The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It's a vast, sentimentalizing structure that reassures the reader, and at every point, offers the comfort of secure moral frameworks and recognizable characters.
Interpretation
The quote critiques bourgeois novels for their tendency to distort reality and provide false comfort to readers.
J. G. Ballard's statement reflects a deep skepticism towards bourgeois novels, suggesting they prioritize entertaining narratives and predictable moralities over authentic representations of truth. He implies that these novels serve to pacify readers with familiar characters and reassuring structures, thereby undermining the raw honesty and complexity of real life, which often presents itself in more chaotic and less comforting forms.
In practice
In a book club discussion about literary realism, this quote would highlight the limitations of bourgeois storytelling.
Science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography.
The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.
Au revoir, jewelled alligators and white hotels, hallucinatory forests, farewell.
Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.
Most English writers are not interested in change but in the social novel. That demands a static backdrop. I'm intensely interested in change - probably as a matter of self-preservation. What the hell is going to happen next?
Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It's no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function. A future Rimbaud, Van Gogh or Adolf Hitler will emerge from their timeless wastes.
All is disgust when a man leaves his own nature and does what is unfit.
I am afraid of falling into hopeless despair, over my wasted life, and I am still not sure how it happened.
The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three dimensional and not in space or time.
The action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual; everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort.
I suspect that one of capitalism's crucial assets derives from the fact that the imagination of economists, including its critics, lags well behind its own inventiveness, the arbitrariness of its undertaking and the ruthlessness of the way in which it proceeds.
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
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