THE DEEP ONES: "The Drowned Giant" by J.G. Ballard

"The Drowned Giant" by J.G. Ballard

Discussion begins August 24.

First published in The Terminal Beach (1964).



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://lucite.org/lucite/archive/fiction_-_ballard/ballard,%20j%20g%20-%20drowne...

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?43949

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard
The Terminal Beach
Nebula Award Stories
Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder
Chronopolis

MISCELLANY

http://www.jgballard.ca/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=du4pf2pgxss
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyZPRL90hNY
http://www.ballardian.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._G._Ballard
http://weirdfictionreview.com/2014/11/four-stories-the-drowned-giant-by-j-g-ball...
http://tinyurl.com/h7kl9v2

That's a great jacket design, though I expect it'd become tiresome lined up with other similar 1960s-70s designs. Oh, the retinal afterimages.

Online for me!

>2 elenchus:

I like that cold, clinical cover too. Retro feel. It looks like a manual.

The Road to Science Fiction #5 for me.

>2 elenchus:

Here's a short article about Gollancz, with more examples of the distinctive yellow dustjackets:

http://www.abebooks.com/books/publishing-pioneer-yellow-typography/victor-gollan...

I've got this story in The Complete Short Stories: Volume 2.

>5 housefulofpaper:

That's a great little overview. The "brand" idea reminds me of Puffin and Penguin books, and across the pond, Anchor Books and Left Review Press.

The Christopher Burke essay (weirdfictionreview.org, in the miscellany links) is a good read. I was especially struck by the idea, which hadn't occurred to me in reading the story, that the giant corpse is a metaphor for modern mass-media spectacle. It does sort of fit with the pervasive anonymity of the tale, which Burke emphasizes.

I really like Ballard's surgical style in this tale. I still have to get to that Burke essay. From initially swarming over the giant to eventually reducing him to scattered bones, the people in the story have actually taken on the function of the animal kingdom's usual carrion eaters, although they add that novel human touch of mutilation, graffitti and "a sudden flood of repressed spite".

>7 paradoxosalpha:

I sensed a message about people ignoring the deeper wonder in favour of superficial spectacle. And possibly something religious or mysticist in how the giant eventually became remembered as a relatively mundane "sea monster"?

The article on Ballard on the Encyclopaedia of SF may be of interest:
http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/ballard_j_g

I suppose the power of this story is that the reader comes away from it thinking he or she has been given an insight into how people 'really" behave - as if the body of the giant has been dropped into the mundane world as some kind of psychological or clinical experiment. In that sense the giant is a 'McGuffin" - it get's things moving but it's not what the story's about (I can imagine readers in the 1960s not enjoying this one - where's the sense of wonder? where's the science fictional explanation for these events?).

There are parallels, I think, with a poem from around the same time, "Sunny Prestatyn" by Philip Larkin although perhaps surprisingly, given the direction Ballard took a few years later (The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash) there's more sexual imagery - violent sexual imagery - in Larkin's description of a defaced poster than Ballard puts into this story.

I haven't read Christopher Burke's essay yet but the suggestion that the giant stands in for a mass-media spectacle doesn't seem right to me. It's a local phenomenon, no TV cameras arrive, no broadcaster or press baron tries to impose a narrative on it (it would be a bit much to expect Ballard to have anticipated, and commented on, bloggers and Twitter back in 1964).

>10 housefulofpaper:

Burke doesn't suggest that the giant is a mass-media spectacle, but rather that it is a spectacle that functions like our mass media do: at first they are a source of compulsory fascination, but we become habituated to them, and their meaningless fragmentation eventually falls beneath our notice. I'm not saying it's a "correct" reading; but it is an interesting one.

The surgical style >8 gwendetenebre: is a good description, there was some tension as I read, wondering where this was leading, and a number of thoughts occurred to me: is this Gulliver told from another vantage? Or another terrestrial human, whereas the reader easily assumes the spectators are human? But the reference to Grecian profiles and Homeric stature, etc seem to puncture that idea.

Then I somehow thought of it taking place in the late 1800s or early 1900s, rather than some contemporary setting, for whatever reason. But I realise that, too, doesn't have any compelling evidence to support it.

I like the mass-media metaphor reading (still have to get to the Burke essay itself), and am curious about the fact the narrator is from the library.

Such the obverse of a 1950s interplanetary expedition, in high tech spacesuits and scads of scanning devices! I like it, but I can't quite put a finger as to why.

I too was reminded of Gulliver's Travels of course, but also James Morrow's Towing Jehovah. I wonder if Morrow was influenced by this story. The explicit identification of the giant rotting corpse as the God of the Bible in Morrow's novel sort of flattens out the numinosity by comparison, actually.

>13 paradoxosalpha:

I'd not heard of Morrow's tale, that was fun to learn about. Not motivated to read it myself quite yet, though, I sense I'd share your opinion the Ballard story does more for me than the Morrow novel. It's good to know about, though, such a classic premise.

Gulliver and Morrow did put me in mind of a pun, though: God's Body / Dogsbody, which for me unaccountably fits the Ballard story.

Don't get me wrong; I like the Morrow. It's sequels were even better. But this Ballard story did things a novel can't.

>9 AndreasJ: And possibly something religious or mysticist in how the giant eventually became remembered as a relatively mundane "sea monster"?

I was possibly too elliptical above - what I had in mind was that that aspect reminded me of an argument one sometimes hears from religious people, namely that miracles do happen but that skeptics mentally edit them out of their experiences.

I have no idea if Ballard was religious or intended anything like that message.

>16 AndreasJ:

Although SFE groups Ballard with Philip K. Dick as "the most influential of all sf writers who focused their transformative energies on the marriage between Inner Space and world," the reading I've done in Ballard seems sort of anti-mystical to me--certainly not "religious" in flavor.

I read this out of James Gunn's The Road to Science Fiction #5. His introductory notes for the Ballard stories was cleverly titled "The Universe Considered as a Concentration Camp".

The story seems typical of the Ballard I read, a passive description of some wonder or apocalypse.

Gunn seems to think the story might be an allegory for vanishing England.

My thoughts are more on the lines of >8 gwendetenebre:. The giant seems a symbol of a human life -- works and deeds unremembered and the material of the body recycled for amusement and practical uses. It's what the social and physical universes do to us.

What strikes me is what's absent. There's no talk of studying the mysteries of the giant. Where did he come from? How did he grow this big? Are there any others like him?

>18 RandyStafford:

a passive description of some wonder or apocalypse

That is a good way of describing Ballard's style!

There is some curiosity at first (funny that marine biologists called in) but the mystery dwindles almost immediately in favor of novelty. You might say that the people are too jaded or maybe even too dull-witted to care, but they're more like little children who simply accept the idea of a giant at face value and proceed accordingly.

I've been thinking of the story as a reflection of knowledge, as well: the giant serving as the natural world, appearing without explanation, and the rudimentary and destructive efforts to understand it largely leading to the destruction of that very subject of inquiry. A skeptical take on what is actually learned in that fashion: pieces disconnected from the whole, a ready characterisation of much of human understanding.

>11 paradoxosalpha:, thank you for the clarification of Burke's point in his article. I've read it now, and agree with pretty much all of what he says. But that actual observation seemed to come out of nowhere for me; it didn't seem to follow from the previous analysis.

Ballard is a writer who still gets mentioned in the literary press and the review sections of the broadsheets - here in the UK at least As a result, I feel I know about him without having read all that much of his work. In fact there's a stack of paperbacks that I've owned for years, that I've still to read.

I was going to write more, to try to clarify my thoughts about this story and what it is that's specifically "Ballardian" but I wanted, firstly, to avoid simply reciting other people's half-remembered insights and opinions, and secondly to avoid applying the author's biography to his work in a clumsily reductionist way - this is particularly tempting in the case of Ballard, given his childhood experiences in a Japanese internment camp.

I think that might be biting off more than I can chew, but if I was planning a long essay, maybe I'd try to touch on these themes:

- Ballard originally linked to 20th Century Modernism: Surrealism, Absurdism, etc, - but the work reconsidered as more or less straightforward memory/reportage post publication of Empire of the Sun?

- Behavioural view of human nature? - another link/result of Wartime experiences? - but also trained as medical student.(Note: psychological/behavioural view of characters ties in with Modernism rather than traditional presentation of character in realist fiction. "Character" as history/rational motive sometimes disappears replaced by response to stimuli - i.e. behaviourism no "inside" as such).

- Ballardian not obsessed with modern culture so much as seeing past/through it - to basic human (animal) behaviour?

- Draw out parallels with post-war British culture. Are they real? re. Movement poets/"Angry Young Men" etc.

>21 housefulofpaper: - Ballardian not obsessed with modern culture so much as seeing past/through it - to basic human (animal) behaviour?

That's quite interesting as an observation. I also have read more of Ballard than from him, not so much because I don't think he's worth it as that I've not quite ever decided it's time to make the next book one of his, and meantime I come across others writing about him. Most recently, it was Iain Sinclair in his Ghost Milk.

>22 elenchus: Yes, Iain Sinclair is someone who refers to Ballard quite often. Will Self was the other writer who came immediately to mind.