J.G. Ballard – Running Wild
&
Yukio Mishima – The Sailor Who Fell from
Grace with the Sea
 |
| Left: Mishima, in his prime. Right: Ballard. |
LUCK is
purely at fault for bringing together these two works for comparison. The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
is a work I’d been meaning to read for a good while after reading his
spectacular, and in places mind-bending, Sea
of Fertility tetralogy. The Ballard
is something I just happened to pick up on the same day based purely upon the
recommendations Crash has received
from a few associates of mine.
Both texts, which are essentially novelettes, deal with the
killing of parental figures by youths and at their respective hearts, with the
decline of their cultures’ values. What
sets them apart is that Mishima’s novelette is excellently written – a
masterpiece, even, while Ballard’s novelette is, frankly speaking, thoroughly
substandard.
Running
Wild is written with Ballard’s characteristic minimalist, cold,
analytical style taken to the extreme, with the narrative written in the style
of a Forensic Diary for a Psychiatric Adviser:
|
Where
to start? So much has been written about the Pangbourne Massacre, as it is
now known in the popular press throughout the world, that I find it difficult
to see this tragic event with a clear eye.
|
Here,
immediately we can see that we have a would-be protagonist who has a level of
detachment which seems on par with a police report – which is fitting for the
framework Ballard has given us. However, as the course of the novelette
progresses, there is little in the way of character development. It is only
during “The Great Ormond Street Kidnapping”, that we get a real glimpse at our
protagonist’s humanity. We see his tenacious conviction about his theory
faltering when he lays eyes on the child, and then we see his dramatic
confrontation with the killers themselves. However, by this point, we as
readers are more than convinced that the theory is correct, and it is time for
our good Psychiatric Adviser to stand aside and let the children become the
protagonists.
At this
point there is a short psychological explanation for the massacre, which I’ll
touch upon later alongside Mishima, followed by a reconstruction of the events.
This section of the text essentially fills what, in a detective novel, would be
the summation of the detective’s monologue where he would outline the details
of how the crime was perpetrated. Unfortunately, where this fails, and an
ordinary detective story would succeed is the characterisation: we barely know
the ‘detective’, the victims were dead before the story began and the children
are only quite tangentially developed over the course of the investigation.
Mishima’s
novelette follows its protagonist far more closely. We are given the narrative
in standard third-person form. However, quite wonderfully, and
characteristically Mishima-esque, our protagonist has something of a
voyeuristic tendency. While this seems to be a prevailing theme in his works
(see Temple of Dawn, book three of
the Sea of Fertility, for instance),
Mishima uses the device here to great effect. Noburo early on, discovers a
peephole through which he can watch his mother’s bedroom:
|
Shortly
after he made this discovery, Noburo began spying on his mother at night,
particularly when she had nagged or scolded him. The moment the door was
closed he would slip the drawer quietly out of the chest, and then watch in
unabating wonder while she prepared for bed. On nights when she was gentle,
he never looked.
- The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea,
Chapter 1
|
The Oedipal
nature of the text is made immediately clear here, and further, that the boy’s
initial absence of a father figure perhaps leads to the boy’s curiosity
relating to his mother’s femininity – he spies on her, views her gender-ness,
only when she scolds him in a typically paternal way, as if trying to diffuse
his confusion. Relating this back to Running
Wild, it’s also clear that the viewing of the mother in this way, and later
Ryuji , the would-be father figure and eponymous sailor of the text, allows the
reader to get a glimpse of their adult existence, providing a way for us to
relate to them. The character of Ryuji and Fusako, the boy’s mother, are
further fleshed-out by sections during which they are the focus of the
narrative.
Though
there are certainly other subtexts running through the latter text, the main
focus of this comparison should be the reasons why the children in Running Wild murder there parents, and
the reasons for the implied killing of Ryuji by Noburo and his associates – the
latter killing presumably takes place after the ending of the novel, we are
left with quite a cliff-hanger. Ballard tells us at the end of the text, with
our good doctor as his mouthpiece, that the children killed their parents
because they lived in a far too comfortable, controlled, and positive
environment which left them nothing to rebel against – in other words, they
lived a rather empty existence of hollow praise and accomplishment. In the
latter, the chief of Noburo’s little gang, referred to as simply Number One tells
us that modern parents are too vacillating and soft.
Obviously,
in order to look at the implications of these two statements, there needs to be
a clear moral division between the reader’s own judgement and the text’s
message. In Running Wild, the
distance that the reader is placed from the crime – it only taking place in
recreation, with barely any characterisation – places the parents firmly in the
wrong and the little explanation at the end comes across as a heavy-handed
denouncement of this new bourgeois lifestyle. The entire text is thus
transformed into a crude allegorical tale, which is so empty of humanity as to
be completely forgettable. Thus, in this regard the text fails in its aim. The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
allows us to empathise with the child, the mother and the would-be father, and
the division is placed firmly between the boy and his mother. There is even a
point in the text where it would seem that Noburo likes Ryuji, and where we
come to wonder whether in fact Noburo wants to kill the man, or if he is not
just swept along with his gang. Similarly, with reference to the picture above
and Mishima’s deep love for Japanese culture, and his apparently sadness at its
decline, we wonder whether or not we should be siding with the children after
all. Such a nuanced rendering of what is the same theme – and in Running Wild, it is implicit that such
empty bourgeois lifestyles represent a modern decline – it is impossible for
the reader to make any value judgement on the actions which take place in the
text without assessing the novelette with detailed reflection.
I have broken the wall, I can now see
ReplyDelete