This is the foreword to the Greek edition of Ballard’s Miracles of Life, due to be published by Oxy in November 2009.

In 2006 I interviewed Jim Ballard. I was nervous at the thought of matching wits with this towering figure but my anxiety was quickly banished, for he was a charming and generous conversationalist. Although taxed from the recent discovery of the cancer that would claim him, he applied his blowtorch intelligence to everything from CSI and the ‘soft fascism’ of consumer culture to the surreality of having an English queen as an Australian head of state, weaving such cultural flashpoints in among the warps and wefts of a philosophy that has sustained his writing across 19 novels and around 100 short stories. Performing a similar function, but in reverse, his wonderful memoir contextualises some of the darkest and strangest corners of his fiction – as elements hotwired into his life.

It was never easy, perhaps not even possible for Ballard to separate his life from his work. Nominally English, he was born in Shanghai and lived in the expatriate community there before being interned in 1943 with his family in Lunghua, a Japanese war camp. He didn’t see England until he was 16. Accordingly, the Shanghai years, and the squalor and horror of Lunghua, take up almost half of Miracles, an index to its deep psychological fissures. Marguerite Duras once said she only truly recognised herself in her novels, not the biographies written about her. Perhaps Ballard felt the same. Like Duras, who also wrote iterative, fictionalised accounts of her expatriate upbringing in Saigon, he has practised a form of time travel throughout his career, most famously in the 1984 novel Empire of the Sun, reinhabiting his Lunghua memories in numerous stories, blurring the edges in each incarnation, incrementally shifting the background scenery, erasing forever the demarcation between fiction and reality. The summoning of memory is a key theme in Miracles. But it is memory that becomes hopelessly, irrevocably contaminated with the writer’s imaginative life. The sudden death of his wife, Mary, in 1964 takes up barely a page, but Ballard’s dream of her returning to his world to say goodbye takes up considerably more, as does a discussion of his experimental novel The Atrocity Exhibition, which Ballard has said was in part his attempt to sublimate the hurt and anger he felt at losing Mary so unexpectedly. Motifs from Ballard’s fiction bleed into the autobiographical frame, reversing the process set in train by Empire. When he writes that he was drawn to science fiction because it examined the trend towards ‘politics conducted as a branch of advertising’, we recognise the echoes from Crash, where the phrase was first used in the original introduction to that work.

Significantly, when he describes his holidays with his girlfriend Claire and his children, he says they took very few photographs for ‘memory is the greatest gallery in the world, and I can play an endless archive of images of the happy time’. Looking back at the creative process that led to Empire, he suggests, ‘I was frisking myself of memories that popped out of every pocket. By the time I finished, Shanghai had advanced out of its own mirage and become a real city again’. Bizarrely, when Empire becomes a Spielberg film and production begins at the studios near his home in Shepperton, Ballard describes how his neighbours are recruited as extras in the film, portraying his fellow Lunghua inmates. Christian Bale, playing the young Jim, comes up to him to announce, ‘Hello, Mr Ballard, I’m you’. At every turn, Lunghua erupts from the subconscious well. The sense is of a man simultaneously cursed and blessed with the task of processing a remarkable upbringing – blessed, because to Ballard Lunghua was his ‘happy childhood’, an experience that, although shocking, fed the first stirrings of his startling imagination.

Perhaps surprisingly for an autobiography, there’s very little ego on display and not much gossip, save for a scurrilous tale about Kingsley Amis, which sounds like it’s common coin anyway. But there is extraordinary detail. Interspersed throughout are lingering snapshots that impart a sense of a man enamoured of his three children (the ‘miracles of life’ that give the book its title), of his wife Mary and, later, Claire … and of cats. Ballard’s eye is as scalpel-sharp as ever, and his remembrances of domestic bliss, ‘days of wonder’ with the kids – like the vivid scene where he takes them scavenging among abandoned film sets – resonate with as much intensity as the immorality of the early Shanghai street scenes, or the bleak humour inhabiting his medical-student days when he would dissect corpses and keep skeletons under his bed.

Finally, Miracles of Life is another version of his past, as gloriously open-minded as all his fiction. It is brief, modest, honest – and poignant, with Ballard confronting his cancer in the final chapter. But shortly before this terminal appointment, Ballard realises ‘the true nature of my assignment. I was looking for my younger self’. Perhaps he is like the man in Chris Marker’s La Jetée, a film that he openly admired, about the mutability of memory. In La Jetée, the man, via the peculiarities of time travel, realises that as a boy he had witnessed his own death. In Miracles, via the peculiarities of auto(bio)graphy, Ballard time travels with the ongoing revelation that as a boy, Lunghua was the map of his future. Miracles, then, reunites his younger self with the older man, allowing Ballard to again see through young Jim’s eyes, viewing his own impending death with detached, yet remarkably clear vision.

Simon Sellars, June 2009.

All photography by Simon Sellars.

Bizarrely, it has been almost a year since I posted the first part of this photo essay. There are so many loose ends dangling from this site, frayed and incomplete due to the mad scramble to complete my PhD in the latter half of 2008. Now it’s my mission to clear the backlog as best I can, beginning with this, the conclusion to ‘”Paradigm of Nowhere”: Shepperton, a photo essay’, my attempt to traverse the fantasy-film of Ballard’s Unlimited Dream Company playing in my head. As I wrote in Part 1, I had intended to take photographs of Shepperton, the arena that has supplied so much raw material for Ballard’s writing, but at the same time I had no intention of infringing on his privacy. What I was aiming for instead was the traversal of a distinct psychic terrain (studiously avoiding the dreaded “p*****geography” word): the blanket overlay of Shepperton with a mental template gleaned from so many Ballard novels and short stories, UDC in particular.

In Part 1, we set out from Shepperton train station, making a direct line for the fields and water meadows surrounding the motorway just past Ballard’s street. Crossing this metallized river by bridge, which Blake in The Unlimited Dream Company was unable to do, we made our way to the famous film studios, which feature prominently in the book (doubtless Blake made it by flying). Now in Part 2, we explore the reservoirs near the film studios before crossing back over the motorway and into town, finally alighting in Old Shepperton, where we attempt to locate the exact spot where Blake ditched his plane in the Thames.

I was struck by the fact, when I [first] came [to Shepperton], that I was living in a sort of marine landscape, most unusual. There are these enormous reservoirs, the nearest is only four or five hundred yards away, the Queen Mary Reservoir, which is a gigantic reservoir about a mile in diameter. The whole area in fact is infested with reservoirs and settling beds and conduits and little private canals. When you fly from London airport, when you look down while the plane circles around, you will see what looks like a huge expanse of water, with the Thames of course here too.

J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Alan Burns, 1974.

Above is the entrance to the reservoir that worked its magic on Ballard’s psyche. Although we were disappointed that the reservoir embankment was fenced-off and inaccessible, it must be remembered that for a man of Ballard’s imaginative powers, it would not be necessary to empirically observe a water body to imagine Shepperton — or London — submerged.

Rather, the reservoir is high above us; we are literally ‘under water’.

In fact, [in Shepperton] we’re living … on little causeways. There are huge gravel lakes as well; for a hundred years they’ve been digging sand out, and some of these old pits are damn big, ten times the size of the Serpentine. We’re living in these houses, these little quiet suburban streets, which are little causeways running between these reservoirs. Most of them are invisible because there are high embankments for obvious reasons; the Water Board doesn’t want people peeing in them, throwing cigarette ends in and so on. So they’re well screened off, but one is aware of a sort of invisible marine world, of living below the water line. It works on you imaginatively after a while.

JGB, interviewed by Burns, 1974.

It was plainly not by chance that I had crash-landed my burning aircraft into this riverside town. On all sides Shepperton was surrounded by water — gravel lakes and reservoirs, the settling beds, canals and conduits of the local water authority, the divided arms of the river fed by a maze of creeks and streams. The high embankments of the reservoirs formed a series of raised horizons, and I realized that I was wandering through a marine world. The dappled light below the trees fell upon an ocean floor. Unknown to themselves, these modest suburbanites were exotic marine creatures with the dream-filled minds of aquatic mammals. Around these placid housewives with their tamed appliances everything was suspended in a profound calm. Perhaps the glimmer of threatening light I had seen over Shepperton was a premonitory reflection of this drowned suburban town?

J.G. Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company.

I am a scholar of Ballard’s interviews, especially the ‘Golden Age’ spanning the late 60s to the mid-70s. I find them endlessly fascinating. Once you have a good knowledge of the many interviews he has given, you begin to unravel themes and motifs that he has discoursed on at length before committing to fiction. These interviews are laboratories in which Ballard unleashes thought experiments upon his unwitting interrogators, who sometimes are unable to keep up (see his 1974 conversation with Carol Orr, where Orr seems quite flustered, taken aback at the brutal clarity of Ballard’s futurology). Having taken his creations for a dry run, we then find them machine-tooled and recalibrated in his writing: compare the previous quotes from the Burns interview (‘I was living in a sort of marine landscape’), with the one above from UDC (‘I realized that I was wandering through a marine world’). It’s a fascinating, holographic process, and in some cases appears to work retrospectively. In the Burns interview, for example, Ballard is talking about when he first settled in Shepperton with his wife and kids in 1960. Now we know where the inspiration for The Drowned World, published in 1962, really came from…

Or is it all an elaborate metaphysical game — another version of Ballard’s maddening, yet emancipatory, version of circular time?

It was now late afternoon, and the bridge approaches were filled with traffic returning from London. Although Walton lay to the south of Shepperton, even further from the airport, at least it would spring me from this zone of danger.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

…back across the bridge and into town, crossing the always-flowing metal sea that seems to both energise and enervate the citizens in UDC’s version of Shepperton.

I … set off for the pedestrian bridge that spanned the motorway. Poppies and yellow broom brushed my legs, hopefully leaving their pollen on me. They flowered among the debris of worn tyres and abandoned mattresses. To my right was a furniture hypermarket, its open courtyard packed with three-piece suites, dining-tables and wardrobes, through which a few customers moved in an abstracted way, like spectators in a boring museum. Next to the hypermarket was an automobile repair yard, its forecourt filled with used cars. They sat in the sunlight with numerals on their windshields, the advance guard of a digital universe in which everything would be tagged and numbered, a doomsday catalogue listing each stone and grain of sand under my feet, each eager poppy.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

To my utter amazement, the virtual and the actual continued to merge down to the smallest detail: as we began walking back to Shepperton centre through the parkland just over the bridge, we noticed pollen from poppies and yellow broom dusted on the legs of my jeans. Suitably tagged with Ballardian seed, I dutifully followed the road back into town.

That evening I saw the faces of the three crippled children watching me through the damp light, small moons quietly circling each other. They squatted among the dead flowers and macaws, and played with the pennants of my blood. Rachel fondled them, her blind eyes flickering raptly, trying to read their mysterious codes, cryptic messages from another universe transmitted by the ticker-tape of my heart.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

When you observe Shepperton through a Ballardian lens, everything seems in code. I imagined Rachel had daubed the back of this sign with the glyphs of her psyche, marked out using the pennants of Blake’s blood.

Already I was convinced that there was no evil, and that even the most plainly evil impulses were merely crude attempts to accept the demands of a higher realm that existed within each of us. By accepting these perversions and obsessions I was opening the gates into the real world, where we would all fly together, transform ourselves at will into the fish and the birds, the flowers and the dust, unite ourselves once more within the great commonwealth of nature.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

In the book, Blake encourages all to slip the noose of consumerism, to rouse from the waking dream of late capitalism, to throw down whitegoods and gadgets and escape into the unfetettered realm of the imagination, passing through into a micronational realm, ‘the commonwealth of nature’, responsible to no master, least of all bored London admen selling lifestyles to the satellite towns. Pyramids of discarded goods line the streets, expanding upon the consumer bricolage of ‘The Ultimate City’ and presaging the razed shopscapes of Kingdom Come.

Here, the barbaric razor wire surrounding something as banal as the Shepperton Carpet & Flooring Centre triggered something suitably apocalyptic in my mind.

Over my head the sky brightened, bathing the placid roofs in an auroral light, transforming this suburban high street into an avenue of temples. I felt queasy and leaned against the chestnut tree outside the post office. I waited for this retinal illusion to pass, unsure whether to halt the passing traffic and warn these ruminating women that they and their offspring were about to be annihilated.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

Above: Shepperton’s placid high street, over-ripe for transcendence and transformation…

There is an antiseptic quality about Pangbourne Village, as if these company directors, financiers and television tycoons have succeeded in ridding their private Parnassus of every strain of dirt and untidiness. Here, even the drifting leaves look as if they have too much freedom. Thirteen children once lived in these houses, but it is hard to visualize them at play.

J.G. Ballard, Running Wild.

I recalled the above quote from Running Wild when I came across this leaf that had been embedded in the tarmac. It seemed to be lacquered solid into the road surface, losing any semblance of nature, losing its ability to drift, its colours supervivid and oversaturated; the organic encased in concrete, the fusing of the animate with the inanimate: UDC in a nutshell.

Waiting for release…

Soon after dawn the river had disgorged this antique Pegasus on to the same beach where I had swum ashore. I approached the horse and pulled it on to the bank. The fresh paint silvered my hands, leaving a speckled trail across the sand. As I wiped the paint on to the grass, the pelicans watched me from the flowerbeds. The same vivid light flared from their plumage. The foliage of the willows and ornamental firs seemed to have been retouched by a psychedelic gardener with a taste for garish colours. A magpie swooped across the overlit lawn, feathers brilliant as a macaw’s.

Stimulated by this display of light, I stared into the stained water.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

The levels in this photograph have been messed with to give it a suitably lysergic feel — as much a cliche as it sounds, UDC feels like an acid trip; but the synaesthetic elements of tripping, rather than any notions of ‘cosmic consciousness’. Ballard’s work, after all, is relentlessly about reordering and recoding the senses to subvert dominant systems of control.

We were soon more than a mile above Shepperton, this jungle town surrounded by its palisade of forest bamboo, an Amazon enclave set down here in the quiet valley of the Thames.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

Above: the jungle-like gateway to Old Shepperton, the third part of the town’s tripartite structure (high street/reservoir/old town)… and representing our best chance of locating the sunken Cessna.

Pinned to the wall were the X-ray plates of my head, deformed jewels through which a ghostly light still shone, like that corona of destruction I had first seen over Shepperton.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

In interviews, Ballard has often said that in the suburbs one needs to perform a deviant act almost daily — like kicking the dog — to get a charge out of one’s flaccid existence. This ‘report vandalism’ sign, itself vandalised by a blob of incoherent spray paint, amused me, as I imagined it to be the first bumbling stirrings of Blake’s legions awakening themselves from their perimeter-town stupor.

The sun hid itself behind my naked body, dazzled by the tropical vegetation that had invaded this modest suburban town. Pausing to rest, the crowd began to settle itself. Mothers and their infants sat on the appliances in the shopping mall, children perched on the branches of the banyan tree, elderly couples relaxed in the rear seats of the abandoned cars. There was a sense of intermission.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

Intermission: lurking in the background, the invading chaotic rhizomes of supernature prepare to engulf the arboreal trap-cars and litter patrols of civic duty.

Father Wingate unlocked the doors of the church. ‘So it was a dream … ? I’m relieved to hear you say so, Blake.’ He stepped through the doors and beckoned me to follow him. ‘Right — we’ll get this over with.’

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

If I had known that only ten minutes after taking off from London Airport the burning machine was to crash into the Thames, would I still have climbed into its cock-pit? Perhaps even then I had a confused premonition of the strange events that would take place in the hours following my rescue.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

When Blake crashes into the Thames at Shepperton, I can’t help but think of Ballard hitting the town in 1960, wondering what he had got himself in for, but deciding after all, in a strange way, that his perverse talent could be explored to the hilt here. When Blake’s love interest, Miriam St Cloud, dies, I can’t help but think of Ballard’s wife, Mary (known as “Miriam” in The Kindness of Women, of course), and her sudden death in 1964. When Blake teaches the townspeople to not only fly but to explore the farthest reaches of their sexuality, I can’t help but think of the obsessed Ballard, stricken with grief at the death of his wife, hatching The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash on an unsuspecting world; what must the good people of Shepperton have thought of this ‘madman’ lurking in their midst? When Blake is shot down by Stark, I can’t help but think of the storms of outrage that greeted Crash on its publication — and perhaps of Ballard’s later, more cautious narrative approach, when he managed to touch the same veins of psychopathology in his work, but without flying as close to the sun himself.

The final pages of UDC are touching, as Blake yearns to once again merge with Miriam in the afterlife. Ballard has always stared with extraordinarily clear, unmisted eyes at the spectre of death, perhaps never more so than in this book. Ballard’s announcement that he has cancer is very sad, of course, but I can think of no other writer more prepared for whatever may follow.

I decide to visit J.G. Ballard at Shepperton. How does he feel about predicting, and thereby confirming, the psychogeography of Heathrow’s retail/recreation fallout zone? The river was my target… We drove to a riverside pub and, too hot to sit outside, lounged under an overhead fan in a comfortable, clubbish atmosphere. … He’s here, but he doesn’t belong. I think of him as a long-term sleeper, an intelligence operative forgotten by his paymasters.

Iain Sinclair, London Orbital.

The Cessna was almost submerged, its wings tipping below the sweeping tide. As I watched, the fuselage turned and slipped below the coverlet of the water. When the river had carried it away I walked across the beach to the bone-bed of the winged creature whose place I was about to take. I would lie down here, in this seam of ancient shingle, a couch prepared for me millions of years earlier.

There I would rest, certain now that one day Miriam would come for me. Then we would set off, with the inhabitants of all the other towns in the valley of the Thames, and in the world beyond.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

Here it is: the exact spot where Blake crashed his plane into the river. How did we know? Call it instinct…

Ballard said that The Unlimited Dream Company was yet another preview of his, at the time, still-to-be-written autobiography; thus the book’s transformation of Shepperton is about ‘the writer’s imagination, and in particular my own imagination, transforming the humdrum reality that he occupies and turning it into an unlimited dream company’ (interview with David Pringle, 1996).

The book is a beautifully vivid evocation of Ballard’s love for Shepperton. He may playfully run it down in interviews, but it’s precisely Shepperton’s anonymity that has allowed Ballard to play out his own psychopathology in the pages of his books. He has lived there for almost 50 years now and virtually his entire ouevre has been composed within its boundaries. If, as Ballard has repeatedly claimed, the nature of fiction and reality has reversed in the post-war era, with the imagination the only true node of reality left in a world of endlessly mediated fictions, then The Unlimited Dream Company can be read as more autobiographical than either of Ballard’s so-called ‘semi-autobiographical’ works, Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women.

In this light, visiting the place is an enriching experience, as Iain Sinclair identifies from his own Shepperton sojourn:

“To be here, in bright sunshine, a small Thames-side town where nobody hurries, is to balance on a hinge. Specifics of the geography that inspired a writer seem, in their turn, to be responding to that ouevre.”

To take a trip to (or even in) Shepperton, ‘the everywhere of suburbia, the paradigm of nowhere’, as Blake declares, is to submit to a form of virtual reality that anyone admiring of Ballard’s work simply must experience.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ ‘Paradigm of nowhere’: Shepperton, a photo essay, part 1
+ JGB: a ‘billionaire’ in Shepperton?
+ J.G. Ballard: The Oracle of Shepperton
+ Sam Scoggins: ‘Unlimited Dream Company’ film
+ A Home and a Grave: Mike Holliday on The Unlimited Dream Company
+ Shepperton under water

Ballard and the meaning of life

Agent Margaret Hanbury, who is enjoying her 25th Frankfurt Book Fair as an independent agent, touched down with something rather special in her briefcase: a new book by J G Ballard. An envelope arrived, quite out of the blue, a couple of weeks back — Hanbury admits she assumed it was a royalty query.

In fact it contained an outline for a new book, working title Conversations with My Physician. The physician in question is oncologist Professor Jonathan Waxman of Imperial College, London, who
is treating Ballard for prostate cancer. While it is in part a book about cancer, and Ballard’s struggle with it, it moves on to broader themes — indeed, the subtitle is The Meaning, if Any, of Life. The
agent — whose careful handling of Katie Price has propelled the artist formerly known as Jordan to the top of the charts, and to great wealth — is talking to Ballard’s long-standing publishers, among them Fourth Estate in the UK.

It is a poignant moment for Hanbury: in 1983, she arrived in Frankfurt with the manuscript for Empire of the Sun in her briefcase. Ballard’s semi-autobiographical novel went on to be shortlisted for the 1984 Booker Prize, losing to Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac; it won the Guardian Fiction Prize and, four years later, became a Stephen Spielberg film.

[thanks, Tim C]

by Rick McGrath

ABOVE: Rick talking to CCCB Director-General Josep Ramoneda on opening night. Photo by Christian Mauri from Spain’s El Mundo newspaper.

Hola, Simon, and buenos dias from Barcelona.

I’m currently standing in the Carrer de Montalegre, a narrow street deep in the university section of Barcelona. Behind me is the university’s Dept of Philosophy, and I’m standing in the overbright sunlight, looking at an imposing 18th century building which is currently the home of the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB)… and even more currently the home of the very first museum exhibition ever dedicated to the life and work of JG Ballard.

It’s a great place to be…

I’ve been here two days now, and have toured the show three times in different guises – as it was being finished, once with the Press, and finally at the Grand Opening with Barcelona VIPs – and to tell you the truth, I’m feeling a little late with this report, as I’ve already read all the various and sundry exhibition press releases you and the rest of the world’s media have published. And besides, I was out each Barcelonian night with a short story of fellow Ballardians, and one must follow one’s obsessions. So I thought I wouldn’t cover that ground again. Instead, I’d like to treat you to an overall taste of the experience – a sort of old-fashioned slide show with commentary – a visual tour of what visitors to this extraordinary exhibition will see and experience.

OK, you ready? Visitor’s pass showing?

ABOVE: CCCB exterior.

The first bit of irony comes quickly when you discover this building was first constructed as a hospital. What better place to perform an Autopsy of the New Millennium? Crossing the street we enter the building thru an archway – to the left is the Museum’s administration offices, to the right the ubiquitous gift shop. Ahead is a huge courtyard, empty save for a few trees and student-filled lounge chairs. The building retains its ancient decorations on three sides, and these walls face an angled wall of glass, which rises and tips protectively over the courtyard.

ENTERING THE EXHIBITION

ABOVE: Spain’s longest escalator… a sort of Kingdom Come message to rise into the imaginary…

The trip into the exhibition itself is a Ballardian experience of corridors and obsessively angled floors. It’s a maze. You first walk along the left wall of the courtyard, noticing what must be medical slogans from the 1700s painted on the ornate tiles, then you’re suddenly at a hidden entrance. Turning right, you walk down a long, slow incline, mirrored on the right wall, to a set of hidden doors. Entering, you reverse direction and descend again down another long incline which empties into to a large auditorium with information booths, ticket sales, and a large screen showing the CCCB’s specially-made promotional video for the show.

You’ve already commented on this vid, Simon, so we’ll pass thru here and then climb a series of long, open stairs, which leads us into the new glass tower and onto Spain’s longest escalator – a three-story monster right out of Kingdom Come – which delivers us to the Exhibition’s entrance and a charming young lady who would like to see our passes, por favor.

ABOVE: Martin Amis pontificates; the media records.

We’re here. I’d suggest we put on our surgical masks and rubber gloves now. The first room we enter is actually not part of the Autopsy itself, but a sort of literary introduction to what follows. What we see is a video projection onto a wall that features a number of writers, English and Spanish, French and Catalan, extolling the influence and seductive qualities of Ballard’s work. John Clute, Martin Amis and Catherine Millet I recognized, and once your mind has been properly attuned and your Ballard glasses are in focus, it’s time to enter the Autopsy Rooms proper.

AUTOPSY #1: What I Believe

I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.

This section is called “Credo”, and it’s a multimedia effort with a wall of words and hidden, tiny mirrors, JGB’s dulcet tones, and three video screens repeating what JG says he believes in Spanish, Catalan and English. It’s a repetition of JG’s piece in the January 1984 issue of Science Fiction magazine, in which he summarises his obsessions and their often-disturbing logic.

If you stand in precisely the right spot, the words on the wall before you also reveal tiny mirrors reflecting the light from an electric candle. The words that appear on the TV screens also melt and fade, ebbing and flowing with the tidal resonance of Ballard’s musical speech. It’s a fascinating experience, and I noted both the press and VIPs were mesmerised by the incantory nature of this first cut into the body of our culture.

AUTOPSY #2: From Shanghai to Shepperton

ABOVE: After the 1937 bombing.

I believe in the forgotten runways of Wake Island, pointing towards the Pacifics of our imaginations.

From Credo we dip back in time to JG’s youth in Shanghai and Lunghua camp where the Japanese interned JG and his family for three years. This display begins with a loop from Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun, where young Jimmy attempts to bring the young Japanese kamikaze pilot back to life, and then settles into the real thing in a cleverly-constructed room which shows scenes from the camp on one wall, and opposite, separated by prison-like planking, scenes from the destruction of Shanghai.

ABOVE: Watching Shanghai Jim.

Against the far wall runs a continuous vid of Shanghai Jim, JG’s BBC-produced return to Lunghua in 1991. The CCCB organizers (I’ll laud them later) have done a terrific job of assembling period photographs of Shanghai under siege, and many of these photos I’ve not seen before… but have unconsciously experienced in JG’s work. The camp is represented by a series of soft watercolours, in stark opposition to the black and white photographs of war, and I was pleased and surprised to see the image of Lunghua camp survivor Irene Duguid in two of the photos – I had the pleasure of sitting and talking with her at her home in Surrey just four days earlier.

AUTOPSY #3: Landscapes of Dream

ABOVE: From the surreal image “machine”.

I believe in Max Ernst, Delvaux, Dali, Titian, Goya, Leonardo, Vermeer, Chirico, Magritte, Redon, Duerer, Tanguy, the Facteur Cheval, the Watts Towers, Boecklin, Francis Bacon, and all the invisible artists within the psychiatric institutions of the planet.

This is one of my favourite autopsy rooms. It begins with a short quote from Miracles of Life printed just inches from the floor on a black wall: “At the age of 16, I discovered Freud and the surrealists, a stick of bombs that fell in front of me and destroyed all the bridges I was hesitating to cross.”

This room contains just three exhibits, but powerful ones they are: a photo of JG in his home at Shepperton in front of his Delvaux painting, a new version of the painting specially done for this show by Brigid Marlin (it’s dated 2008), and the piece de resistance, an incredible surreal image generator! As the CCCB press release says: “His writings not only recreates many of the visions of Surrealism, it also reproduces some of its aesthetic strategies – superimpositions, mirroring, false perspectives, mutations – in order to explain the profound structure of the real.”

ABOVE: From the surreal image “machine”.

These strategies are all visualised in this very clever display: ten or so sheets of thin, white muslin cloth have been suspended from the ceiling, approximate three feet apart. At each end a projector illuminates a slowly changing series of images from famous surrealist paintings onto the cloth. Walking back and forth and up and down between the sheets reveals an endlessly-changing collage of images from the likes of Dali, Ernst and Delvaux, spinning endlessly thru impositions and mutations. I spent a lot of time in this room. You will, too.

AUTOPSY #4: Inner Space

ABOVE: Pixelated Ballard.

I believe in madness, in the truth of the inexplicable, in the common sense of stones, in the lunacy of flowers, in the disease stored up for the human race by the Apollo astronauts.

Now we’re moving into more familiar territory – this section deals with the ramifications of JG’s 1962 New Worlds editorial, “Which Way To Inner Space?” Visitors are treated to wall-projected vids of JG’s favourite SF movies (Alien, Alphaville, Barbarella, Close Encounters, Dark Star, Dr Strangelove, Forbidden Planet, Silent Running, The Man Who Fell To Earth, and The Road Warrior) and opposite these imaginary images we move to the real with vids from Cape Canaveral space program projected upon the opposite wall – but in reverse… then you note the large central display case is mirrored and the visuals magically right themselves.

ABOVE: From Rick’s JGB collection.

In this display case are souvenirs of JG’s 1969 trip to Rio for the International Festival of Cinema, and, oh look – some items from my collection have made an appearance: early SF pulps from the 1950s, various magazines, such as Interzone, and literary newspapers such as Bananas. The only thing here I had not seen is a rather Hollywood-inspired photo of JG, looking young, round-cheeked and rather smug in his pressed white shirt and cool shades.

AUTOPSY #5: Disaster Area

ABOVE: Drought car in sand.

I believe in my own obsessions, in the beauty of the car crash, in the peace of the submerged forest, in the excitements of the deserted holiday beach, in the elegance of automobile graveyards, in the mystery of multi-storey car parks, in the poetry of abandoned hotels.

This exhibit begins with a series of small exhibits of clever homages to The Wind from Nowhere, The Drowned World and The Crystal World, and leads ultimately to one of the exhibition’s strongest images: a huge room filled with sand, out of which protrudes the top of a sun- and rust-ravaged car. The effect is enhanced with off-centre lighting, and this startling image of The Drought is one you’ll remember, and think about, long after you leave.

AUTOPSY #6: Technology and Pornography

ABOVE: Cronenberg’s Crash.

I believe in the gentleness of the surgeon’s knife, in the limitless geometry of the cinema screen, in the hidden universe within supermarkets, in the loneliness of the sun, in the garrulousness of planets, in the repetitiveness or ourselves, in the inexistence of the universe and the boredom of the atom.

Now we move into another of my fave pieces of the dismembered millennium… very cleverly organized with each mini-exhibit separated by the white sheets of medical privacy screens. The original use of the building as a hospital is reflected in the ancient arches overhead, and the visuals are pumped up with the addition of a heartbeat-like bass drum slowly thumping in the background. Half of this exhibit is literary, with displays of JG’s “Advertiser’s Announcements”, a copy of the Doubleday Atrocity Exhibition, a facsimile of the “Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan” handout distributed at the Republican Convention, copies of the Warren Commission Report and the book of car crash injuries (which I must get).

ABOVE: Rick in front of the ‘Project for a New Novel’ (photo: Joanne Murray).

The most fascinating object in this section is the original two-page spreads JG made in 1958 or 1959 which he called “Project for a New Novel”. JG gave it to Ambit editor Dr Martin Bax, who had it framed in two sections, and as far as I know this is the very first time the complete piece has been shown outside the Bax home. As you know, parts of it have been reprinted by RE/Search and New Worlds, but this is the only time all of it has been made available for public viewing. Interestingly enough, they have the pieces in the wrong order.

ABOVE: The big visual wall display.

The rest is video, with each examination room showing excerpts from Cronenberg’s Crash, a fragment of Jonathan Weiss’s movie of The Atrocity Exhibition, with real footage of victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, and finally, a huge room showing multi-vids on two walls, with all reflected on a third wall. The effect is startling and cumulative, and on both times I visited both the press & VIPs just stood there, captured by the strength and variety and perversity of the visuals…

AUTOPSY #7: Asepsis and Neobarbarism

ABOVE: Infinity drenched in blue.

I believe in flight, in the beauty of the wing, and in the beauty of everything that has ever flown, in the stone thrown by a small child that carries with it the wisdom of statesmen and midwives.

Here the exhibition features the realist phase of JG’s writings, starting with Running Wild and ending with Kingdom Come. The visuals are split into two – the main effect created by a long corridor, mirrored on one side and at both ends, with the symmetry punctuated by overhead text generators which feature copy from Millennium People. On the unmirrored wall are four TV screens, set at child-height level, and they display a series of looping visuals, such as adverts for gated communities in Dubai, and Disney’s fake town of Celebration, Florida. The whole thing is drenched in a dark blue light, and the mirrors reflect all to infinity in both directions. Very cool.

AUTOPSY #8: The Ballard Library

ABOVE: From my JGB collection.

I believe in the death of the emotions and the triumph of the imagination.

OK, here’s where the bulk of the books the CCCB borrowed from me reside, so I won’t go on at length. Suffice perhaps to say this is the first time they’ve been out in public, and I hope they behave themselves. As well as these excerpts from my collection, this area features a series of computer monitors that allows visitors to replay all the videos shown in the prior exhibits, and three tables contain softcover editions of JG’s work which have been translated into Spanish and Catalan. The public is encouraged to pick up and read a little JG for themselves. Good idea. This section also contains filmmaker Solveig Nordlund’s very important interview with JG – “Encontro con o escritor JG Ballard” – and whoa, let’s not leave you out, Simon, as this is where your outstanding, exhaustive and brilliantly commented selection of Ballardian music can be heard. Great job!

ABOVE: Donovan Wylie’s photography.

The end wall contains a fascinating series of photographs taken in 2006 by Donovan Wylie, which were never published, and they reveal JG at home at approximately the same time he received his unfortunate diagnosis. The final part of this particular autopsy report is the staggeringly honest “Answers Given by Patient JGB to the Eyckman Personality Quotient Test”, from Sam Scoggin’s film The Unlimited Dream Company. In it JG quickly and steadfastly answers “yes” or “no” to a series of rapidfire questions while the camera slowly zooms in on his face, finally settling on an extreme closeup of his left eye. Sixty minute zoom, indeed. This video was very popular, and continually elicited grunts, titters and the odd chittering from its always-large audience.

AUTOPSY #9: Ballardian Art

ABOVE: Michelle Lord with her Ballard-inspired art.

I believe in nothing.

The Exhibition ends, fittingly, with four rooms of art influenced by Ballard and the concept of “Ballardian”. We’re first treated to a wall of unsettling and disturbing photos by Ana Barrado, she of RE/Search publications fame, then a captivating video of sunlight changing the perspectives of two rooms by Ann Lislegaard, photos of Michelle Lord’s miniature models of stacked cars, TV sets, and washing machines…

ABOVE: Mike Bonsall’s Ballardian home movie.

…and finally, Simon, the Ballardian cellphone home videos you commissioned last year, cleverly set up so you watch them on a cellphone.

And that, amigo, is the Exhibition. All in all, around 90,000 square feet of Ballardian bounty. We leave the same way as we arrived, by taking a long escalator ride back to the main floor, reminding me in a curious way that we have traveled “up” into the realm of the unbridled imagination, and are now returning “down” to the reality of convention and habit.

You can keep the surgical mask as a souvenir.

THE MEDICAL TEAM

This is an excellent, thought-provoking, informative exhibition, Simon, and one I’m sure which would have pleased JG had he been well enough to attend. Can you give it greater praise? Yes, those responsible should be dragged out and severely congratulated:

Jordi Costa: The Curator.
Hip, intense, knowledable, and an accomplished writer himself, Jordi’s vision and leadership has created the first, and most impressive overview of JGB, his work and influence. Super job, Jordi!

Marcial Souto: The Advisor.
Marcial has translated 10 of JG’s novels and short story collections, plus many other classic SF, outsider and popular writers. He’s an extremely pleasant and knowledgeable man, and is so interesting I’m going to interview him for you later.

Miquel Nogués: The Coordinator.
He’s the man who tracked down and organized all the various elements of the Exhibition, including the original flats for “Project For A New Novel” from Dr Martin Bax, the news Delvaux painting by Brigid Marlin, all the photographs and videos, and more. Basically, he’s responsible for the body that has been autopsied.

Dani Freixes & Pep Angli: The Designers & Assemblers.
These two gentlemen are responsible for the show’s brilliant visual appeal, the use of colour and music and light. It’s a retinal circus, and they deserve lots of credit.

Mariona Garcia: The Designer.
With the assistance of Anaïs Esmerado, she developed the textual look of the show, relying on understated, clean fonts and all the show’s peripheral print, such as the catalogue, posters and handouts.

Cristina Giribets: The A/V.
She is responsible for all the exhibition’s marvelous audio-visual work, and, it should also be noted that the Large Wall of compelling images found in the Technology and Pornography exhibit was created by Andres Hispano and La Chula Productions. Good eye, everyone!

All in all, a most excellent adventure into the mind of JGB… thank you, doctors, for all your hard work.

And that, Simon, is just about it.

From Barcelona, adios!

– Rick.

Rick McGrath 2008.

All quotes excerpted from ‘What I Believe’ by JG Ballard. All photography by Rick McGrath, except where noted.

…:: FURTHER INFO:

+ More exhibition photography from Rick McGrath
+ J.G. Ballard, Autopsy of the New Millennium
+ Ballard at Kosmopolis
+ Official exhibition blog

…:: Previously on Ballardian:

+ Ballardoscope: some attempts at approaching the writer as a visionary
+ J.G. Ballard: In the Raw
+ JGB exhibition opens tomorrow in Barcelona

BALLARDOSCOPE: SOME ATTEMPTS AT APPROACHING THE WRITER AS A VISIONARY

by Jordi Costa

Here is the press release with fuller information on JG Ballard, Autopsy of the New Millennium, opening today at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB).

EXHIBITION AT THE CCCB: J.G. Ballard: An Autopsy of the New Millennium

CURATOR: Jordi Costa
DATES: 22 July–2 November 2008
ADVISOR: Marcial Souto
SPACE: Gallery 2
PRODUCTION: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB)
DESIGN: Dani Freixas – Varis Arquitectes, with the collaboration of Pep Anglí
COORDINATION: Miquel Nogués

The CCCB presents the exhibition “JG Ballard. An Autopsy of the New Millennium”, from 22 July to 2 November 2008. The exhibition features the English writer of novels and short stories, considered one of the most intelligent, seminal voices of contemporary fiction.

The literary work of James Graham Ballard (Shanghai, 1930), the paradigm cult writer, has for some time now been looking ahead to dissect the world in which we are now living. His visionary imagination grew in the realms of dreamlike, subjective science fiction and gradually came to embrace an aseptic hyperrealism. Deep down, the themes are always the same: the keys of contemporaneity and the pathologies of our immediate future, as though he were carrying out the autopsy of a stillborn future.

J. G. Ballard has constructed a body of work marked by recurrent themes and obsessive symbols that is capable of transcending generic codes to decipher the present and propose plausible views of the future. This exhibition sets out to offer an itinerary through Ballard’s creative universe: his themes and obsessions, his dissection of the secret keys of the contemporary, the traces of his own life in his fictional body of work, his artistic and literary referents, and his precise, disenchanted intuitions of a future life governed by the concepts of aseptic anti-utopia and disaster.

The exhibition uses a whole range of supports to introduce visitors into the Ballardian world: stage sets, audiovisual installations, the complete library of Ballard’s writings, works by Ballardian artists and miscellaneous documentation.

The exhibition “JG Ballard. An Autopsy of the New Millennium” coincides with this year’s International Literature Festival, Kosmopolis 08. It is therefore included in the festival programme, which devotes a special section to Ballard.

K08 includes two sessions about the work of this English author and his influence on the contemporary cultural imaginary. The first looks at the influence of Ballard’s body of work on Hispanic writers, and the second centres on the English-speaking world, in the form of a dialogue about the various ways in which Ballard’s literature has struck a chord with new generations of writers who identify with the visionary aspect of his work. Participants: Paco Porrúa, Marcial Souto, Marta Peirano, Toby Litt, Bruce Sterling, Agustín Fernández Mallo and V. Vale.

Alpha Channel devotes a further section to Ballard, exploring the audiovisual production inspired by his literature.

Layout of the exhibition

WHAT I BELIEVE

Photo via RE/Search Publications.

The French magazine Science Fiction, edited by Daniel Riche, commissioned a text from J. G. Ballard in which he summed up his personal and artistic credo. The result, published in the January 1984 issue of the publication, was “What I Believe”, a summary of Ballardian poetics which synthesises the obsessions of the author and the ability of his writing to decipher the secret keys of the contemporary world, as well as its disturbing evolutive logic. The canonic version of the text in English appeared in the summer 1984 issue (number eight) of the British magazine Interzone. Below are some excerpts:

I believe in the impossibility of existence, in the humour of mountains, in the absurdity of electromagnetism, in the farce of geometry, in the cruelty of arithmetic, in the murderous intent of logic.

I believe in the non-existence of the past, in the death of the future, and the infinite possibilities of the present.

I believe in the body odors of Princess Di.

I believe in the next five minutes.

I believe in anxiety, psychosis and despair.

I believe in the death of the emotions and the triumph of the imagination.

I believe in Tokyo, Benidorm, La Grande Motte, Wake Island, Eniwetok, Dealey Plaza.

J.G. Ballard

FROM SHANGHAI TO SHEPPERTON

Photo via CCCB.

Despite being fantasy fiction, the literary work of J. G. Ballard handles a repertory of images and obsessions that are closely linked to his own life. These early experiences were to mark his worldview and find a particular form of sublimation in his later literary output.

Son of chemist and textile entrepreneur James Ballard (1902-1967) and of Edna Ballard (1905-1999), J.G. Ballard was born in Shanghai General Hospital on 15 November 1930 and spent his early years in the comfortable surroundings of the international colony in the west of the city. The Japanese invasion of 1937 and the outbreak of World War II brought to an end the hitherto peaceable existence of a British community that ran its everyday life under the aegis of a nostalgia for Victorian society. Between March 1943 and August 1945 the Ballard family was held captive in the Lunghua internment camp.

In semi-autobiographical works such as Empire of the Sun (adapted for the cinema by Steven Spielberg) and The Kindness of Women, the writer revealed the origin of many of the obsessions running through his work. The atomic bomb on Nagasaki, how he adapted to life in a concentration camp and the series of deaths that marked his life (victims of bombings in the streets of Shanghai, the Chinese soldier killed by the Japanese at a train station, the first corpse he dissected in his years as a medical student, the Turkish pilot presumed dead during his years as a pilot at a Canadian base, the premature death of his wife and the death of a close friend) have a correlate in some of the most shocking scenes of his literary work.

The creation of his imaginary world has its epicentre away from the literary circles and bustling cultural life of London, in his home in Shepperton: a territory that the writer considers not as a soulless suburb but as a magical space whose inner light can be freed by imagination, as he illustrates in his novel The Unlimited Dream Company.

LANDSCAPES OF DREAM

Dali meets Ballard. Scan via The Terminal Collection.

J. G. Ballard’s formative years were marked by the attempt to reconcile his incipient literary vocation with the articulation of a voice of his own. His initial contact with psychoanalysis and Surrealist painting opened the door to the construction of a unique and totally distinctive artistic identity. As he saw it, explorations of the unconscious in the fields of science and art offered the most precise reading of the spirit of the time and had predicted some of the more obscure pathways of the 20th century. In the dreamlike, desolate landscapes of Surrealism Ballard recognised the images of his own inner world. His writing not only recreates many of the visions of Surrealism, it also reproduces some of its aesthetic strategies⎯superimpositions, mirroring, false perspectives, mutations⎯in order to explain the deep structure of the real.

INNER SPACE

JGB’s second ‘advertiser’s announcement’ for Ambit magazine. Scan via Mike Holliday.

After discovering science fiction as a reader during his years in Canada as an RAF pilot (1953-54), J. G. Ballard encountered in the genre the ideal framework for his literary creation. From the very first, his sudden emergence in the medium entailed a break with tradition and the dominant currents of the time. To his contemporaries’ technological optimism and fascination for the exploration of outer space, Ballard counterposed an immersion in inner space.

Ballard theorized his singular contribution to the science-fiction genre in an article published in 1962 in New Worlds magazine. “Which way to inner space?” represented a turning point in the evolution of the genre with consequences that only much later became evident. With his theory of inner space, Ballard established a distance between himself and science-fiction forerunners and many of his peers as he sketched out the future direction of the genre. Ballard conquered a new territory for the genre, highlighting the role of science fiction as a mirror of the present and a means to self-exploration.

DISASTER AREA

Photo by Ana Barrado.

The idea of disaster underlies Ballard’s entire body of work though it finds its maximum expression in works such as The Drowned World and The Drought. In the face of disaster, typical Ballard characters do not act like characters in a 1970s’ disaster film. Far from trying to re-establish order, Ballardian characters see cataclysm as a focus of attraction and seem ready to accept the rules that this new reality imposes, though this may mean renouncing their own identity, wisdom and, inevitably, survival. In this process, the characters will discover a number of hidden truths about themselves. What is happening is not so much self-destruction as the seduction of change and the tortuous path towards psychological plenitude.

The idea comes from Joseph Conrad, and in Ballard’s hands it becomes the basis for his particular conception of science fiction: a literature that speaks to us of radical changes in mindset, fundamental transformations in perception—in short, of the constant evolution of inner space.

TECHNOLOGY AND PORNOGRAPHY

Scan via The Terminal Collection.

J. G. Ballard’s career entered a feverish state of change in the mid-1960s, following the premature death of his wife Mary Ballard from pneumonia in San Juan (Alicante). His traditional interest in the avant-garde and in experimental literature completely intoxicated his writing, which exploded in a radical switch to fragmentation, technical language and a taste for the abstract. The Terminal Beach (1964) blazed a trail that the later books The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) and Crash (1973) were to take to the limit. The author focussed on a form of contemporaneity marked by the death of feeling and a shift from a physical to a mediatic landscape in which reality and fiction are blurred. The more classical High Rise (1974), Concrete Island (1975), The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) and Hello America (1981) continued to develop this vision of an essentially psychopathological 20th century in which pornographic imagery, technological fetishism and dehumanised architecture converge in a traumatic cosmology.

ASEPSIS AND NEOBARBARISM

Photo by Ana Barrado.

It is significant, and deeply disturbing, that J. G. Ballard’s literature has moved from science fiction to the realist register without abandoning its main themes. The most recent passage in Ballard’s narrative work⎯opening with the novella Running Wild (1988) and for the moment closing with Kingdom Come (2006)⎯tours the aseptic architecture of gated communities, residential areas, technoparks, holiday villages and shopping malls in order to extend the terminal diagnosis of a humanity disconnected from its primary instincts. According to the writer, only injections of violence can disrupt the lethargy and make a new utopia possible.

THE BALLARD LIBRARY

Scan via The Terminal Collection.

Here, the exhibition presents the first editions (in English) of the 42 books written by Ballard and offers visitors the chance to consult modern editions published in Spanish.

The Wind from Nowhere. Berkeley, New York, 1962
The Voices of Time. Berkeley, New York, 1962
Billenium. Berkeley, New York, 1962
The Drowned World. Gollancz, London, 1963
Passport to Eternity. Berkeley, New York, 1963
The Terminal Beach. Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1964
The Burning World. Berkeley, New York, 1964
The Drought. Jonathan Cape, London, 1965
The Four-Dimensional Nightmare. Victor Gollancz Ltd, London, 1963
The Crystal World. Jonathan Cape, London, 1966
The Impossible Man. Berkeley, New York, 1966
The Voices of Time. Berkeley, New York, 1966
The Terminal Beach. Penguin, London, 1966
The Disaster Area. Jonathan Cape, London, 1967
The Overloaded Man. Panther, London, 1967
The Atrocity Exhibition. Jonathan Cape, London, 1970
The Inner Landscape. Paperback Library, New York, 1971
Chronopolis and other stories. Putnam, New York, 1972
Love & Napalm: Export U.S.A. Grove Press, New York, 1972
Vermilion Sands. Jonathan Cape, London, 1973
Crash. Jonathan Cape, London, 1973
Concrete Island. Farrar, Jonathan Cape, London, 1974
High-Rise. Jonathan Cape, London, 1975
Low-Flying Aircraft. Jonathan Cape, London, 1976
The Unlimited Dream Company. Jonathan Cape, London, 1979
Hello America. Jonathan Cape, London, 1981
News from the Sun. Interzone, London, 1982
Myths of the Near Future. Jonathan Cape, London, 1982
Empire of the Sun. Gollancz, London, 1984
The Day of Forever. Gollancz, London, 1986
The Day of Creation. Gollancz, London, 1987
Running Wild. Jonathan Cape, London, 1988
War Fever. Collins, London, 1990
The Kindness of Women. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, New York, 1991
Rushing to Paradise. Flamingo, London, 1996
Cocaine Nights. Flamingo, London, 1996
A User’s Guide to the Millennium. Picador, New York, 1996
Super-Cannes. Flamingo, London, 2000
JG Ballard. The Complete Short Stories. Flamingo, London, 2001
Millennium People. Flamingo, London, 2003
Kingdom Come. Fourth Estate, London, 2006
Miracles of Life. Shanghai to Shepperton. An Autobiography. Fourth Estate, London, 2008

BALLARDIAN ART

Image by Michelle Lord.

Ballard’s work represents an open-ended body of work that still has revelations in store for his readers.

On the one hand, Ballard functions as an oracle who is proved right with every day that passes.

On the other, he exerts an enormous influence on creators in all disciplines, from fantasy cinema to industrial music.

J. G. Ballard forms part of the small group of creators capable of inspiring an adjective. Collins English Dictionary defines the adjective Ballardian as “1. of James Graham Ballard (J. G. Ballard; born 1930), the British novelist, or his works. (2) resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard’s novels & stories, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes & the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments”.

Proceeding from the most diverse realms of creation, artists who accept the adjective as a badge of honour are increasingly numerous. To identify oneself as Ballardian is to form part of a widening circle of initiates aware of the central role played by an author who is a stranger to labels and resists any attempt at classification.

At this point, the exhibition immerses us in the work of various authors to have been described as Ballardian: Ana Barrado, Ann Lislegaard, Michelle Lord and creators of home cinema using mobile phones.

GENERAL INFORMATION

DATES
22 July – 2 November 2008

TIMES
From Tuesday to Sunday and public holidays: from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Thursdays: from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Closed on Mondays except public holidays

PRICES

Admission: €4.40
Wednesdays (except public holidays) and group visits: €3.30
Free admission: under-16s, the unemployed, Friends of the CCCB and every first Wednesday of the month.
Concessions on Wednesdays (except public holidays) for senior citizens and students: €3.30

FURTHER INFORMATION
CCCB – www.cccb.org

CCCB PRESS OFFICE
Mònica Muñoz – Irene Ruiz – Lucia Calvo
Montalegre, 5 – 08001 Barcelona
93 306 41 23 / 93 306 41 00
premsa@cccb.org

..:: Previously on Ballardian…
+ Autopsy of the New Millennium: JGB exhibition opens tomorrow in Barcelona

…:: FURTHER INFO:

+ J.G. Ballard, Autopsy of the New Millennium
+ Ballard at Kosmopolis
+ Official exhibition blog

We had a discussion here some time ago about Ballard’s preference for the typewriter over the computer. Even more old school, he writes the first draft in longhand. Cop that, cyberpunks!

Rick McGrath has unearthed proof in the form of a repro of the first page of the first draft of Empire. Wonderful! Any graphologists in the house? According to Wikipedia, graphology ‘is the study and analysis of handwriting especially in relation to human psychology. In the medical field, it can be used to refer to the study of handwriting as an aid in diagnosis and tracking of diseases of the brain and nervous system. The term is sometimes incorrectly used to refer to forensic document examination’.

Oh, what a gloriously Ballardian profession, full of barely bridled tension between latent and manifest desire!

Graphology is based upon the following basic assertions [including]:

When we write, the ego is active but it is not always active to the same degree. Its activity waxes and wanes; being at its highest level when an effort has to be made by the writer and at its lowest level when the motion of the writing organ has gained momentum and is driven by it.

…from Wiki.

The repro came with Rick’s copy of a 1984 interview with Ballard, conducted by Thomas Frick and published in the Paris Review.

Lifted from that is the following, clarifying Ballard’s approach to the first draft. Seven hundred words a day? Phew. Makes me feel less guilty about my own meagre output.

Warning to academics: anti-po-mo humps ahead:

[I write] every day, five days a week. Longhand now, it’s less tiring than a typewriter. When I’m writing a novel or story I set myself a target of about seven hundred words a day, sometimes a little more. I do a first draft in longhand, then do a very careful longhand revision of the text, then type out the final manuscript. I used to type first and revise in longhand, but I find that modern fiber-tip pens are less effort than a typewriter. Perhaps I ought to try a seventeenth-century quill. I rewrite a great deal, so the word processor sounds like my dream. My neighbor is a BBC videotape editor and he offered to lend me his, but apart from the eye-aching glimmer, I found that the editing functions are terribly laborious. I’m told that already one can see the difference between fiction composed on the word processor and that on the typewriter. The word processor lends itself to a text that has great polish and clarity on a sentence-by-sentence and paragraph level, but has haywire overall chapter-by-chapter construction, because it’s almost impossible to rifle through and do a quick scan of, say, twenty pages. Or so they say.
…
I’ve never aborted or abandoned anything, perhaps because everything I’ve written has been well-prepared in my mind. I write the complete first draft before returning to the beginning, though of course I’m working from a fairly detailed synopsis, so I’m sure of my overall structure. I then do a fair amount of cutting of superfluous phrases, occasionally of paragraphs or pages. Each book is written consecutively, as read, never out of order. I think that the use of the synopsis reflects, for me, a strong belief in the importance of the story, of the objective nature of the invented world I describe, of the complete separation of that world from my own mind. It’s an old-fashioned standpoint (or seems to be, though I would argue vigorously that it isn’t) and one that obviously separates me from the whole post-modernist notion of a reflexive, self-conscious fiction that explicitly acknowledges the inseparability of author and text.

I regard that whole postmodernist notion as a tiresome cul de sac, from which any writer with a strong imagination, or any sense of moral urgency towards his subject matter, would burst forth with immense relief. Of course, I accept that an imaginative writer, like a figurative painter, takes for granted perspective, illusionist space, the unlimited depth of the picture plane, and that with the more extreme types of imagination, such as the surrealists (or myself), a double piece of illusionism is called for — one is asked to accept not only the illusionist space of the picture plane or the narrative text, but the strange events going on within that illusory space. Curious to say, the human mind seems to have not the slightest difficulty in doing this, and even seems designed to work that way, at least, if dreams, myths, and legends are any guide. The notion put about by deconstructionist critics — who I hear are all the rage in the States — that there is no difference between a bus ticket and, say, Mr. Micawber, that both equally are fictions, seems to me to miss the point that we can’t think about Mr. Micawber at all without making just that old-fashioned imaginative leap that the deconstructionists are working so hard to dismantle.

J.G. Ballard, ‘The Art of Fiction’, an interview with Thomas Frick, The Paris Review #94 (Winter, 1984).

Novelists make up a surprisingly big presence in the longlist for this year’s Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction, with memoirs of JG Ballard, VS Naipaul and Julian Barnes in the running for the £30,000 award. The 20 books in contention for the prize also feature a number of very personal takes on subjects including mathematics, climate change and national traumas in Northern Ireland and Congo.

Novelist Julian Barnes’s autobiographical meditation on death, Nothing to Be Frightened of, makes the list, alongside Miracles of Life, JG Ballard’s memoir of the traumatic experiences that fed into his work. Also in the running is Patrick French’s Authorised Biography of VS Naipaul, which has recently been startling critics with its unflinching portrayal of its subject’s flaws.
…
The shortlist will be announced on May 15, with the prize awarded at a ceremony in central London on July 15. As well as the winner’s £30,000, each of the five shortlisted authors will receive £1,000.

The longlist in full
Mad, Bad and Sad by Lisa Appignanesi (Virago)
Nothing to be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape)
Miracles of Life by J G Ballard (Harper Collins)
Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart by Tim Butcher (Chatto & Windus)
Crow Country by Mark Cocker (Jonathan Cape)
Finding Moonshine: A Mathematician’s Journey Through Symmetry by Marcus Du Sautoy (Fourth Estate)
The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul by Patrick French (Picador)
The Whisperers by Orlando Figes (Penguin Press)
Rudolf Nureyev by Julie Kavanagh (Fig Tree)
Austerity Britain 1945-1951 by David Kynaston (Bloomsbury)
Mrs Woolf and the Servants by Alison Light (Fig Tree)
Cold Cream: My Early Life and Other Mistakes by Ferdinand Mount (Bloomsbury)
Watching the Door by Kevin Myers (Atlantic Books)
Confessions of an Eco Sinner: Confessions of an Eco Sinner: Travels to Find Where My Stuff Comes from by Fred Pearce (Eden Project Books)
Great Hatred, Little Room: Making Peace in Northern Ireland by Jonathan Powell (Bodley Head)
The Discovery of France by Graham Robb (Picador)
A Life of Picasso: Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 vol 3 by John Richardson (Jonathan Cape)
The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross (Fourth Estate)
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale (Bloomsbury)
The Brother Gardeners by Andrea Wulf (William Heinemann)

More at the Guardian.

The final version of Thomas Cazals’ tribute, ‘J.G. Ballard: The Oracle of Shepperton’, has been uploaded.

This is one of the stranger JGB-related films I’ve seen; ‘documentary’ is not quite the word for it, even as it functions as a biography of both Ballard and Shepperton.

Basically, it’s the story of Thomas’s doomed attempt to interview Ballard. He takes a taxi to Shepperton, and before he knows it is in a parallel dimension, being driven by a gruff hoodlum with clear contempt for his passenger. Shepperton motorways pass by, but only as a front projection; there is no taxi, just a car seat pretending to be one as Thomas and the driver go nowhere fast. The taxi driver, who is French speaking, tells Thomas he needs clearance to visit Shepperton, which is now the ‘new capital of the galaxy’, and we recognise the obvious nods to Godard’s Alphaville, in which Lemmy Caution similarly travels through ‘sidereal space’ in his Ford Galaxie. Finally, Thomas ‘lands’ in Shepperton and attempts to ring Ballard, but is rebuked, whining ‘I’m not an amateur’.

Weaving in and out of this is the story of Ballard’s life, told via newsreels and family snapshots. Basic canonical facts are strung together: Ballard’s time in Shanghai, his arrival in England and his settling in Shepperton, his studying of medicine, his siring of three children, his writing of Crash and Empire of the Sun…

There is an English-speaking narrator, who does quite a good job of impersonating Ballard, letting forth with some very well-chosen JGB quotes, the clack of a typewriter underpinning this prophecy of the ages.

We see what is supposed to be Ballard’s house; strange shapes and apparitions emanate from it.

Then Thomas appears to find himself in a Tarkovsky-style zone, and ‘Ballard’ tells us that:

Shepperton is nowhere, that’s its great appeal for me. There are film studios here, and it lies within the psychic catchment area of London airport so it expresses transience, classlessness, alienation and a complete lack of traditional reference points. It’s the way of the future.

Thomas, wandering aimlessly around Shepperton, interviews residents: an elderly lady shopkeep, a Lotus car salesman, a young guy playing snooker, who laughs when asked, ‘What is there to see in Shepperton?’ None of them mention Ballard or seem to know who he is; one chap, talking about ‘stars’ in the area, mentions Edward Woodward! These interviews are skilfully contrasted with Thomas’s own science fictional glimpses of the suburb, which suggest something altogether stranger below the surface of this placid riverside town. Although he gets no closer to meeting Ballard, he is beginning to hotwire the Ballardian signal directly into his frontal lobe. Then he is attacked and beaten by uniform-clad thugs, and the familiar front projections return, images of suburbia taking over from the real thing, and we are back in the zone again.

A French-speaking woman emerges, called ‘Karen Novotny’ no less — the name, of course, of the cypherwoman from The Atrocity Exhibition (all the weirdness is in French, appropriate since these sequences worm their way inside the brain of the Thomas character, who is of course from France). She informs Thomas that she and her sub-militia are attempting to wrest psychic control from Ballard, whom she calls ‘the Unlimited Dreamer’; the ‘whole city is controlled by the Unlimited Dreamer’s thought waves,’ she says.

Cut to more biographical detail. ‘Ballard’ intones, ‘We live inside an enormous novel’, which is the green light burning for more high weirdness, and we finally end up in the ‘psycho-geographic area of the first spaceport in America, opened in 2010′…

All up, this is an inventive short film, displaying considerable verve and skill, especially in its juggling of three separate time tracks: the story of Ballard, of Shepperton, of Thomas. Rather than trying to cover up the lack of budget, they’ve made a virtue of it, with the front projections standing in for unstable reality. I’m also assuming the crew actually did try to interview Ballard; rather than give up the film when that didn’t come off, they’ve weaved a story around his reclusiveness. Plus, the acting is really good — the actor playing Thomas does a great line in self-deprecation — the sound design and score is effective, and the film is faithful to the power of Ballard’s work. Rather than trying to intellectualise or contextualise Ballard, it presents his vision as ‘felt’, as experiential, as utterly mysterious as a multi-storey car park, as banal as a Shepperton high street, as transcendental as a pirate radio wave.

For Thomas Cazals, the power of J.G. Ballard’s writing is important for the transformation it wreaks on the everyday, for its power to remake the world in thrall to personal fulfillment. He is clearly in awe of the Seer from Shepperton, and has found a thoroughly unique way to parlay that into a tribute to the man. We might even be able to read the film as a parody of the typical starstruck fan who visits Shepperton hoping to catch a glimpse of his hero, and is mesmerised by the surrounding motorways and the dull suburban sheen that is now so recognisably Ballardian.

Recently, a reader commented elsewhere on this site:

Perhaps we have to take seriously the (diffused ambient) notion that Ballard’s writing really does access and stimulate previously un-tapped regions of the brain. A new organ, better fitted to understanding the monolythic psychological blandscapes of, eg. The Atrocity Exhibition (which is itself a cryptic blueprint for the construction of a unique time travel device). We have to do more deep theoretical R&D into Ballard: as fresh, varied, radical, and disturbingly alive as the source itself.

I’d say Cazals has done exactly that.

..:: Previously on Ballardian
+ Shepperton’s Oracle.

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.

From amazon.co.uk:

Synopsis

‘Miracles of Life’ opens and closes in Shanghai, the city where J.G.Ballard was born, and where he spent the most of the Second World War interned with his family in a Japanese concentration camp. In the intervening chapters Ballard creates a memoir that is both an enthralling narrative and a detailed examination of the events which would profoundly influence his work. Beginning with his early childhood spent exploring the vibrant surroundings of pre-war Shanghai, Ballard charts the course of his remarkable life from the deprivations and unexpected freedoms of the Lunghua Camp to his return to a Britain physically and psychologically crippled by war. He explores his subsequent involvement in the dramatic social changes of the 1960s, and the adjustments to life following the premature death of his wife. In prose displaying his characteristic precision and eye for detail, Ballard recounts the experiences which would fundamentally shape his writing, while simultaneously providing an striking social analysis of the fragmented post-war Britain that lies behind so many of his novels. ‘Miracles of Life’ is an utterly captivating account of an extraordinary writer’s extraordinary life.

From the Back Cover
‘I was born in Shanghai General Hospital on 15 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’

For almost half a century, J G Ballard has been one of the country’s most important writers. In this revelatory autobiography, bookended by time spent in Shanghai – the city of his childhood and internment in a WWII prison camp, and setting of his novel Empire of the Sun – he charts the course of his remarkable life.

Beginning with his early childhood spent exploring the vibrant surroundings of ‘that magical place’, Miracles of Life takes us from the deprivations and unexpected freedoms of Lunghua Camp to his arrival in a Britain physically and psychologically crippled by war. He recounts his first attempts at fiction while stationed in a frozen airbase in Canada, his part in the social and artistic revolutions of the 60s and his lfe as a single father after the premature death of his wife.

In prose of characteristic precision and wit, Ballard recalls the experiences that would fundamentally shape his writing, while simultaneously providing a striking analysis of the fragmented post-war Britain that lies behind so many of his novels. Miracles of Life is a captivating account of the extraordinary life of an extraordinary writer.

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

Photo by Jennie Middlemiss.

There’s loads of media action surrounding Miracles of Life at the moment. Note how it’s all UK based, though; Ballard is virtually invisible in the mainstream media anywhere else. I can barely get this site noticed outside of England, so imagine how JGB must feel about the sad fact that his last few books have failed to find a US publishing deal. That’s got to be a bone in the throat (I reckon it’s a complete travesty) although I do suspect JGB himself gave up caring long ago, his attitude towards the US media loud and clear in The Atrocity Exhibition and Hello America.

Here’s the round up…

+ An extended interview with Ballard, conducted by James Naughtie from BBC Radio 4 and available as a RealPlayer stream. The talk’s a bit ‘same old’, but check out the fabulous photos of JGB accompanying it: very candid, very ‘on’, completely different from the studied and seemingly slightly bored poses we’re used to. Good stuff.

+ A review in the Telegraph from Frances Wilson. Most of it is a summary of the book, barely a review, save for this:

There is a peculiar beauty to the work produced during a final illness, whether or not that work is the crowning achievement of a lifetime.

The beauty of Miracles of Life lies in the love Ballard feels for those dear to him. As I reached the closing pages, I felt I was intruding on a private scene; J.G. Ballard the writer belongs to his readers; as a father and a partner he belongs to his family, and we should quietly leave the room.

+ Paul Dunn’s review in the Times. He makes the salient point that not only is Ballard invisible elsewhere, but he is barely appreciated in England:

IF EVER THE OLD WISDOM that a prophet is without honour in his own country applied to a writer, surely it is to J.G. Ballard.

True, the publishers of this autobiography have found a couple of (undated) jacket quotes proclaiming him our “number one” and “most important living novelist”. But you look in vain for any real recognition from the literary establishment for a career that started with The Drowned World in 1963.
…
His refusal – or inability – to fit in is apparent from the opening pages of this book. If he is without honour in his own land, one good reason is the difficulty of pinning down where home is.

+ A great review from Sam Leith in the Literary Review:

Two of his great praise-words, applied with ingenuous enthusiasm, are ‘cheerful’ and ‘easy-going’. Ballard finds these qualities, and values them, even and in fact especially, in circumstances where you would not expect them. They are abundantly present in him. The man sporadically denounced in the pages of the Daily Mail as a menace to society is in fact an exemplary family man with an enormous capacity for affection.

He brought up his three children – they are the ‘miracles of life’ of the title – single-handedly after the sudden death of his wife in the early 1960s, and positively trills at the mention of them. He pays open-handed tribute to friends, and writes gratefully of his long relationship with his partner Claire Walsh. You get the strong impression that he is happy. In an endnote, he delivers the rabbit-punch: he has advanced prostate cancer. Ballard is dying. His note seems to suggest that this will be his last book. He can be proud of it.

+ Miracles will be book of the week on BBC Radio 4, from Feb 11:

JG Ballard’s memoir, abridged in five parts by Andrew Simpson, in which the best-selling author reflects on various influences that have shaped his work. 1: Early life in 1930s Shanghai was like a stage set. Read by James Laurenson. (description from radiotimes.com)

Thanks to Mike B. Andy L. and David P. for tip offs.

In the autumn of 1954 we sailed on one of the Empress liners, then spent a month at an RCAF base near London, Ontario, not far from Niagara Falls. We were all eager to embrace the North American way of life. We arrived at our training base in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, as the first snow was falling, and I think it was still falling when I left the following spring. A wilderness of ice and snow was not the best location for a flying school. For long periods we had nothing to do but sit in the flight rooms, reading magazines and watching the snow fall on the buried runways. Now and then a moose would leap the perimeter fence and gallop off into the mist. In the very comfortable mess, virtually a four-star hotel, I would sit by the picture windows and watch the snow carried horizontally by the icy wind.

With a great deal of time on my hands, I wrote a few short stories and tried to find enough reading matter to keep me going. Most of the paperbacks in the bus depot were popular thrillers and detective stories, but there was one type of fiction that occupied a lot of space. This was science fiction, then enjoying its great postwar boom. I had read little, apart from the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon strips of my Shanghai childhood. I would later realise most professional SF writers, British and American, were keen fans from their early teens, and many began their careers writing for fanzines. I was one of the very few who came to science fiction at a relatively late age. By the mid1950s there were some 20 SF magazines on monthly sale in America and Canada, and the best of these were in the Moose Jaw magazine racks.

These I seized on and began to devour. Here was a form of fiction that was actually about the present day, and often as elliptical and ambiguous as Kafka. It recognised a world dominated by consumer advertising, of democratic government mutating into public relations. This was a world of cars, offices, highways, airlines and supermarkets that we actually lived in, but which was completely missing from almost all serious fiction. Nobody in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car. Nobody in Sartre or Thomas Mann ever paid for a haircut. Nobody in Hemingway’s postwar novels ever worried about the effects of prolonged exposure to the threat of nuclear war.

And in this one, Ballard discusses the stimulus for Crash:

In 1970, I began to write Crash. This was more than a literary challenge, not least because I had three young children crossing Shepperton’s streets every day, and nature might have played another of its nasty tricks. I have described the novel as a kind of psychopathic hymn, and it took an immense effort of will to enter the minds of the central characters. In an attempt to be faithful to my own imagination, I gave the narrator my own name, accepting all this entailed.

Two weeks after I had finished, my tank-like Ford Zephyr had a front-wheel blowout at the foot of Chiswick Bridge. The car swerved out of control, crossed the central reservation and rolled onto its back. Luckily I was wearing my seat belt. Hanging upside down, I found the doors had been jammed by the partly collapsed roof. The car lay in the centre of the oncoming carriageway, and I was fortunate not to be struck by approaching traffic. Eventually I wound down the window and clambered out.

Looking back, I suspect that if I had died, the accident might well have been judged deliberate, at least on the unconscious level. But I believe Crash is less a hymn to death than an attempt to buy off the executioner who waits for us all in a quiet garden nearby. Crash is set at a point where sex and death intersect, though the graph is difficult to read and is constantly recalibrating itself. The same is true of Emin’s bed, which reminds us that this young woman’s beautiful body has stepped from a dishevelled grave.

Earlier in this extract, Ballard talks about the violent reception his infamous exhibition of crashed cars received, where spectators attacked the cars and the hostess, and how that reaction gave him the ‘green light’ to go ahead and write Crash:

It occurred to me I could test my hypothesis about the unconscious links between sex and the car crash by putting on an exhibition of crashed cars. … The cars went on show without any supporting graphic material, as if they were large pieces of sculpture. A TV enthusiast at the Arts Lab offered to set up a camera and closed-circuit monitors on which the guests could watch themselves as they strolled around. I suggested we hire a young [topless] woman to interview the guests about their reactions.
…
I have never seen the guests at a gallery get drunk so quickly. There was a huge tension in the air, as if everyone felt threatened by some inner alarm that had started to ring. Nobody would have noticed the cars if they had been parked in the street, but under the unvarying gallery lights these damaged vehicles seemed to provoke and disturb. Wine was splashed over the cars, windows were broken, the topless girl was almost raped in the back seat of the Pontiac (or so she claimed: she later wrote a damning review headed “Ballard Crashes” in the underground paper Frendz).
…
My exhibition had been a psychological test disguised as an art show, which is probably true of Damien Hirst’s shark and Tracey Emin’s bed.

Interestingly, the Guardian is currently featuring a story about ’13 unlucky works of art’. Hirst and Emin (with her storied bed) appear, but not Ballard and his crashed cars:

11 Damien Hirst is rubbished and inked

Art not recognised as art has often fallen prey to cleaners. The most celebrated case is cleaner Emmanuel Asare’s bin-bagging at London’s Eyestorm Gallery in 2001 of Damien Hirst’s installation Painting by Numbers, a representation of his studio and its detritus. ‘I didn’t think for a second it was art,’ explained Asare. Hirst found this ‘hysterical’. Less so the pouring of black ink into his sculpture Away From the Flock during an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in 1994. The perpetrator, artist Mark Bridger, re-labelled the piece Black Sheep. ‘I was providing an interesting addendum to his work,’ said Bridger in court.

13 Tracey Emins bed springs are tested

In 1999, at Tate Britain, artists Yuan Cai and JJ Xi intervened in Tracey Emin’s installation My Bed. ‘Although they got on the bed for a few seconds, mostly they just threatened guards with kung-fu kicks,’ said witness Harry Pye. ‘They realised we were serious artists – doing it purely from a creative point,’ said Xi. ‘Don’t take seriously Emin saying we were “like failed artists threatening to jump off Waterloo Bridge unless given a gallery” – probably she got drunk.’ In 2000, Cai and Xi urinated on Marcel Duchamp’s La Fontaine to alleged cheers from Tate Modern visitors.

Still from Hari Kunzru’s interview with J.G. Ballard. © Waterstone’s Books Quarterly.

Waterstones is featuring a video interview with JGB, conducted by Hari Kunzru to promote Miracles of Life. There are no surprises here. Kunzru asks Ballard about the relationship of Miracles to JGB’s semi-autobiographical novels, Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women, and Ballard replies that, of course, the novels are filtered versions whereas Miracles is something like the unvarnished truth.

Ballard also repeats old anecdotes familiar from Empire and the various interviews surrounding that book, including his view of wartime Shanghai as a stage set, the way in which slums challenge teenage boys to become dominant, his distaste for notions of ‘Englishness’ and for the class system, how he admired the Japanese during the war, how he views the distinction between inner and outer space, and how humans are dangerous with their reserves of psychopathic behaviour bubbling below the surface. But there is one memorable quote:

I was very attracted to science fiction because it had huge vitality. Meeting British and American SF writers of the period I felt a sort of ferment of ideas and possibilities which I never had meeting mainstream English novelists. All they induced was a kind of overpowering headache and a wish to leave for the South Seas.

Ballard seems noticeably weary, distracted and drawn as a result of his illness; there’s clearly not a lot of time to engage in lengthy discussion.

I don’t believe we can expect any new revelations from Miracles, but never mind. Anyone interested in Ballard must get used to the idea of repetition after all, in all its guises and in every iteration — for multiple personas are the key to Ballard’s fractured take on supermodernity.

Instead, I’m looking forward to Miracles for the fact that it is a precise summing up of the career of a writer who has had a profound impact on my life and work. As John Gray so astutely recognises, ‘Ballard’s achievement is not to have staked out any kind of political position. Rather it is to have communicated a vision of what individual fulfilment might mean in a time of nihilism.’

That is precisely the guidance I receive from Ballard’s work.

And so the new book means that, reassuringly, that pulse — that jolting, sharding signal disturbing the atmosphere and breaking up the vertical hold — is still beaming out from Shepperton to the global dystopia, however weakened the signal is these days (whether through JGB’s illness or his marginalisation in the strange scheme of literary mores).

Weakened it may be, but that only reinforces the fact that this pulse must nonetheless be tapped, trapped and magnified, and passed on by all who read this new work.

Are you with me?

The Times is featuring an extract from J.G. Ballard’s forthcoming autobiography, Miracles of Life. There’s also an accompanying interview, in which it’s revealed that Ballard has been diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer:

Ballard is courteous and genial in a slightly donnish way. At 77, he takes his time assembling his thoughts, but they remain unflinching and provocative, expressed with the verbal tics of his colonial background. But time, the malleable stuff of his science fiction, is running out. After being diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer in 2006, he sat down at his electric typewriter – “The computer age came too late for me” – and rapidly wrote his autobiography.

Here’s a sample of the extract:

THE Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor, the American naval base near Honolulu, took place on the morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941. In Shanghai, across the International Date Line, it was already Monday, December 8 and I was lying in bed reading when my father burst into my bedroom. He ordered me to get dressed and told me that Japan had declared war.

“But I have to go to school,” I protested. “Exams start today.”

He then uttered the greatest words a schoolboy can ever hear: “There’ll be no more school and no more exams.”

From that point the old Shanghai ceased to exist. The Japanese army aggressively enforced its presence throughout the Settlement and street executions of Chinese were common. All foreign cars were confiscated and my father bought a bicycle to take him to his office.

By March 1943, with the war in the Pacific turning against the Japanese, they decided to intern British and other allied nationals in Lunghua – my last real childhood home, where I would spend the next 2½ years. It resembled a half-ruined college campus. Families with small children were sent to G block, a two-storey building that held some 40 small rooms. I remember how my mother and father sat together on one of the beds with my younger sister, Margaret, staring at this tiny space, as small as the rooms in the servants’ quarters at Amherst Avenue.

My first impression was of how relaxed the internees seemed. I had known a Shanghai where the men wore suits and ties, but here they were dressed in cotton shorts and shirtsleeves. Many of the younger women, among them the rather formal mothers of boys at school, were in beachwear. On the observation roof of F block a group of music lovers listened to a classical symphony on a wind-up gramophone. On the steps of the assembly hall the Lunghua Players rehearsed a scene from The Pirates of Penzance. I enjoyed my years in Lunghua, made a huge number of friends of all ages (far more than I did in adult life) and on the whole felt buoyant and optimistic, even when the food rations fell to near zero, skin infections covered my legs, malnutrition had prolapsed my rectum and many of the adults had lost heart.

For the first time in my life I was extremely close to my parents. At home we had had our own bedrooms and bathrooms. I had never seen my parents naked or in bed together. Now I slept, ate, read, dressed and undressed within a few feet of them in the same small room. I revelled in this closeness. Lying in bed at night I could, if I wanted to, reach out and take my mother’s hand, though I never did.

In the early days when there was still electric power my mother would read late into the night, hidden inside her mosquito net. One night a Japanese officer burst in, drew his sword and slashed away the mosquito net above her head, thrashed the light bulb into fragments and vanished without a word. I remember the strange silence of people woken in the nearby rooms, listening to his footsteps as he disappeared into the night.

I think the years together in that very small room had a profound effect on me and the way I brought up my own children. Perhaps the reason why I have lived in the same house in Shepperton for nearly 50 years, and to the despair of everyone have always preferred make-do-and-mend to buying anew, even when I could easily afford it, is that my small and untidy house reminds me of our family room in Lunghua.

I made friendships of a kind with several young Japanese guards. When they were off duty they would allow me to sit in their hot tubs and then wear their kendo armour. After handing me a duelling sword, a fearsome weapon of long wooden segments loosely strung together, they would encourage me to fence with them. Each bout would last 20 seconds and involved me being repeatedly struck about the helmet and face mask, which I could scarcely see through, every dizzying blow being greeted with friendly cheers from the watching Japanese.

They too were bored, only a few years older than me, and had little hope of seeing their families again soon, if ever. I knew they could be viciously brutal, especially when acting under the orders of their NCOs, but individually they were easy-going and likeable. Their military formality and never-surrender ethos were very impressive to a 13-year-old looking for heroes to worship.

In the last 18 months of the war our rations fell steeply. As we sat in our room one day, pushing what my mother called “the weevils” to the rim of our plates of congee (pulped rice), my father decided that from then on we should eat them – we needed the protein. They were small white slugs and perhaps were maggots, a word my mother preferred to avoid. I regularly counted them before tucking in lustily – a hundred or so was my usual score, forming a double perimeter around my plate.

Despite the food shortages, the bitterly cold winters and the uncertainties, I was happier in the camp than I was until my marriage and children. At the same time I felt slightly apart from my parents by the time the war ended. One reason for our estrangement was that their parenting became passive rather than active – they had none of the usual levers to pull, no presents or treats, no say in what we ate, no power over how we lived or ability to shape events.

There was never any friction or antagonism and they did their best to look after me and my sister; but there is no doubt that a gradual estrangement began there and it lasted to the end of their lives. THE first American air raids began in the summer of 1944. Squadrons of fighters, Mustangs and Lightnings, attacked nearby Lunghua airfield. Waves of B-29 bombers followed. I spent every spare moment watching the sky.

© JG Ballard 2008

Extracted from Miracles of Life by JG Ballard, to be published by Fourth Estate on February 4 at £14.99. Copies can be ordered for £13.49 including postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585

More at the Times.

From the BBC World Service:

World Book Club – J.G. Ballard (Radio)

(24 January, 2008)

January’s guest is J.G. Ballard talking about his novel Empire Of The Sun with Harriet Gilbert and a studio audience. Each month an internationally renowned author discusses their most celebrated novel with presenter Harriet Gilbert. To be part of the audience and put a question to J.G. Ballard email your details to World Book Club at worldbookclub@bbc.co.uk.

Also, here’s a reminder of an event featuring Ballard at the Southbank Centre on Wednesday, 20 February 2008, at 7:30pm.

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

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

Sample quotes from the interview:

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

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

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

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

[ Thanks Mike B. and Mike H. ]

Above is the cover for J.G. Ballard’s forthcoming autobiography, to be published by Fourth Estate (and previously announced here).

Meanwhile, the Burroughs crowd over at Reality Studio are having spirited words about the chosen title… They’ve also voiced an intriguing proposition, a ‘what if’ scenario to get the good old synapses firing: imagine if Ballard were to write a memoir of William Burroughs?

Christian Bale in Empire of the Sun (more at YouTube.)

by Pedro Groppo

EMPIRE OF THE SUN (1987)

Director: Steven Spielberg
Screenplay: Tom Stoppard, based on the novel by J.G. Ballard
Starring: Christian Bale, John Malkovich

Whereas the sensibilities of J. G. Ballard and David Cronenberg, who directed Crash (1996), seem to overlap and complement each other, one would be hard-pressed to think of someone like Steven Spielberg as the ideal director of a Ballard adaptation. Empire of the Sun (1987) was the first of the more mainstream adaptations of Ballard’s work, and still remains today the most widespread and popular work based on his fiction, even if it is Spielberg’s least successful movie to date in box office terms. It is however, a landmark in the development of Spielberg’s sensibilities as a director and in the popularization of Ballard.

LEFT: Bale, Spielberg, Malkovich.

The novel had met relative success upon its publication in 1984, being shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winning the Guardian Prize for Best Fiction, and David Lean (Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago) was at first interested in making a film of it. Spielberg was asked by Lean to acquire the rights and produce the film, which he hoped to direct. Interestingly, after a year of preparation, Lean abandoned the project because he decided the book “lacked sufficient dramatic structure for a film and dropped the project to adapt Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo. It was for the better, as Spielberg later admitted he had “secretly wanted to do it himself.” The shadow of Lean hovers over the picture, much like Stanley Kubrick’s would in Spielberg’s later A.I. (2001). Echoes of Oliver Twist, The Bridge on the River Kwai and A Passage to India figure prominently. Ian Freer notes that Spielberg even consciously echoes Lean’s “sense of scope, sweep, and camera stylings — in particular, Lean’s signature crane shot moving from a lone figure to reveal a mass of swarming people.”

Spielberg was, and still is, associated with a particular kind of Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking, having directed a number of box office record breakers, such as Jaws, Jurassic Park, and the Indiana Jones series. His work is often seen as naive, ideological, corny, lacking in subtlety, and even uncritical; but it’s almost a fact that he has a superb visual sense and a genuine flair for storytelling. Empire of the Sun shows a marked development of Spielberg’s abilities and range as a filmmaker, being probably one of (if not the) most mature of his films to date.

As Spielberg has noted:

I really had come to terms with what I’ve been tenaciously clinging to, which was a celebration of a kind of naiveté. … But I just reached a saturation point, and I thought Empire was a great way of performing an exorcism on that period. I had never read anything with an adult setting … where a child saw things through a man’s eyes as opposed to a man discovering things through the child in him.

What Spielberg shares most with Ballard is his ability to immerse the viewer in a world of complete subjectivity, adopting the logics and desires of their protagonists in full. There is hardly, if ever, a critical distance between the viewer and the action on screen in a Spielberg film. He or she accepts it and revels on this acceptance of a subjective and even internal world, safe and desirable in its peculiar kind of escapism. The success of many of Ballard’s texts also depend on a similar stance to be taken by the reader, perhaps most notably in the case of Crash.

‘Complete subjectivity’: Ballard’s iconic drained swimming pools make an appearance…

Robert Kolker, in his analysis of American cinema, A Cinema of Loneliness, describes Spielberg’s films as a kind of “encyclopedia of desire, a locus of representations into which audiences wished to be called,” based on their frequency, success, and influence. Spielberg’s success in conveying such subjectivity in such a congenial and influential way has allowed him to become a true mythmaker of the cinema. Ballard is unquestionably a mythmaker in his own right, but Spielberg is in a position, as the most powerful and influential filmmaker of contemporary American cinema, to actually construct and impose his values artistic choices as ideology. In this sense, his films do not present ideology, but become ideology, as it were, a kind of projection of our own desires.

Empire of the Sun is Spielberg’s most realized attempt at a conscious exploration of these ideas. In the recent documentary “Spielberg on Spielberg,” produced for Turner Classic TV, he acknowledged that the novel “made selections of what a child grabs onto with his eyes compared to what an adult chooses to look at,” and that was what caught his interest. He explicitly wanted to make his film very visual, by showing the world through a child’s eyes, and later, the child losing it all because it was a story of “the death of childhood.” Although Tom Stoppard’s screenplay is very clever and literate, with uniformly excellent excellent dialogue, Spielberg tells his story primarily through visual means, and many of the key scenes do not feature any dialogue — and no narrator. Janet Maslin, on her 1987 New York Times review, said even that the film’s “first half hour, for example, could exist as a silent film — an extraordinarily sharp evocation of Shanghai’s last prewar days, richly detailed and colored by an exquisite foreboding.” In a number of instances, this keen visual sense helps to heighten the drama and translate implicit notions of Ballard’s source very effectively without having to resort to language.

Take for instance the scene where Jim (Christian Bale) is separated from his parents, during the attack on the Petrel (parallel with chapter 4). The panic-stricken crowd at Shanghai is so dense and chaotic that Jim and his mother quickly find themselves separated from Jim’s father, who is going on a different direction, warning him not to let go of her hand. They struggle to get to safety, but in a poignant moment, Jim is distracted by the Japanese fighters flying over his head. He stops to admire them and drops his silver toy plane, and at that point lets go of his mother to retrieve the toy: almost immediately he realizes he’s lost her. In the novel, Jim gets separated from his father after he has been taken to a hospital after the attack. Jim assumes he’s on another floor and never sees him again until the last chapter. Mainly through visuals, Spielberg manages to condense and intensify the sense that Jim is quite able to choose and pursue his own desires over what is responsible, even if he’s not completely aware of the consequences. It foreshadows the air raid on the camp, where he stands on the roof of a tall building, oblivious of the danger of doing so. It also makes explicit the notion that somehow Jim has chosen his individuality, even if that has forced him to abandon the security of his family. These are all ideas from Ballard’s novel, but that are compressed in this single sequence.

ABOVE: The China Odyssey on YouTube.

Spielberg’s understanding of the novel is clearly stated in the China Odyssey documentary on the making of the production: he believes “half of what happened, happened [in Ballard's head]“. The middle portion of the film, parallel to part 2 of the novel, takes place in Lunghua Camp (Soochow in the film). Ballard’s narrative condenses all the action in a single day, beginning with Jim going under the wire (“The Pheasant Hunt”), getting food, doing homework, watching the air raid, burying the dead, and helping out Dr. Ransome (Rawlins in the film). Because they are condensed into a continuous action, these events seem to take place on a different level. The way one event leads to another is of an unnatural fluidity, as if this is Ballard’s artificial dramatization and selection of what would happen in a given day at Lunghua, rather than a faithful account. It suggests in a structural level that much of what happens is informed by Jim’s imagination.

This portion of the film is unfortunately its weakest, as it is greatly expanded, probably to give more screen time to many of the secondary characters, especially Basie (John Malkovich). The action, instead of being continuous and condensed, is put in a conventional narrative frame, losing perhaps too much of its force and rhythm. This is a concern also voiced by the film’s screenwriter, Tom Stoppard, who believed the camp scenes lacked the “compression” and “density” of the first hour, which he thought were “somewhere in the masterpiece class … The balance for me there just seemed to be perfect.” The notion that Jim’s imagination is in full gear, however, is maintained: during the air raid, Jim is on the roof of a tall building at Lunghua, observing with delight the American planes. As he identifies his favorite, a P-51 Mustang, everything stops. In slow motion, the fighter flies in front of him: Jim is ecstatic as the pilot looks directly at him and waves. It’s a powerful moment, and although it doesn’t happen quite like this in the novel, it translates well the concept that what we are seeing is not concrete reality, and that Jim finds liberation and mental nourishment in this hostile but fervent environment.

The ecstasy of the P-51: mental nourishment in Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun.

It is worth mentioning that the most Ballardian character in Spielberg’s entire body of work is Richard Dreyfuss’ Roy Neary from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). In this pivotal film, Spielberg shows a man obsessed with an image that he can’t quite articulate — it’s a vague feeling and is supposed to be a sign of a site (a peak in Wyoming) where aliens (who communicated the image) will be landing. One of the most memorable moments is when he builds a huge model of the peak inside his living room, his obsession making him oblivious to his wife and children — who end up abandoning him. In the end, he is chosen by the aliens to leave Earth and go up on their spaceship with them — Roy leaves his family and responsibilities behind to actively pursue his obsession and doesn’t look back. In the TCM documentary, though, Spielberg says he wouldn’t have this ending if he made the movie today, and that maybe his sensibility has changed since 77. Looking at his recent films it’s clear that for him, the importance of redemption by love, camaraderie, and especially the family unit is paramount. Empire of the Sun may be transitional in this shift in sensibilities, as its ending is untypical for Spielberg, although it softens the dread of Ballard’s vision.

Ballard’s last chapter is titled “The Terrible City.” Jim is leaving Shanghai, perhaps forever, and is already estranged from his family and his home. The chapter is about the future, but for Jim, the future is foreboding and perhaps even unimaginable. He has lost his innocence not at Lunghua, but in the seemingly endless last stages of the war (part 3 in the novel) where he couldn’t tell if it had ended or not, and all sense of security had been taken away from him, much more so than when the war began. In a sense it is at this point that the hard times begin: he’s reunited with his family and is safe from harm, yes, but spiritually, he’s dead:

He stepped on to the gangway, conscious that he was probably leaving Shanghai for the last time, setting out for a small, strange country on the other side of the world which he had never visited, but which was nominally “home”. Yet only part of his mind would leave Shanghai. The rest would remain there forever, returning on the tide like the coffins launched from the funeral piers at Nantao.

J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun.

The image of the coffins, symbolizing the part of his mind that is lost forever in Shanghai, is not only one of death, but an echo of the opening paragraph of the novel: “Wars came early to Shanghai, overtaking each other like the tides that raced up the Yangtze and returned to this gaudy city all the coffins cast adrift from the funeral piers of the Chinese Bund.” It suggests that while “dead”, his mind will be always coming back to this place, his memories haunting him. The last shot of the film is a fine visual equivalent of Ballard’s penultimate paragraph (quoted above), as we see Jim’s suitcase floating in the river in Shanghai (which he had thrown in the water during the march to Nantao stadium). We know that inside are Jim’s cherished cutouts of American magazines, the closest thing he has to memories, and aptly echoes the opening shot of a coffin floating in the same river. Ballard’s bookends are maintained, even if with a somewhat different flavor.

LEFT: Wishing he’d never left the camp… Christian Bale in Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun.

The final scene shows Jim’s parents looking for him among other children that supposedly were collected from other camps. Jim is aloof, not interested or it’s as if he has no hope of ever seeing his parents again. As his mother spots him, it takes Jim a moment or two to recognize her. They embrace, and the last we see of him are his tired eyes, closing finally in (a sort of) tranquility. There is a sense that he’ll never be the same again — but Spielberg refuses to look past this moment and consider any kind of closure for Jim other than rejoining his parents and recovering the security of the family unit. It’s ambiguous and circumspect, as if Spielberg didn’t want to commit to the bleakness of Ballard’s original vision or an all-out “happy” ending. It overstates the importance of family, as if what Jim had been through was only consequence of them being separated. It’s the death of childhood, whereas Spielberg’s earlier films were all about a rediscovery of childhood or its celebration, and he even acknowledged that Empire was the opposite of Peter Pan.

Unfortunately Empire is probably the most undervalued of Spielberg’s more serious outings, and it is by far his least successful film commercially. When it was released, it had to compete with the public’s attention with two other films about boys in WWII or Oriental backdrops: John Boorman’s Hope and Glory (about the London Blitz) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (which got the most attention). The general impression is that the film was panned by the critics, but it was nominated for six Oscars, and won the National Board of Review award for Best Picture, Best Direction and Best Juvenile Performance (Christian Bale’s acting is indeed astonishing). Perhaps most importantly, Ballard himself responded quite well to it. In a 2006 interview conducted by Travis Elborough (included in the Harper Perennial 2006 edition of Empire), he said:

I liked the film. I think it is a very impressive piece of work. I see it once every couple of years. … It seems to have got richer and more interesting as the years pass. I see it not as the film of my book but a film in its own right.

He further elaborated his feelings for the film in an excellent article for the Guardian, in which he shared his memories of the writing process and his reception to the film:

I was deeply moved by the film but, like every novelist, couldn’t help feeling that my memories had been hijacked by someone else’s. … Actors of another kind play out our memories, performing on a stage inside our heads whenever we think of childhood, our first day at school, courtship and marriage. The longer we live — and it’s now 60 years since I reluctantly walked out of Lunghua camp — the more our repertory company emerges from the shadows and moves to the front of the stage. Spielberg’s film seems more truthful as the years pass. Christian Bale and John Malkovich join hands by the footlights with my real parents and my younger self, with the Japanese soldiers and American pilots, as a boy runs forever across a peaceful lawn towards the coming war. But perhaps, in the end, it’s all only a movie.

Empire of the Sun being a novel that is a mixture of memories, facts, and imagination, represents Ballard’s attempt to come to terms with his wartime experience. The film adaptation is a reimagining of the same material by someone else, and it can’t possibly fulfill the same purpose for Ballard as the book does. But for everyone else, Spielberg’s film remains a powerful cinematic adaptation of Ballard’s work, unusually clever and subtle for a Hollywood production. It benefits greatly from repeated viewings, as previously unnoticed details suddenly throw new light on Spielberg’s treatment. Although some may feel it’s a little too saccharine or somewhat pasteurized for mass consumption, the film is never cheap and the emotions are all genuine, as great a film as could have been made in mainstream American cinema in 1987.

Pedro Groppo, 2007.

..:: REFERENCES

+ Ballard, J. G. Empire of the Sun. London: Harper Collins, 2006.
—. “Look Back at Empire.” The Guardian. March 2006.
+ Friedman, Lester B. Citizen Spielberg. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006.
+ Kolker, Robert. A Cinema of Loneliness. London: Oxford University Press, 2000.
+ Maslin, Janet. “Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun.” The New York Times.
+ McBride, Joseph. Steven Spielberg: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.

..:: MORE INFO

Shanghai Jim: Form Dictated by Time.

From last week’s Bookseller:

Ballard memoir to HarperCollins
31.08.07 Sarah Finley

Fourth Estate editorial director Clare Reihill has acquired J G Ballard’s autobiography Miracles of Life from agent Maggie Hanbury. Reihill bought British and Commonwealth rights in the memoir, due in February next year.

Ballard, most famous for Crash and the autobiographical novel, Empire of the Sun, grew up in Shanghai and returned to Britain just after the Second World War. The book will detail his observations about post-war Britain, as well as his life as a single father after his wife died in her 30s, and his experience as a writer.

“J G Ballard has been a giant on the literary landscape for the last 40 years,” Reihill said, “and his long-awaited autobiography will be an exceptionally important and momentous publishing event. For fans of this work it will be a very insightful read. He has narrated his life exceptionally well, showing how events in his life have influenced his work.”

Fourth Estate is also re-issuing five of Ballard’s backlist in February next year: Millennium People; The Crystal World; The Drought; The Drowned World; and The Unlimited Dream Company. They will be promoted alongside the autobiography.

Over on BallardoTube, the “China Odyssey” doco on the making of Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun has appeared. Ballard features prominently.

Don’t forget part two.

[ thanks Pedro! ]