Ballardian

by William Viney

Future Ruins: Michelle Lord © 2007. Used with permission.

NOTE: This feature was published in two installments: Parts I & II last week, Part III this week.

William Viney, © 2007.

III. Ultimate Waste: Crash and Empire of the Sun

Crash presents a barrage of images that expresses collapse, dereliction, and waste; a seemingly endless carnival of sex and destruction; intoxicating, perverting, and desensitizing the reader. Towards the beginning of the novel, Ballard records James’ thoughts on the sexual possibilities of the everyday [1]. James imagines plane-crash victims whose minds have become a ‘brothel of images’ [2]. This phrase neatly draws together the union of sex and destruction that is the novel’s obsession: not only does it suggest the perversions that lurk in the hidden transcript of daily life, but also an attendant destructiveness built into the etymological roots of ‘brothel’. The word originates from the Middle English; broðen, ‘ruined, degenerate’ the past participle of breoðan; ‘to go to ruin ‘ [3]. This intense and paradoxical portrayal of generative destruction is arguably the novel’s central preoccupation, as Ballard himself has noted, the car crash is where the ‘twentieth century reaches its purest expression [...] Here we see, all too clearly, the speed and violence of our age, its strange love affair with the machine and, conceivably, with its own death and destruction’ [4]. The crash is inconceivable without laying waste to both man and machine.

With its brutal collision of violence, technology, and desire, Crash represents a distillation of imaginative obsessions, characterised by some as uniquely Ballardian [5]. Nowhere else in Ballard’s oeuvre is the human body treated with such sustained, clinical, and graphic representation. The raw violence of the car crash allows the secret or forbidden aspects of the body to become visible. The corporeality of Crash might seem unrelated to ideas of rubbish and refuse, but, as I hope will become clear, Ballard’s bodies are defined by their waste; made flesh by their vulnerable viscosity.

The definition of the human body through its constituent fluids has a long history. Since Galen (A.D. 130-200?), people have believed our physiological complexion to be the product of four fluid humours: blood, phlegm, choler (yellow bile), and melancholy (black bile). The letting of one or more of these fluids can directly affect an individual’s health. In this ancient conception, the body is borderless, neither bounded nor defined, a state of continual flux predicated upon the extraction and renewal of fluids. For Dalia Judovitz, Descartes reversed this process, making the body rigid; a machine inhabited by the ghost of consciousness [6]. Ballard’s Crash finds itself at the very juncture of Galen’s and Descartes’ theories of the body. The novel catalogues the body’s oozing fluids with meticulous detail, they are, in fact, often the only physical attributes of what are, in the general, rather hollow characters. On the other hand, Ballard’s bodies incessantly threaten to become machines, blending into the cars with which they collide. The wastes of body and car are frequently commingling, confusing the relations between human and machine, natural and synthetic.

Vomiting proves a regular reaction to a car crash. James vomits across his steering wheel after his crash with Dr. Helen Remington and her husband (C, 14), whilst Catherine and Vaughn both vomit after separate collisions (C, 3, 8). It is well known that one of the body’s instinctive reactions to shock, trauma, or disgust, is to vomit; a seemingly involuntary act that can appear to envelop ones entire being. For Kristeva, the importance of bodily fluids relates to the threatened individual, a safeguard against both a loss of self and a loss of affect. Rather than signifying loss, the excretion of bodily fluids can register a means to ‘compensate for the collapse of the border between inside and outside [...] Urine, blood, sperm, excrement then show up in order to reassure a subject that is lacking its ‘own and proper self’ [7]. From a more anatomical perspective, vomiting is a sign of the sympathetic nerve at work: the aspect of the nervous system that autonomically regulates the body’s organs. The sympathetic system is closely associated with a primitive ‘fight or flight’ response to bodily trauma [8]. From either the psychoanalytic or the anatomical standpoint, vomiting is a clear signal of bodily threat; to excrete is a powerful statement of corporal vulnerability.

James vomits again when in hospital, the beginnings of a series of illuminating passages that deal with the body’s propensity to excrete various solid and viscous waste materials. This propensity, luridly and voyeuristically imagined by James, becomes an obsession: ‘did small grains of faecal matter still cling to [the nurses'] anuses as they proscribed some antibiotic for a streptococcal throat, did the odour of illicit sex acts infest their underwear [...] traces of smegma and vaginal mucus on their hands [...]?’(C. 19). James becomes transfixed by the lurking filth beneath the sterile exterior of the hospital staff. In the same way, he realises that the nurses are also constantly preoccupied with the ‘unclean’ aspects of his body: ‘all these women only seem to attend to my most infantile zones [...] commissaries guarding my orifices’ (C .22). James’ subjection to the maternalistic waste management of his nurses finds direct parallel in the creation of the body’s boundaries during infancy. Kristeva has argued that the mother has a primal role in mapping the body, using her maternal authority to order the child’s body into ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’, ‘waste’ and ‘want’: ‘[t]hrough frustrations and prohibitions, this authority shapes the body into a territory having areas, orifices, points and lines, surfaces and hollows, where the archaic power of mastery and neglect, of the differentiation of proper-clean and improper-dirty, possible and impossible, is impressed and exerted’ [9]. James has this process rehearsed in the hospital, his orifices, points, lines, surfaces, and hollows are again placed under the ‘commissar’ of female prohibition, giving him a sharpened view of his own body, and a fresh perspective on its waste. Sensitised to the processes of self-creation that the body’s waste inspires, James describes how he ‘saw my own reflection, a mirror of blood, semen and vomit.’.. (C, 9). With an ironic allusion to Narcissus, James realises that the body’s waste can hold up a mirror to the self.

Vaughn’s car is always described as dirty. Its first appearance in the novel is anonymously described as: a ‘dusty American car’, as Vaughn watches James and Catherine through his ‘mud-spattered windshield’ (C, 43). Elsewhere, it seems Vaughn’s car cannot appear in the text without the presence of accompanying filth: ‘dusty Lincoln’, ‘unwashed windshield’ (C, 68, 86). The dirt that constantly attaches itself to Vaughn’s Lincoln comes to mark the dangerous and unpredictable character of his obsessions. However, it is the bodily residues that most indelibly mark Vaughn’s car: ‘with mucus from every orifice of the human body’ (C, 111). Vaughn’s brutal obsession with the car crash and the eroticisation of wounds is intimately bound to the residues left on the crashed car: ‘the perverse logic of blood soaked instrument panels, seat-belts smeared with excrement, sun-visors lined with brain tissue’ (C, 5). Later in the novel, James discovers a ‘black gelatinous material’ that covers ‘the muddied disc of the whitewall tyre’ (C, 129). These ‘gummy residues’, perhaps evidence that Vaughn’s has been actively hitting pedestrians or animals, remark upon the often ambiguous circumstances by which waste material attaches itself to another surface, and by doing so, competes for fresh meaning and significance. To avoid suspicion from the police, Vaughn suggests they clean the car, an act that provokes one of the most ruthlessly powerful scenes of the novel. The episode becomes a ritual in cleansing and defilement, a sardonic automobile-baptism.

James sits passively whilst his wife and Vaughn copulate on the rear seat, giving way to a series of dramatic yet playfully ambiguous juxtapositions: ‘the white soap sluiced across the roof and doors like liquid lace. Behind me, Vaughn’s semen glistened on my wife’s breasts and abdomen. The rollers drummed and battered at the car; the streams of water and soap solution jetted over its now immaculate body’ (C, 134). Elsewhere, Catherine is also described as having ‘immaculate cleanliness’, ‘as if she had reamed out every square centimetre of her elegant body, separately ventilated every pore’ (C, 89–90). She appears so clean to James, so untainted, that he wonders whether ‘her whole identity was a charade’, leading him to deliberately inspect ‘every orifice’, to find some trace of dirt or filth that will verify her existence (C, 90). The central question is this: is Vaughn’s semen analogous to, or at odds with, the soap that jets across the body of the car? Who, or what, is being cleaned? Semen, here and elsewhere in the novel, is entirely divorced from its generative potential. In a similar episode James and Catherine have sex that is ‘empty and sterile, a jerking away of waste tissue’ (C, 97). Ballard prevents any association in Crash between semen and its common life-giving properties. New associative arrangements are therefore fostered. With the car-wash context in mind, we might question William Miller’s argument that semen is ‘the most polluting of male substances’, its contaminating power rising from its sticky fecundity, misogynist threat of instant feminisation, and a complex process of defilement linked to post-coital shame [10]. Miller’s overtly heterosexual reading of the body’s fluids emphasises the possessive or polluting aspects of the body. In contrast, Crash is decidedly neutral in its response to both bodily fluids and the sexual acts that provoke them; no clues are given to guide our response. We are left guessing as to whether the cleaning of the car is an ironic metaphor for the ethical degeneration of the central characters, or that, by having sex with Vaughn, Catherine is actually being cleansed of her corporeal unreality. However morally ambiguous these passages are, the corporeal residues nevertheless provide provocative and arresting images, the reader is allowed an uncompromising vision of the body’s waste.

By repeatedly commingling the fluids of humans and cars, Ballard achieves a certain hybridity of waste, a union of the organic and synthetic that perfectly encapsulates ‘the nightmare marriage between sex and technology’ [11]. As James and Helen have sex in his car for the second time, the equivocal use of pronouns exaggerates the possibility of this marriage:

The nail of her forefinger scratched at this fretline, which rose diagonally from the window-sill at the same angle as the concrete ledge of the irrigation ditch ten feet from the car. In my eyes this parallax fused with the image if an abandoned car lying in the rust-stained grass on the lower slopes of the reservoir embankment. The brief avalanche of dissolving talc that fell across her eyes as I moved my lips across their lids contained all the melancholy of thisderelict vehicle, its leaking engine oil and radiator coolant (C, 61)

The key aspect of this passage is the structural position of ‘this derelict vehicle’, the obscure reference to talc, and the fragmented interaction between ‘her’ and ‘my’ that blurs the object of dereliction. Because engine oil and radiator coolant so easily correlate with fluids of the human body (blood and sweat), the themes of sex, technology, and destruction are precisely rendered in a single ambiguous sentence. The commingling of human and technological wastes, becomes the principal image that draws together the novel’s ambitious thematics: ‘[t]he passenger compartment enclosed us like a machine generating from our sexual act an homunculus of blood, semen, and engine coolant’ (C, 63). In the mixing of fluids, death, sex, the body and the machine become inextricably linked.

Future Ruins: Michelle Lord © 2007. Used with permission.

When blood, semen, and vomit are mixed, the novelty of the image dulls our familiar reflexes. The blurring of the organic and inorganic undoes our ability to clearly see the abject material, obscuring the relationship between the wastes of the body and the violent event that produces them. Some have tried to argue that the ‘death of affect’ Ballard’s characters experience is due to a media-drenched Baudrillardian hyper-reality [12]. Although this might explain their apparent affectlessness, it does not fully explain our states and levels of abjection; our responses to a book that is often uncomfortable to read. And yet, several things numb the senses when reading Crash, the most obvious being stylistic. Crash lacks Kristeva’s ‘crying-out theme‘, what she goes on to define as ‘the theme of suffering-horror [that] is the ultimate evidence of such states of abjection within a narrative representation’ [13]. The repetitiveness of Ballard’s narrative tone, with its endless brothel of images, never reaches this state of hysteria; Crash has, as Luckhurst has noted, a ‘remorseless monologism’ [14]. It is because Ballard’s prose style is so clinical, so obsessively repetitious, and so immersed in the idiom of the scientific, that it fails to conform to Kristeva’s theory of the abject. Moreover, Ballard’s refusal to employ a lurid vernacular idiom places a clinical filter between image and revulsion. It is through this clipped and distant narrative tone that Ballard can allows the body’s waste to be so wholeheartedly examined, as if dissected in an urban operating theatre. Ballard has described his studies in medicine as ‘minutely paring away the skin and muscles and nerves, carrying out this extremely detailed study of what was once a human being’ [15]. In a similar way, he pares down the descriptive flesh of conventional narrative, leaving a disparate littering of waste material. Crash sees Ballard at his most ambiguously provocative. The obsessive descriptions of organic of inorganic waste serve as both a voyeuristic invitation to share in these gruesome fantasies and a warning against the psychologically deranging combination of technology and late capitalist individualism. The novel was always intended as a ‘cautionary tale’ [16], but a cautionary tale to be voyeuristically enjoyed. The moral ambivalence of the narrative, and the explicit commingling of fluids, prevents our full and unreserved revulsion. Crash allows us to view the body’s waste without the distraction of disgust or the perversity of hedonistic acceptance.

Empire of the Sun is a novel of indeterminate ends and beginnings. It inaugurates Ballard’s partially autobiographical account of war-torn Shanghai (continued in The Kindness of Women). As such, it creates the opportunity to map the abandonment, dereliction, and half-empty swimming pools that recur throughout his fiction, marking the psycho-literary genesis of the Ballardian idiom, an enlightened vantage point from which to reread his entire oeuvre. Furthermore, the novel can be seen as the terminus of Ballard’s treatment of waste, the epitome of all that has gone before. Although Ballard’s other works deal with the subject of death and the disposal of corpses, Empire of the Sun attempts to cope with this disposal on a mass-scale, or rather, during both war and peace, it explores the complex transition between the valued human being and lifeless, disposable cadaver.

Jim’s confrontation with death is irrevocably intensified by the war. Corpses begin to appear to him as litter, just another object made derelict by bombing: ‘[t]he verges were littered with the debris from the air attacks. Burnt-out trucks and supply wagons lay in ditches, surrounded by the bodies of dead puppet soldiers, the carcasses of horses and water buffalo’ (ES, 291). As the occupation begins, Jim observes: ‘[b]odies of Chinese lay everywhere, hands tied behind their backs in the centre of the road, dumped behind the sandbag emplacements, half-severed heads resting on each other’s shoulders’ (ES, 76). Ballard’s matter-of-fact tone, so reminiscent of Crash, remarks upon the self-evident nature of death: through the eyes of a young boy, death is without mystery or terror.

Jim’s proximity to death has always been a close one; corpses are a regular sight even in peacetime. At the beginning of chapter three, Jim plays on a burial tumulus, peering and poking at the sun-warmed skeletons inside: ‘Jim felt his cheeks and jaw, trying to imagine his own skeleton in the sun, lying there in this peaceful field within sight of the aerodrome’ (ES, 29). Jim’s intimacy with the deceased allows his imagination to erode the barrier between the dead and the living; he positions himself within rather than beyond the grave. With ‘the rotting coffins project[ing] from the loose earth like a chest of drawers’ (ES, 29), these re-emerging corpses have an implicitly symmetrical relationship with the novel’s numerous others:

Every night in Shanghai those Chinese too poor to pay for the burial of their relatives would launch the bodies from the funeral piers at Nantao, decking the coffins with paper flowers.Carried away on one tide, they came back on the next, returning to the waterfront ofShanghai with all the other debris abandoned by the city (ES, 41).

Here is a theme that will literally haunt the reader throughout the novel: the uncanny return of the dead. In fact, the novel ends with a vision of inevitable return:

The flowers formed a wavering garland around the coffin as it began its long journey to the estuary of the Yangtze, only to be swept back by the incoming tide among the quays and mud- flats, driven once again to the shores of this terrible city (ES, 351).

It is as if the dead, like memory itself, have an unpredictable capacity to powerfully revisit the living. In the camp graveyard Jim observes: ‘[h]ere and there an arm or a foot protruded from the graves, the limbs of restless sleepers struggling beneath their brown quilts’ (ES, 205–206). Burial is a deeply contingent form of waste disposal; a change of weather conditions is all that needed for the discarded to reannounce their presence. Just as a change of wind can bring an unpleasant smell, so heavy rain can exhume the dead. As long as they refuse to be out of sight, the dead continue to ruthlessly occupy our minds.

The ritual of mourning often involves an intricate process of objectification, once the body has been made object it can be made absent, discarded, making death’s absence complete. This is not done purely for emotional reasons. Just as food waste can become hazardous to one’s health if it is not discarded, so the rotting corpse presents a threat. So when Jim drinks from the river, with the corpse of a Chinese woman only fifty yards away, he ‘[c]autiously, [...] decanted a little water from one palm to the other, then drank quickly so that the germs would have no time to infect him’ (ES, 90). Nevertheless, the corpse also poses a threat to the psychological health of the living. For Julia Kristeva, the corpse is the absolute essence of the polluting abject, the ‘decaying body, lifeless, completely turned into dejection, blurred between the inanimate and the inorganic, a transitional swarming, inseparable lining of a human nature whose life is indistinguishable from the symbolic-the corpse represents the fundamental pollution’ [17]. In a similar vein, Françoise Dastur has argued that ‘the corpse occupies a disconcerting intermediate position between persons and things and, on account of its corruptibility, is regarded as a source of pollution’ [18]. If the cadaver is the ‘fundamental’ object of abjection and pollution, then it follows that it must represent a form of fundamental or ‘ultimate’ waste, an act of disposal that maintains both the physical and psychological health of the living.

Flies swarm and buzz about them about the corpses that fill the final chapters of Empire of the Sun, greedily profiting from the lack of organised burial or disposal. As both prophets of and fanfares for the physical presence of death, flies enjoy a structurally integral position in the novel’s unique taxonomy of waste. When Jim first meets the wandering Kamikaze pilot he observes: ‘[t]he flies hovered around the pilot’s mouth, tapping his lips like impatient guests at a banquet [...] the Japanese made no move to brush them away. No doubt he knew that his own life was over .’.. (ES, 280–281). When he meets the pilot for the second time, dead on the riverbank, Jim must see him through a ‘swarm of flies’, one of whom ‘drank from [the pilot's] pupil’ (ES, 339). Counterbalancing this sense of enormous waste, Ballard’s flies are ferocious feeders. The corpses encourage ‘a plague of a thousand glutted flies’, flies who devour the very air (ES, 309, 336). In a scene that undeniably contains echoes of the 10th floor swimming pool in High-Rise, Jim returns to Lunghua camp to discover that ‘a cloud of flies enveloped him [...] Brushing the flies from his mouth, Jim walked into the men’s ward. The decaying air streamed down the plywood walls, bathing the flies that fed on the bodies piled across the bunks [...] like sides of meat in a condemned slaughterhouse’ (ES, 302). Flies profit from the decay of humans. As detrivores they are dependent upon on our discards: one creatures waste is another’s want, and disturbingly, flies will not let us ‘go to waste’. Our carefully constructed divisions between clean and unclean, waste and want, become sullied under the promiscuous attention of the fly. More than simply disrupting categories of value, flies wield the power to locate waste and, most unsettling of all, the capacity to identify humans as waste. As Steven Connor has written: ‘[f]lies and humans are asymmetrically deterritorializing [...] Flies and humans are each other’s parasite or interference. Each gives the other its unbeing’ [19]. If the human corpse announces a form of ultimate or essential waste in Empire of Sun, then flies, the very species that profit from this waste, constitute a means of conceptualising a form of ‘impossible’ waste. The fly is one of the few species that remains entirely intractable to human mastery or design: ‘for humans, there is no disposing of or dispensing with flies’ [20]. The fly ridden corpse provides a consummate image of human powerlessness, expressing the essential transience of human life; the waste we all become in the Christian burial service: ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’.

IV. Conclusion

As Jim lies in the stadium with Mr Maxted’s corpse, he makes an implicit judgement about exactly when Maxted’s body becomes waste: ‘[l]ong after Mr Maxted had grown cold, Jim had continued to massage his cheeks, keeping away the flies until he was sure that his soul had left him’ (ES, 272). We have already been told that Jim is an amateur soul-spotter, ‘[h]e often watched the eyes of the patients as they died, trying to detect a flash of light when the soul left’ (ES, 207). When Maxted’s body becomes vacant, the flies are permitted to feed. In a profound way, the ‘flash of light’ that announces the moment when Maxted’s body becomes waste resonates with the consequences of the atomic age. The phrase is tellingly repeated when Jim sees the atomic flash from the Nagasaki bomb: ‘a flash of light filled the stadium’ (ES, 276). If a ‘flash of light’ is all that prevents Maxted from becoming waste, then Ballard emphasises how the whole human race teeters dangerously on the brink of absolute destruction, in one flash of light civilisation can be laid waste.

In this way, Empire of the Sun marks the beginning of the atomic era, inaugurating the possibility that the human race can come to a sudden and violent end. With their shared interest in abrupt and unexpected renegotiations of value, High Rise, Concrete Island and Crash all share this revelation of potential apocalypse. The minute and the enormous, the antique and the everyday, the built environment and the natural, the organic and the inorganic; Ballard allows every aspect of modernity to be transferred into waste. Ballardian waste is so ubiquitous that what we ordinarily view as secret and hidden becomes the abundantly normal, a permanent feature of our lived environment. Far from being a useless nuisance that we would prefer to discard as our past, the figure and the figuring of waste provides the central metaphor for our present. Ballard’s work stands in the indelible afterglow of the flash, the flash of waste creation that is the very hallmark of our age.

NOTE: This feature was published in two installments: Parts I & II last week, Part III this week.

Endnotes

[1] To avoid confusion between J. G. Ballard the author and James Ballard the central character of Crash, I will refer to the character as ‘James’.

[2] J. G. Ballard, Crash (1975; London: Vintage, 1995), 19. Hereafter, cited in the text as C.

[3] Interestingly, there is an additional sense of abandonment and worthlessness, see ‘Brothel’, The Compact Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Ed, 2002).

[4] J.G. Ballard, A User’s Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews, (London: Flamingo, 1997), 262.

[5] See Roger Luckhurst, ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard, 119–50, for an account of Crash‘s place in the long thematic and narratalogical development of Ballard’s fiction.

[6] Dalia Judovitz, The Culture of the Body: Genealogies of Modernity (2001; Michigan: U of Michigan P, 2004), 67-82.

[7] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 53.

[8] See Henry Gray, Anatomy: Descriptive and Surgical (1858; Bristol: Paragon, 1998), 546-56.

[9] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 72.

[10] William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, 103, 103-104.

[11] J. G. Ballard, ‘Introduction’, Crash, n.p.

[12 For two excellent overviews on the relationship between Ballard and Baudrillard, see: Emma Whiting, ''Abject Literature': Disaffection and abjection in The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash, ' unpublished essay, 2007; Roger Luckhurst, 'The Angle Between Two Walls': The Fiction of J. G. Ballard.

[13] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 141.

[14] Roger Luckhurst, ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard, 123

[15 J. G. Ballard, interview with Melvyn Bragg, The South Bank Show, ITV1. 17 Sept. 2006.

[16] J. G. Ballard, interview with Melvyn Bragg, The South Bank Show, ITV1. 17 Sept. 2006.

[17] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 109.

[18] Françoise Dastur, Death: An Essay on Finitude, trans. John Llewelyn (1994; London: Althone, 1996), 8.

[19] Steven Connor, Fly, (London: Reaktion, 2006), 182, 183.

[20] Steven Connor, Fly, 183.

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