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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Friday, January 10, 1969
1968: full cycle
1968, the Hour of the Wolf.
It was the hour when great men died,when America awaited a new birth and yearned for a deeper sleep.
If 1968 truly was the hour before dawn, that is its most optimistic note—that the most frightening nightmares are past.
It was a year turned full cycle of disparagement, hope and futility, brightened only by the flaring tail of Apollo 8 reaching towards heaven.
1968 limped into America, still suffering from the plague of Vietnam, and discontent wrought by black men and students. Before the year had passed, the discontent of the lower and middle classes would be added to the list of national ills.
At times it came in uncomfortable mixed moments, moments when trembling tears nurtured solemn hopes. April 4 was such a time. A bullet whizzing from a flop house to a motel balcony in Memphis ended the life of America's foremost peacemaker. It came at a time when peacemakers were needed most. Dr. Martin Luther King, an apostle of non-violence was dead.
But there was intangible hope.
'When will they ever learn?'
When win they ever hurt.
But the ensuing moments swelled the hope that,
because of this martyrdom the anonymous they
would learn. For a few cherishable moments, the
nation, perhaps the world, was tied together by
grief. But the intangible ties soon gave way to the
tangible. Violence. What seemed to be black
revenge, swept through forty cities in the nation,
lending an eery, ominous tone to "We shall
overcome." In Washington, 4,000 National
Guardsmen were called on to squeelch
disturbances.
assassination. Again, two months later an assassin's bullet plundered the nation into self-doubt. This time, Sen. Robert Kennedy, a candidate for the highest office in the country, was the victim. Surely, the nation wondered if it too was victim. Again, the country was bound together by days of public grief.
"When will they ever learn?"
If there were tangible moments of hope, they too were unforeseen and came as unexpected moments.
Sen. Eugene McCarthy, in a drive for the presidency, stimulated the young, the intellectuals, the doves, and those who simply yearned for a hero. The soft-spoken senator was given credit for providing the impetus to one of the major news stories of the year.
On March 31, President Lyndon Johnson announced that he would attempt to move the Vietnam war to the bargaining table and announced he would not seek re-election. Hopes were never higher than on the night following that televised speech.
But again, harsh reality intruded.
Late in August, all the hope and subsequent futility were shaped into angry aggression. Television viewers saw demonstrators at the Democratic convention bloodied by the clubs of Chicago police. The nation reeled, not knowing how to react. Sharp criticism of Mayor Richard Daley's gestapo tactics turned to popular support.
The nation-provoked by the rape of Czechoslovakia, angered by revolt at Columbia, and aroused by two assassinations, April riots, the lingering Vietnam war and the limbo status of the captured Pueblo crew-came to rest on the stage of Chicago.
Events after that became anti-climatic
Richard Nixon, like the fog, came on cat feet. All the way to the White House, as the alienated supporters of Robert Kennedy, McCarthy and Nelson Rockefeller watched.
But even after the Chicago and Miami conventions, there were moments of anxiety. The frenzied activity of George Wallace threatened to divide the nation further.
A lower-middle class backlash vote of critical proportions brought the threat of chaos to the electoral machinery. But for one of the few times during the year, crisis was averted. Wallace was confined to his electoral home in the South, and Vice-President Hubert Humphrey came dramatically close to making the old Democratic coalition work that fabled one more time.
coauthion work that turned full cycle. By Christmas, the year had turned full cycle. Hope was given substance. It was given by the god of science and technology. As Apollo 8 circled the moon, Americans listened as astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders read from Genesis. Despite the agony of the past year, Americans viewed the earth, "and saw that it was good."
Coming as it did, at the end of such a turbulent year, Apollo was applauded as the top news event of the year.
Surely the nation yearned for hope—and a deeper sleep.
Richard Lundquist
Assistant Editorial Editor
'I was only kidding.'
Social insight
by Scott Nunley
J. G. Ballard is one of the most exciting of contemporary science fiction novelists. His stories have the power, rather rare in this field, to generate an emotional as well as intellectual response.
to generate an emotional as well as interactive in inexpensive paperback editions from Berkley Medallion, Ballard's nine excellent volumes should have established for him a wide audience approaching that enjoyed by Heinlein and Clarke. Yet Ballard remains to some extent an underground phenomenon, a cult-read writer that the broader popular readership has (vaguely) heard about, but does not actually enjoy reading.
All right.
Tolkein began on the same basis—when Dr. Guy Davenport first assigned "The Lord of the Rings" at the University of Kentucky, he had to ask his class to pay $18 for the hardback edition. (It is some criterion of the Tolkein-experience that not one of the students would later resell his expensive volumes.)
Both men reach beyond the traditional audience for science fiction, an audience still escape-oriented. Wells, Huxley, and Orwell also survived the jump because a general readership recognized in them a certain truth-full-ness, a valuable insight into human dilemmas of a basically social nature.
KU's James Gunn, with his successful collection "The Immortals," is struggling with the same task, to bring social insight into a field of literature that has been occasionally scientifically prophetic but traditionally shallow in the treatment of its human element.
Ballard, however, is still cut off from a great segment of this wider audience.
His science fiction does refuse to provide mere escape and can be, in fact, distinctly unpleasant in its naturalism. But at the same time, Ballard is not a social visionary. He is not primarily concerned with the political or cultural trends of the future, but with the individual conditions of individual humans violently wrenched out of their historico-cultural environment.
historic cultural environment. If there is one drive that Ballard's varied characters seem to share, it is exactly this tendency to go backward, not forward, in seeking patterns and meanings for their disrupted lives.
In this way, the hero of "The Drowned World" begins to feel the throbbing equatorial sun as a red beacon drawing him back in a Jungian retracing of his racial memory.
Jungian retracing of his recent memory There is in Ballard a heavy weight of the mystical, of statements and actions that can scarcely be translated into denotative language.
Not only is each man reacting in a way based immediately upon his unique character and experiences, but Ballard's overall premise is apparently that the more profound grows a man's search within himself, the more necessarily ineffable it becomes.
The resulting prose is poetic, emotion-laden, even at moments obscure. The resulting plots become predominated by patterns of decay, a direction natural to men whose traditional world has been suddenly destroyed. The mixture, then, of prose and plot generates an evocative, moving, but frequently brooding reading experience.
Although "The Wind from Nowhere" appears to end "happily," for example, the last moment reprieve does little to lighten the heavy hurricane-howling that builds throughout the novel. (This reprieve does not appear before the most disturbed, disrupted character of the book has finally perished in his crumbling pyramid citadel.)
Ballard's more recent novel, "The Crystal World," follows this nightmarish pattern. With only an offhand attempt at scientific plausibility, Ballard plunges his hero baldly into the catastrophe that will force him to re-align his life.
Again, in the title story from the collection "Billenium," the hero may not literally die, but he is re-intombed in a horrible press of world overpopulation that leaves the reader with an apocalyptic picture of earthly hell, of living death.
Frequently, Ballard's characters do not seem to be able to fathom each other's actions any more than the reader can.
fictional people.
Perhaps by leaving these mysteries occasionally as inexplicable, Ballard is making a very accurate (but also a very disturbing) comment on the "human condition."
Some form of dark symbolism does seem to be underlying most of these obscurities, but it is certainly possible that at times Ballard himself is trapped outside the madly ideosyncratic worlds of his fictional people.
Here, unfortunately, Ballard's brooding sours into melodrama.
The characters' personal gestures become so openly symbolic—baptismal plunges into life-giving African rivers, self-sacrificing crucifixions at Catholic altars—that they lose the horrible immediacy of his other fictional insanities. Characters here seem to be "play-ing" at being persons, with all the poses and exaggerations of bad theatre.
"The Crystal World" will even disappoint the Ballard Cult. Conrad has said all this about the siren-call of the African forest so much better in his "Heart of_Darkness," that Ballard's 1966 version may seem to be little more than a retelling deliberately obscured with phony-profound motifs of leprosy and beatification.
The earth is being elevated into a beautifully (and beautifully described) crystalline existence, but on the human plane little meaningful transformation is occurring.
influential transformation is occurring.
J. G. Ballard, of course, does not have to depend upon the success of "The Crystal World" for his reception. His earlier and still available volumes have established his power to tell a captivating horror tale, to create memorable suffering men, and to wring from his reader the heavy emotions that resonate through the decayed landscapes of Ballard's universe.
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