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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Michael Jackson’s Facelift – 2 July 2009

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

5. Dead Models – 31 October 2007

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

6. Triple Transgression – 26 December 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Goodbye, Jim…”

10. Love Among the Mannequins – 15 January 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LEFT: Image by Rick McGrath.

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

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

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

LEFT: Image by Simon Sellars.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REFERENCES

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

Empire of the Sun, French edition, Denoël (1985), with cover art ‘Singapour 1945′ by Ronald Searle. Thanks to Herve for all cover scans.

Interview by Tony Cartano & Maxim Jakubowski.

Translation by Dan O’Hara.

The following interview, originally titled ‘Le passé composé de J. G. Ballard’, appeared in Magazine Littéraire in May 1985, to mark the publication of the French edition of Empire of the Sun. As the interviewers, Tony Cartano and Maxim Jakubowski, observe, Ballard was almost the subject of a cult in France, where Crash in particular had been read rather more sympathetically than in England. In 1984 Denoël, who had previously published the French editions of The Drowned World, The Crystal World and Hello America, also brought out the first issue of their revue Science-Fiction, a special edition on Ballard.

Ballard was therefore already riding a wave of critical acclaim in France, and his interviewers here are clearly very well acquainted with his opus, so much so that their use of the adjective — le monde ballardien — slips past almost unnoticed. Their questions, too, are subtle and well-informed. In somewhat elliptically raising the problem of why there are no car-crashes in Empire of the Sun, they reveal a real and very suggestive lacuna in that particular novel: the absence of an entire complex of metaphors for one of Ballard’s most prominent obsessions. His initial reply is ingenious, if not very persuasive.

What Ballard suggests elsewhere in this interview is that, even when one characteristic theme is absent from a work, the underlying emotion may remain the same, expressed by different means. Choice of metaphor (and in Ballard’s anti-realist stories, entire settings, environments, and even chronologies can operate metaphorically) is merely a matter of tone, determined in the case of Empire of the Sun by the specific psychological apprehensions of the fourteen-year-old protagonist Jim, whose pathology is to perceive the whole of Shanghai as an expression of his own ambivalent feelings about his confinement and the paradoxical liberty it brings him.

By a generation of French readers schooled in the works of Robbe-Grillet, Roussel, Federman, Sarraute, Sollers, Pinget and Butor, and the films of Godard and Resnais, such an approach would be almost intuitively understood. To such writers, to paraphrase Samuel Beckett, reality remains a surface, whereas imagination cannot tolerate the limits of the real. No wonder, then, that French readers were more alive to the terrible affective power of Ballard’s ‘psychopathic hymn’ to the death of affect, Crash.

Dan O’Hara

TONY CARTANO/MAXIM JAKUBOWSKI: Empire of the Sun is your first ‘traditional’ novel outside the field of science fiction. Nonetheless, this book contains echoes of your customary universe: there are empty swimming-pools, the cadavers of soldiers, archetypal landscapes, as if this autobiographical novel was in some sense going to give us the key to, and the origin of the Ballardian world.

J.G. BALLARD: That’s precisely so. I reinvented my past life in the manner of the fictions I had written previously. In Shanghai, one in fact found empty swimming-pools, abandoned hotels, all the vestiges of a situation created by technological war. The novels and stories I wrote between 1956 and 1980, that’s to say before Empire of the Sun, placed the emphasis on my personal obsessions. And that’s why in this last novel I look back at my life on two accounts: Jim, my young alter ego, sees existence like a hero who might have read all my books. There’s nothing surprising in that my science fiction themes should be at work in Empire of the Sun. What writer has not been marked by his adolescence? And suppose that I had pursued the medical career of which I initially dreamt, before starting to write, and that Empire of the Sun were the first novel by a fifty-year-old man, well, it wouldn’t be the same book, because there wouldn’t have been the experience acquired by my work in science fiction. All writers develop a kind of mythology. I simply applied this personal mythology to my memories of my youth. Utilising radical forms in my SF, I had a tendency to adopt a harsher light (the emphasis there is much more violent than in the ‘novel’) so that the images stand out more forcefully. In Empire of the Sun I wanted to make it seem as if these kinds of image were appearing for the first time.

How does a science fiction novelist become a novelist, in brief?

Without this personal experience of China during the war, I would probably never have written such a novel. And in the past, I couldn’t see myself writing novels that were ‘traditional’, in the manner of Kingsley Amis or Angus Wilson, for example. I followed without any doubt in the tracks of the speculative novel. But as far as it goes, this conception of the imaginative novel is not restrictive: I readily include works such as Robinson Crusoe, Moby Dick [sic]… or even The Plague by Camus. One thing is certain: I’ll never be a naturalist novelist. And perhaps it’s that, that separates me from my friend Moorcock today.

Yes, like many other ex-authors of science fiction he too has turned his back on his original style to write ‘novels’ like The Final Programme. One could wonder about the significance of other, comparable evolutions. But be that as it may, there is incontestably a continuity of themes and of vision in your own work. The Unlimited Dream Company, in which you describe in the realist manner life after death, seems to me a novel close to Empire of the Sun. One single exception, perhaps: Crash!, this novelistic fantasy which stigmatizes the influence of the automobile on our civilization.

LEFT: Crash, French edition, Pocket n°5256 (1987).

It’s difficult to define with precision the source of such a singular obsession. It’s got nothing to do with real life. The only car accident I’ve ever had happened two weeks after I’d finished the book. Yet another good example of the fact that art doesn’t imitate nature; on the contrary, it’s nature that imitates art, and often with questionable taste. The obsessions of Crash were not artificial. I didn’t at all want to blow the fantasy out of all proportion. Truly, the obsessions which subtend that novel are without a doubt the strongest of all those which run through my work, including Empire of the Sun. It’s an extreme metaphor for a profound emotion, for a desperate attempt to find a way out of an intimate crisis. The absence of this theme in Empire of the Sun has to do with the fact that, in taking power in Shanghai in 1942, the Japanese requisitioned all the cars, thereby annulling all possibility of collision! Empire of the Sun is not the synthesis of everything I’ve written.

Up to now, you’ve sought to invent new narrative techniques: non-linearity, fragmentation of sequences, writing discontinuous with the quantified image of our lives, as you say. Conversely isn’t the autobiographical process, by definition, oriented towards a reconstitution of time?

For a long time I thought the opposite, but it’s evident that style is determined by the subject. When you take liberties nonetheless, the autobiographical form is constraining, above all if the action rests on autonomous historical events in relation to the characters. Your depiction must of necessity be synchronized with the great clock of History. Crash or The Atrocity Exhibition were very subjective fictions, in which the reader was invited to penetrate into an alienated universe, one which was at any rate very close to madness. The central personality interiorizes, if I can say this, external reality, to the point where the latter becomes an extension of his own psyche. He controls the time, a little in the manner of the mentally ill, of psychotics who live in an entirely subjective temporality. Hence the need to adapt the narrative technique to the psychological structures of the individual. It’s very different when you deal with historical facts, the order and signification of which are, in this case, imposed on the individual.

One of your stories ‘The Dead Time’ (in Myths of the Near Future) announced Empire of the Sun: for once, the protagonist was an infant, and it was also the first appearance of China in your work. Did you know then that a few years later you would write Empire of the Sun, this story being a kind of sketch, a kind of preparatory work?

Yes, that was without doubt the first inkling. ‘The Dead Time’ dates from 1977. And moreover I always knew that one day I would write Empire of the Sun, even if I repeatedly kept putting the project off ‘til later. Approaching fifty, I told myself that the moment had come. To wait longer was to take the risk not only of a failing memory but of the motivation flagging, of an enfeebling of the affective power. That said, and contrary to what I’d imagined, that wasn’t at all in evidence. At the start, I made my principal character an adult. And I quickly perceived that it didn’t work. Quite simply because my experience of China was not that of an adult. My memories of that epoch were impressed on me with great force. But this memory belonged to the fourteen-year-old boy I was then. Hence the conscious return to that story written in ’77 and the choice of a child as the hero of the book. Without ‘The Dead Time’, I would perhaps have kept my adult character and the novel would have become something else.

A more realist novel, no?

Yes, but also more fictive. The interesting thing about the fourteen-year-old is that he’s no longer a child and not yet an adult.

Myths of the Near Future, French edition, Calmann Levy, Dimensions SF (1984).

The dividing line between autobiography and fiction is a rather subtle question in Empire of the Sun. When the Times printed extracts from the book before it was published, people who had been in the Japanese camps wrote to the paper to contest your version of the facts.

First of all, I said that the events go back more than forty years. Then, these letters make more sense if one considers the hostility of my protagonist towards the British. These last are ridiculed; they’re judged severely. Look, what’s of sole import to me is the truth of the imagination which, all things considered, is separate from prosaic truth. Sticking to the pure truth is impossible. Even the most serious of historians are hard pushed to reconstitute this or that event with exactitude, and each of them has his fashion of viewing things. In my ‘imaginative’ truth, the real is the foundation on which is elaborated a fiction conforming not just to what I knew of Shanghai but to the whole of what happened then in the Far East. Everything evoked in the novel certainly took place, perhaps not in the camp where I found myself, but somewhere in that region of the world between 1937 and 1945. It’s a novel and nothing but a novel. The essence consists in awakening a certain emotional sympathy, in touching the imagination of the reader who knows nothing of the events in question. A literal account would hardly manage that. The novel enlarges the vision, it’s to do with a hypertrophied truth. The obsessions, the fantasies are almost the only element we’re sure of. Our inventions are the only realities left to us.

“The job of the novelist is to invent reality”, you wrote in the preface to the French edition of Crash.

That’s it. Consider these experiments with unrehearsed, simulated bank raids. You put questions to the public: how many cars were there, how many gangsters etc. You show them the film of the events they’ve just witnessed. No-one has the same interpretation. So how could you rely on a testimony recalled after more than forty years! A few weeks after the publication of the book in England, some fellow called me. “Jim,” he exclaimed, “how are you, old thing? It’s been a long time…” And he said that he was called Buddy or something of that kind, and that he had been interned in the room adjacent to mine. Just think: I spent three years playing with this boy the same age as me, and I remembered nothing of him! If such a detail escaped me, it proves that one can respect rigour in spirit but certainly not to the letter. And it’s true that I didn’t have a very high opinion of the British and their conduct in the camps. This most unpleasant aspect of their character came from the class system, the taste for the past, the illusion of grandeur. Of course, one musn’t generalize. There were also courageous people next to those who didn’t face up to adversity, contenting themselves with a comfortable idleness in proportion to their dreams of grandeur incarnated by this British Empire which they had in reality helped to destroy. I think of the invasion of Singapore by the Japanese or the merciless exploitation of the Far East by the West. In the closing lines of the novel, I describe Shanghai as a “terrible city”, terrible in the proper sense, that’s to say: that which inspires terror. A similarly systematic exploitation probably no longer exists in our days on this planet. On this point, my novel is very faithful to the reality of the era.

Before Empire of the Sun, at least in England, your public was not very extensive, yet in other countries, notably in France, you’re the object of a kind of cult. How do you explain the success of Empire of the Sun, an anti-British novel? Might the English be masochists?

It’s a book about the Second World War. That’s all. And about the decline of the British Empire. For the rest, I can only take into account this open-mindedness of which you speak, with regard to the great public. Most people don’t like the imaginative novel, and they like science fiction still less. Above all if it’s to do with the serious novel. That frightens them. They don’t want to think too much about what’s going to happen in the next five minutes. In general, readers balk at the allegorical mode; they prefer the naturalist novel, which seems to them to come directly from their own lives. With regard to France, I have to recognize that the reaction of the readers and the critics over fifteen years has given me the greatest encouragement one could have. Although I don’t speak a word of French, I’ve always felt myself close to symbolism or surrealism. Excuse this naïveté, but when my car disembarks at Boulogne, I can’t help myself thinking that I’ve arrived at the Holy of Holies!

LEFT: Empire of the Sun, French edition, Gallimard Folio n° 2179 (1990, 1995).

Might not the acclaim given to your work in France be explained by this unwavering taste of our compatriots for the avant-garde, or everything which resembles it, closely or distantly? Haven’t you for example been compared with William Burroughs?

You say that but, up to the Sixties, England and the United States were subject to spasms of implacable censorship. In France, one could obtain Sade, Henry Miller, Burroughs. Not here. We haven’t got this tradition of… pornography, or better, the literature of dissolution, in which the writer puts elements of abnormal psychology to serious uses. The books published in Paris by Olympia Press were a godsend. I remember that one day, Moorcock brought me several. I was sitting in this same armchair you see me in now, I read Naked Lunch. As disheartened as I was faced with the absence of prospects for the novel, I sprang up with a bound shouting ‘Hurrah!’ At last, a light! England is a very puritanical country. The protestant notion of moral progress comes to justify the elimination of everything that doesn’t accord with that rule. France, in my view, is a country where technology has always had an important influence on the collective consciousness. You haven’t only got, as we so often believe here, just the Impressionists or the Ecole de Paris, which is already quite sufficient I admit. You’ve also got engineers, and formidable inventors. And that’s perhaps the reason that you haven’t reduced Crash to a simple exercise in style, of erotic and fantastic inspiration.

You were a part of the New Worlds team, that magazine set up and led by Michael Moorcock, where in the 60s-70s there appeared the best of British science fiction. Now since, a number of New Worlds authors has produced important books: D. M. Thomas’ White Hotel, Angela Carter and her The Passion of New Eve or most recently Nights at the Circus, and you yourself today. How do you explain these writers, who ten years ago were considered marginal, occupying henceforth the premier rank of the British novel?

We haven’t changed. It’s the public who have caught up with us. In England in the 60s and 70s, the novel was secondary, far behind the visual arts as a purveyor of the imagination for a cultivated public. This latter group preferred then to interest themselves in pop-art, in David Hockney or Andy Warhol. As far as fiction was concerned, television replaced it. The producers benefited from great freedom. The creative TV shows, the dramas played the role formerly devolved upon the novel, to make observation and commentary upon the most burning contemporary issues. The novel could only decline. The Booker Prize, our most important literary prize, was awarded for the first time in 1969. At first, nobody took any notice of it, not even the editors or the journalists, still less the public. It took ten years for the situation to change. If since five or six years ago there’s been an interest in the Booker Prize, it’s quite simply because readers themselves are returning to the novel. And at the same time, there’s been a noticeable fall in television viewing figures. This disaffection is partly due to the video invasion, or to the bureaucratization of channels who’ve become less and less creative, but that’s not the main thing. It’s begun to be realized that the novel offers a unique experience: communication with the imagination of a particular individual, and television is incapable of that. Angela Carter, Michael Moorcock, myself, we’ve accordingly benefited from this open-mindedness. Now, it must be recognized that certain of our novels are not so easy to read. The British public accepts the need to make a little effort, from now on.

You’re therefore optimistic about the current state of the English novel?

The situation is very healthy. I don’t say this solely because of the success of Empire of the Sun; more generally the winds are changing. Ten years ago, very few novels appeared on the hard-cover best-seller list. Now, they occupy the top places. An extraordinary phenomenon!

All the same, you’re a very ‘visual’ writer…

Yes. Although I take care of fiction at the magazine Ambit and hence I’m led to read numerous manuscripts by young writers, I sometimes prefer contemplation of surrealist paintings. In leafing through an album of reproductions of Max Ernst, Magritte or Dalí, the cerebral alchemy which is produced in me preoccupies me much more than the better part of the novels or stories I’m led to read. With the exception of William Burroughs, who helped me to understand how my imagination functions, or rather how the world works. Still today the surrealists guide us towards a discovery of the secret formulas of reality with more certainty than most novels.

Yet André Breton announced the death of the novel.

That’s true. But literary surrealism is a little forgotten, no? What interests me greatly is surrealist painting. I would have liked to be a painter, you know. My texts are born of a desire to compensate for this frustration. I think and I write in pictorial terms.

What you call ‘inner space’?

Yes, the surrealist space…

Television and cinema play this negative role of which you just spoke. But otherwise, these media influence you profoundly. You couldn’t write what you write, nor in the manner you write if television, cinema and video didn’t exist.

That’s without doubt. The popular consciousness represents the world to itself through the prism of television. The televisual image fashions its vision, its experience of the real. Everything is predigested, as if were a matter of pre-chopped, packaged supermarket food, which only needs reheating. That’s television: it reheats a preprepared reality aimed at the audience. It’s often said that Empire of the Sun is a very cinematic novel. Doubtless that’s so, but it doesn’t proceed from a conscious and deliberate process. It’s certainly necessary that the writer should use the language to which people unconsciously refer in their perception of the world. Even though cinema and television may not be constructed along the same lines, their common grammar defines the language of our times. Nothing is possible without this basic observation. Hence, as I was just saying, the need for me to work in a style and with techniques in accordance with the material treated. The models of the classics don’t help me at all: I don’t feel obliged to read or re-read, for example, George Eliot or Henry James, that’s to say the writers of the conscious. For me, the more important tradition through which contemporary consciousness in all its complexity is articulated, is certainly television. The whole question lies in knowing how the writer manages to annex this medium to his literary approach.

In Empire of the Sun, the eye of Jim, the young hero, works like a camera. He seems to make no judgment on the reality surrounding him. His eye discovers the world. The sole reaction of which he’s capable seems to be fascination.

LEFT: The Atrocity Exhibition, French edition, Champ Libre, Chute Libre n°14 (1976).

Jim witnesses events as if he was watching a news film or a television magazine at 8 o’clock. And it’s in exactly this manner that things happened. Most of the scenes evoked in the novel — aerial attacks on the camp, bombardments of Japanese airfields by Mustangs — correspond to what I saw myself. This manner of regarding the world is that of a child. In Shanghai, I led a very protected life, away from the streets, from beggars, and so cut off from a possible emotional reaction. I’d be seated in the back seat of an American car with a chauffeur and governess, fearful of an abduction attempt. I was behind the glass, like being behind the camera — or some television spectator faced with reports on the Indochinese war, or Nicaragua or El Salvador. In The Atrocity Exhibition, I had already shown how technology kills feeling. In Shanghai, I was in a similar situation. If I had been a French boy, living with his parents under the Occupation, in a small, familiar town, I surely wouldn’t have experienced this feeling of isolation, as I would have been part of a real community. The same had I been a German or Italian fifteen-year-old. In China in the 30s and 40s, the Europeans were nothing but tourists. This division, all the more distinct as life in Shanghai was very hard, foreshadowed the death of affect brought about by systems of mass communication.

In this sense, the aggressive development of televisual information in the 60s, at the time of the Vietnam war, must not have failed to have an influence upon you.

Certainly. It reminded me of another war I had known. With the exception of the palm trees, the landscapes were almost the same — the omnipresent water, the densely-populated town suburbs, the natives who, in both cases, seemed passive, acting as if we didn’t exist.

In reality, and contrary to your novel, you weren’t alone in the Japanese camp; your parents were with you.

Yes, which proves that Jim and I are not one and the same person. I never found myself in a situation as desperate as his. My hero is orphaned. And there lies the impression that the novel is more true than the reality.

Jim believes he sees, as if in an hallucination, the light of the Nagasaki explosion. Is it a reminiscence of your obsession with the atomic bomb, such as is expressed in your science fiction works?

It’s a subject about which no-one is indifferent, no? The nuclear myth has replaced the old religious archetypes. In antiquity there was the destruction of Troy, the fall of Rome. Today we have the break-down of Western civilization and nuclear war. We think in apocalyptic terms. What contemporary writer could avoid it? That said, in our Japanese camp we had the conviction that we’d been saved by the bomb. In August 1945, nobody expected to see the Japanese surrender. They would probably never have done so. Remember their hand-to-hand combat in each small island, to the last man. In Okinawa, even the civilians perished at the side of the soldiers at the time of the attack on the island by the Americans. Okinawa was relatively close to Shanghai. And the Japanese contingent was very important in China. If one believed the rumour, the Japanese intended to deport the prisoners to camps in the countryside and dispose of them. There was no more for us to eat. When the war ended, overnight, like a film which stops abruptly after the last image, my feelings about the bomb — and this goes for all those who were in the same situation as me — were rather ambiguous. Imagine our perplexity. And without a doubt that’s the reason I’m in favour of nuclear armament. I haven’t the slightest sympathy for movements in favour of disarmament, especially our CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament). I share the view of the Americans on the matter of nuclear armament. And that goes back to the events I survived in the Far East. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions quite simply saved our lives! Without them, the Americans would have had to invade Japan and the territories in the region of Shanghai. None of us would have escaped that. That’s without a doubt. Since then, far from being an instrument of death, the atomic bomb has become for me an instrument of protection. It doesn’t embody the forces of destruction, but on the contrary, those of life and creation. It would be an error of interpretation to read the nuclear intervention in my works as a calling-into-question.

Another interesting paradox, if I might mention it: in Empire of the Sun, Jim seems fascinated by the Japanese soldiers. He must fear them, and he admires them.

Between the ages of seven and fifteen, I had the opportunity to see them at work. Today I’m fifty-four and certainly my view of things is more relative, more moderate. But you have to understand that these intractable Japanese, faithful to their Emperor and to their flag, these Japanese who would never surrender, couldn’t help but appeal to the imagination of a young adolescent in need of heroes, whereas in Singapore the English, although well their superior in numbers, were lamentably defeated by the Japanese. The British arrogance was to imagine that it would be sufficient to stop them, after Pearl Harbour, by sending two battleships, the Repulse and the Prince of Wales, without any aerial cover. The Japanese planes were only made out of bamboo and rice paper, were they not, and their pilots bespectacled incompetents! What do you believe would happen? Well, the Japanese possessed remarkable aircraft at the start of the war, and the pilots were already war-hardened by years of combat in Manchuria and China. In ten minutes, the Repulse and the Prince of Wales were sent to the bottom. And that fiasco signaled the end of the British Empire in the Far East.

One wonders at the end of the novel how Jim will readapt to life in the West, after his return to England.

One nightmare after another! I came back in ’46. A dramatic experience! It took me years to do so. And still today I don’t feel completely integrated. England is an exceedingly strange country. I’ve never had the impression of being at home here. A little like compulsory tourism, as if I were part of some diplomatic delegation.

Fascinated as you are by modern technologies, have you never thought of living in the United States?

Before going to China with my parents, I spent six months in Canada, I went to Detroit, Buffalo, the Niagara falls.* What’s more, the Shanghai I knew was entirely within the sphere of American influence: the cars, the merchandise, Coca Cola, air conditioning, the radio stations, the comics, the lifestyle, it was all American. Today, I’d very much like to go to the United States, but up to now I haven’t had the opportunity. You know, I’ve had to bring up my three children, and that doesn’t make travelling easy. And then the America that interests me is that reflected to us in the mass media. The America of cinema, of television, of magazines, of publicity — in a word, the ‘models’ seem to me more important than this or that aspect of concrete reality, of the type ‘the smell of the fields of wheat in Iowa’. No need to travel: these models are sent to us direct by satellite! These days, journeys are practically pointless.

*N.b.: the French text actually says this, but evidently an error of translation or a misunderstanding has garbled the sense. Ballard was born in Shanghai, and visited the U.S. in 1939. It was much later, in 1954, that he went to Canada with the R.A.F. It was at this time that he visited the places mentioned.

Originally published in French as ‘Le passé composé de J. G. Ballard’. Propos recueillis par Tony Cartano et Maxim Jakubowski. Magazine Littéraire 219 (May 1985), 92-7.

by Mike Holliday

Ballard’s oeuvre has many highlights: the 1960s ‘disaster trilogy’ of novels, Crash, Empire of the Sun, and short stories such as ‘The Voices of Time’ and ‘The Terminal Beach’. Not surprisingly, much of the secondary literature tends to concentrate on these key works. But even the most unremarkable of Ballard’s writings can repay close attention. One of the best examples is his ‘Court Circular’, which appeared in 1968 in Ambit magazine.

The first I heard of this curio was whilst idly perusing the ‘Bibliographies’ section of RE/Search 8/9: J.G. Ballard. There I saw an advertisement for back-issues of Ambit, including the following:
No. 37 (1968) — ‘Court Circular’; and ‘Love — A Print-out for Clair Churchill’ (Rare: $25).
Not just one, but two items by Ballard that I’d never heard of! I traced the second piece, ‘Love – A Print-out’, to David Pringle’s 1984 bibliography, where it is described as ‘concrete poetry’ … but I was left wondering what on Earth the ‘Court Circular’ might be.

Eventually I got hold of a copy of Ambit #37, and found both items on the same page:

At first the ‘Court Circular’ appears to be a straightforward, rather ordinary, concrete poem, with a bit of artwork added to fill up the space. But one thing that bothered me was the apparently minor matter of the titles: the heading for the concrete poem — ‘Love: a Print-out for Claire Churchill’ — is in a much smaller typeface than ‘J. G. Ballard’s Court Circular’, almost as if the latter were the title for the entire page.

That this might actually be the case was suggested in the previous issue of Ambit where there is an announcement of a forthcoming newspaper-styled issue:

Do not miss number 37 a big blown-up Ambit (to newspaper size). All usual newspaper features but no journalists. J. G. Ballard reserved whole court page for an advertisement. Edwin Brock appointed Sports Editor. Henry Graham education correspondent. Lots and lots of pictures by all your favourite Ambit artists. Plenty of real news of the Going World.

(Ambit #36, 1968)

But if the ‘Court Circular’ was some form of advertisement, what might it be saying?

In order to understand that, we have to go back to the sorts of things that Ballard was working on during the period 1967 to 1968. In a cultural milieu where experimentation was almost mandatory, Ballard now counted among his friends and companions in experimentation: Eduardo Paolozzi — the Scottish sculptor and artist, Dr. Christopher Evans — the ‘maverick scientist’ who would partly inspire the character of Vaughan in Crash, and Martin Bax — a London paediatrician whose main off-curricular interest was editing Ambit, a magazine which he had started in 1959 to provide a mixture of poetry, fiction and art.

Inspired in part by these new friendships, Ballard’s work had gone well beyond prose fiction. A prime example — and particularly significant if the ‘Court Circular’ is some form of advertisement — is the series of what Ballard described as ‘advertiser’s announcements’, the first of which had appeared in the summer of 1967. Eventually a total of five such announcements would be published during the period 1967 to 1970.

The fourth of Ballard’s advertiser’s announcements: from Ambit #45, 1970.

The concept behind these announcements was to advertise ideas, as Ballard explained in a 1968 interview:

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

Interview with Jannick Storm, Speculation #21, recorded July 1968.

Another of Ballard’s interests in this period was textual and visual collage. Martin Bax has related how both he and Ballard were fascinated by the archive of their friend Paolozzi:

Eduardo has a huge image archive of material – which I think fascinated Jim very much. I suppose what Jim was interested in was Eduardo’s style of collecting images of the 20th century … I’ve been in his studio when we were doing some images, and he said, ‘What about a playing card, Martin?’ I said, ‘A playing card?’ And he opened a drawer which was totally full of packs of playing cards which he’d bought all over the world – some extremely sexy ones of ladies with nothing on … Eduardo’s used that type of material in his silkscreen work, and Ballard saw this as a way in which you could use this material in texts. There was a piece by Eduardo called ‘Moonstrips’ and ‘General Dynamic Fun’ that was published in Ambit. He had collected 300 or 400 pages of texts, and Ballard and I went through this huge pile of texts together and we cut and arranged it so it has some sort of curious logic. It starts off with a piece about internists locking up wealthy women in Long Island mental hospitals, and goes through a curious range of material.

Interview in ‘Re/Search 8/9: J. G. Ballard’, recorded in 1983.

Advertisement for Volume 1 of Paolozzi’s ‘Moonstrips’: from Ambit #33, 1967.

The photograph of the models that formed part of the ‘Court Circular’ had originally been included in the Paolozzi/Ballard/Bax piece ‘Moonstrips — General Dynamic F.U.N.’, where it had been accompanied by a babble of ad-copy:

ALSO AVAILABLE FOR THE FIRST TIME, A ROMANTIC BIT OF MAQUILLAGE, VIENNA ROSE LIPSTICK-IN-THE-ROUND WITH A SABLE CONTOUR BRUSH TO DIP IN THE LITTLE ROUGE POT AND STROKE COLOR ON YOUR LIPS. THEN, READY TO LET GO FROM A WELL-PACKED QUIVER, THE INFINITE POWERS OF ATTRACTION THAT ARE UNIQUELY YOURS. THE WALTZING DRESS IN PURPLE SATIN (BELOW)-A LUXURIOUS CONCOCTION–SKIRT, BILLOWING FROM A TINY STRAPLESS BODICE, COVERED WITH A JACKET OF LIGHTS-CATERPILLARS OF CHENILLE, TWINKLING WITH FIREFLIES OF CRYSTALS, SILVER AND BLUE SEQUINS. BY SARMI, AT BERGDORF GOODMAN; NAN DUSKIN, PHILADELPHIA; NEIMAN-MARCUS BOTH PAGES; JEWELRY BY KENNETH LANE. KISLAV GLOVES. THESE PAGES: ALL COIFFURES BY THE ANTOINE SALON OF NEIMAN-MARCUS

Photo of models plus ad-copy, from Paolozzi’s ‘Moonstrips – General Dynamic F.U.N.’; Ambit #33, 1967.

When we turn to Ballard’s prose fiction output in 1968, the year the ‘Court Circular’ was published, we find that he was in the middle of writing the short stories that were to form The Atrocity Exhibition. The previous issue of Ambit had contained one such story, ‘The Great American Nude’, from which many of the usual ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ themes are missing: there’s no car crashes, no JFK assassination or Jackie Kennedy, no atrocity films, no gigantic billboards, and Kline, Coma and Xero — the ‘couriers of the unconscious’ — are conspicuous by their absence. Instead, ‘Great American Nude’ concentrates on the theme of the erotic. Central to the story is a gigantic abstract sculpture of the actress Elizabeth Taylor, and there are some humorous asides on the male’s perception of the female; for example, one of the characters, Captain Webster, is afraid to ‘climb up on her’ in case he falls into ’some unpleasant orifice’.

Cover of Ambit #36, 1968, which included Ballard’s ‘The Great American Nude’.

Ballard’s emphasis on the erotic during this period may be in part due to Paolozzi. Michael Moorcock has recollected that in 1967/8, ‘Jimmy fell in with Paolozzi [and] shifted in that direction. Techno stuff. Women with big tits and guns’ (quoted in Iain Sinclair, Crash: David Cronenberg’s Post-mortem on J G Ballard’s ‘Trajectory of Fate’, 1999).

Something else that was evidently important for Ballard at that time is the notion that we live on three different levels simultaneously, and that meaning is created where those different levels intersect. This idea is put into the mouth of Dr. Nathan in ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’, which was published in mid-1967 under its original title ‘The Death Module’. It had first appeared, using many of the same phrases, in comments that Ballard made in a BBC radio interview with George MacBeth:

… one has many layers, many levels of experience going on at the same time. On one level one might have the world of public events, Cape Kennedy, Vietnam, political life, on another level the immediate personal environment, the rooms we occupy, the postures we assume. On a third level, the inner world of the mind. All these levels are, as far as I can see them, equally fictional, and it is where these levels interact that one gets the only kind of valid reality that in fact exists nowadays. The characters in these stories occupy positions on these various levels. On the one hand, a character is displayed on an enormous billboard as a figment in a CinemaScope epic; on another level he’s an ordinary human being moving through the ordinary to-and-fro of everyday life; on a third level he’s a figment in his own fantasies. These various aspects of the character interact and produce the main reality of the fiction.

‘The New Science Fiction: A Conversation between J. G. Ballard and George MacBeth’, broadcast on the BBC Third Programme, 29th March 1967.

Pulling all this together, we can see that in 1967/8 Ballard was particularly interested in the advertisement of ideas, in textual and visual collage, in eroticism and the male’s perception of the female, and in the idea of three levels of experience. And all of this is present in the ‘Court Circular’ in Ambit #37. Here’s what we see …

Firstly there is the concrete poem ‘Love: A Print-out…’. This is explicitly personalised — it’s ‘for Claire Churchill’. It deals with the everyday facets of sex and love — ‘hair’, ‘fuck’, ‘girl’, ’suck’. And it presents itself as having a structure: firstly because it is laid out in the form of a regular grid, and secondly because it can be read in the form of a ‘boy meets girl’ story, ending with ‘wife’ and ‘baby’. (Of course, we have to impose that linearity on the poem ourselves by reading it from the top left and then consecutively down each column — it’s actually just a series of separate words spaced out in a regular display.) So this is sexuality, or the perception of the female by a male, on the level of everyday life.

Next, there is the photograph of the models. The girls all look much the same, and have a ‘classic female figure’ of the time; they all wear underwear that is designed to say ’sexy’ but without actually being especially erotic; they all wear a broad and meaningless smile. And the photo is an ‘image’ — it’s presumably from Paolozzi’s archive, and it has even appeared in Ambit the previous year, as part of ‘Moonstrips — General Dynamic F.U.N.’ This is sexuality at the level of mediatised reality, ‘a figment in CinemaScope’ as Ballard puts it.

Finally, there are the drawings by Bruce Mclean. Here the individual features of the woman cannot be seen … what we have instead are the elements of erotic fantasy: the long hair, the arched back, an open mouth, the over-emphasised thighs in various positions, the arm hanging languidly down from the body, a glimpse of the pudenda (it seems to be a black blob, perhaps the ‘orifice’ that worries Captain Webster in ‘The Great American Nude’). This is sexuality as perceived by a man on the level of the imagination.

Two of Bruce Mclean’s drawings from the ‘Court Circular’.

So the ‘Court Circular’ displays sexuality — or, more specifically, the perception of the female by the male — in terms of all three of Ballard’s levels of reality. And perhaps Bruce Mclean’s drawings symbolise the power that the imagination has to flow into the interstices and create a meaningful reality in the gaps and angles between the different levels of our existence.

This, then, is the advertisement within ‘J. G. Ballard’s Court Circular’. Perhaps it is a touch didactic … but Ambit #37 is, after all, a newspaper.

Front page of the newspaper issue; Ambit #37, 1968.

Recently, I was seriously puzzled by an attack from an anonymous (of course) ‘academic’ (female) on another forum that branded the contents of this site as ’seething with testosterone’. Well, you make of that what you will, but it reminded me of an incident back when I first attempted my doctoral thesis on Ballard, some 12 years ago. I vividly recall delivering a paper at a postgrad seminar and being roundly attacked during question time by a woman who was disgusted by my support of such a ‘deeply misogynistic writer’. I remember replying that in Ballard, it’s actually the male characters that have a pretty hard time of it, and if anything their flaws are more magnified and on display, thus supporting my interrogator’s sense of outrage about male attitudes in a roundabout way if she could only bring herself to see it thus.

Related to this, there was something else going on about Ballard’s female characters, something to do with male inadequacy in the wake of female intelligence, that I couldn’t quite articulate at the time but which Joanne McNeil of Tomorrow Museum has perhaps nailed, in this recent interview over at Deep Glamour:

DG: Who are the most glamorous characters in science fiction?

JMcN: J. G. Ballard’s female characters are straight out of film noir, except a million times smarter. The only thing he obsesses over more than airports and drained swimming pools is feminine intellect. He barely describes their appearance, but instead gives them high-power jobs, introverted tendencies, and sharp wit. They are doctors, never nurses. They are usually thinking one step ahead of the male protagonist. He recognizes that intellectual curiosity and femininity aren’t contradictory. I mean, this is a man who confessed to a crush on Hillary Clinton in a recent interview. Susan Sontag so much adored his books she briefly planned to script and direct The Crystal World with Jean Seberg in a starring role.

Rosanna Arquette and Holly Hunter are two of my favorite actresses, but it was Deborah Unger who epitomized “Ballardian” for me in Crash. She was so perplexingly remote and intelligent. She’s not a bitch, but she’s not quirky, rarely smiles, and has a tentative way of interacting with other people. Unger’s mother is a nuclear scientist and she studied economics and philosophy in college. So she really is that Ballardian ideal analytic woman. That she’s as beautiful as she is makes it all the more disarming.

ABOVE: Photo by Steven Meisel.

ABOVE: Photo by Kohei Yoshiyuki.

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

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

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

..:: Previously on Ballardian

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

Hans Ulrich Obrist. Formulas for Now.

What do you get if you multiply sex by technology? The future (according to JG Ballard, in this book). Obrist, co-director of the Serpentine Gallery, asked creatives and academics to invent a formula that summed up modern life: Jeff Koons, Richard Dawkins and Damien Hirst were among those to oblige. Out now. (Thames & Hudson).

ABOVE: Image via Hard Mag.

The following written interview with J.G. Ballard was first published in issue 1 of Hard Mag in 2005. It was conducted by Dan Mitchell and Simon Ford, the publisher and editor respectively of the magazine, and was intended to follow up some of the questions raised in Ford’s article about Ballard’s ‘Crashed Cars’ exhibition of 1970, published in the same edition. The article has since been revised and republished over at /seconds and if you’re unfamiliar with the exhibition, it makes for a great introduction. Meanwhile, the interview makes its first reappearance beyond the confines of Hard Mag here at ballardian.com.

Many thanks to Dan, Simon and Hard Mag for sanctioning this second wind.

Interview Date: March 2004 (1756 words)
Original font: Lucida Sans Typewriter Oblique (9-point)

Copyright Hard Mag 2005.

QUESTION 1
We’re interested in the reaction of the visitors to ‘Crashed Cars’. Do you think the work and a similar presentation today would elicit a similar response? Would an audience today be more detached and more self-conscious about their reactions? Are the reasons for going to such events different today from then? Was the audience likely to be more critical then? How did the audience see themselves then (today’s art world audience can be accused of looking to be seen looking good), were the visitors part of an elite, did you see them as sophisticated? Or perhaps as mere extras in a visual field dominated by your work (the grass to the cows)?

ANSWER 1
At the opening party there was wildly drunken reaction, and what seemed to be barely repressed hostility came bursting out. During the month on show the cars were attacked, daubed with paint and so on. Many visitors stared at them numbly. I don’t think there would be the same reaction today, 35 years later. Since then there have been so many provocations that the audience response to three crashed cars would be much more calm. People are still shockable today — as with the Myra Hindley handprints portrait — but nothing defuses a sense of shock more than the sense that it’s all been done before. Duchamp’s urinal would produce no gasps, in fact I think a [sic] saw it, or a replica, at the Hayward gallery some ago. No-one was looking at it. I said to my girl-friend that the only way to startle the audience would have been to urinate into the thing, which I think someone has now done. I don’t think today’s audiences are all that different. Apart from the Arts Lab regulars, the audience in 1969 were readers of International Times, rather than today’s Time Out, and people interested in any new ideas that might be floating about. They certainly weren’t extras — I was very keen to see their reactions to the cars. The whole thing was a psychological test, to see whether my hunches were sufficiently confirmed for me to go on and write Crash. They were. The show’s object was not to shock, but to prompt a response.

QUESTION 2
What would have to be done to create a similar response today, given the increased number of international artists, the larger scale of the art world, the many crossovers with global finance through sponsorship deals and the post-young British artist Tate Modern era/culture?

ANSWER 2
To shock people today is as easy as it ever was. Set up a situation that elicits pity sympathy and concern and then deride the sentiments — the Hindley portrait did that. But that kind of outrage has been devalued, and the artists with it. Besides, there are far more subtle ways of unsettling people. Think of the outrage that greeted the impressionists. Dali’s melting watches, Ernst’s eroded rocks are far more disturbing than anything dreamed up by the Turner Prize.

ABOVE: Ballard’s crashed Pontiac. Photo via The Terminal Collection.

QUESTION 3
Were the cars for sale as artworks? Did you see them as artworks, then and now? Were you asked or did you ever plan to do any more shows? What is your general attitude to the art world, did you ever want to be an artist?

ANSWER 3
They weren’t for sale, though there is a photograph of the Pontiac with a ‘£3500′ [sic] price tag in the windscreen, which I think was published in the Daily Mirror and was probably put there by the cameraman. The cars were certainly sculptures of a kind. I wasn’t asked to do any more shows. The Arts Lab closed for good soon after, and the 1970s began, a dreary decade. I saw the cars as a one off. I’ve always been very interested in painting and sculpture, which are a better key to the public’s imagination than the novel, a form that tends to resist innovation. In many ways the art world is ferociously competitive, far more than the literary world, whre [sic] writers are protected by their agents and can work in total isolation if they want to (like myself).

QUESTION 4
Was Euphoria Bliss the stripper/interviewer at the opening party? Do you have a copy or can you summarize what you described as the stripper’s ‘damning review’ she wrote for the underground paper Friendz?

ANSWER 4
No, the interviewer was not Euphoria Bliss, who was highly intelligent (and I hope still is) and completely tuned into the various projects I experimented with — stripping to a recital of a scientific paper at the ICA and so on. These were part of my then association with the magazine Ambit, for which I was trying to drum up publicity. Euphoria, who worked as a professional stripper, was extremely beautiful, and easy-going. The interviewer/stripper at the Arts Lab was recruited by someone at the gallery. She disapproved strongly of the cars, deciding that she would only appear topless (a fascinating response, it seemed to me at the time). A couple of drunken guests manhandled her in the back seat of the crashed Pontiac, and she claimed that they had tried to rape her. I can’t remember the review in detail or her name, but she was damning.

ABOVE: Euphoria Bliss holds court. Front row left to right: Euphoria, Eduardo Paolozzi, Ballard, Michael Foreman (art editor of Ambit) and Dr Martin Bax, editor of Ambit. We don’t know who the chaps at the back are. This photo was taken in 1972, at the Royal Academy of Art in front of a Paolozzi sculpture that was being exhibited.

QUESTION 5
Would you produce something similar to ‘Crashed Cars’ today? Has the car, at the same time as maintaining its position as the engine of capitalism, lost something of it’s power to signify by its very dominance and accessibility (for example, cars are smashed up for fun on quiz shows to aid the spectacle). Has the ‘crashed car’ taboo shifted, and if so to where?

ANSWER 5
I would if I wanted to test some idea, though I think those days are past for me. I think the car has retained its hold on us, partly by the way in which it elicits aggression and an illusion of freedom and partly because while driving we control the possibility of our own deaths. The Princess Di death took on extra resonance that would have been absent if she had died in a hotel fire.

QUESTION 6
Are you still interested in creating ‘posters’ that can be read as novels, or has the poster lost some of its power? If so what has it been replaced by?

ANSWER 6
Sadly, the economies of publishing are against the idea.

QUESTION 7
Was Millennium People intended as an attack on the middle classes? Compare to the 1959 short story ‘Now: Zero’, a text that kills its reader.

ANSWER 7
Not an attack, no. As one of the middle classes. I feel for their plight. Their rebellion in MP turns out to be pointless, since they are the last group who could hope to rebel — docility is in their bones. The book is about pointless violence, and pointless protest, which are increasingly around us today. It’s a waste of time looking for a motive, when the absence of a motive is the only point. This makes Hungerford, Columbine and so on impossible to predict. The Islamist attacks on New York and Madrid are another matter entirely.

ABOVE: JGB photo via Hard Mag.

QUESTION 8
Why blow up Tate Modern? Is it because it is now the representative site of contemporary high culture, an instrument of the massification of that high culture, and the ’spiritual’ heart of new religion, a cathedral to the art of spectacle? Or is it a cultural Auschwitz? Would it be better to disseminate this culture far and wide, so there was a mini Tate in every shopping centre, or really dissolve the barrier between culture and life Helmut Newton photos used to sell Sainsbury’s economy baked beans?

ANSWER 8
My revolutionaries see Tate Modern as one of the ways in which the middle classes are brain-washed, along with education generally. (Not a view I share). The process of popularising doesn’t necessarily entail dilution or dumbing down — the Hollywood film was popular but highly original in its heyday. But the modern movement set out to be provocative and revolutionary from the start (Manet?), and popularising the avant-garde is bound to blunt the blade. The entertainment conglomerates that now rule our world can neutralise and absorb almost anything, and one needs educated feet to dance just out of reach of their embrace. People have done it — Dalí, Helmut Newton, Francis Bacon and others.

QUESTION 9
Are the middle classes really at fault here, squeezed as they are between the workers (soldiers, policemen, builders etc.) and the ruling elite who use the workers to maintain and build order? What else are they supposed to do? This comes close to a very important theme for Hard Mag, just what is the role of the middle class intellectual/artist/writer/thinker? What is the responsibility now? Have things changed much in the last 50-60 years? What would you be interested in seeing happen in the next 5-10 years? How far can you see things (such as the art spectacle, middle class attitudes of unfairness and intolerance) continuing to accelerate?

ANSWER 9
The middle classes aren’t at fault. They are the yeomen class, who have given loyal service to the feudal lord, refining their archery and swordsmanship, and now find that they are no longer needed, since the feudal lord has hired foreign mercenaries equipped with the new wonder-weapon, the flintlock. As for the special problems facing the middle-class artist — it looks as if alienation is going to be imposed on him whether he likes it or nor. Most artists and writers in the past have been middle-class, the surrealists to a man, with backgrounds similar to those of the Baader-Meinhof gang. However, the middle-class world against which they rebelled was vast and self-confident. Who today would bother to rebel against the Guardian or Observer-reading, sushi-nibbling, liberal, tolerant middle-class? I think the main target the young writer/artist should rebel against is himself or herself. Treat oneself as the enemy who needs to be provoked and subverted.

QUESTION 10
Is there a role today for an avant-garde? And if so what fields of operation are open to such an avant-garde? Is there the possibility for such an avant-garde within the art world and the world of publishing today?

ANSWER 10
Yes, though it won’t necessarily appear in the places we expect. Follow your own obsessions, use them like stepping stones. and with luck you’ll find your way into your mysterious inner self.

All the best,
J.G. Ballard

..:: MORE INFO:
+ Hard Mag

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

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

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

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

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

Peter says:

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

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

Elsewhere, he elaborates, suggesting that we are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the info (via the JGB Yahoo list):

Contemporary Critical Perspectives: J.G. Ballard

Series Editors: Jeannette Baxter, Sebastian Groes, Sean Matthews

Editor: Jeannette Baxter

J.G. Ballard is one of the most significant British writers of the contemporary period. His award-winning novels are stock features of school and university reading lists, yet the appeal of Ballard’s idiosyncratic imagination is such that his work also enjoys something of a cult status with the reading public. The hugely successful cinematic adaptations of Empire of the Sun (Spielberg, 1987) and Crash (Cronenberg, 1996) further confirm Ballard’s unique place within the literary, cultural and popular imaginations.

Although J. G. Ballard is known primarily as a novelist, he is also the author of over one hundred short stories, a number of which have been adapted for television and theatre. For the first time, Contemporary Critical Perspectives: J. G. Ballard places a discussion of Ballard’s short stories alongside readings of the major novels in order to explore issues of form, narrative and experimentation.

Another defining element of this volume is its coverage of Ballard’s extensive catalogue of cultural journalism. Over the course of five decades, Ballard has written for publications as various as The Daily Telegraph, Playboy, the Guardian, Time Out, New Worlds, The Times and Vogue. Contemporary Critical Perspectives: J. G. Ballard is the first study of its kind to explore Ballard’s significance as a cultural commentator, and to investigate the relationship between his creative and critical writings.

Whilst offering fresh readings of dominant and recurring themes in Ballard’s writing, including history, sexuality, violence, consumer capitalism, and urban space, this edition of Contemporary Critical Perspectives engages with hitherto unexplored questions of post 9/11 politics, terrorism, neo-imperialism, science, morality and ethics.

Contents:

General Introduction: Jeannette Baxter (UEA)

Biography/Chronology: Jeannette Baxter

Chapter 1: Brian Baker(Lancaster) ‘The Geometry of the Space Age: J. G. Ballard’s short fiction and science fiction of the 1960s’: a reassessment of J. G. Ballard’s early work.’

Chapter 2: Jake Huntley (UEA) ‘Re-reading The Atrocity Exhibition.’

Chapter 3: Sebastian Groes (Liverpool Hope), ‘From Shanghai to Shepperton: Place and Space in the Work of J. G. Ballard.’

Chapter 4: Corin Depper (Kingston), ‘Death at Work: The Cinematic Imagination of J. G. Ballard.’

Chapter 5: Umberto Rossi Mind is the Battlefield: Reading Ballard’s ‘Life Trilogy’ as War Literature

Chapter 6: David Pringle, ‘The genres of J. G. Ballard’s non-fiction.’

Chapter 7: Jeannette Baxter (UEA), ‘Visions of Europe in Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes’

Chapter 8: Philip Tew (Brunel), ‘The possibilities of sacrifice, the certainties of trauma: J. G. Ballard’s Postmillennial Fiction.’

An interview with J.G. Ballard by Jeannette Baxter

Translation by Dan O’Hara.

JGB in 1985: photo by Bleddyn Butcher.

The following interview was conducted in Shepperton at some point during the autumn of 1982, shortly before the publication of Myths of the Near Future, and published in 1985 in a German collection of essays on Ballard called J. G. Ballard: Der Visionär des Phantastischen, edited by Joachim Körber. Ballard’s next book would be Empire of the Sun, in 1984, but his concerns here seem far from his own past.

Much of the interview concerns influences, and Ballard is particularly strident in his rejection of Burroughs’ influence, whom he appears to see as a modernist after the fact. He stresses the distinction between the modernists’ exploration of subjective consciousness and his own method, which affirms the outer world as a reality to be comprehended by consciousness, rather than created by it. Rarely has he stated his materialism so explicitly. In this context, his assertion that The Atrocity Exhibition is like a machine working to analyse the concrete relations of the outer world seems hardly a metaphor.

Dan O’Hara.

LEFT: ‘Die Stimmen der Zeit’ (‘The Voices of Time’), the German title for part 1 of Ballard’s Complete Short Stories collection (German edition published 2007).

FUCHS & KÖRBER: Even today quite a few critics are still of the opinion that Science Fiction concerns itself with the future. Yet you yourself have said repeatedly that it is with the present that SF must concern itself. The present in England is surely interesting enough to deal with. How do you see it and its possible consequences for the future?

BALLARD: Now, we have here at present a situation such as has never arisen before. We find ourselves in a process of drastic social transformation. I can’t say what the world will look like if these upheavals take effect, but they will in any event be significant. Youth rebellion, violence in the street, such things have never yet occurred in Great Britain, and the middle classes and moneyed upper classes particularly are faced with a problem, as they lack any experience of it. Of course there have been social revolutions that only took place through violence in all eras, for example in the Twenties, when fascism was strong, but I scarcely believe that these developments can be compared to each other. Nowadays there are fewer poor, and the revolt issues less from need and much more from weariness.

Violence in the streets is something one knows rather better from continental Europe, but not in England where such things are quite unheard of. I can’t imagine a larger proportion of the working classes in this country being drawn towards the right wing, especially since it was precisely the Conservative administration which is at least in part responsible for the current state of affairs. But I also don’t see any danger of class war coming here, that might change some aspect of the British system. England is an expressly conservative country, it was always so, and that’s as true as ever today. The unrest is not as bad as the media and particularly television would have us believe. It is in fact true that many of the young are in revolt, skinheads, punks and so on, but their number is smaller than one would suspect – which naturally should not be taken to mean that their cause or their concerns are any less serious or important on that account.

FUCHS & KÖRBER: That you yourself have mentioned punk directly offers us an excellent opportunity to re-direct things to another subject. The modern punk revolution, especially in music, seems to be comparable with the mood of literary upheaval in the Sixties, which in the end led to SF’s ‘New Wave’. This is also the view of Michael Moorcock, then the principal writer. What’s your view of this?

BALLARD: Now, one can certainly draw some parallels. Punk is a movement of rebellion against outdated and overbearing values. But there, the parallels are in my view already exhausted, as the New Wave was a cultural affair in the first place, a quest for a literary breakaway, whereas punk goes much further. Punks often aren’t looking for any new direction, but only to denounce the old. And the New Wave orientated itself towards the future, whereas punk rock, as much as I pick up from listening to the radio, is really reliant on older musical traditions.

FUCHS & KÖRBER: Let’s stick closer to literature. Even when you published your first stories there was, in certain ways, a dominant atmosphere of upheaval, even if it was entirely different. Or can one not see it that way?

BALLARD: Certainly one can! My first story appeared in 1957, and that was the year of Sputnik. I still remember it all exactly today: we sat in front of the radios and listened to the signals from this first artificial satellite – nothing more than bleep, bleep, bleep. And that really was a break such as one dramatically, emphatically cannot understand. This event seemed to change everything at a stroke. On the radio it was as if it was a celebration of the beginning of a new world, and it was also actually the beginning of the space age. It was unimaginable: one heard messages from other planets!

1957 was the real beginning of the space era, and it seemed to confirm everything that the old guard of SF authors had dreamed of and written together up to then. In those days it was like an intoxication; Campbell’s prophecies seemed to be really becoming true. (Laughs). And yet I was already back then of the view that outer space was not the right environment for science fiction. SF concerned itself with the gigantic proportions of outer space, and as a result the psychological component was forgotten completely – and naturally the literary aspect, too. I knew the way couldn’t lead outwards, because the space programme had already taken off. There was nothing really interesting to explore. The way had to lead inwards, in my view. That was natural for me, as I’d always been greatly interested in psychology. For me, SF was and is the only legitimate literature of the space age, but back then it took a wrong turn in a direction which never interested me personally because it wasn’t based on a psychological component, at least, not in a clear and deliberate way. The Fifties were an interesting time in various ways (as it seems the Eighties will also be), and one didn’t need a literature dealing with imaginary worlds when the most fascinating was the current-day on our own planet.

In my opinion, it’s important for a science fiction author to pay attention to and describe the present, the modern landscape of communications, technological and scientific developments, and so forth. Even in the Fifties so many changes had begun, the media landscape expanded, TV, high-circulation magazines, tourism gradually grew, pop music, all these developments had a direct influence upon human life, and in fact a much more direct influence than the space programme and the like – and no-one dealt with it in a proper way. The first computers were developed, the automation of modern industry began, technology also gained an ever greater influence over the lives of people who had nothing at all to do with it directly. And then naturally there was always the nuclear threat in the background, which hadn’t been there to such an extent before. And if one thinks of all these fascinating facts, it really is just too laughable that a literature such as science fiction, with such great opportunities, concerned itself with what was taking place on… pah, Proxima Centauri, or with invasions of giant dragons and such trivialities. The future began back then, in the present, and we were all witness to it!

LEFT: ‘Vom Leben und Tod Gottes’ (‘The Life and Death of God’), the German title for part 2 of Ballard’s Complete Short Stories collection (German edition published 2007).

FUCHS & KÖRBER: And your view found nothing to mirror it in American science fiction?

BALLARD: I believe a little of it rubbed off there, too, at least they still talk of a New Wave over there even now, in connexion with authors like Harlan Ellison or Roger Zelazny. But I don’t believe one can compare that with the actual New Wave in England. Authors like Zelazny or Harlan Ellison represent the world without reflecting on the times in which they live or write, they chiefly plunder ancient myths and dress them up in new clothes. That may be new and fascinating for American SF, but it isn’t original. At present, the big market for science fiction in America is the cinema, with films like Star Wars and so on. And hence SF is reduced to the level of comic strips, and from that a view all too easily arises that the whole of science fiction is worthless rubbish.

Science fiction is very popular today, and it was in those days too, but what differs from then is that today, the whole machinery is more geared towards commercial exploitation. Back then there were magazines like Galaxy, F&SF and New Worlds, in which one could publish original and unusual material. I find it rather hard to believe that a magazine like for example the very popular Omni would today publish one of the really innovative and ground-breaking stories of the Fifties, like something by Pohl and Kornbluth. Of course they’d be published there today, but only because they’re now known.

We live today in an era in which the sci-fi game is becoming ever more popular, and naturally that’s bad news for the serious science fiction writer. To outline things from my point of view: when I began SF had just had a terrifically big boom; in the USA there were 35 different magazines on the market, and even in this country there were six. That offered the serious interested writer a great opportunity to express himself. Writers like Philip K. Dick were popular back then.

FUCHS & KÖRBER: How did the New Wave proceed, anyway? In the Sixties there existed a brigade of interesting authors who were relatively quiet in the Seventies. And just now, at the beginning of the Eighties, many are coming late to fame and honour. One could perhaps here mention John Sladek as one of the best examples. What was the matter with the New Wave in the Seventies? And why have many authors become popular only now? Do you think that the time is ripe for the kind of literature which they wrote back then, and which largely met with disconcertment on the part of the readership?

BALLARD: Now first of all, the magazine New Worlds was suspended, which had been a common forum for many of us for a long time. That was a hard blow. Also many simply lost interest in SF, and went into other fields. Most simply didn’t manage to break into the American market, since there were no more opportunities to publish in England, at least no magazines that were sold under the label ‘Science Fiction’.

As far as I myself am concerned, I also distanced myself a little from SF at the beginning of the Seventies. After the stories in The Atrocity Exhibition appeared in book form, I worked very intensively on the novel Crash… and that’s how it went. I think I also somehow lost interest in the American magazine market. The USA was not nearly as interesting as in the Fifties and Sixties, and I think back then that applied to the whole of Western Europe. The USA had lost its supremacy in every respect, nothing really original and new came out of it anymore. Europe in the Seventies was (and still is today) far more interesting. Nowhere in the world can one follow such a clash of opposing political ideologies as in Western Europe. In this respect, there must surely also follow a cultural rapprochement with the Soviet Union at the least, in the long term the Soviet Union has to open itself to Europe – but Europe must also reciprocate. And the USA is an obstacle to this process. I think that Europe is a far more fascinating place, because the United States has simply lost the flair it had in the Fifties, it no longer has a monopoly on the future, the unlimited possibilities it once had. I said at the beginning that I expect interesting developments in this country. I think one can confidently extend that comment to the whole of Europe. Europe is a bubbling cauldron of constant psychological and political change, whereas in the USA there isn’t anything at all like politics in our sense. In the USA we have something to do not with opposed political ideologies, but at best a power struggle between men neither of whom is any better than each other, who are at most perhaps more power-hungry. Look at how mediocre American politicians are! Or the trade unions – in the United States the unions are completely apolitical, something unthinkable in Europe. Men like Reagan for example… or let’s take Ted Kennedy, who is already regarded as a left-leaning liberal in his country. Here – I don’t mean just in Germany – but here one would undoubtedly put him at best in the liberal wing of the conservative party.

LEFT: German compilation containing Crash, Concrete Island and High-Rise (2004).

Many writers here lost interest completely in the USA and instead concerned themselves more with Europe. I can say that for myself, at the least. At the beginning of the Seventies I wrote Crash, The Concrete Island [sic] and High Rise, and none of these books is strictly speaking science fiction – they are all concerned rather with certain social trends that were becoming apparent in Europe, and I tried to realize them novelistically. Accordingly these books did very poorly in the USA.

The same is true of Moorcock. In the Fifties we all looked to the USA, because SF there produced original achievements in those days. But no longer, in the Seventies. Take Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius novels – they’re very typically European, inspired by London and the so-called pop-culture of ‘Swinging London’, a radical departure from the American model.

For me the gap between European and American science fiction opened up in the Sixties, because the public there simply couldn’t understand the New Wave experiment – still less the editors and publishers. And if for once one of the New Wave books did stray over to America, it was mostly by mistake, because publishers bought in an author without seeing the work. That happened to me with The Atrocity Exhibition, and I recall a very nice story about that, one which in many respects demonstrates the exact situation. The Atrocity Exhibition was bought by a US press, and shortly before the distribution of the book, this respectable publisher glanced over the contents and saw to his horror that it contained stories such as ‘Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan’ and the like. Consequently he had the whole print-run pulped, all but my author’s specimen copies. Unbelievable! And afterwards I permitted myself the pleasure of sending a copy to Ronald Reagan, complaining about whichever respectable US publisher dared to publish this smut and filth. Of course I never got any reply, but it was worth it, for me.

Back to the topic. If a movement such as the New Wave forms, it always takes a while until new borderlines are defined and the whole thing takes shape. In the Sixties there arrived many new authors who were published in the genre, and who afterwards seemingly abandoned it. The only reason for that is that the complete shape of the innovations of the New Wave still wasn’t fully defined throughout. I myself never set out with the conscious intent: ‘And now you write science fiction.’ I always only wrote what was important to me at a particular moment, and then realized it was science fiction in retrospect. In the Sixties the situation was different again. In those days I wrote much that wasn’t strictly speaking science fiction, but that was published in related magazines and anthologies. The anthologies grew particularly in the Seventies, when the great dying-off of the magazines began. For me that was a shame in all sorts of respects. I like anthologies, I like to read original anthologies, but still they lack the freshness of a monthly magazine. Anthologies get created in publishing house offices, and by and large they’re conceived by the publishers as being in the same mould as a magazine. Also one can usually publish more quickly in magazines, get in touch with the public more quickly. Original anthologies are entirely different, there it can sometimes take years before something gets published, and that’s no good because by the time of publication the writer may very well find himself in an entirely new phase of creativity.

Magazines are more flexible in this respect. All my early stories appeared in Carnell’s magazine, I think I wrote something like fifty for him. Maybe more, but there were certainly fifty in the period from 1957 to 1964. And he never turned even a single one down. Everything I wrote got published, because he needed the material. He had a magazine to fill, some twelve issues a year appeared, and that’s not uninteresting to an author in any case, if he has a stable and reliable market. I’m extremely sorry about the end of New Worlds, it was a shame the magazine had to be closed down.

It would be my greatest wish for a new magazine to come out right now, as these times resemble the Fifties, and we could urgently do with one about them. I think that drastic changes in our lifestyle will come directly from new technologies. The video revolution, for example, will change everything. In the Fifties TV came along, which changed everything, the whole world, and video will also change the world, lastingly, in fact. Everyone can experiment with video, everyone can be his own artist. With video, everyone can transform his living room into a TV studio. It will have serious consequences, the extent of which is not yet at all quantifiable. We absolutely need a new magazine, the Eighties deserve to be examined more closely. With these continuous upheavals, the Eighties are really much more like the Fifties than were the Sixties or Seventies. I would rather it were a small format magazine like Carnell’s New Worlds, as with a large illustrated magazine there’s always the danger of it ending as so many such ventures do, that is, with the illustrations spreading and starting to displace the stories.

FUCHS & KÖRBER: And what do your plans for the Eighties look like? How will J. G. Ballard deal with the dawning of this new era in his work?

BALLARD: I’ve already written some new short stories and novellas emerging from the end of the Seventies and beginning of the Eighties, and they will also appear shortly in a collection. In all sorts of ways they’re a return to ‘pure’ science fiction, and a re-envisioning of what I wrote in the Fifties.

FUCHS & KÖRBER: What are the actual influences forming you yourself, and your work? Several of the stories in the Sixties were influenced by the new French literature, and if one takes a look around right here, one sees books about the Surrealists everywhere. Have they had an influence upon your style of writing, and if so, which ones?

BALLARD: Yes, naturally, it’s true that I’m a great admirer of all the Surrealist painters, and their works certainly continue to be not without influence on my work, and if I hadn’t become a writer – and hence a painter with words, in a way – I would surely have had a go at painting Surrealist pictures. I can’t say with such certitude what influenced my work in the Fifties. My early books are stuffed full of allusions to the Surrealists, that’s also true, but that was more of an expression of the admiration I felt for them. I don’t believe that the literature I’ve written would have developed differently had I never heard anything of the Surrealists. I do want to say, not once have I consciously taken Surrealist paintings as a model for my short stories or novels, even though naturally stories like ‘The Voices of Time’ or the Vermilion Sands stories do display certain parallels. It was more of a homage on my part, rather than a direct influence on their part. Moreover, in practice it’s impossible to recast sculpture or painting in a narrative form because it’s a question of fundamentally different forms of art. It is simply impossible to capture the mood expressed in a Dalí painting in the right words.

If painters have influenced me at all, it was the Pop-Art artists, initially much later, when I wrote the Atrocity Exhibition stories. Writing had already become an important business to me when I was at the beginning of my twenties, and in those days the great French symbolists of the nineteenth century may have exercised an unconscious influence upon me.

ABOVE: JGB at home in Shepperton, 1985: photo by Bleddyn Butcher.

FUCHS & KÖRBER: Your influences lie in any case outside Science Fiction to a considerable extent?

BALLARD: Most certainly. I first came across SF when I was in Canada with the Air Force, it must have been 1953 or 1954. Before then I’d read no science fiction at all, but in the base there they kept SF magazines to sell in the canteen, everything possible from pulps to the better digest magazines. I realized that a lot of the magazines back then contained really interesting, colourful stories that in various respects were better suited to the times than so-called ‘contemporary literature’. It’s true that they were hideous in design, with these ghastly covers – one knows them quite well enough – but the content was sometimes genuinely interesting. Sheckley, Pohl, Kornbluth, Jack Vance – those were the authors I liked to read back then. Kornbluth was an intelligent author, and I thought to myself, my god, here are really vital and interesting stories! But they were nonetheless still stories that were published in popular and commercial magazines, and that meant that the authors were quite freely subject to certain laws of the mass market, and so furthermore, they only went just as far as they could and no further. They employed no idea solely of their own accord. And suddenly it was all clear to me: here you have exactly the right environment for the kind of literature you really want to write, a literature of limitless possibilities. I had a head full of ideas and stories, and here was a medium that offered me the chance of expressing them adequately. I knew one could push open the window of commercial science fiction and let a little fresh air stream in. Outside there was a whole new world waiting for the literati to comment on it. And shortly after I’d got to know science fiction, I left off reading it again, because I made up my mind to write it myself.

FUCHS & KÖRBER: Let’s stay with your career for a moment. You published as you said something like fifty stories in Carnell’s magazine, some in the US also, and then came the point when time started to play an important role, when the stories became freer and more experimental. They lost the linear narrative of a story and brought in different events taking place simultaneously. That was the starting shot for the later ‘condensed novels’. For science fiction it was new and revolutionary.

BALLARD: That may be, but as with much that was ‘new’ in the New Wave, it was rather an aspect of that which was already recognized in literature generally. That goes for the New Wave in general, and for my collection The Atrocity Exhibition especially. That too was not new in modern literature. There were already experiments taking place even in very early modernist literature, for example in the novels of Virginia Woolf. The sole meaning of the more experimental literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries lay in an exploration of different subjective states of consciousness. The big difference in the New Wave and my own ‘condensed novels’ was that it wasn’t exactly very important to me to investigate different subjective conditions of consciousness, at least not in the first place. What concerned me primarily was to take the traditional themes and view them through subjective eyes, through the eye of science and the changes introduced by it, if one will.

If one takes a look at The Atrocity Exhibition one will realize that, naturally the book has a hero of a much more subjective type, who has possibly been driven from a nervous breakdown into madness, but actually he isn’t the ‘hero’ of the book at all: that’s much more the experimental landscape of the world in the Sixties. That’s the subject of the book: the communications landscape, the intersecting mirages of fiction and reality with which we all live, they’re the real heroes. It’s not important to me to investigate an internal sensibility, as the great modernist writers did. In this context I actually don’t like hearing the phrase ‘experimental literature’, exactly, as when it’s used here in this country, it appears mostly in a critical sense, because unfortunately ‘experimental’ literature is mostly really nothing more than the ego-trips of different people into their own psyches, which hardly anyone can follow and which are ultimately only of interest to themselves. That’s the case with much of what’s generally considered ‘High Literature’. Unfortunately.

With The Atrocity Exhibition, on the contrary, that’s not the case. Here, the outer world is omnipresent, whereas in such books as those I’ve just mentioned, it has no relevance whatsoever. Consequently the book isn’t just a daydream, but consists of concrete relations throughout.

FUCHS & KÖRBER: What actual influence did the works of William S. Burroughs have on The Atrocity Exhibition? Do you appreciate him only as an author, or has he also made a lasting impression upon you?

BALLARD: He’s had no influence on me at all. I like several of his works. I often hear that Burroughs must have been a great influence on me and that it’s particularly noticeable in The Atrocity Exhibition. But it’s untrue. If one looks at Burroughs’ books, one can see that they’re entirely unstructured stylistically, that they consist almost completely of a ’stream of consciousness’ in the Joycean sense, and are hence of a fully subjective world, and his works are improvised, frayed at every point, without a clear aim. His narrative structure is without architecture, written straight out of the feelings, without planning. And I’ve never used the so-called cut-up technique. I’ve been acquainted with Burroughs for several years, and he is quite of the opinion that his cut-up and fold-out techniques are very helpful in representing the world around us as it really is. He is of the opinion that the true nature of the world will be revealed by his random associations. My stories in The Atrocity Exhibition are entirely in opposition to that, they have a very precisely designed structure; the ‘condensed novels’ are like a machine working towards a clearly defined goal.

FUCHS & KÖRBER: On to the Seventies. Your first novel to be published in this new decade was Crash.

BALLARD: Right. It developed directly out of The Atrocity Exhibition; there was even one of the ‘condensed novels’ with that title. The automobile accident has always interested me, and Crash is actually a model of the fictionalization of reality in the Sixties. In the ‘condensed novels’ there appears at one point a protagonist who puts together an exhibition of crashed cars, that was before I’d yet written Crash, the theme already held an extraordinary fascination for me. I wanted to have this exhibition as a sort of test for my theories, and I held this art exhibition as a psychological experiment as it were. What interested me particularly was how the visitors to this exhibition would react. So, we exhibited these automobiles that were heavily crash-damaged in a gallery in London, a gallery that was otherwise completely bare, only white walls, nothing else, no posters, no other exhibited items, just the junked cars. And naturally no explanation of what it was all supposed to mean, just the three cars displayed as sculpture. And then I had an internal monitor system, as well as a topless girl who went about interviewing the audience, and this would be recorded on the monitors. At the opening I gave a party for the press and so forth, and you can believe me when I say that although I’ve been invited to a lot of publisher’s parties and the like, I’ve never yet seen one where people got drunk so quickly as on that evening. And also, when the exhibition opened, people would react with shock and nervous laughter. One of the cars was a Pontiac that had had a frontal collision. The cars were intact up to the forward part and the front seats, where the motor had been impressed into them, as it were; or better, the other way round. Especially these cars with their emblematic American appearance and the psychological contouring embodied in American cars, these cars had a very particular fascination for people. People were stunned. And the girl who conducted the interviews was actually supposed to do it entirely naked, but when she saw the cars she decided to refuse. And when she conducted the interviews and people saw themselves on the monitors being interviewed in the cars, they would shift into the back seats at the drop of a hat.

And also the cars got in worse condition the longer they were on display, the remaining windows smashed in with bottles and so on. The result of this test was in any case extraordinarily odd, and quite evidently I touched people’s nerve, a psychological nerve. Many people came to the exhibition several times, just to attack the cars and destroy them further. Ultimately, this exhibition convinced me that I ought to write Crash. I’m still of the firm conviction that everything I wanted to express in Crash is true.

And something fascinated people, as the book went through two hardback editions here, which is unusual, and it was a big success especially in France. It’s a pity that it never appeared in Germany. Incidentally, the book was a flop in America, despite great expense on publicity. But that might be because Europeans are mostly faced with uncompromising subjects more frequently, particularly in France where there’s a very long literary tradition of pornographic texts. In France pornography was always recognized as a serious literary stylistic movement, their tradition stretches back as far as people like Sade. And also all the principals in the French revolution wrote pornographic or erotic literature. In France it’s recognized, whereas people in this country or in America maintain a very strict distinction between it and other literature, because it’s only just started to be published during the last fifteen years, and most of that is of dubious character.

FUCHS & KÖRBER: After Crash, Concrete Island and High Rise, the two other novels which both essentially take issue with modern technology, there was another short story collection published, Low-Flying Aircraft, which when set against the stories from the Sixties also contain new material that proceeds more from your earlier stories…

BALLARD: Oh, I’ve always only written basically a certain type of literature. People always think that in the middle of the Sixties I only wrote The Atrocity Exhibition, but that’s not the case. In actual fact I also wrote a great number of entirely conventional short stories during that time. People tend to think that I left off writing ‘condensed novels’ in 1970 because they weren’t accepted by the public, just as they’re of the opinion that I left off writing conventional stories after 1965, because they were no longer accepted. One also often reads that, but it’s not true. In 1965 I wrote my fifty-fourth short story, and that was ‘The Assassination of JFK’, and story number fifty-five was ‘You and Me and the Continuum’. Then in 1970 I wrote my eighty-sixth short story. That’s thirty-two stories all told, and of those, twenty were certainly entirely conventional stories. I’ve therefore never turned my back on them.

I admit that in a certain way 1975 was the end of a period. I’d written four books all tending in one particular direction, if one counts The Atrocity Exhibition, all dealing with the communications landscape and modern technology. Afterwards I’d simply had enough of it and I went off towards other themes. That will also be apparent in the new collection, which I’ve just finished. It will have the title Myths of the Near Future, and many of the stories it contains are pure imagination, so they range about in the zone of free, fantastic literature, like both of my last novels, The Unlimited Dream Company and Hello America.

LEFT: Kristallwelt (The Crystal World; Phantasia Science Fiction Series, 2005).

FUCHS & KÖRBER: In the newer novels there’s somewhat of an absence of the forceful hallucinatory images that your earlier books like The Crystal World contained. Did those descriptions back then have their origins in drugs, and have you yourself ever experimented with drugs or written under the influence of drugs, as many have supposed of The Crystal World?

BALLARD: Now, I wrote The Crystal World in 1964, and ‘The Illuminated Man’, the short story upon which the novel was based, must have come into being in about 1961. In those days LSD had certainly not yet become an issue, and I myself first tried it in 1967. Back then it was the great fashion, and everyone tried it once, psychedelic culture came directly out of it. Naturally there are states of affairs described in The Crystal World – the prismatic world, the static elements, the complete absence of time and so on, even experiences – that bear a marked resemblance to an LSD trip. Yet the novel didn’t emerge from a drug experience, and that to me is further evidence that nothing comes even close to human imagination, it can do it all. The ending of ‘The Voices of Time’ is also very strongly evocative of a drug experience, when the protagonist with his increasing perceptions can suddenly perceive every most minute particle of the world, loses all sense of time, and sinks completely under a storm of impressions. This story also came about without drugs, and that, I believe, confirms what I’ve just said, that the human imagination is incapable of nothing, it doesn’t have to fall back on artificial stimulants, on chemicals, to release something that the brain can do even on its own. A fertile imagination is better than any drug.

Originally published in German as Werner Fuchs/Joachim Körber, ‘Ein Interview mit J. G. Ballard’ in Joachim Körber, ed., J. G. Ballard: Der Visionär des Phantastischen (Meitingen: Corian-Verlag, 1985).

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Munich Round Up: An Interview with J.G. Ballard
+ ‘It would be a mistake to write about the future’: J.G. Ballard in Conversation with Jörg Krichbaum and Rein A. Zondergeld

All photography by Simon Sellars.

In May 2007 I found myself in England for the J.G. Ballard conference at the University of East Anglia. With that out of the way, I did what comes naturally. I took the train to Shepperton: Ballardian Ground Zero. I had intended to take photographs of the arena that has supplied so much raw material for Ballard’s writing, but at the same time I had no intention of infringing on JGB’s privacy. So, no shots of his house and street here. What I was aiming for instead was the traversal of a distinct psychic terrain (while avoiding the dreaded “p*****geography” word), the blanket overlay of Shepperton with a mental template gleaned from so many Ballard novels and short stories.

In the end, despite Shepperton’s reoccurrence across Ballard’s ouevre, just one book coloured the day, so brilliant is its corona: The Unlimited Dream Company, that beautiful, mad, lush waking dream wrenched direct from Ballard’s cerebral cortex. In the book an airport worker, Blake, seeking to escape his mundane life in London, steals a Cessna and crashes it into the Thames River in Shepperton. He is rescued from drowning by a troupe of locals and discovers that he is unable to leave the town; there seems to be an invisible psychic barrier that denies him egress. Giving in to it, he learns that he now has strange powers. He can fly unaided (although still unable to leave the town boundaries) and he can shapeshift into different animals: birds, whales, deer. He can also conjure into being menageries of birds and packs of wild animals from thin air, or even from the orifices of his body. His sexual appetite grows polymorphously perverse and he attempts to mount anyone and anything. Galvanized by his raw libido, the townsfolk forget about their London office jobs and their safe suburban lives, and a cult soon forms around Blake as he teaches them to fly, to reject their hyperreal consumerist lifestyles in favour of a journey into the sun, an ultimate realm in which they would celebrate “the last marriage of the animate and inanimate, of the living and the dead”.

Throughout, Ballard allows Shepperton to glow lysergically before the mind’s eye, a flaring vision of the suburbs and post-industrial liminal zones that threatens to negate the entire world. It’s no wonder he’s such a powerful influence on artists and filmmakers: the writing has a pure visionary quality that, as I’ve always maintained, transcends literature, that bends time and space (but of course). Here, then, are my photos and commentary from my trip to Shepperton — my small tribute to this remarkable book and the marvellously vivid quality of Ballard’s work, my attempt to provide an on-location correlation for the film of The Unlimited Dream Company playing in the cinema of my mind.

I must thank Jo M. for her company throughout the day. Jo’s marvellous insights into the town and her knowledge of Ballard’s work enriched the experience, and her maps and keen navigational skills greatly surpassed my own wretched sense of direction.

This feature is presented in two parts. In Part 1 we set out from the train station, making a direct line for the fields and water meadows surrounding the motorway just past Ballard’s street. Crossing this metallized river by bridge, which Blake was unable to do, we make our way to the film studios, which feature prominently in the book (doubtless Blake made it by flying). In Part 2, due next week, we explore the reservoirs near the studios, also a prominent feature of the book, before crossing back over the motorway and into town, and then on into Old Shepperton where we attempt to locate the exact spot where Blake ditched his plane in the Thames.

Outside the railway station the last of the office-workers were once again making a half-hearted attempt to set off for London. But as I approached they gave up all thought of work. Ties loosened, jackets over their shoulders, they strolled through the holiday throng, their sales conferences and committee meetings forgotten.

J.G. Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company (1979).

I live in Melbourne, where if you travel in certain directions 40 minutes out from the centre you find outlying suburbs and satellite towns that are basically parched-concrete aprons with brick-veneer boxes on them in which entire families somehow cohabitate. Parks are rare, greenery is sparse and everything is geometric and regimented, with great swathes of freeway cut through the middle. (Here is an example of the type of ennui this leached Australian suburbia can inspire; here is another.) Somehow from reading Ballard I expected similar of Shepperton, 40 minutes from the capital by train, especially given that most people who interview Ballard at his house remark on the dominance of the motorway and the terminal nature of the town.

Ballard himself has been known to play this up, as in his 1988 interview with Paul Rambali. “Post space race, when the moon was discovered to be merely dust,” Rambali writes, “his novels caught the imagination of a young generation that sensed an imminent everyday apocalypse, the future shock of the homogenous new suburbs”:

“I fear this is the future,” says Ballard… He is talking about Shepperton… “Driving through the suburbs of Germany in the Seventies I could see it. Everything is controlled. Even a drifting leaf looks out of place… Once you move to the suburbs, time stops. People measure their lives by consumer goods, the dreams that money can buy. I think that’s more dangerous. People have no loyalties anymore.”

But Ballard continues to live in this suburb where time has stopped, a sort of self-imposed alienation. In this, he is like a character from one of his novels, accepting the entropy that surrounds him.

Paul Rambali, “Visions Of Dystopia”, The Face (1988).

Thus I was a bit taken aback upon arriving at Shepperton station to be greeted by what looked like a picturesque town with a homely village atmosphere, winding streets with real-ale pubs smack in the middle of them, greenery galore and heritage-style red-brick housing. Sure, time has stopped but it’s hardly the dehumanised non-space of Ballardian lore. I’ve certainly seen far bleaker residential areas elsewhere in the British Isles. Still, it’s what’s under the surface that counts in Ballard…

Completing my transformation of this suburban town, I walked along the main roads leading to the perimeter of Shepperton. To the south I threw my semen at the foot of Walton Bridge. Standing in the centre of the main road to London, I ignored the hornblasts of the passing drivers. Once again I was sure that none of them realized I was naked, and thought they were looking at an eccentric villager trying to throw himself under their wheels.

Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company.

In 2004, why did the stars align in such a cataclysmic way in Surrey, the county in which Shepperton nestles? As the Shepperton sign above indicates, it was a bumper year. But that’s not the whole story: in 2004 Surrey was in the top 10 for child road deaths in Britain. What would 2006’s final tally be? The sign’s single interrogation point for 2006 almost begs us to beat the 2004 record. Death Race 2006, perhaps?

Is Surrey, and Shepperton, somehow responsible? Is there any truth to the rumour, spread by Mikita Brottman in her introduction to the book Car Crash Culture, that Ballard in Crash “charts a parallel between road intersections and astrological signs”?

Perhaps the truth is rather more prosaic, yet far more disturbing:

Are we just victims in a totally meaningless tragedy, or does it in fact take place with our unconscious, and even conscious, connivance? Each year hundreds of thousands of people are killed in car crashes all over the world. Millions are injured. Are these arranged deaths arranged by the colliding forces of the technological landscape, by our own unconscious fantasies about power and aggression, our obsessions with consumer goods and desires, the overlaying fictions that are more and more taking the place of reality?

Ballard, Crash! (short film; 1971).

[The] demise of feeling and emotion has paved the way for all our most real and tender pleasures… our apparently limitless powers for conceptualisation — what our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths.

Ballard, “Introduction to the French edition of Crash” (1973).

For some reason known only to the interior of my head I was trapped in this riverside town, around which my mind had drawn a strict perimeter, bounded on the north by the motorway, on the west and south by the winding course of the Thames. I watched the traffic moving eastwards to London, certain now that if I tried to leave by this last door of the horizon the same queasy perspectives would unravel in front of me.

Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company.

Ian Allan Ltd. is a travel agent based in Terminal House just near the station. “The Terminal Beach” (1964) is one of Ballard’s finest stories and the blueprint for The Atrocity Exhibition. Set on the Pacific island of Eniwetok, which has been blasted into an undifferentiated slag by American nuclear testing, the story follows a possibly irradiated ex-US airman who wanders around on the island attempting to find the beach that reminds him of where he was born. Detaching himself from reality, he communes with the dead and reinvents — and destroys — himself according to the “any space whatever” of postwar globalism, represented by the sad spectre of the nuclear-poisoned island.

Before we ventured further into the dark heart of Shepperton, I was tempted to ask Ian Allan himself if he would later sell me a ticket to “the white leviathan, zero”, as the spirit of a dead Japanese man describes the terminal beach. But inside I suspected that like the travel agent in The Truman Show, he would conspire to ensure I could never leave Shepperton, that the only journey I would be undertaking would be deeper and further into my skull.

“Our latent psychopathy is the last nature reserve,” said Ballard in 2000. “A place of refuge for the endangered mind.”

The helicopter had retreated to the water-meadow across the river. Swept along towards the church, I saw Miriam knocked from her feet by the running crowd. As she knelt on the grass she was seized by the young women, a group of secretaries who happily stripped the clothes from her shoulders and lifted her into a head-dress of feathers.

Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company.

At the end of Ballard’s street is a walking trail that passes through verdant parks and meadows. It’s completely unexpected as you follow the winding road and come out the other side. We pictured Ballard, on first arriving in Shepperton, exploring his environs, going for a walk to the end of his street and discovering this wonderland that is like a theme park torn from its context and thrust into the middle of suburbia, like the geodesically preserved forests in Silent Running. The effect is quite unreal, and gazing into these ponds I was summarily transported to that mystical long shot in Tarkovsky’s Solaris, in which vegetation ripples and sways under flowing water, at once completely artificial in the intensity of the film’s colour and focus but at the same time so organic it transcends reason and logic.

Everywhere a macabre vegetation was emerging. Strange predators moved through the grass. Snakes climbed from the banks of the creek. A plague of spiders cast webs of pus across the trees, drawing silver shrouds over the dead flowers. Above the grave white flies festered in a halo. As a pale dawn filled the meadow I could see shrike attacking the last of the hummingbirds and impaling them on the thorn-bushes. The whole of Shepperton was sickening, poisoned by the despair flowing from me.

Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company.

It was then, fifty yards from the motorway, that I made an unsettling discovery. Although I was walking at a steady pace across the uneven soil, I was no longer drawing any closer to the pedestrian bridge… the motorway remained as far away as ever. If anything, this distance between us seemed to enlarge. At the same time, Shepperton receded behind me, and I found myself standing in an immense field filled with poppies and a few worn tyres.

Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company.

Where we found ourselves, a tiny river cuts under concrete slabs and leafy vegetation snakes around motorway pedestrian bridges. The sound of trickling water blends with the Doppler effect of speeding vehicles. Here, where we found ourselves, “the last marriage of the animate and inanimate”, the absolute state to which Blake craves, would be fully apparent to a man of Ballard’s imaginative powers, in fact would appear fully formed. How many of his books were inspired by walks through this backstreet terrain? The Drowned World, with its vision of a lush, overgrown London? The Unlimited Dream Company itself? Even Concrete Island, despite the austerity of its title?

According to Peter Linnett:

The island isn’t concrete at all. It seems to live, organically. Admittedly it overlays the ruins of some old streets, a cinema, an air raid shelter; but on first sight: simply grass.

Linnett, “The Greening of Ballard: A Review of Concrete Island” (1976).

An unvarying light calmed the waiting nettles along the motorway palisade. A few drivers watched me from their cars, demented priest in my white sneakers. I picked up a chalky stone and set out a line of numbered stakes with pieces of driftwood, a calibrated pathway that would carry me to the pedestrian bridge. But as I walked forward they encircled me in a spiral arm that curved back upon itself, a whorl of numerals that returned me to the centre of the field.

Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company.

Dan Mitchell of Hard Mag writes with news of a very interesting exhibition he’s co-producing called “Zodiac 3000″ at the International Project Space in Birmingham. It’s one of a plethora of recent JGB-themed events, and sounds like it’s one of the more elaborate, too. According to Dan, “Ballard gave us permission to use his name and that of two of his characters for the show. There is also a publication featuring an essay by ‘Dr. Robert Laing’ titled ‘The Emerging New Psychology’”.

The J. G. Ballard Centre for Psychopathological Research presents: ‘Zodiac 3000′
Curated by: Dr Robert Laing and Karen Novotny.
Including: Merlin Carpenter, Alastair MacKinven, Dan Mitchell, Josephine Pryde, and Rachel Reupke.

+ 26 April to 31 May 2008. (Preview: Saturday 26 April 3.00pm to 5.00pm).
+ Open Monday to Saturday 12.00pm to 5.00pm. (Wednesday 12.00pm to 7.00pm) Closed Sunday.

International Project Space
Bournville Centre for Visual Arts, Birmingham Institute of Art and Design
University of Central England, Maple Road, Birmingham B30 2AA
tel +44 (0) 121 331 5785
info@internationalprojectspace.org
http://www.internationalprojectspace.org/current.htm

From the press release:

Introduction to ‘Zodiac 3000’
by Karen Novotny, April 2008

‘We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.’
Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)

‘You see, people these days, who give the impression that their minds are a complete vacuum – no dreams or hopes of any importance, even to themselves, emanate through the sutures of their skulls… But that doesn’t matter, in a sense, because the environment does the dreaming for them.’ J.G. Ballard, 21C (1997)

In April 2007 I met Dr Robert Laing at Kingston University, and it was from this initial encounter that the exhibition ‘Zodiac 3000’ has formed. At the time, we were visiting a series of talks for another exhibition; one based on the theme of new forms of criticism, which took place at Stanley Picker Gallery, the university’s contemporary art space. After the event we both went our separate ways, but it wasn’t very long until we spoke again; affected by the critical context of the exhibition, Laing proposed that we meet about the potential of a project based on J.G. Ballard’s literary oeuvre, and most of all the suggestion of a New Psychology within his writing. Laing referred to the power of the surrounding suburban area of our initial encounter – Ballard has resided in Shepperton close to Kingston in South West London for the majority of his life – and so our discussions moved on to explore a series of contemporary visual representations that might suggest a deeply Ballardian view of the world.

The decision to use the International Project Space (IPS) became pertinent for the context within which the gallery is set. One could say that the original utopian philanthropy of George Cadbury’s Bournville Estate, within which Bournville Centre for Visual Arts (BCVA) and IPS are situated, holds a darker side. When functioning as a factory village, the generous architecture of the workers’ houses masked the area’s purely economic function of creating an effective workforce. In fact, slave labour effectively operated in Birmingham in the 20th century because people in Bournville felt trapped for a whole host of reasons, including not being able to escape the institutional confines of Cadbury’s ‘philanthropic’ enterprise. Now a predominantly well-to-do population occupies the area, one that is at odds with the wider demographic of Birmingham. On the one hand, the contemporary nature of Bournville still contains a utopian flavour; its Quaker run committee insists on the area being maintained to a high degree. It is dry, has no pubs, and recent achievements have included the blocking of a planned Tesco Express on the edge of the estate’s boundaries. However, the area is desirable and increasingly bourgeois, and it’s perhaps this fact that situates the area as appropriate for the theme of this exhibition. If the utopianism of Cadbury’s original endeavour is historically embedded in Bournville’s architecture or plan, then its current population might be relevant to Ballard’s theme of unexpected revolutions, which take place in middle class suburbs or ghettos. In this sense the exhibition deals with the flip side of the utopianism represented by places like Bournville and the dystopian class-based split contained in Ballard’s oeuvre.

One of the persistent themes in Ballard’s writing is an investigation into the heart of things, a fact that stems from the writer’s internment in a prisoner of war camp as a child in the Second World War. Rather than attempting to escape the boundaries of his given circumstances – to jump over the fence of his confinement, or escape the frame of the picture, so to speak – he attempts to burrow into the centre of his captivity and incarceration, to achieve a solid and disturbing investigation of his institutional surroundings. With this in mind, the exhibition attempts to enquire into the nature of the gallery’s environment, its position within a university, and the possibility of applying a new set of institutional parameters to contemporary art. To carry this theme further, IPS has been turned into the foyer of the J.G. Ballard Centre for Psychopathological Research, an institute built to interrogate the New Psychology explored in Ballard’s fiction. This subterranean institution, constructed by Laing, will effectively try to explore and enhance new psychological tendencies.

Within this context, Dan Mitchell will focus on middle class sexual boredom and its relationship with the desired prize of interior design. This obsession dominates time and represents occupational therapy as a battleground of castle decoration, together with a fight for survival. In this respect, the floors of products on display at Habitat become sacred, full of brooding vibrancy, and contain dark and textured themes of repressed rage.

Alastair MacKinven’s project for the exhibition will physically divide the gallery in two. A partition will extend through IPS to the gates of BCVA, across into Cadbury’s chocolate factory, and out through the entire estate. Indicated by wooden pegs holding flat signs, MacKinven’s work intends to socially segregate the area, and aims to provoke a division between two future warring communities – The Cocoshuffters and The White Chocolateers – within the currently peaceful Bournville Estate.

Along with his Burberry flags of style, which represent notions of class and consumer identity (these works, The St. George’s Cross, The Homecoming and The Riot take their titles from Ballard’s Kingdom Come (2006)), Merlin Carpenter has proposed a ready-made sculpture redolent of Ballard’s fetishised fixation on sex and disaster, and contemporary Britain’s obsession with royalty, celebrity, death, and unresolved conspiracy theories. He plans to drive a dilapidated black 1997 S-type Mercedes at high speed straight into IPS’ interior sign situated within BCVA’s courtyard. The resulting crash scene will become a prop for the duration of the exhibition.

Rachel Reupke has chosen to use found images gleaned from billboards and posters on the street. Her video, or rather her animated ‘presentations’, announce the promise of a new society filled with lifestyle choices – a modern arcadia of high-rises, shopping malls and parkland. Based partly on Eden-Olympia, the high-tech business park in the hills above Cannes in Ballard’s Super Cannes (2000), and on illustrations of architectural developments on construction boom hoardings in Beijing, her work speaks of the future inserted into the present. Containing the strange yet banal directorial feel of a corporate video, faith in these images’ vision falter, as symbolic motifs become unreadable and the architecture remains generic. We are left to observe a half true record, and a half faux artifact.

Similarly, Josephine Pryde takes her photographs into the darkroom and beyond. Ballard’s thoughts on photography questioned whether the camera was a ‘Cyclops eye of the late 20th century, recording everything but seeing nothing,’ and observed that the planet was drowning ‘in an ocean of photographic emulsion.’ Pryde’s images surf above this wave of recorded and flattened photography, which clutter our imaginations; they flood the drained mind with fantastic scenes that render our consciousness open and changed. As Pryde has said in her 2004 Secession catalogue ‘…all this fantastic image stuff and style, and the consumer world, can leave me very confused and over-excited, and making my own photographs is quite a good way for me to try to stay calm.’

At a certain point during the research for the project, Laing and I wrote to Ballard in Shepperton to ask his permission to make a project based on his concept of a New Psychology. He responded with a message written on the back of two postcards that depict surrealist paintings; Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory (1931) and Paul Delvaux’s La Rue du tramway (Street of the Trams) (1938-39). ‘All I ask is that you keep my “participation” within reasonable bounds… there are too many madmen out there who think that they are completely sane.’ he wrote. Taking Ballard’s advice, we have attempted to take an ethical stance on our motivations for this exhibition, and have tried to do justice to the disturbing view of the world represented in the writer’s work. What follows in this exhibition is a series of projects that try not only to open up a contemporary psychological viewpoint on our surroundings, but which also attempt to present new possibilities for psychology through the effect of contemporary sociological, cultural and political tendencies that we are we can all see around us on an increasingly powerful level. We hope that you enjoy the exhibition.

For further information and images please contact International Project Space curator Andrew Hunt tel +44 (0)121 331 5785 / +44 (0)7828 537 989 email info@internationalprojectspace.org

This project has been generously supported by Arts Council England and Birmingham City University.

London has always been a palace of sexual varieties: both the hub of Britain’s sex trade and the chamber in which, since the advent of the printed word, debates about liberty, repression and obscenity have raged and (occasionally) been resolved. It’s the country’s erotic centre – its G-spot, if you will. Which is why Time Out decided it was high time to consider the ways in which sex has been celebrated by London writers down the centuries.

Our Top 30 chart of London’s rudest writers collects, in a single heaving but well-ventilated space, the authors we feel have contributed the most to our understanding of the city’s complex sexual psychology. What do we mean by ‘rude’? Boldly transgressive as well as pornographic (after all, anyone can be pornographic), seductive and titillating as well as obscene and, always, well written.

One of the functions of nostalgia is to purge the past of elements that don’t chime with our limited sense of how people once lived. So it’s salutary, and oddly bracing, to be reminded that dildos were around in the sixteenth century (Thomas Nashe) and that ‘cunt’ (okay, ‘queynte’) was a slang term for female genitalia in Chaucer’s day.

But don’t just take our word for it. Our saucy scribblers come endorsed by some of London’s finest contemporary writers, including Martin Amis, Sarah Waters, Will Self and Jilly Cooper.

So put down your whip, unbuckle that gimp mask and let’s begin…

28: JG Ballard
Our foremost chronicler of dystopian modernity, Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930. He announced recently that he has advanced prostate cancer and that his latest book, the memoir ‘Miracles of Life’, will be his last.

In his own words
‘The crushed body of the sportscar had turned her into a being of free and perverse sexuality, releasing within its dying chromium and leaking engine-parts, all the deviant possibilities of her sex.’ (‘Crash’)

Toby Litt (author ‘Corpsing’, ‘I Play the Drums in a Band Called Okay’)
‘It’s no discovery, of course, that cars are objects of desire. But it took Ballard to go that logical extra step: if cars are going to get it on, then they need to crash. This isn’t just about Volvo-protected voyeurism, it’s about exchanging body fluids upon impact, it’s about suicidal interpenetrations. Ballard takes thing-sex to the point of polymorphous perversity. Anything can be sexier than sex – buildings, airplanes, deserted swimming pools. Even Shepperton. Or, as Ballard would insist, especially Shepperton.’

Here’s the full list:

1 Walter, aka Henry Spencer Ashbee
2 Alan Hollinghurst
3 Kenneth Tynan
4 Algeron Charles Swinburne
5 Thomas Nashe
6 John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester
7 William Shakespeare
8 Geoffrey Chaucer
9 Gerald Kersh
10 John Cleland
11 Havelock Ellis
12 Hanif Kureishi
13 Sigmund Freud
14 Henry Fielding
15 James Boswell
16 William Wycherley
17 Daniel Defoe
18 Mark Ravenhill
19 Geoff Nicholson
20 Maxim Jakubowski
21 Oscar Moore
23 Sebastian Horsley
24 Molly Parkin
25 Stewart Home
26 Mary Robinson
27 Patrick Marber
28 JG Ballard
29 Lady Caroline Lamb
30 Anthony Neilson

More at Time Out.

And for a different view on the erotic potential of Crash, see here.

Translation by Dan O’Hara.

JGB, somewhere in the early-to-mid 70s.

This interview, conducted on the 1st of March 1976, was first published in German in the science fiction magazine Quarber Merkur, and later re-published in a paperback collection of articles from the magazine in 1979.

What’s intriguing about this contradiction is the implied concept of a moral form: a postulated style of literature which, without embroiling the writer in any moral stance in a traditional sense, constitutes what Graeme Revell calls ‘a morality in progress’. One would have thought that Ballard would agree with Oscar Wilde, that ‘there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book’. This interview suggests that Ballard’s view is rather more complex.

Dan O’Hara.

LEFT: JGB in 1975.

JÖRG & REIN: In Germany we do know most of your books, which have been brought out here in a series of translations by several publishers, and which are also in paperback, but as a person you’re hardly known. Could you therefore tell us a little bit about your background, as an introduction, as it were?

JGB: Certainly. So, I was born in Shanghai in China in 1930. My father was an English businessman. I was brought up there until the war broke out. During the war we were held for three years in a Japanese camp with all the other Allied residents. In 1946 I came back to England, went to school and then Cambridge University; I intended to be a doctor. Therefore I studied medicine for two years. And then, like many other writers who first study medicine, I discovered that I actually wanted to be a writer. Therefore I broke off my studies. In the meanwhile I had a lot of jobs: I worked in advertising, then for a scientific film company, etc., etc., and in the end I started writing. Quite unlike most SF writers, I had no interest in science fiction when I was young. Most American authors in the genre were as young people enthusiastic fans…

JÖRG & REIN: …they generally begin their careers as writers by writing for fanzines.

JGB: Exactly! Which means that their activity as SF authors issues directly from their activity as SF fans; they go to conventions where they meet other fans and authors and so forth. With me it wasn’t thus, because I hadn’t really decided to write science fiction until I was something like 26. Then I wrote my first SF story, rather late therefore. A lot of SF authors end their careers at 26 and don’t merely begin then. I worked for a scientific journal in London to earn my living and then, I think it was in 1963, I gave up my job and became a full-time writer.

JÖRG & REIN: Was your first book then The Wind from Nowhere, which was the first of your books to be published in Germany?

JGB: Oh, yes, as a paperback by Heyne. You should know, I don’t regard it as a serious work; I only wrote it to earn a bit of money, as things weren’t going too well then. The Marion von Schröder press published my better works. Very nice editions. And then there’s another press that published The Atrocity Exhibition.

JÖRG & REIN: The Melzer press, under the title Liebe und Napalm.

JGB: Yes, right. But I believe they are broke, no?

JÖRG & REIN: Let’s come back to your beginning in England. Did your first texts appear in magazines, or straight off in book form?

LEFT: 70s Ballard: The Drowned World, Penguin edition (1974).

JGB: The natural medium for the SF author is the short story magazine. At any rate, it was then. And I also began by writing for the English and American magazines. The first of my serious novels to be accepted, New Worlds, that was much more open, and I could publish there. If you read these stories today they seem to be quite conventional, but back then everyone was amazed.

JÖRG & REIN: But nowadays there are a fair few writers who write in such a way or, rather, who try to write as you do – who have a similar view of reality. There’s Thomas Disch, or Brian Aldiss.

JGB: Yes, and that’s good. There’s also Sladek — and Moorcock, maybe.

JÖRG & REIN: You know each other personally, too, don’t you?

JGB: Now, yes; I’ve known Disch and Aldiss for several years.

JÖRG & REIN: So far, we’ve spoken only about SF in England and America, but in eastern Europe there’s also a great tradition of SF, Lem for example, or the Strugatskis. What do you think of them?

JGB: To be honest, I find Lem rather hard going. His whole attitude towards the subject matter is entirely different from my own. He has something so demonstratively scientific and… messianic… In my work I proceed analytically, whereas he assembles vast systems synthetically. There’s something reminiscent of Star Trek in his work, ‘The Big Concept’, do you understand? I don’t like Russian SF, or at least not that which I’ve read. Previously I often wrote reviews for the newspapers here. And I would sometimes get a Russian anthology sent to me, but I found it lacking in imagination. I say it reluctantly, but it was as if the spark was missing. It was never exciting, all grey on grey.

JÖRG & REIN: This style of grey mediocrity, which is also the principal quality of official socialist-realist literature…

JGB: Right, that’s exactly what I meant. You know, you always get these stories in which people are sitting around in tiny flats in Moscow. And then: ‘Agricultural Controller Woroschilow said…’ or some computer specialists bustle about the prose, you know… They rarely get off the ground, there’s something dead in it, like the regime of Soviet style. SF needs these old-fashioned things: the consumer society. It needs the media, which trickles slowly down to us. In SF it’s not a matter of science, but of pop-science, and that’s something entirely different. Pop-science, in how it’s transmitted for a mass audience through the media, TV and newspapers, through encyclopaedias, which are published in a series of volumes. That’s the wave that carries SF. If one doesn’t have this whole mass media, then the material of SF is simply missing. It’s a peculiar thing.

JÖRG & REIN: It’s interesting, in this connexion, that Stanislaw Lem is one of the most popular SF authors in Germany.

JGB: Really?

JÖRG & REIN: Oh yes, four or five new publications come out each year.

JGB: Actually I’m not surprised. He is perhaps an east-European Asimov, in a certain sense, and Asimov also sells well.

JÖRG & REIN: One reason for Lem’s popularity in West Germany might be that one finds such elegant theories in his books, and one can also develop elegant theories about his books, which the Germans just love to do.

JGB: Yes, you know, an author who gives answers is always more popular than one who asks questions. It’s simply unavoidable.

70s Ballard: The Crystal World, Avon edition (detail; 1976).

JÖRG & REIN: There is a uniform thematic in your early books like for example The Drought or The Crystal World, but the later works are entirely different from them. From where does this complete break come? Or would you not see it as a break?

JGB: No, there is one. In fact, it was around 1965 when I began to write the stories that were later collected in The Atrocity Exhibition. Up until then I was still writing approximately within the tradition of SF. Most of the books up to 1965 are set in the future; maybe some weren’t, but certainly the majority.

I’ve seen my whole task as a writer as to drag SF back into the present, and it seems to me as if in 1965 I found a method of achieving this: to write SF that issues completely from our present. This also seemed necessary to me. You know, the mid-Sixties were marked by events like the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam war, the space race and the continually increasing importance of science and technology. One simply had to write about the present. It would have been a mistake, a moral failure, to write about the future. There was actually a moral imperative to write about the present, and I started to do so and have not yet stopped doing so in the subsequent books.

JÖRG & REIN: And in connexion with the form of these books, you’ve used the expression ‘condensed novels’. Or was that a critic’s neologism?

JGB: No, the expression came from me. I designate each section of these books a ‘condensed novel’, that is, they were normal novels, lacking only the unimportant connective material. In my case there’s only…

JÖRG & REIN: …the real essence.

JGB: Good, let’s call it the essence. But there’s also a corresponding tendency in the other arts. Take, for example, sculpture. A sculptor doesn’t need a huge block of stone to suggest the concept of ‘mass’. One can capture a structure solely through its outline, no? One doesn’t need a mass of stone or steel to create an impression of volume.

JÖRG & REIN: Norbert Kricke’s space sculptures would be a good example, or in painting the works of Monkiewitsch. Both artists show the viewer the boundaries of imaginary spaces and in so doing, stimulate the imagination…

JGB: Exactly, the outlines are enough, one can fill out the rest oneself. I wanted to produce a kind of fiction in which one could more easily range about, in which one had more freedom. Rapid change, and constant confrontation with this change is, I believe, our life’s essence. Computers hold all kinds of material ready at the touch of a button. Day in, day out, TV brings us a intensive flood of images, one watches the news, then one takes a little journey round the world, an advertisement for dog-food, and then some documentary, and so on, and so on. And I needed a form which corresponded to this rapid change. The conventional novel is, on the other hand, largely like a train: once it’s rolling in its tracks, it can’t deviate from them

JÖRG & REIN: Also in music, with the quest for new instruments, for new sound processes, one finds a similar problem.

JGB: Of course.

JÖRG & REIN: And this new form, are you completely satisfied with it? Or will there be a new break?

JGB: It’s hard to say, I don’t know. My last four books are all about what I call the marriage of sex and technology. And by sex, I mean the biological instinct. The marriage between ourselves and technology, so to speak. Yes. I look at the landscapes around me, the landscapes of colossal motorways and huge concrete high-rises, the absolutely new social structures, and I try to understand, to analyse, what’s really going on in this country. Freud made this classic distinction between the apparent content of dreams and the latent, respectively the real content. And one must view the landscapes of today as dreams. One knows their apparent meaning, but what is their real meaning? What’s really going on in the world we live in? This world of vast airports, etc., etc. And I’ve tried to get to the bottom of this in these last four books. But perhaps I’ve now done enough in this area, therefore my thoughts are now going in some other direction, although I don’t know exactly where.

LEFT: 70s Ballard: Crash, Cape edition (1973).

JÖRG & REIN: Your last books, like Crash or Concrete Island, are no longer translated into German.

JGB: Yes, for some reason the German publishers didn’t want to bring them out anymore. I don’t know why.

JÖRG & REIN: To return to your earlier books: an interesting thing there is the relation between painting and literature, especially the relation to Surrealist painting. Could you perhaps briefly say something about the possibilities of one artistic discipline influencing another? In your case, such seems particularly clear.

JGB: Yes, that’s true, actually. The Surrealist painters have strongly influenced me. I don’t believe I’ve been influenced in this way by other literature. It’s been said that I was influenced by Joseph Conrad…

JÖRG & REIN: …why Conrad?

JGB: …but when the critics wrote that, I had still never read anything by Conrad. I first began with him a few years ago. But the Surrealist painters were important. The essence of the Surrealist imagination is its ability to translate the apparent forms of the world, the outer forms, into inner ones, into mental forms. The Surrealist painter doesn’t seek to interpret the outer world as the classic schools of painting did, the Impressionists or the Cubists or what you will; these painters analyse the real world without violating its integrity, although the techniques can vary greatly. But the Surrealists recreate the outer world, completely, in fact! And this was exactly the right method for SF, which needs something very similar. I used this concept of ‘psychological space’, and that again I found in Surrealist paintings. I thought to myself, that’s exactly what we need in science fiction.

JÖRG & REIN: The combining of elements which don’t necessarily seem to be heard together.

JGB: Right. This traditional division between the inner and the outer world, between the mental, and the reality surrounding us, becomes fully abolished. There’s no longer any dividing line, it’s all a continuity. And this method is the most fertile for a writer, because the outer world nowadays so resembles a dream. We live as though in an immense novel and therefore can only approach things in this way.

JÖRG & REIN: To recap: this reciprocal influence of art is therefore for you evident. Could you imagine that your work might have influenced painters in return?

JGB: Yes, that could happen.

You know, Surrealism is without a doubt the most important direction in painting before the war; Cubism is all well and good, but we had that already during the First World War, after which Surrealism was dominant for decades. But the next development, therefore after the Second World War, that was most especially important for writers was Pop-Art. Many authors were influenced by that.

JÖRG & REIN: Malanga, perhaps, and Ron Padgett.

In your later books like The Atrocity Exhibition, but also already in The Four-Dimensional Nightmare, you seem at times to have adopted filmic structures. Could you say something about that?

JGB: Certainly, there are many connexions there. I’ve transferred what one in film calls the ‘cut’ into my literary work. I also use various other filmic methods: like the close-up, slow-motion and similar. I wanted to apply equivalents of these methods in the novel. In the traditional novel the close-up means that one looks somebody in the eye and starts to study their mental state, their motives and so on, whereas in film a close-up doesn’t have to mean anything that corresponds to this level of depth. It can be that one wants to show only the skin of the face, its condition. In spaghetti westerns, for example, you see a close-up of Charles Bronson waiting at a station, that is, you see only a shot of the back of his head, with a fly crawling around it. Such a kind of close-up isn’t intended to explain anything about the man’s personality, it shows only a detail. And in The Atrocity Exhibition I use close-ups that for example show only a girl’s arm against the background of an automobile.

JÖRG & REIN: Therefore only as an object.

JGB: Only objects, exactly. Like in a Hitchcock film, where one catches sight of a close-up of some object on a table, of a fried egg on a plate or a pair of spectacles, for purely atmospheric reasons! That applies also to slow-motion, which is very significant, as it sometimes transforms an intrinsically violent piece of action, for example the collision of two automobiles, into a ballet of great elegance and beauty.

JÖRG & REIN: A change of aesthetic dimension.

JGB: Right, but a complete change. These filmic techniques can be used by a writer; they powerfully extend the resources at his disposal.

JÖRG & REIN: Have you had no desire to make a film yourself?

JGB: Oh, quite, I’d like to very much. But I lack the technical essentials.

JÖRG & REIN: Is there not perhaps one director with whom you’d like to work?

JGB: Oh, there are many directors I admire. Kubrick, for example, he’s a great director. And Godard, who’s also very important, albeit in a different way.

JÖRG & REIN: Godard uses almost the same techniques as you.

JGB: That’s true… yes… I also like Antonioni a great deal. But it’s hard to give a plain answer. I’ve never really considered it.

JÖRG & REIN: Is there a film script written by you?

JGB: I wrote a script from my novel Concrete Island, that a French director wanted to film. That was last summer. I don’t know if he’ll actually make the film. And then I once also wrote a script from my early novel The Drought, which was bought up for TV by David Frost, but he’s never used it… I am actually interested in film.

LEFT: 70s Ballard: Vermilion Sands, Panther edition (1975).

JÖRG & REIN: Up to now we still haven’t mentioned your Vermilion Sands stories. It seems as if there the influence of decadent literature makes itself felt, of the fin-de-siècle.

JGB: You’re thinking of Huysmans here?

JÖRG & REIN: Also.

JGB: Yes… you know, Vermilion Sands corresponds to my vision of the future. It will not be like 1984, but rather like Vermilion Sands. No brave new world, but a kind of country-club paradise. If one goes to the Mediterranean coast in the summer, one sees the future there already. Half of Europe finds itself in this linear city that runs from Gibraltar to Athens. A city that’s three thousand miles long and a hundred metres wide. And that is, in my opinion, the future.

JÖRG & REIN: In your books there are many technical terms from the various scientific disciplines, from medicine, climatology, physics and geology, for example. Don’t you think that this fact could complicate the reading process for many of your readers?

JGB: There’s something in that. As it is, I try not to use so much of this kind of terminology. But on the other hand I think that people nowadays have such a level of general knowledge…

JÖRG & REIN: …a truly optimistic view!

JGB: You know, everyone has a little bit of knowledge about these fields. Doctors are always complaining about the fact that their patients read more medical journals and know more about medicine than they do themselves. All things considered, I don’t think that my stuff is incomprehensible.

JÖRG & REIN: You don’t therefore consciously write for a wholly special kind of reader, for a smaller public than most SF authors?

JGB: No, I write for all readers; at least, I try to.

JÖRG & REIN: Might there not exist, particularly within the field of SF, the possibility that people read your books and find them good, but that your motives for writing these books remain obscure to them, so that your success in part rests on a misunderstanding?

JGB: That’s possible. There is just this problem, that I’m categorized as an SF author, and many people read SF for entertainment, and they approach my books as if I were Asimov… or Ray Bradbury. But I work in a completely different sphere. I’m moving in the opposite direction. That is a problem. And then naturally there’s the further problem of writing in my quite specific manner. I have in fact one story which one can read on one level, but what I actually mean is happening on another level. So The Drowned World, for example, is on one level a traditional disaster novel about the end of the world, like in John Wyndham, and one can read it as such. The first American publisher of these books told me that he found the book very good, but then he added: ‘Jim, the ending is quite false. Your hero goes south, but he should really go north, into the safe zones.’ And I answered, ‘The entire meaning of the book lies in the fact that he wants to go south! The book is exactly about that fact.’ Yes, many readers will certainly only pick up on the surface in this way, and then they don’t understand what’s really going on, why my characters act in such a manner, so that in their view the characters act in a false, illogical way. And from their point of view, they’re correct. That really is a problem.

JÖRG & REIN: Is there a book or a film which has made an especially strong impression on you or by which you’ve been particularly influenced? We’re talking rather a lot about influences, but it could still possibly make clear something about your particular position.

JGB: Now, I admire William Burroughs for example, and I greatly love Genet’s book, Notre dame des fleurs, and many older authors, Huysmans and his A rebours, to give just an example. I found Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove outstanding, a masterpiece, absolutely overwhelming. Recently I saw Fellini’s Dolce Vita again on the TV, and again this film made a great impression on me.

JÖRG & REIN: It’s interesting that you mention Genet and Burroughs, because both those authors write books without conventional plots. There is no more plot, or not as one normally understands it. In your case, it’s hardly conceivable however that you could abandon tight structuring and plot. Your books function too hermetically, they’re too self-contained.

JGB: Right, I need a convincing plot to write in my way, a clear structure. Even in the latest books. Those are very highly developed stories. Sometimes I also try to conceal the story, but there has to be something like a bridge, otherwise everything falls apart.

JÖRG & REIN: One could imagine a hopefully purely hypothetical situation in which, if your development took yet another turn in an experimental direction, you might one day find yourself without publishers. Or do you not have this worry?

JGB: Up to now I’ve had a lot of luck with my publishers. Certainly the latest books weren’t printed in Germany, but in England the latest books were also very successful. Crash, it’s true, was no success in America, but it was an immediate bestseller in France, which was a considerable surprise to me as I’d expected quite the reverse.

JÖRG & REIN: If one takes into account the success or absence of real success for example in West Germany, one must surely conclude that certain books are simply flops in certain countries.

JGB: That’s surely not wrong. National psychology is a particularly difficult field.

JÖRG & REIN: Is there for you a special relationship to America?

JGB: Oh yes, I’ve always been greatly interested in America. There, I find the landscapes of my books, about which we already spoke earlier. But on the other hand I’m sure that in some twenty or thirty years a new renaissance will take place in Europe. Now that borders are gradually being abolished and we’re getting away from the past, there will be quite a bit of change. The new developments, of this I’m sure, will come from Europe and not from America.

Shepperton, Walton-on-Thames, 1 March 1976.

Originally published in German in Quarber Merkur: Aufsätze zur Science Fiction und Phantastichen Literatur, ed. Franz Rottensteiner (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), pp. 141-55.

Thanks to The Terminal Collection for all JGB photos and all cover scans.

+ From Joanne:

You might want to take a look at the newest issue of Modern Painters (Feb 08.) There is an article about writers that inspire visual artists, and Ballard is mentioned several times. (“The reception of literature in the art world is partly a matter of adjectives: today any work that raises the topic of technology and catastrophe, for example, is automatically Ballardian.”)

Very intriguing. I’ll be expanding on the points raised in this article some time soon.

+ From Simon:

Drained swimming pools!

+ From melb psy:

I wondered if you’d seen this [girl films her attempted murder of her parents].

rather ‘Running Wild’….

+ From John:

Ran across this, ‘abandoned wonders of the former Soviet Union’, and thought it would interest you (if you haven’t already seen it).

+ From Alan:

I thought you might find this of some interest/use! Tis a pity it’s too late for your site, but they have, if you’ll excuse the pun, more in the pipeline!!! Great site by the way.

Toilet duct and other diminutive issues
January 23rd, 2008

Resonance FM’s Amenity Space is the only regular series on British radio dedicated to architecture, in this week’s edition Nicky Kirk and Tony Broomhead examine the acoustic spaces of toilets, ventilation shafts and other utilitarian spaces in some of London’s most well known public spaces. In next week’s edition Kirk and Broomhead discuss micro-architecture and look at some of the smallest projects making the biggest headlines in a show that will no doubt be of gargantuan quality.

Amenity Space broadcasts every Thursday between 1 and 2pm.

+ From Andy:

I linked your site from an article I did for Shanghaiist.com [about Rick McGrath's recent trip to Ballard's old home in Shanghai]. It’s only a digest style post but just letting you know all the same.

+ From Anonymous:

Ballard-related exhibition in Barcelona.

Note: I will be writing more about this when the time comes, ie, June/July this year; I’ve already written something about the event, speculating on the shape of it, some time ago.

+ From Darin:

I write to offer you a link to the current issue of an e-zine I edit. While not specifically “Ballardian,” the latest issue, “Dietrologia” of Farrago’s Wainscot features fiction that touches on themes that I think you might find worthwhile. I first heard of your site when you reviewed/blurbed the first issue of Diet Soap, in which my story “The Basement, Borges” appeared.

Urls: http://www.farragoswainscot.com
[current issue]: http://www.farragoswainscot.com/current.html

+ From Greg:

Extreme Ballardian tourism — The Island of Prora:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prora
http://www.worldarchitecturenews.com/index.php?fuseaction=wanappln.projectview&upload_id=563
http://www.inst.at/trans/15Nr/10_5/rostock15.htm

Did Hitler invent mass tourism…?

+ From JD:

Hi, not sure whether this would interest you, but a guy called Paul Torrens has a project for modeling urban panic.

Some quotes . . .

“the project will develop simulations to explore avenues of sustainability in downtown settings, such as how cities can promote walking as an alternative to driving, and how pedestrian flow can be better integrated with transit-oriented development.”

“4) design a mall which can compel customers to shop to the point of bankruptcy, to walk obliviously for miles and miles and miles, endlessly to the point of physical exhaustion and even death;5) identify, if possible, the tell-tale signs of a peaceful crowd about to metamorphosize into a hellish mob; 6) determine how various urban typologies, such as plazas, parks, major arterial streets and banlieues, can be reconfigured in situ into a neutralizing force when crowds do become riotous; and 7) conversely, figure out how one could, through spatial manipulation, inflame a crowd, even a very small one, to set in motion a series of events that culminates into a full scale Revolution or just your average everyday Southeast Asian coup d’état — regime change through landscape architecture.”

Link:
http://pruned.blogspot.com/2007/06/modeling-urban-panic.html

P.S. Loving Ballardian.com BTW.

+ From Mr. Nobody:

Sex Offenders Set Up Camp

+ From Joe:

Simon, there’s a terrific video of JGB at home giving a kind of ‘greatest hits’ performance for the Italian publishers of Millenium People. I don’t think you have a link to it on the website, if you’re interested it can be found here.

Keep up the fine work, Ballardian.com is truly the website the great man deserves.

+ From Anonymous:

Greetings, Mr Sellars

If I may, Phantom Shanghai, an exquisite book of photography by Greg Girard. China’s hyper-economy is eerily represented by a ravenous building boom which is literally devouring all traces of the old. These new buildings loom threatening over what little is left, as if deliberating upon their next move towards total domination. William Gibson offers a brief introduction.

An interview with Girard is here.

Love The Ballardian!

+ From electric:

Black Friday Die Die Die: America’s most obscene shopping day meets its doom in an oily nightmare hell. All true!

+ From Peter:

Something from Ballard’s “The Subliminal Man” has begun to come true.

+ From Thomas:

cockroaches–first creatures conceived and born in space

+ From Mark:

Audi TT, and a model, in a swimming pool for a fashion photo shoot

Like the car wash scene from Crash, but wetter.

+ From Henry:

‘Letter bomber who bore a grudge’: The fightback begins.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

..:: RETROSPECTO REWIND ::..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This disturbing photo feature focuses on peeping toms in Japan and Kohei Yoshiyuki, the photographer who documented them in the 1970s. Listen to Philip Gefter’s voiceover: he notes the triple trangsression here (eminently worthy of Crash as it so happens), involving the couples who have sex in public, the peeping toms observing them, and the photographer recording it all.

[ Thanks, Ben ]

As GH writes, “This news story, reported in the New York Times, reminded me of several JGB stories, especially those collected in ‘Memories of the Space Age’. The (former) astronauts, the sexual obsession, the abandonment of family, the curious triangle drama; these are familiar motifs. Had one of the people involved been a medical doctor or a psychiatrist, the whole affair would have been downright spooky.”

It’s been a bit quiet around these parts. Sorry. Something’s brewing, though…like a wind from nowhere, sweeping through London Town…

…:: Incoming (soonish)
+ News on next year’s International JG Ballard Conference
+ More interviews exploring the Ballard continuum across time and space
+ Guest posts from guest bloggers

Subscribe for notification of updates as they occur. Meanwhile…

…:: Picking Up the Slack
+ The full transcript of Toby Litt’s recent interview with JGB is now online (a severely truncated version previously appeared in Waterstones magazine). According to Toby, five days before he was due to interview JGB, he received spam with the subject: “Enter: Impress your girl with prolonged hardness, plentiful explosions and increased duration”. He says it was from a spambot calling itself “Ballard”. As JGB himself likes to point out, “Deep assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences”.

..:: Random Gender
+ Here’s a delicious experiment from Matteo Bittanti, who has been experimenting with ‘gamics’, using videogame screenshots to create comics. He’s got good taste: he adapts Ballard’s Crash, using dialogue from the book, with Burnout screen caps (thanks, GameSetWatch).

..:: Synchromesh
+ I found this tantalising tidbit on the IMDB regarding Bruce Robinson’s early script for High-Rise:

Bruce Robinson, who is known mainly for ‘Withnail & I’ and ‘The Killing Fields’, wrote a script for this J. G. Ballard novel in 1979. It is unproduced and unpublished. It is just typical of ‘Hollywood’ to disregard this fact. I’m sure the current writer is good, but Bruce put a lot of work into it. He researched the architectural side of the story, as well as some particularly gruesome torture devices available to ‘ordinary’ people. He was commissioned by Euston Films, ending up writing a $35 million film. It was dumped because Bruce believed it would never be made. Here we are, nearly 30 years later, and it’s due to be released. Please read ‘Smoking In Bed: Conversations with Bruce Robinson’ by Alistair Owen, for more about this script.”

I want to know more about these “gruesome torture devices” — sounds a bit like he wanted to turn HR into a slasher pic. Bruce, you reading this mate? Send me your script: maybe we could adapt it here on the site, in a gamic stylee.

..:: Night of the Virtually Dead
+ An enterprising chap has whacked together some found footage, pieced it together with a voice over reading from Ballard’s super-short story, ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’, and bunged the lot up on YouTube. Not too shabby (thanks, Ryan Cole).

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Lyle Hopwood uncovers a lost Ballard work, apparently the only surviving fragment from JGB’s novelization of David Cronenberg’s film of Alien, before the studio infamously got cold feet and replaced Cronenberg with Ridley Scott and Ballard with Alan Dean Foster.
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It’s only the cat, Ripley.
Squatting in the brine strained from the ore above, Kane pressed the activation panel of the locker. Startled by the noise of the lock tumblers, the skittish cat bounded over him, causing him to slip on a thin mesentery, a sloughed skin like that of an amphibian dissected by a careless junior doctor. “Catch it, you fool,” Ripley shouted. “It’ll show up on our scanners again.” Ignoring her, Kane shone his torch on the masklike membrane, recognising it as the discarded integument of the final nymph of the Alien. He was unaware of the caudal barb creeping behind him until he was pulled up into the air-duct. He heard Lambert’s irritating hysteria below him as he gazed onto the Alien instar. The moist, immaculate skin of the erect head reminded him of the perineum of a young boy; he felt an almost ceremonial arousal but experienced only the ghost of his orgasm as the buccal ram of the creature shattered his spinal column between the fourth and fifth thoracic verterbrae. As consciousness diminished he relished lying in the warm saline flow of the duct, a simulacrum of his origin unexpectedly recreated in the gulf of space.

Priority Override 1007: Crew Expendable
Holding the data-CD that it had removed from the high-pressure liquid chromatograph, the dismembered robot Ash lay before the three medical display monitors like the sacrificial victim of some digital Cargo Cult. Framing the AI like a triptych of its credo, the three video frames displaying dorsal, ventral and sagittal section of the arachnid-phase Alien called up an impossible geometry, a forbidden angle in which some non-Euclidian Angel could dance only in isolation on the head of a pin. Its injured hands proffered the data, the compositional analysis of the buccal mucus, like a wafer. “The organism, like a moss, has an alternation of generations,” Ash said. “Unlike a moss, both the gametozoon and the sporozoon stages require a living host. The last acts of humanity may be as surrogate mothers for this free-living phallus existing only to impregnate the weak. Darwin and Freud in one jewelled lizard. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, they say. Where does that leave me?”

“History,” said Parker, raising the muzzle of the flamethrower.

The option to override the destruct sequence has expired.
The bolts tethering the shuttle exploded in a series of magnesium flares, strobing the tableau inside, a technological Burgess Shale. Between the bars of darkness a woman stood; her interpatellar distance, an indicator of sexual arousal, increasing with each burst of light; her obsolete mammalian uterus nurturing only the copper worm of her IUD. Beside her the Alien basked in the warm exhaust of the hibernaculum, a confident equilibrium suffusing all its parts, a physical instance of a new paradigm. Instead of some implacable hatred that one zoological class might feel for its usurper, she felt a brisk, matronly efficiency. She replaced the flamethrower in the translucent plastic rack. As the ovipositor sought out and probed the hollow of her solar plexus, the cat’s hiss framed the moment, a Polaroid of the Hieros Gamos of the once and future predicates of sentience. Reaching out, Ripley, the Madonna of the New Flesh, stroked the elongated head of the creature, her fingerprints in the mucus tracing in an unknown alphabet the names of the children of the dead.

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This piece originally appeared in Interzone #75, September 1993. The blurb from the editor, David Pringle, was as follows:

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

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

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

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

As Ballardian reader Mike Holliday points out:

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

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

From Amazon:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

..:: BUY THE BOOK

‘Obscene mannequins’. ‘Conceptual deaths’. The eroticisation of violence in the media landscape… the stunning ‘State of Emergency’ spread in the current Vogue Italia seems to come straight out of JG Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition…

Welcome to our first guest post, hopefully the beginnings of a regular series in which we invite bloggers from far and wide to adapt the Ballardian template to their own themes, obsessions, and psychopathologies. This instalment is from k-punk, who still can’t quite keep his eyes off State of Emergency, Steven Meisel’s recent effort for Vogue Italia, a controversial photo shoot that has been splashed all over the ballardo(blogo)sphere…

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A few weeks ago, I asked whether it would be possible ‘for there to be a pornography, sponsored by Dior or Chanel, scripted by a latter-day Masoch or Ballard, whose fantasies were as artfully staged as the most glamorous fashion photo shoot?’ Steven Meisel’s Vogue photo-shoot, much more than Mike Figgis’s drearily vanilla promotional films for Agent Provocateur, suggests that such a pornography is conceivable.

‘State of Emergency’ shows, once again, that it is left to high fashion to take up the role that fine art has all but abandoned. While much of fine art has succumbed to the ‘passion for the real’, high fashion remains the last redoubt of Appearance and Fantasy.

The used tampons and pickled animals of Reality Art offer, at best, tracings of the empirical. Their quaint biographism reveals nothing of the unconscious. Meisel’s elegantly-staged photographs, meanwhile, drip with an ambivalence worthy of the best Surrealist paintings. They are uncomfortable and arousing in equal measure because they reflect back to us our conflicted attitudes and unacknowledged libidinal complicities. (In this respect, they form a sharp contrast with the infinitely more exploitative image being used to front the American Express Red campaign, whose meaning is easily anchored to the co-ordinates of the currently dominant ideological constellation.)

Reframed as Art, the Vogue photographs would no doubt be described — in the all-too familiar terms of art-critical muzak — as ‘negotiating with ideas of violence/ terror/ etc.’ As high fashion, they meet instead with a type of liberal denunciation that is no less familiar. In the Guardian, Joanna Bourke complained that, ‘It is no coincidence that the security forces are shown to be protecting us from a person who is neither male nor obviously Muslim’. Would Bourke have preferred it, then, if the images did feature a Muslim man?

Bourke continues:

Instead, the terrorist threat is an unreal woman. In contrast to the security personnel depicted, she is placed beyond the realm of the human. Her skin is as plastic as a mannequin’s; her body is too perfect, even when grimacing in pain. When the model is depicted as the aggressor, she remains nothing more than the phallic dominatrix of many adolescent boys’ wet dreams. In both instances, the beauty of the photographs transforms acts of violence and humiliation into erotic possibilities.

Again, what would Bourke have preferred: simulated snuff in which ‘real-looking’ women were roughed up by security staff? Bourke’s hostility to the fantasmatic is oddly doubled by the aggression of the security personnel towards the ‘unreal’ women. And what does it mean to substitute an ‘unreal woman’ for an all-too-real Muslim male, in any case? What does the confusion of ontological levels — agents of reality conjoined with the waxy artificiality of Bellmer-doll fashion models — tell us? The photographs are fascinating and unsettling because there are no straightforward answers to these questions.

Needless to say, Meisel’s photographs do find erotic possibilities in violence and humiliation, but this is not so much a ‘transformation’ as a rediscovery. Two hundred years after Sade, a century after Bataille and Masoch, it appears that anything which publicly acknowledges that eroticism is inseparable from violence and humiliation is more unacceptable than ever. The issue is not how ‘healthy’ sexuality can be purged of violence, but how the violence inherent to sexuality can be sublimated. Meisel’s photographs — which, we should remember, appear in a magazine the vast majority of whose readership is not ‘adolescent males’ but women — are ‘fantasy kits’ which offer just such sublimations, providing scenarios, role-play cues and potential fantasmatic identifications.

‘State of Emergency’ demonstrates that, rather than simply retaining its capacity to shock, The Atrocity Exhibition is more disturbing than ever. The overt sexualisation and compulsory carnality of postmodern image culture distracts us from the essential staidness of its rendition of the erotic. As Baudrillard argues in Seduction, biologised sex functions as the reality principle of contemporary culture: everything is reducible to sex, and sex is just a matter of meat mechanics. Ours is an age of cynicism and piety, which, as Simon suggested in his initial post on ‘State of Emergency’, primly and pruriently resists the equivalences between eroticism, violence and celebrity that Ballard explored.

Entering the exhibition, Travis sees the atrocities of Vietnam and the Congo mimetised in the ‘alternate’ death of Elizabeth Taylor; he tends the dying film star, eroticising her punctured bronchus in the over-ventilated verandas of the London Hilton; he dreams of Max Ernst, superior of the birds’.

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JG Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition
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To imagine the atrocities of September 11th and Abu Ghraib mimetised in the alternate death of Paris Hilton feels far more unacceptable, because contemporary piety has sacralised its atrocities in a way that the 60s could not. In Atrocity, Dr Nathan’s reminder that, at the level of the unconscious, ‘the tragedies of Cape Kennedy and Vietnam…may in fact play very different parts from the ones we assign them’ is extremely timely. (As Burroughs tells us in his preface to The Atrocity Exhibition, ‘Surveys indicate that wet dreams in many cases have no overt sexual content, whereas dreams with an overt sexual content in many cases do not result in orgasm’.) It is clear that the appalling Abu Ghraib photographs were already intensely eroticised stagings whose scenarios were derived from cheap American pornography. Love and Napalm: Export USA, indeed*. Part of the reason that the Abu Ghraib images were so traumatic for a deeply conflicted American culture which combines religious moralism with hyper-sexualised commerce, and which is united only by a taste for megaviolence, is that they exposed the equation between military intervention and sexual humiliation that the official culture both depends upon and must suppress.

It’s interesting to compare both The Atrocity Exhibition and ‘State of Emergency’ to Martha Rosler’s series of collages, Bringing the War Home. ‘Sixties iconography: the nasal prepuce of LBJ, crashed helicopters, the pudenda of Ralph Nader, Eichmann in drag, the climax of a New York happening: a dead child’: this typical section from The Atrocity Exhibition could almost be a gloss on Rosler’s images, with their irruptions of war and atrocity amidst domestic scenes. But in Rosler’s case, unlike in Ballard’s, surrealist juxtaposition has a clear polemical purpose. The Atrocity Exhibition, like ‘State of Emergency’, is devoid of any decipherable intent; the oneiric juxtapositions in Ballard’s and Meisel’s work seemed to be conceived of as neutral re-presentations of the substitutions and elisions made by the mediatised unconscious.

Meisel’s fantasy kits, their narratives left implicit and mysterious, suggest ways in which Ballard might be adapted in future. Part of the problem with Weiss’s film adaptation of The Atrocity Exhibition is that it subordinated the fragmentary mode of the novel to the duree — the lived time — of the feature film. The most successful part of the film was perhaps the first few moments, where Ballard’s text was intoned over still images in a style reminiscent of Marker’s La Jetee (a film which Ballard adores, of course). That is partly because it is the profound stillness of the Surrealist paintings which The Atrocity Exhibition describes and appropriates — their beaches drained of time — which sets the rhythm of the novel. The most successful adaptation of The Atrocity Exhibition would, precisely, be an exhibition — not only of photographs, but also of newsreel footage, mandalas, diagrams, paintings and notebooks. It would be left for the viewer-participant to assemble their own narratives from these fantasy kits.

k-punk

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*Love and Napalm: Export USA — title of The Atrocity Exhibition’s original American edition
————————————————————————————————

..:: LINKS
+ Buy The Atrocity Exhibition from Amazon
+ State of Emergency: scans from the mag
+ k-punk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nicholas Ruddick. ‘Ballard/Crash/Baudrillard’.

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

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

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“In the first place, why did I steal the aircraft?”

The Unlimited Dream Company is “one of the titles featured in Anthony Burgess’ Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939″.

It’s also one of Ballard’s most surprising and underrated works, and deeply personal, too, given that it takes place in his home town of Shepperton. Substitute the narrator, Blake, for Ballard, then consider Malcolm Bradbury’s insightful review:

For the citizens of Shepperton, Blake performs strange wonders, spinning abundance and exuding sexual energy, drawing them away from their work and into a new world of polymorphous perversity.

From the Triad/Panther edition, 1985:

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

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

..:: BUY THE BOOK

Here’s a Vogue Italia photo shoot by Steven Meisel that posits supermodels as new-age terrorists (thanks for the link, FJ Torres). As Tim has already commented, “If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boot stamping on a supermodel’s throat forever.”

Yes, it’s Ballardian. Yes, it’s JGB’s imagined “sinister marriage between sex and technology”, the final realisation of “violence as consumer spectator sport”. Yes, its disturbing — living in Australia, as I do, and reading about the horrific details of the Dianne Brimble case, it’s difficult to adjudicate otherwise. And yet…and yet…it operates on so many levels I wouldn’t even begin to know where to start in beginning to even imagine formulating an analysis.

Is it a comment on the war on terror? On the place of women in society? On the predominance of anorexic models in the fashion industry, which the industry is attempting to self-regulate? Or is it, as Tim again astutely summarises, merely a point “for academic and media handbags to be flapped”? Certainly Joanna Burke, writing in the Guardian, is under no illusions. For her, “the most disturbing thing about these photographs … is that they have taken their inspiration from the torture photographs taken in Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere in Iraq … we see how those images of torture have been translated into consumer products”.

Despite Jonathan Weiss’s claims to the contrary, that’s what Andres’s review, for whatever faults Jonathan thinks it may embody, was trying to get at: how much more shocking is the type of ‘libidinization of violence’ (thanks to k-punk for the clarity of terms) defined by Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition when spliced with today’s terror porn: September 11…Iraq, etc — a complete fetishisation of mediated violence. That’s at least one level on which Meisel’s shoot operates. And that’s the point Andres was at least attempting to make in his review and which Mr Weiss ripped us to shreds over.

I’m all for updating, expanding, modifying and recasting the Ballardian template…and I now know, after reading Kingdom Come, that JGB is, too. Is Steven Meisel? Perhaps Kingdom Come could form the basis of his first feature film…

Then again, perhaps Pippa, on the same chat group as Tim, is closer to the mark, when she says, “Hmmm. Pretty anodyne really. It just looks like a fashion shoot. Which makes one ask whether fashion shoots are looking more like atrocity images, or the other way around. Isn’t this the real death of affect, when it’s all pretty damn boring?”.

There’s no doubt about it — this is definitely a job for k-punk…I’m sending out the Bat Signal…

Over at k-punk a few months back, Mark posted a radical thesis that positioned Basic Instinct 2 as the unofficial sequel to Cronenberg/Ballard’s Crash:

[Catherine] Tramell returns in the second film as a camp vamp whose persona owes more to Ballard than to film noir. Catherine is a name Ballard has often used, and Basic Instinct 2 sometimes feels that it is as much a sequel to Crash as to Verhoeven’s film. Setting the film in a phantasmatic, cybergothic London means, in fact, that Basic Instinct 2 recalls aspects of Ballard’s novel that Cronenberg’s film, with its North American setting, didn’t get to”.

Now, as part of an inter-weblog pornography symposium, k-punk writes:

Crash, of course, follows Masoch and Newton in delocalizing sex from genitality. Libido is invested in the mis-en-scene more than in the meat, which draws its attraction almost entirely from its adjacency to the decorous nonorganic – to clothes as much as cars. Clothes differentiate Glam’s cold and cruel cultivation of appearances from hardcore’s passion for the real. Without suits, dresses and shoes, without fur, leather and nylon, pornography might as well be arranging meat in a butcher’s window. Newton told Ballard that he ‘loved Cronenberg’s Crash, but one thing bothered him. ‘The dresses,’ he whispered. ‘They were so awful.” This strikes me as waspishly unfair to Denice Cronenberg’s elegant wardrobe selections. (One major problem with Jonathan Weiss’ version of The Atrocity Exhibition, however, is precisely the dreadfulness of the clothes.) Crash takes its cues from high fashion magazines, whose images are more sumptuously arty than fine art, more suffused with deviant eroticism than hardcore porn. Would it be impossible for there to be a pornography, sponsored by Dior or Chanel, scripted by a latter-day Masoch or Ballard, whose fantasies were as artfully staged as the most glamorous fashion photo shoot?”

It’s possible, of course, but it just wouldn’t sell.

OPENING LINE:
“Every afternoon in Shanghai during the summer of 1937 I rode down to the Bund to see if the war had begun.”

I have a real soft spot for The Kindness of Women, an autobiographical work that’s loosely described as a sequel to Empire of the Sun. Here, Ballard is honest, self-deprecating and wildly vivid in laying out the tracks of his adult life. While it’s actually a fictional ‘reimagining’ of Ballard’s life rather than a straight recounting (which is what all autobiographies essentially are, if only they’d care to admit it), Kindness is essential for anyone looking to delve into the motivations behind works such as Crash and the 70s Ballard that has been so mythologised.

And it’s very funny, too, full of keenly applied and intentional humour, like this description of being serviced by a prostitute (p. 250): “Like a fisherwoman at an angling hole, patiently waiting for a bite, she moved about on her heels, the tip of my penis between her labia.”

I can see Ballard’s wry smile behind the typewriter every time I read this, his passive, avuncular expression tinged with mildly titillated bemusement at the abstraction sex has become.

Some quotes from the Grafton edition:

Ballard is the most modern of writers; his art engages with the artefacts and obsessions of the second half of this century in a manner and with an intensity unmatched by any other writer I can think of. The book is full of memserising writing, classic examples of the Ballard Style, paragraphs and pages that disturb and enthrall… A force is operating in this astonishing book which is hard to resist.”

William Boyd, Daily Telegraph

“It has a brutal spine — plenty of hardware and violence and graphic and clinical sex scenes. But it is also, in its own chilly way, enormously tender and likeable with huge vision and ambition.”

Sunday Times

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

..:: BUY THE BOOK

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

From the 1996 Harper Collins edition:

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

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

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

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

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

J.G. Ballard. ‘The Lucid Dreamer’.

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

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

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

..:: CONTENTS

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

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

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

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

More contents to come.

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

..:: BUY THE BOOK

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plus the obligatory endorsement:

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

Nicholas Royle, Guardian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I call that a missed opportunity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

..:: CONTENTS

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

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

..:: BUY VOLUME 1

..:: BUY VOLUME 2

PENGUIN: You don’t belong to any one school, who do you read or admire?

WILL SELF: I do have some very defined and precise influences on my work and on how I see my work as a writer. Of the post-war writers, I stand most in thrall to J G Ballard, to his vision of an apocalyptic world. A world in which effect and in which feeling is to some extent deadened or even destroyed by alienation and by technology. I think the big difference between me and Ballard is that there are no jokes in his books at all, or at least not intentionally any jokes.

No intentional jokes in Ballard? Maybe not; but his work is full of keenly applied and intentional humour. Here’s a favourite ‘passage’ (oooh err, sounds a bit rude) from Crash: “…she masturbated in the bed beside me in the mornings, thighs splayed symmetrically, fingers grovelling at her pubis, as if rolling to death some small venereal snot…” (p. 180).

Then there’s the description of being serviced in The Kindness of Women: “Like a fisherwoman at an angling hole, patiently waiting for a bite, she moved about on her heels, the tip of my penis between her labia” (p. 250). I can see Ballard’s wry smile behind the typewriter every time I read these, his passive, avuncular expression tinged with mildly titillated bemusement at the abstraction sex has become.

Granted, these examples aren’t exactly thigh slappers. There’s no punchline. And they’re different in execution (if not conceit) from the classic Self sex farce, typified by this passage from Self’s Cock:

“Carol dreamt that she was an enormous chemical factory; like the ICI refinery near her parents’ house in Dorset. Great twisted ganglia of pipes burst forth from her vagina, some of them emitting vast plumes of dry ice spume, others winking with warning lights protected by metal basketry. Her head was marooned far away on the estuarine sand; her great buttocks were shoved against the concrete causeway. Little men, wearing hard yellow hats and driving little yellow trucks, hovered around her anus and vagina. Carol awoke screaming” (pp. 25-26).

In terms of comedy value maybe it’s like comparing Terry Jones with John Cleese, but Ballard makes me laugh, that’s all there is to it, by underscoring the absurd stylisation sex can descend into.

James “Gags” Ballard does have his critics, though, like Brigette Frase. In her summation of Cocaine Nights (worst book of 1998, according to Brigette), she wrote that it was “a shame that Ballard and his characters are unblemished by any sense of humor. With a nip here and a tuck there, this could have been a really funny novel”.

Thanks to Iain X from the JGB Mailing List for this link, a series of photos taken by a ’seabee’ stationed on the North Pacific, Micronesian island of Tinian during WWII. As the site’s author, Dan Norton, says, “These photos were developed by my grandfather in his clandestine photo lab he ran while stationed on the island of Tinian.” Many thanks to Dan for allowing me to publish some of them here.

Grandpa Norton’s photos — of mass military graveyards; bombers submerged in sand; the flash of war in a tropical setting — will resonate with anyone familiar with J G Ballard’s war stories. I travelled around Micronesia (Yap, Palau, Pohnpei, Guam, Tinian, Rota, Saipan) last year and was floored by Tinian, this serene place, and its role as the launching pad for the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Atomic Bomb Pits, Tinian, 2005 (Simon Sellars)

On Tinian I was caught off guard in lots of ways. When I went for a skinny deep at a northern beach, I felt safe as I’d not sighted another human being for hours. But the universe conspired; as soon as I emerged naked from the water, a busload of Japanese tourists unloaded right next to my car. Where my clothes were. Women giggled; men looked away. Walking over to my clothes, I waved and tried to act natural. The bus driver, a local, looked me up and down.

‘Hey Little Boy,’ he scoffed. ‘You looking for Fat Man?’

But I was. How did he know? Oh, I see. Very funny. He gave me directions, I got dressed and hightailed it to North Field, Tinian’s abandoned US airbase.

Like Melville in Ballard’s ‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’, I took photos of all the abandoned runways and bases; the shot above is of the pits where the the Little Boy and Fat Man atomic bombs were loaded into the B29s that destroyed Japan. They’re now covered with plexiglass, to deter souvenir hunters I presume; a man was recently charged with stealing bits of North Field and selling them on the Internet. Or maybe it’s a deterrent to vandals… I took hundreds of shots of the remains of Japanese Zeroes, tanks and anti-aircraft guns in the Micronesian jungle, and I tried to visualise what the islands were like during WWII — Tinian was the world’s busiest air base back then, traffic generated entirely by American war planes. It’s a tiny, tiny place — peaceful and lush — so it’s very hard to imagine.

Dan’s photos fill in some of the gaps. As does Ballard…

“The B-29s which bombed the airfield beside Lunghua Camp, near Shanghai, where I was interned during the second World War, had reportedly flown from Guam. Pacific Islands, with their silent airstrips among the palm trees, Wake Island above all, have a potent magic for me. The runways that cross these little atolls, now mostly abandoned, seem to represent extreme states of nostalgia and possibility, doorways into another continuum.

It was from the island of Tinian, in the Marianas, that the atom bombs were launched against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which ended the war unexpectedly and almost certainly saved the lives of myself and my fellow internees in Shanghai, where the huge Japanese armies had intended to make a last stand against the unexpected American landings”.

– from Ballard’s annotations, JG Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, RE/Search, 1990, p. 33.

Tinian, WWII, © Dan Norton

Abandoned Japanese Zero, Yap, 2005 (Simon Sellars)

In Micronesia I tapped into other Ballardian currents, especially in Saipan, an island continually lumped in with Guam as a no-culture, overdeveloped resort park for rich Japanese and Americans. It’s said that during WWII, the occupying Japanese forces wiped out the Saipanese villages and the local Chamorro culture and replaced them with facsimile Japanese towns, bars, restaurants. Landing in Saipan today, you’d be forgiven for wondering if they were ever kicked out. Hotel signage and pamphlets are often solely written in Japanese; there’s an abundance of Japanese restaurants and sushi houses; and many of the locals speak at least a smattering of the language.

Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, Banzai Cliff, Saipan, 2005, (Simon Sellars)

In the north, possibly Saipan’s most beautiful region, filled with rolling hills and lush beaches, there are numerous monuments, statues and homages to the war-dead Japanese. There’s a happy-go-lucky atmosphere at these monuments. Busloads of Japanese tourists make the circuit from cannon to cliff, from the early morning to the late afternoon, laughing and joking, taking snaps and enjoying picnics.

At Banzai Cliff I witnessed something extraordinary, the afterimage of which has remained with me ever since. Some background: it was at this cliff where, during the war, hundreds of Japanese families committed mass suicide rather than surrender to the Americans. The youngest child would be the first to go, pushed over the edge by the next youngest, and so on, until the mother pushed the last child over. Finally, the father pushed the mother over before he too made a running jump. This story sums up the futility of the Japanese war effort, especially considering the return of the Japanese these days, in greater numbers and as valued customers. Looking over the cliff, I was caught up in mad visions of the raging water swirling below, imagining I was one of those poor children, beginning to understand that I was looking at death.

Banzai Cliff (northern Saipan), 2005 (Simon Sellars)

I heard some giggling: a young Japanese girl dressed in fashionable camouflage pants and cap was posing by one of the monuments, having her photograph taken. OK, that’s what Japanese tourists do; but then she began to pout sexily, twirl her hair seductively, and tilt her head at a come-hither angle. When she slipped her top down to reveal a nipple, the penny dropped. She was either modelling the latest in camo gear and had picked a suitably war-drenched region to pose against, or it was some kind of soft-porn shoot…with a war theme.

I found this odd couple ahead of me at two other monuments — this young, desirable girl and her photographer, an older guy in his forties, dressed like the hip movie director in Lost In Translation, with his baggy pants, blow-waved hair, John-Lennon sunglasses and red baseball cap. At an old WWII Japanese cannon near Banzai Cliff, I watched her mount the weapon then dismount, pouting and pretending to lick the barrel. She was incredibly un-self-conscious, and at one point looked me directly in the eye with a dazzling smile. I was beginning to understand where these pictures would end up; maybe I’ll do a Google search in a few months time (something like ‘saipan banzai nipple gun barrel’) and all will be revealed.

Hotel Nikko (northern Saipan), 2006 (Simon Sellars)

On the way to Banzai Cliff is the Hotel Nikko Saipan, especially notable for its futuristic design: the architects must have modelled the Nikko on the domed city from the ’70s sci-fi film Logan’s Run. Clearly this luxury hotel was meant to herald in a tourist-driven utopia that would transform Saipan. There’s no doubt that Saipan is very popular with the Japanese, but not nearly as much since the bottom fell out of the Asian economy a few years back. The local Chamorros seem to have traded in their cultural heritage for a stake in this consumer-driven utopia, only for the gamble to backfire. Even more so than Guam, there’s a fully devolved Chamorro culture in Saipan, replaced by the rusted hulks of abandoned shopping centres.

Across the road from the Nikko is one of these burnt-out shells, the La Fiesta shopping centre. The Lonely Planet guidebook touted this as a major hub, but things have obviously changed in the five years since the book was written. The La Fiesta was like San Francisco at the start of another ’70s sci-fi flick, The Omega Man: there were cars and other technological signs of civilisation, but no indication whatsoever of human life. I wandered around for a good ten minutes, staring at abandoned Japanese restaurants and computer-less Internet cafes filled with wires and cables, before I saw another person. A man – stepping from the shadows, well-dressed and genial. He smiled and winked at me, then disappeared into an office. I was spooked. An apparition? But there were other people, busily typing away at their desks. I discovered another office, with more actual people, but the whole centre was infused with a dank melancholy. I couldn’t help but think that these office workers — like the last survivors of a nuclear war, holed up underground and trying to restart civilisation on a scorched Earth — were clinging to Saipan’s dreams of a tourist utopia, desperately trying to kick-start the economy all by themselves…

La Fiesta Shopping Centre (northern Saipan), 2006, (Simon Sellars)

>>>>>>>>>>

“These illustrations of the Pacific atoll, with its vast concrete runways, he had collected over the previous months. Melville’s real interest had been in the island itself, a World War II airbase and now refuelling point for trans-Pacific passenger jets. The combination of scuffed sand and concrete, metal shacks rusting by the runways, the total psychological reduction of this man-made landscape, seized his mind in a powerful but ambiguous way.
…
Melville prowled along the mantelpiece of the beach-house, slapping the line of photographs. ‘Look at those runways, everything is there. A big airport like the Wake field is a zone of tremendous possibility — a place of beginnings, by the way, not ends’.
…
He resolved to make his world-wide journey, externally to Wake Island, and internally across the planets of his mind”.

– J.G. Ballard, ‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’, 1974.

>>>>>>>>>>

Distressed B29, Tinian, © Dan Norton 2006

From Playboy:

“Crash by J.G Ballard (1973)

Plot: Group of Londoners discovers that they are turned on by automobile crashes. Scars become a new erogenous zone.

Why it’s on the list: Ballard’s 1973 tour de force weds the sexual with the industrial. He imagines the body is branded by the metal parts of an automobile “like the contours of a woman’s body remembered in the responding pressure of one’s own skin for a few hours after a sexual act,” and his work yields remarkable energy and obsession.

Excerpt: Catherine visited me. She would soap her hand from the toilet bar in its wet saucer inside my cupboard, her pale eyes staring through the flower-filled window as she masturbated me….

Did Catherine respond to the…dark bruises of my body and the physical outline of the steering wheel? In my left knee the scars above my fractured patella exactly replicated the protruding switches of the windshield wipers and parking lights. As I moved towards my orgasm she began to soap her hand every ten seconds, her cigarette forgotten, concentrating her attention on this orifice of my body like the nurses who attended me in the first hours after my accident. As my semen jerked into Catherine’s palm she held tightly to my penis, as if these first orgasms after the crash celebrated a unique event.”

Victor Slezak as ‘T’ in The Atrocity Exhibition

Ballardian presents an exclusive interview with Jonathan Weiss, director of The Atrocity Exhibition, the film based on the J.G. Ballard collection of ‘condensed novels’.

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NOTE: This is a revised and expanded version of the original interview. The new additions are a reworked introduction, the addition of notes, and the inclusion of JW’s original, lengthier reply to one question (which I missed the first time around; see the note), plus my follow-up response and JW’s follow-up response. See the postscript for more background to this interview. SS
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When film adaptations of JG Ballard’s work are discussed, it’s Crash and Empire of the Sun that grab the headlines. And then there’s Jonathan Weiss’s Atrocity Exhibition. For ages, JGB watchers have speculated about this film — because it’s had just a few screenings since its completion six years ago, it’s gathered a thick crust of secrecy. Weiss, working with very limited resources, oversaw a stop-start production that unfurled over a number of years. Originally running at 105 minutes, the film was edited down to its present 90-minute form after its screening at the 1999 Slamdance festival. And that was pretty much it for The Atrocity Exhibition — it never had a theatrical release, was never marketed. Very few people have seen it. But now, thanks to the Dutch company Reel 23, which recently released this buried work on DVD, we can finally see what Weiss was up to — as Andrés Vaccari did in his review of the DVD for Ballardian.

And now here it is, flawed, fatal and totally flammable — the Jonathan Weiss Interview.

– Simon Sellars

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All images © Jonathan Weiss and Reel 23
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How did you first come across Atrocity Exhibition, the book?

I had been hunting for the book for a long time, maybe without even knowing it. I never went to film school and initially had no desire to be a filmmaker in the traditional sense. I had been making some truly ‘experimental’ films (I usually hate that term) in that I really was experimenting with film structure looking for what worked, what did not. I started to realise that the duration of short films might be posing inherent problems for what I had in mind. But I found very few feature length films that did what I was interested in, perhaps only Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror, and a bit in some of the Derek Jarman Super 8 films blown up to 35mm, like Last of England.

And then somehow I found the RE/Search edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, and I knew in about two pages that I had the book I was looking for. It was absolutely perfect. It was already a shooting script for a film, but since Ballard was an author, he called it a book. I had read other Ballard works, but of course they are totally different from The Atrocity Exhibition, which is the ultimate distillation of his thinking, rendered in a poetically scientific style.

How did you approach Ballard?

I wrote a letter to his agent asking for permission to use the text to do a Super 8 version. I received some sort of vague permission, which would have been worth entirely nothing later. But the film became a real production, as people who were commercial entities in New York City at the time found out about what I was doing and begged to sign on. You cannot believe how enthusiastic people were to help me make it into a ‘real’ film — something that could be projected from 35mm in a typical movie house. So we just made it. It reminds me of the children’s book, Stone Soup: you start making a cauldron of soup with nothing but stones and water, but if you do it right, at the end it’s filled with vegetables and meat.

Anna Juvander in The Atrocity Exhibition

At the end of the filming process, when we had a rough cut that was close to the finished version, a friend from England who knew Ballard’s daughter offered to deliver a copy of the VHS to him. He called a few days later to report it delivered. The next day, I heard my wife at the time, Anna Juvander, who plays many roles in the film, screaming. I went to see what the ruckus was about. She was standing by the fax machine, shaking, reading a fax. It was the first one from Ballard, praising the movie. The next day, I kid you not, we received another. He loved it. He loved it so much, in fact, that when I read the faxes I thought, ‘Maybe he’s not quite right any longer’. I was not ready for him to call the movie ‘a poetic masterpiece’ — I would have been happy just hearing that he could watch it in one sitting, or something similar.

We subsequently were able to buy the rights, very reasonably, because of that. In the nick of time, too, as Lars Von Trier’s Zentropa company were after it. I shudder to think what would have happened if JGB did NOT like the movie. Moral of this story: don’t ever, ever, ever do anything as stupid as making anything without getting the rights, in stone, for one million years minimum.

Did Ballard have any input into the film?

JGB indeed helped after the film was finished with a suggestion for a little introductory sequence, which makes the film a tad bit more accessible. I liked the inaccessible opening, but saw the wisdom in his approach. Other than that, he essentially rubberstamped the film with his good wishes.

What was the funding structure like? Was it entirely private?

You are obviously not an American. There is NO such thing as public money for this kind of film in the USA. There might be public money for making a documentary about Eskimos with Down Syndrome, but not for features. That is one reason why American film is the way it is and why other countries’ films are, also, the way they are.

Why did you cut 30 minutes from the original running time?

We took out all the good parts. Like the serious sex and violence.

OK, but why?

Just kidding. I did have a funny interlude with the head of programming for the Sundance Channel, who wanted to buy the film but wondered whether the few frames (less than one second) of hard-core penetration would make it through corporate headquarters. I suggested I replace the footage, because it did not have to be penetration to do what I wanted in that scene. She looked at me like I was a naughty child: how dare I contemplate ‘compromising’ a work of art by self-censoring it. So I said, ‘Fine, leave it in’. She was fired or left the station soon after, anyway. The porn is still there. We just did some necessary editing. I am happy with the length of the final version of the film. Longer was not better.

The film took a number of years to complete. How did you maintain the look and feel over time?

Formaldehyde works wonders. The film took more than a year to shoot, mainly because the shooting schedule coincided with the worst winter in about one hundred years. The editing took forever and went through three different editing houses, because we had no money — it was done as a labour of love, and love runs out.

How did Reel 23 come into the picture?

They liked the film.

That’s it? You suggested to me that the parent company, Filmfreak, actually created Reel 23 so your film could finally be seen. That must have been a huge boost to your confidence.

The people at Filmfreak and Mr Ballard have been the only bright spots on an otherwise very depressing and bleak landscape since making the film. The problem, of course, is that the film is SO very different from other films that to sell it you need to differentiate it from the rest of the stuff in the store. To do this the wonderful people at Filmfreak really went out on a limb and made a very risky investment to market Atrocity and, importantly, other films like it or in the same spirit. This includes very different material, like David Cronenberg’s first films. They had Atrocity subtitled in most languages necessary for a wider release and even had the master made for a NTSC DVD, which to date is waiting for the right distributor to take on the film for America. They’re a European company and not in a position to do distribution for the USA and Canada.

How do you feel about your home audience missing out?

It’s tragic.

Are you being sarcastic?

Wouldn’t you be sarcastic about the prospects of finding distribution for a tiny Ballard adaptation in the ultra-commercial, competitive American market if the main Ballard website thoroughly trounced your film? It’s like asking a thirsty man if he wants something to drink, whilst turning the spigot off. I was at an event a week ago that precipitated this — where someone asked if I had read Vaccari’s review of my film. It was clear from my conversation with them just how damaging this is to TAE in terms of finding a distributor. You may not think so, but you are not in the film business, to my knowledge.

You may not realize the irony of the situation, but having started TAE at the age of 25, (I turned 42 yesterday), I now find myself having to try and undo the damage that some two-bit clod has perpetrated, so that some people might still want to see my film. You talk about the “dire” situation of film in Australia, due to a lack of funding, you say.

[ NOTE: I mentioned to Weiss that I have interviewed many independent filmmakers here in Australia. I told him this mainly in an attempt to establish some kind of common ground -- also to express sympathy with him and with the concomitant plight of independent filmmakers working with extremely scarce resources. I needn't have bothered. Jonathan refused to meet me halfway, and my attempt was swiftly used against me. ]

Do you realize that the problems with film, on the level of something like my film, for example, are far more complex than getting the government to give you some cash? Imagine working for more than 15 years on a difficult, little film which one would expect at least Ballard fans to appreciate. Then having some ham-fisted moron who authoritatively pronounces Ballard to be “outmoded” in his thinking (on a “Ballardian” website, no less) trashing the film as being “dated” because it does not mention Britney Spears and Paris Hilton!

NOTE: Andrés mentioned Britney and Paris, in his comment after the review, as an example of how cultural icons become dated, not of how Weiss’s film is dated; he never calls for either woman’s inclusion in the film and to suggest otherwise is a clear misrepresentation. Also, Andrés never calls Ballard outmoded; rather he suggests that the one book, Atrocity, has not worn as well as some of JGB’s other works. I don’t agree with that, but it’s Andres’s opinion and he’s entitled to it.

Don’t you feel embarassed publishing that? Would you really want to have a drink with Jim after he read that? What would you say to him? Something like, “Sorry to publish that blather, but its not my opinion. Really.”

[ NOTE: That's 'Jim Ballard', in case you're wondering. ]

Put yourself in my shoes for a moment, Simon. Your website, and others like it, are about the only portal through which prospective audiences for TAE will likely travel. At the moment, the world walks the Google path and the first place they are going to start is yours, as far as this is concerned. Google “Atrocity Exhibition” and film and see where you go. For most people the first stop, with an authoritative name like Ballardian, is also going to be their last. How many people who read the review will go to the trouble of trying to see TAE? I would not waste my time, if I were the usual sort, having read such a cursory dismissal of not only the film but the book itself.

[ NOTE: I can't wear this charge. I never look at one review when deciding whether to see a film; I always like to gather a range of opinions, and as far as I can tell that's a pretty normal attitude... By this stage I was getting thoroughly tired of Jonathan’s attempts to bully us into giving him a favourable review, tired of him belittling my journalistic credentials, tired of him abusing my colleague despite repeated requests to stop, and tired of this website bearing the brunt of being the only site to review Weiss’s film. I suggested to him that he publish his own website devoted to the damned thing. Jonathan could then shape public opinion the way he wanted to shape it. As it is, Reel23’s graphics-intensive Atrocity page does him no favours — with no text, merely images of text, it is nowhere to be found on Google. In this day and age of instant access and instant publishing, Jonathan really has only himself to blame for Google searches returning at No. 1 anything other than the official, sanctioned Atrocity product. ]

In short, I think you have done a disservice to the only small, independent film ever made of one of Ballard’s works, and you worry about the “dire” condition of film? Rather ironic. I would be extremely suprised if either you or Mr Vaccari ever gave any thought whatsoever about the effects of your actions on a film like this. Mr Vaccari’s motivations seem clear — this is his little moment of authority and attention. Your motives escape me.

Reading what you have up now, you would never even know what Ballard himself (namesake of your site, remember) thought of the film, which is quite extraordinary. Most authors quietly hate what is done with their work on film.

I’m sorry the review played a part in your decision to not contact distributors, but neither I nor Andres should feel any responsibility or obligation to you in that regard. What if a major newspaper like the Guardian published a negative review in their online section? What then? You really need to get out of the trap of thinking that this site has some kind of obligation to publish a positive review of your film. I’m sorry to say, but I don’t run a Ballard ‘fan site’. I am as interested in publishing critical opinions of Ballard’s work and related products (like film versions) as I am in praising the man. The site is not hagiography.

Would you care to expand upon your responses to Andres’s criticisms? It would seem he is not alone in voicing some of these points. Other reviewers make similar claims, like this one.

Anyone who thinks that the world depicted in The Atrocity Exhibition has been rendered obsolete in anything but its decorative attributes is severely deluded. That review suggests I ‘made a grave error’ in thinking that the content of Atrocity is still relevant. So what is that content: that we DON’T live in a pervasive media landscape where reality checked out long ago? That we are not obsessed and consumed by psychopathologies that create and determine our relationships with ourselves, our family and friends, our celebrities, our governments? That our cars and other vehicles stopped having polyperverse identities, and are no longer sexualised fetish objects? Has sex itself receded from the flood plains of our time and gone back to its purely procreative origins?

The problem is that as subsequent generations are born into this upside-down world, they see it as normal and natural. It is not. They see the wardrobe, props and sets change and use these ephemera as a surveyor sets his stakes.

NOTE: Weiss originally emailed me the following ‘postscript’, which I missed the first time around, but which I recently discovered at the bottom of another message. I’m publishing it here, for completeness’ sake.

Mr Vaccari’s contention that the book, the film, or both, are “dated”, seems to be making two points. One is that the film belongs to a certain specific historical period (I assume the late 60s) and that is bad. It’s bad to be dated. Which means that all historical films, for example, anything that tries or simply does evoke a period is bad (TAE, by the way, does not do that as a matter of course). Bad meaning dated. Toss all Merchant Ivory, not because it’s sickly film culture, but because it’s historical, it’s dated, thus it’s bad. Toss Andrei Rublev, too, I would assume. Where we stop tossing, I don’t know.

The second point pertaining to this line of attack would be that the references themselves, being historic, are dated and getting old and grey. They don’t work anymore, don’t have the power they used to. Nobody can identify with Marilyn Monroe anymore (excepting yesterday’s Wall Street Journal dated April 10 06, discussing the economics of control over her image). Mr Vaccari must know this problem himself from rereading his own torturous attempt at recreating Ballardian fictional prose and style in “Chariots of Fire”, a delightful piece I found on his website, using Princess Di to “update” things a bit from Ballard’s “dated” original. Actually, if truth be told, Mr Vaccari has quite the hard on for Atrocity Exhibition, despite his professed disdain, as he copies it yet again in form and function in the wonderful short bit, “Why I Want to Fuck John Howard,” a real treat and topical to boot.

But back to Mr Vaccari’s major point of criticism — the point of referencing. References function in a myriad of ways, and no film, nor any work of art, can possibly be divorced from the culture and icons which comprise it. People have no problem watching films set in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, etc. Why? Because whether a film is good or not has nothing to do with the period in which it is set or the references it contains. If you needed a Rosetta Stone to watch the film, that would be another story.

There’s an interesting quote over at Senses of Cinema: ‘Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair have never done anything so vulgar as attempting to “adapt” a Ballard fiction. They understand too well that we now live in the landscape that Ballard has been faithfully anatomising and populating with characters since the 1960s. Why bother ‘adapting’ when you can hit the motorway and find all the sets, the actors, and the (CCTV) camera positions ready and waiting for you?’

Mr Petit and Mr Sinclair do not make feature films. They make arthouse installations, but call them ‘films’. Here’s an IMDB comment on their London Orbital: ‘Pompous, pretentious, meaningless and totally pointless’. Maybe they should try being vulgar next time. Since you bring up Mr Sinclair, please note that his BFI book on Cronenberg and Ballard [also called Crash] was so filled with fabrications and outright lies in its discussion of my film, still then a work in progress, that when I spoke to JGB about it he was as appalled as I was. That some of the self-appointed gatekeepers of ‘avant-garde’ culture in the UK, and, for that matter, Ballard’s work, have to invent things about The Atrocity Exhibition, as Sinclair did, suggests another agenda at work.

That shocks and surprises me. Do you want to set the record straight and point out exactly what Sinclair got wrong?

Sinclair invented erroneous figures for how much the film cost and where the money went — having NEVER having talked to me or communicated with me in any way. I even called Ballard as some of the errors were actually attributed to him. JGB assured me that these things were fabricated and indicated he had his own issues with the veracity of the book.

I can live with a so-called serious author trying to belittle my little film, in a book on a relatively big film by Cronenberg, by saying it cost a fraction of what it did, and that the money was spent in a trivial way, et cetera. What I cannot abide by was Sinclair’s central premise: that all filmic adaptations of serious literary work have to be divorced in spirit from their progenitors. If not, Sinclair insists, they have no integrity. Well, I consider Ballard to be a very good judge of things like integrity. Ballard loved the film and has been the film’s biggest support. But Sinclair could not mention that, because his premise and his pay check was to write a book praising Cronenberg’s take on Ballard, which compelled him, I assume, to denigrate my approach.

Why would Sinclair do that? Because you’re from outside the UK? I haven’t read the book; I’m just speculating…

The problem, well understood in academia and minor cultural zones like this, boils down to territoriality. The stakes, understood in terms of money or power, are miniscule. This breeds the worst kind of petty territorialism, where supposedly intelligent adults behave like spoiled children not wanting to share their sandbox. I assume Mr Sinclair, who later went on to try and make a Ballardian film with a small budget himself, was trying, like a dog pissing on a hedge, to mark off his own little fiefdom. The fact that some unknown American with no pedigree had actually made a full-length adaptation of the most difficult-to-adapt book Ballard ever wrote, and having Ballard LIKE the movie, may have pissed off some people in the UK, Sinclair included.

I also, in retrospect, now think the same of Mr Vaccari’s very strange dismissal of both the book and my film, as he has obviously been inspired enough by The Atrocity Exhibition to write his own undisguised copies of parts of the book.

NOTE: I have since read Sinclair’s book and I cannot see how it could have provoked such a reaction. As Tim Chapman mentions in the comments at the end of this interview, Weiss’s film is barely mentioned in Sinclair’s book, but even so Sinclair actually notes that Ballard praises the film. Tim has reproduced the relevant excerpts in the comments section: see it and decide.

Have you ever confronted Sinclair?

I would not know how to reach him let alone expect him to come clean. If you fabricate a bunch of garbage and someone confronts you with your malfeasance, would you expect contrition?

I had a similar thing happen at the same time with the BBC. They had requested a copy of my film to include in a program about adaptations of Ballard’s work. I was thrilled, of course. Imagine my shock when they used footage from my film as if the BBC had shot it, with no context and no proper acknowledgement of my film. They even used an actor to narrate OVER my film, from the book! No mention at all that I had made The Atrocity Exhibition. When I demanded an explanation and retraction, it was a month later and all I got was a curt letter admitting what they had done and removing my footage from their piece.

This is how even the BBC behaves with small films. It’s truly shameful, and no one cares.

Is a Ballardian aesthetic still needed in film and literature these days? Is Ballard’s worldview still relevant?

If it was not relevant, why operate a Ballard website? Nostalgia?

The question isn’t whether I think a Ballardian aesthetic is relevant today, but whether you do. Do you? I’m not attacking you; I’m genuinely interested in your answer.

Ballard’s work is essentially dystopic. Its subject is the world gone wrong, usually a slightly-in-the-future world which makes the whole thing easier for the reader to accept. In the last several decades, the Ballardian project has become centred on the decline of a value system which has held sway for Western Civilisation for centuries, even millennia. What is supplanting this value system — something extremely nihilistic — Ballard seems to see very clearly and be able to capture in his work. I felt that is true in The Atrocity Exhibition, and I feel it compelling his most recent work, perhaps even more strongly. Very few authors have the ability to both sense and capture this seismic change. He is a philosopher as much as an artist. Thus his aesthetic, his thinking, is more relevant than ever.

That does not even begin to come to terms with Ballard’s prescription for the malady, which is truly, majestically radical. It can be summarised, perhaps, by not rejecting or resisting the process of decline, but by abetting it.

Because your film deliberately subverts traditional narrative and contains some fairly disturbing imagery, people perceive it as ‘difficult’ viewing. Did that make it hard to market the film? How did audiences initially react to it?

The film has never had a theatrical release. And perhaps it should be that way, given the ‘vulgarity’ (to use the word properly) of film marketing and the realities of theatrical distribution today, worldwide. Where the hell is it supposed to play? At my local multiplex? I can count all of the theatres in New York City that play other films such as this on the fingers of one hand, with a few fingers left over. It’s not exactly March of the Penguins, now, is it? The film was never marketed because marketing requires money, hiring a publicist, et cetera. We never had the money to do that. I was hoping that a few influential critics or cultural figures (besides Ballard) would help the film in that regard, but I was mistaken. This website constitutes marketing, because the readers here are the core audience for the film, and look at how well that is going.

As for being difficult, if people call a film difficult, then it becomes so. I have had numerous instances of people showing up at private screenings with NO idea of what the film would be, dragged there by a friend, with no warning. At the end of a typical screening, it is usually very, very quiet. For some minutes. People are usually very still. They are in some kind of other state — maybe it’s shock, but I don’t think it’s that. Quite frequently, people who have nothing to do with the film business, or the culture world generally, are the best viewers, the ones who get the most from the film — the ones who understand the most, precisely because they THINK the least. The most difficult aspect of the film is actually seeing it.

Was the 1999 Slamdance screening the first?

The film first showed at Rotterdam in 1998, as a work in progress. As for festivals in general, they are not very good places to expect people to seriously watch films. They are essentially big parties, or rather disgusting, stupid, frenzied greed fests with people desperately running around, literally, looking for the next indie film that could make them a few million bucks. Considering that the problem with indie film (meaning everything save studio megaliths) today is the utter triumph of the worst kind of commerciality, it is really pathetic to see adults spend the kind of energy they do in the film world to make a few, paltry bucks. If you want to be a capitalist, it’s such small change.

You could, for example, be a hedge-fund manager and make in one year the total gross of all of those films. Then you could finance or even make yourself any films you wanted, and not give a shit how much money they made or lost. Obviously, the rewards are elsewhere.

You co-wrote the script with Michael Kirby [who also plays Dr Nathan in the film]. How did the working process between the two of you evolve?

Normally, a script is extremely important, as a film is about characters and you understand them through dialogue and action. The Atrocity Exhibition is very different. It is about places, space — meaning architectural space — time, events, unusual forms of consciousness, et cetera. There is no narrative. A non-narrative film. How do you make a ‘non-narrative’ film? They don’t teach you that in film school, which I had no interest in going to, anyway. You cannot read books or magazine articles on this subject. Michael, who was a very smart man, realised that the best approach for a book and a project like this is to create the illusion of a narrative.

People are so thoroughly conditioned in narrative, they will project it ANYWHERE they can. Everyone who watches The Atrocity Exhibition will construct a narrative of their own, and I have never heard two that were identical. Some viewers become quickly frustrated by the lack of narrative and think of it as a personal affront, an insult to their intelligence. Since they do not ‘get it’ because they are looking for ‘it’ in the wrong place, they become upset and dismiss the film. But others, who just let it flow over them, have reported experiences usually found during serious drug episodes, extended periods in isolation tanks or other attempts to get beyond the purview of quotidian consciousness. I guess that means Michael was on to something.

I wrote my part of the script visually, seeing the scenes happen. Michael did most of the dialogue, which is often lifted from the book. We were not looking for a ‘natural’ effect, but it might be worth noting that I spent most of my time directing the actors to stop acting, and deliver their few lines in as natural a way as possible. Michael did most of his writing for the Wooster Group, a very famous theatre company in SoHo, New York — funny how no one complains that the Wooster Group, people like Willem Dafoe, are doing non-narrative stuff.

The best way to look at dialogue in the film is like traffic signs for a motorist. They are there to keep you from getting lost — or worse.

Anna Juvander in The Atrocity Exhibition

The film is full of striking imagery — in parts it plays almost like a photo-roman. Do you have a photographic background? Is Chris Marker’s La Jetee an influence on your work?

I adore that film, and often wonder why so little came after it in the same vein. As for imagery, my issue with cinema is that it is not about film, it’s just filmed theatre — if you want to do film, it’s about the image. So if you make a non-narrative film, what is on the screen had better be compelling visually. Other than my sensibility, I have no photographic background and am a crap photographer.

Many people are surprised to learn that’s there’s a film version of The Atrocity Exhibition. How does it feel being the father of the ‘bastard child’ of JGB film adaptations? How do you see your film in relationship to David Cronenberg’s Crash and Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun?

I don’t see any relationship with those films.

Right, but what I’m getting at is this: do you feel your film has suffered unfavourably when Ballardian adaptations are discussed, considering you were up against the King of Hollywood on one side and the Indie King on the other?

It would be nice if people could just watch my film for what it is and not compare it to something as heterogeneous as the other Ballard films. But that does not usually happen, and considering the hostility to The Atrocity Exhibition, I have to wonder why? What is so threatening about this film? It has nothing in common with the other films — is that the issue? I truly do not know myself.

Victor Slezak as ‘T’ in The Atrocity Exhibition

I see some similarities. Just as the Atrocity book seems a prototype of Ballard’s novel Crash — a prequel in many ways — I wondered if you saw your film as serving that function to Cronenberg’s Crash. There seem to be similar stylistic choices: the blue light bathing some scenes; Victor’s acting as ‘T’, which seems to share mannerisms and tics with Elias Koteas in Crash; Anna’s Novotny, again sharing traits with Holly Hunter in Crash; the framing of scenes in car parks and so on. Or are such similarities merely functions of Ballard’s writing and its remarkable consistency?

Just to set the record straight, I shot The Atrocity Exhibition BEFORE Cronenberg shot Crash, so there is no possibility of influence from his film, nor would I copy his look, because I never liked Cronenberg’s cinematography, though I like some of his earlier films, like Videodrome. Anything shared between the two films is due to the books emerging one from the other, as Cronenberg, ‘parasite’ that he is (to use your fellow reviewer’s terminology) also lifted the exact same lines from Crash as I used in Atrocity. Ballard actually repeated material word for word in both books.

Cronenberg took a literal, ‘narrative’ approach to another supposedly ‘unfilmable’ book, Naked Lunch. Now, on the DVD’s commentary track you say you had no idea how to film Ballard’s ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ scene, and so you went for the most literal approach [in the film, T has sex in an automobile with Karen Novotny as she wears a Ronald Reagan mask]. But wouldn’t a literal approach have simulated some kind of mental therapy group, with patients masturbating over pictures of Ronald Reagan?

The issue, which keeps coming up in the comparisons with Cronenberg, is that I am literal in my adaptation of Ballard, but in fact Cronenberg is not. Just as he was not in Naked Lunch. Read that book and tell me that it is anything like the text. My problem is simple: Naked Lunch or The Atrocity Exhibition are essentially exceptional vehicles, which if read properly, will take you someplace very different from what is considered normal life. Cronenberg’s very style, which is extremely mainstream from a cinematographic and editing point of view, will always be at odds with his subject matter, at least when it comes to a book like Crash. To me, that is a fatal flaw. If you want to ride the vehicle to the end of the line, it has to be stylistically consistent or at least not fighting the material, the essence of what is being portrayed. I thus had to use a style as extreme as the book itself, something Cronenberg NEVER does. All his films look the same to me, visually speaking, the only difference being that over the years they got a bit slicker and better produced.

Anna Juvander as Karen Novotny in The Atrocity Exhibition

Regarding my ‘literal’ approach to the Reagan scene, I simply ask myself, ‘What is really happening here — in the text?’ People are in a constant sexual flux, consistent with the chaos of images we have created for ourselves, continuously overlaying images over objects and vice versa, often to sexual ends. In the film, there are scenes where ‘literally’ people are confused as to what is more ‘real’ — the image of a thing or the thing itself.

You’re keen for me to emphasise to our readers that Ballard was totally sold on your vision of the film. But Ballard was also keen on Empire of the Sun and Crash. So, it seems to me that Ballard would rubberstamp any filmed version of his work. Obviously, though, his reaction means a lot to you. Can you tell us a bit more about your relationship with Jim?

This is a tricky subject. As it is no mystery what I think of the films you mention, it may seem contradictory that I actually believe what JGB thought of my film. With Empire, Ballard was paid a lot of money and had access to a huge new audience for his work. If I were Ballard, I would not be complaining about Cronenberg, either. Ballard is certainly not biting the hand that feeds him. I honestly don’t know what Jim said about Crash. I know he was generally positive, but I never discussed the other films or directors with him. I thought that crass. I do not, however, see what Jim could possibly gain from spouting a bunch of goo about my film. He was very clear, for example, in those initial faxes, that he thought the film might fall irretrievably between the cracks. In private, he completely dismissed other attempts to film his work. So I believed him, and especially so since he did the DVD commentary, something to my knowledge he has not done for either of the other films. There is really no motivation, in this instance, for Ballard to fluff The Atrocity Exhibition. Unless you think he is some senile old geezer who just loves anyone making a film, however bizarre, of his work.

If I have to choose who, as an authority and a critic, to listen to regarding Atrocity, I will choose Ballard and not chimps like Vaccari and Sinclair. Since I gather your readers might follow my inclination, I noted the omission of Jim’s positive comments in the negative criticism of Vaccari and Sinclair, whose motives I find suspect on a host of counts — such as the fact that they are both guilty of trying to make really bad versions of Ballardian film or writing.

The two commentaries on the DVD (yours and Ballard’s) suggest there was a great deal of congruence between your interpretation of the book and Ballard’s views on his own text. Was there any area or aspect of the book where you found Ballard’s interpretation substantially at odds with your own?

I must be the most sheep-like of all possible interpreters of Ballard’s work, as I found no place I was at variance with the material I worked upon. Because of this, some reviewers enjoy using the term ‘parasitic’ in discussing my approach. A parasite, however, is defined by its negative effect on its host. JGB has yet to voice his objections.

My DVD copy is very grainy. Is that a deliberate effect?

You need a better TV set.

The set I have is just fine. The grainy texture merges the filmed footage with the archival film — it’s a good effect. So, is that a deliberate effect or a bad transfer?

I spent a great deal of time in pre-production choosing film stocks, lenses and exposure settings to create a very different film look, almost a vintage look, a bit like the visual texture of some of Tarkovsky’s films (I am only talking about the texture or grain here.) We used an Agfa stock, discontinued about when the film commenced shooting, which looks completely different from Kodak or Fuji, what everyone else uses. Same with the black and white, which was Ilford.

Would a bigger budget have changed the film? Would you have retained the archival footage?

I set out to make a film that I had never seen before. That much I accomplished. Having no money made it a much better, more interesting film than if I were better endowed. I moved out of Manhattan and found a large, industrial loft space in a very bad area of Brooklyn where I could shoot and live at the same time. That enabled a much different mode of production, where I could actually cook for my crew while a shot was being setup, for example. It was far more human, less hurried and stressed. It’s hard to work on a train when it’s doing 60mph, they say, and it’s true.

The archival footage was an interest of mine long before making the film. With the book, I found an ideal project to put such material to work. There is a very special psychological effect that comes from using decontextualised real footage, even after our little reality TV epidemic. When you view plastic surgery footage, or car crash simulations with dead bodies, outside the context of a documentary or program on that subject, the result is entirely different from watching the same material with a narrator droning on. The archival footage I used in Atrocity, which required months of searching in US government archives, brought another level to the film, one that could not have been achieved in any other manner. All the footage I used, by the way, was obtained gratis, contrary to what Mr Sinclair wrote in his book, where he asserts that my film’s budget was consumed by purchasing archival footage.

North American directors are all over Ballard film adaptations, but to me much of Ballard’s work is especially British. Obviously, much of his work is set in Britain, but there’s also a peculiar kind of British reserve regarding issues of class and sexuality that JGB appears to be sending up. Any thoughts on that?

I don’t see the book I adapted as having much to do with these issues. I actually went to University at London School of Economics, and understand what you mean in terms of British pomposity and sexual repression, but don’t find it relevant in this instance.

In your DVD commentary, you say that people watch narrative films to escape their ‘dull, boring’ lives? Isn’t that a little patronising?

Is it really patronising, or just true? Do you think I was talking about everyone else’s life whilst my own is so brimming full of excitement, sex, violence and generally interesting conflicts that culminate in highly satisfying denouements? Come on.

The modern world is replete with slaves: you have office slaves, factory slaves, agricultural slaves. The ones who have enough money to spend on two hours of escape go to the movies. That includes, of course, the rich, bored slaves, too, of which there are plenty. In fact, in 20th-century terms, just about everyone leads dull, boring lives, as seen relative to the lives of people like Tom, Brad and Angelina, whose real lives are mythologised on checkout-stand magazines so that the illusion is complete and pervasive.

Just go back to the film:

Traven: ‘Don’t you want to be in the movies, Karen?’
Karen Novotny: ‘We’re all in the movies’.

Are there any current directors at all whom you feel kinship with? Or do you feel that you’re at the vanguard of a new sensibility?

I would suggest that I am merely a leftover from an older sensibility, of directors inconceivable today. Unfortunately Tarkovsky died prematurely and all the other directors I admire, like Antonioni, Kubrick, Passolini, Teshigahara, Ozu, Kurosawa and the like, are long gone. Men who cared about what humanity is and what it is becoming. That especially is what I am interested in and is the sole concern of my filmmaking. Other people can make the entertaining stuff.

That would tie in with your DVD commentary, where you claim Atrocity is some kind of ‘nurturing’ film rather than a ‘junk food’ film.

‘Nurturing’ sounds like I made a granola bar into a film. Or that I’m some sort of wet nurse. At least the part about Atrocity not being the filmic equivalent of junk food is indeed correct. It’s not some empty crap that when consumed gives the illusion of fullness and satisfaction, if only for an instant. And then leaves you fat and sick.

I did not set out to make this or any other film as a stepping stone to a greater career in film, which was obviously my first, and perhaps my last, mistake. I’ve found that people in the film world, even the part of that world that pertains to my kind of films, really take you seriously only if they sense you are a ‘player’. They want to see where you are going. Lest you think I am kidding, Darren Aronofsky made PI around the same time I did Atrocity. It looked to me like a bad student film, but it was shrewdly marketed and now the guy is making Batman films.

That is the state of films today — it’s total sell-out land. So no, I don’t feel any kinships with people working today, not even people like Gaspar Noe, who I am sometimes compared with, because I am no fan of either gratuitous violence or doing anything in a film for the sake of effect or shock value.

Is it possible to change audience perception within a narrative-driven film industry? You must feel under siege from critics who see a non-narrative aesthetic as some kind of fault.

Go back a hundred years and look at the art world. How many artists were leaving traditional painting and representation for abstraction? What happened to them? Does that answer the question?

Not really — I’m not especially versed in the art world and its history.

My point is very simple: when abstraction arrived in the art world it was met with total derision, condemnation and refusal by the academy and the mainstream. Today, in a world where everyone is supposed to go to art museums, if only to catch the King Tut or Van Gogh megashow, we actually delude ourselves that we are culturally more astute than our forebearers, that a development like abstraction would immediately be greeted today with open arms, and/or that the avant garde has been subsumed into culture generally.

Cinema is the most comprehensive current art form, also the one uniquely of our time. Yet there is virtually no filmmaking being done that deserves the name of art. Film is entertainment, which is basically what art has become, as well. Abstraction, a bastard child of art which came to define modernism, is obviously kith and kin with the dep