The following is excerpted from Matteo Pasquinelli’s book Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers / Institute of Network Cultures, December 2008). Reproduced with permission.

Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessel are the written mythologies of memory and desire.

— J.G. Ballard, Ambit magazine, 1967[1]

“Fiction is a Branch of Neurology”

The novels of J.G. Ballard can describe the nature of technology and the contemporary mediascape better than any philosopher, media theorist or cultural studies academic. During the mass media revolution, while spectres of the collective imaginary were flourishing on everybody’s television screens in a genuine “atrocity exhibition”, both academic and radical theorists were imploding in the semiotics of the image: postmodernism indeed reduced the image to a linguistic sign. Ballard and other science fiction writers, meanwhile, were left alone to map the new becoming of the media unconscious. In retrospect, it is increasingly apparent how the postmodern agenda and the church of simulacra functioned as an immunisation strategy of an armchair intelligentsia against the monsters emerging from the collective Id.

Ironically, the notion of ‘collective unconscious’ can itself be interpreted as a high culture sanitisation attempt to what was visibly and consciously intensifying at the core of mass media society: libido. As much as Deleuze and Guattari recognised that delirium is always social, political and historical (something not simply isolated to the morbid intimacy of a psychoanalyst’s couch), Ballard understood that “after Freud’s exploration within the psyche it is now the outer world of reality which must be quantified and eroticised”.[2] Significantly, he began his cartography of the machinic unconscious of the West outside the mediated discourses of philosophy and psychoanalysis. His context was the American cultural imaginary of the ’50s and ’60s that colonised the European psyche by broadcasting morbid televisual images of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Marilyn Monroe’s second lives, the Vietnam war and so on. At the time of May ’68, Ballard’s own personal “counterculture” was on the other side of the barricades, on the side of power and mass media, where he discovered far stronger and more lysergic forces than in any leftist movement. From this science-fiction perspective on the mainstream, Ballard effectively anticipated the Guattarian schizoanalysis of the collective machinic unconscious.

For an accurate introduction to the Ballardian universe, however, it may be useful to make a comparison with a sparring partner from the postmodern school. Baudrillard, once more, is worth considering for his review of Crash, where Ballard’s uncanny worlds are sanitised through the theoretical frame of Simulation.[3] His review twisted the novel’s carnal tangle into a “semiurgy of the body” (semiurgy being the trendy neologism introduced by postmodern for ‘the art of creating new signs’). Amusingly, Ballard would dismiss this postmodern critique of his writing as “the apotheosis of the hamburger”.[4] In a society increasingly exposed to mass media, Baudrillard is an obvious symptom of iconophilia turned to iconophobia.

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

From the classical (and even the cybernetic) viewpoint, technology is an extension of the body. […] From Marx to McLuhan, one sees the same instrumentalist vision of machines and of language: relays, extensions, media-mediators of a Nature destined ideally to become the organic body. In this “rational” view, the body itself is only a medium. Inversely, in its baroque and apocalyptic treatment in Crash, technology is the deadly deconstruction of the body — no longer a functional medium, but an extension of death: […] all the metallurgy of accidents is inscribed in a semiurgy of the body — not in anatomy or physiology, but in a semiurgy of contusions, scars, mutilations, and wounds which are like new sexual organs opened in the body.[5]

Baudrillard interprets Ballard’s death of affect as the postmodern haze through which everything is grey and desire is lacking. On the contrary, the death of affect actually marks an intensified longing or love for the inorganic; otherwise Ballard’s “erotisation” of the “outer world” would not be intelligible. In particular, the sophisticated relation between violence, libido and machine signals a notion of desire that is not unfamiliar within the intellectual account of masochism and the BDSM subcultures of the last decades.

In Crash, there is neither fiction nor reality — a kind of hyper-reality has abolished both. Even critical regression is no longer possible. This mutating and commutating world of simulation and death, this violently sexualized world totally lacking in desire, full of violent and violated bodies but curiously neutered, this chromatic and intensely metallic world empty of the sensorial, a world of hyper-technology without finality.[6]

Baudrillard’s hyper(flat)-reality clearly disappointed Ballard. While for Ballard, “fiction is a branch of neurology”, Baudrillard annexed his novel to the realm of simulacra, unequivocally stating that “Crash is the first great novel of the universe of simulation, the world that we will be dealing with from now on”. In a completely opposite reading, William Burroughs wrote in the introduction to The Atrocity Exhibition: “The line between inner and outer landscapes is breaking down. Earthquakes can result from seismic upheavals within the human mind”. By illuminating the “death of affect”, Burroughs effectively underlines how “sexual arousal results from the repetition and impact of image”. Ballard’s novel The Atrocity Exhibition is indeed a sincere anti-postmodern manifesto.

“Neuronic Icons on the Spinal Highway”

Ballard’s iconology is not concerned with a flat image framed according to academic coordinates, but it is a journey into the subterranean world beyond that surface. Rather than being purely a linguistic sign, Ballard’s image is part of the collapse between “inner and outer landscapes”. A recurring codeword in The Atrocity Exhibition is “spinal”: images have nerves, they become part of the nervous system. Like Leroi-Gourhan’s anthropology, the medium of technology is an extension of the human skeleton, not a self-indulgent eye.[7] The aesthetics of the contemporary image cannot be found through its metaphysical fabric, in the claustrophobic white cube of the art world or the minimal semiotics of the digital screen, but precisely in the externalisation of the nervous system.

[In] The Atrocity Exhibition, the nervous systems of the characters have been externalized, as part of the reversal of the interior and exterior worlds. Highways, office blocks, faces and street signs are perceived as if they were elements in a malfunctioning central nervous system.[8]

Images are “neuronic icons on the spinal highway”, signs of a biomorphic unconscious lurking beneath the urban landscape. The diagram of these icons is a “neural interval” in the physiology of the body. In other words, the neural space we enter with Ballard is not the re-assuring social-democracy of psychoanalysis, but the “spinal battlefield” of contemporary warfare, the space of World War III and of Foucauldian “biopolitical conflicts”. Ballard has in effect inaugurated a neurospace — a carnal and physical understanding of the mediascape that only many decades later will surface from the underworld of cyberspace. Ballard’s neurospace, however, should not be considered an autonomous media sphere, but a continuum between inner and outer landscapes, between the psychological and libidinal life of any physical form and object.

The blitzkriegs will be fought out on the spinal battlefields, in terms of the postures we assume, of our traumas mimetized in the angle of a wall or balcony.[9]

To consider The Atrocity Exhibition as a manual for the contemporary collective imaginary, another lesson is worth remembering: the image is always social and collective, and the figures of the collective imaginary are always “giants”. The image by nature is socially expansive, “commercial cosmologies” covering the unconscious of the nation. Even as early as the 1920s, Benjamin took note of the “huge images across the walls of the houses, where toothpaste and cosmetics lie handy for giants”.[10] The conceptual origin of the ‘mediascape’ can be traced back to this particular skyline of huge advertisements, a commercial landscape of billboards associated with the American horizon of the 1950s. In two famous cryptic fragments, Ballard spreads a giant pornographic picture of Elizabeth Taylor across hundreds of such billboards.

A group of workmen on a scaffolding truck were pasting up the last of the displays, a hundred-foot-long panel that appeared to represent a section of a sand-dune. Looking at it more closely, Dr Nathan realized that in fact it was an immensely magnified portion of the skin over the iliac crest. Glancing at the billboards, Dr Nathan recognized other magnified fragments: a segment of lower lip, a right nostril, a portion of female perineum. Only an anatomist would have identified these fragments, each represented as a formal geometric pattern. At least five hundred of the signs would be needed to contain the whole of this gargantuan woman, terraced here into a quantified sand-sea.[11]

Dr Nathan limped along the drainage culvert, peering at the huge figure of a dark-haired woman painted on the sloping walls of the blockhouse. The magnification was enormous. The wall on his right, the size of a tennis court, contained little more than the right eye and cheekbone. He recognized the woman from the billboards he had seen near the hospital — the screen actress, Elizabeth Taylor. Yet these designs were more than enormous replicas. They were equations that embodied the relationship between the identity of the film actress and the audiences who were distant reflections of her. The planes of their lives interlocked at oblique angles, fragments of personal myths fusing with the commercial cosmologies. The presiding deity of their lives the film actress provided a set of operating formulae for their passage through consciousness.[12]

Elizabeth Taylor, as she appears on the cover of Crash.

In these two passages, Ballard deconstructs a sample of the collective imaginary (the archetypical 1950s movie star), stripping the image back to its fundamental components. First, its infrastructural medium: the skeleton of scaffoldings and billboards that turns a pop star to architecture. Second, its picture as replica: a sensuous module of a benevolent propaganda machine. Third, its pornographic focus: intimate details of the body that fall under the public eye and become part of public constructions. Fourth, the sexual nature of such an apparently neutral magnification: perineum and ilium are the scientific names for the anatomic zones where the male gaze is usually drawn. Fifth, its sexualised body is exploded into different fragments and patterns. Sixth, those replicated fragments function together as a collective image over the unconscious domain, as “a set of operating formulae for their passage through consciousness”, “equations that embodied the relationship between the identity of the film actress and the audiences who were distant reflections of her”. No other description could provide a better diagram of the basic elements of the mediascape.

Ballard is not the first writer to investigate the intoxicating effect of mass media society, but he is exceptional for offering a detailed mapping of its unconscious parallel dimension. Ballard attempts to reveal the existence of a “second narrative” behind the official version of events, and how the collective consciousness produces “emergency scenarios”, as in dreams, to face the violent stimuli emanating from the mediascape. For Ballard, the collective imaginary is a bicephalous entity that simultaneously maintains contradictory meanings and dimensions.

The media landscape of the present day is a map in search of a territory. A huge volume of sensational and often toxic imagery inundates our minds, much of it fictional in content. How do we make sense of this ceaseless flow of advertising and publicity, news and entertainment, where presidential campaigns and moon voyages are presented in terms indistinguishable from the launch of a new candy bar or deodorant? What actually happens on the level of our unconscious minds when, within minutes on the same TV screen, a prime minister is assassinated, an actress makes love, an injured child is carried from a car crash? Faced with these charged events, prepackaged emotions already in place, we can only stitch together a set of emergency scenarios, just as our sleeping minds extemporize a narrative from the unrelated memories that veer through the cortical night. In the waking dream that now constitutes everyday reality, images of a blood-spattered widow, the chromium trim of a limousine windshield, the stylized glamour of a motorcade, fuse together to provide a secondary narrative with very different meanings.[13]

Against the contemporary dismissal of the notion of unconscious (but actually of its metaphysical and linguistic interpretations), Ballard identifies a clear energetic undercurrent behind the mediascape and the surrounding biosphere of machines. To confront this new environment, he appropriates the notion of latent and manifest content from Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and applies it to external reality. According to Ballard, beneath the “benign or passive posture” of machinic civilisation and consumerist society resides a latent energy, “ambiguous even to the skilled investigator”.

From this and similar work it is clear that Freud’s classic distinction between the manifest and latent content of the inner world of the psyche now has to be applied to the outer world of reality. A dominant element in this reality is technology and its instrument, the machine. In most roles the machine assumes a benign or passive posture — telephone exchanges, engineering hardware, etc. The twentieth century has also given birth to a vast range of machines — computers, pilotless planes, thermonuclear weapons — where the latent identity of the machine is ambiguous even to the skilled investigator. An understanding of this identity can be found in a study of the automobile, which dominates the vectors of speed, aggression, violence and desire. In particular the automobile crash contains a crucial image of the machine as conceptualized psychopathology.[14]

What is the nature of this dark side of the machinic landscape? Irrational violence, animal instincts, sexual impulses and natural aggressiveness emerge as constitutive of the “biomorphic horror” pulsating through the collective technological imaginary. Rather than Baudrillard’s imagined society of simulacra, the “death of affect” is actually a consequence of the molecular dissemination of a conceptual violence that makes any object, even the most aseptic one, a vector of conflict. In this sense, the “abstraction” of violence causes psychopathologies to become everyday playthings. The violence of The Atrocity Exhibition is not comparable to, for instance, the aesthetisation of sadism in Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, since the former emerges through the force of inorganic structures.[15] Just like a sophisticated philosophy of sadomasochism, Ballard considers the abstract psychopathologies of the mediascape “as a game”, as an intrinsic means of human communication. This intuition will be useful later when introducing the notion of masochism of image.

Travers’s problem is how to come to terms with the violence that has pursued his life – not merely the violence of accident and bereavement, or the horrors of war, but the biomorphic horror of our own bodies. Travers has at last realized that the real significance of these acts of violence lies elsewhere, in what we might term “the death of affect”. Consider our most real and tender pleasures — in the excitements of pain and mutilation; in sex as the perfect arena, like a culture-bed of sterile pus, for all the veronicas of our own perversions, in voyeurism and self-disgust, in our moral freedom to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game, and in our ever greater powers of abstraction. […] The only way we can make contact with each other is in terms of conceptualizations. Violence is the conceptualization of pain. By the same token psychopathology is the conceptual system of sex.[16]

Surprisingly, Ballard suggests his own counter-strategies for confronting the psychopathologies of the imaginary — a sort of political agenda born from the perspective of science fiction. Against both conservative puritanism and radical pessimism, against the politically correct ethos of the peace movements, Ballard professes a joyful and “just psychopathology” as the “final destination of the 20th century”. The only way to deal with the abyss, Ballard suggests, is to stare directly into it, immerse ourselves in the dark waters of the unconscious and “swim”.

..:: NOTES:

[1] J.G. Ballard, “Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?”, Advertiser’s Announcement, Sex: Inner Space, Ambit magazine, no. 33, 1967.
[2] J.G. Ballard, A Neural Interval’. Advertiser’s Announcement: A J.G. Ballard Production. Ambit magazine, no. 36, 1968.
[3] Jean Baudrillard, “Ballard’s Crash”, 1976. Trans. Arthur B. Evans. Science Fiction Studies 18: 313-20, #55, Nov 1991.
[4] J.G. Ballard, “A Response to the Invitation to Respond”, Science Fiction Studies, 18: 329, #55 (Nov. 1991): “I thought the whole problem SF faced was that its consciousness, critically speaking, had been raised to wholly inappropriate heights —the apotheosis of the hamburger. An exhilarating and challenging entertainment fiction which Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain would have relished has become a “discipline” — God help us — beloved of those like the Delany who will no doubt pour scorn on my novel of the early ’70s. The “theory and criticism of s-f”!! Vast theories and pseudo-theories are elaborated by people with not an idea in their bones. Needless to say, I totally exclude Baudrillard (whose essay on Crash I have not really wanted to understand) — I read it for the first time some years ago. Of course, his Amerique is an absolutely brilliant piece of writing, probably the most sharply clever piece of writing since Swift — brilliancies and jewels of insight in every paragraph — an intellectual Alladin’s cave. But your whole “postmodernism” view of SF strikes me as doubly sinister. SF was ALWAYS modern, but now it is “postmodern” — bourgeoisification in the form of an over-professionalized academia with nowhere to take its girlfriend for a bottle of wine and a dance is now rolling its jaws over an innocent and naive fiction that desperately needs to be left alone. You are killing us! Stay your hand! Leave us be! Turn your “intelligence” to the iconography of filling stations, cash machines, or whatever nonsense your entertainment culture deems to be the flavor of the day. We have enough intellectuals in Europe as it is; let the great USA devote itself to the spirit of the Wrights — bicycle mechanics and the sons of a bishop. The latter’s modesty and exquisitely plain prose style would be an example to you — especially his restrained but heartfelt reflections on the death of one of his sons, a model of the spirit animating SF at its best. But I fear you are trapped inside your dismal jargon.”
[5] Jean Baudrillard, “Ballard’s Crash”, cit.
[6] Ibid.
[7] See: André Leroi-Gourhan, L’Homme et la matière, Paris: Albin Michel, 1943; and:
Milieu et techniques, Paris: Albin Michel, 1945.
[8] J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, London: Jonathan Cape, 1970. Notes by the author added in a reissue by RE/Search Publications, San Francisco, 1990. Page numbers refer to the edition by Harper Perennial, London, 2006, p. 76.
[9] Ibid, p. 7.
[10] Walter Benjamin, “One Way Street”, in Reflections, cit., p. 86.
[11] J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, cit., p. 11.
[12] Ibid., p. 13.
[13] Ibid., p. 145.
[14] Ibid., p. 156.
[15] Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, London: William Heinemann, 1962.
[16] J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, cit., p. 116

..:: ELSEWHERE ON BALLARDIAN:
+ Crimes of the Near Future: Baudrillard/Ballard
+ RIP Elizabeth Taylor: A Ballardian Primer

by Simon Sellars

This is an earlier version of an article published in Continuum, Volume 24, Issue 5 October 2010, pages 721-33. Both versions were based on a paper given by Simon Sellars at the Monash University conference, B for bad cinema: aesthetics, politics and cultural value.

Recent academic discussions of ‘badfilm’ and ‘paracinema’ have highlighted the re-appraisal of ‘all forms of “cinematic trash”’ (Sconce 1995, 372). This article addresses the theme by contrasting films from two of the most well-known purveyors of ‘cinematic trash’: X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963), directed by Roger Corman, and They Live (1988), directed by John Carpenter. In X, a scientist develops X-ray vision, seeing into the fourth dimension and something so shocking he rips his eyes out. This act is analogous with Corman’s career as purveyor of trash cinema: refraining from pushing badfilm’s power to the absolute limit; foregoing the gift of ‘second sight’; content to exist on a marginalised, second-tier, parallel reality to the Hollywood mainstream. In They Live, Carpenter re-empowers the thesis: the hero stumbles on a secret society that has developed sunglasses to see through the real to the alien-generated subliminal messages in advertising and politics. Rather than withdrawal, Carpenter’s hero declares: ‘I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass – and I’m all out of bubblegum’. Unabashed, glorying in his outsider status, Carpenter reappropriates Hollywood values in a cheap ‘bubblegum’ universe, deploying trash culture as a smart bomb that aims to prise apart not only cinematic convention but also reality itself.

Ultimately, both films, in very different historical specificities, and linked by the work of J.G. Ballard, offer up the B-movie as a response to the gathering global and economic forces of late capitalism, signified by what Slavoj Žižek identifies as the ‘ideological state apparatus’ of the Hollywood movie-making machine (2002).

ROGER CORMAN: THE ‘X EFFECT’

Still from X.

Roger Corman, known as the ‘King of the Bs’, was a force of nature. An undeniably intelligent and daring filmmaker, more often than not he seemed a hyper-manic combination of accountant, adrenalin junky and huckster than a maverick artist with a vision. Reminiscing about an early script, he said: ‘I told [the production company] I would give them the film if they would give me all of my money back immediately as an advance against distribution and I would do the same thing on three more films, so I could set myself up as producer’ (Emery 2003, 120). He even seemed in competition with himself: ‘I did Bucket of Blood in five days and … Little Shop of Horrors in two days and a night, but that was really an experiment and a joke to see if I could do it’ (Emery 2003, 121). In 1963, Corman completed The Terror in three days on sets leftover from The Raven, also from 1963. That year, too, he somehow found the energy to direct X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, with its portrayal of Dr James Xavier, who experiments on his own eyes with a super-powerful X-ray serum. The ‘X-effect’ is exponential as Xavier begins to see through more and more layers of reality: right through his eyelids and beyond, then through walls and buildings. When he sees through a sick girl’s skin to discover a malignancy her operating doctor has missed, Xavier disables the doctor by cutting his hand and performing the operation himself, saving the girl’s life. Facing a subsequent malpractice suit, the funding for his experiments is cut. Feverish from the X-effect and sleeplessness, his grip on sanity worsens and he lashes out at a colleague, inadvertently pushing him out of an upper-floor window to his death.

Xavier hides out in a backwaters town. Under thrall to a manipulative carnival hustler, he performs circus tricks as a sideshow ‘mind reader’ (in actuality, he reads people’s ID cards through their clothing). Needing money to progress his experiments, he follows the hustler to another anonymous, small town, where, in a distortion of his former life, he looks through sick people’s skin to identify diseased internal organs. He then provides a diagnosis to the victim, who, having abandoned hope, is grateful and willing to reward him. Of course, he must hand over a cut to the hustler, becoming ever more embittered as a result.

Another colleague finds him and Xavier escapes with her. His observations become increasingly deranged: ‘I see the city as if it were unborn … Limbs without flesh, girders without stone, signs hanging without supports, wires dipping and swaying without poles … flesh dissolved in an acid of light: a city of the dead’. Wearing modified sunglasses, with a thickness that retards the X effect to some extent, he works a Las Vegas casino, winning money by seeing through card decks and slot machines. However, when his sunglasses fall off, his horribly blackened eyes are revealed to the crowd and he flees to the desert, stumbling across a religious revival tent complete with blood-and-thunder preacher. Now he has begun to see through the final layers of reality and into the heart of the universe. Recoiling in horror, Xavier addresses the preacher: ‘I’ve come to tell you what I see. There are great darknesses, and beyond the darkness, a light that glows. And in the centre of the universe: the eye that sees us all.’ The preacher exhorts: ‘You see sin and the devil! But the bible tells us what to do: if thine eye offends thee, pluck it out!’ Xavier, unable to bear the burden of seeing what no one has seen before, takes the advice and gouges out his own eyeballs.

Still from X.

There have been many interpretations of the film. Ann Reynolds sees Xavier’s condition as a cinematic corollary of Robert Smithson’s ‘ruins in reverse’, symbolising the illusory hopes of future utopias (Reynolds 2003, 116). For Akira Mizuta Lippit, Xavier’s experiments invoke ‘the nuclear age, a premonition of total catastrophe destined to follow’ (Lippit 2005, 145). But in this act of self-immolation – Xavier putting out his eyes rather than trusting the perceptual logic he has set in train[1] – there seems an even clearer analogy: namely, with Corman’s directing career. In 1961, Corman made The Intruder, which dealt with small-town racism. This raw, uncompromising film garnered excellent reviews yet failed to make money. Subsequently, ‘after [this] financial disaster … Corman never again forgot the importance of the bottom line’ (Dixon 2005). His films from then on would be designed to make money first and foremost, with ‘art’ and ‘worthiness’ as secondary commodities. In his autobiography, he even devotes an entire chapter to the ‘disaster’ that in his mind was The Intruder, an act of pathos according to William D. Routt: ‘What was the big artistic “risk” here? Apparently, as it turns out, it was Corman’s sense of personal self-worth. Yet here, as the details of financial risk are spelled out, what seems significant is risk itself, a nameless danger that posits the film maker as One against the Rest: art as a specific, fraught enterprise’ (Routt 1994, 57).

This moment of realisation reached its apex when Corman founded his production company, New World Pictures, in 1970. He would not direct another film for 20 years, [2] an absence clarified by this 1974 announcement: ‘my earlier theories of the director as auteur are undergoing some revision and I’m beginning to think the producer is more important than the director’ (Morris 2000). For Charles Griffith, screenwriter on Little Shop of Horrors (1960), such an outcome was assured insofar as Corman ‘uses half his genius to degrade his own work, and the rest to degrade the artists who work for him’ (Griffith in Gray 2000). Although Corman had given up directing himself, he still wielded power over New World’s staff directors. According to Paul Bartel, once filming had started on Bartel’s Death Race 2000 (1975), Corman excised much of the black humour in the original cut, replacing it with excessive gore and positioning it as a knock-off of Norman Jewison’s blockbuster, Rollerball, from the same year. As Bartel observed: ‘It was very important to him to be the David against the studio Goliath, and to come up with a cheap version that could be marketed along the same lines as some megaproduction’ (Gray 2000, 121). For Joe Dante, another Corman protégé, Death Race 2000 was ‘a real pop-art masterpiece before Roger got to it’ (Gray 2004, 121). Inadvertently, Corman’s autobiography confirms this angle. His account of the creative process surrounding Death Race 2000 is told entirely from his own perspective; Bartel and the screenwriters are barely mentioned: ‘When I read the story,’ Corman writes, ‘I thought: You can’t do this as a straight and serious film’ (Corman and Jerome 1990, 205).[3]

Still from X.

There is no small irony at this fate befalling Corman, whose forsaking of edgy, independent drama (typified by The Intruder) for cheap, moneymaking thrills, while running roughshod over colleagues, echoes that of Xavier. After all, the scientist was finally on the verge of a major metaphysical breakthrough only to succumb to fatal hubris. Destroying his talent, he subsists by performing cheap carnival tricks solely to raise cash before eventually rendering himself blind – literally, but also metaphorically blind to those around him.[4] Again, Corman’s autobiography hints at a literal act of self-sabotage. Reflecting on his enforced layoff from directing, Corman asks himself:

‘Did I quit out of fear? Did I let myself get wrapped up in the business of New World so I wouldn’t have to confront any insecurities I may have had about my worth as an artist, as an auteur? … Was New World a way for me to remain master of my own limited universe and reject a mainstream system that would only compromise my creative freedom and financial autonomy?’ (Corman and Jerome 1990, 231)

Today, he has pushed this logic to its bitter end: Corman’s latest productions are virtually unwatchable, a view held by detractors and admirers alike. Winston Wheeler Dixon, an avowed fan, voices the consensus:

‘These later films are extremely problematic … they are all but invisible to the public, being released solely through US cable networks, or on straight-to-home-video deals… [Their] excessive … sex and violence … makes many … uncomfortable …. [They] seem devoid of any artistic impulse whatsoever, designed solely to make money.’ (Dixon 2005)

In fighting such a longstanding resistance war against Hollywood, indeed against his own talent, Corman has marginalised himself out of existence, victim of a system that today fights back in very different ways – with absorption. As the novelist J.G. Ballard cogently observes: ‘the time span between the Rebel – the Revolution – and Total Social Acceptance is getting shorter and shorter …. In the future (this is part of the problem in the arts as well) you’ll get some radical new idea, but within 3 minutes it’s totally accepted, and it’s coming out in … your local supermarket.’ (Ballard in Savage 1978, 107).

Thus, Corman’s later work, defiantly yet ineffectually schlocky, is decidedly out of step when appropriated by a Hollywood simulacrum that has not only successfully mimicked exploitation values, but also, as Greg Villepique notes, Corman himself:

‘[Before] Jaws and Star Wars … studios allotted big budgets to historical epics and character-driven dramas while tossing off exploitation films on the cheap, so Corman was at least competing in the same ballpark as the majors (albeit from left field). Since the mid-70s, the studios’ priorities have flipped and they’ve poured all their resources into aping, with far more polish, Corman’s audience-pleasing strategies – tongue-in-cheek, $100 million Arnold Schwarzenegger and Will Smith blow ’em-ups that simply out-Corman Corman.’ (Villepique 2000)

In a world of commodity fetishism, where the lag between radicalism and flaccid cliché becomes negligible, what space can the ‘rebel’ hope to occupy?

JOHN CARPENTER: THE ‘X Continuum’

Still from They Live.

They Live begins as a sombre affair. John Nada, a humble working-class drifter, needs a job and a place to sleep. Finding work on a construction site, he is offered a bed in a shantytown. He becomes intrigued by a nearby church and sneaks inside, overhearing a resistance group bent on bringing down the government. Later, the police discover the shantytown, bulldozing it and arresting the freedom fighters. Nada returns to the now-empty church, finding a box of sunglasses left behind.

LEFT: An alien, as seen by Nada sans shades…

Putting on a pair, he is stunned to discover that they reveal hidden messages in billboards and signs: ‘OBEY’, ‘MARRY AND REPRODUCE’, ‘SLEEP’, ‘CONFORM’. Dollar bills now read: ‘THIS IS YOUR GOD’. When he takes them off, everything is normal again. But there is an even bigger shock when the sunglasses reveal that certain people are in fact shapeshifting aliens with skeletal faces and metallic eyes. Nada flees and takes refuge in a bank, where with his enhanced vision he sees that most of the customers are aliens. At this point, the film shifts gears without warning, becoming unabashedly ‘cartoonish’. At the sight of the enemy, Nada instantly slips into cocky, wisecracking mode, a jarring transition from his previously low-key demeanour, as he blows apart the aliens while spitting out corny one-liners almost as much as bullets, like a B-film version of Arnold Schwarzenegger (he is muscle-bound, too, enhancing the comparison).

LEFT: …and as seen by Nada, with shades on.

This dramatic shift in tone has been criticised widely, with many commentators lamenting its supposed undermining of the Althusserian account of false consciousness inherent in the film’s first half. Barry Keith Grant is typical: ‘They Live … abandons its cultural critique halfway through to concentrate on [Nada’s] improbable heroics … Ironically, the film becomes exactly the kind of formulaic escapist entertainment it begins by critiquing as the opiate of the people’ (Grant 2004, 18). But what if the film is suggesting there is no way to step outside of ideology, no way to unwork false consciousness, but that the best one can do is to rework it to satisfy personal need? This then speaks of the difference between Corman and Carpenter, and ultimately of the difference in cultural value of the B-film in the 1960s (loitering in some kind of rebellious ‘outside’) and the B-film today (as fully absorbed, hyperreal selling point). Nada is like a badfilm version of Schwarzenegger’s character Doug Quaid in Total Recall (1990), who does not realise he is an undercover secret agent, but is instead brainwashed to think he is an ordinary labourer – just like Nada. But when danger comes, Quaid’s training kicks in automatically and he transforms into the lethal agent he was all along, as seamlessly as Nada does when the bullets begin to fly. Nada, then – indoctrinated, brainwashed, but subliminally aware – is the secret agent of badfilm. When he assumes his wisecracking, B-movie action stance, he is turning the autonomous, controlling intelligence the film rails against back against itself.

They Live sits within a continuum of SF works that challenge the consensus reality of consumer and mass-mediated culture. Examples include: Ray Nelson’s short story ‘Eight O’Clock in the Morning’ (1963), the basis for Carpenter’s screenplay alongside the ‘Nada’ comic strip (1985) that Nelson adapted from his story;[5] Ballard’s ‘The Subliminal Man’ (1963); Philip K. Dick’s Ubik (1969); and the films Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1956), The Truman Show (1998) and The Matrix (1999). In terms of They Live, ‘The Subliminal Man’ is most revealing. In fact, it seems to have inspired ‘Eight O’Clock in the Morning’ (and therefore could be said to be the real inspiration for They Live),[6] although Nelson’s story comes off as little more than a heavy-handed rewrite with freaky aliens added for shock value. ‘The Subliminal Man’ features a world (minus aliens) in which subliminal messages control the populace through advertising and billboards, part of a society structured around conformity and planned obsolescence. There is only one make of car (only one make of everything: cigarettes, household goods, foodstuffs), produced in the same colour and specifications each year and designed to wear out at six-monthly intervals, and consumers become trapped in unbreakable shopping contracts, locked into the pursuit of false fulfilment.

Panels from Ray Nelson’s ‘Nada’, first published in Alien Encounters #6, 1985.

A man, Hathaway, becomes agitated about a series of giant signs erected on city outskirts and shopping centre perimeters. They don’t advertise anything – their facades are blank, shuttered grilles – so their true purpose is a mystery. But Hathaway believes they carry subliminal messages designed to control the populace. As he tells his doctor, Franklin, in a scene reminiscent of Nada’s futile pleas to others to understand the truth: ‘If you can’t believe your own senses what chance have you left? They’re invading your brain, if you don’t defend yourself they’ll take it over completely! We’ve got to act now before we’re all paralysed’ (Ballard 2006, 569–70). Franklin watches Hathaway climb one of the billboards, where he attacks a switch-box and destroys the sign’s grille, revealing, in another clear parallel with Carpenter’s film, a cycling and repeating display underneath:

‘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
YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES’ (Ballard 2006, 576)

‘The Subliminal Man’, while not specifically referring to the concept of X-rays as a hard scientific process, does reveal a sense of ‘seeing beyond’ consumerism, and the fake reality consumerism begets, thereby aligning itself with both X and They Live. As Steven Connor notes in his overview of the history of X-ray vision in art, literature and myth:

‘X-rays promise a utopia of pure spiritual essences, in which it would be possible to see through the obscuring veil of materiality, and in the process leave it behind, moving to a higher plane, or to a more refined condition. [Yet] they involve an irreducible necessity for some form of material meditation, a screening, detaining, or fixing, which seems to compromise, or indefinitely to defer the immaterialist dream of a world in which all that is solid may be melted into air.’ (Connor 2008)

This dream of ‘seeing through the obscuring veil of materiality’, and the necessity for ‘material mediation’, fits well with the kind of critical terrain in the 60s and 70s that would come to position advertising as an ideological system that denies consumers ‘true’ identity by virtue of a supersaturation of all modes of informational output. For Judith Williamson, the false image of ourselves bestowed by buying into the referent system of advertising is a system which devalues and erodes our nature and obscures ‘social realities’, resulting in a situation where ‘ideology and symbolic or signifying structures combine to form a Platonic system where everything means something else, and nothing is what it is’ (Williamson 1978, 170). In fact, ‘The Subliminal Man’ fictionalises the devolutionary effects of advertising and the forbidding sense that ‘nothing is what it is’. While the story’s narrative device seems an obvious influence on Nelson, its denouement recalls both Corman and Carpenter. As Hathaway is shot by the police and falls to his death – punished, like Xavier, for the sin of knowing reality as no one else can – Franklin orders yet another new car, as if nothing has ever happened, as ‘blind’ as everyone in They Live. But while the texture of the story is undeniably prescient in its central message, that the media landscape has redefined the world as itself, it, like Corman’s film, is essentially old-style message SF: socially aware science fiction depicting one man against the system, where the hero’s rebellion is brutally crushed and his broken body used as a totem to warn the rest of society.

Panels from ‘Nada’.

What exactly was in the air in 1963? As all three texts were formulated that year, it is fruitful to analyse Ballard’s story as a hinge text that embodies elements of both Corman’s and Carpenter’s films, yet one that points the way forward to a ‘Ballardian’ solution to the problem of futile rebellion – a solution Carpenter would also arrive at. Ballard refined the thesis of ‘The Subliminal Man’ in his experimental novel The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which depicts the struggle of a schizophrenic man, ‘T-’, to formulate new sensory responses to the emergent dynamics of the burgeoning media and communications landscape in the 1960s. The Atrocity Exhibition mirrors Marshall McLuhan’s observation that the ‘medium, or process of our time – electric technology – is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life’ (McLuhan and Fiore 1967, 8). It is a work that places its protagonist ‘inside’ the image, absorbed within the Spectacle, with no ‘outside’ of which to speak or to safely retreat to. There is no limit to the multiple fantasies the media landscape feeds to ‘T-’, and which nourish his psychopathic tendencies, which then take on a life of their own: an invasion of the actual by the virtual. As Ballard puts it: ‘the nervous systems of the characters have been externalized, as part of the reversal of the interior and exterior worlds. Highways, office blocks, faces and street signs are perceived as if they were elements in a malfunctioning nervous system’ (Ballard 2001, annotations 76).

Mirroring the text’s Burroughsian cut-up narrative technique, ‘T-’ cuts and pastes the major cultural and political events of the 1960s into a bricolaged, reordered version of reality playing inside the cinema of his mind, with himself in the lead role. This is a process summarised usefully by Dominika Oramus:

‘[Ballard’s characters] live surrounded by texts which invade their minds, but they cannot focus long enough to appreciate any complex messages. The characters dream about violence and excitement in their own lives, and the mediascape (ever full of aggressive imagery) makes them long for the re-enactment of atrocities: ‘all those scenes of pain and violence that illuminated the margins of our lives’.’ (Oramus 2007, 161)

It is precisely this sense of ‘re-enactment’ that They Live inhabits, placing it further along a historical and cultural specificity that bears no relation to X, indeed to Corman’s career. In the early part of the film, Nada is as indoctrinated as everyone else, with no agency over the external conditions he finds himself in. As Carpenter intercuts banal television shows with inane conversations on the street, suggesting they are symbiotic, Nada, when asked how he plans to make ends meet, blithely parrots Reaganomics: ‘I believe in America. The opportunity will come’. Yet he does get smart, reworking those external conditions in a performative manner that evokes not only Ballard but also Simon Cottle’s sense of media consumers who, in ‘late-modern societies and, in their mediatized expression, periodically summon and galvanize collective beliefs, myths and solidarities – collective sentiments and appeals increasingly performed on a global media stage’ (Cottle 2006, 428).

Still from They Live.

Rather than Xavier’s fatal withdrawal, Nada declares, in the film’s most quoted line: ‘I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass – and I’m all out of bubblegum’. Unabashed, glorying in his outsider status, Carpenter reappropriates Hollywood values in a cheap ‘bubblegum’ universe that invades, reinvigorates and repopulates what Žižek (himself borrowing from Jean Baudrillard) calls the ‘desert of the real’ – the ideology of late capitalism (2002, 15). This intent is made blatantly clear from the opening titles, which display the words ‘They Live’ fading into graffiti on a desolate railway overpass. This simple dissolve is indicative: in Carpenter’s world, badfilm is the reality; there is no place left to stand outside of mass mediation. Perfomativity, the audience reacting within the dynamic system of media ritual enacted on the global media stage, with ‘spectators’ mirroring content back to ‘producers’, becomes, if enabled correctly, the last – the only – line of resistance.

Still from They Live.

Studying the ‘role of media in processes of manufacturing consent’, Cottle suggests that it is inadequate to conclude that mass media has an unquestioned role in enacting ironclad attitudes and frameworks through which processes such as ‘moral panics’ are channelled. Instead, he speaks to the issue of perfomativity in audience reception:

‘[Media] ritual only comes alive experientially, emotionally, subjunctively, when actively read by audiences/readerships who are prepared to ‘participate’ within it as symbolically meaningful to them, and who are prepared to accept the imagined solidarities on offer. Performativity, then, is not confined to the performative ‘doing’ of media producers but includes the ‘doing’ of ‘spectators’ as well, who actively enter into (‘commit themselves to’) the proceedings and who can identify themselves and their sentiments within them.’ (Cottle 2006, 428-9)

For Cottle, if this process can be used to enable moral panics (which are dependent on being actively ‘read’ by audiences, before being reflected back onto the global sphere), then it can also be used to re-project more intimate details of the audience’s experience and social lives, all the while remaining inside the technology of media ritual, a dynamic, interlocking system with constituent parts ‘producers, performers and participating audiences’ (Cottle 2006, 429). To return to the narrative conceit of X-ray vision, of seeing beyond, the notion of perfomativity in mediatised landscapes (mediascapes) can be seen as analogous to a form of brake or control – Connor’s ‘material mediation’ – on the capacity to see beyond. But why would we need it?

Connor describes how the very idea of X-ray vision has historically induced anxiety and terror because ‘the problem with X-rays is that, for the most part, what they like best is to go through things, and to go on going through things unless or until they meet something, like lead, that absorbs or scatters them’ (Connor 2008). To demonstrate, he identifies X as a ‘dystopia’ in which ‘every last pocket of opacity has been seared away, leaving a vitreous desert of universal transparency’, and he aligns the film with Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality, with its preoccupation with depthlessness and the fatal blurring of private and public realms: ‘In a world in which everything must be made visible, and in which “value radiates in all directions”, the transparency of evil is indistinguishable from the evil of transparency’ (Connor 2008).

In this account, seeing everything, a process to which we willingly succumb via commodity fetishism, is the tool of an oppressive, autonomous system that exposes us to its inner workings: the truth that is revealed may not be a truth we are ontologically equipped to handle, with its inescapable highlighting of the fact that our free will has been stripped to the bone, and that this outcome has been smuggled in via our own collusion. The prediction of Baudrillard’s contemporary, Paul Virilio, is also apposite. Probed about our heavily surveilled and intrusive Western society, Virilio was asked: ‘But what shall we dream of when everything becomes visible?’ To which he replied: ‘We’ll dream of being blind’ (Wilson 1994). The disturbing parallel with Xavier’s fate need hardly be stated. Thus, for Connor, ‘the problem of how to see X-rays, or to employ them indirectly as a form of visual perception is similar to the problem … with the schoolboy fantasy of a universal acid, capable of burning through any substance: so what do you keep it in?’ (Connor 2008). Appropriate to this analysis of trash culture, Connor approaches the conundrum as Superman might. After all, ‘In order to exercise his X-ray vision, Superman would need some arrangement whereby the rays could be bounced back to him, as though he were able to exude some kind of screen which could be sent out in advance of the X-rays in order to reflect them’ (Connor 2008).

Let us return to the two films, then, with this framing question in mind: ‘If you have a narrative device that can see everything: what do you keep it in?’

‘HOW TO RECONSTITUTE YOURSELF’

LEFT: The preacher from X.

They Live subverts the thesis of X in a number of ways. Both feature apocalyptic preachers, that old B-movie staple. In X, the preacher exhorts Xavier to destroy himself and he is all too willing to comply. They Live’s preacher, however, implants the idea in Nada’s mind that there is another layer of reality of consumerism to be unpeeled, thereby leading him to the church, the sunglasses and the jouissance of self-realisation.

In one scenario, trash culture destroys the protagonist; in the other, it enables him to become complete. In both films, the sunglasses themselves, a heavily iconic popcult signifier, reinforce the division. In X, Xavier’s pair hinders his ability to see through reality, but Nada’s sunglasses allow him to see beyond, with the fullest sense of liberation – ‘like a drug’, he says.

LEFT: The preacher from They Live.

Crucially, Nada is in control of the process. He can turn the ‘high’ of popular culture on and off by taking the sunglasses on and off, whereas Xavier is helplessly trapped inside a spiralling nightmare – there is no permanent way to halt his worsening condition.[7]

Further, when Xavier is on the run, the subculture he is drawn to, filled with sideshow freaks and circus workers, is unequivocally depicted as degrading, lowlife, exploitative, even as it provides him with a living. In They Live, when Nada hides out, his subcult of freedom fighters is nourishing, welcoming, each warrior dedicated to one other: ‘There’s no need to wear your sunglasses,’ he is told. ‘We’re all human in here’.

ABOVE: X’s subcult. BELOW: They Live’s subcult.

Even the character’s names are overripe with signification. ‘X’, which refers to Xavier himself (as the film’s subtitle makes clear), is the classic signifier of negation, but also a generic marker, as in ‘Brand X’. Xavier, then, is everyman, but one who thinks he can rise above it, thus negating himself, cancelling himself out in the process. ‘Nada’, too, signifies generic values, literally nothingness (in Spanish and Portuguese, ‘nada’ means nothing) but in Carpenter, the name signifies the obvious blank slate that his character has become – the bland everyman ripe for reinscription. Inevitably, Corman’s real-world circumstances yet again mirror his film world’s inherent bias. Like Xavier, he became repulsed by what he had become, and the world towards which he was drawn: ‘Fairly early on, I began to worry that New World Pictures might become too closely associated with exploitation films … I did not want to personally be identified, even stigmatized, by exploitation filmmaking’ (Corman and Jerome 1990, 188, 189).

Between the two filmmakers, there is another critical parallel/division: as Corman did before him, Carpenter, in recent times, has forsaken directing indefinitely. Yet this too effects a very different outcome. Carpenter has embraced the world of computer games, as a consultant on the first-person shooter computer game F.E.A.R. (2005). Tellingly, he describes the game in terms of ‘cinematics’, pointing out that ‘you,’ as the user, ‘are the character’ and that there is no difference between creating a suspense scene for film or game.[8] This merger between Carpenter, films and gaming was predicted 17 years earlier in They Live. When Nada and his sidekick Frank make their way up through the floors of the alien-controlled television studio, their goal is to destroy the antenna that beams the signals masking the subliminal messages and the aliens’ real faces. In the smoking hallways, strewn with debris from their shootouts with alien guards, Nada and Frank hear voices and must decide in a split second whether to fire automatically and risk killing humans. The entire sequence, with its rapid-fire decision making seen from Nada’s perspective and its ultimate goal of blowing up a vital installation in an alien base, is nothing less than a first-person shoot ’em up computer game – in live action.

ABOVE: still from They Live. BELOW: screenshot from F.E.A.R.

Here, Carpenter seems to anticipate the badfilm zeitgeist as outlined by Brendan Murphy and Jane Mills. Murphy points to the emergence of a new mode of filmic production that not only ‘blurs production and consumption’ as a result of our Web 2.0 society, encompassing social media, the aesthetics of appropriation and the cutting-edge interactivity of computer games, but that also looks to the B-movie world as a kind of shared repository of generic, iconic signifiers that create meaning across cultural, aesthetic and even political boundaries (Murphy 2009).[9] This corresponds with what Mills highlights as the breaking down of the traditional binary opposition between Hollywood and ‘not Hollywood’ (that is, most alternative/independent cinema movements) by a globalising, hybridising process that provides a ‘fluid screenscape in which cultural phenomena flow in and out of the frame’ (Mills 2009).

How does They Live resolve these strands of cultural data? According to Janet Maslin, Carpenter directs the film ‘with B-movie bluntness, but with none of the requisite snap’, while the ‘B-movie casting is another problem’ (Maslin 1988). But there are two ways to take the badfilm tropes she criticises: as a universal sign of narrative/aesthetic weakness, or, with Murphy and Mills in mind, as a liberating mesh of codes and signifiers that actually support the film’s critique. In fact, They Live draws more from Nelson’s comic strip ‘Nada’ than from the original short story upon which both comic and film are based.[10] The comic features the same sudden shift in tone from conspiracy theory to all-out ‘superhero’ action, a narrative device de rigueur for the pulpy comic-book world but apparently not for the serious world of film that Maslin wants They Live to inhabit.

Rather than lacking ‘requisite snap’, Carpenter is in fact completely true to his source material (moreover, more faithful to pulp fiction as revealing of reality than ‘serious’ literature), even if he does make one vital modification (although this in no way devalues his respect for pulp). In They Live, when Nada finally destroys the antenna, the film ends abruptly with a groan-inducing punchline. As a woman makes love to her partner, Nada destroys the antenna and the signal is switched off. The partner’s alien face, no longer electronically masked, is suddenly revealed to the woman. As she looks on in horror, he asks, ignorant of his outward appearance and only concerned with his sexual performance: ‘What’s wrong, baby?’ This awful joke is also present in ‘Nada’, but whereas Nelson hints at a subsequent war against the aliens brought on by their unmasking, Carpenter does no such thing. Instead, he immediately cuts to the credits with absolutely no hint of a new revolution sweeping out the old, no realistic, tangible sense of political upheaval: just that final, terrible gag as the film’s exclamation point.

The same joke twice. ABOVE: Panel from ‘Nada’. BELOW: Still from They Live.

Typically, Carpenter has been criticised for not being able to deliver a sense of the world after the alien signal has been destroyed. However, to return to Žižek, not even a provocateur of his experience has been quite able to imagine what exactly comes after capitalism.[11] Far more compelling in Žižek’s discourse is the methodology by which he uses examples from popular cinema as metaphoric circuit breakers in political discussion. For Žižek, Hollywood itself is the ultimate ‘ideological state apparatus’ (Žižek 2002, 16), inherently political in that it produces a cultural product – popular film – that belongs to a wider system of ideology that invents reality and supports cultural myths and institutional structures. According to Žižek, revolutionary cinema is therefore ‘cinema as the art of appearances telling us something about reality itself, about how reality constitutes itself’. When ‘the coordinates of your reality disintegrate’, the problem becomes ‘how to reconstitute yourself’ (Žižek in Fiennes 2006). In contrast to commentators who protest that They Live sells out the leftist critique it sets up, Žižek uses the film’s sunglasses premise as a crucial metaphor for the need to unwork the ‘real message’ lying beneath Republican ideology:

‘The glasses … function as a device for the critique of ideology. In other words, they enable [Nada] to see the real message lying beneath the glossy, colorful surface. What would we see if we were to observe the Republican presidential campaign through such glasses? The first thing would be a long series of contradictions and inconsistencies.’ (Žižek 2008)

Extrapolating to the aftermath of 9/11, Žižek demonstrates how the demonisation of the Islamic enemy is seen as an insidious by-product of American global expansion. For Žižek, we must reject the binary opposition that supports a war on terror, instead adopting ‘both positions simultaneously; this can be done only if we resort to the dialectical category of totality: there is no choice between these two positions; each one is one-sided and false …. The two sides are not really opposed …. They belong to the same field … The choice between Bush and Bin Laden is not our choice; they are both “Them” against Us’ (Žižek 2002, 50-1). This instantly recalls They Live, in which Carpenter ensures there is no distinction ‘between them and us’ (aligning the film with Mills’ Hollywood/not Hollywood hybridity): the aliens in their human guise are seamlessly integrated into our world, and it is only by a trick of the light that we are able to see them differently.

In the face of this ‘dialectical category of totality’, Žižek suggests that: ‘Instead of imposing our version of universality (universal human rights etc), universality – the shared space of understanding between different cultures – should be conceived of as an infinite task of translation, a constant reworking of one’s own particular position’ (Žižek 2002, 66). This returns us to Cottle’s media performativity and to Carpenter’s latter-day career as remaker/remodeler of his own B-movie legacy. Like Corman, Carpenter has his own empire – not producing other people’s work, but recycling and remixing his own, on (at the time of writing) no fewer than five big-budget remakes of his films. Undoubtedly, he is adept at ‘constantly reworking his own position’.[12] This is in stark contrast to Corman, eternally casting himself as David against the Goliath of Hollywood, yet slaying only himself (as Žižek might argue, ‘resistance is surrender’).[13] Indeed, Routt specifically examines how Corman’s adherence to the ‘outside’, and his blindness to fluidity of hypercapitalism, constantly undercuts his position: ‘Corman’s case, particularly in the “enigma” of the way in which his taste is transformed into that of the public, seems exemplary to me partly because what he … clearly thinks of as dichotomies keep melting into one another’ (Rout 1994, 60).

Meanwhile, the default critical position is that Carpenter, the filmmaker, is in decline. As Philip Kerr caustically observes: ‘the modestly titled John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars … is no exception to this decline, in that it finds the director now feeding off his own corpse … I myself was sad to see a once inventive talent eating his own excrement’ (Kerr 2001, 44). But Carpenter has always ‘fed off his own corpse’, fully aware of dichotomies that melt into one another: his entire oeuvre features repeated motifs, aesthetics and concepts, extending down to his self-composed soundtracks, with their minimal and repetitive refrains. Further, his films borrow just as freely from the films he admires as they do from his own work. As he said in response to an interviewer who detected elements from his films in other directors’ work: ‘I’ve made money off the creativity of Howard Hawks, Sergio Leone, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, John Sturges, Orson Welles, and many many others for my entire career – how can I complain when it happens to me?’ (Bright 1999).

With this statement, Carpenter situates himself as a nodal point in Mills’ ‘fluid screenscape of cultural phenomena’. If Xavier/Corman is the hubristic, overreaching modernist, then Nada/Carpenter is the exuberant postmodernist: ‘eating his own excrement’ is perhaps the Faustian pact Carpenter pays for delivering such astonishing work, a golden period stretching from his first feature Dark Star (1974) to They Live 14 years later. Accordingly, the jamming of the signal at the end of They Live is badfilm producing its own transmission, performing its own means of production, reconstituting itself from signals beamed out, mirrored back and reworked in the endless play inherent within Murphy’s proscribed repository of generic signifiers.

In They Live, that last scene – that note of purest trash reflected back to the horrified woman, back to the viewer of the film, a mirror halting the progress of the X-ray vision that demands to see beyond into the world to come – is the product of this new, reordered transmission. As ‘material mediation’, it is the ultimate solution to the problem of reconstitution, to the metaphoric problem of unstoppable X-ray vision, which, in Žižekian terms, is very much ‘your reality disintegrating’.

It is a solution that Xavier/Corman, forever scrabbling to find an outside from which to fire bullets, was never destined to achieve.

Image found on the internet. Creator unknown.

Notes

[1] Earlier, the cocky scientist had proudly announced about his experiments: ‘I’m closing in on the gods’.
[2] According to Greg Villepique: ‘As if to formally declare himself all washed up as an artist, Corman made a surprise return to directing for the 1990 time-travel stinker Frankenstein Unbound, a film sunk by his refusal to spend a little more money on effects; nobody much noticed its brief theatrical run’ (Villepique 2000).
[3] Elsewhere, he reflects: ‘We are a violent … species. If we weren’t … the sabre-toothed tiger would be … the dominant species. But the humans killed them. I touched on this in Death Race 2000’ (Corman and Jerome 1990, 162).
[4] Xavier, of course, kills one colleague and fails to heed another’s warnings about the serum’s side effects.
[5] Both Nelson’s story and comic strip are standard alien-invasion fare. Carpenter’s reworking is markedly more political, ironic, anti-consumerist and popcult-savvy.
[6] This is further borne out by publication dates: ‘The Subliminal Man’ was published in New Worlds in January 1963, while Nelson’s story appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction in November that year.
[7] Carpenter’s masterstroke, not present in Nelson’s short story or comic strip, was to use the sunglasses as the device that reveals reality. In Nelson’s original story and comic, Nada ‘wakes up’ through hypnosis and is unable to turn the effect off.
[8] In an interview, Carpenter explains: ‘There’s a quality to [F.E.A.R.’s] visual cinematics …. I’m a video game fan from the old days, and I love first person shooter games. I’m a big fan of DOOM, but this is … a leap forward in terms of graphics which is the first thing you look at as a director. How does it look and how does it play and how does it feel? … The audience, whether it’s for a game or for a movie, invests in the characters on screen and psychologically bonds with them. What happens to them is what emotionally happens to you. In F.E.A.R., you are the character, so you already step into it, assuming that things will jump out and they will be frightening”’ (Ferrante 2005).
[9] Recall Nada’s appropriation of the Quaid character in Total Recall, the latter film itself a kind of glorified, unabashed B-movie made with Hollywood money.
[10] Amusingly, Nelson’s son Walter wrote on his father’s Facebook fan page: ‘Dad’s short story “Eight O’Clock in the Morning” had been pretty much continuously in print in multiple languages since the late ’60s. In the early ’80s, a friend convinced Ray to turn it into a graphic novel called ‘Nada’. The Nada comic hadn’t been on the shelves for a week before John Carpenter was on the line. The moral of this story is that Hollywood doesn’t read books, but does read comic books (er, graphic novels)’ (Nelson 2008).
[11] As he writes: ‘One of the clearest lessons of the last few decades is that capitalism is indestructible. Marx compared it to a vampire, and one of the salient points of comparison now appears to be that vampires always rise up again after being stabbed to death. Even Mao’s attempt, in the Cultural Revolution, to wipe out the traces of capitalism, ended up in its triumphant return’ (Žižek 2007, 4).
[12] And philosophical about it, too: ‘It’s a brand new world out there in terms of trying to get advertising. There’s so much going on that if you come up with a movie that people have never heard of they don’t pay attention to it – no matter how good it is. So it becomes, “Let’s remake something that maybe rings a bell and that you’ve heard of before”. That way, you’re already ahead. I’m flattered, but I understand what’s going on. They’re picking everything to remake. I think they’ve just run down the list of other titles and have finally got to mine (laughs)’ (Matloff 2007).
[13] This phrase refers to the title of Žižek’s 2007 article, in which he outlines the ‘defeat of the Left’: ‘The response of some critics on the postmodern Left to this predicament is to call for a new politics of resistance. Those who still insist on fighting state power, let alone seizing it, are accused of remaining stuck within the ‘old paradigm’: the task today, their critics say, is to resist state power by withdrawing from its terrain and creating new spaces outside its control. This is, of course, the obverse of accepting the triumph of capitalism. The politics of resistance is nothing but the moralising supplement to a Third Way Left’ (Žižek 2007, 4).

References

+ Ballard, J.G. 2001. The Atrocity Exhibition [1970]. London: Flamingo.
–––––– 2006. ‘The Subliminal Man’ [1963]. In The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1, 559–77. London: Harper Perennial.
+ Bright, Marc. 1999. ‘John Carpenter Speaks to the “John Carpenter Website”.’ http://www.geocities.com/j_nada/carp/interview/jcspeakstojcpage.html.
+ Connor, Steven. 2008. Pregnable of Eye: X-Rays, Vision and Magic. http://www.stevenconnor.com/xray.
+ Corman, Roger, with Jim Jerome. 1990. How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime. New York and Toronto: Random House.
+ Cottle, Simon. 2006. Mediatized rituals: beyond manufacturing consent. Media, Culture & Society, 28, no. 3: 411-32.
+ Emery, Robert J. 2003. The Directors: Take Three. New York: Allworth Press.
+ Dixon, Winston Wheeler. 2005. Roger Corman. Senses of Cinema, August. http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/06/corman.html.
+ Ferrante, Anthony C. 2005. John Carpenter and game producer Rob Loftus uncover the nature of F.E.A.R. mania.com, 31 October. http://www.mania.com/john-carpenter-game-producer-rob-loftus-uncover-nature-fear_article_49967.html.
+ Grant, Barry Keith. 2004. Disorder in the Universe: John Carpenter and the Question of Genre. In The Cinema of John Carpenter: the Technique of Terror, ed. Ian Conrich and David Woods, 10-20. London and New York: Wallflower Press.
+ Gray, Beverly. 2000. Roger Corman: An Unauthorized Biography of the Godfather of Indie Filmmaking. Los Angeles: Renaissance Books.
+ Kerr, Philip. 2001. Mars bores. New Statesman, 10 December.
+ Lippit, Akira Mizuta. 2005. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
+ McLuhan, Marshall and Quentin Fiore. 1967. The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. New York: Bantam Books.
+ Matloff, Jason. 2007. John Carpenter’s Business of Insanity. MovieMaker, 31 July. http://www.moviemaker.com/directing/article/john_carpenters_business_of_insanity.
+ Maude, Collette. 2008. They Live. Time Out. http://www.timeout.com/film/reviews/79208/they-live.html.
+ Mills, Jane. 2009. Hollywood’s ‘bad’ other. Conference paper given at B for BAD Cinema, Monash University, 15 April.
+ Morris, Gary. 2000. Roger Corman on New World Pictures: An Interview from 1974. Bright Lights Film Journal, no. 27, January. http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/27/cormaninterview1.html.
+ Murphy, Brendan. B Grade 2.0: Gondry, ‘Sweding’ and B-movie tropes in emerging social media culture. Conference paper given at B for BAD Cinema, Monash University, 15 April.
+ Nelson, Ray. 1963. ‘Eight O’Clock in the Morning’. Fantasy and Science Fiction, November.
–––––– 1985. ‘Nada’. Alien Encounters, no. 6.
+ Nelson, Walter. 2008. The Story Behind They Live. http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ray-Faraday-Nelson/44349104571?v=feed&story_fbid=91694579571.
+ Oramus, Dominika. 2007. Grave New World: The Decline of the West in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard. Warsaw: University of Warsaw.
+ Reynolds, Ann. 2003. Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
+ Routt, William D. 1994. Art, popular art. Continuum: the Australian Journal of Media and Culture, 7, no. 2.
+ Savage, Jon. 1978. J.G. Ballard, in V. Vale (ed.), Search & Destroy #7-11: The Complete Reprint, San Francisco, V/Search Publications [date not given].
+ Sconce, Jeffrey. 1995. Trashing the academy: Taste, excess, and an emerging politics of cinematic style. Screen 36: 371-93.
+ Villepique, Greg. 2000. Roger Corman. Salon, 13 June. http://www.salon.com/people/bc/2000/06/13/corman/index1.html.
+ Williamson, Judith. 1978. Decoding Advertisements. London: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd.
+ Wilson, Louise. 1994. Cyberwar, God And Television: Interview with Paul Virilio. Ctheory.net, 1 December.
+ Woods, David. 2004. Us and Them: Authority and Identity in Carpenter’s Films. In The Cinema of John Carpenter: the Technique of Terror, ed. Ian Conrich and David Woods, 21-34. London and New York: Wallflower Press.
+ Žižek, Slavoj. 2002. Welcome to the Desert of the Real!: Five Essays on 11 September and Related Dates. London and New York: Verso.
–––––– 2007. Resistance Is Surrender. London Review of Books, 29, no. 22.
–––––– 2008. Through the Glasses Darkly. In These Times, 29 October. http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3976/through_the_glasses_darkly.

Films

+ Carpenter, John. 1988. They Live. Alive Films.
+ Corman, Roger. 1963. X: the Man with the X-Ray Eyes. Alta Vista Productions.
+ Fiennes, Sophie. 2006. The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (written and presented by Slavoj Žižek). Amoeba Film.

Advertiser’s Announcement: ‘Sex: Inner Space: J.G. Ballard’. Ambit no. 33, 1967.

Better Living through Psychopathology
Benjamin Noys (2009)

Presentation at at ‘The Future’, David Roberts Art Foundation, Fitzrovia, London (5 November 2009).

The image of the future which I have selected is one of the series of J. G. Ballard’s pseudo-advertisements that he published in Ambit no. 33 in 1967. Ballard explains that:

Back in the late 60s I produced a series of advertisements which I placed in various publications (Ambit, New Worlds, Ark and various continental alternative magazines), doing the art work myself and arranging for the blockmaking, and then delivering the block to the particular journal just as would a commercial advertiser. Of course I was advertising my own conceptual ideas, but I wanted to do so within the formal circumstances of classic commercial advertising – I wanted ads that would look in place in Vogue, Paris Match, Newsweek, etc. To maintain the integrity of the project I paid the commercial rate for the page, even in the case of Ambit of which I was and still am prose editor. I would have liked to have branched out into Vogue and Newsweek, but cost alone stopped me … (R/S 147).

The actual image is a still from Stephen Dwoskin’s 1963 film Alone (USA 1963 13min), of a woman masturbating. The text is a typically concise and forensic manifesto for Ballard’s own counter-science fiction.

The reason for my fascination with this image as an image of the future, which is in fact over forty years old, is that it represents the deliberate attempt to construct an image of the future that can resist the obsolescence of the future. This might seem an ironic proposition when we consider the fact that this image was created in the mid-60s – a time when, as Ballard retrospectively notes, ‘people … were intensely interested in the future’ (1994). Yet, he also notes that ‘[s]adly, at some point in the 1960s our sense of the future seemed to atrophy and die’ and that, by the 70s, only ‘a few romantics like myself still believe[d] that our sense of the future remain[ed] intact’ (1994). In fact, the atrophy of the future took place because of the impoverishment of our images of the future. The possibility of the future became blocked by those images of the future that seemed to attest to faith in a better tomorrow: the space race, two years away from the moon landing, pop futurism, the consumption-driven Keynesian compact, ‘the dreams that money can buy’, ‘advertising and pseudoevents’ (R/S 96). These images of a promised land of ‘outer space and the far future’ (R/S 97) had been predicted and generated by the science fiction of the 1950s. Locating himself as a science-fiction writer Ballard recognised the exhaustion of this tradition in its realisation: ‘by an ironic paradox, modern science fiction became the first casualty of the changing world it anticipated and helped to create.’ (R/S 97)

Ballard’s image is a counter-image to this atrophy and impoverishment of the future. It is a ‘chromosome of the future’ designed to ‘divide and grow in the reader’s mind’ (Ballard 1994). We can understand it as belonging to that conceptual Third World War Ballard would later invoke in The Atrocity Exhibition: ‘The blitzkriegs will be fought out on the spinal battlefields, in terms of the postures we assume, of our traumas mimetized in the angle of a wall or balcony.’ (AE 11) With the threat that ‘the future is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all-voracious present’ (R/S 97), the counter-image tries to extract a new future; the obsolete science-fiction of outer space has to give way to the new science-fiction of inner space. Reviewing Hitler’s Mein Kampf in 1969 Ballard remarks ‘[t]he psychopath never dates’ and speculates that: ‘perhaps one reason why the American and Russian space programs have failed to catch our imaginations is that this quality of explicit psychopathology is missing.’ (R/S 104) In response conventional science-fiction can only ratify its own transition to archaism, by producing images of the future that are ‘a kind of historical romance in reverse, a sealed world into which the hard light of contemporary reality was never really allowed to penetrate.’ (R/S 97) (Ballard’s reference is 2001, but I also think of Star Wars).

The colonisation of reality by fictions requires a dialectic of involution and externalisation. We turn inward to the body and the psyche – fiction is a branch of neurology – as ‘the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads.’ (R/S 98) And yet that inner reality has been turned inside-out, as our innermost desires are always-already realised by science, pornography, and advertising. For Ballard the usual elements of the so-called ‘human condition’ – sex and death – are the first casualties of this war. Instead of de-conceptualising them, to recover their ‘natural’ form, à la Reich or Marcuse, we must take them as manipulable elements ‘of a wholly conceptual character’ (AT 80). The ‘node of reality’ is not even some residual or surplus (Lacanian) capital ‘R’ Real, which could resist the totalising forces of mediatisation. Instead, ‘We’re living in an abstracted world, where there aren’t any values, where rather than fall back, one has to, as Conrad said, immerse oneself in the most destructive element, and swim.’ (R/S 161)

To wage this Third World (Image) War we have to move deeper into our own psychoses (AT 9) – to immerse ourselves in the image-stream to wrest the future from the perpetual present by an ‘elective psychopathy’ (Ballard 2008). The subsumption of the psyche makes it available for further re-conceptualisation, for the invention of new pathologies and new perversions. Ballard’s image is a radicalisation of the fact ‘that sex is becoming more and more a conceptual act, an intellectualization divorced from affect and physiology alike’ (AT 56). We can imagine it as the creation of one of the psychiatric patients in The Atrocity Exhibition, the future image guerrillas of this Third World War: ‘these bizarre images, with their fusion of Eniwetok and Luna Park, Freud and Elizabeth Taylor’ (AT 7). The involution to inner space, to scenarios of nerve and blood vessel, forms an alternative ‘conceptualized psychopathology’ (AT 99) of re-externalisation.

The ‘future’ is now an image concocted from the iconography of the mediatised unconscious, in which Jung’s archetypes and Freud’s drives are re-figured in ‘the nasal prepuce of L.B.J., crashed helicopters, the pudenda of Ralph Nader, Eichmann in drag, the climax of a New York happening: a dead child.’ (AT 20) The result is that these images become reversible; as one character ponders in The Atrocity Exhibition: ‘Are space vehicles merely overgrown V-2s, or are they Jung’s symbols of redemption, ciphers in some futuristic myth?’ (AT 84) Instead of merely being quaint and anachronistic technologies harnessed to an anodyne future, we can re-conceptualise and re-pathologise space vehicles. The science-fiction writer creates a new ‘predictive mytholog[y]’ (R/S 42): myths of the future that are also performative acts to create and construct that future.

From the original Doubleday edition, Michael Foreman’s artwork for an Atrocity Exhibition chapter, ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’.

Through the choice of psychopathology as a conscious act we can shape new written mythologies of memory and desire. The images of the ‘future’ that previously closed-out the future can now become the material for mythologies of a truly new future. Of course, the problem of such a mythology is that the more successful it is the more it is absorbed by the very mediascape it mimetizes. As Ballard writes ‘A lot of my prophecies about the alienated society are going to come true’ (R/S 155), however, if they come true, then they become superfluous. In The Atrocity Exhibition a ‘Festival of Atrocity Films’ is put on in a venue presumably very much like this one: ‘the results were disappointing; whatever Talbot had hoped for had clearly not materialized. The violence was little more than a sophisticated entertainment. One day he would carry out of Marxist analysis of this lumpen intelligentsia.’ (AT 19) Leaving aside the interesting question of what that analysis might be, and its relevance today, Ballard presciently probes the neuralgic point of his own fiction. The coinage ‘Ballardian’ is the very sign of this ironic success, as Ballard’s own fiction succumbs to the fate he had sketched for the science-fiction of the 1950s: ‘bec[oming] the first casualty of the changing world it anticipated and helped to create’.

It appears that the angle between two walls does not have a happy ending. Ballard’s own creation of himself as a brand or concept becomes another image in the media stream. This, however, is the essential risk of Ballard’s own active nihilism, which accepts that abstraction and conceptualisation operate all the way down: there is no point of immunity or safety from which one might safely create a ‘pure’ image of the future. His images of the future are always, explicitly, transitory, with ‘in-built-obsolescence’. In response we could extrapolate two possible positions from Ballard’s work. The first is that of a quasi-Weberian re-enchantment of a denuded reality through re-conceptualisation. In The Atrocity Exhibition the character Travers ‘has composed a series of new sexual deviations, of a wholly conceptual character, in an attempt to surmount this death of affect’ (AE 80) We could also cite Ballard’s retrospective tendency to position The Atrocity Exhibition as a work of moral commentary. We fall back from the future into a kind of Swiftean satire, at once reactionary and conservative.

The second position is something like what Nietzsche calls ‘completed nihilism’: the traversal and transcendence of the nihilism Ballard anatomises. In this case, Ballard’s dialectic proceeds by the ‘bad side’: the worse the better. He remarked in a 2006 interview that: ‘I’m somebody who stands by the side of the road with a sign saying, Dangerous Bends Ahead – Slow Down.’ He pauses. ‘Although it is true that I sometimes seem to be saying Dangerous Bends Ahead – Speed Up.’ (in Brown, 2006: 20) That speeding up, this accelerationism, of course risks passing from an active nihilism to a mere passive nihilism: the embrace of what is, and the closure of any possibility of the future, or the courting of a deliberate cynicism that re-converges with the position of the moral critic as disgusted and disenchanted observer.

This unease or instability is I want to suggest the reason why Ballard’s image of the future is so resonant. This image, of course, appears as a very 60s image, imbued with the kind of deliberately perverse utopianism that no longer registers with us except in the forms of nostalgia or cynicism. The difference is that this image disjoints itself from that moment by its prescient refusal of the usual models of repression, liberation, and recuperation. In The Atrocity Exhibition Ballard notes that images of elective psychopathy, in which Vietnam combat films are shown with a muzak soundtrack, create an environment ‘in which work-tasks, social relationships and overall motivation reached sustained levels of excellence’ (AT 94). The release of repressed desires can be made to serve the logic of the ‘perpetual present’ of accumulation. This is the mechanism of ‘repressive desublimation’, sketched by Marcuse, in which our desires are ‘liberated’ as the ‘dreams that money can buy’. In response the writer can only immerse themselves and swim, by imagining ‘an optimum torture and execution sequence’ (AE 93). This image fascinates me as an image of the future because it embraces fully the saturation of the future by abstraction and the only remaining possibility being further abstraction. For all its kitsch retro-sixties styling the encrypted moment of resistance figured in this image is the embrace of a future that never really took place, in which the only form of a future we can construct is one that takes place through absolute abstraction.

Bibliography
Ballard, J. G. (1984), Re/Search: J. G. Ballard 8/9. [R/S]
___ (1985) The Atrocity Exhibition [1970], London: Triad Granada. [AE]
___ (1994) ‘Introduction’ in Myths of the Near Future, London: Vintage.
___ (2008) ‘An Exhibition of Atrocities: J. G. Ballard on Mondo Films’, An Interview with Mark Goodall, The Ballardian, http://www.ballardian.com/jg-ballard-on-mondo-films [consulted 16 April 2009].

Brown, M. (2006) ‘From Here to Dystopia: Interview with J. G. Ballard’, Telegraph Magazine 2 September: 16-22.

Nietzsche, F. (1968) The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage.

interview by Simon Sellars.

In the wake of J.G. Ballard’s passing, Berlin’s 032c magazine asked me to rework my 2007 Simon Reynolds interview. I put some new questions to Simon, and here is the result…

“‘Magisterial, precise, unsettling’: Simon Reynolds on JG Ballard”, originally published in 032c, no. 18, winter 2009/10, pp. 126-9.

Simon Reynolds is one of the most recognizable music critics around. He possesses a willingness to tackle pop music as an art form worthy of intellectual discourse rather than a fleeting moment of adolescent flash. Reynolds breaks new ground, melding unchecked enthusiasm with a robust theoretical foundation in a body of work that is exciting for its eclecticism alone: he’s just as compelling writing on hip hop, Britney, and rave, as he is on grunge, prog rock, and grime.

Reynolds’s work reached a peak with the publication of Rip It Up and Start Again, a timely excavation of post-punk: Cabaret Voltaire, PiL, Magazine, and so on. What’s more, J.G. Ballard was a thread throughout the book, as Reynolds charted the influence of JGB — and especially his experimental novel, The Atrocity Exhibition — on the era.

Simon Sellars: For you, what’s the relationship between J.G. Ballard and music?

Simon Reynolds: Obviously I always loved music, but it was things my parents had introduced me to — Beethoven, or Hollywood musicals, plus stray things I’d heard on the radio like the Beatles. And then when I was around fifteen, I was inducted into that whole rock apparatus of taking music -pop culture, youth culture, rock criticism — seriously. And what I was into on a fanatical level immediately before entering rock culture was science fiction, and particularly Ballard. The new fanaticism simply replaced the old one, and I stuck to music journalism!

SS: Do you still return to his work?

SR: It’s only in the last decade or so that I rediscovered science fiction, and particularly Ballard. I’ve also started reading more of his critical work, his interviews and journalism, and become more impressed by him — he was clearly the most advanced writer and thinker in his field.

SS: Which of his books have impacted you the most?

SR: In some ways the one that grabbed me most, and has yet to relinquish its hold, was the first one I read, The Drowned World. Penguin used to do these great science fiction paperback editions, and they had one series with really evocative paintings — glossy, garish, almost hyperrealist — on the covers. The Drowned World, The Drought, and The Wind From Nowhere were all in that series and looked particularly good. But in The Drowned World, the severity of Ballard’s imagination was what hooked me, and just the idea of the protagonist who — as in all Ballard’s cataclysm novels — is perversely drawn towards the heart of catastrophe, and finds his true self in the transformed landscape. That really grabbed me.

Also, the idea of the world you know being drastically transformed … I lived near London, in a commuter town 30 miles north of the capital, and went down to the city quite frequently; so imagining it submerged was exciting.

Two David Pelham-illustrated ’softcover classics’ (both Penguin, London, 1974).

SS: Has he influenced your work in any way, either as a critic of popular culture, or stylistically?

SR: Actually, the influences on my writing and thinking come from a totally different place, although there are certain affinities — a sense of the power of the irrational, these atavistic drives pulsing inside culture. I’ve long felt that pop music is driven by ambivalent, sometimes outright malevolent energies. But I’ve probably derived that more from various French thinkers, and Nietzsche; or certain rock writers. Still, you can see the connection between music and the Ballardian worldview, which sees human culture as fundamentally perverse. And the self-reflexivity in science fiction is very similar to music criticism, because neither genre gets respect from the literary establishment, give or take a Kingsley Amis or an Anthony Burgess in science fiction. Both science fiction and rock writing have an inferiority and superiority complex. Science fiction writers love to think of what they’re doing as one really crucial, contemporary form of literature — a literature of ideas with elements of speculation and an estrangement effect.

Rock critics are just the same: they crave that validation from mainstream art criticism, but they also like being the renegade form. Ballard exemplifies this meta aspect of science fiction, although he goes beyond it as a great cultural critic.

SS: His work can also be read as philosophical inquiry, an approach that seems to sum up a particular late-capitalist mode of being. What makes the Ballardian worldview so prescient?

SR: He was dealing with similar things as Marshall McLuhan, and, later, as Jean Baudrillard. But he was doing it with far greater clarity, sharper perceptions, and more style and wit than either. All the obscenity of mass communication, simulation, and social implosion in Baudrillard’s books was being explored earlier, and more effectively, in Ballard’s fiction. He was dealing with the pornification of everything very early.

SS: You’ve remarked elsewhere that Ballard’s short stories have more appeal to you than his novels.

SR: After the disaster novels, the mid-1970s urban breakdown ones like Concrete Island and High-Rise, I think that, as a critic, Ballard’s shorts are his supreme achievement — so magisterial, so distilled and precise, atmospheric and unsettling. I recently re-read “The Ultimate City,” which is about a young man who lives in a near future that’s very green-conscious and placid and dull. So he goes to the deserted city and starts up urban life again — gets generators going, and then misfits start to flock in from the eco-communes and garden towns. But of course the whole thing goes haywire.

It was only a few years ago that I finally read Crash all the way through. I was writing Rip It Up and Start Again, and I wanted to understand why it had such a big influence on post-punk. In away, I prefer the side of Ballard that relates to someone like John Wyndham over the side that relates to William S. Burroughs. I like that dour, flat Britishness confronted by something alien or catastrophic.

SS: I was surprised by your Ballard tribute in Salon, in which you wrote: “While his novels of the late 1980s and thereafter, such as Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes, have admirers, few would argue they’ve contributed a jot to his enduring cult.” For me, Super-Cannes seems to be one of his very best, a hyper-aware distillation of the “pornification” you were talking about earlier, a sense of entrapment within a system that only recognizes exchange values as authentic modes of being.

SR: It’s not about the relative merits of his books, but about what his cult is based on. It’s a bit like with rock stars. Morrissey put out a number of solo albums, ranging from dire to mediocre to excellent. But the basis of his cult will always be the Smiths. The same goes for the Rolling Stones — their last album, A Bigger Bang, was actually a really fine album, but “Stones-iness” was defined by the 1960s albums, plus Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street. It’s hard to imagine many people starting their Stones fandom with A Bigger Bang, just as it’s hard to imagine many people becoming obsessed with Morrissey on account of You are the Quarry. I think the same thing applies to Ballard’s work. Not to say you’re wrong about Super-Cannes.

SS: You’ve mentioned Ballard’s influence on post-punk. Growing up on this music, Ballard was always a vague referent, glimpsed through obscure Cabaret Voltaire or Ultravox interviews. So I appreciated the way Rip It Up and Start Again unpacked the connection. But what about today’s crop? Is there a continuum from then to now? For example, the dubstep musicians Kode9 and Burial — every second review of their albums seems to invoke the dreaded word “Ballardian,” possibly becoming as much a cliché as it was during the post-punk period.

SR: That relates more to the Spaceape’s contribution to the Kode9 album Memories of the Future. His lyrics and delivery are a bit like Linton Kwesi Johnson reading excerpts from The Atrocity Exhibition. With Burial, the connection is that his album is supposed to be a concept record about South London becoming flooded when the Thames Barrier breaks in the global-warmed near future. I think Katrina and New Orleans is more likely to be the inspiration, but there’s an obvious parallel there with The Drowned World.

There is also an urban psychogeography thing going on in Burial’s music that recalls Ballard in Crash. The album draws a lot from South London, this inter-zone of semi-suburbia between Brixton, where the tube line stops, and Croydon, which is on the city’s periphery. So it’s a hinterland similar to the outer London areas near Heathrow where Ballard situated Crash. A real anomie zone, but possessed with a certain desolate beauty. Burial has also talked of putting his tunes through the “Car Test,” driving around South London playing music from his car to see if it has the atmosphere he wants, the “distance” he’s looking for.

People have also compared Burial to Joy Division in terms of bleak urbanism. And Martin Hannett, their producer, used to do a similar thing: drive around Manchester’s most brutally industrialized zones in his car, stoned, listening to Joy Division, PiL, or Pere Ubu.

SS: Does “Ballardian” mean anything substantial to you, or do you think Ballard’s work is too complex to be contained in this way?

SR: It has become something of a cliché, and that’s perhaps the inevitable result of having an impact and becoming famous — that your ideas become simplified, reduced to a caption. So Ballardian equals “picturesque, postindustrial decay,” “kinky technophilia,” and “perverted obsessions with celebrities.”

When the Diana and Dodi crash happened, people in TV newsrooms were apparently like, “Let’s get Ballard on the phone.”

SS: You’ve casually mentioned that Ballard and Brian Eno are “the two greatest British thinkers of the second half of the 20th century.”

SR: That’s slightly over the top, isn’t it? I wonder if it really stands up. Then again, as thinkers specifically on culture, in the British context, I can’t honestly think of too many rivals, especially for the generation who came out of the 1960s and developed during the 1970s.

One of the fantasy projects that I’ve toyed with for a while is a book on Ballard and Eno. They feel like the patron saints of post-punk to an extent. But it’s difficult, because they’ve said it all better than anyone else. I suppose you could historicize or contextualize them – Ballard with the ICA milieu and Eno with the UK art schools. In some ways the affinity seems as much temperamental as anything conceptual. They have this wonderful Englishness — you imagine they would get on like a house on fire, trading ideas over whisky in a Shepperton living room. One thing they both do is take ideas from science and set them loose in culture, find applications.

Ballard is like a British McLuhan, except better because he’s a far better writer and thinker — more original, more convincing. In some ways, Eno is almost like a British Barthes.

SS: While explaining his collage method in The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard said he wanted to produce “crossovers and linkages between unexpected and previously totally unrelated things, events, elements of the narration, ideas that begin to generate new matter.” Could you draw parallels to Eno’s formulation of “generative” music?

SR: I’m not sure about that. It seems more related to Burroughs, and perhaps also to Ballard’s debt to surrealism.

Eno’s generative music is much more cybernetics-meets-Zen, emptying out the authorial ego, setting up a process and then withdrawing. I don’t think Ballard has that Eastern mystical aspect. With Ballard, there’s always more of a violence bubbling up from below, even though the writing is cold and controlled. If Eno is a British Barthes, a languid sensualist, Ballard would be a British Bataille. I can also imagine Ballard enjoying Camille Paglia’s writing, which I can’t imagine Eno doing — it would be too passionate for him.

SS: Both Ballard and Eno inverted, retooled, and then abandoned the genre they started out in. As Richard Sutherland writes, “To call Ballard’s work science fiction is a bit like describing Brian Eno’s music as rock ‘n’ roll.”

SR: Yes and no. Eno is like the culmination or extension of certain ideas within rock to the point where they verge on un-rock. But when he started he owed a lot to Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, a certain English kind of psychedelia. And he could do the “idiot energy” thing with “Third Uncle.” As for Ballard, to divorce him from his genre is unnecessary. The methodology in his disaster stories and in the bulk of his short stories is totally science fiction.

SS: As someone who has successfully integrated critical theory into writing about music, what do you think of the growing incursion of theory into music criticism?

SR: I’d make a distinction here between theorizing about music and applying critical theory to music. The former happens a lot, obviously — and you could argue that any critical position is at some level theoretical. What I don’t see a lot of is people using ideas from critical theory or philosophy to explicate pop music. Even I don’t do nearly as much as I used to. But I certainly still generate theorems and analytical ideas that go beyond the thumbs up/thumbs down consumer guidance aspect.

SS: To return to Ballard, is it possible to imagine, after his death, what his enduring legacy might be?

SR: That’s too big a question really. But I guess his legacy is due to his invention of a completely original way of perceiving reality, which merges reality with the unreality of the entertainment-scape. He did this to the point where it seems almost obvious, even cliché, as we discussed earlier. You see that a lot in music. I’ve argued that coming up with a cliché is the highest achievement in dance music, a sound or a beat or a riff pattern that everyone wants to copy. Becoming a cliché is, in lots of ways, a triumphant success for any artist.

www.ballardian.com
www.blissout.blogspot.com

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

JG Ballard, the writer who brought SF into the mainstream, has remarked that “Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.” Ballard’s visions of “inner space”, Orwell, Huxley and Atwood’s totalitarian nightmares, Kafka’s uneasy bureaucracies, Gibson’s cutting-edge cool — all are examples of a literature at the forefront of the collective imagination. Every truly original writer must, by definition, create a new world. Here is a whole galaxy of worlds to explore.

…yet it fails to include a single Ballard novel in the accompanying list.

Still, mustn’t grumble: there is Toby Litt’s ‘Best of JG Ballard’ subsection instead:

When I read JG Ballard, I go into a particular kind of trance. The effect of his books isn’t comparable to those of any other writer. His prose, right from the beginning, has a mesmerising pace, rhythm and decorum all its own. Even more remarkably, Ballard has established his own set of visionary locations. Plenty of other writers now fictionally venture into multistorey carparks, airport hospital wards, decaying hotels, but they do so in the knowledge that they’re trespassing on Ballard’s territory. He was here first; he was the pioneer — back when these places were seen as totally unliterary. What could possibly happen on a motorway embankment that was of interest?

‘Crystal World (after J.G. Ballard)’, screening at Autopsy of the New Millennium, Barcelona. Photos: Simon Sellars.

For you, I have unearthed a trove of information about ‘Crystal World (after J.G. Ballard)’, Ann Lislegaard’s digital interpretation of Ballard’s novel. Recall that in my Barcelona report, I raved about it — as an undisputed highlight in an already outstanding exhibition.

The Light Project in St Louis, USA, recently staged this work as part of a series of site-specific commissions that illuminated the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts at Grand Center in St Louis, USA. By all accounts, the show was a great success and I only wish I could have seen this mesmerising work projected onto urban space; the Light Project has archived photos and background information of the setup and subsequent audience reactions, and there’s an interview with Ann, in which she discusses Ballard and the inspiration she drew from the book. (Also available are sound bites from the interview.)

Ann Lislegaard preparing the Light Project staging of her work, ‘Crystal World (After J.G. Ballard)’.

I fully agree with her view of the novel: it’s a ‘mental space, a state of mind’, and that is really emphasised by her iterative work, which constantly chases its own tail. It’s shown on two screens, side by side, and takes place inside a modernist hotel which residually succumbs to the crystallising process described in the novel. Scenes loop back and subsequently fade and buckle from screen to screen under supersaturation of light, forcing you to constantly question the veracity of what’s come before, and where you are in the loop. Mirror images from one screen to another split off into parallel worlds/scenes, the same but not quite. It’s simply beautiful.

From the Light Project interview with Ann:

ROBIN CLARK: What is it about this text that inspired you to create your installation?

ANN LISLEGAARD: I was fascinated by the scenario, by the jungle location, and by the notion of a place in a constant state of transformation. Ballard is very much a conceptual writer and I think his idea for this novel is related to entropy, since the crystals are completely taking over, creating a sameness, a sort of all encompassing world of light and mirrors. Also, I see the Crystal World as a mental space, a state of mind.

RC: In different ways, the novel and your installation both circle around the idea of light as medium, as a scientific phenomenon that also has psychological and conceptual aspects. How are you using light as a material in Crystal World?

AL: I’ve worked with light in my sound installations, but light has never been the subject matter itself. In the past I always used light as an element in relationship to ideas of space, narrative and gender. Crystal World plays with the notion of too much light. The crystallization of the environment is expressed through light that becomes so bright that it bleaches out and creates its own kind of blindness.

If you’d like a feel for the piece, watch the video above — I don’t know much about its providence, except that it was uploaded to blip.tv and is described thus: ‘Backstage footage from Ann Lislegaard’s “Crystal World” at SMK, Copenhagen 20.03.2007. Condensed and dreamy, electronic soundtrack from un escargot vide’. Now, while this footage is low quality and hard to make out, it does give you a sense of the incredible, dislocating sense of perpetual motion that Ann achieves through her work. But I really don’t think that soundtrack is part of the original piece — I saw it at Barcelona in complete silence, and in my opinion it was much, much more powerful that way for obvious reasons to do with the psychological autonomy of interior, inner space etc etc. For a taste of that experience, follow this link for a four-minute excerpt of the work over at New York Magazine (sneaky NY Mag have encoded the vid in such a way that I can’t rip it and embed it here on Ballardian, so a link will have to do).

Lislegaard’s Left-Hand of Darkness. Photo courtesy Murray Guy.

Ann recently staged a visualisation of Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, along with ‘Crystal World’, at Murray Guy in New York. This ended today, sadly, but hopefully both works will exhibit again in the near future.

From Murray Guy:

“Murray Guy is pleased to present two major digital animations by Ann Lislegaard: Crystal World (After J.G. Ballard), 2006 and Left Hand of Darkness (after Ursula K. Le Guin), 2008. These works comprise the second and third parts of a trilogy of 3D animations based on science fiction novels that began with Bellona (After Samuel R. Delany), exhibited at Murray Guy in 2005.

This trilogy continues Lislegaard’s longstanding investigation into spatial perception and cognition and, in particular, divergent forms of narrative. She draws here on science fiction not to illustrate its imaginative content but rather, as Frederic Jameson articulates it, because of science fiction’s potential to provide “something like an experimental variation on our empirical universe.” The works reference modernism and historical visions of the future to reflect on our present triangulation of space and knowledge and temporality; as a whole, they comprise a far-reaching investigation into the structuring of cognition in the digital age.

Crystal World (After J.G. Ballard) is a looping double screen animation showing a modernist glass hotel in a tropical jungle that is slowly invaded by crystalline growth. Text drawn from Ballard’s 1966 novel, which describes a viral crystal found deep in the rainforest that petrifies all organic matter, mingles intermittently with shifting digital images of shadows and the jungle seen from vague interior spaces. Taking the glass house as conceit for a modernist structuring of knowledge, Lislegaard’s animation directly references the Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi’s 1951 Glass House, and the work of Robert Smithson and Eva Hesse, who investigated crystalline and organic structures as a means of articulating nonlinear time.

Set in a similarly extreme climate, Left Hand of Darkness (After Ursula K. LeGuin) is a three-channel projection that draws on LeGuin’s 1969 novel describing an icy planet populated by a single sex of androgynous humanoids. Pages of the novel are inscribed on top of another and rotoscopic images spin next to drawings of male and female genitalia. Here identity and behavior seem at once both paralyzed and in a state of constant flux; the novel’s radical re-imagining of gender is inscribed in a fluid space between cinema, architecture and writing. As in The Crystal World, Lislegaard works to reconfigure polarities—between interiority and exteriority, male and female, organic and inorganic—in an explosively horizontal digital terrain, where nothing aligns as we would expect.

Ann Lislegaard lives and works between Copenhagen and New York. Crystal World (After J.G. Ballard) was recently on view as an outdoor installation in The Light Project at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis, and was originally commissioned for 27th Bienal de São Paulo in 2006. Lislegaard has had numerous solo museum exhibitions, including presentations at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway (2007); Statens Museum fur Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark (2007); Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2004); Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, Scotland (2002); and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (1999), among others. She represented Denmark at the 51st Bienniale di Venezia in 2005 and will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle opening in May 2009.”

‘”We do not move in one direction, rather do we wander back and forth, turning now this way and now that. We go back on our own tracks…” That thought of Montaigne’s reminds me about something I thought of in connection with flying saucers, humanoids, and the remains of unbelievably advanced technology found in some ancient ruins. They write about aliens, but I think that in these phenomena we are in fact confronting ourselves; that is our future, our descendants who are actually traveling in time.’

Andrei Tarkovsky

[via Notes from the Era of Imperfect Memory, a site dedicated to the work of Chris Marker]

If a purely biographical study were undertaken, it could feasibly be argued that Ballard’s work is a variation on the one theme of his wartime experience. To take some examples from his oeuvre: the fake space station in ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’, the patch of waste land in Concrete Island, the degraded apartment block in High-Rise, the motorway system in Crash, the abandoned New York in ‘The Ultimate City’, the secessionist house in ‘The Enormous Space’, the ecotopia in Rushing to Paradise, the gated communities in Running Wild and Cocaine Nights, the micronational shopping mall in Kingdom Come – all could reasonably be seen as iterations of the insular and self-contained conditions of Ballard’s Lunghua childhood. But as Roger Luckhurst asserts, therein lies the danger of reductionism, a retrospective, contextual dilution:

Once Ballard published his two ‘autobiographies’, Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women, they were seized on, in effect, as signed confessions, detached from fictional space but working as decoding machines to render autobiographically readable the body of his work… The logic of this repeated argument is a retrospective rereading of the prior science fiction as encrypted autobiographical performance.

Luckhurst, The Angle Between Two Walls.

Luckhurst aims to recoup Ballard’s standing as a writer of SF rather than ‘downgrad[ing] the “science fiction” texts to drafts of a final “literary” text’, as he sees other commentators doing in the wake of Empire of the Sun. However, during the course of my research it has never been my intention to downgrade these texts by relating them to Ballard’s personal history or to Empire’s fictionalised personal history. Instead, I’m especially interested in tracking a motif that reoccurs across Ballard’s work (including interviews as well as short stories and novels) and to extrapolate what this might mean in the context of memory retrieval and personal myth. As Luckhurst later qualifies, both Empire and The Kindness of Women:

mythologize, which is to say that they take elements of the same compulsively repetitive landscapes, scenarios, and images and recombine them in fictions which yet teasingly and forever undecidably play within the frame of the autobiographical. There is no authenticity here, no revelatory discourse of (in Gusdorf’s insistent phrase) “deeper being”.

For Ballard, his art — his writing — has remodelled the scenario, replaying and recreating a series of parallel worlds that recycle biography and memory as something approaching myth:

Art is the principal way in which the human mind has tried to remake the world in a way that makes sense. The carefully edited, slow-motion, action replay of a rugby tackle, a car crash or a sex act has more significance than the original event. Thanks to virtual reality, we will soon be moving into a world where a heightened super-reality will consist entirely of action replays, and reality will therefore be all the more rich and meaningful. Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant.

Ballard in interview, ‘Theatre of Cruelty’.

Perhaps we should consider Ballard’s novels and short stories as ‘carefully edited, slow-motion replays’ of the Lunghua camp (and Empire as Ballard’s life seen through the prism of his fiction) — or as virtual-reality projections, in which anything goes in any combination. In The Atrocity Exhibition, T-’s obsessive need to restage, recreate and reinvent scenarios (the ‘sex death’ of his mistress; his own initiation into crash culture) is a microcosm of Ballard’s entire career strategy, a fragment of a hologram rose that in its holistic incarnation seems designed to function hypertextually, in the sense that each piece of writing operates as a portal to another. The anti-linear style encourages the reader to follow pathways of her own device. This goal is embedded in Atrocity’s paragraph headings, some of which are named after earlier Ballard short stories such as ‘The Concentration City’, some of which refer to other chapters in the book such as ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’, some of which refer to stories yet to be written such as ‘The Sixty Minute Zoom’. The accompanying paragraphs have nothing to do with the stories after which they are (or would be) named; they are parallel universes of the mind that resist integration, challenging the primacy of the ‘text’. They inhabit the non-space of the interstice, the neural interval prised open when two disparate, yet interrelated parts rub together, creating new meanings, new connections, new portals that themselves split into infinite parallel worlds. As Corin Depper identifies, this strategy bears strong resemblance to Deleuze and Guattari’s overarching sense of ‘rhizomatic’ cultural theory:

The ‘rhizome’ … operates against linear and dialectical ideas. This is mirrored in the formal structuring of [Deleuze and Guattari's] books as a series of seemingly unconnected sections, which force the reader to abandon earlier experiences of reading philosophy in favour of a radically decentred process, almost inevitably skipping across sections and creating new pathways of meaning… these … works could easily be seen as companion pieces to … The Atrocity Exhibition, which proffers a similarly unstable ground on which new notions of history and identity are endlessly being constructed and destroyed.

Depper, ‘Death at Work: The Cinematic Imagination of J. G. Ballard’

ABOVE: La Jetée. Apologies for the English narration – it proved difficult to locate an online version in the original French, with English subtitles.

Unsurprisingly, Ballard was an advocate of Chris Marker’s 1962 ‘photo roman’, La Jetée, a film concerned with nothing but the confusion of physical and mental time, and the eternal cycle of revisiting, overwriting and reinhabiting memory. Shot almost entirely in stills, La Jetée depicts an inmate of a prisoner-of-war camp in post-apocalyptic Paris. The man’s captors select him for a time-travel experiment in which he is returned to the pre-war. He is judged to be a suitable candidate for time travel since he has a particular recollection of the peacetime era that won’t leave him, the memory of a woman he briefly glimpsed as a boy on the jetty at Orly Airport, her face creased in horror as they both watch a man inexplicably shot and killed before them. It is thought that this memory will cushion the shock of his awakening in the past:

This man was selected from among a thousand for his obsession with an image from the past. Nothing else, at first, but stripping out the present, and its racks…

On the tenth day, images begin to ooze, like confessions. A peacetime morning. A peacetime bedroom, a real bedroom. Real children. Real birds. Real cats. Real graves.

On the sixteenth day he is on the jetty at Orly. Empty. Sometimes he recaptures a day of happiness, though different. A face of happiness, though different. Ruins.

Chris Marker, La Jetée.

When he is sent back he seeks out the woman, but is never really sure whether he is travelling through time, dreaming, or remembering the past and reinhabiting the memory. The denouement reveals that the man, due to the paradoxes of time travel, had as a child witnessed his own death, blurring past, present and future in profound flux. Time tracks exist simultaneously, recording, reflecting and contaminating each other.

Time is like a circle, which is endlessly described. The declining arc is the past. The inclining arc is the future.

Everything has been said, provided words do not change their meanings, and meanings their words.

Jean-Luc Godard, Alphaville.

For Ballard, as it clearly is for Marker, film is a crucial tool for excavating simultaneous time (which of course is also circular time … may the circle never be broken):

I define Inner Space as an imaginary realm in which on the one hand the outer world of reality, and on the other the inner world of the mind meet and merge. Now, in the landscapes of the surrealist painters, for example, one sees the regions of Inner Space; and increasingly I believe that we will encounter in film and literature scenes which are neither solely realistic nor fantastic. In a sense, it will be a movement in the interzone between both spheres.

Ballard, Munich Round Up, 1968.

In 1966 Ballard wrote an appreciative review of La Jetée for New Worlds, commenting on its ‘fusion of science fiction, psychological fable and photomontage … in its unique way a series of potent images of the inner landscapes of time’. For Ballard, Marker’s technique of using almost entirely still frames creates a ‘succession of disconnected images … a perfect means of projecting the quantified memories and movements through time that are the film’s subject matter’. Elsewhere, reflecting on the process of repetition and memory retrieval in The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard might almost be reviewing La Jetée:

[Atrocity's] mental Polaroids form a large part of our library of affections. Carried around in our heads, they touch our memories like albums of family photographs. Turning their pages, we see what seems to be a ghostly and alternative version of our own past, filled with shadowy figures as formalized as Egyptian tomb-reliefs.

Ballard, annotations to The Atrocity Exhibition, RE/Search edition (1990).

Andrzej Gasiorek’s view is that Empire and Kindness are concerned with the imagination’s ‘ambiguous role’ in identity formation: ‘The truth-telling status of both narratives is thereby called into question – both are to be read as versions of the past, not as definitive reconstructions’.

Like La Jetée’s protagonist, then, Ballard has been fixated by a moment he was given to witness as a child — the stasis of Lunghua, interned in suspended time; the atomic flash heralding the post-war era of simulation and planing identity — revisiting it, revising it and re-enacting it in multiple retro-forward scenarios, so that the terms ‘past, present and future’ become inconsequential, irreparably meaningless.

..:: PREVIOUSLY ON BALLARDIAN:
+ Ballard and the Vicissitudes of Time

LEFT: Burroughs in 1963: ‘particularly spectral and menacing: a fitting mug shot for a literary outlaw’ (image via Reality Studio). RIGHT: Moorcock, from around the same era (image via Moorcock’s Miscellany).

Over at Reality Studio, there’s an excellent interview with Michael Moorcock, conducted by Mark P. Williams. Naturally, Moorcock is as insightful discussing Burroughs and the Beats as he has been analysing the New Wave and Ballard, and I think he sums up Kerouac for me, too:

I read two books while hitchhiking from Sweden to France and was starving by the time I got to Paris — On the Road by Kerouac and Brideshead Revisited by Waugh. I thought On the Road a bit of a wank and the Waugh a bit frozen in a time which meant almost nothing to me.

And then came Burroughs…

Read the interview for more on the intersection of three great writers (there’s quite a bit of detail on Ballard, also). And kudos to MPW for the weighty questions — to which Moorcock responds in kind.

MPW: Both your writing and Burroughs at this time would fall under what Jeff Nuttall described as “Bomb culture” (Nuttall, Bomb Culture, 1968), a peculiar reaction to the uncertainties and contradictions revealed in the post-1945 era, which he identifies particularly with the atom bomb. How much do you feel that the specific cultural circumstances of the mid-to-late-1960s, particularly in the Ladbroke Grove area, are reflected in the appeal of what Mary McCarthy calls Burroughs’ novel of “statelessness?”

Moorcock: Jeff was a bit older than me. I didn’t react much to the bomb. I wasn’t scared of it, maybe saw it as a useful symbol… and though I sort of went along with friends in the Ban the Bomb movement, I knew it wouldn’t be banned and rather relished the idea of it. I did see it as a way of keeping the peace. I shared this view with Ballard and Barry [Barrington] Bayley, the two writer friends I saw regularly and with whom I had most in common. Ballard had been liberated by the Bomb, as had [Brian W.] Aldiss, another friend. Ballard from the Japanese civilian camp and Aldiss from having to begin the invasion of Japan. I think I was born a little too late to worry. I had enjoyed the excitement of the V-bombs, the majority of which fell in SW London, where I lived, and had always felt slightly let down by peacetime. Few of my close friends gave much of a crap about the bomb. We understood sensibilities had changed and that we needed a new kind of fiction to deal with it, but we didn’t lose much sleep except, maybe, during the Cuban crisis. But even there our attitude was sort of elevated. I was more focussed on discovering a new kind of urban fiction.

I like the notion of the “stateless” novel and indeed you could argue I was looking for a form like that. Cornelius certainly reflects that. A novel which looked for a new form of identity? McCarthy was arguing from a more academic, conventional point of view. I was more practical, I think, in that I was trying to reclaim the “literary” novel for a general public, through sf. Burroughs, Bayley and Ballard all had an interest in taking certain ideas from sf for their own uses, as I did. So we were trying to marry popular and, if you like, elitist art, in much the way Michael Chabon and his Bay Area friends are trying to do today. I did assume Burroughs to be a writer with an audience amongst sf readers, for instance. It turned out that the sf audience, like the audiences for any genre fiction (including the middle-brow “modern” or even “modernist” novel) is deeply conservative and pretty much addicted to generic conventions. Repetition is what it needs, not innovation.

..:: MORE
+ ‘To Write For the Space Age’: Interview with Michael Moorcock by Mark P. Williams
+ A New Literature for the Space Age: Moorcock’s Editorial on Burroughs for New Worlds
+ The Cosmic Satirist: Moorcock’s review of Naked Lunch for New Worlds

Photos by Filip Dujardin.

Junkspace, controlspace, blurred zones … Ballardian space (‘The Ultimate City’, in particular). BLDGBLOG on the ‘resampled space’ of Belgian photographer Filip Dujardin:

Filip Dujardin makes images of unexpected buildings – that is, he “combines photographs of parts of buildings into new, fictional, architectonic structures,” Mark Magazine explains.

The resulting projects look like old factory sites in the American rust belt – Mark describes them as “informal and often dilapidated structures with unspecified functions” – or, in some cases, new projects by LOT-EK, Simon Ungers, or OMA.
…
There seem to be multiple sub-themes, and even sub-projects, within the larger effort. There are surreal detached structures, for instance, like the image that opens this post, standing free amidst a recognizable but anonymous landscape. In some of these we see that even geological forms become subject to resampling. But then there are also what could be called a back series – that is, the backs of incredible buildings whose facades you can barely imagine.

These are groves of architecture, weird islands of form, like the city as seen from a rail line: sheds and retaining walls, stained by rain, their bricks chipped away behind piles of rubbish, their corrugated steel repeating ever onward in infinite ridges.

And if you’re in London this November, you could a lot worse than catch Geoff from BLDGBLOG in action at what sounds like two fascinating events. From BLDGBLOG:

On Monday, November 24, I’ll be hosting a live interview at the Barbican in London with director Michael Winterbottom, for a special screening of his film Code 46. You can read a bit more about the event – as well as buy tickets – here. This is part of an ongoing series called Architecture on Film, curated by the Architecture Foundation.

The purpose of the event is to talk about film and architecture – or, in this case, cities, urban design, memory, science fiction, landscape, globalization, and the built environment. As you can see from the list of locations used for the film’s production, Code 46 is very well-traveled, stitching together urban – and exurban – environments from London, Shanghai, Dubai, Hong Kong, and even the deserts of Rajasthan.

That the film achieves the feel of science fiction simply through a well-edited depiction of existing landscapes says as much about the film as it does about the nature of city-building today; perhaps one might only half-jokingly suggest that people build cities today in order to live inside science fiction films.

I’ve got two more events coming up in London, both on Wednesday, November 26. I’ll post more info about the first event in a bit. The second one, in the evening, has been organized by the Complex Terrain Laboratory, and it will take place in the J.Z. Young Lecture Theatre at UCL, inside the Anatomy Building on Gower Street. Here is a map.

I’ll be teaming up with Antoine Bousquet, Lecturer in International Relations at Birkbeck College, and author of the forthcoming book The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity to discuss our work in relation to space, war, and the city.
…
For my own part, I’ll be discussing a pretty broad swath of ideas about “feral cities” – what I like to call cities gone wild – ranging from Richard J. Norton’s seminal paper on the topic to Mike Davis’s research on “the Pentagon as global slumlord,” via reference to J.G. Ballard, Eyal Weizman, Stefano Boeri, Reza Negarestani, and many others.

More info here and here.

Simon Sellars investigates whether connections can be found between the oeuvre of HP Lovecraft and that of JG Ballard. The post comes up with only “…vague parallels between the two writers”… The post misses out on a pair of short stories which evince quite clear parallels between the two writers: HP Lovecraft’s 1927 short story “The Color Out Of Space” and JG Ballard’s 1964 short story “The Illuminated Man”. In both stories, a cosmological event infects a rural area, warping color, threatening to mutate the world… Both stories highlight the vulnerability of man in an inhumane cosmic environment…

Both Lovecraft’s and Ballard’s story focus on a fictive world into which classificatory ambiguity is introduced by a cosmological event — by a deus ex machina. In both stories, the effect is contagious, and threatens to mutate the world. In Ballard’s story, it is made clear at the very beginning of the story that the effect is spreading on a cosmic scale…

Where the two stories differ is in the attitude of the protagonist towards the ambiguity. On the one hand, Lovecraft’s surveyor is repelled by the cosmological pollution. Ballard’s protagonist on the other hand is attracted by the boundary-dissolving effect, and in the finale of the book seeks to dissolve the boundaries of his own self…

To recapitulate: both stories present a numenous cosmological event which destabilizes classificatory boundaries in a rural area. In both stories, ‘warped color and light’ are the central metaphor for this destabilizing effect, which both attracts and repels. Other than Simon Sellars, I’d say that the parallels between these two stories are far from vague: they are clear and distinct.

Much more at SD.

BALLARDOSCOPE: SOME ATTEMPTS AT APPROACHING THE WRITER AS A VISIONARY

by Jordi Costa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Layout of the exhibition

WHAT I BELIEVE

Photo via RE/Search Publications.

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

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

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

I believe in the body odors of Princess Di.

I believe in the next five minutes.

I believe in anxiety, psychosis and despair.

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

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

J.G. Ballard

FROM SHANGHAI TO SHEPPERTON

Photo via CCCB.

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

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

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

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

LANDSCAPES OF DREAM

Dali meets Ballard. Scan via The Terminal Collection.

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

INNER SPACE

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

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

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

DISASTER AREA

Photo by Ana Barrado.

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

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

TECHNOLOGY AND PORNOGRAPHY

Scan via The Terminal Collection.

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

ASEPSIS AND NEOBARBARISM

Photo by Ana Barrado.

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

THE BALLARD LIBRARY

Scan via The Terminal Collection.

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

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

BALLARDIAN ART

Image by Michelle Lord.

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

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

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

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

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

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

GENERAL INFORMATION

DATES
22 July – 2 November 2008

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

PRICES

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

FURTHER INFORMATION
CCCB – www.cccb.org

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

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

…:: FURTHER INFO:

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

This strange and poetic film, directed by Chris Marker, is a fusion of science fiction, psychological fable and photomontage, and creates in its unique way a series of potent images of the inner landscapes of time. Apart from a brief three-second sequence — a young woman’s hesitant smile, a moment of extraordinary poignancy, like a fragment of a child’s dream — the thirty-minute film is composed entirely of still photographs. Yet this succession of disconnected images is a perfect means of projecting the quantified memories and movements through time that are the film’s subject matter.
…
This familiar theme [time travel] is treated with remarkable finesse and imagination, its symbols and perspectives continually reinforcing the subject matter. Not once does it make use of the time-honoured conventions of traditional science fiction. Creating its own conventions from scratch, it triumphantly succeeds where science fiction invariably fails.

J.G. Ballard ‘La Jetée: Academy One’, New Worlds, 1966.

Chrismarker.org is an randomly-compiled, taxonomically naive and hopefully useful archive of ruminations, bibliographic & filmographic notations, untimely meditations, mnemonic minutiae and other glosses on the cinematic, written, photographic and multimedia work of world-citizen & time-traveler Chris Marker.

We welcome contributions in short article form from the global village that Marker helped to map. We also welcome Chris Marker news, links, memorabilia, aphorisms, quotations, images and stray insights. Contributions from animals are welcome too, of course, including but not limited to cats, owls, giraffes, emus and elephants (слоны).

ABOVE: Still from La Jetée (1964; dir. Chris Marker).

Meanwhile, we leave the academic penal colony – to which we once belonged and from which we no doubt still bear the scars – to crunch through the seemingly inevitable canonization process, as it has done so well with Walter Benjamin. That may be just what awaits epigonically for the rare few who scribble & bricole in a deep, careful, dedicated, crafty and continuous manner with a master’s brilliance and an asystematic approach, in whatever medium, ahead (or outside) of their time.

You may notice that some of the material initially appearing on this site is a port of resources from the old and crumbling edifice of silverthreaded presents chris marker, once housed at a so-called tilde account at silcom.com, now still hanging around for old time’s sake at a nowherenear relevant domain called vajramedia.com, in and amongst the rubble of a disastrous project once known as Cinema Paranoia. Upon this shaky base we build, quoting mostly, writing little, ever fascinated by and admiring always the oeuvre of Chris Marker, le plus célèbre des cinéastes inconnus.

Chris Marker: Notes from the Era of Imperfect Memory

ABOVE: Still from Sans Soleil (1983; dir. Chris Marker).

ABOVE: Disch, photo by Jamie Spracher.

SF writer Thomas M. Disch committed suicide on July 4, and was described by John Clute as ‘perhaps the most respected, least trusted, most envied and least read of all modern first-rank SF writers’. The obits have been noting Disch’s involvement with the New Wave of British SF, and Joanne, of Tomorrow Museum, writes to tell me of Disch’s admiration for Ballard.

Joanne says:

You’ve likely heard the sad news of Thomas M. Disch’s suicide. Although they are very different writers stylistically, Ballard and Disch seem to appeal to the same readers. And Disch was very much a fan of Ballard’s. I pulled a few quotes from Disch’s book about science fiction ‘The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of’. He devotes several pages of it to Ballard. Remarking on the New Wave, Disch writes of:

‘Ballard in the role of T.S. Elliot, the genius in residence, and Moorcock as Ezra Pound, a Svengali for all seasons, ready to welcome anyone in the club who might in some way advance the cause. They were essential to each other (and to the cause), for without Moorcock and New Worlds to beat the drum, Ballard’s work would have appeared in only those few avant-garde venues receptive to the transgressive fictions of non-Establishment writers … and without Ballard’s conspicuous and then prolific talent to showcase, the New Wave and New Worlds would never have reached escape velocity.’
…
‘Ballard, in erasing the rocketship from his fiction, and along with it the notion of outer space as the new frontier, found a new subject matter for SF: the present in, as it were, its futuristic aspect. He could look at the world around him — suburban Shepperton — with the radical innocence of someone whose home town had been a Japanese internment camp. And everything was strange. The sports car that he owned and drove around like a kamikaze pilot was a good deal stranger and more vivid than any rocket ship, which existed, if at all, only as a TV image among a host of other images….Why not build a future from those images rather than the do-it-yourself kits of traditional SF?’

Later, Disch writes about meeting with Ballard when he was 26. Interestingly, David Pringle doesn’t believe it happened the way Disch says. (Pringle also calls Disch the “second-greatest iconoclast” of science fiction after Ballard):

‘His several meetings with J. G. Ballard in 1966 and after, we are told, “took the invariable form of a trip to the Shepperton train station south of London and then a terrifying ride with Ballard at the wheel of his sports car. At his home, a dilapidated, infinitely cluttered bungalow that he shared with his two children, Ballard, fuelled with whisky, would deliver an oral version of his private gospel. Sad to say, I remember not a single oracle from those occasions, only a sense that the man was, as advertised, a genius hard-wired to the Zeitgeist.” Memory may play even the greatest truth-tellers false, and as one who has visited the same house on half a dozen occasions from the 1970s to the 1990s I can testify that Ballard lives in a classic British semi-detached, not a “bungalow,” and that he raised three children there throughout the 1960s, not two; also I can vouch for the fact that JGB’s front door is less than five minutes’ walk from Shepperton station (which lies west of London, not south), so why a car-ride was necessary I can’t imagine. As for the drinking and hairy driving of the period following his wife’s death in the mid-1960s, Ballard has described those things himself in several interviews — and has even fictionalized them, in a chapter called “The Exhibition,” in his novel The Kindness of Women (1991); so, no surprises there — except, perhaps, for the revelation (if true) that JGB once drove a sports car.’

Joanne has included her own tribute to Disch over at Tomorrow Museum:

He will get the audience he deserves. I see other gay writers as well as women and non-whites, and just about anyone who has felt like a genre misfit, really responding to his work and taking influence. Heck, “slipsteam” is already deeply indebted to him.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if one day his name is as popular among teenagers as Vonnegut’s. It is just too bad it didn’t happen while he was alive.

Leigh P. emailed to tell me of this odd stamp sci-fi set issued in Sam Marino in the late 90s. Among the hard-SF names like Clarke, Heinlein and Asimov are not only Ballard but also Burgess and Orwell (both of whom, as far as I’m aware, wrote just one ‘SF’ novel apiece, while Ballard distanced himself from the genre a long time ago).

Leigh says:

I was procrastinating earlier (I’m in the process of completing a doctoral thesis, so this has indeed become somewhat of an artform) when I came across a picture of a bizarre 1998 stamp issue from San Marino, which depicted Ballard’s ‘The Drowned World.’ It might be worth posting something about it for philatelically-inclined Ballardians out there. Or not.

Thanks Leigh. I know what you mean about the procrastination. Not only am I also labouring through the last stage of a doctorate, but it’s taken me two months to get around to posting this.

In the words of Burgess, appy-polly-loggies!

ABOVE: ‘Joshua Says GO!’ by Troy Paiva. ‘A 30s twin-tail Lockheed Electra does the big sleep at Aviation Warehouse. Night, full moon, red-gelled strobe flash. Canon 20D.’

The photography of Troy Paiva treats us to canted visions of a crumbling, post-industrial America — decommissioned military bases, aircraft ‘boneyards’, abandoned desert towns. The scenarios are all shot at night and the work is presented straight out of the camera, mostly untouched by Photoshopping or other post-processing techniques. Troy uses available light, such as moonlight or sodium light (the latter of course plentiful in the modern-day archaeological ruins he haunts), but he also uniquely marks the shots with his light-painting skills (the introduction of hand-held, hand-applied light during the exposure) and the unearthly effects of red, green and blue-gelled strobe flashes. The cumulative effect is startling: like stills from a David Lynch film in a parallel universe in which Lynch, instead of adapting Barry Gifford’s novel Wild at Heart for his twisted desert noir masterpiece, had chosen Ballard’s Vermilion Sands instead.

Simon Sellars

NOTE: Although I have tried my best to include a representative selection of Troy’s photos, I found it almost impossible to do justice to the scope, beauty and sheer volume of his work. If after reading this interview you find yourself wanting more examples, my advice is to start either at Troy’s official site or his flickr page and work your way from there.

I had arrived in Vermilion Sands three months earlier. A retired pilot, I was painfully coming to terms with a broken leg and the prospect of never flying again… I found a shallow basin among the dunes… The owner had gone, abandoning the hangar-like building to the sand-rays and the desert, and on some half-formed impulse I began to drive out each afternoon.

J.G. Ballard, ‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’, first published in 1967, collected in Vermilion Sands (1971).

SIMON: Troy, when we first talked about your photos, you said, ‘People constantly refer to my photography as “Ballardian”.’ I can certainly see the connections, especially with Vermilion Sands and its sense of decadent ruin, a lurid, near-future civilisation lost in the desert sands. But is Ballard actually an influence on your work?

TROY: No. I came to him much later. I enjoyed the Vermilion Sands stories very much when I read them a couple of years ago and I can see why people connect my work with his writing. There is that sense of desolation and isolation, the fetishism of decay and destruction and a general sense of being outside the realm of normal society, as well as the melancholia of straggling on after everything has ended.

Same thing happened with Kerouac’s On the Road. After reading it recently I thought, ‘Wow, no wonder people keep saying that to me.’ Much of my photography stems from massive, epic road trips that criss-cross the southwest, where I cover thousands of miles in a couple of very surreal days. The mythology of The Road figures in a lot of my work. I guess these similarities show that human experience is roughly the same for all of us, we just have different ways of expressing it. See also Philip K. Dick.

The books of my formative years were George Stewart’s pastoral apocalypse classic Earth Abides, Hunter S. Thompson’s surrealist freak-out, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and The Stand, Stephen King’s pop-epic story of The End. Those three books kinda say it all about where my approach to the road, abandonment and the ‘post-everything’ world lies. And the movie Vanishing Point – that encapsulates my own road-trip mythology perfectly.

HENRY: ‘And there goes the Challenger, being chased by the blue, blue meanies on wheels. The last American hero, the electric Shinta, the demigod, the super driver of the Golden West.’

TROY: ‘And beans, lotsa beans.’ Man, I love that movie. It’s totally what the desert is about for me.

ABOVE: ‘Color Television’ by Troy Paiva. ‘Behind an abandoned restaurant in the sleepy Mojave Desert town of Yermo, CA. The density of the sky was caused by the October Fires in SoCal. You could taste every breath. Night, full moon 2 minute exposure, natural, yellow and red-gelled strobe and flashlights. Composite of 2 images.’

HENRY: There are other things your work brings to mind, like the Mojave Desert Phone Booth.

TROY: Love it. Wish I’d had a chance to shoot it! I got lost on a series of endless dirt roads trying to find it, many years ago. Almost got stuck and had to give up. It’s been gone for at least five years now.

SIMON: What exactly is it about the desert that appeals?

TROY: I just love the expansiveness and isolation – it’s primal and uncompromising. I love that you can go for days without talking to anyone. It’s a land of outcasts and oddballs, where non-conformists can thrive. An incredible volume of American mythology is based on the desert and Western expansion, from the Gold Rush to Route 66. I’ve even heard my photography described as an epitaph for the mythology of the American West.

Dr Paul Ricci was thinking: So this is New York – or was. Greatest city of the twentieth century, here you heard the heart-beat of international finance, industry and entertainment. Now it’s as remote from the real world as Pompeii or Persepolis. It’s a fossil, my God, preserved here on the edge of the desert like one of those ghost towns in the Wild West. Did my ancestors really live in these vast canyons? They came on a cattle boat from Naples in the 1890s, and a century later went back to Naples on a cattle boat. Now I’m making another stab at it.

Still, the place has possibilities, all sorts of dormant things might be lying here, waiting to be roused.

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

SIMON: Your bio says your work is about ‘the evolution and eventual abandonment of the communities, structures and social iconography spawned during this country’s 20th century western expansion’. How did it come to be this way?

TROY: It’s simply who I am. When I was 13 my family went on a road trip, one of many, and we somehow found ourselves bouncing down 15 miles of bad dirt road to the classic ‘wild west’ ghost town of Bodie, arguably the most authentic ghost town in America. Today Bodie is kept in a state of ‘arrested decay’ and is a major tourist destination. Much of the road is paved and the parking lot is filled with tour buses, and in the summer the town is crawling with thousands of tourists from around the world. But back in the early 70s you could drive right into the centre of town and park. When we climbed out of the car we found we were the only ones there! I wandered that town alone for hours, slack-jawed at the thought that people would just walk away from furnished houses and businesses, a whole city, and never come back. I was hooked for life.

ABOVE: ‘Texaco Marine’ by Troy Paiva. ‘North Shore Marina, Salton Sea, 2001. Most, if not all, the letters are gone by now. Night, 100% full moon/star light, 8 minutes, f5.6.’

SIMON: I understand it’s your Salton Sea work that gets most of the Vermilion Sands comparisons.

TROY: Yes. The Salton Sea is an enormous, accidentally created salt lake in a remote corner of the SoCal desert. In the 50s developers built elaborate resorts and golf courses around its shores and the department of interior stocked it with game fish. By the 60s it had become an idyllic combination of Lake Tahoe and Palm Springs, half outdoorsman’s paradise, half retreat for the Hollywood elite. By the 70s, however, two years of record rain caused massive floods and the lake, which has no outlet, began to fester and decay. The smell became unbearable as massive algae blooms died off. Anyone who could afford to move away did. By the 90s fish and birds were dying on a biblical scale – in the millions – triggered by the algae blooms. It’s a horrible, filthy place rimmed with rotten modernist resorts, marinas and trailer parks (most of which have been torn down now), and decaying dead fish and birds. Today the Salton Sea feels very much like the epicentre for the end of the world, a poster child for mankind’s failure to tame nature.

Ballardian for sure!

Ronnov-Jessen: [In your novella 'The Ultimate City'] one could say that the dynamism represented by New York is actually the dynamism of decay.

Ballard: No, I don’t accept that. The city is abandoned, and with it, suspended in time, is a whole set of formulae for expressing human energy, imagination, ambition. The clock has stopped, but it will be possible for the boy to start it up again, just as in the novel Hello America where the young hero does precisely the same — except he attempts to do it on a continental level.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Against Entropy’, a 1984 interview with Peter Ronnov-Jessen.

ABOVE: ‘Precis’ by Troy Paiva. ‘A flipped Mitsubishi Precis, run over by a tank, in the abandoned base housing at George AFB near Victorville, CA. There were several smashed cars left in strategic lines of sight used for infantry cover during wargames exercises. The engine block in this thing was crushed like an egg. Shot March 2001, 160T film. Night, about 8 minutes, full moon, but overcast, yellow and purple-gelled strobe-flash.’

HENRY: Do you think your photos suggest a cryptic ‘signs of passing’ of American Culture from the world stage?

TROY: I suppose it can’t help but be interpreted that way‚ but I must also say the rest of the world has more ruins and debris left behind than America does. The internet is overflowing with amazing photography shot in the abandoned places of the 21st century. Spend an hour Googling ‘urban exploration’ and you’ll see that the culture is exploding worldwide, so whilst you got the concept right, it’s important to see it as a human, post-industrial thing rather than purely American.

UrbEx is as old as mankind. Humans have always been obsessed with both building and exploration. I’m sure primitive man explored the abandoned caves of his ancestors too. We’re drawn to ruins. It’s just how we’re wired as a species. Whereas the 20th century saw an unprecedented worldwide explosion of construction, by the dawn of the 21st century much of this expansion had failed or become obsolete, leaving the world littered with an amazing array of every type of ruins imaginable. Today we are experiencing a true golden age of abandonment.

SIMON: You describe it as a ‘culture’. That suggests it’s more than simply the illicit thrill of sneaking into abandoned or forbidden territory.

TROY: Yes. UrbEx, or Urban Exploration, is the pastime of visiting TOADS (temporary, obsolete, abandoned and derelict spaces), but not for scientific, anthropological or nefarious purposes. It’s about absorbing the atmosphere and wabi sabi soul of these places. A ‘finding beauty in decay’ aesthetic. I visit these lapsed spaces for several of the same reasons that normal people visit a serene mountain glen: the soul-cleansing quietude and the sense of feeling very small in a big universe. But ultimately it is an entirely different sensibility. Where most people see waste and blight in TOADS, Urban Explorers see elegant devolution and the weight of time.

Found the man Traven. A strange derelict figure, hiding in a bunker in the deserted interior of the island. He is suffering from severe exposure and malnutrition, but is unaware of this or, for that matter, of any other events in the world around him … He maintains that he came to the island to carry out some scientific project — unstated — but I suspect that he understands his real motives and the unique role of the island … In some way its landscape seems to be involved with certain unconscious notions of time, and in particular with those that may be a repressed premonition of our own deaths. The attractions and dangers of such an architecture, as the past has shown, need no stressing …

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

HENRY: Ballard has a strangely acute, Triassic sense of ‘deep time’ in his fiction‚ especially in short stories like ‘The Terminal Beach’. Similarly, in your book Lost America, you wrote, ‘The stars pinwheeling overhead and clouds smearing across the sky mirrored the compression of time created by the relentless pace of the trip.’ You said you were seeking to ‘heighten the unreality’ of these bizarre, spectral non-places.

TROY: It is a different reality. UrbEx night photography is very far removed from normal life, and my goal is to accentuate this surreal, otherworldly atmosphere in the work. One of the big attractions of night photography is this weird time-space distortion thing. Most of the night shooters I know are philosophical about the process. The exposures are minutes long, giving you time to sit in the dark and absorb the scene. Regardless of whether you are shooting cranes in an abandoned shipyard, or you’re on the top of a windswept mountain shooting thousand year old trees, it’s a wonderfully zen, contemplative experience.

ABOVE: ‘Hot Seat 2′ by Troy Paiva. ‘Shot at the abandoned Fort Ord Army Base in Monterey, CA. I recently learned that most (soon to be all) of the barracks and entire laundry have recently been bulldozed. Hundreds of buildings. Gone. Night, full moon, pink and green-gelled strobe-flash, 3-4 minute exposure.’

HENRY: You must get scared sometimes.

TROY: I don’t really worry about stuff very much. I have yet to see a ghost or the undead, although I’ve had thousands of weird experiences. I’ve shot in many supposedly haunted locations and seen and heard things that some people would pass off as paranormal, but nothing that couldn’t be attributed to wind, settling or vermin in the walls. What I have seen a lot of are big poisonous spiders, three-storey drop offs into the yawning darkness with no railings, copper thieves, rattlesnakes, rotten floors and wasted teenage vandals. I’ve come out of buildings crawling with spiders (I’ve had some very bad spider bites over the years), missed a rattlesnake bite by inches and been chased back to the car by a pack of wild dogs. I’ve been run off by crazy, desert-rat property owners racking shotguns. I’ve been swarmed by a heavily armed platoon of border agents in southern Arizona while I was shooting in a pet cemetery. I’ve had countless cuts and bruises and sprained and twisted ankles, and I once gave myself an excruciating second-degree burn while light painting with fireworks in a sandstorm.

Doing this is a whole lot of fun, but there are a lot of very real ways to get hurt or killed. The dangerous aspect of UrbEx night photography is just not something I dwell on. If I did I’d never leave the house.

SIMON: In Lost America you wrote about coming across a sacrificial altar used in an occult ceremony.

TROY: Yeah, that was nasty. They had sacrificed a sheep on a makeshift altar in an abandoned Air Force fire station in a remote corner of the Mojave desert. Blood and entrails were smeared everywhere, lots of evil graffiti about how much fun it is to kill. It was a miserable sight. Sad.

SIMON: You said it was part of the ‘growing evidence of downright creepy stuff’ you’ve encountered. Are you implying that this kind of activity is on the rise?

TROY: Is it on the rise, or has it always been there, bubbling away under the surface? I don’t have the answer for that. Remember what I said earlier about the desert being the last place where oddballs can thrive? Some people are just bigger oddballs than others, what can I tell you?

HENRY: I enjoy reading your interior highway dialogues [Troy wrote 12,000 words to accompany the photos in Lost America]. You should definitely do more existential travel essays – you seem to have a feel for it.

TROY: Thanks, but I clearly don’t have as much to offer as a writer that I do as a photographer. Urban Exploration needs a new young writer, this generation’s version of Lester Bangs or Hunter S. Thompson, who can bring it into a modern pop-culture context. I’m not that writer, but I’ll gladly play the photographic role of Ralph Steadman.

ABOVE: ‘Danger Zone’ by Troy Paiva. ‘Building 4900, abandoned. Decommissioned Fort Ord Army Base. It’s all in the details. Shot 1/07, night- totally dark space, red-gelled strobe and ungelled strobe through fenced room.’

SIMON: Do you know about the recent hysteria in Britain, with people being questioned and harassed by police for using a camera in public places under suspicion of terrorism? There has been a huge backlash from ordinary people demanding the right to take pictures in public without being branded a terrorist.

TROY: I’ve heard rumblings about that sort of thing here too, especially in big cities. No question, the climate for photographers has changed since 9/11. The police have all of us on a shorter leash. Here in western America everything is spread out though, so it’s much easier to fall between the cracks if you get out of the big cities. That’s why I like shooting in rural locations. You are a lot less likely to be hassled by the police or unsavoury characters.

HENRY: Ballard has described Shanghai as ‘cruel and lurid, polluted and exciting’. Except for ‘cruel’ this seems an apt description of your photography (I find your work too surreal to be genuinely malicious). Do you feel this same kind of frantic, otherworldly rush as you travel the land in search of… of what, exactly?

TROY: Ghosts. Not Hollywood movie ghosts-actors under sheets waving their arms, but the ghosts of technology, a slice of amazing human history that is already being forgotten as we rush headlong towards… whatever the hell it is we are rushing towards. I don’t believe in ghosts in the traditional sense, but these places carry a spiritual weight that is unlike occupied places or nature. The stillness and atmosphere, especially alone at night, can be an emotionally overwhelming experience. No question, it is a rush.

ABOVE: ‘Canted’ by Troy Paiva. ’1959 Buick at a nameless high desert junkyard near Lake Los Angeles, CA. Night, 2 minute exposure, full moon purple and green-gelled strobe-flash. Big and rusty.’

SIMON: Is America really changing as rapidly as your work suggests?

TROY: Yes, it’s changing faster and faster. America is all about speed and ‘the new’ so we’re always replacing things that don’t really need replacing. It’s interesting how the places and objects I find have changed over the years. Twenty years ago it was all about the debris left behind by the finned atomic-age, but now the focus has shifted to the debris of the 70s and 80s: junkyard minivans and wide-body airliners are replacing the big-finned station wagons and 707s. Disposable plastic replacing chromed steel.

Who knows where it’s headed? Surely we’re into another period of contraction in the West as gas tops $4 a gallon, which only means junkyards filled with giant SUVs and more abandonments to explore, but I have no idea where it will ultimately end up.

When Los Angeles is forgotten, probably what will remain will be the huge freeway system. I’m certain the people in the future — long after the automobile has been forgotten — will regard them as enigmatic and mysterious monuments which attested to the high aesthetic standards of the people that built them. In the same way that we look back on the pyramids or the mausoleums in a huge Egyptian necropolis as things of great beauty — we’ve forgotten their original function. It’s all a matter of aesthetics. I think that highways for the most part are beautiful. I prefer concrete to meadow.

J.G. Ballard, ‘How to Face Doomsday without Really Dying’, a 1974 interview with Carol Orr.

SIMON: How did you get interested in night photography?

TROY: In 1989 I was working as a designer/illustrator for a major toy company, drawing and painting every day in a heavily art-directed environment. After several years of that I lost any sense of the artistic fulfilment I was originally getting from the job. The last thing I wanted to do was draw and paint at home too, so I was desperate to find a new personal creative outlet. At the time my brother Tom was a full time photography student at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. One of his classes was in night photography. Being my brother, he knew I’d be fascinated by night shooting on a conceptual level, so he snuck me along to some lectures and shoots with the class in the decaying industrial sections of SF. It instantly dawned on me that this was the perfect way to photograph the abandoned roadside towns I was already exploring. After one trip to the desert to shoot at night I became totally obsessed and consumed by it.

ABOVE: ‘Alameda Corridor’ by Tom Paiva.

SIMON: Do you see any similarities with your brother Tom’s work?

TROY: When we were both learning the ropes in night shooting we frequently shot at night together. Now Tom lives in Los Angeles and he has a commercial photography business shooting large format architectural and industrial work. Living 500 miles apart, we seldom get the chance to shoot together anymore. Tom’s aesthetic is the complete opposite of mine; he doesn’t light paint, he doesn’t do the UrbEx-style locations, and his complex and meticulous – and ultimately gorgeous – large-format work is the exact opposite of my quick and dirty, guerrilla-style shooting. My compositional style tends towards a pop-surrealist, melodramatic and cartoony look, whereas his is a more stately and formalist style. His work is cool and elegant, mine hot and visceral. Yes, we’re both night photographers, but our styles couldn’t be more different. We’re very careful to avoid doing similar work specifically because we are both named ‘T. Paiva’ and we both make a conscious effort to avoid stepping on each other’s artistic toes. One way we’re similar though is that we’re both loners, but I think that is a trait that runs strong in most night shooters. It’s funny to watch a group of night photographers descend on a location – they usually say something like ‘meet you here at 1am’ and head off in opposite directions.

SIMON: Who else can you recommend in the field?

TROY: Jan Staller, Richard Misrach, Michael Kenna and Steve Fitch for sure. Studying the lighting work of O. Winston Link, William Lesch and Chip Simons back in the late 80s was really important for me, too. I’d sit there for hours, deconstructing their images trying to figure out how they lit their subjects. But maybe I owe more to David Lynch, Roger Deakins, Vittorio Storaro, Juan Ruiz Anchía, Emmanuel Lubezki, Tim Burton and a trillion other movie artists. I watch a lot more movies than I read photo books.

SIMON: What kind of equipment do you use?

TROY: I shot on film from 1989 to 2004 using cheap, outdated flea-market 35mm gear. It felt right for me to be shooting this forgotten junk with junk. This old work has a Holga-esque, toy-camera lo-fi quality that many find endearing today. I guess I was unintentionally ahead of the curve there too. I stopped shooting for a year in 2004 as the film era fizzled out, frustrated by lab closures, the lack of quality film processing and the low yield of acceptable work with my ancient equipment. In 2005 I moved to digital once I saw that camera technology had advanced enough to allow me to do noise-free time exposures. I now shoot with a Canon 20D and a 12-24mm Tokina zoom lens. I use a heavy, solid Slik tripod because I do a lot of work in wind and rough conditions and I need as stable a platform for the camera as possible. Regrettably, I was forced away from the ‘shooting junk with junk’ ethos by changing technology, but with the 20D already being superseded by several newer models in the past few years, maybe the 20D is already ‘outdated junk’ gear too.

ABOVE: ‘Speedlines’ by Troy Paiva. ‘Mid ’70s Chevy Monte Carlo at the Pearsonville, California Junkyard. This is the last of the Pearsonville work, I wanna try to head back soon tho. Night, 2 minute exposure, full moon, blue and green-gelled flashlight.’

SIMON: You’ve described your technique as ‘low cost/high impact lighting’. Is it therefore accessible for amateurs and people beginning to experiment with photography?

TROY: Absolutely. The advent of digital photography and the ability to chimp the shot on the back of your camera as you work has revolutionized night photography and light painting. In the film era you could shoot a whole roll of film and not know that the leader on the film never got picked up by the sprocket, let alone that your exposures were incorrect or your lighting was not bright enough.

All my lighting is done with a single 20 year old Vivitar 285 strobe flash and a collection of flashlights from a tiny keychain LED to a 1,000,000 candlepower spotlight. I have a set of theatrical lighting gels cut to small swatches that I just hold over the light source. Because the exposures are minutes long, I have plenty of time to do multiple flash pops and take my time with my flashlight work. Observers are often surprised by my low-tech lighting technique, asking ‘Is that really all there is to it?’ I have to keep it simple because this is frequently a guerrilla-style of photography. Travelling light is critical, so all my gear except the tripod fits in a small daypack, allowing me to get in, set up, shoot and get out quickly.

You can buy a flash like mine second-hand for $50. All of my flashlights could be bought at any drugstore like Target or Walmart. Every halfway-large city has at least one theatrical supply store where you can buy gel material. It costs about $10 a sheet. The reason for not trying light painting is not because of cost! Look at any of the myriad night photography or light-painting groups at a photo-sharing site like flickr and prepare to be overwhelmed with amateurs doing this kind of work in all sorts of locations. It’s everywhere now. I seem to have created a Frankenstein.

SIMON: Do you work fast?

TROY: I work incredibly fast compared to other night shooters. A lot of that is a product of having almost 20 years of experience, but I am a seat-of-the-pants type of artist in any media. The less thinking and planning and fussing over the piece, the more relaxed and natural it will be.

It’s kind of like a pianist playing a song with thousands of notes without sheet music: if they think about every note, they can’t possibly play the song. Rather, they turn off the conscious part of their mind and just let it flow. Same for painters and other artists. It’s no different for photography. The more you think, plan and try to get the shot, the more likely it will elude you.

ABOVE: ‘Las Vegas Club’ by Troy Paiva. ‘The YESCO sign boneyard, Las Vegas, NV. Shot May, 2000. Night, 160 Tungsten film, full moon, sodium and mercury vapor lights, red-gelled strobe flash. That’s the Luxor hotel spotlight. Legendary location seen in many TV shows and movies containing hundreds of old signs. Almost everything here was donated and moved to the Las Vegas Neon Museum across town shortly after I shot here, this lot was turned into more manufacturing/warehouse space.’

Had they any idea that Las Vegas was defended by a rag-tag army of children? In an attempt to blind their camera lenses, Manson continued to turn up the electric power flowing into the city. The neon façades of the casinos and hotels were now so many cataracts of white lava, walls of incandescent pink and purple that seemed to set alight the surrounding jungle, turning the Strip and the downtown casino centre into an inflamed, shadowless realm through which the occasional armoured car would appear like a spectral dragon on the floor of a furnace.

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

SIMON: Funnily enough, given that your signature style is this unnaturally vivid primary-colour palette, I always picture purples and reds when I think of Vermilion Sands, more so Ballard’s Hello America. The gels you use irradiate your scenery – for me it really does evoke the near-future sheen of Hello America‘s abandoned United States, in which whole cities are buried in the desert, a vast continent paved over with accreted hyperconsumerism. But in photography at least, this seems an unusual approach to take with urban ruins – many would rather focus on the grey, rusting aspects of abandoned towns. Perhaps, like Ballard, you are breathing new life into these ruins, recombining them in new and unexpected ways.

TROY: Yes, you nailed it. Most UrbEx photography is a pure documentation of locations weathered to dreary and monochromatic greys and browns, but I’m taking it someplace else entirely by reanimating these places with light. Some say I’m bringing a festive, circus-like atmosphere to these dead places. It’s done in a sort of Mexican ‘Day of the Dead’ spirit. My colour choices are usually predicated on the actual colour of the subject and location, not because of some premeditated ‘I must use green tonight’ mentality.

I see it as embracing the idea of death rather than fearing it. It’s about accepting it and having fun with this darker side of the human condition. My work tends to inspire melancholia, especially in older people, because they remember these places from their youth. It reminds them of their own mortality, but I think that palpable sense of transience and loss in these places is actually exciting and inspiring rather than sad or futile. I suspect that feeling runs strong in many urban explorers.

Personally, I’m not that opposed to pollution – I think the transformation of the old landscape by concrete fields and all that isn’t necessarily bad by definition. I feel there’s a certain beauty in looking at a lake that has a bright metallic scum floating on top of it. A certain geometric beauty in a cone of china clay, say, four hundred yards high, suddenly placed in the middle of the rural landscape. It’s all a matter of a certain aesthetic response. Some people find highways, cloverleaf junctions and overpasses and multi-storey car-parks ugly, chiefly because they are made of concrete. But they are not. Most of them are structures of great beauty.

J.G. Ballard, ‘How to Face Doomsday without Really Dying’, a 1974 interview with Carol Orr.

HENRY: Ballard has said that his fiction is the ‘dissection of a deep pathology’. Do you also see your own work as a kind of surgical procedure, laying bare the arid and often post-apocalyptically tinged dreamscapes of the USA in all its mythical glory? Or is it more intimate, personal and emotional than that?

TROY: Jeez, these are hard questions. It is a very personal and emotional process for me. It is an artistic process more than an intellectual one. My photography is about these places as they are now, not as they were. It’s not socioeconomic commentary, an anti-technology or anti-military-waste rant, or a warning about rampant consumerism and conspicuous consumption, though it has been interpreted as such by others. Put simply, I love these places. I am laying bare this rotten underbelly, but I’m doing it because these places simply move me, not necessarily because of what they were, but because of what they are now. It’s all about the atmosphere and feeling, and I try to enhance this surreal vibe with my time exposures and light painting.

ABOVE: The cover of Paiva’s Night Vision: The Art of Urban Exploration, published by Chronicle Books.

SIMON: I see that Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG has written the foreword to your forthcoming book, Night Vision: The Art of Urban Exploration. As we’ve previously seen, Geoff shares a Ballardian approach to architecture and urban exploration.

TROY: My editor at Chronicle Books introduced me to Geoff. He was a last-second addition to the project when my original essayist fell through at the 11th hour. Geoff immediately ‘got it’ and wrote a very eloquent and flattering forward, quoting from The Atrocity Exhibition among several other books. I enjoy Geoff’s blog tremendously, especially when the subject of ‘the philosophy and aesthetics of abandonment’ comes up.

Paiva’s images of airplane graveyards, in particular, are all the more evocative and gripping when you consider that his father was a flight engineer, hopping planes from country to country. In his book The Atrocity Exhibition, J.G. Ballard describes a surreal landscape of crashed bombers, abandoned air warfare ranges, and disused runways. He refers to such images as ‘the nightmare of a grounded pilot,’ or ‘the suburbs of Hell,’ a ‘University of Death,’ across which people wander, stunned by the ruins all around them.

Geoff Manaugh, foreword to Night Vision: The Art of Urban Exploration.

SIMON: Tell us more about the book.

TROY: It’s broken down into five chapters: ‘Byron Hot Springs Hotel’, about an abandoned early 20th century resort; ‘16th Street Station’, about a derelict Beaux Arts inner city train station; ‘Decommissioned’, which covers over a dozen various abandoned military and industrial complexes; ‘Desert’, about the abandoned roadsides of the desert southwest; and ‘Boneyard’, a high-desert graveyard comprised of hundreds of junk aircraft.

While it’s as similar to Lost America as you’d expect two volumes of ‘light-painted night photography in abandoned places’ to be, this new one is about specific locations rather than general overviews of types of places. I have the first production copy sitting on the desk in front of me and it really looks sharp. It’s a much higher-quality piece than Lost America. The layout and design is much more sophisticated and refined and the print quality is a vast improvement. I’m frankly floored by it and I’m my own worst critic, so I’m pretty optimistic that other people are going to be floored by it too.

SIMON: What sort of research do you do, in terms of finding out sites to visit and photograph?

TROY: I drive around in the desert and scout locations. I have a collection of old road maps from the 50s, which I’ve studied at length. It’s fascinating to see whole towns on those maps that no longer exist. In the last few years I’ve had a lot of email from people telling me about great locations and I’ve been acting on some of these tips with great results. I’ve also been shooting with a lot of local UrbEx photographers who have introduced me to some spectacular spots very close to home.

ABOVE: ‘Wind Slice’ by Troy Paiva. ’1930s airliner in storage at Aviation Warehouse in El Mirage, CA, a Mojave Desert aircraft boneyard that services the film industry as well as recycles aircraft parts. Night, full moon, red-gelled flash. 2-3 minutes.’

He welcomed this journey into a familiar land, zones of twilight. At dawn, after driving all night, they reached the suburbs of Hell. The pale flares from the petrochemical plants illuminated the wet cobbles. No one would meet them there. His two companions, the bomber pilot at the wheel in the faded flying suit and the beautiful young woman with radiation burns, never spoke to him… Who were they, these strange twins – couriers from his own unconscious? For hours they drove through the endless suburbs of the city. The billboards multiplied around them…

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

SIMON: And your favourite shoot so far?

TROY: The aircraft boneyards are still my favourites. I’m an airline brat so I grew up around planes. There is nothing that can prepare you for walking up to half of a 747 laying on its belly in the sand. It’s just epic. I shot the derelict ocean liner ‘S.S. Independence’ earlier this year, days before it left to be towed to the breaker beaches of Asia. That was an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime shoot.

SIMON: Do you have a desire to shoot outside of America?

TROY: Oh sure: the abandoned industrial cities of Eastern Russia, Gunkanjima – that completely abandoned island city in Japan – the half-finished hotels of the Sinai, the abandoned Formula 1 racetrack at Reims, France… the list goes on and on. Realistically, though, there is more than enough in the American Southwest to shoot for a lifetime.

It’s mainly a money issue. Being a freelance artist in the 21st century is a low-budget lifestyle. Still, with a few deep-pocket patrons I’d be happily winging my way across the globe next week!

Night Vision: The Art of Urban Exploration is shipping on 2 July, 2008 and is available for preorder via Chronicle Books and Amazon.com.

ABOVE: ‘Clipped and Headless’ by Troy Paiva. ‘A mutilated Delta 727 fuselage on its belly at Aviation Warehouse in El Mirage, CA, a Mojave Desert aircraft boneyard that services the film industry as well as recycles aircraft parts. Night, full moon, red-gelled strobe flash. 2-3 minute exposure.’

..:: MORE INFORMATION
+ Troy’s official site
+ Troy’s Lost America site
+ Troy’s flickr stream
+ Design Shed, Troy’s freelance design and illustration site

ABOVE: JGB in 2006 (photo courtesy The Terminal Collection).

Translation by Dan O’Hara.

The interview below was published in a vast tome, an annual German review of the year in science fiction which came out in July last year. The interview itself was presumably conducted sometime in Spring 2007, after the publication of Kingdom Come and the re-issue two-volume set of The Complete Short Stories.

One suspects, in the end, that Ballard’s playful teasing of his interviewers results from a certain sanguinity about the state of his health; it’s less a callous dissimulation at the expense of his interlocutors than the resolution of the old Lunghua survivor. Evidently by the time of the interview he had already been visiting hospitals, as he notes their science fiction-like hypermodernity, and even advises his interviewers to visit one. I’d rather remember the Ballard of this interview, his sense of mischief intact even in the face of his physical atrophy, than the Ballard who has appeared in recent TV interviews, in which he seems oppressed by less considerate and more parasitical personalities.

Dan O’Hara

Many thanks to Michaela Pape for proofing these interviews.

WERNER FUCHS & SASCHA MAMCZAK: Mr Ballard, last year marked a very special anniversary for you: fifty years ago, in 1956, with the publication of your first story, your career as a science fiction author began.

J.G. BALLARD: Yes, that’s true. But don’t remind me of it! I’m an old man.

Well, your publishers have effectively reminded you of it by newly publishing a thousand-page-plus collection of all your stories from the last fifty years.

Naturally, I was very impressed. After all, that’s half a century of hard work, half my life, if you like. You know, short stories were always very important for me. Like many science fiction authors, I began by writing short stories, which isn’t the norm any more, at least not among British authors today. Today young authors would rather write novels straight off – and that’s precisely why these novels are mostly so poor. In every job you need a certain amount of practice, whether you’re a violinist or a joiner, and short stories offer writers a wonderful chance to acquire the necessary tools. The Mona Lisa, was, after all, not exactly Leonardo da Vinci’s first painting. In any case I learned what it meant to be a writer by writing short stories; what my weaknesses and strengths are.

Today, short stories – even SF short stories – have fallen out of style somewhat.

Yes, one’s become used to these overlong novels in which everything is explained and tidied up. At the heart of every good short story lies a certain ambiguity, a sort of “Yes, but.” That’s very seldom found in novels. And yet this ambiguity is the very stuff of life. Many people tell me I should write more short stories – and I reply that I don’t know where I’d publish them. When I began writing them fifty years ago, it was completely different: nearly every paper and magazine in those days published short stories, some of them even every day. And then there were of course the science fiction magazines, which had an almost insatiable appetite for short stories. The SF magazines in those days were an entirely wonderful training space for budding authors – one could pursue one’s obsessions, one’s fantasies; one could discover what kind of writer one wanted to be. It’s a little like the way that, in one’s youth, one has a lot of affairs: one learns how to make love. It’s different now: most young authors don’t know how to make love, and they don’t know how to write. Oh, well, that’s only the grumbling of an old man.

ABOVE: JGB in 2006. Photograph by Adam Bloomberg & Oliver Chanarin.

How, back then, did you come to write science fiction?

Now, most authors in those days were fans before they began to write professionally. Which means that they’d already written something or other in their youth, mostly for fanzines. With me it was different, I only came to science fiction later. I was twenty-six when I published my first story. Before then I’d scarcely read any science fiction. It was when I went to Canada with the Royal Air Force that I first became aware of SF. We were based somewhere in the Canadian provinces, it snowed incessantly, and there was nothing to do and nothing to read, not a single daily paper. So I started to read science fiction magazines – and I was extraordinarily surprised. It gave me a glimpse of a hitherto unexplored terrain. The then literary mainstream – the stories which the New Yorker or other magazines published – was purely oriented towards the past, both thematically and stylistically. That didn’t interest me. I was interested in the changes around us – the consumer society, the first computers, TV, the fear of nuclear war, gigantic motorway and airport complexes – all of that created a new landscape, an external landscape like the mental one. I wanted to write about that. So I thought, why not science fiction? One could investigate this landscape there.

And of course the nascent space age.

Of course. I remember very well how in 1956 – as I said, the year in which I published my first short story – I heard for the first time on the radio the Sputnik 1 signal: beep, beep, beep. The sound of a new world. So long, past! Hello, future! They were really very exciting years. Years in which, in practice, I wrote exclusively short stories.

Which authors – both within science fiction and outside it – influenced you the most back then?

Within SF, very few – I simply learned too little from them. I was weaned, if you will, on the classical European and American menu, and the one to make the most impression on me was Franz Kafka. He was the most significant writer of the 20th century, far more significant than James Joyce. Edgar Allan Poe and Dino Buzzati also fascinated me. Of the SF authors in those days I had the most respect for Ray Bradbury, but I’ve never written like him. He was too romantic, too naive for me at times.

What about Philip K. Dick? And Theodore Sturgeon?

I did like Sturgeon. Dick, less so – he was too American for me. Many British authors imitated the Americans in those days, so as to get published in the US magazines. And that’s exactly what I didn’t want. I’d prefer the neutral tone of a Robert Sheckley or a Cyril Kornbluth. But if you ask me who really influenced me – it was less writers than painters like Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio di Chirico, René Magritte. The surrealists. I wanted to create in words what they created on canvas. These dreamlike landscapes, this fascinating way of artistically realizing psychological states. You know, as a teenager I lived through the greatest surrealistic situation on the planet: the war. You go into the street, and half the houses are in ruins. A car sitting on top of one of the houses. And so on… War is full of surreal surprises, full of surrealist images. Back then it became clear to me that something in human culture was taking a dreadfully warped turn – and as an artist, a writer, I wanted to understand it.

LEFT: The Drowned World, German edition (Phantasia, 2008).

When your first stories were published in British SF magazines, what was the reaction in the USA? Were many of the stories accepted?

No, the Americans were very hesitant to publish my stories. They just didn’t understand what I was driving at. The American SF magazines of the late 50s and early 60s wanted conventional SF stories, stories set in the future or in space. An SF story set in the present irritated them terribly, and many of my stories were set in the present then. In time it got better, naturally, and many of my stories could then appear over there, but the experimental pieces were really published almost exclusively in Britain. So up to 1963 – when the success of my first really serious novel The Drowned World brought me a certain independence – I wrote almost entirely experimental short stories.

Can it be that your 1964 short story ‘The Terminal Beach’ marked a turning point in your work? With respect to what one generally designates ‘inner space’?

Absolutely. ‘The Terminal Beach’ is certainly one of my most important stories. Even though it was published in New Worlds, it wasn’t a science fiction story at all, but rather conveyed merely a certain science fiction atmosphere. It described a landscape that was the expression of a particular psychological state – our fear of nuclear war. Yes, I think ‘The Terminal Beach’ is the first real ‘inner space’ story and it leads directly to The Atrocity Exhibition, but also to novels like Crash, High Rise and Concrete Island. There, there are particular mental landscapes described throughout, like those made by the surrealists in their paintings.

‘Inner space’ was also the thematic centre of the start of the New Wave back then. When you look back today, how do you see your rôle in that literary movement?

I was the New Wave! (Laughs.) Well, in some ways there was something inevitable about the New Wave. Back then in the early 60s American science fiction had exhausted itself in repeating its themes, and people were looking for something new and exciting. You know, as soon as I began to write, I constantly saw in SF authors and especially in the American ones a collection of truly naive and, if you like, innocent men – people who truly didn’t know what they were doing. Ray Bradbury is a prominent example. A few years ago someone sent me a book about him, with many photographs. One of these showed Bradbury in his work room, which is about as large as a tennis court – and every millimetre of this huge workroom is stuffed full of toys: rockets, spaceships, dinosaur models, every kind of monster. A child’s room. A wonderful image for the American science fiction of these times, even for the whole of American culture.

You said that you wouldn’t describe ‘The Terminal Beach’ as a science fiction story at all. Would that go for everything you’ve written since?

Absolutely. I don’t see novels like Crash, High Rise or Concrete Island as science fiction. And I think that many people only describe it as science fiction because in that way they can neutralize the uncomfortable feeling it radiates.

Then what are these novels and tales?

Good question. They’re certainly not part of Realism, which dominates modern fiction – I’ve only really written one ‘realistic’ novel: Empire of the Sun. No, I think they belong to another literary tradition, one which goes back to Sade and which was carried on by writers like Genet or Celine. The bad boys of literature, if you like. An extraordinarily powerful tradition that deals with truths people don’t want to hear. I’ve always seen myself as a kind of moralist, one who stands on the roadside holding up a sign with the legend: Look out, dangerous bends, drive slowly!

ABOVE: JGB in 2006 (photo courtesy The Terminal Collection).

So, stories that read like science fiction, but aren’t?

Something like that. It’s simply that the themes of science fiction were eagerly ingested by the mainstream, and readers got on with them better and better. Just take William Burroughs, who I admire greatly: he demonstrated very early on, with his paranoid fantasies which naturally go back to Kafka, that one doesn’t have to be a science fiction author to write science fiction. No, I think that with The Atrocity Exhibition at the latest, I abandoned the genre for good. And I’ve not gone back to it since. But that’s not at all uncommon: even H. G. Wells began as a science fiction author, and at some point left off with it and wrote mainstream novels.

In the 80s with cyberpunk there arose a literary movement about which, in retrospect, one asks oneself if it was still science fiction.

Yes, I greatly admired the cyberpunk authors, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, many others. Whether they wrote science fiction or something else is hard to say. The fact is that new forms of communications have a great influence on literature, particularly the internet – and cyberpunk was the first expression of it. But it came too late for me. I’ve never owned a computer, and I still don’t have one even today.

But you surf on the internet now and then, don’t you?

Naturally. One cannot avoid it anymore. The internet’s a fascinating thing – it really has made the world into a global village.

Let’s come back to your short stories. Or rather to the fact that in the 90s you hardly wrote them any more…

I think that short stories are basically a playing field for young authors, a bit like the lyric. Moreover there are, as I said, scarcely any more opportunities to publish short stories. Of course now and then a magazine rings me and asks for a story, which is quite wonderful. But when I then ask how long it should be, they answer: 2000 words. 2000 words! That’s not a story, it’s a vignette. Yes, I stopped writing short stories in the 90s. But in some ways all my most recently published novels are extended short stories. But please don’t tell anyone.

And all these novels seem to have a common theme: the failure of every form of middle-class utopia.

Yes, in some ways. I’m very interested in social pathology, in what really drives us on in our everyday lives. My newest novel Kingdom Come raises the question of whether the consumer thinking of the present day might not at some point suddenly turn into fascism.

A very trenchant thesis.

Yes, but just take a look at what’s going on in these huge shopping malls. Evidently not much more than shopping is left for us. That and sport. That’s where we get our kicks, those are the new religions. I already believe that one of these days we could end up in a kind of leisure-time dictatorship.

But don’t events like the attacks of the 11th of September or the catastrophe in New Orleans remind people of the hard facts of reality?

I’m not so sure about that. I think it was difficult for many people to distinguish the picture of the collapsed World Trade Center from all the other images they know from Hollywood. It’s such a binary matter: real, unreal, real, unreal… And as for whether the current American administration finds itself brought down to reality or not, I very much doubt it. No, I think we live in dangerous times.

Do at least modern SF authors react appropriately to what’s going on around us?

I can’t say, I read practically no science fiction any more. You know, it’s like an old affair: if it ends, it’s gone forever. It doesn’t come back. What fascinated me about science fiction fifty years ago has long become a part of our everyday life, it’s permeated the whole of society. Just go to a modern hospital sometime – it’s pure science fiction. I only very seldom read novels at all. I read far more non-fiction, political analyses, biographies. The older one gets, the more one clings to facts.

And to come back to the aforementioned tome of fiction, your collected short stories: could you tell us what your favourite short story is?

Hm… My favourite story is probably ‘Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan’. That story changed everything for me.

And will there one day be a sequel? ‘Why I Want To Fuck George W. Bush’?

No, I really would not want to fuck George W. Bush! Hillary Clinton, maybe. If you know what I mean.

Many thanks for the chat, Mr. Ballard.

Originally published in German as Werner Fuchs and Sascha Mamczak, ‘George W. Bush möchte ich nun wirklich nicht ficken!’ in Das Science Fiction Jahr 2007, eds. Sascha Mamczak and Wolfgang Jeschke (Heyne, 2007).

From outer space to inner…
LEFT: Gabrielle Drake in UFO. RIGHT: Ms Drake in Crash!.

Pringle: [In Crash!] you were playing opposite a professional actress, so it wasn’t as though it was purely a documentary.

Ballard: Yes, that was… oh, what was the name of the actress? A rather pretty actress, I suppose she’s now in her 50s. Gabrielle Drake! She briefly appeared as a mysterious woman that I drove around with. It was fun.

David Pringle, “The SFX Interview with J. G. Ballard”, 1996.

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

J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Iain Sinclair in Crash: David Cronenberg’s Post-mortem on J.G. Ballard’s “Trajectory of Fate”, 1999.

At the terminal risk of coming on like a refugee from io9, this post is in honour of the actor Gabrielle Drake, the most beautiful and stylish woman to ever appear in SF film or TV. How could so many American boys waste their sci-fi wet dreams on Carrie Fisher in Star Wars, especially given that Ms Drake, playing Lt. Gay Ellis in Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s UFO TV series, had much, much cooler hair and clothes than Princess Leia. Give me Gay’s sexy purple wig and slinky silver spandex catsuit over Leia’s ridiculous side-buns and risible toga-cum-kimono any day of the week.

As for technical ability, well, Ms Drake is a well-respected Shakespearean actress! But if that doesn’t impress, consider that in the role of Lt. Ellis she was required to not only portray a character who lacks confidence but to also invest that character with a determination to overcome her self-doubt and rebirth herself as a dynamic officer type. Plus she convincingly portrayed unrequited love for a fellow officer, unrequited love being a difficult task for any actor and a far cry from Leia’s cartoonish are-they-or-aren’t-they “bromance” with that pansy Luke Skywalker. Also, any glance at UFO can tell you that Ms Drake’s eyes say so much, a riot of organic semiology fluttering beneath the candy, subtlety beyond compare.

Ms Drake also had the enormous good taste, the good sense, during the UFO era (1970-71) to work with none other than the Sage of Shepperton himself, starring opposite JGB in Harley Cokliss’s short film, Crash! (1971). She performs admirably, playing the very first Ballardian woman-catalyst on film, beautiful but utterly doomed, stripped of identity in the face of an encroaching technological landscape, her coquettish sexuality reduced to literally nothing more than a hood ornament: Ms Drake makes us believe it all in Crash!. I very much doubt that Ms Fisher would be able to switch from space opera to inner space with such ease, skill and grace. And as for Ms Drake vs. either Rosanna Arquette or Holly Hunter in the other Crash, the Cronenberg version, well again there really is no contest, is there? It’s got to be Gabrielle all the way down the line, and then some. (Weiss’s cypher-woman looked the part but she clearly couldn’t act).

Ballard and Gabrielle Drake, sister of the mythologised singer/songwriter Nick Drake. Colonials all. Ex-pats, with memories of tropical splendour, marooned among the concrete atolls of Watford. The Drakes had grown up in Burma. Gabrielle’s parents had been evacuated from Rangoon to India when the Japanese invaded. She recalls her father composing “an entire comic operetta about an Englishman who was based out East”. (Ballard, paying his respects to the earlier film, used the name Gabrielle for the character in Crash who would be played by Rosanna Arquette.)

Iain Sinclair, David Cronenberg’s Post-mortem on J.G. Ballard’s “Trajectory of Fate”, 1999.

To further demonstrate Ms Drake’s versatility in that magical year of 1971, I have interpolated stills of her in the UFO series with screengrabs of her in Crash!. There are also YouTube clips of both works towards the end. And I must thank The Diary of a Mad Natural Historian for alerting me to the existence of Gabrielle on Flickr, from which the stills were lifted. For more, visit Poletti’s “The Ladies of UFO” set.

NOTE: See the Noise blog for a warm interview with Ms Drake, in which she remembers her brother and his music.

SIX DEGREES OF J.G. BALLARD: Ms Drake is connected to JGB in other ways. In 1970 Ballard received his first screen credit (misspelled as “J.B. Ballard”), providing the story for Val Guest’s prehistoric potboiler, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. In 1972, just one year after UFO and Crash!, Guest directed Au Pair Girls, starring none other than Ms Drake, who appeared, gulp, naked as the day she was born.

1971: YEAR OF THE DRAKE

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in UFO.

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in Crash!.

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in UFO.

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in Crash!.

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in UFO.

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in Crash!.

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in UFO.

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in Crash!.

YOUTUBE

ABOVE: a clip from UFO, featuring Ms Drake dubbed into German.

ABOVE: Crash! by Harley Cokliss, starring Ms Drake.

ABOVE: opening sequence of UFO.

ABOVE: a montage of clips from UFO.

According to Polygon Castle, there’s hope for the kids yet!

Since there’s never anything good on TV during the day, I switched it to the Cartoon Network, in the hopes that its programming would at least be tolerable (at least compared to the malodorous MadTV). But lo and behold, it was more than tolerable– the episode of “Squirrel Boy” (which, as a cartoon, I could grow to like, I think…) was a partial recreation of JG Ballard’s novel Concrete Island. Rodney the Squirrel gets stranded on a dividing island after a car crash, surviving there for over two weeks. Of course, it’s been ages since I read the novel, so I really only remember that bit. But still! I was amused.

Ah, that sounds truly transcendental. Here’s some more info on the episode, called “Islands in the Street”. You’re supposed to be able to watch the ep via the Cartoon Network, but I couldn’t get it to load.

The Concrete Island allusion may be accidental, but even if deliberate it wouldn’t be the first time children’s TV has wrestled with Ballard: in 1966 JGB actually wrote an episode, “Gulliver in Space”, for Jackanory, the venerable British kids’ show.

This fact was buried on IMDB, unknown and unreferenced by all scholars, fans and critics of Ballard for all this time — until 2007, when David Pringle stumbled across it. Mr Pringle was unable to believe it. But Rick McGrath took the initiative and wrote to Ballard, receiving this snippet of information from JGB in return:

Yes, I did write a script for the BBC TV’s children’s programme, Jackanory — I really wrote it for my children, who were keen viewers at the time.

Now I’m going to try and do my bit by hunting down the actual episode. But I don’t fancy my chances, given that the BBC may very well have, gulp, wiped it.

If anyone can help with unearthing footage of “Gulliver in Space”, even if it’s just providing some more concrete information as to its availability, please be in touch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recently, a reader commented elsewhere on this site:

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

I’d say Cazals has done exactly that.

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

Robbe-Grillet on set (photographer unknown).

ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET: BORN AUGUST 18, 1922; DIED FEBRUARY 18, 2008.

“The world is neither significant nor absurd,” says Robbe-Grillet. “It is — quite simply.” In his novels, Robbe-Grillet aims at a “certain ceremonious solidity, often slow-moving, with a theatrical sense which sometimes fixes the attitudes of characters in a rigidity of gestures, words and decor, recalling a statue or an opera.” Finally, he tries to “construct a space and time purely mental, that of a dream or memory.”

Robbe-Grillet, quoted in Time magazine, 1966.

Hardly surprising in light of the above quote, Ballard was an admirer of the Robbe-Grillet scripted, Alain Resnais directed Last Year at Marienbad…

Those films that I most admire — Cocteau’s Orphee, Alphaville, Last Year at Marienbad — are much closer to dreams than they are movies. Insofar as film resembles the dream it is a uniquely powerful means of exploring the inner world.

J.G. Ballard, quoted in J.G. Ballard: Quotes.

Surprisingly, s-f is one of the most literary forms of all fiction, and the best s-f films [including] Last Year at Marienbad (not a capricious choice, its themes are time, space and identity, s-f’s triple pillars) … have all made use of comparatively modest special effects and relied on strongly imaginative ideas, and on ingenuity, wit and fantasy.

Ballard, ‘Hobbits in Space’ (a review of Star Wars), Time Out, 1977.

The Warren Commission’s Report is a remarkable document, especially if considered as a work of fiction (which many experts deem it largely to be). The chapters covering the exact geometric relationships between the cardboard boxes on the seventh floor of the Book Depository (a tour de force in the style of Robbe-Grillet), the bullet trajectories and speed of the Presidential limo, and the bizarre chapter titles – ‘The Subsequent Bullet That Hit,’ ‘The Curtain Rod Story,’ ‘The Long and Bulky Package’ – together suggest a type of obsessional fiction that links science and pornography.

Ballard, 1994 annotations to ‘The University of Death’, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

In Paris [in the late 50s] science fiction was popular among leading writers and film-makers like Robbe-Grillet and Resnais, and I assumed that I would find their counterparts in London, a huge error.

Ballard, Miracles of Life, 2008.

Meanwhile, Michel Delville, in his volume on Ballard, adds critical weight to the Ballard/Robbe-Grillet show:

[The Atrocity Exhibition] bears an interesting relation to the ‘objective style’ of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s ‘new novels’ … a conception of narrative as a sequence of primarily visual perceptions, an ability to sustain the dispassionate gaze of the scientist and … a fascination with objects and human beings that exist above all in a closed relation to themselves, to the detriment of the metaphorical and symbolic aura of traditional, ‘humanist’ fiction.

Delville, J.G. Ballard (1998).

As does Steven Severin:

[Robbe-Grillet] casts the technique of displaced memory and sinister eroticism into a vortex of puzzling snapshots. Never a denouement, the plot is cut-up into a loop of paradoxes & riddles. The parallels one can draw with Ballard are ones of detachment; of an inner space (reality) and outer world (fiction). Both employ sensory ellipses in search of a question. A quest for the unaskable. Pulp noir vs. sci-fi in a game of Russian roulette, as opposed to say, Peter Greenaway’s parlour tricks, these devices are foreboding and elusive.

Severin, ‘Stranger than Fiction: Ballard & Cinema’, the Independent, 1996.

But not Andrzej Gasiorek — in his volume on Ballard, he claims JGB was less than impressed with Robbe-Grillet’s novelistic technique:

[Ballard] considered extreme modernist experimentation (instancing James Joyce’s Ulysses as an example) to be a self-defeating preoccupation with technique at the expense of subject matter, and his lack of patience with this kind of innovativeness extended to Robbe-Grillet’s experiments with the nouveau roman…

Gasiorek, J.G. Ballard (2005).

Original photography by Steve Double (Ballard) and Jerry Bauer (Self).

The indefatigable Mike Bonsall has kindly transcribed the Will Self segment on BBC Radio 4′s Open Book program; listen to the entire program on the Open Book website. Mike says: “Interesting to note the ‘quote’ from Millennium People at the start (and probably the second one), isn’t taken directly from the text but I’m guessing is a slice from an adaptation which ran some time ago as a short serial on Radio 4.”

The interviewer is Mariella Frostrup, the regular presenter of Open Book.

Reader: Outside Broadcasting House the demonstrators pressed closer to the entrance. A smoke bomb shot a gust of black vapour into the air. A startled security guard tripped over one of the barriers and fell to the ground. The protesters seized their chance and surged past him, forcing their way through the doors, led by one of the BBC producers who had come over to our side. They planned to invade the new studio and broadcast the manifesto of middle-class rebellion to the listening nation, mouths agape over their muesli.

Not the staff response to Mark Thompson’s recent BBC cuts, but JG Ballard’s vividly imagined revolt of the middle-classes in Millennium People. Will Self will be telling me about that book, and his passion for the work of JG Ballard…

Mariella Frostrup: …there’s a new book … from the novelist JG Ballard, but this is non-fiction. An autobiography dealing with his childhood in Shanghai, the trauma of World War Two, his family’s internment by the Japanese, his eventual move to Britain and a productive life spent writing in Shepperton. Much of this Shanghai story was included in the Booker nominated novel Empire of the Sun. But alongside more autobiographical work, he’s also renowned for his Science Fiction novels and more recently a string of very engaging books about the malevolent influence of a technologically obsessed society, the moral vacuum at the heart of modern life, and a middle-class who are, quite literally revolting. Well, to offer a reader’s guide to Ballard, and to help me pick my way through his work, I’m joined by one of his best-known fans, the novelist Will Self. Will — welcome. Ballard has produced a lot of work though; seventeen novels, and many many more short stories, so where would you invite somebody to start?

Will Self: I’ll declare my colours, I think he’s probably the most significant and influential — or among a handful of the most significant and influential — writers of the English language since the second war. So, why not read them in order? You could do that and get the full development. Perhaps an easier way in, and there’s nothing wrong with sometimes taking things easy, is a kind of autobiographical way into it. I mean many people — when Empire of the Sun came out and then a second sort of quasi-autobiographical novel, The Kindness of Women, which came out in 1991 — felt that these works recapitulated and explained a lot of the themes, the motifs, the kind of currents that ran through his more, in a sense attention-grabbing, fictional work, they saw what the genesis was. So you could start with those two novels and then work into the fiction from them.

MF: Because the books that preceded Empire of the Sun had mainly been what we might call, for shorthand, science fiction, hadn’t they? And they had been sort of post-cataclysmic novels about dystopian futures.

WS: Mmm, they are kind of apocalyptic. I mean he kicks off, Ballard, with this book The Drowned World which is astonishingly prescient like a lot of his science fiction. I mean Ballard, to get this straight, has always viewed his sort of science fiction as being concerned with inner, rather than outer space. He’s not death-rays or weird aliens or anything like that at all, he’s very much writing about parallel worlds that mutate out of our own or are latent within our own. And in the Drowned World, which really showcases this preoccupation, you have a strange journey, through a very recognisably drowned Britain really — so very astonishing prescient about global warming.

MF: And I think published in about 1962?

WS: ’62 is The Drowned World, and then you have The Burning World (or The Drought), The Crystal World, and then you get to another kind of thematic break in Ballard’s work, when he publishes The Atrocity Exhibition, which doesn’t have a conventional narrative, it contains some of his most extreme imagery of, kind of, physical discorporation. It maps out the territory of what Ballard has described as the Death of Affect, this kind of — I think like a writer who he was friendly with in the 60s and who he knew fairly well, William Burroughs — Ballard’s view was that in the post-Hiroshima era there had been this kind of death of feeling in western culture, and a lot of his shock-tactics and his extreme imagery, are aimed at mapping this landscape. Contained in the Atrocity Exhibition, is the kernel, the germ, of perhaps one of his most famous novels, Crash — there is a section of the Atrocity Exhibition entitled Crash — and then he goes on to publish Crash in 1973.

MF: Described by one critic as ‘the most repulsive book I’ve ever read’!

WS: It’s a book that carries with it this most astonishing penumbra. I know that one early editor that read it sort of suggested that Ballard sought psychiatric help. As many people will know, it’s a book about the relationship between sexual excitation and car accidents. It begins with this incredible description of how this man who pursues sexual kicks through car crashes, achieves his aim:

Reader: Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. During our friendship he had rehearsed his death in many crashes, but this was his only true accident. Driven on a collision course towards the limousine of the film actress, his car jumped the rails of the London Airport flyover and plunged through the roof of a bus filled with airline passengers. The crushed bodies of package tourists, like a haemorrhage of the sun, still lay across the vinyl seats when I pushed my way through the police engineers an hour later. Holding the arm of her chauffeur, the film actress Elizabeth Taylor, with whom Vaughan had dreamed of dying for so many months, stood alone under the revolving ambulance lights. As I knelt over Vaughan’s body she placed a gloved hand to her throat.

WS: Now, around this time another major theme I think begins to develop in Ballard’s work, which is this idea of a kind of dystopian critique of contemporary society and it begins with a novel called High-Rise. In High-Rise a war develops between the kind of lower-class tenants of the building and the upper-class tenants on the top. And this kind of social, almost political critique, Ballard develops through a series of books and it kind of goes on into the later kind of — tetrarchy, trilogy, I don’t know what – quartet, of novels which begins with Cocaine Nights in 1996 and is still running; it’s gone through Millennium People, Super-Cannes, and now on to Kingdom Come. That kind of social critique is another thing.

MF: One of my favourites, I have to say, is Millennium People and the notion of this kind of disenfranchised middle-class who decide finally that enough is enough. We’ve got a reading from that as well, maybe we’ll play it then I’d love to hear your thoughts on that book.

Reader: The residents of Chelsea Marina had launched a small crime wave on the surrounding neighbourhood, as executives and middle-managers gave up their jobs; there was an outbreak of petty thieving from delis and off-licences. Every parking meter in Chelsea Marina was vandalised and the council street-cleaners, traditional working-class to the core, refused to enter the estate, put off by the menacing middle-class air. Removed from their expensive schools, bored teenagers haunted Slone Square and the King’s Road, trying their hands at drug-dealing and car theft.

MF: It’s enough to have you setting your four-by-four alight isn’t it Will?

WS: Yes, it’s difficult to tell with Ballard exactly how far his tongue is in his cheek, or whether it’s wrapped right the way round the back of his head. I think the interesting thing about Millennium People perhaps, as opposed to the two precursor books, Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes — which are kind of a piece — is that it’s very funny. It’s very, very sly and very, very funny. And he himself has been absolutely unashamed in professing his contempt and hatred for the metropolitan bourgeoisie, he’s always had this thing that he lives out at Shepperton.

MF: I can’t let you go — seeing as his new book, coming out in February, is an autobiography — without talking a bit more about the autobiographical work. Was that very straightforward in comparison? I mean Empire of the Sun — a pretty classic novel in most aspects?

WS: I think the thing about Empire of the Sun is that it is relatively straightforward; it seems to be a naturalistic novel. But in a way I’d sort of urge people coming fresh to Ballard perhaps not to leap in with Empire of the Sun. Read a couple of the other ones first, because it’s fascinating to come to Empire of the Sun and see that this is the crucible of his perspective of the world. His father worked in Shanghai; they lived in the kind of English canton there in a kind of wealthy upper-middle-class atmosphere in the late 1930s, and then the cataclysm of the collapse of Chinese society, of the invasion of the Japanese from the north. And he, you know he would see people dead on the streets on his way to school, the dead and dying, and then of course the internment by the Japanese. And so all of these images of, kind of, dystopian, run down, fractured societies and indeed his imagery of hyper-shiny technological futures comes out of the war. So all of that imagery is there once you’ve read some of the other books to kind of see what its genesis is in Empire of the Sun.

The companion book to Empire of the Sun is Kindness of Women. And many people feel that Ballard is perhaps a bit too heavy for their taste, a little too disturbing, a little too warped. Kindness of Women is all of those things and it’s also an extremely affecting book about love and about the impact of love on somebody’s life. This is a novel that actually kind of made me cry and that’s not something that I can say about many things apart from people treading hard on my feet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11 Damien Hirst is rubbished and inked

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

13 Tracey Emins bed springs are tested

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

I am delighted to report that the book of Chris Marker’s La Jetée is back in print through Zone Books — and in hardcover, too. It will be out in (US) Spring 2008. Thank you, thank you: for years, second-hand copies were changing hands via Amazon and eBay for anything up to $400.

Unable to fork over so much cash, the only copy I could find was at my local library and I would borrow and reborrow it, unable to let it go.

Congratulations, Zone Books. Chris Marker himself will be happy, too:

This book version of La Jetée is, to my mind, astonishingly beautiful. It brings a total freshness to the work and a new way to use photos to deal with dramatic events. Not a film’s book, but a book in its own right — the real ciné-roman announced in the film’s credits.

Chris Marker

It’s also pleasing to see that Zone is promoting the book with an admiring quote from Ballard, taken from his 1966 review of the film in New Worlds:

This strange and poetic film, a fusion of science fiction, psychological fable, and photomontage … creates its own conventions from scratch. It triumphantly succeeds where science fiction invariably fails.

J.G. Ballard.

SPOILER ALERT
This prompted me to dig out Ballard’s full review, where I am surprised to discover that Ballard gets the ending wrong. I’d never noticed that before. Ballard says the man throws himself off the pier, when in fact he is shot by the camp guard. His interpretation completely changes the dynamic. For Marker, the man’s execution means he is forever trapped in time, eternally haunted by his memories. In Ballard’s version, the man’s display of agency means he is still trapped, but that he has willingly altered time, with the expected tragic consequences, Definitely Ballardian, then, but maybe not what Marker intended.

Here’s an overview of La Jetée, which I wrote a few years back.

If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas. From where I sit, traditional “literary fiction” has dropped the ball. I studied literature in college, and throughout my twenties I voraciously read contemporary fiction. Then, eight or nine years ago, I found myself getting — well — bored.

Why? Because it puts me in mind of similar sentiments from Ballard — from 31 years ago:

I firmly believe that science fiction is the true literature of the twentieth century, and probably the last literary form to exist before the death of the written word and the domination of the visual image. S-f has been one of the few forms of modern fiction explicitly concerned with change—social, technological and environmental—and certainly the only fiction to invent society’s myths, dreams and utopias.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Hobbits in Space?’ (a review of Star Wars), 1977.

This is itself a variation of a thesis Ballard had been expounding since at least 15 years before that:

Science fiction is the apocalyptic literature of the twentieth century, the authentic language of Auschwitz, Eniwetok, and Aldermaston.

J.G. Ballard, from the blurb to the original 1962 edition of The Drowned World.

But Ballard doesn’t even write SF anymore — or does he? I asked him about this in our 2006 interview:

Well, the problem is that at the heart of science fiction was novelty: it was predicting the new all the time. I remember reading science-fiction magazines from the 1950s and one was constantly excited by the vision of the future dominated by television, advertising, space travel — the modern world, in short. As far as I can see, science fiction has lost that sense of the new, because its vision has materialised around us. We take it for granted. The future envisaged by science fiction is now our past, and the result is it’s probably come to a natural end. That doesn’t mean that one can’t continue writing it: one just has to move into a different terrain.

Move into a different terrain…

This echoes recent remarks expressed by William Gibson:

Well, I thought that writing about the world today as I perceive it would probably be more challenging, in the real sense of science fiction, than continuing just to make things up… If I’m going to write fiction set in an imaginary future now, I’m going to need a yardstick that gives me some accurate sense of how weird things are now. ‘Cause I’m going to have to go beyond that… But I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it again. I don’t know if I’ll be able to make up an imaginary future in the same way. In the ’80s and ’90s, as strange as it may seem to say this, we had such luxury of stability. Things weren’t changing quite so quickly in the ’80s and ’90s. And when things are changing too quickly, as one of the characters in Pattern Recognition says, you don’t have any place to stand from which to imagine a very elaborate future.William Gibson, 2007

In light of these comments, views to which I subscribe needless to say, I’m having trouble plugging into this sudden swell of geekazoid enthusiasm for ‘science fiction’, expressed most visibly by hotshot blog i09. When in the course of a normal day one can stroll through any number of virtual realities and simulations, engaging in prosthetic inter-personal communications which would have seemed unthinkable even 10 years ago, where’s the point in continuing to try and define the genre? When the future has collapsed into the present so completely, and completely reshaped our view of reality right down to the most banal details of our lives, as it does in the here and now, all I see when I conjure up the term ‘science fiction’ is mouldy old episodes of Star Trek and creaky reruns of Flash Gordon.

As for the stuff that addresses the bewildering rate of change in the technological and social spheres of today — the writing that is currently floating the boat of Clive Thompson — call it ‘realism’ instead, and consign the ‘literary fiction’ that wasted so much of Clive’s time into the same ‘dead genre’ file as Flash and all those other space operas.

UPDATE
With its increasing focus on things like today’s NASA nanotech, real-world cutting-edge green technology and guns that shoot Nerf darts, io9 is looking more and more like Boing Boing…and vice versa. And doesn’t that sort of prove my point?

The Daily Mail reports on a recent sighting of the pop star on a late night bookstore run in Las Vegas. He apparently purchased a large quantity of SF. Begging the important question: what is Michael Jackson’s favorite literary science fiction? I’ll bet you dinner at Picasso that right now he’s curled up in the overstuffed armchair of his penthouse suite at the Bellagio, giggling at The Atrocity Exhibition.

Who knew such an activity could be subtly transformed into a bit of media jamming performance art? MJ’s continued pushing of the boundaries of the new weird, straddling some unexplored territory between late Marlon Brando and The Man Who Fell to Earth, is appreciated. Can you think of a more science fictional figure in the contemporary celebrity landscape?

The Menzies Building, Monash University: Conference HQ. Photo: Simon Sellars.

I recently gave a paper on Ballard at Demanding the Impossible: the Third Australian Conference on Utopia, Dystopia and Science Fiction at Monash University. The conference, spread over three days, was intensive and impossible to digest in its entirety (of the 76 papers, I attended just 15 including my own), but various themes emerged. Terry Eagleton was a keynote speaker, meaning that, as another attendee (who goes by the very academic name of ‘Superdave’) has noted, ‘A lot of the people at the conference were Marxist theorists, which is natural considering the theme. Marx may have condemned utopianism, but Marxism is essentially utopian nonetheless–as its repeated failure attests.’

DAY 1: Welcome, Catastrophe

The work of Kim Stanley Robinson seemed to be a focal point, from what I gathered from some of the papers and from many of the conversations I engaged in. On the first day, keynote speaker Tom Moylan, in his talk entitled ‘Making the Present Impossible: On the Vocation of Utopian Science Fiction’, took up Fredric Jameson’s assertion that Robinson’s Mars trilogy is the ideal expression of utopian literature, in that it presents multiple possibilities for utopian expression and moves between them in a state of flux. As Moylan said, this type of work ‘nominates and explores new alternatives, not to find immediate answers, but to alleviate and enlighten political strategy.’ As I tried to tease out in my own paper, I see Ballard’s Rushing to Paradise as fulfilling a not-too-dissimilar function, my conclusion being that this book (and, to a lesser extent, the rest of what I term Ballard’s ‘Pacific fictions’) is both uniquely Ballardian and exquisitely Jamesonian.

Moylan’s presentation basically served as an introduction to current utopian thought in literature. Again echoing Jameson, it concluded that the form, rather than being associated with the nasty stench of various dictatorships that have co-opted utopianism in the name of genocide, should be reclaimed and thought of as ‘a device to cut through quotidian reality and open up a gap through which we can see a better world.’ There was an interesting question from the audience, in which Moylan was asked, ‘If utopian writing should be conceived as a disruption, an alternative, should it therefore embody disruptive, ie, experimental, form?’ Moylan’s answer was, ‘Perhaps, but the virtue of SF is that it’s both immediate and accessible’, and this exchange immediately made me think of recent conversations in which people have wondered why Ballard abandoned the experimental form of The Atrocity Exhibition for more conventional structures and narratives. My feeling is along similar lines to Moylan, that the subversive value of Ballard’s later work lies precisely in the fact that it is ‘immediate and accessible’.

As Iain Sinclair has said, Ballard ‘has shifted from something that’s manufactured or tooled to fit in magazines where there was a market for these short sharp pieces, to something that now sits and pretends to be a mainstream literary novel. It comes out looking like a literary novel — Cocaine Nights has almost the form of an Agatha Christie novel, it’s comfortable — except that they’re doing stranger things. There’s a much darker kick in it.’

My paper, ‘Zones of Transit: J.G. Ballard’s Pacific Fictions’, was in the early afternoon and I was pleased that it was well received. Thinking back I wish I’d included footage or slides of A-bomb tests and perhaps some photos of the WWII aircraft I found abandoned in the North Pacific jungles. Still, my paper seemed accessible enough, even though, disappointingly, I was asked just half a question (directed to me and the other speaker on my panel, who also referenced Ballard). That paucity would normally be a sign of audience incomprehension, but to my relief a few people told me in the break that they enjoyed my presentation. And to also tell me that they love Ballard but can’t stand Rushing to Paradise. Well, I don’t think it’s Ballard’s best work at all but the ideas are most intriguing and underexplored compared to the rest of his canon. I’ll refrain from further comment as I think I’ll post my paper here in the New Year.

The question asked of myself and the other speaker was, ‘If Ballard is essentially writing the same story over and over again, does that therefore spell the end of the concept of utopia as a historical concern?’ The audience member used Ballard’s ‘Ronald Reagan’ piece from Atrocity (as prefiguring anti-celebrity culture) and Crash (as prefiguring cyber- and virtual sex) and their temporal location in the late 60s and early 70s as examples of the writer mining a prophetic wave of inspiration and then revising and refining that template to the present day. I wasn’t entirely sure of the point of this question, so my rambled and thoroughly non-academic answer was that Ballard, of course, is out of time (or ahead of his time, if anything), and if he has been writing the same thing since the 1960s, that simply means to me that the rest of us are still yet to catch up. As to the utopian angle, to my understanding Ballard has never been especially concerned with the past or the future, or any sense of historicity, focusing instead on a collapsed present, and that in any case it’s arguable as to whether his work is utopian (or rather, dystopian) at all. Instead, as I tried to make clear in the paper, the notion of an ‘affirmative dystopia’ is the key to his work, an oscillation between the poles that is neither one nor the other, but that plays on the elements of both. Actually I was a little surprised that Ballard was so under-represented in the rest of the conference: like I say I don’t classify him as a straight utopian or dystopian writer, but his work very definitely plays with the conventions in an innovative and provocative fashion.

With my paper out of the way, I made it to an afternoon panel featuring Kate Rigby, whose paper, ‘Apocalypse Now: Whither Utopianism in the Midst of Catastrophe?’, was rooted in reality, in an acceptance of the parlous state of climate change and the notion that things are only going to get worse. What role, asked Kate, can utopianism serve in the face of such a dire state of affairs? Looking to the biblical narrative of Noah’s Ark, she examined ‘non-human’ life and called for a ‘radical extension of hospitality towards more than only human others’ as a means to mobilise action in a world in which the utopian impulse seems to be well and truly exhausted as we slide downwards into eco-disaster.

Now this was a very stimulating presentation, with issues you could really sink your teeth into. Of course, what I wanted to ask Kate was, informed by Ballard’s early eco-disaster novels, how does one account for the fact that there actually might be a certain strata of the populace that would welcome the catastrophe for whatever reasons: psychological, psychopathological, aesthetic, evolutionary, etc. But I was beaten to the punch by another attendee. In response to Kate’s assertion that ‘If we see the apocalypse as a purifying event, that almost legitimises inaction’, he said (and I’m paraphrasing from memory), ‘There’s an unwarranted belief that eco-disaster can be averted. The world will run down of its own accord anyway, so why bother prolonging the inevitable for our children and grandchildren, who may only grasp a habitable world for just a few generations’.

Kate’s response was that for her it’s an ethical question, it’s ‘about allowing life to flourish, for however long that may be’. I wish I’d had the insight to follow this up along Ballardian lines, but I was still mulling all of this over as this exchange was talking place. Unfortunately I’m a bit slow like that. Interestingly, Geoff Manaugh asked something similar of Kim Stanley Robinson in their recent BLDGBLOG interview, and Robinson’s answer is perhaps similar to how Kate may have responded:

Robinson: The crash scenario that people think of … as an escape to freedom would actually be so damaging that it wouldn’t be fun. It wouldn’t be an adventure. It would merely be a struggle for food and security, and a permanent high risk of being robbed, beaten, or killed; your ability to feel confident about your own – and your family’s and your children’s – safety would be gone. People who fail to realize that… I’d say their imaginations haven’t fully gotten into this scenario.

After Kate’s presentation I sat in on the Comparative Utopias workshop (overheard before I went in: ‘What on earth is a utopias workshop? Lessons in how to build a utopia?’). This was useful in that it extrapolated the utopian impulse beyond Western culture, although, as Jacqueline Dutton asserted, ‘There’s no real tradition of utopias outside the West’. But for me, Roberto Gonzalez-Casanovas‘s paper, ‘Utopian and Dystopian Typologies of Arawaks vs. Caribs: Relativising Cannibals in Colonial Myth and Postcolonial Critique’ was the standout, with its fascinating account of the role cannibal cultures have played in the Western mythos, as a composite cut-out, symbolising and embodying the insecurities and ambitions of the West.

And that was it for me for the first day. On the train home, I sat next to a retired chap who’d been at the conference. Funnily enough, he wasn’t even remotely involved in academia — instead, he was your archetypal sci fi ‘fanboy’ who told me he has worn Star Trek outfits at conventions. He’s a smart and engaged chap who came along to gain a different perspective on science fiction, and this to me was a sign of the conference’s success.

DAY 2: The Eagle(ton) Has Landed

The Menzies Building, Monash University: Conference HQ. Photo: Simon Sellars.

I missed Day 2 as I had to work, but I was informed that Eagleton’s presentation, ‘Utopia and the New Testament’, was like stand-up comedy. See Superdave’s blog for info on Day 2 and for some Eagleton hot gossip… (he calls it ‘Day 3′ on his blog but he’s actually talking about Day 2).

DAY 3: This Argument Did Not Take Place

The Menzies Building, Monash University: Conference HQ. Photo: Simon Sellars.

Australian SF and fantasy author Lucy Sussex was the keynote speaker for the third day. As Andrew Milner noted when introducing her, ‘Lucy, unlike those of us in academia with our tenure, actually lives off her writing’. And she’s very good at it, too. Lucy’s presentation, ‘A Tour Guide in Utopia’, for me was the highlight of the conference. Her style was witty and imaginative, taking the time to explore the absurdities of her subject matter.

Lucy took us through the history of utopian literature in Australia, from 100 years ago to now. The early account was fascinating as I had no idea there was such a strong utopian tradition in Australian writing — it’s something ‘official’ histories never discuss. Early Australian utopias, as Lucy explained, were propelled by a stew of influences, including the threat of Western Australia seceding, the advent of Federation, the prospect of New Zealand becoming a state of Australia, and from elsewhere, the advent of Freud, electricity, Einstein, Marconi, Wells, suffragettes, you name it.

For Lucy, Australian politics today cries out for the form to be revived and she pointed to some examples that take up the call, with the caveat that dystopian literature has replaced the utopian mode in Australian writing, fuelled by the Howard government and Australia’s involvement in the ‘War on Terror’. She referred to an Australian novel that sounded most intriguing (unfortunately I’ve lost the author’s name), with its vision of terrorists beheading their victims, and via some weird technology, forcing them to live on in a kind of half-life as headless slaves. I can’t quite get that image out of my head and I must seek out that book. If anyone knows of it, let me know. Lucy also mentioned Andrew McGahan’s novel Underground, which depicts Canberra wiped out in a jihad attack. Imprisoned in Parliament House, the protagonist has nothing to read but Hansard — a vision of hell if ever there was one.

Lucy finished up by relating the answers she was given when she asked some prominent writers about the need for utopian writing today. Ursula Le Guin said (and, again, excuse my paraphrasing from memory), ‘How can anyone draw up a blueprint for utopia when science and technology today are changing so rapidly?’ While for Dorothy Porter, ‘The Howard Government’s years were a literal dystopia. I didn’t need to write about it.’

That was a wonderful note to end on.

At lunchtime I got chatting to a chap who informed me that he identified as a Marxist but that his university department was all Derridean; the way he told it, it was like he was a black man who had wandered into a Klu Klux Klan meeting. When he asked what I identified as, I was stumped and eventually answered, ‘a Ballardian?’, which was very lame, I know. Then he was stumped too. And then we had some more wine and talked about something else.

In the afternoon I chaired a panel on utopian themes in film. Both papers were uniformly excellent. Julia Vassileva’s paper, ‘On Imagination, Energy and Excess: the Lasting Legacy of Eisenstein’s Utopias’, was a deep examination of the manner in which Eisenstein, like Freud, sought to ‘represent the non-representational’. Julia made the excellent point that for Eisenstein, the use of montage generates a parallel narrative that makes ambiguous comment on the main narrative, a stimulating concept with vast utopian potential. As Julia explained, for Eisenstein who ‘dreamed of a classless society’, utopian ideals were simply not able to be realised in the time in which he lived. However ‘it is the very insistence on utopian ideals despite a knowledge of their impossibility that creates the inner spring’ — or an energy that can be realised — a similar conclusion reached by other speakers examining other writers and artists at the conference.

Rachel Torbett’s paper, ‘The Silence Afterwards: Lyotard with Haneke’s “Le Temps du Loup”‘ focused on Haneke’s film “Le Temps du Loup”, with its post-apocalyptic world in which the catastrophe is never explained and which is alluded to only in the most oblique of terms. Rachel played an edited copy of the film behind her, timed to finish when her paper finished, a fabulous touch that really enhanced her presentation. For Rachel, ‘Speculating on the human opens up a space of indeterminacy’ and she noted that this film accomplishes that, with its vision of ‘gross inhumanity’ and the barbarism that people descend into when their technological safety nets are stripped away (a Ballardian theme too, as it happens; earlier Rachel had told me she had originally considered a paper on Ballard’s High-Rise). Weaving Lyotard into this argument, she explored the concept of the ‘sublime’ and how the film presents ‘the threat that something will happen in this void; that it’s not over’. I hadn’t seen the film, but with the video behind her I clearly saw how Haneke, with his use of darkness and snatched, whispered dialogue fully explores this idea, as characters lose themselves in the landscape which is shot in fading, natural light.

For Rachel, the problems raised in the film ‘linger because they go unresolved’. Withholding vital information from the audience, then presenting a final scene in which a train passes through a countryside that is beautiful once again, Haneke promises pleasure emerging from the terror only for it to be deferred as we realise that we don’t know who is on the train, where they are going or what they intend to do. The endpoint, I believe, was that we ultimately come to question the notion of ‘humanity’ itself and whether it is to be desired at all. This paper made me want to explore Haneke’s work in more detail, and watching the extracts from the film, I couldn’t help but compare that ending with Children of Men’s, in which the humanity is virtually rammed down your throat.

After this I caught Andrew Milner‘s paper, which he co-wrote with Robert Savage. The paper derived from a great central conceit: what would happen if the German philosopher Ernst Bloch had included the Golden Age of science fiction in his ‘magnum opus’ The Principle of Hope? (Originally Milner and Savage had planned to write a short story exploring this idea; that would have made a great paper.) Bloch wrote of ‘the colportage novel, the circus and the fairy tale’, but ignored the SF pulps, which were being produced at the same time he was working. Milner then took us through an examination of utopian themes in the pulps. All in all an engaging paper. Andrew is a hyperactive speaker, almost tripping over his own words in his enthusiasm for his subject matter, an infectiousness transmitted to the audience.

And then the conference, for me, was over (there was another workshop but I had to leave).

That night I was having drinks with some friends when someone I didn’t know wandered into the group and heard me talking about Ballard, Baudrillard and the conference. Immediately he began attacking me, saying that Baudrillard (and Ballard) believe that nothing is real, and that they are wrong and irresponsible. He kept saying that the body is real, that if someone attacks you on the street then you will bleed, you may even die, and you will then know that your corporeal self is very very real, and not part of some fantasy virtual reality theory. None of which I’ve ever argued against. Weary from too many beers and suddenly being put on the spot and forced to defend theory in the middle of a packed and noisy pub filled with steroid heads and Paris Hilton clones, I tried to explain that my interest in media landscapes, informed by Ba(udri)llard, lies in the way advertising and media has changed to become nomadic, fluid and omnidirectional, rather than top-down, hierarchical and sticky, and that because the so-called spectacle is so complete and so enveloping, this renders traditional notions of ‘authentic’ behaviour obsolete. (Behind me, as if to emphasise my point, one of the Paris clones threw up on the pavement). But this doesn’t mean I believe that nothing is real, even though I may feel overwhelming ennui and deflation, even something approximating fear, from time to time because of it. It’s purely a mode of enquiry into something that’s basically unanswerable, but still worth questioning for anyone remotely interested in the forces of cultural production in the early 21st century. In fact, the idea of the mediated ‘spectacle’ is so ingrained now in popular culture that it — in and of itself — has become a tedious marketing cliche in films and advertising (cf. the Matrix, with its pop-cult take on Baudrillard, and hyperware and self-reflexive ads that consistently ‘break’ the frame), so it was somewhat surprising to hear someone argue that there was no such thing.

Even more shocking, I couldn’t believe this guy was dredging up a stock argument against Baudrillard, an argument over 10 years old in fact, regurgitating the whole ‘Gulf War Did Not Happen’ gambit and using that to discredit him. I mean, honestly, this is such an old and tired argument. After all these years I don’t think you need me to explain that Baudrillard was not claiming that the physical event of war didn’t happen, but that the war was the first to be almost entirely mediated by technology and therefore was not ‘real’ according to traditional theatres of warfare. And that that notion is very applicable to today, in the midst of our pervasive and all-invasive FaceSpace culture. But this just didn’t wash with this fellow, and he kept pushing and pushing until I finally asked him what he studied at university. Surely nothing French?

And he said: ‘Derrida. I’m a Derridean, of course. A realist’.

Derrida? A realist? That’s a new one on me.

(By the way, see the blog Obscene Desserts, in which Anja relates a similar scenario — only in reverse, and in Germany).

..:: Previously on Ballardian
+ ‘If I had a pound for every time someone mentioned psychopathology’: A Review of the First International Conference on the Work of J.G. Ballard

After much pushing and prodding from me over a period of months, Sam Scoggins has finally digitised his ‘lost’ quasi-doco on Ballard, loosely structured around themes found in The Unlimited Dream Company. Sam has posted it over at blip.tv, and it’s a special work, with wonderful fictional interventions interpolating passages from The Atrocity Exhibition with close ups of Ballard discussing his fiction.

Great sound design, great effects, and it also features an astounding section in which Ballard responds to “90 questions from the Eyckman Personality Quotient, each of which Ballard answers Yes or No”. Ballard is clearly amused, but also deeply absorbed, and the minimalism of this interrogation is actually quite revealing, saying a lot about the man’s character, as when he’s asked if he “locks the house up at night” — to which the reply is “no”. Sometimes he hesitates, as when asked if manners are important (“yes”); other times he answers quick as a flash, such as when asked if he would dodge taxes if he was sure he wouldn’t be caught (“yes”). The nature of both responses, in different ways, betray the rough grain of Ballard’s anti-establishment bias. There’s a real sense that this format, as minimal as it is, is far more revealing than some of the more recent, overblown and repetitive interviews with Ballard, in which he seems fed up with answering the same biographical questions from journalists over and over again. Stripped to the bone in this fashion, we inhabit Ballard’s psychology in extreme close up…an effect mirrored by the camera, which inches ever closer as Ballard ploughs his way through the questions.

I have tentative plans in the near future to do an interview with Sam about the film, but for now, here’s some info from RE/Search #8/9: J.G. Ballard:

The Unlimited Dream Company, written, edited & directed by Sam Scoggins. 16mm, 24 mins, color, 1983.

“The British science fiction writer J.G. BALLARD talks about his life and work. Meanwhile a crashed pilot stalks the landscapes of his dreams. The film is concerned with what constitutes an adequate picture of a person, the role of the imagination in transforming the world.”

Cast: J.G. Ballard, Tom Pollock. Credits: Camera, Ian Duncan; Assistant Camera, Bryan Morgan; Art Director, Charlotte Humpston; Sound, Tom Pollock..

Scoggins’ own description of the film follows:

“There are two main types of material intercut in the film:

1) A big close-up of Ballard’s face. He talks, looking straight at the camera,

2) Ballard’s alter ego wearing a ragged flying suit wanders through “Ballardian” landscapes and in each makes a portrait of Ballard from things around him.

The landscapes are:

a) The jungle (past). He makes a portrait from feathers.

b) Motorway/Scrapyard (present). He makes a portrait from crashed cars.

c) The Beach (future). He draws a huge spiral in the sand.

These sections were shot in black and white, then printed each in a different monochrome, i.e. a green, b) red, c) blue.

There are other bits of material in the film!

i) Tracking shots through Shepperton ending up on Ballard’s house with him standing outside,

ii) The same repeated but in negative color while Ballard talks about The Unlimited Dream Company in voice-over.

iii) Shots from different sequences of the film cut to the “Captain Kirby” quote.

iv) Single framed images from TV while Ballard talks about the latent and manifest content of TV.

v) A 6 min. duration very slow zoom in from a head and shoulders shot of Ballard to a very large close-up of his right eyeball. Off camera a voice asks the 90 questions from the Eyckman Personality Quotient, each of which Ballard answers Yes or No.

vi) The last sequence of the film is a zoom out from some clouds to a shot of the whole earth, which match dissolves into Ballard’s eye as the zoom out continues until we see the whole of Ballard’s head.

On one level I hope the film is a fairly straightforward introduction to Ballard and his work, but on another level the film (at least for me) is concerned with two things:

1) How can you make an adequate picture of someone;

2) The way in which the imagination/film transforms “reality.”

..:: PREVIOUSLY ON BALLARDIAN

+ ‘A Home and A Grave’: Mike Holliday explains how to read J.G. Ballard’s 1979 novel The Unlimited Dream Company as a fascistic work.
+ The Unlimited Dream Company: bibliographical entry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

World’s first hydrogen bomb explosion, Eniwetok Atoll, 1952.

Dominika Oramus teaches Brit.Lit. professionally at the University of Warsaw. The following is Part Two of the introduction to Grave New World: The Decline of the West in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard, her post-doctoral thesis. Grave New World currently exists as a (very) limited edition book, with the possibility of it being published in a more commercial format being explored.

For more information on the work, please see Part One.

INTRODUCTION. 2
J.G. Ballard’s Auto-Creation [21]

Many critics describe the surprising proliferation of ‘Ballards’ in recent years, numerous doubles of the author, ones who people pages of other critics’ studies and who seem to be quite different persons: an avant-gardist, a science fiction reformer and a mainstream writer of post-war classics. To me, this uncanny multiplication seems to result not only from the diverse criticism of essayists representing separate literary groups (the science fiction field, London’s literary establishment, French postmodernists, American theorists of science fiction etc.), but also from Ballard’s own journalism. In each stage of his long career Ballard was explicitly defining his artistic aims and describing the art of the writers, painters and filmmakers who influence him most, thus defining the context of his own output. During those years Ballard’s ideas and likes have continuously evolved.

Ballard wrote essays and reviews for various literary magazines and daily newspapers; his journalism, collected in the 1996 volume entitled A User’s Guide to the Millennium, reflects changes in his artistic fascinations and literary style. Initially he wrote for the ambitious counter-cultural SF magazine New Worlds, in the seventies he moved to Ink, Vogue and Drive; after the success of Empire of the Sun he started to collaborate with the and the Daily Telegraph and, occasionally, to contribute to thematic anthologies of essays. Read chronologically, his essays and reviews show both his development as a writer and the way in which he creates his own image, for example, by choosing and presenting his gurus – ones such as Salvador Dali or William Burroughs.

Ballard’s journalistic debut took place in New Worlds, a magazine intending to educate its readers. Apart from experimental fiction, Moorcock insisted on publishing Guest Editorials, reviews and articles that were meant to introduce to SF the artistic manifesto of the ‘New Wave’. J. G. Ballard soon became his major essayist, and Moorcock called him ‘the Voice’ of the movement. From 1964 to 1970 Ballard wrote numerous articles in which he described all the factors he saw as shaping contemporary artistic sensibility. His choice of subjects reveals his own fascinations, while the exuberant, metaphorical style of these articles imparts them with the unique character of revolutionary manifestos.

In these articles Ballard chooses his masters: the books and albums he reviews are by authors he admires and wants to be included into artistic canons. In the article ‘Myth Maker of the Twentieth Century’ (1964) [22] he speaks strongly in favour of William Burroughs, whom he considered the second most important writer of the century, second to James Joyce. What he admires is Burroughs’s ability to describe the ‘inner landscape of the post-war world’, as we subjectively perceive it. The ‘man-made wilderness’ of contemporary cities, the ugliness of civilization and paranoid perception of people surrounded by numerous fictions are for Ballard the true literary subject which Burroughs describes in the appropriate technique: his text is full of opposites, juxtapositions, chaotic imagery. Ballard enjoys the apparent contrast between organized, decent society and the psychopathic world of dropouts and, most of all, the way in which the differences between the two blur. Paranoia, fictionalization of media landscapes and hallucinations are characteristic for the contemporary psyche. Fictional elements derived from SF belong in our shared cultural competence and are incorporated into our inner landscape:

What appear to be the science fictional elements… in fact play a metaphorical role… The sad poetry of… the whole apocalyptic landscape of Burroughs’s world closes in upon itself, now and then flaring briefly like a dying volcano, is on a par with Anna Livia Plurabelle’s requiem for her river-husband in Finnegan’s Wake. (Ballard 1997b: 128-129)

Ballard admires Burroughs for his presentation of SF as a part of the general consciousness long ago absorbed into the mainstream of culture. His books are given as an example of the late 20th-century fiction that reflects the contemporary human mind and is not afraid of taboos and the truthful presentation of chaos. Ballard’s tone is didactic; he instructs the readers of New Worlds in a very authoritarian way. [23]

His even greater early fascination is surrealism: visual art, but also poetry. He strongly advises the readers to incorporate this aesthetics into SF. ‘The images of surrealism are the iconography of inner space’ (ibid.: 84). With this sentence he opens his famous early article ‘The Coming of the Unconscious’ (1966). Admiring surrealism for its ability to appeal to our innermost often-subliminal feelings and advocating its ‘landscapes of the soul, the collage of the strange and familiar, and all the techniques of violent impact’ (ibid.: 84), he indirectly postulates what literature, SF included, should be like.

Trying to persuade his readers that surrealism is the key to the 20th century experience he goes on to present its sources. He starts by describing the Dada movement and its protests against war, society and art and then goes back in time to the symbolists and expressionists of the nineteen-century. Sade, Lautréamont, Jarry and Apollinaire are able to reflect the whole human experience – sciences, physiology, even dreams and subliminal longings [24]. Ballard considers them the harbingers of psychoanalysis and compares their art to Rorschach tests, ‘with [their] emphasis on the irrational and the perverse, on the significance of apparently random associations’ (ibid.: 85). Writing about André Breton and the First Surrealist Manifesto he implies similarities between the surrealist movement and the ‘New Wave’: in imagery, language and attempts to reach to the deeper levels of the human mind.

The major part of Ballard’s article is devoted to various surrealist paintings that for him are the best presentations of states of mind. A good example of his exuberant style is the paragraph on one of the very famous paintings by Salvador Dali:

Dali: ‘The Persistence of Memory’ The empty beach with its fused sand is a symbol of utter psychic alienation. Clock time is no longer valid, the watches have begun to melt and drip. Even the embryo, symbol of secret growth and possibility, is drained and limp. These are the residues of a remembered moment of time. The most remarkable elements are the two rectilinear objects, formalizations of sections of the beach and sea. The displacement of these two images through time, and their marriage with our own four-dimensional continuum, has warped them into the rigid and unyielding structures of our own consciousness (ibid.: 87).

Dali’s ‘The Persistence of Memory’ (1931).

It is in the language of psychoanalysis that Ballard talks about thoughts and perceptions. Surrealism, the artistic movement that developed partly in response to Freud, is for him the ultimate 20th-century art. Three years later, in his article exclusively on Dali ‘The Innocent as Paranoid’ (1969) [25], he divides the output of this painter into periods on the basis of references to different cultural phenomena (psychoanalysis tops the list). He maintains that Dali, ‘with Max Ernst and William Burroughs … forms a trinity of the only living men of genius’ whose ‘paintings constitute a body of prophesy about ourselves unequalled in accuracy since Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents’ (ibid.: 91).

The prevailing references to Freud and psychoanalysis may seem strange in a SF periodical such as New Worlds, but according to Ballard at present only science fiction and surrealism are able to give an imaginative response to science. Psychoanalysis together with other schools describing the human mind are becoming one of the most important contemporary sciences [26]. He continues this line of reasoning in his most famous Guest Editorial in New Worlds, ‘Which Way to Inner Space’ (1962), considered to be the fullest artistic manifesto of the ‘New Wave’. In that text he postulates a rejuvenation of SF: replacement of outer space exploration and technological detail with interest in the inner space of the human mind. He sites Ray Bradbury as an example of the very few authors who are able to ‘transform even so hackneyed a subject as Mars into an enthralling private world’ (ibid.: 195), but criticizes lesser writers who have made SF synonymous with fantastic stories for small boys. Nevertheless, because of the inherent lack of limits and restrictions:

SF has a continuing and expanding role as an imaginative interpreter of the future… The biggest developments of the immediate future will take place, not on the Moon or Mars, but on Earth, and it is inner space, not outer, that needs to be explored. The only truly alien planet is Earth. In the past the scientific bias of SF has been towards the physical sciences – rocketry, electronics, cybernetics – and the emphasis should switch to the biological sciences (ibid.: 197).

Ballard goes on to postulate abstract science fiction, uninterested in dramatic stories, but rather in the oblique presentation of phenomena such as the human experience of time, genetic memories, subliminal drives, and archeopsychic time. Science fiction should develop a vocabulary to deal with the social and psychological problems of tomorrow and, Ballard fervently claims, it has chances to become the intellectual and artistic avant-garde.

In the second half of the decade, long after the decline of the ‘New Wave’, Ballard was slowly recognized as one of the theorists of contemporary society and postmodernist culture. Always placed on the margins of the mainstream and associated with scandal and artistic provocation, he was nevertheless often asked his opinions on SF, futurology and different aspects of contemporary life. No longer restricted to avant-garde magazines, he published his essays and reviews in a wide range of titles. His most interesting journalism of this decade is concerned with the status of art in a world dominated by mass media and the numerous fictions of urban landscape such as commercials, billboards and ever-present TV screens. Leitmotifs of these essays are the latent artistic potential of science fiction, the regrettable decline of this genre, the prospects of future life in postmodernist society and the new kind of imagination shaped by the late 20th century: the Moon landing, Vietnam and the assassination of J.F. Kennedy.

Aware of the rapid changes in culture he formulated a whole new artistic program for the future SF writer. Our reality is now full of people filling the environment with all kinds of fictions, therefore a writer cannot just produce fictitious stories, but has to ‘out-imagine everyone else’, analyze the minds of contemporary men, and create situations and images able to move, excite and reach to the unconscious. Such an artistic plan soon proved too idealistic. In subsequent years Ballard witnessed the rapid decline of intellectual SF, the commercialization of the genre and the dominance of visual media.

In his review of Star Wars, ‘Hobbits in Space?’ (1977), his criticism of this film (‘totally unoriginal, feebly plotted, instantly forgettable, and an acoustic nightmare’) is only a pretext to examine the condition of science fiction: a genre, which is becoming passé as its intellectual values resist translation into cinema:

Although slightly biased, I firmly believe that science fiction is the true literature of the twentieth century, and probably the last literary form to exist before the death of the written word and the domination of the visual image. SF has been one of the very few forms of modern fiction explicitly concerned with change – social, technological and environmental – and certainly the only fiction to invent society’s myths, dreams and utopias. Why, then, has it translated so uneasily into the cinema? (ibid.: 14).

J.G. Ballard (photo courtesy RE/Search publications).

The commercialization of culture maims both SF film and SF literature. Ballard is aware that in the 1970s there is no place for ambitious writing of the ‘New Wave’ kind. In ‘The Cosmic Cabaret’ (1974), a review of Brian Aldiss’ Billion Year Spree, he announces that modern SF has come to an end. ‘Anything that happened five minutes ago is already the centre of a cult, embedded in Lucite and put on a display shelf. Modern SF… has already become a victim of this nostalgia’ (ibid.: 203). There is no interesting new movement and the tendency of more ambitious writers is to come back to stylized ‘retro’ poetics. The authors who ten years earlier had been the ‘New Wave’ abandoned SF and their postmodernist experiments are being misunderstood,

One of the most inaccurate jibes leveled at the so-called ‘New Wave’ is that its writers suffered from delusions of literary grandeur, that they took themselves far too seriously. In fact in my own personal experience, it is the absolute reverse that is true (ibid: 203).

Such a decline in science fiction is for him the result of a huge civilizational change that is taking place in America, the centre of the world’s science fiction. Concepts for the future no longer cause excitement, stress falls on the present day and, moreover, the huge moral and imaginative reserves possessed by the USA in the first part of the century are exhausted. In times of pessimism, distraction and social entropy there is no place for a literature exploring the excitements of tomorrow. The post-Vietnam world abandoned the future and then SF. This process was enhanced throughout the decade, and, at the beginning of the 80s, Ballard’s voice sounded even more pessimistic. In ‘New Means Worse’ (1981), published in the Guardian, he wrote:

In fact, science fiction today… is entering the most commercial phase it has ever known. The ‘New Wave’, along with almost all the more intelligent magazines and anthologies, has long since been inundated by a tsunami of planet fiction, sword-and-sorcery sensationalism… What science fiction needs now is a clear, hard and positive voice (ibid.: 190).

Nostalgia and dissatisfaction with the contemporary world and its stupid escapist fables made Ballard concentrate on the history of SF rather than its present state. The ability to probe deep down into our psyche is the ultimate goal of literature. Nevertheless, in the 1970s something wrong happened to SF and culture at large. For some years Ballard kept toying with SF ideas in a playful and less serious way. A good example of this kind of journalism is his cooperation with Vogue, where in the late 1970s he published several impressions on the future. Easy and nice to read, they described a make-believe 21st century. In ‘The Future of the Future’ (1977) he talks about a world dominated by TV. Each one of us lives in a room full of TV screens that report on our daily life and bodily functions. People spend their evenings editing the material recorded by cameras – their own talks and interactions with the family and friends. They live keeping in mind the film we continuously are making. Gradually they step back into our rooms and perform our work and family life via the TV screen, unable to cope with un-mediated reality.

LEFT: The young Ballard (photo courtesy RE/Search publications).

This article is interesting for several reasons. Firstly, soon thereafter Ballard used this idea to write two short stories – ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ (1977) and ‘Motel Architecture’ (1978), both picturing a society in which people live separately in screen-filled studios. Secondly, it is worth noticing that 1977 is long before the creation of virtual reality, and that Ballard quite rightly anticipated the development of media. Thirdly, compared with earlier texts on SF – engaged artistic manifestos teaching how to write, read and think – this article shows his disappointment in SF, which he now treats as a plaything only. Lastly, we can see here Ballard’s growing obsession with TV screens and media culture, something so very characteristic of his fiction (and journalism [27]) at the time.

In the second Vogue text, ‘The Diary of A Mad Space-wife’ (1979), he describes life in one of the hundreds of satellite cities in Earth orbit. The future’s life, entertainment and abortive work lead people to depression and space-madness. The article combines science fiction-like ideas and descriptions with bits and pieces of real-life astronauts’ memories and recorded dialogues. The atmosphere is sad and nostalgic, and the article shows that the Space Age is really over, no one dreams of space conquests, and what we are left with is TV. The beginning of the eighties is for Ballard the end of artistic involvement with science fiction (he never abandons the genre as a writer of fiction, but ceases to see it as means of social education and artistic experiments) and he turns to quasi-autobiographical writing.

The tremendous artistic success of Empire of the Sun marked a sudden breakthrough in Ballard’s literary career. After nearly thirty years of continuously writing and publishing both fiction and non-fiction he was finally recognized as a modern classicist for writing an autobiography and World War II novel. Set in pre-war Shanghai and the Lunghua camp, where the Japanese interned British civilians during the war, the novel was generally received as a confession of the real-life sources of Ballard’s literary fascinations and obsessions [28] and was often confused for a factual account of his early years. His popular image as an orientalist (enhanced by the acclaimed Steven Spielberg film Empire) prompted the numerous essays and reviews having to do with China and Japan that he was asked to write in subsequent years.

Some of this non-fiction is explicitly autobiographical. For example ‘Unlocking the Past’ (1991), written for the Daily Telegraph, is a report on Ballard’s visit to Shanghai, which took place during the making of the Spielberg film. Ballard writes this text for readers who know his novel: there are implied comparisons of Shanghai at the end of the 20th century and the city described in the Empire. Ballard visits the places important for Jim, his fictitious persona (without referring to the book or summarizing it), and the suspense works only if we wait for him to trace his prison room. At the same time the article has certain features of a travelogue:

The first day I moved around Shanghai in a daze. Memories jostled me like the Chinese crowds who surrounded the film crew. Watching as the Belgian lad cycled past the Cathy Hotel, where Noël Coward had written Private Lives, I remembered the Shanghai of gangsters and beggar-kings, prostitutes and pickpockets. I had opened a door and stepped into a perfectly preserved past, though a past equipped with a number of unattractive reflexes of my own – walking along the Nanking Road, I caught myself expecting the Chinese pedestrians to step out of my way (ibid.: 175).

Ballard creates his own image here; partly an elderly English sentimental tourist, partly a boy from half a century earlier with his imperial ways of a colony dweller and describes the modern, exotic city from such a perspective. We read about his walks throughout the city, the visit to the former Ballard house, and a trip to Lunghua, his search and the final retrieval of memories of his younger self. All of these adventures are described in such a way as to emphasize the real life details which he had incorporated into Empire of the Sun. This article is in itself a piece of fiction, a footnote to this novel, in which Ballard presents his half-literary persona: the writer of Empire of the Sun, an English intellectual with the vivid though naïve memories of a rich European boy in the colonial China. [29]

This persona is used in numerous other journalistic texts that Ballard wrote in the nineties: from this perspective he judged Chinese books, discussed the history of Asia, the Second World War and recent political changes. A good sample of this style is the beginning of ‘Survival Instincts’ (1992), a review of Wild Swans, a Chinese woman’s memoir [30], published in the Sunday Times;

I can remember the bad-tempered amahs of my childhood, ruthless and hard-fisted little women darting about on their bound feet. At the other end of the social scale were the dragon ladies – tycoon’s wives or successful businesswomen – in their long fur coats and immaculate make-up, who could petrify a small boy at fifty paces with their baleful stares.

Returning to China last summer, I was startled to find an advance guard of dragon ladies apparently waiting for me in the Cathy Pacific lounge at Heathrow. But there were none in the streets of Shanghai, and, fortunately, their places were taken by thousands of relaxed and cheerful young women (ibid.: 36).

A similar procedure can be found in a group of texts that deal with the powerful Asiatic politicians and royals [31]. In ‘Lipstick and High Heels’ (1993), written for the Daily Telegraph, it is Ballard’s recent visit to China compared with the mental picture of pre-war Shanghai that give him a background to talk about political issues. Reviewing Richard Evans’s Deng Xiaoping and the making of Modern China Ballard juxtaposes references to Empire of the Sun and the making of the film with the revolutionary changes described by Evans. His comments on Hirohito in ‘Last of the Great Royals’ (1989), published in the Observer, discuss the emperor’s policy line during the war from the perspective of China, not Japan.

Therefore, the readers of Ballard’s fiction and non-fiction in the early 1990s grapple with a small mountain of autobiography material encompassing Empire of the Sun, its 1991 sequel The Kindness of Women and a body of journalism. The resulting confusion of facts and fiction made Ballard write in ‘The End of My War’ (1995), in the Sunday Times, the exact account of what happened to him (and not to Jim, the protagonist of Empire of the Sun) in Shanghai in the 1940s.

The end of the war is here viewed from the perspective of the Lunghua Camp (a place described in detail in Empire of the Sun). This time instead of Jim (the war-name adopted by the protagonist of the novel when he is separated from his parents and left to his own devices in the middle of the war) we have Jamie, who spent the three years of internment with his parents;

Then at last it was all over. The day after Hirohito’s broadcast, we heard from the Swiss Red Cross that the war had ended. The Japanese armies had agreed to lay down their arms. We were told of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which had vaporized both cities and brought the war to a sudden halt.

‘Is the war over?’ I asked my father. ‘Really, really over?’

‘Yes, it’s really over.’ My father stared at me somberly. ‘Jamie, you’ll miss Lunghua’ (ibid.: 284).

In a similar way the events described in Empire of the Sun are here briefly narrated from Jamie Ballard’s point of view, thus demonstrating artistic distortions in the novel. Camp life, the English school in Shanghai before the war, the small boy’s memories of colonial times – this autobiography encompasses all aspects of Empire of the Sun. The very fact of being in Asia during the war gives Ballard the moral right to judge the American decision to drop the bomb:

As a nation the Japanese have never faced up to the atrocities they committed, and are unlikely to do so as long as we bend our heads is shame before the memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The argument that atomic weapons, by virtue of the genetic damage they cause to the future generations, belong to a special category of evil, seems to me to be equally misguided. The genetic consequences of a rifle bullet are even more catastrophic, for the victim’s genes go nowhere except the grave and his descendants are not even born (ibid.: 293).

His scandalous works from the 1960s and 1970s forgotten, Ballard started to enjoy the privileged position of an authority on literary and moral issues. The success of Empire of the Sun made Ballard write its 1991 sequel, The Kindness of Women, in which he describes Jim after the war: a young man who does not fit into the world of post-war Britain. He thus created the next chapters of his autobiography. In his journalism he refers to them from time to time; all this writing, regardless of the chronology of its publication dates, forms one intertextual whole.

The cultural shock of leaving Asia for Britain is best reflected in numerous articles about the books he read as an adolescent. The sharp comparison of dull English life and the Far East he found in Greene, as he remembers in ‘Memories of Greeneland’ (1978), was written for Magazine Littéraire:

“I first began to read Graham Greene in the mid-1950s, and will never forget the sense of liberation his novels gave me… whether serious or ‘entertainments’ as Greene likes to call them, [they] had the tonic effect of stepping from an aircraft on to the airport tarmac of a strange country” (ibid.: 138).

‘Memories of James Joyce’ (1990) is concerned with the same period, the 1950s, and describes the young Ballard who then studied medicine, but wanted to be a writer, just like the protagonist of The Kindness of Women:

James Joyce’s Ulysses had an immense influence on me – almost entirely for the bad. I read Joyce’s masterpiece as an eighteen-year-old medical student dissecting cadavers at Cambridge, then a bastion of academic provincialism and self-congratulation… Ulysses convinced me to give up medicine and become a writer, but it was the wrong example for me, an old-fashioned storyteller at heart, and it wasn’t until I discovered the surrealists that I found the right model (ibid.: 145).

The most revealing in this context is the piece ‘The Pleasures of Reading’ (1992), written for the anthology edited by Antonia Fraser entitled The Pleasure of Reading. Here Ballard juxtaposed each phase of his life with the books he remembers enjoying at that time. In the pre-war polyglot Shanghai he read the Victorian children’s classics and American comics together with the Latin Primer, described in Empire, just like the books and magazines which circulated among the prisoners of the Lunghua Camp.

Arriving in England in 1946, I was faced with the incomprehensible strangeness of English life, for which my childhood reading had prepared me in more ways than I realized. Fortunately, I soon discovered that the whole of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature lay waiting for me, a vast compendium of human case histories that stemmed from a similar source (ibid: 181).

He finishes the article with a list of his favourites and his own characterization of a reader of other people’s books.

In recent years his fiction and non-fiction together influence his image: his preferences, ideas and opinions are often made public. Sometimes an interesting intertextual links join his novels and essays, like in the case of his descriptions of Shepperton [32], the Great London village where he lives:

Shepperton, like most Thames Valley towns, is now a suburb not of London but of London airport, and one can see the influence of Heathrow in the office buildings that resemble control towers and the huge shopping malls whose floors remind the visitor of a terminal concourse… we live in the TV suburbs, among the video shops, take-aways and police speed-check cameras, and might as well make the most of them, since there is nowhere else to go (ibid.: 183-84).

This quote comes from ‘Shepperton Past and Present’ (1994), published in the Guardian, and is a good example of his journalism in the nineteen-nineties. The impressions and descriptions of the contemporary world and post-modernist culture mingle with personal memories and ciphered allusions to his books. The devoted reader of Ballard is now faced with a maze of cross-referential allusions and remarks, which together form his imaginary autobiography.

Dominika Oramus, 2007.

..:: Back to Part One.

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

ENDNOTES

[21] This sub-chapter is based on my article ‘From the Avant-Garde to the Autobiography: The Journalism of J.G. Ballard’, in Anglica 2005, pp. 39-52

[22] Re-printed in A User’s Guide to the Millennium (1997). All quotes of Ballard’s articles (unless stated otherwise) come from this edition of his journalism.

[23] His tone changes over the years, but his admiration for Burroughs remains intact. Nearly thirty years later he reviewed Burroughs’s biography and the collection of his letters for the Independent on Sunday and the Guardian. Though these do not read like enthusiastic manifestos, Ballard still compares Burroughs to Joyce.

[24] Ballard’s admiration for Jarry at the time can also be seen in his short stories from the 1960s, first and foremost ‘The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’, which is an intertextual echo of Alfred Jarry’s ‘The Crucifixion Consider as an Uphill Bicycle Race’.

[25] In 1994 this article was revised and reprinted as ‘Introduction’ in Salvador’s Dali’s Diary of a Genius.

[26] His analyses of psychopathology in this magazine even include a review of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, in which he compares Hitler to Oswald and, surprisingly to Leopold Bloom – a self-educated man in the streets who tries to control the cross-referential knowledge he acquired.

[27] Compare: ‘The Kennedy assassination alone, it seems to me, makes 1963 the most important year since the war. Kennedy’s murder, the greatest mystery of the twentieth century, was the crime for which television was waiting, just as Vietnam was the war that TV needed. Together they freed the medium from the airless, studio-bound realm of stilted news announcers and staid game shows, transforming the screen into a global media landscape that soon became a direct competitor with reality itself, and may even have supplanted it (ibid.: 243), he wrote in his memories of the year 1963 in ‘The Overlit Carousel’ for the Guardian.

[28] Such as the recurrent imagery of disaster and desolation in his prose, the leitmotif of finding dead pilots in crashed aircraft and an abundance of violence.

[29] Ballard is nevertheless very careful to avoid political commitments. He turned down a prestigious offer of membership in the Royal Society of Literature (because he did not like the adjective ‘Royal’). Offered a ‘Commander of the British Empire’ medal he also turned it down. Thus he builds his public image in a consequent way, he wants to be seen as somebody ‘on the outside’, a keen and intelligent but non-committed observer.

[30] Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang, a Chinese woman who after years of life under the Mao regime managed to emigrate to the UK, describes the atrocities of Chinese governments from the point of view of a person who, just like Ballard, knows both the Far East and the affluent West. The great success of this book in England in the early 1990s is perhaps partly due to the general interest people had in China after the publication of Empire of the Sun in the mid-1980s .

[31] Or other celebrities: see for example ‘The Samurai of the Epic’ (1991), his text on Akira Kurosawa in the Guardian. Moreover, he is an unquestionable authority on Shanghai, its history and its present day, which he discusses on many occasions, a good sample of his style might be found in ‘A City of Excess’ (1991). This text written for Daily Telegraph juxtaposed the review of Harriet Sergeant’s Shanghai with the account of the 1941 evacuation of the Ballards’ house.

[32] The town of Shepperton has a very special place in Ballard’s fiction: the protagonists of Crash and The Kindness of Women live there, the action of The Unlimited Dream Company takes place there. Ballard is very fond of talking and writing about Shepperton, it seems that he purposefully wants to be associated with this town and by notoriously describing it in his novels he blurs the reality/fiction dichotomy and seems to be saying: ‘these books are about me’.

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

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

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

Dominika Oramus, 2007.

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

NOTE: Part Two is now available.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cover: New Worlds #179, Feb. 1968.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

J.G. Ballard: photo by Eamonn McCabe.

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