Empire of the Sun, French edition, Denoël (1985), with cover art ‘Singapour 1945′ by Ronald Searle. Thanks to Herve for all cover scans.

Interview by Tony Cartano & Maxim Jakubowski.

Translation by Dan O’Hara.

The following interview, originally titled ‘Le passé composé de J. G. Ballard’, appeared in Magazine Littéraire in May 1985, to mark the publication of the French edition of Empire of the Sun. As the interviewers, Tony Cartano and Maxim Jakubowski, observe, Ballard was almost the subject of a cult in France, where Crash in particular had been read rather more sympathetically than in England. In 1984 Denoël, who had previously published the French editions of The Drowned World, The Crystal World and Hello America, also brought out the first issue of their revue Science-Fiction, a special edition on Ballard.

Ballard was therefore already riding a wave of critical acclaim in France, and his interviewers here are clearly very well acquainted with his opus, so much so that their use of the adjective — le monde ballardien — slips past almost unnoticed. Their questions, too, are subtle and well-informed. In somewhat elliptically raising the problem of why there are no car-crashes in Empire of the Sun, they reveal a real and very suggestive lacuna in that particular novel: the absence of an entire complex of metaphors for one of Ballard’s most prominent obsessions. His initial reply is ingenious, if not very persuasive.

What Ballard suggests elsewhere in this interview is that, even when one characteristic theme is absent from a work, the underlying emotion may remain the same, expressed by different means. Choice of metaphor (and in Ballard’s anti-realist stories, entire settings, environments, and even chronologies can operate metaphorically) is merely a matter of tone, determined in the case of Empire of the Sun by the specific psychological apprehensions of the fourteen-year-old protagonist Jim, whose pathology is to perceive the whole of Shanghai as an expression of his own ambivalent feelings about his confinement and the paradoxical liberty it brings him.

By a generation of French readers schooled in the works of Robbe-Grillet, Roussel, Federman, Sarraute, Sollers, Pinget and Butor, and the films of Godard and Resnais, such an approach would be almost intuitively understood. To such writers, to paraphrase Samuel Beckett, reality remains a surface, whereas imagination cannot tolerate the limits of the real. No wonder, then, that French readers were more alive to the terrible affective power of Ballard’s ‘psychopathic hymn’ to the death of affect, Crash.

Dan O’Hara

TONY CARTANO/MAXIM JAKUBOWSKI: Empire of the Sun is your first ‘traditional’ novel outside the field of science fiction. Nonetheless, this book contains echoes of your customary universe: there are empty swimming-pools, the cadavers of soldiers, archetypal landscapes, as if this autobiographical novel was in some sense going to give us the key to, and the origin of the Ballardian world.

J.G. BALLARD: That’s precisely so. I reinvented my past life in the manner of the fictions I had written previously. In Shanghai, one in fact found empty swimming-pools, abandoned hotels, all the vestiges of a situation created by technological war. The novels and stories I wrote between 1956 and 1980, that’s to say before Empire of the Sun, placed the emphasis on my personal obsessions. And that’s why in this last novel I look back at my life on two accounts: Jim, my young alter ego, sees existence like a hero who might have read all my books. There’s nothing surprising in that my science fiction themes should be at work in Empire of the Sun. What writer has not been marked by his adolescence? And suppose that I had pursued the medical career of which I initially dreamt, before starting to write, and that Empire of the Sun were the first novel by a fifty-year-old man, well, it wouldn’t be the same book, because there wouldn’t have been the experience acquired by my work in science fiction. All writers develop a kind of mythology. I simply applied this personal mythology to my memories of my youth. Utilising radical forms in my SF, I had a tendency to adopt a harsher light (the emphasis there is much more violent than in the ‘novel’) so that the images stand out more forcefully. In Empire of the Sun I wanted to make it seem as if these kinds of image were appearing for the first time.

How does a science fiction novelist become a novelist, in brief?

Without this personal experience of China during the war, I would probably never have written such a novel. And in the past, I couldn’t see myself writing novels that were ‘traditional’, in the manner of Kingsley Amis or Angus Wilson, for example. I followed without any doubt in the tracks of the speculative novel. But as far as it goes, this conception of the imaginative novel is not restrictive: I readily include works such as Robinson Crusoe, Moby Dick [sic]… or even The Plague by Camus. One thing is certain: I’ll never be a naturalist novelist. And perhaps it’s that, that separates me from my friend Moorcock today.

Yes, like many other ex-authors of science fiction he too has turned his back on his original style to write ‘novels’ like The Final Programme. One could wonder about the significance of other, comparable evolutions. But be that as it may, there is incontestably a continuity of themes and of vision in your own work. The Unlimited Dream Company, in which you describe in the realist manner life after death, seems to me a novel close to Empire of the Sun. One single exception, perhaps: Crash!, this novelistic fantasy which stigmatizes the influence of the automobile on our civilization.

LEFT: Crash, French edition, Pocket n°5256 (1987).

It’s difficult to define with precision the source of such a singular obsession. It’s got nothing to do with real life. The only car accident I’ve ever had happened two weeks after I’d finished the book. Yet another good example of the fact that art doesn’t imitate nature; on the contrary, it’s nature that imitates art, and often with questionable taste. The obsessions of Crash were not artificial. I didn’t at all want to blow the fantasy out of all proportion. Truly, the obsessions which subtend that novel are without a doubt the strongest of all those which run through my work, including Empire of the Sun. It’s an extreme metaphor for a profound emotion, for a desperate attempt to find a way out of an intimate crisis. The absence of this theme in Empire of the Sun has to do with the fact that, in taking power in Shanghai in 1942, the Japanese requisitioned all the cars, thereby annulling all possibility of collision! Empire of the Sun is not the synthesis of everything I’ve written.

Up to now, you’ve sought to invent new narrative techniques: non-linearity, fragmentation of sequences, writing discontinuous with the quantified image of our lives, as you say. Conversely isn’t the autobiographical process, by definition, oriented towards a reconstitution of time?

For a long time I thought the opposite, but it’s evident that style is determined by the subject. When you take liberties nonetheless, the autobiographical form is constraining, above all if the action rests on autonomous historical events in relation to the characters. Your depiction must of necessity be synchronized with the great clock of History. Crash or The Atrocity Exhibition were very subjective fictions, in which the reader was invited to penetrate into an alienated universe, one which was at any rate very close to madness. The central personality interiorizes, if I can say this, external reality, to the point where the latter becomes an extension of his own psyche. He controls the time, a little in the manner of the mentally ill, of psychotics who live in an entirely subjective temporality. Hence the need to adapt the narrative technique to the psychological structures of the individual. It’s very different when you deal with historical facts, the order and signification of which are, in this case, imposed on the individual.

One of your stories ‘The Dead Time’ (in Myths of the Near Future) announced Empire of the Sun: for once, the protagonist was an infant, and it was also the first appearance of China in your work. Did you know then that a few years later you would write Empire of the Sun, this story being a kind of sketch, a kind of preparatory work?

Yes, that was without doubt the first inkling. ‘The Dead Time’ dates from 1977. And moreover I always knew that one day I would write Empire of the Sun, even if I repeatedly kept putting the project off ‘til later. Approaching fifty, I told myself that the moment had come. To wait longer was to take the risk not only of a failing memory but of the motivation flagging, of an enfeebling of the affective power. That said, and contrary to what I’d imagined, that wasn’t at all in evidence. At the start, I made my principal character an adult. And I quickly perceived that it didn’t work. Quite simply because my experience of China was not that of an adult. My memories of that epoch were impressed on me with great force. But this memory belonged to the fourteen-year-old boy I was then. Hence the conscious return to that story written in ’77 and the choice of a child as the hero of the book. Without ‘The Dead Time’, I would perhaps have kept my adult character and the novel would have become something else.

A more realist novel, no?

Yes, but also more fictive. The interesting thing about the fourteen-year-old is that he’s no longer a child and not yet an adult.

Myths of the Near Future, French edition, Calmann Levy, Dimensions SF (1984).

The dividing line between autobiography and fiction is a rather subtle question in Empire of the Sun. When the Times printed extracts from the book before it was published, people who had been in the Japanese camps wrote to the paper to contest your version of the facts.

First of all, I said that the events go back more than forty years. Then, these letters make more sense if one considers the hostility of my protagonist towards the British. These last are ridiculed; they’re judged severely. Look, what’s of sole import to me is the truth of the imagination which, all things considered, is separate from prosaic truth. Sticking to the pure truth is impossible. Even the most serious of historians are hard pushed to reconstitute this or that event with exactitude, and each of them has his fashion of viewing things. In my ‘imaginative’ truth, the real is the foundation on which is elaborated a fiction conforming not just to what I knew of Shanghai but to the whole of what happened then in the Far East. Everything evoked in the novel certainly took place, perhaps not in the camp where I found myself, but somewhere in that region of the world between 1937 and 1945. It’s a novel and nothing but a novel. The essence consists in awakening a certain emotional sympathy, in touching the imagination of the reader who knows nothing of the events in question. A literal account would hardly manage that. The novel enlarges the vision, it’s to do with a hypertrophied truth. The obsessions, the fantasies are almost the only element we’re sure of. Our inventions are the only realities left to us.

“The job of the novelist is to invent reality”, you wrote in the preface to the French edition of Crash.

That’s it. Consider these experiments with unrehearsed, simulated bank raids. You put questions to the public: how many cars were there, how many gangsters etc. You show them the film of the events they’ve just witnessed. No-one has the same interpretation. So how could you rely on a testimony recalled after more than forty years! A few weeks after the publication of the book in England, some fellow called me. “Jim,” he exclaimed, “how are you, old thing? It’s been a long time…” And he said that he was called Buddy or something of that kind, and that he had been interned in the room adjacent to mine. Just think: I spent three years playing with this boy the same age as me, and I remembered nothing of him! If such a detail escaped me, it proves that one can respect rigour in spirit but certainly not to the letter. And it’s true that I didn’t have a very high opinion of the British and their conduct in the camps. This most unpleasant aspect of their character came from the class system, the taste for the past, the illusion of grandeur. Of course, one musn’t generalize. There were also courageous people next to those who didn’t face up to adversity, contenting themselves with a comfortable idleness in proportion to their dreams of grandeur incarnated by this British Empire which they had in reality helped to destroy. I think of the invasion of Singapore by the Japanese or the merciless exploitation of the Far East by the West. In the closing lines of the novel, I describe Shanghai as a “terrible city”, terrible in the proper sense, that’s to say: that which inspires terror. A similarly systematic exploitation probably no longer exists in our days on this planet. On this point, my novel is very faithful to the reality of the era.

Before Empire of the Sun, at least in England, your public was not very extensive, yet in other countries, notably in France, you’re the object of a kind of cult. How do you explain the success of Empire of the Sun, an anti-British novel? Might the English be masochists?

It’s a book about the Second World War. That’s all. And about the decline of the British Empire. For the rest, I can only take into account this open-mindedness of which you speak, with regard to the great public. Most people don’t like the imaginative novel, and they like science fiction still less. Above all if it’s to do with the serious novel. That frightens them. They don’t want to think too much about what’s going to happen in the next five minutes. In general, readers balk at the allegorical mode; they prefer the naturalist novel, which seems to them to come directly from their own lives. With regard to France, I have to recognize that the reaction of the readers and the critics over fifteen years has given me the greatest encouragement one could have. Although I don’t speak a word of French, I’ve always felt myself close to symbolism or surrealism. Excuse this naïveté, but when my car disembarks at Boulogne, I can’t help myself thinking that I’ve arrived at the Holy of Holies!

LEFT: Empire of the Sun, French edition, Gallimard Folio n° 2179 (1990, 1995).

Might not the acclaim given to your work in France be explained by this unwavering taste of our compatriots for the avant-garde, or everything which resembles it, closely or distantly? Haven’t you for example been compared with William Burroughs?

You say that but, up to the Sixties, England and the United States were subject to spasms of implacable censorship. In France, one could obtain Sade, Henry Miller, Burroughs. Not here. We haven’t got this tradition of… pornography, or better, the literature of dissolution, in which the writer puts elements of abnormal psychology to serious uses. The books published in Paris by Olympia Press were a godsend. I remember that one day, Moorcock brought me several. I was sitting in this same armchair you see me in now, I read Naked Lunch. As disheartened as I was faced with the absence of prospects for the novel, I sprang up with a bound shouting ‘Hurrah!’ At last, a light! England is a very puritanical country. The protestant notion of moral progress comes to justify the elimination of everything that doesn’t accord with that rule. France, in my view, is a country where technology has always had an important influence on the collective consciousness. You haven’t only got, as we so often believe here, just the Impressionists or the Ecole de Paris, which is already quite sufficient I admit. You’ve also got engineers, and formidable inventors. And that’s perhaps the reason that you haven’t reduced Crash to a simple exercise in style, of erotic and fantastic inspiration.

You were a part of the New Worlds team, that magazine set up and led by Michael Moorcock, where in the 60s-70s there appeared the best of British science fiction. Now since, a number of New Worlds authors has produced important books: D. M. Thomas’ White Hotel, Angela Carter and her The Passion of New Eve or most recently Nights at the Circus, and you yourself today. How do you explain these writers, who ten years ago were considered marginal, occupying henceforth the premier rank of the British novel?

We haven’t changed. It’s the public who have caught up with us. In England in the 60s and 70s, the novel was secondary, far behind the visual arts as a purveyor of the imagination for a cultivated public. This latter group preferred then to interest themselves in pop-art, in David Hockney or Andy Warhol. As far as fiction was concerned, television replaced it. The producers benefited from great freedom. The creative TV shows, the dramas played the role formerly devolved upon the novel, to make observation and commentary upon the most burning contemporary issues. The novel could only decline. The Booker Prize, our most important literary prize, was awarded for the first time in 1969. At first, nobody took any notice of it, not even the editors or the journalists, still less the public. It took ten years for the situation to change. If since five or six years ago there’s been an interest in the Booker Prize, it’s quite simply because readers themselves are returning to the novel. And at the same time, there’s been a noticeable fall in television viewing figures. This disaffection is partly due to the video invasion, or to the bureaucratization of channels who’ve become less and less creative, but that’s not the main thing. It’s begun to be realized that the novel offers a unique experience: communication with the imagination of a particular individual, and television is incapable of that. Angela Carter, Michael Moorcock, myself, we’ve accordingly benefited from this open-mindedness. Now, it must be recognized that certain of our novels are not so easy to read. The British public accepts the need to make a little effort, from now on.

You’re therefore optimistic about the current state of the English novel?

The situation is very healthy. I don’t say this solely because of the success of Empire of the Sun; more generally the winds are changing. Ten years ago, very few novels appeared on the hard-cover best-seller list. Now, they occupy the top places. An extraordinary phenomenon!

All the same, you’re a very ‘visual’ writer…

Yes. Although I take care of fiction at the magazine Ambit and hence I’m led to read numerous manuscripts by young writers, I sometimes prefer contemplation of surrealist paintings. In leafing through an album of reproductions of Max Ernst, Magritte or Dalí, the cerebral alchemy which is produced in me preoccupies me much more than the better part of the novels or stories I’m led to read. With the exception of William Burroughs, who helped me to understand how my imagination functions, or rather how the world works. Still today the surrealists guide us towards a discovery of the secret formulas of reality with more certainty than most novels.

Yet André Breton announced the death of the novel.

That’s true. But literary surrealism is a little forgotten, no? What interests me greatly is surrealist painting. I would have liked to be a painter, you know. My texts are born of a desire to compensate for this frustration. I think and I write in pictorial terms.

What you call ‘inner space’?

Yes, the surrealist space…

Television and cinema play this negative role of which you just spoke. But otherwise, these media influence you profoundly. You couldn’t write what you write, nor in the manner you write if television, cinema and video didn’t exist.

That’s without doubt. The popular consciousness represents the world to itself through the prism of television. The televisual image fashions its vision, its experience of the real. Everything is predigested, as if were a matter of pre-chopped, packaged supermarket food, which only needs reheating. That’s television: it reheats a preprepared reality aimed at the audience. It’s often said that Empire of the Sun is a very cinematic novel. Doubtless that’s so, but it doesn’t proceed from a conscious and deliberate process. It’s certainly necessary that the writer should use the language to which people unconsciously refer in their perception of the world. Even though cinema and television may not be constructed along the same lines, their common grammar defines the language of our times. Nothing is possible without this basic observation. Hence, as I was just saying, the need for me to work in a style and with techniques in accordance with the material treated. The models of the classics don’t help me at all: I don’t feel obliged to read or re-read, for example, George Eliot or Henry James, that’s to say the writers of the conscious. For me, the more important tradition through which contemporary consciousness in all its complexity is articulated, is certainly television. The whole question lies in knowing how the writer manages to annex this medium to his literary approach.

In Empire of the Sun, the eye of Jim, the young hero, works like a camera. He seems to make no judgment on the reality surrounding him. His eye discovers the world. The sole reaction of which he’s capable seems to be fascination.

LEFT: The Atrocity Exhibition, French edition, Champ Libre, Chute Libre n°14 (1976).

Jim witnesses events as if he was watching a news film or a television magazine at 8 o’clock. And it’s in exactly this manner that things happened. Most of the scenes evoked in the novel — aerial attacks on the camp, bombardments of Japanese airfields by Mustangs — correspond to what I saw myself. This manner of regarding the world is that of a child. In Shanghai, I led a very protected life, away from the streets, from beggars, and so cut off from a possible emotional reaction. I’d be seated in the back seat of an American car with a chauffeur and governess, fearful of an abduction attempt. I was behind the glass, like being behind the camera — or some television spectator faced with reports on the Indochinese war, or Nicaragua or El Salvador. In The Atrocity Exhibition, I had already shown how technology kills feeling. In Shanghai, I was in a similar situation. If I had been a French boy, living with his parents under the Occupation, in a small, familiar town, I surely wouldn’t have experienced this feeling of isolation, as I would have been part of a real community. The same had I been a German or Italian fifteen-year-old. In China in the 30s and 40s, the Europeans were nothing but tourists. This division, all the more distinct as life in Shanghai was very hard, foreshadowed the death of affect brought about by systems of mass communication.

In this sense, the aggressive development of televisual information in the 60s, at the time of the Vietnam war, must not have failed to have an influence upon you.

Certainly. It reminded me of another war I had known. With the exception of the palm trees, the landscapes were almost the same — the omnipresent water, the densely-populated town suburbs, the natives who, in both cases, seemed passive, acting as if we didn’t exist.

In reality, and contrary to your novel, you weren’t alone in the Japanese camp; your parents were with you.

Yes, which proves that Jim and I are not one and the same person. I never found myself in a situation as desperate as his. My hero is orphaned. And there lies the impression that the novel is more true than the reality.

Jim believes he sees, as if in an hallucination, the light of the Nagasaki explosion. Is it a reminiscence of your obsession with the atomic bomb, such as is expressed in your science fiction works?

It’s a subject about which no-one is indifferent, no? The nuclear myth has replaced the old religious archetypes. In antiquity there was the destruction of Troy, the fall of Rome. Today we have the break-down of Western civilization and nuclear war. We think in apocalyptic terms. What contemporary writer could avoid it? That said, in our Japanese camp we had the conviction that we’d been saved by the bomb. In August 1945, nobody expected to see the Japanese surrender. They would probably never have done so. Remember their hand-to-hand combat in each small island, to the last man. In Okinawa, even the civilians perished at the side of the soldiers at the time of the attack on the island by the Americans. Okinawa was relatively close to Shanghai. And the Japanese contingent was very important in China. If one believed the rumour, the Japanese intended to deport the prisoners to camps in the countryside and dispose of them. There was no more for us to eat. When the war ended, overnight, like a film which stops abruptly after the last image, my feelings about the bomb — and this goes for all those who were in the same situation as me — were rather ambiguous. Imagine our perplexity. And without a doubt that’s the reason I’m in favour of nuclear armament. I haven’t the slightest sympathy for movements in favour of disarmament, especially our CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament). I share the view of the Americans on the matter of nuclear armament. And that goes back to the events I survived in the Far East. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions quite simply saved our lives! Without them, the Americans would have had to invade Japan and the territories in the region of Shanghai. None of us would have escaped that. That’s without a doubt. Since then, far from being an instrument of death, the atomic bomb has become for me an instrument of protection. It doesn’t embody the forces of destruction, but on the contrary, those of life and creation. It would be an error of interpretation to read the nuclear intervention in my works as a calling-into-question.

Another interesting paradox, if I might mention it: in Empire of the Sun, Jim seems fascinated by the Japanese soldiers. He must fear them, and he admires them.

Between the ages of seven and fifteen, I had the opportunity to see them at work. Today I’m fifty-four and certainly my view of things is more relative, more moderate. But you have to understand that these intractable Japanese, faithful to their Emperor and to their flag, these Japanese who would never surrender, couldn’t help but appeal to the imagination of a young adolescent in need of heroes, whereas in Singapore the English, although well their superior in numbers, were lamentably defeated by the Japanese. The British arrogance was to imagine that it would be sufficient to stop them, after Pearl Harbour, by sending two battleships, the Repulse and the Prince of Wales, without any aerial cover. The Japanese planes were only made out of bamboo and rice paper, were they not, and their pilots bespectacled incompetents! What do you believe would happen? Well, the Japanese possessed remarkable aircraft at the start of the war, and the pilots were already war-hardened by years of combat in Manchuria and China. In ten minutes, the Repulse and the Prince of Wales were sent to the bottom. And that fiasco signaled the end of the British Empire in the Far East.

One wonders at the end of the novel how Jim will readapt to life in the West, after his return to England.

One nightmare after another! I came back in ’46. A dramatic experience! It took me years to do so. And still today I don’t feel completely integrated. England is an exceedingly strange country. I’ve never had the impression of being at home here. A little like compulsory tourism, as if I were part of some diplomatic delegation.

Fascinated as you are by modern technologies, have you never thought of living in the United States?

Before going to China with my parents, I spent six months in Canada, I went to Detroit, Buffalo, the Niagara falls.* What’s more, the Shanghai I knew was entirely within the sphere of American influence: the cars, the merchandise, Coca Cola, air conditioning, the radio stations, the comics, the lifestyle, it was all American. Today, I’d very much like to go to the United States, but up to now I haven’t had the opportunity. You know, I’ve had to bring up my three children, and that doesn’t make travelling easy. And then the America that interests me is that reflected to us in the mass media. The America of cinema, of television, of magazines, of publicity — in a word, the ‘models’ seem to me more important than this or that aspect of concrete reality, of the type ‘the smell of the fields of wheat in Iowa’. No need to travel: these models are sent to us direct by satellite! These days, journeys are practically pointless.

*N.b.: the French text actually says this, but evidently an error of translation or a misunderstanding has garbled the sense. Ballard was born in Shanghai, and visited the U.S. in 1939. It was much later, in 1954, that he went to Canada with the R.A.F. It was at this time that he visited the places mentioned.

Originally published in French as ‘Le passé composé de J. G. Ballard’. Propos recueillis par Tony Cartano et Maxim Jakubowski. Magazine Littéraire 219 (May 1985), 92-7.

L’ile de béton (Concrete Island), French edition, Calman-Lévy (1974). Thanks to Herve for the scan.

Interview by Philippe R. Hupp.

Translation by Dan O’Hara.

Ballard’s novels have always been translated into French with alacrity. His 1974 novel, Concrete Island, was already in translation in time for review in the January 1975 edition of the major Paris literary organ Magazine Littéraire, and Antoine Griset’s review was both penetrating and positive. Griset immediately connected the predicament of Ballard’s protagonist, stranded on an urban desert island between motorway intersections, with the extremes of social inequality within our society.

‘The image or the idea of a man dying of hunger only a step away from a haven of abundance is tragically familiar’, Griset writes, noting how absurd it is that such distress has become a banal commonplace. Whilst admiring the ‘immense talent’ of Ballard in transforming a vague, banal terrain into a hallucinatory hell — a feat also achieved in Crash — Griset observes that although Concrete Island may be a continuation of the earlier novel, this time the automobile is a mere symbolic pretext for an examination of the flip-side of our ordered, automated, aseptic lifestyle.

Griset sees the real focus of Concrete Island as being on the flotsam of urban Man Fridays (or should that be ‘Men Friday’?) living in the interstices of modern cities: the invisible masses we observe daily from behind the safety of the windscreen or the office window. In the novel Maitland, an affluent architect who crosses this invisible barrier, decides to remain on the concrete island, having triumphed over its obstinate vagrants. Yet Griset suggests that, if the Maitland who first arrived on the island dies and is transformed into a new, stronger version of himself, he also remains afraid to recognize his own true nature. In a brilliant insight into Ballard’s metafictional method, Griset implies that this transformation of the protagonist is intended to provoke a similar transformation in the reader. Concrete Island is less concerned with awakening a new moral knowledge than with demonstrating the ways in which the mirror-world of own native brutality is just on the other side of the windscreen.

The following brief interview was printed alongside Griset’s review. Mostly concerned with the novel he was then in the early stages of writing, High-Rise, it does however contain an intriguing reference to Ballard conducting research on the relation between criminal behaviour and the urban environment. Whatever the sources of this research might have been, it seems that it started a line of enquiry which became a central topos of his writing, leading from Concrete Island through High Rise to Running Wild and the loose tetralogy bookended by Cocaine Nights and Kingdom Come.

Dan O’Hara

PHILIPPE R. HUPP: You’re in the process of writing a new novel called The Towers…

JGB: In fact I still haven’t found a title. It’s a book about what in England and the USA are called ‘high-rises’, these residential towers which can have forty or fifty floors or more. I saw a film about Poland last week, in which one complex of apartments had twenty floors and was a kilometre in length! I’ve been interested for several years now in new lifestyles which permit modern technology; skyscrapers have always attracted me. The life led there seems to me very abstract, and that’s an aspect of setting with which I’m concerned when I write — the technological landscape.

Have you read The World Inside by Robert Silverberg? It’s a novel in which people live in groups of 800 thousand in vertical cities. And Silverberg, instead of simply planting the people of today in a futuristic setting, is concerned with showing how their mentality and their social life would be affected.

I haven’t read that book, but what interests me is the present. I don’t want to extrapolate too far – there’s the risk of becoming detached from reality. Although I did write a story a few years ago, ‘Build up’, in which one city occupied the entire universe. It’s a quite fascinating subject.

You’ve already examined housing schemes?

I did research before sitting down to write. For example, in cities, the degree of criminality is affected by liberty of movement; it’s higher in culs-de-sac. And high-rises are culs-de-sac: two thousand people jammed together in the air…

Entirely isolated.

Cut off from the rest of the world. In this kind of situation, all sorts can happen. Above all I’d like to examine the psychological modifications which occur without the knowledge of the inhabitants themselves, to see to what degree the mind of someone who drives a car or lives in a concrete high-rise has been altered. In the course of my investigations, I observed that there now exists a new race of people who are content in their little prisons, who tolerate a very high level of noise, but for whom the apartment is nothing more than a base allowing them to pass the night in comfort, as they’re absent during the day.

Will this new novel be as symbolic as Crash and Concrete Island?

I think it will be in the same vein, although this time I’m no longer concentrating on one single character.

And after that, will you further continue your series on the ‘technological landscape’?

No. I don’t have an idea for a novel, but I’d very much like to write several stories that I haven’t had the time to write these last few years. And it’s been a long time since I’ve written anything in the way of imaginative narratives, romances…

I.G.H. (High-Rise), French edition, Calmann-Levy, Dimensions SF (1976). Thanks to Herve for the scan.

Originally published in French as ‘Entretien avec J. G. Ballard’, Magazine Littéraire 96 (January 1975), 54.

ABOVE: Image via Hard Mag.

The following written interview with J.G. Ballard was first published in issue 1 of Hard Mag in 2005. It was conducted by Dan Mitchell and Simon Ford, the publisher and editor respectively of the magazine, and was intended to follow up some of the questions raised in Ford’s article about Ballard’s ‘Crashed Cars’ exhibition of 1970, published in the same edition. The article has since been revised and republished over at /seconds and if you’re unfamiliar with the exhibition, it makes for a great introduction. Meanwhile, the interview makes its first reappearance beyond the confines of Hard Mag here at ballardian.com.

Many thanks to Dan, Simon and Hard Mag for sanctioning this second wind.

Interview Date: March 2004 (1756 words)
Original font: Lucida Sans Typewriter Oblique (9-point)

Copyright Hard Mag 2005.

QUESTION 1
We’re interested in the reaction of the visitors to ‘Crashed Cars’. Do you think the work and a similar presentation today would elicit a similar response? Would an audience today be more detached and more self-conscious about their reactions? Are the reasons for going to such events different today from then? Was the audience likely to be more critical then? How did the audience see themselves then (today’s art world audience can be accused of looking to be seen looking good), were the visitors part of an elite, did you see them as sophisticated? Or perhaps as mere extras in a visual field dominated by your work (the grass to the cows)?

ANSWER 1
At the opening party there was wildly drunken reaction, and what seemed to be barely repressed hostility came bursting out. During the month on show the cars were attacked, daubed with paint and so on. Many visitors stared at them numbly. I don’t think there would be the same reaction today, 35 years later. Since then there have been so many provocations that the audience response to three crashed cars would be much more calm. People are still shockable today — as with the Myra Hindley handprints portrait — but nothing defuses a sense of shock more than the sense that it’s all been done before. Duchamp’s urinal would produce no gasps, in fact I think a [sic] saw it, or a replica, at the Hayward gallery some ago. No-one was looking at it. I said to my girl-friend that the only way to startle the audience would have been to urinate into the thing, which I think someone has now done. I don’t think today’s audiences are all that different. Apart from the Arts Lab regulars, the audience in 1969 were readers of International Times, rather than today’s Time Out, and people interested in any new ideas that might be floating about. They certainly weren’t extras — I was very keen to see their reactions to the cars. The whole thing was a psychological test, to see whether my hunches were sufficiently confirmed for me to go on and write Crash. They were. The show’s object was not to shock, but to prompt a response.

QUESTION 2
What would have to be done to create a similar response today, given the increased number of international artists, the larger scale of the art world, the many crossovers with global finance through sponsorship deals and the post-young British artist Tate Modern era/culture?

ANSWER 2
To shock people today is as easy as it ever was. Set up a situation that elicits pity sympathy and concern and then deride the sentiments — the Hindley portrait did that. But that kind of outrage has been devalued, and the artists with it. Besides, there are far more subtle ways of unsettling people. Think of the outrage that greeted the impressionists. Dali’s melting watches, Ernst’s eroded rocks are far more disturbing than anything dreamed up by the Turner Prize.

ABOVE: Ballard’s crashed Pontiac. Photo via The Terminal Collection.

QUESTION 3
Were the cars for sale as artworks? Did you see them as artworks, then and now? Were you asked or did you ever plan to do any more shows? What is your general attitude to the art world, did you ever want to be an artist?

ANSWER 3
They weren’t for sale, though there is a photograph of the Pontiac with a ‘£3500′ [sic] price tag in the windscreen, which I think was published in the Daily Mirror and was probably put there by the cameraman. The cars were certainly sculptures of a kind. I wasn’t asked to do any more shows. The Arts Lab closed for good soon after, and the 1970s began, a dreary decade. I saw the cars as a one off. I’ve always been very interested in painting and sculpture, which are a better key to the public’s imagination than the novel, a form that tends to resist innovation. In many ways the art world is ferociously competitive, far more than the literary world, whre [sic] writers are protected by their agents and can work in total isolation if they want to (like myself).

QUESTION 4
Was Euphoria Bliss the stripper/interviewer at the opening party? Do you have a copy or can you summarize what you described as the stripper’s ‘damning review’ she wrote for the underground paper Friendz?

ANSWER 4
No, the interviewer was not Euphoria Bliss, who was highly intelligent (and I hope still is) and completely tuned into the various projects I experimented with — stripping to a recital of a scientific paper at the ICA and so on. These were part of my then association with the magazine Ambit, for which I was trying to drum up publicity. Euphoria, who worked as a professional stripper, was extremely beautiful, and easy-going. The interviewer/stripper at the Arts Lab was recruited by someone at the gallery. She disapproved strongly of the cars, deciding that she would only appear topless (a fascinating response, it seemed to me at the time). A couple of drunken guests manhandled her in the back seat of the crashed Pontiac, and she claimed that they had tried to rape her. I can’t remember the review in detail or her name, but she was damning.

ABOVE: Euphoria Bliss holds court. Front row left to right: Euphoria, Eduardo Paolozzi, Ballard, Michael Foreman (art editor of Ambit) and Dr Martin Bax, editor of Ambit. We don’t know who the chaps at the back are. This photo was taken in 1972, at the Royal Academy of Art in front of a Paolozzi sculpture that was being exhibited.

QUESTION 5
Would you produce something similar to ‘Crashed Cars’ today? Has the car, at the same time as maintaining its position as the engine of capitalism, lost something of it’s power to signify by its very dominance and accessibility (for example, cars are smashed up for fun on quiz shows to aid the spectacle). Has the ‘crashed car’ taboo shifted, and if so to where?

ANSWER 5
I would if I wanted to test some idea, though I think those days are past for me. I think the car has retained its hold on us, partly by the way in which it elicits aggression and an illusion of freedom and partly because while driving we control the possibility of our own deaths. The Princess Di death took on extra resonance that would have been absent if she had died in a hotel fire.

QUESTION 6
Are you still interested in creating ‘posters’ that can be read as novels, or has the poster lost some of its power? If so what has it been replaced by?

ANSWER 6
Sadly, the economies of publishing are against the idea.

QUESTION 7
Was Millennium People intended as an attack on the middle classes? Compare to the 1959 short story ‘Now: Zero’, a text that kills its reader.

ANSWER 7
Not an attack, no. As one of the middle classes. I feel for their plight. Their rebellion in MP turns out to be pointless, since they are the last group who could hope to rebel — docility is in their bones. The book is about pointless violence, and pointless protest, which are increasingly around us today. It’s a waste of time looking for a motive, when the absence of a motive is the only point. This makes Hungerford, Columbine and so on impossible to predict. The Islamist attacks on New York and Madrid are another matter entirely.

ABOVE: JGB photo via Hard Mag.

QUESTION 8
Why blow up Tate Modern? Is it because it is now the representative site of contemporary high culture, an instrument of the massification of that high culture, and the ’spiritual’ heart of new religion, a cathedral to the art of spectacle? Or is it a cultural Auschwitz? Would it be better to disseminate this culture far and wide, so there was a mini Tate in every shopping centre, or really dissolve the barrier between culture and life Helmut Newton photos used to sell Sainsbury’s economy baked beans?

ANSWER 8
My revolutionaries see Tate Modern as one of the ways in which the middle classes are brain-washed, along with education generally. (Not a view I share). The process of popularising doesn’t necessarily entail dilution or dumbing down — the Hollywood film was popular but highly original in its heyday. But the modern movement set out to be provocative and revolutionary from the start (Manet?), and popularising the avant-garde is bound to blunt the blade. The entertainment conglomerates that now rule our world can neutralise and absorb almost anything, and one needs educated feet to dance just out of reach of their embrace. People have done it — Dalí, Helmut Newton, Francis Bacon and others.

QUESTION 9
Are the middle classes really at fault here, squeezed as they are between the workers (soldiers, policemen, builders etc.) and the ruling elite who use the workers to maintain and build order? What else are they supposed to do? This comes close to a very important theme for Hard Mag, just what is the role of the middle class intellectual/artist/writer/thinker? What is the responsibility now? Have things changed much in the last 50-60 years? What would you be interested in seeing happen in the next 5-10 years? How far can you see things (such as the art spectacle, middle class attitudes of unfairness and intolerance) continuing to accelerate?

ANSWER 9
The middle classes aren’t at fault. They are the yeomen class, who have given loyal service to the feudal lord, refining their archery and swordsmanship, and now find that they are no longer needed, since the feudal lord has hired foreign mercenaries equipped with the new wonder-weapon, the flintlock. As for the special problems facing the middle-class artist — it looks as if alienation is going to be imposed on him whether he likes it or nor. Most artists and writers in the past have been middle-class, the surrealists to a man, with backgrounds similar to those of the Baader-Meinhof gang. However, the middle-class world against which they rebelled was vast and self-confident. Who today would bother to rebel against the Guardian or Observer-reading, sushi-nibbling, liberal, tolerant middle-class? I think the main target the young writer/artist should rebel against is himself or herself. Treat oneself as the enemy who needs to be provoked and subverted.

QUESTION 10
Is there a role today for an avant-garde? And if so what fields of operation are open to such an avant-garde? Is there the possibility for such an avant-garde within the art world and the world of publishing today?

ANSWER 10
Yes, though it won’t necessarily appear in the places we expect. Follow your own obsessions, use them like stepping stones. and with luck you’ll find your way into your mysterious inner self.

All the best,
J.G. Ballard

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interview by Mark Goodall

The following is a short interview with JGB conducted by Mark Goodall in 2006 for his book Sweet & Savage: The World Through the Shockumentary Film Lens. The book is published by Headpress, and the interview is posted here with the kind permission of Mark Goodall and the publisher.

News reporter turned film director, Gualtiero Jacopetti, kickstarted the trend for outrageous documentaries — ’shockumentaries’ if you will — back in 1962 when he made Mondo Cane. MARK GOODALL talks to J.G. BALLARD, a fan, about Mondo Cane, its successors and its influence on his own work as a writer.

LEFT: Gualtiero Jacopetti.

MARK GOODALL: What were your initial impressions of the films of Gualtiero Jacopetti (Mondo Cane, Mondo Cane 2, Women of the World, Africa Addio etc.); where did you see them; what was the audience like?

J.G. BALLARD: I was very impressed by Jacopetti’s films — I saw all of them from 1964 or so onwards — they were shown in small cinemas in the West End, and to full or more or less full houses, and my impression is that the audiences completely got the ‘point’. As far as I remember, the response of the people sitting around me was strong and positive. I think there was comparatively little sex in the first Mondo Cane, and I can’t recall even one dirty raincoat. The audience was the usual crew of rootless inner Londoners (the best audience in the world) drawn to an intriguing new phenomenon. At the time, some twenty years had gone by since the war’s end, and everyone had seen the World War 2 newsreels — Belsen, corpses being bulldozed, dead Japanese on Pacific Islands and so on. All grimly real, but safely distanced from the audiences by a sign that said ‘horrors of war’. What the Mondo Cane audiences wanted was the horrors of peace, yes, but they also wanted to be reminded of their own complicity in the slightly dubious process of documenting these wayward examples of human misbehaviour. I may be wrong, but I think that the early Mondo Cane films concentrated on bizarre customs rather than horrors, though the gruesome content grew fairly rapidly, certainly in the imitator’s films.

I was a great admirer of Mondo Cane and the two sequels, though if I remember they became more and more faked, though that was part of their charm. We, the 1960s audiences, needed the real and authentic (executions, flagellant processions, autopsies etc) and it didn’t matter if they were faked — a more or less convincing simulation of the real was enough and even preferred. Also, the more tacky and obviously exploitative style appealed to an audience just waiting to be corrupted — the Vietnam newsreels on TV were authentically real, but that wasn’t ‘real’ enough. Jacopetti filled an important gap in all sorts of ways — game playing was coming in. Also they were quite stylistically made and featured good photography, unlike some of the ghastly compilation atrocity footage I’ve been sent. It is lovely to think that he had his retrospective in a British university (as in The Atrocity Exhibition, which is not set in the US, as some think).

J.G. Ballard.

But the audiences were fully aware that they were collaborating with the films, and this explains why they weren’t upset when what seemed to be faked sequences (they might have been real in fact) started to appear in the later films — there was almost the sense that they needed to appear ‘faked’ to underline the audience’s awareness of what was going on — both on screen and inside their own heads. We needed violence and violent imagery to drive the social (and political) revolution that was taking place in the mid 1960s — violence and sensation, more or less openly embraced, were pulling down the old temples. We needed our ‘tastes’ to be corrupted — Jacopetti’s films were part of an elective psychopathy that would change the world (so we hoped, naively). Incidentally, all this was missing from the way audiences (in the Curzon cinema I think) saw another 1960s shockumentary — The Savage Eye (directed by Joseph Strick) — when I saw it I, like the audience, shuddered but felt no complicity at all. A fine film.

ABOVE: Still from Mondo Cane.

MG: Can you recall any critical or other ‘professional’ reactions to Jacopetti’s films when they were released?

JGB: I remember the critical/respectable reaction to the Jacopetti films was uniformly hostile and dismissive. As always, this confirmed their originality and importance.

MG: Jacopetti has distanced himself from the films that later copied Mondo Cane labelling them ‘counterfeit’. What were/are your impressions of the copies of his films?

JGB: I can’t remember any specific imitations, though I must have seen one or two. They were too obvious, ignoring the delicate balance between ‘documentary’ footage on the one hand, and on the other the need to remind the audience of its role in watching the films, and that without its intrigued response the films wouldn’t function at all. The balance between the ‘real’ and the ironic simulation of the real had to be walked like a tightrope.

MG: How did mondo films influence your own work/ideas/thought processes (in particular The Atrocity Exhibition)?

JGB: For me, the Mondo Cane films were an important key to what was going on in the media landscape of the 1960s, especially post the JFK assassination. Nothing was true, and nothing was untrue (The Atrocity Exhibition tried to find a new sense in what had become a kind of morally virtual world) — ‘which lies are true?’

I think that Jacopetti was genuinely important, and opened a door into what some call postmodernism and I call boredom. Screen the JFK assassination enough times and the audience will laugh.

J.G. Ballard.

MG: What in your view was important about Jacopetti’s films? Do you think the films have any relevance to the present day, or to the future?

JGB: I suspect they’re very much of their time, but that isn’t a fault, necessarily. But there are many resonance’s today as in the Bush/Blair war in Iraq — complete confusion of the simulated, the real and the unreal, and the acceptance of this by the electorate. Reality is constantly redefining itself, and the electorate/audience seems to like this — a Prime Minister, religiously sincere, lies to himself and we accept his self–delusions. There’s a strong sense today that we prefer a partly fictionalised reality onto which we can map our own dreams and obsessions. The Mondo Cane films were among the first attempts to provide the collusive fictions that constitute reality today. Wartime propaganda, and the Believe it or Not (Ripley) comic strip of bizarre facts in the 1930s, were assumed to be largely true, but no one today thinks the same of the official information flowing out of Iraq — or out of 10 Downing Street and the Pentagon and significantly this doesn’t unsettle us.

A Gualtiero Jacopetti retrospective occurred as part of the 2003 National Museum of Photography Film and Television’s Bradford International Film Festival. The retrospective was a collaboration between the festival and the department of postgraduate studies at the School of Art and Design, Bradford College.

‘An Exhibition of Atrocities: J G Ballard on Mondo Films’ is taken from the book Sweet & Savage: The World Through the Shockumentary Film Lens by Mark Goodall. Published by Headpress.

UK £9.99 / US $19.95
ISBN 1900486490

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+ Escaping the gaze: A review of John Foxx’s Tiny Colour Movies

Conducted by Evelyn Finger.

Translation by Dan O’Hara.

ABOVE: JGB in recent times. Photographer unknown (image courtesy The Terminal Collection).

The following interview appeared in the German newspaper Die Zeit in September 2005, hence its initial focus on Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent evacuation of New Orleans. For the most part, Ballard’s on auto-pilot, fending off what seem to be journalistic devil’s-advocate provocations with stock responses; yet his view is all the more persuasive given the ease and directness with which he meets such questions.

Some of the imagery he uses here is not so common, however, and the conclusion of the interview, which addresses the issue of social control, is fascinating. Ballard notes that religions no longer have a monopoly on the ‘domestication of the psyche’, and asks who is now playing the zookeeper. His image of a chimpanzee’s tea-party that ends in violence is a neat allegory in this respect. Chimps might have memories, but they have little concept of the future – something which could hardly be said of Ballard’s fictions. His attitude here – that of the writer-as-anthropologist, studying the patterns of human behaviour so as to prognosticate the future of the species – underlines the urgent need for writers who explore the future, especially when we live in an era and society that’s proved itself incapable of or unwilling to do so.

Dan O’Hara

EVELYN FINGER: Again and again you’ve described the collapse of enlightened society when faced with deadly threats to its existence. Do you feel that applies to the events in New Orleans?

J.G. BALLARD: I’m afraid it does. All my books deal with the fact that our human civilization is like the crust of lava spewed from a volcano. It looks solid, but if you set foot on it, you feel the fire. Events in Louisiana remind us that the freedom of the rich still depends on the oppression of the poor. Since we repress this fact, we’re ill-prepared to pay the price for our society’s functioning.

Were you surprised by the hurricane’s aftermath?

I was as shocked as everyone else. But I wasn’t surprised when I saw that most of those left behind in New Orleans were black. America takes no responsibility for its abysmal racism, although the blacks still constitute a gigantic underclass in American society. It’s no wonder that it took so long for the National Guard to begin rescue operations. Had it been middle-class whites stuck in the filth, the aid would have been in more of a hurry.

In your 1962 novel The Drowned World you described the world after climate change: flooded, mired, a subtropical hell. What symbolism do you see in the scenes from New Orleans? Are the harsh words of rapper Kanye West justified?

What happened in Mississippi was a kind of ethnic cleansing, in which the hurricane played something of the role played by the civil war in former Yugoslavia. Katrina offered a pretext for attacking the underprivileged blacks. Katrina ensured that a particular section of the population were uprooted and driven from their homes. Now armed whites are flying in, wearing police and army uniforms, and they’re carrying their guns ready to shoot. They’ll take care that the displaced blacks are dispersed in every direction, so that they won’t come back for a long time. They’ll most certainly make it out of bounds for them.

Why should white Americans take an interest in the misfortune of the blacks?

From fear. If one travels across the United States, one meets countless intelligent middle-class Americans who are afraid of their fellow black citizens. They’re nervous when faced with their former slaves: they don’t want to share schools with them, they don’t want to be bumping into them in their own neighbourhood. At the same time, however, they deny their fear. They maintain that everyone is equal in law. But it’s not true. If there’s something good about this hurricane, it’s the fact that it’s brought racial discrimination to light. The black refugees are completely aware of that, by the way. One can sense it in every TV interview.

Most of your books are set in a western nowhere. Racial conflict doesn’t occur. Why?

My plots are international. They deal with the neuroses, the manias of the postmodern. The American race problem is too specific. In Europe we also have many immigrants, it’s true – in Germany the Turks, in Great Britain the Asians, in France the North African muslims – but despite tensions and outbreaks of racist violence, the West European countries manage to get along with their immigrants.

What’s the problem with the idea of a cultural melting-pot?

The idea has never worked. It’s still not so long ago that America abolished slavery. It was after the Second World War, during the presidencies of Kennedy and Johnson, that civil rights for all were first established. Up to the sixties, there was segregation in the South: separate places on the bus, separate tables in the restaurant. The memory of that is still too fresh. It will take a long time to be forgotten.

You once wrote that, sooner or later, all science fiction comes true. When you see the pictures of the helpless hurricane victims, are you afraid that you were right?

Naturally, I’m afraid, above all for my children and grandchildren. This planet is moving towards dangerous times. There are many kinds of war and terror, but the worst thing is that violence holds a subliminal attraction for us. If we want to combat it successfully, we have to admit that humanity is not completely civilizable. Regrettable, but true.

In 1996, David Cronenberg filmed your novel Crash, a highway-thriller about the death drive and the urge towards self-destruction. Most of the victims in New Orleans, however, don’t look like they’re enjoying the disaster.

But we the audience do. We live in masochistic times. Our societies are driven by conflicting psychopathological impulses. A huge natural catastrophe like Katrina fits perfectly with our fundamentally apocalyptic mood. One has to realize that we live in principally secular societies: God is dead. And these huge cataclysms like Katrina or the tsunami in the far East now assume the function of God. They are the violent forces that punish us for our immoral lives. That can be very satisfying, so long as one isn’t affected oneself.

In your latest novel Millennium People, the leader of a revolt says, “There is a profound need for meaningless action”.

For meaningless violence! Unfortunately. We live in civilized conditions, but we are not rational creatures. German history proves that. Or take Soviet Russia, a nightmarish dystopia based on a brilliant idea. The European Enlightenment that began with Newton and Voltaire, which successfully preached belief in human reason and which dominated our philosophy and our politics, is most certainly at an end. Man, as one sees in New Orleans, does not necessarily act in his own best interests.

If the situation is so hopeless, was it not therefore reasonable of President Bush to hold off from intervention for as long as possible?

No. One must, unreasonably and in spite of everything, strive for unity with one’s fellow humanity all the more. Europe is at present split between the anglo-saxon social models as they’re represented by Reagan and Thatcher, and the social-democratic model as it’s been realized in Germany and France. On the one hand: economic freedom, unrestricted trade, denationalization. Business must go on! On the other hand: the welfare state, high taxes, state control over almost everything. Some people find this confining. But this model was very successful, since it helped the notion of a friendly togetherness to be accepted. It’s unimaginable that France and Germany would go to war with each other again. In that, strong government has succeeded.

Do you think that a stronger state, and possibly even a strong army, can protect us from ourselves and our own irrational urges?

Yes. In an emergency. But such a state must be founded on a sense of community. After the tsunami in Indonesia there was hardly any rioting. Nor after the atrocious earthquakes ten years ago in Japan, or two years ago in Turkey. Evidently there was a stronger social cohesion at work there. That doesn’t exist in America.

Because the Americans are fickle egocentrics?

No. But everything in America has become subordinate to economic demands. If your company says, leave your home in Los Angeles and move to New York, you do it. The Americans like to fly the flag. But this demonstrative patriotism is no substitute for real solidarity.

Can one prepare for apocalypse?

Naturally. Katrina is a warning. We may not be able to prevent the hurricane itself, but we can plan in advance what to do after the event. The American government did far too little.

ABOVE: JGB in recent times. Photographer unknown (image via The Telegraph).

Should George Bush have read your books?

It’s a comical idea. But in truth, it wouldn’t have done any harm. However, I’m astonished that my books are read in Germany, even though they no longer appear there. I was published for a couple of decades, but all of a sudden it ceased.

Yes, it’s incomprehensible.

No, I understand it well. The Germans are sensitive. And the writer James Graham Ballard seems to glorify violence. He seems to approve of chaos.

If it’s true that, at some point, all science fiction comes true, which of your apocalyptic visions are we yet to face? The demolished skyscraper in High-Rise, the ghostly New York in Hello America! [sic] or the car races in Crash? What comes next?

That’s a treacherous question. I’m afraid that scenarios such as those in Crash and High-Rise are almost contemporary already. Not, it’s true, as outbreaks of violence such as those depicted in the literature, but as subliminal aggression. People will continue getting up in the mornings, climbing into their cars and driving to the office, but in their heads there’s something dangerous happening. Because they’re suffering from middle-class boredom. Nothing happens. One can’t take politics seriously. Our monarchy here in England is a joke. What should people still believe in? Everything exciting is happening in their heads. That’s a dangerous place.

Were people more humane when they still went to church regularly?

No. The religions of the past tried to control the human psyche, to domesticate man as though he were a horse, so as to ride him. Religions wanted to exorcize man of his savagery. But who’s doing that today? That’s our problem.

In High-Rise the solid middle-class tenants regress into barbarity for no reason, they live in their luxury apartments like primates. With hurricane Katrina, the disaster had a concrete cause.

The catastrophe in New Orleans was an affliction There seem to be more natural catastrophes today than 50 years ago, and we’ve become accustomed to thinking that it’s to do with global warming. But maybe it’s not so much the globe that’s heated up, as our minds that are boiling. It’s like the chimps in the zoo. If one sets a table for them, for a time they’ll sit calmly and drink a cup of tea. But all of a sudden they’ll start to smash everything up, because they can’t stand the boredom, the absence of incident. They’d rather resort to violence. I’m afraid that we’re still much more closely related to the chimpanzees.

But how are we to escape on the one hand boredom, and on the other decline? At the end of your novel The Wind From Nowhere, the hurricane blows itself out.

I don’t want to sound pessimistic. But I think that the real hurricanes are starting to blow more strongly. And the wind in our heads is getting stronger day by day. I can only advise: look out for yourself!

Originally published in German as ‘Gewalt ohne Ende’, Die Zeit, 8 September 2005.

ABOVE: JGB in 2006 (photo courtesy The Terminal Collection).

Translation by Dan O’Hara.

The interview below was published in a vast tome, an annual German review of the year in science fiction which came out in July last year. The interview itself was presumably conducted sometime in Spring 2007, after the publication of Kingdom Come and the re-issue two-volume set of The Complete Short Stories.

One suspects, in the end, that Ballard’s playful teasing of his interviewers results from a certain sanguinity about the state of his health; it’s less a callous dissimulation at the expense of his interlocutors than the resolution of the old Lunghua survivor. Evidently by the time of the interview he had already been visiting hospitals, as he notes their science fiction-like hypermodernity, and even advises his interviewers to visit one. I’d rather remember the Ballard of this interview, his sense of mischief intact even in the face of his physical atrophy, than the Ballard who has appeared in recent TV interviews, in which he seems oppressed by less considerate and more parasitical personalities.

Dan O’Hara

Many thanks to Michaela Pape for proofing these interviews.

WERNER FUCHS & SASCHA MAMCZAK: Mr Ballard, last year marked a very special anniversary for you: fifty years ago, in 1956, with the publication of your first story, your career as a science fiction author began.

J.G. BALLARD: Yes, that’s true. But don’t remind me of it! I’m an old man.

Well, your publishers have effectively reminded you of it by newly publishing a thousand-page-plus collection of all your stories from the last fifty years.

Naturally, I was very impressed. After all, that’s half a century of hard work, half my life, if you like. You know, short stories were always very important for me. Like many science fiction authors, I began by writing short stories, which isn’t the norm any more, at least not among British authors today. Today young authors would rather write novels straight off – and that’s precisely why these novels are mostly so poor. In every job you need a certain amount of practice, whether you’re a violinist or a joiner, and short stories offer writers a wonderful chance to acquire the necessary tools. The Mona Lisa, was, after all, not exactly Leonardo da Vinci’s first painting. In any case I learned what it meant to be a writer by writing short stories; what my weaknesses and strengths are.

Today, short stories – even SF short stories – have fallen out of style somewhat.

Yes, one’s become used to these overlong novels in which everything is explained and tidied up. At the heart of every good short story lies a certain ambiguity, a sort of “Yes, but.” That’s very seldom found in novels. And yet this ambiguity is the very stuff of life. Many people tell me I should write more short stories – and I reply that I don’t know where I’d publish them. When I began writing them fifty years ago, it was completely different: nearly every paper and magazine in those days published short stories, some of them even every day. And then there were of course the science fiction magazines, which had an almost insatiable appetite for short stories. The SF magazines in those days were an entirely wonderful training space for budding authors – one could pursue one’s obsessions, one’s fantasies; one could discover what kind of writer one wanted to be. It’s a little like the way that, in one’s youth, one has a lot of affairs: one learns how to make love. It’s different now: most young authors don’t know how to make love, and they don’t know how to write. Oh, well, that’s only the grumbling of an old man.

ABOVE: JGB in 2006. Photograph by Adam Bloomberg & Oliver Chanarin.

How, back then, did you come to write science fiction?

Now, most authors in those days were fans before they began to write professionally. Which means that they’d already written something or other in their youth, mostly for fanzines. With me it was different, I only came to science fiction later. I was twenty-six when I published my first story. Before then I’d scarcely read any science fiction. It was when I went to Canada with the Royal Air Force that I first became aware of SF. We were based somewhere in the Canadian provinces, it snowed incessantly, and there was nothing to do and nothing to read, not a single daily paper. So I started to read science fiction magazines – and I was extraordinarily surprised. It gave me a glimpse of a hitherto unexplored terrain. The then literary mainstream – the stories which the New Yorker or other magazines published – was purely oriented towards the past, both thematically and stylistically. That didn’t interest me. I was interested in the changes around us – the consumer society, the first computers, TV, the fear of nuclear war, gigantic motorway and airport complexes – all of that created a new landscape, an external landscape like the mental one. I wanted to write about that. So I thought, why not science fiction? One could investigate this landscape there.

And of course the nascent space age.

Of course. I remember very well how in 1956 – as I said, the year in which I published my first short story – I heard for the first time on the radio the Sputnik 1 signal: beep, beep, beep. The sound of a new world. So long, past! Hello, future! They were really very exciting years. Years in which, in practice, I wrote exclusively short stories.

Which authors – both within science fiction and outside it – influenced you the most back then?

Within SF, very few – I simply learned too little from them. I was weaned, if you will, on the classical European and American menu, and the one to make the most impression on me was Franz Kafka. He was the most significant writer of the 20th century, far more significant than James Joyce. Edgar Allan Poe and Dino Buzzati also fascinated me. Of the SF authors in those days I had the most respect for Ray Bradbury, but I’ve never written like him. He was too romantic, too naive for me at times.

What about Philip K. Dick? And Theodore Sturgeon?

I did like Sturgeon. Dick, less so – he was too American for me. Many British authors imitated the Americans in those days, so as to get published in the US magazines. And that’s exactly what I didn’t want. I’d prefer the neutral tone of a Robert Sheckley or a Cyril Kornbluth. But if you ask me who really influenced me – it was less writers than painters like Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio di Chirico, René Magritte. The surrealists. I wanted to create in words what they created on canvas. These dreamlike landscapes, this fascinating way of artistically realizing psychological states. You know, as a teenager I lived through the greatest surrealistic situation on the planet: the war. You go into the street, and half the houses are in ruins. A car sitting on top of one of the houses. And so on… War is full of surreal surprises, full of surrealist images. Back then it became clear to me that something in human culture was taking a dreadfully warped turn – and as an artist, a writer, I wanted to understand it.

LEFT: The Drowned World, German edition (Phantasia, 2008).

When your first stories were published in British SF magazines, what was the reaction in the USA? Were many of the stories accepted?

No, the Americans were very hesitant to publish my stories. They just didn’t understand what I was driving at. The American SF magazines of the late 50s and early 60s wanted conventional SF stories, stories set in the future or in space. An SF story set in the present irritated them terribly, and many of my stories were set in the present then. In time it got better, naturally, and many of my stories could then appear over there, but the experimental pieces were really published almost exclusively in Britain. So up to 1963 – when the success of my first really serious novel The Drowned World brought me a certain independence – I wrote almost entirely experimental short stories.

Can it be that your 1964 short story ‘The Terminal Beach’ marked a turning point in your work? With respect to what one generally designates ‘inner space’?

Absolutely. ‘The Terminal Beach’ is certainly one of my most important stories. Even though it was published in New Worlds, it wasn’t a science fiction story at all, but rather conveyed merely a certain science fiction atmosphere. It described a landscape that was the expression of a particular psychological state – our fear of nuclear war. Yes, I think ‘The Terminal Beach’ is the first real ‘inner space’ story and it leads directly to The Atrocity Exhibition, but also to novels like Crash, High Rise and Concrete Island. There, there are particular mental landscapes described throughout, like those made by the surrealists in their paintings.

‘Inner space’ was also the thematic centre of the start of the New Wave back then. When you look back today, how do you see your rôle in that literary movement?

I was the New Wave! (Laughs.) Well, in some ways there was something inevitable about the New Wave. Back then in the early 60s American science fiction had exhausted itself in repeating its themes, and people were looking for something new and exciting. You know, as soon as I began to write, I constantly saw in SF authors and especially in the American ones a collection of truly naive and, if you like, innocent men – people who truly didn’t know what they were doing. Ray Bradbury is a prominent example. A few years ago someone sent me a book about him, with many photographs. One of these showed Bradbury in his work room, which is about as large as a tennis court – and every millimetre of this huge workroom is stuffed full of toys: rockets, spaceships, dinosaur models, every kind of monster. A child’s room. A wonderful image for the American science fiction of these times, even for the whole of American culture.

You said that you wouldn’t describe ‘The Terminal Beach’ as a science fiction story at all. Would that go for everything you’ve written since?

Absolutely. I don’t see novels like Crash, High Rise or Concrete Island as science fiction. And I think that many people only describe it as science fiction because in that way they can neutralize the uncomfortable feeling it radiates.

Then what are these novels and tales?

Good question. They’re certainly not part of Realism, which dominates modern fiction – I’ve only really written one ‘realistic’ novel: Empire of the Sun. No, I think they belong to another literary tradition, one which goes back to Sade and which was carried on by writers like Genet or Celine. The bad boys of literature, if you like. An extraordinarily powerful tradition that deals with truths people don’t want to hear. I’ve always seen myself as a kind of moralist, one who stands on the roadside holding up a sign with the legend: Look out, dangerous bends, drive slowly!

ABOVE: JGB in 2006 (photo courtesy The Terminal Collection).

So, stories that read like science fiction, but aren’t?

Something like that. It’s simply that the themes of science fiction were eagerly ingested by the mainstream, and readers got on with them better and better. Just take William Burroughs, who I admire greatly: he demonstrated very early on, with his paranoid fantasies which naturally go back to Kafka, that one doesn’t have to be a science fiction author to write science fiction. No, I think that with The Atrocity Exhibition at the latest, I abandoned the genre for good. And I’ve not gone back to it since. But that’s not at all uncommon: even H. G. Wells began as a science fiction author, and at some point left off with it and wrote mainstream novels.

In the 80s with cyberpunk there arose a literary movement about which, in retrospect, one asks oneself if it was still science fiction.

Yes, I greatly admired the cyberpunk authors, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, many others. Whether they wrote science fiction or something else is hard to say. The fact is that new forms of communications have a great influence on literature, particularly the internet – and cyberpunk was the first expression of it. But it came too late for me. I’ve never owned a computer, and I still don’t have one even today.

But you surf on the internet now and then, don’t you?

Naturally. One cannot avoid it anymore. The internet’s a fascinating thing – it really has made the world into a global village.

Let’s come back to your short stories. Or rather to the fact that in the 90s you hardly wrote them any more…

I think that short stories are basically a playing field for young authors, a bit like the lyric. Moreover there are, as I said, scarcely any more opportunities to publish short stories. Of course now and then a magazine rings me and asks for a story, which is quite wonderful. But when I then ask how long it should be, they answer: 2000 words. 2000 words! That’s not a story, it’s a vignette. Yes, I stopped writing short stories in the 90s. But in some ways all my most recently published novels are extended short stories. But please don’t tell anyone.

And all these novels seem to have a common theme: the failure of every form of middle-class utopia.

Yes, in some ways. I’m very interested in social pathology, in what really drives us on in our everyday lives. My newest novel Kingdom Come raises the question of whether the consumer thinking of the present day might not at some point suddenly turn into fascism.

A very trenchant thesis.

Yes, but just take a look at what’s going on in these huge shopping malls. Evidently not much more than shopping is left for us. That and sport. That’s where we get our kicks, those are the new religions. I already believe that one of these days we could end up in a kind of leisure-time dictatorship.

But don’t events like the attacks of the 11th of September or the catastrophe in New Orleans remind people of the hard facts of reality?

I’m not so sure about that. I think it was difficult for many people to distinguish the picture of the collapsed World Trade Center from all the other images they know from Hollywood. It’s such a binary matter: real, unreal, real, unreal… And as for whether the current American administration finds itself brought down to reality or not, I very much doubt it. No, I think we live in dangerous times.

Do at least modern SF authors react appropriately to what’s going on around us?

I can’t say, I read practically no science fiction any more. You know, it’s like an old affair: if it ends, it’s gone forever. It doesn’t come back. What fascinated me about science fiction fifty years ago has long become a part of our everyday life, it’s permeated the whole of society. Just go to a modern hospital sometime – it’s pure science fiction. I only very seldom read novels at all. I read far more non-fiction, political analyses, biographies. The older one gets, the more one clings to facts.

And to come back to the aforementioned tome of fiction, your collected short stories: could you tell us what your favourite short story is?

Hm… My favourite story is probably ‘Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan’. That story changed everything for me.

And will there one day be a sequel? ‘Why I Want To Fuck George W. Bush’?

No, I really would not want to fuck George W. Bush! Hillary Clinton, maybe. If you know what I mean.

Many thanks for the chat, Mr. Ballard.

Originally published in German as Werner Fuchs and Sascha Mamczak, ‘George W. Bush möchte ich nun wirklich nicht ficken!’ in Das Science Fiction Jahr 2007, eds. Sascha Mamczak and Wolfgang Jeschke (Heyne, 2007).

Translation by Dan O’Hara.

JGB in 1985: photo by Bleddyn Butcher.

The following interview was conducted in Shepperton at some point during the autumn of 1982, shortly before the publication of Myths of the Near Future, and published in 1985 in a German collection of essays on Ballard called J. G. Ballard: Der Visionär des Phantastischen, edited by Joachim Körber. Ballard’s next book would be Empire of the Sun, in 1984, but his concerns here seem far from his own past.

Much of the interview concerns influences, and Ballard is particularly strident in his rejection of Burroughs’ influence, whom he appears to see as a modernist after the fact. He stresses the distinction between the modernists’ exploration of subjective consciousness and his own method, which affirms the outer world as a reality to be comprehended by consciousness, rather than created by it. Rarely has he stated his materialism so explicitly. In this context, his assertion that The Atrocity Exhibition is like a machine working to analyse the concrete relations of the outer world seems hardly a metaphor.

Dan O’Hara.

LEFT: ‘Die Stimmen der Zeit’ (‘The Voices of Time’), the German title for part 1 of Ballard’s Complete Short Stories collection (German edition published 2007).

FUCHS & KÖRBER: Even today quite a few critics are still of the opinion that Science Fiction concerns itself with the future. Yet you yourself have said repeatedly that it is with the present that SF must concern itself. The present in England is surely interesting enough to deal with. How do you see it and its possible consequences for the future?

BALLARD: Now, we have here at present a situation such as has never arisen before. We find ourselves in a process of drastic social transformation. I can’t say what the world will look like if these upheavals take effect, but they will in any event be significant. Youth rebellion, violence in the street, such things have never yet occurred in Great Britain, and the middle classes and moneyed upper classes particularly are faced with a problem, as they lack any experience of it. Of course there have been social revolutions that only took place through violence in all eras, for example in the Twenties, when fascism was strong, but I scarcely believe that these developments can be compared to each other. Nowadays there are fewer poor, and the revolt issues less from need and much more from weariness.

Violence in the streets is something one knows rather better from continental Europe, but not in England where such things are quite unheard of. I can’t imagine a larger proportion of the working classes in this country being drawn towards the right wing, especially since it was precisely the Conservative administration which is at least in part responsible for the current state of affairs. But I also don’t see any danger of class war coming here, that might change some aspect of the British system. England is an expressly conservative country, it was always so, and that’s as true as ever today. The unrest is not as bad as the media and particularly television would have us believe. It is in fact true that many of the young are in revolt, skinheads, punks and so on, but their number is smaller than one would suspect – which naturally should not be taken to mean that their cause or their concerns are any less serious or important on that account.

FUCHS & KÖRBER: That you yourself have mentioned punk directly offers us an excellent opportunity to re-direct things to another subject. The modern punk revolution, especially in music, seems to be comparable with the mood of literary upheaval in the Sixties, which in the end led to SF’s ‘New Wave’. This is also the view of Michael Moorcock, then the principal writer. What’s your view of this?

BALLARD: Now, one can certainly draw some parallels. Punk is a movement of rebellion against outdated and overbearing values. But there, the parallels are in my view already exhausted, as the New Wave was a cultural affair in the first place, a quest for a literary breakaway, whereas punk goes much further. Punks often aren’t looking for any new direction, but only to denounce the old. And the New Wave orientated itself towards the future, whereas punk rock, as much as I pick up from listening to the radio, is really reliant on older musical traditions.

FUCHS & KÖRBER: Let’s stick closer to literature. Even when you published your first stories there was, in certain ways, a dominant atmosphere of upheaval, even if it was entirely different. Or can one not see it that way?

BALLARD: Certainly one can! My first story appeared in 1957, and that was the year of Sputnik. I still remember it all exactly today: we sat in front of the radios and listened to the signals from this first artificial satellite – nothing more than bleep, bleep, bleep. And that really was a break such as one dramatically, emphatically cannot understand. This event seemed to change everything at a stroke. On the radio it was as if it was a celebration of the beginning of a new world, and it was also actually the beginning of the space age. It was unimaginable: one heard messages from other planets!

1957 was the real beginning of the space era, and it seemed to confirm everything that the old guard of SF authors had dreamed of and written together up to then. In those days it was like an intoxication; Campbell’s prophecies seemed to be really becoming true. (Laughs). And yet I was already back then of the view that outer space was not the right environment for science fiction. SF concerned itself with the gigantic proportions of outer space, and as a result the psychological component was forgotten completely – and naturally the literary aspect, too. I knew the way couldn’t lead outwards, because the space programme had already taken off. There was nothing really interesting to explore. The way had to lead inwards, in my view. That was natural for me, as I’d always been greatly interested in psychology. For me, SF was and is the only legitimate literature of the space age, but back then it took a wrong turn in a direction which never interested me personally because it wasn’t based on a psychological component, at least, not in a clear and deliberate way. The Fifties were an interesting time in various ways (as it seems the Eighties will also be), and one didn’t need a literature dealing with imaginary worlds when the most fascinating was the current-day on our own planet.

In my opinion, it’s important for a science fiction author to pay attention to and describe the present, the modern landscape of communications, technological and scientific developments, and so forth. Even in the Fifties so many changes had begun, the media landscape expanded, TV, high-circulation magazines, tourism gradually grew, pop music, all these developments had a direct influence upon human life, and in fact a much more direct influence than the space programme and the like – and no-one dealt with it in a proper way. The first computers were developed, the automation of modern industry began, technology also gained an ever greater influence over the lives of people who had nothing at all to do with it directly. And then naturally there was always the nuclear threat in the background, which hadn’t been there to such an extent before. And if one thinks of all these fascinating facts, it really is just too laughable that a literature such as science fiction, with such great opportunities, concerned itself with what was taking place on… pah, Proxima Centauri, or with invasions of giant dragons and such trivialities. The future began back then, in the present, and we were all witness to it!

LEFT: ‘Vom Leben und Tod Gottes’ (‘The Life and Death of God’), the German title for part 2 of Ballard’s Complete Short Stories collection (German edition published 2007).

FUCHS & KÖRBER: And your view found nothing to mirror it in American science fiction?

BALLARD: I believe a little of it rubbed off there, too, at least they still talk of a New Wave over there even now, in connexion with authors like Harlan Ellison or Roger Zelazny. But I don’t believe one can compare that with the actual New Wave in England. Authors like Zelazny or Harlan Ellison represent the world without reflecting on the times in which they live or write, they chiefly plunder ancient myths and dress them up in new clothes. That may be new and fascinating for American SF, but it isn’t original. At present, the big market for science fiction in America is the cinema, with films like Star Wars and so on. And hence SF is reduced to the level of comic strips, and from that a view all too easily arises that the whole of science fiction is worthless rubbish.

Science fiction is very popular today, and it was in those days too, but what differs from then is that today, the whole machinery is more geared towards commercial exploitation. Back then there were magazines like Galaxy, F&SF and New Worlds, in which one could publish original and unusual material. I find it rather hard to believe that a magazine like for example the very popular Omni would today publish one of the really innovative and ground-breaking stories of the Fifties, like something by Pohl and Kornbluth. Of course they’d be published there today, but only because they’re now known.

We live today in an era in which the sci-fi game is becoming ever more popular, and naturally that’s bad news for the serious science fiction writer. To outline things from my point of view: when I began SF had just had a terrifically big boom; in the USA there were 35 different magazines on the market, and even in this country there were six. That offered the serious interested writer a great opportunity to express himself. Writers like Philip K. Dick were popular back then.

FUCHS & KÖRBER: How did the New Wave proceed, anyway? In the Sixties there existed a brigade of interesting authors who were relatively quiet in the Seventies. And just now, at the beginning of the Eighties, many are coming late to fame and honour. One could perhaps here mention John Sladek as one of the best examples. What was the matter with the New Wave in the Seventies? And why have many authors become popular only now? Do you think that the time is ripe for the kind of literature which they wrote back then, and which largely met with disconcertment on the part of the readership?

BALLARD: Now first of all, the magazine New Worlds was suspended, which had been a common forum for many of us for a long time. That was a hard blow. Also many simply lost interest in SF, and went into other fields. Most simply didn’t manage to break into the American market, since there were no more opportunities to publish in England, at least no magazines that were sold under the label ‘Science Fiction’.

As far as I myself am concerned, I also distanced myself a little from SF at the beginning of the Seventies. After the stories in The Atrocity Exhibition appeared in book form, I worked very intensively on the novel Crash… and that’s how it went. I think I also somehow lost interest in the American magazine market. The USA was not nearly as interesting as in the Fifties and Sixties, and I think back then that applied to the whole of Western Europe. The USA had lost its supremacy in every respect, nothing really original and new came out of it anymore. Europe in the Seventies was (and still is today) far more interesting. Nowhere in the world can one follow such a clash of opposing political ideologies as in Western Europe. In this respect, there must surely also follow a cultural rapprochement with the Soviet Union at the least, in the long term the Soviet Union has to open itself to Europe – but Europe must also reciprocate. And the USA is an obstacle to this process. I think that Europe is a far more fascinating place, because the United States has simply lost the flair it had in the Fifties, it no longer has a monopoly on the future, the unlimited possibilities it once had. I said at the beginning that I expect interesting developments in this country. I think one can confidently extend that comment to the whole of Europe. Europe is a bubbling cauldron of constant psychological and political change, whereas in the USA there isn’t anything at all like politics in our sense. In the USA we have something to do not with opposed political ideologies, but at best a power struggle between men neither of whom is any better than each other, who are at most perhaps more power-hungry. Look at how mediocre American politicians are! Or the trade unions – in the United States the unions are completely apolitical, something unthinkable in Europe. Men like Reagan for example… or let’s take Ted Kennedy, who is already regarded as a left-leaning liberal in his country. Here – I don’t mean just in Germany – but here one would undoubtedly put him at best in the liberal wing of the conservative party.

LEFT: German compilation containing Crash, Concrete Island and High-Rise (2004).

Many writers here lost interest completely in the USA and instead concerned themselves more with Europe. I can say that for myself, at the least. At the beginning of the Seventies I wrote Crash, The Concrete Island [sic] and High Rise, and none of these books is strictly speaking science fiction – they are all concerned rather with certain social trends that were becoming apparent in Europe, and I tried to realize them novelistically. Accordingly these books did very poorly in the USA.

The same is true of Moorcock. In the Fifties we all looked to the USA, because SF there produced original achievements in those days. But no longer, in the Seventies. Take Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius novels – they’re very typically European, inspired by London and the so-called pop-culture of ‘Swinging London’, a radical departure from the American model.

For me the gap between European and American science fiction opened up in the Sixties, because the public there simply couldn’t understand the New Wave experiment – still less the editors and publishers. And if for once one of the New Wave books did stray over to America, it was mostly by mistake, because publishers bought in an author without seeing the work. That happened to me with The Atrocity Exhibition, and I recall a very nice story about that, one which in many respects demonstrates the exact situation. The Atrocity Exhibition was bought by a US press, and shortly before the distribution of the book, this respectable publisher glanced over the contents and saw to his horror that it contained stories such as ‘Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan’ and the like. Consequently he had the whole print-run pulped, all but my author’s specimen copies. Unbelievable! And afterwards I permitted myself the pleasure of sending a copy to Ronald Reagan, complaining about whichever respectable US publisher dared to publish this smut and filth. Of course I never got any reply, but it was worth it, for me.

Back to the topic. If a movement such as the New Wave forms, it always takes a while until new borderlines are defined and the whole thing takes shape. In the Sixties there arrived many new authors who were published in the genre, and who afterwards seemingly abandoned it. The only reason for that is that the complete shape of the innovations of the New Wave still wasn’t fully defined throughout. I myself never set out with the conscious intent: ‘And now you write science fiction.’ I always only wrote what was important to me at a particular moment, and then realized it was science fiction in retrospect. In the Sixties the situation was different again. In those days I wrote much that wasn’t strictly speaking science fiction, but that was published in related magazines and anthologies. The anthologies grew particularly in the Seventies, when the great dying-off of the magazines began. For me that was a shame in all sorts of respects. I like anthologies, I like to read original anthologies, but still they lack the freshness of a monthly magazine. Anthologies get created in publishing house offices, and by and large they’re conceived by the publishers as being in the same mould as a magazine. Also one can usually publish more quickly in magazines, get in touch with the public more quickly. Original anthologies are entirely different, there it can sometimes take years before something gets published, and that’s no good because by the time of publication the writer may very well find himself in an entirely new phase of creativity.

Magazines are more flexible in this respect. All my early stories appeared in Carnell’s magazine, I think I wrote something like fifty for him. Maybe more, but there were certainly fifty in the period from 1957 to 1964. And he never turned even a single one down. Everything I wrote got published, because he needed the material. He had a magazine to fill, some twelve issues a year appeared, and that’s not uninteresting to an author in any case, if he has a stable and reliable market. I’m extremely sorry about the end of New Worlds, it was a shame the magazine had to be closed down.

It would be my greatest wish for a new magazine to come out right now, as these times resemble the Fifties, and we could urgently do with one about them. I think that drastic changes in our lifestyle will come directly from new technologies. The video revolution, for example, will change everything. In the Fifties TV came along, which changed everything, the whole world, and video will also change the world, lastingly, in fact. Everyone can experiment with video, everyone can be his own artist. With video, everyone can transform his living room into a TV studio. It will have serious consequences, the extent of which is not yet at all quantifiable. We absolutely need a new magazine, the Eighties deserve to be examined more closely. With these continuous upheavals, the Eighties are really much more like the Fifties than were the Sixties or Seventies. I would rather it were a small format magazine like Carnell’s New Worlds, as with a large illustrated magazine there’s always the danger of it ending as so many such ventures do, that is, with the illustrations spreading and starting to displace the stories.

FUCHS & KÖRBER: And what do your plans for the Eighties look like? How will J. G. Ballard deal with the dawning of this new era in his work?

BALLARD: I’ve already written some new short stories and novellas emerging from the end of the Seventies and beginning of the Eighties, and they will also appear shortly in a collection. In all sorts of ways they’re a return to ‘pure’ science fiction, and a re-envisioning of what I wrote in the Fifties.

FUCHS & KÖRBER: What are the actual influences forming you yourself, and your work? Several of the stories in the Sixties were influenced by the new French literature, and if one takes a look around right here, one sees books about the Surrealists everywhere. Have they had an influence upon your style of writing, and if so, which ones?

BALLARD: Yes, naturally, it’s true that I’m a great admirer of all the Surrealist painters, and their works certainly continue to be not without influence on my work, and if I hadn’t become a writer – and hence a painter with words, in a way – I would surely have had a go at painting Surrealist pictures. I can’t say with such certitude what influenced my work in the Fifties. My early books are stuffed full of allusions to the Surrealists, that’s also true, but that was more of an expression of the admiration I felt for them. I don’t believe that the literature I’ve written would have developed differently had I never heard anything of the Surrealists. I do want to say, not once have I consciously taken Surrealist paintings as a model for my short stories or novels, even though naturally stories like ‘The Voices of Time’ or the Vermilion Sands stories do display certain parallels. It was more of a homage on my part, rather than a direct influence on their part. Moreover, in practice it’s impossible to recast sculpture or painting in a narrative form because it’s a question of fundamentally different forms of art. It is simply impossible to capture the mood expressed in a Dalí painting in the right words.

If painters have influenced me at all, it was the Pop-Art artists, initially much later, when I wrote the Atrocity Exhibition stories. Writing had already become an important business to me when I was at the beginning of my twenties, and in those days the great French symbolists of the nineteenth century may have exercised an unconscious influence upon me.

ABOVE: JGB at home in Shepperton, 1985: photo by Bleddyn Butcher.

FUCHS & KÖRBER: Your influences lie in any case outside Science Fiction to a considerable extent?

BALLARD: Most certainly. I first came across SF when I was in Canada with the Air Force, it must have been 1953 or 1954. Before then I’d read no science fiction at all, but in the base there they kept SF magazines to sell in the canteen, everything possible from pulps to the better digest magazines. I realized that a lot of the magazines back then contained really interesting, colourful stories that in various respects were better suited to the times than so-called ‘contemporary literature’. It’s true that they were hideous in design, with these ghastly covers – one knows them quite well enough – but the content was sometimes genuinely interesting. Sheckley, Pohl, Kornbluth, Jack Vance – those were the authors I liked to read back then. Kornbluth was an intelligent author, and I thought to myself, my god, here are really vital and interesting stories! But they were nonetheless still stories that were published in popular and commercial magazines, and that meant that the authors were quite freely subject to certain laws of the mass market, and so furthermore, they only went just as far as they could and no further. They employed no idea solely of their own accord. And suddenly it was all clear to me: here you have exactly the right environment for the kind of literature you really want to write, a literature of limitless possibilities. I had a head full of ideas and stories, and here was a medium that offered me the chance of expressing them adequately. I knew one could push open the window of commercial science fiction and let a little fresh air stream in. Outside there was a whole new world waiting for the literati to comment on it. And shortly after I’d got to know science fiction, I left off reading it again, because I made up my mind to write it myself.

FUCHS & KÖRBER: Let’s stay with your career for a moment. You published as you said something like fifty stories in Carnell’s magazine, some in the US also, and then came the point when time started to play an important role, when the stories became freer and more experimental. They lost the linear narrative of a story and brought in different events taking place simultaneously. That was the starting shot for the later ‘condensed novels’. For science fiction it was new and revolutionary.

BALLARD: That may be, but as with much that was ‘new’ in the New Wave, it was rather an aspect of that which was already recognized in literature generally. That goes for the New Wave in general, and for my collection The Atrocity Exhibition especially. That too was not new in modern literature. There were already experiments taking place even in very early modernist literature, for example in the novels of Virginia Woolf. The sole meaning of the more experimental literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries lay in an exploration of different subjective states of consciousness. The big difference in the New Wave and my own ‘condensed novels’ was that it wasn’t exactly very important to me to investigate different subjective conditions of consciousness, at least not in the first place. What concerned me primarily was to take the traditional themes and view them through subjective eyes, through the eye of science and the changes introduced by it, if one will.

If one takes a look at The Atrocity Exhibition one will realize that, naturally the book has a hero of a much more subjective type, who has possibly been driven from a nervous breakdown into madness, but actually he isn’t the ‘hero’ of the book at all: that’s much more the experimental landscape of the world in the Sixties. That’s the subject of the book: the communications landscape, the intersecting mirages of fiction and reality with which we all live, they’re the real heroes. It’s not important to me to investigate an internal sensibility, as the great modernist writers did. In this context I actually don’t like hearing the phrase ‘experimental literature’, exactly, as when it’s used here in this country, it appears mostly in a critical sense, because unfortunately ‘experimental’ literature is mostly really nothing more than the ego-trips of different people into their own psyches, which hardly anyone can follow and which are ultimately only of interest to themselves. That’s the case with much of what’s generally considered ‘High Literature’. Unfortunately.

With The Atrocity Exhibition, on the contrary, that’s not the case. Here, the outer world is omnipresent, whereas in such books as those I’ve just mentioned, it has no relevance whatsoever. Consequently the book isn’t just a daydream, but consists of concrete relations throughout.

FUCHS & KÖRBER: What actual influence did the works of William S. Burroughs have on The Atrocity Exhibition? Do you appreciate him only as an author, or has he also made a lasting impression upon you?

BALLARD: He’s had no influence on me at all. I like several of his works. I often hear that Burroughs must have been a great influence on me and that it’s particularly noticeable in The Atrocity Exhibition. But it’s untrue. If one looks at Burroughs’ books, one can see that they’re entirely unstructured stylistically, that they consist almost completely of a ’stream of consciousness’ in the Joycean sense, and are hence of a fully subjective world, and his works are improvised, frayed at every point, without a clear aim. His narrative structure is without architecture, written straight out of the feelings, without planning. And I’ve never used the so-called cut-up technique. I’ve been acquainted with Burroughs for several years, and he is quite of the opinion that his cut-up and fold-out techniques are very helpful in representing the world around us as it really is. He is of the opinion that the true nature of the world will be revealed by his random associations. My stories in The Atrocity Exhibition are entirely in opposition to that, they have a very precisely designed structure; the ‘condensed novels’ are like a machine working towards a clearly defined goal.

FUCHS & KÖRBER: On to the Seventies. Your first novel to be published in this new decade was Crash.

BALLARD: Right. It developed directly out of The Atrocity Exhibition; there was even one of the ‘condensed novels’ with that title. The automobile accident has always interested me, and Crash is actually a model of the fictionalization of reality in the Sixties. In the ‘condensed novels’ there appears at one point a protagonist who puts together an exhibition of crashed cars, that was before I’d yet written Crash, the theme already held an extraordinary fascination for me. I wanted to have this exhibition as a sort of test for my theories, and I held this art exhibition as a psychological experiment as it were. What interested me particularly was how the visitors to this exhibition would react. So, we exhibited these automobiles that were heavily crash-damaged in a gallery in London, a gallery that was otherwise completely bare, only white walls, nothing else, no posters, no other exhibited items, just the junked cars. And naturally no explanation of what it was all supposed to mean, just the three cars displayed as sculpture. And then I had an internal monitor system, as well as a topless girl who went about interviewing the audience, and this would be recorded on the monitors. At the opening I gave a party for the press and so forth, and you can believe me when I say that although I’ve been invited to a lot of publisher’s parties and the like, I’ve never yet seen one where people got drunk so quickly as on that evening. And also, when the exhibition opened, people would react with shock and nervous laughter. One of the cars was a Pontiac that had had a frontal collision. The cars were intact up to the forward part and the front seats, where the motor had been impressed into them, as it were; or better, the other way round. Especially these cars with their emblematic American appearance and the psychological contouring embodied in American cars, these cars had a very particular fascination for people. People were stunned. And the girl who conducted the interviews was actually supposed to do it entirely naked, but when she saw the cars she decided to refuse. And when she conducted the interviews and people saw themselves on the monitors being interviewed in the cars, they would shift into the back seats at the drop of a hat.

And also the cars got in worse condition the longer they were on display, the remaining windows smashed in with bottles and so on. The result of this test was in any case extraordinarily odd, and quite evidently I touched people’s nerve, a psychological nerve. Many people came to the exhibition several times, just to attack the cars and destroy them further. Ultimately, this exhibition convinced me that I ought to write Crash. I’m still of the firm conviction that everything I wanted to express in Crash is true.

And something fascinated people, as the book went through two hardback editions here, which is unusual, and it was a big success especially in France. It’s a pity that it never appeared in Germany. Incidentally, the book was a flop in America, despite great expense on publicity. But that might be because Europeans are mostly faced with uncompromising subjects more frequently, particularly in France where there’s a very long literary tradition of pornographic texts. In France pornography was always recognized as a serious literary stylistic movement, their tradition stretches back as far as people like Sade. And also all the principals in the French revolution wrote pornographic or erotic literature. In France it’s recognized, whereas people in this country or in America maintain a very strict distinction between it and other literature, because it’s only just started to be published during the last fifteen years, and most of that is of dubious character.

FUCHS & KÖRBER: After Crash, Concrete Island and High Rise, the two other novels which both essentially take issue with modern technology, there was another short story collection published, Low-Flying Aircraft, which when set against the stories from the Sixties also contain new material that proceeds more from your earlier stories…

BALLARD: Oh, I’ve always only written basically a certain type of literature. People always think that in the middle of the Sixties I only wrote The Atrocity Exhibition, but that’s not the case. In actual fact I also wrote a great number of entirely conventional short stories during that time. People tend to think that I left off writing ‘condensed novels’ in 1970 because they weren’t accepted by the public, just as they’re of the opinion that I left off writing conventional stories after 1965, because they were no longer accepted. One also often reads that, but it’s not true. In 1965 I wrote my fifty-fourth short story, and that was ‘The Assassination of JFK’, and story number fifty-five was ‘You and Me and the Continuum’. Then in 1970 I wrote my eighty-sixth short story. That’s thirty-two stories all told, and of those, twenty were certainly entirely conventional stories. I’ve therefore never turned my back on them.

I admit that in a certain way 1975 was the end of a period. I’d written four books all tending in one particular direction, if one counts The Atrocity Exhibition, all dealing with the communications landscape and modern technology. Afterwards I’d simply had enough of it and I went off towards other themes. That will also be apparent in the new collection, which I’ve just finished. It will have the title Myths of the Near Future, and many of the stories it contains are pure imagination, so they range about in the zone of free, fantastic literature, like both of my last novels, The Unlimited Dream Company and Hello America.

LEFT: Kristallwelt (The Crystal World; Phantasia Science Fiction Series, 2005).

FUCHS & KÖRBER: In the newer novels there’s somewhat of an absence of the forceful hallucinatory images that your earlier books like The Crystal World contained. Did those descriptions back then have their origins in drugs, and have you yourself ever experimented with drugs or written under the influence of drugs, as many have supposed of The Crystal World?

BALLARD: Now, I wrote The Crystal World in 1964, and ‘The Illuminated Man’, the short story upon which the novel was based, must have come into being in about 1961. In those days LSD had certainly not yet become an issue, and I myself first tried it in 1967. Back then it was the great fashion, and everyone tried it once, psychedelic culture came directly out of it. Naturally there are states of affairs described in The Crystal World – the prismatic world, the static elements, the complete absence of time and so on, even experiences – that bear a marked resemblance to an LSD trip. Yet the novel didn’t emerge from a drug experience, and that to me is further evidence that nothing comes even close to human imagination, it can do it all. The ending of ‘The Voices of Time’ is also very strongly evocative of a drug experience, when the protagonist with his increasing perceptions can suddenly perceive every most minute particle of the world, loses all sense of time, and sinks completely under a storm of impressions. This story also came about without drugs, and that, I believe, confirms what I’ve just said, that the human imagination is incapable of nothing, it doesn’t have to fall back on artificial stimulants, on chemicals, to release something that the brain can do even on its own. A fertile imagination is better than any drug.

Originally published in German as Werner Fuchs/Joachim Körber, ‘Ein Interview mit J. G. Ballard’ in Joachim Körber, ed., J. G. Ballard: Der Visionär des Phantastischen (Meitingen: Corian-Verlag, 1985).

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Munich Round Up: An Interview with J.G. Ballard
+ ‘It would be a mistake to write about the future’: J.G. Ballard in Conversation with Jörg Krichbaum and Rein A. Zondergeld

Translation by Dan O’Hara.

JGB, somewhere in the early-to-mid 70s.

This interview, conducted on the 1st of March 1976, was first published in German in the science fiction magazine Quarber Merkur, and later re-published in a paperback collection of articles from the magazine in 1979.

What’s intriguing about this contradiction is the implied concept of a moral form: a postulated style of literature which, without embroiling the writer in any moral stance in a traditional sense, constitutes what Graeme Revell calls ‘a morality in progress’. One would have thought that Ballard would agree with Oscar Wilde, that ‘there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book’. This interview suggests that Ballard’s view is rather more complex.

Dan O’Hara.

LEFT: JGB in 1975.

JÖRG & REIN: In Germany we do know most of your books, which have been brought out here in a series of translations by several publishers, and which are also in paperback, but as a person you’re hardly known. Could you therefore tell us a little bit about your background, as an introduction, as it were?

JGB: Certainly. So, I was born in Shanghai in China in 1930. My father was an English businessman. I was brought up there until the war broke out. During the war we were held for three years in a Japanese camp with all the other Allied residents. In 1946 I came back to England, went to school and then Cambridge University; I intended to be a doctor. Therefore I studied medicine for two years. And then, like many other writers who first study medicine, I discovered that I actually wanted to be a writer. Therefore I broke off my studies. In the meanwhile I had a lot of jobs: I worked in advertising, then for a scientific film company, etc., etc., and in the end I started writing. Quite unlike most SF writers, I had no interest in science fiction when I was young. Most American authors in the genre were as young people enthusiastic fans…

JÖRG & REIN: …they generally begin their careers as writers by writing for fanzines.

JGB: Exactly! Which means that their activity as SF authors issues directly from their activity as SF fans; they go to conventions where they meet other fans and authors and so forth. With me it wasn’t thus, because I hadn’t really decided to write science fiction until I was something like 26. Then I wrote my first SF story, rather late therefore. A lot of SF authors end their careers at 26 and don’t merely begin then. I worked for a scientific journal in London to earn my living and then, I think it was in 1963, I gave up my job and became a full-time writer.

JÖRG & REIN: Was your first book then The Wind from Nowhere, which was the first of your books to be published in Germany?

JGB: Oh, yes, as a paperback by Heyne. You should know, I don’t regard it as a serious work; I only wrote it to earn a bit of money, as things weren’t going too well then. The Marion von Schröder press published my better works. Very nice editions. And then there’s another press that published The Atrocity Exhibition.

JÖRG & REIN: The Melzer press, under the title Liebe und Napalm.

JGB: Yes, right. But I believe they are broke, no?

JÖRG & REIN: Let’s come back to your beginning in England. Did your first texts appear in magazines, or straight off in book form?

LEFT: 70s Ballard: The Drowned World, Penguin edition (1974).

JGB: The natural medium for the SF author is the short story magazine. At any rate, it was then. And I also began by writing for the English and American magazines. The first of my serious novels to be accepted, New Worlds, that was much more open, and I could publish there. If you read these stories today they seem to be quite conventional, but back then everyone was amazed.

JÖRG & REIN: But nowadays there are a fair few writers who write in such a way or, rather, who try to write as you do – who have a similar view of reality. There’s Thomas Disch, or Brian Aldiss.

JGB: Yes, and that’s good. There’s also Sladek — and Moorcock, maybe.

JÖRG & REIN: You know each other personally, too, don’t you?

JGB: Now, yes; I’ve known Disch and Aldiss for several years.

JÖRG & REIN: So far, we’ve spoken only about SF in England and America, but in eastern Europe there’s also a great tradition of SF, Lem for example, or the Strugatskis. What do you think of them?

JGB: To be honest, I find Lem rather hard going. His whole attitude towards the subject matter is entirely different from my own. He has something so demonstratively scientific and… messianic… In my work I proceed analytically, whereas he assembles vast systems synthetically. There’s something reminiscent of Star Trek in his work, ‘The Big Concept’, do you understand? I don’t like Russian SF, or at least not that which I’ve read. Previously I often wrote reviews for the newspapers here. And I would sometimes get a Russian anthology sent to me, but I found it lacking in imagination. I say it reluctantly, but it was as if the spark was missing. It was never exciting, all grey on grey.

JÖRG & REIN: This style of grey mediocrity, which is also the principal quality of official socialist-realist literature…

JGB: Right, that’s exactly what I meant. You know, you always get these stories in which people are sitting around in tiny flats in Moscow. And then: ‘Agricultural Controller Woroschilow said…’ or some computer specialists bustle about the prose, you know… They rarely get off the ground, there’s something dead in it, like the regime of Soviet style. SF needs these old-fashioned things: the consumer society. It needs the media, which trickles slowly down to us. In SF it’s not a matter of science, but of pop-science, and that’s something entirely different. Pop-science, in how it’s transmitted for a mass audience through the media, TV and newspapers, through encyclopaedias, which are published in a series of volumes. That’s the wave that carries SF. If one doesn’t have this whole mass media, then the material of SF is simply missing. It’s a peculiar thing.

JÖRG & REIN: It’s interesting, in this connexion, that Stanislaw Lem is one of the most popular SF authors in Germany.

JGB: Really?

JÖRG & REIN: Oh yes, four or five new publications come out each year.

JGB: Actually I’m not surprised. He is perhaps an east-European Asimov, in a certain sense, and Asimov also sells well.

JÖRG & REIN: One reason for Lem’s popularity in West Germany might be that one finds such elegant theories in his books, and one can also develop elegant theories about his books, which the Germans just love to do.

JGB: Yes, you know, an author who gives answers is always more popular than one who asks questions. It’s simply unavoidable.

70s Ballard: The Crystal World, Avon edition (detail; 1976).

JÖRG & REIN: There is a uniform thematic in your early books like for example The Drought or The Crystal World, but the later works are entirely different from them. From where does this complete break come? Or would you not see it as a break?

JGB: No, there is one. In fact, it was around 1965 when I began to write the stories that were later collected in The Atrocity Exhibition. Up until then I was still writing approximately within the tradition of SF. Most of the books up to 1965 are set in the future; maybe some weren’t, but certainly the majority.

I’ve seen my whole task as a writer as to drag SF back into the present, and it seems to me as if in 1965 I found a method of achieving this: to write SF that issues completely from our present. This also seemed necessary to me. You know, the mid-Sixties were marked by events like the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam war, the space race and the continually increasing importance of science and technology. One simply had to write about the present. It would have been a mistake, a moral failure, to write about the future. There was actually a moral imperative to write about the present, and I started to do so and have not yet stopped doing so in the subsequent books.

JÖRG & REIN: And in connexion with the form of these books, you’ve used the expression ‘condensed novels’. Or was that a critic’s neologism?

JGB: No, the expression came from me. I designate each section of these books a ‘condensed novel’, that is, they were normal novels, lacking only the unimportant connective material. In my case there’s only…

JÖRG & REIN: …the real essence.

JGB: Good, let’s call it the essence. But there’s also a corresponding tendency in the other arts. Take, for example, sculpture. A sculptor doesn’t need a huge block of stone to suggest the concept of ‘mass’. One can capture a structure solely through its outline, no? One doesn’t need a mass of stone or steel to create an impression of volume.

JÖRG & REIN: Norbert Kricke’s space sculptures would be a good example, or in painting the works of Monkiewitsch. Both artists show the viewer the boundaries of imaginary spaces and in so doing, stimulate the imagination…

JGB: Exactly, the outlines are enough, one can fill out the rest oneself. I wanted to produce a kind of fiction in which one could more easily range about, in which one had more freedom. Rapid change, and constant confrontation with this change is, I believe, our life’s essence. Computers hold all kinds of material ready at the touch of a button. Day in, day out, TV brings us a intensive flood of images, one watches the news, then one takes a little journey round the world, an advertisement for dog-food, and then some documentary, and so on, and so on. And I needed a form which corresponded to this rapid change. The conventional novel is, on the other hand, largely like a train: once it’s rolling in its tracks, it can’t deviate from them

JÖRG & REIN: Also in music, with the quest for new instruments, for new sound processes, one finds a similar problem.

JGB: Of course.

JÖRG & REIN: And this new form, are you completely satisfied with it? Or will there be a new break?

JGB: It’s hard to say, I don’t know. My last four books are all about what I call the marriage of sex and technology. And by sex, I mean the biological instinct. The marriage between ourselves and technology, so to speak. Yes. I look at the landscapes around me, the landscapes of colossal motorways and huge concrete high-rises, the absolutely new social structures, and I try to understand, to analyse, what’s really going on in this country. Freud made this classic distinction between the apparent content of dreams and the latent, respectively the real content. And one must view the landscapes of today as dreams. One knows their apparent meaning, but what is their real meaning? What’s really going on in the world we live in? This world of vast airports, etc., etc. And I’ve tried to get to the bottom of this in these last four books. But perhaps I’ve now done enough in this area, therefore my thoughts are now going in some other direction, although I don’t know exactly where.

LEFT: 70s Ballard: Crash, Cape edition (1973).

JÖRG & REIN: Your last books, like Crash or Concrete Island, are no longer translated into German.

JGB: Yes, for some reason the German publishers didn’t want to bring them out anymore. I don’t know why.

JÖRG & REIN: To return to your earlier books: an interesting thing there is the relation between painting and literature, especially the relation to Surrealist painting. Could you perhaps briefly say something about the possibilities of one artistic discipline influencing another? In your case, such seems particularly clear.

JGB: Yes, that’s true, actually. The Surrealist painters have strongly influenced me. I don’t believe I’ve been influenced in this way by other literature. It’s been said that I was influenced by Joseph Conrad…

JÖRG & REIN: …why Conrad?

JGB: …but when the critics wrote that, I had still never read anything by Conrad. I first began with him a few years ago. But the Surrealist painters were important. The essence of the Surrealist imagination is its ability to translate the apparent forms of the world, the outer forms, into inner ones, into mental forms. The Surrealist painter doesn’t seek to interpret the outer world as the classic schools of painting did, the Impressionists or the Cubists or what you will; these painters analyse the real world without violating its integrity, although the techniques can vary greatly. But the Surrealists recreate the outer world, completely, in fact! And this was exactly the right method for SF, which needs something very similar. I used this concept of ‘psychological space’, and that again I found in Surrealist paintings. I thought to myself, that’s exactly what we need in science fiction.

JÖRG & REIN: The combining of elements which don’t necessarily seem to be heard together.

JGB: Right. This traditional division between the inner and the outer world, between the mental, and the reality surrounding us, becomes fully abolished. There’s no longer any dividing line, it’s all a continuity. And this method is the most fertile for a writer, because the outer world nowadays so resembles a dream. We live as though in an immense novel and therefore can only approach things in this way.

JÖRG & REIN: To recap: this reciprocal influence of art is therefore for you evident. Could you imagine that your work might have influenced painters in return?

JGB: Yes, that could happen.

You know, Surrealism is without a doubt the most important direction in painting before the war; Cubism is all well and good, but we had that already during the First World War, after which Surrealism was dominant for decades. But the next development, therefore after the Second World War, that was most especially important for writers was Pop-Art. Many authors were influenced by that.

JÖRG & REIN: Malanga, perhaps, and Ron Padgett.

In your later books like The Atrocity Exhibition, but also already in The Four-Dimensional Nightmare, you seem at times to have adopted filmic structures. Could you say something about that?

JGB: Certainly, there are many connexions there. I’ve transferred what one in film calls the ‘cut’ into my literary work. I also use various other filmic methods: like the close-up, slow-motion and similar. I wanted to apply equivalents of these methods in the novel. In the traditional novel the close-up means that one looks somebody in the eye and starts to study their mental state, their motives and so on, whereas in film a close-up doesn’t have to mean anything that corresponds to this level of depth. It can be that one wants to show only the skin of the face, its condition. In spaghetti westerns, for example, you see a close-up of Charles Bronson waiting at a station, that is, you see only a shot of the back of his head, with a fly crawling around it. Such a kind of close-up isn’t intended to explain anything about the man’s personality, it shows only a detail. And in The Atrocity Exhibition I use close-ups that for example show only a girl’s arm against the background of an automobile.

JÖRG & REIN: Therefore only as an object.

JGB: Only objects, exactly. Like in a Hitchcock film, where one catches sight of a close-up of some object on a table, of a fried egg on a plate or a pair of spectacles, for purely atmospheric reasons! That applies also to slow-motion, which is very significant, as it sometimes transforms an intrinsically violent piece of action, for example the collision of two automobiles, into a ballet of great elegance and beauty.

JÖRG & REIN: A change of aesthetic dimension.

JGB: Right, but a complete change. These filmic techniques can be used by a writer; they powerfully extend the resources at his disposal.

JÖRG & REIN: Have you had no desire to make a film yourself?

JGB: Oh, quite, I’d like to very much. But I lack the technical essentials.

JÖRG & REIN: Is there not perhaps one director with whom you’d like to work?

JGB: Oh, there are many directors I admire. Kubrick, for example, he’s a great director. And Godard, who’s also very important, albeit in a different way.

JÖRG & REIN: Godard uses almost the same techniques as you.

JGB: That’s true… yes… I also like Antonioni a great deal. But it’s hard to give a plain answer. I’ve never really considered it.

JÖRG & REIN: Is there a film script written by you?

JGB: I wrote a script from my novel Concrete Island, that a French director wanted to film. That was last summer. I don’t know if he’ll actually make the film. And then I once also wrote a script from my early novel The Drought, which was bought up for TV by David Frost, but he’s never used it… I am actually interested in film.

LEFT: 70s Ballard: Vermilion Sands, Panther edition (1975).

JÖRG & REIN: Up to now we still haven’t mentioned your Vermilion Sands stories. It seems as if there the influence of decadent literature makes itself felt, of the fin-de-siècle.

JGB: You’re thinking of Huysmans here?

JÖRG & REIN: Also.

JGB: Yes… you know, Vermilion Sands corresponds to my vision of the future. It will not be like 1984, but rather like Vermilion Sands. No brave new world, but a kind of country-club paradise. If one goes to the Mediterranean coast in the summer, one sees the future there already. Half of Europe finds itself in this linear city that runs from Gibraltar to Athens. A city that’s three thousand miles long and a hundred metres wide. And that is, in my opinion, the future.

JÖRG & REIN: In your books there are many technical terms from the various scientific disciplines, from medicine, climatology, physics and geology, for example. Don’t you think that this fact could complicate the reading process for many of your readers?

JGB: There’s something in that. As it is, I try not to use so much of this kind of terminology. But on the other hand I think that people nowadays have such a level of general knowledge…

JÖRG & REIN: …a truly optimistic view!

JGB: You know, everyone has a little bit of knowledge about these fields. Doctors are always complaining about the fact that their patients read more medical journals and know more about medicine than they do themselves. All things considered, I don’t think that my stuff is incomprehensible.

JÖRG & REIN: You don’t therefore consciously write for a wholly special kind of reader, for a smaller public than most SF authors?

JGB: No, I write for all readers; at least, I try to.

JÖRG & REIN: Might there not exist, particularly within the field of SF, the possibility that people read your books and find them good, but that your motives for writing these books remain obscure to them, so that your success in part rests on a misunderstanding?

JGB: That’s possible. There is just this problem, that I’m categorized as an SF author, and many people read SF for entertainment, and they approach my books as if I were Asimov… or Ray Bradbury. But I work in a completely different sphere. I’m moving in the opposite direction. That is a problem. And then naturally there’s the further problem of writing in my quite specific manner. I have in fact one story which one can read on one level, but what I actually mean is happening on another level. So The Drowned World, for example, is on one level a traditional disaster novel about the end of the world, like in John Wyndham, and one can read it as such. The first American publisher of these books told me that he found the book very good, but then he added: ‘Jim, the ending is quite false. Your hero goes south, but he should really go north, into the safe zones.’ And I answered, ‘The entire meaning of the book lies in the fact that he wants to go south! The book is exactly about that fact.’ Yes, many readers will certainly only pick up on the surface in this way, and then they don’t understand what’s really going on, why my characters act in such a manner, so that in their view the characters act in a false, illogical way. And from their point of view, they’re correct. That really is a problem.

JÖRG & REIN: Is there a book or a film which has made an especially strong impression on you or by which you’ve been particularly influenced? We’re talking rather a lot about influences, but it could still possibly make clear something about your particular position.

JGB: Now, I admire William Burroughs for example, and I greatly love Genet’s book, Notre dame des fleurs, and many older authors, Huysmans and his A rebours, to give just an example. I found Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove outstanding, a masterpiece, absolutely overwhelming. Recently I saw Fellini’s Dolce Vita again on the TV, and again this film made a great impression on me.

JÖRG & REIN: It’s interesting that you mention Genet and Burroughs, because both those authors write books without conventional plots. There is no more plot, or not as one normally understands it. In your case, it’s hardly conceivable however that you could abandon tight structuring and plot. Your books function too hermetically, they’re too self-contained.

JGB: Right, I need a convincing plot to write in my way, a clear structure. Even in the latest books. Those are very highly developed stories. Sometimes I also try to conceal the story, but there has to be something like a bridge, otherwise everything falls apart.

JÖRG & REIN: One could imagine a hopefully purely hypothetical situation in which, if your development took yet another turn in an experimental direction, you might one day find yourself without publishers. Or do you not have this worry?

JGB: Up to now I’ve had a lot of luck with my publishers. Certainly the latest books weren’t printed in Germany, but in England the latest books were also very successful. Crash, it’s true, was no success in America, but it was an immediate bestseller in France, which was a considerable surprise to me as I’d expected quite the reverse.

JÖRG & REIN: If one takes into account the success or absence of real success for example in West Germany, one must surely conclude that certain books are simply flops in certain countries.

JGB: That’s surely not wrong. National psychology is a particularly difficult field.

JÖRG & REIN: Is there for you a special relationship to America?

JGB: Oh yes, I’ve always been greatly interested in America. There, I find the landscapes of my books, about which we already spoke earlier. But on the other hand I’m sure that in some twenty or thirty years a new renaissance will take place in Europe. Now that borders are gradually being abolished and we’re getting away from the past, there will be quite a bit of change. The new developments, of this I’m sure, will come from Europe and not from America.

Shepperton, Walton-on-Thames, 1 March 1976.

Originally published in German in Quarber Merkur: Aufsätze zur Science Fiction und Phantastichen Literatur, ed. Franz Rottensteiner (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), pp. 141-55.

Thanks to The Terminal Collection for all JGB photos and all cover scans.

Translation by Dan O’Hara.

LEFT: JGB in 1968.

Early in 1968 in Germany, Bavarian TV ran a four-part educational series on science fiction, the third episode of which featured excerpts from an interview with J.G. Ballard. The footage of this episode is no longer available, and is presumably now lost; like so much valuable TV footage of that era, it was probably shot on tape which, owing to its expense, was reused, thereby erasing the interview.

It seems likely that this 1968 interview is in fact a transcript of the German subtitles used in the TV programme, as the interview here contains no questions. I have therefore chosen to translate back into English as literally as possible, preserving some of the odder and more interesting artefacts produced by the original translator, Gary Klüpfel. One of the most obvious of these is Ballard’s assertion that he uses the diamond (‘Diamant’) as a symbol of timeless structure in The Crystal World. Clearly the original translator decided that Ballard intended a more conventional symbol of eternity.

Dan O’Hara.

J.G. BALLARD: I believe that SF is important because it is the sole form of literature we have today that has looks forward. All forms of literature other than Science Fiction are oriented towards the past. Their character is backwards-looking, whereas SF concerns itself with the future and interprets the present day in terms of the future, rather than of the past. It uses a vocabulary that is on the whole exclusively oriented towards the world of tomorrow, with all its science, its technology, and with all its developments in politics, sociology, advertising and so forth.

Cover (detail); The Drowned World (SF Book Club edition, 1964).

I have written three novels — The Drowned World, The Drought, and The Crystal World — which form a trilogy dealing with the topic of time. In The Drowned World I deal with the past, and employ water as the central metaphor. In The Drought I deal with the future, taking sand as the central image. In The Crystal World I am concerned with the present, the symbol of which is the diamond or the precious stone which — so I believe — possesses a timeless structure.

In The Drowned World I describe the return of the entire planet to the era of the great Triassic forests, which covered the earth some 200 million years ago. I tell how human beings likewise regress into the past. In a certain sense, they climb down their own spinal column. They traverse down the thoracic vertebrae, from the point at which they are air-breathing mammals, to the lumbar region, to the point at which they are amphibious reptiles. Finally they reach the absolute past, which on one hand represents the birth of life itself in the hot womb of the primaeval jungle, and which in another sense represents their own origins and birthplace in the mother’s womb. I show humanity face-to-face with the difficulty of making sense of this decline in their status to non-entities.

I use this portrait of the spinal column as a vessel containing a reflection of the memory of the past, and the details of the entire evolutionary development of the human race, as a literary device, as I was dissatisfied with the traditional forms used by SF writers to realize time travel. It seems to me that the method of investigating the imaginative capacities of the central nervous system gives a more reliable and more precise account of how the human race has evolved in time, and of how we as individuals have evolved in our own time, than Wells’ time machine.

In my novel The Drought, I see the future as a world dominated by sand. It is the end of the planet, and the few people who survive on the planet are governed by perfectly abstract relations, through an entire geometry of space-time, of emotion and action. It is a completely abstract world, as abstract as the most abstract of painters or sculptors one can imagine.

Cover; The Drought (Cape, 1965).

I believe that SF will become more and more an aspect of daily reality. It has migrated from the bookshelf to daily life. One sees the landscapes and imagery of SF, one sees their contents playing a part in the world of pop music, of film, even that of psychedelic experiences. The reason being, that SF was always concerned with psychological perceptions, and the world of pop music, film and psychedelic experience is now greatly concerned with the senses, with perspectives of our own psychological space-time, and has not so much to do with questions of individual histories, the past and so forth, as were the prejudices of the literature and cinema of the past.

I believe that in the last ten years the entire basis of SF has changed rapidly. Modern SF began at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the ‘30s, and was at that time an authentically vernacular vision of the future, a future seen through the lens of science and technology and, above all, in the light of outer space, so I believe. Now in the last ten years SF as I see it has turned full circle. The physical sciences now play less of a major role than do the biological, Inner Space, the world of the mind — which once more reflects the altered attitudes of people towards science in general. After Hiroshima, the whole magic and authority of science was called into question. Now, I don’t think that the authority of biologists was attacked to such an extent, and to a considerable degree the biologist and the psychologist took over something of the functions of a lay-church, in exploring man’s place in the universe.

I define Inner Space as an imaginary realm in which on the one hand the outer world of reality, and on the other the inner world of the mind meet and merge. Now, in the landscapes of the surrealist painters, for example, one sees the regions of Inner Space; and increasingly I believe that we will encounter in film and literature scenes which are neither solely realistic nor fantastic. In a sense, it will be a movement in the interzone between both spheres.

J.G. Ballard, 1968.

Cover; The Crystal World (Cape, 1966).

Thanks to Rick McGrath for all cover scans.

James Naughtie & J.G. Ballard. Photo by Jennie Middlemiss.

This presentation of James Naughtie’s interview with JGB for BBC Radio 4 is the last in our batch of transcripts of recent Miracles promotions. Many thanks to Mike Bonsall for all his hard work in bringing these to us.

A difficult transcription this, lots of wise words but a poor quality recording — Claire’s flat must be just under a flightpath! Still, well worth it, I’m finding more and more evidence for my theory that Atrocity and Crash are sane screaming at an insane world…

Mike Bonsall

James Naughtie: Why ‘Miracles’?

J.G. Ballard: I think everyone’s children, particularly at the moment of birth — if they’re, if the parents are lucky enough to be present — everyone’s children seem absolutely miraculous. I watched two of my children being born, and I was absolutely overwhelmed by this sort of creation on the grandest scale, you know, this tiny infant — but as I say in the book, far from being very new, very young — seemed ancient, streamlined by time, like one of the, sculptures of the pharaohs. I think I was so transformed as a parent by these young children, in a way, they construct the universe for themselves, their little habits and favourite fantasies and dreams and passions, and things they always get into an argument about — particularly If you’ve got more than one — I had three children, and I was, kind of, conscripted into becoming a fourth child in the family. It’s such an overwhelmingly rich experience.

JN: So when you came back to look at your own life, you apply that description of a miraculous beginning to life to your own surroundings in Shanghai, which was a sort of magical setting for childhood, despite all the deprivations that you suffered.

JGB: It was an extraordinary city on any level, I think partly because it was an artificial city, I mean, it’s one of the few artificial cities in the world, and I think they’re all — I mean Las Vegas, I suppose is another one — both actually created with the same end in view — money and how to make as much as possible in the shortest possible time. Shanghai was an anything-goes place, there were no restrictions of any kind, you know, if you wanted to build a replica of Buckingham Palace or the Queen Mary, you know, twice life-size. You could do it. You didn’t have to ask anybody’s permission, the whole place was extraordinary in every respect.

Photo by Jennie Middlemiss.

JN: What about the illusions that you refer to there, that it had, because in many ways it was quite open about what it did as a city, by your description. It was rough and ready, it was a moneymaking machine. It was corrupt. It was full of bars and brothels and all the rest of it. In a sense it didn’t have illusions. It said, well, this is just what we are.

JGB: That’s absolutely true. I mean, I’ve often said that if you fainted from hunger on the streets of Shanghai, and fell to the pavement, you’d just lay there and die. These are the hardest pavements in the world. The kind of notions about Social Security, for example, that we take for granted, were completely absent then. I mean, there was no Social Security, if you were a starving peasant, and you managed to get through the cordons of Shanghai police beating you back, there was nothing. I mean, there were no Red Cross workers to greet you.

JN: You had the twin experiences of growing up in that city on, terribly English sounding, Amherst Avenue, which could have been in Surbiton, Godalming, or somewhere, and then you had the time as an internee in a Japanese camp for most of the war. Two extraordinary experiences, almost polar opposites, one where you were confined, one where you were free in the city. I suppose that meant that when you came back here, to an England that you didn’t know, after the war, there was a huge, er, well it wasn’t just a culture shock, you were bringing a set of quite extraordinary experiences to bear on the old country.

JGB: Absolutely, of course, I realised that the England I’d been brought up to think of as home was in fact, a complete fantasy, sustained by AA Milne, by Peter Pan, by Chums annuals, with all their tales of empire and derring-do. It was a huge delusion that was sustained by middle-class professional people, who helped to run Britain and its empire.

JN: There’s a very moving series of passages in the book, where you describe your reactions to this country, on arriving back just after the war. Give us a flavour, I think this is one of the places where you observe life around you, and compare your idea of the old country to the reality.

JGB: Looking at the English people around me, it was it impossible to believe that they had won the war. They behaved like a defeated population. I wrote in The Kindness of Women that the English talked as if they had won the war, but acted as if they had lost it. They were clearly exhausted by the war and expected little of the future. Everything was rationed — food, clothing, petrol — or simply unobtainable. People moved in a herd-like way, queuing for everything. Ration books and clothing coupons were all-important, endlessly counted and fussed over, even though there was almost nothing in the shops to buy. Tracking down a few lightbulbs could take all day. Everything was poorly designed — my grandparents’ three-storey house was heated by one or two single-bar electric fires and an open coal fire. Most of the house was icy, and we slept under huge eiderdowns like marooned Arctic travellers in their survival gear, a frozen air numbing our faces, the plumes of our breath visible in the darkness.

JN: It wasn’t very nice?

JGB: It wasn’t. I think we, in a way, we came out of the war the worst, I think, of all the major powers who took part in it, much of France was untouched. It wasn’t immediately obvious, as you stayed in your hotel in Paris or travelled south of Paris, that there had been a war at all, whereas Britain showed terrible devastation. Most of the major cities and ports from Southampton to London, Manchester, you name it, had been heavily bombed over an extended period and, you know, large sections of Birmingham were just heaps of rubble. It’s really hard to, people to understand, what it was like, and given that nothing had been replaced during the war years — not a building had been painted, you know, not a window had been replaced — everything looked so dilapidated.

Photo by Jennie Middlemiss.

JN: It’s interesting that your observations of that time, when you arrived home, were laced with an awareness of class which you thought couldn’t be ignored. And yet when you came to write, and came to write full-time, in the late 50s, early 60s, you weren’t one of those English novelists, or short story writers, who wrote about the peculiarities of class, people like Anthony Powell and Waugh in his own way, Kingsley Amis, who you came to know very well — were in a way obsessed by that whole business. You went in another direction, why do you think that was?

JGB: Partly because I’d had no experience of the English class system, out in Shanghai, everyone really was sort of, what you would call, managerial middle-class, I mean the same sort of class that you would find if you went out to Dubai and lived among the British expats there or, you know, Calcutta, or Mexico City. It’s a sort of professional class emerges that has its own ways of doing things, prefers to drive, you know, BMW’s rather than Mercs and so on. I’d had no experience of the English class system, so when I came here, sustained by this mythical England of, you know, the Just William books and Christopher Robin, I thought — my god, the whole thing — it’s a delusion, and the people taken in are the middle classes themselves, they believe that it’s all cricket and ’spinsters cycling to evensong’, in John Major’s immortal phrase. I think England became a vast puzzle, I mean I was up a kind of sociological Amazon. I mean, you needed to be an anthropologist…

JN: Ah well, this is interesting, because you studied medicine at Cambridge. Now, you didn’t stick with it, you abandoned it and took up literature at one point, but you also had an interest in psychoanalysis, for example. So you were always interested in the sort of — nervous system — underneath, I mean how the body kept going, is that really something that, in a literary sense, was the origin as well?

JGB: Yes, I think, so, I think… I studied medicine for a couple of years, and most of it consisted of dissecting the human cadaver.

JN: Did you enjoy that?

JGB: Yes, it was a very, very important experience for me; I think it came only second to my experience of the camp during the Second World War, outside Shanghai. There’s something about — I mean, I think, when I came to England, I was still carrying all these memories of the thousands of dead Chinese I’d seen, ever since the Japanese invasion in 1937 — the bodies that lay in the streets. I think I was carrying a huge cargo of death really and I, you know, I couldn’t understand why all this had happened. Why did human beings behave in such a bestial way towards each another? Because there is no doubt the Japanese behaved atrociously towards the Chinese, the behaviour of the Japanese in China from 1937 onwards, was very close to genocide, they looked down on Chinese as an inferior people.

JN: There was a kind of studied cruelty about it?

JGB: Absolutely, I mean, the things that went on in an educated officer class. The Japanese officer class took part in competitions to see how many Chinese they could behead with their swords, all that was just — It was impossible to understand it — and in a way the anatomy, dissecting room, was a way of exploring death at very close quarters.

JN: And yet you confessed to a certain admiration for the courage of the Japanese

JGB: As a boy, yes — I don’t now — as a 12 or 13-year-old you couldn’t help but admire the way the Japanese embody all the, sort of, manly and military virtues; fighting to the last man and so on.

Photo by Jennie Middlemiss.

JN: And the sort of code of honour.

JGB: Tremendous code of honour, Bushido, an impressionable twelve-year-old finds a lot to admire in that sort of military ethos. Just as English boys of twelve, over here admire the Black Watch, admire commandos, but it’s something that adults need to be a little more sceptical about.

JN: So you are cutting up cadavers, you were aware of the bestial urges that lurk in all of us, or in many of us, from your own experience, and then you began to write, and you discovered — slightly to your surprise — but to your pleasure, that you could make a living out of writing, so by the time the 60s came there you were, living at home, writing… The terrible tragedy of your wife’s death, with almost no warning — psychologically, was that another of the things that took you deeper into the kinds of analyses that mark out so many of your books — that personal tragedy?

JGB: Yes I think there’s no doubt about that, I think, my wife’s death was a reminder that you couldn’t pretend that, you know, death had left the stage. Death was present in the world, it was liable to make an entrance onto the stage…

JN: …in the midst of life…

JGB: …in the midst of life, in a very unexpected moment. I felt at the time, and still do, that nature had committed an appalling crime against this young woman, and her three very young children, and how to explain this death was a huge imaginative and emotional challenge.

JN: Because you didn’t have any religious template that you could place on it.

JGB: None, nothing, my parents were agnostic, so was I, but I had this inkling that perhaps, you know, the imagination, was a door that I could open and somewhere, on the other side of this doorway, I would find a realm, where two and two made five, I mean, that sounds sort of like Alice in Wonderland-ish, but…

JN: Well of course, one of the realms you did end up in, without any background really, was science fiction, and here you were walking through a door into worlds that no one could imagine, let alone have experienced, and you did it, sort of from a standing start. It looks extraordinary in a way, glancing back.

JGB: Yes, I mean, in some ways I was very fortunate that I stumbled across this form of fiction — but I never really read — I mean I read the short stories and novels of H. G. Wells, but not much else. I mean most science-fiction writers, American and British, started writing science fiction in their teens.

JN: That’s the time when it grips you normally, isn’t it?

JGB: Yes exactly, I didn’t really start reading it in any depth until I was about 23, 24, and then I found I had a kind of flair for it, and it also coincided with a period of great change in England, I mean this is what I wanted to see happen here, there was so much that needed to be changed.

JN: We’re talking about the 60s now?

JGB: Yes, and I felt the old traditional, class bound, England that I’d come across in 1946 when I arrived here, it needed to be laid out on the psychoanalyst’s couch and thoroughly analysed — I wanted to dismantle it and see what this strange creature was made of.

Photo by Jennie Middlemiss.

JN: It was a sort of cadaver that you could get to work on.

JGB: It was, it was, but I also felt I could see change was coming. I’d been to the United States and I’d seen that already, by the early 60s, we were getting the first supermarkets, motorways, we were getting, you know, consumer society, television and the like, we were turning into a kind of — media landscape — and I thought; this is interesting, because we’re all going to be Americanised, sooner or later, whether we like it or not, and science-fiction was above all, it was American, it described an Americanised future.

JN: To that extent it was right.

JGB: Yes it was right. It was right.

JN: By the time you came to write Kingdom Come, many years later, you saw this consumerism, you’d come to see it as — really as a dark force — as something that was all pervasive, and almost had evil intent, or worked in evil ways.

JGB: Yes I mean, I’ve always been drawn to consumerism and Americanisation of daily life but I’ve always been aware, you know, there’s a sort of — dark side to the sun, and in the case of Kingdom Come — which describes, really, a sort of high-point reached by consumerism in this country, a year or two ago — I suggest that, you know, consumerism, could evolve into something very close to fascism.

JN: Because it does involve; a death, an investigation, darkness, forces that seem beyond the control of any single human being.

JGB: Right, what is taking place when you go into these vast shopping malls, is you’re being seduced into a semi-ritualised, kind of, mass affirmation.

JN: You have to believe to go in.

JGB: Exactly, the cash counter is not simply a place where you lay out your credit cards.

JN: This kind of dissection of consumerism, or of the way people behave, I suppose, was the same process that was going on in Crash, which became a cult book in many ways, was filmed, was still being read many years later when similar books maybe passed away, quite quickly, and it involved a narrator, who became extraordinarily involved; erotically, emotionally, in violent ways, sometimes, with corpses, with people being cut up on motorways — a terribly dark story — it does seem to be though, quite close to the centre of your life as a writer, that vision, the vision that’s in that book.

JGB: That’s probably true, and in some ways, I regret it, I mean, now and again I open Crash. I think, my god, this is horrific, I mean, this man is clearly mad — and then, you know, it takes me a while to realise that — the JG Ballard, who brought up three very happy children and…

JN: By that time, the time you wrote that book, it would have been eight or nine years after your wife’s death, in the early 70s.

JGB: Early 70s yes. I find it a shocking book to read, I mean I literally have to put it down and take a few breaths. In a way it’s a sort of psychopathic hymn, there’s almost a religious dimension to it, in a peculiar way.

JN: In some ways Crash is about your life as a writer, because it’s about a narrator who is involved and who’s also exposed, in the course of the book, who’s feelings are laid bare, which of course is what writing’s all about.

JGB: Yes, and I think, I laid myself bare there in a way that — I mean it’s a cry of anguish, in a way — it’s a cry of outrage — you know the… I felt, it took me a long while to get of my wife’s death and it’s something I was reminded of every day — I was making sausage and mash for her three children. I think it was another attempt to make, you know, two and two equal five, once you’ve cracked that particular nut, if it’s possible to do so, you know everything seems to be a bit easier, but I’m not sure it is.

Photo by Jennie Middlemiss.

JN: Many people who didn’t follow you into science fiction, and don’t know that book, came to know you through Empire of the Sun, the story of your years in the camp, which, of course, became an extraordinary success; won prizes, then became a Spielberg film, and although it described horror, it also celebrated human dignity.

JGB: In a way it shows the lengths that human beings will go to survive, the instinct for survival is intensely strong, no doubt about that, people will give up everything: every shred of dignity, every dream, every illusion, they will give up their most cherished fantasies, just to live for another half-an-hour. It’s a terrible thing to have to face but it’s true — war is a corrupting experience, it’s corrupting in the sense that violence Is quite seductive, it has an appeal, In that, you can understand a world entirely given over to brutality and violence, whereas, sort of, peace — civilised life in the everyday sense of the term — is much more ambiguous, in fact, because we keep discovering there are things about ourselves that don’t quite accord with this notion that we are — civilised inheritors of the whole enlightenment tradition, and that we live in welfare societies and, you know, care for each other, but then something happens that reminds us that maybe it’s not quite that straightforward — war is very corrupting because it is so clear cut — people have a ruthlessness about the need to survive that is unmistakable really.

JN: What are the important things that survive war?

JGB: I think, sort of, memories of companionship, comradeship of soldiers and servicemen and women, who’ve been through combat together. I think that draws on very deep feelings of companionship.

Photo by Jennie Middlemiss.

JN: It’s obvious that you value these feelings, and you know they’re there because — despite your pessimism about the consumer society, about the capacity for violence that lurks in people — I mean, you’re a jovial man, you appear in many ways — despite all that — to be an optimistic man, how do those two things sit together?

JGB: I am optimistic on the whole, but I’m rather suspicious of human beings, and I think this goes back to the war — when I’d visit a friend’s apartment and there were, you know, empty suitcases lying across beds, and they’d just vanished — wind blowing through the curtains — what happened? Oh they’ve gone to some camp…

JN: You tell the story of your father saying: the Japanese are coming, we’re off, no more school, no more exams, it’s over.

JGB: Yes, absolutely, the sense that reality is a stage set that can be cleared at any moment; that came over very strongly, because children are very reliant on stability and convention, they take for granted that their parents are maintaining this friendly place called home. I think the experience of war is to undermine all that. I’ve always been a little sceptical about what I’m told — there’s nothing new about that nowadays — nobody trusts a politician. And I think I’m sceptical about consumerism because it’s really all we’ve got left — the main pillars of British society have always been: the monarchy, the Church of England, the class system, you know, respect for the Armed Forces, and so on. And they’ve all, these pillars have all been knocked down: politicians are distrusted, we think of them really as a collection of — many of them anyway — as a collection of rogues, the Church of England has lost a lot of its authority, so has the monarchy. So what we have: consumerism. I’m not sort of suspicious of consumerism, but the problem arises is when it’s all there is left. I mean, if you go out in the London suburbs, away from our great museums and Houses of Parliament and art galleries, theatres and the like, into a world where all you have are retail outlets, you suddenly, think my god, how can you live here? In fact I do live here. It’s that sense that there’s nothing other than a new range of digital cameras, or what have you, to sustain one’s dreams…

JN: In the memoir, you use Shanghai as the endpapers of the book. It’s quite a long way into the book before you leave, after the years in the camp, but then you go back, and it’s striking to look at your reflections, having known it as a boy, in a strange way, it had changed utterly but not at all.

JGB: I think that’s true, when I went back in 1991, I spent a week there with the BBC team. At first sight the city was totally transformed, there were hundreds of high-rise buildings, TV towers, vast new road complexes, and the former city had spread outwards for miles, across what had once been the countryside, was a vast urbanised area. But then, down at street level, I saw the old Shanghai, all the art Deco mansions of the French concession built in the 1930s, the Provencal villas, those white Bauhaus boxes that the Germans built in the 1930s, all those half-timbered Tudor mansions, one of which we lived in, which was British — any nationality sort of built a replica of its most cherished architectural myths, and a lot of this was still there — amazingly.

JN: And people were still doing the same things: they were buying and selling, they were involved in various corrupt practices, they were — they were at it.

JGB: Absolutely, I mean, probably — in the 1930s — the most corrupt city in the world, because you could get away with anything, and when people can get away with anything, they do — and I’m told that it’s going back in that direction.

JN: You describe it somewhere in the book as being known — or coming to be seen as — the wickedest city in the world, it’s a kind of uproarious wickedness though isn’t it?

JGB: I think, you know, if you weren’t starving on the pavements in the 1930s and 40s, Shanghai was a lot of fun, because everything was so cheap, if you weren’t doing well it was a different story altogether — but that’s not a story we often hear.

JN: When you came to write the memoir, which is not hugely long, you were trying to distil ideas and experiences, and describe them as beautifully and simply as you could, despite all those years as a writer which involved a great deal of, display, and a great deal of self-examination, did you learn anything more about yourself, looking back, that had eluded you before?

JGB: Yes I did, I learned a lot about myself. I don’t want to spell out my strengths and weaknesses — I’m not sure my strengths are, although I’ve got a pretty shrewd idea what my weaknesses might be — but, I don’t think we should sit in too many moral judgements on ourselves. Life can be difficult, I mean there’s no doubt about it — even at the best of times — and we don’t have, as human beings, enormous resources of kindness, goodwill, and the like, what we think of as positive virtues. You know, we’re a rather confused collection of highly intelligent mammals, but we’re quite capable of stabbing each other in the back, if no one’s looking. I think I learned, writing the book, that in many ways, I’ve been as much a victim of certain dreams and delusions as the English living in Britain were during the war.

JN: But the writer’s life isn’t a delusion, you’ve lived it.

JGB: Absolutely, that’s what we’re trying to do, we’re trying to tell stories that make sense, and I hope the stories I’ve told, and this one — which I suppose is my last story — I hope that makes sense too.

Photo by Jennie Middlemiss.

Photo by Jennie Middlemiss.

Here’s a transcription of the BBC Radio Front Row review of Miracles, presented by Mark Lawson and featuring Iain Sinclair and Hermione Lee.

Mike Bonsall

Mark Lawson: The work of the novelist JG Ballard divides fairly neatly into two sets, there are the novels which draw clearly on his own experience of the world, including the Booker prize-winning Empire of the Sun, which describes his internment in a Chinese prisoner of war camp during World War Two, and The Kindness of Women which fictionalises his experience post-war of being widowed with three young children. And then there are stories which take place in a distorted, warped, surreal version of the modern world, such as The Unlimited Dream Company and Crash — about sexual fantasists involved in car wrecks, which became one of the few modern movies to be widely banned. But confusingly, books of both kinds are likely to include central characters called Jim Ballard. Readers and critics though, who are policing the line between Ballard’s life and writing, are now helped with their enquiries by the author himself with the publication of his latest book, Miracles of Life: From Shanghai to Shepperton, an autobiography. To discuss it, I’m joined in the studio by the writer Iain Sinclair, whose books include Downriver, and from Oxford by the writer and critic Professor Hermione Lee. Iain Sinclair, we have to get this out of the way really, for any readers of Ballard, or admirers, the book contains a shock. In that calm voice that he’s used about so many terrible things, he explains he’s been diagnosed with terminal cancer, his oncologist has made it possible for him to write this book. It’s another example of the unflinching way in which he can describe what happens to him.

Iain Sinclair: Yes, and he holds that revelation back until the end of the book, although in some senses it underwrites it, because this is a very generous book, it’s amazingly warm hearted, and although it is very similar to Empire of the Sun in some ways, and other books, there are these little glancing details that give you more of himself than he’s offered before. The parents appear in the prison camp, the sister appears. It’s very subtly done, I think it’s wonderfully crafted and in the classic Ballard way; it’s also a tremendous page turner.

ML: Hermione Lee, he’s always played, as we’ve said, with the boundaries between fact and fiction — Jim Ballard — in books which seemed autobiographical, and ones which almost certainly can’t be. He does, as Iain says, he does provide useful footnotes here.

Hermione Lee: Yes, it’s terribly interesting to set it against Empire of the Sun, which came out in 1984, when he was in his 50s, and which, as you say, drew on that childhood experience of being, you know, the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, and being in the internment camp. And what Ballard fans remarked on then, when that novel came out, was how close the images of that experience were to the fantasy novels, novels like The Drowned World. And now he goes over that time again and shows how haunted he’s always been by that mental furniture — as how could he not be — but also what’s gripping about it is that he shows what actually he made up in Empire the Sun, you know, which people said — oh, it’s much autobiographical than the other novels — and here, now you can see from, as Iain says, the extra things he tells us, how much he actually invented and imagined in Empire of the Sun. So it’s really fascinating to hold the two together

ML: Iain, having discussed that, give me an example of something that you learned from this that you hadn’t known about him… Or which changes the way…

IS: Um… the figure of his sister for example; I didn’t know about. And then there’s this extraordinary surreal image of the sister — when he’s a child — he builds a plywood barrier that goes onto the dinner table so that he doesn’t have to look at his sister, it as a peep-hole in it — this is like something out of Dali. And underwriting everything Ballard does, goes back to a remark he made many many years ago, which was that he tries to obey the surrealist formula, which is — to place the visible at the service of the invisible. And this is a very visible book, but beneath it are these shadows of the invisible that he’s releasing for the first time, and I find that quite moving.

ML: Hermione, on that point of surrealism…

HL: Yes, I was just going to say, that’s such a brilliant image to pick up, because that little spy-hole, which is so weird, is actually like Ballard’s eye, because elsewhere there are little tiny places that he crawls into, like the cockpit of a disused plane, and he’s looking out, he says, as if through a small window into a dream, and he talks very fascinatingly about the influence of dissecting corpses when he’s a medical student and Francis Bacon and Kafka and film noir. And he talks about Freud and surrealism as the key influences on his work and he calls them: ‘a secret corridor into a more real and more meaningful world’, so he’s really giving you a kind of interpretation of his whole work here.

ML: And Iain, he’s one of the few writers to have become an adjective — Ballardian — lots of writers used that after the death of Princess Diana, in that week. The artist Marc Quinn, on Front Row the other day, who’d made these impossible flowers, he said: ‘I think of them as Ballardian’. And he has — it’s apparent throughout this book, and the others, as Hermione was saying — that way of looking at the world and describing it.

IS: Yes, he says, often, he wanted to be a painter. He was a great friend of Paolozzi, Eduardo Paolozzi, a sculptor, and I think the dominant figures in his influence over the years were Paolozzi and Chris Evans, who was the kind of rogue scientist who provided him with outprints of scientific matters and who is the figure behind Vaughan, to some extent, in his novel Crash. Ballard really is like a kind of Delvaux — famously he has an imitation Delvaux in his house — and here, I think that there are key images that come back repeatedly in his fiction, as with the famous drained swimming pool. There’s also the figure of a Chinese man who’s strangled with wire on a railway station, who comes back in this book and comes back in the fictions. There’s, as Hermione said, there’s this moment when the boy gets onto an airfield and climbs into the cockpit of a plane. There is the bicycle ride through the streets of Shanghai — these things just come back again and again and again…

ML: Also, Hermione, the amazing revelation that he almost died in a car crash after writing Crash, and he reflects on what would have been made of that, in his life, if it’d happened.

HL: Absolutely extraordinary, he writes his own obituary — as in a sense he’s doing here, I feel. I mean, there is a kind of — benign benediction — going on in this book, but that, what I’m left with is this sense that, when he was a little boy, the mothers of his friends used to complain that he was always rearranging the furniture in their in their houses, and this is what he does, he rearranges the furniture.

Newsnight Review: Tony Parsons, Kirsty Wark, Julie Myerson and John Harris.

More Miracles discussion… Here’s a transcript of the Newsnight Review segment on BBC 2. Not as revealing as the interviews, and having Tony Parsons say that Empire is ‘possibly the great novel of the 20th century’ isn’t necessarily a good thing. Still, all publicity is good…

Mike Bonsall

Kirsty Wark: The writer JG Ballard responded to the diagnosis of advanced cancer in 2006 by writing his autobiography. He says Miracles of Life is the last story he will ever tell, and it’s one of early sensory overload, beginning in Shanghai, the place of his birth in 1930, and his home until the age of fifteen. Shanghai fuelled his imagination for novels, starting with sci-fi, to more modern dystopias. His time in a Japanese internment camp was the inspiration for his two semi-biographical novels; Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women; with death as a part of his life in occupied Shanghai. His preoccupation with violent sex and death resulted in his 1970 novel Crash, later to be one of the most controversial films of all time. Miracles of Life: from Shanghai to Shepperton, is the key to JG Ballard’s extraordinary life.

Reader: In Shanghai the fantastic, which for most people lies inside their heads, lay all around me, and I think now that my main effort as a boy was to find the real in all this make-believe. In some ways I went on doing this when I came to England after the War, a world that was almost too real. As a writer I’ve treated England as if it were a strange fiction, and my task has been to elicit the truth, just as my childhood self did when faced with honour guards of hunchbacks and temples without doors.

KW: Tony, I think I’m right in saying that, for a long time he said he wasn’t going to write an autobiography and he has, for you, did it illuminate his writing more?

Tony Parsons: Well it did, I mean, if you love Ballard, as I love Ballard, then you’ve certainly read Empire of the Sun, and you’ve seen the Spielberg film, and you’ve almost certainly read The Kindness of Women. So, when I was reading the early part, and the Shanghai years, there were so many images that seemed incredibly familiar to me; the beggar expiring at the gate of the family home, the young Chinese peasant who’s being tortured by Japanese soldiers at the end of the war, the boy, the English schoolboy who’s never been to England, riding round Shanghai on his bicycle. And I did have a sinking feeling, you know, I was worried that I was going to be disappointed, that so much of this stuff was familiar to me, but the glory of it is, it fills in the gaps, between what he is — you know his parents were with him in the prisoner-of-war camp — and he’s very illuminating round around about why he left his parents out of Empire of the Sun, but they were actually there. And when he gets back to England, it’s always — it’s a life that’s permanently dislocated, it’s always out of step, you know, he loses his wife at a tragically young age, he becomes a single father — at a time when there are no single mums around — and just does — I mean he’s a genius, and he’s got the genius eye for the killer detail, after his wife dies, he sees a happy couple embracing in the car in front of him and he sounds his horn with anger.

Newsnight Review: Julie Myerson and John Harris.

John Harris: Um, Ballard’s writing style, and I sort of had to remind myself of this by going back to the books of his that I own; I’ve read Empire of the Sun, Super-Cannes and um, another, name of which I’ve forgotten…

TP: Crash?

JH: … No, it’s the other piece with that. Anyway, very, very dry and dispassionately he writes, but the imaginative conceit behind what he writes is, what, kind of, enlivens it and renders it spectacular. Clearly, in the case of his real life, large parts of it are so spectacular that the same thing happens but it is written fantastically dryly and dispassionately and there are occasions when you start to think that it was written under duress and in a hurry, he does, he does race through. I mean he could have written his autobiography about twice as long; a good example is the early death of his wife which is dealt with in a matter of paragraphs, but you have to take into account that it was written under duress and in a hurry because he’s very seriously ill; once that’s happened, I’ll cut him all the slack in the world because I can’t think of anybody who’s had as interesting a life as him.

KW: There are some extraordinary scenes aren’t there, in Shanghai?

Julie Myerson: Oh yes, so many. I haven’t read any of his novels and this makes me want to read them; obviously I have an awareness of what his novels are. I came to it, sort of, not knowing about his novels and also, actually not knowing about the cancer diagnosis, so when I got to the end, having really got to know and like this extremely likeable man. It really took me by surprise, that did. I didn’t know his wife was going to die either and he does deal with these things with great economy and he’s not at all self-indulgent and he’s had the most extraordinary life, so, lots of things, first of all Shanghai but also, becoming a single parent. I think he’s writing Crash, looking after three young children, making bangers and mash, between bangers and mash and Blue Peter he’ll write a chapter and as a writer you so identify with that and he said ‘my greatest ally was the pram in the hall’.

TP: That’s an incredible line, that’s an unbelievable line…

JM: There is a warmth to him, he’s passionate about family and children, and what I love best about this book, even, not having read any of his books, is that it’s the story of someone who had quite an undernourished childhood and found huge artistic fulfilment through writing, but also found joy and fulfilment through family life, despite his wife dying, he’s really got something from family.

KW: And I suppose what happened was, that he had this extraordinary childhood that almost gave him enough in his bag to write for the rest of his life without having to do other extraordinary things.

Newsnight Review: Tony Parsons and Kirsty Wark.

TP: And it’s extraordinary too that I think it wasn’t uncommon for people to come back from China, or India, or Hong Kong, in their mid-teens, never having seen this place — and this is home — you’re home — you’re home now, and then moving from, I mean, you know, he had both extremes in Shanghai, he was in a prisoner of war camp and he also had armies of servants indulging him and so he’s always been dislocated, he’s always been out of step. I would urge you, and I would urge anybody, to read Empire of the Sun because I think it’s really, it’s possibly the great novel of the twentieth century.

KW: You talk about him writing very dispassionately but what he writes about is the most extraordinary — for example the Buick is going through — the families go out of the international settlement, and go through the old battlefields and there’s bodies lying here — and he’s only ten.

JH: The best illustration — Cocaine Nights was the book, I forgot — the best illustration of why dry and dispassionate writing often serves its subject matter well, is the occasion when he gets out of the prisoner of war camp and he goes to find Shanghai again and he’s on a railway platform, and he watches a party of Japanese soldiers slowly murdering a Chinese man — and he’s not florid — he doesn’t have to ladle on metaphor, he just says I was, what, nine or ten years old and this is what I saw, that’s so powerful…

TP: That’s one of the key scenes of Empire of the Sun and when I was reading this — and that’s when I thought — am I going to get the same stuff all over again but it’s…

JM: One of the most amazing things about the book is the way his experience in Shanghai, the way it comes back through his life in unexpected ways, so it isn’t till when he’s cutting up dead bodies as a medical student in Cambridge that he realises he’s embarking on a kind of moral and emotional journey to deal with that.

TP: He loves Shanghai, despite all the horror and death, he calls it the magical place, he calls it.

KW: Well, Miracles of Life by JG Ballard is published by Fourth Estate.

Photo by Jennie Middlemiss.

Enormous thanks to Mike Bonsall, who once again has transcribed a Ballard interview from the BBC’s latest round of Miracles of Life promotions. From the Nightwaves program on Radio 3, it’s my favourite from this latest batch. The interviewer, Philip Dodd, engages JGB in such a way that a different spin is applied to the familiar elements from Ballard’s life. But he’s also wise enough to avoid the ‘Ballardian cliches’ that we know so well from Empire of the Sun, instead focusing on the really interesting strata of the autobiography where new and revealing information can be found.

His reference, “‘The skull beneath the skin’ as Eliot said of Webster…”, is to Eliot’s poem Whispers of Immortality that starts:

Webster was much possessed by death
And saw the skull beneath the skin;
And breastless creatures under ground
Leaned backward with a lipless grin.

…Webster being the gruesome Jacobean playwright of The Duchess of Malfi (who I only know from ‘Shakespeare in Love!).

I originally thought PD was saying that Walter Benjamin had written an essay called ‘The German Jew’, but that’s a description of him. The idea of the Angel of History comes from his essay ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’:

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Which does sound suitably Ballardian!

Finally, the reference to ‘the growing good of the world’ is in Middlemarch by George Eliot. Sorry if you already know all that, but I’ve learned a lot!’

M.B.

Philip Dodd: …Just two riveting writers on tonight’s programme, first Martin Amis ‘a man with acid in his inkwell’, to quote the New York Times, and second, JG Ballard — in my view, Britain’s greatest living novelist — who’s written a mesmeric autobiography:

J.G. Ballard: I was born in Shanghai General Hospital on the 15th of November 1930, after a difficult delivery that my mother, who was slightly built and slim hipped, liked to describe to me in later years, as if this revealed something about the larger thoughtlessness of the world. Over dinner she would often tell me that my head was badly deformed during birth, and I feel that for her this partly explained my wayward character as a teenager and young man (though doctor friends say that there is nothing remarkable about such a birth).

PD: …Now if Martin Amis, who was born in 1949, knows war and violence at second hand, It’s arguable that JG Ballard was marinaded in them. In his novel, Empire of the Sun, he wrote a fictional account of his childhood days living in Shanghai under Japanese occupation. Now he’s written his memoir, Miracles of Life, which offers an extraordinary account of the daily killing that the young Jim Ballard witnessed during the occupation, when for a time he was interned with his family. Reading Miracles of Life, it’s clear that those Shanghai years were the defining ones for the novelist’s imagination. It’s there that he first encountered a disintegrating city, an image that’s become such a powerful part of his iconography in novels such as The Drowned World, about a city dying into a beautiful lagoon. Miracles of Life is subtitled ‘Shanghai to Shepperton’, and it takes in not only his childhood years in Shanghai, but also the shock of coming to live in England in the late 40s, his time as a medical student at Cambridge — his description of the pathology class is worth the price of the book alone — his life as a door-to-door salesman, and in the RAF in Canada. But the book also includes very personally painful subjects, from his alienation from his mother and father, to the death of his young wife. When we met in a wonderfully noisy flat, I suggested that Shanghai, and his experiences there, clearly provided the stage for what would become his preoccupations; spectacle, sex, violence and death.

JGB: Death was everywhere, in a way that’s almost impossible to imagine. We lived in a suburban house — beggars died on our doorstep. And it’s impossible to imagine, living in Shepperton for example, or Tunbridge Wells in a comfortable house with nine or ten servants, and some elderly beggar, leaning against the wall in a drive and quietly dying, without anyone coming to his aid. Unbelievable, here, but it was all too believable then, I mean, it was routine.

PD: Was it because they were Chinese who were dying that your parents, in a sense, just took their dying for granted?

JGB: Yes, I think the fact that they were Chinese played a large part in it. Firstly of course there were so many Chinese; there had been civil wars from the 1920s onwards. From ‘37 onwards there was the Japanese invasion of China. Millions of Chinese, destitute peasants for the most part, were struggling to get into Shanghai; why I don’t know because there was nothing there for them, nothing at all. Tens of thousands died on the streets every year; cholera, smallpox, typhoid were rife. I mean it was a place that sort of challenged every conceivable assumption that we now make about what constitutes civilised life.

PD: There’s this small boy, you, Jim Ballard, cycling his way, kind of, round the city and, you know, in this book you’re very tender towards your own children — after all the book is called Miracles of Life in response to your sense of the importance of children — and yet you as a child kinda face this and, the way you write about it, as if it’s just the wind blowing through the streets. This death, this boy – you — the younger self just kind of — just like rain.

JGB: I’d never known anything else; one has to bear that in mind. As far as my parents were concerned, they must have been shocked to the core when they first arrived in Shanghai in, whatever it was, 1929. I was never really able to draw from either of my parents any sort of answer to the question: Why didn’t we help that old beggar who was dying on our doorstep? What Shanghai proved was that kindness, which we place a huge value on — there, things were completely different. It’s very hard to convey — a kind of terminal world where all human values really have ceased to function. Every conceivable kind of, you know, entrepreneurial venture capitalism going full-blast. It’s very difficult to visualise a world were, sort of pity, didn’t really exist. Kindness didn’t exist, and could be dangerous. I think that’s something I learned very early on as a boy, to place too much reliance on kindness is a big error because it’s such an intangible thing, and the supply of kindness is finite and can be switched off.

PD: One of the things that’s very powerful in the book, and I think one of the things that binds together Shanghai and Shepperton is the sense that the world is a stage. Shanghai is this extraordinary stage that gets destroyed through the war and Shepperton, this blessed English suburb is a place where films are made, and this sense that actually beneath this staging is just that violence and to put it in the most blunt sense, just death.

JGB: I don’t want to give the wrong impression of the book but I think coming to terms with death is one of the main themes of the book. I mean, the death all around me; as a boy, in Shanghai, the death of Chinese, countless Chinese at the hands of the Japanese military, during the war itself, personal tragedy that brutally crossed my own life, the death of my wife, but also the experience of say, dissecting cadavers when I was a medical student in Cambridge, a very important phase of my life in fact, where I think I was trying to carry out my own work, a sort of — I don’t know how to describe it — a sort of restorative pathology. I was trying to sort of, analyse, what had happened to all the dead Chinese I’d seen, and used the cadavers in the dissecting room as, sort of, exploratory vehicles almost.

PD: ‘The skull beneath the skin’ as Eliot said of Webster…

JGB: Webster, yes.

PD: …is something very powerful in this book,

JGB: You know war is — a world war — is so dislocating, it shatters everything. Also one has to accept that violence in many ways is quite seductive, particularly when you’re in your teens. It’s not the glamour of violence that you see in Hollywood films. Violence — very clearly defines itself. The brutality of, say, Japanese soldiers towards Chinese civilians was really a matter of routine, you knew exactly what was going to happen. A couple of bored Japanese sergeants ride a rickshaw all the way from Shanghai, quite a journey, and then decide they don’t want to pay; more than that, they decide they’ll have a little fun, kick the poor rickshaw coolie’s only source of livelihood into matchwood and then they turn on him, kick him to death. I witnessed such an event. I mean, I think I knew exactly what was going to happen and everybody else did. Violence is very — it’s almost settling — there is no disputing it. It’s seductive in that it has a logic of its own — one almost misses it when it’s gone — a terrible thing to say, but there is an element of truth in that. One tries to recreate episodes of violence because they do tell a kind of truth — a final truth — about human beings and what we are.

PD: When you came to England, you register very well in the book, the kind of cataclysmic or non-cataclysmic shock of arriving in this place. The word that keeps coming up in the book is ‘it needed to change’ was that something you palpably and viscerally felt then?

JGB: Absolutely, I mean, I was so shocked when I arrived. You’ve got to remember that I was brought up on a huge and extremely potent mythology, the mythology of Chums annuals, of the Just William Books, AA Milne, Peter Pan, to some extent, the image of a middle-class England. I think there was a sense that this country had collectively decided to believe these nostalgic fantasies about itself, that shook me. Why on earth would anyone want to believe all this nonsense? Slowly, change arrived, actually I think it came across the Atlantic; supermarkets and motorways, it really didn’t change in a really radical way until the 60s.

PD: The word change now being polluted by a kind of a — Whig liberalism — a slow incremental change for the good; what George Eliot rather wonderfully once called ‘the growing good of the world’. I can’t think of anybody less, who believes in that than you, and one of the things — reading this book — I felt was that you want change and you’re future oriented, but actually you’re like the angel of history, Walter Benjamin’s great essay, the German Jew, who said actually that the angel of history is blown towards the future, but looking towards the past.

JGB: I think past and future were just so entangled in the minds of the English after the war. I don’t think they knew really which way they were facing. Some people can cope with nostalgia, I think the French, for example, do it very well, I think the Americans do. I think we, the English, do not cope well with nostalgia; it is used and exploited to buttress the class system.

PD: But somehow you’ve been formed, haven’t you, by the past, it’s not something you can let go of; you’re not a Whig historian who can just forget the past.

JGB: The past sits astride me like a — like a sort of crashed aircraft straddling a railway line, or a tank that’s sort of thrown one of its treads, the crew can rotate the turret, but not much more. I think I knew that change would eventually arrive. Because I’d been brought up in this ultra-modern city; I’d seen American cars, I’d seen modernity, whether in the form of art Deco architecture, cinemas, nightclubs and the like. I’d seen consumerism in Shanghai, going full blast, and I knew that it would arrive sooner or later. I remember going to see the This is Tomorrow show at the Whitechapel Gallery in, I think, 1956. That had an enormous effect on me. I’d just begun writing science fiction and Hamilton and Paolozzi’s exhibits in particular at the Whitechapel firmed the direction that I felt my own writing should take. They were celebrating consumerism — they were celebrating the art of the street — neon canopies over cinemas and the like.

PD: But that’s only half the truth of you because — I’m going to reach into a bag — where I’ve brought a book, which is an early book of yours, called Disaster Area, mid-60s book, rather wonderful book from mid-60s, but on the front is a charnel house on top of which are sat a few of Edgar Allan Poe’s ravens — there’s a darkness in you…

JGB: I didn’t pick that picture.

PD: …No, no I’m sure, but it’s a fair reflection of what the book’s about — there’s a dark side to you isn’t there?

JGB: Well, I mean a large part of my fiction has been an exploration of, you know, the dark side of the sun. Consumerism, you know, lights up the world — but it has its dark side. You know a large part of my fiction has been an attempt to show what happens at midnight, when the lights go out and a different set of lights — rather more lurid — come on. My more recent novels, over the last ten years, I’ve looked hard at what I see as the, sort of, the psychopathology of the city and the sort of social structures, the big office complexes and the like that, you know, that we now inhabit.

PD: There’s another book inside Miracles of Life, we’ve spoken very much about your — what I call the ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’. But there is another book which is the book of two families. There’s the family you grew up in, and there’s the family that you had, your own children. And the early part of the Shanghai is an extraordinary kind of Proustian Remembrance of Things Past and then there’s a bluntness about your account of your parents that I found quite shocking.

JGB: I try to explain it in the book. I try to suggest that a lot of what seems to be callousness in my parents actually reflected a different, sort of different role, that childhood played then. Childhood was a gamble; it was a gamble for the child, but it was a gamble for the parents. So many children died in the era before antibiotics, so many children died without ever leaving childhood. Whereas today we tend to measure our success as human beings by our success as parents, parents felt, I think, to some extent detached. Parents felt towards their children in many ways — though it sounds bizarre — the way people would feel towards domestic pets. You love your Labrador dearly, but if it catches some ghastly, dog disease, and dies, you don’t blame yourself.

PD: I suppose the reason I ask that, I often think you’ve spent a lot of your writing life — flirting with confessional. I mean in Crash, 1973, you call a character after yourself; in Empire of the Sun the boy is called Jim. You’ve sort of outed yourself, at this late stage of your career; and even the cover of the autobiography there’s the picture of you, and a picture of you and your children on the back cover. What’s kind of compelled this revelatory, because you’ve always been the most frugal of people it strikes me with information about yourself?

JGB: I’m not sure if that’s altogether true. I think there’s no doubt that my ordinary, everyday life — my children have played an absolutely central role and have been much more important to me than being a writer really.

PD: You really believe that?

JGB: Yes, because whenever there’s been as a choice between the two, family life came first. You know, if they wanted me to watch Blue Peter, I watched Blue Peter — willingly; I wanted to watch it with them, even if that meant that I wouldn’t be able to type out a short story I was working on. I felt a commitment to my children once my wife had died that dominated everything. You know we’re all mysteries to ourselves, most of us have only a hazy notion of who we are we really are. Writing the particular sort of imaginative fiction that I write does tend to expose you to all kinds of hazards, you know, very easy to slip off the edge of the sidewalk and find yourself in the gutter. It’s very hard to understand, and I remember my wife — and I had a happy marriage — but I remember my wife reading some of my early short stories, and saying, ‘Why are there all these tormented marriages, with these strange and rather unappealing women – where do they come from?’ Poor husband sort of would hide behind his typewriter and say: ‘Errrr – well, you’ve got to understand; I’m not a realistic writer.’ But it is a point, you know — where do they come from? I wrote this Miracles of Life when I was 76, quite an advanced age, you know, I realised the very strange currents that make up a life.

PD: You could have ended the book other than you did, I mean, you’ve even shared with the reader that you’re ill, that you’ve got cancer and I kept trying to just work out — what had possessed you to do that — and I was thinking of Philip Larkin who didn’t even want to be told he’d got cancer.

JGB: People who’ve watched me sort of evolve as a writer know that my fiction is full of drained swimming pools and abandoned hotels that, you know, are highly significant elements in what makes up my world. I only wrote the autobiography because I knew I had advanced cancer. In fact my consultant, who looks after me, urged me to write. Once I’d embarked on telling the story of my life I had to press on until, sort of, the final chapter, and there was no point in hiding, hiding behind vague hopes of the future, because basically I hadn’t got a future. I think I discovered things about myself which I might not have done otherwise, particularly in my relationships with my parents. I think I have to face the fact that I didn’t really like them very much. I tried in my earlier fiction — and in my earlier life — I mean, to maintain a kind of neutral stance, particularly towards my mother. I mean it is perfectly possible she wasn’t a very nice human being, I don’t think she was. I don’t think either of them had that big an influence on me, one habit I’d learned from the the war, was that I’d have to look after myself. You couldn’t really rely on other people. One of the huge sustaining myths is that you can rely on your parents in a time of crisis, WWII showed me that this isn’t the case. I think that I was right to be honest, there would have been an element of deceit if I’d not mentioned it. After all, the final chapter is only two pages long, and it places everything in its proper position.

Original photography by Steve Double (Ballard) and Jerry Bauer (Self).

The indefatigable Mike Bonsall has kindly transcribed the Will Self segment on BBC Radio 4’s Open Book program; listen to the entire program on the Open Book website. Mike says: “Interesting to note the ‘quote’ from Millennium People at the start (and probably the second one), isn’t taken directly from the text but I’m guessing is a slice from an adaptation which ran some time ago as a short serial on Radio 4.”

The interviewer is Mariella Frostrup, the regular presenter of Open Book.

Reader: Outside Broadcasting House the demonstrators pressed closer to the entrance. A smoke bomb shot a gust of black vapour into the air. A startled security guard tripped over one of the barriers and fell to the ground. The protesters seized their chance and surged past him, forcing their way through the doors, led by one of the BBC producers who had come over to our side. They planned to invade the new studio and broadcast the manifesto of middle-class rebellion to the listening nation, mouths agape over their muesli.

Not the staff response to Mark Thompson’s recent BBC cuts, but JG Ballard’s vividly imagined revolt of the middle-classes in Millennium People. Will Self will be telling me about that book, and his passion for the work of JG Ballard…

Mariella Frostrup: …there’s a new book … from the novelist JG Ballard, but this is non-fiction. An autobiography dealing with his childhood in Shanghai, the trauma of World War Two, his family’s internment by the Japanese, his eventual move to Britain and a productive life spent writing in Shepperton. Much of this Shanghai story was included in the Booker nominated novel Empire of the Sun. But alongside more autobiographical work, he’s also renowned for his Science Fiction novels and more recently a string of very engaging books about the malevolent influence of a technologically obsessed society, the moral vacuum at the heart of modern life, and a middle-class who are, quite literally revolting. Well, to offer a reader’s guide to Ballard, and to help me pick my way through his work, I’m joined by one of his best-known fans, the novelist Will Self. Will — welcome. Ballard has produced a lot of work though; seventeen novels, and many many more short stories, so where would you invite somebody to start?

Will Self: I’ll declare my colours, I think he’s probably the most significant and influential — or among a handful of the most significant and influential — writers of the English language since the second war. So, why not read them in order? You could do that and get the full development. Perhaps an easier way in, and there’s nothing wrong with sometimes taking things easy, is a kind of autobiographical way into it. I mean many people — when Empire of the Sun came out and then a second sort of quasi-autobiographical novel, The Kindness of Women, which came out in 1991 — felt that these works recapitulated and explained a lot of the themes, the motifs, the kind of currents that ran through his more, in a sense attention-grabbing, fictional work, they saw what the genesis was. So you could start with those two novels and then work into the fiction from them.

MF: Because the books that preceded Empire of the Sun had mainly been what we might call, for shorthand, science fiction, hadn’t they? And they had been sort of post-cataclysmic novels about dystopian futures.

WS: Mmm, they are kind of apocalyptic. I mean he kicks off, Ballard, with this book The Drowned World which is astonishingly prescient like a lot of his science fiction. I mean Ballard, to get this straight, has always viewed his sort of science fiction as being concerned with inner, rather than outer space. He’s not death-rays or weird aliens or anything like that at all, he’s very much writing about parallel worlds that mutate out of our own or are latent within our own. And in the Drowned World, which really showcases this preoccupation, you have a strange journey, through a very recognisably drowned Britain really — so very astonishing prescient about global warming.

MF: And I think published in about 1962?

WS: ‘62 is The Drowned World, and then you have The Burning World (or The Drought), The Crystal World, and then you get to another kind of thematic break in Ballard’s work, when he publishes The Atrocity Exhibition, which doesn’t have a conventional narrative, it contains some of his most extreme imagery of, kind of, physical discorporation. It maps out the territory of what Ballard has described as the Death of Affect, this kind of — I think like a writer who he was friendly with in the 60s and who he knew fairly well, William Burroughs — Ballard’s view was that in the post-Hiroshima era there had been this kind of death of feeling in western culture, and a lot of his shock-tactics and his extreme imagery, are aimed at mapping this landscape. Contained in the Atrocity Exhibition, is the kernel, the germ, of perhaps one of his most famous novels, Crash — there is a section of the Atrocity Exhibition entitled Crash — and then he goes on to publish Crash in 1973.

MF: Described by one critic as ‘the most repulsive book I’ve ever read’!

WS: It’s a book that carries with it this most astonishing penumbra. I know that one early editor that read it sort of suggested that Ballard sought psychiatric help. As many people will know, it’s a book about the relationship between sexual excitation and car accidents. It begins with this incredible description of how this man who pursues sexual kicks through car crashes, achieves his aim:

Reader: Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. During our friendship he had rehearsed his death in many crashes, but this was his only true accident. Driven on a collision course towards the limousine of the film actress, his car jumped the rails of the London Airport flyover and plunged through the roof of a bus filled with airline passengers. The crushed bodies of package tourists, like a haemorrhage of the sun, still lay across the vinyl seats when I pushed my way through the police engineers an hour later. Holding the arm of her chauffeur, the film actress Elizabeth Taylor, with whom Vaughan had dreamed of dying for so many months, stood alone under the revolving ambulance lights. As I knelt over Vaughan’s body she placed a gloved hand to her throat.

WS: Now, around this time another major theme I think begins to develop in Ballard’s work, which is this idea of a kind of dystopian critique of contemporary society and it begins with a novel called High-Rise. In High-Rise a war develops between the kind of lower-class tenants of the building and the upper-class tenants on the top. And this kind of social, almost political critique, Ballard develops through a series of books and it kind of goes on into the later kind of — tetrarchy, trilogy, I don’t know what – quartet, of novels which begins with Cocaine Nights in 1996 and is still running; it’s gone through Millennium People, Super-Cannes, and now on to Kingdom Come. That kind of social critique is another thing.

MF: One of my favourites, I have to say, is Millennium People and the notion of this kind of disenfranchised middle-class who decide finally that enough is enough. We’ve got a reading from that as well, maybe we’ll play it then I’d love to hear your thoughts on that book.

Reader: The residents of Chelsea Marina had launched a small crime wave on the surrounding neighbourhood, as executives and middle-managers gave up their jobs; there was an outbreak of petty thieving from delis and off-licences. Every parking meter in Chelsea Marina was vandalised and the council street-cleaners, traditional working-class to the core, refused to enter the estate, put off by the menacing middle-class air. Removed from their expensive schools, bored teenagers haunted Slone Square and the King’s Road, trying their hands at drug-dealing and car theft.

MF: It’s enough to have you setting your four-by-four alight isn’t it Will?

WS: Yes, it’s difficult to tell with Ballard exactly how far his tongue is in his cheek, or whether it’s wrapped right the way round the back of his head. I think the interesting thing about Millennium People perhaps, as opposed to the two precursor books, Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes — which are kind of a piece — is that it’s very funny. It’s very, very sly and very, very funny. And he himself has been absolutely unashamed in professing his contempt and hatred for the metropolitan bourgeoisie, he’s always had this thing that he lives out at Shepperton.

MF: I can’t let you go — seeing as his new book, coming out in February, is an autobiography — without talking a bit more about the autobiographical work. Was that very straightforward in comparison? I mean Empire of the Sun — a pretty classic novel in most aspects?

WS: I think the thing about Empire of the Sun is that it is relatively straightforward; it seems to be a naturalistic novel. But in a way I’d sort of urge people coming fresh to Ballard perhaps not to leap in with Empire of the Sun. Read a couple of the other ones first, because it’s fascinating to come to Empire of the Sun and see that this is the crucible of his perspective of the world. His father worked in Shanghai; they lived in the kind of English canton there in a kind of wealthy upper-middle-class atmosphere in the late 1930s, and then the cataclysm of the collapse of Chinese society, of the invasion of the Japanese from the north. And he, you know he would see people dead on the streets on his way to school, the dead and dying, and then of course the internment by the Japanese. And so all of these images of, kind of, dystopian, run down, fractured societies and indeed his imagery of hyper-shiny technological futures comes out of the war. So all of that imagery is there once you’ve read some of the other books to kind of see what its genesis is in Empire of the Sun.

The companion book to Empire of the Sun is Kindness of Women. And many people feel that Ballard is perhaps a bit too heavy for their taste, a little too disturbing, a little too warped. Kindness of Women is all of those things and it’s also an extremely affecting book about love and about the impact of love on somebody’s life. This is a novel that actually kind of made me cry and that’s not something that I can say about many things apart from people treading hard on my feet.

Image from Antiflaneur.

This is an English translation of an interview with J.G. Ballard by Alexander Gutzmer, originally published in German by Welt am Sonntag, 3 June 2007. The translation, by John Carter Wood, appears here with Alexander’s permission.

BRITISH AUTHOR J. G. BALLARD IS A BLEAK VISIONARY OF THE PRESENT. IN HIS WRITINGS, HE DEPICTS A SENSELESS WORLD FULL OF EXCESSIVE VIOLENCE. AN INTERVIEW ABOUT THE EROTICISM OF TERROR ATTACKS, POST-BLAIR BRITAIN, AND AMERICA’S DESIRE TO BE LOVED.

Hardly any author can move among genres so ably as J. G. Ballard, who has created historical novels, science fiction and ‘anti-utopias’. Again and again, he has turned his psychological gaze toward violence and collapsing worlds.

GUTZMER: Mr. Ballard, in your novel Crash you carry the fetishisation of the automobile to an extreme and speak of the eroticism of auto accidents. Today, a different form of violence dominates the media – terror. Does that also have an erotic component?

BALLARD: It certainly has an element of erotically charged perversion. The last will of Mohammad Atta is full of erotic fascination with his own body. Atta found his sexuality as irritating as it was fascinating.

The German essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger sees the attackers at the ultimate losers…

They are. They experience a failure of modernity and modernity as failure. Particularly those who are raised in the West. Consider the London bombers: they wore trainers, listened to Walkmen but were at the same time trapped in another value-system.

Is the West experiencing – as in Crash – a fascination with being attacked, with its own vulnerability? Is there even something inherently erotic about the Iraq War?

For America, the invasion of Iraq was a frustrated reaction: the US was lashing out because it had to recognise that it was no longer the world’s favourite nation. With terror, that time is over. Iraq was punished as a stand-in for the rest of the world.

Then why did Britain participate in the war? After all, it’s a well-liked country.

I don’t think that we Britons are all that popular. No former colonial power is truly well liked. I believe that through the war we wanted to satisfy our craving for emotions. We want cheap emotions. ‘Big Brother’ is just one example of that.

Critics say that Tony Blair had something of the actor about him…

Blair is an actor: a bad one. It’s precisely for that reason that we Britons loved him for so long. For that and for his promises, which everyone knew that he could never fulfil: such as a better health system without higher taxes. We were lied to.

Is Gordon Brown also a bad actor?

No, he’s not an actor at all. He’ll probably stay true to his Scottish-Protestant background; with him we can expect the return of honesty to politics.

Many of your books criticise Western capitalism. In Super-Cannes for example, a resident of an ultra-modern industrial park runs amok. Shouldn’t the novel have been set in London?

Super-Cannes alludes to an actual business park, to Sophia-Antipolis. In the end, it’s not France but rather a placeless, completely globalised assemblage. Americans, Britons, Germans and French work and live there. But you’re right: London is probably the most impressive financial centre in the world today. And it’s thereby losing its character as an English city.

Architecturally too, London is changing its character too, through more and more skyscrapers…

They’re trying to Manhattanise London. I’m not fundamentally against tall buildings, but they depress me in Manhattan. Perhaps as an author, you need to be surrounded by shorter buildings. We always want to see the sky.

Sounds romantic. When one reads your books, it’s easier to think that you’re inspired by ugliness.

I’m very inspired by beauty! I’m not a pessimist. I see my books as warnings. I’m the man who stands on the side of the road and yells ‘Slow down!’

Oh, come on, you’re also fascinated by the absurdities of our time.

As an author, sometimes you work through how people in extreme situations would behave.

An example of such extreme situations in your books involves coldly Modernist architecture.

Yes, Modernism brings with it an emptiness that seems dangerous. It’s not for nothing that 20th century dictators were fascinated by it.

Is it this emptiness that brings out the madness in Super-Cannes?

Modernism brings out the dark drives that slumber in us. It reserves no place for the unexplainable or the mysterious – and for precisely that reason causes a return to barbarism.

Because it shows everything…

Exactly. We need mystery, that little bit of poetry. Seeing everything makes you sad.

You were raised in Shanghai. Your books were based upon this outsider perspective on the West. Now Shanghai is a prototype of capitalist building. Is the circle complete?

Yes. However, before Mao, Shanghai was not a counter-example to the West. In my childhood, Western styles were wildly mixed there – German Bauhaus, French art deco, English Tudor. You’ll find such a mix of architecture in only one other place: Beverly Hills.

That fits: Shanghai and Beverly Hills, the dream factories of the world.

Exactly. At the same time, both cities are marked by nostalgia. That is revealed by the retro-buildings: people flee where they come from – and rebuild it in a new place.

Still, Western nations are impressed by China.

I see Shanghai as unique, not as a global model. We Europeans cannot afford the social costs of turbo growth. We have other strengths.

And they are?

We are orderly, civilised. Especially the Germans.

Is Shanghai the future?

Only partly. Maybe the future will be very different – more orderly, conformist. Like a suburb of Düsseldorf.

A publisher’s reviewer once said that you were beyond psychiatric help. Is that true?

I saw that as an absolute artistic triumph. But thanks for asking: all things considered, I’m fine.

..:: Previously on Ballardian: ‘Who sees everything, becomes sad.’

I phoned J.G. Ballard at his home early in September 1996, shortly before the publication of his novel, Cocaine Nights, the murder mystery set in the Costa Del Sol, whose ‘detective story’ format bears much the same relation to the book’s real themes as the skull does to the subconscious.

The interview was conducted for a short feature on the novel that ran in The List magazine (issue dated 20 September 1996), the Glasgow-Edinburgh events guide that is pretty much Scotland’s Time Out. This is the first time the full transcript of the conversation has been published anywhere.

Damien Love, 2007

Damien Love is a writer, journalist and independent publisher, based in Glasgow, UK.

LEFT: Cocaine Nights: French edition, with a different title, ‘The Hidden Side of the Sun’.

DL: You still live in Shepperton. How long have you been based there now?

JGB: Oh god. Since… 1960. A long time.

And I take it you have no immediate desire to resign to the Costa Del Sol?

Oh, no. I have every desire to. I intend to go fairly soon. I think it’s time I warmed my old bones in the sun.

And settle into the lifestyle you’ve described?

Well… umm… yes. I wrote the book and then thought, well, it sounds rather fun. I must go and live there. I have been there, of course.

What was the genesis of Cocaine Nights?

Well, I think watching the growth of the Costa Del Sol and similar places along the Mediterranean over the last 40 years that I’ve been going there, and seeing a microcosm of a future that’s waiting for us all. You know, these security obsessed enclaves with tele-surveillance and armed guards and smart cards and all, the whole paraphernalia, like a kind of maximum security state, reduced to the size of a village. If you know the States at all, you’ll know there are masses of similar security compounds. And there have been for many, many years. But they’re coming, they’re all over Europe now. You can see them out in the Home Counties where I live, to the west of London. People are obsessed with security, at all costs. And you pay a price for it. And I can see this development beginning to isolate people, more and more, behind their triple-security locks, and they’ll pay an enormous price, in terms of social cohesion, civic life, you know, just to feel ‘safe.’

So, do you see any merits in the radical prescription to the problem prescribed by Crawford?

Well, I the author am not suggesting that we all go out and… burgle our neighbour’s houses, or take up drug trafficking, and the very next day we’ll all be practising our violins and forming chess clubs. But I’m saying that it’s possible that we’re too obsessed with security. Although, anyone who has just been burgled is going to think me an idiot. Quite rightly. But, it’s a matter of realising that, you know, certain things have to be bought at a price, and maybe the price is too high. Maybe, to make a pearl, you need a bit of grit in the oyster shell. I think, probably, that the proposition I’ve put forward in the novel is probably correct.

The novel reminded me of the conversation you had with Will Self, about a future of boredom springing up as consumer culture envelops the globe, and these Kafkaesque communities spring up into… living death…

Yes. Kafka with unlimited Chicken Kiev.

LEFT: Cocaine Nights: Russian edition. RIGHT: Cocaine Nights: Italian edition.

The protagonist of the novel, Charles Prentice, is a travel writer, and, as is mentioned, an observer rather than a participant. Why make him so consciously someone who, initially at any rate, observes rather than interacts?

Well, he is an observer. I mean he’s a visitor to this strange place. And as a travel writer, he’s got a trained eye so that he is, as it were, more aware. More aware of the strangeness of this coast where the Brits have settled over the last thirty years, than the average person would be. As you drive along that coast, from Marbella to Malaga, or from Gibraltar to Malaga, you pass all these condominiums and pueblo-style housing estates, and you think ‘Well, they’re a bit odd, I wouldn’t want to live in one myself’. But you don’t realise how odd they are until you go into one, and then you realise that tens of thousands of Brits, along with Dutch and French and Germans and so on — many of them retired there permanently, are all living these very strange lives. I’m not just concerned with the Costa del Sol. What I’m interested in is an emerging psychology where people, for the sake of security or some other social end, are willing to sacrifice a large number of the stresses and strains that are a part of the price one pays for an active and lively and rich cultural mix. I don’t say that crime is necessary to kickstart a culture, I’m just saying that one must beware of extreme solutions.

LEFT: Cocaine Nights: Latvian edition.

Are you — as a person and not a writer, as it were — consciously frightened of a future where people are so obsessed with themselves and their own security, that in a way they cease to be aware of themselves any more?

I think that we’re moving in that direction. As living standards continue to rise, as they have done since the war — and, I’m sure living standards will, on the whole, continue to rise — people have got more to lose. You know, they’ve packed their homes with high-tech electronic gear. It’s worth burgling the average suburban house, now. Many of them are equipped like TV studios, not to mention things like jewellery. So, one gets this strangely interiorised style of living, where you switch off the outside world, rather like it was some threatening television programme. You do this by treble locking your front door and switching on the alarm system, and then you retreat and watch videos of the World Cup. And that’s not a good recipe for healthy society. Looked at objectively, one could say that cinema, the visual arts, the ‘entertainment’ culture generally, are in a worse state than they have ever been this century. The cinema is a shadow of what it was in the forties. There’s scarcely a novelist worth reading. There’s scarcely a painter or sculptor worth looking at. I’m too old to know if the music scene has the vitality that it had back in the 60s, but I don’t imagine that it has. And, you know, we’re in a culture of substitutes — Elizabeth Hurley. They had Marilyn Monroe, we’ve got Elizabeth Hurley. Something’s gone wrong. Is it that we’re engineering a new kind of life for ourselves that has echoes of those that I describe in this book?

I take it that, if presented with the choice, you’d have no difficulty in choosing between living somewhere like the retirement pueblos on the coast or somewhere like Estrella de Mar?

Well, yeah. I would opt for somewhere like Estrella de Mar, where it’s lively. I mean, it’s silly to say this, because I’m not inviting anyone to come and steal my car or burgle my house; but one always assumes that totalitarian states will be imposed from the outside on the average citizen, that they’ll be sort of horrific and threatening. But in a way, I’ve often thought that the totalitarian systems of the future will be actually rather kind of subservient and ingratiating, and will be imposed from within. We’ll define the terms of the TV mono-culture which we now inhabit, and it’s a pretty empty place. I can imagine, 50 to 100 years from now, social-historians looking back at the closing years of the 20th century and saying, ‘My God, it opened with the flight of the Wright Brothers; halfway through they went to the moon; they discovered scientific miracle upon miracle. And then they ended with people sitting in their little fortified bungalows while the tele-surveillance cameras sweep the streets outside, and they watch reruns of The Rockford Files.’

It’s a nightmare vision.

ABOVE: Cocaine Nights: two Spanish editions.

You mentioned earlier the state of the cinema.

Well, there are exceptions, don’t get me wrong…

Of course. And there’s Crash. I take it you’ve seen the film, and reacted favourably?

Oh, very. I think it’s a brilliant film, an absolute masterpiece. Cronenberg’s best film, I think.

Do you think that any of the rest of us in the UK will ever get the chance to see it?

Oh well, I don’t know you see. I don’t know whether we’re mature enough to cope with such a film. I think the powers-that-be feel it may give us a rush of blood to the head. I hope that we get a chance to see it. It opened a couple of months ago in France, where it did extremely well. In its first week it was the top-grossing film at the French box office. Pretty remarkable when you bear in mind that it couldn’t be further away from the world of Twister and Mission: Impossible. I mean, it’s a serious film.

We’re at a very strange cultural state now. We’re so panicky, so frightened. So nervous of everything that goes on. Some ghastly tragedy happens, like the Dunblane disaster or Hungerford, and people feel that there must be an explanation, there’s got to be some kind of larger reason. Similar mass murders have taken place in England, like the Hungerford tragedy of some years ago, when this youth shot about fifteen or sixteen people, including his own mother. Something like that happens and people think, ‘My God, there must be something wrong with our society.’ And so they find the obvious culprits. After Hungerford people immediately jumped to the conclusion that Michael Ryan, or whatever his name was, had been watching all the Rambo films. Turned out that he hadn’t in fact; he didn’t even own a VCR. But people look for desperate remedies to make sense of some desperate tragedy, but it’s often the wrong way. I think that the distributors are frightened that there’ll be a huge outcry when Crash is released and hundreds of over-excited drivers will start crashing their cars into each other. It doesn’t seem to have happened in France. As far as I know. I think the film will have exactly the opposite effect, and calm everyone down.

Of course, we weren’t deemed mature enough as a society to see A Clockwork Orange, in that instance by the filmmaker himself.

Yeah, Kubrick himself, as you know, pulled that one. You can rent it anywhere else in the world. You can buy it. I bought one abroad, a copy of Clockwork Orange. But he decided for reasons of his own. I think he had young daughters at the time and they were threatened, so he pulled the plug on the film as far as Britain was concerned.

LEFT: Cocaine Nights: German edition.

It seems strange that, in both cases, the country where the source material of the movie was generated is deemed unable to handle the film.

I know. But I mean, this country, we’re heavily censored. The sort of films that you can catch on your Adult Movie Channel in any hotel on the continent, we’d never see here in a million years. The sort of videos you can rent freely in the States will never be available here. We’re far too nervous. So many of the films we see are heavily cut, particularly on video. We’re very heavily censored here. People are frightened. Of course, it’s all bound up in the whole political system here — you can’t give the plebs too much freedom in one direction, because they might start asking for it in another. Who knows where it will end? You know. I think the film will be shown. It’s going to be shown at the London Film Festival in November, and then I think the company will distribute it themselves. I can’t believe that a Cronenberg film, starring Holly Hunter and James Spader and Rosanna Arquette, which won a prize at Cannes, is never going to see the light of day.

Your work has now been filmed by two very different directors. Do you think this says something about the work itself, or are Spielberg and Cronenberg similar in some way that might not be instantly apparent?

I don’t think there really are any similarities between Spielberg and Cronenberg. There aren’t any similarities between Empire of the Sun and Crash, of course. They are very different books. But Cronenberg, Spielberg and myself do share something in common, in that we all spent a large part of our careers in our own versions of science fiction. None of us were working in the mainstream SF field, but in a sort of marginal zone alongside mainstream SF, which we made our own, in different ways. I, in a sort of Inner Space direction, Spielberg more in the kind of…I don’t know how I would describe it…that sort of poetic SF almost, with something like Close Encounters, and Cronenberg in another kind of Inner Space of his own. So we have that in common. But I’ve been very, very lucky to have two of the greatest talents in present day cinema adapting novels of mine.

Is it a spurious piece of lazy critical shorthand to draw parallels between the character of Bobby Crawford in Cocaine Nights and Vaughan in Crash, these deviant Messiahs?

No, I think they are rather similar types, now that you mention it. I think they are. They’re kind of… they are deviant Messiahs. They’re sort of well intentioned psychopaths. They’re public-spirited psychopaths, a very curious blend. They genuinely want to do good and show people the truth. I know that sounds like Adolf Hitler. But neither Vaughan nor Crawford really want to do harm, to do bad for its own sake. Their idea is to do good. Take the blinkers off, show the truth. They’re both small-scale redeemers.

ABOVE: Cocaine Nights: audio book (detail).

It struck me that there are a lot of female doctors cropping up in your work. Is this a conscious, self-referential thing?

Well, I dunno how many there are. I mean, I’ve written a lot of stuff… Of course, I trained as a medical student, and I met a lot of young women doctors, who I probably will meet again, when my time is up. I think I’ve always been intrigued by the notion of the woman doctor but… that’s another story. But it’s true, there have been a few. There’s one in Crash and there’s one in Cocaine Nights .

And in Rushing to Paradise, too.

That’s true, that’s the sort of Margaret Thatcher figure. Another Messianic do-gooder. Another public-spirited psychopath.

Not quite as attractive, though?

Oh, I found her wonderfully attractive. I always had a thing for Margaret Thatcher. Until I grew too old for her.

Have you started on another project?

No, I haven’t. I’m moving ideas around, having a bit of a rest.

Do you have any notion of what might be your place in the British Literary scene, how you fit in?

None at all. I don’t fit in. I’m definitely outside the castle walls. I gather you have a fairly tight-knit Scottish literary scene. I don’t think the English one is like that, it’s very scattered. I get the impression that the Scots, rightly, are today very conscious of their national identity, whereas the English are losing theirs. They’re a bit lost. It’s very large and dispersed. I don’t know what part I play in it. I don’t think I play any part, actually.

Well, time’s about up.

Great. You’ve got enough for about seven lines. It’s been a pleasure. Best of luck.

Copyright © 1996 & 2007 by Damien Love

..:: MORE INFO
+ J.G. Ballard Live in London: Q&A transcripts from the same era discussing similar themes.

This transcript was first published in Sub Dee Magazine (no. 5 Summer 1997), a print project I was involved in long before Ballardian. At the time, J.G. Ballard’s career was in the ascendancy after what was perceived to be an average period in his writing. Cocaine Nights had just been released and was enjoying critical acclaim, with its tale of a hermetically sealed group of pleasure-seekers in the Spanish coastal resort of Estrella de Mar, a typically Ballardian sub-cult a la High-Rise. Also, David Cronenberg’s Crash, the controversial film of Ballard’s eponymous novel, was causing a tidal wave of State-sanctioned moral panic in Britain.

Ballardian is pleased to republish this rare archival piece from one of the most distinctive and controversial phases of JG Ballard’s career.

– Simon Sellars

—————————————————————————————–

KEVIN JACKSON: It seems that Cocaine Nights is a premonition of the future, of a slightly ageing, leisured community.

JG BALLARD: Absolutely. But I think this picture I draw is one that’s been around for quite a long time – people tend to not notice it. These enclave communities with high-security protection have been around for many years; you can read about them in Raymond Chandler. People are terrified of crime and they’re prepared to sacrifice almost anything for peace of mind so they can do nothing, as far as I can tell, except watch a lot of football games on satellite TV.

KEVIN JACKSON: Certain parts of the book advance rather unorthodox ideas about crime: that crime cements a community and that, in more concrete terms, it can be seen as a kind of performance art.

JG BALLARD: Well, the main character has stumbled on a way of waking people up. Life for them becomes keener, sharper, and so these people become more prepared to explore their own imaginations. They’re no longer passive. I’m not suggesting we should all leave our doors unlocked; or that we should burgle our neighbours, who, enriched by the experience, will then bring the violin down from the attic and entertain us with a string quartet… Rather, I think we need to look at the world we inhabit and see how these social aggressions are manufactured. It may be that a civilised life comes at a price.

This monoculture that is emerging, a world of noisy, intruding horror: you just want to get on with what you’re doing, which is nothing. These security-suburbs are a way of shutting out the world, like static on a TV set. The British, especially, have retreated into their own homes. We’re obsessed with a material space where we can define all the elements that make up our lives.

KEVIN JACKSON: In the course of research for the book, did you rely on an intuitive, imaginative approach, or did you actually have a look around these communities.

JG BALLARD: I’ve been visiting the Mediterranean for the last 40 years, and I’ve observed this 3,000 mile-long village, containing however many millions of people… It’s a unique phenomenon. This vast metropolis is 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.

KEVIN JACKSON: I was struck by the similarities between Cocaine Nights‘ protagonist, Crawford – who grants people their deepest, darkest wishes – and the character, Vaughan, in Crash.

JG BALLARD: Yes, these lovable psychopaths occur right throughout all of my fiction. I’m not talking about someone like Adolph Hitler, but nowadays our world is so conformist, we need these crazy ogres, a dangerous personality to bring about change. All of my psychopaths are socially integrated. And they’re benevolent!

KEVIN JACKSON: What part did you play in the making of Cronenberg’s Crash?

JG BALLARD: None. I wasn’t involved and I’m glad I wasn’t. Filmmaking is for professionals – I don’t have my taxman telling me how to construct a plot. Having met Cronenberg, I was aware of the nature of his films and the way he writes, which is alone. And Crash is a great film. I think it’s his greatest film, and a masterpiece, but apparently British audiences don’t deserve to see it!

AUDIENCE QUESTION In Crash you have a character say, ‘It’s not sex that Vaughan’s interested in, but technology’. But I’d have to say that it’s not technology that David Cronenberg’s interested in, but sex. His film seems to strongly identify with current obsessions with body modification – piercing, scarification and so on – and the sexual possibilities of these practices…

JG BALLARD: Cronenberg’s film merges seamlessly with the book. The book is far more explicit, but in the framework of cinema, the film is a remarkable translation in every respect. I don’t feel that the emphasis has been shifted from technology to sex, or that Cronenberg has compromised the novel. The film coolly and elegantly conveys the world we already inhabit in our everyday lives. It’s not pornographic, although that’s not necessarily a bad thing!

AUDIENCE QUESTION Crash is set in Britain. Do you think the change to Canada in the film has impacted on the way in which the story is conveyed?

JG BALLARD: When I met Cronenberg, the question of where the film was to be set came up. I said, ‘Don’t set it in England, set it in North America’. That’s the land of the automobile and of great highways, where the car has an iconic beauty. But the film’s greatest strength is that it is not set in a recognisable North American city, like San Francisco, but in Toronto, a kind of idealised American city.

AUDIENCE QUESTION When will Crash be shown in the UK, and how do you feel about the ongoing controversy surrounding the film and its lack of distribution here.

JG BALLARD: I don’t know when it will be released; I hope it will be. It’s very hard to believe that this film – from a very serious filmmaker – which won a prize at Cannes (even if it was for ‘audacity’) and stars James Spader, Holly Hunter and Rosanna Arquette, is having problems getting a release. It’s really typical of our puritanical society and an indictment of the British conservative attitude towards sex. I mean, the film is showing everywhere else in the world! In France, it’s the Number One box office attraction; as far as I know, it hasn’t caused an upsurge of dangerous driving there, although the French are notoriously bad drivers to begin with!

It says something about us, doesn’t it? We are not considered ‘adult’ and ‘mature’ enough to see this film. We’re too vulnerable; we may go out and behave badly as a result. Are they enlightened, these Virtual Reality Police? It highlights the nervousness of England: we’re trembling in our shoes at the thought of being corrupted by this film, which has far less explicit sex than any Sharon Stone film, far fewer car crashes than the Die Hard movies. In a sense, we’re policing ourselves and that’s the ultimate police state, where people are terrified of challenge.

It goes with the atmosphere in England today. The monarchy has lost its authority; politics is a sleazy game; the church is a farce; bishops turn out to have secret families – Catholic bishops; the city is riddled with insider trading; Lloyds is just a racket. We don’t trust anything and when a terrible tragedy like Dunblane takes place, people jump to conclusions: ‘It must be all those violent films’. But Crash is a cool, elegant , cautionary tale. If you see it, you’ll drive more carefully!

AUDIENCE QUESTION Is the current controversy about the film a rerun of that surrounding the book’s original release?

JG BALLARD: Yes it is – I recognise the same tones of voice. You know, I’ve always respected the Evening Standard’s film critic, Alexander Walker; I think he’s a very liberal man for the most part. But halfway through Crash’s press conference at Cannes, he suddenly got up with a flourish and walked straight out. And when he got back to London, he wrote a piece calling Crash the most depraved film ever made. To me, this represents Total Artistic Success!

It’s very hard to estimate these things, but Crash wouldn’t incite any kind of behaviour, whereas the broad mass of American films – which I love, needless to say – can be genuinely corrupting, as they tend to trivialise death and pain in a tidal wave of fantasised violence. Crash is a warning about the desperate need people have to make contact with each other, and how they’ll find the most deviant means of doing so. It’s a love story in many ways, about the love between a wife and husband.

AUDIENCE QUESTION You write a lot about technology and its impact on people. At the same time, you are quoted as saying you’re not interested in technology. Can you talk about that?

JG BALLARD: Well, I am quite fascinated by technology – most homes these days are approaching the technological level of a TV studio! Now, how has technology changed our lives? I’m interested in that interaction with people, and in Crash, with the car, which is like an extension of the home. We’re loaded with technological systems, all converging in the automobile. I’m interested in the psychology arising from these systems and how they modify our imaginations, and how we relate to one other.

AUDIENCE QUESTION In Crash, you call the protagonist by your own name. Why?

JG BALLARD: Well, the book is written in the first person – these are my own speculations and obsessions, whatever you like to call them. I wanted to root the book – with its real-life film star, Elizabeth Taylor – in my obsessions. This is my psychopathology; the book is a psychopathological hymn and I’m singing it. Attaching my name to the protagonist’s reminds the reader where these ideas are coming from: a real human being, a ‘real’ reality.

AUDIENCE QUESTION Cocaine Nights reminded me of your novella, Running Wild. Could one of the young boys in that book have grown up to be Crawford?

JG BALLARD That’s a good point. I wrote Running Wild about an enclave in the Thames Valley, where maximum security is the order of the day – it’s very similar to communities all over the world, but particularly in the United States where they’ve been in place for the last fifty years. And in my Thames Valley enclave, the children mysteriously murder their parents; it’s not so much a ‘whodunnit’ as a ‘whydunnit’. I think a similar logic underpins Cocaine Nights, because people are obsessed with the phenomenon of total security now without realising that it’s bought at such a huge price. The home is now an electronic fortress: you switch on your triple security locks and your hidden cameras and you’re virtually switching off the world. But, in a sense, you’re also switching off the central nervous system that evolution provides us with.

There may be a totally sterilised kind of life that is led in these enclaves, which is probably the way the future is going. More and more of the professional middle class – doctors, lawyers architects, dentists, middle management – are retreating, all over the world, from the center of cities into purpose-built estates where security is the big come-on in the developers’ brochures. I just wonder: if the world is going to be like this, what’s the outlook?

AUDIENCE QUESTION How would you compare that vision of high security with the sort of thing that’s going on in the Walt Disney theme towns – artificially created settlements reacting against the typical North American city, providing a return to ‘roots’ and ‘traditional’ values, searching for something that’s been lost…

JG BALLARD Well, these theme parks and heritage enclaves are another kind of artificial substitute for reality, aren’t they? Ordinary reality is too messy and confusing – why not construct a replica to satisfy all your instant needs for heritage? There’s no litter, it’s comfortable and if somebody has a heart attack, an ambulance disguised as the Fairy Queen will sweep them away to some high-tech creche. But this isn’t reality, it’s not even a dream. It’s sort of a halfway house between the two.

I’m not trying to say that the majority of people, 30 thirty years from now, will be living in ultra high-tech enclaves with no contact with the rest o the human race, turning the inner city centres into a kind of urban guerilla battle ground… However, you can see in the US and Europe extraordinary urban developments based absolutely on the need for total security.

I’ve been visiting a town near Antibes, in the South of France, where there’s a huge new complex housing 10, 000 people in total security – armed guards, everything – to the extent that every apartment has what they call ‘Medical Tele-Linkage’ with the local hospital. So if you’re sitting in your high-tech security apartment and you have what you think is a slight heart attack, you rapidly code in ‘heart attack’ and the screen flashes up in some paramedic’s office – who’s probably in a suburb of Dusseldorf or wherever the records are kept – who then dials back what you should do about it. Now this is bizarre! The intercession of a doctor, nurse or comforter is completely absent; it’s assumed that we don’t need contact on face-to-face level. And in a way, the Disneyland theme parks and their imitators are a way for people to avoid any sort of contact with a real past.

AUDIENCE QUESTION Would you say that Cocaine Nights is similar to your earlier book, High Rise? They both contain similar themes which you obviously want the reader to believe strongly in.

JG BALLARD No, I wouldn’t actually. In any case, I leave things open for the reader. In a lot of my supposedly ‘dystopian’ novels, I don’t say that the sort of thesis Crawford is proposing is what I accept. That’s a silly responsibility…

AUDIENCE QUESTION Is High Rise being made into a film? I remember reading that a screenplay had been written.

JG BALLARD There have been options taken out, but the whole process of movie making, especially in Hollywood, is so convoluted that nothing has seen the light of day.

AUDIENCE QUESTION The situation in Cocaine Nights only represents one section of property owners; the vast majority would be very alienated from that. It’s so negligible and meanwhile the alternative culture flourishes and those people eventually die off. So it’s a cause for celebration, not depression.

JG BALLARD What I’m saying is that over the last 20 or 30 years in Europe – longer in the US (and it was evident in the Shanghai I lived in before the war) – a minority of middle class professionals – any term you like – retain the greatest energising and creative input into life. And they’ve decided for reasons of security to remove themselves from the hurly-burly of city life. American cities were the first to show this; it’s now happening here, Nairobi, Singapore. They’re subtracting themselvs from the whole of these civic interactions that depend on them, virtually conducting an internal immigration – and that’s dangerous. It’s the middle classes who are now abandoning hope and that’s not a good sign, particularly as they’re moving into these sterile communities where, by the nature of security systems, they’re isolated and their only form of contact is via a TV screen.

AUDIENCE QUESTION I’d like to ask you about Empire of the Sun. Do you think you would have been a writer anyway, or did the experience of living in Shanghai push you in that direction?

JG BALLARD I was probably set to be a writer. I was born in 1930 and already in the late ’30s, I was writing short stories; I had an overactive imagination which was a great strain on my parents and friends. In fact, the war gave me a subject matter which I didn’t really write about directly for 40 years. The war made me realise that reality was just a stage set; you couldn’t trust anything , and it made me intensely interested in change. That’s why I started writing science fiction to begin with, because science fiction was about change.

AUDIENCE QUESTION Are you a devotee of the internet?

JG BALLARD Actually, I’m not hooked up to the internet, which is rather bad of me. I write all my books in longhand – don’t believe all this stuff I say about technology! My girlfriend has a PC and a modem, but we don;t seem able to connect it up. But I love the idea. my dream would be to download the entire Harvard University database, or to consult every psychiatric journal ever published. However, I’m terrified that if I do get the modem working, I’d never do anything else!

The Atrocity Exhibition is a profound and disquieting book. The nonsexual roots of sexuality are explored with a surgeon’s precision. An auto-crash can be more more sexually stimulating than a pornographic picture. (Surveys indicate that wet dreams in many cases have no overt sexual content, whereas dreams with an overt sexual content in many cases do not result in orgasm). The book opens: ‘A disquieting feature of this annual exhibition … was the marked preoccupation of the paintings with the theme of world cataclysm, as if these long-incarcerated patients had sensed some seismic upheaval within the minds of their doctors and nurses’.

The line between inner and outer landscapes is breaking down. Earthquakes can result from seismic upheavals within the human mind. The whole random universe of the industrial age is breaking down into cryptic fragments: ‘In a waste lot of wrecked cars he found the burnt body of the white Pontiac, the nasal prepuce of LBJ, crashed helicopters, Eichmann in drag, a dead child …’ The human body becomes landscape: ‘A hundred-foot-long panel that seemed to represent a section of sand dune … looking at it more closely Doctor Nathan realized that it was an immensely magnified portion of the skin over the iliac crest …’ This magnification of image to the point where it becomes unrecognizable is a keynote of The Atrocity Exhibition. This is what Bob Rauschenberg is doing in art — literally blowing up the image. Since people are made of image, this is literally an expensive book. The human image explodes into rocks and stones and trees: ‘The porous rock towers of Tenerife exposed the first spinal landscape … clinker-like rock towers suspended above the silent swamp. In the mirror of this swamp there are no reflections. Time makes no concessions’.

Sexual arousal results from the repetition and impact of image: ‘Each afternoon in the deserted cinema: the latent sexual content of automobile crashes … James Dean, Jayne Mansfield, Albert Camus … Many volunteers became convinced that the fatalities were still living and later used one or the other of the crash victims as a private focus of arousal during intercourse with the domestic partner’.

James Dean kept a hangman’s noose dangling in his living room and put it around his neck to pose for news pictures. A painter named Milton, who painted a sexy picture entitled ‘The Death of James Dean’, subsequently committed suicide. This book stirs sexual depths untouched by the hardest-core illustrated porn. ‘What will follow is the psychopathology of sex relationships so lunar and abstract that people will become mere extensions of the geometries of situations. This will allow the exploration without any trace of guilt of every aspect of sexual psychopathology’.

Immensely magnified portion of James Dean subsequently committed suicide. Conception content relates to sexual depths of the hardest minds. Eichmann in drag in a waste lot of wrecked porous rock.

– William Burroughs, preface to The Atrocity Exhibition, 1970