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.

Conducted by Evelyn Finger.

Translation by Dan O’Hara.

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

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

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

Dan O’Hara

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

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

Were you surprised by the hurricane’s aftermath?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because the Americans are fickle egocentrics?

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

Can one prepare for apocalypse?

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

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

Should George Bush have read your books?

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

Yes, it’s incomprehensible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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