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.
It is a dangerous thing to ask why someone else has been given more. It is humbling - and indeed healthy - to ask why you have been given so much.
The church is like manure. Pile it up, and it stinks up the neighborhood. Spread it out, and it enriches the world.
I believe everyone should have a good death. You know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. Because after all, tears are appropriate on a death bed. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.
Remove grace, and you have nothing whereby to be saved. Remove free will and you have nothing that could be saved.
The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody.
Intentions, good or bad, are not enough. There's luck or fate or something else that takes over.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.