The Index
May 5th, 2008
At Ballardian, an account of a J G Ballard short story I’m going to have to track down:
Ballard’s “The Index” (1977) is a damnably clever short “story”, playing all sorts of games with the reader, with the act of writing, with existence itself. It tells the tale of a mysterious man named Henry Rhodes Hamilton, who, although he has been hitherto completely invisible in the world’s media, seems to have been the confidante of every world leader of note since WWII — and the lover of some of their wives as well. According to the “editor’s note” that begins the piece, HRH is “a man who may well have been one of the most remarkable figures of the 20th century. Yet of his existence nothing is publicly known, although his life and work appear to have exerted a profound influence on the events of the past fifty years.”
[…]
The story’s conceit is that it is typeset like an index, apparently the only surviving fragment of HRH’s “unpublished and perhaps suppressed autobiography”, and all of the plot details above, plus much, much more, can be gleaned from the brief fragments in the index itself.