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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Michael Jackson’s Facelift – 2 July 2009

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

5. Dead Models – 31 October 2007

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

6. Triple Transgression – 26 December 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Goodbye, Jim…”

10. Love Among the Mannequins – 15 January 2008

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

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

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

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

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

‘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’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LEFT: Image by Rick McGrath.

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

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

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

LEFT: Image by Simon Sellars.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REFERENCES

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

In short, he had access. JGB News therefore benefitted from occasional input from the man himself in the form of JGB’s replies to Pringle’s letters, answering various queries in his genial style. Now, Rick McGrath and Mike Holliday have onlined JGB News in its entirety: 25 issues in all.

There’s so much of interest in these pages, but what is humbling for me in rereading these is the fact that many of the discoveries we as Ballard students are making today seem to have been made by Pringle a few decades ago. Nothing, it seems, is new(s) under (let alone, from) the sun.

ABOVE: Stills from ‘The Projectionst’ by ‘Alan Marker’ (John Foxx; Tiny Colour Movies).

In Melbourne a few months back, I had occasion to see John Foxx’s live soundtrack performance and presentation of Tiny Colour Movies, a selection of found-film fragments. Regular readers will recall that I interviewed Foxx in 2006, when the TCM album had just been released. At the time John was maintaining the line that the album was the soundtrack to a found-film collection owned by one Arnold Weizcs-Bryant, who, we were told, collects home movies and ‘repurposed movie fragments’, indeed any type of film produced outside of commercial considerations and not meant for public consumption. John, so the story goes, attended a private screening of Arnold’s collection and was compelled to create a soundtrack to accompany these resonant images, what he calls ‘tiny colour movies’.

According to the TCM liner notes:

Arnold stipulates that the movies he collects must be short — none is more than seven or eight minutes long, and some have a duration of only a few seconds. He insists that these represent a new kind of art. One which is only now becoming possible to recognise. Photography has recently become acknowledged as a new technological art form and commercial cinema is currently undergoing this kind of reassessment … these ideas cross over with Stanley Brakhage. Indeed Arnold was very excited when he discovered Brakhage’s work a few years ago, since he feels it confirms many of his long held views about the aesthetic beauty and cultural significance of film fragments.

John Foxx, TCM liner notes (2006).

ABOVE: ‘Stray Sinatra Neurone’ by ‘Max Forbert’, performed by John Foxx at the Leeds International Film Festival, 2007.

One of the filmmakers in Arnold’s collection is a certain Max Forbert, who makes what John terms ‘assemblage movies’. Forbert, supposedly a janitor in Hollywood, collected film scraps saved from the cutting-room floors he was sweeping for a living and later compiled them into his own sampled productions, a fragment of which was found by Arnold after Forbert’s death:

This is a section of a Forbert film that he identifies as using cutting room outtakes from a Sinatra movie, among others which remain unidentified. Shots are: Back view of a man in a suit looking through the window of a set interior (too tall for Sinatra — possibly an extra brought in to test-light a scene). Some brief outdoor shots of cars driving through a glittering downtown New York. Close-up of a woman applying deep red lipstick — again this appears to be a test shot of make-up and lighting. Location shots of Paris and Rome. Intricately cut together, these damaged fragments become an almost tactile essay on the sensual textures and enigmatic images that film can make available.

Foxx, TCM liner notes.

In the liner notes, John talks of the beauty of the imperfections in the films, the scratches and grain, the bleaching from wear and age, ‘elements which only add to the mystery, the emotional and intellectual resonance, and the sensual appreciation, of film’. Tiny Colour Movies, then, is not only an interesting document but also one that has overtly Ballardian overtones. For starters, there’s Ballard’s own interest in the subversive potential of home movies. But also, as I tried to tease out in the interview, The Atrocity Exhibition features many examples similar to what John identifies as a ‘sample film aesthetic’ in the Weizcs-Bryant collection, including therapeutic DIY film groups designed to aid the recovery of schizhophrenic patients:

Cine-films as group therapy. Patients were encouraged to form a film production unit, and were given full freedom as to choice of subject matter, cast and technique. In all cases explicitly pornographic films were made. Two films in particular were examined: (1) A montage sequence using portions of the faces of (a) Madame Ky, (b) Jeanne Moreau, (c) Jacqueline Kennedy (Johnson oath-taking). The use of a concealed stroboscopic device produced a major optical flutter in the audience, culminating in psychomotor disturbances and aggressive attacks directed against the still photographs of the subjects hung from the walls of the theatre. (2) A film of automobile accidents devised as a cinematic version of Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed. By chance it was found that slow-motion sequences of this film had a marked sedative effect, reducing blood pressure, respiration and pulse rates. Hypnagogic images were produced freely by patients. The film was also found to have a marked erotic content.

J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

Throughout Atrocity, T-, the book’s troubled protagonist, stitches and sutures together fragments from the media landscape — TV broadcasts, snatches of film, billboard representations of movie stars, the Zapruder film of JFK’s assassination (even the ‘time music of the quasars’, derived from a strange contraption on his roof, a sculpture consisting of ‘antennae of metal aerials’) — into a form that will make sense to his disordered psyche. This is most clearly expressed in Ballard’s dictum that politics today has become a branch of advertising that sells personalities rather than policies, and that as a result politicians involve us in their fantasies without our consent — fantasies of power, ego, domination, celebrity, lust, all disguised as governance but which are really designed to place us in peripheral roles as impotent bystanders in the major decisions affecting our lives. In Atrocity, then, Ballard’s schizophrenic patients involve politicians in their fantasies, notably the hapless figure of Ronald Reagan:

The conceptual role of Reagan. Fragments of Reagan’s cinetized postures were used in the construction of model psychodramas in which the Reagan-figure played the role of husband, doctor, insurance salesman, marriage counsellor, etc. The failure of these roles to express any meaning reveals the non-functional character of Reagan. Reagan’s success therefore indicates society’s periodic need to re-conceptualize its political leaders. Reagan thus appears as a series of posture concepts, basic equations which re-formulate the roles of aggression and anality… In assembly kit tests Reagan’s face was uniformly perceived as a penile erection. Patients were encouraged to devise the optimum sex-death of Ronald Reagan.

ABOVE: T- devising the ‘optimum sex death of Ronald Reagan’ in Jonathan Weiss’s film of The Atrocity Exhibition.

Essentially, T- reclaims the inner space he feels has been invaded by media and advertising — the colonisation of the subconscious and the stealing of his memories — repopulating it with a collaged, open-ended landscape of images drawn from the free circulation of signs and signals of what we can now view, with hindsight, as Ballard’s own proto version of hyperreality.

As Ballard says,

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

J.G. Ballard, annotations (1994) to The Atrocity Exhibition.

This strategy of treating all media and perceptual inputs as equal, with no distinction between the inner world of fantasy and the outer world of reality, seems a clear precursor to the kind of culture-jamming hacktivism that would reach a peak in the 90s with the sound artists Negativland and their followers:

Negativland occupies itself with recontextualizing captured fragments to create something entirely new — a psychological impact based on a new juxtaposition of diverse elements, ripped from their usual context, chewed up, and spit out as a new form of hearing the world around us.

As audio artists, we pursue a uniquely contemporary and wholly appropriate creative process which inevitably emerges out of our electronic age of media saturation and the reproducing technologies available to all consumers.

Negativland, Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2 (1995).

ABOVE: JGB in London Orbital.

More explicitly, Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair, in the film version of London Orbital, acknowledge a clear debt to Ballard, whose influence over the film looms large, both in the interview with him in the middle section and in the reading by Sinclair of JGB’s ‘What I Believe’ that frames it. Sinclair and Petit see the Bluewater shopping centre, ‘Ground Zero’ for the film’s aesthetic, as an architecture mediated by technology, specifically the omniscient CCTV cameras which in their endless, plastic and formless state create what the filmmakers call ‘a new nostalgia, a new boredom, a new kind of time’. If everything is filmable then, Petit and Sinclair’s method of resistance is to become like the surveillance camera, to always be open and to always be filming but to locate the degradations in the tape, the fraying at the edges, recovering and recycling elements of old technologies, what Esther Leslie calls an ‘aesthetic of refuse’, drawing on the double meaning of ‘refuse’: as both rubbish, in that if everything is filmable then everything is junk, valueless; and as resistance, ie refusing to be dissolved into the ‘electronic slums’, to use Petit’s term. Thus Sinclair inserts his home movies into the end of the film, recovering a memory that is in danger of being overwritten yet still framed in the logic of the image, both inside and outside at once — an aesthetic that instantly recalls Atrocity and many other Ballard stories.

Foxx’s Tiny Colour Movies project seems a direct descendant of this lineage, especially given this statement of John’s from our interview:

Movies will be played with, just as sound was sampled, for fun and surrealism. Simply because it can be done. I remember positing this five years ago in a talk at the London College of Music and Media. Around that time, I made a movie called A Man Made of Shadows from several other movies. This made a new movie from existing films by collaging, repurposing, hommaging, stealing, sampling, appropriating. Whatever you like to call it. ‘Repurposing’ is my current fave term, along with ‘theft’. Watch out Hollywood. Movies had better get used to this because it will happen. Inevitable.
…
We’ll also need to develop new aesthetics of film, to regard elements formerly regarded as faults as intrinsic qualities inherent in film itself. The beauty of scratches, bleached out film ends, emulsion faults, grain, frameslip, etc. Just as we now value surface scratches in audio sampling.

ABOVE: Stills from ‘Lost New York’ by ‘George Wilkes’ (John Foxx; Tiny Colour Movies).

So, freighted with all of this intertextual baggage, I was therefore very excited to learn that John was bringing the Arnold collection to Melbourne; I knew he’d premiered it overseas with a live soundtrack, but that’s about all I knew. I hadn’t really done much research on John since we last communicated, but I still harboured the suspicion that, as I detailed in the afterword to the interview, Arnold and the filmmakers were fictitious personas and that the films were in fact John’s own inventions. I sensed various clues that gave the game away including the name of one of the filmmakers, ‘Alan Marker’. This seemed far too close to the aura of Chris Marker (but with an amusingly British first name), especially given John’s stated admiration for La Jetée, which of course is also about memory being overwritten and recovered.

I felt there were more clues, not least the fact that the synopses of the various filmmakers and their motivations in the liner notes to the album resembled John’s own very individualistic short stories, especially one he wrote a while back called ‘The Quiet Man’ (for even with the best of intentions the best of artists can find it hard to disguise their ‘voice’ when inhabiting alter egos):

The old newscasts affected him greatly, the Kennedy Assassination, the images of Christine Keeler, early Beatles footage, all in a slightly worn Black and White. He edited together a film containing all these images and more, and played it constantly. He found it profoundly moving, the images gaining even more emotive power with each viewing. All these characters of his past moving in old daylight, waving and smiling and moving on.

One of his favourite films was The Swimmer starring Burt Lancaster, and he often played this without the soundtrack, drowning in the crude beauty of its early technicolour.

At home, too, he kept a small 8mm projector for playing home movies that he came across in his exploration of the city’s deserted apartments. He was fascinated by all the tiny intimate details of these films, the jerky figures waving from seaside and garden at weddings and birthdays and baptisms, records of whole families and their pets growing and changing through the years.

John Foxx, ‘The Quiet Man’, 1978.

In fact, my musings sparked off quite a bit of debate in various forums about the nature of Arnold, with many people, including myself, initially believing the entire story of Mr Weizcs-Bryant and his amazing collection of found film.

But John remained tight-lipped… or so I thought. More on that later.

ABOVE: ‘Skyscraper’ by ‘Jerry Golden’, performed by John Foxx at the Leeds International Film Festival, 2007.

From the first film of the performance, I was drawn into the degraded beauty of the Super 8 footage and the blown-out and colour-saturated celluloid on display. And yes, this was clearly found footage, the genuine article. It appeared I was wrong — you can’t fake period details, hairstyles and cars, on John’s limited budget. But it had been assembled artfully, like the looped film of traffic on LA freeways drawing out the beauty of this perpetual motion sculpture. Or time-lapsed shadows and sunlight passing across buildings, slowed down or reversed, the motion of the elements becoming imperceptible, the buildings and backgrounds the same but not quite as shadows gently ripple across them as if the fabric of time and molecular space was slowly re-weaving itself. When a building became covered completely in shadow, the film was edited so that another building emerged from the black and into daylight, a slow modernist dance of compacted grace and proportion. It seemed a trick of the mind designed to evoke the passing of civilisation, like the classic Ballardian ideal that treats reality as just a stage set that can be pulled away at any moment.

At this point, I thought I might need to re-assess: if these films were genuine, maybe Arnold was, too.

There was much to enjoy throughout the program. Extraterrestrial, sun-soaked clouds magnified to massive proportions so that they seemed composed of nothing but pure colour and grain. Flickering film projected onto women’s faces, turning them into shapeshifting cats and dogs with whiskers and elongated ears. A naked woman underwater, swimming among the wrecks of submerged automobiles as the sunlight from above the surface turns her and everything it touches into a blue dream.

ABOVE: Stills from ‘Underwater Automobiles’ by ‘Robert Rouncefield’ (John Foxx; Tiny Colour Movies).

But then I began to imagine that John had made a very clever play: he’d inserted what I was sure were his own films into the found footage. The giveaway for me was twofold. First, the film ‘Smokescreen’ by ‘Unknown’ featuring a man walking into a series of smoke-filled rooms — we never see his face as it is either obscured by smoke, or he is filmed from the side or behind. In the liner notes, Arnold says this:

I saw these marvellously lit sequences which seemed to have a very definite story, yet there is no explanation or development or resolution. We can have no idea what the filmmaker had in mind. Because of this lack of resolution, they seem strangely suspended. You begin to make connections, you feel compelled to write a story. But there is none. There can be none. The effect is tantalising, like a damaged and incomplete fragment of memory.

But, I’m sure, both the film and this explanation is very obviously the voice of Foxx; this film, to me, is another iteration of Foxx’s ‘quiet man’ persona, the ghost moving through the streets of the city, his identity never quite coalescing, always escaping the gaze. As John has said, ‘The point of view I’ve always worked from is that of a ghost in the city — someone who is a sort of drifting, detached onlooker — but still vulnerable and trying against the odds to maintain a sort of dignity in the face of all the static.’

ABOVE: ‘Smokescreen’ by ‘Unknown’, performed by John Foxx at the Leeds International Film Festival, 2007.

There appeared to be more confirmation in the film ‘A Peripheral Character’ by ‘Evan Parker’, a montage of shots supposedly featuring a mysterious extra from Hollywood films:

He has appeared in dozens of major Hollywood movies and American television series, yet he is completely unknown to the public. He appears as a background character, a passer-by, often wearing a grey suit, or a raincoat. His calm unhurried walk, his spectacles, his lapel flower and his habit of turning his head briefly (seemingly so that his face will be momentarily on the film), are what eventually make him distinctive. The film was researched and assembled by the man who first discovered his existence, Evan Parker. Parker is an academic whose field is the evolution of Hollywood. In the course of his studies, Parker watched hundreds of films and had begun to speculate about making a study of the extras, those figures passing by in the background. That is when he began to notice one who appeared to be present in several movies. Intrigued, Parker began a search and was surprised to discover the presence of this figure in dozens of major and minor Hollywood movies. This is a slow-motion montage of all the clips of his appearances so far discovered. His identity remains unknown.

TCM liner notes.

Note the reference to the GREY suit!

‘A Peripheral Character’ is an intriguing concept and very well put together, but at times you could tell John had judiciously selected clips of not the same mysterious person, but of similar looking actors from dozens of films, always with their face half turned away, or shot from behind, or bending over — you might just be convinced if you weren’t paying close enough attention that you were viewing just the one ghost in the city.

By the program’s end, I felt as if I’d finally worked it out for sure: that ‘Arnold Weizcs-Bryant’ was merely another psuedonym for Dennis Leigh (Foxx’s real name), and that it was indeed John Foxx himself who is the passionate collector of found footage, the underground filmmaker inspired by what he has stumbled across to create his own ‘sample films’, his own ‘tiny colour movies’…

And the live music? Well, it was classic Foxx, yes, lovely electronic washes drifting as timelessly as the shadows and sunlight of the films. I do like John’s work, but even so I have to say I was disappointed that there didn’t seem to be much improvisation, given that this was ostensibly a live performance of the soundtrack. Tracks stopped and started exactly when the films did, and it all seemed a bit too perfectly sequenced, too faithful to the CD. I would have liked more of a continuous flow, more segues to sustain the atmosphere, more improv, more of the scratches, collages and squelches that John so admires in the films, for as good as the music is, it just seems far too clean, too digital in the live context to suit the conceptual conceit of the films themselves. As a standalone CD it’s great; as an audiovisual package, I’m not so sure.

And then it was question time, and John appeared from behind his bank of keyboards, dressed head to toe in black like a handsomer version of Lux Interior. Before the show I’d thought of sticking my hand up and asking him if Arnold really did exist, but as I was watching the films I decided it just didn’t matter at all to me anymore. Whatever the answer, either way, John’s assemblage of the results had become compelling — if John wanted to keep up the pretense, if indeed that’s what it was, I was happy to play along. Besides I’d already voiced my suspicions two years ago and I didn’t want to seem like a curmudgeon or a stalker by hounding him forever more about it. Also, I was curious to see if anyone else in the audience would broach the subject. Perhaps no-one even cares…

ABOVE: Stills from ‘A Peripheral Character’ by ‘Evan Parker’ (John Foxx; Tiny Colour Movies).

Questions were asked about Ultravox, about the soundtrack and always John’s answers were mystical, evasive, talking of dreams and flight. Then someone asked him about the Hollywood extra. ‘Did you ever ask Arnold if he had any info on the extra, or whether he’d tried to trace his identity?’ John fidgeted, looked a little uncomfortable. ‘Er… no’ he replied. The mere mention of Arnold appeared to be making him nervous.

Then someone else stuck up a hand. ‘John, I read the piece on Ballardian where you talk about the influence of J.G. Ballard on your work.’ Ah, he’d read my interview, meaning he’d know of the afterword where I first expressed my doubts! We were getting warm, no doubt about it, but would this guy pop the burning question? But ‘Which of his novels is your favourite?’ was the interrogation and the moment had passed again.

A few more questions and then someone asked John if he wanted a beer. He quickly said he’d love one, but then just as quickly said his goodbyes and hustled off the stage, always the enigma, always elusive, never to be seen again. The end.

And I couldn’t help but think of part 2 of our interview, for I was greatly surprised to see him in Melbourne in the first place.

Because when I asked him if he would ever tour Australia, this is what he said: ‘I’d like to. But it will most likely be as drifting molecules about twenty years from now…’

POSTSCRIPT: After the screening, my dormant interest in John Foxx was reignited and I went Googling for more information. As I mentioned, all I really knew of the background to this project was what had emerged in our interview. As far as I knew, for others, as it was for me, the mystery was still sustainable. Little did I know that John had recently come clean! In this post on John’s forum, for example, it’s claimed that ‘The footage that JF and Mike Barker use in TCM is bought at car boot sales, jumble sales and at market stalls. Sometimes people put their home movie collections up for grabs on ebay… this is then digitised and re-edited to produce TCM.’

And this is confirmed in an interview John did just before the Melbourne screening:

I used to buy reels of film (from Brick Lane and Portobello Road markets) and didn’t know what they were and view them to see if there was anything interesting on them. Eventually I amassed all this stuff and didn’t quite know what to do with it. Then I saw this collector’s reel of films one night and thought ‘Yeah — that’s exactly right! It is finite. It does have a place in history’. And some of it is unique and some of the stories behind the pieces are very interesting too. It’s like reading an obituary; which is something I like — it’s not morbid at all. It’s very interesting because you get a summation of someone’s life and their achievements…

So, is it actually John’s collection on display? It would appear that way, yes, judging by this interview. It would appear that Arnold is John, just as John is Dennis. And what of the filmmakers and their backstories? As I wrote in the afterword to the 2006 interview, after mulling over the ‘Frank Watts’ film:

Urban drift; walking through the city; submitting to psychic entry points … surely this is yet another brilliantly evocative John Foxx short story? Yes — the more I think about it, the more I think that’s the case … re-reading the liner notes, the parallels with these ‘filmmakers’, with their obsessions and aesthetics, to Foxx himself now seem all too obvious (let’s not forget that ‘John Foxx’ is a character that Dennis Leigh himself has said he inhabits because ‘John Foxx is smarter than me’).

Arnold’s ‘filmmakers’ are called Robert Rouncefield; Jerry Golden; Earnst Lubin — like ‘John Foxx’, these are humdrum yet fanciful names, mythical yet ordinary, dull names to the point of incandescence. Their bios and summaries exhibit all the traits of the condensed novels in The Atrocity Exhibition.

But there would be one final nail in the coffin…

ABOVE: John Foxx answering audience questions after the Sydney screening of TCM.

Something else I found in my latest research was this video of John’s Q&A after the Sydney performance of TCM. Note that this was filmed the day after the Melbourne gig. Now recall the Melbourne audience member who asked John if he wanted a beer. Finally, watch the Sydney video: as the uploader writes, ‘Note the beer in his hand. Someone from the audience was kind enough to rush off and get him one.’

Someone had obviously been taking notes in Melbourne, had flown up to Sydney, and wasn’t letting John rush off the stage without a drink this time!

Perhaps they thought the beer might loosen his tongue just a little. Indeed, it appears that way for in this Q&A John is far more expansive and revealing than in the session I attended, and even goes so far as to say that some of the TCM movies are outright fiction, ‘complete lies’ as he calls them, created by him under the guise of a fictitious filmmaker and inserted into the program to mess with the audience’s perception:

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Did you cut some of those movies up?

JOHN FOXX: Oh, some of them were invented. And some aren’t. And I want to use these films as a way of telling stories. And being dishonest. Because I think dishonesty’s really interesting. What do you call someone who tries to convince you that something is true when it’s not? You call them a liar, don’t you? So what do you call an author? And that’s the thing that really interests me, is that line between truth and fiction. So some things are true in the movies, and some are complete lies. And I think it’s very interesting to try and work out which is which. Some of them are totally fabricated and some aren’t. But they’re all made up of the real thing.

So what one of the filmmakers practices, in other words cutting Hollywood up into pieces and reassembling it, I’ve been doing as well. And I want to continue doing that, because I think film is raw material now, to be used in any way we want. We’ve all grown up with that stuff. And I even dream it. Because I went to the cinema when I was 7, 6, 5 years old in Lancashire. And Lancashire was so grey, in England, and the cinema was so grey, everything merged together. You know, I was usually covered in soot when I was a kid, and everything was in black and white, the factory chimneys and smoke and all that, and when I looked on the screen it was the same thing. So all my memories of it are mixed up in the movies, old science fiction movies and utter rubbish. None of which I could understand as a kid, so I had to make things up with a kit from my own mind. It became a part of my dream language. And I still dream it. So I think we all mix stuff in strange ways because it’s in our heads, isn’t it? We’ve grown up with it. So why not reassemble it in the way we want to? Because we own it, you know — we don’t have to be dominated by it. It’s ours for God’s sake, not theirs — we own it.

However, I’m glad I went into the screening not knowing about John’s admission. It meant there was still a bit of mystery and wonder about the project, it meant I could ‘script’ the story a little bit as I tried to link and crosslink various ideas and theories — using a ‘kit’ from my own mind.

Does John’s admission matter in the end? No — the project stands on its own merits. I was reminded of how many people still take Empire of the Sun to be Ballard’s autobiography, and how they are often greatly surprised and sometimes angry to discover the book is as ‘fictional’ as the rest of his novels. In this day and age, surely it is not too farfetched to suggest that authenticity is just another mask? I personally love the idea of creating a character and inhabiting it so that the boundaries become blurred, inhabiting the interzones and interstitial zones, ‘the yes or no of the borderzone’ to borrow a phrase from Atrocity, escaping definition and classification.

As does Ballard, for that matter, who has his own passion for the idea of faked newsreels, and the notion of fiction passed off as truth:

The fake war newsreel (and most war newsreels are faked to some extent, usually filmed on manoeuvres) has always intrigued me — my version of Platoon, Full Metal Jacket or All Quiet on the Western Front would be a newsreel compilation so artfully faked as to convince the audience that it was real, while at the same time reminding them that it might be wholly contrived. The great Italian neo-realist, Roberto Rossellini, drew close to this in Open City and Paisa.

J.G. Ballard, annotations to The Atrocity Exhibition, 1994.

For anyone interested in Ballard — especially Atrocity — and experimental film, John Foxx’s Tiny Colour Movies performance is highly recommended. I’m not sure any of it is especially ‘cutting edge’ — Foxx’s liner notes, for example, state that the Alan Marker stuff (as commanding as it is, one of my favourites from the set) is ‘surely unique in the history of filmmaking’, yet I saw the exact same technique performed with skulls and ghost imagery last week in Melbourne by Australian artists who’d been practising it for some time. And overall, in terms of experimental and repurposed film, the phenomenal, unparalleled work of the likes of Guy Sherwin, the old master, and Ben Russell and Ben Rivers, the heirs, is certainly more of an assault in both audio and visual terms.

What Tiny Colour Movies undoubtedly is, however, is Foxxian: too cold by half for some, beautiful and sad for others, an industrial spiritualism and an unalloyed sensuality of machines.

Arnold Weizcs-Bryant: R.I.P.

..:: Previously:
+ John Foxx: A Whirlpool with Seductive Furniture, part 1
+ John Foxx: A Whirlpool with Seductive Furniture, part 2

..:: More information::
+ Metamatic: John Foxx’s official site
+ Tiny Colour Movies official site

Reader Martin Jones has been following the recent film posts on this site, and emails to tell me of his own film-related ‘encounter’ with JGB.

Martin writes:

Attached: JGB note dated 25.5.94. It reads:

“Dear Mr Jones, Thanks for your happy notion of the life-time novel, and for the kind comments on my writing — I wish you the best of luck with your degree course — incidentally, it’s not true that I would sell options on the telephone — film rights, as you’ll soon discover, are fanatically fought over by agents, and mine have always been handled by my agent. Best, J.G. Ballard.”

Some background. At this time I had just undertaken a second interview for a place on a university screenwriting degree course. Having no academic qualifications I was taking an ‘A’ level in English, and to be honest, was thoroughly bored with the books we were studying — Susan Hill, Thomas Hardy, Hamlet — although ironically I appreciate them more now than I did then (I would have been 23); I wanted to get back into reading for pleasure, and a re-read of The Kindness of Women was top of my list. I decided to write to Ballard, and did so via his agents (found, pre-internet, in a reference book in the local library). Around the same time he had made a comment in The Daily Telegraph on Moby Dick that struck a chord with me, and so I opened my letter with an enthusiastic ramble on the subject of the ‘life-long novel’, and how a person could be issued with just one weighty tome at birth, to be devoured throughout their years. I also mentioned a comment one of the interviewers had made (actually the head of the course at the time) after I had been asked which authors I liked, namely, that there was a time when producers would ring JGB out of the blue, hoping to option one of his books, and more often than not he would sell the rights over the telephone! The course leader added that he had tried to buy the rights to High-Rise this way.

Thought this might make a curious addition to your film post. An interesting detail about Ballard’s reply is that it was posted in a second-hand envelope, with his name scrawled out and my address put beneath it, and sealed at the top with sellotape. Also, I was quite surprised that his home address and phone number were on the note paper.

On a similar subject, two years ago I contacted him again. Around the beginning of 2006 I found out that my publishers, Headpress, were releasing a book by Mark Goodall entitled Sweet & Savage: The World Through The Shockumentary Film Lens, and that JGB contributed a short interview on Gualtiero ‘Mondo Cane’ Jacopetti to it (it is reprinted in Headpress 27). I saw an opportunity and swiftly sent him a synopsis and art (by Rik Rawling) for the book I was (and indeed still am) working on at the time, Saturn In Retrograde: Counter-Culture Murder, Bad Trips & Demon Fantasies, in the hope that he might show interest and pen a foreword for it. It was not to be, however, and by swift return of post I got a postcard that — prophetically — began, “Powerful stuff, buit I’m afraid this I’ll have to pass — old age and fear of death — but best of luck…”

My second choice enthusiastically took up the task: author, anthologist and filmmaker Michel Parry. I’m sure he won’t mind being a close second to Ballard!

Incidentally, I did the three year degree course, but never fell into the turgid waters of the TV and film world, as it was then.

Cheers,
Martin

J.G. BALLARD’S BOOK REVIEWS FOR C&I
Notes by Mike Bonsall.

Published 31/03/1962

Dictionary of Chemistry. Including Chemical Engineering and fundamentals of Allied Sciences. Volume 1. German-English. By Dr. R. Ernst. Pp. 727. London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons Ltd. 1961. 52s. 6d.

This German English dictionary contains some 45,000 terms, and in addition to organic, inorganic, physical, electro- and nuclear-chemistry, it includes material from those technologies which have a close relationship with chemistry–for example, oil, food and the sugar industry–and the more relevant terms encountered in the fields of geology, mineralogy, metallurgy and mathematics.

The author has wisely included words which are the same or nearly the same in both languages, as there are unexpected and important irregularities. Words with several meanings have been explained by synonyms. The dictionary also includes notes on the different usage of some words in English and American practice.

Inevitably every dictionary of this type is to some extent a compromise, but the attention Dr. Ernst has devoted to chemical technology and allied fields has ensured that this dictionary will prove a valuable addition to those already available to the chemist and translator.

J.G.B.

Published 02/06/1962

The Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. By Sir Harry Melville. The New Whitehall Series, No. 9. Pp. 200. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. 1962. 25s.

This book describes how the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research promotes and undertakes scientific research in the United Kingdom, and shows how the present organisation has developed over the past forty-five years. It illustrates the work of such DSIR establishments as the National Physical Laboratory and the National Engineering Laboratory, whose functions are defined in terms of a field of science and technology, and of those research institutions with carefully defined practical objectives, such as the Forest Products Research Laboratory and the Building Research Station.

Some of the major contributions to scientific discovery made by DSIR research establishments are described. One of these was the invention of ion-exchange resins before the last war at the Chemical Laboratory, which led to the cheap recovery of uranium from low-grade ores. Another was the invention of “gas storage” for fruit, which allows it to be transported over greater distances and makes it possible for the sale of crops to be spread over longer periods of the year.

The role of the DSIR in awarding grants for scientific research in universities and colleges is illustrated, and the present role of the Research Associations is described.

The author has been Secretary to the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, and head of the DSIR, since 1956.

J.G.B.

Published 16/06/1962
“Writing a technical paper”: arguably something JGB has been doing for half a century.

Writing a Technical Paper. By D. H. Menzel, H. M. Jones and L. G. Boyd. Pp. vii + 132. London: McGraw-Hill Publishing Co. Ltd. 1961. 15s.

This book is intended to be of practical assistance to the graduate scientist, student or technical writer preparing a scientific paper or report. The authors emphasise the need for the clear statement of facts and ideas. They discuss some of the common flaws in technical exposition and describe methods of correcting them.

The first chapter, “The Evolution of a Paper,” demonstrates how the material for a paper should be assembled and prepared. The next chapter, “Revision,” describes the progress of the paper from the second to the final draft, and explains the correct presentation of footnotes, equations, tables and figures, and the use of abbreviations. Subsequent chapters consider style and grammar, and the last chapter, “The Physical Manuscript,” describes how the final typescript should be prepared and offers a few general rules for the correction of proofs.

J.G.B.

Published 04/08/1962
Shades of Ballard’s “Track 12″ written in 1958.

Poisoning by Drugs and Chemicals: An Index of Toxic Effects and their Treatment. By Peter Cooper. 2nd edn. Pp. x + 264. London: Alchemist Publications. 25s.

This book provides doctors, pharmacists, chemists, and all who are liable to be suddenly confronted with cases of poisoning with a pocket-size guide to the toxicology of the commonly handled drugs and chemicals.

Each monograph gives the alternative (including proprietary) names of the compound discussed, followed by concise notes on its pharmacological action, its absorption and excretion in the body, its toxic effects, possible effects of massive overdose, suggestions for treating cases of poisoning, and simple aids to identification.

An appendix discusses the more important first aid measures for use in cases of poisoning, e.g. artificial respiration, gastric lavage, the use of emetics and “universal antidotes”.

J.G.B.

Published 11/08/1962

Great Chemists. Edited by E. Farber. Pp. xxvi + 1642. London: John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 1962. 222s.

This collection of more than 100 biographies covers the development of the science of chemistry over the period of the last 3000 years. The opening chapters provide a brief historical introduction in which the work of Babylonian and Arabic chemists is considered. This is followed by a chapter entitled “Philosophical Alchemists and Practical Metallurgists” which consists of brief accounts of a few outstanding men, such as Albertus and Roger Bacon, who lived in the period between the Arabic chemists of the ninth and tenth centuries, and Paracelsus (1493-1541).

Subsequent chapters on Van Helmont, Glauber and Boyle introduce the age of modern chemistry, and the remainder of the book describes the lives and work of the great chemists and physical chemists of the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. No living chemist is included. The roster of authors is itself drawn from the last two centuries.

No work of such scope could fail to be of great interest, or suggest numerous comparisons, for example between those great chemists who carried out chemical experiments at an early age, such as Ostwald and Werner, and those who found their way to chemistry after pursuing interests in entirely different fields, such as Kekulé and Windaus. Each of the biographies is preceded by an illustration of the subject.

J.G.B.

Published 01/09/1962

“Roget the eminent doctor”: another medic, like Ballard, who went on to greater things. The thesaurus itself is of course very valuable to a writer…

Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases. Revised and modernised by Robert A. Dutch. London: Longmans, Green & Co. Ltd. Pp. lii + 309. 30s.

The first draft of what was to become Roget’s Thesaurus was completed by Dr. Peter Mark Roget in 1806, but it was not until 1852 that the first edition made its appearance. After his death the task of revising the Thesaurus fell to his son. John Lewis Roget, who in turn passed on the task to his own son, Samuel Romilly Roget. In 1950, after numerous editions had appeared and the Thesaurus had long become established as a classic, the outright copyright was purchased by Longmans, who entrusted the task of preparing a new edition to Mr. R. A. Dutch, sometime Senior Scholar of Christ’s College. Cambridge.

This edition has been arranged on exactly same principles of classification as Roget’s original. The text has been completely rewritten and greatly expanded. There are over 50,000 new entries, and the number of cross references has been increased. The index has also been entirely revised.

Dr. Peter Mark Roget was born in Soho in 1779. A scientific prodigy, he entered the University or Edinburgh at the age of 14, and at 19 had graduated as an M.D. Subsequently he became an authority on physiology and anatomy. He invented a slide-rule, a pocket chess board, and in his spare time took up botany. It was from this pursuit that the Thesaurus was born, when the possibility occurred to him of classifying words in the way in which botanists classify plants and their families.

J.G.B.

Published 08/09/1962

Dictionary of Commercial Chemicals. By F. D. Snell and C. T. Snell. 3rd edn. Pp. viii +714. London: D. Van Nostrand Co. Ltd. 1962. 97s.

The large number of chemicals recently added to those already in commercial use have now been incorporated in a revised and enlarged edition of this reference work. As in the past, it provides information on the composition of products as sold commercially and has been prepared especially for the manufacturer and others connected with the chemical industry. Technical terms have either been defined or limited to those familiar to the reader with an elementary knowledge of inorganic and organic chemistry. Chemical formulae are used in order to define briefly composition and structure.

Only items in general use are included, and the term “chemical” is used to describe basic materials as well as mixtures containing several ingredients. For each product the information supplied includes name, formula, general description, method of manufacture, common impurities or contaminants, commercial grades and uses.

J.G.B.

Published 22/09/1962

Concise Chemical and Technical Dictionary. Edited by H. Bennett. 2nd edn. Pp. xxxix + 1039. New York: Chemical Publishing Co. Inc. 1962. $15.

Some 60,000 definitions, including about 5000 entries, are contained in this enlarged second edition, which covers every field of scientific and technical development. It has been prepared for both the professional scientist and the lay reader, and gives the basic technical terms internationally accepted by chemists and engineers

The present edition contains information on newly developed synthetic compounds, processes and apparatus; descriptions of the more important manufacturing techniques and machinery, raw materials and finished products.

A special feature of the dictionary is the compilation of several thousand proprietary products in such fields as synthetic resins and plastics, food, drugs and cosmetics. An addendum lists recent trade-names and definitions.

J.G.B.

Published 29/09/1962

Riegel’s Industrial Chemistry. Edited by J. A. Kent. Pp. xii + 963. London: Chapman & Hall Ltd. 1962. 160s.

This reference book covers the main sections of the chemical industry, and describes fundamental chemistry, basic chemical engineering operations, economic and production aspects, and practical applications. The chemical aspects of the pharmaceutical and atomic energy industries are considered separately. Particular emphasis is given to those industries which have made rapid progress in recent years, including the plastics, rubber and man-made fibres industries. The book also contains information on industrial water supplies, the disposal of industrial wastes, fuels and their utilisation.

A large number of illustrations are provided, including process flow diagrams, production statistics, tables and diagrams of equipment.

It is now 34 years since the first edition of “Riegel” was published, and the present editor and authors maintain the tradition established by their predecessors.

J.G.B.

Published 13/10/1962

Dictionary of Chemistry and Chemical Technology. In four languages: English. German. Polish and Russian. Edited by Z. Sobecka, W. Biernacki, D. Kryt and T. Zadrozna. Pp. 724. London: Pergamon Press. 1962. 200s.

This dictionary contains some 12,000 terms from all branches of theoretical and applied chemistry, chemical engineering, chemical and related technologies, and essential scientific terms frequently encountered in chemical literature. The lexicographic basis of the dictionary was provided by the chemical card register of the Technical Terminology Division of the Polish Technical Publishing Institute. This material was supplemented from recent publications in such fields as nuclear physics, radiation chemistry and plastics. Sonic English terms in current use have not been included because corresponding expressions do not exist in one or other of the remaining three languages.

The entries are arranged in alphabetical order of the English terms and are followed by the corresponding German, Polish and Russian terms determined from the literature of those languages. The names of chemical compounds have been restricted to group names and to particular compounds of practical importance. Many scientific names, e.g. Geneva nomenclature similarly expressed in each of the four languages, have not been included as the editors believe these would serve no useful purpose.

Immediately following the main text there is an index of English Synonyms for chemical compounds, to which the user may refer for terms not found in the main text.

J.G.B.

Published 03/11/1962

Technical Market Research. By R. Williams. Pp. 18. Geneva: Roger Williams Technical & Economic Services, S.A. 1962.

This book is based on a series of lectures delivered to the Chemists’ Club of New York in January-March 1962 and subsequently edited for publication. The author describes what he believes to be the wisest method of conducting market surveys and the difficult problems involved with specialised industrial products. He claims that the rule-of-thumb methods once used by company executives in surveying markets are no longer valid, and outlines a more systematic procedure for conducting interviews, preparing reliable reports and assessing a market’s potential. The author’s style is informal and idiomatic, illustrated by a wealth of amusing personal anecdotes.

The lectures are followed by the question and answer discussions tape-recorded at the meetings.

J.G.B.

Published 10/11/1962
I assume this is “the” Bob Maxwell, who did produce science journals… Dry humour at expense of Soviet system: complains that Pasternak and Gagarin are missing.

Information U.S.S.R. Edited and compiled by Robert Maxwell. Pp. xii + 982. Oxford: Pergamon Press Ltd. 200s.

This encyclopaedia is the first of a series of volumes that will eventually cover all the countries of the world. It will be a principle of the series that the articles in each volume will be written by authors who are nationals of and resident in the relevant country. Pages 1-763 of the present volume were translated from Volume 50 of the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia and contain articles on the geography and history of the Soviet Union, its political and governmental institutions, industry, science and the arts. There are also sections on the trade unions, sport, education, religion and the church.

Appendices are provided giving the official national census figures, addresses and departments of establishments for higher education, and a guide to foreign trade organisations in the U.S.S.R. The final appendix is a resume of the Third Programme adopted at the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, giving its programme for the next 20 years. There are also brief biographies of some prominent Russian statesmen.

The encyclopaedia appears to contain no reference later than 1960. Among omissions are the names of Paternak and Gagarin.

J.G.B.

Published 17/11/1962

Index to Reviews, Symposia Volumes and Monographs in Organic Chemistry. For the period 1940 1960. Compiled and Edited by N. Kharasch, W. Wolf and E. C. P. Harrison. Pp. vii + 345. Oxford: Pergamon Press Ltd. 70s.

Approximately 7000 references are listed in this volume, each of which, with few exceptions, was inspected by the compilers. Articles in English, French and German are included, and titles are given in English or the English equivalent. An author index allows the user to locate immediately all the works of a particular author for the period 1940-1960.

The articles included are not only those in standard review journals, but in major reference works of organic chemistry, such as the Houben-Weyl compendium and Traité de Chimie Organique.

The names of editors have been provided and the appendix contains a list of publishers’ addresses.

J.G.B.

Published 12/01/1963

Practical and Industrial Formulary. By Mitchell Freeman. Pp. v + 297. New York: Chemical Publishing Co. Inc. 1962. $7.95

This book comprises a collection of formulae covering a wide field of formulated products. The contents include products tinder the following section headings: adhesives, cleaning preparations, cosmetics, perfume oils, perfumes, food products, furniture and metal polishes, inks, insecticides and rodenticides, paints, pharmaceuticals and proprietary preparations, stain removers and veterinary preparations. There are three appendices: weights and measures with conversion tables, composition of foods and atomic weights. There is a biography of suppliers (U.S.) of the chemicals mentioned.

The book, which is rather superficial in treatment, is unlikely to find readers among chemists working in a particular field, but may be useful for those engaged in work where acquaintance with a wide range of uses for chemicals is desirable.

J.G.B.

Published 26/01/1963
Evidence of some “toilet soap” humour. Presumably the chapter on diet was too fat to fit in.

Modern Cosmeticology. By R.G. Harry. Revised by J. B. Wilkinson in co-operation with R. Clark, E. Green and T. P. McLaughlin. Vol. I of The Principles and Practice of Modern Cosmetics. Pp. xxiv + 683. London: Leonard Hill (Books) Ltd. 1962. 84s.

The publication of the fifth edition of “Harry” six years after the fourth edition is an indication of the increasing speed with which cosmetic science is developing. The revision has involved the complete rewriting of several chapters with alterations and additions to all others. The chapter on toilet soap has been omitted as being impossible to deal with adequately as a manufacturing problem. The chapter on diet and health has also been omitted for reasons of space. The growing importance of pressurised packs has called for a new chapter devoted entirely to this subject.

The original author stressed the need to provide a book which was not a mere formulary, but would show the relation between cosmetic science and basic physiological principles. Newly acquired knowledge has not necessarily overthrown the older empirical formulae but has frequently provided an explanation previously lacking for their success and has indicated directions of improvement. Throughout the new revision, the revisors have successfully demonstrated these relationships.

J.G.B.

Published 09/02/1963
His longest review. Freud: ‘Royal road to the Unconscious’. Most dreams unpleasant, and get worse as we get older. Hallucinations etc if no dreaming. Puzzle & Joke.

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

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

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

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

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

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

J.G.B.

Published 06/04/1963
Back to the grindstone…

Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. 44th edition. Editor in Chief: Charles D. Hodgman. Pp. xxv + 3604. Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications Ltd. 1963. 105s.

Continuing the past policy of the editors, the Handbook is being revised at frequent intervals. The general features and scheme of arrangement of previous editions have been retained, and the aim throughout has been to present in condensed and convenient form as large an amount of accurate and up-to-date information in the fields of chemistry and physics as possible. An attempt has been made to include material on all branches of chemistry and physics and the closely allied sciences, and the present edition contains a periodic chart, a list of atomic weights of the elements and a recalculation of the fundamental constants based upon the new atomic weights scale. Among other additions, there is a new table of physical and chemical properties of the rare earth metals and supplementary material for synthetic oils, fats and waxes.

J.G.B.

Published 04/05/1963

Use of the Chemical Literature. Edited by R. T. Bottle. Pp. x + 231. London: Butterworth & Ltd. 1962. 35s.

Sources of information and reference available to the newly qualified chemist are now so numerous that a book designed to assist him in the selection of those most suitable for his own research work is an invaluable asset. Most of the chapters in the present book are based on lectures given at the short courses organised by Liverpool College of Technology during the past three years. Among the chapters are “Translations and their Sources with Special Reference to Russian Literature,” “Nuclear Chemistry,” “Use of Patent Literature,” “Government and Trade Publications of Interest to the Chemist,” and “History of Chemistry.” There is an appendix containing a brief glossary of terms used in photocopying and microfilming, and a selection of practical exercises, with notes on their solution, designed to familiarise the reader with the correct methods of tackling literature problems.

J.G.B.

Published 01/06/1963
In same edition as the article about Road Research Laboratory.

Paint, Oil and Colour Year Book. 3rd edn. Pp. 401. London: Scott Greenwood & Sons Ltd. 1963. 50s.

This third edition of the Year Book is a guide to suppliers of products and equipment used in the paint, printing ink and allied industries. A number of new headings has been added to the Raw Materials and Machinery sections and the whole book has been revised to bring the sources of supply up to date.

The editors have also added to the Machinery and Equipment Section a few ancillary products, e.g. industrial detergents and paint brushes. In addition a section covering addresses of Trade Associations and Technical Societies has been added.

J.G.B.

Published 24/08/1963
Ballard can’t resist dwelling on the word ‘ablation’ which has meanings in surgery and space travel, two favourites: ablation (surgical) — the removal of any part of the body by mechanical means; ablation (astrophysics) — the blunt end [of the capsule] acts as an ‘ablation shield’ for re-entry.

Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology. Vol. 1. A to Aluminium. Second Edition, completely revised. London: John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 1963. Price: £13 per volume (for subscribers to complete set of 18 volumes).

The first edition of the Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology appeared in 15 volumes, of which Volume 1, A to Anthrimides, was published in 1947, and the final volume, including the index, in 1956. A similar schedule will be maintained for the succeeding volumes of the second edition, which is a complete revision of its predecessor. All the articles on technological topics have been rewritten in many cases by different authors. The general scheme of the Encyclopedia has not been changed, but the list of titles is not exactly the same. The first two articles in this volume, Abherents and Ablation, are entirely new. Changes in format are relatively minor. The first edition concentrated on presenting United States technology; in the second edition a number of articles have been contributed from abroad, and the intention has been to present chemical technology without regard to national boundaries.

J.G.B.

Published 05/10/1963

Food Processing & Packaging Directory, 1963 1964. Edited by R. De Giacomi. Pp. 1065. London: Tothill Press Ltd. 60s.

The extensive revision of the sixth edition of this directory reflects the changes that have taken place in the industry since the previous edition. The tendency towards diversification formerly noted has been superseded by a period of re-grouping and consolidation. Examples are to be found in the recent merger of the three major ice-cream producing companies, the re-grouping of the frozen food sections of two of the latter, and the disposal of its sugar confectionery interests by one of them.

One new section has been added, namely a personal index which contains all the names of the individuals listed in the Food Processors and preceding sections. A tribute is paid in the preface to the late C. L. Hinton, the compiler of the Food Standards and Regulations section of the Directory since its inception. The revision for the sixth edition has been undertaken by B. R. Knapp, the Information Officer of the British Food Manufacturing Industries Research Association, who continued this aspect of Hinton’s work at the British Food Manufacturing Industries Research Association after his retirement. Ah the other sections of the Directory have been retained and fully revised.

J.G.B.

Published 19/10/1963
About scientific inspiration, mention of serendipity, after Freud, Jung?

The Flash of Genius. By A. B. Garrett. Pp. ix + 249. London: D. Van Nostrand Co. Ltd. 1963. 30s.

“The Flash of Genius” consists of accounts of 51 discoveries in the fields of physics and chemistry, as far as possible in the discoverer’s own words, describing the important event or experiment which led to the discovery. Each account is prefaced by a brief introduction which places the discovery within the context of contemporary work and knowledge. The accounts range from the discovery of oxygen in 1774 by Joseph Priestley to the discovery of penicillin by Sir Alexander Fleming and of nylon by Wallace Carothers.

The book concludes with appendixes on Serendipity, Nobel Prize-winners, the ages of discoverers, and the dates of birth and nationality of scientists.

J.G.B.

Published 30/11/1963
Ballard’s final C&I review.

Committees. How they work and how to work them. By E. Anstey. Pp. 116. London: George Allen Unwin Ltd. 1963. 15s.

This book analyses the functioning of different kinds of committee groups and describes the factors which make for efficiency or inefficiency. The author discusses different types of committee and their purposes; how to lead a discussion so as to help bring out a genuine group view; the roles of chairman and secretary; how individuals influence committee decisions; good and bad tactics; and the preparation of reports. An appendix contains the proceedings of a specimen Committee Meeting.

J.G.B.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And there is a near car-crash:

Advertisement from C+EN 14/7/58.

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

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

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

Advertisement from C+EN 27/1/58.

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

Advertisement from C+EN 6/10/58.

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

Advertisement from C+EN 4/11/57.

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

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

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

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

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

Advertisement from C&I 28/2/59.

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

Advertisement from C&I c.1962.

Here’s an earlier ad from Chemical & Engineering:

C+EN 19/05/1958.

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

Advertisement from C&I 30/5/59.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

J.G.B.

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

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

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

C&I article, 1/6/63.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

J.G. Ballard, Crash (1973).

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

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

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

Mike Bonsall, July 2007.

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

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

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

I have only stolen one book in my life, and that was a copy of the Los Angeles Yellow Pages, which I took from my suite at the Beverly Hilton hotel. This was in 1987 when I attended the premiere of Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun. A Hollywood premiere is an extraordinary event, but in many ways it was outclassed by the LA Yellow Pages, which I read during a bored moment. It struck me that I should hang on to this precious volume which transformed my holiday at the expense of Warner Brothers. What is interesting about the LA Yellow Pages is the picture it gives of real life in Los Angeles, so different from the glitzy world of film premieres, stars and directors. There are more psychiatrists listed than plumbers, and more dating bureaus than doctors, and more poodle parlours than vets. Like the classified advertisements in newspapers, which provide a picture of the readership, the Yellow Pages of any great city reveals its true underside. The Los Angeles Yellow Pages is richer in human incident than all the novels of Balzac.”

[ thanks, Greg ]

Toby Litt is an English novelist who published his first book, Adventures in Capitalism (a volume of short stories), in 1996, when he was 28. He’s since won praise for the dark inventiveness of his writing, a combination of cinematic prose, apocalyptic imagery and sharp wit that freely dissects contemporary relationships and the sociopathic glue that binds them. Litt’s latest book, Hospital, was released in April, and was likened in a recent review to ‘Stephen King, in his gory horror phase, scripting a feature-length episode of Holby City.’

Given that he’s one of the special guests at this weekend’s J.G. Ballard Conference at the University of East Anglia, we thought we’d quiz Toby on his relationship to Ballard’s writing.

G.R. & S.S.

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GWYN: Ballard famously eschews ‘dinner party London’ in favour of the orbital suburbs, both in his fiction and in his life. Your work, on the other hand, has emphasised the drudgery and boredom of growing up in the suburbs (I’m thinking of Beatniks in particular). Do you agree with Ballard that the suburbs are where the ‘real’ England is?

TOBY: Clearly, it’s not in one place. That’s the reason why England is such a good subject, because it’s a hugely large number of subjects, all under the one heading. My understanding of Ballard is that he’s being slightly paradoxical: the suburbs are usually seen as innately conservative (small ‘c’), but they are where new phenomena are constantly emerging — rather than in the smug centre, which prides itself on being ‘cutting edge’. And because these phenomena are suburban, and widely accepted almost immediately, they aren’t seen as in any way interesting. In this, I think Ballard is right. Hanging on to a sense of the weirdness and extremity of everyday life is very difficult. Particularly in empirical England which lives in constant denial of being weird or extreme.

GWYN: What you mean by ‘empirical England’?

The traditional values of England are often seen to be those of scepticism, common sense and conservatism. These are often contrasted to the values of France, which, from this English point of view, appear perverse and paradoxical, or the values of Germany, which appear metaphysical, obfuscatory and generally dubious. This strain of thought is particularly strong in English philosophy, right up to the present day. A philosopher like G.E. Moore wouldn’t have got started in Germany. And in France he’d have been taken to be some faux naïf prankster.

GWYN: Could you give us some examples of the weirdness and extremity you mentioned?

I’ll give you one idea of extremity. I was at Birmingham airport last week, and along came a stag party. The groom-to-be was dressed as the tooth fairy. He wore a pink leotard, a tutu and a silver plastic tiara. He was carrying a can of Special Brew. Nobody paid him much attention. He was a perfectly normal emanation of suburbia. He wasn’t in any way extreme. Nor was what he was going to get up to in the next week.

Everyone’s in denial. Or they’ve been sectioned.

GWYN: Is there a particular phase of Ballard’s career that you think has produced his best work?

TOBY: An invidious question. I will answer by saying that I think that there is a particular rhythm to Ballard’s sentences. It was there right from the start (The Wind from Nowhere; I don’t understand why he disowns this), and it’s still there now. But, to my ear, this rhythm in his writing was most distinctive in The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, Concrete Island and High-Rise. His rhythm now seems to me slightly faster, slightly less sure of itself.

SIMON: I agree with you about The Wind from Nowhere; I re-read it recently and found it surprisingly decent. There’s a real sense of psychological disintegration, of claustrophobia as the survivors hole up; the ambient menace of the wind was terrifically drawn.

TOBY: Yes. It seems to be very much the start-point for his oeuvre, if you want to call it that. It’s certainly not comparable to, say, Graham Greene’s disowned novels — which, from what I’ve read, aren’t only very badly written but are also acutely anti-Semitic. As Ballard started with the four elements [in his first four novels], it seems odd and imbalancing to leave one of them out. Everyone realises it’s an early novel.

GWYN: What’s your favourite Ballard?

TOBY: The Drowned World. I find the imagery very satisfactory. But Crash probably had the most influence on my own writing. I put it in the acknowledgements to Corpsing, because I felt the influence should be openly acknowledged.

GWYN: Corpsing has sections that read like ballistics reports, describing the path of a bullet through someone’s body in minute detail. Like Ballard, do you read and find inspiration in invisible literature?

TOBY: Yes — medical textbooks. There’s quite a bit of that in Hospital. But I am probably more influenced by non-literary non-verbal sources: paintings, music.

SIMON: I read where you said critical theory was another influence — Deleuze, in particular. What’s the appeal there? Does theory feedback into your writing?

TOBY: I have been reading Deleuze in the past couple of years, yes. Both in his own books and those he wrote with Guattari. It’s important to remind yourself that there are many different ways of thinking. I find the French theorists fascinating. Much more so than any English philosophy of the same period. It is an assault on common sense. I tend to assume that common sense, because it’s common, is wrong. I don’t believe the truth is simple.

When we looked upwards we saw beneath us a sky of rosebushes, gravel paths, equipment and thick, healthy, but slightly too-dry grass. (Not that it would ever go razor-edged and cut you. It was too purely English for that. Tensed between thumbs, it would give a farty vibrato like that of a badly beaten-up cello.) The ground above us, on the other hand, was blue, blue as the deep end of a very wide swimming pool. A swimming pool seen not from the diving board, but suspended motionless above it. Suspended so that no shadow is projected down, and there is no idea of edge at all. A swimming pool splash-virgin, quite unruffled. At the horizon, a rough line of oak trees was interrupted halfway along by the leap of pylons and wires.”

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Toby Litt. Deadkidsongs (2001).
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Original cover ideas for Deadkidsongs.

GWYN: Like Ballard in Running Wild, you’ve dealt with pre-meditated murder committed by children — in Deadkidsongs. What draws you to writing about violence?

TOBY: I really don’t know. It may be that I feel that everyone is capable of violence — if only imaginary violence. To portray the world honestly, you have to include that.

GWYN: As a father, do you worry about violence, especially in the wake of recent moral panics to do with inner-city London?

TOBY: I try not to. But it’s not merely moral panics. The corner shop at the end of my road was recently robbed by a group of six or seven men, each one of them carrying a gun. They hospitalised the guy working behind the till — hit him several times on the back of the head with the butt of a pistol. I probably worry more about a general callousness — callousness as entertainment.

SIMON: That worries me, too. In Australia recently, there was a case where a group of school kids sexually assaulted a girl, set a homeless man on fire, filmed it all, sold it to their mates on DVD, and uploaded parts to YouTube. Discussing this case, Stephen Smith traces this strand of ‘callousness as entertainment’ back to Abu Ghraib, and the desensitisation of images of torture. I’m guessing you’d agree with his very Ballardian conclusion, that ‘violence has become part of consumerism’…

TOBY: I think we could go further back, and become even more Ballardian. How about the Kennedy assassination? Perhaps what we need to do is realise how consumerism has become violence, and nothing but violence. That was, perhaps, the message of Kingdom Come. However, in talking about these things, an even longer perspective is sensible. In the eighteenth century, crowds used to attend executions; criminals were placed in the stocks, entirely at the mercy of the mob. Capital punishment was probably the most entertaining thing people saw from one end of the year to the next. Clearly, a festival atmosphere surrounded these deaths.

What seems, to me, to have changed is an unmistakable feeling that unless the victim is seen to be suffering, a prank isn’t really funny. If you look at English film comedies of the 1940s, they appear to be almost entirely without ill will. In fact, they are based on a kind of communal good humour, rather than any kind of wit. This continued into the fifties, though that may be where things started to change. No-one actually wanted Norman Wisdom to suffer permanent injury. Maybe it was the Angry Young Men who first admitted they wanted someone to be bloody well hurt.

SIMON: Stephen Smith uses Kingdom Come to bolster his argument. Similarly, in your interview with Ballard, you suggested the book is ‘more directly political’ than Ballard’s previous work. Why, then, do you think KC — so attuned to today — wasn’t so well received by the majority of critics?

TOBY: Probably because it is so easy now to read Ballard in a Ballardian way. By which I mean, people are very inward with his thought. He is always going to be compared with himself, with his own previous bests. And because the Ballardian reading places a value on the extremes, most readers following this logic will compare Kingdom Come to The Atrocity Exhibition or Crash, and find it lacking. It isn’t as extreme. It isn’t ahead of it’s time – it’s, as you say, ‘attuned to today’. Accurate social commentary is less sexy than prophecy.

The point is that what see as threatening about the all-pervasive and all-powerful consumer society is that it’s not any specific individual who is responsible for anything nasty that may happen in the future. This is a collective enterprise. All of us who are members of consumer society — all of us are responsible, in a way … I think it may be that in the future we’ll be dominated by huge masochistic systems. Soviet Russia was an example of this. I mean, people tolerated their own abuse because for some reason they wanted to be abused. Someone says in [Kingdom Come] that the future is a system of huge competing psychopathologies. I’d say that was true of the 20th century. It sort of sums it up, in a way. So I’m not talking about an individual impetus that will drive the engine. This engine has been assembled, and will be started, by everyone probably working unconsciously.

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J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Toby Litt, 2007.
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When I said that Kingdom Come was ‘more directly political’ I meant that it would be fairly easy to make a case for it as an anti-fascist novel. Yet the seductions of a different kind of techno fascism in Ballard’s earlier novels, those containing his deranged leader-figures, are more convincing — perhaps because they are, on occasion, almost given in to. You don’t know what’s really going on, morally. The glamorous psychopaths seem, at least, to have energy going for them. They are often surrounded by wastelands of apathy. In such circumstances, the person who makes change — however objectionable — is always going to be a delight of sorts.

GWYN: Would you like to see any of your books filmed?

TOBY: I would be happy to see any or all of them filmed. So far, there have only been short films made from short stories.

GWYN: Some of your most vivid and memorable writing takes the form of short fiction. In your Ballard interview, he bemoaned the recent lack of places to publish short stories. Do you find this as well?

TOBY: I agree. However, I think the American scene — with which ours is often compared — can be immensely smug. It is easier to be published in anthologies, over here, than in magazines.

GWYN: What can be done to improve the situation?

The only thing that can really be done is developing an audience specifically for short stories. I think it’s there, if only because of the number of people now attending creative writing courses.

GWYN: What do you appreciate about the shorter form, as opposed to novel-length fiction?

TOBY: It is a far less reasonable proposition. Hospital is an attempt to be unreasonable at novel length. But, most of the time, a novel requires the novelist to moderate their extremity.

GWYN: Some of your writing — particularly some of your short stories — are experimental in form; you use internet culture and email as narrative in the ‘Betamax Boy’ story in Adventures in Capitalism, for example. Where, if anywhere, do you see the best current avant-garde/experimental fiction?

TOBY: I don’t really believe in literary experiments. If a writer writes experimentally, that suggests they don’t know what the outcome of their experiment will be. Whereas, when I write, I have a fairly good idea of the outcome, I just don’t know what the effect will be — on readers. That’s a very different proposition. If I misjudge, I misjudge the readers rather than the work itself.

GWYN: In Ghost Story you begin with an apparently autobiographical, long introduction and make it clear that the novel is based, at least to some extent, on your own experiences. Ballard has, of course, written extensively about his life, in a highly fictionalised form, in Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women. In the latter, especially, it is not clear to what extent he projects his own obsessions and character types onto the people around him, and to what extent events have influenced his fiction. Presumably all novelists base ideas and characters on people and events from their own lives, but does this work the other way around as well? Do you ever interpret reality through your own fiction?

TOBY: It’s all I do.

SIMON: Ballard recently said in a couple of interviews that he thinks internet culture has a tremendous vitality. And in your recent interview with Ballard, you spoke about the MySpace phenomenon. As a writer, and a successful one, how have you found your experience on MySpace, in terms of interacting with your audience? Has it been beneficial?

TOBY: I have a better sense of my audience now, I think. Whether that is a good or a bad thing, I’m not sure.

SIMON: There’s a bit more to it than that, though, isn’t there? Didn’t readers of your MySpace blog suggest characters for Hospital?

TOBY: There was a competition to suggest names for characters who might have appeared in Hospital. But that was only after the book was completed, and I’d put a full list of Staff & Patients online. Two real-life readers do appear in the book, because they bid for that dubious privilege at so-called ‘Immortality Auctions’. The money went to charity, and Peter Dixon and Melanie Angel went to Hospital.

SIMON: Can you see yourself opening up sections of your work to readers in the future?

TOBY: I may, at some point, show readers work in progress, to see how they react. At the moment, though, I’m happy to work in private. Over the past few years I’ve read episodes from my next book (called I play the drums in a band called okay) out at festivals. The reaction led me to make a few changes.

SIMON: Do you find MySpace addictive? Your MySpace Doppel idea suggests that you’d like to go deeper and further into the whole social networking aspect. Could you explain a bit about the Doppel concept and how you think it would enhance the MySpace experience?

TOBY: It was the idea that instead of just searching for a single thing you have in common with another MySpace user (My Chemical Romance, for dull example), you could compare the entirety of your profile. In this way, you could find someone who had pretty much identical tastes in everything. That’s why they’d be your doppelganger.

This idea has already been nixed by someone at MySpace. Apparently there are child safety issues. Paedophiles might pose as fans of The Sugababes.

I do find MySpace addictive. I may stop.

GWYN: How do you see the state of fiction writing in this day and age? Are we in a positive place?

TOBY: The state of publishing is not good. A lot of pseudo-literary writing is passed off as the real thing. The real thing is very rare. But that’s always been the case. There is a real problem that many readers are offended by anything which asks them to work. Books must go to them, not the other way round. I’m sure that, from the point of view of the future, much of our fiction will seem simplistic and banal. Any decent novel should require rereading, probably more than once.

GWYN: What do you mean by ‘pseudo-literary writing’?

TOBY: Writing that makes no genuine attempt to extend what writing is capable of.

Around Nurse Swallow, the Trauma Team was moving smoothly into action. To her left, bending over the patient’s held open mouth, anaesthetist Sarah Felt slid a breathing tube down into the trachea. Patricia Parish, one of the most senior team-members, inserted a cannula into a vein in the left forearm, then attached the long plastic tube flowing out of a transparent saline bag. Other nurses moved swiftly in and out, bringing things, removing them.

Opposite her, standing back a little, Surgeon John Steele looked calmly on – it was not yet his time.

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Toby Litt. Hospital (2007).
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SIMON: In Hospital101, a list of 101 influences on Hospital, you include Ballard’s High-Rise — how so?

TOBY: In that the book is, to a great extent, the biography of the fabric of the building rather than of any particular character in it.

GWYN: You’re a guest at the Ballard conference at the UEA in May. What can we expect from your talk?

TOBY: I’m taking part in a panel. So, I’ll wait to see what questions come up. We should be discussing the most recent books.

SIMON: You actually took the creative writing course at the UEA, didn’t you? Was that helpful as a way into your professional writing career?

TOBY: It got me my break. Malcolm Bradbury chose four of my stories for an anthology called Class Work. It contained writing from the twenty-five years he’d been teaching there. Once that happened, I had a publisher approach me. Up until that point, I’d had about five years of solid rejection.

SIMON: Any final words on Ballard?

TOBY: I’d just like to say I admire his writing immensely. I think he is unique among British writers for the consistent extremity of his vision, and his willingness to engage with the stuff of now.

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..:: MORE INFO

+ From Shanghai to Shepperton: An International Conference on J.G. Ballard
+ Toby Litt interviews J.G. Ballard
+ Toby Litt on MySpace
+ Toby Litt homepage
+ Short film of Toby Litt’s short story, ‘Rare Books & Manuscripts’

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.”

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J.G. Ballard. ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’ (1992).
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by Benjamin Noys

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In the wake of Jean Baudrillard’s death, Ballardian presents Benjamin Noys’s essay exploring the ‘point of convergence between the writing of Jean Baudrillard and J.G. Ballard’. This is a slightly modified version of the article that appeared as ‘Crimes of the Near Future: Baudrillard / Ballard’, Ícone 9 (2006): 29-38, reproduced with Dr Noys’s permission.

Benjamin Noys is Lecturer in English at The University of Chichester. He is the author of Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction (2000) and The Culture of Death (2005).
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In his key work Simulacra and Simulations (1981) Jean Baudrillard lauded the British science-fiction writer J.G. Ballard’s novel Crash (1973) as ‘the first great novel of the universe of simulation’ (1994: 119). For Baudrillard it took science-fiction beyond its usual coordinates of imaginary future universes and towards our world as hyperreal (1994: 125). In this situation of the ‘precession of simulacra‘ (1991: 1, Baudrillard’s italics) theory becomes science-fiction and science-fiction becomes theory. Therefore we see a point of convergence between the writing of Jean Baudrillard and J. G. Ballard, which has developed as both try to ascertain the precise mutations of this new universe of simulation. Together they form a strange kind of Beckettian ‘pseudo-couple’: locked together as ‘Baudrillard-Ballard’ or ‘Ballard-Baudrillard’. Despite the fact that, unlike the most famous theoretical ‘pseudo-couple’ of Deleuze and Guattari, they have not collaborated together numerous points of exchange exist between them. This is not a neutral cooperation but often takes an antagonistic form; what Baudrillard calls the mode of alterity or ‘the duel’ (2005: 72). However, in this mode we find an increasingly shared diagnosis of the present and a ‘hypercriticism’ that tracks the fate of alterity (synonymous for Baudrillard with Otherness, difference, and negativity in their radical forms). If the universe of simulation aims at ‘a virtual universe from which everything dangerous and negative has been expelled’ (2005: 202) then alterity will be its victim.

This problem can be seen in what might seem an appropriately mediated reference to Baudrillard in Ballard’s recent novel Super-Cannes (2000): ‘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’ (88). Although this might be dismissed as a typically postmodern ironic ‘in-joke’ it actually speaks to the fate of alterity. The extremity of Baudrillard’s own theory becomes absorbed as a marketing tool by the culture industry, reduced to an unnamed quotation. What we can see here is a further mutation of the ‘perfect crime’ of the murder of alterity. This is a crime which also ‘erases its own tracks’ (Baudrillard, 2005: 197) by the production of new forms of simulated alterity. This then is the situation faced by the hypercritic; not only the extermination of any principle of alterity from which to make a critique but also the simulation of critique itself. It is precisely this mutation that both Baudrillard and Ballard engage with in their recent work.

Baudrillard’s example is that of auto-immune disorders (1993: 60-70). The more medicine eliminates disease the more it becomes haunted by disorders in which the body’s own immune system turns on itself. To avoid the disastrous consequences of this elimination of alterity the system of simulation introduces doses of homeopathic alterity (small amounts of alterity that keep the system in ‘health’ rather than leading it to turn on itself). In this way simulation goes so far as to simulate alterity, after it has ‘murdered’ its truly threatening forms. The result is a new form of what Baudrillard calls ‘trompe-l’oeil negativity’ (2005: 203), the simulated mirror-image of ‘real’ alterity. Although Baudrillard has laid a great deal of stress on this analysis recently, such as in Part II of The Transparency of Evil (1993: 113-174), it was present in his earlier work. In Simulacra and Simulation he remarks about the capacity of simulation ‘to regenerate a moribund principle through simulated scandal, phantasm, and murder – a sort of hormonal treatment through negativity and crisis’ (1994: 18-19). In fact it also bears close resemblance to the ‘artificial negativity’ thesis of Paul Piccone (1978) and the Telos group who, inspired by the work of the Frankfurt school, argued that the system required protest to buoy its functioning. Piccone argued the new left and other social movements of the 1960s were not real threats to the social system, but encouraged by the system to correct its own functioning. However, while he still sought an ‘organic negativity’ that could resist this process Baudrillard (and Ballard) instead trace the potential exacerbation of simulated alterity.

The murder of Otherness, of alterity, produces a new obsession with it and its return in what Baudrillard describes as ‘the melodrama of difference’ (1993: 124-138). For Baudrillard this is particularly true of forms of identity politics and other proclamations of the ‘right to difference’. In fact this always reduces alterity to something negotiable and actually refuses radical alterity. We can see further evidence for this ‘melodrama of difference’ in the toleration and funding of so-called ‘transgressive’ art – for example, in the symptomatic fact that Charles Saatchi, who made his fortune in advertising (including for the British Conservative party), was the chief patron of the ‘Sensation’ exhibition of New British Art. In this case the ‘melodrama’ generates the requisite shock while also being used to market the singular ‘new’ achievements of British culture. Outside of the still relatively ‘high’ domain of art we could also consider the fashion for ‘extreme’ works in popular film. Since Se7en (1995), which explores the baroque tortures inflicted by a serial killer, a whole range of contemporary films have exploited the horror of torture: Ôdishon [Audition] (1999), Saw (2004), Saw II (2005), Creep (2004), Wolf Creek (2005), and Hostel (2006) (to mention only the most well-known). Often they are seen as a reaction against the postmodern irony that has been prevalent in horror film since Scream (1996). In a sense, though, they offer a meta-irony; to make a ‘true’ horror film rather than a pastiche is simply to pastiche the ‘true’ horror film. This is evident in the way in which recent explicit remakes of 1970s horror films, such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003; original 1974) and The Hills Have Eyes (2006; original 1977), have returned to negativity of the ‘original’ film only all the more effectively to simulate it. Any political negativity present in the original is lost through a focus on more and more precise representations of bodily suffering.

Still from Wolf Creek (dir. Greg McLean, 2005).

This then is a situation of administered alterity and the hypercritic responds not by withdrawing into a position of disgust, ressentiment, or resignation, as does Paul Virilio (2003). Neither do they simply celebrate this new body-shock art as revealing the obverse ‘truth’ of our mediatised culture. Instead they try to exceed both the new forms of simulated alterity and those forms of critique which rely on an alterity that has now disappeared. In fact despite the seeming pessimism of this analysis, in which every instance of alterity is ‘always-already’ simulated, Baudrillard insists on the ‘Other’s indestructibility’ (1993: 146) and the need to reconstitute the radical Other ‘starting with the fragments and tracing its broken lines, its lines of fracture’ (1993: 155). The very capacity of simulation to simulate alterity actually threatens to overwhelm it, with radical alterity now taking a viral or catastrophic form that permeates simulation. Of course what remains contentious is not only the extent to which we accept this analysis, presented quite explicitly as a fiction, but also the mechanism or mechanisms by which this reversal, implosion or catastrophe is supposed to, or is, taking place. Here we re-encounter the notion of crime, but this time a crime directed against the original crime and its cover-up. This is the exacerbative approach, not returning to ‘organic negativity’ or celebrating the ‘truth’ of negativity, but committing a new crime, which will exceed the original.

In Ballard’s fiction this articulation of excess literalises Baudrillard’s metaphor of crime. This is particularly true of the novel Super-Cannes, which begins with Paul Sinclair, an aviation journalist, and his young wife Jane, a doctor, travelling to the business park of Eden-Olympia on the Côte d’Azur. While Paul is recovering from the effects of a flying accident Jane’s role is to replace the previous doctor David Greenwood, who went on a killing spree before killing himself. Almost immediately they arrive they encounter the threatening psychiatrist Wilder Penrose and take up residence in Greenwood’s old villa. With time on his hands, and increasingly obsessed with the fate of Greenwood, Paul Sinclair begins to investigate the circumstances of the killings. He slowly uncovers evidence that suggests both a network of criminality in the business park and that Greenwood was deliberately executed. Although it comes as no surprise to the reader, there is deliberately little mystery in this novel, the psychiatrist Wilder Penrose is the orchestrating figure. Suffocated by the banality and conformity of the park, which is totally regulated and simulated, the executives who lived there had begun to fall ill with minor and persistent ailments. Penrose’s solution was ‘a controlled and supervised madness’ (2001: 251) through a secret therapy programme of crime.

The novel ‘stages’ both the danger of simulation leading to the internal collapse of a social system and the way in which those who manage the system recognise this risk and ‘re-inject’ alterity. Penrose’s crime programme is directed outside the park in the form of violent raids (ratissages) against the local Arabs and blacks, robberies, and also child prostitution. It was Greenwood’s role in administering this programme, and especially his recognition of his own paedophilic desires, which led to his attack on the park. As Paul discovers it was not actually a wild striking out but a deliberate attempt to both punish those responsible and to uncover the ‘therapy’ programme. The novel ends with Paul setting out to complete the task at which Greenwood fails – another crime to expose this surreptitious criminality. Certainly Ballard’s novel is a fiction and, despite the seriousness of its subject matter, not without humour. However, Ballard’s recent work also puts into play the necessity for an apocalyptic or catastrophic violence to exceed the regulated violence of contemporary culture (see Gasiorek, 2005: 202-214) – to literally blow apart the limits of the existing order. Again the only way to exceed licensed transgression is through an out-bidding by another hypertransgression.

This process recalls Baudrillard’s analysis of potlatch, the gift exchange of so-called ‘primitive’ societies, as a process of ‘continual higher bidding in exchange’ (1998: 194). The excess emerges out of the acceleration of this bidding beyond any hope of containment or return. In the same way Paul Sinclair’s crime answers, and out-bids, both the failed crime of David Greenwood and the organised criminality of Wilder Penrose. It also conforms to Baudrillard’s description of the terrorist act as ‘at the same time a model of simulation, a micro-model flashing with a minimally real event and a maximal echo chamber’ (1983: 114). It belongs to the order of simulation, as it will be spectacular and an object of media interest, as was Greenwood’s original crime. Also, it functions as a micro-model of dissident resistance against the organisation of alterity: the ‘real event’ here being the eruption of a ‘real’ alterity. Finally, as an echo chamber, it expands beyond the immediate context of the novel as fiction, resonating in the mediascape of contemporary culture. What is also crucial is that Ballard does not actually describe this act; it remains a virtual future left in all its potential ambiguity. Rather than provide another representation of radical alterity, bringing the crime back into simulation, Ballard’s novel marks its ‘presence’ in the form of an absence. The perfect crime of the murder of alterity and its simulation is ‘matched’ or out-bid by another crime that never occurs, and may not actually occur, in the fictional universe.

Still from 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (dir. Michael Haneke, 1994).

This is very similar to the recent work of Baudrillard. Although he does not have the license of fiction for him the out-bidding of the perfect crime takes place in thought: ‘[o]ur only hope lies in a criminal and inhumane kind of thought’ (2001: 61). The substance of Baudrillard’s thought has, as we have seen, remained quite constant. Therefore I want to suggest that this ‘criminal and inhumane kind of thought’ for which he strives is rather more a question of form. Since what we might call Baudrillard’s ‘simulated sociology’ (the last great work being Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976)), which at least mimicked existing academic forms, his work has increasingly been articulated through disruptive formal strategies. His use of aphorism, impressionistic or journalistic writing (the bête noir of academic writing), fragments, diaries, and so on, work towards a hypercritical writing, which is itself implosive or catastrophic. The reason for these strategies is, again, the refusal to simply stage or represent the ‘indestructible Other’. Instead the fragmentary form of his work circulates around it, registering its destabilising and implosive effects through writing. This is Baudrillard game of seduction: seducing simulated alterity into contact with the distortive ‘black hole’ of radical alterity.

Of course it is worth noting that there is nothing particularly original in these strategies per se, which can be found in thinkers like Pascal, Lichtenberg, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Lyotard. Each, in their own way, also chose these forms to explore the effects of a radical alterity which cannot be spoken of directly. However, unlike the tendency of these thinkers to put everything on the side of subjectivity Baudrillard insists on the ‘Object’ as the final figure of otherness (1993: 172). The Object is not present as such but functions as a ‘vanishing point’, and the role of theory is to mimic the challenge of the Object (1993: 173). Despite this difference the manoeuvre is fundamentally similar, and perhaps even closer to his contemporaries like Lévinas and Derrida. A radically fragmentary writing attests, through its fragmentation, gaps, and absences, to the ‘strange attractor’ that is the Object. The risk in this invocation of absolute alterity is that something will be lost: Baudrillard’s concrete tracing of the effects of simulation and alterity in the mediascape. For all its fictionality and Baudrillard’s studious avoidance of the scholarship of media studies his extreme thinking always anchored itself in the actuality of the present. In his choice of conventionally unconventional writing strategies and a conventionally unconventional thought of the Other this threatens to disappear in an unspecific and generalised invocation of absolute alterity.

In the terminology of Alain Badiou, we might locate Baudrillard as part of the dissident tradition of ‘anti-philosophy’ (see Hallward, 2003: 20-23). According to Badiou this ‘tradition’ poses an ineffable transcendent meaning against philosophy, and often does so in fragmentary anti-systematic forms. Although he does not deign to mention Baudrillard his list of anti-philosophers includes most of the figures mentioned above. Identifying unequivocally with philosophy, in a new rationalist form, Badiou argues that the fundamental orientation of anti-philosophy is theological. Lurking behind the transcendent meaning or figure of radical alterity is God. From this point of view Baudrillard’s ‘criminal thought’ would be another attenuated religiosity, searching for an ever-receding mystical intuition of the ‘Object’. Now Baudrillard himself, in Simulacra and Simulation, realised the danger of the ‘anti-’position of simply being opposed to an existing form or discourse (1994: 19). In precisely the terms I have been discussing the ‘anti-’ position is one of simulated alterity, by means of which dead forms sustain themselves. Instead of destroying what it opposes, the pose of opposition supports and sustains it. The irony is that Baudrillard and Ballard’s invocation of the extreme crime might all too easily sustain the system of simulation they are subjecting to hypercriticism. Rather than out-bidding and accelerating simulated alterity the danger is providing a new form of simulated alterity. They are both transfixed by the possibility of a truly authentic criminal act always just out of reach. This is made even more ironic by the media fascination with ‘true crime’ – from CCTV footage of criminal acts to the fascinated horror of accounts of the activities of serial killers. Therefore I am suggesting that Baudrillard’s ‘criminal and inhumane kind of thought’ is not criminal and inhumane enough.

Passivity and inertia — the way forward? Photo by Emiliano Granado.

Isn’t the problem that this criticism simply leaves us in the position, so often made by critics of Baudrillard, of an absolute pessimism in the face of inescapable systems? ‘Criminal thought’ is a failure and so we have no escape from the reign of simulated alterity, other than a quite literal faith in the Other. I want to take another line of thought developed by Baudrillard as a line of flight out of this impasse of obsession with the radical crime. His earlier text In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1983) avoids the language of radical alterity and the Other. Instead Baudrillard explores how the masses, the ‘silent majorities’, offer ‘the strength of inertia, the strength of the neutral’ (1983: 2). Rather than the masses incarnating any sort of excessive energy or reservoir of transgressive alterity it is their very muteness which threatens. The text makes an explicit break with sociology, including media sociology, by refusing the operation of the ascription of meaning. This refusal is undertaken in the name of the masses, which, like the new theorist (or post-theorist) are indifferent to meaning. Here we can see a strange connection traced between the indifference of the masses and the indifference of the theorist. Not that Baudrillard simply falls into the trap of being the spokesperson for this indifference, which would immediately nullify it. Instead the masses indicate the way forward for theory through passivity and inertia that refuses to respond to the relentless incitement of the media: ‘Bombarded with stimuli, messages and tests, the masses are simply an opaque, blind stratum’ (1983: 21). What is also different is the mode of challenge they offer. They do not exacerbate alterity through a further crime, or excessive violence, instead they follow the fatal strategy of hyperconformity.

As Baudrillard puts it ‘You want us to consume – O.K., let’s consume always more, and anything whatsoever; for any useless and absurd purpose’ (1983: 46). Let’s take the previous example I used of new extreme horror films. They seem to incarnate a logic of simulated alterity and invite either horrified disgust or perverse celebration, both operations of giving meaning to them. What about those spectators who take the films precisely as it often seem they are intended, as a game? The game is ‘what have you got to show me?’, ‘how far will you go?’, but rather than a perverse logic of escalation or desensitisation, it is a matter of indifference. Instead of searching for an alterity that would push beyond the screen, or even the viral return of the alterity, say in forms of mimicking of the violence shown, we simply have a passive response to it as a game. There is no alterity here, but only play.

One of the so-called ‘video nasties’ of the 1970s, Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (1972), had the tagline ‘To avoid fainting, keep repeating “It’s only a movie … It’s only a movie…”‘. The playful assumption of the tagline is that the audience will identify so much with what they are watching that they will be overcome unless they remind themselves that they are only watching a film. This sense of identification with the film has also been a common assumption in film theory, especially in its psychoanalytic forms [1]. However, what if the audience does not have to keep repeating ‘it’s only a movie’ to avoid fainting? What if they recognise this simulated alterity as what it is and hyperconform to it? They play a game with the film by not treating it as real, but at the same time conforming to its effects of horror. This does not involve a simple fascination with finding an authentic transgressive excess but rather a blank passivity. In some senses it might be suggested that the increasingly extremity of recent horror films responds to this audience inertia; as this over-involvement absorbs simulated alterity the filmmakers must ‘up the stakes’, only to encounter another level of inertia. Certainly these are my own highly speculative suggestions, but I think they indicate something that Baudrillard’s own recent invocations of criminal thought and radical alterity step-back from in his own work. What is being avoided is banality in favour of the transgressive crime.

This argument for the banality of the media and the hyperconformity of the masses to this banality has implications for our strategies of response that have not fully been exhausted. Within academia it is a familiar accusation that media studies is banal. In that most directly Baudrillardian of novels White Noise (1984) the character Murray, a lecturer on ‘living icons’, remarks ‘I understand music, I understand the movies, I even see how comic books can tell us things. But there are full professors in the place who read nothing but cereal boxes’; his friend replies ‘It’s the only avant-garde we’ve got’ (1999: 10). This exchange indicates something interesting, with a remark about the banality of the object being answered with the suggestion that this is our avant-garde. It identifies one of the key modes by which media studies has often justified itself: as an avant-garde political gesture. Therefore against the supposed banality of the object the media studies scholar replies by finding within that object, or more exactly in its use by the consumer, strategies of transgression or its synonyms (subversion, resistance, alterity, etc.). In this way the banality of the object is redeemed through its association with political or cultural transgression. At the same time the activity of the scholar is also redeemed from banality due to its political import, which is revealed by the superior insight of the critic. On the other side, that of cultural producers, the game of transgression is also played to elevate their own products to the status of transgressive objects. In this way academia and cultural producers position themselves with a self-confirming loop of transgression.

The ‘criminal’ gesture of Baudrillard and Ballard could easily be regarded as simply a hyperbolic extension of this line of argument. They claim that although the kind of everyday transgressions identified by media scholars or practiced by cultural producers are part of the society of simulated alterity there is still a radical alterity beyond representation. This might appear to be a radical ‘out-bidding’ but it falls within the same ‘avant-garde’ logic, as well as drawing radical alterity back into representation. In a sense it retains a faith in a pure product of transgression in relation to which every actual gesture of transgression, whether critical or artistic, must necessarily fall short. The alternative I am suggesting is to reply to the critic of the banality of the media in the mode of hyperconformity: ‘You accuse the media of being banal? O.K. what I do as a critic or producer is banal, more banal and useless than you could ever know!’. The advantage of this hyperconformist response lies not simply in disarming the critic. It refuses to justify the media object in other terms (political or artistic, for example) and it refuses the frantic invocation of transgression. The account that Baudrillard and Ballard give of simulated alterity suggests that transgression is not actually transgressive; it is rather that transgression is boring. Although de Sade is often regarded as the original thinker of transgression he already came to this insight in his account of the final apathy of the libertine (see Klossowski, 1992: 28-34).

To play the game of transgression is to fall within an unacknowledged banality, as well as to continue to sustain the dead forms of contemporary culture. Therefore it is a matter of pushing through and completing the banality of transgression. Of course this hyper-conformity can easily fall back into plain conformity, such as with the American artist Jeff Koons in his ‘Banality’ show of 1988. As he put it ‘[m]y work tries to present itself as the underdog. It takes a position that people must embrace everything’ (in Muthesius (ed.), 1992: 107). However, the withdrawal that I am tracing is not quiescent, but the refusal of the immediate equation of certain content with transgression and the refusal of the conformity of transgression itself. It is an attention to the politics of form. In particular it is an attention to that banality that Ballard accessed through science-fiction. As he stated in 1971:

The subject matter of SF is the subject matter of everyday life: the gleam on refrigerator cabinets, the contours of a wife’s or husband’s thighs passing the newsreel images on a color TV set, the conjuncture of musculature and chromium artifact within an automobile interior, the unique postures of passengers on an airport escalator (1984: 100).

Even, we might add, a cereal box.

Ushering in Banality (Jeff Koons, 1988). Photo by Henrike Schulte.

What is produced in Ballard’s work on the 1970s, and partly what attracted Baudrillard to it, is the refusal of the ascription of meaning and a free-floating attention to the ‘invisible literature’ that shapes our cultural landscapes. In Baudrillard’s reading of Crash precisely what he refused was Ballard’s positioning of the novel as traditional criticism, or his enclosing it within the logic of perversion (Baudrillard, 1994: 113). Instead of a world of transgression we have world ‘without desire’ (Baudrillard, 1994: 118). I want to suggest then that their more recent work functions still as a diagnostic but risks regression to a fascination with transgression rather than what Baudrillard calls the ‘dull splendor of banality or of violence’ (1994: 119). The return to those previous positions is then a matter of rethinking the exacerbative possibilities of form without conceding to a fixing of the form of alterity in the absolute crime or the totally Other. Contrary to the desire to find a real future crime we might follow Baudrillard’s previous suggestion for a fatal strategy: becoming-banal.

[1] For a convincing critique of this assumption see Smith (1995).

Benjamin Noys

..:: BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ballard, J. G. (1984) ‘Fictions of Every Kind’ (1971), Re/Search 8/9: JG Ballard, eds. V. Vale and Andrea Juno: 98-100.
___. (2000) Super-Cannes. London: Flamingo.

Baudrillard, J. (1983) In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities. Trans. P. Foss, J. Johnston and P. Patton. New York: Semiotext(e).
___. (1993) The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. Trans. J. Benedict. London and New York: Verso.
___. (1994) Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. S. F. Glaser. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
___. (1996) The Perfect Crime. Trans. C. Turner. London and New York: Verso.
___. (1998) ‘When Bataille Attacked the Metaphysical Principle of Economy,’ in F. Botting and S. Wilson (eds) Bataille: A Critical Reader. Oxford and Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 191-195.
___. (2001) ‘From Radical Incertitude, or Thought as Impostor,’ in: S. Lotringer and S. Cohen (eds) French Theory in America. London and New York: Routledge, 59-69.
___. (2005) The Conspiracy of Art. Ed. S. Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e).

DeLillo, D. (1999) White Noise. London: Picador.

Gasiorek, A. (2005) J. G. Ballard. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.

Hallward, P. (2003) Badiou: A Subject to Truth. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Klossowski, P. (1992) Sade My Neighbour. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. London: Quartet Books.

Muthesius, A. (ed.) (1992) Jeff Koons. Cologne: Taschen.

Piccone, P. (1978) ‘The Crisis of One-Dimensionality’. Telos 35: 43-54.

Smith, M. (1995) Engaging Characters. Oxford: Clarendon.

Virilio, P. (2003) Art and Fear. Trans. Julie Rose. London and New York: Continuum.

Well, I’ll try certainly try within the next 10 years. Currently busy working my way through the Los Angeles Yellow Pages, the latest IKEA catalogue, the Operation Paget findings, a research report on outer suburban high-rise housing, a sex manual for incontinents, a few company reports (mainly businesses dealing in storm drains and aluminum cladding for houses) and a report on salinity in the Melbourne wetlands, all in order to understand Ballard more.

That’s the trouble with invisible literature — it never ends. There is no canon.

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

Bruce Sterling is a prolific science-fiction writer, futurist, social critic and design professor, best known for his bestselling novels and seminal short fiction, and as the editor of the Mirrorshades anthology that defined the ‘cyberpunk’ subgenre. His nonfiction includes works of futurism such as Tomorrow Now; a regular column and blog for Wired; and his Viridian Design listserv that presciently riffs on climate-change issues and Green design. He’s also wrapping up a one-year tenure as Visionary in Residence at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. In his hometown of Austin, Texas, Sterling sat down in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, after a day spent visiting the local evacuee center, to talk about the continued importance of JG Ballard in an increasingly apocalyptic world.

————————————————————————————————————————–
Chris Nakashima-Brown writes short fiction and criticism in Austin, Texas. See www.nakashima-brown.net for more.
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So, have you read any Ballard lately?

I read Super-Cannes and the User’s Guide to the Millennium essays. And I come across his critical work with some regularity – newspapers columns, interviews and so forth.

Yeah, he’s kind of a regular in all of the English newspapers.

He is. He’s doing a lot of occasional journalism these days. It’s surprising how often I’ll be reading something and just think to myself “Gosh, this is so lucid and stimulating and – wait a minute, this is Ballard!”

You wrote in the introduction to Mirrorshades that Ballard had a key role in cyberpunk.

I think I may have name-checked him in the introduction to that book, but that wasn’t the half of it. Ballard was the first science-fiction writer I ever read who really blew my mind. I was reading a lot of basic Andre Norton ‘space-squid’ nonsense at the time – I must have been 13 or 14 – then I read The Crystal World. And the assumptions behind The Crystal World were so radically different and ontologically disturbing compared to common pulp-derived SF. If you just look at the mechanisms of the suspension of disbelief in The Crystal World, it’s like, okay, time is vibrating on itself and this has caused the growth of a leprous crystal…whatever. There’s never any kind of fooforah about how the scientist in his lab is going to understand this phenomenon, and reverse it, and save humanity. It’s not even a question of anybody needing to understand what’s going on in any kind of instrumental way. On the contrary, the whole structure of the thing is just this kind of ecstatic surreal acceptance. All Ballard disaster novels are vehicles of psychic fulfilment. But at the age of 14 I couldn’t begin to think in terminology like that. All I knew was that there was something going on in this book that was radically different from the sensibility of everything else I had seen.

They’re narrative laboratories, right? They’re constructed to explore the subconsciousness of the humans that inhabit them rather than getting at it the other way around.

Sort of. Ballard’s a medical student. And he’s also a guy who’s really good at pastiching things that he finds in the wastebasket: the sterile language of the Warren Commission or crash-injury textbooks. He’s really good at repurposing found material. It’s like Mark Pauline – you ask him, “Gee, Mark, how do you make your machines so monstrous?” Pauline says, “I try to get close to them and understand what it is they’re really trying to do”. Right? So it doesn’t surprise me that Pauline is a big Ballard fan, because Ballard has a very similar approach. If you show him some kind of techno-social-medical innovation, he’s always trying to peel it back and understand it from the unconscious urgings that power it.

So how do you position him as an influence on you and the other seminal cyberpunks? Would cyberpunk have happened without him?

Well, I’m sure cyberpunk would have happened without him because cyberpunk is just science fiction by another name. It’s just another attempt, another wave of technical development, and another wave of literateurs trying to jump the gap between the two cultures. Trying to literarily repurpose the computer revolution. And Ballard is someone who’s really good at repurposing scientific material to literary purposes without ever speaking that kind of spavined pop science-ese. The kind of lame language that says something like [holds up digital camera]: “You know, if you could see the tiny grooves that have been carved on the chip of this digital camera, why they would stretch to the moon and back three-and-a-half times!” Which is an attempt to invest wonder in a dry, industrial process. It’s the Carl Sagan school of trying to pump mystic scientism into the dryness of physics. There’s just something phoney-baloney about it because it’s taking an intellectual process that’s very much about methodically stripping the mystery out of natural phenomena and then trying to re-mystify it by approaching it from some more “friendly” sensibility. And there’s just something bogus about that. It has the bogusness of an adult telling a pre-pubertal child about the birds and the bees without talking about the burning needs of sexuality.

That’s what a lot of pop science writing is like. It talks down to the reader, and it covers the stark majesty of Euclidean insight with redigested pap. You don’t get that kind of talking down from Ballard. He’s someone who really seems at ease in the science world, basically because he was writing for science magazines in the early years of bitter struggle. He knew how to get the stuff, translate it down, and pass it out to the readers of technical mags. So he’s not buffaloed by the material. He doesn’t go in for mystic scientism. He doesn’t dress things up in any kind of literary majesty or outrageous metaphors or phoney-baloney sideshows, style, extended similes.

Is he a science-fiction writer?

Oh, yeah. In some sense he’s the only science-fiction writer. He’s a figure who ranks with Stanislaw Lem in that regard, I think. He’s just repurposed the tools of the genre to such a tremendous extent that he’s doing things that are unheard of. He’s like a Hendrix figure who’s, like, this guy that picks up a guitar and instead of doing the things you expect to hear from a guitar, there are notes coming out of it that are like flutes and saxophones. That’s the kind of creative idiosyncrasy that Ballard brings to the genre.

But he’s not extrapolating anything. He’s not a futurist, is he?

Well, he is a futurist, and he’s always extrapolating something or other, but he’s usually extrapolating dark motivations.

More social science than physical science?

No, I don’t think it’s even social science. I mean, a book like Crash is like a guy who’s studied hardcore porn, like bondage porn. The kind of porn where people are so trussed up in like ropes and bags that it’s weirdly asexual, like latex porn, or one of these really extreme levels of fetishism that are close to mental breakdown. And he’s thought: why doesn’t someone do this with cars? That’s an extrapolation. It’s like saying, okay, given A and given C, given latex porn, what about people who have sex with car collisions? And in point of fact, there doesn’t seem to be a reason why people couldn’t get obsessed with car collisions. On the face of it it’s like saying, given a car, why not a flying car – which is a very standard sci-fi extrapolation.

Ballard is one of the few people who would extrapolate that kind of interiority in the human psyche – to say, okay, given bondage porn, why not cars colliding? Take his story “Manhole 69″ – it’s about an experiment that renders people sleepless, and they end up with attacks of claustrophobia. They’re sort of liberated and they don’t sleep, and at the end they succumb to a massive mental breakdown where they feel like their psyches have been crushed in a box. And that’s an extrapolation, but it’s an extrapolation along the lines of madness. It involves someone thinking about the human reaction to technical innovation in a way which is not cut and dried. It’s not design thinking, it’s not science thinking, it’s not technical thinking, it’s not medical thinking – it’s really surreal thinking.

Is it the reaction to technical developments that makes it science fiction, or is it the surreal element?

Well I don’t know what else you would call it besides science fiction, because it posits a breakthrough. It’s got cognitive estrangement. It’s got an arc of idea development. In some sense it’s a reasonable extrapolation, but it’s also just very horrifying, and you don’t see many science-fiction writers who are willing to push that line of development – the flaws in the human psyche and what might happen under such circumstances.

You mention Lem. Are there other writers within the genre that you think come at science fiction from a similar angle?

Well, the British New Wave writers. Aldiss’s Barefoot in the Head – that’s a pretty Ballardian work. But Aldiss is very prolific and he can sort of do anything for anybody, whereas Ballard does stick to his last.

A lot of his work has an apocalyptic setting, similar to more contemporary climate-catastrophe works from people like Kim Stanley Robinson; some of your mid-90s work has that going on. Ballard comes at it from a very different angle, like he’s one of these cosy English catastrophe-school writers, but with a perverse enjoyment of the liberating aspects of the disaster.

Well, I think it’s Ballard’s youthful acceptance of life in a prison camp that allows him to cheerfully look at the major breakdowns of the bourgeois world and accept them. Lem is very much the same way. I remember Lem saying something along the lines that the Nazi concentration camps had conclusively destroyed the ability of literature to be written about the individual – that from now on you could only write serious work with the scope of the annihilation of a whole population. It simply made no sense to write to any scale less grand than a response to genocide. Lem has the experience of somebody who has witnessed the unspeakable. It’s like going out one day and finding your capital city reduced to ruins by Stuka bombers – that gives him a grandeur of the imagination.

< < Italo Calvino

Do you suppose the next Ballard or Lem is going to come out of the Ninth Ward?

Well, I’m not sure if we saw the next Ballard or Lem we’d be able to recognise them as such. We’d just say, well, okay, he’s William Vollman, or whoever. He’d be as sui generis as these other two characters. You know, another guy who I think is oddly in Ballard’s camp in some profound way is Calvino.

Absolutely.

Yeah. Calvino is similar because his work is very extrapolative in a lot of ways, an Oulipo-style mathematical game playing. A Calvino story will posit something unusual, and then it’s chewed over from a whole mathematical-philosophical perspective. And there’s a great deal of mental fireworks in it, but it’s not the sort of thing that makes your Analog engineer-reader slap his forehead with a sense of fulfilment: “Oh, that’s my kind of story”. No, afraid not.

Some of your work has some really overt Ballardian influences, like “The Beautiful and the Sublime,” where you have these people hanging out at this kind of Alpine Vermilion Sands, and you have grounded astronauts and people flying gliders and they’re all very bourgeois and it’s got this English parlour thing going on – it’s a beautiful story, like the kinder and gentler aspects of Ballard. Are you cognisant of those similarities?

I internalised the guy’s work at an early age but I never wanted to write a Ballard pastiche, any more than I would have wanted to write an Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiche. There have been moments in stories where I’ve written a phrase and thought, “Well, that’s very Jimmy Ballard”. But I wouldn’t dare write a Ballard story. I just wouldn’t do it.

Do you perceive that he had a similar influence on some of the other seminal cyberpunks like Gibson or Neal Stephenson?

Lew Shiner talked a lot about Ballard – he was a Ballard fan. Gibson is certainly a Ballard reader. A lot of cyberpunks were major Anglophiles. We’re really kind of New Wave 2.0, and if you were into New Wave, you really had to be into British New Wave because that was where it was happening. Of course, I’m a Harlan Ellison disciple, so I’m American New Wave by right of inheritance. But, yeah, you had to read Ballard. I know for a fact that John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly and a lot of the other humanist writers were jealously anxious of Ballard. They didn’t appreciate the idea that cyberpunks were somehow appropriating this guy – someone they really thought of as a hero of their own – as somebody who was willing to write real literary fiction about scientific things, without doing these annoying cyberpunk tropes like “my deck’s got more RAM than yours”.

How do you think it is that Ballard transcended the genre in terms of critical acceptance?

Well, mostly because he really knows what he’s talking about. Ballard can write a movie review that I would dare any other science-fiction writer to do. Science-fiction writers can’t write about popular culture, even high culture, without trotting out their own self-importance. Which is sort of humiliating. Ballard never does that. He’s said things that are very affirmative about science fiction, like “it’s the only true literature of the twentieth century,” “Earth is the only alien planet,” and other wise things. Ballard’s the kind of guy – the kind of science-fiction writer – who can put on a performance in a pop art gallery that would cause a riot! If you took most science-fiction writers and dropped them in a pop-art gallery, they’d be saying things like “I didn’t get it about Picasso”, or “I kind of like Bridget Riley op art. Is that her real name, Bridget Riley?” They wouldn’t grab the bit between their teeth and push the world of artistic expression to a place that caused people to freak out.

There’s a disconnect between the science-fiction community and the rest of popular culture.

Well, science fiction’s a form of popular culture. But if you’d look at most science-fiction practitioners, they basically come across like a Nashville hat act. They’re hicks.

William Gibson wrote an introduction last year to Eileen Gunn’s short story collection, Stable Strategies, in which he recalled his younger self yearning for SF as Bohemia. Ballard seems like he really pulls that off in the context of London in the swinging Sixties. He takes the genre more into the same territory as abstract painters or pop-art practitioners.

I think that’s right. And of course he’s a real scholar of the surrealist movement – he really gets it about André Breton and Max Ernst and the other surrealists. Take early Ballard books like Crystal World with its Ernst frottage cover – that wasn’t by accident. He just has better taste than most science-fiction writers. He’s better read than most science-fiction writers. He takes a coherent intellectual interest in things that aren’t science or technology or engineering. He’s cognisant of those things because he’s got a more variegated tool set. He’s better read. He’s a widely travelled guy. He’s a child of the diaspora. He grew up in China, mostly. He’s not a Little England kind of guy. There’s nothing parochial about him. He never succumbs to nationalist cant. He’s not religious. He just has imagination on the cosmic scale. He’s a hard guy to surprise.

Ballard wrote in the French introduction to Crash that “science fiction is the only true literature of the twentieth century”. Is that still relevant in the 21st century?

I’m not sure that that’s going to hold any water. But I would bet that, in the 22nd century, if someone read that, then Ballard, and if they themselves were of a Ballardian frame of mind, then they would certainly agree with him. Unfortunately, they would also think that if science fiction was the only true form of literature in the twentieth century, it’s only genuine practitioner was JG Ballard. Which may in fact be the case. The judgment of history is still out, but my suspicion is that he has a better chance of being read in a hundred years than ninety percent of his colleagues.

What about Burroughs? Ballard seems to talk about Burroughs a lot. Do you think he can be situated in the same territory roughly?

No. I think Ballard is actually about ten times smarter than Burroughs. I mean, Burroughs is like a drunk who found a sharpened screwdriver in the gutter. His work is claptrap, but it’s marvellous claptrap. So that gives it a weird demented Bohemian majesty. Whereas Ballard is a very fastidious kind of guy who’s very much on top of his game. He’s willing to stare into the same abyss as Burroughs, but he’d never sit there in a heroin stupor as the abyss started eating its way up his leg. You look at the colleagues of Burroughs and you just tick off the body count. It’s unbelievable. Whereas the colleagues of Ballard did pretty well for themselves. Burroughs may be a greater artist than Ballard, because he’s really pushing right past, and over, the edge. But I think Ballard as a creative figure is much more on top of his game than Burroughs. His muse is not a carnivore. He doesn’t have a monkey on his back. He’s really in command of his material.

Over the course of his career we’ve seen this retreat from conventional science-fictional settings and situations, at least in the novels, where we start out with the post-apocalyptic scenarios of the early novels, and then we go to the 70s novels – the urban laboratories of Crash, Concrete Island, and High Rise – and on to the contemporary novels, set in a very contemporary setting with very apparently conventional protagonists: Super-Cannes, Cocaine Nights, and Millennium People, where we have middle-class revolutionaries in Chelsea. Any thoughts on what drives that kind of progression?

Well, probably living in Shepperton…

I see similar trends with the cyberpunks: you and William Gibson and Neal Stephenson all write books that have a more contemporary setting. Your most recent novel, The Zenith Angle, is a kind of contemporary, cyberpunky techno thriller; Gibson’s last book, Pattern Recognition, is a post-9/11 quasi-thriller about a cool hunter…

I don’t know. You get good at something and you want to refine it. I think young men have a lot of trouble just keeping the muse down to a hard, steady glow. You tend to see an awful lot of fireworks when you’re a young science-fiction writer, and you tend to use a lot of found material, which I think Ballard did. You look at Ballard, you find a truly deracinated guy in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, in the Air Force with nothing to do with himself, suddenly discovering American pulp magazines and thinking, “Jesus, I had no idea this stuff even existed”. So he finds his toolkit at hand and he repurposes all of it. That was certainly the case in the first three books I wrote. They’re all stock material and I’m just trying to bring them up to date, file off the serial numbers, and adjust them to my own sensibility.

Do you perceive a lingering influence of Ballard and the other British New Wave writers in the new British SF?

< < China Mieville

You know, I’d like to say that I did, but I don’t know. There is a kind of edginess to, say, China Mieville – this kind of really “go for the Grand Guignol” thing, something you don’t see American fantasy writing do very much. British SF and fantasy generally just has a broader emotional palette than American fantasy. But the new British space opera, or even British New Weird, doesn’t feel particularly Ballardian to me. They really feel like the Beatles repurposing Chuck Berry or Little Richard. I mean, these are guys who were reading mostly American cultural product and recognising that the Americans had fallen mute in some terrible way and this is their chance to really step out onto the stage and play the pipe organ.

Who’s the real standard bearer in American sci fi these days, other than people who are just writing rack product?

I would guess it would be something like Small Beer Press or maybe McSweeney’s – if you want to read something that will make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, that would be where you would go. I mean, that really has a very British feel to it. McSweeney’s feels British to me – you read it and it’s all these arch little overeducated statements by guys who are making sort of dry, semi-British kinds of…I don’t know, it’s weird.

Ballard’s early novels were centred on environmental disasters: the environmental devastation is used as the excuse for the creation of a surreal landscape with its own strange logic. Do you see a new awareness of these issues of environmental disaster in the genre? Do you think that science fiction has a role to play in that debate?

I guess. There’s The Drought, The Wind From Nowhere, Crystal World, The Drowned World – his apprentice works. Those works, to me, don’t show any serious environmental awareness; The Wind From Nowhere is literally a wind from nowhere, which makes no sense on the face of it. It’s not like it’s a work of meteorological extrapolation. This isn’t Kim Stanley Robinson manfully tackling climate change. It’s really a guy who saw his world comprehensively destroyed as a young man trying to come to terms with what he himself went through, I think. They’re classic period pieces. The subtext of all those works is British imperial decline. If the question is whether we’re going to be seeing more works of imperial decline, then yeah, I’d be forecasting a few of those, actually. That wouldn’t surprise me a bit.

Do you see any early tremors of that out there?

I don’t know. My suspicion is that in another four to five years you’re going to find people writing about climate change in the same way they wrote about the nuclear threat in the 50s. It’s just going to be in every story every time. People are going to come up with a set of climate-change tropes, like three-eyed mutants and giant two-headed whatevers, because this is the threat of our epoch and it just becomes blatantly obvious to everybody. Everybody’s going to pile on to the bandwagon and probably reduce the whole concept to kindling. That may be the actual solution to a genuine threat of Armageddon – to talk about it so much that it becomes banal.

To me these late-Ballard pieces, these Shepperton pieces – Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes and so forth – really seem like gentle chiding from somebody who’s recognised that his civilisation really has gone mad. They’re a series of repetitions that say, “Look, we’re heading for a world where consensus reality really is just plain unsustainable, and the ideas that the majority of our people hold in their heart of hearts are just not connected to reality”. I think that may be a very prophetic assessment on his part. I think we may in fact be in such a world right now – where people have really just lost touch with the “reality-based community” and are basically just living in self-generated fantasy echo chambers that have no more to do with the nature of geopolitical reality than Athanasius Kircher or Castaneda’s Don Juan.

Any reasons for optimism?

Well, yeah. I think it’s an optimistic thing that Ballard’s lived a long time. He’s sort of a great, spreading oak tree, really. If you had looked at the wild boys of the British New Wave in their heyday, you might’ve thought, “Oh, well, they’ll all hang themselves,” or “They’ll throw themselves into the sea like beatniks,” or “This will end in murder”. And if anybody was going to come to a wicked end, it would have been Jimmy Ballard – the obsessive, the psychotic crank, the man who’s staring right into the eyes of it. His condensed novels [collected in The Atrocity Exhibition] really have a freak-out quality to them. But he didn’t die of that. On the contrary, he just sort of fed on it. You can read his critical works now and he’s obviously in full possession of his senses. He’s funny, he’s on top of his game. He’s still an interesting guy to read even though he’s at an advanced age now. He’s got things to say that are remarkable and make you feel better about things and really demonstrate some analytical insight. I envy that. I hope that if I live that long I have that many marbles left in my little velvet drawstring bag. To me that’s reason for optimism. I don’t like to call it optimism, because as a futurist I think there’s something wrong with that term. If you say you’re optimistic or pessimistic about the future, it’s just giving you an excuse to place a patch over one eye and ignore half of the determining factors. You should struggle hard not to be optimistic or pessimistic about a future prospect. What you should do is be engaged and in command of the facts. So to be optimistic or pessimistic are really intellectual vices. But on the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with a role model.

Ballard is somebody who really has something to say. He’s saying it to a lot of different people. He’s never sold out, never wrote a cheesy trilogy. He had movies made of his books. He recovered. He didn’t care. They were okay movies, even. He had some money. His children grew to adulthood. He has grandchildren. He was never arrested. He hasn’t been in a jail or a clinic. He’s not Jeffrey Archer. He didn’t come to a bad end. He’s not an alcoholic. He has a life that many people would envy. And justly so. To that end, I feel very pleased about him. Not that I am an optimist about him or his worldview. I would not want him to have another worldview. I’m not going to criticise his sensibility. He’s a great artist. He’s given something very few people can give; in his case, he’s the only one who could possibly have given that. He gave a lot of it, it was good, it was consistently interesting. What more does one want?

..::: LINKS
>> Beyond the Beyond (Bruce Sterling’s blog)
>> Viridian Design
>> Art Center College of Design
>> Survival Research Labs/Mark Pauline
>> McSweeney’s