In having to research for a paper on Ray Bradbury, I read this story in Hartwell's The Dark Descent. My motive for doing so was specific: I needed to juxtapose Bradbury's science fictional horror with him at possibly his purest. It is quite clear to anyone familiar with Bradbury's oeuvre that the kind of fiction he wrote owed more to gothic horror and a familiarity with human reaction to the supernatural than science fiction per se. His speculation was not rigorous extrapolation; it was rather, much like his contemporary Fritz Leiber, utilizing the vocabulary of SF to render the everyday of reality into mythic proportions. It is a crestfallen mythology, one where the gods have been displaced by complacency behind which lurks a kind of dread of the future, a dread of having mistaken an utility for what that utility promises.
In The Veldt as well as Mars is Heaven!, this dread has a tangible locus. In case of the previous story, it is a sentient nursery which surmises the deepest needs of its inhabitants and virtually provides them with it. In the latter, it is Mars itself, which for Bradbury becomes a landscape of the human unconscious, mixing desire with dread in equal measure. I shall not attempt a psychoanalytic reading of Bradbury however, precisely because while much of his fiction might show traces of dream logic given rational heft, it is made more corporeal by the inclusion of the science fictional novum, which leads to both it becoming metaphor and a kind of supra-realism.
In The Crowd, however, there is no such one material locus. The object of our attention in this case becomes the perverse attraction J G Ballard would go on to write about in his pornographic novel Crash, which fetishizes the speeding sports car and car crashes in general as a sexual pursuit. Both Ballard and Bradbury are writing about a kind of horror, but this horror is sublimated in two different directions entirely. For Ballard, the horror is intrinsic in the almost sexual gratification humans receive in such physical exhibition of destruction and violence, while for Bradbury, the horror is underscored precisely by the fact that such a pleasure is an unstated reality we brainwash ourselves into thinking does not exist. The paradigms, therefore, are different, and perhaps not as subtly as it seems. The Crowd is science fiction in the sense that Bradbury makes explicit a social fact that is relegated to a kind of invisible conceptual hell that, try as we might, we shall never intentionally exorcise. Ballard is not afraid of such truths, and the horrors of his fiction lie precisely in the fact that neither are his characters. They have surrendered to a new paradigm of humanity, where humanism as we know it and morals as we accept them have no place. It is a perverse parody of the ubermansch, an animal rationale with a limitless capacity for redefining and extending the boundaries of immorality, rendering the entire concept moot in the process.
In The Veldt as well as Mars is Heaven!, this dread has a tangible locus. In case of the previous story, it is a sentient nursery which surmises the deepest needs of its inhabitants and virtually provides them with it. In the latter, it is Mars itself, which for Bradbury becomes a landscape of the human unconscious, mixing desire with dread in equal measure. I shall not attempt a psychoanalytic reading of Bradbury however, precisely because while much of his fiction might show traces of dream logic given rational heft, it is made more corporeal by the inclusion of the science fictional novum, which leads to both it becoming metaphor and a kind of supra-realism.
In The Crowd, however, there is no such one material locus. The object of our attention in this case becomes the perverse attraction J G Ballard would go on to write about in his pornographic novel Crash, which fetishizes the speeding sports car and car crashes in general as a sexual pursuit. Both Ballard and Bradbury are writing about a kind of horror, but this horror is sublimated in two different directions entirely. For Ballard, the horror is intrinsic in the almost sexual gratification humans receive in such physical exhibition of destruction and violence, while for Bradbury, the horror is underscored precisely by the fact that such a pleasure is an unstated reality we brainwash ourselves into thinking does not exist. The paradigms, therefore, are different, and perhaps not as subtly as it seems. The Crowd is science fiction in the sense that Bradbury makes explicit a social fact that is relegated to a kind of invisible conceptual hell that, try as we might, we shall never intentionally exorcise. Ballard is not afraid of such truths, and the horrors of his fiction lie precisely in the fact that neither are his characters. They have surrendered to a new paradigm of humanity, where humanism as we know it and morals as we accept them have no place. It is a perverse parody of the ubermansch, an animal rationale with a limitless capacity for redefining and extending the boundaries of immorality, rendering the entire concept moot in the process.
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