World’s first hydrogen bomb explosion, Eniwetok Atoll, 1952.

Dominika Oramus teaches Brit.Lit. professionally at the University of Warsaw. The following is Part Two of the introduction to Grave New World: The Decline of the West in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard, her post-doctoral thesis. Grave New World currently exists as a (very) limited edition book, with the possibility of it being published in a more commercial format being explored.

For more information on the work, please see Part One.

INTRODUCTION. 2
J.G. Ballard’s Auto-Creation [21]

Many critics describe the surprising proliferation of ‘Ballards’ in recent years, numerous doubles of the author, ones who people pages of other critics’ studies and who seem to be quite different persons: an avant-gardist, a science fiction reformer and a mainstream writer of post-war classics. To me, this uncanny multiplication seems to result not only from the diverse criticism of essayists representing separate literary groups (the science fiction field, London’s literary establishment, French postmodernists, American theorists of science fiction etc.), but also from Ballard’s own journalism. In each stage of his long career Ballard was explicitly defining his artistic aims and describing the art of the writers, painters and filmmakers who influence him most, thus defining the context of his own output. During those years Ballard’s ideas and likes have continuously evolved.

Ballard wrote essays and reviews for various literary magazines and daily newspapers; his journalism, collected in the 1996 volume entitled A User’s Guide to the Millennium, reflects changes in his artistic fascinations and literary style. Initially he wrote for the ambitious counter-cultural SF magazine New Worlds, in the seventies he moved to Ink, Vogue and Drive; after the success of Empire of the Sun he started to collaborate with the and the Daily Telegraph and, occasionally, to contribute to thematic anthologies of essays. Read chronologically, his essays and reviews show both his development as a writer and the way in which he creates his own image, for example, by choosing and presenting his gurus – ones such as Salvador Dali or William Burroughs.

Ballard’s journalistic debut took place in New Worlds, a magazine intending to educate its readers. Apart from experimental fiction, Moorcock insisted on publishing Guest Editorials, reviews and articles that were meant to introduce to SF the artistic manifesto of the ‘New Wave’. J. G. Ballard soon became his major essayist, and Moorcock called him ‘the Voice’ of the movement. From 1964 to 1970 Ballard wrote numerous articles in which he described all the factors he saw as shaping contemporary artistic sensibility. His choice of subjects reveals his own fascinations, while the exuberant, metaphorical style of these articles imparts them with the unique character of revolutionary manifestos.

In these articles Ballard chooses his masters: the books and albums he reviews are by authors he admires and wants to be included into artistic canons. In the article ‘Myth Maker of the Twentieth Century’ (1964) [22] he speaks strongly in favour of William Burroughs, whom he considered the second most important writer of the century, second to James Joyce. What he admires is Burroughs’s ability to describe the ‘inner landscape of the post-war world’, as we subjectively perceive it. The ‘man-made wilderness’ of contemporary cities, the ugliness of civilization and paranoid perception of people surrounded by numerous fictions are for Ballard the true literary subject which Burroughs describes in the appropriate technique: his text is full of opposites, juxtapositions, chaotic imagery. Ballard enjoys the apparent contrast between organized, decent society and the psychopathic world of dropouts and, most of all, the way in which the differences between the two blur. Paranoia, fictionalization of media landscapes and hallucinations are characteristic for the contemporary psyche. Fictional elements derived from SF belong in our shared cultural competence and are incorporated into our inner landscape:

What appear to be the science fictional elements… in fact play a metaphorical role… The sad poetry of… the whole apocalyptic landscape of Burroughs’s world closes in upon itself, now and then flaring briefly like a dying volcano, is on a par with Anna Livia Plurabelle’s requiem for her river-husband in Finnegan’s Wake. (Ballard 1997b: 128-129)

Ballard admires Burroughs for his presentation of SF as a part of the general consciousness long ago absorbed into the mainstream of culture. His books are given as an example of the late 20th-century fiction that reflects the contemporary human mind and is not afraid of taboos and the truthful presentation of chaos. Ballard’s tone is didactic; he instructs the readers of New Worlds in a very authoritarian way. [23]

His even greater early fascination is surrealism: visual art, but also poetry. He strongly advises the readers to incorporate this aesthetics into SF. ‘The images of surrealism are the iconography of inner space’ (ibid.: 84). With this sentence he opens his famous early article ‘The Coming of the Unconscious’ (1966). Admiring surrealism for its ability to appeal to our innermost often-subliminal feelings and advocating its ‘landscapes of the soul, the collage of the strange and familiar, and all the techniques of violent impact’ (ibid.: 84), he indirectly postulates what literature, SF included, should be like.

Trying to persuade his readers that surrealism is the key to the 20th century experience he goes on to present its sources. He starts by describing the Dada movement and its protests against war, society and art and then goes back in time to the symbolists and expressionists of the nineteen-century. Sade, Lautréamont, Jarry and Apollinaire are able to reflect the whole human experience – sciences, physiology, even dreams and subliminal longings [24]. Ballard considers them the harbingers of psychoanalysis and compares their art to Rorschach tests, ‘with [their] emphasis on the irrational and the perverse, on the significance of apparently random associations’ (ibid.: 85). Writing about André Breton and the First Surrealist Manifesto he implies similarities between the surrealist movement and the ‘New Wave’: in imagery, language and attempts to reach to the deeper levels of the human mind.

The major part of Ballard’s article is devoted to various surrealist paintings that for him are the best presentations of states of mind. A good example of his exuberant style is the paragraph on one of the very famous paintings by Salvador Dali:

Dali: ‘The Persistence of Memory’ The empty beach with its fused sand is a symbol of utter psychic alienation. Clock time is no longer valid, the watches have begun to melt and drip. Even the embryo, symbol of secret growth and possibility, is drained and limp. These are the residues of a remembered moment of time. The most remarkable elements are the two rectilinear objects, formalizations of sections of the beach and sea. The displacement of these two images through time, and their marriage with our own four-dimensional continuum, has warped them into the rigid and unyielding structures of our own consciousness (ibid.: 87).

Dali’s ‘The Persistence of Memory’ (1931).

It is in the language of psychoanalysis that Ballard talks about thoughts and perceptions. Surrealism, the artistic movement that developed partly in response to Freud, is for him the ultimate 20th-century art. Three years later, in his article exclusively on Dali ‘The Innocent as Paranoid’ (1969) [25], he divides the output of this painter into periods on the basis of references to different cultural phenomena (psychoanalysis tops the list). He maintains that Dali, ‘with Max Ernst and William Burroughs … forms a trinity of the only living men of genius’ whose ‘paintings constitute a body of prophesy about ourselves unequalled in accuracy since Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents’ (ibid.: 91).

The prevailing references to Freud and psychoanalysis may seem strange in a SF periodical such as New Worlds, but according to Ballard at present only science fiction and surrealism are able to give an imaginative response to science. Psychoanalysis together with other schools describing the human mind are becoming one of the most important contemporary sciences [26]. He continues this line of reasoning in his most famous Guest Editorial in New Worlds, ‘Which Way to Inner Space’ (1962), considered to be the fullest artistic manifesto of the ‘New Wave’. In that text he postulates a rejuvenation of SF: replacement of outer space exploration and technological detail with interest in the inner space of the human mind. He sites Ray Bradbury as an example of the very few authors who are able to ‘transform even so hackneyed a subject as Mars into an enthralling private world’ (ibid.: 195), but criticizes lesser writers who have made SF synonymous with fantastic stories for small boys. Nevertheless, because of the inherent lack of limits and restrictions:

SF has a continuing and expanding role as an imaginative interpreter of the future… The biggest developments of the immediate future will take place, not on the Moon or Mars, but on Earth, and it is inner space, not outer, that needs to be explored. The only truly alien planet is Earth. In the past the scientific bias of SF has been towards the physical sciences – rocketry, electronics, cybernetics – and the emphasis should switch to the biological sciences (ibid.: 197).

Ballard goes on to postulate abstract science fiction, uninterested in dramatic stories, but rather in the oblique presentation of phenomena such as the human experience of time, genetic memories, subliminal drives, and archeopsychic time. Science fiction should develop a vocabulary to deal with the social and psychological problems of tomorrow and, Ballard fervently claims, it has chances to become the intellectual and artistic avant-garde.

In the second half of the decade, long after the decline of the ‘New Wave’, Ballard was slowly recognized as one of the theorists of contemporary society and postmodernist culture. Always placed on the margins of the mainstream and associated with scandal and artistic provocation, he was nevertheless often asked his opinions on SF, futurology and different aspects of contemporary life. No longer restricted to avant-garde magazines, he published his essays and reviews in a wide range of titles. His most interesting journalism of this decade is concerned with the status of art in a world dominated by mass media and the numerous fictions of urban landscape such as commercials, billboards and ever-present TV screens. Leitmotifs of these essays are the latent artistic potential of science fiction, the regrettable decline of this genre, the prospects of future life in postmodernist society and the new kind of imagination shaped by the late 20th century: the Moon landing, Vietnam and the assassination of J.F. Kennedy.

Aware of the rapid changes in culture he formulated a whole new artistic program for the future SF writer. Our reality is now full of people filling the environment with all kinds of fictions, therefore a writer cannot just produce fictitious stories, but has to ‘out-imagine everyone else’, analyze the minds of contemporary men, and create situations and images able to move, excite and reach to the unconscious. Such an artistic plan soon proved too idealistic. In subsequent years Ballard witnessed the rapid decline of intellectual SF, the commercialization of the genre and the dominance of visual media.

In his review of Star Wars, ‘Hobbits in Space?’ (1977), his criticism of this film (‘totally unoriginal, feebly plotted, instantly forgettable, and an acoustic nightmare’) is only a pretext to examine the condition of science fiction: a genre, which is becoming passé as its intellectual values resist translation into cinema:

Although slightly biased, I firmly believe that science fiction is the true literature of the twentieth century, and probably the last literary form to exist before the death of the written word and the domination of the visual image. SF has been one of the very few forms of modern fiction explicitly concerned with change – social, technological and environmental – and certainly the only fiction to invent society’s myths, dreams and utopias. Why, then, has it translated so uneasily into the cinema? (ibid.: 14).

J.G. Ballard (photo courtesy RE/Search publications).

The commercialization of culture maims both SF film and SF literature. Ballard is aware that in the 1970s there is no place for ambitious writing of the ‘New Wave’ kind. In ‘The Cosmic Cabaret’ (1974), a review of Brian Aldiss’ Billion Year Spree, he announces that modern SF has come to an end. ‘Anything that happened five minutes ago is already the centre of a cult, embedded in Lucite and put on a display shelf. Modern SF… has already become a victim of this nostalgia’ (ibid.: 203). There is no interesting new movement and the tendency of more ambitious writers is to come back to stylized ‘retro’ poetics. The authors who ten years earlier had been the ‘New Wave’ abandoned SF and their postmodernist experiments are being misunderstood,

One of the most inaccurate jibes leveled at the so-called ‘New Wave’ is that its writers suffered from delusions of literary grandeur, that they took themselves far too seriously. In fact in my own personal experience, it is the absolute reverse that is true (ibid: 203).

Such a decline in science fiction is for him the result of a huge civilizational change that is taking place in America, the centre of the world’s science fiction. Concepts for the future no longer cause excitement, stress falls on the present day and, moreover, the huge moral and imaginative reserves possessed by the USA in the first part of the century are exhausted. In times of pessimism, distraction and social entropy there is no place for a literature exploring the excitements of tomorrow. The post-Vietnam world abandoned the future and then SF. This process was enhanced throughout the decade, and, at the beginning of the 80s, Ballard’s voice sounded even more pessimistic. In ‘New Means Worse’ (1981), published in the Guardian, he wrote:

In fact, science fiction today… is entering the most commercial phase it has ever known. The ‘New Wave’, along with almost all the more intelligent magazines and anthologies, has long since been inundated by a tsunami of planet fiction, sword-and-sorcery sensationalism… What science fiction needs now is a clear, hard and positive voice (ibid.: 190).

Nostalgia and dissatisfaction with the contemporary world and its stupid escapist fables made Ballard concentrate on the history of SF rather than its present state. The ability to probe deep down into our psyche is the ultimate goal of literature. Nevertheless, in the 1970s something wrong happened to SF and culture at large. For some years Ballard kept toying with SF ideas in a playful and less serious way. A good example of this kind of journalism is his cooperation with Vogue, where in the late 1970s he published several impressions on the future. Easy and nice to read, they described a make-believe 21st century. In ‘The Future of the Future’ (1977) he talks about a world dominated by TV. Each one of us lives in a room full of TV screens that report on our daily life and bodily functions. People spend their evenings editing the material recorded by cameras – their own talks and interactions with the family and friends. They live keeping in mind the film we continuously are making. Gradually they step back into our rooms and perform our work and family life via the TV screen, unable to cope with un-mediated reality.

LEFT: The young Ballard (photo courtesy RE/Search publications).

This article is interesting for several reasons. Firstly, soon thereafter Ballard used this idea to write two short stories – ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ (1977) and ‘Motel Architecture’ (1978), both picturing a society in which people live separately in screen-filled studios. Secondly, it is worth noticing that 1977 is long before the creation of virtual reality, and that Ballard quite rightly anticipated the development of media. Thirdly, compared with earlier texts on SF – engaged artistic manifestos teaching how to write, read and think – this article shows his disappointment in SF, which he now treats as a plaything only. Lastly, we can see here Ballard’s growing obsession with TV screens and media culture, something so very characteristic of his fiction (and journalism [27]) at the time.

In the second Vogue text, ‘The Diary of A Mad Space-wife’ (1979), he describes life in one of the hundreds of satellite cities in Earth orbit. The future’s life, entertainment and abortive work lead people to depression and space-madness. The article combines science fiction-like ideas and descriptions with bits and pieces of real-life astronauts’ memories and recorded dialogues. The atmosphere is sad and nostalgic, and the article shows that the Space Age is really over, no one dreams of space conquests, and what we are left with is TV. The beginning of the eighties is for Ballard the end of artistic involvement with science fiction (he never abandons the genre as a writer of fiction, but ceases to see it as means of social education and artistic experiments) and he turns to quasi-autobiographical writing.

The tremendous artistic success of Empire of the Sun marked a sudden breakthrough in Ballard’s literary career. After nearly thirty years of continuously writing and publishing both fiction and non-fiction he was finally recognized as a modern classicist for writing an autobiography and World War II novel. Set in pre-war Shanghai and the Lunghua camp, where the Japanese interned British civilians during the war, the novel was generally received as a confession of the real-life sources of Ballard’s literary fascinations and obsessions [28] and was often confused for a factual account of his early years. His popular image as an orientalist (enhanced by the acclaimed Steven Spielberg film Empire) prompted the numerous essays and reviews having to do with China and Japan that he was asked to write in subsequent years.

Some of this non-fiction is explicitly autobiographical. For example ‘Unlocking the Past’ (1991), written for the Daily Telegraph, is a report on Ballard’s visit to Shanghai, which took place during the making of the Spielberg film. Ballard writes this text for readers who know his novel: there are implied comparisons of Shanghai at the end of the 20th century and the city described in the Empire. Ballard visits the places important for Jim, his fictitious persona (without referring to the book or summarizing it), and the suspense works only if we wait for him to trace his prison room. At the same time the article has certain features of a travelogue:

The first day I moved around Shanghai in a daze. Memories jostled me like the Chinese crowds who surrounded the film crew. Watching as the Belgian lad cycled past the Cathy Hotel, where Noël Coward had written Private Lives, I remembered the Shanghai of gangsters and beggar-kings, prostitutes and pickpockets. I had opened a door and stepped into a perfectly preserved past, though a past equipped with a number of unattractive reflexes of my own – walking along the Nanking Road, I caught myself expecting the Chinese pedestrians to step out of my way (ibid.: 175).

Ballard creates his own image here; partly an elderly English sentimental tourist, partly a boy from half a century earlier with his imperial ways of a colony dweller and describes the modern, exotic city from such a perspective. We read about his walks throughout the city, the visit to the former Ballard house, and a trip to Lunghua, his search and the final retrieval of memories of his younger self. All of these adventures are described in such a way as to emphasize the real life details which he had incorporated into Empire of the Sun. This article is in itself a piece of fiction, a footnote to this novel, in which Ballard presents his half-literary persona: the writer of Empire of the Sun, an English intellectual with the vivid though naïve memories of a rich European boy in the colonial China. [29]

This persona is used in numerous other journalistic texts that Ballard wrote in the nineties: from this perspective he judged Chinese books, discussed the history of Asia, the Second World War and recent political changes. A good sample of this style is the beginning of ‘Survival Instincts’ (1992), a review of Wild Swans, a Chinese woman’s memoir [30], published in the Sunday Times;

I can remember the bad-tempered amahs of my childhood, ruthless and hard-fisted little women darting about on their bound feet. At the other end of the social scale were the dragon ladies – tycoon’s wives or successful businesswomen – in their long fur coats and immaculate make-up, who could petrify a small boy at fifty paces with their baleful stares.

Returning to China last summer, I was startled to find an advance guard of dragon ladies apparently waiting for me in the Cathy Pacific lounge at Heathrow. But there were none in the streets of Shanghai, and, fortunately, their places were taken by thousands of relaxed and cheerful young women (ibid.: 36).

A similar procedure can be found in a group of texts that deal with the powerful Asiatic politicians and royals [31]. In ‘Lipstick and High Heels’ (1993), written for the Daily Telegraph, it is Ballard’s recent visit to China compared with the mental picture of pre-war Shanghai that give him a background to talk about political issues. Reviewing Richard Evans’s Deng Xiaoping and the making of Modern China Ballard juxtaposes references to Empire of the Sun and the making of the film with the revolutionary changes described by Evans. His comments on Hirohito in ‘Last of the Great Royals’ (1989), published in the Observer, discuss the emperor’s policy line during the war from the perspective of China, not Japan.

Therefore, the readers of Ballard’s fiction and non-fiction in the early 1990s grapple with a small mountain of autobiography material encompassing Empire of the Sun, its 1991 sequel The Kindness of Women and a body of journalism. The resulting confusion of facts and fiction made Ballard write in ‘The End of My War’ (1995), in the Sunday Times, the exact account of what happened to him (and not to Jim, the protagonist of Empire of the Sun) in Shanghai in the 1940s.

The end of the war is here viewed from the perspective of the Lunghua Camp (a place described in detail in Empire of the Sun). This time instead of Jim (the war-name adopted by the protagonist of the novel when he is separated from his parents and left to his own devices in the middle of the war) we have Jamie, who spent the three years of internment with his parents;

Then at last it was all over. The day after Hirohito’s broadcast, we heard from the Swiss Red Cross that the war had ended. The Japanese armies had agreed to lay down their arms. We were told of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which had vaporized both cities and brought the war to a sudden halt.

‘Is the war over?’ I asked my father. ‘Really, really over?’

‘Yes, it’s really over.’ My father stared at me somberly. ‘Jamie, you’ll miss Lunghua’ (ibid.: 284).

In a similar way the events described in Empire of the Sun are here briefly narrated from Jamie Ballard’s point of view, thus demonstrating artistic distortions in the novel. Camp life, the English school in Shanghai before the war, the small boy’s memories of colonial times – this autobiography encompasses all aspects of Empire of the Sun. The very fact of being in Asia during the war gives Ballard the moral right to judge the American decision to drop the bomb:

As a nation the Japanese have never faced up to the atrocities they committed, and are unlikely to do so as long as we bend our heads is shame before the memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The argument that atomic weapons, by virtue of the genetic damage they cause to the future generations, belong to a special category of evil, seems to me to be equally misguided. The genetic consequences of a rifle bullet are even more catastrophic, for the victim’s genes go nowhere except the grave and his descendants are not even born (ibid.: 293).

His scandalous works from the 1960s and 1970s forgotten, Ballard started to enjoy the privileged position of an authority on literary and moral issues. The success of Empire of the Sun made Ballard write its 1991 sequel, The Kindness of Women, in which he describes Jim after the war: a young man who does not fit into the world of post-war Britain. He thus created the next chapters of his autobiography. In his journalism he refers to them from time to time; all this writing, regardless of the chronology of its publication dates, forms one intertextual whole.

The cultural shock of leaving Asia for Britain is best reflected in numerous articles about the books he read as an adolescent. The sharp comparison of dull English life and the Far East he found in Greene, as he remembers in ‘Memories of Greeneland’ (1978), was written for Magazine Littéraire:

“I first began to read Graham Greene in the mid-1950s, and will never forget the sense of liberation his novels gave me… whether serious or ‘entertainments’ as Greene likes to call them, [they] had the tonic effect of stepping from an aircraft on to the airport tarmac of a strange country” (ibid.: 138).

‘Memories of James Joyce’ (1990) is concerned with the same period, the 1950s, and describes the young Ballard who then studied medicine, but wanted to be a writer, just like the protagonist of The Kindness of Women:

James Joyce’s Ulysses had an immense influence on me – almost entirely for the bad. I read Joyce’s masterpiece as an eighteen-year-old medical student dissecting cadavers at Cambridge, then a bastion of academic provincialism and self-congratulation… Ulysses convinced me to give up medicine and become a writer, but it was the wrong example for me, an old-fashioned storyteller at heart, and it wasn’t until I discovered the surrealists that I found the right model (ibid.: 145).

The most revealing in this context is the piece ‘The Pleasures of Reading’ (1992), written for the anthology edited by Antonia Fraser entitled The Pleasure of Reading. Here Ballard juxtaposed each phase of his life with the books he remembers enjoying at that time. In the pre-war polyglot Shanghai he read the Victorian children’s classics and American comics together with the Latin Primer, described in Empire, just like the books and magazines which circulated among the prisoners of the Lunghua Camp.

Arriving in England in 1946, I was faced with the incomprehensible strangeness of English life, for which my childhood reading had prepared me in more ways than I realized. Fortunately, I soon discovered that the whole of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature lay waiting for me, a vast compendium of human case histories that stemmed from a similar source (ibid: 181).

He finishes the article with a list of his favourites and his own characterization of a reader of other people’s books.

In recent years his fiction and non-fiction together influence his image: his preferences, ideas and opinions are often made public. Sometimes an interesting intertextual links join his novels and essays, like in the case of his descriptions of Shepperton [32], the Great London village where he lives:

Shepperton, like most Thames Valley towns, is now a suburb not of London but of London airport, and one can see the influence of Heathrow in the office buildings that resemble control towers and the huge shopping malls whose floors remind the visitor of a terminal concourse… we live in the TV suburbs, among the video shops, take-aways and police speed-check cameras, and might as well make the most of them, since there is nowhere else to go (ibid.: 183-84).

This quote comes from ‘Shepperton Past and Present’ (1994), published in the Guardian, and is a good example of his journalism in the nineteen-nineties. The impressions and descriptions of the contemporary world and post-modernist culture mingle with personal memories and ciphered allusions to his books. The devoted reader of Ballard is now faced with a maze of cross-referential allusions and remarks, which together form his imaginary autobiography.

Dominika Oramus, 2007.

..:: Back to Part One.

Previously on Ballardian:
+ Review: Grave New World, by Rick McGrath.

ENDNOTES

[21] This sub-chapter is based on my article ‘From the Avant-Garde to the Autobiography: The Journalism of J.G. Ballard’, in Anglica 2005, pp. 39-52

[22] Re-printed in A User’s Guide to the Millennium (1997). All quotes of Ballard’s articles (unless stated otherwise) come from this edition of his journalism.

[23] His tone changes over the years, but his admiration for Burroughs remains intact. Nearly thirty years later he reviewed Burroughs’s biography and the collection of his letters for the Independent on Sunday and the Guardian. Though these do not read like enthusiastic manifestos, Ballard still compares Burroughs to Joyce.

[24] Ballard’s admiration for Jarry at the time can also be seen in his short stories from the 1960s, first and foremost ‘The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’, which is an intertextual echo of Alfred Jarry’s ‘The Crucifixion Consider as an Uphill Bicycle Race’.

[25] In 1994 this article was revised and reprinted as ‘Introduction’ in Salvador’s Dali’s Diary of a Genius.

[26] His analyses of psychopathology in this magazine even include a review of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, in which he compares Hitler to Oswald and, surprisingly to Leopold Bloom – a self-educated man in the streets who tries to control the cross-referential knowledge he acquired.

[27] Compare: ‘The Kennedy assassination alone, it seems to me, makes 1963 the most important year since the war. Kennedy’s murder, the greatest mystery of the twentieth century, was the crime for which television was waiting, just as Vietnam was the war that TV needed. Together they freed the medium from the airless, studio-bound realm of stilted news announcers and staid game shows, transforming the screen into a global media landscape that soon became a direct competitor with reality itself, and may even have supplanted it (ibid.: 243), he wrote in his memories of the year 1963 in ‘The Overlit Carousel’ for the Guardian.

[28] Such as the recurrent imagery of disaster and desolation in his prose, the leitmotif of finding dead pilots in crashed aircraft and an abundance of violence.

[29] Ballard is nevertheless very careful to avoid political commitments. He turned down a prestigious offer of membership in the Royal Society of Literature (because he did not like the adjective ‘Royal’). Offered a ‘Commander of the British Empire’ medal he also turned it down. Thus he builds his public image in a consequent way, he wants to be seen as somebody ‘on the outside’, a keen and intelligent but non-committed observer.

[30] Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang, a Chinese woman who after years of life under the Mao regime managed to emigrate to the UK, describes the atrocities of Chinese governments from the point of view of a person who, just like Ballard, knows both the Far East and the affluent West. The great success of this book in England in the early 1990s is perhaps partly due to the general interest people had in China after the publication of Empire of the Sun in the mid-1980s .

[31] Or other celebrities: see for example ‘The Samurai of the Epic’ (1991), his text on Akira Kurosawa in the Guardian. Moreover, he is an unquestionable authority on Shanghai, its history and its present day, which he discusses on many occasions, a good sample of his style might be found in ‘A City of Excess’ (1991). This text written for Daily Telegraph juxtaposed the review of Harriet Sergeant’s Shanghai with the account of the 1941 evacuation of the Ballards’ house.

[32] The town of Shepperton has a very special place in Ballard’s fiction: the protagonists of Crash and The Kindness of Women live there, the action of The Unlimited Dream Company takes place there. Ballard is very fond of talking and writing about Shepperton, it seems that he purposefully wants to be associated with this town and by notoriously describing it in his novels he blurs the reality/fiction dichotomy and seems to be saying: ‘these books are about me’.

A-bomb explosion, Bikini Atoll, 25 July, 1946.

I’m a scholar, I teach Brit.Lit. professionally at the University of Warsaw. My PhD (1999) was on Angela Carter and it got me a job there as assistant professor. But in my country, to be a scholar you need one more degree — you need to write something like a post-doctoral thesis — and you have about ten years to write it. To cut a long story short, one day in 2000 I said to myself: ‘J.G. Ballard’.

Which brings us to the introduction from Grave New World, presented here as a sampler of my work.

Dominika Oramus, 2007.

For more information on the book, please contact Dominika at dominika dot oramus at neostrada dot pl.

NOTE: Part Two is now available.

Are we living in the happy times of a social utopia where everybody can participate equally in the blessings of advanced technology, modern science and sophisticated communications systems? Are we witness to the true ‘Brave New World’ the human race has dreamt of for generations? Or is our contemporary reality yet another ‘Grave New World’ [1] — a dystopian land of social manipulation and hegemonic mass media? Is ours a world that denies free will, breeds psychopathologies and supplants first-hand experience with simulacra? In 1932 Aldous Huxley published his Brave New World as a warning against what the future might bring. And indeed, throughout the last century numerous philosophers, historians, sociologists, and fiction writers repeated similar concerns and fears. In that same year, 1932, the first one-volume English translation of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West was published, thereby introducing to English literary culture the idea of an inevitable end to every civilization, ours included. His study prompted Arnold Toynbee to begin work on his monumental opus A Study of History, wherein he discusses a host of past human civilizations and points to the causes of their fall, indirectly suggesting that our own Western culture is well advanced on its own way to disintegration. Arnold Toynbee writes:

The self-inflicted wounds from which civilizations die are not these of a material order. In the past, at any rate, it has been the spiritual wounds that have proved incurable (Toynbee 1949: 135).

It seems appropriate to me to start the present study of J.G. Ballard by quoting the above passage from Toynbee’s lecture ‘The International Outlook’; coming in the wake of World War II, it reveals the sad truth about civilizations in general: they are universally threatened with decline and demise. Whatever may precipitate the West’s fall will involve external factors (waves of immigration, dangerous weapons in irresponsible foreign hands, terrorism, alien cultures and religions filling in the spiritual vacuum, etc.), but these matters will be allowed in only because of the internal spiritual damage that is already underway. In both his fiction and non-fiction J.G. Ballard describes the dire spiritual changes that have been taking place since the war and have transformed the West. Though Western civilization has apparently succeeded in perpetuating itself to the new millennium in having overcome communism and avoided the threat of a Third World War, nuclear catastrophe and internal collapse, for Ballard Huxley’s [2] vision remains uncanny in the way it is coming true. At least in some of its key aspects.

In this book I read Ballard’s fiction (and some of his non-fiction) as a record of the gradual internal degeneration of Western civilization in the second half of the twentieth century. In sundry ways and styles Ballard’s ostensibly very heterogeneous oeuvre depicts the same intangible catastrophe that has happened to the world. Contemporary reality is thus presented in his late prose as ‘post-apocalyptic’: though we are not literally living amidst the ruins, the golden age is far behind us and we are witnessing the twilight of the West. It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment in the past when things went wrong [3], but that fateful turn has undeniably taken place and wrought grave spiritual change. Thus do we hear the death knells of our civilization, one growing increasingly hostile to individuals and erecting a cult of violence.

I hope to achieve two aims in this study. Firstly, I hope to show ‘Grave New World’, the imaginary territory Ballard describes in his books, which is a combination of the turn-of-the-millennium world, intertextual allusions to both fiction and non-fiction, and Ballard’s projections for the near future with its sociological idiosyncrasies. I would like to prove that irrespectively of the literary conventions Ballard applies in a given text (science fiction, speculative fiction, detective story, thriller, war novel or any other), he charts the very same territory and remains throughout primarily interested in the reaction of the human mind to the post-World War II reality which is the common denominator of his diverse obsessions. Secondly, I would like to shed some light on the spiritual condition and social problems of contemporary Western civilization as seen by its ever so inquisitive member. [4]

‘Continuously creating his own image’: J.G. Ballard self-portrait, double exposure, 1950 (photo via RE/Search Publications).

My technique in approaching Ballard is mostly that of textual analysis and close readings of passages of his texts that best show his exuberant stylistics; sometimes I also point out his references to literary and cultural theories. As far as said theories are concerned, I shall follow Ballard’s own readings. He very often alludes to critical schools and makes his characters discuss fashionable notions and ideas. Therefore, I will refer to the same sources: mostly psychoanalysts (many Ballardian characters are psychiatrists), but also historians and recent cultural theorists.

There are two problems with discussing Ballard’s fiction, and they need be dealt with at the very beginning. The first concerns the generic classification of his books — the second is posed by Ballard’s continuous attempts at auto-creation. As far as classification goes, the critics in different decades have described Ballard as a science fiction writer, a mainstream writer, a surrealist, a representative of the avant-garde, and an author who defies any classifications. To portray these controversies, in the next part of this Introduction (‘The Critical Response to J.G. Ballard’) I will briefly present the most important critical approaches to Ballard, at the same time showing how his oeuvre alludes to many different literary conventions. As for myself, I am not going to deal with this problem and give my opinion about, for example, the precise moment when Ballard left science fiction behind and started writing ‘serious’ books. Rather, I will discuss all his works on the same plane: moreover, I will not follow the chronology of Ballard’s long and generically diverse literary career, opting instead to treat all of his oeuvre synchronically, as descriptions of different vistas of his ‘Grave New World’. To provide the reader with relevant dates and the order of Ballard’s works I have included a calendar of his life and career at the end of this thesis (Appendix II).

In the last part of this Introduction (‘J.G. Ballard’s Auto-creation) I will deal with the second problem the Ballardian critic has to face. Over the fifty years of his career Ballard was continuously creating his own image. His quasi-autobiographies, numerous articles and memories present a persona or rather a number of personas that he constructed in different moments of his life. Such a self-fashioning should not be mistaken with any kind of ‘historical truth’ and in a study concerned with the intellectual history of the twentieth century it is important not to take the fictitious ‘James Ballard’ for a person who really witnessed the war in Asia and the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Therefore, I will briefly discuss the images Ballard constructed in different decades of the last century and later, in the main body of my thesis, I will, to quote D.H. Lawrence, ‘trust the tale not the teller’ and try to avoid the auto-creation fallacies.

In my first chapter, before the focused discussion of Ballard’s own oeuvre, I will succinctly present those thinkers who are most important to the understanding of his works. Such a spiritual map of the (mainly) twentieth century as sketched by following Ballard’s favourite philosophers and scientists will help to place his fiction in the proper intellectual perspective, as his works are deeply informed by theories that, from differing points of view, discuss the alarming state of our civilization. This chapter does not aim to present on its but few pages a grand critique of the century and the path our world is taking (as that, of course, lies far beyond the scope of the present study). Rather, I will confine myself to pointing out those books and essays that Ballard directly refers to. This chapter will therefore give a theoretical frame to the subsequent discussion and will allow me to avoid repetitive summaries of cultural theories in the rest of the study. Thus, in the following chapters I will refer back to this theoretical frame numerous times, owing to the fact that Ballard often alludes to the very same set of critical essays and enters into intertextual discussions with their authors from changing vantage points.

J.G. Ballard: photo via RE/Search publications.

As far as my own approach to his fiction is concerned, I will start by discussing, in Chapter II, the war narratives: Empire of the Sun, The Kindness of Women and some short stories devoted to both World War II and imaginary military conflicts of the future. These texts describe events which for Ballard are the very beginning of cultural decline, as it is after the war that Western civilization turned into ‘Grave New World’. Though these books play with the reader by giving the origins of events from Ballard’s other fictional works and might be treated as a conscious mythologizing of his life and career, they nevertheless do reveal the crux of Ballard’s historiosophy.

In the following chapters I try to map ‘Grave New World’ and chart its diverse territories. In Chapter III I show cityscapes in Ballard’s books and discuss contemporary urban civilization — the cause of psychological traumas. Chapter IV is devoted to mediascapes and the influence of modern communication technology on the way people live, think and dream. Life in a world full of highly developed technologies makes people indulge in escapist fantasies and thus Chapter V describes the mindscapes of contemporary Man: the end of the world fantasies, death-drive utopias, and wish-fulfilment catastrophic scenarios. Chapter VI, the final one, deals with the plexus of the contemporary world and the near future, picturing the decadent decline of Western wastelands: life in gated communities, secluded enclaves and luxurious resorts home to psychopathologies, deviations and terminal boredom enlivened only by acts of pointless violence.

In the autumn 2006, long after the first draft of this thesis had been completed, the newest of Ballard’s books, Kingdom Come, was published. Though it was too late to incorporate analysis of that novel into the main body of my work, I do discuss the novel in Appendix I and examine how it adds to the description of ‘Grave New World’. Therefore, September 2006 marks the close of my research and no books published later are discussed.

INTRODUCTION. 1 THE CRITICAL RESPONSE TO J.G. BALLARD

J.G. Ballard’s literary career started in the nineteen-fifties. His early stories were published in the popular magazines promoting a new, unique type of science fiction, one that differed from the pulp space fiction from America, which after the war flooded the British market. In the early sixties the need to reform the genre of science fiction and start a new thoroughly British artistic movement was all-pervasive. A small group of young writers, who later were dubbed the ‘New Wave’, looked for a periodical that would publish intellectual SF, or ‘speculative fiction’, as they insisted on calling it. Speculative fiction was to be a medium to discuss current social and cultural issues in an experimental, and often dramatic way.

Cover: New Worlds #179, Feb. 1968.

The periodical they finally found was New Worlds, a magazine published since 1946, but which in its long history had many times changed publishing houses and its artistic profile. In 1967 the post of editor-in-chief was given to Michael Moorcock, an ambitious young writer and a friend of Ballard — together they prepared a number of artistic manifestos defining speculative fiction and setting the goals for British avant-garde science fiction. The term ‘speculative fiction’ was soon abandoned, as the critics and columnists preferred to call the New Worlds group the ‘New Wave’, which is a literal translation of the French nouvelle vague. [5] Christopher Priest, a writer and a journalist, and Judith Merril, an influential US-born anthologist and columnist, popularized the phrase ‘New Wave’ among readers in Britain and the US.

Although the avant-garde tendencies in British science fiction are in fact older than the late-1960s term, and stories written by Ballard, Moorcock and Brian Aldiss a few years earlier are now subsumed under the ‘New Wave’ label. Peter Nicholls writes in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993):

By 1965, then, science fiction was ripe for change. In fact many of the so-called experiments of the period were not experiments at all, but merely an adoption of narrative strategies, and sometimes ironies that had long been familiar in the mainstream novel. In the event, some of the science fiction writers who felt they now had the freedom to experiment, especially Ballard, were to add something new to the protocols of prose fiction generally (Clute and Nicholls 1993: 866).

Therefore, from the very beginning of his literary career Ballard is considered an in-between writer oscillating between ‘low-brow’ and ‘high-brow’ literature. Sometimes he is called a postmodernist, sometimes an avant-garde author. [6] The critic who as early as the nineteen-sixties writes about him passionately and is partly responsible for his being dubbed an experimental ‘New Wave’ writer is Judith Merril. Merril is an author of a number of well-known disaster stories describing nuclear catastrophes, but only in the nineteen-fifties when she began editing anthologies did she become one of the most influential figures in American science fiction. Always experimental and eager to revise the clichéd standards of American pulp magazines, she swiftly became an advocate of the ‘New Wave’, and especially of Ballard. As a columnist in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction she presented speculative fiction to American readers and discussed the books of the New Worlds writers.

New Worlds today is an altogether unique publication: and the astonishment of some of the stuffier intellectual circles in London when the Art Council announced an annual grant of 1800 pounds for a science fiction magazine… was probably no greater than the shock experienced by American fans attending the 1967 World Science Fiction Convention in New York when they had their first look at the transformed magazine of Speculative Fiction… The new magazine is quarto size, non-glossy… with cover art, interior illustrations and (increasingly) page design to match the most experimental of the fiction, and to suit the sophistication of Chris Finch’s articles on avant-garde art and graphics (Merril 1968: 344-345).

In 1968 Merril edited an anthology of the ‘New Wave’ writers: England Swings SF. Stories of Speculative Fiction. Apart from stories and poems Merril presents in this book her opinion on every writer in original fashion. England Swings SF tries to match the ‘New Wave’ fiction in graphic experiments and narrative strategies. The very beginning of the anthology resembles an avant-garde poem:

You have never read a book like this before, and the next time you read one anything like it, it won’t be much like it at all.

It’s an action-photo, a record of process-in-change,
a look through the perspex porthole at the
momentarily stilled bodies in a scout ship boosting
fast, and heading out of sight into the multiplex mystery of inner/outer space.

I can’t tell you where they are going, but
maybe that’s why I keep wanting to read what they write. The next time someone assembles the work of the writers in this … well, ‘school’ is too formal
and ‘movement’ sounds pretentious… (ibid.: 9-10).

The anthology contains works of over twenty young and ambitious writers — Ballard is the only one who has three of his stories reprinted: the other authors boast but one. Given the prominent position of ‘guru of British avant-garde’, he is presented to American readers (the anthology was meant to introduce the new literary fashion in America) as an often misunderstood, intellectually challenging writer. Merril chooses the newest stories, ones which are written is the present tense and use the collage technique: images, bits and pieces of commercials, psychiatric studies and TV newsreels are juxtaposed to show the prevailing violence of the contemporary mediascape.

Merril also decides to characterize Ballard (and other writers) in collages. Her introductions to stories are combinations of different texts cut into pieces and glued together. According to Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974), collage technique challenges the readers expectation of a synthetic, singular meaning. Diverse passages, graphically rearranged quotes of interviews, reviews and Merril’s own opinions do not give a unified picture but rather show, at least in the case of Ballard, discussions and quarrels concerning his person and his place in the British literary world.

One can only hope that for Ballard too the worst misunderstanding is over, so that he will be free to create in a more intelligent atmosphere.

And so it was … in England, where the earlier work had finally been digested.

Freud pointed out that one has to distinguish between the manifest content of the inner world of the psyche and its latent content; and I think in exactly the same way, today, when the fictional elements have overwhelmed reality, one has to distinguish between the manifest content of reality and its latent contents.

And his sponsorship of the Ambit contest for the best prose or poetry written under the influence of drugs (ibid: 104-105).

Though Merril’s style is far from critical exactness [7] (she does not give the sources of the texts used in her collages, not all sentences are complete), it very well reflects the atmosphere of the 1960s discussions of the ‘New Wave’ and Ballard’s place in it. Juxtaposed with other experimental writers he is discussed within the science fiction movement, with the strong suggestion that his literary goal was to uplift, renew and meliorate science fiction. Ballard at that time was praised not only by science fiction critics [8] — and the general tone of his reviewers is similar to Merril’s: this writer is the best and the most interesting of the speculative fiction writers.

Gradually, speculative fiction writers were either absorbed by the literary mainstream or stopped writing experimental prose and turned to pulp fiction. Harlan Ellison, the editor of an influential American anthology of speculative fiction, Dangerous Visions, complains in his Introduction that: ‘despite the new interest in speculative fiction by the mainstream, despite the enlarged and variant styles of the new writers, despite the enormity and expansion of topics open to these writers, despite what is outwardly a booming, healthy market, there is a constricting narrowness of mind on the part of many editors in the field!’ (Ellison 1983: XXIII). In his attempt to revive this ambitious kind of popular fiction, Ellison decided to create an anthology ‘intended as a canvas for new writing styles, bold departures, unpopular thoughts’ (ibid., XXVIII). And although he did not manage to ‘save’ speculative fiction, his Dangerous Visions remain an important book in the history of science fiction.

Ellison is a very intrusive anthologist: to every one of the thirty-two stories in the book he writes a separate introduction and epilogue, wherein he gives his opinions, suggestions and remarks concerning both the meaning of the story and its author. It is interesting to see how he describes J.G. Ballard, whom he presents to his American readers as a leader of the young English writers. Indeed, it is Ballard’s Englishness, his upper-middle-class origins and colonial past that appeal to Ellison the most, while he in fact cannot define Ballard’s literary style:

Yet in totality [Ballard's books] present a kind of enriched literacy, a darker yet somehow clearer — perhaps the word is ‘poignant’ — approach to the materials of speculative writing. There is a flavour of surrealism to Ballard’s writing. No, it’s not that, either. It is, in some ways, serene, as oriental philosophy is serene. Resigned yet vital. There appears to be a superimposed reality that covers the underlying pure fantasy of Ballardian conception (ibid., 459).

I am quoting Ellison to show how Ballard was received in the United States, for the American market is the most important (if not hegemonic) as far as science fiction goes. Ellison completed his anthology in the late 1960s, in the last days of the British ‘New Wave’ in science fiction. James Gunn, the editor of probably the most important single anthology/history of science fiction ever written, the multi-volumed The Road to Science Fiction, produced his book in the following decade. At that time in the US nobody well remembered what the ‘New Wave’ was about. So, while presenting Ballard and his story ‘The Terminal Beach’ to his readers, Gunn had to lecture on this movement. He discusses it from the perspective of America in the late 1970s, treating it as a very remote phenomenon. He calls Ballard the leader and guru of the New Worlds group, compares his enigmatic symbolic style to James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake and John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. and explains the nihilism of his writing by claiming that Ballard wrote against Americans in Vietnam, about drugs, the Beatles, pop-art, pop-music, political assassinations and terrorism. And this is probably how Ballard is read by fans of science fiction to this day.

Although Ballard’s career stretched well beyond the ‘New Wave’ movement, which ended by the early nineteen-seventies, his early fiction is often discussed in the context of its poetics. The ambitious artistic programme of the movement and the fact that many of its representatives became well-known and important writers [9] attracted the attention of literary critics. One of the first scholars to study the output of the group was Colin Greenland, who in the late 1970s was a postgraduate student at Oxford. A great fan of New Worlds and science fiction in general, he dreamt of writing serious criticism about this literary genre, which at the time was considered too ‘low-brow’ to study. [10] Tom Shippey [11], then Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, an author of criticism about J.R.R. Tolkien and a contributor to Patric Parrinder’s critical anthology Science Fiction. A Critical Guide agreed to supervise Greenland’s work.

Finally, in 1980 a thesis entitled The Entropy Exhibition. Michael Moorcock and the British ‘New Wave’ in Science Fiction was accepted for a doctorate in English Literature at the University of Oxford. Greenland, thanks to a grant from the Arts Council of Great Britain, reworked his thesis and in 1983 a book of the same title was publish. The Entropy Exhibition is a superb criticism of science fiction, as Greenland shows the literary output of the ‘New Wave’ in the context of cultural and artistic life in the nineteen-sixties. And although only one chapter is devoted exclusively to Ballard, it remains to this day an important item in Ballardian criticism.

Greenland describes the social situation in the sixties, the emergence of youth culture, the influence of the Space Race [12] on popular imagination, the Vietnam War and the stormy history of New Worlds — a magazine that tried to reflect current cultural phenomena. Additionally, he inserts in his book three monographic essay-chapters presenting the works of Ballard, Aldiss and Moorcock.

As far as Ballard’s output is concerned, Greenland discusses his early disaster novels and some of the stories he wrote in the fifties and sixties. The books High-Rise and Concrete Island (written in the seventies) are but mentioned, and Ballard’s later works are of course absent from the study. His general approach to both Ballard and the ‘New Wave’ is to read their output as a new kind of fiction growing out of traditional science fiction and characterized by its fascination with entropy: the universal and irreversible decline of energy into disorder. This fiction is in intimate connection with other cultural experiments of the epoch. Ballard, according to Greenland, is first of all a masterful stylist whose metaphors and allusions recreate the pessimistic attitude of the times and show a Universe doomed to death, one already frozen in its final stage. Ballard’s early prose is described as pictorial and portrayed in the context of visual arts — Pablo Picasso, Paul Delvaux, Salvador Dali, René Magritte — Greenland points to colours, shades and figures borrowed by Ballard from concrete paintings.

Greenland also proves to what extent Ballard is indebted to Surrealism as far as his language is concerned, the poetic character of his early prose being an effect of a highly associative style:

The Surrealist techniques that Ballard has used involve deliberate dissociations and mystifications. The object is taken from its usual context and dismantled, or put in a new context, or confused with other objects. But the result of the process is not mere nonsense, but a revaluation. The elements acquire new significance from the reorganisation, so that we sense more about the object than we knew or felt before. Surrealism can thus be said to have both a synthetic and an analytic aspect; it consists not only of inspiration, but also of inquiry. This duality Ballard has inherited (Greenland 1983: 104).

LEFT: J.G. Ballard: Illustration by Carol Gregory, from J.G. Ballard: The First Twenty Years (eds. James Goddard & David Pringle).

Such a characterization of Ballard’s early style strikes as being very apt, as it accounts for Ballard’s fascinations with Lautréamont, Alfred Jarry and André Breton, numerous visual intertextual allusions in his stories, as well as for Ballard’s obsessive returns to the same or similar figures of speech. What Ballard and the Surrealists surely have in common is the belief that an apocalypse had already taken place, both in the intellectual sphere and in daily life. Ballard’s prose shows the contemporary world abundant in fictions whose only connotations are the fantasies of their authors. Our environment is fragmented and coded, the popular imagery of posters and commercials needs deciphering — hence, Ballard’s indebtedness to semiology and Roland Barthes. In other words, we live in the nightmarish world of the Surrealists.

Greenland describes Ballard’s style and his specific figures of speech in an attempt to show why Ballardian prose is immediately recognizable and ‘unmistakable’. He analyzes Ballard’s habit of introducing a story with a stylized tableau and his conscious use of what he calls ‘pseudo-simile, one in which there is no discoverable parity between the terms. Ballard’s version of it employs a literary sleight commonly used by ironists: he keeps the relation but blurs the distinction, so that the two halves of the simile, the actual and the virtual, can be swapped over’ (ibid.: 103).

Greenland’s book is still, after over twenty years, the best critical analysis of the ‘New Wave’ movement, for among other reasons because it allows us to look at Ballard’s early works from the perspective of the literary life in England at that time. It shows Ballard’s involvement in the editing of New Worlds, his views on art and civilization in the 1960s, and his ambiguous position on the literary scene. Greenland (just like Merril) is very much interested in categories such as science fiction, mainstream literature, modernist writing, and the avant-garde. He shows the difficulties in pigeonholing Ballard and presents diverse opinions about how to classify his works. His major achievement as far as critical appraisal of Ballard’s fiction goes is the discussion of his style in the context of the Surrealists: painters and poets alike.

In the nineteen-seventies many writers and critics discovered Ballard and came to highly prize his unique style and remarkable literary achievements. Among them were Kingsley Amis (a great advocate of ‘New Wave’ prose), Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess, Susan Sontag and William S. Burroughs. They wrote reviews and introductions, but no monograph was published till the end of the decade [13]. Ultimately, David Pringle decided to work on a serious study of Ballard and in 1979 he published Earth is the Alien Planet. J.G. Ballard’s Four-Dimensional Nightmare, a brief (sixty-one page) but important monograph. His ambition in the book is to present Ballard’s literary output to both science fiction fans and the general reading public. Moreover, Pringle offers them a key to Ballard: he defines the place Ballard has on the market, divides his career into periods and classifies Ballardian characters and motifs.

Pringle starts by comparing Ballard to Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut, who also started their careers as science fiction writers, but subsequently transcended that category. Pringle describes Ballard as being less acclaimed, but equally worthy of being published ‘without the SF label’ (Pringle 1979: 3). He pins Ballard’s lack of popularity on the fact that, unlike Bradbury and Vonnegut, he does not write for big and glossy magazines such as Playboy, but for the ambitious low-circulation press. This ‘courting of the avant-garde’ (ibid.: 3) wins him a new but limited audience. Nevertheless, Pringle is sure that in the future Ballard will be fully appreciated and the book ends in a prophesy:

Nevertheless, Ballard’s reputation will grow in the decades to come, and he is likely to become recognized as by far and away the most important literary figure associated with the field of science fiction. More than that: he will be seen as one of the major imaginative writers of the second half of the 20th century — an author for our times, and for the future (ibid.: 61).

J.G. Ballard: photo by Eamonn McCabe.

The division of Ballard’s career into periods is also based on the genre of criticism. Here Pringle distinguished an early ‘romantic’ stage, when Ballard published in the science fiction press stories concerned with the inner landscapes of characters’ minds, and the post-science fiction period. It was then that Ballard shifted his interests to outer landscapes, abandoned science fiction conventions and embraced the avant-garde and literary periodicals. This is a ‘dark’ period of formal experiments and of bitter criticism of the violence intrinsic to contemporary life. Pringle also suggests that Ballard is at the beginning of yet another period, one of writing present-oriented fiction describing technological environments: ‘he has also made larger concession to social realism — he is trying to become more of a novelist‘ (ibid.: 50).

Pringle explains that last statement by saying that Ballard is trying to construct rounded characters, while in his early prose his characters are symbolic ‘figures in an inner landscape’ (ibid.: 51). He classifies these symbolic figures according to Jungian archetypes as the lamia, the jester and the king — and most Ballardian characters are demonstrated to belong to one of the categories. A similar symbolic key is used to deal with Ballardian themes (the categories are: Imprisonment [14], Flight, Time Must Have A Stop And Superannuation) and to classify his obsessively recurrent images [15]. Ballardian mythology is four-fold: Pringle distinguishes four groups of symbols representing mythical meanings of water, sand, concrete and crystal. Water stands for the past and the return to previous stages of evolution, sand and dryness are in the future of the human race when only the exhausted shell of the planet will remain. Further, concrete is the world of the present day — the urban culture, while crystal, like a Jungian mandala represents oneness with the Universe.

Generally speaking, Pringle’s book represents Jungian criticism (though once he very rightly remarks, albeit in passing, that Ballard’s references to Jung and Freud are mixed), and as such is it usually quoted. Pringle is also the first critic to mention Ballard’s biography in the context of his fiction and to announce Ballard’s affiliation to the avant-garde. In the following years Pringle remained Ballard’s major critic, but more and more scholars interested in both science fiction and mainstream literature began to approach Ballard’s books, often trying to ascribe his writing to some larger cultural frame. In The Hidden Script (1985), for example, David Punter discusses Ballard’s fiction in the section ‘Narratives and the Unconscious’, showing (in reference to psychoanalytic theories) the interrelation of the internal and the external spheres in his fiction.

The short chapter ‘J.G. Ballard: alone among the murder machines’ is an excellent analysis of the metaphoric space Ballardian characters inhabit (e.g., in Atrocity Exhibition, High-Rise, Concrete Island, Hello America and The Unlimited Dream Company). This territory is nightmarish and ruled by man-made machines, ‘the lurking engines of destruction which keep us pinned down’ (Punter 1985: 11), and people strive to regain a spiritual hold on objects, but they are in fact helpless victims of their own psychopathologies. Surrounded by technology and advanced communication systems, Man loses the ability of expression: ‘the areas of language already colonised by the public media too developed to allow for more than the slightest insertion of a discourse of individual desire’ (ibid.: 10). Punter goes on to define Ballard’s oeuvre in relation to contemporary culture and, although his analysis was written a quarter of a century ago, it is still very illuminating:

Where character is concerned, Ballard is one of the few writers who can be sensibly termed post-structuralist: the long tradition of enclosed and unitary subjectivity comes to mean less and less to him as he explores the ways in which a person is increasingly controlled by landscape and machine; increasingly becomes a point of intersection for overloaded scripts and processes which have effectively concealed their distant origins in human agency (ibid.: 9).

In Twentieth Century Science Fiction Writers (1981), edited by Curtis C. Smith, a lexicon of those authors whose work goes beyond realism (even if they usually are not referred to as science fiction writers), the entry ‘J.G. Ballard’ presents him as an original and distinctive writer whose style is described as idiosyncratic ‘as a signature’ and shaped by the painter’s eye of the author. [16] The stress falls on Ballard’s intellectual fascinations: ‘masterpieces of literature (from Homer and the Bible through Shakespeare to Coleridge and Melville) and the arts (from Bosch to Dali and Leonor Fini)’ (Smith 1981: 31). His early fiction is called romantic and exuberant science fiction rich in intertextual allusions, where bizarre landscapes ‘reflect and amplify the inner and mutual conflicts of glamorous lamias and their suicidal wooers, in a baroque symphony of art, love, and death’ (ibid.: 31). 1966 is given as the turning point after which Ballard abandons science fiction and starts to describe the contemporary world and to criticize its technology, violence and perverted entertainment. Such a present is just a fossil of the future, and his interest in science fiction gives Ballard an ability to look at social life in a detached, scientific way. Beyond that, Ballard’s style changes abruptly: all exuberance is gone and instead we read about people like us, with popular names, living in real cities and made to cope with an inhuman urban existence.

It is interesting to juxtapose this entry with a later one hailing from the prestigious The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993, revised 1999), edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls. ‘J.G. Ballard’ by David Pringle is a long entry and, for the first time, the author is presented not primarily as a science fiction writer (despite the very character of this Encyclopedia). Indeed, stress falls on those aspects of Ballard’s output which transgress the standards of the genre. Even the earliest stories are shown as eschewing traditional science fiction themes and instead concentrating on ‘near-future decadence and disaster’. We learn that Ballard was severely criticized by fans as a pessimist and a life-hater, that the science fiction world wrote him off, and that he never won a single science fiction award. Pringle also describes the hostility with which editors treated his later prose (the entire Doubleday edition of Atrocity Exhibition was printed only to be pulped just before publication) because he used people such as Ronald Reagan, the Kennedys and Marilyn Monroe as characters. Pringle ends by presenting Ballard’s psychological war novels and by briefly characterizing his biography — these are the beginnings of the legend of J.G. Ballard, his war and the impact it had on his imagination. Pringle concludes:

J.G. Ballard: photo by David Levenson.

Although most of his longer work of the past decade has been outside the field, the originality and appropriateness of his vision continue to ensure JGB’s standing as one of the most important writers ever to have emerged from sf (Clute and Nicholls 1993: 85).

When in 1994 Simulacra and Simulations (1981) by Jean Baudrillard was translated into English, the prose of J.G. Ballard found a new and influential advocate. In a chapter devoted to Ballard’s Crash (which had previously been translated and reprinted in Science Fiction Studies) Baudrillard calls Ballard’s book one of the masterpieces of contemporary literature, one which shows the world of today as it really is, the simulated, unreal projection of mass culture and sophisticated hi-tech. Science fictionalizes reality, the world of cyber-technology is by nature fictitious and Ballard’s prose is a rare example of the conscious exposure of the simulacra-ridden mediascape.

Generally, in the late nineteen-eighties [17] the status of ambitious science fiction changed. On the one hand some of the very good science fiction writers elevated the genre to the status of intellectually provoking, erudite reading, yet on the other hand many postmodernist writers began to apply science fiction conventions. Used as sophisticated literary trope, science fiction was no longer associated solely with an adolescent male audience and acquired the ambiguous status of ‘a game with the reader’ or ‘a play with a convention’. ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’ The Fiction of J.G. Ballard (1997) by Roger Luckhurst, the best critical book on Ballard to date, is devoted to the role Ballard’s output plays in the contemporary discussions about literary genres. Luckhurst’s major thesis is that Ballard evades any and all classifications and that, moreover, his writing produces an effect of unease just because it exposes the binary, opposition-based categories we apply when reading. Ballard’s books (especially Crash and Atrocity Exhibition; other works are either but mentioned or discussed in brief subchapters) are for Luckhurst a pretext to expose contemporary reading protocols defining what is post-modern, what is modern, what is science fiction and what is avant-garde.

Luckhurst begins by showing Ballard as a fringe writer living literally in the suburbs of London and figuratively outside literary London and outside the Academia of English studies (a little like Ian Sinclair and, once, Angela Carter). His key to Ballard is the notion of la brisure (according to deconstruction, this is the point in any structural system that makes the working of the system at once possible and impossible), and in his analyses he most often refers to Derrida [18]. The choice of deconstruction as his approach is dictated by Ballard’s paradoxical proliferation in recent criticism:

The mainstream post-war novelist of increasing import; the aberrant foreign body within science fiction; the belated voice of a science fiction modernism; the anticipatory or timely voice of a paradigmatic postmodernism; the avant-garde writer of extreme experimental fictions; the prophet of the perversity of the contemporary world (Luckhurst 1997: xii).

Deconstruction exposes binary oppositions we constantly use while thinking and thus allows Luckhurst to subvert generic codes and frames of recognition that allow readability, and to ‘speak from a structurally similar space of the between‘ (ibid.: xiii). Such a critical standpoint sometimes makes his text a little enigmatic and focused not on Ballard’s output but on the reader’s (and critic’s) response to it. Nevertheless, Luckhurst’s study is very erudite, well grounded and full of insights into Ballard, the most valuable of which is the observation that Ballard’s text anticipates its interpretations. ‘His work at once constantly activates theoretical models, but it is also awkward, didactic, and overtheorized, tending to evade or supersede the theories meant to ‘explain’ it’ (ibid.: xvii).

Luckhurst proves his thesis on Ballard’s fiction as exposing reading conventions by discussing in subsequent chapters the disaster story convention, surrealist writing, postcolonial writing, and theories of avant-garde and of contemporary reality as simulation. In each case Ballard’s books are shown as both transgressing genres and subverting the oppositions they are based on. The conclusion is, expectedly, that Ballard’s ‘oeuvre will not give up its irreducible core’ (ibid.: xix), which very well sums up over forty years of critical discussion of Ballard’s place on the twentieth-century literary map.

Nowadays Ballard is recognized as a major contemporary English novelist by the critical establishment and he is usually referred to as an author writing across high and low, literary and popular paradigms. His website page in the Internet, www.jgballard.com, is frequently visited by numerous fans from all over the world and apart from publicity material — book covers, offers, etc., one can find links there to numerous texts originally written for various newspapers and magazines, forming a complex body of inter-related discourses to do with Ballard and his career. A closer look at the website shows that the more ambitious texts might be categorized into four groups: reviews of novels, longer articles summarizing Ballard’s oeuvre, interviews, and Ballard’s own press articles dealing with issues such as war in Iraq, terrorism, urban architecture and consumerism. [19]

Photographer unknown. Details welcome.

Some of the reviews offer interesting insights into Ballard’s prose. For example, Chris Hall in ‘Future Shock’ discusses Crash in a text written just after David Cronenberg made his film based on it and points out that the novel defamiliarizes the violence omnipresent in the Hollywood convention of family films [20]. ‘White Line Fever’, by David B. Huingstone, shows that Cocaine Nights is an exposition of our cultural unconscious, while Marcos Moure in ‘Desert Island Disaster’ compares Rushing to Paradise to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. It is also worth mentioning two reviews by L. J. Hurst: ‘The Dark Side of the Equinox’, which interprets The Crystal World as a metaphysical thriller, and ‘Through the Crash Barrier’, which is a Shakespearean reading of Concrete Island.

To give samples of longer presentations of Ballard’s literary output, Richard Behrens’s ‘J.G. Ballard’ concentrates on surrealism in his writing and Gary Evans in ‘J.G. Ballard: a Crash Course in the Future’ analyzes the future psychology of Ballardian characters. The most comprehensive in this category of texts is Roger Bazzeto’s ‘J.G. Ballard L’écrivain, auter de Science-Fiction ‘, an academic account of Ballard’s prose comparing Ballard to Andy Warhol. Bazzeto claims that the world in Ballard’s novels is three-fold: mythologies of media legends, everyday life in post-modern society, and urban nightmares.

The most interesting articles are perhaps interviews with Ballard, who often speaks about contemporary phenomena as reflected in his novels. In ‘Flight and Imagination’ he shares with Chris Hall his opinions on the relation of late capitalism, psychopathology and violence, and in ‘Not a Literary Man’ (by Marcos Moure) he discusses the decline of science fiction. To David Gale’s ‘Grave New World. Interview with J.G. Ballard’ I am indebted for the title of my thesis; in this very revealing interview Ballard explains what his radical vision of the future is.

Even a short look at these texts about and by Ballard shows that his name is no longer associated with ‘fringe’ or ‘marginal’ literary life, but is a part of the legitimate centre — he has found his way into the histories of contemporary literature. Currently a number of theses devoted to Ballard are being written at English universities by doctorate students, some of whom, like Sam Francis from the University of Leeds, publish their papers in international reviews of science fiction. A good example of critical evaluation of Ballard is a monograph published in the prestigious British Council-sponsored series Writers and Their Work, which is meant to briefly present the most important British authors to the reading public. J.G. Ballard (1998) by Michel Delville is a very good, concise account of all his most important works. Arranged in chronological order, it retraces subsequent stages in Ballard’s career and attempts to show this diverse oeuvre as an example of artistic evolution. Delville is aware that critical assessment of Ballard is very heterogeneous:

At least three J.G. Ballards have so far been championed in critical studies and literary histories: the science fiction writer, famous for his disaster novels and stories of entropic dissolution; and admirer of William S. Burroughs and author of scandalous tales remarkable for their sexual frankness and eccentric violence; and the Booker Prize nominee, whose account of a boy’s life in Japanese-occupied wartime Shanghai in Empire of the Sun was published to great acclaim in 1984 (Delville 1998: 1).

Delville is aware of the temptation to draw a clear-cut line between Ballard’s ambitious popular fiction and his mainstream novels. He is also careful not to reduce Ballard to a case of the prolonged artistic maturation of a science fiction writer who finally manages to disentangle himself from the immature genre. Instead he treats Ballard’s obsessive and imaginary writing as a means to reflect the violent paradoxes of life in the twentieth century that escape less anxious discourses.

In 2005 another monograph under the same title, J.G. Ballard, was published in the new series ‘Contemporary British Novelists’ by the Manchester University Press. Written by Andrzej Gasiorek, this book (second in the series, after Aaron Kelly’s Irvine Welsh) is a presentation of Ballard’s oeuvre and a critical response to it. Like the whole series, it aims at disclosing controversies in contemporary literary life and theory. Just like Luckhurst, he reads Ballard in the context of surrealism, Pop Art and science fiction. Gasiorek’s book is very recent and marks the growing critical interest in Ballard’s writing. He shows Ballard’s output as ‘a symbolic rejection of the familiar heritage’ (Gasiorek 2005: 2), writing against the tradition, against ‘Englishness’, against ‘a socially rooted fiction based on psychological realism’ (ibid.: 3), and against legitimate traditional literary genres.

The way the above critics approach Ballard seems to me very fair and it is quite similar to my own critical standpoint (I side especially with David Punter and Michel Delville). But as there have been so many exhaustive studies devoted to assimilating Ballard to generic categories (or abolishing the notion of genre fiction), I would rather refrain from repeating their arguments, and discuss what to my knowledge has not yet been discussed — the picture of The Decline of the West seen from the perspective of both his fiction as a whole and that of theorists of civilization. Before embarking on that intellectual voyage, we need first look at the way Ballard constructs his own persona.

..:: Part Two is now online.

Previously on Ballardian:
+ Review: Grave New World, by Rick McGrath

ENDNOTES

[1] This phrase comes from an interview Ballard gave to David Gale: ‘Grave New World. Interview with J.G. Ballard’, BBC Radio 3, 10 November 1998 ( www.jgballard.com, on: 20 August 2006).

[2] As late as in 2004 in an appendix to his novel Millennium People J.G. Ballard gives Huxley’s Brave New World at the very top of the list of books he advises to read for those who have liked his novel (Ballard 2004: Appendix 16).

[3] For Ballard the plausible candidate is the invention and use of the nuclear bomb. For the first time in history the human race acquired the means to realize its latent propensity for self-destruction. Men have always been violent creatures unconsciously dreaming of death and war, something which culture has tried to cover up for thousands of years. Once the true human nature was revealed, there is no turning back and human destiny — destruction for internal reasons — is going to happen sooner or later.

[4] In one of Freud’s essays that Ballard often quotes, Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud calls human civilization a mistake. Ballard’s fiction is devoted to the descriptions of this mistake.

[5] An experimental artistic movement in the French cinema associated with the films of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut.

[6] It may be interesting to note that in 1993 Ballard wrote a review of this Encyclopedia. Published in the Daily Telegraph, that article was re-printed in Ballard’s collection of journalism, A User’s Guide to the Millennium. Ballard speaks in favour of the Encyclopedia and science fiction in general, noticing that in the second part of the 20th century more and more mainstream writers (such as Angela Carter, Anthony Burgess, Doris Lessing and Kingsley Amis) turn to science fiction, which is the true folk literature of the century, with ‘folk literature’s hotline to the unconscious’ (Ballard 1997b: 193). Science fiction has the power to design the future, and to tell us what life might be like in some years’ time. He also writes that in the mid-century, after the Moon Landing and during the space race, everybody was interested in the future and the conquest of space and in trying to imagine what the year 2000 would bring, while at the real end of the Millennium People forget all about that. Certain crazy millenarian cults are treated in the same way, such as fitness fanatics, or animal-rights activists and New Agers — and they in fact deserve no better, which is a telling sign of our spiritual deterioration.

[7] As one can see in the quote above, Merril’s technique is to cut into pieces different texts and mix the cuttings irrespectively of syntax., the only differentiation between them is in the shape of print (I preserve Merril’s bolds and margins to show how difficult it is to read her).

[8] In 1973 Brian Aldiss published Billion Year Spree, a history of science fiction. In the last chapter, devoted to the newest phenomena in the field, Ballard is described in the following way: ‘His ferocious intelligence, his wit, his cantankerousness, and, in particular, his extraordinary rendering of the perverse pleasures of today’s paranoia, make him one of the grand magicians of modern fiction. His is an uncertain spell, but it spreads; far beyond the stockades of ordinary science fiction’ (Aldiss 1973: 343).

[9] Ballard is the most prominent among them, but there are many others, for example: Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss, D.M. Thomas.

[10] Greenland is now a prominent science fiction scholar and an author of highly regarded fantastic books.

[11] Many years later Shippey remembers how science fiction critics were treated in the 1960s and 1970s by Academia: ‘A further way of putting this is to say that during my science fiction ‘lifetime’ (1958 to now) being a science fiction reader was rather like being gay. In both cases, one could say, drawing out the similarities: *there was a definite pressure, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, not to admit the fact; *there were social penalties if you did; *you got used to hiding the fact’ (Slusser and Westfall 2002: 8). Note: Volumes of criticism containing the essays, papers, and interviews which are quoted in the text of the present study are identified in the footnotes and then listed in the biography in alphabetic order under the name of the editor. The same is true for the prefaces and introductions which precede books written by some other author: in the footnotes the edition is identified and listed in the biography under the name of the author.

[12] Disappointed by the space programme and disinterested in conquering the Universe, the ‘New Wave’ writers produced anti-space fiction and were much more interested in the inner space of the human psyche.

[13] In 1973 David Pringle, a scholar specializing in writers associated with the field of science fiction, together with James Goddard edited J.G. Ballard — the First Twenty Years, a book which is not a monograph but a collection of texts consisting almost entirely of previously-published material by notable figures.

[14] Pringle is the first to explain Ballard’s obsession with imprisonment by his personal experience of the three years spent in the Japanese prison camp. Such explanations in the nineteen-eighties became critical cliché.

[15] Pringle enumerates typically ‘Ballardian’ images: ‘concrete weapon-ranges, dead fish, abandoned airfields, radio telescopes, crashed space-capsules, sand-dunes, empty cities, sand reefs, half-submerged buildings, helicopters, crocodiles, open-air cinema screens, jewelled insects, advertising hoardings, white hotels, beaches, fossils, broken juke-boxes, crystals, lizards, multi-storey car-parks, dry lake-beds, medical laboratories, drained swamps, motorway flyovers, stranded ships, broken Coke bottles, vegetation, high-rise buildings, predatory birds and low-flying aircraft’ (Pringle 1979: 16). This list is highly insightful; indeed, Pringle succeeds in pinpointing what the critics all vaguely describe as Ballard’s unmistakable style.

[16] The entry is written by George W. Barlow and in its bibliography all critical essays are by David Pringle. Currently (summer 2006) Pringle is preparing a new edition of J.G. Ballard: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography, which is going to be very important to every Ballard scholar.

[17] In 1983 Ballard was contacted by V. Vale and the rest of RE/Search group, avant-garde publishers from San Francisco who became advocates of Ballard in the USA. In 1984 a special Ballard issue of their magazine RE/Search was published. In the following years they also re-published other of Ballard’s works in America. For instance, RE/Search published an annotated version of The Atrocity Exhibition. Ballard wrote commentaries to each chapter of this difficult but very important book. In recent years they published two important Ballardiana: J. G. Ballard Quotes and J.G. Ballard Conversations. The first is a collection of one-line aphorisms taken from Ballard’s books, the latter is a compilation of interviews given by him to different journalists (mostly from the RE/Search group).

[18] Jacques Derrida has the largest number of references (of course after Ballard) in the index and the bibliography.

[19] A good example of such an article is ‘Going Somewhere?’ (www.jgballard.com, on: 20 August 2006). Ballard writes about the role airports have in contemporary life and city architecture. Himself an inhabitant of Shepperton, a distant London suburb near the London airport, he describes the unreal landscape of post-modern concourses and by-ways in his neighbourhood and then generalizes and writes about tourism, the cosmopolitanism of the affluent West and aircraft. This short text is therefore informed by subjects recurrent in his prose: futuristic enclaves, a nation of people in the air, and global culture.

[20] For all Internet sources in the following text www.jgballard.com, on: 20 August 2006.