A NOTE ON NEWNESS

The death of J. G. Ballard presents the modern writer - the writer of modernity - with no small stylistic and thematic barrier. The dominant imagery bequeathed by Ballard being dystopian and apocalyptic, how does one write, in his wake, the post-apocalypse (after his predictions have come true, as has often happened)? One way, perhaps, is that related by Iain Sinclair in London: City of Disappearances: ‘Ballard, in an essay on the director Michael Powell, suggested that drama in the “serious” novel of the future would “migrate from the characters’ heads to the world around them.”’

Sinclair is one great living writer whose focus is on place, the world around, yet his corresponding focus on the effects of place upon its inhabitant(s) means that his work stops short of Ballard’s predicted aesthetic. Sinclair is as interested in the subjective experience of place, by him or by others, as he is in the objectivity of place. Subjective romanticisation of place, or for that matter subjective unromanticisation, has awkward implications for fiction. Handled badly (that is, Sinclair very much excluded), subjectivity is vanity - why should a reader necessarily care how a person or persons experience a place? This last stand for the vanity of postmodern self-conscious narration could become a literature bearing little resemblance to the actual experience of living in a modern city.

It has resulted in what is being called faction, the grounding of personal perception in more reliable fact. Since any text will comprise elements of both fiction and fact (language itself belonging to both states), faction is a non-genre, and is a lazy route for fiction to take. It is insufficient to merely refer to a place; without verbal mimicry of the experience of place, which is the experience of living in the world, a street name will suggest nothing.

More positively, and paradoxically, contemporaneous to the rise in popularity of the heritage industry and of environmental awareness, the memorialization of place, through this very subjectivity, is leading to a more democratic and objective romanticisation of place. In short, were everyone to tell the story of a place, every place would find its narrative, which is objectivity- place takes over from people, as in the suggestion of Ballard’s fiction that nature will regain control over man. Unexpected architectures are enjoying reconsideration, Brutalism in particular a source of new nostalgia. Part of this trend must surely be recession, which has created through the act of uncreation a stasis in building, and correspondingly in demolition. The pre-built goes out to meet the un-built, the new and the old are each structurally empty, are frameworks. Aesthetically, future and past look no different. How we experience cityscapes must take account of the city as it stands at present, in the immediate. At a static time, it is inappropriate to try to give narratives to places.

In any case, the city will outlast its inhabitants. The current sense that we are living in a London that is “after London,” a term derived from Richard Jefferies’ book of that name, must be reconfigured- we are living both after and before London, in a static city. Writing about London should now take account of an aesthetic of stasis- no more grand narratives- and by taking account of shapes and colours of a confused cityscape, should not narrate, but give- show, not tell. If fiction, as Sinclair says, is that which has not happened yet, then the city is always fictional, not factional. Styles and techniques beyond the prosaic are required to meet the city experientially. One architectural theory suggests that to change a place, one should not build upon it, should make it better by making it the same. A new fiction will take a similar stance.

This article is taken from the first issue of the Off Modern Journal, which you can buy here. William Shutes is contributing to a forthcoming book about Syd Barrett to be published by Essential Works.