I’ve often wondered about Ballard’s propensity to name his protagonists after writers- Melville, Traven, Blake, even himself (in Crash), all the while claiming he ‘wasn’t a literary man’. Michael Moorcock even asserted Moby Dick was the only novel in Ballard’s house...
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Was he playing a game with readers & critics?-the latter in particular always want to know a writer’s influences. In one interview Ballard said he liked to conceal his true opinions about things,maintain an ambiguous persona.Exact opposite of what people are expected to do today.
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Replying to @RightModernist
1. Ballard was clinical. Remember that he trained as a doctor and a pilot—these are clinical and objective professions. He worked as an editor on a chemical trade magazine for many years, I think. He is not from a traditional “literary” background, and he seems to have...
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2. ...preferred art, particularly modern art, to literature. He explored the inner space, the only refuge of the real in the age of a simulacrum, and so achieved universal recognition by becoming extremely particular.
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