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

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

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

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

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

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

Simon Sellars, June 2009.

From the files of Dr Ricardo Battista’s assistant, School of Specialization in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Melbourne, Australia.

“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.

The eminent plastic surgeon Ricardo Battista has remarked that one of the great misfortunes of the cosmetic surgeon is that he only has the technical skill, ability and understanding to correct this situation by surgical means. However, as long as people are prepared to pay fees for this treatment the necessary operation will be performed. Incisions made across the neck with the object of removing redundant tissue should be avoided. These scars tend to be unduly prominent and may prove to be the subject of litigation. In the case of Michael Jackson the incision was designed to be almost completely obscured by his hair and ears.

Surgical Procedure: an incision was made in Michael Jackson’s temple running downward and backward to the apex of his ear. From here a crease ran toward his lobule in front of the ear, and the incision followed this crease around the lower margin of the lobule to a point slightly above the level of the tragus. From there, at an obtuse angle, it was carried backward and downward within the hairy margin of the scalp.

The edges of the incision were then undermined. First with a knife and then with a pair of scissors, Jackson’s skin was lifted forward to the line of his jaw. The subcutaneous fatty tissue was scraped away with the knife. Large portions of connective tissue cling to the creases formed by frown lines, and some elements of these were retained in order to preserve the facial personality of the King of the Pop. At two places the skin was pegged down firmly. The first was to the scalp at the top of his ear, the second was behind the ear to the scalp over the mastoid process. The first step was to put a strong suture in the correct position between the cheek flap anterior to the first point, and a second strong suture to the neck flap behind the ear. The redundant tissue was then cut away and the skin overlap removed with a pair of scissors.

At this point the ear was moved forward toward the chin, and the wound was then closed with interrupted sutures. It did not matter how strong the stitches were behind the ears because that part of the King of Pop’s scarline was invisible in normal conditions.

Complications: haematoma formation is a dangerous sequela of this operation, and careful drainage with polythene tubing was carried out. In spite of these precautions blood still collected, but this blood was evacuated within 48 hours of the operation. It was not allowed to organize. In the early stages the skin around the area that had been undermined was insensitive, and it was not difficult to milk any collection of fluid backward to the point of drainage.

Scarring was hypertrophic at the points where tension was greatest: that is, in the temple and the region behind the ear, but fortunately these were covered by the King of Pop’s hair. The small fine sutures which were not responsible for tension were removed at 4 days, and the strong sutures removed at the tenth day. The patient was then allowed to have a shampoo to remove the blood from his hair. All scarlines are expected to fade, and by the end of three weeks the patient was back in social circulation.

At a subsequent operation after this successful face lift, Michael Jackson’s forehead wrinkles were removed. An incision was placed in the hairline and the skin lifted forward and upward from the temporal bone. The skin was then undermined and the excess tissue removed. The immediate result was good, but as a result of normal forehead movements relapse may occur unduly early after the operation. To remove the central frown line, the superciliary muscle was paralysed by cutting the branches of the seventh nerve passing centrally to it. A small knife-blade was inserted from the upper eyelid upward for 3 cm and then pressed down to the bone. External scars on the forehead often persist, and even in the best hands results are not always reliable. It was explained to Michael Jackson where the scars would lie, and the object of the intervention.”

Based on ‘Princess Margaret’s Facelift’, by J.G. Ballard.

“I feel a tremendous rapport with pop artists and in a lot of my fiction I’ve tried to produce something akin to pop art. For instance, I’ve just published a piece in New Worlds called ‘Princess Margaret’s Facelift’, in which I’ve taken the text of a classic description of a plastic surgery operation, a facelift, and where the original says “the patient”, I’ve inserted “Princess Margaret”. So I’ve done precisely what the pop painters did, using images from everyday life — Coca-Cola bottles, Marilyn Monroe — and manipulated them. The great thing about pop painters is their honesty. They’ve turned their backs on the traditional subject matter of the fine arts — which had hardly changed since the Renaissance — and looked at their own environment and decided: yes, the shine on domestic hardware, like the refrigerator or the washing machine, the particular gleam on the mouldings of a cabinet, the moulding of doorhandles, are of importance to people, because these are the visual landscapes of people’s lives, and if we’re going to be honest we’re going to use reality material instead of fiction. I want to do the same.”

‘Sci-fi Seer’, interview with J.G. Ballard, Penthouse Magazine, 1970, Vol. 5 No. 5 (pp. 26-30).

“The relationship between the famous and the public who sustain them is governed by a striking paradox. Infinitely remote, the great stars of politics, film and entertainment move across an electric terrain of limousines, bodyguards and private helicopters. At the same time, the zoom lens and the interview camera bring them so near to us that we know their faces and their smallest gestures more intimately than those of our friends.

Somewhere in this paradoxical space our imaginations are free to range, and we find ourselves experimenting like impresarios with all the possibilities that these magnified figures seem to offer us. How did Garbo brush her teeth, shave her armpits, probe a worry-line? The most intimate details of their lives seem to lie beyond an already open bathroom door that our imaginations can easily push aside. Caught in the glare of our relentless fascination, they can do nothing to stop us exploring every blocked pore and hesitant glance, imagining ourselves their lovers and confidantes. In our minds we can assign them any roles we choose, submit them to any passion or humiliation. And as they age, we can remodel their features to sustain our deathless dream of them.

In a TV interview a few years ago, the wife of a famous Beverly Hills plastic surgeon revealed that throughout their marriage her husband had continually re-styled her face and body, pointing a breast here, tucking in a nostril there. She seemed supremely confident of her attractions. But as she said: ‘He will never leave me, because he can always change me.’

Something of the same anatomizing fascination can be seen in [this] present piece… which also show[s], I hope, the reductive drive of the scientific text as it moves on its collision course with the most obsessive pornography. What seems so strange is that these neutral accounts of operating procedures taken from a textbook of plastic surgery can be radically transformed by the simple substitution of the anonymous ‘patient’ with the name of a public figure, as if the literature and conduct of science constitute a vast dormant pornography waiting to be woken by the magic of fame.”

Annotations: “Princess Margaret’s Face Lift”, J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), RE/Search edition, 1990.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Jimmy Ballard’s Hospital Review
+ Chariot of Fire: Preliminary Analysis & Damage Reconstruction of the Death of Diana, Princess of Wales

David Pringle: Have you read any modern horror – Stephen King, for example?

JGB: I enjoyed Clive Barker’s Weaveworld. He gave me a copy, and it was a pleasure to read. He’s an engaging, lively character. I liked him enormously – very lucid and intelligent and simpatico. But, I’m afraid, apart from the Barker, I’ve read almost nothing. No, I haven’t read Stephen King, though I enjoyed the TV movie of Salem’s Lot. I thought that was well done, but then I enjoyed the Omen films too. I know nothing about the world of horror. My reading of horror fiction is strictly Edgar Allan Poe and W W Jacobs and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

DP: Would you consider yourself a writer of horror stories?

JGB: You could say Crash is on the edges of horror fiction. I take it that, in horror fiction, the horrific effects are the object of the exercise. In the Gothic novel the clanking chains and creaking drawbridges and whistling pendulums are the object; the chill of terror and fear is the whole purpose. Whereas in a book like Crash I’m not out to make the blood run cold: I’m trying to look at the eroticism of the car crash and the way modern technology has infiltrated our minds, taken over a large part of our imaginations and created a world of very different values.

I’ve never thought of myself as a writer of horror. When you’re dealing with a sensational subject matter, where you’re showing radical changes with people making sudden discoveries about the reality of their lives in dramatic circumstances, where people are being plagued by intense mental crises (as they are in a lot of my fiction), you’re getting into an area close to horror fiction. The main props of the classic tale of terror were haunted castles and alike. The present day equivalents of haunted castles are psychiatric hospitals; the blade-tipped pendulum has given way to the scalpel in the neurosurgeon’s fingers. It’s not the evil potion in a dusty bell-jar that frightens us now, it’s the contents of the hypodermic syringe, and the needle that may not be too clean. The props have changed. There are sudden glimpses of the shocking and unspeakable in my fiction too, so there is a certain overlap.

David Pringle, ‘Memoirs for a Space Age’, 1990 interview with JGB in Fear magazine.

..:: Previously:
+ Ballardcraft: Ballard/Lovecraft
+ JGB vs HPL

Ballard and the meaning of life

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

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

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

[thanks, Tim C]

Margarida Marinho in Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude (dir. Solveig Nordlund, 2002).

An interview with Solveig Nordlund follows this review, plus clips from Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude.

In 2002 the Ballardian feature-film universe expanded substantially with the release of Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude, Solveig Nordlund’s artfully rendered riff on JG Ballard’s 1976 short story, ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’. Seen mainly at film festivals, this Portuguese-Swedish co-production was a welcome addition to the Ballard filmography.

Ballard’s story receives its power from its fantastic setting (an abandoned Spanish resort in the future), his trio of representative characters – Dr Gould, the iconoclast visionary, Richard Forrester, the horny bureaucrat, and Judith Forrester, the mannequin-like mother – and the dark irony of ignoring Mother Nature. Ballard slowly teases out the plot, revealing that humankind has been systematically killing off its deformed newborn (called ‘Zotes’ in the film) for the past thirty years, seemingly unaware they were slaughtering the first generation of a new variation of homo sapiens. The story’s genius lies in its deft and subtle details and immaculate timing, leading the reader blindly along with Forrester through sex hotels of irony to the oddly optimistic ending, where the culture of one empire again crumbles and the children of the world begin to assume control of their new universe.

Culture’s fear of the unknown and special revulsion toward the sexually deformed is analyzed in psychological and artistic terms in ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’. These babies aren’t born with deformities of the limbs, such as the thalidomide babies of the 1960s, but with optic-nerve-exposed eyes and deformed genitals, aberrations guaranteed to register high on the psychological disgust scale. In this otherworld, mothers will kill, not nurture, their abnormal babies. Forrester sees these sexual deformities as ‘grim parodies of human genitalia’, and he cannot go beyond the ‘nervousness and loathing’ they elicit. All is now subject to an irrational norm. Blind but sighted, sexually deviant but innocent, these doomed children offer up a Dorian Gray portrait of civilisation’s obsessions which everyone is only too willing to rip and burn, horrified at seeing their true selves revealed at last.

In the following interview, Nordlund says, ‘I centred the story on the woman, on her fears and longings’. By inverting the masculinity of the short story, the film reclaims the natural bond of mother and baby and corrects the errors of civilisation as Ballard imagines it. As Nordlund explains: ‘When I did the film I thought very much about parents who want to educate their children into copies of themselves and don’t see the beauty of difference.’

LEFT: Solveig Nordlund (photo by Rick McGrath).

The basic plot is still there – the deformed baby is given to Carmen after the epiphany that these newborn aren’t monsters – but pretty well everything else, save the location, is changed to a feminine perspective, a parallel version of Ballard’s original. In Ballard’s story Judith is essentially a baby incubator, reflecting culture’s taboos and fears about abnormality. She immediately forgets all after the child is born and presumed killed, leaving the resort ‘with the amiable and fixed expression of a display-window mannequin’. Nordlund re-creates her as the driving force behind the story, from her desire to have the baby through her troubled pregnancy to her transformative encounters with Carmen and her ultimate ‘correct’ decision. She and Carmen bond to the point where they start looking the same. In a world of generational warfare, this is definitely an act of peace. Gould changes from Ballard’s observant biker hippie pilot into a surrogate mother — thus retaining a slight echo to Ballard’s Gould — and Nordlund is forced to compensate for his philosophic posturings by greatly enlarging the role of Carmen. A black-shawled, hand-signing mongoloid waif in Ballard, found by Gould and herded by silver paint, she’s transformed by Nordlund into a complex mystery, an exotic beauty in slink who wanders the dark halls like a hologram from the future. Forrester’s role is also diminished – he either makes passes at Judite or is combing the deserted grounds, talking with Gould, or stalking Carmen.

Nordlund keeps her eye firmly on the social by replacing Ballard’s Dali references with state-produced posters showing Zotes on the one hand (baby head with dark, wormy areas where the eyes should be, and the menacing ZOTE written underneath) and normal babies on the other (complete with slogans such as “This Is Us” and “I Believe In The Future”). Nordlund has created the same psychological war zone as Ballard, pitting Eros against Thanatos, but she uses a much less psychologically sensitive path, replacing personal “newsreels from Hell” and the attendant disgust with “monsters” one should fear because they’re seen as grotesque throwbacks to an earlier, more primitive time. The sense of disgust, so prevalent in the short story, is not given any kind of deep psychological examination by Nordlund, although flushing a Zote down the toilet is some recognition of the feeling’s psychological roots.

The film is a marvellous treat for eye and ear. Carmen’s psychedelic cave-room, for example, with its watches and fluorescent lighting is amazing. The cinematography of Acácio de Almeida is often breathtaking in its subtle love affair with light, and the music by Johan Zachrisson is evocative and emotional. The special effects are often highly foregrounded to maximise the intimate effect, and art direction is helped immeasurably by the found set, an abandoned seaside resort in Spain. This is a strong, punchy movie that emphasises the flow of the action in carefully crafted edits.

I made contact with Solveig Nordlund during the July opening ceremonies of J.G. Ballard: Autopsy of the New Millennium exhibition at Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Culture, where Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude was (and will be) screening. We met for a chat and coffee on our final day there, but unfortunately circumstances made it impossible to do any kind of formal interview. Fortunately, Solveig graciously agreed to conduct the following email Q&A after we had settled down from the Millennium Autopsy rush.

– Rick McGrath.

Opening 10-minute sequence from Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude. Two further 10-minute extracts are available: Part 2 and Part 3.

RICK McGRATH: Solveig, can you tell us when you first became interested in film, and about the beginnings of your career?

SOLVEIG NORDLUND: I was always interested in film, since I was a child, and I wanted to become a filmmaker. I just didn’t know how. To satisfy my mother I studied at the University of Stockholm and participated in a film made by a theatre group, but I had already met my Portuguese husband and wanted to leave Sweden. My Portuguese husband studied film in London and I followed him there and so it began. I began to work with him and only later did I make proper studies, with the French director Jean Roch in Paris from 1972 to 74.

Do you remember when you first became aware of Ballard?

I read Ballard for the first time in the late 60s in a Portuguese science-fiction collection. I think the first story of his I read was ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’. It must have had a great impact. I began to read all his books and later I made a short film based on this story, called ‘Journey to Orion’. It was totally shot in one of those big ferries between Stockholm and Helsinki. The idea was that the inside of ferryboats and spacecrafts look more or less the same: a closed world with no exit. Made to last for a long time and endure tough weather. After that I obtained the rights to shoot ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’.

When I had the opportunity in 1986 to propose programs about different writers for Swedish television, I proposed Ballard and managed to convince the board. I went to London in order to visit him at his house in Shepperton. I did a series of portraits of my literary favourites, another one was Marguerite Duras. In Sweden the JG interview was called ‘Future Now’ and everybody was impressed with his intensity. JG himself liked it very much. For me it was an opportunity to get to know him and the beginning of a kind of friendship.

What kind of friendship can you have with J.G.? I think I’d always have the feeling he was sizing me up as a potential character. In The Kindness of Women, the family renting the apartment beside the Ballards in Spain are called the Nordlunds. Did you think J.G. was thinking of you?

I feel befriended with Ballard and his universe. That’s the kind of friendship it is. I think he wrote The Kindness of Women at the same time as I made the interview with him. He probably needed a name and took mine.

Was he as you expected?

I expected to meet a tall military-like man and got very surprised when a small, jovial and round man came out of the house. He asked if I had a hat and made me think of Alice in Wonderland. He invited me in and as it was already six in the afternoon he was authorized to begin to drink. We talked and planned the interview for the following day. J.G. Ballard is a fascinating storyteller, also when he is telling his own story.

When you first read ‘Low Flying Aircraft’, did it strike you as filmable?

I think all J.G. Ballard’s stories are filmable and I think I have thought of them all as films. I was on a film festival in Troia, Portugal, the seaside resort that I later used in Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude. I think it was in 1987. Troia was a tourist investment that was interrupted by the revolution in 1974, and this abandoned place struck me as the perfect set for a Ballard story. I thought of stories from Vermillion Sands and Low-Flying Aircraft. It took me 15 years to concretise the project.

That’s amazing, that these big lumps of resort would still be vacant after all those years. You must have been amazed. How did you first get in? With permission, or as a trespasser?

It was a tourist project that had begun to be built before the revolution with Brazilian money and that was nationalised after the revolution. Some buildings were used but they never finished the big hotels. They were a kind of unfinished ruins, that you could enter trespassing.

How did Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude come about?

After having done the Swedish television program ‘Future Now’ with Jim, I did ‘Journey to Orion’. After that I obtained the rights to film ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’. The film is a Portuguese-Swedish low budget co-production. At the beginning I thought of shooting it in English, with international actors, but the budget didn’t allow it. And as there were threats that they were going to reconstruct the seaside resort Troia, I had to hurry with the film. It was shot in 2002 and one or two years later the towers were imploded.

‘Journey to Orion’ (dir. Solveig Nordlund, 1987). Part 2 is also available.

When did you decide to make the alterations to J.G.’s basic plot?

Ballard’s story is a short story and I had to do a feature film. In Ballard’s story everything is in the head of the husband who is waiting for his wife to come back with the results of the scan. I centred the story on the woman, on her fears and longings. I participated in a workshop directed by the English script doctor Colin Tucker in order to elaborate the script in that sense. It works in the way that a group of people with scripts criticise each other’s works. Colin Tucker directed us.

How did you choose the cast and crew?

The crew was chosen among technicians I normally work with, Acácio de Almeida for example. The cast was chosen among Portuguese actors once it was decided that there was no possibility to have an international cast. I think we shot for eight weeks. And edited for another six weeks. There were some complementary shots and a rather long digital post-production. From the start of shooting till the film finished, it was nine months more or less.

I was slightly surprised by the Orwellian society you use as a backdrop. Where did that idea come from?

I think it comes from Jim Ballard. When I asked him if it was something he thought I should think about when writing the script, he mentioned the laws of genetic cleaning that until very recently were in use for example in Sweden, and the fear of global epidemics, for example, AIDs.

Interesting. Governments are vaguely mentioned in the short story, but in your version they actively seek out and destroy the newborn, which you call Zotes. I like your slogan, too: ‘We Believe In The Future. This is Us.’ Where did that come from?

From nowhere especial. Just sounded right.

How often did you consult with Ballard over the film?

Only in the beginning, when I asked if he had something he wanted to point out in the story.

What do you think is J.G.’s point in the short story? Given the variations in the film, do you feel it still represents Ballard’s vision, or your own?

I think J.G.’s point is to show that humans make everything to transform and dominate nature but that nature always will find new dimensions in order to survive. When I did the film I thought very much about parents who want to educate their children into copies of themselves and don’t see the beauty of difference.

Has J.G. seen it?

Yes, and he liked it very much. He wrote a very enthusiastic letter where he mentioned especially the cinematography and the actress, Margarida Marinho.

She is fantastic. How did you find her?

She is a very well-known and popular Portuguese actress now, but in 2002 she was in the beginning of her career.

The cinematography is truly breathtaking. Aside from the power of the sets, Acácio De Almeida’s lens seems to caress the light in a very Ballardian way. You must have been very happy with the results.

Yes I was. I also was very lucky to have a very good post-production laboratory with very good technicians.

I was also quite taken with the film’s art direction. Mona Teresia Forsén did an amazing job with the film’s overall look. Did you work this out together? Gould’s stylized fluorescent green ‘V’ sign is also compelling.

Mona Teresia Forsén is a very well-known Swedish art director, but there were many hands that collaborated in the creation of the visual aspect. The Zote alphabet, for example, was created by the Portuguese artist Rui Serra.

I thought the sound was foregrounded in an interesting way, and that Johan Zachrisson’s musical score is very evocative. Did you work closely on this with Johan?

Yes. Johan Zachrisson is a collaborator of mine since a long time. He is Swedish but lives and works in Portugal. I think we tried to get a correspondence to the green colour that the doctor paints the world with.

You show Carmen in the film as a sort of futuristic movie starlet, with sexy dark glasses.

Carmen hides her deformed eyes behind dark glasses. She is blind in a conventional way, she sees with other senses, that’s why she moves in such an adulatory way. Don’t forget that her father, the doctor, has made her look like an ordinary Venus client in order to protect her.

Are you influenced by any particular filmmakers?

I admire Alain Resnais’ Muriel and Providence.

Do you think your film has a happy ending?

Yes. Life goes on even if it is not our life.

Will the film ever be available on DVD? Many people are curious to see it.

It is on DVD in Portugal. If somebody is interested in publishing it with English subtitles I would be happy.

Miguel Guilherme and Rui Morrison in Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude (dir. Solveig Nordlund, 2002).

Do you have plans to do anything more from the Ballard oeuvre?

I like very much ‘Deep End’, the story about the last fish on Earth. I had plans to do Concrete Island. I think it is an amazing story and so frightening. You can die in the middle of the crowd without anybody seeing you. But the rights JG’s agent demanded were so high that it’s not possible. But who knows, he has many good short stories.

You told me in Barcelona you didn’t think any more JGB stories would be made into films because of the cost of film rights. Can you elaborate?

I think J.G.’s agent has set a Spielberg level for his novels.

I heard £3.5 million — that’s a lot of money. I wonder if JG knows what’s going on? You’d think he’d like to have his stories made into movies, where reality and illusion combine.

I think he knows and agrees.

What appeals to you most about JGB?

J.G.’s stories are often told as thoughts and memories, but those thoughts and memories are very visual. I like to imagine those worlds the main characters see. I think that had the film rights been more accessible, most of his novels would have been made into film. Now, a lot of films inspired by his work have been made instead.

Many people who have visited the Ballard home comment on its quirkiness. Did you find it unusual?

I found it touching, a big man in a small house. Like Alice in Wonderland.

Interview by Rick McGrath, 2008.

Born in Stockholm on June 9, 1943, Solveig Nordlund began working in film while completing her degree in art history from her native Stockholm’s Universitet. Leaving Sweden for Portugal, Nordlund first worked as an assistant and then a film editor on such productions as Sweet Habits (1973) and Doomed Love (1978). In 1976 she co-founded the left-wing film cooperative Grupo Zero, and that year directed her first film, although she received no on-screen credit. In 1978, she directed a pair of medium-length features, but did not direct her first full-length feature until 1980 with Dina e Django. Nordlund then returned to Sweden in 1982 where she founded the Torrom Film Company. In 1986 she directed ‘Journey to Orion’, her take on J.G. Ballard’s ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’, which won a prize at the Bilbao Festival, and also directed a filmed interview with Ballard called Future Now. In 1998, Nordlund’s Swedish-Portuguese-Mozambican co-production Comedia Infantil was nominated for a Tiger Award at that year’s Rotterdam Film Festival. In 1999 she made The Ticket Inspector, which won the RTP/Onda Curta Prize at the Avanca Film Festival, and followed that with Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude in 2002, which won an award at the Coimbra Caminhos do Cinema Portugués, and My Baby in 2003.

..:: MORE INFORMATION:
+ Ambar Filmes: blog for Solveig’s film company.
+ Ambar Filmes’ YouTube channel.

..:: NORDLUND & BALLARD ON YOUTUBE:
+ Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude trailer.
+ Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude (extract; part 1).
+ Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude (extract; part 2).
+ Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude (extract; part 3).
+ Future Now interview (extract).
+ ‘Journey to Orion’, part 1.
+ ‘Journey to Orion’, part 2.

review by Jamie Sherry

ABOVE: Grande Anarca, part 1 (2003; dir. Alvise Renzini).

Runtime: 18 mins
Voice: Ermanna Montanari
Sound: Davide Sandri
Music: Egle Sommacal
Editor: Benedetto Lanfranco
Photography: Alvise Renzini
Animation: Alvise Renzini
Script: Lucio Apolito (based on the short story ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ by J.G. Ballard)
Director: Alvise Renzini
Producer: Opificio Ciclope

NOTE: An English translation of the voiceover can be found here.

In discussion about his adaptation of Marcel Proust’s Swann in Love (1984), the director Volker Schlöndorff famously remarked that ‘if I make a movie which Proustians celebrate for its fidelity, I will have failed as a director’. Predictably, the film was widely criticised for misrepresenting the source material and for perceived acts of violent reductionism. It was these issues that framed my viewing of the Italian animation Grande Anarca, based on my favourite Ballard short story, ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ (1985). As a devotee of Ballard’s post-60s short stories, I was expecting to be underwhelmed by the film, regardless of my interest in the idea of adapting such an un-cinematic work of prose. The film ended up actually exceeding my expectations, deviating from the demands of a faithful adaptation, yet finding a life of its own amongst the wider architecture of the Ballardian.

The study of literature on film has largely liberated itself from the confines of the ‘fidelity debate’ and aesthetic judgements regarding how close the film is deemed to be to the ‘spirit of the book’. Cartmell and Whelehan’s Adaptations (1999), Stam and Raengo’s Literature and Film (2004) and Elliott’s Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (2003), amongst others, have done much to progress the study of adaptation, a field that has privileged the status of literature over film. For too long film adaptations have been viewed as misrepresenting, reducing, despoiling and ultimately failing to capture an essential essence somehow contained in the source text. Film adaptations are judged by what they fail to do, or what they omit, rather than what they achieve, or add. Within an atheistic, post-structuralist view of adaptation, the novel does not contain a ‘spirit’, but is rather an intertextual assortment of many precursor texts that make up the bricolage landscape of culture. It is with this more open and democratic approach to adaptation that Grande Anarca should be approached, appreciating the intertextual methodology that has been employed in the adaptation process.

First published in Ambit 100 (Spring 1985), ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ is a fascinating, if unlikely, choice of source material for a film adaptation. Very much an understudied story, it sits alongside ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’ (1976) and The Index (1977) as Ballard’s most experimental and playful self-contained short stories, whilst also sharing many of his central themes concerning madness and incarceration. Eventually published together in the compendium War Fever (1990), these stories mischievously subvert classical notions of structure, form and content, unifying Ballard’s playful deployment of paratexts as narrative medium. The French literary theorist Gérard Genette coined the neologism ‘paratext’ to describe subsidiary and secondary material such as prefaces, post-scripts, footnotes and illustrations, which illuminate, but are ultimately subservient to, the principle text. As Ballard himself noted in Paris Review (Winter,1984): ‘lists are fascinating; one could almost do a list novel’.

Ballard sets out to exploit these paratextual narrative devices to self-consciously confront the reader, and include us in an ironic discourse with the text. Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown (not to be confused with the chapter of the same name in The Atrocity Exhibition) commences with a lone 18-word sentence; the rest of the story comprising eighteen footnotes cited from each word, the sentence savagely deconstructed by a mental asylum inmate into its constituent units. The story is reminiscent of, and arguably indebted to, Vladimir Nabokov’s metafictional novel Pale Fire (1962), a narrative famously comprised of a character’s foreword, index and commentary on a murdered poet’s 999-line poem. As Pale Fire progresses, rather than shedding light on the elliptical poem, these fictional paratexts instead begin to illuminate the delusional psychological state of the annotator.

ABOVE: Still from Grande Anarca (2003; dir. Alvise Renzini).

Continuing these techniques, the use of the classical paratext as a vehicle for story is probably best encapsulated in Ballard’s The Index. The narrative is conveyed via the listed index to an imaginary autobiography that, as the short introduction informs us, is missing, or may never have existed at all. Small snippets of information in the index ultimately converge to form narratives that spectacularly reveal Ballardian obsessions with mental breakdown, sexual deviance, murder, psychological spaces and institutional confinement.

It is these themes that also dominate ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’, a piece that functions more by exclusion, than inclusion. Employing the metafictional technique of showing only the answers to questions set by an unknown authoritarian presence, a narrative becomes clear that would traditionally far exceed the limitations of a short story. As the answers progress, we learn that the interviewee is a man living surreptitiously in Ballard’s beloved Heathrow Airport:

1) Yes.
2) Male (?)
3) c/o Terminal 3, London Airport, Heathrow.
4) Twenty-seven.
5) Unknown.
6) Dr Barnado’s Primary, Kingston-upon-Thames; HM Borstal, Send, Surrey; Brunel University Computer Sciences Department.

Sometimes the answers are deliberately obtuse, with no obvious allusion to a potential question. At other times the answers are detailed in an ironic way, completely out place with the sequence of narrative events (see answer 14 below). We soon learn about the interviewee, including his criminal history:

10) Manchester Crown Court, 1984.
11) Credit card and computer fraud.
12) Guilty.
13) Two years, HM Prison, Parkhurst.
14) Stockhausen, de Kooning, Jack Kerouac.
15) Whenever possible.
16) Twice a day.
17) NSU, Herpes, gonorrhoea.

It becomes clear that the interviewee believes he befriended the second coming of Jesus within Heathrow Airport, and begins to help him with his project to provide mankind with the power of immortality:

27) I took him to Richmond Ice Rink where he immediately performed six triple salchows. I urged him to take up ice-dancing with an eye to the European Championships and eventual gold at Seoul, but he began to trace out huge double spirals on the ice. I tried to convince him that these did not feature in the compulsory figures, but he told me that the spirals represented a model of synthetic DNA.
35) When he was drunk. He claimed that he brought the gift of eternal life.
61) He stated that synthetic DNA introduced into the human germ plasm would arrest the process of ageing and extend human life almost indefinitely.
81) Government White Paper on Immortality.
82) Compulsory injection into the testicles of the entire male population over eleven years.

The protagonist accompanies this man, as he meets with members of the royal family, politicians and celebrities in a bid to raise money for the Immortality project. The plan clearly gets out of control for the interviewee, as he takes matters into his own hands:

88) Assassination.
89) I was neither paid nor incited by agents of a foreign power.
90) Despair. I wish to go back to my cubicle at London Airport.
97) I was visited in the death cell by the special envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
98) That I had killed the Son of God.
99) He walked with a slight limp. He told me that, as a condemned prisoner, I alone had been spared the sterilising injections, and that the restoration of the national birthrate was now my sole duty.
100) Yes.

ABOVE: Grande Anarca, part 2 (2003; dir. Alvise Renzini).

Ballard’s investment in us as active readers also allows meaning to be gained from absence. Ballard finds his preoccupations and themes best explored through the paratexts that traditionally surround culture’s dominant storytelling mediums. A list of answers, an index, and the footnotes of a single sentence become vehicles for the Ballardian. It is within this free interplay with the reader that we are able to construct a narrative, regardless of how unreliable the protagonist may or may not be. Within these empty spaces and narrative vacuums, the reader is empowered to create meaning. The dichotomous function of these omissions provoke us to address the character’s mental state, and serves to further problematise the role of the unreliable narrator/s within. As the author Ursula K Le Guin states in her review of War Fever, Ballard opts for storytelling in which we see the ‘condition of fictional bones without flesh — crystals without molecular instabilities to cloud the clarity’. Ballard uses metatextual techniques to highlight the devices of fiction and in doing so, provokes the reader to dwell on the relationships between fantasy and reality, concepts central to ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’.

It is these narrative devices so rooted in the literary form of the story that potentially problematise a cinematic adaptation (yet also make the concept very alluring). Conceived from the perspective that the source material is merely a starting point, Alvise Renzini’s short animation Grande Anarca diverts from ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ in a number of notable ways. Although strongly influenced by the unusual structure of Ballard’s original text, the film completely dispenses with the central storyline of ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’, ignoring the second-coming, immortality project, murder of Jesus plot points. However, there is continuity in the film’s eerie voiceover, as the omnipotent narrator answers a set of unheard questions. Replacing the Jesus narrative with a story regarding a genetic experiment carried out on the inhabitants of a block of flats, the film also manages to confront and adapt the medium-specific tropes encoded in the literary form of the source material.

Although Renzini is credited with photography, animation and direction, the film is clearly a group effort, produced under the ‘joint tradename’ of Opificio Ciclope. Producers of various media forms, including music videos, TV graphics and documentaries, the Italian collective purports to have a ‘shared interest for interacting, mixed techniques and hybrid formats’. It is certainly this mastering of art/media forms that bestows Grande Anarca with a unique visual complexity.

The film is literally multi-layered, the images painstakingly built up in successive levels. Firstly, the background is hand-illustrated, the images then photographed and projected as slides. These slide projections are then shot using 35mm film, the individual frames then serving as a canvass to be painted and etched upon. Finally, digital post-production provides the last layer to complete the film. This inter-medial technique for building a film layer-by-layer brings to mind the German short film Copyshop (2001) in which a photocopy shop worker begins to literally replicate himself in an endless cycle. The short is produced by filming almost 18,000 photocopies of digital frames. It could be said that these animation devices, particularly well executed in Grande Anarca, in which the viewer is confronted with the mechanics and textual processes of the medium, somehow mirror the self-conscious literary referencing of Ballard’s original story.

And it is within this visual process that Grande Anarca evokes much of its drama. Dark fractured imagery blends onto inanimate objects which drift into our vision, as obscured tower blocks meld into shimmering close-ups of cells and bacteria. Distorted alien-like bodies glimmer before us, gasworks flash, abject bodies morph into DNA structures. Buildings vying for dominance over nature obtain a hallucinatory quality as swift editing coupled with repetitious music (dramatic repeating violin chords) compliment the images of tree like cells inhabiting cityscapes. The film ranges between stark black and white before displaying sepia tinted browns and blues. Although ostensibly an animation, the film does feature real footage of apartment blocks and abandoned train stations. The geometrics of man-made, Vorticist shapes mingle haphazardly with biological structures. The calm, dispassionate voiceover and the melodious repetition of the music almost produce a feeling that we are watching a propaganda film, benevolently advertising a social experiment, only the visuals offering a sinister reminder that all is not well.

The story that unfolds in Grande Anarca is clearly a major deviation from Ballard’s source story, but it is the narrative replacements that really illuminate the film-makers application to the task. The answers start off relatively dull, though are notable by their contrast to Ballard’s original text:

01) Corals.
02) Light.
03) A face-shaped flower vase.
04) Glaciers.
05) Emerald green.
06) Science fiction books: Fritz Leiber, James Ballard, Stanislaw Lem.

ABOVE: Still from Grande Anarca (2003; dir. Alvise Renzini).

As the film develops, it becomes clear that the narrator was involved in a complex genetic experiment on the inhabitants of a huge multi-storey building:

20) Tenants were selected from thousands of applicants.
21) Yes, I think it was a crucial event in my life.
22) Apartments were identical in shape, size, and decors. The building was divided into 22 units, identified with a letter. Each unit had 8 floors. Each floor housed 64 persons in as many apartments. The whole of the tenants were divided in 4 groups: A, T, C, G. The building contained 5632 persons.
23) I was part of the original project team, and I came up with several of the ideas in the experiment.

Importantly, the inhabitants of the building are represented by the protagonist as being both co-operative and willing participants:

30) All the tenants were aware of the nature of the experiment in different ways. I would not therefore paint in-house relations as unconscious.
31) They were deeply involved in the experiment, and they talked about it regularly: when they met on the stairs or in the garden, or during building meetings.
32) Each tenant had to spend 4 hours with the other three individuals on his team, then 8 hours on his own. He had to write 4 pages a day. In the early stages, that was how we looked for similar descriptions, cross-references, reoccurring words. At a later stage, they were forced to write about their personal desires. Finally, about their dreams.
33) In each apartment, a pneumatic system provided food rations in exchange for the reports. Locks were automatically operated. To open the doors, tenants had to deliver their daily reports.

Eventually we see thematic cross-overs with Ballard’s original story, as the synthetic depiction of DNA creates a startling psycho-pathologic relationship:

36) The building was a to-scale replica of the DNA from algae. Tenants represented nucleotides.
37) We wanted to communicate directly with the DNA, with no go-betweens.
38) We wanted to endow it with some sort of awareness.
39) By collecting the tenants’ dreams.
40) We measured everything: heartbeats, the patterns created on the windows by electric light, decibels. Everything.

As the voiceover draws the film to a close we start to view the possibility that Renzini is sourcing more than just one Ballard text, with allusions to the effects of the building architectures acting as a kind of Tarkovskian Zone:

48) During the third stage, the building started to emit a frequency at night, while the tenants slept. The wave reached a range of over 20 kilometers. Suddenly everyone was aware of the experiment.
49) The wave from the building reverberated through the dreams of whoever lived in the area. It was those obsessive dreams that spurred the riots.
50) Lies, now as before, you keep repeating your lies.
51) That was not our purpose.
52) I would rather not talk about that.
53) Several such buildings were destroyed by mistake.
54) Scientific research is not a democratic system, nor should it be.
55) The experiment could be repeated.

ABOVE: Grande Anarca, part 3 (2003; dir. Alvise Renzini).

In Grande Anarca we see the narrative structure of ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ married to the Ballardian tropes of urban alienation, techno-surveillance, sociological experimentation and the psychological consequences of man-made environments, as best exemplified in High-Rise (1975). So whilst the film may break free from the plot points of the source story, it still exists within a wider Ballardian universe. We see the moral complexity of social experimentation, the actions of a closed community reverting to a primal state and the symbiotic relationship between man and urban structures. As Rick McGrath states in his affectionate and incredibly detailed analysis of the novel, ‘Reconstructing High-Rise’:

The horror of meaningless acts piled high with Ballard’s trademark detatched omnipotent narrator. High-Rise can both shock and exhilarate its reader, and its insistence that the ‘ends justify the means’ reinforces Ballard’s geometry of violence…

Further to this we see textual equivalents in the actions of individuals acting as a group, and the type of belief systems (religious, political and moral) that can become normalised in the reverie of community psychology. McGrath again illuminates these notions of the intoxicating myth:

J.G. Ballard has often told interviewers that his characters all seek a kind of highly personal psychic salvation, and that they will, if necessary, create their own self-defining mythologies and pursue them to their furthest logical ends, no matter how illogical it seems, or what the cost. In High-Rise, Ballard has created an isolated environment for the close study of the deconstruction of an ultra-modern apartment block into a new, devolved society…

The compliance of the subjects in the film to willingly engage with these socio-scientific experiments, even though their food can be kept from them if they do not co-operate, draws on some well explored Ballardian areas. What is exposed in both High-Rise and Grande Anarca is a pathological willingness to be imprisoned or otherwise confined in institutional regimes. As Ballard puts it in a 2001 Literary Review article, we can see ‘hints that a benign version of a Sadeian society is still emerging, of tormentors and willing victims’. Ballard explores the willingness to be dominated by these architectures of control, as the character Sinclair notes in Super-Cannes (2000), these ‘totalitarian systems of the future would be subservient and ingratiating, but the locks would be just as strong’.

Unfortunately, Grande Anarca is far from perfect, and at least for me, fails on one quite fundamental level. In most cases I am an admirer of extreme deviation from the adapted source material, but Renzini, like so many others, appears to disregard or ignore the ironic humour that saturates most pages of Ballard’s writing. From the opening line of High-Rise, through to most of the chapter titles in The Atrocity Exhibtion, Ballard is able to infuse his stories with subtle but biting wit. Taking ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ as an example, many of the protagonist’s answers are nothing more than in-jokes as Ballard plays with the edges of humour in ways that are reminiscent both of Bret Easton Ellis and William S Burroughs:

33) Porno videos. He took a particular interest in Kamera Klimax and Electric Blue.
34) Almost every day.
36) At the Penta Hotel I tried to introduce him to Torvill and Dean…
37) Females of all ages.
38) Group sex.
58) He had a keen appreciation of money, but was not impressed when I told him of Torvill and Dean’s earnings.
63) He announced that Princess Diana was immortal.
71) He wanted me to become the warhead of a cruise missile.

The humour found in Ballard’s work is usually satirical, sometimes surreal, and always illustrative of the moral malaise infused through the story. To ignore Ballard’s humour, as I feel the makers of Grande Anarca have done, is to reduce Ballard to less than the sum of his parts. But these actions could be considered deliberate aesthetic acts, removing humour for the sake of some artistic achievement.

ABOVE: Still from Grande Anarca (2003; dir. Alvise Renzini).

Traditionally, fans of Ballard’s writing have had an uneasy relationship with adaptations of his writing. It seems that for some, films that explore Ballardian themes, or which have influenced Ballard, can offer more comforting routes to understand his work. These include both Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), and Solyaris (1972), Godard’s Alphaville (1965), Lucas’ THX 1138 (1971), and of course the most potent Ballardian film, Chris Marker’s remarkable short La Jetée (1962). All benefit from their potential to be arguably more useful cinematic texts with which to contextualise Ballardian tropes, than actual official adaptations of his own books. These films are liberated from the compare-contrast analysis that dogs literal Ballard adaptations such as Cronenberg’s Crash (1996), Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun (1987) and Weiss’ The Atrocity Exhibition (2000), amongst a host of others. The confining responsibility of fidelity can raise the stakes for the Ballard reader, in which we are not always able to read these films either objectively or fairly.

Cronenberg, both in Naked Lunch (1991) and Crash attempts to decant experimental literary narratives into a more linear cinematic language (albeit an idiosyncratically unorthodox one). Perhaps to the point where his earlier films Videodrome (1983) and Dead Ringers (1988) could be seen as a more fitting arena to explore the Ballardian. Likewise, Spielberg’s moral subjectivity, a kind of revisionist 50′s idea of ‘Boys Own’ heroism and the inevitable triumph of good over evil, constrains his adaptation of Empire of the Sun. To the point where many, as before, may find more interesting material in his Duel (1971) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) with which to better understand the relationship between Ballard and cinema. It is left to one’s imagination to wonder what could have occurred if counter-intuitively, Cronenberg had taken on Empire the Sun, and Spielberg tackled the auto-erotic allegories of Crash.

I believe that Weiss’ over-faithful use of iconic 60s imagery in his bold reworking of The Atrocity Exhibition makes the film stand out for me, in contrast to some who believe that these images lack cultural punch due to their sell-by-date expiring. In contrast to this, Renzini instead prefers to place further abstractions onto the source text. However, what the film does share with both Cronenberg and Weiss is a desire to inhabit the universe of the Ballardian. Far from slavishly conforming to Roland Barthes’ battle-cry that the ‘birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author,’ Renzini pursues a thornier path – casting aside the author’s original narrative and replacing it with something that is loosely Ballardian, rather than strictly Ballard.

Perhaps there is something inherent in Ballard’s writing that actively resists successful adaptation. McGrath’s previous mention of Ballard’s trademark ‘detatched omnipotent narrator’ could be regarded as a profoundly uncinematic central character. Taking this further, McGrath expounds on the dynamically impotent character of Laing in High-Rise and the way in which he ‘survives because his driving psychic force is self-preservation through isolation and passivity’. Again, perhaps cinematic narratives resist passive characters, demanding more open, morally unambiguous, actively obstacle defeating heroes. This in marked contrast to the types that survive the carnage of High-Rise simply by keeping their head down, staying quiet and isolating themselves from the mayhem. It could also be argued that some adaptations fail because the source material is so prescriptive; readerly texts that imprint visual codas onto the reader, allowing little in the way of artistic flourishes for the adaptor. However, with Ballard the opposite could be true. The moral ambiguity, detached solipsism, and exclusion of characters’ first person psycho-dynamics mean that we can only form vague (yet highly personal) ideas of main protagonists. When we encounter these people on screen, in the flesh, saying words, and reacting to external agents, it is possible that we balk at both the unavoidable physical humanity before us, and the distinctly un-Ballardian theatrics of film-acting which we excluded from our original reading.

Grande Anarca enjoys a curiously dichotomous romance with Ballard. The aims seem contradictory: rejecting Ballard’s authority over the story, yet clearly conforming to the author’s recognised signifiers and themes. In the process of leaving the story behind, the makers of this film enter into a new dialogue, re-inhabiting and re-acquiring universal themes of the Ballardian, displaying what the Collins English Dictionary famously describes as ‘dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments’.

… MORE INFO:

+ Information on Grande Anarca at Opificio Ciclope

… GRANDE ANARCA:

+ Grande Anarca Part 1
+ Grande Anarca Part 2
+ Grande Anarca Part 3

+ English translation of the voiceover.

by Rick McGrath

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

Hola, Simon, and buenos dias from Barcelona.

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

It’s a great place to be…

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

OK, you ready? Visitor’s pass showing?

ABOVE: CCCB exterior.

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

ENTERING THE EXHIBITION

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

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

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

ABOVE: Martin Amis pontificates; the media records.

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

AUTOPSY #1: What I Believe

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

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

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

AUTOPSY #2: From Shanghai to Shepperton

ABOVE: After the 1937 bombing.

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

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

ABOVE: Watching Shanghai Jim.

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

AUTOPSY #3: Landscapes of Dream

ABOVE: From the surreal image “machine”.

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

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

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

ABOVE: From the surreal image “machine”.

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

AUTOPSY #4: Inner Space

ABOVE: Pixelated Ballard.

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

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

ABOVE: From Rick’s JGB collection.

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

AUTOPSY #5: Disaster Area

ABOVE: Drought car in sand.

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

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

AUTOPSY #6: Technology and Pornography

ABOVE: Cronenberg’s Crash.

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

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

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

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

ABOVE: The big visual wall display.

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

AUTOPSY #7: Asepsis and Neobarbarism

ABOVE: Infinity drenched in blue.

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

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

AUTOPSY #8: The Ballard Library

ABOVE: From my JGB collection.

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

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

ABOVE: Donovan Wylie’s photography.

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

AUTOPSY #9: Ballardian Art

ABOVE: Michelle Lord with her Ballard-inspired art.

I believe in nothing.

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

ABOVE: Mike Bonsall’s Ballardian home movie.

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

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

You can keep the surgical mask as a souvenir.

THE MEDICAL TEAM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that, Simon, is just about it.

From Barcelona, adios!

– Rick.

Rick McGrath 2008.

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

…:: FURTHER INFO:

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

…:: Previously on Ballardian:

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

BALLARDOSCOPE: SOME ATTEMPTS AT APPROACHING THE WRITER AS A VISIONARY

by Jordi Costa

ABOVE: From the ‘Kiss’ series, by Wim Delvoye.

[In The Atrocity Exhibition] Traven explores what most people would regard as pretty frightening pornographic imagery; he explores with the kind of eye of a forensic pathologist. He treats sexual desire as if it was something stretched out on an autopsy table; he takes a woman’s body and dismantles it – not literally, but almost literally – and constructs a kit which is literally that. I mean inside of a suitcase, as you show in the film, there is a set of the key elements that we respond to when we become sexually aroused – a pair of latex breasts, nipples, detachable pubic hair…

J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Jonathan Weiss in 2006, commentary track on The Atrocity Exhibition (2000; film directed by Weiss).

Peter C. emailed to tell me of his discovery of the work of Belgian artist Wim Delvoye, whose ‘Kiss’ series of x-ray photographs involved Delvoye asking friends to ‘paint themselves with small amounts of barium (that liquid used in x-rays for digestion and such like) and then be “photographed” having sex in medical clinics. The resulting images are… striking’ (according to Joseph Brett).

Peter says:

I feel a bit weird submitting this, and you might not find it relevant at all, but I just discovered this “X-Ray Porn” and it, for whatever reason, reminded me of Ballard! It’s rather striking how unpleasant it is!

Actually, it’s very relevant, given Ballard’s medical background and his observation in the introduction to Crash that we live in a time in which ‘Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography.’

Elsewhere, he elaborates, suggesting that we are:

moving ever closer to that junction where science and pornography will eventually meet and fuse. Conceivably, the day will come when science itself is the greatest producer of pornography. The weird perversions of human behaviour triggered by psychologists testing the effects of pain, isolation, anger, etc. will play the same role that the bare breasts of Polynesian islanders performed in the 1940s wildlife documentary films.

JGB, quoted in Linda S. Kaufman, Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture, 1995.

Of Ballard’s books, it’s The Atrocity Exhibition that most clearly makes the case for this fusion, something the RE/Search edition of Atrocity brilliantly enhanced with its anatomical art from Phoebe Gloeckner, art that very much anticipates the spirit of Delvoye’s ‘Kiss’. See for yourself: I’ve interspersed some of Gloeckner’s illustrations with a few of Delvoye’s x-rays, along with the usual allotment of Ballard quotes (although I think the one heading this post says it all, really).

ABOVE: Illustration by Phoebe Gloeckner from The Atrocity Exhibition (RE/Search edition, 1990).

BELOW: From the ‘Kiss’ series, by Wim Delvoye.

A preoccupation with forensic detail characterises [Ballard's] writing: one thinks of the numerous accounts of sex in his extraordinary autobiographical novel The Kindness of Women. “I placed my hands on her hips and began to kiss the small freckles on her abdomen and the spiral scar whose pearly silver curved around the small of her back and ended below her appendix. This marked her kidney operation 10 years earlier, the Anderson-Hinds resection of the renal pelvis.”

Mick Brown, ‘From Here to Dystopia’, Telegraph Magazine, 2 September 2006.

ABOVE: Illustration by Phoebe Gloeckner from The Atrocity Exhibition (RE/Search edition, 1990).

BELOW: From the ‘Kiss’ series, by Wim Delvoye.

Traven sees pornography as a kind of hyper-analytic response to sexuality. Normally, traditional sexual activity involves a sort of warm bath where physical activity and a world of mental affections blur into each other, and give rise of course to a huge number of problems. Traven takes the view ‘What is actually going on?’ — his own body and the body of his wife and of his on-off girlfriend, Karen Novotny, he sees their sexual identity as a mystery that needs to be decoded and dismantled. He sees pornography, which is emotionally neutral — pornography is sex with the emotions deleted — pornography is a useful technique for exploring what exactly is going on when two people copulate, when a penis enters a vagina, when a hand embraces a breast, when fingers explore clefts (which are obviously geometric structures which powerfully cue innate responses laid down in the central nervous system a hundred thousand years ago). Pornography is a way of dismantling all the excrescences that have grown around this sexual activity at its most basic, and finding the actual sort of operating elements.

J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Jonathan Weiss in 2006, commentary track on The Atrocity Exhibition (2000; film directed by Weiss).

ABOVE: Illustration by Phoebe Gloeckner from The Atrocity Exhibition (RE/Search edition, 1990).

BELOW: From the ‘Kiss’ series, by Wim Delvoye.

Science is moving into an area where its obsessions begin to isolate completely its subject under the lens of its microscope, away from its links with the rest of nature. This is always the risk with science as a whole. The pornographic imagination detaches certain parts of the human anatomy from the human being and becomes obsessively focussed on the breast or the genitalia, or what have you. That sort of obsession with what I call quantified functions is what lies at the core of science; there is a shedding of all responsibility by the scientist who is just looking at a particular subject with a tendency to ignore the contingent links.

JGB, quoted in Jeremy Lewis, ‘An Interview with J.G. Ballard’, Mississippi Review, Volume 20 Numbers 1&2, 1991.

PS: Good old Wim, when not tattooing pigs, even turned the ‘Kiss’ series into a stained-glass window…

Wim Delvoye
Euterpe, 2002
steel, x-ray photographs, glass, lead
78 3/4 x 31.5 inches
200 x 80 cm
SW 02299

Over at Barnes & Noble, SF writer Paul Di Filippo makes a valiant attempt to get Americans interested in Ballard, making some pertinent remarks about market forces in the US:

One of the most visionary, autocatalytic, and influential writers of the past five decades, a genuine nonpareil and prophet, a true diagnostician of our postmodern malaise, is courageously but inexorably dying of advanced metastatic prostate cancer at the age of 77. He announced this sad news in the concluding chapter of his autobiography, published in February of this year.

But if you’re an American reader — even if you’re a fan of this author’s many classic books and knowledgeable about his career — chances are good that you don’t know this sad fact, that you simply haven’t heard. That’s because the author is British, and his autobiography, in the eyes of U.S. publishers, has merited no U.S. edition — no more than his last two neglected novels did. And North American press coverage of his plight has been limited to a few genre journals… a sad testament to the privileging of marketplace concerns over art, and also a hurtful slight to a writer whose main topic, in whatever elaborate guise, has always been the American Century.

‘J.G. Ballard. Essay by Paul Di Filippo’, Barnes and Noble, 2/6/2008.

It’s great to see Paul champion Kingdom Come (after all, it has only recently survived a fresh round of new-pleb point-scoring):

[In Kingdom Come] Ballard’s complex brief, simplistically rendered, maintains that the banishment of spirituality and the suppression of many primal human drives in favor of status seeking and the most limited hunter-gatherer reflexology has resulted in a crippled and clinically insane culture — a culture fated to erupt in irrational and often violent compensatory ways.
…
Ballard’s stock troupe of actors who have been his loyal partners forever — brutishly intellectual doctors, damaged femmes fatales, Fisher King sacrificial heroes — speaking their often hilariously out-of-sync lines, enact a perverse vest-pocket apocalypse. As always, Ballard’s vivid metaphors entice, and his acerbic aperçus provoke…

‘J.G. Ballard. Essay by Paul Di Filippo’, Barnes & Noble.

Paul’s passion for Ballard’s writing is obvious, drilled into every line, and while none of the info will be new to readers of this site (the piece is ostensibly used to promote both Kingdom Come and Miracles of Life), think of it as smart-bomb planted in the fertile plains of the mighty Barnes & Noble. Let’s hope the message gets through one day (and hopefully before 2080, when Ballard predicts America will fall into ruin):

A Blakean Cassandra honored in his own country, Ballard deserves equal laurels in America, a dream country whose portrait and influence he has so indelibly etched in his books, and which exists in no truer form than in his skull.

‘J.G. Ballard. Essay by Paul Di Filippo.’

Paul’s been a long-time champion of Ballard’s work and his imaginative criticism is notable for the fact that it pays equally incisive attention to the less well-known artefacts in Ballard’s armoury. In this 1990 article, for example, Paul links The Drowned World with The Day of Creation with pleasing results:

Nowhere, I believe, is the nature of Ballard’s art more evident than in the simultaneous junction and disjunction between one of his oldest works, The Drowned World, and one of his latest, The Day of Creation. What I would like to do here is, first set forth the similarities — ranked roughly in importance from most significant to least — in a kind of catalog for our hypothetical exhibition, and then deal with the differences between the two works — which, in the end, are almost more important than the recurrent themes and patterns.

In no way do I mean to suggest that the latter work is some rip-off or mere re-write of the earlier piece, anymore than one Dali canvas is a rehash of another simply because both contain soft clocks. In fact, The Day of Creation strikes me as the more mature and esthetically satisfying of the two, although lacking The Drowned World’s obsessive, world-shattering dementia.

Twenty-Five Years Of Drowning: Mapping J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World onto The Day of Creation. Paul Di Filippo, Quantum Science Fiction & Fantasy Review, No 37, Summer 1990, pp 13-15.

It’s well worth reading.

Also worth scrutinising is Paul’s wonderful 1991 interview with Ballard, which cheekily renders the conversation as a cut-up anatomy textbook (an anatomical marriage of science and pornography of course being one of Ballard’s main obsessions):

III. “WHENEVER I HEAR THE WORD ‘ART,’ I REACH FOR MY CHECKBOOK.”

The TRIFACIAL NERVE may be affected in its entirety, or its sensory

1) Have you ever read a contemporary genre fantasy? If so, do you feel saddened by the degeneration of the fantasy mode from the work of such visionaries as George MacDonald and Charles Williams and David Lindsay to its current state of endless Tolkien-trilogy ripoffs?

I don’t read either fantasy or SF anymore. Tolkien has had a disastrous influence.

or motor root may be affected, or one of its primary main

2) What do you think of the current state of SF?

Much healthier since the arrival of the so-called cyberpunks. They [are] An important sign that SF is returning to reality again. Most encouraging.

divisions. In injury to the sensory root there is anaesthesia of the

3) Do you find any validity in the term “postmodern,” as applied to fiction, architecture, etc., or do you believe it is merely a facade for retrogressive techniques and concerns?

Yes, [it's retrogressive]. Bogus nostalgia and theme-parkism, as far as architecture is concerned. As for the novel, post-modemism represents a dead-end, a desperate admission that the author has nothing to say and can only think of evermore devious ways of disguising the fact.

half of the face on the side of the lesion, with the exception of

4) What has happened to the experimental urge among writers? Can you point to a single innovator equal to, say, Beckett, among contemporary authors?

Burroughs [is such an innovator]. [But] bourgeois life is crushing the imagination from this planet. In due course this will provoke a backlash, since the imagination can never be wholly repressed. A new surrealism will probably be born.

‘Ballard’s Anatomy’, an interview by Paul Di Filippo, Science Fiction Eye, 1991.

Thank you very much, Paul Di Filippo!

Illustrations by Ferret, from Paul DiFilippo’s interview with Ballard.

Written & directed by: Simon Brook.
Based on the short story by: J.G. Ballard.
Produced by: Susanna Virtanen.
Music: Joshua Zaentz.

Starring: Alfred Hyslop, Paul Ravich, Earl Hagen, Bob Arcaro.

I’m probably biased, but in my estimation Ballard has hardly released a clunker — at least in novel form. Granted, The Wind from Nowhere is even in Ballard’s own analysis, ‘just a piece of hackwork’, knocked off in a matter of weeks to get a foot in the door, but still it has its moments. And the ones the critics loathe — Kingdom Come, say — reflect more the sour prejudice of mainstream media than they do Ballard. I find resonance with Kingdom Come each time I set foot outside my door. How many other 78-year-old novelists can we say that about?

But if we turn to the short stories it’s a slightly different matter, at least early on. ‘Now: Zero’ (1959), for example, was predicated on a last-sentence twist that was as corny as it was predictable. Ballard was big on the surprise reveal in those days, yet when it paid off the reward was secure. ‘Concentration City’, a classic short published two years before ‘Now Zero’, hinged on the sneak attack of the last line and was all the better for it. Even so, the feeling lingers that Ballard, pre-Atrocity Exhibition, was somewhat inconsistent, reinforced by the fact that ‘The Subliminal Man’, one of his very best stories (either novel or short), came out in 1963, the same year as one of his weakest efforts, ‘Minus One’.

‘Subliminal Man’ is quintessentially Ballardian: its sharply delineated descriptions of motorways, flyovers and shopping malls haven’t aged at all. As with the vision of urban panic in ‘Concentration City’, it works precisely because of the taste and restraint Ballard dedicates to the mise en scene; both stories are imbued with an uncanny resonance, the power of suggestion, as much for what they don’t reveal as for what they do. But ‘Minus One’, contextualised with the rest of the oeuvre, is completely baffling. It barely feels like Ballard at all, straining to make its point with considerable overkill.

‘Minus One’ is set in Green Hill Asylum, which ‘serves the role of a private prison’, catering to the very rich who dump their mentally defective relatives and lovers there — ‘abandoned casualties of the army of privilege’ — safe in the knowledge that these outcasts will not be seen nor heard from again; the asylum promises they won’t be re-entering society, presumably from a cocktail of drugs and shock treatment. But when a patient, Hinton, goes missing, the asylum’s director, Dr Mellinger, panics. Fearful of losing his job, he manages to convince his staff that Hinton never existed in the first place.

Although it’s not a bad premise, paradoxically the very nature of that premise reveals the story’s greatest flaw: it’s just too talky, with its tedious description (rather than depiction) of events. Yes, that’s necessary, given Hinton apparently doesn’t exist and therefore his ‘backstory’ can’t be shown, but it hardly makes for great writing. Ballard toys with the old ‘what is reality and who defines it?’ conundrum, and almost trips over his words describing Mellinger’s examination of Hinton’s ‘total existential role in the unhappy farce of which he was the author and principal star’. Perhaps we can detect the elements of a failed experiment here, the story’s overblown dialogue and interior monologues leading to a much more pared down and streamlined prose in Ballard’s late-60s works. But then again, even Ballard’s student story, ‘The Violent Noon’, written some 12 years earlier, seems to have a sharper blade. Maybe ‘Minus One’ was simply an aberration, reminding Ballard of the need to refocus; remember, ‘The Terminal Beach’, his stunning document of postwar malaise, came just one year later…

In ‘Minus One’ Ballard clearly has a point to make about the nature of psychiatry and its insular cabal but his heart just doesn’t seem in it, as when Mellinger meditates on Hinton’s file:

He refused to accept that this mindless cripple with his anonymous features could have been responsible for the confusion and anxiety of the previous day. Was it possible that these few pieces of paper constituted this meagre individual’s full claim to reality?

Unfortunately, the concept is not really developed beyond the ‘few pieces of paper’ analogy, and ultimately there is never any doubt that Hinton actually existed; the Ballard of just a few years’ hence would undoubtedly have heightened that ambiguity. Eventually the whole thing limps to a halt with yet another of Ballard’s patented twists in the tail, and while I admit I didn’t see it coming, after it unfurled itself I found it rather banal: potentially mindblowing, but, again, undercooked in its execution.

So, why did documentary filmmaker, Simon Brook, choose this story, this runt in JGB’s litter, as his first foray into film in 1991? I don’t really know, but I do know that ever since I saw a listing for it on IMDB I had to see it. So I tracked Simon down and asked him to send me a copy. (Note that as Simon now lives in France, he has requested I also upload a version with French subtitles, alongside the version you see at the start of this post.)

The film is undeniably stagey, but I’m guessing that had to have been a chief reason for Simon choosing the story; with a cast of four, set in a psychiatrist’s study, you won’t be needing a massive budget. Offsetting that, Simon’s fluid, restless camera extracts the maximum mileage from close angles and slow backward pans, relentlessly tracing the study’s cramped interior, mimicking the asylum’s stuffy worldview. Plus he cleverly mixes up the eyeline matches; the scenic parameters between two characters engaging in dialogue are never simply a matter of reversing the shot when one character is speaking to the other. Instead, we see perspectives from the side, from above, from everywhere. It’s a brisk cinematographic pace, but sometimes the pacing works against the film; if you slacken your concentration for a second or two you might actually miss the final twist.

The acting magnifies the overtly rhetorical language and vaudevillian aspects of Ballard’s story, an effect further intensified by Joshua Zaentz’s faux-chamber-music soundtrack. I can’t say any of that is to my taste. Alfred Hyslop, as Mellinger, eye-pops and mugs for the camera, veering dangerously close to Carry On territory, while Paul Ravich, the actor playing Booth, Mellinger’s main underling, comes to resemble the spaced-out astro-hippies in John Carpenter’s Dark Star. It’s all a bit much.

I can’t help wondering what the results would have been like if the film had played up the dark secret of the asylum, with its habit of making people disappear. There is a hint of this, when we learn that Dr Normand, who doesn’t go along with Mellinger’s methodology, has been lobotomised; that’s a great touch that wasn’t in Ballard’s story, but I’m really talking about mood and tone, and the acting and music, mainly. Combined with the twist in the end, enacted in Mellinger’s claustrophobic study, and Simon’s camera breathing down everyone’s necks, the effect could have been rather disturbing.

Still, this may well be the only time you will see Ballard played strictly for laughs. And for that, Simon Brook certainly deserves his place in the pantheon of unsung directors of JGB, alongside Potter, Cokliss, Scoggins and Cazals.

It’s not all Cronenberg and Spielberg, you know…

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.

———————————————————————————————————-

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.”

——————————————————————-
Toby Litt. Deadkidsongs (2001).
——————————————————————-

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.

————————————————————————————-
J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Toby Litt, 2007.
————————————————————————————-

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.

————————————————————-
Toby Litt. Hospital (2007).
————————————————————-

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.

———————————————————————————————–

..:: 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’

OPENING LINE:
“Apocalypse. A disquieting feature of this annual exhibition — to which the patients themselves were not invited — was the marked preoccupation of the paintings with the theme of world cataclysm, as if these long-incarcerated patients had sensed some seismic upheaval within the minds of their doctors and nurses.”

For many, The Atrocity Exhibition is J.G. Ballard’s most important work. It reads like an instruction manual in how to disrupt mass media and recontextualise technology, as the ‘T’ figure reconfigures the media landscape ‘in a way that makes sense’ — an aesthetic that’s proved to be hugely influential, perhaps more so on artists and musicians than writers.

Is Atrocity a novel or a collection of short stories? Ballard published the Atrocity pieces as standalone stories over a period of four years, while always claiming that he was working towards the big picture: an experimental novel.

Two versions are available: the Flamingo edition, and the large-format RE/Search edition. Both feature annotations from Ballard, although RE/Search’s version is recommended for the gynaecological illustrations from Phoebe Gloeckner.

As Ballardian reader Mike Holliday points out:

The 1990 Re/Search edition added an Appendix with four additional pieces. These comprised three of Ballard’s ‘surgical fictions’ from the 1970s: ‘Princess Margaret’s Facelift’ (1970), ‘Mae West’s Reduction Mammoplasty’ (1970), and ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Rhinoplasty’ (1976); along with (rather incongruously) a story from the late 1980s, ‘The Secret History of World War 3′.

There was a U.K. large format paperback edition by Harper Collins/Flamingo in 1993; of the additional stories included by RE/Search, only Princess Margaret’s Facelift and Mae West’s Reduction Mammoplasty were incorporated in this U.K. edition. Subsequent U.K. editions are identical in this respect (though I don’t think I’ve looked at the very latest one).”

From Amazon:

First published in 1970 and widely regarded as a prophetic masterpiece, this is a groundbreaking experimental novel by the acclaimed author of “Crash” and “Super-Cannes”, who has supplied explanatory notes for this new edition. The irrational, all-pervading violence of the modern world is the subject of this extraordinary tour de force. The central character’s dreams are haunted by images of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, dead astronauts and car-crash victims as he traverses the screaming wastes of nervous breakdown. Seeking his sanity, he casts himself in a number of roles: H-bomber pilot, presidential assassin, crash victim, pscyhopath. Finally, through the black, perverse magic of violence he transcends his psychic turmoils to find the key to a bizarre new sexuality.”

I recommend the inimitable Mark Fisher (aka k-punk) for his analysis of Atrocity — dense and theory-driven, but undeniably intelligent and provocative:

In a sense, the phrase “atrocity exhibition” is a strictly literal description of this media landscape as it emerged in the early 1960s, populated by images of Vietnam, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. The novel deals with the violence that haemorrhaged in the 1969 in which it was published: Manson, Altamont, War across the USA. But, for Ballard, the events of 1969 are merely the culmination of a decade whose guiding logic has been one of violence; a mediatized violence, where “mediatization” is a profoundly ambiguous term which doesn’t necessarily imply a disintensification. As they begin to achieve the instantaneous speed Virilio thinks characteristic of postmodern communication, media (paradoxically) immediatize trauma, making it instantly available even as they prepackage it into what will become increasingly preprogrammed stimulus-response circuitries.”

Mark Fisher. ‘Flatline Constructs — The Atrocity Exhibition’.

..:: CONTENTS
+ ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ (1966)
+ ‘The University of Death’ (1968)
+ ‘The Assassination Weapon’ (1966)
+ ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’ (1966)
+ ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’ (1967)
+ ‘The Great American Nude’ (1968)
+ ‘The Summer Cannibals’ (1969)
+ ‘Tolerances of the Human Face’ (1969)
+ ‘You and Me and the Continuum’ (1966)
+ ‘Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy’ (1966)
+ ‘Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A.’ (1968)
+ ‘Crash!’ (1969)
+ ‘The Generations of America’ (1968)
+ ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ (1968)
+ ‘The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’ (1966)

Appendix
+ ‘Princess Margaret’s Facelift’ (1970)
+ ‘Mae West’s Reduction Mammoplasty’ (1970)
+ ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Rhinoplasty’ (1976)
+ ‘The Secret History of World War III’ (1988)

..:: LINKS
+ Excerpt: Chapter 1 — ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’
+ Excerpt: Chapter 5 — ‘Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown’
+ Excerpt: Chapter 12 — ‘Crash!’

..:: ELSEWHERE ON BALLARDIAN (selected posts)
+ Grand Theft Auto IV: Ballardian atrocities
+ ‘Confronting ourselves’: Ballard and Circular Time
+ ‘An exhibition of atrocities’: J.G. Ballard on Mondo film
+ ‘The fusion of science and pornography’ (WARNING! Exceptionally unsafe for work)
+ ‘Der Visionär des Phantastischen’: An Interview with J.G. Ballard
+ ‘It would be a mistake to write about the future’: J.G. Ballard in Conversation with Jörg Krichbaum and Rein A. Zondergeld
+ The Ballardian Primer: Car Parks
+ Love among the mannequins
+ J.G. Ballard: The Corridor Interview
+ Angry Old Men: Michael Moorcock on J.G. Ballard
+ Atrocity II
+ ‘Magisterial, Precise, Unsettling’: Simon Reynolds on the Ballard Connection
+ The Brangelina Exhibition
+ Fantasy Kits: Steven Meisel’s State of Emergency
+ ‘When in doubt, quote Ballard’: An interview with Iain Sinclair
+ “Thirsty Man at the Spigot”: An Interview with Jonathan Weiss
+ Another Atrocity: A ‘New’ Work by J.G. Ballard
+ Jonathan Weiss: The Atrocity Exhibition
+ 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
+ William Burroughs: Preface to The Atrocity Exhibition
+ Author’s Note: The Atrocity Exhibition

..:: BUY THE BOOK

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

From the 1996 Harper Collins edition:

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

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

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

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

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

J.G. Ballard. ‘The Lucid Dreamer’.

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

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

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

..:: CONTENTS

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

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

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

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

More contents to come.

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

..:: BUY THE BOOK

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plus the obligatory endorsement:

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

Nicholas Royle, Guardian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I call that a missed opportunity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

..:: CONTENTS

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

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

..:: BUY VOLUME 1

..:: BUY VOLUME 2

“The focused description of scenes, of the medical exactness of throat architecture recalls nothing so much as Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition. It is frighteningly easy to visualise his film. (Parts were also originally published as a graphic novel.) The reference to Ballard is interesting. The decaying militarism of this book’s coda is straight out of Ballard’s work, while the climax seems torn from much the same vein of doomed inevitability that David Cronenberg has mined so well; the final image would have to burn out in the gate like Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop“.

The Atrocity Exhibition is a collection of J.G. Ballard’s most extraordinary short stories. Written in the few years following the tragic death of his wife, they are his most difficult work, representing the extremes of anguish, desire, alienation and horror. Compact and repetitive, they pick over the same questions of psychopathology, sexuality and death in paragraph after paragraph.

In this ‘new work’, Another Atrocity, each paragraph has a heading which may or may not relate to its contents. As the original work is already ‘cut-up’ in some sense, I felt it would be perfect for my electronic cut-up technique, in which each heading and sentence is chosen at random from the complete text.

In doing this, I was also reminded of Borges’ ‘Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote’, in which a modern writer becomes so immersed in Cervantes’ work that he is able to ‘re-write’ it, word-for-word. This is also an attempted ‘recreation’ of Ballard’s work by reproducing it.

I felt the addition of one of Versalius’ brilliant etchings of a dissected man complemented the biomorphic horror of the text, and also reflects Ballard’s (and my own) formative experience in the dissecting room.

And now it is complete, with every click on the refresh button, a unique page of Ballard’s Another Atrocity is created!

>>> Click here for access.

– Mike Bonsall

“Exactly when the term medical fetish became popular among the BDSM community is hard to determine. However, it is a widely used phrase that has been touched on by authors like J.G. Ballard, romance novelists in the romantic doctor/patient role-play scenario, filmmakers like David Cronenberg, and photographers like Romain Slocombe.

Yet, even among these diverse artists and perhaps not unlike medicine itself, there is an obvious and expansive divide among their specialized medically themed works. Slocombe appears like an ER specialist or ambulance worker as he makes a fetish art out of bandages in his ‘Broken Dolls’ series. In Deviant Desires, Katharine Gates describes his bandages as a medical version of Japanese erotic rope bondage.

Cronenberg is said to describe himself as a ‘Beverly Hills gynaecologist’ and you can see how this arises in many of his films from his use of speculums and references in Dead Ringers (1988) and to the vaginal-looking organic game in eXistenz (1999). Ballard, who is the author of the notorious novel, Crash (1973), which was, not surprisingly, turned into a film by Cronenberg in 1996, is a medical student, and his specialty seems to be forensic psychology and science. “When he is shown 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.”

All of these artists are avant-garde and just like anything that’s avant-garde or taboo, it eventually moves into the popular imagination. Through these artists, we can certainly see how fetishism plays a role and particularly how medical fetishism may have appeared more prevalently in popular and porn culture since the early seventies.”

“An Everyman’s life history doomed to repeat itself as farce”
Remainder, By Tom McCarthy
Published: 12 December 2005

“Re-enactment has been a feature in recent art, most famously in Jeremy Deller’s reprise of the Orgreave battle between striking miners and police. It is a art practice that readily invokes issues of trauma, nihilism and death. In fiction, it has been most prominent in the work of JG Ballard. As well as Ballard, McCarthy also draws upon influences including Huysmans, Bataille and Freud. Above all, his novel deals with the difficulty of
relocating authenticity in everyday life.
…
McCarthy’s prose is precise and unpretentious. His anti-hero is a sympathetic Everyman, and it is difficult to resist the dominion of his obsession. It has to be said that the title is not a positive portent for future sales, and Remainder might amount to no more than a cult. This would be unfortunate, because its minatory brilliance calls for classic status.”

METRONOME PRESS, £6. ORDER (FREE P&P) ON 0870 079 8897

What might have happened if J.G. Ballard had used his medical training to its fullest potential and become a doctor rather than a writer? Well, there would be no pen name for a start; ‘Jimmy Ballard’ would be a different man indeed, as Johnny Strike discovers. In this fascinating snapshot into an alternate Ballardian universe, Mr Strike transplants the cold, airless, subliminally deviant psychopathology of JG Ballard’s writing into Jimmy Ballard’s life…

Johnny Strike is the author of the cult novel Ports of Hell published by Diagonal in the UK. His work has appeared in Headpress and Ambit among other journals, and he is a founding member of the influential US protopunk band Crime. ‘Jimmy Ballard’s Hospital Review’ was included in A Loud Humming Sound Came from Above, Johnny’s latest collection of short stories, published by Rudos and Rubes Press.

Jimmy Ballard got out of the taxi and stood admiring the vast, impersonal buildings of the hospital whose wards and departments constituted a city unto itself. His mind was filled with the wonders of transplant surgery, the various highs induced by the deadpan team of anesthesiologists, and the haunted pictures displayed in the X-ray rooms. He had always suspected that this hospital was also part of an advanced psychological experiment. And now he was part of it. He was here to write the annual review for the Board.

On his first day the bookish yet sexually charged PR rep, Kate North, R.N., took him on a quick tour of the inpatient units, the operating theaters, the laundry, the kitchen, and finally the pharmacy/lab, where under a harsh light, a young West Indian wearing a lab coat focused on a small container of dark liquid. Kate North ignored him and he did not acknowledge their presence either. Even so, Ballard felt that there was some romantic bond between his guide and this intense pharmacist. As though reading Ballard’s mind, Kate North quickly guided him along another busy hallway, holding his arm now as though he was a patient who had wandered away from his assigned ward.

From a top tier of the main building, through a glass wall, they looked over the layout of the hospital. Ballard imagined the mental landscapes of the victims of road crashes, the pregnant women, the cancer patients, the kitchen staff preparing massive amounts of food, as well as the army in charge of linen for the 500 beds that were usually occupied. Kate North pointed out a staff lounge in a far corner that boasted an indoor courtyard with shrubs, trees, and an ornamental pool. A round skylight gave the pool and surrounding area a dose of natural light and a false feeling of open air and space. Ballard found this lounge the most unsettling of all the areas he would visit during his inspection.

The hospital was divided into three main sections: the central one housed primary clinical and emergency services, operating theaters, intensive care units, and maternity services. Around the central core were the psychiatric units, outpatient clinics, and administration offices. Grouped in the back were the service areas that provided the hospital with food and other supplies. Kate North pointed out the Accident and Emergency entrance, located near a hallway of shops and cafés. Had the architect thought that the emergency patients on entry might catch a glimpse of the diversions the hospital offered—as a kind of prize to motivate recovery?

Kate North escorted Ballard to his temporary office. “Tomorrow we’ll visit the Casualty Department,” she said flatly. Ballard watched her turn and walk away. He admired her athletic legs and the movement of her well-formed buttocks encased in a uniform that seemed a little tight for regulations; even a hint of black silk could be seen at the hem.

THE CASUALTY DEPARTMENT

Kate’s breath smelled of coffee and cigarettes, and mixed enticingly with the fumes of the Dior perfume she had dabbed on in the wee hours. In the staff area, she pulled Ballard aside so they could view the main reception room without being noticed. A man in greasy coveralls sat holding his crushed arm, with a drained look on his pockmarked face. A fat, red-faced man next to him held a swab of gauze over his eye and looked to be staring into space with the other one. Kate guided Ballard into a dark room where he half-expected her to unzip him, but instead she switched on a dim light and they stood looking through a one-way mirror into a small operating room. A doctor and nurse in scrubs were attending to a patient. A saline drip dangled from above and was inserted into the patient’s arm. A nasty wound on his knee was exposed. The blood was sponged away by the nurse who then applied an antiseptic. The wound was finally sutured by the doctor, then wrapped in a dressing by the nurse.

“There are no new crash or burn injuries today,” Kate said blandly, yet Ballard sensed a touch of chaos in her big, gray eyes. They exited the room and moved on to the blood bank, and Kate inquired at the reception desk as to when the next transfusion was scheduled, as if inquiring the next showing of a film at the local cinema. They watched the rather boring procedure for a few minutes before she nudged him and they left.

Ahead, ambulance lights played off the corridor walls as Kate and Ballard made their way past the X-ray techs who slumped slightly, perhaps imitating their patients, weighed down by lead aprons. A couple of them stood sipping teas in their doorways, forlornly guarding their domain of equipment, darkrooms, and radiation residue.

Kate stopped and introduced Ballard to Dr. Stuart, head radiologist and diagnostic expert. Dr. Stuart wore black frame-glasses and a neatly trimmed mustache. His bluish-black hair gleamed under the fluorescent lights from ample application of hair gel. He reminded Ballard of a barber more than a doctor, and he seemed to be sizing up Ballard as well. Stuart invited them into his office and led them to seats that looked borrowed from a spacecraft. Stuart sat opposite, behind a wide blue steel desk. The color photos on the walls were all of children; Ballard was soon to learn they’d been photographed in Peru, where the doctor had done field work in his younger days. After a well-practiced recital of the hospital’s features and the general functions of most departments, he began an in-depth discussion of his specialty. Here his passion poured forth and Ballard felt he was listening to an opinionated visual artist rather than a radiologist. Dr. Stuart segued into the proper preparation of a barium meal, as though he were a profiled chef working for a swank restaurant, determined to maintain its high rating in the Zagat Guide. Again, Kate seemed entranced as he spoke, and Ballard wondered if she’d had liaisons with all the prominent men at the hospital.

Ballard’s mind wandered as they left Dr. Stuart. Had one too many documentaries been filmed in these corridors and departments, making his assignment redundant, even meaningless? How could his review ever compete with the cine-cameras, zoom lenses, and continuity people viewing the latest drama in the Trauma Ward? Ballard could imagine Dr. Stuart checking his makeup before stepping onto the set to explain the X-ray results to the frantic and distressed family members. The Board need only view these films to see that their experiment had taken on a life of its own.

Kate invited Ballard to lunch with some of her friends. “They’re all techies,” she said. “So you’ll get a flavor of all their points of view.” They chose a pizza parlor a short walk from the hospital and Ballard was the only male present. Holly, the stylish, brunette X-ray tech who wore her makeup so pale it approached that of a Goth rocker, worked exclusively with radiation treatment. She was the quiet one of the bunch, but occasionally exuded a sultry look between sips of Diet Coke and rearranging her salad on a paper plate. Betty, a middle-aged redhead with bottle-green eyes and a thin upper lip, called herself a mechanic and began describing in loving detail the various hospital equipment and machinery she worked on. Her discussion of a new type of laser might have continued for the entire lunch, had Kate not butted back in. The lab tech, Sharon, an Amazon who could have pursued a career as a fashion model but seemed ignorant of her especially good looks, wore little makeup and her hair was cut into a messy style that she occasionally brushed out of her eyes. She talked about her duties with a curious zeal. Was she eager for a glowing report from him? Ballard wondered. He enjoyed listening to her while the others seemed to be daydreaming or scanning the room for potential lovers.

“I move from department to department,” Sharon continued, touching Ballard’s hand in a familiar way, “but, mostly, you’ll find me in pathology. I’m the queen of the biopsies and the microtome. I study blood as well, some biochemistry, but lately it’s been more work than I can handle from the doctors in microbiology. Bacteria today are becoming increasingly immune to the antibiotics at an alarming rate. And everybody is afraid of a pandemic.” This brought everyone back and Kate looked especially disturbed.

Sharon laughed and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll always have a stash of antidotes for my friends.” Everyone laughed but Ballard.

“She’s joking, James,” Betty said, winking like a drunken sailor.

“Is it true,” Ballard asked, “that all gated communities in this district have medical tele-linkage with the hospital?” Kate answered in the affirmative and the others nodded silently.

On the walk back, Kate told him that there was a fifth member of their usual lunch group, Will Sanders, who was a physical measurement technician, but that he was out sick with the flu. His specialty was audiology; he suffered from hearing loss himself but wore an advanced aid not yet on the market that gave him the acute hearing abilities of a barn owl. In fact, he was nicknamed “The Fox,” and his ears twitched when he tried to listen to anything a bit out of his range.

THE OPERATING THEATRE

The surgical team entered the theater and approached the patient on the operating table. Each began their respective tasks. The nurse adjusted the patient’s gown to expose the abdomen. She cleaned the skin with an antiseptic, then the surgeon outlined the area where the incision would be made. The anesthesiologist placed a mask over the face of the already unconscious patient.

Standing for a moment in the pose of a matador, the surgeon stepped forward and made his incision. One of the two assistant surgeons carefully swabbed the blood. In rapid succession, the surgeon cut through the layers of muscle. The anesthesiologist studied his instrument panel, making sure the patient was getting the right mixtures of gases. Both assistants clamped off the severed blood vessels and used retractors to pull back the skin and muscle flaps. The surgeon found the appendix and quickly removed it. The assistants worked together to remove the clamps and expertly sew up the incision. The surgeon bowed slightly to his team and departed. Ballard looked at his watch and saw that the whole process had taken under fifteen minutes. He thought of the faceless patient waking up later, groggy and sore and pressing the call button for a shot of morphine. He looked at his notes and the peculiar configuration of his drawing: surgeon, anesthetic machine, assistants, nurse, operating light, patient, diathermy machine, and the instrument trolly that held the various surgical instruments: the dissecting forceps, operating scissors, and the scalpels.

“Tomorrow you’ll have a day on your own,” Kate said, escorting him back to his office. “Will you miss me?” she teased, making him smile and say yes. “But then Wednesday first thing. I’ll be introducing you to all the big shots.”

“Till then,” Ballard said, taking Kate’s hand and feeling the warmth of her palm, but instead of the look of seduction he was hoping for, her expression had shifted to business-as-usual. But she did finally throw him a vampy smile before heading off. Kate North was a mystery that he longed to solve.

THE HOSPITAL DOCTORS

When Kate and Ballard entered Dr. Kaminsky’s office, led by his haughty secretary, they could see him across the room in a white lab coat, standing, viewing a computer screen, wearing headphones. His modish haircut came over the collar of his coat. He was writing something in a notebook. The secretary gestured toward two chairs that faced the doctor’s desk and they sat down. Dr. Kaminsky finished up, removed his headphones, and turned to greet them. He was a young man, with generally good looks and a pleasant smile. Ballard stood briefly and shook hands with him.

“Excuse me, Mr. Ballard, but I prefer to stand whenever I can.” Dr. Kaminsky walked behind his desk, folded his arms, and cradled his chin with his right hand. “I’m an anesthesiologist, and so a key member of the surgical team. I, also, hold the patient’s life in my hands.” The doctor looked briefly at his hands. “We deliver the patient into the world of dreams, across the rivers of myth, to a multitude of netherworlds.” He smiled beatifically. “The afterlife is previewed and it’s nothing like what religions tell us. No, it’s more like the mind of Dali or the hallucinations of the Huichol Indians of Northern Mexico.” Dr. Kaminsky was charming and eloquent and peculiar. Ballard listened with interest as he keenly described his gases and drugs. He was also a contact if needed, set into position a year ago by the Board.

They moved on to Dr. Huber, a cardiologist, who was the opposite of the young Kaminsky, an older man with an annoyed presence, wearing a suit that would have better served a lawyer. He announced that his specialty, heart disease, was bound to affect everyone eventually. Dr. Huber touched his stethoscope and looked expectantly at Ballard, as if waiting for him to volunteer himself for a listen.

“My friends are the diagnostic machines in D Ward,” he said with the wicked, impersonal smile of a new breed of gangster scientist. “They display for me the electrical patterns that help me to see certain blood vessels.”

Next, Dr. Paul, the head pediatrician, was a tall, bony man in his early forties. He, too, wore a modish cut like Dr. Kaminsky, but Dr. Paul had a receding hairline, a Roman nose, and dull, brown eyes. He wore a lab coat with lollipops, candy sticks, pens, and thermometers stuffed in the upper pocket. They met him in the hallway and as he talked he glanced around, monitoring the foot traffic in and out of his department. As they chatted, Ballard got the impression that Dr. Paul was covertly still a child himself, and a devious one at that—overly cautious about what he had to say. Even his expressions seemed borrowed from his adolescent patients. A smiling Eurasian nurse appeared with a young Down syndrome girl in tow. Dr. Paul abandoned their conversation and crouched to face his young patient. They communicated in some barely audible, secret language.

“This is Sybil, my star patient,” he said, looking up at Ballard and Kate. Dr. Paul’s entire face had transformed into a bright smile.

Sybil seemed only marginally affected by the Down syndrome and, after a quick study of the couple, offered her hand. Dr. Paul, Sybil, and the nurse moved on toward the hospital gift shop. Dr. Paul called back that they were going shopping, promising to meet up later in the Children’s Ward.

Dr. Craig, the head gynecologist, appeared more like a strange policeman or some new type of security agent in his tight, powder blue uniform and Egyptian ankh bolo tie. How did this correspond to his arduous work in the domain of the vulva, pubis, labia, and reproductive system, Ballard wondered. But Dr. Craig cut the meeting short after taking a phone call—a call that Ballard suspected had been pre-arranged. As he walked away, Ballard noticed the many keys that swung from his belt, and a pair of rubber gloves that dangled from his back pocket. He appeared more like a sexual deviant posing as a doctor, Ballard decided. Kate stirred him from his thoughts, touching his lower back. Ballard imagined her as an ardent masseuse or chiropractor assessing the area she soon would be working on.

The head pathologist, Dr. Rollins, an elderly man, they caught snoozing at his desk. Kate knocked loud enough on the open door to rouse him. He reminded Ballard of the French bulldog he had petted in the hospital parking lot the previous afternoon. Dr. Rollins’s desk was piled with files and papers and books. Vials of what looked like blackish blood were haphazardly laying amongst a cigar, a thick men’s spy-adventure paperback, and an open box of prophylactics. Dr. Rollins put his fingers together in a steeple and recited, in a monotone, his trials and tribulations as head pathologist. Kate soon appeared drowsy listening to the words that, clearly, made little sense to either of them.

In the next office, the head psychiatrist insisted that Ballard call her Dorothy. But once they’d left their meeting with her, he had trouble recalling what she looked like, let alone what she had said. Ballard felt as though they had participated in some kind of brainwashing or hypnosis session. This crafty shrink would get a special note in his report.

The last stop for the day was the office of the head surgeon, Dr. Spencer, whom they had watched perform the appendectomy. A hum leaked from some invisible machine in his office and Ballard noted that, like some mad maestro, he did not shake hands but instead gave a slight bow. He reminded Ballard of a stage performer as he spoke and moved around his office, almost as though he were practicing steps and poses. Then he stood still, appearing again for a moment like a slightly unhinged matador. For such a large office, it was surprisingly bare, as if to emulate the surgery theater itself: his desk and bookcases were as sterile and empty as his operating tables. They said goodbye to Dr. Spencer and left him to his elaborate rehearsals.

“Do you have a little energy left for a visit to the Maternity Ward?” asked Kate.

“Of course, sure,” Ballard said as she studied him over her glasses. He could see thickly applied black eyeliner and was lost for a moment in her beguiling eyes. Again she guided him by the arm, now as though he were a reluctant father trying to put off the inevitable obligation of facing his new offspring. He expected to hear babies crying, but the Maternity Ward was strangely silent, and Kate seemed to be enjoying his mystification. She pulled a white lab coat out of a supply closet and offered to help him on with it.

“It’s better that you look like a doctor on this ward,” she said, admiring the fit. In the first room, a midwife was checking a patient’s rate of contractions. The patient smiled at them in a daze. Through a number of doors, they stepped into another room where a young mother was breastfeeding her infant. The bedcover was pulled back and her legs were bare. Kate seemed to bristle, perhaps suspecting that he was admiring the woman’s legs.

“There are supposed to be two, maybe even three, births later today, if you’re interested,” she said as she guided him along a window where the incubated babies were lying in clear, square compartments like some bad science fiction film.

He stopped to view a black baby who appeared almost purple in the gaudy lighting and the circulating swirls of purified air.

“Would you like to visit the Children’s Ward? Dr. Paul and Sybil are probably there now.”

Although Ballard was tired, he felt a boost as they entered the Children’s Ward. The walls were painted in lively colors—one in glitzy red and yellow stripes that reminded him of a carnival tent. The beds were arranged in a circle and two laundry baskets were stuffed with toys. But the beds were empty, as though an abduction had just taken place. A stuffed bear and stuffed giraffe sat there, looking at them dumbly. The Eurasian nurse, Lee, came into the room and explained that the children had gone to the hospital garden. Lee had changed to a lab coat decorated with clowns, balloons, flowers, and butterflies. She led them to the window and they looked down at the line of children being led by Dr. Paul, the adult Peter Pan, and Sybil, an awkward Tinkerbell.

“Beyond the garden, they’ll climb a summit and look back to view the hospital grounds in its entirety,” Lee said, making a motion as though adjusting a troublesome corset.

Ballard spent the next day typing up his notes on an electric typewriter. At lunchtime, Kate tapped on his door in a playful mood.

“You know, James, you haven’t asked me much about myself, or the nursing profession, for that matter.”

“I’m sorry, Kate, it’s a very general report.”

“Aren’t you interested in me?”

“Why, of course.”

“Then take me to lunch?”

“Well, with pleasure.”

“Good,” said Kate with a coquettish look. “I’ve found a little bistro not too far. And no one has discovered it yet.”

They left the hospital, boarded the Tube, and got off one station later. The restaurant was on the second level of a shopping complex: dark, comfy, something like a gentleman’s clubroom. They settled themselves into a leather booth in one corner. They both ordered the crab stew special, and Ballard was pleased to see a good French wine on the menu. During lunch, Kate spoke of growing up in London, her early disillusionment with art school, the great thrill of the early punk scene, and a summer of bumming around the beaches of Greece and Turkey. After a profound dream where she’d been a nurse on a battlefield, she became obsessed with the profession. For once, her parents gave her their complete support and even paid for nursing school. From the beginning, she had studied hard. After graduation, she’d worked in many of the different specialties: intensive care, psychiatry, midwifery, elder care, pediatrics, but finally found her true calling in public relations.

“But what was the most challenging before you took this job?” Ballard asked, and wondered just what had so attracted him to this independent young lady twenty-three years younger than he was.

“The elderly,” she said, looking at him as though he had somehow just been transformed into Herbert Humbert, and she into a more sophisticated Lolita. “And it was also the most rewarding.” She sipped her wine and stared off across the empty room, perhaps picturing some stressful life-changing experience she’d had while working in the world of geriatrics.

“Depression is widespread with this age group,” she said. “But I worked under a brilliant doctor who knew the cure and used it: opiates. During that time, the ward for the elderly was an even happier place than the Children’s Ward. He determined the dose each patient could tolerate while remaining functional and then prescribed that dose as needed. Pain complaints ceased almost completely. He also supplied other drugs if the patient had a preference; cannabis extract was very popular.

“During this period, one patient, who’d been a notorious swinger in the Sixties, filled notebooks with her racy memoirs that were later published. And a fantastic art show was exhibited by the elderly patients; it was reviewed by the local media and even caused a bit of controversy. A certain eighty-seven year-old, Mr. Simon Thurston, had obtained Polaroids of his disfigured penis from his medical files and displayed them as found art.

“There were a few musicians there at that time who held impromptu concerts. They covered Stravinsky, Mariachi music, and even some cool jazz. They changed the lighting in the ward to a mix of soft golden splashes and dreamy purple shades, which helped to transform it into an atmosphere of a decadent nightclub-cum-opium-den. But it couldn’t last, of course. The doctor was exposed and booted from the hospital.

“I secretly agreed with his treatment,” she added quietly, as though someone might be listening. “But soon after the scandal, things went back to their old gloomy ways, and after some night classes, I applied for a position in public relations.” Ballard made a mental note of the doctor’s name to file a petition to have him reinstated.

The following day, Kate introduced him to a blur of people. She seemed to take some pleasure in making the endless introductions, including the staff from the hospital gift shop; the manager of the on-site radio station; the chaplain again, whom Ballard managed to neatly brush off; and a sexy, young couple that he was surprised and delighted to find were the hospital disc jockey and beautician.

THE HOSPITAL AT NIGHT

The first thing Ballard noticed was the absence of activity in the hallways. The quietude was enhanced by dim lighting throughout the corridors and waiting rooms. He stopped by a room where a red light above the door was flashing. At the far end of the hallway, Dr. Huber and two nurses were hurrying towards him. Dr. Huber urged Ballard inside. In a moment, they were all in the patient’s room.

In bed was an elderly woman lying on the covers, motionless. Her head was to the side and an arm was dangling over the bedside. A night nurse explained to Dr. Huber that heart massage and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation had both failed. Dr. Huber watched his team set up two trolleys of machines, including a defibrillator. An oxygen mask was strapped onto her by one nurse and a tube was guided down her throat. The electrocardiogram equipment was set in place and Dr. Huber studied the readout and then placed the shock pads on the patient’s chest. After two jolts, the woman was revived. She sat up suddenly, with an almost serene expression, and the team quietly congratulated her.

“Send Mrs. Martin to IC for a few days,” Dr. Huber instructed the night nurse. He turned to Ballard with a nod and then he was gone. Ballard walked out of the room and down another hallway, letting some inner sense of navigation guide him. He wandered the back corridors and looked into the empty rooms and offices. He came across a few porters in a waiting room watching news on TV and drinking tea. He continued on his inspection and spoke with a few women from domestic services. The kitchen was open so he bought a coffee and headed to his office.

MEDICAL ENGINEERING

The clear plastic-covered booklet on his desk, probably left by Kate North since she knew his interest in this field, was titled: Medical Engineering, 1984. The cover diagram depicted a green, human form showing all the current spare parts of the human body in yellow, with corresponding numbers. One leg and arm were orange and obviously artificial. The illustration could have doubled for the cover of a deranged science fiction collection. He read the listing slowly.

1. Wig. 2. Skull plate. 3. Skull plug. 4. Plastic cornea. 5. Plastic eye. 6. Contact lenses. 7. Spectacles. 8. Hearing aid. 9. False teeth. 10. Chin enlarger. 11. Artificial larynx, 12. Pacemaker. 13. Artificial breast. 14. Shoulder joint. 15. Artificial arm. 16. Synthetic artery. 17. Heart valves. 18. Elbow joint. 19. Synthetic vein. 20. Elbow cap. 21. Elbow hinge. 22. Abdominal patch. 23. Hip joint. 24. Testicle implants. 25. Artificial knee. 26. Femur. 27. Finger joints. 28. Knee joints. 29. Knee plate. 30. Shinbone.

Ballard turned the page and the next fantastic drawing was of an artificial hand with its “Arm socket, motor with amplifier and gears,” and its “Rechargeable battery pack.” Another page showed an X-ray, perhaps taken by one of Dr. Stuart’s assistants. The finger joints of stainless steel were already in position in a skeletal hand. Another page displayed the devilish and confusing diagram of a heart-lung machine. Below it was a pacemaker, looking something like a lighter except for the plastic tubing that was attached to it.

He worked on his review throughout the day, breaking only for brief meetings with a physiotherapist and a psychotherapist who had both just returned from holidays in Spain. Afterward, he found himself near the hospital pharmacy/lab. This time, the West Indian pharmacist wished him a cheery good afternoon.

Ballard made brief visits over the next few days to the more mundane outpatient department, admissions office, medical records, the hospital switchboard, and the supplies department. On his final rounds, he looked for Kate North in the staff lounge where he instead spotted Dr. Rollins, coming out of a back room with Lee, the Eurasian nurse from the Children’s Ward. Rollins shot him a quick, contemptuous look, then tried to smile. Lee looked away but he thought he’d glimpsed a slightly bruised lip.

In the cafeteria, Ballard asked Betty and Sharon where Kate might be. Sharon grinned and sent him on what turned out to be a wild goose chase. During his last days, Kate was never where she was supposed to be. He was starting to suspect a conspiracy. Eventually, he stood by her office for nearly an hour, looking periodically at a small notebook before, finally feeling foolish, deciding to give up.

Ballard knew that compiling the psychology of the future was the ultimate aim. The Board would be pleased to see that the inner migration continued unabated. There would always be the variants, the Dr. Craigs and the Dr. Rollinses. But as they were the first of the inevitable deviant behaviors that would erupt from time to time, they, too, would be studied and contained. Dr. Craig would have to go, of course, before he plotted some kind of insane takeover. Ballard had photographed the documents in his files that indicated this tendency. So far, Craig and Rollins had interfered only slightly with the psychic fulfillment that otherwise looked to be flourishing since the Board had put its systems into place. And there were a few others who needed further monitoring, but so far, showed no major glitches.

Ballard finished typing his report and placed the sheaf of papers in a white plastic case. He would present it to the Review Board the following week. On this, his last day, he had hoped to invite Kate to his favorite restaurant in Chelsea, but wondered again if she’d been avoiding him.

He left the hospital, left the grounds, and headed off down a busy city street. It started to rain heavily and he had not brought an umbrella.

He hurried along, looking through the blur of rain for a place to duck into. Shielding his face with the briefcase, he spotted the restaurant where he had eaten with Kate. An exquisite girl, decked out in an open black slicker and stiletto heels, stood under the awning at the entranceway, making him think of a Helmut Newton photograph.

Kate North smiled at him as he approached, now dripping wet. For the first time, she was wearing her hair down and no glasses. She wiped off his face and kissed his mouth, biting at his lip.

“I was just looking for you inside,” she whispered into his ear.

“Now, the real review will begin,” Ballard said, realizing his voice had dropped to a lower register.

The History of Eduard Pernkopf’s Topographische Anatomie des Menschen

by David J. Williams

“Frequently misunderstood because of the history of the time in which it was produced, Eduard Pernkopf’s Topographische Anatomie des Menschen nevertheless represents the pinnacle of color anatomic illustration. The more than 800 magnificent watercolor paintings of human anatomy found in Pernkopf’s atlas occupied a number of Viennese artists for three decades. This article closely examines the work and its creators.”

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.
————————————————————————————————————————–

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

J.G. Ballard photo courtesy of Steve Double

This is a work of fiction concerning one of the 20th-century’s more controversial writers, J.G. Ballard. It utilises the method Ballard himself employed as part of a short piece in the RE/Search reprint of his Atrocity Exhibition collection. In that piece, “Mae West’s Reduction Mammoplasty”, Ballard recontextualised actual medical texts to describe the “surgical challenge the reduction in size of Mae West’s breasts presented,” using the techniques of plastic surgery and the icnonography of actor West to present a critique of contemporary body politics.

In this Ballardian special, Kristoph Eggleston applies the method to the iconography of Ballard himself, in order to present an imaginative look at Ballard’s place in the literary canon.

See ‘Author’s Note’ at the end of the article for more background.

————————————————————————————————-
The increase in size of J.G. Ballard’s penis presented a surgical challenge of some magnitude. There were many factors to be taken into account: Mr Ballard’s age; the type of enlargement; the degree of ptosis present; the actual size of enlargement; and, finally, the presence of any pathology in the penile tissue itself.

After the age of fifty years, penile tissue may behave in a very unfortunate manner if the blood supply is in any way impaired – from wastage as a result of the ageing process, for example. In the case of Mr Ballard, therefore, it was decided that the ‘K2 plasty’ should be performed, rather than pubic incisions, as successful K2 implementation generally results in greater lengthening of the penis.

In dealing with shrunken penises in older subjects, it may be necessary to build up huge volumes of penile tissue in two stages, since radical additions in one stage may well interfere with the nerve supply of the penis and prevent erection of the penis during subsequent sexual excitation. Mr Ballard was warned, therefore, of the possible need for a second operation. As ptosis was present without hypertrophy the chief concern was that the patient’s penis should be replaced in its normal position. Thus, it was decided to also insert a penile prosthesis to allay such fears.

Penile prostheses are grouped in two major categories: rigid, semi-rigid and malleable rods, producing varying degrees of rigidity; and inflatable prostheses including two types: a) the multicomponent inflatable prosthesis, and b) the self-contained inflatable prosthesis.

Rigid prostheses generally produce a low mechanical failure rate, as they contain few moving parts and are able to be implanted relatively simply. However, they often produce unsightly erections and can interfere with urination due to their obstructive nature. Nonetheless, the rigid prosthesis is suitable for men with poor hand mobility, who are relatively elderly, or who do not desire to chance the higher risk of malfunction due to more moving parts. After consulting with the urologist and carefully reviewing the risks, benefits and drawbacks associated with each procedure, Mr Ballard registered his approval for the rigid prosthesis.

PROCEDURE
The most important step before operating on the penis was to ascertain carefully the sites proposed for graft enhancement and prosthesis implantation. Measurements were made in his suite before operation with Mr Ballard lying on his back. Steadying the penis with his free hand, the assistant drew a line directly from the glans to the base of the testicles. The prosthesis would fall directly in line with this marking.

The entire skin of Mr Ballard’s penis was cleansed with soap, water and spirit and wrapped in sterile towels. Mr Ballard was then ready for operation. The markings were redrawn on the patient when he was anaesthetised and on the operating table. The penis was then dissected upwards from its attachment to the perineum, after first splitting the testicular sack in two and carefully laying each half (including the testicles) in miniature humidicribs clamped to either side of the penis. Great care was taken to preserve the internal pedicle arising from the perforating branches of the internal penile artery.

Insertion of the prosthesis.
After proper selection of length and diameter to fit the corpus cavernosum, and general dilation of the corporal body to avoid perforation proximally, meticulous attention to detail was taken to avoid infection, including intraoperative antibiotics and copious irrigation during the procedure. After constructing an artificial canal within the interior penile wall, using a pair of small curved scissors with blunt points, the prosthesis was successfully embedded within its new home.

Further precautions included the use of a surgical bubble system to prevent particles and bacteria from gaining access to the device. The length of the penis and the testicular sack was then successfully sealed with the latest ‘meltpoint’ stitch technology.

Other complications that may have arisen include perforation of the corporal body (the area where the prosthesis is held), which can cause migration of the prosthetic device. A Dacron graft was therefore created to prevent migration.

Dermafat injection (K2 plasty).
The penis was brought forward and laid on a surgical steel board. Abdominal liposuction was performed as part of the procedure, minimising the disadvantages of fat absorption and nodule formation by limiting the amount of fat injected at any one time, thereby improving the overall viability of the procedure. A limit to the thickness of the grafts to be placed was also enforced, so as to ensure adequate blood supply to prevent the grafts from becoming hardened.

Once again, the knife was brought forward and incisions made on the topside of the penis. Injections were made using the dermafat procedure, with the entire field consistently reviewed for bleeding points. Loose skin coverings, freed using the surgeon’s knife, were then arranged to fit snugly over the grafts. A curved clamp was used, but the fact that it fitted tightly on the skin margins did not appear to damage the vitality of the skin edges. Five straight needles mounted with strong silkworm gut were then inserted between the two layers of the skin on the topside of the penis.

Once sealed, the nanografts – via remote microchip technology – extended lengthwise while attached to the interior penile wall. This stretching process occurred slowly over eight hours, so as not to damage skin tissue or vital capillary vessels. The usual increase in length is one-to-two inches and one-and-a-half-to-three inches in girth. Mr Ballard’s penis was found to be incrementally on track.

Upon completion of the operation, it remained to ensure that there was no blood collected in the penis, and the penis was adequately drained on both the top and bottom surfaces. Corrugated rubber drains proved to be satisfactory.

POST-OPERATIVE RECOVERY
Mr Ballard suffered a serious degree of surgical shock, with intravenous saline solution given during the operation. Mr Ballard’s bed was raised on blocks at the foot-end, and he was allowed to lie comfortably on his back until a normal pulse rate and normal blood pressure was achieved. Mr Ballard was then allowed to sit up for as long as the dressings remained firm. The wounds were redressed the next day, with the drains removed after forty-eight hours. Mr Ballard was then informed of his payment options, noting that the facilities accepted most major credit cards and cashier cheques.

It was some time before Mr Ballard’s penis reached its final proportion and shape, and there was no urgency about trimming scar lines until three months had passed. Although Mr Ballard subsequently contacted the surgeon to indicate satisfaction with the length of his penis, the ultimate results of this operation with regard to sexual function are not known, as Mr Ballard has since divorced from his wife.

—————————————————————————————————
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction concerning one of the twentieth-century’s more controversial writers, J.G. Ballard. It uses the method Ballard himself used as part of the appendix to the RE/Search reprint of his Atrocity Exhibition – a short piece entitled “Mae West’s Reduction Mammoplasty.” Here, Ballard, uses (or “samples”) actual medical texts to describe the “surgical challenge the reduction in size of Mae West’s breasts presented,” using the techniques of plastic surgery to present a critique of contemporary body politics.

Was Ballard’s penis too small? No, as far as one can tell, but it hangs (by way of deed and reputation) over the collective consciousness like a too-ripe banana. As this figurative member dangles from the tree of Old Guard Avant Garde writing, we pluck it, peel it, suck it, disgorge it – merging its putrefactive flesh with the twisted obsessions of the next generation, giving new life to a ‘once-great’ author on the verge of emasculation by his peers.

——————————————————————————————————
This piece was first published in the short-fiction anthology Amorphik: An Erotic Constellation (2000), edited by Simon Sellars and published by Sub Dee Industries (Melbourne, Australia).
——————————————————————————————————