The unlimited dreams of J.G. Ballard

[2 articles]

The unlimited dreams of J.G. Ballard

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2009/04/23/ballard/index.html

His dark, perverse fiction is unforgettable. But the author of
"Crash" and "Empire of the Sun" was also a visionary who mapped the
collision of culture and technology, media and desire.

By Simon Reynolds
April 23, 2009

Earlier this week a literary colossus made his exit, after a long
struggle with cancer. The ovation that accompanied J.G. Ballard's
departure was fully deserved. He was a visionary, one of the few
fiction writers of our era with an imagination so singular that he
was granted the suffix treatment: the attachment of an - esque or
-ian to their surname, à la Kafka-esque or Dickensian.

But in death as in life, Ballard never quite got his full due as a
thinker as well as a storyteller; he was a penetrating and endlessly
provocative theorist about the intersections between culture and
technology, media and desire. This tendency to think of him only as a
fabulist is understandable to an extent, given that he never wrote a
full-length book of nonfiction that condensed and focused his ideas.
Instead his insights, speculations and polemical barbs are scattered
across a panoply of reviews, columns, memoiristic essays, think
pieces and single-topic commentaries written for or spoken to
newspapers looking for the Ballardian take on some current event,
issue or innovation. (Thankfully, a decent-size heap of J.G.'s wit
and wisdom has been shoveled into a single spot by the esoteric San
Francisco publisher RE/Search: The 2004 "JG Ballard: Quotes" is a
pocket-portable collection of mind-bomb aphorisms and pithy
observations. "A User's Guide to the Millennium," a scrappy but
absorbing anthology of essays and reviews, is currently out of print.)

Of course Ballard's ideas are also present in his novels and short
stories, and arguably at their most potent there. He was drawn to
science fiction as the preeminent literature of ideas of our time,
the only form of fiction that could take the measure of the 20th
century. At his most full-on, Ballard transformed SF into a kind of
theory-fiction, his short stories and novels functioning in a manner
similar to Marshall McLuhan's "probes," the latter's term for
speculative aphorisms as opposed to fully developed theories backed
up by research and empirical data. McLuhan is an apt comparison
because his primary concern -- mass communications and man's
increasingly symbiotic relationship with technology and media --
overlapped with one of Ballard's key zones of obsessive
investigation: the post-WW2 culture of media overload, what he called
"our perverse entertainment landscape." In a 1983 interview he
characterized it as "a completely new thing, a parallel world which
we inhabit," presciently anticipating the virtual and
post-geographical realm of Web culture.

Operating as a fabulist, Ballard was less tethered than even McLuhan
by the restraints of academia or journalism. But even his most
disturbed and hallucinatory stories generally started with reality,
extrapolating from its emerging tendencies to create extreme but
plausible scenarios in a near-future more often than not located just
past the present's horizon. Classic science fiction methodology, in
other words. There's an impulse among some Ballard fans, especially
those who are "proper" literati themselves, to elevate Ballard and
argue that his work transcends the ghetto of genre fiction. Although
Ballard occasionally expressed frustration with SF's pulpy aura, and
later in his career wrote novels that fell outside its parameters, he
generally was content to situate himself in the genre and loudly
championed its potential. "I believe that if it were possible to
scrap the whole of existing literature," he once declared, "... all
writers would find themselves inevitably producing something very
close to SF ... No other form of fiction has the vocabulary of ideas
and images to deal with the present, let alone the future."

The work on which Ballard's reputation is based -- his novels and
short stories of the 1960s and '70s -- is either science fiction or
based on speculative techniques very close to SF. The only real
exception is 1970's "The Atrocity Exhibition," whose delirium of
experimental prose has more in common with William S. Burroughs than
Robert A. Heinlein. An unstructured collation of 15 micro-novels
written during the late '60s and bearing titles such as "Why I Want
to Fuck Ronald Reagan," "You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe" and ''The
Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill
Motor Race," "The Atrocity Exhibition" reads like an infinitely
perverse cross between "The Golden Bough" and a forensic science
textbook. Ballard described his approach as gathering "the materials
of an autopsy" and treating reality "almost as if it were a cadaver."
(As a young man he'd briefly studied medicine.) But his true interest
wasn't everyday life but media hyperreality. He clinically probed the
grotesque (de)formations of desire created by media overload and
celebrity worship, a new psychomythology in which the deities were
movie stars, politicians and murderers. Doubleday was all set to
publish "Atrocity" in the USA but lost its nerve and pulped the
entire print run; three years later it belatedly saw American release
courtesy of Grove Press under the title "Love & Napalm: Export U.S.A."

"Crash," the infamous 1973 novel that developed from "Atrocity's"
coldly seething matrix of obsession, is ostensibly set in the present
but it feels like a form of SF -- if only because its cast of auto
accident survivors turned flesh-on-metal perverts are presented as a
kind of erotic avant garde, heralds of a future sexuality. Ballard
had become interested in the role of car crashes in Hollywood movies
and the emergence of an appetite on the part of a mass audience for a
voluptuous and highly stylized violence. He diagnosed this
carnographic entertainment culture as a symptom of suburbanization
and anomie, the loss of meaning and community in people's lives, and
a corresponding hunger for sensation. "'Crash' is an attempt to
follow these trends off the edge of the graph paper to the point
where they meet, " he explained some years after the novel was
published. As a kind of research experiment, in 1970 he presented an
exhibition at a London art gallery that involved the display of
wrecked automobiles, and was gratified by the extreme emotional
responses of the attendees. For Ballard this was the "green light" to
start writing "Crash."

An early reader of the novel at one publisher advised: "This author
is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish!" (Ironically, Ballard was
living a stable domestic existence of responsibility and
respectability in Shepperton, near London Airport, bringing up his
three children as a single parent -- his wife having died tragically
young -- and squeezing in writing between escorting the kids to
school and helping with their homework.) Many reviewers rejected
"Crash" as pornography. It isn't actually a titillating read (for
most people, anyway), but where it does resemble porn is in its
clinically graphic language and extreme repetitiveness, with certain
buzz phrases ("bloody geometry," "perverse logic") and tableaux
(angles of conjunction between genitalia and instrument binnacles,
semen emptying across luminescent dials, and so forth) recurring in a
manner finely balanced between the incantatory and the numbing.

"Crash" is generally considered by Ballard buffs to be the first
installment of a loose trilogy of novels set in a recognizable
present-day (i.e., mid-'70s) London. But "Concrete Island" (1974) and
"High-Rise" (1975) could equally be seen as a reversion to the
narrative-driven approach of Ballard's first four novels, "The Wind
From Nowhere," "The Drowned World," "The Drought" and "The Crystal
World." This tetralogy, published between 1961 and 1966, firmly
belonged in the science fiction camp, and specifically the SF
sub-genre of the cataclysm story, where some kind of natural or
man-made environmental catastrophe causes the breakdown of society.
"High-Rise" simply localizes the post-apocalyptic scenario to a more
confined area, a giant apartment building in the Docklands area of
East London, whose warehouses and harbors would actually be
redeveloped and gentrified in the 1990s. But Ballard's inspiration
was the urban redevelopment boom of the 1960s that razed the old
Victorian slums of urban Britain and replaced them with skyscrapers
and gigantic housing projects linked by concrete walkways and
tunnels. Built in a spirit of neo-Corbusian idealism, these massive
complexes rapidly deteriorated into behaviorist social laboratories
blighted by vandalism, crime and drugs. "High-Rise" takes the fraying
of the social fabric several steps further than anything actually
going on in '70s Britain, hooking the reader from the opening
sentence: "As he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing
reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge
apartment building during the previous three months."

"Concrete Island," a slim and deceptively slight novel published the
previous year, focused the cataclysm/collapse scenario down to the
level of an individual. Losing control of his car, a man crashes into
an area of overgrown scrubland circumscribed on all sides by highways
and overpasses. Injured and unable to climb up the steep embankments,
he's forced to survive as a modern-day Crusoe surrounded by the
endless streams of traffic, whose drivers steadfastly fail to see, or
actively ignore, his plight.

"High-Rise" and "Concrete Island" share with the earlier, more
overtly SF-oriented catastrophe novels a similar psychological
narrative: the protagonist who finds himself perversely attracted to
the cataclysm, feels at home in the drastically altered landscape
it's created. "The Drowned World" -- easily the best of the disaster
tetralogy, although I'm biased perhaps because it was my initiating
dose of Ballard -- takes place in what now seems like an
uncomfortably possible near-future where sea levels have risen in
sync with temperature. The setting is a London half-submerged by
water and encroached by tropical jungle. While the surviving remnants
of humanity are gradually migrating to the Arctic Circle, Ballard's
protagonist is last seen heading in the opposite direction, toward
the uninhabitable Equatorial zones.

Ballard has argued that the devastated but dreamlike landscapes of
these four '60s novels are "far from being pessimistic" but are
actually "stories of psychological fulfilment. The characters at last
find themselves." In a 1977 essay on the catastrophe subgenre written
for an SF encyclopedia, Ballard ventured that SF was just a "minor
offshoot of the cataclysmic tale" that had existed for millennia. He
claimed that these fictions spoke to primal and antisocial urges,
citing both the rattle smashing of the infant child and "psychiatric
studies of the fantasies and dream life of the insane" that " show
that ideas of world destruction are latent in the unconscious mind."
But he also argued that doomsday novels were positive expressions. On
the one hand, they involved a form of imaginative adaptation (he
cited Conrad's dictum "immerse yourself in the most destructive
element -- and swim!") in preparation for the worst the 20th century
had up its sleeve. On the other hand, they used the imagination to
create "alternatives to reality" and thus represented a legitimately
angry and subversive response to "the inflexibility of this huge
reductive machine we call reality."

Seeing them as "transformation stories rather than disaster stories"
makes sense, if only because it helps to explain what the reader gets
out of them -- which is less to do with dread and more a kind of
twisted utopianism or sublimated revolutionary impulse: a hunger to
see the world turned upside down. The appetite for doomsday scenarios
in fiction could also have something to do with the longing for an
emptier world, a response to our overcrowded, stimuli-saturated
civilization. J.G. Ballard didn't have to daydream about cataclysm,
though; as a teenager he lived through conditions of total collapse.
Born in Shanghai in 1930, his childhood began in fairly idyllic
quasi-colonial circumstances (Dad worked as managing director of a
textile factory, they lived in a fancy house, had lots of servants).
But with the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, Shanghai was occupied
in 1937. When Japan joined with the Axis powers against the
Allies, all "enemy civilians" were herded into internment camps.
Ballard's experiences of post-invasion chaos and prison camp life
lead to 1984's best-selling and prize-winning novel "Empire of the
Sun," the book that took Ballard from culthood to the middlebrow
mainstream (helped, of course, by Spielberg's 1987 movie version,
with the young Christian Bale playing the J.G. character, Jim).

For many of Ballard's original fans, though, there was some
disappointment in discovering there was a biographical source,
however exotic and dramatic, for his trademark imagery of drained
swimming pools, deserted roads, abandoned airfields and empty hotels.
All of a sudden we had a pat psychoanalytic explanation (trauma on a
young psyche, the aesthetic equivalent of abused children re-creating
similar psychosexual arrangements for themselves as adults) for
Ballard's sensibility, all his talk about "the magic and poetry one
feels when looking at a junkyard filled with old washing machines, or
wrecked cars, or old ships rotting in some disused harbor." It all
felt somehow reductive and demystifying -- which is one reason I've
never been drawn to actually read "Empire of the Sun."

The fans' misgivings were lent some credence by Ballard's
post-"Empire" fiction, which seemed to lose its spark, as though
confronting his childhood experiences had defused some crucial
mechanism of creativity. While his novels of the late '80s and
thereafter such as "Cocaine Nights" and "Super-Cannes" have admirers,
few would argue they've contributed a jot to his enduring cult, based
solidly on the early cataclysm fiction, on "Atrocity" and the urban
trilogy of "Crash"/"High-Rise"/"Concrete Island," and above all on
the distilled, magisterial economy of his short stories, which
regularly appeared through the '60s and '70s in collections with
titles like "The Terminal Beach" and "Low Flying Aircraft." Happily,
W.W. Norton will be publishing " The Complete Stories of J. G.
Ballard" this fall, a massive compendium that ran to 1,200 pages in
its U.K. incarnation.

Stylistically what connects the avant-porn of Ballard's experimental
phase with the perverted adventure yarns of his cataclysm and
urban-collapse novels is his inattention to traditional fiction
virtues like character or dialogue. But more than plot, his books are
about atmosphere, defined as a physical space colored by or charged
with a psychological mood. Really the Ballard narrative is a
machinery for delivering up landscapes and tableaux that linger in
the reader's mind's eye. In the '50s, before turning to writing, he
tried his hand at painting, then gave up when he realized he had no
flair for it. "I would love to have been a painter in the tradition
of the surrealist painters who I admire so much," he once confessed.
In his fiction, vision reigns supreme over all the other senses, from
touch (sex in "Crash" is about the arrangement of limbs and objects
in compelling patterns, about geometry rather than sensuality) to
sound (Ballard professed to have minimal interest in or feeling for
music, although he did write a couple of very good short stories
involving music of the future).

All through his career, he maintained a connection to visual artists,
drawing inspiration from and befriending the British division of pop
art (Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi, et al.), whose infatuation
with American advertising and pop iconography had obvious affinities
with Ballard's mass cult obsessions. But the surrealists remained his
first and greatest love . He passionately defended Dalí from
fashionable detractors, while the critic Chris Hall has noted the
parallels between the dreamscape-like vistas that teem through his
writing and Yves Tanguy's "strange beaches," Max Ernst's "silent
forests and swamplands, weathered scenery and gnarled
post-apocalyptic detritus." Ballard, again, could connect it to his
own teenage experiences, describing "prewar and wartime Shanghai" as
"a huge Surrealist landscape ... There was a complete transformation
of everything, complete unpredictability, while formal life went on,
just as in Bunuel's films or Delvaux's paintings -- a bizarre
external landscape propelled by large psychic forces."

A problem for anyone who wants to write about Ballard is that the
author is his own best critic. You'll come up with a perception, spot
a pattern, then have the smile wiped off your face as trawling
through his interviews or essay you'll find it preempted by some
remark of his own -- expressed more sharply, taken further. These
ideas about what he's trying to do, or what fiction can be, are also
embedded in the stories, which means that they sometimes verge on
metafiction (but without being tediously postmodern -- indeed,
Ballard may well have been the last great literary modernist). At his
height, every image is an idea and every idea is embodied as an
image, sensation, mood.

Ballard's achievement relates to the adjectivization of his name: the
fact that "Ballardian" has become a glib descriptor for certain
landscapes and cultural phenomena is a measure of his impact. For
some of us, Ballard has imposed his way of seeing between us and
reality. For this sort of hardcore fan, it was impossible not to
think of J.G. within seconds of hearing about Princess Diana's crash
(for added Ballardianism, she and Dodi were harried to an early grave
by the image-vampires of the paparazzi, whose wages are paid by the
general public's voyeurism). Katrina and New Orleans, too -- the
flooded wards, the refugees clustered on partially submerged highway
overpasses, the chaos and squalor of the overcrowded dromes, seemed
to come straight from his pages. Perhaps reality caught up with his
imagination, outstripped it. That might have been his message all
along: that truth was already becoming stranger than fiction,
something he'd glimpsed in occupied China in the 1940s.

Strangely, although we live in an ever more Ballardian reality, I
can't really see a Ballardian school of writing out there, even
within science fiction. Perhaps J.G. is easier to parody than to be
positively influenced by. Instead, his direct impact is most evident
in music, particularly late '70s and '80s postpunk. Ironically, the
art he had the least feeling for was the one that responded most
fervently and productively to his vision. Probably his most famous
fanboys were Joy Division. Their final studio album, "Closer,"
featured an aural abbatoir of a track titled "Atrocity Exhibition,"
with Ian Curtis playing the role of freakshow barker, luring voyeurs
with the chorus "this is the way, step inside" and pointing to the
twisted bodies on display. The band's debut album, "Unknown
Pleasures," pulled a Ballardian maneuver by aestheticizing the
postindustrial desolation of late '70s Manchester, finding a somber
glamour in its derelict factories and baleful motorways.

Industrial groups like Joy Division's friends Throbbing Gristle and
Cabaret Voltaire venerated the two Bs: Ballard and Burroughs (the
latter a major influence on J.G., who read "The Naked Lunch" in the
early '60s and drew huge impetus from Burroughs' "severity" and
unblinking, nonjudgmental gaze, a reprieve from the naturalistic and
moralizing fiction that still ruled literary England). The Normal's
1978 synth-punk classic "Warm Leatherette" was a three-minute precis
of "Crash": the catchiest couplet goes "The hand brake penetrates
your thigh/ Quick -- Let's make love, before you die." Gary Numan's
"Cars" and David Bowie's "Always Crashing in the Same Car" bear
slightly smaller debts.

Another group of Ballard fans was the Human League. Founding member
Ian Craig Marsh, later part of Heaven 17, raved to me about "The
Atrocity Exhibition" and "High-Rise" ("the proles sending piles of
human excrement up in the express penthouse elevators, the
documentary maker who still carries his camera on his shoulder like
it's some symbolic totem, even after the lens is all smashed to
fuck!"). But the Human League also made fun of the alienation chic of
postpunk's Ballard casualties in their 1980 song "Blind Youth,"
singing "high-rise living's not so bad" and "dehumanization is such a
big word." Elsewhere in '80s mainstream pop, the Buggles, those
MTV-inaugurating one-hit-wonders, loosely based "Video Killed the
Radio Star" on the Ballard short "The Sound Sweep."

During the grunge years, Ballard's influence dipped away, but more
recently it's crept back, from Radiohead to the Klaxons (who named
their Mercury Prize-winning "Myths of the Near-Future" after one of
his short story collections) to numerous electronic musicians, most
notably another Mercury nominee, Burial, whose debut LP was framed as
a concept album about South London being flooded. And would you
believe it, as I'm writing this feature, a publicist's e-mail pings
into my in box touting a new band named Empire of the Sun. Just as
each new generation of angsty and imaginative youth discovers the
music of bands like Joy Division for itself, it seems likely that
half-lives of the Ballardian vision will keep reverberating through
pop culture for a long time to come.
--

About the writer

Simon Reynolds is the author of "Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk
1978-84" and "Bring the Noise: 20 Years of Writing About Hip Rock and Hip Hop."

---------

Ballard: explorer of catastrophe

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/earticle/6561/

The author of Empire of the Sun and Crash was no dystopian prophet;
he used disaster to reimagine the world.

James Heartfield
20 April 2009

The Steven Spielberg film, Empire of the Sun, was the highpoint of
fame for James Graham Ballard, who died yesterday aged 78. Released
in 1987, the film takes him back to the point where it all began for
him, the Japanese occupation of Shanghai and his own childhood
detention in a prisoner of war camp, with the fictionalised Ballard
played by a young Christian Bale.

The film was good, but the novel was uncanny for its dispassionate
setting out of a world turned upside down. In the opening scene,
Ballard describes the fictional Jim walking across a large garden
towards his own house, through its entire contents, which are laid
out before him. The overriding horror of the English settlers at
their defeat at non-white hands is described, but from the outside,
in scenes that leave you to read the emotion, as the young hero never
really sympathises with their outrage. The shocking point in the
novel is where Jim comes to identify with the Japanese guards' brutal
rule and loathe his fellow prisoners.

Good as it is, Empire of the Sun is not typical of Ballard's work.
For many years, Ballard laboured under the damning label of 'science
fiction writer', long before Iain M Banks and Will Self wrote fantasy
novels that were respectably literary. Ballard was next to Alfred
Bester and Ray Bradbury on the geeks shelf at the back of the
bookshop. To most people, science fiction meant cowboys and Indians,
only with fishbowl helmets and rocket ships. But Ballard, who had
started to read American science fiction magazines when he was in the
Royal Air Force in Canada, reacted against the cheesy themes to help
launch a New Wave of the genre, alongside Philip K Dick, Larry Niven
and Roger Zelazny. The magazine New Worlds, later edited by Michael
Moorcock, published his first stories in the 1950s.

Ballard's fiction needed no Venusians; instead it changed the world
in the imagination. Ballard was like a scientist, holding all the
variables constant, but changing just one to brilliant effect. It was
his second novel, The Drowned World (1962), that set the tone: in
this work, solar radiation melted the ice caps, so raising the sea
level by a few hundred feet, and Ballard imagined what would happen
as a result. What today is the compelling myth of the campaign
against climate change was all guessed before by Ballard - not to
address the climate, but to imagine the psychological recovery of
primitive man in a modern setting. Already in The Wind from Nowhere
(1961), Ballard had pictured a world beset by natural disaster, in
that case unremitting hurricanes.

Naturally, today's writers think Ballard was the visionary of
environmental collapse, though it would be just as true to say that
he was acting out the trauma of his childhood experience of the
eclipse of the white race, or dealing with the threat of nuclear war
(which hung over us throughout much of his writing career). Those who
are excited by the 'tipping point' forget that we had 'chaos theory'
in the 1980s and 'catastrophe theory' in the 1970s. Still, any of
those explanations reduces Ballard to the status of reporter or
prophet, when the marked thing about his work was what he added, not
what he passed on: the imaginative reinvention of the world.

Science fiction gave him the license to turn things inside out, but
he was inspired as much by surrealism. In those days, surrealism was
an underground movement, not the mainstay of the National Curriculum
that it is today, and you were not allowed to watch Luis Buñuel's
films in Britain. The beat writer, William Burroughs, and his
hallucinatory vision of the Cold War, Naked Lunch, helped Ballard to
see things differently. There is an affinity, too, with John
Wyndham's novels, like The Day of the Triffids, and Nigel Dennis'
Cards of Identity.

Moving from Canada to Shepperton in west London, Ballard lost his
wife to pneumonia, and from then on raised his three children alone.
It was a change that pushed him to work harder. He had been working
on a scientific journal, Chemistry and Industry. At Shepperton,
Ballard was in the middle of Britain's film and television industry,
where illusions were made. He was very taken with Pop Art, which he
first encountered at Richard Hamilton's 'This is Tomorrow' exhibition in 1956.

In the fictionalised autobiography The Kindness of Women, he tells of
a Sixties 'Art Laboratory' and the situationist experiments of
psychologist Dick Sutherland (probably drawn from his friend
Christopher Evans) all leading up to the events that he fictionalised
in 1969 as The Atrocity Exhibition. In that collection, Ballard's
surrealistic reinterpretation of the glamour and violence of the
times can be read in chapters like 'Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan'
and 'The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a
Downhill Motor Race' (suggested by Dada-hero Alfred Jarry's 'The
Crucifixion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race').

The Atrocity Exhibition features a chapter, 'Crash', which in 1973 he
expanded into the novel of the same name. It scandalised Britain when
David Cronenberg filmed it in 1996 (and Westminster Council banned
it). Crash is about Vaughan, who eroticises car crashes, and
Elizabeth Taylor. Ballard holds the reader in suspense between
revulsion and arousal by mixing his images, describing in close
detail a lung punctured by door handles, a white blouse irrigated
with blood. The Normal wrote a song about it, Warm Leatherette, which
was even better when Grace Jones sang it.

By the 1980s, Ballard had broken through the snobbish opposition to
science fiction and inspired writers who were in a similar vein
though escaping the label. His dystopias are often seen as an
endorsement of contemporary fears ­ like the consumerist
authoritarianism that descends in Kingdom Come (2008). But he could
still unsettle even the jaded bourgeoisie, as his tale of
middle-class revolt (dismissed as unbelievable by Adam Mars Jones in
the Observer) Millennium People showed in 2003.

It would be truer to say that Ballard investigated the idea of
catastrophe ­ and the disorder that followed opened up all
possibilities. His political views were a little more restrained than
his artistic ones. He declined to sign a petition for 'No More
Hiroshimas' in 1995, saying that he thought the atomic bomb had saved
a great many lives in the Pacific (not adding, but perhaps meaning,
his own). But he was always interested in original ideas and it was a
great thrill for me when he wrote a letter complimenting spiked's
predecessor, LM, which was edited by Mick Hume and which Ballard
described as 'the most interesting and provocative magazine I have
read for many years'. 'Michael Fitzpatrick is excellent. Ditto James
Heartfield', he wrote.

.