Jeremy Reed at the JG Ballard Memorial, 2009. Photo: Rick McGrath.

West End Survival Kit, by Jeremy Reed. Furze Hill, Hove: Waterloo Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-1-906742-07-2.

JEREMY REED IS A HUGELY PROLIFIC poet, novelist, biographer and spoken-word musician, the author of 15 novels, 16 poetry collections and 14 works of non-fiction since 1984. Yet despite that phenomenal output, he remains an exile in British letters. According to Reed, ‘People have reacted so nastily to me and tried to airbrush me out of the picture… The establishment never forgave me, because I used to give readings in heavy make-up’. That’s not a working method that was ever going to appeal to Sir Andrew Motion, the former Poet Laureate, who famously dubbed Reed ‘that effete little pseud’. He also sledged him as the ‘David Bowie of the poetry circuit’, an especially backhanded insult, given Reed’s sartorial style and the fact that among his back catalogue are biographies on Lou Reed, Marc Almond and Brian Jones. In fact, the latter provided one very revealing insight into the mind of Jeremy Reed. Once asked what he thought was the defining moment of the 60s, he replied: ‘I’d say it was the first time Brian Jones wore a girl’s polka-dotted blouse. It had never been done before’. In the same interview, he derided ‘the barbiturate poetry of Andrew Motion and those post-Larkin poets. Very grey, very drab’. And so the stage is set.

Following the pattern of this exile, whenever there is talk about the latter-day British writers who enjoyed the friendship, patronage or thematic repertoire of J.G. Ballard, invariably the same names are mentioned: Will Self and Iain Sinclair. Not Reed. Yet Reed and Ballard enjoy a long and very intriguing relationship. Reed’s science-fiction novel Diamond Nebula (1994), set in the 23rd century, even featured a film-director character obsessed by Bowie, Ballard and Warhol:

Her eye was arrested by an open photograph album … David Bowie at the Rainbow Theatre, 1972; at the LA Forum in 1976; Hiroshima, 1973; LA Amphitheatre, 1974; Wembley, 1976: the images seeming to have been chosen for their visual diversity and metamorphoses. Over the page were weirdly angled shots of Ballard getting into his car at Shepperton after the publication of Crash; and then the publicity photographs of him that had appeared on the jackets of High-Rise and Myths of the Near Future, together with a series of solarized images in the manner of Man Ray, in which the writer’s head was superimposed on Brancusi sculptures. Cindy flicked through the obsessive preoccupations: Warhol screened by black glasses on a couch at the Factory, and then seen filming Edie Sedgwick and Gino Persicho in Beauty 2; and a few pages on, isolated, filming Chelsea Girls.

Jeremy Reed, Diamond Nebula.

These aren’t the ordinary images of Ballard (let alone Bowie) that get bandied about. They are cult snapshots, taken by a writer with a fan’s eye for obscure detail surrounding the object of worship. As an alternative biography, then, of its three avant-garde celebrities, Diamond Nebula is a tantalising work, drawing on Reed’s main obsessions: style, flashy pop, mutation (both psychic and physical), cult fame, inner space … and Ballard. In the preface to the book, Reed describes ‘Ballard as the chief proponent of the futuristic novel … seen as the person most receptive to occupying a colony that looks towards the arrival of mutants from another galaxy’. Reed talks of creating an environment in which ‘the external world provides a backdrop to the exploration of inner space, a vanishing-point rather than a structure for continuous reference’, and with further reference to the ‘geography of the unconscious’, it’s easy to realise the superficial similarities with Ballard’s own working methods and obsessions.

Jeremy Reed speaking to Nicky Singer at the ICA.

In interview, too, Reed always pays his dues, recording his writerly debt to Ballard’s ‘visionary present’ – an especial act of linguistic engagement that ‘transform[s] the universe into its imagined equivalent’ and provides an instruction manual in ‘blowing up the social structure’. He sees Ballard’s work as a hotwire to the pure, uncut imaginative spirit that also powers the work of Stephen Barber and Edmund White:

They all have that very charged language. When I began as a writer, Ballard was the writer who had a new language that I was looking for, the way he crystallised the modern world into images. It’s something that he has never lost. Ballard is not part of literature at any level, he’s got no concern about it at all. He’s a rogue gene which is what attracted me to him from the start. And work is all he is, what he writes is so integral to him. That’s all he does all day, write all day and live in Shepperton.

But the admiration cut both ways. According to Rick McGrath, Ballard provided blurbs for 12 of Reed’s books and wrote forewords to two others, more JGB endorsements than for any other writer. One of the forewords was for Reed’s latest collection of poetry, West End Survival Kit (2009), possibly the last writing Ballard had published, in which he enthuses about Reed’s ‘talent … almost extraterrestrial in its brilliance’. For Ballard, Reed is ‘Rimbaud reconfigured as the Man who fell to Earth, a visitor from deep space whose time machine was designed by Lautréamont and de Sade, and powered by the most exotic fuels the imagination has ever devised’. That’s a very dense sentence, pricking imagistic sensors of recognition in almost every one of its 36 words: Bowie, Roeg, symbolism, science fiction, surrealism, film, sadomasochism, inner space…

And so it is with these poems, which are compacted like diamonds, an intent signalled by this excerpt:

firing ideas at me like big hitters
for work we do
shape-shifting architecture into words,

the way 10 million atoms colonize
an inked full stop.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream’, West End Survival Kit.

The back cover gives no real description of the contents, save for general endorsements from a stellar cast: Ballard, David Gascoyne, David Lodge and Seamus Heaney. We are led to believe that this is a collection of free-standing poems, and reading them is simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting. Reed is obsessed with both surface flash and the hidden layers of meaning inherent in modern urban life, with which we constantly negotiate and are in dialogue with: the meaning of ‘junk DNA’ and the enigma of Michael Jackson, the sigils in corporate signage, the mental cross-chatter engendered by rapid communications technology. His street-level descriptions are often as unfathomable as conspiracy theory, and shot through with a selection of barely glimpsed, constantly rotating characters (including a first-person narrator), invariably described within a mesh of techy jargon:

meditating in front of his mezzanine.
His girlfriend paints her toes
in Howard Hodgkin moods,

reads Holy Anorexia and grooves
at being air
she’s molecules wired to neuronal drive.

He’s into ‘dark matter’, lab neutrinos,
thermonuclear fusion
generating energy in the sun.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Astroparticle Physicist Chills’, West End Survival Kit.

The writing is a rush, a blur. It’s slippery, emphasised by quick-fire, three-line stanzas:

They share headphones on the new R.E.M.:
a shimmering slice of post-modern pop,
impersonal as an airport lounge,

riffy, mid-tempo anomie
for the 21st century.
He wears a Titian red Gucci jacket,

as though it’s cut out of the sun,
and she two dollops of mauve eye shadow
co-ordinating with her top.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Endgames’, West End Survival Kit.

Certain motifs begin to gestate a picture in the mind as you gradually learn through half-remembered, diaphanous glimpses that Mars and the moon have been colonised; dispossessed astronauts wander the Earth; drugs are rampant; and technological virtuality is encoded into the very fabric of everyday life. By the end, you are left with the inkling that the poems are perhaps not free-standing, but part of a continuous (albeit fractured) narrative, illuminated snapshots of a mordant near-future world seen from multiple, cross-linked perspectives. They could be interior hallucinations, or the exterior unspooling vision of CCTV cameras all over the city, but whatever they are, they are engendered by Reed’s very effective trick of repeating a motif, phrase or word from one poem to the next, but never more than two poems in a row. Subliminally, you become aware of a deep, unfolding narrative, even if consciously you assess that you are reading two poems with very different characters:

ten miles above Cape Canaveral.
He journeys back in his neurology
to pink skies over the oxygen plant,

graffiti discovered on a rock face –
RAD51D — the king’s returned —
and gantried higher up a gold statue

Jeremy Reed, ‘Red Planet Blues’, West End Survival Kit.

Someone’s got the dangling hexagonal
molecule RAD51D
under scrutiny for cell death

like a registration number
on a top security Jeep.
She’s paid to disinform. Each day

Jeremy Reed, ‘Drug Giant PA’, West End Survival Kit.

Given all the Ballard associations, it’s tempting to read Ballardian themes into the work (the damaged astronauts fit well) and the densified prose method strives to convey as much meaning as the ‘condensed novels’ in The Atrocity Exhibition. Vaughan from Crash (and Atrocity) even makes an appearance, enmeshed in a shady deal with the clone of Princess Di:

H.R.H. has a contract out
on this blonde afterlife simulacrum:
Di as an endlessly repeatable clone.

Vaughan knows he’s watched. The Jeep outside
has on-board machine guns, a snoop
positioned in it with a cold black eye.

Jeremy Reed, ‘The Reckoning’, West End Survival Kit.

Jeremy Reed – photograph courtesy Waterloo Press.

But in the end, the most obvious reference point seems to be the glistening, cypher-filled, pop-artefact worlds of William Gibson. The characters in West End Survival Kit come on like Case from Neuromancer crashlanding in London (which has merged with Tokyo, as it did in Reed’s 2008 novel The Grid), as if Case was too burnt out to even care about fixing his damaged neurosystem, too jaded to even muster up any more passion for his beloved cyberspace. In her review of The Grid, Bidisha wrote that ‘one wishes Reed would produce a scholarly work about Jacobean theatre instead of an inexpert cyber-romp. His next work should be excellent, but it shouldn’t meddle with the future. Reed’s seriousness and intelligence emerge when he drops his coolness and cleaves to the past’. But this sounds more like the kind of genre snobbery Ballard was forced to endure when he, too, dared to write science fiction. Reed does post-cyberpunk very well: he has a real feel for the imagery, the characters and the worldview, and like both Gibson and Ballard, he is interested in the next 5 minutes rather than the next 500 years. For Reed, too, science fiction is the sociological study of the present. Yet he infuses this with his own ‘extraterrestrial’ brand of theatricality, poetic sensibility and mutant, gender-bending attitude to create a hybrid form. As science-fiction poetry, it recalls the work of Robert Calvert, the late Hawkwind lyricist and lead singer, and another tortured anti-hero whose own life story could easily inhabit the Reed pantheon.

Towards the end of West End Survival Kit, Reed ties it all up with two poems about, of all things, the history of Pink Floyd. And given all of the above, it makes perfect sense. As the poem identifies, the classic-era Floyd, despite being saddled with what people assumed was an intergalactic persona, was always more about inner space than outer (like Ballard’s anomie-infested astronauts), producing a brace of albums that reflected with sensitivity on battered individuals like their founder Syd Barrett, as in Wish You Were Here, and the assorted lunatics in the cast of Dark Side of the Moon. The Floyd poems make a fitting coda to Reed’s painful folio of snapshots from a numb world. They solidify his eulogy to people too disconnected, too exiled in their own minds to ever tread ‘meaningful’ paths through life, but who nonetheless retain a unique sense of self allied to their damaged intelligence:

Barrett’s the rock astronomer
boating the Cam’s lime green spine,
wristing downriver like a water-boatman

listening to voices, his schizophrenia
big in the mix
like invasive radio.
…
Echoing slide. It’s paranoia synthesised –
their moon trip – dark side in reverse.
Barrett’s still running through a corridor

As undertow, a brain damaged psycho.
The music road maps inner space.
It’s like a river knocking at the door.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Brain Damage: a short history of the Pink Floyd’, West End Survival Kit.

It’s out there somewhere, while the London rain

slashes the light-polluted scuzz,
wacks down fried leaves, keeps me inside
this rainy, orange October day,
retrieving the Floyd’s mission to locate
the alien in the psychopath.
Outside my window a wet jay

jabs at a red berry gash.
I go out on their dimension,
beamed by the music’s escalating curve,
back to my youth and Apollo
cargoing human hardware to the moon –

their weighted boots grating on dust,
Pink Floyd the terrestrial soundtrack
to space conquest, a white plateau
opening out to three astronauts
learning by hesitant degrees to trust.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Wish You Were Here’, West End Survival Kit.

West End Survival Kit is not wholly successful (although it’s pretty close). It briefly falls flat, for example, when Reed makes reference to ‘psychogeography’, a loaded concept degraded through cultural overuse that, although undoubtedly inherent within the work, sounds inauthentic when actually named and nudged up against his own dream geographies. Yet mostly, Reed’s innate ability to explore new genres, new forms and new plans of attack in the hope of creating something extreme and unique makes the work well worth reading. As Bidisha implies, it is probably this genre slippage that is the real cause of Reed’s exile, but somehow, given the figures with which he identifies, you get the impression that on some level that’s how he likes it.

‘Video surveillance sights the street. The city leaks pathology…’ We know exactly what Jeremy means, though we may never have thought of our everyday world in these terms. The poet is our extraterrestrial visitor, calmly surveying everything, the highspeed neural networks of his poetic gift assessing the landscape, making only the most important connections, linking the present moment to the most vital possibilities of itself … Use this volume of poems as a guide-book to the present, to the real world of possibility that most of us ignore. It’s the poet’s job to be a seer, to seize us by the shoulders and force us to out-stare the mirage. Reading these poems, I find myself marvelling at their cleverness and brilliance, and saying: ‘…yes, yes, absolutely.’

J.G. Ballard, foreword to West End Survival Kit.

West End Survival Kit can be purchased direct from the publisher.

Jeremy Reed performing with Itchy Ear as The Ginger Light, ‘a progressive poetry act’.

Jeremy Reed – photographer(s) unknown.

Thanks to Shane for help with research for this article.

..:: More information:
+ Jeremy Reed
+ Waterloo Press

REFERENCES
Bidisha (2008). ‘The Grid, by Jeremy Reed’. The Independent, 28 September.
Carter, Randolph (2006). ‘Dreaming with his eyes open’. 3am Magazine.
Lachman, Gary (2006). Jeremy Reed: A supernova in orange and purple ink. The Independent, 30 July.
Reed, Jeremy (1994) Diamond Nebula. London: Peter Owen.
———- (2008). West End Survival Kit. Furze Hill, Hove: Waterloo Press.

The inspiration behind this body of work came from a growing curiosity about recent corporate developments of private space in London that apparently encourage the public to access them. Typically these environments have beautiful landscaping around a canal or lake. An amphitheatre seems to be a further prerequisite as is CCTV which monitors everything including security guards who amble around these empty places. The hustle and bustle of neighboring streets feels a world away.

In the summer of 2008 I went for a series of walks along arterial routes heading out of London. That summer I had read several of J.G. Ballard’s novels including Super Cannes, which is about disturbing behaviour amongst the inhabitants of a gated community isolated from the world. On one of these ambles I chanced upon a recently completed building development. I felt compelled to enter this beautifully landscaped glass and steel environment. It appeared as if no expense had been spared. What I encountered there helped to crystallize some vague ideas that became the photographs that are presented in this collection. The idyllic setting combined with the ever-present ’security’ got under my skin and left me wondering about a dystopian outcome for this kind of world.

I remember sitting down by the artificial lake. The sun was beating down and people casually wandered about. I gazed up at the office blocks. I thought it must be an idyllic place to work. London felt far away. I imagined that you could lift these acres up and deposit them in any city in the world and they would feel at home. This was an anti-Dickensian space, more an abstract one. It was a statement of how the world of work could be. The management ethos, proclaimed on various signs, was ‘enjoy.work’.

Enjoy.work. Arbeit macht frei. Freedom through work. I rose to the bait. Unease crept into my thoughts.

I found myself searching for the cracks. A variety of methods had been used to try to block the sun reaching the interior spaces. It appeared as if, as each building had been erected, ever more elaborate ways had been devised to keep nature out. What was it really like to work in there?

I noticed that an algae bloom threatened the lake’s plant and animal life. Peering into one building’s reception area, I saw how the appearance of leisure had been carefully arranged. Bicycles, guitars and deckchairs in neat rows. An abandoned chess game and open magazines on the coffee table. A half-finished painting-by-numbers canvas on an easel. No one about. Why had everyone had to leave so suddenly? Or, were they trying to hide something? Soon after, I was asked to leave for taking photographs without permission.

After some months I built an architectural model inspired by this corporate campus, and began photographing. I wanted a dystopian world, centred on a dark lake, that seemed to have the opposite effect on those that gazed into it than that intended by the landscape architect. So, some of the ant-like figures turn up to work, use the facilities and leave. Others seem to be employed in extracurricular activities of a more malevolent nature.

Nicholas Cobb, 2009.

The Office Park book, featuring many more images, is available at blurb as well as a number of other books by Nicholas Cobb.

Lured by tax concessions and a climate like northern California’s, dozens of multinational companies had moved into the business park that now employed over ten thousand people. The senior managements were the most highly paid professional caste in Europe, a new elite of administrators, énarques and scientific entrepreneurs. The lavish brochure enthused over a vision of glass and titanium straight from the drawing boards of Richard Neutra and Frank Gehry, but softened by landscaped parks and artificial lakes, a humane version of Corbusier’s radiant city. Even my sceptical eye was prepared to blink.

J.G. Ballard, Super-Cannes (2000).

The advertising displays in the estate office overlooking the roundabout on the RN7 had the look of museum tableaux, and the artist’s impression of a concourse as crowded as the Champs-Elysées, lined with boutiques and thronged by high-spending customers, seemed to describe a forgotten twentieth-century world. Only the cyber-cafe next door was serving any customers. The computer terminals facing the bar were out of use, but three bikers in metallized boots and Mad Max leathers sat at the outdoor tables. They formed a feral presence in the hyper-modern complex, like carrion-birds on a skyscraper cornice, filling an unplanned niche in the ecology of the future.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

An almost drugged air floated across the lake, a rogue cloud that had drifted down the hillside, carrying the scent of office-freshener from a factory in Grasse. I walked along the water’s edge, attracting the attention of two security men in a Range Rover parked among the pines. One watched me through his binoculars, no doubt puzzled that anyone in Eden-Olympia should have the leisure to stroll through the midday sun.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

As if to encourage the fantasies of the stranger sitting nearby, she kicked off her high-heeled shoes and hitched up her skirt to scratch her stockinged insteps, exposing a satisfying glimpse of white thigh. Despite the smart suit, her blonde hair was a little too blown, giving her the look of a nervy and intellectual tart. Was she a call-girl, computerized like everyone else at Eden-Olympia?

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

A black Range Rover clumsily straddled a flowerbed, its tyres flattening the rose bushes. Isolated figures patrolled the lawns, like shadows free to play among themselves for a few hours each night. Behind the shrubbery sounded the low-pitched murmur of radio traffic, a soft anatomy of the night.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

Halder stood with his back to me, searching the upstairs windows, and I could see his reflection in the glass doors of the sun lounge. He was smiling to himself, a strain of deviousness that was almost likeable. Behind the brave and paranoid new world of surveillance cameras and bulletproof Range Rovers there probably existed an old-fashioned realm of pecking orders and racist abuse.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

Crowds strolled under the palms, enjoying the warm autumn day, like citizens of another world who had come ashore for a few hours. Wilder Penrose had been right to say that there was something unreal about them.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

Were assassins aware of the contingent world? I tried to imagine Lee Harvey Oswald on his way to the book depository in Dealey Plaza on the morning he shot Kennedy. Did he notice a line of overnight washing in his neighbour’s yard, a fresh dent in the nextdoor Buick, a newspaper boy with a bandaged knee? The contingent world must have pressed against his temples, clamouring to be let in. But Oswald had kept the shutters bolted against the storm, opening them for a few seconds as the President’s Lincoln moved across the lens of the Zapruder camera and on into history.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

Prostitutes came out at dusk, usherettes in the theatre of the night, shining their miniature torches at any kerb that threatened their high-heels. Two of them entered the Rialto and sat at the next table, muscular brunettes with the hips and thighs of professional athletes. They ordered drinks they never touched, killing time before they set off to trawl the hotels.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

‘There’s a remarkable need for punitive violence hidden away in the senior executive mind.’
‘And sex tends to release it?’
‘It’s meant to, for sound biological reasons. Sex is such a quick route to the psychopathic, the shortest of short cuts to the perverse. We aren’t running an adventure playground, but a forcing house designed to expand the psychopathic possibilities of the executive imagination. It needs to be carefully monitored. Sadomasochism, excretory sex-play, body-piercing and wife-pandering can easily veer off into something nasty.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

The glass and gun-metal office blocks were set well apart from each other, separated by artificial lakes and forested traffic islands where a latter-day Crusoe could have found comfortable refuge. The faint mist over the lakes and the warm sun reflected from the glass curtain-walling seemed to generate an opal haze, as if the entire business park were a mirage, a virtual city conjured into the pine-scented air like a son-et-lumière vision of a new Versailles.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

‘Homo sapiens is a reformed hunter-killer of depraved appetites, which once helped him to survive. He was partly rehabilitated in an open prison called the first agricultural societies, and now finds himself on parole in the polite suburbs of the city state. The deviant impulses coded into his central nervous system have been switched off. He can no longer harm himself or anyone else. But nature sensibly endowed him with a taste for cruelty and an intense curiosity about pain and death. Without them, he’s trapped in the afternoon shopping malls of a limitless mediocrity. We need to revive him, give him back the killing eye and the dreams of death. Together they helped him to dominate this planet.’

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

I needed to escape from Eden-Olympia, with its ceaseless work and its ethic of corporate responsibility. The business park was the outpost of an advanced kind of puritanism, and a virtually sex-free zone. Jane and I rarely made love. The flair she had shown during my days as a virtual cripple had been smothered by a sleep of eye-masks and sedatives, followed by cold showers and snatched breakfasts.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

‘Places like Eden-Olympia are fertile ground for any messiah with a grudge. The Adolf Hitlers and Pol Pots of the future won’t walk out of the desert. They’ll emerge from shopping malls and corporate business parks.’

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

‘Who are the tenants? Big international companies?’
‘The biggest. Mitsui, Siemens, Unilever, Sumitomo, plus all the French giants – Elf Aquitaine, Carrefour, Rhone-Poulenc. Along with a host of smaller firms: investment brokers, bioengineering outfits, design consultancies. I sound like a salesman, but when you get to know it you’ll see what a remarkable place Eden-Olympia really is. In its way this is a huge experiment in how to hothouse the future.’

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

Between the security building and the Elf-Maritime research labs was an open-air cafeteria, a facility intended to soften the public face of the business park and give it a passing resemblance to an Alpine resort. Tired after my meeting with Zander, I sat down and ordered a vin blanc from the young French waitress, who wore jeans and a white vest printed with a quotation from Baudrillard.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

The future was a second Eden-Olympia, almost twice the size of the original, the same mix of multinational companies, research laboratories and financial consultancies. Hyundai, BP Amoco, Motorola and Unilever had secured their plots, investing in long-term leases that virtually financed the whole project. The site-contractors were already at work, clearing the holm oaks and umbrella pines that had endured since Roman times, surviving forest fires and military invasions. Nature, as the new millennium dictated, was giving way for the last time to the tax shelter and the corporate car park.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

Work and the realities of corporate life anchored Eden-Olympia to the ground. The buildings wore their ventilation shafts and cable conduits on their external walls, an open reminder of Eden-Olympia’s dedication to company profits and the approval of its shareholders. The satellite dishes on the roofs resembled the wimples of an order of computer-literate nuns, committed to the sanctity of the workstation and the pieties of the spreadsheet.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

High above me, fluted columns carried the pitched roofs, an attempt at a vernacular architecture that failed to disguise this executive-class prison. Taking their cue from Eden-Olympia and Antibes-les-Pins, the totalitarian systems of the future would be subservient and ingratiating, but the locks would be just as strong.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

I stepped from the car-park lift onto the overheated roof, a cockpit of sun and death. In the mirror curtain-walling of the office building I could see myself reflected like an unwary tourist who had strayed through the wrong door into the danger-filled silences of a bullring.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

This was the first office building to be constructed at the business park, but after a bombastic overture the architecture that followed was late modernist in the most minimal and self-effacing way, a machine above all for thinking in.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

‘We ought to move on. Ghosts are walking around Eden-Olympia…’

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

The Office Park book, featuring many more images, is available at blurb as well as a number of other books by Nicholas Cobb.

..:: MORE INFORMATION:
+ Interview with Nicholas Cobb about The Office Park.
+ Nicholas Cobb’s website.

‘Iterative Architecture: a Ballardian Text’

by Brian Baker

Instructions/ Introduction

Readers hoping to solve the mystery of J.G. Ballard’s ‘The Beach Murders’ may care to approach it in the form of a card game. Some of the principal clues have been alphabetized, some left as they were found, scrawled on to the backs of a deck of cards. Readers are invited to recombine the order of the cards to arrive at a solution.* Obviously any number of solutions is possible, and the final answer to the mystery lies forever hidden.

Brian Baker, 2009

Originally published in 21: Journal of Contemporary and Innovative Fiction, Issue 1 (autumn/winter 2008/09). Reproduced with permission.

♣♠♥♦

Architecture (A♣). Physical space is crucial to the Ballardian imaginary, from the eponymous tower block in High-Rise (1975) to the ‘gated communities’ and science parks of Super-Cannes (2000) and Millennium People (2003). Counterposed to images of flight and transcendence found in many of his stories, the urban environment is often an imprisoning space. In his article ‘J.G. Ballard and the Architectures of Control’, Dan Lockton argues that ‘One of the many ‘obsessions’ running through Ballard’s work is what we might characterise as the effect of architecture on the individual’, while complicating his argument by acknowledging the mutual implication of inner and outer, psychological and environment: this blurring being Ballard’s method of ‘reflecting the participants’ mental state in the environment itself’. [1] Lockton also suggests that ‘[t]he architecture […] acts as a structure for the story’ in locating the protagonist and ‘plot’ firmly in an ‘obsessively explained and expounded’ architecture. I would like to develop this argument by suggesting that the informing structural principles of Ballard’s short stories, particularly that of the period beginning with ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964) and embracing The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) but also later short fictions, are spatial and iterative: geometry and algebra.

Ballardian (2♣). On the BBC Radio 4 arts review programme Front Row, presenter Mark Lawson, in introducing a discussion of Ballard’s autobiography Miracles of Life, suggested that ‘he’s one of the few writers to have become an adjective — Ballardian’. [2] An author who attains the status of an adjective runs the risk of reduction to culturally received ideas of their work (often erroneous and masking the texts themselves) or, worse still, it makes them the object of caricature or burlesque. To become an adjective suggests a certain kind of cultural visibility (or even cultural power), but also indicates a possible ossification through repetition: another reduction, to a set of representative images, ideas and tropes. In this case, ‘Ballardian’ signifies a recurrent set of narrative structures, characters, and particularly iconic places and things, many of which were identified by David Pringle in his groundbreaking critical work of the 1970s:

Such things as concrete weapons ranges, dead fish, abandoned airfields, radio telescopes, crashed space-capsules, sand dunes, empty cities, […] beaches, fossils, broken juke-boxes, crystals, lizards, multi-storey car-parks, dry lake-beds, medical laboratories, drained swimming-pools, […] high-rise buildings, predatory birds, and low-flying aircraft. [3]

To assert a ‘Ballardian’ imaginary is to suggest a limitation to his work, a finite set of materials out of which a range of texts are worked (and re-worked). It is a critical commonplace to note the ‘obsessional’ return to key images, objects and concerns in Ballard’s work – from emptied swimming pools to a desire to transcend time – that could have reduced his texts to a set of symptoms of an identifiable pathology (and did, in the notorious judgement on Crash by a publisher’s reader). At best, Ballard’s ‘obsessional’ return to a limited creative palette can be used to articulate a consistent and particular vision of the world – what Mark Lawson, characterising ‘Ballardian’, called a ‘way of looking at the world and describing it’ – or is, at worst, a boring and repetitive re-working of the same old material by a ‘minor’ (genre) writer who lacks a wider engagement with human life. ‘Ballardian’ is perhaps best understood (a) as a symptom of genre, and the repetition-with-difference pattern of much genre fiction; and (b) as an effect of Ballard’s structural reliance on iteration.

Confetti Royale (9♣). The original title of the story collected in the 2001 Collected Short Stories as ‘The Beach Murders’ is ‘Confetti Royale’, signifying its intertextual relation to Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale (1953) and the Cold War spy or espionage narrative. The impenetrable motivations of the characters in ‘Confetti Royale’ – two Russian agents, on CIA operative, an ‘absconded State Department cipher chief’ and ‘American limbo dancer’ (whose actions entirely exceed this belittling characterization) – both anticipate the labyrinthine logic of Le Carré’s espionage fiction and compromises the more straightforward and linear adventures of Fleming’s secret agent. There has been some recent speculation on the Ballardian website about the connection between Ballard and Fleming, particularly with regard to The Wind from Nowhere (Ballard’s 1962 ‘disowned’ apprentice novel) and its megalomaniacal industrialist Hardoon, who could be seen as a an analogue of the Bond super-villains who seek the chimera of ‘world domination’. [4] While ‘Confetti Royale’ is a playful iteration of espionage fiction, its card-game structure raises to a formal principle the centrality of the game between Bond and Le Chiffre in Casino Royale. Here, the 27 textual elements (Introduction plus 26 alphabeticized titled paragraphs) are strewn as ‘confetti’, compromising the ordering principles of the baccarat tables or Cold War ideologies.

Diamonds Are Forever (6♣). The 1969 James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (OHMSS) was the first to be made without Sean Connery. The opening 15 minutes is suffused by a self-reflexivity which marks out the problematic nature of generic repetition-with-difference. The new Bond, George Lazenby, looks directly at the camera at the end of the pre-credits sequence, when the ‘girl’ he has been fighting for drives off, and says ‘This never happened to the other fellah’; the film’s title sequence replays scenes from earlier Bond films; and when Bond ‘resigns’ and clears his office drawer, key objects from earlier films are introduced with aide-memoire musical leitmotifs from previous Bond films overlaid on the soundtrack. Anxiety-provoking difference is suppressed by reference to the recognisable and familiar, even at the risk of disrupting the film diegesis. In 1971, not only did Bond return, but so did Connery. Diamonds Are Forever is Bond’s ‘revenge’ mission for the death, in OHMSS, of Bond’s wife Tracey (the ‘girl’ who escaped him at the beginning), and is largely set in Nixon’s USA. A morally rotten, bloated film (featuring two sadistic homosexual assassins as an index of its gender sensitivities), Diamonds Are Forever’s main location is Las Vegas, the ‘old’ Vegas of the Dunes and the Sands, the excessive, corrupt Vegas of Bugsy Siegel and the Mob.

Diamonds Are Forever plays the megalomaniacal Blofeld – murderer of Bond’s wife and manipulator of the diamond trade to create a laser-bearing ‘killer’ satellite – against one ‘Willard Whyte’, a helpful billionaire resident of a Las Vegas penthouse suite. This character’s good-ole-boy persona fails to mask the fact that he is a Whyte-washed reiteration of a real-life Las Vegas resident, Howard Hughes, who in real life more nearly approximated Blofeld. Unlike Fleming’s Casino Royale (1953) and the 2006 film version of this Bond narrative, where the high-stakes card games function as a trope for ideological conflict and the dangerous fluidity of capital markets and financial flows, Diamonds Are Forever makes little or no play with the casino chronotope. Ballard’s own Las Vegas novel is Hello America (1981), the most generically ‘science fiction’ of his later works. This novel narrates a journey by a European exploratory mission to a depopulated, post-apocalyptic United States, where they find a self-anointed (and self-named) President Charles Manson, who has assumed command of the remainder of America’s nuclear arsenal. Hello America uses the Las Vegas gambling icon of the roulette wheel, rather than the card table, to critique the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction. As Ken Cooper suggests, ‘self-destruction […] is the inevitable payoff of atomic roulette’. [5]

Experimental Fiction (7♣). Ballard’s most formally experimental period lies between ‘The Terminal Beach’ and The Atrocity Exhibition. Although his later novels are iterative in their narrative and textual patterning, they are much closer to ‘mainstream’ literary fiction’s spatial continuity and temporal causality. However, in his short fiction Ballard did return to formally experimental or innovative texts, often playing with textual conventions. ‘The Index’ (1977) consists of just that, ‘the index to the unpublished and perhaps suppressed autobiography of a man who may well have been one of the most remarkable figures of the 20th century’, one Henry Rhodes Hamilton, but the mystery of who he was and the status of the text remains unresolved; ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’ (1976) consists of annotations to the subtitle of the story (‘A discharged Broadmoor patient compiles “Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown”, recalling his wife’s murder, his trial and exoneration’), each word of which is footnoted; and in ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ (1985) the respondent implies that he has assassinated the second incarnation of Christ in 100 ‘answers’. [6] These texts are organised by absence or ellipsis, the architecture of the stories signifying a missing central element or text that reader must configure or enunciate for herself/himself. Non-linear, spatial in design, Ballard’s later experimental short stories are textual games that posit a foundational enigma, a mystery that the reader must work to decode.

ABOVE: Artwork by Jeffrey K. Potter for ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (commissioned for the collection Memories of the Space Age).

Fugue Fiction (5♣). The ‘fugue fictions’ are three connected short stories that Ballard published around the turn of the 1980s: ‘News from the Sun’ (1981), ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (1982) and ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (1982). A close examination of these stories discloses the iterative principle at work even in Ballard’s later texts, where formal fragmentation has given way to more linear narrative models. A paragraph from ‘A Question of Re-Entry’ (1962) pinpoints the shared emphases of these stories:

The implication was that the entire space programme was a symptom of some inner unconscious malaise afflicting mankind, and in particular the Western technocracies, and that the space-craft and satellites had been launched because their flights satisfied certain buried compulsions and desires. [7]

In ‘Memories of the Space Age’, the protagonist Mallory, a doctor in the NASA program, confesses to his unconscious complicity in the first orbital murder, by a borderline-disturbed astronaut named Hinton. This act produced a kind of ‘space-sickness’ of fugue-states and loss of temporal awareness that is centred on Cape Canaveral: ‘he had torn the fabric of time and space, cracked the hour-glass from which time was running’. [8] The fugues experienced by Mallory and the protagonists of the two other stories are a kind of congealing of time, a transcendence of clock time; in ‘News from the Sun’, these fugues are explicitly typed as a return to a pre-lapsarian state of consciousness. In ‘Myth of the Near Future’, the protagonist Sheppard pursues his terminally ill wife to Canaveral, where the time-effect may ultimately revivify her. All three stories are patterned on a triangulation between the protagonist, his wife (or lover), and an antagonist; a fourth figure is present, outside of the primary triangulation, who is either an astronaut or connected to the space program.

‘News from the Sun’: Franklin-Ursula-Slade (Trippett)
‘Memories of the Space Age’: Mallory-Anna-Hinton (Gale Shepley)
‘Myths of the Near Future’: Sheppard-Elaine-Martinsen (Anne Godwin)

The triangulations suggests a geometric/architectural emphasis, but the sense that these three fictions, published in sequence, are reworkings of the same conceptual material and re-deploy the same motifs (flight, the space programme, fugue states and time) signifies their centrality to the Ballardian iterative complex.

Gemini. (4♣) The Space Age is a crucial source for the Ballardian imaginary, from the negotiations of cargo-cult imperialism in ‘A Question of Re-Entry’ (1963) to the assassination of a messianic astronaut in ‘The Object of the Attack’ (1984). The icon of the astronaut is central to the ‘fugue fictions’ and their sense that NASA’s manned space programs were a cosmic transgression, an hubristic leap out of biological time which has catastrophic psychological consequences. Many of Ballard’s texts are centred on Cape Canaveral, from ‘The Illuminated Man’ (1964) (itself later incorporated – reiterated – into The Crystal World (1965)), where time crystallizes, to ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (1982), where the Cape is the epicentre of a kind of ‘space sickness’. However, it is not Apollo imagery – the Moon landings – that regulate Ballard’s Space Age imaginary. His astronauts have orbital trajectories. In ‘The Dead Astronaut’ (1968) and ‘The Cage of Sand’ (1962) orbiting capsules containing dead astronauts form a kind of artificial constellation in the night sky, while the protagonists wait at Canaveral for their orbits to decay. It is not Apollo, but the Mercury and Gemini programs – manned orbital missions that grew in complexity and duration, but stayed within the ambit of Earth – that provide the backdrop for Ballard’s Space Age. This is no New Frontier, no ascension to other planets, but a limited, problematic endeavour.

Hearts and Minds (8♣). The title sequence of the 2006 Casino Royale plays with the centrality of the card game and the casino to its narrative. In motion-capture animation (where computer-generated graphics are overlaid on live action), a silhouetted polygon Bond fights, shoots, and is finally shown (in a live-action ‘reveal’) to be Daniel Craig, the ‘new’ Bond. The roulette wheel becomes a sniper-scope target in these graphics, as clubs, diamonds and spades become weapons embedded in the torsos of antagonists, ‘blood’ flowing across the screen from their wounds. Bond is himself ‘cut’ by playing cards in one animated sequence, but is invulnerable; no blood seems to flow there. The interrelationship of the casino, the roulette wheel and the playing card with the neo-colonial adventurism represented by the Bond imaginary invites us to read the film itself as a kind of spectacle or game, masking its ideological premises.

Iterative (3♣). Crucial to the idea of a ‘Ballardian’ text is patterning or what I have suggested as iterability. It would be difficult to deny that Ballard returns to similar ideas, or narrative structures throughout his work: it is the effectiveness of the patterning that is crucial, the combination and re-combination of elements to work through a coherent world that provides Ballard’s texts with imaginative power. David Punter, in Modernity, concurs, stating: ‘What is most significant […] is that Ballard is a repetitive writer, a writer of repetition.’ [9] The first formally ‘iterative’ Ballard short story is ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964), in which the textual fabric of the story is fragmented, split into 22 sections (21 of them subtitled), echoing the psychological fragmentation of the protagonist Traven (the earliest incarnation of the ‘T-‘ figure who recurs, as ‘Tallis’ or ‘Talbot’ or ‘Trabert’) who can also be found in Ballard’s iterative masterwork, The Atrocity Exhibition. ‘The Terminal Beach’ and particularly the Atrocity Exhibition texts are non-linear and non-causal in terms of narrative; in ‘The Terminal Beach’, the concrete blocks of the nuclear testing site Eniwetok Island form a maze, ‘their geometric regularity and finish [seeming] to occupy more than their own volumes of space, imposing on him a mood of absolute calm and order.’ [10] Here the spatial ordering of the text is more properly geometric rather than algebraic (iterative), but the repetitive, disorienting regularity of the field of blocks is a figure for a space that repeats itself endlessly. This motif can also be found in the more classically dystopian short story ‘The Concentration City’, where the urban ‘build-up’ has no boundary, no end, and a train journey to find its limits returns the protagonist to the starting point is a regressive, looping trajectory; and in the repeated face of Cordobès on the deck of cards placed upon Quimby’s balcony table in ‘Confetti Royale’.

James (10♣). J.G. Ballard’s first names are James Graham. Only in his Crash alter-ego is Ballard ‘James’, a knowing self-implication in that text’s transgressive sexual material; he was ‘Jimmy’ as a boy, ‘Jim’ to his adult friends. The diminutive, ‘Jim’, humanises Ballard, and it is this name which is given to his ‘autobiographical’ selves in Empire of the Sun (1985) and The Kindness of Women (1991). Opposing this is the self-alienated ‘J.G.’, a not-quite nom de plume that masks the ‘real’ Jim Ballard. Ballard’s textual interrogation of unitary subjectivity is reflected in this circulation of names, and the surnames of his protagonists – Sheppard, Maitland, Franklin, Sinclair – are themselves iterative signs. James Bond, by way of contrast, is never ‘Jimmy’, ‘Jim’ or ‘Jamie’: always ‘James’.

Kennedy (J♣). After his assassination in 1963, President John F. Kennedy’s name was given to the Cape where the NASA space program still has its operational base: Canaveral. This naming has now been reversed, but the Space Center still bears JFK’s name. It is Kennedy who is seen to be the ‘author’ of Apollo, giving the political and economic impetus to reach the Moon through the rhetoric of the ‘New Frontier’ and a sustained arms race (symbolically as well as militarily), though it could be argued that it is Lyndon Johnson who was most committed to the American space program in the 1950s and 1960s. Kennedy’s assassination is, in some sense, a ‘ground zero’ for contemporary American culture, and he looms large in the algebra of icons that Ballard constructs in the period of The Atrocity Exhibition, along with the president’s widow, Jackie. The implication of glamour, celebrity and violent death is embodied in the icon of JFK; in ‘The Assassination of John F. Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’, a key text in The Atrocity Exhibition, the moment of assassination also becomes a fatal game.

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

Lunghua (Q♣). With the publication of Ballard’s autobiography, Miracles of Life, it became apparent that, as much as I would like to resist a biographical reading of Ballard’s work, it is Ballard’s own childhood that has had a fundamental regulatory effect on the Ballardian imaginary. In Empire of the Sun, Ballard playfully encouraged the reader to ‘spot’ the Ballardian icon in an autobiographical context – the drained swimming pool, the crashed plane – while simultaneously denying that autobiography provided any kind of key or code to understanding his work. His life, as represented in both Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women, is filtered through the medium of fiction. In the light of Miracles of Life, I would now like to suggest that it is Lunghua, the resettlement camp into which he, his parents and his sister were interned during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai in World War Two, that is the model for the Ballardian social environment. Lunghua is enclosed, fenced off from the outside world; it is a place where work is scarce; where a system of social codes and conventions regulate personal interaction; where games, hobbies, organised events schedule the lives of its inhabitants; and where existence shades inevitably into a slow decline unto death. A place to rebel against, if space can be found; a space to escape from, if escape is possible. Lunghua is the model for the high-rises, gated communities, science parks and suburban dormitory towns of Ballard’s later fiction.

Metacriticism/metatext (K♣). ‘What is distinctive about The Arcades Project – in Benjamin’s mind, it always dwelt apart – is the working of quotations into the framework of montage [….] the transcendence of the conventional book form would go together, in this case, with the blasting apart of pragmatic historicism – grounded, as this always is, on the premise of a continuous and homogenous temporality. Citation and commentary might then be perceived as intersecting at a thousand different angles, setting up vibrations across the epochs of recent history, so as to effect “the cracking open of natural teleology.” And all of this would unfold through the medium of hints or “blinks” – a discontinuous presentation deliberately opposed to traditional modes of argument.’ [11]

Spades ♠

(A♠) Macro-economic tidal systems. B sat down in the oak-panelled room of state opposite Sir Richard Markham. Markham assessed this loose-limbed man in the ragged flying jacket. A constellation of scars around his mouth and jaw-line traced the trajectory of his chequered history as an agent. Markham accepted the logic of the situation – an agent lasted a few years in the field, no more – but B had gone further than most, much further in many ways. The grey, haunted eyes that looked through Markham scanned the ocean bottom of his psyche, cut adrift from the time system of Whitehall.
‘You’ve been away, B,’ said Markham.
B’s eyes refocused.
‘In a manner of speaking.’

(2♠) Auto-intentional displacement. B realised, as he stood on the moving walkway in the inner hub of Charles de Gaulle airport, that the geometry of the architecture expressed a latent psychopathology. The concrete tunnels of the travellators indicated a profound desire to return to the amniotic peacefulness of the womb, the octagonal central atrium and suspended Perspex walkways revealing a fascist worship of the late General in the form of an architectural homage to his nasal septum and zygomatic arch. B found himself profoundly identifying with the unknown would-be assassin who had missed his opportunity to be the French Oswald in 1965. It was clear to him that the French, for all their insistence on grands projets like CDG, inhabited a fundamental and psychotic cultural landscape in which the tension between their embrace of modernity and their nostalgia for empire went unresolved.

(3♠) Goldeneye. As he dipped the clutch of the Aston and thrust the gearstick into fifth, B remembered the death of his wife. It was, he now understood, a special form of automobile accident. Blauveldt and Blunt, whom he had previously recognised as enemies, were in fact the agents of an underlying logic of necessity. Since the death of his wife, B had slipped further and further out of time, occupying fugue states where hours slipped by. Now, as blades of sodium light accelerated across his windshield, B felt himself again returning to the fugue state that had plagued him since her death, the Aston congealing in a viscid block of time.

(4♠) Operation Grand Slam. B opened the attaché case. In it he found what Markham had called his ‘assassination weapon’. It consisted of: (a) reproductions of Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’; (b) a pulp spy novel by one Richard Markham; (c) Eadweard Muybridge’s series photographs of horse and rider; (d) soft inner flying helmet and communication rig of B-29 navigator, USAAF issue; (e) November 1963 edition of Time magazine; (f) an unused prophylactic wrapped in a tin foil sachet; (g) black-box voice recording of co-pilot, Concorde air disaster, Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris; (h) .25 Beretta pistol.

(5♠) Heliotropic. Dr Catherine Penny waited in the secure car park of the Jodrell Bank radio telescopes, as the man in the ragged flying jacket paced the grounds, where the massive volumes of the dishes sprouted like some monstrous alien crop. Dr Penny thought of B‘s grey, haunted eyes, and turned the heating in the MGC up a notch. What B was looking for, he could not find amongst the files and despatch boxes of Whitehall. Could he find it here, among the constellations?

(6♠) Index of Alienation. B calculated the angle between Dr Penny’s rigid torso and her splayed thighs, as she sat like an ill-propped mannequin on the edge of his bed. The conjunction between her naked body, the vintage bottle of Bollinger and the torn foil of the prophylactic sachet brought back disconcerting memories of the buckled armcove on Monaco race day. He turned back to the light box he was building to display x-ray plates of his own fractured clavicle, femur, and kneecap.

(7♠) Quantum theory. ‘Pay attention, B,’ said Quinn, the head of the special quartermaster stores. ‘One day these things could conceivably save your life.’
He placed another card on the desk and invited B to respond.
‘Come on,’ said B. ‘What will it be next? Solitaire? The Tarot pack?’
‘This is for the good of your health, not mine,’ replied Quinn, ‘though God knows it’s difficult enough to tell the difference these days. How did you find Switzerland?’
B smiled. ‘The facilities were excellent. The doctors pronounced me in fine physical shape.’ The lie was automatic, almost unconscious, thought Quinn.
B’s eyes defocused, the deck of cards indecipherable sigils beneath his hands.

(8♠) Beretta .25. Sitting on the balcony of his room in the Loew’s hotel in Monte Carlo, B watched the workmen fix road markings for the motor racing that would take place next week. The late afternoon sun painted the harbour with gold as he finished the club sandwich and drained the last of the glass of Johnny Walker Black Label. On his knees was the conference pack of the neurosurgery symposium he was attending, where he hoped to catch up with Blufeldt. Blufeldt had assumed the legitimate identity of a specialist doctor and had attached himself to a radical clinic in Bern, Switzerland. He was giving a paper on neurology, brain injury and fugue states. B stood up, brushed the crumbs from his knees, and pinned his identification tag onto his shirt. At least the others would know who he was supposed to be.

(9♠) Jackie O. As B entered Catherine Penny from behind, he registered the way her hips, flaring out from the waist, repeated the sensual curves of the mouthpiece of the telephone. Her back, bent rigidly over Markham’s desk, echoed the planes of the reclining chair that sat, as in a psychiatrist’s consulting room, to one side of the grand office. As he moved inside her, B thought of the coil that sat in Catherine’s womb like an ironic plastic echo of the DNA double-helix. He held Catherine’s hips as if he were piloting the Aston at high speed down the autobahn between Köln and Berlin.

(10♠) Neverland. ‘Blaufeld is in Florida,’ said Markham, looking at B carefully. ‘Down at the Cape, the disused launch site. We don’t think he’s interested in the physical possibilities of the gantries, but…’
‘I always wanted to be an astronaut,’ said B. ‘The NASA program drew a lot of astronauts from Navy fliers, like Sheppard. I met him once. A difficult man. He told me flatly that no Royal Navy Commander could ever make NASA grade.’
‘Space,’ Blaufeld had said, ‘is money.’

(J♠) Solar Transits. The strip lighting haloed from Bluffield’s large, pink, shaven skull as he looked up at B from under cerebrotonic brows.
‘You’ve never understood my work, James. God knows I’ve tried to explain. But I knew you’d come. Particularly here, of all places.’
B looked out of the office windows and saw the rusted, half-ruined gantries propped like a disused stage-set against the Florida sky. He could feel the .25 Beretta in its clam-shell holster beneath his left arm, but knew he would never use it now. The cool afternoon seemed to stretch forever, like the nearby glades.
‘How long have you been having these fugues, James?’ asked Bluffield.

(Q♠) Restitution. Karen Blunt sat astride the Yamaha, revving it slowly, her aviator shades reflecting the parking lot where B sat in the open-top Pontiac. One side of B’s face was turning coral in the intense afternoon sun, as he lived out a waking dream, his memory tapping out the algebra of his past. Karen’s dark hair cascaded onto her sturdy shoulders and chest, which were buttoned up in a grubby NASA flight suit scavenged from Kennedy. Here at Cocoa Beach, outside the bar where the astronauts once dreamed of flight, B and Karen pitched in the oceanic tides of time.

(K♠) Pinewood to Shepperton. In the attaché case B found his instructions from Markham, consisting of a sequence of defaced postcards posted to B by Bloveldt, from Cape Kennedy, Florida; the Alamagordo testing grounds, New Mexico; Utah Beach, Normandy, France; and Fort Knox, Kentucky. They read, in date order: ‘(1) Maiden flight of Concorde (2) Abbey Road (3) Rolling Thunder (4) Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong walks on moon (5) The Wild Bunch (6) Inauguration of President Richard Milhous Nixon (7) Medium Cool (8) d.o.b 20 March (9) Let It Bleed (10) The Stones in the Park (11) Tommy (12) The election of French President Georges Pompidou, succeeding General de Gaulle (13) Woodstock (14) Altamont Speedway (15) On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (16) The Atrocity Exhibition.’

..:: CONTINUED: >> Part 2 ::…

‘Iterative Architecture: a Ballardian Text’

by Brian Baker

..:: CONTINUED from >> Part 1 ::…

♣♠♥♦

The Joker. The Joker in the pack is the card that, in some games, can replace (or substitute for, take the place of) any of the others. In this sense, the Joker is the empty sign.

♣♠♥♦

(A♥) Time Drill. ‘I don’t remember much about my father,’ replied B.
‘No, I’m sorry, you misunderstand,’ said Bluefield. ‘I meant Markham, Sir Richard Markham.’
‘Ah…’ B looked a little confused, then passed a thin, sunburnt hand across his eyes. Bluefield thought B looked exhausted after his ordeal in the Pontiac. Karen Blunt had finally rescued the half-blistered scarecrow figure in his ragged flying jacket, and at least the soft flying helmet had prevented too much sunstroke. Even now, after a week’s rest and medical attention, Bluefield could see the sores around B’s dirty neckline, beneath the leather collar of his jacket.
‘Are you really a doctor?’ asked B, looking up.
‘Of a special kind.’

(2♥) Unwritten histories. ‘You’ve been in Florida before?’ asked Karen.
B was surprised to hear her speak in light, rather melodious accentless English.
‘Yes, some time ago. I met a man by the name of Scaramanga.’
Blowfield smiled gently and looked down at his large, soft hands. Pink and scrubbed, they looked out of place on the dusty grey melamine table-top. They sat in a red vinyl horseshoe-shaped booth in the abandoned diner, three Coca-Colas in green bottles growing ever closer to blood heat in front of them.
‘I read that case,’ said Blowfield. ‘You weren’t quite yourself to begin with, I recall.’
B’s eyes flickered as he began to enter another fugue.
‘And who am I now, doctor?’

(3♥) Whisky and soda. The fugues seemed to take the place of any true dream sleep, but that afternoon B drew up a sun-lounger beneath an overgrown palm, and drifted to sleep by the side of the drained swimming pool. He dreamed of flight. Propeller blades flashed from his shoulders in the golden sunlight as he ascended into the Florida sky, below him the gantries and concrete aprons of Canaveral. A space-age archangel, clothed in light, he rose until he could see the curvature on the blue rim of the earth and the vault of the sky deepened to a crushing black. Turning on his back, in coronation armour flashing like a new star, he awaited blissful deliverance.

(4♥) Kuomintang. B sat in the wrecked Aston, its red leather trim burst like a rotten scarecrow. He toyed with the broken instrument stalk as he stared at the cracked dials and buckled binnacle, the Aston’s instruments frozen at the crash speed of a hundred and twenty. Feeling his cracked kneecap, B pressed down on the accelerator pedal and saw, through the frosted windshield, the roads of the International Settlement in Shanghai, where he sat on his father’s lap as they drove down empty boulevards in the grandiose Packard that his father bought to impress high-ranking Chinese officials.

(5♥) Viennese Benediction. ‘Who do you want to be, James?’ asked Blovelt.
‘Is it a matter of choice, doctor?’
‘For you, it’s a matter of necessity,’ said Blovelt, drawing aside the Styrofoam cup of coffee.
‘I think you may have the question wrong, if I may say so,’ said B. ‘It’s not a matter of who do I want to be, but why?’
Blovelt slowly traced the parabola of his pink skull with his left palm.
‘Have you seen her, again?’
B seemed, with an effort of will, to come to himself, and looked searchingly at Blovelt, certainty and horror at home in the grey eyes.
‘She’s out there on the gantries, doctor,’ said B. ‘She keeps escaping me, and I don’t have much time left. But I’ll find her.’

(6♥) X-1. In one of his increasingly rare periods of physical activity, B walked towards the Apollo gantry and heard the spluttering engine of the Cessna. Through the cockpit window, as the aircraft circled the gantry, B could make out the habitual white coat, red shirt and pink skull of Blyfield, the man who had murdered his wife, but who had now somehow brought her back to him. Blyfield was waving, pointing to the top of the gantry, and as B looked up, he saw a figure clambering among the rusted geometry of the access platforms. There she was. As B made his way to the stairwell on aching, sore legs, he heard the Cessna’s engine cut out, and watched as Blyfield wrestled the aircraft to a controlled crash landing on the concrete apron.

(7♥) Cobalt Blue. B and Blueweldt met in the mezzanine of the Monte Carlo convention centre, which presented itself as a provincial casino without the formal wear. The foyer was crowded with middle-aged men in light summer suits.
‘Dr. Blueweldt, I assume?’ asked Bond, peering at a name tag.
‘My dear James! How lovely to see you here!’ Blueweldt warmly clasped B’s hand. ‘How have you been?’
B looked searchingly into Blueweldt’s eyes for signs of dissimulation.
‘Have you been to any of the panels?’ asked Blueweldt ruefully. ‘Second rate, to a man. As you can see, they all look like middle-management executives. Appearances, in this case, are not deceptive.’
Blueweldt’s own light-blue three-piece blended him in perfectly with the crowd, but B’s worn leather jacket, cracked aviator glasses and khaki pants identified him either as a media don or a stray patient. B opened his conference pack and scanned the schedule of panels.
‘Nothing of interest next, doctor. Shall we step outside for a sundowner and a talk?’

ABOVE: Artwork by Jeffrey K. Potter for ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (commissioned for the collection Memories of the Space Age).

(8♥) Yarrow Stalks. As he finally stepped onto the access platform near the top of the rusting Apollo gantry, legs shaking and a fugue beginning to come on, B saw his wife looking at him from a pool of silver sunlight. His wife pointed away from Canaveral, out into the light and air. He wondered if she was beckoning him to step out into the æther and join her. He edged further along the platform towards the open end, feeling the pull of the light airs that breathed past the gap. As he approached, time slowing, he realised what his wife was pointing towards – there he seemed to see, in the far distance, the light shining on the Everglades, a burnished mirror of the sun. He stared, the reflected light searing an image onto his retina. Turning, slowly turning, he realised that his wife had gone.

(9♥) Dilation of the Iris. Ordinarily, B only found motor vehicles interesting if he was behind the wheel, and despite the glamour of the grand prix circus that had now arrived in Monaco, this week was no exception. He had lost track of Blaufield some time before the end of the neurology conference, having become bored by the presentations of the delegates and unimpressed by the exhibits and displays. He had drifted off into strolling the streets of the city principality, unwilling to return to London and admit – perhaps to himself most of all – that he had lost the urgency of the hunt. He haunted the harbour, obsessed with the Mediterranean light playing upon the water and the large white motor yachts that now filled the marina. Time, here in this piece of France that was not France, seemed to stretch into a long, martini-filled afternoon.

(10♥) Emergency Procedures. Using his conference accreditation to flash the security staff, B made his way with the crowd onto the deck of a large motor launch and accepted a glass of champagne from a waiter. His worn leather jacket and aviator sunshades gave him just the right kind of down-at-heel glamour so that the crowd accepted him as an out-of-work American character actor or throwback racing driver, scion of a far less technical and bureaucratic age. Bored by the upscale small talk, he drifted to the stern rail of the launch and looked back across the marina. At his elbow, a young woman in matching aviator glasses coughed slightly, and said, ‘Thinking of jumping?’
He turned and looked at the self-possessed young woman in the pale blue silk dress who leaned into him, looking up, and saw his own rather ragged features reflected in her glasses. She was a head shorter than B, but held herself with a kind of rakish confidence that marked her difference from the crowd behind them.
‘No, of flying,’ he said.
‘You’re not a race driver, then?’
‘I can’t say I’m much of anything.’
‘You do, however, have a name?’
‘It’s James. James B.’

(J♥) Facts in the Case. They stood arm in arm as the fumes from the high-octane engines hazed the sidewalk, pressed as it was with spectators. Their ill-timed stroll had locked them into the very circus they had hoped to avoid. The falsetto roar of the factory-team racing cars blasting past the barriers stilled their conversation, and they communicated by way of near-hysterical mime, raised eyebrows, pointedly directed eye movement and clasps of the hand. Both wore smiles that the crush and the noise could not erase. B motioned with his head to cut past the end of a run-off area to walk away from the crowds and up into the town away from the circuit. As they disengaged themselves from the crowd and walked past a race marshall frantically waving a red flag, B was suddenly conscious of a blast of engine-hot air that lifted him bodily then slammed him back onto the asphalt. Time and space wheeled like a burst tyre. His ears full of the roar of the dying high-performance engine, he turned his head to the right and saw her propped up against the buckled armcove, smiling slightly at him and tenderly brushing away the drops of blood that spilled from a graze in her scalp onto the white cotton dress.

(Q♥) Left Luggage Office. ‘Come in,’ said Markham.
‘Thank you,’ replied Professor Blowfield with a slight bow. ‘You would like to discuss the case of James B?’
‘Yes. Although when he came back from Switzerland, he professed the desire to return to active service, his behaviour has been erratic to say the least. Here is a record of the surveillance that one of our top female operatives has been conducting.’
Blowfield took up the file that had been slid across the desk to him, and scanned down the list of B’s movements and activities. His eyebrows, beneath the dome of his naked forehead, raised in surprise once, then again. ‘Here?’
M smiled ruefully. ‘I thought that once B’s dalliance with a wife had been ended, he would come back to us. It seems he has, in fact, gone much further away. Is there anything else we can do?’
Blowfield winced, and dipped his head. Looking up at Markham, he said, ‘There’s one more thing we can try. After that…’

(K♥) Zoëtropic. B drove out to one of the abandoned small towns on the edge of the glades, looking for an airboat. He finally found one in the late afternoon, one that started after a little tinkering, and seated high in the driver’s chair, he powered up the caged propeller and swung the airboat out into the middle of the reed-choked creek. He throttled back and let the engine idle as the boat skimmed out into the glades proper, skirting the causeway he had driven on. Once out into flat water, he opened the airboat up, skimming at a speed that seemed literally unearthly, a dream of flight, airborne on water, airborne on light. He glanced to his left and saw his wife sitting beside him looking forward into the sun, dark hair streaming behind her, light cotton dress swept against her breasts and torso. He looked ahead, feeling the fugue coming on him again, and pointed the airboat towards the sun that dipped molten gold into the Everglades.

Diamonds ♦

New Worlds (6♦). Under Michael Moorcock’s editorship from 1964, New Worlds magazine became the home of the science fiction ‘New Wave’. The archetypal New Wave science fiction story was textually experimental and formally and/or generically self-conscious; alienated from the mores and conventions of contemporary mainstream culture (and mainstream ‘literary’ writing); and infused with a cynical, dystopian or counter-cultural politics, signified in the recurrent use of the scientific concept of entropy. Moorcock has written about New Worlds:

Style and technique was merely a means to an end – frequently a very moral means to some very moral ends. We were looking at the Vietnam War, Kennedy’s assassination, the computer revolution, the armaments industry, the manipulations of the media, the profound hypocrisies of the liberal bourgeoisie, the appalling condition of the majority of human beings on the planet, the useless currency of outmoded or inappropriate political language. But our response was scarcely a puritan one and neither did we recoil from experiencing our subject matter. We relished and embraced change, we celebrated the advent of new technologies and theories which opened up the multiverse for further exploration, which helped us understand our own behaviour and which provided us with some profound and spectacular metaphors! If the world was going to hell, we were determined to see how, but we were also determined to enjoy it while it was happening. Our curiosity was considerably greater than our uncertainty. [12]

The iterability of Ballard’s work makes him a central player in the ‘New Wave’ and in New Worlds.

Out There (8♦). James Bond is crucially implicated in the social and ideological practices of tourism and consumerism; but Bond is ‘at home’ anywhere, as in From Russia, With Love, where he is accepted in the Turkish gypsy caravanserai as a kind of ‘brother’ and is even accorded the honour of judging the outcome of a dispute between women. As Vivian Halloran notes in ‘Tropical Bond’, the issue of ‘passing’ for local recurs in Bond texts which consistently, she argues, ‘complicate Bond’s whiteness’; following Edward Said’s argument about Kipling’s Kim in Culture and Imperialism, I would like to stress here that Bond can ‘pass’, even as a non-white other, where the ethnically troubling ‘villain’ (from Dr No onwards) most assuredly cannot. [13] Ballard’s protagonists are alienated everywhere, even ‘at home’; the fragmentation of the Traven/ Talbot/ Tallis figure is of a different order to the disguises that Bond affects, under which the ‘real’ James Bond still exists. In The Atrocity Exhibition, there is no such foundational unitary subjectivity. Where the Ballardian protagonist travels to different parts of the world, he only ‘passes’ in that the indigenous people recognise such a radical psychological dislocation in him that he is not really there at all.

Pleasure Periphery (7♦). Ballard and Fleming share an interest in what Michael Denning calls the ‘pleasure periphery’, ‘the tourist belt surrounding the industrialized world’: the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, or certain parts of East Asia. The centrality of tourism and travel to Bond texts is echoed in such Ballard texts as ‘Having a Wonderful Time’ (1978) or, more importantly, Cocaine Nights (1996). Denning writes, after quoting from a scene in Fleming’s From Russia, With Love:

Here we find the epitome of the tourist experience: the moment of relaxed visual contemplation from above, leaning on the balustrade; the aesthetic reduction of a social entity, the city, to a natural object, coterminous with the waves of the sea; the calculations of the tourist’s economy, exchanging physical discomfort for a more “authentic” view; and the satisfaction of having made the ‘right’ exchange, having “got” the experience, possessed the “view”. [14]

It is no coincidence, argues Denning, that the Bond narratives find their location in the ‘pleasure periphery’: Fleming’s texts articulate the ‘tourist gaze’ (analysed by John Urry), the mobile gaze of consumption embodied by jet-age travellers to ‘exotic’ tourist destinations. [15] In Ballard’s fictions, the ‘pleasure periphery’ is the location for what Andrzej Gasiorek diagnoses as ‘a world dominated not by work but by leisure’, although in Kingdom Come (2007) and elsewhere, the ‘pleasure periphery’ has now been imported to the centre. [16]

Queens and Kings (3♦). In ‘Confetti Royale’/‘The Beach Murders’, Quimby, who is identified several times as the ‘dealer’ of the deck of cards that ‘he set out […] on the balcony table’, both plays a card game alone (with which he ‘amused himself in his hideaway’) and, by extension, with the other characters in the story. [17] Each card has two aspects: the number or face upon it (denoting its value), and on the reverse or back, a picture of the bullfighter Cordobès, whose image is thereby repeated fifty-two times across the table, another figure of iteration. There are no easy homologies between Queen, King and Jack and the characters in ‘Confetti Royale’, however (even though there is a Princess): what is important is the role of the dealer, and the game itself. The game as metaphor for espionage informs this short story as it has the spy genre since Kipling’s Kim (1901) and the colonial ‘Great Game’ played by Britain and Russia for domination of the Indian subcontinent. Kim’s fluid and liminal subjectivity is an index of the instability of the spy-subject at the centre of espionage narrative: the secret agent becomes the ‘double agent’. [18]

Illustration by Michael Foreman for the original Doubleday edition of The Atrocity Exhibition.

Reified Subjects (4♦). David Punter, in The Hidden Script, identifies the centrality of subjectivity to Ballard’s concerns in his fiction. Punter writes:

The long tradition of enclosed and unitary subjectivity comes to mean less and less to him as he explores the ways in which person [sic] is increasingly controlled by landscape and machine, increasingly becomes a point of intersection for overloaded scripts and processes which have effectively concealed their distant origins from human agency. [19]

Punter’s assessment of Ballard’s critique of subjectivity can be exemplified most clearly in The Atrocity Exhibition, where the Traven/Tallis/Talbot figure, whose ‘breakdown’ is materialised in the fragmented form of the text and in the iterated (‘obsessional’) motifs, is a liminal or fractured subject. Ballard’s critique of contemporary life is articulated largely through his destablisation of unitary subjectivity, a fragmentation which leads to the release of ‘unconscious’ forces and desires which remain obscure (as conscious ‘motivation’) to the subject that enacts them. Figures for the fragmented or replicated subject can be found in ‘Confetti Royale’, for instance, in the repeated image of the bullfighter Cordobès on the backs of the cards, or in the first paragraph, where Princess Manon sees herself in the mirrors: ‘In the triptych of mirrors above the dressing table she gazed at the endless replicas of herself’. [20] Ballardian subjects are rarely agents in their own narratives; agency is displaced on to the ‘provocateur’ antagonist, Vaughan or Wilder Penrose, the third point in the Ballardian triangulation.

Secret Agent (5♦). Fleming’s Bond, by way of contrast with the Ballardian subject, seems all agency, however ‘secret’. Bond, though, is acted upon in the death of his wife in OHMSS, and is subjected to a beating of his genitals, administered by Le Chiffre, in Casino Royale. There are limits to Bond’s agency. Also in Casino Royale, Bond is at first ‘defeated’ by Le Chiffre and the cards and is only saved in his mission by the offer of ‘Marshall aid’ (American finance) by the CIA operative Felix Leiter. His rescue from Le Chiffre is also ex machina, as a Smersh agent enters and kills Le Chiffre and his crew, only to leave Bond alive as he has no orders to kill the British agent. The fantasy of total agency represented by the figure of Bond, an expression of Cold War and decolonisation-era anxieties about Britain’s geopolitical role and influence, is destabilised by the texts themselves.

The Beach Murders (2♦). At the missing centre of ‘Confetti Royale’, the 1966 short story that was renamed ‘The Beach Murders’, is Quimby, the ‘absconded cipher chief’ from the US State department, who is the ‘dealer’ of the pack of cards that feature throughout the narrative. Quimby is an encoder, the master of this textual game, though he himself remains an enigma (his motivations obscure even to himself: ‘what these obsessives in Moscow and Washington failed to realize was that for once he might have no motive at all’). [21] The retitling of the story – the text becoming its own double – emphasises the murders rather than the Cold War espionage milieu, placing the enigma ‘who killed?’ at the heart of the generic recoding: the text becomes a detective fiction rather than a spy fiction. As the ‘Introduction’ to the text suggests, the form of the story is an invitation to the reader to decode the narrative, recombine the 26 alphabeticized paragraphs and narrative events to resolve the text by identifying the murderer(s). No such resolution can take place. Of the murders, the following can be stated:
1. the Russian agent Kovorski murders the Romanoff Princess Manon (with certainty: her death is described).
2. the ‘American limbo dancer’ Lydia is killed (accidentally) by a bomb planted in the CIA agent Statler’s Mercedes by Kovorski (paragraph ends at the point at which she presses the starter and sets off the device)
3. Quimby kills the Russian agent Raissa (less certain, but probable)
4. Kovorski is shot and killed by an unknown assailant
5. Statler is killed in an unknown manner by an unknown assailant
6. Quimby and Sir Giles are left alive at the end of the narrative (probable, because there is no narrative of their deaths)

Of the murders, then, one is known; two are probably ascribable; two remain mysteries. The fate of two characters, including Quimby the ‘dealer’, in unknown. The recombinatory game ‘fails’ because there is, and can be, no solution to this criminal narrative. We might suspect that Quimby, as the ‘dealer’, is responsible, but the murderer(s) might also include Sir Giles or other (unknown) figures. The ‘Introduction’ also suggests that the textual game of deduction is doubled: the ‘solution’ to the ‘mystery of the Beach Murders’ requires a ‘key’, perhaps the very phrase that Lydia lifts from Kovorski’s Travel-Riter ink ribbon. As the text foregrounds from the very beginning, ‘any number of solutions is possible, and a final answer to the mystery […] lies forever hidden.’ [22]

Upwardly Mobile (10♦). James Bond is a curiously classless figure, despite the over-coded aristocratic connoisseurship purveyed by the Roger Moore film incarnation. In the film of Casino Royale, Bond and Vesper Lynd travel by high-speed train to Montenegro (the re-location of the casino). After dinner, the two swap character assessments/ character assassinations. After Bond essays a rather trite analysis of an anxious, beautiful-but-brainy femininity, Lynd reverses the trick: Bond is an orphan, the product of a public school and Oxford education (where he never ‘fitted in’), and MI6 via the SAS. Lynd then asks how his lamb was for dinner; ‘Skewered,’ says Bond. ‘One sympathises.’ Bond may be embarrassed by the ease in which Lynd is able to ‘skewer’ his character, but its detail signifies how dis-located he is in terms of social structures: he is an outsider, ‘maladjusted’, a status which in fact generates his mobility as a secret agent. Bond’s popularity can partly be read as a reflection of the aspirational, economically mobile, consumption-oriented imperatives of the British middle class in the 1960s and afterwards – the period of the Bond film phenomenon. Ballard’s own life history echoes Bond’s: not an orphan, but with distanced parents and Chinese servants in loco parentis; public school in England post-war (the Leys School in Cambridge), then Cambridge University; a short spell in the RAF, then marriage and life as a professional writer. Ballard’s connection to, and insight into, the mores and aspirations of the affluent British middle class is clear throughout his writings. Ballard is, in some ways, as exemplary a twentieth-century Englishman as is Bond, even though both are ‘outsiders’.

Vesper Lynd (Q♦). The second point of the Ballardian narrative triangulation, the wife or lover, is often unfaithful or even lost to the protagonist. Even Crash’s Catherine Ballard is no femme fatale, however; sexual infidelity is less a matter of betrayal than of a mirror-image of the protagonist’s own personal trajectory of (self)alienation and (self)discovery. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, drawing upon the critical work of Rene Girard in her text Between Men, writes of an ‘erotic triangle’ in texts, where the (unspoken) relationship between two rival males predominates over, and regulates, the relationship each has with the ‘third’ point of the triangle, the female. The female thus becomes a counter or marker in a system of exchange: a medium or locus of repressed male desire. [23] Ballard’s triangulations are a geometry of homosociality and homoeroticism, made most explicit in Crash, but present everywhere.

War Fever (J♦). The title of Ballard’s last short story collection, ‘war fever’ symbolises the underlying pathology at work during the Twentieth century: an implication of desire, destruction and death.

X = ? (A♦). Ballard’s texts tend to work particularly through the recognition of the component. This is most evident in The Atrocity Exhibition, where each chapter is itself a ‘condensed novel’ and each titled paragraph thereby a ‘chapter’. Here, the architectural/ iterative imperatives of the Ballardian text are at their fullest extent. Brian McHale, in Postmodernist Fiction, suggests that ‘a pattern of repetition-with-variation’ is a central compositional motif in Ballard’s 1960s disaster fiction, and goes on to propose that ‘a fixed repertoire of modules, many of them repeated from the earlier apocalyptic novels, are differently recombined and manipulated from story to story’. ‘All this suggests,’ argues McHale, ‘the game-like permutation of a fixed repertoire of motifs – “art in a closed field”’. [24] Ballard’s ‘modular’ texts are therefore devices to work another iteration on the Ballardian algebra, the triangulation of protagonist, wife and provocateur/antagonist. Where P is the protagonist, A is alienation, V is the provocateur, W is the wife, and T is time:

X (Transcendence, Escape, Death) = ((P/A x V) +/- W) –T

It is not the aesthetic of the fragment that is central to the Ballardian text; it is the algebra of the iterative component or module.

You Know My Name (9♦). The title song of the 2006 Casino Royale was written by Chris Cornell and David Arnold, and performed by Cornell. Its rock dynamics give the title sequence a kinetic edge, and is one of the more memorable of recent times. Its title and refrain, ‘You Know My Name’, signifies that the Bondian imaginary, like the Ballardian, is recognisable without (necessarily) being explicitly named.

Zones of Transit (K♦). The Ballardian protagonist is often in movement, physically and metaphysically; between one place and another, between one state and another. Cast in the role of detective in Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes and Kingdom Come, what is revealed by the protagonist’s investigations is of less importance than the progressive shedding of the layers of repression, self-delusion or unknowingness that constitute the protagonist’s world-view, compromised by the experiences the investigation leads him into. Just as there is no solution to ‘The Beach Murders’, only a game to be played, Ballard’s texts remain unresolved, in transit.

♣♠♥♦

The Joker. There are two jokers in the pack; like Gemini, twins, red and black. They do not conform to one of the four suits, but take their colours. They are part of the pack but not part of it, always present but unused in many card games. The extra two cards, a kind of supplement, disrupt the seductive numerology of 13 that otherwise attends the ‘French deck’ of cards: 52 cards, in 4 suits, 13 to a suit; 13 x 2 = 26, the letters in the alphabet; 13 x 4 = 52, the number of weeks in a year; 13 is the number of disciples present at the Last Supper, the unluckiest of numbers. The extra two cards, the jokers, the twins, indicate that all this significance is but a game. The jokers are the fly in the ointment, the empty sign, the absent code.

♣♠♥♦

Notes

[1] Dan Lockwood, ‘J.G. Ballard and the Architectures of Control’, Ballardian: The World of J.G. Ballard, 3 January 2008 . Accessed 18 February 2008.
[2] ‘Obeying the surrealist formula’: Iain Sinclair & Hermione Lee on Ballard’, Ballardian: The World of J.G. Ballard, transcription of discussion between Mark Lawson, Hermione Lee and Iain Sinclair on Front Row, broadcast BBC Radio 4 5 February 2008 . Accessed 18 February 2008.
[3] David Pringle, Earth is the Alien Planet: J.G. Ballard’s Four-Dimensional Nightmare (San Bernadino CA; The Borgo Press), p.16.
[4] Simon Sellars, ‘My name is Maitland, Donald Maitland’, Ballardian: The World of J.G. Ballard, 9 February 2008 . Accessed 19 February 2008.
[5] Ken Cooper, ‘“Zero Pays the House”: The Las Vegas Novel and Atomic Roulette’, Contemporary Literature 33:3 (Fall 1992), 528-544 (p.539).
[6] J.G. Ballard, ‘The Index’, The Complete Short Stories (London: Flamingo, 2001), pp.940-945; ‘Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown’, The Complete Short Stories, pp.849-855; ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’, The Complete Short Stories, pp.1101-1104.
[7] J.G. Ballard, ‘A Question of Re-Entry’, The Complete Short Stories, pp.435-458 (p.453).
[8] J.G. Ballard, ‘Memories of the Space Age’, The Complete Short Stories, pp.1037-1060 (p.1049).
[9] David Punter, Modernity (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2007), p.137.
[10] J.G. Ballard, ‘The Terminal Beach’, The Complete Short Stories, pp.589-604 (p.595).
[11] Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, ‘Translator’s Foreword’ to Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge MA and London: Belknap Press, 1999), pp.ix-xiv (p.xi).
[12] Michael Moorcock, ‘Introduction’ to The New Nature of the Catastrophe, Moorcock and Langdon Jones, eds. (1993) (London: Orion, 1997), pp. viii-ix.
[13] Vivian Halloran, ‘Tropical Bond’. Ian Fleming and James Bond: The Cultural Politics of 007, Edward P. Comentale, Stephen Watt and Skip Willman, eds. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005), p. 158-177 (p.165).
[14] Michael Denning, Cover Stories: Narrative and ideology in the British spy thriller (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), p. 105; p.104.
[15] John Urry, The Tourist Gaze, 2nd edition (London: Sage, 2002).
[16] Andrzej Gasiorek, J.G. Ballard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p.26.
[17] Ballard, ‘The Beach Murders’, The Complete Short Stories, p.663.
[18] See Brian Baker, Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Representing Men in Popular Genres 1945-2000 (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), chapter 2.
[19] David Punter, The Hidden Script (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), p.9.
[20] Ballard, ‘The Beach Murders’, The Complete Short Stories, p.663.
[21] J.G. Ballard, ‘The Beach Murders’, The Complete Short Stories, pp.663-668 (p.664).
[22] Ballard, ‘The Beach Murders’, The Complete Short Stories, p.663.
[23] I have myself written on this in relation to Crash: Brian Baker, ‘The Resurrection of Desire: J.G. Ballard’s Crash as a Transgressive Text’, Foundation 80 (November 2000), pp.84-96.
[24] Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Methuen, 1987), p.69; p.70.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ The ‘DNA of the Present’ in the Fossil Record of the Cold War Through the Imagery of JG Ballard, Related Sources and Documents in Various Media
+ ‘My name is Maitland, Donald Maitland’

The Unicorn Bookshop edition of Ballard’s Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.

Ronald Reagan and the conceptual auto-disaster. Numerous studies have been conducted upon patients in terminal paresis (G. P. I.), placing Reagan in a series of simulated auto-crashes, e.g. multiple pile-ups, head-on collisions, motorcade attacks (fantasies of Presidential assassinations remained a continuing preoccupation, subjects showing a marked polymorphic fixation on windshields and rear trunk assemblies). Powerful erotic fantasies of an anal-sadistic character surrounded the image of the Presidential contender. Subjects were required to construct the optimum auto-disaster victim by placing a replica of Reagan’s head on the unretouched photographs of crash fatalities. In 82 percent of cases massive rear-end collisions were selected with a preference for expressed faecal matter and rectal haemorrhages.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ (1968), later published in The Atrocity Exhibition.

“Is this not the meanderings of a dirty and diseased mind?” — that was the question which prosecuting counsel Michael Worsley posed in Court for BBC Radio producer George MacBeth in 1968. The subject of their discussion was a booklet written by J.G. Ballard and published by the Unicorn Bookshop, Brighton, titled Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan. MacBeth’s view was almost as surprising as Worsley’s — he told the Court that if the work became available for broadcasting, he would like to use it.

This surreal discussion took place at the trial of Bill Butler, proprietor of the Unicorn Bookshop, on charges of possessing obscene articles for commercial publication. However bizarre or absurd the proceedings in Brighton Magistrates Court might appear some 40 years later, they had an only too serious effect on Butler, who found himself having to pay fines plus legal costs in the order of £50,000 in today’s money. In a letter written two years later, he asked a correspondent to forgive his temper, explaining that his memory had, to all useful purposes, stopped at the date of the police raid on his bookshop, and that “I am, after all this, paranoid”.

As I looked through the records of the trial, a sense of depression settled on me … Butler seemed like a fly in a spider’s web, fighting the prosecution because he felt he could not do otherwise, yet fearing that at bottom the cause was a hopeless one. Having started out with the intention of investigating Ballard’s involvement with an obscenity trial, I became more interested in how it was that Bill Butler, a 33 year-old American poet, bookshop owner, and sometime publisher, became involved in this drama.

A relaxed-looking Bill Butler (from New Worlds #185).

The law on obscenity in the UK centered on the notion that an article — a book, magazine, or photograph — had to have a tendency to deprave and corrupt those who were likely to view it. The 1959 Obscene Publications Act had provided a defence if it could be shown that publication was in the public interest — for example, because of the article’s literary value. There followed a series of Court cases — sometimes great theatre, sometimes personal tragedy, and sometimes unpleasant listening — as the implications of the law were fought over in a society whose beliefs and tastes were rapidly changing.

The first test was theatre — sufficiently so for BBC television to commission and broadcast a drama about the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover some 45 years later. Prosecuting Counsel shot himself in the foot at the outset when he told the jurors: “Ask yourselves the question, would you approve of your young sons, young daughters — because girls can read as well as boys — reading this book? Is it a book you would have lying around in your own house? Is it even a book that you would wish your wife or your servants to read?” — the jurors reportedly smiled at such a bizarrely out-of-touch view of the world. Numerous defence witnesses were wheeled in to testify to the virtues of one of Lawrence’s lesser novels and its four-letter descriptions of adultery, although they all ignored the passage where the Lady is sodomised … the prosecution had either not read or not understood that scene, since they ignored it also. At the end of the trial, the jury found the publishers, Penguin Books, not guilty.

Mervyn Griffith Jones, QC, Prosecuting Counsel in the Lady Chatterley trial, as portrayed in a Private Eye spoof.

A series of other cases followed, less amusing, and often more discouraging for those who wanted to see a more open society. One of the lesser-known cases indicated the way things might go: Cain’s Book, a novel by the Glaswegian writer Alexander Trocchi, was prosecuted in Sheffield in 1964, and the police justified seizing the book on the grounds that it “seems to advocate the use of drugs in schools so that children should have a clearer conception of art. That in our submission is corrupting.” This extension of the notion of obscenity beyond the sexual was confirmed during an unsuccessful appeal by the publishers, when Lord Chief Justice Parker ruled that “there was no reason whatever to confine depravity and obscenity to sex”. John Sutherland later commented that:

[this decision] marked a new phase of obscenity-hunting in which the primary target would not be the work’s text (for instance its incidence of four-letter words) but the lifestyle it advocated, or that was associated with its author or even its readership. If it was risking ‘obscenity’ to be a junkie and a beat, it was also soon going to be similarly risky to be a hippy.

The truth of this judgment is only too apparent in the Unicorn Bookshop prosecution.

LEFT: The Calder 1963 edition of Alexander Trocchi’s Cain’s Book, the subject of an obscenity trial the following year.

Bill Butler had managed Better Books on the Charing Cross Road in London, before moving to Brighton and then opening the Unicorn Bookshop during 1967. The shop specialized in poetry and American authors; in fact, many of its ongoing sales were by mail order to American universities. In late-1967, Butler returned to the U.S. for a short visit, leaving the shop in the hands of a young man who was then arrested for possession of drugs, convicted, and sent to a young offenders detention centre. According to Butler, “apparently he had had a container for the hashish and some scissors for the cutting of the hashish in the shop. Subsequently my shop was broken into and the meters pilfered. When the police came to enquire about this they seemed more interested in the sales of hashish than in the meters.”

Motion picture studies of Ronald Reagan reveal characteristic patterns of facial tonus and musculature associated with homo-erotic behaviour. The continuing tension of buccal sphincters and the recessive tongue role tally with earlier studies of facial rigidity (cf., Adolf Hitler, Nixon). Slow-motion cine-films of campaign speeches exercised a marked erotic effect upon an audience of spastic children. Even with mature adults the verbal material was found to have minimal effect, as demonstrated by substitution of an edited tape giving diametrically opposed opinions. Parallel films of rectal images revealed a sharp upsurge in anti-Semitic and concentration camp fantasies.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ (1968), later published in The Atrocity Exhibition.

The Unicorn Bookshop, circa 1972 (photo from Frendz #28).

According to the police, someone then complained to them about a publication they had seen in Butler’s shop, Cuddon’s Cosmopolitan Review, an anarchist magazine containing a play by Tuli Kupferberg entitled “Fucknam”. A plain-clothes officer visited the shop on 15th January 1968, and purchased copies of Cuddon’s and the underground magazine Oz. The following day, a full raid was mounted and the police took away over 3,000 items (mostly copies of Oz), representing more than 70 different titles. The items seized included several issues of the U.S. literary magazine Evergreen Review, as well as books by Burroughs and Ginsberg. Also taken were three copies of Ballard’s Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan, which had been found inside an addressed and sealed envelope.

LEFT: Oz #4, poster and front cover. Three thousand copies of the underground magazine were seized by the police from Unicorn Bookshop, but the charges were dropped.

Charges of possessing obscene articles “for publication for gain” were brought, but eventually the Director of Public Prosecutions dropped charges against half the items. Butler speculated that the DPP could not afford to drop the charges against all of the original 76 publications, since “he might have faced a suit from me for malicious prosecution. Thorny problem.” The remaining items that featured in the subsequent trial included issues of Evergreen Review and Kulchur, Cuddon’s Cosmopolitan Review, books of poetry by Herbert Huncke and John Giorno, and Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.

Butler decided to plead “not guilty” to the charges, regardless of having been three times refused legal aid by the magistrates even though he appeared to qualify on financial grounds. Between the raid and the trial, the drugs connection continued to rear its head:

A member of Brighton’s police force has visited the shop since the raid and among other things discussed the problem of drugs in the shop and users of narcotics frequenting the shop. It was suggested that I cooperate with the police by revealing names of people I suspected of using narcotics. … A barrister has advised me that in his view the police probably have it in for me. It has been suggested that the shop might be better off in London.

The trial took place in August, 1968. Since the raid, the entire world seemed to have been in turmoil … the Tet offensive had taken place in Vietnam; agitation and strikes had almost brought down the French government; an anti-War demonstration in London’s Grosvenor Square ended in violence; President Lyndon Johnson had announced he would not seek re-election; Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were both assassinated; and the British politician Enoch Powell made his infamous “rivers of blood” speech. The day after the trial opened, the U.S.S.R. invaded Czechoslovakia; before it had finished, a week later, police had clashed with anti-war demonstrators outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and France had exploded its first Hydrogen bomb.

The Summer of ’68 … Revolution! … Smash the System! … Situationists! … J.G. Ballard!
(publication of Love and Napalm: Export USA in the student magazine Circuit, June 1968).

Rather more prosaically, the charges against Butler were being considered by the three magistrates — a retired Labour Exchange manager, an auctioneer’s wife, and a car salesman and garage proprietor. The defense called a number of “expert witnesses” to provide evidence as the literary value of the condemned items, among them George MacBeth, a poet who also worked as a producer for the BBC and had conducted a radio interview with Ballard the previous year. MacBeth cogently described Ballard’s concerns in Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan:

… here he is concerned with American politics and society and the ways in which, as he sees it, the feelings of sexual desire and love can only be aroused by violence and violent stimuli. He believes American society is sick and he is criticising the sickness in this work. … America is a most highly developed society where advertising is crucial and so is the projection of images. … This [piece] shows how human feelings of sex and love can be manipulated by violence. [It] shows the connection between the different kinds of violence, for example car crashes, Vietnam and racial violence.

At this point prosecuting counsel asked “Is this not the meanderings of a dirty and diseased mind?” “Certainly not,” replied MacBeth, “and it’s obvious to any man of goodwill who reads it.”

But the value to Bill Butler’s defence of two days of deliberation about contemporary culture and literary merit was debatable. Even defending counsel appeared baffled by some of the discussion, commenting at the start of his concluding speech that “it may be that some of us did not fully understand all that the expert witnesses were talking about, indeed I myself occasionally found it very difficult to understand.” In contrast, the prosecution’s approach was simple and direct — they called no witnesses beyond the police who carried out the raid, and relied on the magistrates’ judgement as to whether the books and magazines were obscene:

I rely on your examination of the works themselves to rebut the defence of public good. It is obvious that these books are obscene and it would not be in the public good for them to be published. I rely on this Court knowing a dirty book when they see one …

The prosecution’s strategy played on the problem at the heart of the 1959 Act. Expert witnesses could testify in Court as to a publication’s literary merit, but not as to whether it was obscene or tended to corrupt — that was the essence of the case and therefore a matter for magistrates or jurors. But how can publication be “in the public interest” if what is published tends to deprave and corrupt? The two major prosecution failures in obscenity trials following the 1959 Act were Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Inside Linda Lovelace: both were acquitals by a jury, and both were of books where the jurors stood some chance of understanding what they read, allowing them to conclude that the books were not likely to corrupt and deprave. (Even that may be overstating matters, since five of the jurors in the Lady Chatterley trial apparently had difficulty in reading the oath, let alone the book.)

In other cases, jurors and magistrates tended to react badly to being lectured at by expert witnesses about books they found difficult to understand. A remarkable case was that of the Yorkshire bookseller and publisher, Arthur Dobson, who intended to publish My Secret Life, a pseudonymous autobiographical account of a Victorian middle-class gentleman’s prodigious sexual career (1,200 women, described in 4,200 pages), which was first published for the author’s own amusement in an edition of six copies in 1888. Eighty years later, Arthur Dobson had got as far as typesetting the first two volumes before the police intervened. His subsequent trial at Leeds Assizes in 1969 appeared to be going well for the defence: the judge seemed not ill-disposed, cogent expert witnesses argued for the book’s value as a rare first-hand account of life in the Victorian underworld, and the witnesses dealt well with the prosecution’s attempt to display them as unworldly or inconsistent — on one occasion prosecuting counsel asked of a quiet-mannered academic: “Is this not the vilest thing you have ever read?”, only to receive the reply “You don’t mean that question literally, do you?”, followed by “Have you never heard of the concentration camps of the Third Reich?”

But all this was to no avail. When the jurors were sent to read the two printed volumes of My Secret Life, most looked only at the first few pages. It was subsequently reported that only two of the jurors were in the habit of reading books, and they had given up very quickly on the 19th century language in front of them. The expert witnesses who had impressed everybody else seemed to have little effect on the jury: Arthur Dobson was convicted and sentenced to a heavy fine, plus two years in prison (reduced to one year on appeal).

Banned in ’69: My Secret Life by ‘Walter’.

At Bill Butler’s trial in August 1968, counsel had little difficulty in turning the expert witnesses to the prosecution’s advantage. He extracted from one witness, Mrs Anne Graham-Bell, the opinion that adults are not likely to be corrupted, thereby enabling him to portray her as an innocent who “is not to know the evil to which these sort of things lead”, unlike the magistrates, who, he suggested, had rather more experience of the corruptibility of adults than did the defence witnesses. Not unexpectedly, the magistrates found all charges proven.

Incidence of orgasms in fantasies of sexual intercourse with Ronald Reagan. Patients were provided with assembly kit photographs of sexual partners during intercourse. In each case Reagan’s face was superimposed upon the original partner. Vaginal intercourse with ‘Reagan’ proved uniformly disappointing, producing orgasm in 2 percent of subjects. Axillary, buccal, navel, aural and orbital modes produced proximal erections. The preferred mode of entry overwhelmingly proved to be the rectal. After a preliminary course in anatomy it was found that caecum and transverse colon also provided excellent sites for excitation. In an extreme 12 percent of cases, the simulated anus of post-colostomy surgery generated spontaneous orgasm in 98 percent of penetrations. Multiple-track cine-films were constructed of ‘Reagan’ in intercourse during (a) campaign speeches, (b) rear-end auto-collisions with one- and three-year-old model changes, (c) with rear-exhaust assemblies, (d) with Vietnamese child-atrocity victims.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ (1968), later published in The Atrocity Exhibition.

But what about Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan? The three copies seized by the police had been taken from an envelope addressed to Mrs Graham-Bell, who at the time had been head of public relations for Penguin Books. In her evidence she explained that Bill Butler had told her about this new work by Ballard, and that she had agreed to forward copies to possible interested parties including the editor of the Times Literary Supplement. As was normal practice, she did not expect to be charged for these copies. This gave the prosecution a problem, since the charge involved publication “for gain”. It was obvious to everyone that Unicorn would not have given all the remaining copies away for free, and they were even noted as publisher inside the pamphlet, but the only evidence the prosecution could present to the Court were the copies that were supplied free of charge to Mrs Graham-Bell. After all his discussion of this supposedly “evil” publication, prosecuting counsel had to concede at the start of his closing speech that he couldn’t prove the offence, and asked that the charges relating to Ballard’s work be dropped.

However, in other ways the rules of evidence worked against the defence. They were not allowed to demonstrate that some of the works were widely available throughout the U.K., since the mere fact that a book is available to be bought somewhere is not evidence as to whether or not it is obscene. After Butler had been found guilty, his Counsel was finally able to quote the availability of the works in mitigation before sentencing. One of the issues of Evergreen Review had been included in the charges because it contained an extract from Justine, and defence counsel waved a copy of de Sade’s novel around the Court pointing out that it was an unexpurgated edition published in the U.K. which had sold 100,000 copies.

Not that this seemed to have any effect on the magistrates. Butler was ordered to pay fines plus costs of £419, and his own defence costs would come to much more than this. The Chairman of the Magistrates, the delightfully-named Mr Ripper, commented that John Giorno’s Poems — whose contents included Pornographic Poem — was “the most filthy book I have ever had to read”.

There was a bizarre ending as Mr Ripper went on to attack the expert witnesses:

May I say how appalled my colleagues and I have been at the filth that has been produced at this Court, and at the fact that responsible people including members of the university faculty have come here to defend it. It is something which is completely indefensible from our point of view. We hope that these remarks will be conveyed to the university authorities.

The end of the trial, reported in Brighton’s Evening Argus.

This attack later earned Mr Ripper a public rebuke from the journal Justice of the Peace, for criticizing witnesses “not because they have in any way misbehaved, but merely because they have exercised their legal right of expressing opinions which do not coincide with those held by the bench.” Ripper was quoted as saying that he had made his comments because he objected as a taxpayer to universities spending their money on trashy publications.

Advised by his solicitors that there seemed no realistic grounds for appealing the Magistrates’ decision, Butler was uncertain how to proceed. Eventually, on 21 November, his solicitors asked the Queens Bench for an order of Mandamus instructing the Magistrates in Brighton to state a case for the consideration of the higher court. This request was refused and Butler was left with a final bill in the order of £3,000. A year later, he wrote to a correspondent that, although he had received numerous offers of help, many remained unfulfilled and he still owed £2,500 to his solicitors, “who are beginning to moan ever so gently off in the distance. Like wolves.”

Bill Butler, circa 1972 (photo from Frendz #28).

The Unicorn Bookshop stayed open until 1973, when Butler moved to a remote cottage at Nant Gwilw, Wales, intending to concentrate on publishing. He died a few years later, whilst only in his forties, apparently of an accidental drug overdose. It seems fitting to leave the last words to the late William Huxford Butler, speaking during his trial in August 1968:

You regard it as important that we tell the truth in your court, and you put us under oath to do so. When any poet writes or an artist paints, he is under oath to something inside himself to tell the truth and the whole truth. Not to tell just those parts of the truth which are palatable and pleasing but all that is true – the good and the bad parts. Until he does that, he is incomplete as an artist and a poet.

Acknowledgements:

In researching this article I made considerable use of the records of the Unicorn Bookshop kept by the Archives department of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Background on the U.K.’s Obscene Publications Acts came from Offensive Literature: Decensorship in Britain, 1960-1982 by John Sutherland (Junction Books, 1982), and Freedom’s Frontier: Censorship in Modern Britain by Donald Thomas (John Murray, 2007).

Mike Holliday, April 2009.

Soundwalk by MELANIE CHILIANIS; photography by Simon Sellars.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

J.G. Ballard, ‘Live in London’, 1996.

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

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

J.G. Ballard, ‘Live in London’, 1996.

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

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

J.G. Ballard, Cocaine Nights, 1996.

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

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

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

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come, 2006.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

J.G. Ballard, Cocaine Nights.

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

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

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

J.G. Ballard, Hello America.

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

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

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come.

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

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

Crown Casino, 2009.

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

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

Hunter S. Thompson.

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

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

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come.

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

Headaches and a necessary evacuation followed.

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

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come.

ABOVE: Photo by Steven Meisel.

ABOVE: Photo by Kohei Yoshiyuki.

Via Susannah Breslin (Boing Boing guest blogger), we learn that Ballardian favourite Steven Meisel is back with ‘a layout that was (supposedly) too hot to run in Vogue Italy, so we get to look at them on the internets. NSFW, unless you work in an orgy pit’. Writes Susannah, the shots were ‘inspired by … old school Kodak infrared flashbulb illuminated snaps of Japanese sexhibitionists and their peeping toms in parks that were shot by Kohei Yoshiyuki in the early ’70s’. Evidently, Meisel is updating Yoshiyuki for a dogging generation.

But what’s the deal with NY Mag trading on the perv value of Meisel’s rejection by Vogue, only to reproduce the pictures at such a small size?

In any case, it’s not as NSFW as this.

..:: Previously on Ballardian

+ Triple Transgression
+ Love Among the Mannequins
+ This Time It’s War!
+ Fantasy Kits: Steven Meisel’s State of Emergency
+ JGB’s Sinister Marriage
+ Dead Models

I saw George Romero’s zombie flick Dawn of the Dead for the first time at the Melbourne International Film Festival last night. What a super film. What a statement. And very, very funny too. And in fact very reminiscent of Kingdom Come, for Dead, like KC, also features a sealed-off shopping mall in which a band of resistance fighters attempt to restart a micro society, sustained yet ultimately imprisoned by the trappings of consumer capitalism.

The mall in both Ballard and Romero becomes a city, a country, a galaxy, a self-sustaining micronational state seceding from reality, a State of mind absorbing and zombifying all it touches, and the faceless, cartoonish football hordes in KC are consumer zombies as much as the walking dead in Romero are metaphorically intended to be.

Yet, if you tweak your perspective just a little, the survivors in both could conversely be read as the oppressors, the old world clinging to its accumulated wealth, hording it for themselves in the face of the zombie attack — an all-devouring, ever-growing underclass.

For Romero, like Ballard, is nothing if not a master of ambivalence.

The most Ballardian part of the film is when the survivors seal off a department store — privileged retail space — from the zombies in the mall’s concourse, ie the tacky public domain. The survivors turn on the store’s muzak and roam the aisles to take whatever they want from the limitless, yet depthless wonders of consumerism, free to act out their decadent bourgeois fantasies, setting up their attic space with expensive furniture and luxury TV sets, even though the apocalypse that has blighted the outside world means there is nothing to watch anymore.

Watching this sequence, I could almost imagine yet another parallel world in which KC was written in the late 70s, and George Romero, the master of guerilla filmmaking — an aesthetic and a philosophy that informs the guerilla responses in his storylines — had become the first director to adapt Ballard for the big screen, setting the tone for future Ballard adaptations to come: raw, uncompromising, revolutionary, and shot through with the blackest humour, the perfect defence against insanity.

In short: how Ballard’s books, and Romero’s films, appear to me.

We’re all suffocated by the consumer society and its entertainment culture, where everything is an image or imitation of something else. We’re so starved of the real, as we think of it, that we’ll happily watch CCTV footage of motorways, rain-swept precincts and corner shops.

J.G. Ballard, Literary Review, 2001.

White has the security-camera videotape of his time in the McGraw-Hill elevator. He has watched it twice—it was recorded at forty times regular speed, which makes him look like a bug in a box. The most striking thing to him about the tape is that it includes split-screen footage from three other elevators, on which you can see men intermittently performing maintenance work. Apparently, they never wondered about the one he was in. (Eight McGraw-Hill security guards came and went while he was stranded there; nobody seems to have noticed him on the monitor.)

“Up and then down: The lives of elevators” by Nick Paumgarten.

Is there anybody out there?

Tell me honestly, what would you do? Say you’ve installed SurveillanceSaver on your computer and you’re scanning the far reaches of inner space for signs of life. You stop, breathless, halted in your tracks by — at long last! — intimations of deviant activity. Because that’s what you’re really looking for, isn’t it? Low-level crime. Subterranean sexuality. State-sanctioned scopophilia. You’re not really interested in static civic squares and motionless, humanless hospital parking lots. For you know these are really blank slates, switching stations for ‘the new man’: enter one end, exit via any number of alternate universes.

After the umpteenth feed of pigs in pens, Eastern European building sites and spotty students looking at porn on university computers, you see this: a man nervously pacing around an elevator car, clearly trapped as the car is going nowhere. He opens the doors, sees only a brick wall. He sits back down. Sleeps. Wakes up. Panics. Screams soundlessly, for there is no soundtrack to inner space, in inner space no one can hear you scream, CCTV being as silent as the tomb. Of course, if you have trouble racking up your empathy a notch or two, you could always try playing some melancholy piano music in the background to enhance the humanity.

After a while, White decided to smoke a cigarette. It was conceivable to him that, owing to construction work in the lobby, the building staff had taken his car out of service and would leave it that way not only through the weekend but all through the week. That they could leave him here as long as they had suggested that anything was possible. He imagined them opening the doors, ten days later, and finding him dead on his back, like a cockroach. Within hours, he had smoked all his cigarettes.

“Up and then down: The lives of elevators” by Nick Paumgarten.

Would you applaud and cheer, like it’s some kind of panopticon performance art? Are you so desperate for reality that you would watch this man disintegrate without once trying to summon help? He’s fated to be trapped in that elevator for 41 hours: enough time for you to go out on the town and come back late at night to find out how’s he doing before you retire to bed. You wake up in the morning, log on, hoping to see if he’s resorted to masturbation to block out the pain of a featureless world closing in all around him.

Idea for a new reality-TV show: trap unassuming citizens in urban environments. An elevator, say, or an office-block toilet. A car wash. A factory. The garbage enclosure of a high-rise housing estate. A concrete island. Leave them there for the weekend. Beam the security-camera images to the world. Do they die? Play with themselves? Talk to God? Talk to you?

Record their emotional response. Rate it and vote on it.

The end.

I find “reality TV” absolutely fascinating. I think people are so desperate to find what they believe to be “reality”, that they will happily watch programs of CCTV footage filmed in underground car parks, rainy shopping malls and motorway junctions… in a sense, the drabber the better.

J.G. Ballard, BBC Online Chat, 2002.

..:: Previously on Ballardian…

+ Trompe l’oeil corridors
+ ‘What would Borges do?’
+ Gargle, don’t swallow
+ The Ballardian Primer: Surveillance Cameras
+ One Nation Under CCTV

by the Crashman.

ABOVE: ‘White Bird’ by the Crashman. ‘XB-70, Tu-144: White Bird Must Fly, or she will crash’.

From the moment Blake crashes his stolen aircraft into the Thames, the unlimited dream company takes over and the town of Shepperton is transformed into an apocalyptic kingdom of desire and stunning imagination ruled over by Blake’s messianic figure. Tropical flora and fauna appear; pan-sexual celebrations occur regularly; and in a final climax of liberation, the townspeople learn to fly.

From the cover blurb to The Unlimited Dream Company, J.G. Ballard, 1979 (Triad/Panther edition, 1985).

Perreau: You once said “Nothing has any sense except in terms of ephemeral airplane culture”. Motorways, airplanes, shopping centres… What is the link between these things? What do humans do?

Ballard: They take planes and fly around, like the great soaring birds who endlessly cross and recross the ocean. Like the albatross, we are looking for our soul. Tourism is a rehearsal for death.

From Yann Perreau’s interview with J.G. Ballard.

As a stripling, I had the immense good fortune to stumble across the short stories of J.G. Ballard in the pulp science fiction magazines of the day: IF, F&SF, Analog. These prompted me to get hold of his early novels: The Wind From Nowhere, The Drowned World, The Crystal World. I was seduced by the subtle brilliance of Ballard’s work, by the total absence of worked-to-death SF themes, by the air of detached sophistication, overwhelming to a callow adolescent like me.

When Mr Ballard turned his back on “conventional SF” and pioneered the British New Wave with Michael Moorcock, I was as excited as anyone. His work opened up a relentless, terrifyingly limitless voyage into the libido, the id, the savage psychopathology that lies hidden in every ordinary man and woman, the possibility of any strange thing. Reading Ballard as an adolescent changed my entire view of the world, certainly of what was called “Science Fiction”.

In the early 70s a fellow fan handed me a copy of Crash. It was an utterly stunning experience. Crash ruined my taste for anything but the finest SF, and I was haunted for years by visions of Vaughan’s peculiar hobbies, those bizarrely twisted, almost unheard-of modes of human sexuality spelled out inexorably by the book. Now nothing could satisfy me as fully as Mr Ballard’s experiments with what the human psyche was really capable of, laying out unthinkable sexual and psychological grotesqueries in his trademark elegant, gentlemanly, spare and penetrating prose. His writing remade my intellectual world.

I gulped down his later novels, each more thought-provoking than the last, reveling in the astounding but visibly true events reported in the daily news as much as in his work. I found little to criticize, least of all his unflinching view of the profound yet subtle changes imposed by modern civilization on a thinking organism many millions of years old, an organism evolved under very different conditions than prevail today.

I searched for similar oracles, those who could further light the shattered-glass-strewn, arc-lit motorways we would soon be endlessly traveling. The Cronenberg movie was devastatingly, beautifully faithful to Ballard and after I saw it I realized that all of Ballard’s work could be read as a screenplay, a script for a movie about the storms of change enveloping the world.

ABOVE: ‘Helicopter Opera’ by the Crashman. ‘Helicopters crash to soaring opera by Kimera’.

I developed a desire to put forth my own tribute to Ballard’s work and somehow to carry forward the concepts that had so fascinated and changed me. I am no writer of any skill, and the idea of writing something “derivative of” or “inspired by” the genius of the Oracle of Shepperton was repellent to me. It could not fail to be anything but the crudest of imitations. So, to contribute to the Ballardian universe and its inhabitants, I latched onto the themes expressed in Crash, and since Mr Ballard’s novels acknowledged little or no boundaries, neither would I. I felt I could somehow take the themes of Crash even further, in different media if necessary. I thought about the event that had more or less inspired Crash: Mr Ballard’s exhibition of crashed cars as art, with the death and destruction latent in these twisted, crashed vehicles unleashing something that had always been hidden in the minds of their viewers. I wanted to do that.

In my teens I acquired a pilot’s licence, for sport and for the opportunity to master dangerous technology. But I was also drawn to plane crashes, to air crashes of any type, crashes at air exhibitions, transport accidents, airliners, sport planes, military fighters. They attracted me in the same way as Vaughan, who could not pass a motor accident without slowing to view and, if possible, photograph the result. From childhood I collected every book, press clipping and photograph I could find that dealt with aviation accidents and their strange and often grotesque aftermaths. To this day I have valises bulging with old magazine and newspaper clippings of long-forgotten air crashes.

Famous air tragedies have become iconic for me: so much human anguish dealt out by a crack in a pressurized Comet window joint, by the decision of the KLM captain at Tenerife to advance the throttles of his huge 747 while another loaded 747 on the same runway ahead of him lay hidden in the fog. By the peculiarly unforgiving nature of mechanical flight, midair collisions against all odds, the inexplicable crash deaths of highly experienced pilots from unexpected causes, of men and women who had spent thousands of hours at the controls. As Ballard’s work implies, we are at the mercy of our own technology.

I began to understand what it was that never fails to fascinate the public about aviation: the CRASH. A massive, newsworthy and completely public display of flying vehicular violence always raises the psychological stakes on the table, and is faithful to the essential Ballardian spirit. In the film The Great Waldo Pepper the barnstorming protagonist asks, “Why do people come to airshows?” The answer he is given is: “People don’t come to airshows to watch planes fly. They come to watch a man die.” Few psychoanalysts would disagree.

But I have also never met a pilot who can resist reading a crash report or viewing a film of one. We learn from them, “there but for the grace of God go I” — but like a car accident on the motorways that now define our civilization, no one can look away. We are all spectators at this destructive end-stage of our grotesquely dehumanizing civilization. Eventually it will become boring, as Mr Ballard has predicted our future as a civilization to be.

ABOVE: ‘Kraftwerk Crashes’ by the Crashman. ‘Topnotch crashing, all technical styles’.

Added to that, I was also fascinated by Ballard’s stint in the RAF and the flying symbolism in his books. Again and again he has teased us with aviation and its dangers, so akin to the dangers of the motorway. There’s the protagonist aviator in Super-Cannes with his crash-injured knee and his banner-towing girlfriend. There are the accounts in The Kindness of Women of military training in powerful RAF Harvards in Saskatchewan; of the ceaseless activity at the huge airports that always seem to be at the nexus of those fascinating and deadly motorways; of the forever-lost Turkish aviator trainee and his crashed Harvard, inverted for eternity in an unnamed Canadian lake, its form just visible, slowly disappearing under green algae as Ballard flew over it. And of the bold and virile American Mustang over Shanghai, herald of liberation and of a change in Ballard’s life as profound as that triggered by the Japanese occupation, itself announced by graceful formations of Zeros and Mitsubishi bombers over the soon-to-be-destroyed Shanghai of the 1930s.

So here was my chance to sit at the Ballardian table and place my own dish on its menu. Given my aviation background, and my desire to evoke the spirit of Crash, what could be more appropriate than the sight of a sudden and unexpected crash, preferably of a large airliner, its great silver phallus shattering in an ultra-high-speed orgasm of violent, spasmodic disintegration, uncontrollably spewing the shocked, wandering gametes of its ambulatory survivors and the ragged chunks of human flesh still full of their own unique DNA? This is epistemology, the very question of identity itself: “Who are we?” “Who were you?”. And what could be more Ballardian? No one ever emerges from an air crash unchanged at the deepest levels, even if they do survive.

ABOVE: ‘Crash Right In’ by the Crashman. ‘Baby let your hair hang down…’

The raw materials for the experiment were already available. I found numerous websites devoted solely to air accidents, those rare films where a motion-picture camera has recorded the unfolding of the crash, the cries and shouts of the survivors and onlookers, the stunned silence of the injured and the unending silent rage of the dead, lives with a whole trajectory changed forever in the intersection with violent arcs of shatteringly powerful, aluminium turbine-powered technology. Right away these suggested TV commercials of traveling death and terrifying impacts rather than beaches and sun, films of agonizingly public yet intensely personal disasters of which the Zapruder Kennedy motorcade film was an early harbinger.

I collected these films, poring over dread experiences frozen forever in time. Again, I recalled Ballard’s exhibition, where the mere presence of the crashed vehicles in a public art-space had touched and unleashed the id of the viewers, to the point where the audience began to interact unpredictably and destructively with these static displays of demolished technology. Somehow, Ballard’s work had touched something that was always there, but rarely expressed in public.

I began to edit the films to music, making my own choices and juxtapositions, the goal being to emerge with a collection of short videos that had been extracted from reality, yet would evoke in the viewer the same types of emotions and insights unleashed in Mr Ballard’s work. I used a neo-Ballardian pastiche technique to edit them: no plot, no dialogue with the viewer, nothing but crash after crash, and the result emerged as a video collage of horror, dismay, and death, Ballardianism expressed in an entirely new set of technological media.

ABOVE: ‘Turning Japanese’ by the Crashman. ‘I think I’m turning Japanese…’

The films in their original state were often silent, sometimes monochromatic and flickering with age, and sometimes modern color video, the soundtrack replete with the noise of impact and the cries of onlookers. But music dictated an important “feel” to the videos, echoing and amplifying the visual crash itself, lending it layers of additional meaning (although I often left in the cries of spectators and survivors, the better to immerse the viewer in the event). I found that the visual material of crashing aircraft lent itself readily to many kinds of musical background. Repeated slow-motion test crashes of old airliners called for music evoking the eventual futility of life. Exciting airshow passes and flaming collisions called for equally exciting, pounding rock ‘n’ roll. Surviving, parachuting pilots had their luck accompanied with notes of musical grace. Antique crashes evoked songs from their own black-and-white era. Uniquely elegant aircraft crashes called for matching beauty in the music.

At first I kept these short videos to myself. I felt the general public would see them as merely morbid, while the aviation community, of which I remained a part, would probably react even more negatively. Then I began to post them on websites devoted to bizarre and unpleasant events. After I had made a few of the videos public, a collective audience began to slowly emerge. I began to receive feedback and criticism, sometimes constructive, often laudatory, and sometimes merely abusive. But these people were accustomed to horrible sights and events already, like a doctor or air crash investigator. How would a random, general audience feel and what would they say? I took the next step: in 2006 I uploaded most of the videos to YouTube.

I expected to be excoriated by this wider, larger general public as a ghoul, an exploiter of the suffering of others, and as it happened the word ‘sick’ was freely applied to the videos as well as to myself. I considered this a compliment, as it mirrored the initial response to Crash (‘This author is beyond psychiatric help: do not publish’, according to the publisher’s reader). But, and I had expected this too, neo-Ballardians began to show themselves, finding subtle excitements and even strange beauty in the videos, that uneasy, disquieting splendour inherent in the slow-motion breakup of a speeding aircraft. Negative commenters, meanwhile, would often complain that the music was not to their taste, ignorant of the maxim “de gustibus non est disputandum”.

While I got my share of abuse as a psychopathic air crash ghoul and poor chooser of soundtrack music, I noticed an interesting phenomenon: not one of the persons commenting who had an authentic aviation background found them less than fascinating, and the vast majority of them found the videos praiseworthy. They admitted they were fascinated and horrified at the same time, feelings made familiar by the very real possibility of such crashes happening to them. They had been fatally intrigued. As one of my sharpest critics admitted, even he couldn’t look away from the screen. The material was simply too visually powerful. I had touched something, and I hoped it was close to what Mr Ballard had touched in the readers of his novels and in the viewers of his crashed-car art installation.

I continued to expose my unpromoted, unadvertised work, with all its unfettered techno-pornography of aviation violence. Within a little more than a year my videos had been seen by well over a million people on YouTube alone. The experiment was working on a large stage now.

ABOVE: ‘Proud and Glorious’ by the Crashman. ‘Death and glory in the air…’

The viewers seemed to get the intended spirit of these odd video creations right away. Others had already begun making fascinating crash-collage videos of auto accidents, and my work was seen as kicking the violence stakes up a notch, because, I suppose, of the relative rarity of plane crash films and the indisputably brutal violence inherent in their nature. Famous airliner crashes, the air conflicts of WWII, the pathetic mishaps of general aviation and the unintended accidents at public airshows and aerial exhibitions interested the vast majority of viewers.

I found that nationalism played a large part in most of the negative reactions. Russians, for example, would complain about videos devoted to their own airshow crashes. My video of the incomparably horrible Lviv airshow accident in 2002 showed shredded bodies on the runways, yet how could a video faithfully recording the original event ever be justifiably censored? No one can even see these videos unless they seek them out…

Once a contingent of Britons forced YouTube to take my collage of helicopter crash films offline, by bombarding them with complaints that it showed a completely non-explicit but fatal crash of one of their own country’s helicopters. Again I adopted a Ballardian stance: here it is, make of it what you will. View the videos or not, as you choose. To the extent I needed one, I pleaded the aesthetic defense of reality, of psychological and factual truth-telling — and a strong one it is.

It’s interesting to note that since I began posting in 2005, quite a few others have begun to do the same, editing various aviation-accident and plane crash videos to music and posting the result. The experiment has gone “viral” — a novel subgenre is emerging on YouTube and many other sites devoted to odd videos.

On a personal level, I consider this experiment an enormous success, comparable to the feelings of an author or filmmaker who knows that literally millions of people have chosen to view their work. On the Ballardian level, as a public psychological experiment in Applied Ballardianism, it merely proves what we already knew: that Mr Ballard’s unique visions are as powerful when translated into other media as they are in his work itself.

We know that Mr Ballard does not use the internet, but his partner, Claire, does. If by chance she runs across this project someday and shows it to him, I can only hope he will accept this experiment as it was intended: as a sincere tribute to the man and his work.

I feel that the balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decades. Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind – mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.

J.G. Ballard, introduction to Crash, 1973.

The Crashman. Copyright 2008, Crashman Productions.

..:: MORE CRASHMAN
+ Crashman: YouTube
+ Crashman: LiveVideo

Michael Z. recently wrote to me. Michael is the developer of SurveillanceSaver, the uber-Ballardian screensaver that displays live feeds from over 600 Axis surveillance-camera networks, which I wrote about here.

Michael tells me he has now released a new version for MS Windows with much more cameras, and while I would have been happy to see SurveillanceSaver remain Mac only (because I’m a snob for no good reason save habit and cliche), more cameras can only increase the potential for high weirdness, and that is good.

To celebrate this new release, here is the The Ballardian Primer to CCTV & Surveillance Technology, with all quotes lifted from J.G. Ballard’s novels. As with the Car Park Primer, I’ll have to leave the short stories until a later, less chaotic and less disorganised juncture in my life.

CCTV as a form of social control, as a fully integrated technological system, was implemented in the UK in the late 80s/early 90s, but Ballard was always aware of the power of the lens to flatten time and space and erase identity well before then. Therefore any quotes here that date from before the late 80s should be considered as CCTV’s very own becoming: an AI marshalling its forces, scanning its terrain, scouting for passive, unknowing victims. Indeterminate, invisible. Vapourous. Never quite coalescing.

Until it was defined.

All pics are screengrabs from Axis cameras.

“He moved across to the bank of TV receivers. There were six of them, relaying pictures transmitted from automatic cameras mounted in sealed concrete towers that Marshall had had built at points all over London. The sets were labelled: Campden Hill, Westminster, Hampstead, Mile End Road, Battersea, Waterloo. The pictures flickered and were lashed with interference patterns, but the scenes they revealed were plain enough.”

JGB, The Wind from Nowhere (1961).

“Sequence in slow motion: a landscape of highways and embankments, evening light on fading concrete, intercut with images of a young woman’s body. She lay on her back, her wounded face stressed like fractured ice. With almost dream-like calm, the camera explored her bruised mouth, the thighs dressed in a dark lace-work of blood.”

JGB, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

“Vaughan followed them everywhere with his camera, zoom lens watching from the observation platform of the Oceanic Terminal at the airport, from hotel mezzanine balconies and studio car-parks. For each of them Vaughan devised an optimum auto-death.”

JGB, Crash (1973).

“Watching him from my car, parked alongside his own, I could see that even now Vaughan was dramatizing himself for the benefit of these anonymous passers-by, holding his position in the spotlight as if waiting for invisible television cameras to frame him.”

JGB, Crash (1973).

“Without Vaughan watching us, recording our postures and skin areas with his camera, my orgasm had seemed empty and sterile, a jerking away of waste tissue.”

JGB, Crash (1973).

“Many of the women had portable radios slung from their shoulders, which they switched from station to station as if tuning up for an acoustic war. Others carried cameras and flash equipment, ready to record any acts of hostility, any incursions into their territory.”

JGB, High-Rise (1975).

“My skin prickled like over-sensitive camera film, already recording the hints of light that touched the pewter sky above London.”

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company (1979).

“‘Take it easy…’ Paco eyed Wayne defensively, unsure about the wisdom of admitting this volatile newcomer to their private teenage domain. ‘I only saw you on film — we have a few robot cameras on the other side of the Rockies, with trip-zooms that focus on anything that moves. It’s bad about your two friends, though.’”

JGB, Hello America (1981).

“He was still wearing the safari suit, and sat in front of his TV consoles — vivid colour pictures of Las Vegas at night taken by a camera on the roof of the Desert Inn. He looked pale but alert, as if he had decided long ago to dispense with sleep by a simple executive decree.”

JGB, Hello America (1981).

“Behind him he heard the sinister clatter of the two robot gunships, these blank angels which Manson moved around the sky. They came down from the night and hung fifty feet above him as he strode along the centre of the Strip, gatlings pointed at his back, camera zooms in their empty cockpits straining to catch Wayne’s profile.”

JGB, Hello America (1981).

“Manson glared at Wayne as if he were a malfunctioning robot. He fumbled with a set of buttons inlaid into the table top, his fingers scrabbling for the familiar contours like a blind man comforting himself with a rosary. ‘Look, Wayne, you can see it! There’s your virus!’
The television screens loomed into close-up. The pictures were transmitted from a series of cameras somewhere off Interstate 15.”

JGB, Hello America (1981).

“Carter ran head on through a plate-glass window. Picked up by a lobby camera, his startled face was frozen for ever in an immense, dazed smile.”

JGB, Hello America (1981).

“They clattered down the stairs and ran along the quay, following the remote-control camera mounted between the landing rails of this chimeric machine, like the devotees of a new televised religion.”

JGB, The Day of Creation (1987).

“We had rested through the night under the roof of the hangar, where the wounds to my head and ear had dried again. But the torn muscles of my scalp set it askew on my skull, and in turn seemed to tilt my mind, so that it perceived the world at an odd angle, like a misaligned camera.”

JGB, The Day of Creation (1987).

“The pearly rectangle, scarcely larger than a light-bulb, shrank me down to size, like everything else on which the camera turned its eye, and stripped away the irrelevancies of emotion, pain, and motive. Only my obsession endured, a great dream made small by failures of nerve, but a great dream nevertheless.”

JGB, The Day of Creation (1987).

“A security guard is lying on the floor below the row of television monitors, their screens a blizzard of snow. Someone has cut the cable running from the surveillance cameras mounted all over the estate, but clearly Officer Turner had no time to reach for the telephone whose scissored cord hangs from the desk above his head.”

JGB, Running Wild (1988).

“Secure behind their high walls and surveillance cameras, these estates in effect constitute a chain of closed communities whose lifelines run directly along the M4 to the offices and consulting rooms, restaurants and private clinics of central London.”

JGB, Running Wild (1988).

“The surveillance camera, as if bored with nothing to do, began to scan the house in close-up. The superb lenses, representing the most advanced optical technology, showed every detail with unnerving clarity. The camera panned along the plate-glass windows of the lounge and dining room. The undisturbed furniture could be clearly seen, even a clock registering 8:20 on a mantelpiece.”

JGB, Running Wild (1988).

“Already I resented the camera, staring at me like a deformed robot.”

JGB, The Kindness of Women (1991).

“Drained of emotion and value-judgement, the lens of the scientific camera anatomised the world around it like a patient and pensive voyeur.”

JGB, The Kindness of Women (1991).

“Even the empty camera in whose lens we were reflected had helped to shape our sex act. As she smoothed her eyebrows Carmen was measuring her profile against the lens, preparing herself for the even more elaborate sex films in which she would appear.”

JGB, The Kindness of Women (1991).

“With its passive and unobtrusive despotism, the camera governed the smallest spaces of our lives. Even in the privacy of our own homes we had all been recruited to play our parts in what were little more than real-life commercials.”

JGB, The Kindness of Women (1991).

“The camera lens was our way of disengaging from each other, distancing ourselves from each other’s emotions.”

JGB, The Kindness of Women (1991).

“Here, under the neutral gaze of the rostrum camera, a recruited force of volunteers had explored every legal permutation of lesbian, homosexual and heterosexual intercourse.”

JGB, The Kindness of Women (1991).

“As she lay with her laboratory partner, a remote-controlled camera recorded the involuntary movements of her facial musculature, the flushing of her breasts and abdomen, the skin tremors on the backs of her thighs.”

JGB, The Kindness of Women (1991).

“We were watched by the lenses of a dozen cameras, multiplied and dismantled at the same time.”

JGB, The Kindness of Women (1991).

“When Janet Bracewell called to Neil he turned to face the camera, aware that his chief role was to provide a poignant end-credit to the transmissions.”

JGB, Rushing to Paradise (1994.

“He gestured with a long arm at the villas on the hillside, secure behind their surveillance cameras. ‘I’ve lived here for two years and I’m still not sure if the place is real…’”

JGB, Cocaine Nights (1996).

“Annoyed with myself, I set off along the narrow street, past the surveillance cameras that guarded the lacquered doorways, each lens with its own story to tell.
Hidden perspectives turned Estrella de Mar into a huge riddle. Trompe-l’oeil corridors beckoned but led nowhere.”

JGB, Cocaine Nights (1996).

“I watched him drive away, and repeated his last words to myself. No crime at Estrella de Mar, no drug-dealing, burglaries or car thefts? In fact, the entire resort was wired up to crime like a cable TV network. It fed itself into almost every apartment and villa, every bar and nightclub, as anyone could see from the defensive nervous system of security alarms and surveillance cameras.”

JGB, Cocaine Nights (1996).

“The Sanger villa stood across the road, windows shuttered, the surveillance camera fixed on the litter of cigarette packets and advertisement flyers in the drive. Pushed by the wind, they edged towards the graffiti-covered doors of the garage, as if hoping to be incorporated into this lurid collage.”

JGB, Cocaine Nights (1996).

“Crawford pointed to the crenellated wall. ‘Look at it, Charles … it’s a fortified medieval city. This is Goldfinger’s defensible space raised to an almost planetary intensity — security guards, tele-surveillance, no entrance except through the main gates, the whole complex closed to outsiders. It’s a grim thought, but you’re looking at the future.’”

JGB, Cocaine Nights (1996).

“He fixed his aviator glasses over his eyes and glanced around the car park, counting the surveillance cameras as if calculating the best getaway route.”

JGB, Cocaine Nights (1996).

“‘Town-scapes are changing. The open-plan city belongs to the past — no more ramblas, no more pedestrian precincts, no more left banks and Latin quarters. We’re moving into the age of security grilles and defensible space. As for living, our surveillance cameras can do that for us. People are locking their doors and switching off their nervous systems.”

JGB, Cocaine Nights (1996).

“Civility and polity were designed into Eden-Olympia, in the same way that mathematics, aesthetics and an entire geopolitical world-view were designed into the Parthenon and the Boeing 747. Representative democracy had been replaced by the surveillance camera and the private police force.”

JGB, Super-Cannes (2000).

“Behind the brave and paranoid new world of surveillance cameras and bulletproof Range Rovers there probably existed an old-fashioned realm of pecking orders and racist abuse.”

JGB, Super-Cannes (2000).

“Surveillance cameras hung like gargoyles from the cornices, following me as I approached the barbican and identified myself to the guard at the reception desk.”

JGB, Super-Cannes (2000).

“‘People are so immersed in their work they wouldn’t recognize the end of the world. It explains why no one saw anything unusual about Greenwood. There’s no civic sense here.’

‘There is.’ Halder pointed to a nearby surveillance camera. ‘Think of it as a new kind of togetherness.’”

JGB, Super-Cannes (2000).

“We began to climb the steep road that led towards the billionaire heights of Super-Cannes. Luxury villas as lavish as palaces stood in their groomed parks. On the wrought-iron gates, surveillance cameras crouched like hawks.”

JGB, Super-Cannes (2000).

“‘These security cameras . . . I have to be careful. I’m in Hammersmith, the King Street shopping mall. Consumer hell.’”

JGB, Millennium People (2003).

“Nothing now made sense except in terms of a transient airport culture. Warning displays alerted each other, and the entire landscape was coded for danger. CCTV cameras crouched over warehouse gates, and filter-left signs pulsed tirelessly, pointing to the sanctuaries of high-security science parks.”

JGB, Kingdom Come (2006).

“Everyone’s suffocating — too many barcode readers, too many CCTV cameras and double yellow lines.”

JGB, Kingdom Come (2006).

“Everything about him, from his large feet in a pair of unmatched trainers to the tic that pulled at an infected ear piercing, fixed him firmly as an urban scarecrow designed to frighten away any circling security cameras.”

JGB, Kingdom Come (2006).

“The riot soon began to drink itself into befuddlement, but bands of more determined ice-hockey followers joined forces with track-and-field supporters and marched on an industrial estate in run-down east Brooklands, a night-time wilderness of video cameras and security patrols.”

JGB, Kingdom Come (2006).

“‘This isn’t a suburb of London, it’s a suburb of Heathrow and the M25. People in Hampstead and Holland Park look down from the motorway as they speed home from their West Country cottages. They see faceless inter-urban sprawl, a nightmare terrain of police cameras and security dogs, an uncentred realm devoid of civic tradition and human values.’”

JGB, Kingdom Come (2006).

..:: Previously on Ballardian
+ Car Parks: The Ballardian Primer

From unnamed Dsquared2 campaign, by Steven Meisel.

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

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

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

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

From ‘State of Emergency’, by Steven Meisel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have a feeling it holds the key to everything.

Image from America’s Next Top Model.

How strange is this: Rosanna Arquette, and Crash, popping up in all sorts of places. This film, Ballard’s story, still packs a powerful psychological enema.

First up, Maxim Magazine, anointing the scene with Spader/Ballard fucking Rosanna’s leg wound as no.2 in ‘The Worst Love Scenes of All Time’:

Regardless of how distasteful most of the previous couplings have been, at least they all involved the use of normal human orifices. In Crash (David Cronenberg’s movie about car crash fetishes, not the racism lecture penned by the rich white guy), we have the unfortunate airing of Spader’s penis and a huge gash in the back of Arquette’s leg. Sorry, even we have limits.

According to MelbPsy (who brought this bizarre ripple in the space-time continuum to my attention): ‘Thirty years on and even a magazine which shamelessly promotes the sexiness of dangerously fast cars alongside the geometric fetishisation of specific bodily contours hasn’t the stomach to look Crash in the face. How little we have travelled.’

The other weird detail is that in their excerpt from the film, Maxim has blacked out Rosanna’s breasts and vagina. Are we therefore to infer that ‘normal’ female sexuality is even more distasteful to these people? Do they in fact have any sex life at all? Or do they simply hate women? What a messy, confused, distorted signal they send.

And then, unbelievably, Heather Mills of all people weighs in:

SIR PAUL McCARTNEY’s estranged wife HEATHER MILLS is reportedly “disgusted” by his new girlfriend ROSANNA ARQUETTE for her controversial role in 1997 movie CRASH. The former model – who lost a leg in a motorcycle accident in 1993 – is sickened by Arquette’s portrayal of a disabled woman who gets sexual enjoyment out of car accidents in the David Cronenberg-directed movie, according to a pal. Mills’ alleged attack follows reports of a romance between the ex-Beatle and the Hollywood star, which first surfaced last month (Nov07). A close friend says, “When Heather saw Paul’s new girlfriend appearing on screen with a similar injury to herself, she was disgusted. Rosanna’s character gets turned on by accidents. Heather told pals she finds this reprehensible.” Mills and McCartney – who have a four-year-old daughter, Beatrice, together are currently embroiled in a bitter divorce battle.

Are we therefore to infer from this that Heather wants all amputees and accident victims to live chaste lives, segregated from ‘normal’ society? You can’t have it both ways. Maybe Paul shouldn’t have dated Heather in the first place, as he could be seen to be getting his jollies from accident victims.

Emily, who alerted me to this story, says that ‘Crash still retains the power to shock’, and indeed it does, but so does Beatle Paul. I had no idea he was going out with Rosanna Arquette.

What next? Holly Hunter shacking up with Gerry and all his Pacemakers? Elias Koteas shagging Elton John?

..:: RETROSPECTO REWIND ::..

Here’s a reminder of the throbbing paroxysms generated by Crash on its release in 1996. Alexander Walker was one prominent critic generating most of it; Christopher Tookey was the other. Here’s the latter responding to *his* critics after he called for the film to be denied an 18 certificate:

One perk of being a freelance journalist who writes for the Daily Mail is that there is always the chance of becoming a leftwing hate figure. Last month, it happened to me. I was denounced in the Guardian, Observer and Time Out. Normally friendly fellow critics accused me of being “very, very, very, very bad” (Ann Billson, Sunday Telegraph) or setting myself up as “moral guardian to the nation” (Alan Frank, Daily Star).
…
Perhaps the weirdest response was a complaint to the Press Complaints Commission by a media studies lecturer convinced that I was prejudiced against disabled people having sex. Actually, I used to be director of an ATV programme about disability called Link, and we covered the subject several times, usually in items presented by disabled people.

I duly reassured the commission that what I had found questionable in Crash was not disabled people having sex, nor able-bodied people being interested in having sex with the disabled, but the attempt by the filmmakers to eroticise mutilations and fetishise orthopaedic appliances.
…
Whatever course of action, or inaction, the BBFC takes about Crash, my belief remains that David Cronenberg’s film might well have a “copycat effect” on a few unstable individuals-particularly if it became available on video, where it could be studied obsessively. The lethal weapons that Cronenberg fetishises are, after all, not guns, which are not readily available to the British public, but cars, which are. Joyriding, ram-raiding and reckless driving by youths are already social problems. Cronenberg’s reputation among the young as a cult, “shock horror” director might tempt many more to seek out his film than would normally watch a boring art-house film.

Crash could also have a far more insidious longterm effect by eroticising sado-masochism and orthopaedic fetishism for people previously unaware of being turned on by acts of mutilation. To allow Crash an 18 certificate would set a precedent for even more pernicious-and commercial-films in the future.

“Fetishising orthopaedic appliances”? Like Dr Scholls sandals, for example? Seriously, this is seriously hard to take seriously.

So, what does Tookey think of Hostel and Wolf Creek, then? Surely, 10 years on, in the age of ‘torture porn’, he can’t feel the same way about all of this? And sure enough, he doesn’t…after a fashion. Compare his recent review of Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises:

Such brutality may be hard to watch, but it’s more truthful than most big-screen violence, and it doesn’t have the flippancy that so degrades Eli Roth, Tarantino and other purveyors of “torture porn”. Cronenberg’s intention is probably neither moral or humanistic (there seems to be something about blood and brutality that he finds erotically stimulating) but the effect of Eastern Promises is undoubtedly to bring home the nastiness of violence. And that is moral, humanistic and responsible, whether the film-maker intends it to be or not.

Yes, you guessed it, Tookey has found a couple more straw men to rail against. Thus, although he still begrudges Cronenberg the artistic due the filmmaker so richly deserves, Tookey — in crab-like fashion, two steps forward, 10 steps sideways — ever-so-slightly admits, fighting with all his might against his better nature, that there’s more to Cronenberg than mere ‘shock horror’. As for finding ‘blood and brutality’ erotically stimulating, I would like to direct Tookey’s attention to the charming Dead Girls Fashion Parade and to Steven Meisel’s state-brutalised models. And to those beheading videos with which his review makes reference, the ones that were so virally and virulently propagated all over the internet.

This is the world we live in. We’ve been living in it for a very, very long time now. Tookey makes a good first move by acknowledging the ‘truthfulness’ of Cronenberg-style violence. Now he needs to take the final leap: acknowledging the erotic element, which he seems to find so thoroughly distasteful in both his Crash and Eastern Promises rants.

And delivering that sermon must surely be the task of Cronenberg himself:

I can imagine some wouldn’t want to acknowledge the homoerotic element [in Eastern Promises], but to me it seems pretty obvious. I wish I could be the first to claim to see the connection between sex and violence, but it goes back about 5,000 years. I’m just acknowledging things that are there that seem apparent to me. We’re in a bizarre place with the Internet right now, where we can see snuff porn any minute of the day or night in the comfort of your own home—courtesy, often, of Muslim extremists. I’m sure they would be pretty shocked to think that I was seeing homoerotic stuff in their beheadings and so on, but I do see it, and very clearly. And it drives me crazy that they’re so self-righteous about what they’re doing, because I see it as a very complexly perverse act. The beheading I saw was like a homosexual gang rape, really. Despite the religious chanting and the beards, it was very apparent to me.

Recently, Rick McGrath was in the process of wooing Toronto’s Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy with his extensive collection of Ballard first editions, which the Collection might archive. Sensing his keen collector’s eye, the head of the Collection passed on a binder containing a slew of Canadian JGB reviews, Ballardian esoterica and the jewel in the crown: a long, unpublished interview with Ballard from 1974. According to McGrath: ‘It was conducted by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for a radio show called Ideas, with this specific series featuring science-fiction writers discussing Doomsday scenarios. The interview is 8,000 words long, and covers a wide range of topics.’

Rick has now onlined the transcript and it’s an absorbing read. Today we are well familiar with Ballard’s riffs and routines, but imagine how utterly alien his pronouncements must have sounded back then. An indication of this is the difficulty the interviewer, Carol Orr, sometimes has with Ballard’s concepts. When talking of the isolation that results from surrounding ourselves with technological systems, Ballard says, ‘We tend to assume that people want to be together in a kind of renaissance city if you like, imaginatively speaking, strolling in the evening across a crowded piazza…’ In response Orr says, ‘No, I can’t agree with you there. I think it is not a question of conscious decision to people’s psychological needs, since that was industrialization, that was….’

Then Ballard, with this: ‘These are the sort of dreams these are — I don’t think people want to be together, I think they want to be alone. People are together in a traffic jam or in a crowded elevator in a department store, or on airlines. That’s togetherness. People don’t want to be together in a physical sense, in an actual running crowd on a pavement. People want to be alone. They want to be alone and watch television.’

Protesting, Orr says, ‘Well, if you want to make that kind of statement. I don’t want to be in a traffic jam, but I don’t want to be alone on a dune, either’. To which Ballard replies:

JGB: One is not living in…an 18th-to-19th-century city where, as it were, metaphorically speaking, like a crowded noisy tenement, where we knew every neighbour, where we were surrounded by relations of many generations. Where we were in an intimate sort of social context made up of hundreds of people. This isn’t the case. Most of us lead comparatively isolated lives. That being alone on a dune is probably a better description of how you actually lead your life than you realize. Oh sure, you may…

Orr: … as far as you are trapped within your own body…

JGB: No, no, compared with the life you would have lived 50 years ago, or 150 years ago, where you would have been surrounded in a large tenement or a large dwelling in an overcrowded city, say. If you think a mediaeval town, well, probably every inhabitant knew every other inhabitant intimately, or at least knew something of them. One’s not living in that world any more. The city or the town or the suburb or the street — these are places of considerable isolation. People like it that way, too. They don’t want to know all their neighbours. This is just a small example where the conventional appeal of the good life needs to be looked at again. I don’t think people would want to have the sort of life that was lived 100 years ago or 200 years ago.

I do get a sense that Orr is a little out of her depth, and it’s no surprise that after this exchange she suddenly says, ‘On that note we’re going to have to close up shop’, ending the interview. I’m not having a go at her by saying this, just pointing out that Ballard was thinking through technological relations and scenarios in a rather unique fashion back then. Picture it: he’s a science-fiction writer, whose ostensible job is to predict the future, but who undercuts that by suggesting that there is no future, that ‘the present is throwing up so many options, so many alternatives, that it contains the possibilities of any future right now. You can have tomorrow, today. And the notion of the future as a sort of programmatic device, I mean a direction, a compass-bearing that we can look forward to, a destination that we are moving toward psychologically and physically — I think that possibility is rather outdated.’

I’m especially blown away by the following statement, in response to a question from Orr about the likelihood of nuclear holocaust. Not only does Ballard seriously undermine the nuclear hysteria and paranoia that would reach a frothing peak in the 80s, but he also accurately foretells the role of networked technology and identity theft as much greater threats. All from the ‘primitive’ vantage point of 1974:

JGB: I wouldn’t have thought if there were any danger to life on this planet it would come from the possibility of nuclear warfare. Far more from the misuse of, say, antibiotics, the misuse of computers, [or] of overpopulation as a product of better health, better nutrition and the like, and a general lack of control. What I’m concerned with is that people, by reacting against technology, by taking a very Arcadian view of what life on this planet should be, may no longer be able to deal with the real threats when they begin to come from technology, which they probably will.

Threats to the quality of life that everyone is so concerned about will come much more, say, from the widespread application of computers to every aspect of our lives where all sorts of science-fiction fantasies will come true, where bank balances will be constantly monitored and at almost any given time all the information that exists about ourselves will be on file somewhere — where all sorts of agencies, commercial, political and governmental, will have access to that information. Now, I think that’s much more of a danger.

The potency of Ballard’s prophecy is especially relevant when you consider that Alvin Toffler’s very popular Future Shock was published around the same time, and was considered to be a frightening and all-too-real vision of the future, with its warnings of a ‘massive adaptational breakdown’ unless ‘man quickly learns to control the rate of change in his personal affairs as well as in society at large’.

In this interview, by contrast, while Ballard might be concerned about the effects of networked technologies, he discerns a rather different outcome that derives from a belief in the evolutionary, affirmative possibilities of this rapid rate of change:

JGB: I’m absolutely convinced now people are morally and psychologically stronger and healthier than they’ve ever been before. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t be. I think they’re strong enough and healthy enough to begin to, in a sense, play with their own psychologies, to be able to play games with themselves. In the sense that one goes out to one’s tennis court and plays a set of tennis with a friend. One will be able to play psychological games, one will be able to assume psychological roles of various kinds. One will be able to devise situations, the dramatic kind if you like, which won’t upset us, which won’t damage the mind in any way, which won’t lead to a nervous collapse. I think people are strong enough to begin to play all kinds of deviant games, and I’m sure that this is to some extent taking place.

I think the future is going to be angular, rather hard geometrically, stripped of ornament. Unpredictable, with rapid temperature changes from black to white in the sun. I think the future will be very lunar, and people will behave in a very lunar way, very isolated from each other. Does that appeal to me? Yes, it does, because I think people will have more freedom there. I mean, the freedom of isolation, the freedom of complete choice in one’s behaviour. It’s the difference of being in an empty city or being in a resort out of season or being on a crowded beach…

I can’t help thinking of the whole FaceSpace phenomenon when reading this passage, and while in my mind the jury’s out on the ‘affirmative’ nature of that particular interface, I have no doubt that, as a futurist, Ballard has the edge over Toffler. Very simplistically (I’m no Toffler expert), the difference seems to be that Toffler insists we must impose our will on technology, whereas Ballard is positive that we must, to a certain extent, accept the inexorable logic of technological growth and adapt accordingly.

And now, one final quote, and then you must read the whole 8,000 words for yourself over at Rick’s site. I like this passage for the insight it gives into the Ballardian aesthetic, and the sense that aesthetic standards are really just another form of control (what Fredric Jameson has termed ‘the domination of political form over matter with the imperatives of aesthetic modernism’):

JGB: I feel that a modern high-rise building or a concrete seven-storey car park, or a cloverleaf roadway junction, reflects and embraces within itself the aesthetic laws, all the laws of good design that we apply to the sorts of things we regard as beautiful in our lives — the well-designed cutlery and kitchen equipment. I mean, they embrace all the aesthetic standards of modern sculpture.

The last 100 years have led us toward industrial design, have consistently led us towards the set of standards, the set of aesthetic yardsticks, which we apply in our everyday lives — to our judgment of which washing machine we buy, which motorcar we prefer, which coffee percolator we like. But we must apply these yardsticks right across the board. They’re the same yardsticks, the same criteria that you see in the design of motorway junctions. They are motion sculptures of great beauty. Now, to say “my God” automatically, because to say something is a road, it must therefore be ugly, is illogical. I simply accept the logic of the world in which I live.

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

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

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

Dominika Oramus, 2007.

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

NOTE: Part Two is now available.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cover: New Worlds #179, Feb. 1968.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

J.G. Ballard: photo by Eamonn McCabe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

J.G. Ballard: photo by David Levenson.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photographer unknown. Details welcome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

..:: Part Two is now online.

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

ENDNOTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some people get their kicks from braving a mob of blood-crazed shoppers to attack the nearest mannequin. But if that doesn’t appeal, why not exact virtual revenge? Keith emails to inform of one of the very best things online: a little feature over at ConsumerReports.org called the ‘Crash Test Selector’. It’s a series of films showing latest-model cars equipped with latest-model crash-test dummies being crashed into barriers and rammed side on by robot vehicles. The ‘Crash Test Selector’ is exactly that: you can pick and chose from latest model cars – the Mini Cooper, the new VW Beatle, Mercedes, Lincolns, Volvos – and compare the results. Clearly the dummies fare better in the Audis and they are clearly worse off in convertibles. Lesson learnt.

These films are state of the art. The cinematography is superb. Crashes are filmed from the front, from the side, from inside, in slow motion, as well as at normal speed. My favourite is the view from inside the passenger compartment. Shot in slow-motion, high-definition closeup, we watch shards of glass and ruptured rear-view mirrors fly directly towards the camera lens as the dummies loll about helplessly. It’s as if the car is a space vehicle that has blown its airlock, the slo-mo vacuum of the black hit of space sucking the ship’s debris and its inhabitants into the infinite and beyond. True inner-space poetry.

Keith says, ‘This is totally Ballardian, especially if you own a car. It’s rather disturbing to watch what could be you being smashed over and over, in increasingly close-up shots and from different angles. It also helps give those of us who are jaded a reminder why Crash was such a powerful book.’

Keith is absolutely right: it is a forceful reminder of the power of Crash, at a time when the mainstreaming of extreme violence is at a peak with the current popularity of ‘torture porn’. But for me, the ambivalence of Crash is the really disturbing factor. I’ve been in a side-on car crash that managed to spin the vehicle around and also destroy the front of the car. I’ll never forget looking down at my legs, and then up at the concertinaed bonnet, thinking that just another few inches would have wiped out my lower half altogether. Still, I respond to the dark beauty at the core of these crash-test films.

There’s something sinister in the relentless camera work, a kind of code. The dummy is the ideal metaphor for Ballard’s posthuman protagonists, with its passive expression, its willingness to be experimented on. The complete collapse of time and space I experienced during my crash — the classic dilation of time reported by many crash victims, with everything in slow motion — oozes from these films, a warm, comforting complicitness in the manufacture of my own death. As Ballard says, ‘Are we just victims in a totally meaningless tragedy, or does it in fact take place with our unconscious, and even conscious, connivance? … Are these arranged deaths arranged by the colliding forces of the technological landscape, by our own unconscious fantasies about power and aggression, our obsessions with consumer goods and desires, the overlaying fictions that are more and more taking the place of reality? … If we really feared the car crash, none of us would ever be able to drive a car.’

The films are introduced by Jeff Bartlett from Consumer Reports, a bland anchor man with a slicked-back semi-mullet, a stonewall expression, and the tones of an insurance salesman. He talks about the ‘energy of the impact’, the ‘driver’s survival space’, the ‘integrity of the passenger compartment’, ‘head accelerations’, and each film ends with a sound effect – a ‘boing’ – like it’s an ad for pain relief. Meanwhile, you hear the screeching of tyres and brakes. You see the airbags released, smothering the driver-dummy like an all-enveloping, amniotic sac. The dummy’s head, smeared with makeup, leaves a bright red patch on the airbag, indicating the point of impact as sensors inside the mock human transmit the likely damage to internal organs and external tissue.

Could you project a fantasy onto these bland, affectless protagonists (perhaps including Jeff Bartlett, although I’m really talking about the dummies here)? Could you imagine the red makeup as spurting blood and brain tissue? Given the absolute seductive nature of the cinematography, and the utter helplessness of the victims, could you project, if you were so inclined, a sexual fantasy onto these poor helpless dummies?

Yes you could — if your name is ‘Eli Roth’.

I recently read a Sight & Sound review of Hostel that compared its plot to ‘something out of Ballard’, but Roth has completely elided the clinical, critical distance Ballard inserts into his work. Instead of watching the atrocity with the flat gaze of a surgeon, we now view it from inside the mind of a serial killer. As Roger Luckhurst has noted of Crash, ‘Ballard’s affectless, monologic style … absents itself from making any conclusion about the thesis it remorselessly restates page after page, and this makes it the classic instance of what Roland Barthes termed the “scriptible” text — that is, a text that has to be actively completed, to be almost cowritten by the reader if any sense of meaning or closure is to be reached (Cronenberg repeated the effect in the film by resisting explanatory voice-over or the subjective point of view).’

LEFT: Jeff Bartlett Presents CrashTest Selector. RIGHT: Eli Roth Presents Hostel.

For Eli Roth, that could never be enough. And so his real-life actors and actresses play the role of the crash-test dummy as Roth performs his unspeakable perversions on them, which he also forces on us, forcing the camera to become our subjective POV, so that they become our perversions. Like the high-tech serial killer in Strange Days, we are made to see what Roth sees as he tortures us to death. For this is the man, after all, who is on the record as saying, ‘We’re in a really violent wave and I hope it never ends. Hopefully we’ll get to a point where there are absolutely no restrictions on any kind of violence in movies … I’d love to see us get to a point where you can make a movie and not worry about the limits of the violence. Then I think they’d get so violent that people would get bored of it.’

To compare him with Ballard in any way, shape, or form, therefore, is an enormous miscarriage of justice.

No, I much more prefer the stylised hyperreality of Ballard and Crash (and the gentle ebb and flow of Jeff Bartlett and his harem of enigmatic plastic mannequins) than I do the snuff porn of Eli Roth. And ultimately, if or when my mind wanders into its darkest corners, projecting whatever fantasies are dredged up onto the blank, passive repose of the crash-test dummy, I will find I only have myself to blame for the shock and confusion I feel — rather than suffering the shame of being violated by the fantasies of strangers forced upon me against my will.

Dominika Oramus. Grave New World: The Decline Of The West in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard. University of Warsaw Press, 2007.

review by Rick McGrath

Dr Roger Luckhurst somewhat shocked the gathering of academics at last May’ first international conference on JG Ballard when he suggested all types of literary and cultural theories would find a productive home in Ballard’ open-ended fiction.

It may be somewhat ironic that Luckhurst then pulled out Grave New World and waved it at his audience, because Dominika Oramus’ new book on Ballard is based on the cultural theory that the West is in precipitous decline; her basic tenet in Grave New World is that since the end of World War II western civilization has been merrily racing down the Highway to Hell in a white Pontiac; and all the evidence you need that we’re quickly approaching that gate where Hope is the toll is available in the fiction of J.G. Ballard.

According to Oramus, it all started in 1932: Aldus Huxley published Brave New World, Oswald Spengler published The Decline of The West, and Arnold Toynbee began work on A Study of History. It was not until 1949, however, that Oramus’ theoretical bedrock would be laid in an essay Toynbee wrote called ‘The International Outlook’, in which he noted: ‘The self-inflicted wounds from which civilizations die are not those of a material order. In the past, at any rate, it has been the spiritual wounds which have proved incurable”. No, that’s not religious. In Toynbee’s vernacular, “spiritual” means “internal”.

There you go. For Oramus, “In both his fiction and non-fiction J.G. Ballard describes the dire spiritual changes that have been taking place since the war and have transformed the West”. That’s what this book is about.

It’s All In The ‘Scapes.

One of the most intelligent aspects about Grave New World is the way Oramus organizes her approach. The book starts with a lengthy Introduction in which she lays out her theme, pays polite homage to all the main Ballard critics, from Merrill to Gasiorek, and then offers up a fascinating account of how JGB has publicly remythologized himself over the years, finally emerging as an “orientalist” after the success of Empire of The Sun, novel and movie. Oramus successfully identifies the two main problems prior Ballard critics have faced: his “classification” as a writer, and his proclivity to continuously create and recreate his own public image. The former she dismisses by treating “all of his oeuvre synchronically, as descriptions of different vistas”, and the latter she negates by carefully explaining and then ignoring Ballard’s autobiographical fantasies, trusting the tale and not the teller in the main body of her book.

However, the 11 pages Oramus devotes to Ballard’s self-fiction are some of the most compelling in the book: “The impressions and descriptions of the contemporary world and post-modernist culture mingle with personal memories and ciphered allusions to his books. The devoted reader of Ballard is now faced with a maze of cross-referential allusions and remarks, which together form his imaginary autobiography”. Most of which has been dutifully collected and published by RE/Search Publications.

The next chapter, ‘Grave New World’, is equally interesting, although perhaps mistitled, as the content is a close study of Ballard’s intellectual themes and his theoretical sources. Oramus carefully begins with Huxley, and then moves to a discussion of historians Toynbee, Spengler and Gibbon and their theoretical influence on the young Ballard. Equally influential are concerns of the mind, and Oramus next examines the ideas of Freud, Jung, Laing and the Surrealists, and shows how they, Freud foremost, are essential to understanding Ballard’s fiction. She then moves to mass culture, and examines the ideas of McLuhan, Debord and Baudrillard before finishing the chapter with the weakest links: Toffler, Fukuyama and Huntington in their roles as dire warning futurists. Personally, I’ve never seen much of this trio’s influence in any Ballard, but Oramus probably included them because of their necessary role in her overall thesis of the spiritual (internal) death of the West.

The next five chapters are devoted to Ballardian themes: ‘Battlefields’, a study of war; ‘Cityscapes’, the urban landscape; ‘Mediascapes’, the mass media; ‘Mindscapes’, the inner world; and ‘Wastelands’, the entropic end.

Each of these important themes is intelligently discussed, with conclusions based on close readings of the major novels and short stories. ‘Battlefields’, for example, offers a look at war and violence as “one of the most important motifs in J.G. Ballard’s oeuvre, and surrender to aggression and the death drive are basic characteristics of his vision of contemporary culture.” Oramus treats us to revelatory readings of Empire of the Sun, The Kindness of Women and The Atrocity Exhibition, ultimately linking war, violence and a human mind conditioned to self-destruction with Freud and the A-bomb as a turning point in history with Spengler, to bring it all back to her thesis of decline.

And so it goes through each chapter: a Ballardian landscape is analyzed through its fictional usage in various works, Ballardian sources are applied, conclusions are drawn; the point is made. Sometimes Oramus amuses us with an unusual reading of a Ballard classic, the most daring being her reading of Concrete Island as an hallucination by the protagonist, Maitland, during the seconds that elapsed between the accident and him dying behind the wheel.

On the other hand, in her reading of a lesser work, Day of Creation for example, while astutely recognizing the blend of media and memory Mallory uses to create his tale, she seems to miss the point of it being yet another variation in “creative” autobiography -– a story about writing a story — and veers towards the more sinister reading of the tale being a sign of the power of the media, and how visual culture ensnares its victims.

But this, of course, is the downside of Grave New World — it exists to prove an “external” point, and really, what could be easier than choosing Ballard to substantiate the Ballardian belief that our civilization is slipping into a psychopathological dystopia?

The problem is, a very great part of Ballard’s fiction is not pessimistic, but individually optimistic. Nor are his characters apparently even slightly concerned about changing what’s going on around them — all objects tend to be ciphers, anyway — and they tend to deal with their situations in highly imaginative (“spiritual”) ways that offer personal, not social, psychological relief. There’s also Ballard’s use of humour, which Oramus completely disregards. If we’re all in that Pontiac and Ballard’s driving, there’s a comedy CD playing intermittently on the stereo.

One other aspect of this book I found exasperating is the lack of novels and short stories in the Index. What? Yes… you can’t look up all the times, say, Crash is mentioned. There’s an index or listing for damn near everything else, but nothing for any of the books (Ballard & otherwise) Oramus mentions. Hopefully another edition will solve this serious oversight.

Grave New World is a sort of one-trick pony with ornate dressage. The whole decline of the West thing, although interesting and surely an idea with merit, does begin to pale after awhile, and Oramus almost seems to gloat slightly as she lovingly describes our culture’s long list of woes. It’s almost like complaining about teenagers. However, when she gets into the novels and stories her inner literary critic takes over, and she delivers up many satisfactory readings, links, insights and ideas about most of Ballard’s oeuvre, including, I might add, The Wind From Nowhere, in which we agree many of Ballard’s later stylistic ideas were developed.

What I personally appreciated most about Grave New World is Oramus’ work to establish Freud as perhaps Ballard’s greatest intellectual influence. Her outline of Freud’s Ballard-appropriate theories is clear and succinct, and should help any non-Freudian reader expand their appreciation of all Ballard’s work.

As well, her knowledge of Ballard’s “imaginary” self is extensive and illuminating. Perhaps no other modern writer has created such an extensive mock biography, which he no doubt created to hide behind — a concept Oramus chose not to follow in this work.

At the end of our civilization, I’d rate this as a bifurcated book. The thesis is basically subjective — are we really on the way out? — but the analysis is highly objective, relying basically on the source material. It’s well written, understandable, acknowledges the critical field, and develops a number of Ballardian themes in a way no other critic has attempted. Well worth reading, even if the end is nigh.

Grave New World: The Decline of the West in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard has been produced in a limited quantity. If you’re interested in obtaining a copy, please contact Dominika Oramus at the University of Warsaw.

..:: MORE RICK McGRATH
+ Terminal Collection: Rick McGrath’s JGB site
+ ‘Woefully Underconceptualised’: Rick McGrath on JG Ballard’s Cover Art
+ It’s An Ad, Ad, Ad World: Rick McGrath’s review of Kingdom Come

ABOVE: Crash! on YouTube

by Simon Sellars

CRASH! (1971)

Director: Harley Cokliss
Writer: J.G. Ballard
Starring: J.G. Ballard & Gabrielle Drake

I wasn’t satisfied by just writing SF stories, you see. My imagination was eager to expand in all directions.”

J.G. Ballard. ‘From Shanghai to Shepperton’, 1982.

Leached away by the camera lens, the dimension of depth is missing from the room, and the two figures have an increasingly abstract relationship to each other, and to the rectilinear forms of the settee, walls and ceiling. In this context almost anything is possible, their movements are a series of postural equations that must have some significance other than their apparent one.”

J.G. Ballard, ‘The 60 Minute Zoom’ (1976)

..:: MORE: Ballardian.com transcript of the film’s voiceover and meta-narration.

When Paul Haggis won the Best Picture Oscar in 2005 for a film called Crash, fellow Canadian David Cronenberg wasn’t among the well-wishers. In fact Cronenberg was positively livid, accusing Haggis of ‘functional stupidity’ for allegedly stealing the title of the Baron of Blood’s 1996 Ballard adaptation. But funnily enough Cronenberg wasn’t the first to direct a film called Crash. He wasn’t even the first to direct a Ballard adaptation called Crash. That’s a title claimed 25 years earlier (allowing for the presence of a rogue exclamation mark) by Harley Cokeliss (formerly known as ‘Harley Cokliss’), who made the 1971 short film ‘Crash!’ from fragments found in Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition (including the film’s title, punctuation and all, lifted from the title of an Atrocity chapter). Of course, Cokliss also pre-empted Jonathan Weiss’s feature-film version of Atrocity, released in 2000.

That achievement, of being the first — pre-Cronenberg, pre-Weiss — is worthy in itself, but Cokliss’s film has something even more prized, something else the other two could never have: it stars J.G. Ballard. With his brooding, hypermasculine presence, Ballard plays a version of Atrocity’s ‘T’ character alongside the actor Gabrielle Drake, her own role a composite of the book’s archetypal ‘sex-kit’ women.

The film was a product of the most experimental, the darkest phase of Ballard’s career. It was an era of psychological blowback from the sudden, shocking death of his wife in 1964, an era that had produced the cut-up ‘condensed novels’ of Atrocity, plus a series of strange collages and ‘advertisers’ announcements’. One of the ‘ads’ featured a bondage photo of a bound and ball-gagged woman set to inscrutable text: ‘In her face the diagram of bones forms a geometry of murder. After Freud’s exploration within the psyche it is now the outer world of reality which must be quantified and eroticised.’ Later there were further literary experiments, concrete poems and ‘impressionistic’ film reviews, as well as an aborted multimedia theatrical play based around the car crash. After that came an actual gallery exhibition of crashed cars, replete with strippers and the drunken destruction of the ‘exhibits’ performed by the enraged-for-real audience.

Then came Cokliss’s ‘Crash!’.

In all of these experiments, aborted works, happenings, events, the motif of the car crash is crucial. Ballard sought to understand the role that automobile styling, and therefore mass consumerism, plays in our lives. His sights were set on the built-in death drive that technology embodies, the effacing of identity, the shutting off of our neurological systems. Our willingness to submit to the amniotic bliss of the technological womb. Of course, today we know where all this would eventually beach: his 1973 masterpiece, Crash. But in 1971 Ballard was still pushing the farthest limits of his obsession, refining riffs and routines, expanding the parameters of the car crash as far as popular culture would allow. Crucially this was far beyond the stuffy confines of ‘literature’, which Ballard has never had much time for, and into visual art and film: the realm of the popular imaginary.

‘On 12 February 1971 … the Radio Times announced, for 8.30pm on BBC2, ‘Crash!’. To be introduced by James Mossman. ‘For science fiction writer J.G. Ballard, the key image of the present day is the man in the motor car. It is the image that represents the dreams and fantasies that all too easily can turn into nightmares. In a film for Review Ballard explains the beauty and fascination of this potentially deadly technology.’

Quoted in Crash: David Cronenberg’s Post-mortem on J.G. Ballard’s ‘Trajectory of Fate’, by Iain Sinclair (1999).

J.G. Ballard and Gabrielle Drake in ‘Crash!’ (1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

‘Crash!’ is rather a strange film. It doesn’t have a title sequence, there are no credits and there is no explanation of who Ballard is (although perhaps this was provided by the aforementioned Mr Mossman). It begins with Gabrielle Drake in profile, turning to the camera as a discordant oscillator tone is heard. Then we see Ballard, his strident gaze alighting on his natural environment: the rooftop of a multistorey car park.

Next we hear a meta-narration enacted by a plummy BBC type, as vintage crash-test footage plays. Old, finned American cars collide in slow motion. Plastic dummies are expelled through windows and doors, gracefully shattering into smithereens. The narration is a slightly edited version of a passage in Ballard’s ‘You, Me and the Continuum’ (1966), one of the Atrocity texts. But it’s a tougher version. The original told us the crashing cars were ‘worrying each other like amiable whales’ but there’s nothing of the kind here, just a pure litany of impact zones, flying fenders, severed torsos, dummies disintegrating in a ‘carnival of arms and legs’.

I remember seeing some films on television of test crashes a few years ago. They were using American cars of the late 50s, a period I suppose when the American dream, and American confidence, were at their highest point.”

J.G. Ballard, voiceover from Crash! (1971).

Intercut with the crash tests are subliminal glimpses of Ballard and Drake, before Cokliss switches to Ballard cruising in his large vehicle. Crucially it’s an American model, a left-hand drive, and in it our man rumbles down motorways and feeder roads, down the Westway, on the M41 towards Shepherds Bush. There are some heavy-handed repeats set to phased sound effects: motorway signs looped over and over like the revolving backdrop in a Warner Bros cartoon. The meta-narration gives way to Ballard’s own voiceover: first person, in a tone you just don’t hear from him in interviews or in person. In Iain Sinclair’s book on Cronenberg’s Crash, which features a discussion of the Cokliss film, Sinclair describes Ballard’s voice here as ‘a schizophrenic buzz’. To me he sounds weary, almost jaded, maybe a little disgusted, as he tells us that that ‘the key image of the 20th century is the man in the motor car’ (see the appendix for a full transcript of Ballard’s voiceover and of the meta-narration).

His aim, Ballard suggests, is to home in on the ‘marriage of the physical aspects of ourselves with the imaginative and technological aspects of our lives’. It’s a key point, a partner to his assertion later in the film that ‘we only make sense of ourselves in terms of these huge technological systems’. Indeed, the egocentric popular culture of today, the all-invasive media landscape in which the private becomes public — the Myspace glossolalia of intimate, private space projected onto a global screen — can perhaps be understood in these terms, a result of what Ballard sees as ‘the shared experience of moving together through an elaborately signalled landscape’.

All filtered via this very 70s incantation of cocooned drivers in a ‘metallised dream’.

J.G. Ballard in ‘Crash!’ (1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

The point made, the music returns, edgy and stressed, perhaps synthesised (maybe Mooged) but also sounding like plucked, discordant violins. Ballard, the driver, turns to his right and sees Drake, the woman, in the passenger seat. He blinks, looks again and she’s gone. We now know what she represents: our ‘strange love affair with the machine, with its own death’, according to his voiceover. There’s a clunky edit and the music cuts (well, I say ‘music’ but it’s ‘sound design’ — it serves as pure atmosphere and is as functional as stage-set mise-en-scene). Ballard walks around a new-car showroom admiring Pontiacs, Cadillacs — the kind of American cars that add so much gravitas to Atrocity. Ballard’s voiceover tells us that ‘the styling of motor cars, and of the American motor car in particular, has always struck me as incredibly important… I’m interested in the exact way in which it brings together the visual codes for expressing our ordinary perceptions about reality. For example, that the future is something with a fin on it’.

But acolytes know you’ll never find a tail fin in Ballard’s future, for his future is an anti-Gernsback continuum that has no need for sci-fi trappings because science fiction, for Ballard, is the stuff of the everyday. Ballard’s future is a fiction of the next five minutes, of the spinal landscape, of our bodies tracked and extended into utterly banal technology. Cokliss knows it too, and he shifts gear, treating us to canted tracking shots of fetishised car grilles. The sequence is hypnotic, lasts a few minutes, before Ballard, his chest thrust out, walks on by with the stride of a man on a mission. He stops at one particular vehicle, looks in the window, jaw set.

J.G. Ballard in ‘Crash!’ (1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

At this juncture, let’s reflect: Ballard knows exactly where the camera is. He’s a natural. In this film, he’s an actor. He has presence, undeniably. Wearing his ‘drunk tank Haiti suit’ (as Sinclair describes it), he sees the woman inside the car and there’s a musky erotic charge as her coquettish gaze returns Ballard’s smouldering stare. There’s a close up: her hand is between her thighs and we recall the second of Ballard’s ‘advertiser’s announcements’ for Ambit magazine, with its coded message: ‘Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?’. The merging of our bodies with technology; the manner in which even our most banal and everyday actions are super stylised in the face of an enveloping technological reality — it’s all here in this film. Importantly, the film is a continuum with Ballard’s earlier works, with the multimedia experiments outlined earlier.

LEFT: Gabrielle Drake’s hand in ‘Crash!’ (1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).
RIGHT: detail from Ballard’s second Ambit ‘advertisement’ (1967).

[Harley Cokliss] was an American who was over here. He made a number of documentaries for the BBC. Then he went to the States. He made a thriller with Burt Reynolds and one or two other films. I don’t know what he’s doing now.

J.G. Ballard, quoted in Sinclair’s Crash (1999).

In an interview for Sinclair’s Crash book, Chris Petit is dismissive of Cokliss, saying ‘I was amazed that Harley had read Crash, because he’s not a big reader. Although he never particularly had a career, he was a major hustler’ (of course, Cokliss’s film is based on Atrocity, not Crash). Sinclair asks if Cokliss had ‘any status as a director’; Petit replies, ‘Not really, no.’ But a quick web check of Cokliss’s career reveals some interesting tidbits that aren’t in the Sinclair book. Yes, Cokliss was ‘on the verge of making it as an exploitation director’, as Petit terms it. But he was also studio second-unit director on The Empire Strikes Back, so his stocks must have been reasonably high at some point. And he’s forged a successful latter-day career as a director of children’s fantasy adventure. But most importantly, for the time frame under discussion, Harley Cokliss actually had form; he had the inclination. Just after ‘Crash!’, he made a documentary on Eduardo Paolozzi, an important figure in the Ballardian universe, and he filmed and interviewed Philip K Dick, too.

Admittedly, on a technical level some of the pacing in ‘Crash!’ seems a bit off, as in the moments after we’ve submitted to the dramatic tension of the rather effective sound design and the charged interplay between Ballard and the woman, only to be shoehorned into, well, something else: a clumsy jolt into Ballard’s voiceover and a scene of spaghetti junctions. But aside from that, conceptually, either Cokliss has done his homework (and, yes, read the books) and has absorbed Ballard’s texts thoroughly, or Ballard is the invisible guiding hand behind the camera. Either way the film deserves serious appraisal, rather than languishing as a footnote to a ‘failed exploitation’ career.

The film was based on my interest in the car crash — as it emerged through the pages of The Atrocity Exhibition. It was made in the early 70s. With Gabrielle Drake. She was quite a serious actress in her early days, but then she moved off into Crossroads or something. She was very sweet. I met her a few times on the set, as it were, chasing around multi-storey car parks in Watford.”

J.G. Ballard, quoted in Sinclair’s Crash (1999).

My thoughts are that Ballard is in control. It’s very much his film and he knows it. His voice takes command. His body language dominates. As I said before, here Ballard was testing riffs (‘routines’, as Sinclair calls them, after Burroughs) that would, in time, become familiar. Don’t treat this phase of Ballard’s career lightly: it contains the seeds of what we’ve come to know and understand as ‘Ballardian’. There are fragments of quotes that we now recognise from Ballard’s famous introduction to Crash, regarding Freud and the distinction between the inner world of the mind and the outer world of reality. His evocation of an ‘elaborately signalled landscape’ would later be recycled into the 1994 introduction to Concrete Island. Elsewhere in the film, Ballard spits out his by-now familiar assertion that if all human life on the planet was to vanish overnight, the psychology of the human race could be reconstituted from the technological detritus. (Yes, spits. As before, Ballard’s voiceover verges on disgust; there’s a rather large bee in his bonnet, it seems). The subtext is: to visiting aliens, stumbling across our discarded playthings, we’d be pegged as a band of proto-cyborgs.

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in ‘Crash!’ (dir. Harley Cokliss, 1971): ‘the complexity of movement when a woman gets out of a car’.

ABOVE: Rosanna Arquette as Gabrielle in Crash (1996; dir. David Cronenberg).

Ballard’s voiceover tells us he’s ‘fascinated with the complexity of movement when a woman gets out of a car’ and you can see the fruits of that complexity, the literalisation of an obsession, in the character Gabrielle in the book Crash, and in Cronenberg’s Crash. This severely crippled character, her every movement a complex cryptogram of prosthetics, flesh and leather that isolate her body parts into a perverse geometric grid, was, according to Sinclair, named by Ballard after Gabrielle Drake, the woman in Cokliss’s film.

And it makes sense, especially as Ballard’s voiceover, that eulogy to the complexity of the woman/car, gives way once more to the meta-narration, the plummy Englishman, who verbalises another Atrocity text, this time the list-paragraph entitled ‘Elements of an Orgasm’. It’s found in Ballard’s 1969 piece, ‘The Summer Cannibals’, and it’s actually an inventory, a sex kit, a focus on a woman decommissioned, fragmented, magnified, then reordered by technology:

NARRATOR: Her ungainly transit across the passenger seat through the nearside door. The overlay of her knees with the metal door flank. The conjunction of the aluminized gutter trim with the volumes of her thighs. The crushing of her left breast by the door frame, and its self extension as she continued to rise. The movement of her left hand across the chromium trim of the right headlamp assembly. Her movements distorted in the projecting carapace of the bonnet. The jut and rake of her pubis as she sits in the driver’s seat. The soft pressure of her thighs against the rim of the steering wheel.

The sequence is overlaid with an ascending sound design, with staccato percussion fills, and there are some disorientating slow-motion close ups of knees, a breast, her hand on the gear stick. It’s phallic, yes, and obvious, but actually subtle in contrast to the remarkably similar, though overcranked scene in Mike Hodge’s Get Carter (released in the same year, 1971), in which Carter’s female rescuer changes gears with increasing speed and furtiveness while Michael Caine silently watches with smouldering lasciviousness in the passenger seat. Is Cokliss sending up Hodge’s macho anti-hero — Caine’s Carter? Is the parody an intentional counterpoint to Ballard’s more cerebral dissection of the cheap sex of the automobile?

Again Ballard is driving solo. He pulls into a car wash, gets out, stares unblinkingly as the vaginal parting of the brushes slowly come together to engulf the vehicle. Sinclair writes that Cokliss’s film subverts Cronenberg’s, that there are ‘disquieting parallels’, and nowhere is that more so than here (there are also ‘disquieting parallels’ with Weiss’s Atrocity film, but I’m saving that for another essay). In the Cronenberg there is of course a supercharged carwash scene, in which Vaughan fucks Ballard/Spader’s wife in the back seat while Spader/Ballard drives. Vaughan brutalises her, rearranging her body into death-driven accident postures: cracking her neck sideways, in weird angles, violently splaying her body across the seat as if she’s just been crushed by a car accident. She’s a living crash-test dummy and Vaughan literally fucks the life out of her.

ABOVE: The empty car-wash scene in ‘Crash!’ (1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

ABOVE: Brutalised sex in Cronenberg’s car wash (Crash, 1996; dir. David Cronenberg).

But Cokliss (the ‘interestingly named Harley Cokliss’, as Sinclair calls him) sexually frustrates this earlier Ballard. The woman is of course glimpsed subliminally once again, but the focus is more on Ballard, who glares, fuming, wordless, until the brushes wipe the window and block him from view. He literally sees sex in the motor car, yet he’s frustratingly displaced from it, as his voiceover links the ‘relationship between sexuality and the motor car body’. Cut to a long, voyeuristic shot of Ms Drake taking a shower. Graphic matches pit her body parts with various automobile parts: the point of her nipple, for example, fading to reveal the tip of a manufacturer’s medallion. It’s a bit obvious but it’s nicely shot, and Gabrielle Drake writhes nakedly, and in the end it makes the point well.

Now we’re on the home stretch, as Ballard walks through a junkyard, admiring the car wrecks, the ominous sigils of consumerism representing what his voiceover tells us are our ‘arranged deaths’. As an aside, I like how Ballard, although jaded, disdainful, offers his own opinion as if it’s just that: his own. The point is never forceful (although the tone may appear to be): ‘Have we reached a point now in the 70s,’ his voiceover asks, ‘where we only make sense in terms of these huge technological systems? I think so myself…’

‘I think so myself.’

(Under all circumstances, no matter how taxing — in person, in interview, in this film — Ballard is never less than unfailingly polite and generous with his time. Truly, it’s the mark of the man.)

Then there’s that long oscillating tone again and it signals Gabrielle, bloody in the car, her head smashed on the steering wheel. Just as there was no sex in the car wash, Cokliss here denies us the car crash, the real money shot, which Cronenberg supplies in spades of course (oh, and in Spader, if only in dry humps). She opens the door, falls out, and the meta-narrative intones the third and final passage from Atrocity. As before, it’s taken from ‘The Summer Cannibals’ (or at least the first half is; the second half appears to have been written exclusively for the film).

‘Regaining consciousness,’ the meta-narrator tell us, ‘she stared at the blood on her legs. The heavy liquid pulled at her skirt. The bruise under her left breast reached behind her sternum, seizing like a hand at her heart.’

In shock, perhaps close to death, she turns and stares ‘at the waiting figure of the man she knew to be Dr Tallis’.

Ballard is Tallis. She turns to look at him, at JGB.

Gabrielle Drake in ‘Crash!’ (1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

This detail is a curious inclusion. The ‘T’ figure in Atrocity, variously known as Tallis, Traven, Talbot and so on, is a psychiatrist suffering a mental breakdown; the fractured narrative is delivered via his fractured psyche. But up until now the narration in this film has been divested of its context in the book. Ballard, and perhaps Cokliss, have simply chosen the most evocative passages to do with the car and the role of the car crash (and in that sense, it’s more of a prototype for the Cronenberg film than the Weiss film, as Sinclair correctly identifies). There’s been no mention of character names, no anchoring to a world outside the film. Why mention Tallis, then, at this late stage? This would make no sense to an audience — a mainstream BBC audience — unfamiliar with one of Ballard’s least commercial works.

Never mind. There’s more test crash footage and a sound design of tortuously slowed down metallic crunching to go with it, like a contact mic lowered into the depths of hell. Ballard offers a summation: ‘Filmed in slow motion, these crashes had a beautiful stylised grace’. Yes, we realise, they’re important because they show us how ‘everything becomes more stylised, cut off from ordinary feeling’. Of course, both Cronenberg and Weiss also make effective use of test-crash footage; the motif is an important key to Ballard’s work, and worthy of an essay in its own right (which I am working on; stay tuned).

Crash-test footage in ‘Crash!’ (1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

There are an enormous number of multi-storey car parks in Watford, I discovered. It’s the Mecca of the multi-storey car park. And they’re quite ornate, some of them. They played a special role in The Atrocity Exhibition. They were iconic structures. I was interested in the gauge of psychoarchitectonics and its canted floors, as a depository for cars, seemed to let one into a new dimension. They obviously decided they had to beautify these structures. They covered them in strange trellises. It was a bizarre time.”

J.G. Ballard, quoted in Sinclair’s Crash (1999).

Finally Ballard’s car ascends up the ramp of that wonderful multi-storey car park, truly a work of art, in a sequence that’s again strangely similar to a parallel scene in Get Carter (which of course makes great use of its ‘grim up north’ Newcastle urbanism). But in Cokliss/Ballard, the car park becomes psychogeography, not merely ominous mise-en-scene like in the Carter/Caine, but a mapping of the affective behaviour of the structure — of the fiction of the world around us, this ‘enormous novel’, as Ballard calls it.

‘One of the most mysterious buildings ever built’… (‘Crash!’; dir. Harley Cokliss).

Ballard, in voiceover, asks us to:

Take a structure like a multi-storey car park, one of the most mysterious buildings ever built. Is it a model for some strange psychological state, some kind of vision glimpsed within its bizarre geometry? What effect does using these buildings have on us? Are the real myths of this century being written in terms of these huge unnoticed structures?

Then at last he emerges onto the rooftop into daylight, out from the dank cavernous bowels, as he watches the woman down below, who walks away, while his voiceover intones a scenario of ‘modern technology reaching into our dreams and [changing] our whole way of looking at things: forcing us to contemplate its world instead of ourselves’.

And that’s it — the film’s over.

What to make of it? Well, can we say that Ballard was obsessed at this time? Losing himself in the mantra of repetition? Hypnotising himself with the ritual significance of automobile trauma? Exploring it from every conceivable angle in theatre, exhibitions, visual art, film? (In anything but straight writing, it seemed, at least between Atrocity and Crash.) And isn’t it often the case that such artists — or mediators between worlds, if you like — lose themselves in the glare and (excuse the cliché) fly far too close to the sun? As Sinclair asks in the Crash book, regarding the uncanny similarities between the death of Princess Di and Ballard’s work: ‘Had he activated a demonic psychopathology that could only be appeased by regular sacrifices?’

For incantations of this kind, repeated often enough, sometimes bring something back with them when the voyager, the cosmonaut of inner space, re-enters the world. There are ruptures in space-time. Matter collides and there is fallout, like a Sumerian demon woken from the dead and hungry for souls.

Refer back to the film, where Ballard tells us that:

The car crash is the most dramatic event in most people’s lives, apart from their own deaths, and in many cases the two will coincide. Are we just victims in a totally meaningless tragedy, or does it in fact take place with our unconscious, and even conscious, connivance? … Are these arranged deaths arranged by the colliding forces of the technological landscape, by our own unconscious fantasies about power and aggression, our obsessions with consumer goods and desires, the overlaying fictions that are more and more taking the place of reality?”

LEFT: J.G. Ballard in ‘Crash!’ (1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

And so it happened that shortly after the publication of the book, Crash, in 1973 — two years after the Cokliss film — James Graham Ballard rolled his Ford Zephyr on a divided motorway after a blow out forced the vehicle into oncoming traffic. The car landed upside down with petrol leaking everywhere and Ballard was trapped: the roof had jammed down and the doors wouldn’t budge. Panicked and frozen, with the apocalyptic scent of fuel filling his nostrils, the shouts of ‘Petrol! Petrol!’ from onlookers filling his ears, and the realisation that the car could explode any second swamping his mind, he managed to reach deep within himself, eventually pulling body and mind together to somehow force down a window and escape before he was engulfed in the heat-death of full-tilt autogeddon.

POSTSCRIPT: In a neat Ballardian trick that moment would be immortalised in Cronenberg’s Crash, where the director, digging deep into JGB’s own real-life mythology, fashioned a scene in which the film’s Ballard, played by James Spader, suffered that same scenario and that same subsequent swerve into oncoming traffic. Except this time Holly Hunter playing Helen Remington slammed into James Spader/’James Ballard’. Hunter/Remington’s husband was killed, and Ballard/Spader took his place, and the cycle began again. For J.G. Ballard’s sins we were given a new crash (a new ‘Crash’), a new ‘Ballard’, a new director, a new film, and a reiteration of circular time, as Ballard and his ghastly obsession became reborn in the heat-death of repetition. As Sinclair says: ‘The same crashes happen over and over as new victims are initiated into the vision.’

Simon Sellars, 2007.

APPENDIX
+ Crash! Voiceover Transcription (1971)

REFERENCES
+ Ballard, J.G. The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).
—————- Crash (1973).

+ Ford, Simon. ‘A Psychopathic Hymn: J.G. Ballard’s ‘Crashed Cars’ Exhibition of 1970′ (2005). /seconds magazine.

+ Juno, Andrea & Vale. ‘J.G. Ballard: Interview by A. Juno and Vale’. RE/Search 8/9: J.G. Ballard (1984). In which Ballard relates the circumstances of his car crash, alongside accompanying photos of his ruined car.

+ Sinclair, Iain. Crash: David Cronenberg’s Post-mortem on J.G. Ballard’s ‘Trajectory of Fate’ (BFI Modern Classics; 1999).

MORE INFO
+ Harley Cokeliss Filmography

ABOVE: Cokliss/Ballard on YouTube

CRASH!

Director: Harley Cokliss
Writer: J.G. Ballard
Starring: J.G. Ballard & Gabrielle Drake

This a transcript of the meta-narration and voiceover from the film CRASH!.

See here for ‘Crash! Full-Tilt Autogeddon’, an appraisal of the film.

NARRATOR: In slow motion, the test cars moved towards each other on collision courses, unwinding behind them the coils that ran to the metering devices by the impact zone. As they collided the debris of wings and fender floated into the air. The cars rocked against each as they continued on their disintegrating courses. In the passenger seats the plastic models transcribed graceful arcs into the buckling roofs and windshields. Here and there a passing fender severed a torso. The air behind the cars was a carnival of arms and legs.

J.G. BALLARD: I think the key image of the 20th century is the man in the motor car. It sums up everything: the elements of speed, drama, aggression, the junction of advertising and consumer goods with the technological landscape. The sense of violence and desire, power and energy; the shared experience of moving together through an elaborately signalled landscape.

We spend a substantial part of our lives in the motor car, and the experience of driving condenses many of the experiences of being a human being in the 1970s, the marriage of the physical aspects of ourselves with the imaginative and technological aspects of our lives. I think the 20th century reaches its highest expression on the highway. Everything is there: the speed and violence of our age; the strange love affair with the machine, with its own death.

The styling of motor cars, and of the American motor car in particular, has always struck me as incredibly important, bringing together all sorts of visual and psychological factors. As an engineering structure, the car is totally uninteresting to me. I’m interested in the exact way in which it brings together the visual codes for expressing our ordinary perceptions about reality — for example, that the future is something with a fin on it — and the whole system of expectations contained in the design of the car, expectations about our freedom to move through time and space, about the identities of our own bodies, our own musculatures, the complex relationships between ourselves and the world of objects around us. These highly potent visual codes can be seen repeatedly in every aspect of the 20th century landscape. What do they mean? Have we reached a point now in the 70s where we only make sense in terms of these huge technological systems? I think so myself, and that it is the vital job of the writer to try to analyse and understand the huge significance of this metallised dream.

I’m interested in the automobile as a narrative structure, as a scenario that describes our real lives and our real fantasies. If every member of the human race were to vanish overnight, I think it would be possible to reconstitute almost every element of human psychology from the design of a vehicle like this. As a writer I feel I must try to understand the real meaning of a lot of commonplace but tremendously complicated events. I’ve always been fascinated by the complexity of movement when a woman gets out of a car.

NARRATOR: Her ungainly transit across the passenger seat through the nearside door. The overlay of her knees with the metal door flank. The conjunction of the aluminized gutter trim with the volumes of her thighs. The crushing of her left breast by the door frame, and its self extension as she continued to rise. The movement of her left hand across the chromium trim of the right headlamp assembly. Her movements distorted in the projecting carapace of the bonnet. The jut and rake of her pubis as she sits in the driver’s seat. The soft pressure of her thighs against the rim of the steering wheel.

J.G. BALLARD: The close relationship between our own bodies and the body of the motor car is obvious. American automobile stylists have been exploring for years the relationship between sexuality and the motor car body, the primitive algebra of recognition which we use in our perception of all organic forms. If the man in the motor car is the key image of the 20th century, then the automobile crash is the most significant trauma. The car crash is the most dramatic event in most people’s lives, apart from their own deaths, and in many cases the two will coincide.

Are we just victims in a totally meaningless tragedy, or does it in fact take place with our unconscious, and even conscious, connivance? Each year hundreds of thousands of people are killed in car crashes all over the world. Millions are injured. Are these arranged deaths arranged by the colliding forces of the technological landscape, by our own unconscious fantasies about power and aggression, our obsessions with consumer goods and desires, the overlaying fictions that are more and more taking the place of reality? It’s always struck me that people’s attitudes towards the car crash are very confused, that they assume an attitude that in fact is very different from their real response. If we really feared the car crash, none of us would ever be able to drive a car.

J.G. Ballard in ‘Crash!’ (1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

I know that my own attitudes to the crashed car are just as confused. The distorted geometry of this tremendously stylised object: let’s face it, the most powerful symbol of our civilisation. It seems to pull at all sorts of concealed triggers in the mind: the postures of people in crashed vehicles; deformed manufacturer’s styling devices (crashed General Motors cars look very different from crashed Fords); the stylisation of the instrument panel, which after all is the model for our own wounds. Driving around, each of us knows what is literally the shape of our own death.

NARRATOR: Regaining consciousness, she stared at the blood on her legs. The heavy liquid pulled at her skirt. The bruise under her left breast reached behind her sternum, seizing like a hand at her heart. She sat up, lifting herself from the broken steering wheel, uncertain for a moment whether the car windshield had been fractured. Against her forehead the strands of blood formed a torn veil. Above her knees, her hand moved towards the door lever. As she watched, the door opened and she fell out. Lifting herself, she held tightly to the car, feeling the pressure of the door slip against her hand. Turning, she stared at the waiting figure of the man she knew to be Dr Tallis.

J.G. BALLARD: I remember seeing some films on television of test crashes a few years ago. They were using American cars of the late 50s, a period I suppose when the American dream, and American confidence, were at their highest point. Metering coils trailed out of the windows and they had dummies sitting in them. They were beautifully filmed. They filmed them beautifully because they wanted to know what was happening. They weren’t interested in the aesthetics of the thing. These cars were in head-on collisions, right-angled collisions and sideswipes. And ploughing into other structures like utility poles. One could see four feet of metal suddenly become one foot. Filmed in slow motion, these crashes had a beautiful stylised grace. The power and weight of these cars gave them an immense classical dignity. It was like some strange technological ballet.

I remember looking at these films and thinking about the strange psychological dimensions they seemed to touch. They seemed to say something about the way everything becomes more and more stylised, more and more cut off from ordinary feeling. It seems to me that we have to regard everything in the world around us as fiction, as if we were living in an enormous novel, and that the kind of distinction that Freud made about the inner world of the mind, between, say, what dreams appeared to be and what they really meant, now has to be applied to the outer world of reality. All the structures in it, flyovers and motorways, office blocks and factories, are all part of this enormous novel.

Take a structure like a multi-storey car park, one of the most mysterious buildings ever built. Is it a model for some strange psychological state, some kind of vision glimpsed within its bizarre geometry? What effect does using these buildings have on us? Are the real myths of this century being written in terms of these huge unnoticed structures?

More exactly, I think that new emotions and new feelings are being created, that modern technology is beginning to reach into our dreams and change our whole way of looking at things, and perceiving reality, that more and more it is drawing us away from contemplating ourselves to contemplating its world.

J.G. Ballard, 1971.

Transcribed by Simon Sellars. Please be in touch with corrections.

..:: MORE INFO
+ Crash! Full-Tilt Autogeddon: an appraisal of the film.

While I think Jonathan Weiss’s film of Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition was successful in its own right, I still believe there’s potential for a version (maybe not a straight adaptation, perhaps an obliquely angled ‘nod and a wink’; maybe even a sequel) that updates the notion of celebrity culture, that takes up the direction hinted at in the book’s second-last chapter, ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’. A version that replaces Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears.

In ‘Fuck Reagan’, ‘patients in terminal paresis’ are encouraged to devise the ‘optimum sex-death of Ronald Reagan’. A ‘unique ontology of violence and disaster’ takes shape, as the ordinary public — the patients suffering from paresis; impaired movement, paralysis — reanimate by tearing down the lustre surrounding celebrity culture, the forcefield that has prevented the ‘little people’ from realising their full potential.

In Ballard’s piece, originally published in 1968, the cultural class system that has impaired, or paralysed, ordinary people with feelings of guilt and inadequacy in the face of a galaxy of radiant stars is destroyed in a savage, air-strike of the imagination:

Patients [placed] Reagan in a series of simulated auto-crashes, e.g. multiple pile-ups, head-on collisions, motorcade attacks… Subjects were required to construct the optimum auto-disaster victim by placing a replica of Reagan’s head on the unretouched photographs of crash fatalities.”

—————————————————————
J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (165).
—————————————————————

This literally is SLASH fiction. Blood drips from it.

‘Fuck Reagan’ marks a distinct break from the rest of The Atrocity Exhibition, in which, despite the instability of the central character’s fantasies, there was a certain awe underlying his imaginative sorties into the world of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, John F Kennedy and so on — an awe that prevented him from making the final leap. It’s also present in the character Vaughan, in Crash, who yearns of killing Elizabeth Taylor in a celebrity car crash but ultimately ends up annihilating only himself, terminally unfulfilled (along with a busload of innocent bystanders who got in his way).

In ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’, Ballard tested the wind, pushed the equation to its outer limits, predicted the rise of a new kind of ‘celebrity uncontaminated by actual achievement’ (as Ballard later termed the second wave of celebrity culture), a celebrity that causes resentment when ‘ordinary people’ finally have the means to dismantle the image, trying it on for themselves like a serial killer tries on a woman’s skin. There is no further truck with reification, with celebrity-deity because ordinary people have built a web 2.0 culture (or have been given the power, the means to build it) that will answer back and that will destroy those who seek to involve an unwilling public in their fantasies.

In further studies sadistic psychopaths were given the task of devising sex fantasies involving Reagan… Patients were encouraged to devise the optimum sex-death of Ronald Reagan.”

—————————————————————
J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (168).
—————————————————————

But a web 2.0 culture doesn’t need to employ technology — doesn’t need the web, even — to do so. So, let’s use this term ‘web 2.0′ to denote a free-for-all that translates into the real world, an attitude that’s hardwired into the brain through constant exposure to the media landscape. As Ballard clearly outlines, the media colonisation of all available public and personal space means that there is nowhere to go, nothing to do but feed on the corpses…

Fame and celebrity were again on trial, as if being famous itself was an incitement to anger and revenge.”

——————————————————-
J.G. Ballard, Millennium People (2003).
——————————————————-

…spiraling down a black hole eating white stars, ported into Second Life, which lies just below the whirlpool, landmarked over there.

Paris Hilton is being consumed as we speak, just another star imploding. The savage public will not be placated by her talk of finding God in a jail cell. The savage public will not be wooed with her repentance and renunciation of vacuity. The savage public wants to feast on the corpse of empty celebrity. The savage public wants revenge. Like an anonymous would-be web 2.0 commenter leaving bile in the comments box of some blog that’s got too big for its boots, the savage public wants to break through the screen, wants to pierce the rump of unattainable stardom until blood oozes through the pores. So the savage public goes further, building its own ‘blog’ that becomes a destroying machine that becomes the body, drinking the blood and becoming infested with the knowledge that no one is better than ‘me’. The savage public wants to wank over serial killers and murderers, taking revenge for celebrity being attached to the cult of death. The savage public devours torture porn, bathes in the Bathory blood of actresses hogtied upside down. The savage public ensures that the most searched term leading to this very website is, in fact, the term ‘Princess Diana car crash’ and its multiple variations: ‘Di death fuck’; ‘sex Di death crash’; ‘fuck exhaust sex Di car Dodi died’.

The savage public wants to kill kill kill until there is nothing left, just a flat, smoking wasteland.

The savage public demands that torture porn be indistinguishable from snuff.

The savage public has no imagination and will feed off that corpse before turning on you, too.

Without doubt Oswald badly misfired. But one question still remains unanswered: who loaded the starting gun?”

——————————————————-
J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (173).
——————————————————-

————————————————————————————————————–
…:: ATROCITY II: Notes Towards a Sequel
————————————————————————————————————–

+ ‘R.P.M’ by Chris Nakashima-Brown
+ Invisible Celebrity Literature
+ Gallery of the Absurd by ’14′
+ The Brangelina Exhibition
+ ‘Chariot of Fire: Preliminary Analysis & Damage Reconstruction of the Death of Diana, Princess of Wales’ by Annik Hovac
+ ‘Fantasy Kits: Steven Meisel’s State of Emergency’ by k-punk

This is Xander Walker’s excellent no-budget film of Ballard’s dark, scathing short story ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’ (one of the last shorts JGB ever wrote, unfortunately):

For reasons amply documented elsewhere, intelligent life on Earth became extinct in the closing hours of the 20th Century. Among the clues left to us, the following schedule of a day’s television programmes transmitted to an unnamed city in the northern hemisphere on December 23, 1999, offers its own intriguing insight into the origins of the disaster.”

———————————————————————————-
J.G. Ballard. ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’ (1992).
———————————————————————————-

In the wake of Baudrillard’s death at age 77, with homeostatic news sources struggling to redefine hyperreality while churning out great steaming wads of the stuff, return to Baudrillard’s glistening, seductive appraisal of Crash — more a short story taking place in the same fictional universe as Ballard than a work of criticism.

Until now, we have always had large reserves of the imaginary, because the coefficient of reality is proportional to the imaginary, which provides the former with its specific gravity. This is also true of geographical and space exploration: when there is no more virgin ground left to the imagination, when the map covers all the territory, something like the reality principle disappears. The conquest of space constitutes, in this sense, an irreversible threshold which effects the loss of terrestrial coordinates and referentiality. Reality, as an internally coherent and limited universe, begins to hemorrhage when its limits are stretched to infinity. The conquest of space, following the conquest of the planet, promotes either the de-realizing of human space, or the reversion of it into a simulated hyperreality. Witness, for example, this two-room apartment with kitchen and bath launched into orbit with the last Moon capsule (raised to the power of space, one might say); the perceived ordinariness of a terrestrial habitat then assumes the values of the cosmic and its hypostasis in Space, the satellization of the real in the transcendence of Space—it is the end of metaphysics, the end of fantasy, the end of SF. The era of hyperreality has begun.
…
In Crash, there is neither fiction nor reality—a kind of hyperreality has abolished both… After Borges, but in a totally different register, Crash is the first great novel of the universe of simulation, the world that we will be dealing with from now on: a non-symbolic universe but one which, by a kind of reversal of its mass-mediated substance (neon, concrete, cars, mechanical eroticism), seems truly saturated with an intense initiatory power.”

———————————————————————————————————
Jean Baudrillard. Two Essays: 1) Simulacra and Science Fiction.
2) Ballard’s Crash (1991).
———————————————————————————————————

OPENING LINE:
“Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash.”

If The Drowned World was the book which cemented Ballard’s literary reputation (in Britain, at least), then Crash was almost certainly the one which made him a non-entity in America’s eyes. Following on from publisher Nelson Doubleday’s outrage at an earlier Ballard story, ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’, Crash ensured JGB remained on the periphery of the US sci-fi scene.

In any case, it is doubtful whether this is ‘science fiction’, in the traditional sense. It tells the story of the narrator, ‘James Ballard’, the ‘hoodlum scientist’ Vaughan, and a supporting cast of curiously one-dimensional characters, as they follow their peculiar obsessions along the hyperreal motorways of England. Tuned in to police radios, they descend on the scenes of car crashes, depositing their semen and vaginal mucous on torn flesh and twisted metal. Ultimately, Vaughan desires ‘a union of semen and engine coolant’, splattered in world-wide ‘autogeddon’.

Crash epitomises Ballard’s ‘death of affect’ theories — it is Inner Space in perpetual motion. The media landscape, with its aestheticising of violence, is the novel’s main character. The car, the first and still most recognisable symbol of mass production, provides the eternal metaphor.

Crash was Ballard’s first novel in seven years (The Crystal World from 1966 was the last). Of course he’d been busy writing short stories during that time, and because of that concentrated span many people regard Ballard’s strength as being in the shorter format, even though he’s written novels exclusively for the last 20-odd years.

Crash was the real deal, though, a savage, cool, clinical sex-and-technology masterpiece. Here, Ballard got everything absolutely right: the attitude, the language, the vision, the metaphor (death of affect; media landscapes; dehumanisation), all colliding in a prescient headspin that still has the power to enhrall 32 years on.

I’d argue that Crash saw the first appearance of Ballard’s fully blown ‘catalyst figure’, Vaughan himself, an archetype which Ballard seems to refine in every one of his latter-day novels: the dark, mysterious urban professional liberating the middle-classes by feeding their deepest, darkest psychopathological fantasies.

I have the 1995 Vintage version, with the following blurb:

The cult status of CRASH has intensified since its original publication in 1973, making it a classic of underground literature. In this hallucinatory novel, the car provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a ‘TV scientist’ turned ‘nightmare angel of the highways’, experiments with erotic atrocities among crash victims, each more sinister than the last: ultimately, he craves a union of blood, semen and engine coolant in a head-on collision with Elizabeth Taylor.”

There’s a quote from Malcolm Bradbury of the New York Times Book Review on the back cover:

A writer of enormous inventive powers, J.G. Ballard has, like Calvino, a remarkable gift for filling the empty, deprived spaces of modern life with invisible cities and the wonder worlds of the imagination.”

Crash is, of course, a staple text in university critical-theory courses; in the 1990s, it was very highly prized indeed. Baudrillard wrote an essay about it, academics overanalysed Ba(udri)llard, and JGB himself accused them all of being “trapped inside their dismal jargon”. Read Nicholas Ruddick’s summary of the aftershock here:

As he gazes at the contemporary scene, Baudrillard notices the same cultural symptoms that Ballard does—affectlessness, apparently meaningless circulation, the sense of impending catastrophe. It is no wonder that Ballard celebrates Baudrillard’s brilliant reading of American culture in America (1986). But whereas Baudrillard celebrates—even if ironically—the “marvelously affectless succession of signs, images, faces, and ritual acts” on American roads (America 5), or America’s orgiastic and ecstatic indifference as a “radical modernity” attained (96-97), for Ballard there remains the project of exposing the real (unconscious) desire beneath the debauch of fiction. Baudrillard the hyperrealist is at his best consciously a poet of the surface of things. In this he is a postmodernist par excellence, and this is, it seems to me, why Ballard, for whom such surfaces are equally fascinating but also terrifying for what they conceal, is so ambivalent toward him. It is surely this ambivalence that causes Ballard to attack, in his “Response to the Invitation to Respond” to Baudrillard’s essays, not Baudrillard, but postmodernism itself.”

Nicholas Ruddick. ‘Ballard/Crash/Baudrillard’.

..:: LINKS
+ Read Ballard’s 1995 introduction to Crash.

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

..:: BUY THE BOOK

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

From the 1996 Harper Collins edition:

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

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

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

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

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

J.G. Ballard. ‘The Lucid Dreamer’.

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

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

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

..:: CONTENTS

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

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

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

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

More contents to come.

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

..:: BUY THE BOOK

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plus the obligatory endorsement:

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

Nicholas Royle, Guardian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I call that a missed opportunity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

..:: CONTENTS

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

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

..:: BUY VOLUME 1

..:: BUY VOLUME 2

In that sense, there is a strong link between 9/11 events and the fiction of J. G. Ballard, inasmuch as they both concern a ‘staged’ reality, a manufactured space-time (particularly in Ballard’s ‘mid-period’ novels, Atrocity Exhibition onwards). In early Ballard this sense of deep, geological, ancient time is usually more of a natural fact (as opposed to technological), a deeper ‘voice’ of reality that comes to claim the characters, undoing the more superficial cortex structure of the ego. Ballard’s characters are upper middle-class individuals, absorbed in a state of emotional alienation that can only be broken by the most spectacular transgressions.

In Ballard, however, we only get the point of view of the ubiquitous disaffected individual, but never from the point of view of the engineers of this staged reality. I can think of the architect in High-Rise, perhaps. But he himself is only unlocking a deeper layer of the unconscious through the language of architecture.

This is what annoys me a bit about Ballard: his POLITICS. What are the politics of Ballard?

Ballard, it seems to me, subscribes to a kind of naïve Freudianism. The technological landscape can only unlock what already pre-exists in the human mind. Or the key can be a liberating violence, an absurd violence beyond rationality. There is always a death-drive powering the characters and events. New ‘psychopathologies’ and configurations can, of course, be created (so, it is not a simple regression, or return to the primal scene, or whatever). But there is no sense of real human interests or other historical, social factors driving the manufacturing of these realities (for example, the enclave-resorts ubiquitous in the latest Ballard novels). There is always a sense of withdrawal, of entropic regress, which perhaps is (as R. D. Laing might have put it) a sane reaction to an insane society. Yet, there is no way out of this lock, except a resort to some transcendental mental structure; a natural, essential, pre-social drive. Ballard espouses a certain fatalism born out of a psychological reductionism. Can we ever escape this programming, this death-drive?