Every bit as striking as Ballard’s feeling for entropy is his fictional engagement with neighbor arts from which literary writing too often seems quarantined: music, sculpture, painting, architecture. Ballard evokes art-creation with the passion of an exile for a lost kingdom. Like his scientific characters, Ballard’s overreaching artists glimpse seeds of doom at the heart of their endeavors. And, in perhaps his most famous vision, the novel Crash, technology, sculpture, sex, and death recede to the same vanishing point: the permanently contemporary site of the car crash.

  Returning the favor, the neighbor arts relished Ballard. From the Comsat Angels, a rock band named for a 1968 story, to Radiohead, David Cronenberg, Wim Wenders, Simon Critchley, Alexis Rockman, John Gray, Joy Division, Gary Pan
ter, and countless others, Ballard probably inspired more rock musicians, philosophers, painters, and filmmakers than fiction writers. Reversing the notion of the “writer’s writer,” he’s less esteemed in literary culture than in the wider sphere. His presence is also far stronger in the U.K. than in the United States. The Complete Stories ought to alter both these imbalances.

  My own favorite of Ballard’s stories is 1964’s “The Drowned Giant.” This tale of a vast carcass awash on an English beach is as elegant and devastating as any of Kafka’s or Calvino’s fantasies, simply asking: What happens when Gulliver drifts home?

  Equally perfect, “The Secret Autobiography of J.G.B.,” posthumously published in The New Yorker and the penultimate story in the collection, gently inserts the writer himself into an emptied-out version of his beloved London suburb of Shepperton, there to discover himself at an endpoint that is also a beginning. With his more celebrated role as a social critic of modernity, Ballard was also a poet of infinite regress, gnawing at the Zeno’s paradox of our place in the cosmos with the rigor of an Escher or Bach.

  Not to take away from his verdict on the twentieth century: Ballard’s a bard of techno-anomie, of late-capitalist disaffection, and his writings are just the tonic if your local cloverleaf traffic jam or gated community or global-warming harbinger has got you feeling out of sorts. But it’s precisely his grounding in deeper undercurrents of cosmic-existentialist wonder that give that tonic its fizz. His is the voice reminding you not to take the postmodern hangover too personally: It was always going to happen this way.

  A writer viewed as radical is rarely also so entrenched in formal reserve as was Ballard. Much of the energy in his fiction comes from the pull of his prophecy against the dutiful, typically middle-class English politesse of his characters, the unradicalism of their attitudes toward one another and themselves. In the Vermilion Sands stories, which scatter through his first two decades, much of the dialogue might be taken from a Barbara Pym novel, if instead of small-town vicarages Pym’s milieu had been a crumbling desert resort inhabited by aging celebrities.

  Ultimately, Ballard is simply a master short-story writer, if by this we mean to describe a maker of unforgettable artifacts in words, each as absolute and perplexing as sculptures unviewable from a single perspective. In this book of ninety-two stories are at least thirty that you can spend a lifetime returning to, to wander and wonder around. The measure of the lesser pieces is that they support rather than diminish the masterworks—and that Ballard’s hand is always unmistakable.

  Taking measure of a writer’s life’s work can be intimidating, yet I hope this book will not only be purchased but read. Ballard’s sensibility not only rewards immersion but thrives there. He may have written both an autobiographical diptych of novels (Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women) and an autobiography, but these stories form another version of autobiography: one inadvertent, oracular, and deeply telling.

  I should add that I’m no Ballard “expert.” I quit keeping up with his novels after 1988’s Running Wild, never to return, and though I believed myself well schooled in his short fiction there were dozens here I’d never read before; in fact, my prime years reading him are a quarter-century behind me. Yet very few writers I’ve encountered, even those I’ve devoted myself to, have burrowed so deeply into my outlook, and in my work, where I find myself recapitulating Ballardian patterns not for their beauty, though they are beautiful, but for their tremendous aptness in attempting to confront the dying world before me, and inside me.

  Consider this, then, a late-to-press elegy for perhaps the most profoundly elegiac writer in literature—and like all who mourn, Ballard had first to love.

  —The New York Times Book Review, 2009

  Give Up

  Dear E(arth),

  I am writing to tell you to give up. You may already be a winner, the kind of winner who wins by losing, rolling onto your back and showing me your soft parts, letting me tickle and lap and snort at your supplicant vitals. Perhaps I should put this more forcefully: GIVE UP. You stand no chance. Resistance is futile, futility is resistant, reluctance is flirtatious, relinquishment is freedom. I love you and I am better than you in every way, grander, greater, glossier, more glorious, more ridiculous, energetic, faster in footraces and Internet dial-up speed, hungrier, more full of sex and fire, better equipped with wit and weaponry. I’m taller than you and can encircle you with my lascivious tongue. Admit this and admit me. By opening this envelope you’ve been selected from among the billions upon trillions of amoebic entities, you’re plucked up from the galaxy’s beach like a seashell by a god, something in you sparkled for a moment, terribly unlikely it means anything much in the scheme of things, improbable that taking notice of you squeezed onto the agenda of one such as me, but I was amused, don’t ask me why, it’s practically random like a lottery (yet you’ll never be able to spend the wealth of my love, to run through it and waste it like the hapless lottery winner you are, though you may try, you’d never spend it in a dozen profligate lifetimes). My eyes settled on you in a weak moment (and you’ll never see another, no, I’m an edifice, an enigma, to one such as you my science is like magic). Don’t delay, act now, give up, you’ve been selected by a higher being from another realm to be plucked from your impoverished species to join me, to be seated in the empty throne beside me (only because I’d never troubled to glance to one side before to notice a seat existed there; not, somehow, until my gaze lit on you) where none of your lowly cringing fellows has ever resided, you’re unworthy but will be made worthy by the acclaim of my notice. I say again, I’m superior to you, you’re tinsel, static, a daisy, a bubble of champagne that went to my head and popped, and I don’t even know why I want you and you’d better not give me the chance to think twice. You’ll find I’ve anticipated your responses and attached them below (see attachments, below); they’re feeble and funny, helpless and endearing, and you’ve already blurted yes take me yes how can I resist yes I give up yes. So do as I say now, you’ve already done it, you’re in my arms like an infant, a ward, a swan. Give up, you gave up already, you’re mine.

  Love,

  M(ars)

  —The Walrus, 2008

  III

  PLAGIARISMS

  At present Mickey is everybody’s god, so that even members of the Film Society cease despising their fellow members when he appears. But gods are not immortal. There was an Egyptian called Bes, who was once quite as gay, and Brer Rabbit and Felix the Cat have been forgotten too, and Ganesh is being forgotten …

  —E. M. FORSTER, “Our Diversions” (1934)

  The Ecstasy of Influence

  A plagiarism

  All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated …

  —JOHN DONNE

  LOVE AND THEFT

  Consider this tale: A cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a preteen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator—marked by her forever—remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story: Lolita.

  The author of the story I’ve described, Heinz von Lichberg, published his tale of Lolita in 1916, forty years before Vladimir Nabokov’s novel. Lichberg later became a prominent journalist in the Nazi era, and his youthful works faded from view. Did Nabokov, who remained in Berlin until 1937, adopt Lichberg’s tale consciously? Or did the earlier tale exist for Nabokov as a hidden, unacknowledged memory? The history of literature is not without examples of this phenomenon, called cryptomnesia. Another hypothesis is that Nabokov, knowing Lichberg’s tale perfectly well, had set himself to that art of quotation that Thomas Mann, himself a master of it, called “higher cribbing.” Literature has always been
a crucible in which familiar themes are continually recast. Little of what we admire in Nabokov’s Lolita is to be found in its predecessor; the former is in no way deducible from the latter. Still: Did Nabokov consciously borrow and quote?

  “When you live outside the law, you have to eliminate dishonesty.” The line comes from Don Siegel’s 1958 film noir, The Lineup, written by Stirling Silliphant. The film still haunts revival houses, likely thanks to Eli Wallach’s blazing portrayal of a sociopathic hit man and to Siegel’s long, sturdy auteurist career. Yet what were those words worth—to Siegel, or Silliphant, or their audience—in 1958? And again: What was the line worth when Bob Dylan heard it (presumably in some Greenwich Village repertory cinema), cleaned it up a little, and inserted it into “Absolutely Sweet Marie”? What are they worth now, to the culture at large?

  Appropriation has always played a key role in Dylan’s music. The songwriter has grabbed not only from a panoply of vintage Hollywood films but from Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Junichi Saga’s Confessions of a Yakuza. He also nabbed the title of Eric Lott’s study of minstrelsy for his 2001 album Love and Theft. One imagines Dylan liked the general resonance of the title, in which emotional misdemeanors stalk the sweetness of love, as they do so often in Dylan’s songs. Lott’s title is, of course, itself a riff on Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, which famously identifies the literary motif of the interdependence of a white man and a dark man, like Huck and Jim or Ishmael and Queequeg—a series of nested references to Dylan’s own appropriating, minstrel-boy self. Dylan’s art offers a paradox: While it famously urges us not to look back, it also encodes a knowledge of past sources that might otherwise have little home in contemporary culture, like the Civil War poetry of the Confederate bard Henry Timrod, resuscitated in lyrics on Dylan’s Modern Times. Dylan’s originality and his appropriations are as one.