"The Recognition" (1967)

J.G. Ballard's story probably has to count as one of the best in the Dangerous Visions collection, if only because it's so artfully done in terms of setting and maintaining a mood (not to mention Ballard's subsequent reputation). But ultimately I think it fails by being a little too smugly ambiguous. It's summer solstice time and a small town in the vague country is visited by both a traveling fair and a circus. The circus arrives after the fair and must set up on "waste ground." It's a small circus, with some half-dozen cages occupied by animals we never see. It arrives late in the day, sets up, and people are told it is leaving in the morning. Most of the townspeople go to the fair and only a few visit the circus. Not many even know it's there. Those who do can't quite make out the animals, and occasionally a maddeningly familiar smell is in the air. At the end of the story our first-person narrator has had "the recognition" of what that smell is and what that circus is all about. It might be gauche to say, but I wish Ballard had spelled it out a little more, so I could have a recognition too. Still, there's a wonderfully mordant air about this one. Ballard really captures the fascinating sense of so many carnival scenes (and/or elements such as clowns) as sick, wrong, mysteriously depraved. Really this story is hardly science fiction at all but feels more like something on the order of a fairy tale. For what it's worth, Ursula K. Le Guin and to a lesser extent Ray Bradbury were also good at pulling this off. Checking in with the internet, I found a plurality agreed with me the story is slightly underdone. Others had ridiculously easy answers ("the smell is humanity," whatever that means). Still others pointed out details that seem significant. At least one of the cages, for example, locks from the inside. This could well be a story that improves with careful rereading, or discussion. And that's fine—even makes the case for Ballard as transcending his home genre, which is a case often made for him. I haven't read much of him beyond this and the novel Crash but I'm starting to think I need to read a little more. Still, even taking it just in terms of what's in the story, it seems designed to annoy. The narrator is so pleased with himself that he calls the story "The Recognition" and then declines to name whatever it is he recognized. Sure, right, I get it, "the smell is humanity"—but does that mean like outhouses, or body odor, or cooking food, or plain old spiritual malaise? Or what? And what is inside those blasted cages? This is arguably a strange and unfortunate case of not telling and not showing, but somehow it's still a pretty good story.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison