The following is excerpted from Matteo Pasquinelli’s book Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers / Institute of Network Cultures, December 2008). Reproduced with permission.

Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessel are the written mythologies of memory and desire.

— J.G. Ballard, Ambit magazine, 1967[1]

“Fiction is a Branch of Neurology”

The novels of J.G. Ballard can describe the nature of technology and the contemporary mediascape better than any philosopher, media theorist or cultural studies academic. During the mass media revolution, while spectres of the collective imaginary were flourishing on everybody’s television screens in a genuine “atrocity exhibition”, both academic and radical theorists were imploding in the semiotics of the image: postmodernism indeed reduced the image to a linguistic sign. Ballard and other science fiction writers, meanwhile, were left alone to map the new becoming of the media unconscious. In retrospect, it is increasingly apparent how the postmodern agenda and the church of simulacra functioned as an immunisation strategy of an armchair intelligentsia against the monsters emerging from the collective Id.

Ironically, the notion of ‘collective unconscious’ can itself be interpreted as a high culture sanitisation attempt to what was visibly and consciously intensifying at the core of mass media society: libido. As much as Deleuze and Guattari recognised that delirium is always social, political and historical (something not simply isolated to the morbid intimacy of a psychoanalyst’s couch), Ballard understood that “after Freud’s exploration within the psyche it is now the outer world of reality which must be quantified and eroticised”.[2] Significantly, he began his cartography of the machinic unconscious of the West outside the mediated discourses of philosophy and psychoanalysis. His context was the American cultural imaginary of the ’50s and ’60s that colonised the European psyche by broadcasting morbid televisual images of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Marilyn Monroe’s second lives, the Vietnam war and so on. At the time of May ’68, Ballard’s own personal “counterculture” was on the other side of the barricades, on the side of power and mass media, where he discovered far stronger and more lysergic forces than in any leftist movement. From this science-fiction perspective on the mainstream, Ballard effectively anticipated the Guattarian schizoanalysis of the collective machinic unconscious.

For an accurate introduction to the Ballardian universe, however, it may be useful to make a comparison with a sparring partner from the postmodern school. Baudrillard, once more, is worth considering for his review of Crash, where Ballard’s uncanny worlds are sanitised through the theoretical frame of Simulation.[3] His review twisted the novel’s carnal tangle into a “semiurgy of the body” (semiurgy being the trendy neologism introduced by postmodern for ‘the art of creating new signs’). Amusingly, Ballard would dismiss this postmodern critique of his writing as “the apotheosis of the hamburger”.[4] In a society increasingly exposed to mass media, Baudrillard is an obvious symptom of iconophilia turned to iconophobia.

‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’. One of Mike Foreman’s illustrations for the abandoned illustrated version of The Atrocity Exhibition.

From the classical (and even the cybernetic) viewpoint, technology is an extension of the body. […] From Marx to McLuhan, one sees the same instrumentalist vision of machines and of language: relays, extensions, media-mediators of a Nature destined ideally to become the organic body. In this “rational” view, the body itself is only a medium. Inversely, in its baroque and apocalyptic treatment in Crash, technology is the deadly deconstruction of the body — no longer a functional medium, but an extension of death: […] all the metallurgy of accidents is inscribed in a semiurgy of the body — not in anatomy or physiology, but in a semiurgy of contusions, scars, mutilations, and wounds which are like new sexual organs opened in the body.[5]

Baudrillard interprets Ballard’s death of affect as the postmodern haze through which everything is grey and desire is lacking. On the contrary, the death of affect actually marks an intensified longing or love for the inorganic; otherwise Ballard’s “erotisation” of the “outer world” would not be intelligible. In particular, the sophisticated relation between violence, libido and machine signals a notion of desire that is not unfamiliar within the intellectual account of masochism and the BDSM subcultures of the last decades.

In Crash, there is neither fiction nor reality — a kind of hyper-reality has abolished both. Even critical regression is no longer possible. This mutating and commutating world of simulation and death, this violently sexualized world totally lacking in desire, full of violent and violated bodies but curiously neutered, this chromatic and intensely metallic world empty of the sensorial, a world of hyper-technology without finality.[6]

Baudrillard’s hyper(flat)-reality clearly disappointed Ballard. While for Ballard, “fiction is a branch of neurology”, Baudrillard annexed his novel to the realm of simulacra, unequivocally stating that “Crash is the first great novel of the universe of simulation, the world that we will be dealing with from now on”. In a completely opposite reading, William Burroughs wrote in the introduction to The Atrocity Exhibition: “The line between inner and outer landscapes is breaking down. Earthquakes can result from seismic upheavals within the human mind”. By illuminating the “death of affect”, Burroughs effectively underlines how “sexual arousal results from the repetition and impact of image”. Ballard’s novel The Atrocity Exhibition is indeed a sincere anti-postmodern manifesto.

“Neuronic Icons on the Spinal Highway”

Ballard’s iconology is not concerned with a flat image framed according to academic coordinates, but it is a journey into the subterranean world beyond that surface. Rather than being purely a linguistic sign, Ballard’s image is part of the collapse between “inner and outer landscapes”. A recurring codeword in The Atrocity Exhibition is “spinal”: images have nerves, they become part of the nervous system. Like Leroi-Gourhan’s anthropology, the medium of technology is an extension of the human skeleton, not a self-indulgent eye.[7] The aesthetics of the contemporary image cannot be found through its metaphysical fabric, in the claustrophobic white cube of the art world or the minimal semiotics of the digital screen, but precisely in the externalisation of the nervous system.

[In] The Atrocity Exhibition, the nervous systems of the characters have been externalized, as part of the reversal of the interior and exterior worlds. Highways, office blocks, faces and street signs are perceived as if they were elements in a malfunctioning central nervous system.[8]

Images are “neuronic icons on the spinal highway”, signs of a biomorphic unconscious lurking beneath the urban landscape. The diagram of these icons is a “neural interval” in the physiology of the body. In other words, the neural space we enter with Ballard is not the re-assuring social-democracy of psychoanalysis, but the “spinal battlefield” of contemporary warfare, the space of World War III and of Foucauldian “biopolitical conflicts”. Ballard has in effect inaugurated a neurospace — a carnal and physical understanding of the mediascape that only many decades later will surface from the underworld of cyberspace. Ballard’s neurospace, however, should not be considered an autonomous media sphere, but a continuum between inner and outer landscapes, between the psychological and libidinal life of any physical form and object.

The blitzkriegs will be fought out on the spinal battlefields, in terms of the postures we assume, of our traumas mimetized in the angle of a wall or balcony.[9]

To consider The Atrocity Exhibition as a manual for the contemporary collective imaginary, another lesson is worth remembering: the image is always social and collective, and the figures of the collective imaginary are always “giants”. The image by nature is socially expansive, “commercial cosmologies” covering the unconscious of the nation. Even as early as the 1920s, Benjamin took note of the “huge images across the walls of the houses, where toothpaste and cosmetics lie handy for giants”.[10] The conceptual origin of the ‘mediascape’ can be traced back to this particular skyline of huge advertisements, a commercial landscape of billboards associated with the American horizon of the 1950s. In two famous cryptic fragments, Ballard spreads a giant pornographic picture of Elizabeth Taylor across hundreds of such billboards.

A group of workmen on a scaffolding truck were pasting up the last of the displays, a hundred-foot-long panel that appeared to represent a section of a sand-dune. Looking at it more closely, Dr Nathan realized that in fact it was an immensely magnified portion of the skin over the iliac crest. Glancing at the billboards, Dr Nathan recognized other magnified fragments: a segment of lower lip, a right nostril, a portion of female perineum. Only an anatomist would have identified these fragments, each represented as a formal geometric pattern. At least five hundred of the signs would be needed to contain the whole of this gargantuan woman, terraced here into a quantified sand-sea.[11]

Dr Nathan limped along the drainage culvert, peering at the huge figure of a dark-haired woman painted on the sloping walls of the blockhouse. The magnification was enormous. The wall on his right, the size of a tennis court, contained little more than the right eye and cheekbone. He recognized the woman from the billboards he had seen near the hospital — the screen actress, Elizabeth Taylor. Yet these designs were more than enormous replicas. They were equations that embodied the relationship between the identity of the film actress and the audiences who were distant reflections of her. The planes of their lives interlocked at oblique angles, fragments of personal myths fusing with the commercial cosmologies. The presiding deity of their lives the film actress provided a set of operating formulae for their passage through consciousness.[12]

Elizabeth Taylor, as she appears on the cover of Crash.

In these two passages, Ballard deconstructs a sample of the collective imaginary (the archetypical 1950s movie star), stripping the image back to its fundamental components. First, its infrastructural medium: the skeleton of scaffoldings and billboards that turns a pop star to architecture. Second, its picture as replica: a sensuous module of a benevolent propaganda machine. Third, its pornographic focus: intimate details of the body that fall under the public eye and become part of public constructions. Fourth, the sexual nature of such an apparently neutral magnification: perineum and ilium are the scientific names for the anatomic zones where the male gaze is usually drawn. Fifth, its sexualised body is exploded into different fragments and patterns. Sixth, those replicated fragments function together as a collective image over the unconscious domain, as “a set of operating formulae for their passage through consciousness”, “equations that embodied the relationship between the identity of the film actress and the audiences who were distant reflections of her”. No other description could provide a better diagram of the basic elements of the mediascape.

Ballard is not the first writer to investigate the intoxicating effect of mass media society, but he is exceptional for offering a detailed mapping of its unconscious parallel dimension. Ballard attempts to reveal the existence of a “second narrative” behind the official version of events, and how the collective consciousness produces “emergency scenarios”, as in dreams, to face the violent stimuli emanating from the mediascape. For Ballard, the collective imaginary is a bicephalous entity that simultaneously maintains contradictory meanings and dimensions.

The media landscape of the present day is a map in search of a territory. A huge volume of sensational and often toxic imagery inundates our minds, much of it fictional in content. How do we make sense of this ceaseless flow of advertising and publicity, news and entertainment, where presidential campaigns and moon voyages are presented in terms indistinguishable from the launch of a new candy bar or deodorant? What actually happens on the level of our unconscious minds when, within minutes on the same TV screen, a prime minister is assassinated, an actress makes love, an injured child is carried from a car crash? Faced with these charged events, prepackaged emotions already in place, we can only stitch together a set of emergency scenarios, just as our sleeping minds extemporize a narrative from the unrelated memories that veer through the cortical night. In the waking dream that now constitutes everyday reality, images of a blood-spattered widow, the chromium trim of a limousine windshield, the stylized glamour of a motorcade, fuse together to provide a secondary narrative with very different meanings.[13]

Against the contemporary dismissal of the notion of unconscious (but actually of its metaphysical and linguistic interpretations), Ballard identifies a clear energetic undercurrent behind the mediascape and the surrounding biosphere of machines. To confront this new environment, he appropriates the notion of latent and manifest content from Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and applies it to external reality. According to Ballard, beneath the “benign or passive posture” of machinic civilisation and consumerist society resides a latent energy, “ambiguous even to the skilled investigator”.

From this and similar work it is clear that Freud’s classic distinction between the manifest and latent content of the inner world of the psyche now has to be applied to the outer world of reality. A dominant element in this reality is technology and its instrument, the machine. In most roles the machine assumes a benign or passive posture — telephone exchanges, engineering hardware, etc. The twentieth century has also given birth to a vast range of machines — computers, pilotless planes, thermonuclear weapons — where the latent identity of the machine is ambiguous even to the skilled investigator. An understanding of this identity can be found in a study of the automobile, which dominates the vectors of speed, aggression, violence and desire. In particular the automobile crash contains a crucial image of the machine as conceptualized psychopathology.[14]

What is the nature of this dark side of the machinic landscape? Irrational violence, animal instincts, sexual impulses and natural aggressiveness emerge as constitutive of the “biomorphic horror” pulsating through the collective technological imaginary. Rather than Baudrillard’s imagined society of simulacra, the “death of affect” is actually a consequence of the molecular dissemination of a conceptual violence that makes any object, even the most aseptic one, a vector of conflict. In this sense, the “abstraction” of violence causes psychopathologies to become everyday playthings. The violence of The Atrocity Exhibition is not comparable to, for instance, the aesthetisation of sadism in Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, since the former emerges through the force of inorganic structures.[15] Just like a sophisticated philosophy of sadomasochism, Ballard considers the abstract psychopathologies of the mediascape “as a game”, as an intrinsic means of human communication. This intuition will be useful later when introducing the notion of masochism of image.

Travers’s problem is how to come to terms with the violence that has pursued his life – not merely the violence of accident and bereavement, or the horrors of war, but the biomorphic horror of our own bodies. Travers has at last realized that the real significance of these acts of violence lies elsewhere, in what we might term “the death of affect”. Consider our most real and tender pleasures — in the excitements of pain and mutilation; in sex as the perfect arena, like a culture-bed of sterile pus, for all the veronicas of our own perversions, in voyeurism and self-disgust, in our moral freedom to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game, and in our ever greater powers of abstraction. […] The only way we can make contact with each other is in terms of conceptualizations. Violence is the conceptualization of pain. By the same token psychopathology is the conceptual system of sex.[16]

Surprisingly, Ballard suggests his own counter-strategies for confronting the psychopathologies of the imaginary — a sort of political agenda born from the perspective of science fiction. Against both conservative puritanism and radical pessimism, against the politically correct ethos of the peace movements, Ballard professes a joyful and “just psychopathology” as the “final destination of the 20th century”. The only way to deal with the abyss, Ballard suggests, is to stare directly into it, immerse ourselves in the dark waters of the unconscious and “swim”.

..:: NOTES:

[1] J.G. Ballard, “Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?”, Advertiser’s Announcement, Sex: Inner Space, Ambit magazine, no. 33, 1967.
[2] J.G. Ballard, A Neural Interval’. Advertiser’s Announcement: A J.G. Ballard Production. Ambit magazine, no. 36, 1968.
[3] Jean Baudrillard, “Ballard’s Crash”, 1976. Trans. Arthur B. Evans. Science Fiction Studies 18: 313-20, #55, Nov 1991.
[4] J.G. Ballard, “A Response to the Invitation to Respond”, Science Fiction Studies, 18: 329, #55 (Nov. 1991): “I thought the whole problem SF faced was that its consciousness, critically speaking, had been raised to wholly inappropriate heights —the apotheosis of the hamburger. An exhilarating and challenging entertainment fiction which Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain would have relished has become a “discipline” — God help us — beloved of those like the Delany who will no doubt pour scorn on my novel of the early ’70s. The “theory and criticism of s-f”!! Vast theories and pseudo-theories are elaborated by people with not an idea in their bones. Needless to say, I totally exclude Baudrillard (whose essay on Crash I have not really wanted to understand) — I read it for the first time some years ago. Of course, his Amerique is an absolutely brilliant piece of writing, probably the most sharply clever piece of writing since Swift — brilliancies and jewels of insight in every paragraph — an intellectual Alladin’s cave. But your whole “postmodernism” view of SF strikes me as doubly sinister. SF was ALWAYS modern, but now it is “postmodern” — bourgeoisification in the form of an over-professionalized academia with nowhere to take its girlfriend for a bottle of wine and a dance is now rolling its jaws over an innocent and naive fiction that desperately needs to be left alone. You are killing us! Stay your hand! Leave us be! Turn your “intelligence” to the iconography of filling stations, cash machines, or whatever nonsense your entertainment culture deems to be the flavor of the day. We have enough intellectuals in Europe as it is; let the great USA devote itself to the spirit of the Wrights — bicycle mechanics and the sons of a bishop. The latter’s modesty and exquisitely plain prose style would be an example to you — especially his restrained but heartfelt reflections on the death of one of his sons, a model of the spirit animating SF at its best. But I fear you are trapped inside your dismal jargon.”
[5] Jean Baudrillard, “Ballard’s Crash”, cit.
[6] Ibid.
[7] See: André Leroi-Gourhan, L’Homme et la matière, Paris: Albin Michel, 1943; and:
Milieu et techniques, Paris: Albin Michel, 1945.
[8] J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, London: Jonathan Cape, 1970. Notes by the author added in a reissue by RE/Search Publications, San Francisco, 1990. Page numbers refer to the edition by Harper Perennial, London, 2006, p. 76.
[9] Ibid, p. 7.
[10] Walter Benjamin, “One Way Street”, in Reflections, cit., p. 86.
[11] J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, cit., p. 11.
[12] Ibid., p. 13.
[13] Ibid., p. 145.
[14] Ibid., p. 156.
[15] Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, London: William Heinemann, 1962.
[16] J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, cit., p. 116

..:: ELSEWHERE ON BALLARDIAN:
+ Crimes of the Near Future: Baudrillard/Ballard
+ RIP Elizabeth Taylor: A Ballardian Primer

The Bentall Centre. Photo by Fr3d.org. Reproduced under Creative Commons.

by Mike Holliday

Why do I dislike the Bentall Centre so much? Because it’s so… cretinous. [The consumers] seem to be moving though a kind of commercial dream space and vague signals float through their brains.

J.G. Ballard in interview, 2006.[1]

Ballard’s final novel, Kingdom Come, a dystopian account of consumerism as a type of ‘soft fascism’, [2] received lukewarm reviews and suggestions that the author was, perhaps, finally losing his touch – that the metaphors seemed strained, the text confusing and ambiguous.[3] M John Harrison, one of Ballard’s fellow authors in New Worlds back in the 1960s, commented that ‘Perhaps, after all, it is not the consumers who have fallen for the dream of the Metro-Centre; it is the alienated intellectual of the London suburbs … For the old metaphorista, perhaps, the hidden terror of the shopping centre is that it is just somewhere people go to shop’.[4] Other commentators were eager to point to parallels between Kingdom Come and events in the world around us – aggressive car commercials, racist behaviour by sports fanatics – but appeared reluctant to delve into the novel’s theses in any depth. In this article, I re-examine Kingdom Come and ask: can we really equate consumerism with fascism?

How you convert a metaphor into the arming device of a political conspiracy, or how the consumerist dream might be co-opted to produce the kinds of hard results associated with the nationalist dream of the 1920s and 30s, Ballard seems less sure. In reality, there are only a lot of people buying American sports utility vehicles, Tanzanian fish, Chinese teddy bears, French five-hob stoves … Do unconscious dreams of mass violence need to figure?

M John Harrison, ‘Narratives of the mall’.[5]

The elements of Kingdom Come are taken straight from the world that the author would have seen around him … a giant shopping mall (loosely based on the Bentall Centre in Kingston) which is not just a place to buy things but somewhere to take the family for a day out; low-level racist behaviour against ethnic minorities in the suburbs of West London; an upsurge in interest in sporting events such as the World Cup that enable displays of national or tribal identity. These realistic components can prompt a straightforward reading of the novel: Kingdom Come is rendered as the idea that consumerism in 21st century England can be seen – with the help of a modest dosage of imagination and metaphor – to be a type of fascism. Such realist readings appear to lie behind M John Harrison’s complaints, as well as Rod Liddle’s attack on the book as ‘deeply silly and patronising’.[6]

The Bentall Centre. Photo by Joanne Murray. Reproduced with permission.

‘I remember four or five years ago going into the Bentall Centre, a huge shopping mall in Kingston, a town I hate. It was before Christmas, and there were these three gigantic bears on a plinth in the centre of this huge atrium … automatons, moving to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The place was packed; crowds looking up at them. And I thought, God, these people have left their brains somewhere. What’s going on here? And then I noticed that my head was moving, too. I thought, Jesus, get out fast.’

Ballard in interview, 2006.[7]

If Kingdom Come is a realistic reading of the English suburbs, then various of its details fail to convince. It seems odd to emphasize the violence of spectator sports when the most popular, soccer, has become far less brutal, among both participants and spectators, than was the case 25 or more years ago. And the portrayal of ethnic minorities as antipathetic to consumerism seems equally unrealistic, and risks an accusation of the very racism that the author wants to attack – for implying that they aren’t interested in consumer goods or sport because their culture is different from ours.[8]

Beyond the details, there seems to be a conspicuous problem with the novel’s underlying theme, since fascism was always anti-consumerist in its temperament. As Peter N Stearns puts it in his review of Consumerism in World History: ‘For fascist leaders, modern society had become too disunited and individualistic. Consumerism was a fundamental part of modern degeneracy’.[9]

But any such straightforward reading of Kingdom Come surely founders on the fact that Ballard is simply not, and never has been, a realist writer. Deeply influenced by the surrealist artists, and by Freud’s distinction between manifest and latent content, Ballard’s descriptions are no more ‘realist’ than Dali’s clock-faces or Delvaux’s mysterious women. He described his semi-autobiographical novel, Empire of the Sun, as an effort to reach some sort of psychological truth, as opposed to a depiction of actual events in the camp at Lunghua in which he was interned, and Kingdom Come is perhaps best viewed in like manner, as a surrealistic attempt to discover the latent psychological meaning behind consumerist society, rather than as a portrayal, however exaggerated, of the behaviour of sports fans and visitors to shopping malls.

Dali’s ‘The Persistence of Memory’.

Ballard in front of his commissioned reproduction of a lost painting by Delvaux. Photo: David Levenson.

This still leaves us with the underlying concept, reiterated by Ballard in contemporaneous interviews, of consumerism as a soft fascism. An obvious temptation is to interpret Ballard as agreeing with the frequently articulated view that modern consumerist societies are totalizing – enclosing individuals in a perpetual obligation to choose, but allowing no alternative ways of living outside of the marketplace and the media – and concluding that therefore such societies can be regarded as fascist.

If there is no principle restricting who can consume what, there is also no principled constraint on what can be consumed: all social relations, activities and objects can in principle be exchanged as commodities. This is one of the most profound secularizations enacted by the modern world … [and] places the intimate world of the everyday into the impersonal world of the market and its values. Moreover, while consumer culture appears universal because it is depicted as a land of freedom in which everyone can be a consumer, it is also felt to be universal because everyone must be a consumer: this particular freedom is compulsory.

Don Slater, ‘Consumer Culture & Modernity’.[10]

But seen as an interpretation of Kingdom Come, this makes little sense. Ignoring Ballard the surrealist, it instead concentrates on an all-too-easy transition from ‘totalizing’ to ‘fascist’, a transition which effectively empties the term ‘fascist’ of meaningful content and historical context. Yet Ballard’s novel is full of such context – from the explicit references to the Third Reich in the set-speeches, to the marching groups of supporters and over-lit sports stadia, and even to small details such as the cable-TV presenter naming his new Mercedes limousine ‘Heinrich’. On the proposed interpretation all this detail becomes mere window-dressing, and the novel adds little or nothing to the political critique on which its main thesis supposedly rests. I therefore suggest that Ballard really does intend arguing for the more substantive, if less obvious, notion that modern consumer societies can mutate into something best understood in terms of 1930s Nazi Germany.

To see how this might be the case, I think we should start by recognizing that Ballard’s understanding of society is principally in terms of psychology, and that Kingdom Come re-emphasizes, and links together, two of his long-standing motifs – that the future will be boring, and that humans are dangerous and violent animals.

Consumerism rules, but people are bored. They’re out on the edge, waiting for something big and strange to come along. … They want to be frightened. They want to know fear. And maybe they want to go a little mad.

Ballard, Kingdom Come.[11]

Lying behind Ballard’s expectations of a boring and empty suburban world is the notion of human reality as a constructed reality, the roots of which seem to lie with his early grasp, as a child in Shanghai, of the everyday world as a stage-set.[12] For Ballard, the human brain has presented us with ‘a kind of ramshackle construct’ suitable to the lives of all those countless ancestors who were engaged in the struggle for food, shelter, and safety. But we no longer live in an age of day-to-day scarcity and insecurity, and as a result the external world no longer forces its interpretation upon us. Therefore the conventional ways in which we viewed the world, which had been buttressed by traditional social structures and conforming behaviours, have weakened their hold over us. The external environment has become fictionalized, and ‘reality’ – that which is of most significance in our lives – has retreated inside our minds, to be represented by our hopes, desires and obsessions.[13] One way in which we establish meaningful relationships between events and objects is via our our notion of time, by working out causal relationships and by connecting the present to the past through memories, either individual or social, or to the future through our intentions and expectations. However, as Ballard has emphasized, the past as a guide and the future as a destination no longer have much meaning for us.[14] Nowadays, an understanding of events and objects cannot simply be read off from the external world, nor can we link them in a straightforward temporal manner.

The Bentall Centre. Photo by elyob. Reproduced under Creative Commons.

The retreat of past and future and the internalization of reality – both of which are ultimately grounded in increased prosperity – are viewed by Ballard in two very different ways. On the positive side, our freedom and possibilities for fulfillment are enhanced. But, because we lack the sense of meaning provided by a stable external reality and by an awareness of time, we can experience emptiness and boredom. In the 1960s and 1970s, Ballard chose to emphasize the use of our imaginative powers as a way of providing us with different perspectives and of transcending our conventional outlook on the world. But the way Ballard told it to Carol Orr in 1974, this seemed a demanding and daunting task: ‘people will behave in a very lunar way, very isolated from each other. Does that appeal to me? Yes, it does, because I think people will have more freedom there. I mean, the freedom of isolation, the freedom of complete choice in one’s behaviour.’[15] Fifteen years later, there was more urgency in his comments to Rolling Stone: ‘the suburbanization of the soul [forces] the individual to recognize that he or she is all he or she has got. And this sharpens the eye and the imagination. The challenge is for each of us to respond, to remake as much as we can of the world around us, because no one else will do it for us. We have to find a core within us and get to work. Don’t worry about worldly rewards. Just get on with it!’[16] Using the imagination and following one’s obsessions may, perhaps, be rewarding, but it certainly doesn’t sound easy psychologically, more like hard work. By the early 1990s the warning was starker: ‘If people are going to survive they will need to do this on the plane of the imagination much more than they have done. Otherwise, they’ll simply become a mark on some consumer chart.’[17]

The reasons for concern are clear: if we do not use our imaginations and obsessions, we are at risk of being governed by forces outside ourselves which still operate, such as capitalism or purposeless social conformity. Ballard has drawn attention to the way in which moral structures and decision-making powers have been externalized out into the environment by technology – from traffic lights to CCTV cameras – providing us with a safe passage through our lives,[18] and in like manner we may find it psychologically easier to decline the freedom to utilize the imagination that comes with a safe and prosperous, but individualistic, society. People might instead be content to be governed by forces of social conformity, and to let themselves be directed by their emotions – which Ballard thinks of as tending to reinforce existing social conventions and as restricting, rather than expanding, the possibilities for action.

It may be that we thrive when certain of our relationships are drained of emotion, that we may then be able to explore our lives more fully, because emotions tend to act as a brake. They reinforce the status quo. They set up a kind of tyranny rather like the psychology of a very small child, which may be entirely governed by passionate emotions that are in fact very limiting. It’s only when the child learns to control its emotions that he can begin to explore all sorts of interesting possibilities at the other end of the nursery.

Ballard in interview, 1997.[19]

If this is the bare bones of the psychology that underpins Kingdom Come, we can perhaps add some flesh by considering the social aspects of consumerism. Peter Stearns points out that the growth of consumer behaviour was closely connected with the decline of long-established social structures under the pressures of industrialization and urbanization. In earlier times, social hierarchies were much more rigidly observed, and any crossing of social boundaries or individualistic behaviour tended to be viewed negatively, especially by the upper-classes. The latter had luxury, i.e. their wealth was displayed, rather than consumed, and in standard formats with an absence of individuality or any concern about fashion.[20] However, once this social edifice began to lose its grip, consumer behaviour helped people cope with the resulting uncertainty and insecurity about social status, and with the disruption to established patterns of behaviour, by providing alternative ways of fulfillment and by enabling an individual to demonstrate personal achievement, no matter how limited. This was particularly the case in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the growth of large firms meant that many in the middle-classes found themselves working for others rather than themselves and in jobs with a high degree of routine: satisfaction and success were no longer an integral element of their occupation, and had to be sought elsewhere.[21]

Utama shopping centre, Malaysia

But there is a malign dialectic at work here. I buy things in order to try and reassert my identity, but as the marketplace grows I am offered an increasing variety of goods and services, and associated ways of living, from which to choose. Now my identity is even more in question, because it is something that I myself have to select and realize. The impact is heightened as the material prosperity of society increases – even something as basic as food becomes no longer a matter of survival and physical well-being, but a decision about life-style.[22]

Yet coherent identity seems to be precisely the main problem of modern existence and is itself something to be chosen and achieved. … Consumerism simultaneously exploits mass identity crisis by proffering its goods as solutions to the problems of identity, and in the process intensifies it by offering ever more plural values and ways of being. … That the self must be a project is dictated to us by a pluralized world and must be pursued within that pluralized world. This entails a high level of anxiety and risk. In terms of consumer culture, there is high anxiety because every choice seems to implicate the self: all acts of purchase or consumption, clothing, eating, tourism, entertainment, ‘are decisions not only about how to act but who to be’.

Slater, ‘Consumer Culture & Modernity’.[23]

To make matters worse, the psychological support that might have been available from kinship ties, the local community, religion, voluntary organizations, and such like, is now much weaker – in fact, involvement in these is as much a life-style choice as everything else. Yet the evidence is that people with a rich variety of social connections are less likely to suffer depression and anxiety than those without.[24] As well as support that I might obtain directly from others, I am better able to cope if I am ‘not just the local lawyer, but also the coach of the cricket team, the friendly neighbour, and the person who always sings at the christmas party’, as a setback in one role is of less significance to my sense of identity and self-esteem.[25]

Without a traditional social fabric around me, I live in a world of endless possibilities but any failure to find fulfillment in my life must somehow reflect my own inadequacies. Hence, as Zygmunt Bauman suggests, we are nowadays more likely to suffer from depression – caused by the fear of inadequacy in the face of endless possibilities – than from neurosis arising from guilt caused by the transgression of prohibitions.[26]

The more we are allowed to be the masters of our fates, the more we expect ourselves to be. We should be able to find education that is stimulating and useful, work that is exciting, socially valuable, and remunerative, spouses who are sexually, emotionally, and intellectually stimulating and also loyal and comforting. Our children are supposed to be beautiful, smart, affectionate, obedient, and independent. And everything we buy is supposed to be the best of its kind. … [Hence,] almost every experience people have nowadays will be perceived as a disappointment, and thus regarded as a failure – a failure that could have been prevented with the right choice.

Barry Schwartz, ‘The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less’.[27]

In such circumstances, the temptation is to seek comfort and easy pleasures. But experimental psychology suggests that the systems of the brain which control desire are not the same as the systems that control pleasure.[28] Hence, some things – sex, good food – will both activate desire and bring pleasure, but others – such as a bigger, higher-definition TV – may provoke desire but not add much to our happiness. Biologically speaking, happiness is a spur to action, not some end-state that we are programmed to seek out, and this is reflected in the wealth of data indicating a lack of correlation between absolute levels of income and happiness (other than at extremely low levels of income), whether it be between different societies, different individuals in the same society, or individuals over time.[29]

Ballard’s recognition that we ‘construct our own reality’ implies an understanding that happiness is not some ‘default’ or natural state, and that nowadays we have to create the conditions for our own satisfaction and fulfillment; failure to do this in a world that does not impose its meanings on us will lead to emptiness, boredom, and anxiety. What we seem to have, therefore, are the possible conditions for a social crisis rooted in personal reactions to the complexity and uncertainty inherent in a prosperous, individualistic, consumer society, exacerbated by the lack of established social structures that might provide support. And here we can make start to make the connection with fascism …

Given the near unintelligibility of the Nazi regime,[30] any interpretation of its causes needs to explain why it developed in Germany (and not, say, the U.S.A. or France) and in the 1930s (rather than some earlier or later date). Generic explanations based on the ‘German psyche’, or some form of ‘moral crisis’ in modern capitalism, fail to convince precisely because they have no answer to these questions.

Under a leader who talked in apocalyptic tones of world power or destruction and a regime founded on an utterly repulsive ideology of race-hatred, one of the most culturally and economically advanced countries in Europe planned for war, launched a world conflagration which killed around 50 million people, and perpetrated atrocities – culminating in the mechanized mass murder of millions of Jews – of a nature and scale as to defy imagination.

Ian Kershaw, ‘The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems & Perspectives Of Interpretation’.[31]

No explanations I’ve seen are ever convincing of why cultivated and intelligent people like the Germans and Italians should plunge into this insane world-view.

Ballard in interview, 2006.

A promising approach is to start from the idea that inter-war Germany was suffering from a crisis that was simultaneously political, economic, social, and existential. Fascism is then seen to result from a generalized sense of trauma, where stresses in one arena – say the economic or the existential – cannot find an outlet in another, such as the political or social. Such an explanation of fascism owes a debt to Erich Fromm’s prognosis in his 1941 book Escape from Freedom, where he described the fascist regimes, and Nazi Germany in particular, as resulting from the isolation, powerlessness, and anxiety that people felt following modernization and industrialization in countries where traditional structures had lost much of their strength, and which had suffered hyper-inflation and extremely high unemployment.[32]

By the early decades of the 20th century, the German economy was the most developed in Europe and becoming dominated by large organizations: the local boss whom the worker knew on a personal basis was being replaced by distant and amorphous management, and the individual’s sense of their place in the whole was increasingly opaque. In politics, the parties of the new Weimar democracy were concerned with large-scale, intractable issues at the federal level, weakening the significance of local or work-place participation in political or trade union affairs; and the advent of radio was about to kick-start the transformation of politics into a form of advertising and manipulation of the emotions – as the Nazis were quick to realize.

Hitler practices his acting skills. ‘Apocalyptic, visionary, convincing’: three photos by Heinrich Hoffman from 1925.

The individual was no longer compensated for a lack of security and purpose by the strength of those long-standing and powerful elements of German society to which he had been accustomed. The monarchy had been abolished; the military (who had virtually run the country during 1914-1918) had been defeated in a war largely of their own devising; the once all-powerful German state could no longer even honour the commitments on its own bank notes as a result of massive inflation which had destroyed middle-class savings – together with the resulting bourgeois sense of certainty and security; rapid political change, military defeat, and economic problems had left the older generation lost in the world and the young looking elsewhere than to tradition and family. The lack of – or decline in – local social participation and intermediate-level structures, such as voluntary organizations, led to what Gino Germani referred to as ‘street corner society’.[33] And there were all too many whose recourse was to the street – unemployment rose following the 1929 Wall Street Crash until by 1932 an estimated one-third of the workforce were without a job.[34] To many, the world no longer made sense, and in the words of the Marxist historian TW Mason: civil society was no longer able to reproduce itself.[35]

In such circumstances, one psychological recourse for the individual is to seek to give up their independence and to fuse with somebody – or something – else, in an attempt to somehow recreate the lost bonds that had existed at societal level. Hence the attraction to many of an authoritarian party, such as the Nazis, with a clear leader on whom the party member or citizen could project qualities which – especially in the case of Hitler – they clearly lacked, but which were the counterpart of the psychological needs of the adherent. As Ballard once put it: ‘It’s almost as if what [a politician] needs is sort of a reverse charisma now. Not a light that shines outwards, but the ability, like a black hole, to draw light inwards! You’ve got to be able to draw other people’s fantasies to you’.[36] For the disciple, doubt is assuaged by accepting the opinions and directions of others, and uncertainty is conquered by relying on the conviction of the emotions instead of trusting in rational thought and debate – in a world that no longer makes sense, emotions appear a surer guide than reason. As Michael Burleigh puts it in The Third Reich: A New History: ‘Nazism was truly ahead of its time … This was politics as feeling’.[37]

Not a light that shines outwards, but the ability, like a black hole, to draw light inwards! You’ve got to be able to draw other people’s fantasies to you.

Ballard on the requirements for modern politician, interview, 1997.

Hitler himself understood all this perfectly well, as he displayed in Mein Kampf: ‘The mass meeting is necessary if only for the reason that in it the individual, who in becoming an adherent of a new movement feels lonely and is easily seized with the fear of being alone, receives for the first time the pictures of a greater community, something that has a strengthening and encouraging effect on most people. … If he steps for the first time out of his small workshop or out of the big enterprise, in which he feels very small, into the mass meeting and is now surrounded by thousands and thousands of people with the same conviction … he himself succumbs to the magic influence of what we call mass suggestion.’[38]

Fascist ideology was therefore concentrated on a mythic core constituted by the image of the nation reborn, purified, and following its ‘destiny’,[39] and practical politics accordingly relied heavily on symbols, mass spectacles, and a continuously reiterated vocabulary of basic ideas.

A dreadful mass sentimentality, compounded of anger, fear, resentment and self-pity, replaced the customary politics of decency, pragmatism, property and reason … Belief, faith, feeling and obedience to instinct routed debate, scepticism and compromise. People voluntarily surrendered to group or herd emotions … Among committed believers, a mythic world of eternal spring, heroes, demons, fire and sword – in a word, the fantasy world of the nursery – displaced reality. Or rather invaded it, with crude images of Jews, Slavs, capitalists and kulaks populating the imagination. This was children’s politics for grown-ups, bored and frustrated with the prosaic tenor of post war liberal democracy, and hence receptive to heroic gestures and politics as a form of theatrical stunt.

Michael Burleigh, ‘The Third Reich: A New History’.[40]

Fascism therefore offers an irrational escape from apparently intractable difficulties. As Ballard pointed out long ago, in his review of Mein Kampf for New Worlds,[41] Hitler was successful precisely because he dispensed with any rationalization of his prejudices, and was therefore able to tap directly into the unconscious of his followers.

More prosaically, a sense of place and safety could be supplied by hierarchy and control: a 1938 decree introduced general labour conscription by forcing people to work wherever the State decreed, but this effectively gave the well-behaved worker job security, in stark contrast to the early 1930s and to other countries;[42] and the small-holding farmer was tied to the soil just as much as a feudal serf, but was protected against creditors forcing him to sell his property.[43] Independent groups and sources of power which were not destroyed were assimilated into the system: Nazi ideology did not consider a person to have an identity separate from their obligations as a citizen, and it followed that if one was, say, an engineer, a mother, or a writer, one’s own particular concerns could be most effectively met within the context of the Nazi regime. Organizations such as employee associations or trade unions, or women’s and children’s groups, were therefore effectively incorporated into the party or the administration. For example, sports and recreational societies all functioned under the Kraft durch Freude (‘Strength through Joy’) organization, and one of the tasks legally accorded to the Reich Chamber of Commerce was to ‘gather together the creative artists in all spheres into a unified organization under the leadership of the Reich [which] must not only determine the lines of progress, mental and spiritual, but also lead and organize the professions’.[44]

The Nazi’s ‘Metro-Centre’? A detail from an illustration for an article in the propaganda magazine Signal c. 1941, describing the organization of the Nazi Party: ‘Any creative initiative to be introduced in health and hygiene, the training of youth, welfare work on behalf of the working man … whatever revolutionary idea is to be introduced into the crafts, industry, trade or among the peasantry, all flows through the channels of the Party organization’.

The Nazi state was not a completely controlled society, but rather one where existing societal organizations were subject to a form of ‘capture’. Hence, Germany was no longer a pluralist society in the sense of accepting variation in aims, opinions, and interests; variety could exist but it was merely a functional variety – a diversity in unity. As Kevin Passmore puts it: ‘civil society was absorbed into fascism’.[45] The sense of community was now workers and managers marching in the same procession or rally, all shouting Heil Hitler together whilst feeling the same emotions.[46] One advantage of such a non-pluralist society was that it was able to limit the extent to which the functional and social complexity of modern societies impacted on human subjectivity: common activities and emotions, communal gatherings, signs and slogans, all represented psychological simplifications that helped nullify the difficulties of a complex, modern world. The result of this reliance on myth, symbols and emotions was that fascism transformed consciousness rather than society: ‘The idea of the “national community” was not a basis for changing social structures, but a symbol of transformed consciousness. … [Nazism's] intentions were directed towards a transformation of value- and belief systems – a psychological “revolution” rather than one of substance.’[47]

So there are indeed similarities between inter-war Germany and 21st century consumerist societies: in particular, people can feel they live in a world without meaning and have somehow lost control of their lives. Obviously there are also major differences – one could hardly suggest that boredom and ennui were a major factor in 1920s Germany, for example, and the economic backgrounds are dissimilar – but these can obscure the psychological resemblances.[48] In both cases, customary social and political structures are debilitated, providing little tangible or intangible support, and the sense of community is weakened. Traditional politics are viewed as irrelevant or with contempt: there is an absence of debate and we are left with politics as emotion and advertising.

A Nazi mass gathering: the 1937 Reichsparteitag at Nuremberg, including a spectacular performance from the young girls of the ‘Glaube und Schönheit’ (‘Belief and Beauty’) organisation.

The ‘solutions’ in the two cases are analogous. A sense of pseudo-community is created through common activities and attendance at mass spectacles, by the channeling of emotions into a narrow range, and through a strengthening of the sense of commonality by means of an emphasis – vague but insistent – on ‘outsiders’. Community and a shared-culture may still be with us, but no longer based on locality or history: ‘What’s the point of privacy if it’s just a personalized prison? Consumerism is a collective enterprise. People here want to share and celebrate, they want to come together. When we go shopping we take part in a collective ritual of affirmation. … Shared dreams and values, shared hopes and pleasures’, claims Sangster in Kingdom Come.[49]

The concept of ‘us’ implies a ‘not-us’ … an age-old and reliable way of putting strength back into weakening societal bonds: ‘David Cruise casually referred to the ‘enemy’, a term kept deliberately vague that embraced Asians and east Europeans, blacks, Turks, non-consumers and anyone not interested in sport. New enemies were always needed’.[50] To the extent that I am not an individual but part of a commonality, you are not an individual either, but a category; in Nazi Germany, one was ‘no longer a person, but an anti-social, criminal, Gypsy, homosexual, Jehovah’s Witness, Jew or political, in involuntary anticipation of modern identity politics, with their replacement of persons by categories’.[51]

The effect of this growth in pseudo-community is the same in Kingdom Come as in Nazi Germany, as Ballard himself described in a discussion with Jeannette Baxter, when he referred to ‘the positive features of the new regime [of the Metro-Centre] – the self-disciplined and healthily glowing families, the sense of a revived community with a new confidence and purpose in life (in short, that “accommodation” made by so many in the 1930s in England and Germany who should know better)’.[52]

‘I like the music,’ I commented. ‘Though maybe it’s a little too martial. Somewhere in there I can hear the Horst Wessel
song.

‘It’s good for morale,’ Carradine explained. ‘We like to keep people cheerful …’

Ballard, Kingdom Come.[53]

Symbols and myths – reaching almost religious significance – start to predominate. ‘Politics’ mutates into something else, a mixture of emotion, myth, and violence that comes close to madness. In Kingdom Come, Sangster is convinced that ‘some kind of insanity is the last way forward’, and the psychiatrist, Maxted, draws the parallel with Nazi Germany: ‘The Germans were desperate to break out of their prison. Defeat, inflation, grotesque war reparations, the threat of barbarians advancing from the east. Going mad would set them free, and they chose Hitler to lead the hunting party.’[54]

But what of psychopathology and violence, which I referred to earlier as another of Ballard’s long-standing themes that runs through Kingdom Come? He has always held – based in part on his childhood experiences in Shanghai and Lunghua – that the human psyche has dark and dangerous depths, including an attraction to violence. On Ballard’s conception, mankind has natural psychopathic tendencies which, although they may not come to the fore in all societies, cannot be eradicated … a view which has some support from the anthropological and historical evidence, which indicates that hunter-gatherer and primitive agriculturalist societies often had far higher male mortality rates from violence than did Europe and North America in the 20th century, despite our technologies of destruction and two world wars.[55]

When I refer to my own childhood, and how people behaved in the Far East during the Second World War, it seemed that some people simply enjoy killing and tormenting others. … To use a term like ‘sadism’ and to construct an elaborate psychological machinery to explain this behaviour, however, is to miss the point. The fact is, we are violent and dangerous creatures. We needed to be to survive all those hundreds of thousands of years when we were living in small tribal groups, faced with an incredibly hostile world. And we still carry those genes.

Ballard in interview, 1997.[56]

For the majority of the time that people have lived in crowded urban environments, any proclivity for violence was – probably of necessity – contained by social arrangements and by a widely accepted system of morality. However, both of these types of constraints are weakening, something which concerned Ballard as early as this 1974 interview: ‘I myself think that Man, if you like, is a naturally perverse animal, that the elements of psychopathology or perversity or moral deviancy are a very large part of his character. I don’t think that can be changed. I think attempts in the past to provide a very rigid moral framework succeeded to some extent. I think they’re going to break down now, simply because the opportunities for limitless freedom are so great.’[57]

The risk is that the erasure of meaning in modern societies produces boredom and emptiness, a gap which a dormant psychopathology can readily fill, fuelled by a preference for emotion over cognition. Hence Ballard frequently links boredom and psychopathic behaviour in his later books and interviews: ‘My real fear is that boredom and inertia may lead people to follow a deranged leader … that we will put on jackboots and black uniforms and the aspect of the killer simply to relieve the boredom.’[58] The descriptions of brutality in Kingdom Come – racist attacks and violent sports events – are simply taken from Ballard’s perception of the world around him. Their significance lies not, I suggest, in the precise content, but in their latent meaning: within the absences which permeate both society and our own minds, ‘violence and hate, as always, were organizing themselves’.[59]

Aggressive advertising: For Mercedes-Benz, from the Nazi propaganda magazine ‘Signal’, c1943; and, below, for Hummer SUVs in Australia, 2008.

How might we view consumerism – and in particular the totalizing aspects of a consumerist society – as a result of this analysis of Ballard’s vision of a ‘soft fascism’? Consumer behaviour is an exercise in choice, and can therefore infiltrate other aspects of our lives, replacing the traditional but declining forms of morality and politics, both of which are essentially ways of choosing between alternatives. This presents us with an obligation to choose from what is on offer, and thereby effectively closes off the possibility of exiting the system – something that Pearson discovers in Kingdom Come on his first visit to the West London suburbs: ‘I moved through the darkened streets, searching for a signpost to guide me back to London. But here by the M25, in the heartland of the motorway people, all signs pointed inwards, referring the traveller back to his starting point’[60] (my emphasis). The fictionalization of the external world means that Ballard’s ‘exit door’ through the use of our imaginative faculties is gradually closing, as these powers of the imagination become colonized by the fantasies around us and by our own emotions. This enables consumerism to satisfy our needs, not directly via the goods and services that we purchase, but indirectly by meeting our psychological requirements through our involvement in the activities of consumer society – shopping, media, leisure. The disassociation between our desires and pleasures – which might be seen as threatening the consumerist system once we discover that satisfying our desires is unfulfilling – can now be bridged: we desire the goods and buy them, but our rewards come from elsewhere, from our very participation in the system itself … from our attendance at Ballard’s Metro-Centre.

This totalizing effect of consumerism, whereby everything is absorbed into it in much the same way as existing organizations and groupings were subject to ‘capture’ by the Nazis, is perhaps reflected in some of those elements of Kingdom Come which perplexed reviewers: Are the group led by the local solicitor Fairfax really opponents of the Metro-Centre, or are they just trying to use it for their own purposes? How much can we trust what the main protagonist, Pearson, says – or should we regard him as an ‘unreliable narrator’? Why is it not clear, even at the end of the book, whether Pearson really regrets getting involved with the Metro-Centre?[61] The ambiguity of Ballard’s narrative is in keeping with the self-reflexive nature of the society that he is describing, where the transgressive gesture rapidly becomes another media item that can be purchased for cash, and an attempt at escape puts you right back at the centre. Any effort at political action or opposition becomes pointless, because this is not – on Ballard’s view – a conspiracy of false needs and false consciousness: by accepting the emotional lie and the feel-good fairy story, we are ourselves complicit in the consumerist society. But if this is right, then we can see the point of Ballard’s long-held insistence that we must, as he puts it, immerse ourselves in the most dangerous elements and hope that we can swim to the other side[62] – a view that infects both the ‘extreme hypothesis’ of Crash and the studied ambiguity of Kingdom Come.

Finally, what does Ballard’s novel tell us about fascistic activity and what it represents? As I have described it here, fascism arises as a result of a generalized sense of crisis in prosperous, complex societies, whereby tensions in each sphere – the economic, the social, the political, and the personal – cannot find relief, but actually amplify each other. The result is an escape to pseudo-community, and a surrender to the emotions and to psychopathic urges. This suggests a close similarity to Daniel Woodley’s recent discussion of the links between fascism, modernity, and capitalism:

Modern [critical] theorists have abandoned class reductionism for a more sophisticated account of fascism as a political commodity, a form of ideological production in postliberal capitalism based on the aestheticization of politics and the mobilization of emotion. … postliberal capitalism entails new forms of ideological justification based on the bureaucratization and societalization of economic life. These structural tendencies increase the pressure for collective solutions to political integration, resulting in a panoply of new ideologies aimed at addressing atomization. … [Fascism's] timely appearance and reappearance is rooted … in the aestheticization of depoliticized politics and the fetishization of communal identities which conceal the true nature of the commodity as a structured social practice.

Daniel Woodley, ‘Fascism and Political Theory: Critical Perspectives on Fascist Ideology’.[63]

What I have tried to show in this article is that in Kingdom Come Ballard has attempted to unearth this ‘latent content’ of fascism by means of his well-honed forensic tools of imagination and surrealistic description.[64]

NOTES

[1] ‘JG Ballard: The Comforts of Madness’, interview in The Independent, 15 September 2006.
[2] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, Fourth Estate (London), 2006, pp 167-169.
[3] See, for example, Ursula K Le Guin, ‘Revolution in the aisles’, The Guardian, 9 September 2006.
[4] M John Harrison, ‘Narratives of the mall’, The Times Literary Supplement, 6 September 2006.
[5] M John Harrison, ‘Narratives of the mall’, op cit.
[6] Rod Liddle, ‘Our simple pleasures go up in smoke’, Times Online, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/columnists/rod_liddle/article1267260.ece, accessed 5 May 2010.
[7] ‘From Here to Dystopia’, interview in the Telegraph Magazine, 2 September 2006.
[8] A similar sentiment is displayed here: ‘A mastery of the discontinuities of metropolitan life has always been essential to the successful urban dweller … A failure to master these discontinuities, whether social or genetic in origin, leaves some ethnic groups at a disadvantage, forced into enclaves that seem to reconstitute mental maps of ancestral villages.’ JG Ballard, ‘Airports: Going somewhere?’, The Observer, 14 September 1997.
[9] Peter N Stearns, Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire (2nd edition), Routledge (New York & London), 2006, p 72.
[10] Don Slater, Consumer Culture & Modernity, Polity Press (Cambridge), 1997, p 27.
[11] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, op cit, p 101.
[12] JG Ballard, Miracles of Life, Fourth Estate (London), 2008, pp 58-59.
[13] Some of Ballard’s clearest comments on the fictionalization of the external world and the interiorization of reality as a consequence of increased prosperity are to be found in an unpublished interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, c1974, available at http://www.jgballard.ca/interviews/jgb_cbc_ideas_interview.html, accessed 6 May 2010.
[14] Unpublished interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, op cit.
[15] Unpublished interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, op cit.
[16] ‘The Strange Visions of J. G. Ballard’, interview in Rolling Stone, 19 November 1987.
[17] ‘An Interview with J. G. Ballard’, Mississippi Review Vol. 20 #1-2, 1991, p 32.
[18] ‘Interview by Graeme Revell’, Re/Search 8/9: J. G. Ballard, Re/Search Publishing (San Francisco), 1984, p. 46.
[19] ‘Dangerous Driving’, interview in ‘Frieze’ magazine #34, May 1997.
[20] Peter N Stearns, Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire (2nd edition), op cit, pp 1-14.
[21] Peter N Stearns, Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire (2nd edition), op cit, pp 32-34, 60-62.
[22] Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics, Polity Press (Cambridge), 1994, p 224.
[23] Don Slater, Consumer Culture & Modernity, op cit, p 84-85.
[24] Michael Marmot, Status Syndrome: How Your Social Standing Directly Affects Your Health, Bloomsbury (London), Chapter 6; Robert H Frank, Luxury Fever: Money and Happiness in an Era of Excess, Princeton University Press, 1999, pp 86-88.
[25] Daniel Nettle, Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile, Oxford University Press, 2005, p 180.
[26] Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life, Polity Press (Cambridge), 2007, p 94.
[27] Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, Harper Perennial (New York), 2004, pp 210-211.
[28] For example, when rats have their brains stimulated to eat food, they don’t show the typical ‘liking behavior’ that normally accompanies pleasurable activities – indeed, if anything, they show ‘disliking behavior’. Conversely, the rats can be drugged so that they have no desire to eat, but show liking behavior when a sweet solution is put onto their tongue. See also Daniel Nettle, Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile, op cit, Chapter 5.
[29] Daniel Nettle, Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile, op cit, pp 48-52, 70-75; Robert H Frank, Luxury Fever: Money and Happiness in an Era of Excess, op cit, pp 71-74.
[30] Although the reference is to the generic term ‘fascism’, I shall limit my historical discussion to the Nazi Party and the German Third Reich – as does, by and large, Ballard..
[31] Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems & Perspectives Of Interpretation (4th edition), Hodder Arnold (London), 2000, p 4.
[32] Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom, Routledge (London), 1960, pp 106-116, 180-188 (originally published as Escape from Freedom, 1941).
[33] See S J Woolf (ed), The Nature of Fascism, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968, pp 107-108.
[34] Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History, Pan Books (London), 2001, p 122.
[35] T W Mason, ‘The Primacy of Politics – Politics and Economics in National Socialist Germany’, in S J Woolf (ed), The Nature of Fascism, op cit, p. 171.
[36] In a conversation with Mark Pauline c1987, published in J. G. Ballard: Conversations, RE/Search Publications, San Francisco, 2005, p 136.
[37] Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History, op cit, pp 210-211.
[38] Quoted in Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom, op cit, p 193.
[39] Roger Griffin (ed), Fascism, Oxford University Press, 1995, pp 3-4.
[40] Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History, op cit, pp 8-9.
[41] JG Ballard, ‘Alphabets of Unreason’ in New Worlds # 196, December 1969, p 26.
[42] William L Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Arrow Books, [1960]/1998, p 265.
[43] William L Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, op cit, p 258.
[44] For the Nazi assimilation of intermediate-level organizations, see William L Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, op cit, pp 241-267.
[45] Kevin Passmore, Fascism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2002, p 128.
[46] SL Andreski, ‘Some sociological considerations on fascism and class’, in S J Woolf (ed), The Nature of Fascism, op cit, pp 100-101.
[47] Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems & Perspectives Of Interpretation (4th edition), op cit, pp 174, 179.
[48] It is the psychological similarities that Ballard stressed in an interview with James Campbell: ‘… could consumerism turn into fascism? The underlying psychologies aren’t all that far removed from one another. If you go into a huge shopping mall and you’re looking down the parade, it’s the same theatrical aspect: these disciplined ranks of merchandise, all glittering like fascist uniforms. When you enter a mall, you are taking part in a ceremony of affirmation, which you endorse just by your presence.’ The Guardian, 14 June 2008.
[49] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, op cit, p 85. It is interesting to note that Fromm uses the term ‘automaton conformity’ to describe the form that the attempt to escape from freedom takes in modern democracies (as opposed to fascist dictatorships); see Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom, op cit, pp 159-178.
[50] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, op cit, p 189.
[51] Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History, op cit, p 204.
[52] ‘Kingdom Come: An Interview with J. G. Ballard’, in Jeannette Baxter, J. G. Ballard: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, Continuum (London & New York), 2008, p 127.
[53] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, op cit, p 39.
[54] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, op cit, pp 102, 168.
[55] See, for example, Azar Gat, War in Civilization, Oxford University Press, 2006, Chapters 2, 6 and 9; also Steven LeBlanc, with Katherine Register, Constant Battles: The myth of the peaceful noble savage, St Martin’s Press (New York), 2003.
[56] ‘Dangerous Driving’, interview in ‘Frieze’ magazine #34, May 1997.
[57] Unpublished interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, op cit.
[58] ‘Age of Unreason’, interview published online by the The Guardian, 22 June 2004; available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/jun/22/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.jgballard (accessed 13 May 2010).
[59] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, op cit, p 191.
[60] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, op cit, p 35.
[61] After all that’s happened, Pearson still has positive feelings for the people of the Metro-Centre: ‘Leaving Sangster and his self-hating motives to one side, I admired Carradine and his mutineers, and the robustly physical world they had based on their consumerist dream. The motorway towns were built on the frontier between a tired past and a future without illusions and snobberies’ (Kingdom Come, op cit, p. 266). And on the penultimate page, there’s the following, rather astonishing, meditation from Pearson: ‘The cable channels had reverted to an anaesthetic diet of household hints and book-group discussions. Once people began to talk earnestly about the novel any hope of freedom had died. The once real possibility of a fascist republic had vanished into the air …’ (Kingdom Come, op cit, p. 279, my italics). This appears to mourn the failure of fascism, but I prefer to think of as reflecting Ballard’s oft-mentioned idea of ‘immersing oneself in the most dangerous elements and swimming’. Just to confuse matters further, on the following (and last) page of the book, Pearson turns pessimistic again and ruminates that ‘In time, unless the sane woke and rallied themselves, an even fiercer republic would open the doors and spin the turnstiles of its beckoning paradise’ (Kingdom Come, op cit, p. 280).
[62] See, for example, ‘An Interview with J. G. Ballard’, Mississippi Review op cit, p 33. And the following brief quote well-illustrates Ballard’s reasoning: ‘I certainly do believe that we should immerse ourselves in the destructive element. Far better to do so consciously than find ourselves tossed into the pool when we’re not looking’, interview in The Paris Review #94, 1984, p 143.
[63] Daniel Woodley, Fascism and Political Theory: Critical Perspectives on Fascist Ideology, Routledge (London & New York), 2010, pp 14-18.
[64] c.f. Ballard on the distinction between manifest and latent content: ‘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 content’, from ‘The New Science Fiction: A conversation between J G Ballard and George MacBeth’ in Langdon Jones (ed), The New SF, Hutchinson (London), 1969, p 50.

Advertiser’s Announcement: ‘Sex: Inner Space: J.G. Ballard’. Ambit no. 33, 1967.

Better Living through Psychopathology
Benjamin Noys (2009)

Presentation at at ‘The Future’, David Roberts Art Foundation, Fitzrovia, London (5 November 2009).

The image of the future which I have selected is one of the series of J. G. Ballard’s pseudo-advertisements that he published in Ambit no. 33 in 1967. Ballard explains that:

Back in the late 60s I produced a series of advertisements which I placed in various publications (Ambit, New Worlds, Ark and various continental alternative magazines), doing the art work myself and arranging for the blockmaking, and then delivering the block to the particular journal just as would a commercial advertiser. Of course I was advertising my own conceptual ideas, but I wanted to do so within the formal circumstances of classic commercial advertising – I wanted ads that would look in place in Vogue, Paris Match, Newsweek, etc. To maintain the integrity of the project I paid the commercial rate for the page, even in the case of Ambit of which I was and still am prose editor. I would have liked to have branched out into Vogue and Newsweek, but cost alone stopped me … (R/S 147).

The actual image is a still from Stephen Dwoskin’s 1963 film Alone (USA 1963 13min), of a woman masturbating. The text is a typically concise and forensic manifesto for Ballard’s own counter-science fiction.

The reason for my fascination with this image as an image of the future, which is in fact over forty years old, is that it represents the deliberate attempt to construct an image of the future that can resist the obsolescence of the future. This might seem an ironic proposition when we consider the fact that this image was created in the mid-60s – a time when, as Ballard retrospectively notes, ‘people … were intensely interested in the future’ (1994). Yet, he also notes that ‘[s]adly, at some point in the 1960s our sense of the future seemed to atrophy and die’ and that, by the 70s, only ‘a few romantics like myself still believe[d] that our sense of the future remain[ed] intact’ (1994). In fact, the atrophy of the future took place because of the impoverishment of our images of the future. The possibility of the future became blocked by those images of the future that seemed to attest to faith in a better tomorrow: the space race, two years away from the moon landing, pop futurism, the consumption-driven Keynesian compact, ‘the dreams that money can buy’, ‘advertising and pseudoevents’ (R/S 96). These images of a promised land of ‘outer space and the far future’ (R/S 97) had been predicted and generated by the science fiction of the 1950s. Locating himself as a science-fiction writer Ballard recognised the exhaustion of this tradition in its realisation: ‘by an ironic paradox, modern science fiction became the first casualty of the changing world it anticipated and helped to create.’ (R/S 97)

Ballard’s image is a counter-image to this atrophy and impoverishment of the future. It is a ‘chromosome of the future’ designed to ‘divide and grow in the reader’s mind’ (Ballard 1994). We can understand it as belonging to that conceptual Third World War Ballard would later invoke in The Atrocity Exhibition: ‘The blitzkriegs will be fought out on the spinal battlefields, in terms of the postures we assume, of our traumas mimetized in the angle of a wall or balcony.’ (AE 11) With the threat that ‘the future is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all-voracious present’ (R/S 97), the counter-image tries to extract a new future; the obsolete science-fiction of outer space has to give way to the new science-fiction of inner space. Reviewing Hitler’s Mein Kampf in 1969 Ballard remarks ‘[t]he psychopath never dates’ and speculates that: ‘perhaps one reason why the American and Russian space programs have failed to catch our imaginations is that this quality of explicit psychopathology is missing.’ (R/S 104) In response conventional science-fiction can only ratify its own transition to archaism, by producing images of the future that are ‘a kind of historical romance in reverse, a sealed world into which the hard light of contemporary reality was never really allowed to penetrate.’ (R/S 97) (Ballard’s reference is 2001, but I also think of Star Wars).

The colonisation of reality by fictions requires a dialectic of involution and externalisation. We turn inward to the body and the psyche – fiction is a branch of neurology – as ‘the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads.’ (R/S 98) And yet that inner reality has been turned inside-out, as our innermost desires are always-already realised by science, pornography, and advertising. For Ballard the usual elements of the so-called ‘human condition’ – sex and death – are the first casualties of this war. Instead of de-conceptualising them, to recover their ‘natural’ form, à la Reich or Marcuse, we must take them as manipulable elements ‘of a wholly conceptual character’ (AT 80). The ‘node of reality’ is not even some residual or surplus (Lacanian) capital ‘R’ Real, which could resist the totalising forces of mediatisation. Instead, ‘We’re living in an abstracted world, where there aren’t any values, where rather than fall back, one has to, as Conrad said, immerse oneself in the most destructive element, and swim.’ (R/S 161)

To wage this Third World (Image) War we have to move deeper into our own psychoses (AT 9) – to immerse ourselves in the image-stream to wrest the future from the perpetual present by an ‘elective psychopathy’ (Ballard 2008). The subsumption of the psyche makes it available for further re-conceptualisation, for the invention of new pathologies and new perversions. Ballard’s image is a radicalisation of the fact ‘that sex is becoming more and more a conceptual act, an intellectualization divorced from affect and physiology alike’ (AT 56). We can imagine it as the creation of one of the psychiatric patients in The Atrocity Exhibition, the future image guerrillas of this Third World War: ‘these bizarre images, with their fusion of Eniwetok and Luna Park, Freud and Elizabeth Taylor’ (AT 7). The involution to inner space, to scenarios of nerve and blood vessel, forms an alternative ‘conceptualized psychopathology’ (AT 99) of re-externalisation.

The ‘future’ is now an image concocted from the iconography of the mediatised unconscious, in which Jung’s archetypes and Freud’s drives are re-figured in ‘the nasal prepuce of L.B.J., crashed helicopters, the pudenda of Ralph Nader, Eichmann in drag, the climax of a New York happening: a dead child.’ (AT 20) The result is that these images become reversible; as one character ponders in The Atrocity Exhibition: ‘Are space vehicles merely overgrown V-2s, or are they Jung’s symbols of redemption, ciphers in some futuristic myth?’ (AT 84) Instead of merely being quaint and anachronistic technologies harnessed to an anodyne future, we can re-conceptualise and re-pathologise space vehicles. The science-fiction writer creates a new ‘predictive mytholog[y]’ (R/S 42): myths of the future that are also performative acts to create and construct that future.

From the original Doubleday edition, Michael Foreman’s artwork for an Atrocity Exhibition chapter, ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’.

Through the choice of psychopathology as a conscious act we can shape new written mythologies of memory and desire. The images of the ‘future’ that previously closed-out the future can now become the material for mythologies of a truly new future. Of course, the problem of such a mythology is that the more successful it is the more it is absorbed by the very mediascape it mimetizes. As Ballard writes ‘A lot of my prophecies about the alienated society are going to come true’ (R/S 155), however, if they come true, then they become superfluous. In The Atrocity Exhibition a ‘Festival of Atrocity Films’ is put on in a venue presumably very much like this one: ‘the results were disappointing; whatever Talbot had hoped for had clearly not materialized. The violence was little more than a sophisticated entertainment. One day he would carry out of Marxist analysis of this lumpen intelligentsia.’ (AT 19) Leaving aside the interesting question of what that analysis might be, and its relevance today, Ballard presciently probes the neuralgic point of his own fiction. The coinage ‘Ballardian’ is the very sign of this ironic success, as Ballard’s own fiction succumbs to the fate he had sketched for the science-fiction of the 1950s: ‘bec[oming] the first casualty of the changing world it anticipated and helped to create’.

It appears that the angle between two walls does not have a happy ending. Ballard’s own creation of himself as a brand or concept becomes another image in the media stream. This, however, is the essential risk of Ballard’s own active nihilism, which accepts that abstraction and conceptualisation operate all the way down: there is no point of immunity or safety from which one might safely create a ‘pure’ image of the future. His images of the future are always, explicitly, transitory, with ‘in-built-obsolescence’. In response we could extrapolate two possible positions from Ballard’s work. The first is that of a quasi-Weberian re-enchantment of a denuded reality through re-conceptualisation. In The Atrocity Exhibition the character Travers ‘has composed a series of new sexual deviations, of a wholly conceptual character, in an attempt to surmount this death of affect’ (AE 80) We could also cite Ballard’s retrospective tendency to position The Atrocity Exhibition as a work of moral commentary. We fall back from the future into a kind of Swiftean satire, at once reactionary and conservative.

The second position is something like what Nietzsche calls ‘completed nihilism’: the traversal and transcendence of the nihilism Ballard anatomises. In this case, Ballard’s dialectic proceeds by the ‘bad side’: the worse the better. He remarked in a 2006 interview that: ‘I’m somebody who stands by the side of the road with a sign saying, Dangerous Bends Ahead – Slow Down.’ He pauses. ‘Although it is true that I sometimes seem to be saying Dangerous Bends Ahead – Speed Up.’ (in Brown, 2006: 20) That speeding up, this accelerationism, of course risks passing from an active nihilism to a mere passive nihilism: the embrace of what is, and the closure of any possibility of the future, or the courting of a deliberate cynicism that re-converges with the position of the moral critic as disgusted and disenchanted observer.

This unease or instability is I want to suggest the reason why Ballard’s image of the future is so resonant. This image, of course, appears as a very 60s image, imbued with the kind of deliberately perverse utopianism that no longer registers with us except in the forms of nostalgia or cynicism. The difference is that this image disjoints itself from that moment by its prescient refusal of the usual models of repression, liberation, and recuperation. In The Atrocity Exhibition Ballard notes that images of elective psychopathy, in which Vietnam combat films are shown with a muzak soundtrack, create an environment ‘in which work-tasks, social relationships and overall motivation reached sustained levels of excellence’ (AT 94). The release of repressed desires can be made to serve the logic of the ‘perpetual present’ of accumulation. This is the mechanism of ‘repressive desublimation’, sketched by Marcuse, in which our desires are ‘liberated’ as the ‘dreams that money can buy’. In response the writer can only immerse themselves and swim, by imagining ‘an optimum torture and execution sequence’ (AE 93). This image fascinates me as an image of the future because it embraces fully the saturation of the future by abstraction and the only remaining possibility being further abstraction. For all its kitsch retro-sixties styling the encrypted moment of resistance figured in this image is the embrace of a future that never really took place, in which the only form of a future we can construct is one that takes place through absolute abstraction.

Bibliography
Ballard, J. G. (1984), Re/Search: J. G. Ballard 8/9. [R/S]
___ (1985) The Atrocity Exhibition [1970], London: Triad Granada. [AE]
___ (1994) ‘Introduction’ in Myths of the Near Future, London: Vintage.
___ (2008) ‘An Exhibition of Atrocities: J. G. Ballard on Mondo Films’, An Interview with Mark Goodall, The Ballardian, http://www.ballardian.com/jg-ballard-on-mondo-films [consulted 16 April 2009].

Brown, M. (2006) ‘From Here to Dystopia: Interview with J. G. Ballard’, Telegraph Magazine 2 September: 16-22.

Nietzsche, F. (1968) The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage.

After Robert Anton Wilson, my 2010 goal is to “create the happiest, funniest, most romantic reality-tunnel consistent with my brain signals”. And so the following is probably of no interest to anyone but me…

But here goes, anyway: for 2009, ballardian.com’s top 10 most-read posts, search terms leading to the site and links from other sites:

TOP 10 MOST-READ POSTS ON BALLARDIAN.COM FOR 2009
(Note that most of these are old posts, and, surprise, surprise: the X-ray porn comes in at no. 1; there’s depravity also at no. 5, 6 & 10. Good to see urbanism and film posts making a strong showing, too.):

1. ‘The fusion of science and pornography’ (WARNING! Exceptionally unsafe for work) – 1 July 2008

“Wim Delvoye’s ‘Kiss’ series of x-ray art echoes The Atrocity Exhibition and the illustrations of Phoebe Gloeckner. WARNING: this post is indisputably unsafe for work. No, seriously: you have been warned.”

2. Coming Never: Richard Gere as Blake – 7 May 2008

“Aside from the films of Empire and Crash, Ballard has had almost all his novels optioned for the screen at some stage. Suitors include Richard Gere, Samuel L. Jackson, Jack Nicholson, David Frost and a trio of scantily-clad cavegirls.”

3. Crash! Full-Tilt Autogeddon – 10 August 2007

“Although little known, Harley Cokliss’s 1971 short film Crash!, based on passages from The Atrocity Exhibition, has something even more prized, something else the Cronenberg and Spielberg adaptations could never have: it stars J.G. Ballard. With his brooding, hypermasculine presence, Ballard plays a version of Atrocity’s ‘T’ character alongside Gabrielle Drake, her own role a composite of the book’s archetypal ‘sex-kit’ women.”

4. Michael Jackson’s Facelift – 2 July 2009

“‘As Michael Jackson reached middle age, the skin of both his cheeks and neck tended to sag from failure of the supporting structures. His naso-labial folds deepened, and the soft tissues along his jaw fell forward. His jowls tended to increase. In profile the creases of his neck lengthened and the chin-neck contour lost its youthful outline and became convex.’”

5. Dead Models – 31 October 2007

“A photo shoot for America’s Next Top Model, on the subject of dead girls. The judges’ comments have to be seen to be believed.”

6. Triple Transgression – 26 December 2007

“This disturbing photo feature focuses on peeping toms in Japan and Kohei Yoshiyuki, the photographer who documented them in the 1970s.”

7. ‘Architectures of the Near Future’: An Interview with Nic Clear – 24 December 2008

“Nic Clear leads the remarkable Unit 15 course on the built environment at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. In this interview, Nic explains the course’s focus on the work of Ballard as a way to counter the lamentable state of current discourse on architecture. The article includes clips of six stunning films produced by students as part of this Ballard-inspired methodology.”

8. Crown Casino: ‘A snarling, digitised mutilation’ – 27 May 2009

“Simon Sellars, Mel Chilianis and Melb Psy take an audiovisual tour of Melbourne’s Crown Casino, seeking to map the coordinates of this micronational zone — consumer-driven control space with a raging need.”

9. R.I.P. JG Ballard, 1930-2009 – 20 April 2009

“Goodbye, Jim…”

10. Love Among the Mannequins – 15 January 2008

“Here’s a new campaign from fashion label Dsquared2, featuring sex with crash-test mannequins. But it doesn’t appear to be selling anything. What exactly *is* it selling? Note the photographer: none other than our old mucker, Steven Meisel.”

TOP 10 MOST-FOLLOWED LINKS TO BALLARDIAN.COM FROM OTHER SITES:
(surprise: no porn)

1. http://www.radiohead.com/deadairspace/index.php?a=469
2. http://www.jgballard.com
3. http://www.planetaki.com
4. http://www.metafilter.com
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_Come_(Ballard_novel)
6. http://www.facebook.com
7. http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=7221
8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._G._Ballard
9. http://twitter.com/ballardian
10. http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org

TOP 10 SEARCH-ENGINE TERMS LEADING VISITORS TO BALLARDIAN.COM:
(very surprised at the paucity of porn, also that ‘ballardian’ beats ‘jg ballard’)

1. ballardian
2. jg ballard
3. gabrielle drake
4. ballard
5. medical fetish
6. make love
7. computers internet blog
8. concrete island
9. ballardian.com
10. atrocity exhibition

Soundwalk by MELANIE CHILIANIS; photography by Simon Sellars.

“The consumer society is a kind of soft police state. We think we have choice, but everything is compulsory. We have to keep buying or we fail as citizens. Consumerism creates huge unconscious needs that only fascism can satisfy. If anything, fascism is the form that consumerism takes when it opts for elective madness.”

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come (2006).

We took a recent jaunt to Melbourne’s Crown Casino, prime Ballardian space, in order to map the coordinates of this micronational zone, this city state — consumer-driven control space. We took photos on a Nokia 6288 — photography disguised as furtive texting — while Mel Chil performed a secret sound walk. Her head bowed and her eyes averted (for soundwalkers must not allow the other senses to interfere with the keen art of listening), she strode silently behind us through the Zone, her super-powered, omidirectional microphone and optimal recording unit stuffed into her bag to note the results.

Her sound file* is below — play it loud while reading for maximum effect, for clearly the audiospatial disorientation engendered by Casino space plays a critical role in maintaining the illusion of languid disconnectedness.

* Note: you won’t see the audio player in Google Reader.

Crown Casino increases people’s perception of frequency of winning not only by having big visual displays and advertisements but also by having announcements over a loudspeaker of a poker machine jackpot winner. If every gambler who has lost everything is announced over the loudspeaker in the same way, problem gambling would be greatly reduced. Moreover, the promotion of the illusion of winning is also built into a poker machine in which a winning pay out is made with a loud noise as coins come crashing into the metal pay out tray to remind nearby players that winning is a real possibility.

Public Gambling Enquiry, Australian Vietnamese Women’s Welfare Association.

It’s a unique phenomenon… [a] metropolis … utterly devoted to leisure, something close to suspended animation. And it’s very inviting. But people lying on their backs are very vulnerable to predators.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Live in London’, 1996.

The signage declares, ‘We’re creating a new world at Crown’, a come-on none can resist. But even before entering the Casino, we were aware that we were no longer in the world of quotidian politeness. The first task was to pass through the borderzone, out on the concrete apron surrounding the complex, where brutal expediency in combat with pornographic greed meant that even bag ladies had to secure their shopping trolleys if left unattended.

But this isn’t reality, it’s not even a dream. It’s sort of a halfway house between the two.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Live in London’, 1996.

Opposite the Crown Entertainment Complex, bordering the west side, is the Melbourne Exhibition Centre. Its constructivist lines slice the sky like an obsolete, forward-thinking city of the immediate retro-future to come, a take-off ramp into the ozone that seems to suggest the only way out is through an ascent to heaven, or … this way, down, deep into the east, into Crown — into half-life.

He stared at the silent aisles, working out his challenge to this eventless world. We left the liquor store and paused by a Thai restaurant, whose empty tables receded through a shadow world of flock wallpaper and gilded elephants. Next to it was an untenanted retail unit, a concrete vault like an abandoned segment of space-time.

J.G. Ballard, Cocaine Nights, 1996.

We enter, ‘wearing the Crown‘, instantly absorbed by the otherworldliness of the Casino. The effect is total — there are no clocks anywhere to be seen, creating a timeless zone in which the breakdown of the biological clock (the legend of old ladies urinating at poker tables, rather than missing a hand, for example) is the only indication of chronometry. Perhaps the only remaining link to temporality is the schedule of the televised horse racing. A horse — horses? — seem to haunt the interior…

There is no natural light of any kind, no windows. Mirrors take up entire walls, distending the innards of the place into infinity. The long walk between the mid-section of poker machines and blackjack tables seems to never end. Hovering alien ectoplasm, the sickly UV of Giger-style nightmares, falls into view. Magic mushrooms hang from the ceiling, glowing lysergically. We are in a bunker, are we in a bunker? Miles below the Earth’s surface, below the Earth’s surface? Drinking, gambling and watching spooling sports. Palms itchy.

The first shrines had begun to appear, wayside altars for passing shoppers, places of pause and reflection for those making endless journeys within the universe of the dome.

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come, 2006.

Hanging from the ceiling, a plaster-cast altar of motorcycle fascism, its strident coat of arms larger than the machine itself. Lest the devotees become too overwhelmed and seize the handlebars, a sign warns: “Display Model Only”. Trinkets pile up on the carpet around the altar, burnt offerings of cigarette butts, an unused condom packet, coins, keys. No passing cleaner makes an effort to clean this up and it seems arranged in a perfect concentric ring. Skin hurts.

The resilient carpet is custom designed and can soak up blood, vomit and semen without leaving visible trace. A crazy man says he knows the man who made it and he makes a fortune, too. He also designs bodybags for prom queens addicted to cocaine and ultraviolent bondage. Did a crazy man really say that he knew a man? (Bringing new meaning to the game of ‘craps’, another urban legend tells of sliding compartments in the toilets that can quickly open to dispose of suicidal high-rollers who lost everything without bringing the corpse back through the main arena.) Very near by, another man looks over suspiciously at our furtive photographic activity, but then he seems distracted by what would appear to be an insect buzzing around his head. He bats at it but there is no insect anywhere to be seen. As we walk away, he seems to be madly shaking invisible bugs out of his hair. Is he shaking invisible bugs out of his hair?

The people no longer wish to be freed from their chains, preferring to use them to accessorise their designer handbags instead. Eyes pop.

The neon façades of the casinos and hotels were now so many cataracts of white lava, walls of incadescent pink and purple that seemed to set alight the surrounding jungle, turning the Strip and the downtown casino centre into an inflamed, shadowless realm through which the occasional armoured car would appear like a spectral dragon on the floor of a furnace.

J.G. Ballard, Hello America (1981).

This green-skinned hepcat appeared to us as if in a dream, doffing his cap with sleazy grace. ‘Come with me to the Food Court’, he moaned in our already twitching ears. ‘I know a mystical place — a snack bar — where they spike the Alcoholic Super Slushies with Viagra, and where cyborg men with vat-grown muscle can inflate their pecs with a bicycle pump to 150psi. It’s called Food & Booze Express City and it’s open 24/7, natch, because you know it, don’t you, man, that Dreamland never sleeps. Oh, and dig: the women are unFUCKINGbelievable’.

Crawford gazed across the peninsula at the gutted shell of the Hollinger house.
‘A year from now some hotel or casino complex will stand there. On this coast the past isn’t allowed to exist.’
‘Why not keep the house as it is?’
‘As a tribal totem? A warning to all those time-share salesmen and nightclub touts? That’s not a bad idea…’

J.G. Ballard, Cocaine Nights.

The final sane act of Nietzsche, that great admirer of self-serving individualism, was one of pity — to collapse to the floor and cradle a beaten horse. In this one compassionate act, he disavowed a lifetime of celebrating self-interest. At Crown, they have decapitated the horse and mounted its suffering head as a totem of gambling law: ‘Let he who is strong fill his pockets, and he who is weak empty his’.

This glowing tube filled with inanimate coin is in actuality a super-computer that runs on pure cash. Pulsing throughout that pile of super-compacted currency is a liquid charged with megawatts of electricity and data, a new breed of viscous fibre optics that draws upon the inordinate strength of abstract social wealth to create simulated neurological pathways with highly complex processing power greater than military mainframes. This super-computer runs the whole operation here at Crown Casino and it is called ‘Mr Severin’. Mr Severin’s word is law and he will not tolerate any deviance from that law at any time.

A lake of neon signs formed a shimmering corona, miles of strip-lighting raced along the porticos of the casinos, zipped up the illuminated curtain-walling of the hotels and spilled over into mushy cascades. Under the ultramarine sky, so dark now that the tone had left their faces, the spectacle of this sometime gambling capital seemed as unreal as an electrographic dream.

J.G. Ballard, Hello America.

We became touched by a presence that was almost entirely indescribable except in rhyming couplets of ever-increasing incredulity, ridiculous-sounding as we mouthed them aloud, like cod Shakespeare. An alien intelligence reaching deep into our souls to finger our pathetic humanity with a cold machinic rationalism that was actually a little bit naughty and a little bit nice. A mystical vision appeared — for we were in the circuit, now — a monolith slowly, slowly descending from the ceiling. White light grew and grew. In the zone.

‘Remember, Richard, consumerism is a redemptive ideology. At its best, it tries to aestheticize violence, though sadly it doesn’t always succeed.’
…
‘Every shopping mall and retail park turning into a local soviet. A popular uprising that starts at the nearest Tesco. It’s possible. There’s a hunger for violence, that’s why sport obsesses the whole country. Everyone’s suffocating — too many barcode readers, too many CCTV cameras and double yellow lines. That second bomb really got them going.’

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come.

While their wives indulged in the more passive pursuits of bingo and fruit machines, the mankind gathered in their pit to drink, watch high-volume, biff-and-bash contact sports and back their armchair punditry with hard cash. The more they drank, the more they lost. The more they lost, the more they drank. A gloom began to permeate the air, so much so that condensation seemed to drip from the walls like Amityville house blood, and one sensed that sporadic, remorseless violence might break out at any moment. On the sport screen, some rugby players tore off their clothes and compared biceps and for a moment it seemed the crowd might follow suit. Only one measure could prevent this — a variety show. Mr Severin: call on Elvissey!

Completely Elvis: The Elvises are in the building! Their uncanny sound and appearance will make you feel as if you are watching the King himself. Amazing musicianship elevates the entertaining and genuine portrayals of the famous songs we all know and love. The incredible authenticity of the show takes you on a ride that is unprecedented. Costumes, charisma and charm are coupled with the songs that made Elvis the undisputed ‘King of Rock and Roll’. This combination of artists is not like any ever seen in Australia before.

Crown Casino, 2009.

This man, this fat, tubular, tubercular man – his impersonation was no longer of Elvis, but of a thousand other Elvis impersonators. A discount simulacrum. His women had feathers up their bums and on their heads, and these vixens liked to conga-line to within an inch of some men’s lives. Beer boiling in the glass.

“The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the Sixth Reich”

Hunter S. Thompson.

Projected above our heads, 20 feet high, on the big sports screen: the manifestation of schizoid hyperactivity.

Fleeting impressions, an illusion of meaning floating over a sea of undefined emotions. We’re talking about a virtual politics unconnected to any reality, one which redefines reality as itself. The public willingly colludes in its own deception.

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come.

The horse equine reporter man reads the racehorse results, stutters in vertical hold, image flickers and splits straight down the middle to finally reveal the really real reality underneath. A snarling, digitised mutilation. Mr Severin has had a breakdown — someone, somewhere in here has won far too much cash. The system cannot cope, gets stuck in an infinity loop, cracks and breaks. The noise of clinking coin and tolling fruit-machine bells seems to increase to unbearable levels. But that is the great release, for we have pierced the veil, seen beyond, out into the desertified Racecourse of the Real. No gears and pulleys behind the mask, Phil K Dick-style, but a roiling, raging black void of utter nothingness.

Headaches and a necessary evacuation followed.

One day there would be another Metro-Centre and another desperate and deranged dream. Marchers would drill and wheel while another cable announcer sang out the beat. In time, unless the sane woke and rallied themselves, an even fiercer republic would open the doors and spin the turnstiles of its beckoning paradise.

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come.

J.G. Ballard, photographed at his home in Shepperton for Liberation Newspaper, Paris. Photo courtesy burningrolls.

In Part 1, I asked whether Ballard’s three levels of perception could apply to Ballard’s five advertiser announcements. Look more closely. The first and fifth ads of this series are specifically about and feature Ms Churchill – first just her face, and then just her naked, natural, seaweed-covered body. This bifurcation suggests a natural split between head and body, between mental and physical, between latent and manifest. It also suggests that the three middle ads form some kind of bridge between the eye-dominated conceptual purity of the first ad, and the genital-dominated natural purity of the last. How can this fit within Ballard’s three levels? Here’s a possible answer: ‘Homage’, with its glamorous pose and languid look could represent the world of public events, with its sexuality mimetized on giant billboards across the land.

ABOVE: Detail: ‘Homage to Claire Churchill’ (left) and ‘Venus Smiles’ (right).

On another level, ‘Venus Smiles’ could represent the world of the immediate personal environment, the geometry of postures, the angles of desire, that which has been captured within the immediate and present. This leaves the three middle ads – those without Ms Churchill— as a sort of Coma, Kline and Xero of the inner world; three versions of woman as an imaginary construct, each representing a specific psychopathology of desire. Seen this way the set becomes a kind of psychological study of a love, a public declaration of how, on each level, Ballard can dissect the elements of love into their specific components and conceptualize them as eroticized images, born from his idiosyncratic perception and expressing the validity of his feelings.

This appears to be the manifest… what of the latent? Obviously, given their textual basis in The Atrocity Exhibition, they are also ads for ideas apparently buried within the story/chapters. This additional layer of meaning gives us a new kind of condensation in already compressed text.

If we look at these ads this way, then ‘Homage’ becomes an ad for ‘Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown’, and in this story Catherine Austin and Dr Nathan actually discuss Ballard’s series of ads. In a chapter called ‘Operating Formulae’, Nathan shows Austin the ‘elegant and mysterious advertisements which had appeared that afternoon in copies of Vogue and Paris Match’. Her response will be discussed when ‘Venus Smiles’ is analyzed.

ABOVE: Detail: ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’ (left), ‘A Neural Interval’ (middle) and ‘Placental Insufficiency’ (right).

The three other ads segue neatly into the stories and ideas they promote: ‘Angle’ is from ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’ a chapter in which Tallis attempts to solve the riddle of Marilyn’s suicide. In the story, the angle between two walls results in the death of Karen Novotny, and a happy ending is problematic as we’re not told if Tallis was able to “solve her suicide” in Novotny’s alternate death.

‘Neural Interval’ promotes ‘The Great American Nude’, and again features the death of Karen Novotny, who dies while trying to “break the code” of an immense plastic representation of Elizabeth Taylor’s body. Pleading for the “positive effects of sexual perversions”, ‘Neural’ supplies a variation on the Novotny “sex kit” with art of a woman encased in sado-masochistic fetish gear. As Ballard says in his later Atrocity Exhibition annotations: “the mass media publicly offer a range of options which previously have been available only in private.” This ad, apparently, reveals yet another of those “options”.

‘Placental Insufficiency’ is associated with ‘You and Me and the Continuum’, a story about a “botched second coming” and a time-man pilot who inhabits the story like an alien in Minkowski space-time, a virgin child outside of an oedipal world. This ad inverts the story, however, as the “insufficiency” of the model’s placenta guarantees no savior, and the freezing of time and space in a daily afternoon ritual. Whatever – the incredible choice of art, a sort of female William Burroughs, is guaranteed to attract your attention – as does all the art in this set.

Like ‘Homage’, ‘Venus’ advertises ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’, a recapitulation of the Apollo disaster by a staging of the Dealey Plaza death of John Kennedy and the car crashes of Ralph Nader. The story includes one telling chapter which Ballard may using as the basis of this ad. Entitled “What exactly is he trying to sell?”, the copy block features an exchange between Dr Nathan and Catherine Austin, who asks the question in response to these selfsame ads found in popular European publications. Dr Nathan: “’You, Dr Austin. These advertisements constitute an explicit portrait of yourself, a contour map of your own body, an obscene newsreel of yourself during intercourse’”.

Need Ballard be any clearer? Which is why the argument can be made that in this set of ads, Claire Churchill is not only Claire Churchill, but Ballard’s stand-in for Catherine Austin. And further, that each ad represents a conceptualization of not only Claire Churchill, but of the varied, perverse and geometric sexuality of The Atrocity Exhibition.

While Ballard was working on his five ‘Advertiser’s Announcements’, he also found time to create another advertisement for Ambit, entitled ‘J.G. Ballard’s Court Circular’ which appeared in October, 1968.

From an advertising point of view, ‘Court Circular’ appears to have no specific layout at all. Whereas ‘Project for a New Novel’ crammed copy into the rough shape of a billboard, and the ‘Advertiser’s Announcements’ are based on the techniques of real ads, ‘Court Circular’ fills a full-page of a tabloid newspaper and doesn’t resemble an advertisement at all. In fact, given its layout, it appears to be the reverse of an ad, with the headline on the bottom, followed by art, and then the text at the top.

Does this have meaning? One could argue that Ballard knows well how ads should look, so why this inversion? Mike Holliday makes the point that each element of the ad corresponds to Ballard’s three levels of reality, with the photograph of the models representing mediatized reality, Bruce McLean’s stylized drawings the imaginative reality, and Ballard’s concrete poem – a printout – the “everyday” reality.

However, according to a comment Tim Chapman made on ballardian.com, we can also take clues from the ad’s name: “The Court Circular is the daily diary of official engagements of members of the Royal Family, which was carried in ‘newspapers of record’ such as The Times and Daily Telegraph. So the ‘Court Circular’ would have been an expected feature of the newspapers that this special issue of Ambit seems to have been pastiching. ‘JG Ballard’s Court Circular’ could suggest that it’s intended as the record of Ballard’s own official engagements… or, given Ballard’s oft-stated anti-monarchic principles, it may just be satirical.”

The idea of satire makes sense, given the upside-down nature of the ad, which appears to want to be read from the bottom up. In this configuration, the components might be seen to represent Ballard’s conceptual relationship with Ms Churchill, revealing her as the combination of three disparate works of “art” – the photographic, the illustrated, and the described, with the last example ironically given place of honour by being put at the top.

In any case, upside down or not, ‘Court Circular’ is not a triumph of form over content, and as an ad barely lives up to its name. Perhaps that’s the point, as circles have no top or bottom, and you can read this “ad” in a circular manner.

My last example of Ballard’s experiments with advertising is the extended campaigns detailed in Kingdom Come, a novel ostensibly about consumerism, but also about the “message” of advertising and its effects upon an unsuspecting community.

In some ways a variation of the themes in Ballard’s short story ‘The Subliminal Man’, Kingdom Come envisages a society coerced to consume not for economic reasons, but to slake an unconscious thirst for violence hiding under widespread boredom, ennui and ignorance. In actuality, Kingdom Come presents us with two campaigns, both originating in the mind of the protagonist, Richard Pearson – the first for a car designed for driving in London, and the second for the Metro shopping centre in the suburb of Brooklands.

ABOVE: Fictional billboard campaign for HarperCollins’ Kingdom Come promotion.

Pearson’s campaign for a new micro-car is based on the slogan, “Mad is bad. Bad is good.” This upside-down approach, called “strange” by Pearson, is designed to free the consumer from their usual relationships with cars – that is, giving them iconic status – and instead treat these objects as a vehicle for psychopathology – in this case, drive like maniacs and transform yourself into a liberating vehicle of violence and destruction. It’s not boring. And the fact people died as a result of this strange campaign? “Another of the great advertising breakthroughs that got nowhere”, Pearson complains. You can almost hear Ballard chuckling in the background. And while it may be liberating for the populace to buy very small cars with the idea of using them as weapons of psychic liberation, we are, unfortunately, not told anything more about this campaign – except for the fact it got Pearson fired from his job at the ad agency, a situation which then precipitated his divorce.

Once in the suburbs, Pearson irrationally decides to reprise his radical ad campaign: “Brooklands and the motorway towns were the ultimate consumer test panel, and here I could put into practice the subversive ideas that had cost me my career”.

What Ballard is talking about here when he says “subversive” is instinctive advertising – a direct message to the irrational, the purely emotional, the self-serving pleasure principle. The benefits are not product-oriented (new model, spend money, impress your colleagues and neighbours) as they are in ‘The Subliminal Man’, but rather this campaign is social and attempts to appeal to a new kind of consumer who responds not to rational messages about brand personality or product benefits, but to messages designed to appeal to the id, that unorganized, unconscious part of the personality structure that contains the basic drives. In Freud’s formulation: “It is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality… we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations… It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle.” (12)

The id is also amoral and egocentric, it is without a sense of time, completely illogical, primarily sexual, and infantile in its emotional development. The id can further be divided into two categories – each ruled by the life or death instincts, and in Kingdom Come Ballard focuses his attention on the death instinct, and how it is present in Pearson’s attempts to escape reality through fiction, media, and aggression.

Pearson’s advertising strategies for Brooklands reflect this unorganized outlook: “Message? There is no message. Messages belong to the old politics. No slogans, no messages. New politics. No manifestos, no commitments. No easy answers. They decide what they want”. OK, no message. But what is a non-message? For Pearson, that’s easy: “Madness is the key to everything. Small doses, applied when no-one is really looking.” Overlooking the nitpick that even a non-message is still a message (as we shall see), one could give Pearson the benefit of the doubt and suggest we’ll be seeing something rather different from the usual “50% Off Sale” campaign at the Metro Centre.

ABOVE: Fictional billboard campaign for HarperCollins’ Kingdom Come promotion.

In Kingdom Come we don’t see any actual advertisements, but Ballard does describe the campaign in some detail and outline the media to be used: giant billboards, relentless TV commercials and personal appearances of the campaign’s pitchman, one David Cruise. Pearson’s idea is to reveal him as a “fugitive and haunted hero of a noir film… as a trapped creature of strange and wayward moods – grimacing, frowning, angry, morose, hallucinating and obsessed.” In other words, similar to a four-year-old child… or the pleasure-seeking, pain-averse id.

The novel describes three billboards and six television commercials. As any sophisticated marketer would, Ballard has Pearson design a campaign that builds on itself through evocative scenes, each slightly more fantastic (fictional) than the last. They are indeed mad, although Pearson later calls them “ironic soft-sells”, which is a masterpiece of understatement or self-delusion.

• Billboard #1 shows Cruise, as a “fugitive and haunted hero”, sitting at the wheel of his car, staring ahead at the open road, “and whatever nemesis lay in wait for him.”
• Billboard #2 reveals Cruise in a “nightmare replay of a Strindberg play”, threatening and confused as he stares across a showroom of kitchens.
• TV Spot #1 has Cruise staring “almost ecstatically” at a beat-up garbage can.
• In TV Spot #2 Cruise rings doorbells at random, and when the housewife answers the door, he scowls at her as if to hit her, or beg a place to stay.
• TV Spot #3 shows Cruise “haunting” the Brooklands racing circuit and his mind being “tortured” by squealing tires.
• TV Spot #4 shows Cruise following a group of schoolgirls across a Heathrow concourse “like a would-be child abductor.”
• In TV Spot #5 Cruise is shown howling from the roof of a multi-storey car park.
• TV Spot #6 is just hinted at, but apparently the action takes place in a slaughterhouse. Pearson asks: “The abattoir? Not too gloomy?” And is answered: “Never. Existential choice.” So fraught with death one hardly needs to know the plot.

Pearson himself calls these ads “tense but meaningless psychodramas”, but of course the “meaning” is in the imagery itself – aggressive and violent. It’s what Ballard calls “elective insanity” dressed up in the iconography of the cinema. No longer trapped in their civilized cage of guilty repression and empty minds, the populace of Brooklands quickly responds to Pearson’s siren call of irrational freedom. But then, this is what they’ve been dreaming of: “…people are looking for their own psychopathology. They‘re looking for madness as a way out”. As Pearson notes, his advertisements build on each other in such a way that, “Together they made sense at the deepest levels, scenes from the collective dream forever playing in the back alleys of their mind.”

LEFT: Fictional billboard campaign for HarperCollins’ Kingdom Come promotion.

Pearson’s reconnection with the reality principle comes as he’s driving the streets. Reflecting on the violence his campaign has created, he finally understands the consequences of his actions: “I saw myself as taking part in a merchandising scheme in a suburban shopping mall, using a ‘bad is good’ come-on that was meant to be the ultimate in ironic soft sells. I had recruited a third-rate cable presenter and some-time actor to play the licensed jester, the dwarf at the court of the Spanish kings. But the irony had evaporated, and the slogan had become a political movement… The ad man was faced with the final humiliation of being taken literally.”

There’s the rub, and that’s the danger of advertising Ballard wishes to express in this cautionary tale. Why? Like the unaware populace of ‘The Subliminal Man’, the people of Brooklands also succumb en masse to the message they receive, but not as individuals, as in ‘The Subliminal Man’, but as Philip Tew states in JG Ballard: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, Kingdom Come is “centered upon an underlying malaise not individual or private, but communal”.(13) However, instead of forcing people to do a crazy thing – endlessly buy slightly newer versions of the same product – in Kingdom Come Ballard cuts to the chase and simply encourages people to simply go crazy – with predictable results.

From an advertising point of view, just what is going on in Pearson’s campaign? In structure they appear to be correct: the two billboards offer large, easily-identified images and apparently no copy at all, save perhaps an unmentioned Metro Center logo. Even that may not be necessary, as the pitchman is already a well-known public persona in the community. The six TV commercials are the first of their kind in Ballard’s fiction, and they must be among the oddest commercials ever found in fiction – but then, how many TV spots educate and persuade with glimpses of madness? What is interesting about them is their child-like quality, with their mass of instinctive drives and impulses, their bold representation of fears and aggressions. Technically, the ads are institutional in nature, as they essentially promote a brand – the shopping centre – by equating it with a series of images, usually of an aspirational nature appealing to the mores of the general target group. In that sense, Ballard’s Metro-Centre ads are well-conceived, revealing Pearson’s psychic understanding of the Brooklands population.

ABOVE: Fictional billboard campaign for HarperCollins’ Kingdom Come promotion.

Would such a campaign work in reality? Perhaps in a tightly-controlled dictatorship, where such messages are shown to the exclusion of all others to a population already mad with revenge – Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Bush’s America – but in reality such a conceptual set of ads would have little or no impact upon a lazy, uncaring populace, no matter how much pent-up psychopathology they have buried in their unconscious. They might become a hit on You tube, however. The public consumes ads on a “what’s in it for me” basis, with adults well-trained with experience to gloss over or ignore messages not within their sphere of interest. And Ballard’s noir campaign may be simply too complicated for an average viewer to first comprehend, much less put into action, as there are no direct “commands to action”, an integral part of all advertising messages. No command, no action. This is not to say there are no instances of “crazy ads” on television – it’s an old ploy — especially in the retail sector. The pitch usually involves madness — “we’re crazy to lower our prices this much” – and in rare cases, violence and aggression, such as the American car dealer who took a sledgehammer to new cars and after bashing them in his commercial, reduced the price accordingly. During the late 1960s, when these spots ran, the dealership did Crash-like business. In these instances, however, the psychopathology is directed and focused to a specific sales goal – the point is not to make viewers go out and smash their own cars. In Kingdom Come it’s focused on itself – there’s no “message” to link it to reality. If anything will save us from the horror of Ballard’s marketing nightmare, it’s the simple fact people are too lazy or stupid to do the work of unraveling the madness message and mindlessly adopting it to their own lifestyle. The concept is beautifully executed in Ballard’s psychodrama ads, but it’s a concept that is flawed by its own reliance on the reality principle, which ultimately trumps the pleasure principle upon which the id is based. Well, that and the superego – the state.

So, where does this all leave us? If Ballard did work in a real ad agency, he’d be out on the streets. Real ads cannot withstand the newness and dense conceptualizations of Ballard’s output. Real ads are not as challenging as Ballard’s, in fact, most advertising is nothing more than clichés given a new paint job – old women dressed as tarts. Consumers tend to be frightened by the new, so admen tend to recolonize the familiar by adding a slight twist to it. A perfect example is Saachi & Saachi’s famous punning billboard for Margaret Thatcher’s first UK political campaign – an all-white billboard with a simple, centered headline: “Labour isn’t working.”

Ballard’s ads are artistic, not commercial, although one could imagine them as institutional ads for Ballard’s quiver of concepts. They appear to be dense messages from the subconscious, but are probably highly manipulated concepts of a philosophic nature. Like most of Ballard’s experimental work, they are fascinating more for what they don’t say than what they do. Once again the consumer is expected to complete the process (itself a marketing concept), but even Ballard’s most ad-like ads – the five ‘Advertiser’s Announcements’ – offer up multiple meanings given one’s approach to the set. However, outside the world of harsh reality, and within the world of the unbridled imagination they work hard to reveal those psychological concepts and ideas that Ballard finds interesting enough to separate from his fiction and re-express in a specialized, technical form.

Whether or not it’s Pure Lemon Juice is up to you.

The author wishes to thank Mike Bonsall for his time-saving JG Ballard Concordance, Mike Holliday for his work on ‘Court Circular’, Tim Chapman for his royal insights, and Umberto Rossi for his suggestions and encouragement.

REFERENCES:
(12) Freud, S. (1933) New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (W.W. Norton & Co, 1965)
(13) Tew, Philip (2008) ‘Situating the Violence of J. G. Ballard’s Postmillennial Fiction: The Possibilities of Sacrifice, the Certainties of Trauma’. JG Ballard: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (Continuum, London 2008) p. 116.

J.G. Ballard in front of his abandoned billboard novel, 1960. Photo: Mary Ballard.

J.G. Ballard’s first professional job as a writer came when he was just 22 years old — as a copywriter for the London-based advertising agency Digby Wills Ltd. He remembers writing ads for a company called Pure Lemon Juice in the three or four months he was employed there, but no doubt the restricted creativity of copywriting didn’t appeal to the young and restless Ballard, and his career next veered into the eat-what-you-kill occupation of door-to-door encyclopedia salesman. From fruit to nuts. But one must assume something about print advertising’s combination of truncated text and stylized design must have had some underlying influence on the young Ballard. His fascination with the structure of advertising — an idea neatly contained in a stylized box, exuding promises of fulfilled desires — and the advertising man himself (both Crash and Kingdom Come feature admen as protagonists) crops up regularly in Ballard’s work from 1958 onwards. One can even trace this interest back to Ballard’s Shanghai youth, where, sharing his interest with the cinema, radio, and comic books, he has repeatedly told the story of his fascination with glossy American magazines and their otherworldly pitches for big cars, washing machines and sexy fashions. The aesthetic of the advertisement appears again and again in Ballard’s work, and it may be informative to examine these ersatz works in detail.

Ballard’s earliest experimental work to include elements of advertising, ‘Project For A New Novel’ (1958), was influenced by the groundbreaking ‘This Is Tomorrow’ Pop art exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 1956. And while Ballard claims Pop art and artists had no influence on the commercial fiction he wrote in the late 1950s, the work he did on ‘Project’ reveals he was strongly affected by that exhibition’s interest in collage and the artistic use of everyday or found objects — in this case, the words, text, charts and page layouts of the scientific magazines he edited.

It’s still unclear why so many elements of ‘Project For A New Novel’ resurfaced years later in his breakthrough inner space short story, ‘The Terminal Beach’, and the condensed novel, The Atrocity Exhibition. If Ballard actually knew — and he maybe he didn’t — he wasn’t telling. After all, this is a writer who is fascinated by the mediascape and who thrives on ambiguity and what he calls ‘open-ended’ stories. ‘I wasn’t satisfied just by writing SF stories’, Ballard told David Pringle in 1982. ‘My imagination was eager to expand in all directions.’ [1]

ABOVE: Detail from J.G. Ballard’s ‘Project for a New Novel’ (1958).

And expand it did. ‘Project For A New Novel’ — ostensibly an entire novel reduced to resemble two-page magazine spreads — was designed as an ad to be posted on billboards. As Ballard himself describes the ‘Project’:

“(These are) a series of four facing-page spreads that were specimen pages I put together in the late 50s… sample pages of a new kind of novel, entirely consisting of magazine-style headlines and layouts, with a deliberately meaningless text, the idea being that the imaginative content could be carried by the headlines and overall design, so making obsolete the need for a traditional text except for virtually decorative purposes… The pages from the ‘Project For A New Novel’ were made at a time when I was working on a chemical society journal in London, and the lettering was taken from the US magazine Chemical and Engineering News — I liked the stylish typography. I also like the scientific content, and used stories from Chem. Eng. News to provide the text of my novel. Curiously enough, far from being meaningless, the science news stories somehow become fictionalized by the headings around them.” [2]

Rarely, if ever discussed by Ballard scholars, ‘Project For A New Novel’ remains a kind of curiosity today, a collection of names and themes of interest to those who seek out connections between it and the later works, and those who attempt to fill in its blanks and construct the semblance of a plot from its various components. ‘Project for a New Novel’ was designed to be published on a billboard, however, and as such, had it ever been produced, might have been the first instance of art being published on outdoor media. There was an instance in the late 1960s when Canada’s N.E. Thing Company, founded by Iain Baxter, attempted to publish a line of poetry by placing a word on a billboard in each of Canada’s major cities, thereby constructing a poem 3,000 miles wide, but in both instances, however, Ballard and Baxter’s message surely would have confused or bored almost all of those who observed it. Why? For Baxter, a lack of information; for Ballard, ironically, a lack of time. Our inability to understand the ‘message’ of Project as an ad is not simply a function of the abstract quality of the piece, but because of the severe technical restrictions of billboard media.

LEFT: Image by Rick McGrath.

Designed to be viewed from moving cars (Ballardian in itself), billboards offer the advertiser the benefits of a very large message, but the disadvantage of greatly reduced viewing time. Three to five seconds is the average length of time an individual has to scan a billboard, and this feat has to be accomplished in moving traffic. In order to compensate, successful billboard ads rely on strong, simple visuals and to-the-point messages. No one is going to drive around the block for a second view. It immediately becomes apparent that ‘Project For A New Novel’ breaks these rules by its sheer volume of words and complex, unbalanced layout — as well as the fact it seems to make no sense, offers no brand, no benefits, and no indication of how to respond. But that may be the point, as ‘Project’ is a quasi-surreal piece vaguely reminiscent of the ‘cut-up’ technique used by W.S. Burroughs. This same technical problem was identified by Ballard’s friend and Ambit editor, Dr. Martin Bax, ‘Most of the text you can’t read because when you see things on billboards you don’t read the small print, so the text is deliberately blurred — you can only read the headlines and some remarks.’ [3]

In a September 2008 letter discussing the work, Ballard said, ‘I gave some pages [of Project] away… and then, sadly lost interest — the “fictional” elements were pure stream of consciousness, the first thing to come into my head. I clipped and scissored away.’ [4] Looked at this way, the only real correlation between ‘Project’ and actual billboards is its shape — a correlation that, as we shall see, is developed and expanded to include content in Ballard’s later advertisements.

Ballard’s next foray into the world of advertising came in January 1963 with the publication of the short story, ‘The Subliminal Man’. This story is influenced by Vance Packard’s 1957 tell-all, The Hidden Persuaders, a highly popular book which attempted to reveal advertising’s use of psychological techniques — from motivational to subliminal — to induce an irrational desire for products. ‘The Subliminal Man’, however, is not about advertising. It is concerned with the effects on society of an ‘over-capitalized industrial system’ which requires ever-increasing levels of production and consumption, and is willing to use simple, direct subliminal commands to herd the unsuspecting population.

LEFT: Image by Simon Sellars.

Advertising itself is not overtly critiqued as the society Ballard portrays has no choice of product — there’s only one ‘brand’ of everything — and the subliminal message is not ‘hidden’ within an existing ad. It is interesting to note, however, that the medium chosen by Ballard to deliver this barrage of subliminal commands is again the billboard — appropriate for this culture, which is dominated by cars and the fact that fully one-third of the land space is occupied by roads. ‘The Subliminal Man’ is a warning about what might happen in a state with a fascistic need for increased consumer activity — a theme Ballard would revisit many years later in Kingdom Come — and the point of the subliminal message in this story is not to sell specific products, but to ‘spur’ the populace into increasing productivity and production through ever greater consumption.

Ballard’s next project is the five ‘Advertiser’s Announcements’ he created and published from 1967 to 1971 in Ambit magazine. According to Ballard:

‘Back in the late 60s I produced a series of advertisements which I placed in various publications (Ambit, New Worlds, Ark and various continental alternative magazines), doing the art work myself and arranging for the blockmaking, and then delivering the block to the particular journal just as would a commercial advertiser. Of course I was advertising my own conceptual ideas, but I wanted to do so within the formal circumstances of classic commercial advertising — I wanted ads that would look in place in Vogue, Paris Match, Newsweek, etc. To maintain the integrity of the project I paid the commercial rate for the page, even in the case of Ambit, of which I was and still am Prose Editor. I would have liked to have branched out into Vogue and Newsweek, but cost alone stopped me…’ [5]

While it’s interesting to note that Ballard emphasizes the fun he had in repeating all the steps in the actual production and dissemination of the ads — the craftsman aspect of designing, blockmaking and delivery — Ballard’s five ‘Advertiser’s Announcements’ are not far from the more ‘creative’ ads produced by agencies in the late 1960s, when the emphasis on target groups shifted from war-shocked parents to the leading edge of war babies, from traditional middle class concerns to the newly affluent and psychedelic youth culture. In appearance they most resemble a collage poster — a billboard on end — that may have been created out of Ballard’s original idea to have The Atrocity Exhibition done as a book of montage illustrations: ‘I originally wanted a large-format book, printed by photo-offset, in which I would produce the artwork — a lot of collages, material taken from medical documents and medical photographs, crashing cars and all that sort of iconography.’ [6]

ABOVE: ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’. One of Mike Foreman’s illustrations for the abandoned illustrated version of The Atrocity Exhibition.

However, they are print ads, although not in the same sense that ‘Project For A New Novel’ is a billboard. They are designed in the usual picture-headline-text layout used by ad agency art directors in the late 1960s, and close inspection reveals an intellectual concept behind the set, although it is not apparently obvious and, in fact, requires the consumer to view all five ads to receive the ultimate message. In July 1968, after he had already begun the series of ads, he told Jannick Storm:

‘It occurred to me about a year ago that advertising was an unknown continent as far as the writer was concerned… I had a number of ideas which I could fit into my short stories, my fiction in general, but they would be better presented directly. Instead of advertising a product I would advertise an idea… I’m advertising extremely abstract ideas in these advertisements, and this is a very effective way of putting them over. If these ideas were in the middle of a short story people could ignore them… But if they’re presented in the form of an advertisement, like one in Vogue magazine, or Life magazine, people have to look at them, they have to think about them.’ [7]

In actuality, these ‘ideas’ were already in his Atrocity Exhibition stories, as we shall see, and one could argue about their overall effectiveness, given the fact most people don’t think of an ad as an artistic puzzle they have to ponder to grasp. And when Ballard says advertising is an ‘unknown continent’, his own ads reveal the extent of his explorations, as well the heads of exotic animals he’s caught along the way.

ABOVE: ‘Homage to Claire Churchill’ (1967): JGB’s first ‘advertiser’s announcement’.

‘Homage to Claire Churchill’ is a coded message written in the Euclidian symbols of atrocity exhibitionese and comes complete with a promise of four future ‘announcements’, revealing, perhaps, that Ballard has already planned the project to conclusion. In this first ad, Ballard eschews a headline in favour of a real head and reduces all to a tightly cropped closeup of Ms Churchill’s smiling face. All that intrudes on the art is a downplayed copy block which links her to Abraham Zapruder and Ralph Nader — icons of high conceptual value to Ballard. ‘Homage to Claire Churchill’ was published in Ambit in July, 1967, and it borrows copy from ‘The Death Module’, simultaneously published in New Worlds and later re-named ‘Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown’ in The Atrocity Exhibition. In the short story the copy obviously doesn’t include any references to Ms Churchill, but the section in which it is found — ‘Pentax Zoom’ — expresses Trabert’s attempt to understand the deaths of the three American astronauts in the ‘equations, gestures and postures’ of Karen Novotny who, in the preceding chapter, appears to be a modulus of domestic bliss: ‘Their period in the apartment together had been one of almost narcotic domesticity. In the planes of her body, in the contours of her breasts and thighs, he seemed to mimetise all his dreams and obsessions.’

This ad also seems to have roots in the chapter entitled ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, first published as a short story in the September 1966 edition of New Worlds, with Ballard’s advertisement almost an extension of that story’s section, ‘The Enormous Face’, with Ms Churchill replacing Elizabeth Taylor as the object of Ballard’s ‘private and public fantasy’ — this ad supplying the ‘public’ part. One can barely miss the concept at work here: ‘In some way Travis would attempt to relate his wife’s body, with its familiar geometry, to that of the film actress, quantifying their identities to the point where they became fused with the elements of time and landscape.’ Substitute Ballard for Travis, and Ms Churchill for the actress, and it appears this is a poster disguised as an advertisement that is really a love letter. The emphasis on the eyes, and the rhetorical question that follows (‘At what point does the plane of intersection of these eyes generate a valid image of the simulated auto-disaster, the alternate deaths of Dealey Plaza and the Mekong Delta’) admits Ms Churchill to the conceptual world where she provides ‘a set of operating formulae’ for Ballard’s ‘passage through consciousness’. But just what might these operating formulae be? And is there anything to be made from the fact ‘The Death Module’ was renamed ‘Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown’ based on a suggestion by Ms Churchill?

ABOVE: ‘The Angle Between two Walls’ (1967): JGB’s second ‘advertiser’s announcement’.

As Ballard explains: ”The Angle Between Two Walls’ is a still from Alone, the American filmmaker Steve Dwoskin’s movie about a masturbating woman.’ [8] First published in Ambit, September 1967, ‘Angle’ is a link to another Atrocity Exhibition story, ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’, first published in New Worlds in June, 1966. This ad is another visual-dominant piece, featuring the header, in full reverse, right above a transported female face. Reproduced in high contrast black and white, the woman’s abstracted hand reveals the source of her pleasure, but her thrown-back head reveals the conceptual basis of onanismic sex. Question headlines are usually avoided in real ads (nobody bothers to consider an answer), but in this example Ballard uses the rhetorical question to control our eye and has us read in a backward Z from the headline to the head to hand to text. This announcement is skillfully designed, and actually appears to be an ‘ad’, although one doubts very much that Vogue would consent to run it. The most explicitly ‘sexy’ of the series, Angle introduces the ‘little death’ of a ‘happy ending’, emphasizing in geometric terms the relationship between the two walls of reality and fiction and how they can be conceptualized by the imagination into memory and desire.

And, as we shall see, it also forms part of a larger concept.

ABOVE: ‘A Neural Interval’ (1968): JGB’s third ‘advertiser’s announcement’.

Ballard again: ‘Neural Interval was a picture from a bondage magazine.’ [9]

‘A Neural Interval’ is much the same in design and conception to ‘Angle’, and again the theme is associated with a story from The Atrocity Exhibition — in this case, ‘The Great American Nude’, first published in Ambit in July, 1968 — the same issue as this announcement. ‘A Neural Interval’ is also picture-dominant, showing a bound and gagged woman, dressed in sadomasochistic gear, who appears to be in a boat or beside the ocean. Her picture dominates the ad, and the text is reversed, with the copy left and the headline to the right, probably representing the reversal of affection in a sadistic relationship.

The header, ‘A Neural Interval’, suggests a stoppage in time, or at least a stoppage of stimuli to the senses. The text refers to a chapter in ‘The Great American Nude’ entitled A Diagram of Bones in which women have been reduced to pieces of ‘coloured plastic tubing, the geometry of a Disney.’ In his later annotations to The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard explains: ‘The past… is reassimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonize past and future.’ That is a very good definition of how most advertising works on the conceptual level. Ballard continues: ‘The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality in attractive and instantly appealing forms.’

This concept of ‘packaging’ is one of the main themes of ‘The Great American Nude’, which features a huge, plastic amorphous Elizabeth Taylor and a Karen Novotny ‘sex kit’, which ‘may be more stimulating than the real thing.’ Or, as Dr Nathan explains: ‘Now that sex is becoming more and more a conceptual act, an intellectualization divorced from affect and physiology alike, one has to bear in mind the positive merits of the sexual perversions.’

Such a perversion, in this case shown by the sadomasochistic illustration, reveals Ballard’s attempt at showing how the ‘outer world of reality’ — packaging — ‘must be quantified and eroticized’: in other words, accepted as a part of the aggressive aspect of the male sexual instinct, and not ‘reassimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form’, an invitation to the boredom and jaded excitements of socially-approved sexuality.

ABOVE: ‘A Placental Insufficiency’ (1970): JGB’s fourth ‘advertiser’s announcement’.

Ballard: ‘I’ve no idea of the source for the strange gun photo, though Les Krims was a very well known US photographer.’ [10]

‘Placental Insufficiency’ was published in Ambit in September, 1970, and uses as part of its text a snippet from ‘You and Me and The Continuum’, first published in the March 1966 issue of Impulse Magazine. This announcement is again almost entirely picture-dominated, showing a naked, middle-aged woman holding a rifle and looking away to the left as she stands in from of a car and trailer in a field. The text is small and difficult to read, as Ballard has chosen white type over a dark, mottled background, obscuring the text from a chapter of ‘You and Me and The Continuum’ entitled Placenta, which reads: ‘The X-ray plates of the growing foetus showed the absence of both placenta and umbilical cord. Was his then, Dr Nathan pondered, the true meaning of the immaculate conception — that not the mother but the child was virgin, innocent of any Jocasta’s clutching blood…’ To this Ballard adds some new copy: ‘Each afternoon she would take me into the garden of the trailer park. Undressing herself, she made me memorize the trajectories of her body.’

The meanings here are dense. In his first ad, ‘Homage’, Ballard identifies this ad as ‘the left axillary fossa of Princess Margaret’ — which actually means her royal armpit. Certainly an insufficient placenta, but in this case, given the ‘insufficiency’ of the headline, one assume this announcement deals with the unconceptualized or real woman, the woman who is not virginal, who does not escape the fate of Oedipus’ mother — and who is not embarrassed or concerned about the ‘packaging’ of her body, given it’s obvious distance from any cultural ideal of a sexual icon. The juxtaposition of the woman and her phallic, but non-aggressive gun adds meaning to the line, ‘the trajectories of her body’, but Ballard reduces her sexuality to the point of the ‘outer world of reality’ and appears to challenge us to ‘quantify and eroticize’ her. The irony, of course, is that the bound and gagged woman of ‘A Neural Interval’ and the naked trailer trash of ‘Placental Insufficiency’ both represent mythologized sexuality, albeit in an extreme form.

ABOVE: ‘Venus Smiles’ (1970): JGB’s fifth ‘advertiser’s announcement’.

As Ballard explains: ‘Claire Churchill… is also the subject of the fifth ad, which shows her, after swimming in the sea off Brighton, sitting naked in the front seat of my car covered with thousands of specks of seaweed — so outraged was she by my sneak photography that she stole my only copy of the ad, but she has agreed in the interests of Art and Literature to have it published.’ [11]

Suffice to say ‘Venus Smiles’ is an ad about voyeurism, about obsession, about the conceptualization of the elements of the body. Suppressed by Claire Churchill for years after Ballard made the photo, she finally relented and allowed her seaweed-strewn naked torso to be published in this ad in the winter, 1971 edition of Ambit. The copy is from two chapters in the short story, ‘Tolerance of the Human Face’, first published in Encounter in 1969. The first sentence is from Marriage of Freud and Euclid, and the second from Fake Newsreels. This ad is also dominated by a photo of a naked female body, and his decision to snap it unawares suggests an obsession with form studied at leisure. Given the ambivalence between title and subject — there is no head to supply a facial smile, although we are shown two sets of ‘lips’ — one is initially tempted to interpret this as a kind of thank-you to the goddess of femininity that the ad’s creator is in such close proximity to a loved one who loves back.

Again, Ballard’s design is asymmetrical in this ad, with the head, art and text forming a forward slash across the page, which is further accentuated by the dominant white legs. The normal manner of reading is once again reversed with the headline on the right and copy to the left. It is also a bookend to the first ad in the series — revealing Ballard’s progression through the psychopathologies of sexuality, from the conceptual to the physical. It is also worth noting that the first ad only shows Ms Churchill’s head, and the last just her body. Full circle, and now complete. But what does the text tell us? The first sentence is more revealing in what it leaves out — the idea in Marriage of Freud and Euclid of ‘turning everything into its inherent pornographic possibilities’ and how this marriage can become deformed through ‘displaced affections’ and an obsession with ‘targeting areas’ of sex and violence. The second sentence, from Fake Newsreels, is preceded by a scene in which Travers searches through ‘montage photographs’ of ‘pain and mutilation’ and Catherine Austin wonders why he is so obsessed with these nightmare images when their actual relationship is the opposite — associated with light, ardor and purity. Perhaps a clue can be found in the preceding chapter, called Hidden Faces, in which Ballard links colliding cars, the ‘geometry of aggression and desire’, with ‘celebrations of his wife’s death, the slow-motion newsreels recapitulating all his memories of childhood…’

When all five ads are considered together a pattern does seem to want to emerge. Mike Holliday, in his article on the three levels of reality in ‘J. G. Ballard’s Court Circular’, notes that: ‘Something else that was evidently important for Ballard at that time is the notion that we live on three different levels simultaneously, and that meaning is created where those different levels intersect.’ Ballard has discussed these three levels at length in various interviews, but perhaps one of the best explanations is given by Dr Nathan in the ‘Planes Intersect’ chapter of ‘Notes Toward A Mental Breakdown’:

‘Planes intersect: on one level, the tragedies of Cape Kennedy and Vietnam serialized on billboards, random deaths mimetized in the experimental auto-disasters of Nader and his co-workers. Their precise role in the unconscious merits closer scrutiny, by the way; they may in fact play very different parts from the one we assign them. On another level, the immediate personal environment, the volumes of space enclosed by your opposed hands, the geometry of your postures, the time-values contained in this office, the angles between these walls. On a third level, the inner world of the psyche. Where these planes intersect, images are born, some kind of valid reality begins to assert itself.’

Can this have any meaning or correlate to these Advertiser’s Announcements? In Part 2, we shall find out.

REFERENCES

[1] Pringle, David. (1984) ‘From Shanghai to Shepperton’. RE/Search: JG Ballard 8/9, (San Francisco, CA: RE/Search, 1984) p. 122.
[2] V. Vale. (1984) RE/Search: JG Ballard 8/9, (San Francisco, CA: RE/Search, 1984) p. 147.
[3] Bax, Martin. (1984) ‘An Interview with Martin Bax’. RE/Search: JG Ballard 8/9, (San Francisco, CA: RE/Search, 1984) p. 39.
[4] McGrath, R. (2008)
[5] V. Vale. (1984) RE/Search: JG Ballard 8/9, (San Francisco, CA: RE/Search, 1984) p. 38.
[6] Pringle, David. (1984) ‘From Shanghai to Shepperton’. RE/Search: JG Ballard 8/9, (San Francisco, CA: RE/Search, 1984) p. 124.
[7] Storm, Jannick. (1968) ‘Interview with Jannick Storm’. Speculation #21, 1969.
[8] V. Vale. (1984) RE/Search: JG Ballard 8/9, (San Francisco, CA: RE/Search, 1984) p. 147.
[9] ibid.
[10] ibid.
[11] ibid.

by Mike Holliday

Ballard’s oeuvre has many highlights: the 1960s ‘disaster trilogy’ of novels, Crash, Empire of the Sun, and short stories such as ‘The Voices of Time’ and ‘The Terminal Beach’. Not surprisingly, much of the secondary literature tends to concentrate on these key works. But even the most unremarkable of Ballard’s writings can repay close attention. One of the best examples is his ‘Court Circular’, which appeared in 1968 in Ambit magazine.

The first I heard of this curio was whilst idly perusing the ‘Bibliographies’ section of RE/Search 8/9: J.G. Ballard. There I saw an advertisement for back-issues of Ambit, including the following:
No. 37 (1968) — ‘Court Circular’; and ‘Love — A Print-out for Clair Churchill’ (Rare: $25).
Not just one, but two items by Ballard that I’d never heard of! I traced the second piece, ‘Love – A Print-out’, to David Pringle’s 1984 bibliography, where it is described as ‘concrete poetry’ … but I was left wondering what on Earth the ‘Court Circular’ might be.

Eventually I got hold of a copy of Ambit #37, and found both items on the same page:

At first the ‘Court Circular’ appears to be a straightforward, rather ordinary, concrete poem, with a bit of artwork added to fill up the space. But one thing that bothered me was the apparently minor matter of the titles: the heading for the concrete poem — ‘Love: a Print-out for Claire Churchill’ — is in a much smaller typeface than ‘J. G. Ballard’s Court Circular’, almost as if the latter were the title for the entire page.

That this might actually be the case was suggested in the previous issue of Ambit where there is an announcement of a forthcoming newspaper-styled issue:

Do not miss number 37 a big blown-up Ambit (to newspaper size). All usual newspaper features but no journalists. J. G. Ballard reserved whole court page for an advertisement. Edwin Brock appointed Sports Editor. Henry Graham education correspondent. Lots and lots of pictures by all your favourite Ambit artists. Plenty of real news of the Going World.

(Ambit #36, 1968)

But if the ‘Court Circular’ was some form of advertisement, what might it be saying?

In order to understand that, we have to go back to the sorts of things that Ballard was working on during the period 1967 to 1968. In a cultural milieu where experimentation was almost mandatory, Ballard now counted among his friends and companions in experimentation: Eduardo Paolozzi — the Scottish sculptor and artist, Dr. Christopher Evans — the ‘maverick scientist’ who would partly inspire the character of Vaughan in Crash, and Martin Bax — a London paediatrician whose main off-curricular interest was editing Ambit, a magazine which he had started in 1959 to provide a mixture of poetry, fiction and art.

Inspired in part by these new friendships, Ballard’s work had gone well beyond prose fiction. A prime example — and particularly significant if the ‘Court Circular’ is some form of advertisement — is the series of what Ballard described as ‘advertiser’s announcements’, the first of which had appeared in the summer of 1967. Eventually a total of five such announcements would be published during the period 1967 to 1970.

The fourth of Ballard’s advertiser’s announcements: from Ambit #45, 1970.

The concept behind these announcements was to advertise ideas, as Ballard explained in a 1968 interview:

It occurred to me about a year ago that advertising was an unknown continent as far as the writer was concerned [and that] I had a number of ideas which I could fit into my short stories, my fiction in general, but they would be better presented directly. Instead of advertising a product I would advertise an idea. … I’m advertising extremely abstract ideas in these advertisements, and this is a very effective way of putting them over. If these ideas were in the middle of a short story people could ignore them. … But if they’re presented in the form of an advertisement, like one in ‘Vogue’ magazine, or ‘Life’ magazine, people have to look at them, they have to think about them.

Interview with Jannick Storm, Speculation #21, recorded July 1968.

Another of Ballard’s interests in this period was textual and visual collage. Martin Bax has related how both he and Ballard were fascinated by the archive of their friend Paolozzi:

Eduardo has a huge image archive of material – which I think fascinated Jim very much. I suppose what Jim was interested in was Eduardo’s style of collecting images of the 20th century … I’ve been in his studio when we were doing some images, and he said, ‘What about a playing card, Martin?’ I said, ‘A playing card?’ And he opened a drawer which was totally full of packs of playing cards which he’d bought all over the world – some extremely sexy ones of ladies with nothing on … Eduardo’s used that type of material in his silkscreen work, and Ballard saw this as a way in which you could use this material in texts. There was a piece by Eduardo called ‘Moonstrips’ and ‘General Dynamic Fun’ that was published in Ambit. He had collected 300 or 400 pages of texts, and Ballard and I went through this huge pile of texts together and we cut and arranged it so it has some sort of curious logic. It starts off with a piece about internists locking up wealthy women in Long Island mental hospitals, and goes through a curious range of material.

Interview in ‘Re/Search 8/9: J. G. Ballard’, recorded in 1983.

Advertisement for Volume 1 of Paolozzi’s ‘Moonstrips’: from Ambit #33, 1967.

The photograph of the models that formed part of the ‘Court Circular’ had originally been included in the Paolozzi/Ballard/Bax piece ‘Moonstrips — General Dynamic F.U.N.’, where it had been accompanied by a babble of ad-copy:

ALSO AVAILABLE FOR THE FIRST TIME, A ROMANTIC BIT OF MAQUILLAGE, VIENNA ROSE LIPSTICK-IN-THE-ROUND WITH A SABLE CONTOUR BRUSH TO DIP IN THE LITTLE ROUGE POT AND STROKE COLOR ON YOUR LIPS. THEN, READY TO LET GO FROM A WELL-PACKED QUIVER, THE INFINITE POWERS OF ATTRACTION THAT ARE UNIQUELY YOURS. THE WALTZING DRESS IN PURPLE SATIN (BELOW)-A LUXURIOUS CONCOCTION–SKIRT, BILLOWING FROM A TINY STRAPLESS BODICE, COVERED WITH A JACKET OF LIGHTS-CATERPILLARS OF CHENILLE, TWINKLING WITH FIREFLIES OF CRYSTALS, SILVER AND BLUE SEQUINS. BY SARMI, AT BERGDORF GOODMAN; NAN DUSKIN, PHILADELPHIA; NEIMAN-MARCUS BOTH PAGES; JEWELRY BY KENNETH LANE. KISLAV GLOVES. THESE PAGES: ALL COIFFURES BY THE ANTOINE SALON OF NEIMAN-MARCUS

Photo of models plus ad-copy, from Paolozzi’s ‘Moonstrips – General Dynamic F.U.N.’; Ambit #33, 1967.

When we turn to Ballard’s prose fiction output in 1968, the year the ‘Court Circular’ was published, we find that he was in the middle of writing the short stories that were to form The Atrocity Exhibition. The previous issue of Ambit had contained one such story, ‘The Great American Nude’, from which many of the usual ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ themes are missing: there’s no car crashes, no JFK assassination or Jackie Kennedy, no atrocity films, no gigantic billboards, and Kline, Coma and Xero — the ‘couriers of the unconscious’ — are conspicuous by their absence. Instead, ‘Great American Nude’ concentrates on the theme of the erotic. Central to the story is a gigantic abstract sculpture of the actress Elizabeth Taylor, and there are some humorous asides on the male’s perception of the female; for example, one of the characters, Captain Webster, is afraid to ‘climb up on her’ in case he falls into ‘some unpleasant orifice’.

Cover of Ambit #36, 1968, which included Ballard’s ‘The Great American Nude’.

Ballard’s emphasis on the erotic during this period may be in part due to Paolozzi. Michael Moorcock has recollected that in 1967/8, ‘Jimmy fell in with Paolozzi [and] shifted in that direction. Techno stuff. Women with big tits and guns’ (quoted in Iain Sinclair, Crash: David Cronenberg’s Post-mortem on J G Ballard’s ‘Trajectory of Fate’, 1999).

Something else that was evidently important for Ballard at that time is the notion that we live on three different levels simultaneously, and that meaning is created where those different levels intersect. This idea is put into the mouth of Dr. Nathan in ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’, which was published in mid-1967 under its original title ‘The Death Module’. It had first appeared, using many of the same phrases, in comments that Ballard made in a BBC radio interview with George MacBeth:

… one has many layers, many levels of experience going on at the same time. On one level one might have the world of public events, Cape Kennedy, Vietnam, political life, on another level the immediate personal environment, the rooms we occupy, the postures we assume. On a third level, the inner world of the mind. All these levels are, as far as I can see them, equally fictional, and it is where these levels interact that one gets the only kind of valid reality that in fact exists nowadays. The characters in these stories occupy positions on these various levels. On the one hand, a character is displayed on an enormous billboard as a figment in a CinemaScope epic; on another level he’s an ordinary human being moving through the ordinary to-and-fro of everyday life; on a third level he’s a figment in his own fantasies. These various aspects of the character interact and produce the main reality of the fiction.

‘The New Science Fiction: A Conversation between J. G. Ballard and George MacBeth’, broadcast on the BBC Third Programme, 29th March 1967.

Pulling all this together, we can see that in 1967/8 Ballard was particularly interested in the advertisement of ideas, in textual and visual collage, in eroticism and the male’s perception of the female, and in the idea of three levels of experience. And all of this is present in the ‘Court Circular’ in Ambit #37. Here’s what we see …

Firstly there is the concrete poem ‘Love: A Print-out…’. This is explicitly personalised — it’s ‘for Claire Churchill’. It deals with the everyday facets of sex and love — ‘hair’, ‘fuck’, ‘girl’, ‘suck’. And it presents itself as having a structure: firstly because it is laid out in the form of a regular grid, and secondly because it can be read in the form of a ‘boy meets girl’ story, ending with ‘wife’ and ‘baby’. (Of course, we have to impose that linearity on the poem ourselves by reading it from the top left and then consecutively down each column — it’s actually just a series of separate words spaced out in a regular display.) So this is sexuality, or the perception of the female by a male, on the level of everyday life.

Next, there is the photograph of the models. The girls all look much the same, and have a ‘classic female figure’ of the time; they all wear underwear that is designed to say ‘sexy’ but without actually being especially erotic; they all wear a broad and meaningless smile. And the photo is an ‘image’ — it’s presumably from Paolozzi’s archive, and it has even appeared in Ambit the previous year, as part of ‘Moonstrips — General Dynamic F.U.N.’ This is sexuality at the level of mediatised reality, ‘a figment in CinemaScope’ as Ballard puts it.

Finally, there are the drawings by Bruce Mclean. Here the individual features of the woman cannot be seen … what we have instead are the elements of erotic fantasy: the long hair, the arched back, an open mouth, the over-emphasised thighs in various positions, the arm hanging languidly down from the body, a glimpse of the pudenda (it seems to be a black blob, perhaps the ‘orifice’ that worries Captain Webster in ‘The Great American Nude’). This is sexuality as perceived by a man on the level of the imagination.

Two of Bruce Mclean’s drawings from the ‘Court Circular’.

So the ‘Court Circular’ displays sexuality — or, more specifically, the perception of the female by the male — in terms of all three of Ballard’s levels of reality. And perhaps Bruce Mclean’s drawings symbolise the power that the imagination has to flow into the interstices and create a meaningful reality in the gaps and angles between the different levels of our existence.

This, then, is the advertisement within ‘J. G. Ballard’s Court Circular’. Perhaps it is a touch didactic … but Ambit #37 is, after all, a newspaper.

Front page of the newspaper issue; Ambit #37, 1968.

ABOVE: Kevin Levell’s entry.

We still have no official announcement on the Crash Cover competition, but responding to my enquiry, Kevin Levell wrote to tell me of his own entry. Referring to the unpublished Henry Yee design I previously pointed to, Kevin says: ‘I hadn’t seen this approach with dummies, but it’s remarkably similar to my entry in the final competition…’

Kevin also says, ‘I’ve done a number of searches but have uncovered only a few other entries. My fave is Leona’s but good luck to all who entered anyway.’

I’ve included these below (myself, I love Kevin’s).

ABOVE: Leona Clarke’s entry.

ABOVE: Daniel Gray’s entry.

ABOVE: George Pollard’s entry.

One is to provide full RSS feeds for this site rather than partials, which is what was on offer previously. I did this because I read on various forums about so many people getting indignant about partial feeds, saying if a site supplies partials they’ll ‘unsubscribe from the feed straight away, no fooling around, mister!’ Or that ‘life’s too short to click on a partial feed and go to an external site; the RSS reader is my space, how dare you take me out if it’… Or, ‘sites that supply partials are like big bastard record companies plastering music with DRM; how dare you place restrictions on my content, I want it delivered the way I choose’, etc etc…

Such venom. It really takes me aback, the way people feel about this topic.

Personally, I don’t have a problem clicking on a partial feed to read a post in its original context, and I’m imagining I’m as ‘time poor’ as many, but if it gets me more readers then full feeds it is. Although, after carefully redesigning the site so that no post is privileged over the other, so that there’s no top-down hierarchy, full feeds of course scupper that ideal — it’s top-down all the way with your good old RSS readers.

The other thing I did, perhaps the most controversial, was to set up a MySpace page for the Ballardian Home Movie competition. The cheek of it, eh? After I had the nerve to unceremoniously slag off that whole insidious gated community.

Heh, heh.

Go on, then — flame away.

From unnamed Dsquared2 campaign, by Steven Meisel.

Love among the Mannequins. Unable to move, he lay on his back, feeling the sharp corner of the novel cut into his ribs. Her hand rested across his chest, nails holding the hair between his nipples like a lover’s scalp brought back for him as a trophy. He looked at her body. Humped against his right shoulder, her breasts formed a pair of deformed globes like the elements of a Bellmer sculpture. Perhaps an obscene version of her body would form a more significant geometry, an anatomy of triggers? In his eye, without thinking, he married her right knee and left breast, ankle and perineum, armpit and buttock. Carefully, to avoid waking her, he eased his arm from beneath her head. Through the apartment window the opalescent screen of the open-air cinema rose above the rooftops. Immense fragments of Bardot’s magnified body illuminated the night air.

J.G. Ballard. ‘The Summer Cannibals’, from The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

John C. informs me of a campaign from fashion label Dsquared2, featuring sex with crash-test mannequins. As John says, it’s ‘the usual “god, we need a new thrill” stuff from the fashion industry but it’s difficult not to see this as Crash-inspired.’

Click on ‘Campaign’: this Dsquared2 campaign doesn’t appear to be selling anything. What exactly *is* it selling?

From ‘State of Emergency’, by Steven Meisel.

The photographer is none other than our old mucker, Steven Meisel, who has featured on Ballardian.com thrice before: here, here and here. One thing I like about Meisel is that he seems to be slyly sending up the fashion industry each time. In the ‘State of Emergency’ shoot, I rather fancy reading into it an account of the fashion industry declaring war on the anorexic models that have tainted it, all the better to introduce something even more robotic and inhuman. In this crash-test campaign, I am imagining similarities with Paul Verhoeven’s approach to Starship Troopers: casting beefcake and catwalk queens, oiling them up and fetishing them…then decapitating them with extreme prejudice.

Well, maybe not quite — no one beats Verhoeven for sheer creative cynicism — but there is a certain tension at play in Meisel…maybe. Or is there?

Or have am I just become another fashion victim, swallowing Meisel’s bling-orgy aesthetic hook, line and sinker and trying to justify it to the artless masses?

From ‘Make Love, not War’ by Steven Meisel.

What’s certain, though, is that nothing has quite pushed the envelope like the ‘dead girls’ shoot from America’s Top Model, and I still can’t make up my mind about that one…

I must away and consult The Atrocity Exhibition at great length, as it’s been a while since I read it.

I have a feeling it holds the key to everything.

Image from America’s Next Top Model.

Two readers, Alf & Peter, wrote in separately with news of ‘Accident: A New Fragrance for Women’.

As the punchline says: ‘Accident. New fragrance for women. Fragrance strip: The unique fusion of burnt rubber, brake fluid and excrement. If you don’t want to experience it again, don’t drive and call.’

As Alf says, it’s ‘crypto-Ballardian’, yes. Very Crash. Even after it turns out this is (or was?) a viral marketing campaign from T-Mobile, warning against the dangers of driving while talking on the phone. A campaign I endorse, by the way. Many is the time, as a cyclist, I’ve almost been cleaned up by a car swerving in and out of the lane, a mobile phone glued to its driver’s ear.

Speed and violence is automatically linked with Ballard these days, like shorthand. The car as prosthesis. But in a sense Ballard’s real concern is inside the body, not the exoskeleton, and the ‘scenarios of nerves and blood vessels’ that lay buried under layers of cultural conditioning. Like Cronenberg, I’m sure Ballard would love to judge a beauty contest for the inside of the body, ranking intestines, arteries and internal organs rather than breasts, hips and face.

This was certainly a theme in some of Ballard’s earlier, experimental short stories, less explicit in his later work, although in a recent exhumation of Cocaine Nights I was struck by this passage:

I had never seen Frank make love, but I guessed that he had kissed Paula’s hips and navel as I did, running my tongue around its knotted crater with its scent of oysters, as if she had come to me naked from the sea. … I pressed my cheeks to her pubis, inhaling the same heady scent that Frank had drawn through his nostrils, parting the silky labia that he had touched a hundred times.

However briefly I had known Paula, my brother’s months of intimacy with her body seemed to welcome me to her, urging me on as I caressed her vulva and felt the scent glands around her anus. I kissed her knees, and then drew her to the bed, pressing my tongue to her armpits and tasting the sweet gullies with their soft underdown. Feeling not only lust but an almost fraternal affection for her, my imagined memories of her embracing Frank, I held her to my chest.
…
Taking my penis in one hand, she began to masturbate herself, eyes fixed on my still-leaking glans, forefinger parting her labia.
… ‘Paula, why can’t I stroke you?’

‘Later. It’s my Pandora’s box. Open it and all the ills of Dr Hamilton might escape.’

‘Ills…? Are there any? I bet Frank didn’t believe that.’ I took her palm and held her fingers to my nose, inhaling the rose-damp scent of her vulva. ‘For the first time I really envy him.’
…
She raised one knee, watching the shadows of the plastic blind wrap themselves around her thigh. ‘It looks like a bar code. How much am I worth?’

‘A lot, Paula. More than you think. Put a higher value on yourself. Being hyper-realistic about everything is too simple a get-out.’

‘Being hyper-realistic about everything’, a modern-day sin if ever there was one…

Similarly, like the narrator, Charles, in the above passage, the character Laing in High-Rise allows himself to be guided by bodily odour, seeing it as a pure expression of his new state of being, stripped of his technological exoskeleton after life in the high-rise has broken down into tribal chaos:

Within ten minutes he had returned to his apartment. After bolting the door, he climbed over his barricade and wandered around the half-empty rooms. As he inhaled the stale air he was refreshed by his own odour, almost recognizing parts of his body — his feet and genitalia, the medley of smells that issued from his mouth. He stripped off his clothes in the bedroom, throwing his suit and tie into the bottom of the closet and putting on again his grimy sports-shirt and trousers. He knew now that he would never again try to leave the high-rise. He was thinking about Alice, and how he could bring her to his apartment. In some way these powerful odours were beacons that would draw her to him.

So, with all this in mind, I reckon there’s a new fragrance that is perhaps even more Ballardian than ‘Accident’. I have no idea if it’s a real product or not but who cares? It’s hilarious. And it would definitely appeal to Charles, with his passion for the scent glands of his lover’s anus and especially the ‘rose-damp scent of her vulva’.

It’s a fragrance that is actually called ‘Vulva’, and you must watch the promotional video — it simply has to be seen to be believed. Aside from what I’ve just mentioned, it’s explicitly Ballardian in the way it talks of ‘fiction becoming reality’ and the vaginal scent of the perfume setting off the ‘film inside your head’.

The erotic, intimate scent of a beautiful woman… The precious vaginal odour filled into a small glass phial. The phial is shaken gently, only a tiny amount of the precious, organic substance is applied onto the back of the hand, and the irresistible smell that exudes from a sensuous vagina immediately intensifies your erotic fantasies and starts the film rolling inside your head. VULVA Original is not a perfume. It is a beguiling vaginal scent which is purely a substitute for your own smelling pleasure.

Wonderful. So what do you think? ‘Accident’ or ‘Vulva’ as a gift for that special someone in your life?

UPDATE: John Coulthart informs us that while “VULVA may be a joke the recent ads for a fragrance from clothing designer Tom Ford are quite real.”

The publicity machine is warming up for Ballard’s forthcoming autobiography, Miracles of Life, due for publication February 2008.

First up, we have news of an event featuring Ballard at the Southbank Centre on Wednesday, 20 February 2008, at 7:30pm. Next, there is a new interview with him over at the Bookseller to promote the book.

Sample quotes from the interview:

The shock of coming to England in 1946 is something that has never left me. Very few people now remember quite how bleak life here was. Obviously, the country was exhausted by the war, and visibly shattered. Large areas of London and Birmingham and Manchester were bomb sites.

Surrealism had a big effect on me then, and still does. It explained things. Partly it was that war is surreal in its effects: the bus on top of a block of apartments, thrown there by a bomb; the whole wall of a tall building collapsed, so you can see dozens of flats, like a doll’s house, with the furniture still in place… if you looked at things through the eyes of the surrealist painters, everything was upside down and you got bizarre things being looked on as though they were completely ordinary.

A very important thing for me was being a medical student for a couple of years… Each of us had a little pine box which we kept under our beds containing a human skeleton. Mine was quite small and I was assured it was not that of a child, but of a peasant from Southeast Asia. These were the kind of dead I’d seen [in Shanghai] and now I slept in my bed with this coffin below me.

Note that elsewhere in this piece, Ballard is recorded as saying he wrote The Kindness of Strangers — not The Kindness of Women. Hopefully, that’s a transcription error.

[ Thanks Mike B. and Mike H. ]

The shop mannequin and the crash-test dummy have always held a privileged place in Ballard’s fiction. Battered, broken and discarded, they housed the streaky veins of alienation and despair that marked The Atrocity Exhibition. Rendered with Ballard’s clinical, amoral gaze, they evoked the terminal stylisation wreaked by technology in Crash. Fused by nuclear radiation into a solid, molten slag heap, they formed one of the most potent symbols of postwar anomie in ‘The Terminal Beach’. Trussed in bizarre orthopaedic harnesses, they signalled the insidious posthumanism of the early 21st century in Super-Cannes.

So it was with keen interest that I read Brendan’s email, informing me that shoppers have gone on the rampage at a store called … ahem… Clockwork Orange in Northern Ireland. ‘Feverish shoppers ripped clothes off shop mannequins during a bargain store sale which ended in trouble and police being called,’ the report intoned. According to an employee, ‘It was completely primeval – it was like hunter-gatherers. Within half an hour of the store opening the windows had been ransacked by people coming in and ripping the clothes off the mannequins and just leaving the mannequins on the ground.’

I’d fancifully like to think that these shoppers are exacting revenge for all the failings of themselves that they see reflected, Ballard style, in the eerie melancholy of the shop mannequin. But maybe, as Brendan writes, there is something more bloodless at work: ‘It seems that the store’s sale idea, that the cost is determined by the time of purchase [if you were in by 5am, everything was 5 pounds], is itself part of a willful upending of rational economics. They brought it on themselves…..this riot was part of the sales service?’

By the way, that BBC headline, ‘Mannequins mauled in store wars’ — it may well be the very best headline since ‘headless body found in topless bar’ (or, for Australian readers, ‘Man bites Jana’s bum’).

J.G. Ballard in 1960. In the background is a poster of his ‘Project for a new novel’, made two years earlier.

Chemistry & Industry … was a good place to work because, of course, the office of any scientific magazine is the most wonderful mail drop. It’s the ultimate information crossroads. Most of it went straight into the wastepaper basket, but en route I was filtering it like some sort of sea creature sailing with jaws open through a great sea of delicious plankton. I was filtering all this extraordinary material.”

J.G. Ballard, ‘Shanghai Jim’ (BBC documentary, dir. James Runcie, 1990).

From 1958 to 1964, J.G. Ballard worked as deputy editor and part-time writer at Chemistry & Industry, the journal of the Society of Chemical Industry. When he started he was also a struggling, disillusioned writer of science fiction; by the time he left C&I he was a successful full-time novelist. MIKE BONSALL discovers exactly how that transition occurred, as he delves into the archives at C&I to uncover ultrarare Ballardiana, including Ballard’s earliest non-fiction reviews, the text of which we present here in full — never before seen outside the magazine itself. As Mike argues, what happened at C&I codified the tropes Ballard was to return to throughout his career — the scientific, technical and imaginative motifs that shape the very essence of what we’ve come to know and love as ‘Ballardian’.

J.G. BALLARD’s grim war experiences were followed by grim experiences in post-war Britain. He dropped out of medical school after two years, then dropped out of English after a year; he quit his flying career similarly. After that came a succession of short-lived, low-level jobs: encyclopaedia salesman, porter and copywriter.

Ballard married in 1955, and his first child in 1956 was followed by two more soon after; he was under serious financial pressure and help was given only stintingly by his disapproving parents. During this time he had sold a couple of short stories to Ted Carnell, who must have twisted his arm to come to the World SF Convention in London, in 1957 — the year of Sputnik, the apogee of space opera. Carnell himself was Chair of the convention and John W Campbell was guest of honour and prize speaker. It was the height of ‘hard SF’ and Campbell was the champion of Space Opera, and therefore the scourge of the New Wave — and Ballard. As JGB later said about the convention, ‘That shattered me, and then I dried up for about a year. For over a year I didn’t write any SF at all. I was disillusioned and demoralized.’ But Ballard would find a host of new ideas, new techniques and new ways of creating within the stuffy confines of Chemistry and Industry.

LEFT: Cover of C&I, 12/7/58. When Ballard began his tenure there, it was a fairly dour journal, still mired in the post-war years.

C&I was an ideal place for Ballard to make a new start: the hours were lax and he was even able to do some creative writing there. Ballard later said, ‘One of the reasons my fiction of the early 60s has a high science content is because I was immersed in scientific papers of all kinds continually’.

The editor of the journal was a chemist rather than a journalist, so, as Ballard later recounted, ‘I did all the basic subbing, marking copy up for the typesetter … doing make-up and paste-up … I used to go on works visits, visits to laboratories and research institutes. I wrote a few articles — scientific reporting — and I reviewed scientific books.’ Ballard’s time at C&I is key to his development as a writer: he learned new skills, was given the freedom to experiment, and had time to shake off the feeling that hard SF was the only kind of speculative fiction that was acceptable.

The C&I Offices in Belgrave Square (photo by Tim Chapman, who held Ballard’s former job in the 1990s and may even have inherited Ballard’s desk!).

In 1958 Ballard made a series of photocopied collages — ‘Project for a new novel’ — that were, he says, ‘sample pages of a new kind of novel, entirely consisting of magazine-style headlines and layouts, with a deliberately meaningless text, the idea being that the imaginative content could be carried by the headlines and overall design, so making obsolete the need for a traditional text except for virtually decorative purposes.’

The few pages he did actually produce are obviously influenced by his new-found skills in layout work:

Detail from Ballard’s ‘Project for a new novel’ (1958).

Ballard has said he was inspired by the bold typography of C&I’s sister journal, Chemistry and Engineering News (C+EN), the journal of the American Chemical Society, and that he used text from this journal as ‘filler’ in his collages.

Detail from Ballard’s ‘Project for a new novel’ (1958).

I was fascinated by the possibility of disassembling these Burroughsian ‘cut-ups’ into their original forms, and by the possibility of seeing the roots of some of Ballard’s earliest and most lasting obsessions.

Detail from ‘Project for a new novel’ (1958).

Although influenced by C+EN, Ballard’s typography seems rather to prefigure advertising from a later C&I (2/6/62):

Detail from ‘Project for a new novel’ (1958).

Ballard later said, ‘I was very proud of those pages. Moorcock published them in New Worlds three or four years ago. They were like chromosomes in a way, because so many of the subsequent ideas and themes of mine appeared in those pages. Kline, Coma, Xero — they’re all there. I don’t know. I used to make these things up!’

The pages were in fact published in a special New Worlds edition of mostly visual material in summer 1978, where they are described as ‘displays’. (Interestingly the middle two pages are transposed in New Worlds compared to the photograph of the hoarding at the start of this article.)

Detail from ‘Project for a new novel’ (1958).

Sadly, despite a thorough search, and although the body text of the pieces is obviously taken from an American chemical journal, I was unable to find any evidence of them in back editions of C+EN from that time.

About this ‘filler’ text, Ballard later said, ‘Curiously enough, far from being meaningless, the science news stories somehow became fictionalised by the headings around them.’ This is the kind of technique Ballard was to return to repeatedly, for example in his ‘plastic surgery’ pieces [collected in RE/Search's reprint of The Atrocity Exhibition], where the insertion of a celebrity name transforms the banal medical text, or his short fictions which masquerade as psychiatric reports [eg 'Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan'] or war journalism [eg 'Theatre of War'].

I have always been a voracious reader of what I call invisible literatures — scientific journals, technical manuals, pharmaceutical company brochures, think-tank internal documents, PR company position papers — part of that universe of published material to which most literate people have scarcely any access but which provides the most potent compost for the imagination … ‘

J.G. Ballard. ‘The Pleasures of Reading’.

And there is potent compost indeed in C+EN. The erotic beauty of the tail fin, for example, is much in evidence:

Advertisement from C+EN, 14/4/58.

And there is a near car-crash:

Advertisement from C+EN 14/7/58.

Did Mr F start out as Hydrogen Fluoride, which forms the most corrosive of acids?

Advertisement from C+EN 14/7/58; plus detail from Ballard’s ‘Project for a new novel’ (1958).

Could the name ‘Kline’, a recurring Ballard character, be taken from Smith, Kline and French, as suggested by Tim Chapman?

Advertisement from C+EN 27/1/58.

Or is he part of the electromagnetic spectrum? In ‘You and Me and the Continuum’, from The Atrocity Exhibition, one of the objects mentioned is a ‘spectro-heliogram of the sun taken with the K line of calcium’:

Advertisement from C+EN 6/10/58.

There is also an appearance of that most enigmatic island, Eniwetok, a recurring motif in Ballard’s work. The ‘pace of missile firings quickens’ must have speeded Ballard’s pulse:

Advertisement from C+EN 4/11/57.

Eventually he would abandon the task, and sit down in the dust, watching the shadows emerge from their crevices at the foot of the blocks. For some reason he invariably arranged to be trapped when the sun was at zenith — on Eniwetok, the thermo-nuclear noon.”

J.G. Ballard. ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964).

As Catherine Austin walked around the converted gymnasium these bizarre images, with their fusion of Eniwetok and Luna Park, Freud and Elizabeth Taylor, reminded her of the slides of exposed spinal levels in Travis’s office.”

J.G. Ballard. ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ (ch. 1), in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

Some of the C&I adverts from Ballard’s time are also worth noting, as copywriters were looking forward a decade to the fashions of the 60s:

Advertisement from C&I 28/2/59.

Some of the advertising took a slightly surreal turn in Ballard’s later years at the journal, like this example, featuring an oddly disturbing schoolgirl’s biochemical interventions:

Advertisement from C&I c.1962.

Here’s an earlier ad from Chemical & Engineering:

C+EN 19/05/1958.

Desperately trying to make chemicals interesting… ‘Here comes the Managing Director. Anybody want a bloodstained copywriter — immediate delivery?’ (shades of Super-Cannes?):

Advertisement from C&I 30/5/59.

In the second half of his employment at C&I, JGB went part-time and one of his duties was to write short book reviews. Most are factual — short, dry reviews of long, dry technical reference works that seem little more than fillers. But one stands out and is worth quoting in full. Ballard’s review of The Science of Dreams is his longest and most enthusiastic by far:

The Science of Dreams. By Edwin Diamond. pp. 246. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode Ltd. 1962. 21s.

The universal experience of dreams, and the conviction that they conceal part of man’s essential image of himself, have made them a subject of unfading interest throughout history, to the most primitive societies and the most sophisticated. One of the oldest written documents in existence, a papyrus of the 12th Dynasty, is an Egyptian book of dream interpretations, and to Freud, in the present century, the dream was “the royal road to the unconscious.” Within the last 20 years the orthodox Freudian view generally accepted in Europe and America has been amplified by work carried out by experimental psychologists in the United States. A popular account of this work is given in “The Science of Dreams.”

The hypothesis that the rapid eye movements observed at intervals throughout sleep might indicate the occurrence of a dream was apparently confirmed by the ability of subjects roused during these periods to recount their dreams with remarkable clarity and detail; this occurred in the case of persons who claimed they had never previously dreamed. Subsequent work suggested that everyone has an average of five dreams per night, each lasting 20 minutes; that contrary to popular belief digestive or emotional upsets do not affect the length or intensity of dreams, but only the ease with which they are recalled; that the majority of dreams are unpleasant and grow more so with increasing age; that even intense professional and domestic anxieties play little part in the subject matter of dreams; and that the congenitally blind experience “tactile” dreams. A curious discovery was that the deliberate deprivation of normal dreaming produced tension and irritability, even during an otherwise adequate period of sleep, and that hallucinations and psychotic collapse eventually resulted.

Despite the ingenuity and patience of the experimenters, the nature of the mechanisms generating dreams remains as elusive as ever. If anything, these studies suggest that for all its beguiling mystery the dream is merely a low-level psychic activity of little significance, perhaps similar to certain types of childhood play, and that its content, although cast in dramatic form, is of less importance than the act itself. Only where marked aberrations occur is a careful analysis of individual dreams of value to the physician. Even here, as in the experiments described, the role of the observer remains profoundly equivocal.

In view of the vast number of dreams experienced during a single lifetime, the catalogue of dreams which have furnished any major scientific revelation remains remarkably meagre; Kekulé’s vision of the benzene ring is among the few examples. Undeterred, however, the author offers his readers a simple conundrum (complete the series O, T, T, F, F,-,-) by which they can test the deductive powers of their own sleeping intelligences. No more than 15 minutes immediately before and after sleep should be devoted to the problem. Evidently some 80% of subjects tested dreamed of the problem, and a few even solved it during their dreams.

Those readers who fail to solve it may be interested to know that the Abundavita Corporation of America offers a $395 hypnopaedic “package” consisting of a gramophone, speaker and a 25-lesson course on such topics as “Money–What It Is and How to Have Plenty of It.”

J.G.B.

This appeared on 9th February 1963 and has echoes of JGB’s short story ‘Manhole 69′, published six years earlier, in which a group of volunteers have their ability to sleep removed and slowly descend into madness. Even Papa Freud gets a mention in this review. The article is unusually light and jokey, and the very appearance of a book on dreams is unusual — surely it would never have been sent for review to a journal of industrial chemistry? Was it given to Ballard by his friend Dr Christopher Evans, whose ‘computer memory-purging’ theory of dreaming also seems to make an appearance in the review? After this effort, JGB’s reviews begin to appear more sporadically and eventually petered out altogether. Did this unusual review lead to him having his freedom curtailed?

(See the appendix for the full text of Ballard’s initialled reviews).

A particularly significant article appeared in C&I on 1 June 1963, a lovingly illustrated, nine-page article about the brand new Road Research Laboratory:

C&I article, 1/6/63.

Ballard spoke of writing some C&I articles — did he have a hand in writing or subbing this one? While authorship was credited to the laboratory’s then director, Sir William Glanville, Ballard would certainly have seen the article, as there is one of his less-interesting book reviews in the same issue. Was the young Ballard given the perk of a trip out to Crowthorne to see the Road Research Laboratory for himself? Only a few miles west of London, it would not have been out of his way.

With its Observation Towers, Underground Laboratory, Gatehouse, Control Building, banked bend and even a ‘Terminal Area’, the test track at Crowthorne is a gloriously Ballardian territory:

Taken from the C&I article on Road Research Laboratory, 1/6/63.

And the laboratory certainly keeps rearing its head in Ballard’s fiction:

The Impact Zone. At dusk Talbot drove around the deserted circuit of the research laboratory test track. Grass grew waist high through the untended concrete, wheel-less cars rusted in the undergrowth along the verge. Overhead the helicopter moved across the trees, its fans churning up a storm of leaves and cigarette cartons. Talbot steered the car among the broken tyres and oil drums. Beside him the young woman leaned against his shoulder, her grey eyes surveying Talbot with an almost minatory calm. He turned on to a concrete track between the trees. The collision course ran forwards through the dim light, crushed cars shackled to steel gondolas above a catapult. Plastic mannequins spilled through the burst doors and panels. As they walked along the catapult rails Talbot was aware of the young woman pacing out the triangle of approach roads. Her face contained the geometry of the plaza. He worked until dawn, towing the wrecks into the semblance of a motorcade.’

J.G. Ballard. ‘The University of Death’ (ch.2), The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

Surely Vaughan himself would have attached himself to the ‘team of experts’ in this extract:

Taken from the C&I article on the Road Research Laboratory, 1/6/63.

Through Vaughan I discovered the true significance of the automobile crash, the meaning of whiplash injuries and roll-over, the ecstasies of head-on collisions. Together we visited the Road Research Laboratory twenty miles to the west of London, and watched the calibrated vehicles crashing into the concrete target blocks. Later, in his apartment, Vaughan screened slow-motion films of test collisions that he had photographed with his cinecamera. Sitting in the darkness on the floor cushions, we watched the silent impacts flicker on the wall above our heads. The repeated sequences of crashing cars first calmed and then aroused me. Cruising alone on the motorway under the yellow glare of the sodium lights, I thought of myself at the controls of these impacting vehicles.”

J.G. Ballard, Crash (1973).

Ballard would have had a good excuse to ask for the Crowthorne job — it’s practically on the way home. In this Google map, the upper right blue flag is the C&I offices, the middle flag is Ballard’s home in Shepperton and the upper flag at bottom left is the Road Research Laboratory:

As an interesting aside, what bizarre ley line must exist in Berkshire to have three ‘total institutions’ in a line within a few miles of each other? The three flags on the left are: the Road Research Laboratory, Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane (which also features in Ballard’s work), and Sandhurst Royal Military Academy – all richly Ballardian territories.

But I digress. I hope this article has shed some light on the mass of ‘invisible literature’ and ‘delicious plankton’ that passed before Ballard, the embryonic writer, and helped form the obsessions that were to feed his imagination and stay with him throughout his life. I think the materials and the new journalistic skills that Ballard discovered at C&I gave him an escape route from the impossibility of writing straight SF and suggested new outlets for his burgeoning creativity.

Mike Bonsall, July 2007.

Thanks to Alex and Will Knight, Tim Chapman, Simon Sellars and other members of the JGB Yahoo group for help with research.

..:: REFERENCES
+ Ballard, J.G. (1997), ‘The Pleasures of Reading’ in A User’s Guide to the Millennium.
+ Pringle, D. (ed.) and Ballard, J.G. (1982). ‘From Shanghai to Shepperton’, in RE/Search 8/9: J.G. Ballard (eds. Vale and Andrea Juno). pp. 112-124.

..:: APPENDIX
+ Complete text of Ballard’s book reviews for C&I.

Review by Rick McGrath

To mark this month’s release of Kingdom Come in paperback, former ad man Rick McGrath takes another look at KC from ‘the perspective of marketing, advertising and psychopathology’. He also takes a look at the Metro-Centre website, a viral-marketing tool used to promote the book, and asks, ‘The abattoir? Not too gloomy?’

If you haven’t read the book yet and need a taster, HarperCollins have helpfully onlined a PDF of the first chapter.

HAS the kingdom come to this? The marketing mavens at HarperCollins Publishers have gone “bad is good” and invented a fake Metro-Centre website in order to help promote sales of J.G. Ballard’s latest novel, Kingdom Come.

Inspired by the novel and the adcap antics of its protagonist, Richard Pearson, “2006 UK Adman Of The Year”, this ersatz shopping centre has attempted to represent itself as revealed in the novel, with David Cruise interviews, St George’s shirts, maps, hours of operation, local news, sports — anything to enhance the illusion. Then, in June 2007, just before the release of the softcover HarperPerennial PS edition of Kingdom Come, they upped the ante. They kept the site’s flowery Metro-Centre sunflower background (which had already changed from 4C to B&W), but brutalized the bland logo into a reversed Helvetica motorcycle gang armpatch, and started running their own versions of Pearson’s psychopathic campaign, ironically attempting to foster consumer interest using irrational ads.

LEFT: David Cruise stands forlornly in an empty parking lot. Apparently we don’t have to wait much longer… one assumes the cars will soon arrive (photo copyright Metro-Centre 2007).

Ahh… the joys of marketing: use an imaginary ad campaign to sell a real book about an imaginary ad campaign. You have to give them credit, for it’s a sad fact that Kingdom Come, in hardcover, was met with mixed notices from UK reviewers when it was published in September 2006. City critics know nothing of the suburbs. But now the publication of Kingdom Come, the softcover, offers an opportunity to re-examine the novel from the perspective of marketing, advertising and psychopathology … and the hidden message behind Pearson’s “ironic” ad campaign.

Pearson, remember, is a recently-fired and divorced advertising executive who leaves his London flat to venture out and into the suburbs to a town called Brooklands, off the M25 motorway, to finalize the estate of his recently-murdered father. Who killed dad? Turns out nobody really cares, and Pearson, dazed and confused in this unlandscape of the uncreative, stands out like a slogan without a brand, writhing in newly-felt emotions as he slowly learns the truth about his now ultimately estranged pater.

No matter. All this is just psychological background for Pearson’s main activity in the novel: unleashing his radical ad campaign for a stupendous shopping complex they call the Metro-Centre.

It takes awhile to get there, but Pearson’s psychotic proclivity to link product and buyer finally crashes into consciousness when he meets the very Ballardian Dr Maxted, a professor-like psychiatrist who loves to make summatory pronouncements and who introduces Pearson to the concept of “elective insanity” — psychopathologies which are “waiting inside us, ready to come out when we need it”. Maxted is always right and never wrong. Pearson falls instantly for this intellectual father figure.

So it’s no surprise that Maxted makes the telling prediction, lecturing Pearson that “the future is going to be a struggle between vast systems of competing psychopathologies, all of them willed and deliberate, part of a desperate attempt to escape from a rational world and the boredom of consumerism”. Hmm… hey, that’s a marketing concept: if rationality is prison-like and our only amusement is more of the boredom of going out to buy something useless, then maybe irrationality will free us and add some excitement to our lives… and perhaps make shopping a pleasure again! Helluva notion. For Pearson, this certainly is the basis of an advertising campaign. But which “competing” psychopathology to use?

Pearson knows the answer. His own self-doubts guide him. He’s already tapped into the power of “elective insanity”. In London, Pearson experimented with what he called a “strange” ad — unfortunately, the first campaign he tried it on worked so well he was fired. Full kudos for being brave, but the campaign for a new micro-car — “Mad is bad. Bad is good.” — dives into a pool of irony so deep as to confuse the public into buying the car and killing themselves by completing the slogan’s logic and concluding “mad is good”. And that is sophisticated London. This is not. Again happily undeterred by any thoughts of consequences, Pearson decides to reprise his radical concept: “Brooklands and the motorway towns were the ultimate consumer test panel, and here I could put into practice the subversive ideas that had cost me my career”.

What’s truly subversive about this campaign, however, is its deeper, latent meaning: this is not a campaign for the Metro-Centre, this is a campaign designed to tap the darkness of Pearson’s own unrealized psychopathologies. Oedipal guilt springs to mind. Too Freudian? How about emasculated male ego? No matter. The sublimation begins. In essence, Pearson unconsciously uses his campaign to advertise his own neuroses upon an already-restive society only too happy to consume the deviance of his “elective insanity”. Sounds bad, but once again the Ballardian character obsessively seeks to touch his inner self by dominating the external environment.

Charged with purpose, Pearson immediately gets to work. Not surprisingly, his deepest insight is right out of Freud: true capital is emotional — once you have their hearts, their wallets will soon follow. Once you have their Ids, their Egos will soon follow. Pearson explains to his newly-recruited pitchman, David Cruise, how this situation can be exploited: “People accumulate emotional capital, as well as cash in the bank, and they need to invest those emotions in a leader figure”.

If this is psychopathologic, David Cruise’s first emotions are anger and hate, possibly against an unidentified victim. The booze angle will become part of the campaign’s theme (photo copyright Metro-Centre 2007).

But what kind of “leader figure” will the population invest in? Do they want a dictator whose specific message demands racial fears and violence? No, says Pearson. “There is no message. Messages belong to the old politics… No slogans, no messages. New politics. No manifestos, no commitments. No easy answers. They decide what they want”. Hah, hah. Hardly. People consume what they’re given. Pearson’s anxieties require him to fictionalize his own psychopathogies. But how? For Pearson, that’s easy: use the irrational. “Madness is the key to everything. Small doses, applied when no-one is really looking.” Sneaky boy has been peeking at Mum again.

Once he’s concocted his concept, Pearson goes on to coach Cruise on how to pull off this acting job: “Be nice most of the time, but now and then be nasty, when they least expect it. Now and then slip in a hint of madness, a little raw psychopathology. Remember, sensation and psychopathy are the only way people contact with each other today.” Get the feeling Pearson is describing his childhood? That Cruise might be another kind of father-substitute … as well as Pearson’s projection?

For the media mix, Pearson chooses giant billboards and relentless TV commercials, along with a regular consumer affairs show on the Metro-Centre’s TV station. With this visual approach, and utilizing the appropriate “raw psychopathology”, Pearson re-creates Cruise as a “fugitive and haunted hero of a noir film … as a trapped creature of strange and wayward moods — grimacing, frowning, angry, morose, hallucinating and obsessed.” Pearson unwittingly describes himself.

Let’s see how Ballard captures these “wayward moods” in Pearson’s ads. The novel describes two billboards and six television commercials. A sophisticated marketer, Pearson has designed a campaign which builds on itself through evocative scenes, each slightly more deviant than the last. They are indeed as zany and irrational as Pearson, although he later calls them “ironic soft-sells”, which is in itself a masterpiece of self-delusion.

Billboard #1: Cruise as a “fugitive and haunted hero”, sitting at the wheel of his car, staring ahead at the open road, “and whatever nemesis lay in wait for him.”

Billboard #2: Cruise in a “nightmare replay of a Strindberg play”, threatening and confused as he stares across a showroom of kitchens.

TV Spot #1: Cruise staring “almost ecstatically” at a beat-up garbage can.

In TV Spot #2: Cruise rings doorbells at random, and when the housewife answers the door, he scowls at her as if to hit her, or beg a place to stay.

TV Spot #3: Cruise “haunting” the Brooklands racing circuit and his mind being “tortured” by squealing tires.

TV Spot #4: Cruise following a group of schoolgirls across a Heathrow concourse “like a would-be child abductor.”

TV Spot #5: Cruise howling from the roof of a multi-storey car park.

TV Spot #6: Just hinted at, but apparently the action takes place in a slaughterhouse. Pearson asks: “The abattoir? Not too gloomy?” And is answered: “Never. Existential choice.” So fraught with death one hardly needs to know the plot.

As with all great campaigns, these advertisements build on each other in such a way that, “Together they made sense at the deepest levels, scenes from the collective dream forever playing in the back alleys of their mind.” Unfortunately, that collective dream turns out to be the physical reality of senseless violence, complete with fascist tendencies.

Our man Cruise doing the Strindberg play thing in a showroom with washers and TVs. Today we’re just a little suicidal… (photo copyright Metro-Centre 2007).

Pearson himself calls these ads “tense but meaningless psychodramas”, but of course the “meaning” is in the tension itself — with Cruise a kind of subhero of Pearson’s subconscious. It’s Dr Maxted’s “elective insanity” dressed up in noir. No longer trapped in their civilized cage of guilty repression, the populace of Brooklands quickly responds to Pearson’s siren call of the instincts and gleefully embraces the Metro-Centre’s call to consumerism … and darker action.

Does the campaign work? Of course, and only too well. Unfortunately, the results are similar to Pearson’s car campaign — increased sales and increased violence. The population of Brooklands, already primed by a spectacle diet of aggressive sports and nationalist mobbing, rush to spend their emotional capital: Cruise achieves celebrity status, Metro-Centre becomes a self-contained church of consumerism, the cash registers ring, and all is outwardly well in Happy Valley. By day. By night Brooklands reflects the dark side of Pearson’s psychopathic campaign. His deep guilt and sexual anxieties are reflected in the street crowds around him. These basic instincts rule the streets and sports stadiums; the individual becomes a mob, and the situation becomes dangerous.

The ad man’s moment of self-realization comes as he’s driving the streets. Reflecting on the violence around him, Pearson muses: “I saw myself as taking part in a merchandising scheme in a suburban shopping mall, using a ‘bad is good’ come-on that was meant to be the ultimate in ironic soft sells. I had recruited a third-rate cable presenter and some-time actor to play the licensed jester, the dwarf at the court of the Spanish kings. But the irony had evaporated, and the slogan had become a political movement … The ad man was faced with the final humiliation of being taken literally.”

A humiliation, indeed -– and the turning point in the novel. But, just in case we still don’t get it, Ballard neatly sums it up. In a meeting between Pearson and Dr Maxted, we finally reach analytic ground zero.

Dr Maxted: “You saw fascism as just another sales opportunity. Psychopathology was a handy marketing tool. David Cruise was your tailor’s dummy … a psychopath with genuine moral integrity.”

Pearson: “Still, everyone admired him.”

Dr Maxted: “Why not? We’re totally degenerate. We lack spine, and any faith in ourselves. We have a tabloid world-view, but no dreams or ideals. We have to be teased with the promise of deviant sex. Our gurus tell us that coveting our neighbour’s wives is good for us, and even conceivably our neighbour’s asses. Don’t honour your father and mother, and break free from the whole Oedipal trap. We’re worth nothing, but we worship our barcodes. We’re the most advanced society our planet has ever seen, but real decadence is far out of our reach. We’re so desperate we have to rely on people like you to spin a new set of fairy tales, cosy little fantasies of alienation and guilt.”

Whoa. So much for English culture. But this pessimistic view is, of course, the reason for the novel in the first place. In an ad, ad, ad world, you get what you psychopathologically deserve.

Cruise’s moment of ecstasy with a beat-up garbage can. The overturned shopping trolley is a nice touch; the billboard was posted in Shepperton (photo copyright Metro-Centre 2007).

Without a doubt Richard Pearson is an interesting addition to the stable of unstable Ballardian characters. He enters the novel a typically damaged professional, emasculated by his wife, fired from his job, and looking for the killer of his alienated father. Lost in this unfamiliar landscape, Pearson transforms it by transforming himself, rewriting his nightmares into an ad campaign of irrationality, which he survives and emerges from as a physically damaged but mentally healthier and wiser individual. Whew. And he gets the girl. And yes, she’s a mother figure.

Ultimately, Pearson’s cathartic campaign comes across as Ballard’s real advertisement for his version of a well-balanced life. Pearson’s failure becomes his salvation. If the Metro-Centre campaign is an externalized, artistic version of Pearson’s inner psychological state, then his recovery comes with its ultimate self-destruction. Once again Ballard confirms his longstanding theme of personal affirmation by following one’s obsessions. Through Pearson, Ballard creates his own extreme advertisement for personal and social redemption: Turn your back on the tabloids. Grow a spine. Have some faith in yourself. Go after your dreams. Have some ideals. In other words, get a life.

In a real way, Kingdom Come the novel is an advertisement itself: read it as a very long print ad warning about the real dangers of subversive dreams when they’re carpet bombed on empty lives. Oh yeah, and admen are crazy. You’ve been warned…

Rick McGrath

..:: MORE INFO
+ Rick McGrath’s J.G. Ballard Collection
+ Ballardian’s interview with Rick McGrath
+ More on Kingdom Come
+ Metro-Centre website

+ Kingdom Come has finally been published in paperback, but check out the cover they’ve given it. It looks like a poster from Logan’s Run. McGrath and I have our suspicions that the Metro-Centre website is an official HarperCollins production set up to promote the book. If so, why couldn’t they have made use of that site’s aesthetic — the one that has produced such sublime imagery, especially now they’re into their ‘Mad is Bad; Bad is Good’ phase (although McGrath’s less keen on this than I am).

Never mind. The paperback, David Pringle informs us, features a new interview with Ballard in the back, some of which you can find here. There are no new revelations, as David notes, although Ballard mentions his scotch habit once again, which surprises me. I thought he was on the gin and tonic these days.

Something is stirring over at our favourite shopping mall. After lying fallow for almost two months, the official blog of the Metro-Centre shopping centre in Brooklands stirs to life with a rather ominous poster campaign starring the failed talk-show host, David Cruise.

First, we were promised that ‘the wait is almost over’. And now, with a second poster reinventing Cruise as a Godardian neo-noir anti-hero, we are promised that ‘it will begin’…in five days’ time.

Will jaded shoppers respond?

Tired after my meeting with Zander, I sat down and ordered a vin blanc from the young French waitress, who wore jeans and a white vest printed with a quotation from Baudrillard.”

—————————————————————————-
J.G. Ballard. Super-Cannes. (p. 88).
—————————————————————————-

Rich, car-crashing idiot No. 2: Stefan Eriksson.

Over at The Wrong Advices, Dan writes, ‘After watching Eddie Griffin destroy a Ferrari Enzo I was reminded of some of the other times rich idiots have killed beautiful and expensive cars. I’ve put together a list of some of the more memorable crashes.’

My favourite is No. 2:

Car: Ferrari Enzo
Value: US $1.2 million
Idiot at the wheel: Stefan Eriksson – Former Gizmondo Exec
What happened: Crashed into a pole at 199 mph (320.61 km/h). Tried to
blame it on his imaginary friend Dietrich.”

Surely Vaughan’s shaman, Jimmy Dean, should be on this list…

[ via Spinopsys ]

————————————————————————————————————————

+ BUMPER HUMPER

Mechanic Chris DOES have a girlfriend — just one of the Sun’s charming photos.

Speaking of idiots and cars, Keith emailed to remind me of this news story, reported a few weeks back in the UK’s bastion of truth, the Sun newspaper, about a man who has sex with cars. Keith says: ‘Not sure whether it’s a joke or not. The guy sounds so goofy talking about his lust for cars that it makes you understand just how artful Ballard’s descriptions in Crash are.’

It’s *got* to be a joke:

MECHANIC Chris Donald loves his work — he has sex with CARS… “Some men like boobs and bums, but I much prefer curvy bodywork.”

Chris, 38, has a recognised psychological condition that makes him physically attracted to motors. He has had sex with more than 30 different models in 20 years — plus two motorboats and a pal’s JETSKI. Chris, who DOES have a girlfriend, confessed: “A nice car for me is a feast for the senses. It’s about smells, feelings and tastes. If I see a gorgeous Mercedes I know I’d love to jump into bed with it.”

His weird obsession mirrors that of electrician Karl Watkins, who The Sun revealed was jailed for having sex with pavements in Redditch, Worcs, in 1993.”

————————————————————————————————————————

+ PLEASURE SHOPPING

LEFT: Where pleasure is a way of life…

Look what’s just opened for business! The Metro-Centre, no less, billed as ‘the largest shopping mall in the south of the UK. Located at Brooklands, off the M25 near to Heathrow… This is the Metro-Centre where shopping is a pleasure and pleasure is a way of life.’

According to the Centre’s blog:

Want to try alternative types of medicine? Want to see what the healing power of crystal can do to your life? Then get over to the east wing on the second floor to The Crystal World. Featuring a wide variety of crystals, for both decorative and practical uses, The Crystal World could be your gateway to a new existence!”

The Metro-Centre’s only been open for a few weeks, but I’m predicting that pretty soon the blog is going to be reporting a secession that turns the Centre into an anomalous enclave, following a dark and mysterious ‘ad-noir’ campaign featuring a charismatic cable-TV host and a subsequent takeover by paramilitary goons…

The signs are already there: when you click on ‘map’, it says: ‘AT THE REQUEST OF THAMES VALLEY CID, THIS PAGE HAS BEEN REMOVED.’

————————————————————————————————————————

+ PUBLIC DISORDER AS ENTERTAINMENT

A Ballardian community?

For a taste of what you can expect when the Metro-Centre does kick off, Mountain*7 informs us that a ‘remarkable set of images, taken from a mini-riot that took place at the Gare du Nord in Paris on the 26th March’ has been uploaded to Flickr:

Apparently the whole thing kicked off after a passenger caught travelling without a ticket was arrested with ‘excessive force’ – there were 9 arrests made and some mild injuries (although the vending machine appears to have borne the brunt of the damage).

There’s a banality to the images somehow, as if the whole thing were a media set; and the sheer presence of so many cameras almost doubles the unreality of the event. We’re so inured to the idea of simulation now that the very mention of it seems superfluous, but this seems to have tipped over into something else, a Ballardian sense of community-through-violence, public disorder as entertainment.”

————————————————————————————————————————

+ SERRENIA NIGHTS

Serrenia: layer upon layer of invisible security.

Matteo emailed to direct me to Dan Hill’s mashup of Cocaine Nights and promotional material for the Serrenia project, the waterside development that ‘sits where the Red Sea meets the Eastern Sahara, mountain ranges to the west silhouetting the horizon, and beyond them the ancient city of Luxor and the timeless Nile.’

Dan goes on to say:

…can anything in literature be as bizarrely late-period Ballard as the actual Serrenia promo video and website? Is it even for real? Perhaps most of all, this section from the ‘PEACE OF MIND’ section of the website:

“Discreet, effective and efficient security is all part of the Serrenia experience. The security is there, all but invisible, building layer upon subtle layer. The very latest in high-technology protection, ‘laser’ fences, detect movement and 24-hour CCTV monitors constantly. Even after having been granted access to Serrenia through the main Sahl Hasheesh gate, visitors will still have to pass through one of the three main entry gates. The Hotel and ‘exclusive zone’ will be controlled by another security layer each with extra gates. Finally access to Palace Island is regulated by an additional layer of security and another gate. Experienced professionals, recruited from across the world, have given their expertise to create a secure haven, and to supply the most unobtrusive of safeguards, while all staff are rigorously vetted. Highly trained personnel are available at all times to offer support, though chances are you’ll never even know they are there, to guarantee your safety and freedom, so that you can enjoy the luxury of protection without feeling confined.”

One’s tempted to say “you couldn’t make it up” except that, essentially, Ballard already had.”

————————————————————————————————————————

+ THE CAR CRASH AS SEDUCTION TECHNIQUE

LEFT: Robert Maitland, eat your heart out.

And finally, via Rodcorp, we learn that Paul Thorp — a real-life Maitland from Ballard’s Concrete Island — is in the news again:

“Anyone who’s driven on the M62 between Manchester and Leeds will have seen the farm in the middle of the motorway and wondered: what’s it doing there? And is it, as most people believe, a monument to stubbornness?
…
Its sole occupant is Paul Thorp, a sheep farmer with just his dogs for company and 2,000 acres of land. Living 20 yards from the fast lane has its ups, downs – and near misses – as Paul reveals.

“It has its moments. We’ve had a few visitors over the fence. They’ve put a crash barrier up to stop ‘em, but before my time a wagon came through knocked the wall down landed on its side touching the garden wall. We’ve had plenty of accidents wagons and cars stuff coming through fence not that often but enough.”

…making Stott Hall Farm attractive to the opposite sex has proved difficult… Paul admits it can be a lonely place: “I guess you don’t want to be on your own all the time. It’s just a bit of a bleak place to bring somebody out in the wilds, all that traffic round you, and you’re a long way from anywhere – two miles from the nearest village. The postman only comes to the bottom of the hill and some days you won’t see anybody except those zipping past on the motorway – apart from people ringing you might not see anyone else to talk to.

“I just need someone who likes the outdoor life to have a breakdown outside and then come round!”

Paul, we have just the lady for you…

‘Missing the point’: (detail, Livre de Poche edition, 1973; design: Atelier Pascal Vercken).

NOTE: This is an edited version of an essay published in Designing Pornotopia: Travels in Visual Culture by Rick Poynor, Laurence King Publishing, 2006. First published in Eye no. 52, Summer 2004. Reproduced with permission.

J. G. BALLARD’S Crash tests the limits of the reader’s taste and sympathies in the most profound ways and it has always provoked strong reactions – positive and negative. British novelist Will Self has said, ‘I only have to look at a few paragraphs of Crash to feel I am in the presence of an extreme mind, a mind at the limits of dark imagination.’ He meant this as a commendation. Even Ballard sometimes seemed ambivalent. ‘How many people are there who’d want to read a book like Crash?’ he once asked. ‘Not many.’

Yet Crash, described by Ballard himself as a ‘psychopathic hymn’, did find a following. Over the years it has appeared in French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Finnish, and Japanese translations. It became a cult book, appealing to the kind of reader who also liked William Burroughs — the type of novel a post-punk rock band might enthuse about in the music press.

I read the hardback first edition of Crash as a teenager, soon after it came out. I was already a devotee of Ballard’s other books, but I loved Crash’s extremity, its sense of moral danger, its willingness to probe dark areas of the psyche, and the toxic beauty of its prose. Over the years I collected editions of the book, partly to see whether any publisher could ever visualise a piece of writing which is prepared to be, in Ballard’s words, ‘openly pornographic’ as a literary stratagem. On the whole, though, image-makers have been defeated by Crash. A book that ought to have inspired covers to match and reflect its status as an underground classic has often received visual treatments marked by incomprehension and evasion. I was curious to know how Ballard viewed this, as a writer with such a strong sense of the visual. He didn’t wish to be interviewed – reviewing the covers would, he suggested, be ‘rather too close to an autopsy on myself’ – but he was willing to make notes on some of them if I sent him photocopies.

LEFT: Crash’s first jacket, designed by Bill Botton (Jonathan Cape, 1973).
RIGHT: Chris Foss’s interpretation (Panther, 1975).

The first jacket, published by Jonathan Cape in 1973, shows a jutting gear stick, presumably intended to be phallic, in front of a towering three-dimensional titlepiece that occupies most of the cover. This still rankles with Ballard, who describes it as ‘monstrously bad, one of the worst book jackets ever – for sheer ugliness and crudity, impossible to beat’. Few of the Ballard hardback covers produced by Cape in the 1970s and early 1980s were any good. The first UK paperback edition of Crash, however, illustrated by science fiction artist Chris Foss, retains its power. ‘Superb, in many ways the best ever,’ notes Ballard. ‘Quasi-realistic, but in the right way, like a movie poster of the 1950s – brought into brilliant focus by that line – “A brutal, erotic novel”.’ Foss, an illustrator of The Joy of Sex (1972), treats the image as an opportunity for lurid, pulp-style exploitation. There is nothing quite like this scene in the book. The ruined car smoulders with menace, its twisted bonnet rising above the woman’s naked body like a predator’s gaping maw. This cover established the principle iconographic elements — woman and car — that feature in many interpretations of Crash.

LEFT: Fashionable flirtations (illustration: James Marsh; Triad, 1985).
RIGHT: ‘Too lipsticky; too neat’. (illustration: Larry Rostant; Flamingo, 1993).

In 1985, the novel was reissued as part of a new, oppressively black-bordered series with an illustration by James Marsh, showing a red-lipped Amazon at the wheel, clad in studded leather. This connected the book with emerging trends in fetish clothing and a fashionable flirtation with S&M, but it had nothing to do with Ballard’s vision. By 1993, the woman was reduced to a pair of pouting red lips framed by a shattered rear view mirror – it resembled the kind of airbrush illustration in vogue 20 years earlier. Ballard dismisses the cover as ‘too lipsticky – too “neat”.’

LEFT: Livre de Poche again, for your pleasure… (1973; design: Atelier Pascal Vercken).

Ballard’s 1974 introduction, which might have offered additional clues for visual interpretation, is reprinted in both editions. Crash, he writes, is ‘an extreme metaphor for an extreme situation, a kit of desperate measures only for use in an extreme crisis. . . . Will modern technology provide us with hitherto undreamed-of means for tapping our psychopathologies?’ Neither cover shows any hint of these concerns. The tacky Livre de Poche edition, in which a car’s radiator grille metamorphoses into a flesh-licking tongue, once again turns the vehicle itself into the protagonist and misses the point.

Where interpretations of Crash by male image-makers tend to present female sexual personae in the most obvious and unrevealing ways, as victim or vamp, missing the unbridled perversity of the book’s female characters, women designers and image-makers have been inclined to neutralise the book’s violent eroticism.

LEFT: Crash in the desert (design: Carin Goldberg; Vintage, 1985).
RIGHT: Ecstasy in the fairground (photograph: Clare Godfrey; Vintage, 1995).

A 1985 US paperback, designed by Carin Goldberg, with wide-spaced ‘new wave’ typography, arbitrarily transplants Crash to the American desert, where a faceless female who looks like a misplaced fashion model wanders away from some totemic car parts scattered in the dust. The cover’s Surrealism-lite bears only the most tenuous connection to the novel. Photographer Clare Godfrey’s cover image for the 1995 UK edition treats Crash as a kind of ecstatic fairground ride. The hot neon colours and chaotic superimpositions relate to a scene in which Vaughan and the narrator cruise the expressways while under the influence of LSD, but the image is strangely depopulated and Crash’s relentless sexual content is suppressed.

Crash is peculiarly resistant to attempts to summarise it with a single image. Its synthetic literary method depends on the conjunction within a verbal image of phenomena that are usually discrete. Ballard insistently establishes geometrical relationships between the body parts and postures of his characters and the technology that surrounds them: ‘By entering her vagina among the metal cabinets and white cables of the X-ray department I would somehow conjure back her husband from the dead, from the conjunction of her left armpit and the chromium camera stand, from the marriage of our genitalia and the elegantly tooled lens shroud.’ In the late 1980s, collage and montage became increasingly prevalent means of expressing thematic complexity on book covers. If ever a novel called out for a mode of evocation based on fragments and juxtaposition, it was Crash, but it was 1994 before an American design team explored this possibility.

‘Both sexes, equally implicated’ (detail, Noonday Press edition, 1994; design: Michael Ian Kaye and Melissa Hayden).

Michael Ian Kaye and Melissa Hayden’s cover for Noonday Press makes Crash look like the cult novel that it is. ‘I loved the book,’ says Kaye. ‘It was so much about cars and sex that it seemed stupid to hide that. We went to a junkyard. We were both really into this project.’ Hayden’s boyfriend was also involved in the shoot and, for once, both sexes are presented as equally implicated in Ballard’s nightmare marriage of technology and desire. It was Hayden’s photographic concept, but at the junkyard they passed around a Polaroid. The grid of 12 pictures on the cover shows smashed and crumpled bodywork, a hand clutching a roll of film, a man’s jeans open at the fly with the suggestion of an erection and a woman’s hand delving for her crotch. A glimpse of breasts or buttocks can be seen through a broken windshield. ‘They all represent little blips of the experience,’ says Kaye. ‘Using the grid speaks a little more to the futuristic quality without being so literal. It was about lots of little ideas making up the whole.’ The ‘garage font’ title typeface, a sans serif to which serifs have been applied selectively, adds to the mood of unease. With cult-like understatement, Kaye positions the title in the bottom right-hand corner as a kind of full point to the design.

Ballard had never seen this version of Crash until I sent it to him. Publishers do not always provide authors with copies of foreign editions. He found the cinematic treatment ‘a bit too literal – if the novel is a psychotic hymn, this hardly suggests it’. But then no cover has succeeded in fully expressing the delirium of Crash.

LEFT: Another miss (Vintage, 1996; cover photography © Alliance).

The 1996 UK film tie-in version, which Ballard, a supporter of Cronenberg’s interpretation, does admire, was another missed opportunity. The cover is based on a scene showing actress Holly Hunter (Helen Remington) straddling James Spader (James Ballard) in the front seat of a car. While the image conveys nothing of the perversity of either book or film and only hints at the role of the car, it does carry an erotic charge, acknowledging sexual interaction as the book’s subject in a way that few Crash covers have dared.

The cautious handling of Crash, even now, is all the more surprising when one considers the prevalence of pornographic imagery in contemporary culture. As a work of bizarre prophecy, the book was far enough ahead of its time to be truly shocking, though only a fool would imagine that Ballard thought we should crash our cars for sexual thrills. The phenomenon and meaning of the collision has become the subject of cultural criticism in essay collections such as Car Crash Culture (2001) and Crash Cultures (2003), and the spectre of Ballard’s narrative invariably haunts their pages. Crash’s explosive collisions of flesh and metal are, as Ballard says, a metaphor, taking social tendencies and following their trajectories to discover where they might lead. In his introduction, he notes that ‘we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly’. If that was true in 1973, it is even more the case today. At the time, Ballard described the book as ‘cautionary’ and ‘a warning’, but he has wavered on the question of whether Crash is a moral indictment. In 1997, he told cultural critic Mark Dery that the novel illustrates the process by which ‘formerly aberrant or psychopathic behavior is annexed into the area of the acceptable’ and he pointed out how the proliferation of new communications technologies was aiding this process.

In December 2003, GQ ran a story about ‘dogging’, a sexual subculture in which people use the Internet to arrange meetings where they have sex in parked cars while others watch. The item was illustrated by the Hunter and Spader shot used on the cover of Crash.

Rick Poynor

..:: MORE CRASH COVERS FROM RICK POYNOR’S COLLECTION

Above…
LEFT: Bruna Dutch edition (1980; design: Kothuis Art-Team).
RIGHT: Minotauro Spanish edition (1980; design uncredited).

Above…
LEFT: 10/18 French edition (1992; detail from Roy Lichtenstein’s Woman in bath).
RIGHT: Noonday Press US edition (1994; design: Michael Ian Kaye and Melissa Hayden).

Above…
LEFT: Picador USA edition (2000; design: Henry Sene Yee; painting: Davin Watne).
RIGHT: Vintage Blue UK edition (2004; photograph Scott Wishart; designer uncredited).

Rick Poynor was founding editor of Eye magazine in London from 1990 to 1997. He writes columns for Eye and for Print magazine in New York, and he has covered design, media and visual culture for Blueprint, Frieze, I.D., Icon, Domus, Metropolis, Adbusters, Harvard Design Magazine, The Guardian, Financial Times, and many other publications. His books include No More Rules: Graphic Design and Postmodernism (2003) and the essay collections Design Without Boundaries (1998), Obey the Giant: Life in the Image World (2001) and Designing Pornotopia (2006). In 2003, he co-founded www.designobserver.com, now a leading weblog for design discussion. He is a research fellow at the Royal College of Art in London, and he lectures widely in Europe, the US, Australia and China.

..:: MORE INFO
+ ‘Woefully Underconceptualised’: Rick McGrath on J.G. Ballard Cover Art
+ Rick McGrath’s Terminal Collection
+ Ballardia: Jeremy Dennis’s JGB Cover Art Gallery
+ Mike Holliday’s guide to collecting Ballard

Rick McGrath is a writer and former adman. He is also the curator of what may be the world’s largest collection of J.G. Ballard first editions; he’s the ‘go-to man’ whenever a TV station or glossy mag does a rare feature on Ballard and needs some book covers. Rick has written analyses of Ballard’s work, which you can find — along with ephemera, scans of Ballard’s cover art, and a sizeable selection of criticism from heavyweight Ballard scholars — over at The Terminal Collection.

Thanks to Rick for the book scans and Mike Holliday for the collages and ephemera.

..:: Simon

———————————————————————————–

:: Two David Pelham-illustrated ‘softcover classics’ (both Penguin, London, 1974).

How did you become interested in Ballard’s writing?

I was turned onto Ballard by Lawrence Russell, a now-retired professor of creative writing in Victoria, Canada. The classic 1974 Penguin softcover reprints had just been published, so I bought them all and went home to read The Wind From Nowhere. The writing style was punchy — fine by me — and the plot zipped along in normal adventure narrative mode — no surprises there — but it was the slow burn of the concept that blew me away. Up to this time the furthest into the SF apocalyptic pool I had ventured was Kurt Vonnegut’s Ice Nine. Hardly deep. By the time I waded through The Drowned World I was hooked. The Terminal Beach, my first foray into the short stuff, basically kicked psycho sand in my eyes. It’s a book you’d create a desert island for. My ardour was finally slaked with The Drought, which I still find a lesser god. When I finished that fab four I went out and bought more. I’m still buying.

What interested me then, as it does today, is Ballard’s bald-faced technique of inversion — it’s the elephant in the character’s room — which I still take as a kind of dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, flatly played out against painterly backgrounds in Ballard’s insular little pop-art worlds. Oh yeah, I’m also drawn to enigma and paradox, darkside fantasies, and free-flowing clever imaginations.

You like Wind from Nowhere, don’t you? Even Ballard can’t bring himself to mention it, these days.

It was, admittedly, the first Ballard I ever read. So it’s a little like a first kiss. I was fascinated with the concept of the increasing wind. It had a sudden newness to it. And you have to admit, tentative prose or not, that Ballard’s imaginative powers are already flexing in his minutely detailed descriptions of the disaster. The plot is well paced, with cutaways to the secondary story, and basically the book only fails at the end when Ballard realises he’s written himself into a corner: either they all die, or the wind abates. So it’s no great surprise when, with only a hundred or so words to go, Ballard has to toss this in: ‘Amazed, they looked up at this incredible defiance, intervening like some act of God to save them.’ At least he had the nerve to call it a deus ex machina before his readers did.

The writing style is lucid and honest; the intricacies of just how such a wind would affect the earth seems plausible and the tension is well maintained. It just doesn’t have that inversion of ‘civilised’ reality for Maitland to ponder, and ultimately accept.

In the rest of the apocalyptic quartet the action takes place after the denouement, much like in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, and as such has a lack of tension because the time frame is extended — all the way to infinity in The Crystal World. My position, of course, could prove to be untenable, but I’d still defend Wind as a guilty pleasure on a wild winter night, curled up with a Lagavulin in front of a reassuring fire.

I’m not very good on the archival side of things. I throw away my manuscripts. You’ve got to understand, I can’t take all that stuff. I hate that instant memorialising…frankly it’s of no interest to me whatever. All those things that obsess archivists, like different variants of a paperback published in 1963 (on the first run something is deleted from the artwork, or the Berkeley medallion is not on the spine)…it leaves me cold!”

———————————————————————————–
J.G. Ballard. ‘Interview by A. Juno & Vale’. RE/Search: J.G. Ballard (1984).
———————————————————————————–

You’re known for your huge collection of Ballard first editions, flying in the face of Ballard’s attitude towards archivists and collectors.

Sure. But whaddya gonna do? Ballard seems to have no ego-attachment to specific objects. He even has a fake painting! Is it part of his general aversion to the past? He certainly isn’t nostalgic. And I can understand where he’s coming from — collecting first editions is a totally wacky expenditure of time and energy. The point of a book is the story, not the time it was published or the way it was packaged. I’m sure there’s some unsavoury Freudian explanation for this irrational desire to surround (extend?) yourself with these symbolic cultural objects, but the trip seems fairly harmless.

LEFT: Detail from Vermilion Sands (artist: Peter Jones; Panther, London 1975).
RIGHT: Richard Powers: Surrealism Lite (The Burning World; Berkley, New York 1964).

Actually, the trip is very instructive. Looking at the myriad examples of Ballard cover art on your site, one thing that strikes me is the fact that no publisher has ever really nailed it. Take the Panther cover (see above) for Vermilion Sands — it’s like a futuristic Fantasy Island — ‘De spaceship! De spaceship!’ Surely there’s something to be said here about the difficulties publishers have had in categorising Ballard’s genre-defying work: ‘we can’t work this weirdo out, so we’ll call it science fiction’.

Ballard’s cover art has been woefully under conceptualised. It tells me that either publishers don’t care and/or the artists just used something that was lying around the studio. Stupid. Lazy. Cheap. Choose any two.

The most probable reality is that genre-defying work, ipso facto, makes categorisation difficult. It seems to me Ballard is an intellectually pure writer, one who follows his own instincts and apparently isn’t concerned with hacking up a best-seller. So he doesn’t sit still long enough for a publisher to box him up. I think this happens because of Ballard’s voracious appetite for imagistic input. He devours TV, magazines, oddball scientific journals – invisible literature – and collages it back at us in his never-ending rush of story ideas. His books invariably have topical references, as he basically burrows through the prevailing zeitgeist and projects its imaginative dark side back at us.

JGB at home, showing them how it should be done… (photo: Martyn Goddard).

It’s just about possible to divide Ballard’s career into roughly four periods. What’s the best and worst cover art in each? Let’s start with his early pulp, sci fi period, say from 1956 to 1969…

LEFT: Designer uncredited; The Drowned World; Gollancz, London, 1963.

OK, here Ballard had three publishers: Gollancz, Cape and Berkley. The low points are certainly the Gollancz efforts, which used no art and just two colours on a bilious yellow stock. Most of the press run probably went to libraries. Cheap to do. Garish on the shelf. The Berkleys are almost as bad, as they use the completely irrelevant ‘surrealist’ art pumped out by the prolifically puffy Richard Powers. Low point is his cover art for The Burning World (see above), which shows a scene that is (a) not at all representative of the story, and (b) is antithetical to the book’s theme. My favourite Berkley is a tossup between the Wind From Nowhere cover and the Drowned World effort.

The Capes are by far the best. The Drought (see below) is powerfully minimalist, relying basically on ripped horizontal colour bands; The Crystal World is the first to feature a Max Ernst painting, and the pile of skulls adorning The Disaster Area is also somehow appropriate, with its implication of atrocity. Cape also did wrap-around covers, which extended the effect, and if I have any quarrel with them, it’s their choice of cheesy typeface.

:: Cape’s wraparound Drought (artist: David Fawcett; Jonathan Cape, London, May 1965).

Next up: Ballard’s ‘experimental’ period, lasting approximately from 1970 to 1978…

Here, of the hardcovers, again Cape is the major publisher. Atrocity (below), Crash (see later) and Low-flying Aircraft (see later) are the high points. The Doubleday cover for Atrocity Exhibition is an odd choice, given the other 12 drawings (see later) Mike Foreman did for the book (perhaps it’s the least offensive), and Grove’s Halloween cover for Love & Napalm: USA was obviously developed on bad drugs.

:: The incomparable Dali; a very successful union (artist: Salvador Dali; Jonathan Cape, London, 1970).

Of all the hardcovers, however, I think the best overall is the Farrar, Straus & Giroux cover for Concrete Island (below). It’s just the kind of visual perversion I think Ballard would like. At least it’s clever.

:: The 1970s was a very strange decade.
LEFT: Crash (artist: Lawrence Ratzkin; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, NY 1973).
RIGHT: Concrete Island (artist: Paul Bacon; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York 1974).

The soft covers are more varied. Berkley’s Vermilion Sands and Chronopolis editions have dull covers by the still uninspired sub-realist, Richard Powers, and Panther’s Vermilion Sands in 1975 — as you’ve already highlighted — goes deep retro with a busty woman and distracted midget. At least it’s better than the haunted Gregory Peck figure they put on their reprint of Concrete Island in 1976 (below), and the clothing-challenged waif in front of an inappropriately destroyed building in the 1977 reprint of High-Rise (below). What were they thinking? How could they ignore the dead dog in the pool?

:: Gregory Peck meets a bedraggled, semi-naked nubile wandering dreamily around a post-apocalyptic urban war zone.
LEFT: Concrete Island (artist: Richard Clifton-Dey; Panther, London, 1976).
RIGHT: High-Rise (artist: Chris Foss; Panther, London, 1977).

The third major period of Ballard’s writing is a mish-mash — basically mainstream — lasting from 1979 to 1995. A lot of ground is covered, a lot of different styles…

But really, does anything stand out? In hardcovers, Cape starts to sputter a tad with the enigmatic family portrait on the cover (below) of The Unlimited Dream Company (granted, a silly title — but Brit gothic art?) and the oddly understated cover (below) of Hello America, surely a story with more visual treats than a bulbous car slithering over a brown desert. Carrol & Graf’s version of the same title looks like an old set from Planet of the Apes.

:: Detail from The Unlimited Dream Company (artist: Bill Botten; Jonathan Cape, London, 1979).

The Dragon’s Dream 1981 edition of Drowned World is a visual treat — one of very few ‘special editions’ of Ballard’s more visual works — and Cape continues to milk defeat from the breast of victory with a totally inappropriate fantasist illustration adorning Myths of the Near Future (below).

LEFT: Hello America (artist: Bill Botten; Jonathan Cape, London, 1981).
RIGHT: Artist: Paul Wright; The Day Of Creation, Gollancz, London, 1987.

No wonder Ballard switched to Gollancz, who at least got the project done with Empire of the Sun. I thought Gollancz also did a good job with The Day of Forever and The Venus Hunters (illustrated by Mark Foreman, son of Mike Foreman), although their take on The Day of Creation (above) looks like the Little Tugboat Annie that could… more like Daze of Creation. Hutchinson’s oddball art for Running Wild is cool — at least they’re kids — although Farrar’s attempt looks like they thought the book was called Sitting Wild And Out Of Focus.

LEFT: Myths Of The Near Future (artist: Bill Botten; Jonathan Cape, London, 1982).
RIGHT: Running Wild (artists: Chip Kidd and Barbara de Wilde; Hutchinson, London, 1988).

The oddball Arkham entry, Memories of the Space Age (see later), safely offers up another Max Ernst — and ignores the endless possibilities of a wasted Cape Canaveral, and the Collins hodgepodge of War Fever is yet another example of the ‘more is less’ school of cover design. Bore Fever. Although I think they recover nicely with The Kindness of Women (below), even though the timecode has been wound back to the 40s with the hat/lip styles. This period ends with Rushing to Paradise (below), a nicely executed cover on an unfortunate book. It’s like Ballard says: death has the best architects.

:: Two thumbs up from Rick.
LEFT: The Kindness of Women (designer: Neal Stuart; Harper Collins, Toronto, 1991).
RIGHT: Rushing to Paradise (designer: Chris Moore; Flamingo, London, 1994).

LEFT: Myths and Feathers (detail from Myths of the Near Future; designer: Chris Moore; Panther/Paladin, London, 1984).

In softcovers, Panther/Paladin hit a high point with a reissue of the classics using a more conceptual approach during the 1980s, such as the feather-encrusted pilot’s helmet in their 1984 issue of Myths of the Near Future, a nice, fetishishtic image for Crash, and a strong watch-like visual for Low-Flying Aircraft. Paladin reissued a number of new titles in the early 1990s, but, along with a Dent re-issue, these covers didn’t seem to have the on-the-shelf snap of the previous designs.

:: Two flamboyant Flamingos.
LEFT: Cocaine Nights (designer: Jerry Bauer; Flamingo, London, 1996).
RIGHT: Millennium People (designer: Jerry Bauer; Flamingo, London, 2003).

Now we’re into Ballard’s ‘urban detective’ period — from 1996 to the present…

In which it’s hard to argue with Flamingo’s flamboyant covers, starting with the expensive Cocaine Nights, and moving up the marketing budget ladder to Millennium People, with its flagrant metal emboss and Ralph Steadman-inspired cover art of the melting underside of London. Then, splat: Kingdom Come has an atrocious cover, once again presenting an incongruous image, given all the visual opportunities presented in the novel, and a title made more difficult to read by having it split with Ballard’s name.

Patrick Ness wrote that Kingdom Come’s design ‘is so very much more drab than David Hasslehoff’s autobiography’.

It’s a piece of shite. Amateur design and idiot concept. That cover and the suspect title — Ballard’s titles are often hit or miss, too — no doubt hurt sales as much as the crappy reviews. And what a letdown after Millennium People… Bargain basement productions. Any moron could have thought of the St George Cross, or Brooklands…or, given the plot, one of Pearson’s ads!

LEFT: Splat! (image: Getty Images; Kingdom Come; Fourth Estate, London, 2006)

Speaking of reviews, you’re one of the few to defend KC. Cover art aside, why do you think critics have reacted so savagely to Kingdom Come?

I think their reaction is a result of misreading the book. Ballard is complex, and a lot smarter in a philosophic sense than many critics realise. I think he’s been pigeonholed over the last few years as a sort of cranky old iconoclast with a sharp wit and ready opinion, and this — wait for it — media image tends to colour critical reaction, which means the Brits tend to confuse the books with the writer, and dismiss them as the repetitive hyperbole a sort of cranky iconoclast with a sharp wit and ready opinion would write. In contrast, the book received generally positive reviews in Canada, where Ballard is unencumbered with any prevailing public persona.

KC is a densely plotted story, made even more difficult to follow because of the linear Richard Pearson POV. You have to pay attention. Poor JGB. He writes a ‘cry wolf’ story about manipulation of the instincts (the true fascism?) and how easily an ego-damaged adman can carpet bomb a nuclear noir campaign over a suburban sandbox, and how the resultant mental wrench ironically proves deadly for inherently boring consumerism and life enhancing for the survivors. As a bonus, the book is full of clever and funny insights and asides. Critics completely miss the point, blathering about consumerism, fascism, all the links twixt centre and church, sports mobs, characterisation, repetition, etc etc — all the surface noise.

Ballard is not a writer easily digested, as I discovered myself. His modus operandi is to set little creative enigmas for the reader to imaginatively riff on. Mass-media critics have neither the time nor the depth of interest to really think about what The Man is saying, and with KC they focus on the central premise, consumerism and fascism, and entirely miss the ironic criticism of advertising. The entire plot is dependent on Pearson’s campaign. No wonder it generated an army. And Pearson is the great-grandson of Atrocity’s Travers, insofar as his environment is also mediatised, and both seek ‘closure’ in the creation of public, pop symbolism. Pearson’s ad campaign is thematically connected to both the collages and concepts fashioned by Travers.

But critics are part of the media landscape themselves, and their comments about the book have to be expressed in the language of their readers. That’s how you keep your job. In marketing reality, it really doesn’t matter that much if the review is good or bad — what counts is the mention and a picture of the cover. Reviews are, in their own way, just another advertisement for the book. It’s because it doesn’t look like an ad that we confuse it with commentary.

LEFT: J.G. Ballard Quotes (designer: Brian MacKenzie; RE/Search Publications, San Francisco, 2004).
RIGHT: J.G. Ballard Conversations (designers: Brian MacKenzie and Marian Wallace; RE/Search Publications, San Francisco, 2005).

Back to the art, and stepping away into the secondary sources, RE/Search’s covers for their two recent JGB volumes struck me as, in a word, bizarre.

Honestly, I think these reflect more RE/Search’s sense of their design standards. I’m not sure how a pastiche of retro SF images in any way either symbolises Ballard or represents his philosophy. Why not show a pic of The Man himself? Who’s the hero of the book, anyway? And just to show how the publishing industry is in comparison with the guys who really know — Hollywood — check out the sophisticated cover art for the DVDs and CDs of Empire (film; CD) and Crash (film; CD). What is it? Publishers can’t visualise?

LEFT: J.G. Ballard (image: uncredited; Manchester University Press, Manchester & NY, 2005).

However, the cover for academic Andrzej Gasiorek’s Ballard volume utilises the classic Ballardian stereotype: a human-effacing motorway image (a cliché I’m also guilty of using with the banner for this site). It’s clearly the deep cultural resonance of Crash that has generated this widespread visual shorthand — good or bad, do you think?

I’m not surprised… barren roadways have, I think, replaced the empty swimming pool as the modern Ballard image. Academics have tended to focus their attention on Ballard’s more difficult works – Atrocity Exhibition and Crash — and the dominant image of this creative period is the car and its associative images. Good or bad? More like predictable, as some representative image will be chosen, and the car is certainly a Ballardian creation.

What do you think of today’s crop of book covers in general? A number of commentators have bemoaned an over-reliance on computers rather than collage or hand-drawn art, and certainly you can see this in the recent Flamingo Ballard editions: metallic embossing, boxes around the text, and so on.

Funny. I’ve never been a cover-art hound. First editions have dust jackets and the book’s value is 90% determined by the condition of this stupidly fragile piece of paper. What’s on the cover is basically immaterial. As for the production process, I’ve never thought twice about technique — it’s how well the cover draws the eye to itself, and then suggests it might be a good idea to pick me up. Doesn’t matter how it’s done if the idea is on concept.

Is there a computer-generated Ballard cover, say within the last five years, which has caught your fancy?

Not really, as my taste in covers is to either (a) express the mood, or (b) reveal some action. The Flamingos are examples of the triumph of form over content. Do they give you even the slightest idea of the story behind them? Not in the slightest. The tone? OK, Millennium People suggests a breakdown, but the zebra-hipped hottie on Super-Cannes and the fireworks-splayed stab of coke on Cocaine Nights are merely marketing-generated eye candy. Cool, but candy.

Designers have consistently turned a deaf ear to [my] entreaties that someone, please, sit down and draft some original art… Over-reliance on…clinical [computer] technology is estranging in the decorative arts. That’s why, at my wit’s end…I hauled out my coloured pencils. I drew my own damn book cover — luminous, one-of-a-kind, and, like one of Tolstoy’s real beauties, not quite perfect.”

——————————————————————————————————–
Lionel Shriver. ‘Now that pixels have replaced pencils the art of drawing has vanished. I’m so exasperated I’m designing my own book cover’. The Guardian, 2/8/06.
——————————————————————————————————–

Should writers — like rock stars — be allowed to design their own covers? Or should they never be allowed near a scanner and a copy of Photoshop for as long as they live?

Ha. That’s good. But perhaps it’ll all be moot in the future anyway, as self-publishing and on-demand publishing increase with the expansion of the digital world. Personally, I can’t see why a writer shouldn’t also design, except in those instances where a lack of any skill or interest would diminish interest. With Ballard’s background in art, I don’t know if he’s ventured any suggestions (perhaps he has), but I think the system has a built-in reticence with agents as intermediaries. One suspects that a lot of writers rarely deal with their publishers.

:: ‘Venus Smiles’: one of five Ballardian ‘ads’ published in Ambit magazine (designer: J.G. Ballard; Ambit, #46, Winter 1970/71).

On the strength of Ballard’s advertiser announcements for Ambit, at least he would have made a good go of it. The Atrocity Exhibition would have especially benefited from this approach, don’t you think?

I have to disagree — I’m afraid Ballard’s concepts are so private that there’s little room for viewer overlap, and without that shared language there’s no understanding. I think those Ambit ads were products of their time, and possibly an in-joke with da boys. Times have changed. I’m not sure how Ballard might have handled Atrocity. Even his pro pal, Michael Foreman, had a tough time, falling back on a predictable collage solution himself.

Appropriating a Blake watercolour, say, or a Durer etching or an Ingres painting for the cover’s pictorial element puts the text in excellent company without diluting its descriptive authority. Nobody confuses these artists’ representations with the author’s, but their validated excellence may rub off.”

—————————————————————————————————
John Updike. ‘Deceptively Conceptual’. The New Yorker, 10/10/05.
—————————————————————————————————

:: ‘Europe After the Rain’ by Max Ernst: put to good use? (artist: Max Ernst; Memories Of The Space Age; Arkham House, Sauk City, 1988).

Following Updike’s lead, do you think some of the best Ballard covers are the Ernst paintings used for Crystal World and Memories of the Space Age? (Ernst’s usage for the latter was obviously missed on Evelyn C. Leeper, though…).

If Updike’s pissed, he should write a book about the conservation of symbols through disuse. Is that pre-modern? I like Ballard’s Ernst covers, but invariably they’re badly printed and perhaps too dense an image for your eye to easily resolve. The Dali cover on Atrocity was also an odd choice, I thought, with the primary image on the back cover. You can be too subtle. It’s also poorly printed.

What other artists would you like to see adorning a Ballard book?

I can detect Ballard thematic links with artists as disparate as Magritte and Escher, Russian Stalinist posters and almost all outsider art.

LEFT: Low-Flying Foss (artist: Chris Foss; Low-Flying Aircraft Panther; Panther, London, 1978).
RIGHT: That’s more like it — Cape’s first edition. Although the Monty Python-style vehicles and Gilliamesque cartoon font are a worry… (artist: Bill Botten; Low-flying Aircraft; Jonathan Cape, London, 1976).

You mentioned the low point of Richard Powers earlier. But what about Chris Foss? He seemed even more wide of the mark. For Low-Flying Aircraft, he supplied one of his patented starships that had nothing to do with the contents — it seemed that Ballard would be forever burdened by his sci-fi beginnings, even long after he’d maintained escape velocity from it.

Foss’s Low-Flying Aircraft cover is a joke compared with the Cape first edition — but then I grew up on an air-force base when they still had Lancasters.

Superb, in many ways the best ever. Quasi-realistic, but in the right way, like a movie poster of the 1950s — brought into brilliant focus by that line, ‘A brutal, erotic novel’.”

—————————————————————————————————–
J.G. Ballard on Chris Foss’s cover for Crash, quoted in Rick Poynor, ‘Archive: Crash Covers‘. Eye Magazine, 2004.
—————————————————————————————————–

Monstrously bad, one of the worst book jackets ever — for sheer ugliness and crudity, impossible to beat.”

————————————————————————————–
Ballard on Cape’s Crash cover, quoted in Poynor, 2004.
————————————————————————————–

LEFT: Foss’s Crash (artist: Chris Foss; Panther, London, 1979).

I was very surprised to learn that Ballard praised Foss’s cover for Crash — a lurid, pulpy depiction of a naked woman and a monstrous, Christine-style demon-car. It’s less of a surprise to learn he hates the Cape edition: it’s very 70s, and very crass, although it’s strangely evocative of the poster art for Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange and all of the stylised, morally ambivalent violence that signified.

I hate to admit it, but I don’t have Foss’s Crash cover, although if Ballard liked it, that could be part of his proclivity to provoke when possible. If it has sex, I’m going to bet The Man will find something to like about it. The Cape Crash is fine by me as it fits my criteria of selling the book as quickly as possible. The name and a gear stick. Doesn’t get much simpler than that. The colour helps.

Do you agree with Rick Poynor, who after analysing the various covers for Crash, concluded that the novel ‘is peculiarly resistant to attempts to summarise it with a single image. On the whole, image-makers have been defeated by Crash’.

If Poynor thinks Crash is beyond an image, he just hasn’t found one he likes yet. As I’ve said, the DVD cover is brutally erotic. If image-makers have been defeated by Crash, then they’re either not very good or their imagination is better suited to other themes. Half the battle is matching the right artist to the job.

:: Two Capes: Ballard hates one; McGrath can’t stand the other.
LEFT: Crash (artist: Bill Botten; Jonathan Cape, London, June 1973).
RIGHT: Concrete Island (artist: Bill Botten; Jonathan Cape, London, April 1974).

Poynor also wrote with regards to Ballard that ‘few of the hardback covers produced by Cape in the 1970s and 1980s were any good’. I don’t mind Cape’s Concrete Island cover: it’s full of the Pop-Art allusions that Ballard so skilfully assimilated.

I agree with Poynor. Cape’s Concrete Island has been taken to a level of abstraction as to be meaningless. And it’s literal, not descriptive. The island is green, with a concrete shoreline surrounding it. Suffice to say publishing is a business, and there is a balance between projected sales and what you’ll spend on art.

According to Jeremy Dennis, ‘The Drowned World causes endless problems to cover illustrators, provoking some of the most tedious and literalistic of Ballard’s covers’.

LEFT: Drowned Tanguy (artist: Yves Tanguy; The Drowned World; Penguin, London 1965).

History probably proves him right, although Berkley did choose to show Kerans at the end — a bold move. Dick French does a pretty good job showing the Rousseau-like jungle of Ballard’s imagination in the Dragon’s Dream edition, but even then the hotel is hardly the dominant image. A big crocodile has been used, but perhaps the oddest of all is the 1965 Penguin with a detail of Yves Tanguy’s Le Palais aux Rochers. Now, that’s a stretch.

Does book-cover art have an image problem, compared to rock-album art for example?

Interesting question, but it’s a little like comparing car crashes and wall angles. I’d say book-cover art doesn’t have an image problem — it’s always the answer to the simple question of how to attract the eye in a busy visual environment. Do people really buy a book simply because of the cover design? I doubt it. The cover’s job is to ‘get you in the store’ — pick up the book. After that, other purchase decision criteria kick in. Title. Plot summary. Price. Popular book covers are simply print advertisements. In the old days (before CDs) rock albums had an advantage, simply because the size of the product gave you more space for compelling art. Then they invented foldout albums, and you had a bloody poster to play with. And music is less specific than a story in terms of the images you could use. The bigger acts, as well, could retain creative control over their print image and ensure their album art didn’t go off into marketing department mayhem.

LEFT: A Mike Foreman illustration for Doubleday’s edition of The Atrocity Exhibition (Doubleday, NY, 1970).
RIGHT: A Phoebe Gloeckner illustration for the RE/Search reprint (RE/Search, San Francisco, 1990).

Returning to Mike Foreman: you have an extremely rare copy of Doubleday’s pulped Atrocity edition, which featured Foreman’s illustrations inside. In capturing the essence of the work, how do they compare to Phoebe Gloeckner’s gynaecological art in RE/Search’s Atrocity reprint?

Foreman’s 13 illustrations are line-art mini-collages or posters of the book’s major images and themes. There are the expected images of Kennedy and Monroe, but the great bulk of them basically attempt to visualise some of the book’s themes of war, death, sex and politics. There are quite a few lurid illustrations of Karen Novotny in various stages of déshabillé, and a number of freaky landscapes, and one great image of a worker looking out a window under an eye of Marilyn’s projected face. To tell you the truth, I was somewhat disappointed with the illustrations. Given the flamboyant visual atmosphere of Atrocity Exhibition, it’s actually quite amazing that Foreman’s collaboration is as understated as it is. Foreman’s style is reminiscent of the times, which was dominated by quasi-cutesy little creatures bracketed by Yellow Submarine and Peter Max, and you can see influences of this style throughout, although the obsessively fine line art adds a bit of psycho zing in comparison to the bright, flat colours of Max et al.

Gloeckner’s art is, I think, another example of bringing together a set of drawings and the book. In other words, I’m not sure she did her illustrations as a specific commission for this book. Are they erotic without being sexual? Or the other way around? Her drawings are, undoubtedly, strangely evocative, and certainly reinforce the hallucinatory nature of the work.

:: Two more from David Pelham (both Penguin, London, 1974).

What’s your favourite of all Ballard covers?

I’d vote for the 1974 Penguin paperbacks, designed by David Pelham. These little airbrushed minimalist masterpieces somehow seem to catch the singularity of Ballard’s obsessions, and the clarity of the image immediately attracts the eye. The font is well chosen — a strong stencil — and each cover is true to the overall design themes of the project. These I’d like to have as paintings.

Enough about cover art: what’s your key Ballard text?

There are two…

1) The Drowned World: without it, there is no ‘conceptual landscape’, and Ballard would not have staked out the stupendous idea of how to have his protagonists go with the flow, no matter how irrational it appears.

2) Empire of the Sun: JGB’s artistic pinnacle, and a rosetta stone of images. Without it, we wouldn’t be here…and JGB would be just another cult footnote.

..:: LINKS
+ Richard Powers
+ Chris Foss
+ Phoebe Gloeckner
+ Michael Foreman
+ Rick McGrath’s Terminal Collection
+ Ballardia: Jeremy Dennis’s JGB Cover Art Gallery
+ J.G. Ballard Bibliography at Ballardian
+ Mike Holliday’s guide to collecting Ballard

OPENING LINE:
“In his prime the Hollywood screenwriter was one of the tragic figures of our age, evoking the special anguish that arises from feeling sorry for oneself while making large amounts of money”. (from ‘The Sweet Smell of Excess’).

From the 1996 Harper Collins edition:

The first-ever collection of J.G. Ballard’s articles and reviews, published over the last thirty years. In a long and highly-acclaimed career, J.G. Ballard has established himself as one of Britian’s most distinctive and admired writers, the author of such influential novels as Crash, The Drowned World, High-Rise, Empire of the Sun and, most recently, Rushing to Paradise. Throughout his career he has also been a regular contributor to magazines and newspapers. Now, for the first time, he has gathered together the finest of these pieces and grouped them under themes such as film, lives, the visual world, writers, science, autobiography and science fiction.

Marlon Brando, Nancy Reagan, Elvis Presley, Deng Xiaoping, Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, William Burroughs and Graham Greene are just some of the people who feature in the ninety articles, together with many of the themes familiar to readers of Ballard’s fiction, includign Shanghai, television, surrealism, cars, motorways and the atom bomb.

The result is an astonishingly varied and fascinating collection — a provocative and entertaining review of the modern world, as seen through the eyes of one of this country’s most original writers.”

I happen to think that some of Ballard’s best writing can be found in the non-fiction realm; in fact, there was a time, when I first chanced upon his work, that I was convinced he was a superior journalist than a novelist. Although it’s not in this collection, I especially savour Ballard’s phrasing in his lovely meditation on Helmut Newton:

A company of beautiful women moves through the palatial corridors or gazes into the opaque depths of ornate mirrors, waiting for a last act that will never unfold. Even those women who are naked seem scarcely aware of themselves, as if their sexuality is defused by the strange bedrooms where they wait for the rich and powerful men stepping from their limousines in the courtyards below.”

J.G. Ballard. ‘The Lucid Dreamer’.

The Edge features a typically acerbic review of User’s Guide, by Gerald Houghton:

In 1977 Ballard wrote one of his most experimental and most brilliant short stories, ‘The Index’. Did the attached book ever actually exist? Was it all a figment of some deranged imagination? All that remains of this autobiography is a collection of names and page numbers; tantalising nudges and winks, like a road-map with the motorways rubbed out. It’s a game we can play with A User’s Guide To The Millenium: Hitler nuzzles up to Mae West, Dali to Nancy Reagan, Derek Jarman with Walt Disney, Lee Harvey Oswald and the young Jim interred in the Japanese camp. What, if anything, do all these and the rest have to do with this rather unpresupposing British author?

Ballard is never less than urbane, but his best dinner party manners mask real teeth. Thus he adores the Surrealists, Henry Miller, Joyce and Genet, but is dismissive towards others (Warhol), occasionally outright scathing (Nancy Reagan). The Ballard in these pages is clearly in awe of Burroughs’ reupholstering of narrative form, while describing himself as an old-fashioned storyteller. (It’s fulsome praise that should be tempered with a reading of his superb interview with Will Self in Self’s recent Junk Mail.) He is mystifyingly rhapsodic over Dali, surely the most overrated artist of the century. (What, one wonders, would Ballard make of the comment that Dali is the ‘kind of artist you think is brilliant when you’re 15′? Are you listening Damien Hirst?).”

..:: CONTENTS

1. FILM
Casablanca, Brando and Mae West, Star Wars and Blue Velvet…

• ‘The Sweet Smell of Excess’ (1990)
• ‘Magical Days at Rick’s’ (1993)
• ‘Hollywood Sex Idols’ (1991)
• ‘Push-button Death’ (1991)
• ‘Hobbits in Space?’ (1977)
• ‘A User’s Guide to the Millennium’ (1987)
• ‘Courting the Cobra’ (1993)
• ‘The Samurai of the Epic’ (1991)
• ‘La Jetee’ (1996)
• ‘Blue Velvet’ (1993)

2. LIVES
Nancy Reagan, Elvis, Howard Hughes and Hirohito…

• ‘The Chain-saw Biographer’ (1991)
• ‘Survival Instincts’ (1992)
• ‘Fallen Idol’ (1991)
• ‘The Killing Time’ (1979)
• ‘Mob Psychology’ (1991)
• ‘Closed Doors’ (1977)
• ‘Last of the Great Royals’ (1989)
• ‘Sinister Spider’ (1992)
• ‘Lipstick and High Heels’ (1993)

More contents to come.

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“I first met Jane Ciracylides during the Recess, that world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer which carried us all so blissfully through ten unforgettable years, and I suppose that may have had a lot to do with what went on between us.” (from ‘Prima Belladonna’).

From the 2001 Flamingo edition (originally one volume; reprinted in two volumes in 2006):

For the first time in one volume, the complete collected short stories by the author of Empire of the Sun and Super-Cannes — regarded by many as Britain’s No.1 living fiction writer.

J.G. Ballard is firmly established as one of Britain’s most highly regarded and most influential novelists. Throughout his remarkable career, he has won equal praise for his ground-breaking short stories, which he first started writing during his days as a medical student at Cambridge. In fact, it was winning a short-story competition that gave him the impetus to become a full-time writer.

His first published works, ‘Prima Belladonna’ and ‘Escapement’ appeared in Science Fantasy and New Worlds in 1956. Ever since, he has been a prolific producer of stories, which have been published in numerous magazines and several separate collections, including The Voices of Time, The Terminal Beach, The Disaster Area, The Day of Forever, Vermilion Sands, Low-Flying Aircraft, The Venus Hunters, Myths of the Near Future and War Fever.

Now, for the first time, all of J.G. Ballard’s published stories — including four that have not previously appeared in a collection — have been gathered together and arranged in the order of original publication, providing an unprecedented opportunity tp review the career of one of Britain’s greatest writers”.

Plus the obligatory endorsement:

Ballard is one of the few genuine surrealists this country has produced, the possessor of a terrifying and exhilirating imagination — and a national treasure.”

Nicholas Royle, Guardian.

A large body of opinion says that Ballard’s a better short-form stylist than novelist. On some days, I agree. My first exposure to Ballard, aside from Crash, was his short story ‘The Subliminal Man’. It hung in my imagination like a sharp blade over a heifer’s neck. Absolutely incredible, the imagery of it:

The old cities were surrounded by the vast motion sculptures of the clover-leaves and flyovers, but even so the congestion was unremitting.
…
Then the flicker of lights cleared and steadied, blazing out continuously, and together the crowd looked up at the decks of brilliant letters. The phrases, and every combination of them possible, were entirely familiar, and Franklin knew that he had been reading them for weeks as he passed up and down the expressway.

BUY NOW BUY NOW BUY NOW BUY NOW BUY
NEW CAR NOW NEW CAR NOW NEW CAR NOW NEW CAR NOW
YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES
…
They walked out into the trim drive, the shadows of the signs swinging across the quiet neighbourhood as the day progressed, sweeping over the heads of the people on their way to the supermarket like the blades of enormous scythes.”

J.G. Ballard. ‘The Subliminal Man’ (1963).

All the criticisms that are usually applied to Ballard’s novels — style over substance; lack of characterisation; thin plot — simply don’t apply in this format. In fact, in this realm they become virtues, as the sheer weight of Ballard’s imagination is compressed, and then unpacked, with full force. He didn’t dub the short pieces that make up The Atrocity Exhibition ‘condensed novels’ for nothing. Ballard’s a radical, a man who saw that the 20th-century novel was stifled by 19th-century function and set about stripping it to its very essence. That aesthetic became his body of short stories: quite simply, the man’s a master of the form and it’s a damn shame he doesn’t write them anymore.

I have the hardback, single-volume, supposedly complete version — a fallacy, for it only includes three pieces from The Atrocity Exhibition. I’m not sure if the new two-volume set rectifies that — probably not, considering it would take away sales from Atrocity itself.

It’s a bit of a cheat. If the publisher considers Atrocity to be a novel (as Ballard does), rather than a collection of short stories, then the Complete Short Stories shouldn’t contain any Atrocity pieces at all. According to Ballard expert David Pringle, there are three Ballard shorts that weren’t included, seemingly at the expense of the three Atrocities: ‘Journey Across a Crater’ (1970), ‘The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B——” (1984) and ‘The Dying Fall’ (1994).

I call that a missed opportunity.

Update: reader Mike Holliday contacted me with some further comments on this collection:

Despite its title, the book does not include all of Ballard’s short stories. If we discount those that are shortened versions of Ballard’s novels (Storm-Wind, The Drowned World, Equinox), then the following are missing:

(i) The Violet Noon, an early non-professional story published while Ballard was at university

(ii) most of the stories included in the original edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, namely You and Me and the Continuum, The Assassination Weapon, You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe, The Atrocity Exhibition, Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy, The Death Module, Love and Napalm: Export USA, The Great American Nude, The University of Death, The Generations of America, The Summer Cannibals, Tolerances of the Human Face, Crash!

(iii) the so-called ‘surgical fictions’, Coitus 80, Princess Margaret’s Facelift, Mae West’s Reduction Mamoplasty, Queen Elizabeth’s
Rhinoplasty, Jane Fonda’s Augmentation Mammoplasty

(iv) a few other pieces, namely Journey Across a Crater, The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B******, Neil Armstrong Remembers His Journey to the Moon, and The Dying Fall. It also excludes those items classified as Miscellaneous Media [including Ballard's collages for Ambit magazine].

In 2006, The Complete Short Stories was republished in two paperback volumes, but this edition omits the novella The Ultimate City.”

Disappointingly, there’s not a lot of decent criticism surrounding Ballard’s short-form work. Over at Rick McGrath’s site, however, John Boston has posted a thorough and interesting account of “the four short stories that got [Ballard] back into writing science fiction: Now: Zero (1959), The Waiting Grounds (1959), The Sound-Sweep (1960), and Zone of Terror (1960).”

..:: LINKS
+ J.G. Ballard’s Introduction to the Complete Short Stories

..:: CONTENTS

+ ‘Prima Belladonna’ (1956)
+ ‘Escapement’ (1956)
+ ‘The Concentration City’ (1957)
+ ‘Venus Smiles’ (1957)
+ ‘Manhole 69′ (1957)
+ ‘Track 12′ (1958)
+ ‘The Waiting Grounds’ (1959)
+ ‘Now: Zero’ (1959)
+ ‘The Sound-Sweep’ (1960)
+ ‘Zone of Terror’ (1960)
+ ‘Chronopolis’ (1960)
+ ‘The Voices of Time’ (1960)
+ ‘The Last World of Mr Goddard’ (1960)
+ ‘Studio 5, The Stars’ (1961)
+ ‘Deep End’ (1961)
+ ‘The Overloaded Man’ (1961)
+ ‘Mr F. is Mr F. (1961)
+ ‘Billennium’ (1961)
+ ‘The Gentle Assassin’ (1961)
+ ‘The Insane Ones’ (1962)
+ ‘The Garden of Time’ (1962)
+ ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’ (1962)
+ ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’ (1962)
+ ‘Passport to Eternity’ (1962)
+ ‘The Cage of Sand’ (1962)
+ ‘The Watch-Towers’ (1962)
+ ‘The Singing Statues’ (1962)
+ ‘The Man on the 99th Floor’ (1962)
+ ‘The Subliminal Man’ 63 (1962)
+ ‘The Reptile Enclosure’ (1962)
+ ‘A Question of Re-Entry’ (1962)
+ ‘The Time-Tombs’ (1962)
+ ‘Now Wakes the Sea’ (1962)
+ ‘The Venus Hunters’ (1962)
+ ‘End-Game’ (1962)
+ ‘Minus One’ (1962)
+ ‘The Sudden Afternoon’ (1962)
+ ‘The Screen Game’ (1962)
+ ‘Time of Passage’ (1964)
+ ‘Prisoner of the Coral Deep’ (1964)
+ ‘The Lost Leonardo’ (1964)
+ ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964)
+ ‘The Illuminated Man’ (1964)
+ ‘The Delta at Sunset’ (1964)
+ ‘The Drowned Giant’ (1964)
+ ‘The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon’ (1964)
+ ‘The Volcano Dances’ (1964)
+ ‘The Beach Murders’ (1966)
+ ‘The Day of Forever’ (1966)
+ ‘The Impossible Man’ (1966)
+ ‘Storm-Bird, Storm-Dreamer’ (1966)
+ ‘Tomorrow is a Million Years’ (1966)
+ ‘The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’ (1966)
+ ‘Cry Hope, Cry Fury!’ (1967)
+ ‘The Recognition’ (1967)
+ ‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’ (1967)
+ ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ (1968)
+ ‘The Dead Astronaut’ (1968)
+ ‘The Comsat Angels’ (1968)
+ ‘The Killing Ground’ (1969)
+ ‘A Place and a Time to Die’ (1969)
+ ‘Say Goodbye to the Wind’ (1970)
+ ‘The Greatest Television Show on Earth’ (1972)
+ ‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’ (1974)
+ ‘The Air Disaster’ (1975)
+ ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’ (1975)
+ ‘The Life and Death of God’ (1976)
+ ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’ (1976)
+ ‘The 60 Minute Zoom’ (1976)
+ ‘The Smile’ (1976)
+ ‘The Ultimate City’ (1976)
+ ‘The Dead Time’ (1977)
+ ‘The Index’ (1977)
+ ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ (1977)
+ ‘Theatre of War’ (1977)
+ ‘Having A Wonderful Time’ (1978)
+ ‘One Afternoon at Utah Beach’ (1978)
+ ‘Zodiac 2000′ (1978)
+ ‘Motel Architecture’ (1978)
+ ‘A Host of Furious Fancies’ (1980)
+ ‘News from the Sun’ (1981)
+ ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (1982)
+ ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (1982)
+ ‘Report on An Unidentified Space Station’ (1982)
+ ‘The Object of the Attack’ (1984)
+ ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ (1985)
+ ‘The Man Who Walked on the Moon’ (1985)
+ ‘The Secret History of World War 3′ (1988)
+ ‘Love in a Colder Climate’ (1989)
+ ‘The Enormous Space’ (1989)
+ ‘The Largest Theme Park in the World’ (1989)
+ ‘War Fever’ (1989)
+ ‘Dream Cargoes’ (1990)
+ ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’ (1992)
+ ‘The Message from Mars’ (1992)
+ ‘Report from an Obscure Planet’ (1992)

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY VOLUME 1

..:: BUY VOLUME 2

OPENING LINE:
“The suburbs dream of violence.”

From the 2006 Fourth Estate edition:

Richard Pearson, unemployed advertising executive and life-long rebel, is driving out to Brooklands, a motorway town on the A25. A few weeks earlier his father was fatally wounded at the Metro-Centre, a vast shopping mall in the middle of this apparently peaceful town, when a deranged mental patient opened fire on a crowd of shoppers. When the main suspect is released without charge thanks to the dubious testimony of self-styled pillars of the community — including Julia Goodwin, the doctor who treated his father on his deathbed — Richard suspects that there is more to his father’s death than meets the eye, a more sinister element lurking behind the pristine facades of the labyrinthine mall.

Determined to unravel the mystery, Richard soon realises that the Metro-Centre, with its round-the-clock cable channel and sports clubs, lies at the very heart of his father’s death. Consumerism rules the lives of everyone in the motorway towns and feeds the cravings of this bored community with its desperate need for something new, whatever the costs. Riots frequently terrorise the streets, immigrant communities are set upon by roving bands of hooligans and sports events mushroom into jingoistic political rallies. Gradually, Richard finds himself drawn into this world, caught up in the workings of the mall, exposed to the insides of the consumer dream, and starts upon dismantling this wayward vision his advertising career helped to found…

In this gripping, dystopian tour de force, J.G. Ballard holds up a mirror to middle England, reflecting an unsettling image of suburbia and revealing the darker forces at work beneath the gloss of consumerism and flag-waving patriotism.”

The negative notices this remarkable vision have received don’t make a whole lot of sense to me. Ballard’s a man who admits he doesn’t read novels, instead devouring ‘invisible literature’: marginalia, copywriting, medical journals, psychiatric reports, Ikea catalogues, cereal boxes. He’s influenced by Freud, film noir, science fiction and Surrealist paintings; film, more than anything. To compare him with some literary type who practices the art of ‘tight plotting’ and ‘well-rounded protagonists’ is woefully inadequate. Reviewing KC in the Telegraph, David Robson wrote: ‘The plotting is clumsy … and the violence, integral to the whole design, belongs to the world of comic-strips’. Well, yes. Precisely. Honestly, do we still live in an age where popular culture is considered second-rate to the almighty ‘novel’? Funnily enough, I’m put in mind of my 78-year-old father, who refuses to watch The Simpsons because ‘cartoons are for kids’.

At least we have theorist Steven Shaviro, who has written the most insightful review of Kingdom Come to date, refreshingly free of the restraints of commercial media:

Kingdom Come has so far only been published in the UK, not the US. And it has gotten mostly negative reviews — even from speculative writers like Ursula LeGuin and M. John Harrison, who ought to know better. The book has been criticized for the fact that its plot and characters aren’t slick, catchy, and ‘well-constructed’ enough. But of course these are the wrong standards by which to judge Ballard. He writes genre fiction as social theory — and he remains, at age 76, one of the most acute social theorists that we have. His insights could not be communicated in the form of the artfully structured literary novel. His seeming repetitiveness, his clumsy prosaicness, and his insistence on a kind of pop-culture (so-called) ‘kitsch’ are necessary tools of insight. In a thoroughly Modernist way, his form coincides with his themes; though, as an anatomist of our “postmodern” condition, his forms/themes are such as the classic Modernists could never have imagined.”

Steven Shaviro. ‘Kingdom Come’.

Rick McGrath has also written a provocative review, from his own perspective as an ex-ad-man:

But what form does a non-message take? For Pearson, that’s easy: “Madness is the key to everything. Small doses, applied when no-one is really looking.”

Regardless of all the novel’s ranting about consumerism and violence and fascism, I find this marketing insight perhaps the most chilling prediction of Kingdom Come. Instinctive advertising – a direct message to the irrational, the purely emotional. It’s about using psychopathology, after all. It’s a chilling thought not because it could be a campaign as Ballard imagines it, but because it is a campaign which is currently being successfully employed by, oh, advertising for the fashion industry, Hollywood, political parties.

Rick McGrath. ‘Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Ads Be Run…’

And Ballardian contributor Pippa Tandy offers the following thoughts:

JGB is not Alan Sillitoe. There is little point in reading KC for direct equivalences to social conditions. Although he writes of the effects of consumerism, shopping malls and the obsession with sport, Ballard is not a realist writer. Although he makes reference to the notorious DuPont as the benefactor of a research wing of a mental asylum, (97) and uses as a chapter heading the expression ‘Exit Strategies’, has his protagonist speak of himself as only being good at ‘warming the slippers of late capitalism’, (9) and make other references to political and social realities of the past and present, this is not a direct socially realistic account of society. KC reiterates images that appear from his earliest work, images that are coded references to his earlier writing but which have another function. As in his other writing, they are a register of the psychic state of his society. It is not a question of whether his characters behave as ‘real’ people behave; KC is rather another myth of the near future, except that the near future is now on top of us. (And has been for a while, hardly Ballard’s fault!) Remember Ballard never felt like he needed to check the realist accuracy of his descriptions. You will recall that The Rockford Files and Kojak informed his understanding of America, a Thames Valley gravel pit supplies the lineaments of Cape Canaveral, and so on.

KC begins in the typical liminal setting of the Heathrow motorways, with a protagonist narrator who finds himself drawn into a maze of concrete and paranoia, who backs away from the reflected attenuation in his own mirrored face, who limps through the broken mallscape on a bandaged foot, a black comedy in which motorways and runways intersect, fugitives hide themselves as shop mannequins, the beach of a shopping mall echoes the beach of a nuclear test site, and a deracinated psychiatrist and mock Lemmy Caution move among the crowd. Ballard would probably not like to admit it, but he is doing something similar to Godard in Alphaville. He is using the materials of his time (shopping malls, sporting crowds, consumerism) as latent conditions. That is why it all seems a bit wrong when we try to match it all up. Like his other writing, this novel is Ballard’s attempt to bring vision to the present, to create, like the detonation in the Metro-Centre, a space in which a section of space-time had been erased, exposing a deep flaw in our collective dream.� (113-4)

And, just another point, for fun. Is not the description of the dead Cruise being wheeled around as a kind of totem figure, surrounded by grieving worshippers, very reminiscent of Mr Kurtz on his stretcher in Heart of Darkness?”

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY THE BOOK

Then Beatty got serious and ripped the governor, who once had a road crew create a huge pothole so he could be photographed filling it with a shovel of tar.

“Governing by show, by stunts, by cosmetics, by photo ops and fake events and fake issues and fake crowds and backdrops – that’s a mistake. … That concept of reality should be saved for action movies and show business.”