(c) Short story as a playground to be filled with boobytraps:
Talking of doubling: there is a chapter in Ballard’s 1967 fix-up-collection-collage-novel-anomaly-thing The Atrocity Exhibition titled ‘Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown’ which is entirely different to this 1976 story; and yet also, because it’s Ballard, isn’t, quite. This ‘Notes’ though is probably my all-time favourite Ballard story, because it is made entirely of footnotes, and I love footnotes. Or possibly it’s that I love footnotes because of this story. Whatever.
An eighteen-word synopsis is all that remains of an “undiscovered document” detailing the final breakdown of one Dr Robert Loughlin, and events associated therewith (and just pause there a second to consider that whole “undiscovered document” notion). The story consists of those eighteen words and a paragraph-long footnote for each one of them (including for the two ‘a’s, two ‘his’s, and an ‘and’) that gradually eke out the details of the various characters’ tragic final meeting at Gatwick airport. Each of the characters is named for an aircraft manufacturer, except for Loughlin’s lover who is called Leonora Carrington (but who isn’t the Leonora Carrington, or at least I don’t think so). About halfway through is it noted of Loughlin, who is obsessed with man-powered flight, that “for some reason, empty swimming pools and multi-storey car parks exerted a particular fascination.” By this point, it’s clear that Ballard is having fun with his own mythology. We are then told that the obviously bonkers Dr Loughlin had a habit of meticulously footnoting every single word of large pharmaceutical indexes, usually with “imaginary aviation references”, and it is at this point you realise that you’re in an ouroboros of a story and that there’s no way out.
First published in Bananas, issue number unknown, 1976, and in RE/Search, No. 8/9, 1984. Collected in War Fever, Paladin, 1991, and The Complete Short Stories Volume Two, Flamingo, 2001
A Personal Anthology 