by Mike Holliday

JOHN GRAY is Emeritus Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics. His numerous books include ‘Hayek on Liberty’ (1984) and Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002); his most recent work is The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death (2011). Gray has been described as ‘one of the most challenging and controversial political theorists in the English-speaking world’, and as ‘the most prescient of British public intellectuals’.[1] He is also an enthusiastic admirer of J.G. Ballard, providing an appreciation for the New Statesman following Ballard’s death in April 2009 in which he wrote:

After each meeting with him my view of the world around me was more Ballardian – a tribute not only to the force of his personality, but even more to the exactitude of his vision.[2]

However, there is little in the way of appraisal or commentary on the relationship between Ballard’s fiction and Gray’s philosophy, which may be considered surprising given the prominence of Gray’s writings over the last several years. This is a deficiency that I shall be attempting to rectify in what follows …

During the last 10 years of Ballard’s life, it seemed at times as if the author had formed a two-man mutual admiration society with Gray. It was Gray who had started the ball rolling in 1999 with a review in which he argued that Ballard was Britain’s ‘most gifted and original living writer’, comparing him favourably with Wells, Conrad, Greene, and William Burroughs.[3] Three year later, Straw Dogs, which was to become Gray’s best known book, appeared with an endorsement from Ballard: ‘powerful and brilliant … an essential guide to the new millennium.’ Straw Dogs was duly selected by Ballard as one of his books of the year, as were two of its successors, Heresies (2004) and Black Mass (2007).

It was obvious that the two writers shared common concerns. They both viewed our lives as characterised by chance, fragmentation, and what Ballard termed ‘hidden assignments,’ rather than by conscious choices and intentions.[4] What we think of as reality, they saw as a ‘ramshackle construct’ heavily influenced by our need for day-to-day survival and by the mediatised fictions around us.[5] Both emphasized that, as primates, we bear the traces of our evolutionary heritage, and that violence and psychopathy lie latent within the human psyche.[6] Gray and Ballard therefore saw themselves as opposed to that strand of the Enlightenment tradition which believes humans to be essentially sane and rational.[7] There were resemblances in political outlook as well: both combined criticism of ‘big business’ capitalism with strong anti-socialist sentiments and an admiration for Margaret Thatcher.[8]

Nevertheless, some of Ballard’s readers may have been perplexed by the mutual enthusiasm. Gray’s emphasis on social stability and his support for inherited institutions such as the monarchy[9] appeared at odds with Ballard’s intense dislike of British traditionalism and conformity, and with the passionate welcome which he gave to social and cultural change. It seemed difficult to understand Ballard’s admiration for a political philosopher whose key influences included Friedrich Hayek and Michael Oakeshott[10] and who could write that:

[human beings'] deepest need is a home, a network of common practices and inherited traditions that confers on them the blessing of a settled identity. … their freedom is worth while and meaningful to them only against a background of common cultural forms. Such forms cannot be created anew for each generation. … Where change is incessant or pluralism too insistent, where the links between the generations are broken or the shared raiment of the common culture is in tatters, human beings will not flourish.[11]

Moreover, Ballard’s fiction of ‘psychic fulfillment’[12] contrasted with what many perceived to be the gloomy pessimism and quietism of Straw Dogs and Heresies, epitomised by the Introduction to the latter, which concluded with the words:

Fortunately, the Earth is larger and more enduring than anything produced by the human mind. For humans, the growth of knowledge means only history as usual – if on a rather larger scale of destruction. For the Earth, it is only a dream, soon to end in peace.[13]

This is the type of comment which led fellow-philosopher Simon Blackburn to write that ‘Gray could be comfortable only in a religion with no faith, no hope, and no charity.’[14]

In fact, of the concerns that he shares with Ballard, only Gray’s antipathy towards socialism features strongly in his writings prior to the late-1990s. His initial political philosophy appears to have been based around a rejection of Marxism as a form of utopian messianism,[15] together with a conviction that the post-war consensus in British politics had broken down:

Unlike corporatist institutions in Germany and Austria, which acted as pace-makers for wealth-creation and guarantors of social peace, British corporatism in the 1960s and 1970s had produced economic stagnation, industrial and social conflict and a fiscal crisis of the state which triggered the intervention of the IMF.[16]

In light of this, it is not surprising that Gray was an enthusiast for the economic policies of Margaret Thatcher and the writings of Friedrich Hayek, before coming to realise that the views of the neo-liberal ‘New Right’ were just as utopian as those of the Marxist left – another variant on ‘the Enlightenment project of supplanting the historic diversity of human cultures with a single, universal civilization.’[17] There followed a flirtation with Oakeshottian conservatism, with its emphasis on civic association, localism, and inherited social practices, but Gray eventually saw this as inconsistent with the pluralism and social and economic changes engendered by market forces and the power of capital. Conservatism – of almost any type – had become an ‘atavistic reaction against modern life’;[18] it now rested on credulity towards tradition and had hence become another totalising political narrative. In the 1990s Gray was briefly enthused by Tony Blair and ‘New Labour’, initially seeing the latter as a liberal communitarian project but soon recognising its Thatcherite and neo-conservative roots.[19] The result of this rejection of a series of universal political theories – socialist, neo-liberal, Oakeshottian-conservative, and liberal-communitarian – was two-fold. First came Gray’s attempt to characterize a more restricted form of political agreement in terms of a modus vivendi between differing and incompatible ways of life;[20] and this was followed by what many perceived to be the anti-humanism and nihilism of Straw Dogs, with its rejection of the twin Enlightenment conceits: that we can transcend our animals natures, and that we can attain permanent political and moral progress.[21]

In a sense, therefore, the effect of Gray’s course as a political philosopher has been to bring home the lesson that Ballard understood intuitively from his upbringing in Shanghai and his experiences in Lunghua camp: that the stage-set which we perceive as reality can come crashing to the ground in short order, and that violent and psychopathic behaviour can re-emerge no matter how civilised we view ourselves.[22] Given this, all attempts at an overarching political theory must fail to do justice to the facts of human existence. The implication for Gray is that politics must concern itself with pragmatic activity, with ways of somehow reconciling or negotiating between different interests and values, rather than with prescriptive theorizing. For Ballard, the lesson is that we can no longer look to politics as the source of fundamental change, but must rely on the transcending and transforming powers of the human imagination: ‘radical change [cannot] come from political means any longer. I think it can only come from the confines of the skull – by imaginative means, whatever the route may be …’.[23] But if redemption lies outside politics, then it is not the political philosopher but the writer of the imagination who can indicate a way forward, as Gray himself appears to recognise when he discusses Ballard’s writings:

The casual cruelty he witnessed in Shanghai, and the tragic early death of his wife Mary in 1964, revealed a world devoid of human meaning. The challenge Ballard faced was to show how fulfillment could be found in such conditions. His writings were the result, a lifelong experiment in imaginative alchemy, the transmutation of senseless dross into visions of beauty.[24]

… to view Ballard as a political moralist would be a complete misreading. He is not a Ralph Nader or Herbert Marcuse, railing against the emptiness of a society based on consumption. … Ballard’s achievement is not to have staked out any kind of political position. Rather it is to have communicated a vision of what individual fulfillment might mean in a time of nihilism.[25]

How might we understand Gray’s comment about fulfillment in a time of nihilism? Perhaps the best place to start is by looking more closely at the reasons why Gray rejects all political ideologies. Central to this dismissal of political theorizing is his critique of the idea of progress. Political theories which apply supposedly universal principles or techniques to the vicissitudes of the real world gain their traction from an implied end-point, towards which a society, or humanity as a whole, is travelling. But, claims Gray, improvements in society and ethics are not like gains in scientific knowledge. The latter are cumulative, but the former depend on practices – on skill and practical art – and can be easily lost if conditions change. One of the reasons we do not understand this is that we are blind to the roots of our long-standing assumption that progress is ubiquitous:

Like much else in secular thought the idea of progress is a legacy of Christianity. … The belief that salvation is a type of historical event is an innovation, most likely originating around three thousand years ago with the Persian prophet Zoroaster. … In modern times the belief that God could defeat evil was translated into secular terms, and became a strand in the Enlightenment. Substitute for God a divinized humanity, and you have the myth that lies behind radical secular politics from the Jacobins onwards. The impact of this vision went far beyond revolutionary movements. It also produced meliorism – the faith in gradual improvement of liberal humanists, who although they deny any belief in a single, world-transforming event still believe that the world can be remade by human action.[26]

On this view, the idea of progress constitutes an idolatry of time in which the particulars of the world are perceived and accorded value according to what they might lead to, emptying the present of value and eliminating the perspective of the timeless.[27] It assumes a linear time which flows into the future, rather than, say, a circular time determined by the seasons, which is what agriculturalists would be inclined to suppose. This is reminiscent of Ballard’s long-standing interest in different forms of time: as early as 1962 he was criticizing science fiction writers for ‘treating time like a sort of glorified scenic railway’,[28] which might serve as a graphic metaphor for the faith in unilinear progress which Gray sees as underlying Western political thought. In his early novels Ballard explored a variety of temporal possibilities: the archaeopsychic time of evolutionary history (The Drowned World), the erasure of memory in the ‘lunar landscapes’ of the future (The Drought),[29] and the surrender of temporal identity and erasure of time itself (The Crytsal World). The non-linear structure of The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), was intended as a counterpart to the fragmented nature of modern lives, as Ballard would later explain:

We live in a kind of enormously expanded present, which is just packed like a tenement city with images from the past, and to some extent the future, which have been commandeered, ransacked out of the years past and the years to come, and The Atrocity Exhibition really describes just that world. Traven is making a desperate bid to understand what all these elements that are no longer linked by time mean – if they are not linked by time, what are they linked by?[30]

The notion of a liberation from time re-emerged in a number of Ballard’s short stories from the early 1980s, and much of his subsequent work (Running Wild, Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes, Millennium People, Kingdome Come) can be seen an extended exploration as to how we might live in what he terms an ‘endless present’ dominated by the media and consumption.

Especially problematical is the notion that our own lives are to be understood in terms of an ongoing narrative. For Gray, this is a modern, Western conceit that derives from Christian eschatology and its secularization in terms of the notions of linear progress and utopic societies:

The dominant western myths have been historical narratives, and it has become fashionable to view narrative as a basic human need. … [But] seeing one’s life as an episode in a universal narrative is a fantasy, and … has not always been regarded as a good thing. Many of the world’s mystics have aimed to achieve a state of contemplation in which the succession of happenings from which we construct the story of our lives is absent. … Poets and epicureans have cultivated a condition of spontaneity in which they could enjoy each moment for its own sake.[31]

According to this modern-day myth, our personal lives are a story in which the moment-by-moment present develops out of what happened to us in the past and derives its meaning from what it points to in the future. Ballard agrees with Gray in finding this unrealistic:

I mean there’s no sort of central ordering principle which each of us feels – we don’t sort of say half way through the day ‘Right! I am a character in, as it were, chapter three’ who has a narrative assignment determined by some sort of larger, evolving process, like a character in Hamlet.[32]

For Ballard, if our lives do actually resemble some form of narrative, then it must be one that has been written by William Burroughs, composed of chance or random events: ‘we switch on television sets, switch them off half an hour later, speak on the telephone, read magazines, dream, and so forth. We don’t live our lives in linear terms in the sense that the Victorians did.’[33]

In the absence of a linear narrative – whether it be eschatological, ideological, or personal – that provides meaning to our lives, salvation or fulfillment has to be an individual achievement and is to be sought not in the future but rather in a release from the grip of time. When Gray interviewed Ballard in 2000, he commented on how the author’s characters frequently seek to escape from memory, from the ‘shallow time that passes in their personal lives’: sometimes they find themselves free to explore a deeper notion of time that lies within the human nervous system, but on other occasions they ‘put the past aside in order to inhabit the present better’.[34] As Gray later noted in Straw Dogs and Black Mass, this surrender to the present as a way of finding release from time is a common theme in mysticism, religion and poetry.[35] In Ballard’s fiction, it is perhaps most evident in the three stories published in the early 1980′s: ‘News from the Sun’, ‘Memories of the Space Age’ and ‘Myths of the Near Future’, each of which features a widespread psychic disorder which distorts its victims’ perception of time. The stories’ protagonists come to understand that this makes available to them a world where all events – past and future – can be simultaneously present. This is not the obliteration of memory and hopes, but their displacement and incorporation into an everlasting present. Another – more modest and personal – version of this transformation appears in Ballard’s semi-autobiographical novel The Kindness of Women, where Jim describes the effect that family life has had on him: ‘The children Miriam had borne and the others who played by the stream had taken the place of the dead Chinese lying in the Lunghua creeks and canals. For the first time I was living in an endless present that owed nothing to the past.’[36]

For Gray, this assimilation of past and future into the present is more meaningful than our preoccupation with work and action, which – he supposes – serves the same aim. Activity and enterprise involve a form of ‘time worship’ whereby meaning is imparted to our lives by what we might achieve or become in the future, rather than by what we are now:

The world has come to be seen as something to be remade in our own image. … Action preserves a sense of self-identity that reflection dispels. When we are at work in the world we have a seeming solidity. Action gives us consolation for our inexistence. It is not the idle dreamer who escapes from reality. It is practical men and women, who turn to a life of action as a refuge from insignificance.[37]

This scepticism towards the value of work and action manifests itself in a number of Ballard’s novels – most noticeably in Super-Cannes, but also in the much earlier book The Drowned World. As Ballard explained in a 1975 interview,[38] Kerans’ decision to stay at the flooded lagoon in an attempt to understand and come to terms with the way he has been affected by the changes in landscape – which culminates in his suicidal journey South towards the sun – is the only meaningful course of action in the book. Compared to this, the behaviour of those who flee North, or those who drain the lagoon, is empty of meaning. In the book, Kerans reflects on the activity of Colonel Riggs, who ‘had not seen the dream, not felt its immense hallucinatory power. He was still obeying reason and logic, buzzing around his diminished, unimportant world with his little parcels of instructions like a worker bee about to return to the home nest.’[39] Sanders in The Crystal World learns the same lesson: ‘we have always associated movement with life and the passage of time, but from my experience within the forest near Mont Royal I know that all motion leads inevitably to death, and that time is its servant.’[40]

This rejection of the Western cult of enterprise and action-for-the-sake-of-action is similar to the Taoist concept of wu wei which, although frequently translated as ‘doing nothing’, is not an injunction to quietism but a recognition that, instead of formulating goals and deliberately aiming one’s actions at them, one may be better served by spontaneous behaviour that comes from a clear view of the world.[41] Taoism is just about the only philosophy that Gray has good words for in Straw Dogs,[42] admiring the way in which ‘spontaneous action’ does not mean giving oneself up to subjectivity and intensity of emotion – a legacy of Western romanticism – but reflecting on one’s situation with utmost clarity and discovering that there is actually just the one way in which one can act. In A.C. Graham’s words, ‘contemplating with … the senses perfectly clear one grasps everything in its unity, in a knowing which … we may think of as an instantaneous synthesising of all information as it comes.’[43]

This type of spontaneous action is similar to the behaviour of many of Ballard’s protagonists, particularly those in his early fiction – the novels and stories of ‘psychic fulfillment’ – such as Powers (‘The Voices of Time’), Kerans (The Drowned World), Sanders (The Crystal World), and Traven in The Atrocity Exhibition. Their actions can hardly be described as driven by the emotions, yet they lack the rationality which we normally associate with purposive behaviour. These characters wait, they assimilate the information available in their environments, and they take counsel from their unconscious and imagination – only then do they respond with what seems to them to be the appropriate response, and in doing so they follow ‘that single course which fits no rules but is the inevitable one.’[44] So in The Atrocity Exhibition, Traven listens to the time-music of the quasars, retreats to his terminal beach, and consults with Kline, Coma and Xero – the avatars of his unconscious; then he re-emerges to set out his ‘psychodramas’ and try to wrest meaning from a world made meaningless. These heroes of Ballard’s fiction understand that the relationship between self and world is such that taking a rationalised approach gets us nowhere; there are always reasons for and against several different plans of action, so it is best to ‘listen to Heaven which breathes through us’[45] and let the subterranean areas of our minds do the work:[46]

We are bombarded by this absolute deluge of fictional material of every conceivable kind and all this has the affect of … preempting our own original response to anything. … One has to foster one’s own imagination to a very intense degree, far more than most people realize. Most people have a huge capacity for imaginative response to the world that is scarcely tapped. … One will not be able to trust the external environment to provide all the necessary cues for a rich and fulfilling life.[47]

Gray believes that, once we forsake a rationalist philosophy and accept the power of the unconscious and the human imagination, we are better able to appreciate the significant role that religion and myth play in people’s lives: ‘If humans are different from other animals it is chiefly in being governed by myths, which are not creations of the will but creatures of the imagination. Emerging unbidden from subterranean regions, they rule the lives of those they possess.’[48] Religions constitute ways of living with mystery, with what we simply cannot know – and Gray believes that most of humanity will continue to have need of them. His enthusiasm for religion and his criticism of what he terms ‘proselytizing atheism’[49] would seem at odds with Ballard, who once claimed: ‘I assume there’s no after-life on the same basis that I assume the world is not balanced on the back of a giant tortoise.’ Yet later in the same interview, Ballard explained that he was nevertheless extremely interested in religion as a means by which people cope with the enigmas of the universe and of human consciousness, and compared it to the way that he himself, as a writer, tried to deal with the same subjects in an imaginative manner.[50] In fact a close reading of Ballard’s fiction discloses numerous examples of religious imagery, sometimes in surprising places such as The Atrocity Exhibition, one chapter of which is concerned with an abortive Second Coming of Christ in the 1960s (‘In the eucharist of the simulated auto-disaster we see the transliterated pudenda of Ralph Nader, our nearest image of the blood and body of Christ’), and Crash, which Ballard himself once described as a ‘psychopathic hymn’ (‘She sat in the damaged car like a deity occupying a shrine readied for her in the blood of a minor member of her congregation’).[51]

It seems that for both Gray and Ballard, religion is – in its essentials – about how we deal with what we cannot understand rationally, so it is not surprising to find that Gray attaches little importance to the role that belief plays in most religions. It is only, he thinks, certain types of Christianity and Islam where belief has a central place, where claims to knowledge replace imagination, symbolism and metaphor: ‘For polytheists, religion is a matter of practice, not belief; and there are many kinds of practice. For Christians, religion is a matter of true belief. If only one belief can be true, every way of life in which it is not accepted must be in error.’[52] Hence we can understand how this strong opponent of secular rationalism can tell Will Self: ‘beliefs – especially spiritual beliefs – are just an encumbrance. Best to have none, if you can manage it.’[53]

Yet despite the congruence of views between Ballard and Gray an impression persists that there is a substantive difference between them. For Ballard, there seems to be an urgency, a desire to wake people out of a stupor imposed by unthinking adherence to existing patterns of behaviour. At times, he suggests that almost any action is useful if it can crack ‘the conventional enamel that encases everything’.[54] This imperative is so strong that Ballard sometimes reads more like a proponent of the power of positive thinking than of the efficacy of the Taoist wu wei:

The challenge is for each of us to respond, to remake as much as we can of the world around us, because no one else will do it for us. We have to find a core within us and get to work. … Just get on with it![55]

Although Ballard cannot be said to value choice per se, he is convinced that for us, today, freedom of the individual to choose their own path has to trump the acceptance of established paradigms. The imperative is to exert oneself against ‘smothering conventionalized reality’[56] by using our imaginative resources, perhaps even our psychopathic urges, and this implies that there has to be value in the freedom to be able to act in this way. The individual must recognise that ‘he or she is all he or she has got.’[57]

Gray appears much more ambivalent. He argues that most people throughout history have never been the authors of their own lives, nor would they have even valued this type of life.[58] But, he goes on, ‘we have been thrown into a time in which everything is provisional. … We are forced to live as if we were free. The cult of choice reflects the fact that we must improvise our lives. That we cannot do otherwise is a mark of our unfreedom.’[59] Yet Gray seems to fear that emphasizing individual choice risks delivering us back into the clutches of a liberal individualism that is empty of substance:

… individual well-being presupposes an array of choiceworthy options which can only be supplied by worthwhile forms of common life. It is from the options provided by such forms of life that choices, however autonomous, derive all of their value. The ultimate locus of value in the human world is not, therefore, in individual choices.[60]

For Ballard, one suspects, resorting to values which lie in ‘worthwhile forms of common life’ is at bottom just another failure of the imagination, a refusal to confront the power of social conformity – no matter how much he might share Gray’s skepticism concerning the sovereign individual selves of Enlightenment rationalism and neo-liberalism.

This is maybe why, as he neared the end of his life, Ballard retained his sense of optimism. V. Vale of RE/Search Publications tells of discussing the impending global financial crisis with Ballard in late-2008, a few months before he died: ‘he said, “I remain optimistic”. I was really happy about that [because getting depressed] takes away your power, especially the power of your imagination which Ballard himself has demonstrated and incarnated in his life.’[61]

Vale and Ballard, towards the end of Ballard’s life.

Yet perhaps Gray is not quite the pessimist that one might guess from reading Straw Dogs. As Glen Newey points out,[62] Gray’s activity over the last 10 years or more – his regular public appearances and his journalistic pieces, many of which have confronted current issues such as the nature of globalization, Islamic fundamentalism, and changes in the old Soviet-bloc countries – contrasts sharply with the more theoretical writings of most political philosophers, and indicates that Gray has not given up but is offering us ‘a counsel of modesty rather than of impossibility.’ I suggest that Gray’s apparent pessimism reflects the fact that he has been primarily concerned with counteracting ideologies and puncturing their attendant illusions; conversely, Ballard’s optimism was a necessity for a writer searching for a sense of meaning and purpose which might be available in our everyday lives.[63]

This difference between the two writers points to a critical tension within Gray’s thought. Despite his strictures against liberal individualism, the effect of Gray’s attempts to undermine any and all universalist ‘solutions’ that derive from political theorizing (whether they be socialist, neo-liberal, return-to-basics conservative, or whatever) must be to place the emphasis back on the individual – who, after all, still has to come to terms with the society in which they find themselves.

One way of resolving this tension can be found in Ballard’s contention that (notwithstanding his sense of urgency and desire for change) we can only really become what we already are:

The whole purpose of imaginative enterprise – surrealist paintings or the sort of fiction I try to write – is to find one’s real nature. … I think that all of my fiction is optimistic because it’s a fiction of psychic fulfillment. The characters are finding themselves, which is after all the only definition of real happiness there is: to find yourself and be who you are.[64]

This is a conception of individualism that is no longer dependent on a free-standing, sovereign self or on the privileging of choice. Neither does it generate a temporal dimension whereby the present is a pale reflection of one’s shining future. Instead, by becoming what we already are, we mediate past and future and discover that long-standing Ballardian preoccupation – an everlasting present. Here, suggests Ballard, we can find the immanent counterparts of those aspects of human life – fulfillment, individuality, even community – which appeared to have receded out of reach and been replaced by empty concepts.

We can now see the full import of Gray’s comment that Ballard has tried to describe ‘what individual fulfillment might mean in a time of nihilism’. For Gray, nihilism is constituted by the belief that ‘human life must be redeemed from meaninglessness’.[65] Only a nihilist, after all, would assume that human life is of itself meaningless, and hence in need of rescue – a view which Gray sees as being shared by all political ideologies. What life actually needs is not another rescue attempt but Ballard’s passionate engagement. The alternative of pessimism and quietism represents just another version of the belief that we have reached the truth – a temptation which Gray rejects like all the rest:

The point of showing the flimsiness of all that is seemingly solid is not to come up with an immovable truth, and persuade the reader to accept it. Persuasion is a missionary enterprise, the goal of which is conversion. Instead the aim is to present a record of what one observer has seen, which readers can use as they will.[66]

NOTES

[1] John Horton & Glen Newey, ‘John Gray: A Political Theorist Of and Against Our Times’, in The Political Theory of John Gray, John Horton & Glen Newey (eds.), Routledge (New York & London), 2007; Pankaj Mishra, ‘The War of the Worlds’, Financial Times, 6 June 2009.

[2] John Gray, ‘Appreciation: J G Ballard‘, New Statesman, 23 April 2009.

[3] John Gray, ‘Modernity and Its Discontents‘, a review of Iain Sinclair’s book Crash: David Cronenberg’s Post-Mortem on J G Ballard’s ‘Trajectory of Fate’, New Statesman, 10 May 1999.

[4] The significance of chance and hidden assignments was one of the topics discussed when Gray interviewed Ballard on BBC Radio 4, 21 September 2000. See also Gray’s Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, Granta Books (London), [2002]/2003, p. 38.

[5] For Ballard on ‘a ramshackle construct’, see ‘J G Ballard: Myths of the Near Future‘, an interview in ZG Magazine: Altered States (1988). For similar ideas in Gray, see Straw Dogs, op cit, pp. 26-28. The mediatization of reality is a familiar Ballardian trope, and forms a large part of the subject matter of The Atrocity Exhibition; see also Ballard’s early interviews, such as those in Speculation #21 (1969) and Friends #17 (1970). Gray discusses how the development of a media-dominated society was perceived at an early stage by both Ballard and Guy Debord in ‘Ulrika is a sign that we’ve got it all‘, New Statesman, 28 October 2002, and in his talk at ‘Ballardian Architecture: Inner and Outer Space‘, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 15 May 2010.

[6] The importance of our evolutionary heritage is a motif of The Drowned World and one of Ballard’s perennial themes. For Gray on the same topic, see Straw Dogs, op cit, p. 79, as well as the BBC Radio 4 interview with Ballard on 21 September 2000 where they also discuss the latent nature of violence and psychopathy.

[7] Gray’s Straw Dogs, op cit, is an extended attack on Enlightenment ideas. For Ballard on the Enlightenment, see ‘Ballard of an indignant man‘, an interview in the Australian newspaper The Age, 1 November 2003.

[8] Ballard’s concerns about multinationals, consumerism, and the like are best expressed in his later novels Super-Cannes (2000) and Kingdom Come (2006); for his views on socialism, see his conversation with Zinovy Zinik in The London Magazine: A Review of Literature and the Arts, February/March 2003; and for his opinions on Thatcher, see the interview with Lynn Fox (1991) in J G Ballard: Conversations, RE/Search Publications (San Francisco), 2005.

Gray’s rejection of socialism has been evident from the outset, for example in Hayek on Liberty, Blackwell (Oxford), 1984, and ‘The System of Ruins’ (1983) in Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings, Allen Lane (London), 2009. For Gray’s post-mortem on Thatcherism and his criticism of neo-liberalism, see Chapter 3 of Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, Allen Lane (London), 2007; also ‘A Conservative Disposition’ (1991), ‘The Strange Death of Tory England’ (1995), ‘What Globalization is Not’ (1998) and ‘The World is Round’ (2005), all in Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings, op cit.

Both Gray and Ballard perceive that one result of neo-liberal capitalism is the destruction of the certainties of the middle-class way of life – which is turning out to have been a temporary phenomenon; see Gray’s Straw Dogs, op cit, pp. 159-166, and Ballard’s novel Millennium People (2003), which was reviewed by Gray in the New Statesman, 8 September 2003.

[9] For Gray on the monarchy, see ‘Monarchy is the key to our liberty‘, The Observer, 29 July 2007.

[10] For Gray on Hayek, see ‘Hayek as a Conservative’ (1983) in Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings, op cit; and on Oakeshott, see ‘Michael Oakeshott and the Political Economy of Freedom’, The World and I, September 1988.

[11] John Gray, ‘An Agenda for Green Conservatism’ (1993) in Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings, op cit.

[12] Ballard discusses his writings as stories of psychic fulfillment in ‘An Interview with J. G. Ballard: By James Goddard and David Pringle 4th January 1975′, published in J G Ballard: The First Twenty Years, J Goddard & D Pringle (eds.), Bran’s Head Books, 1976.

[13] John Gray, Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions, Granta Books (London), 2004.

[14] Simon Blackburn, in a review of Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings in The Sunday Times, 12 April 2009.

[15] The early basis for Gray’s view of Marxism as a millenarian philosophy is evident in his choice of Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium as ‘The book that changed my life‘, in New Statesman, 5 February 2009: ‘It is more than 40 years since I first read Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium. Published in 1957, the book deals with millenarian religious movements in late medieval and early modern Europe, but as Cohn makes clear, the millenarian mentality did not end with the waning of religion – 20th-century secular totalitarian movements exhibited similar patterns of thinking. … Reading Cohn’s masterpiece left me with a suspicion of world-transforming political projects that has remained with me ever since.’

[16] John Gray, ‘The Strange Death of Tory England’ (1995) in Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings, op cit.

[17] John Gray, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, Granta Books (London), 1998.

[18] The phrase is Glen Newey’s, from ‘Gray’s Blues: Pessimism as a Political Project’ in John Horton & Glen Newey (eds.), The Political Theory of John Gray, op cit.

[19] For Gray’s post-mortem on New Labour, see ‘Tony Blair, Neo-Con’ (2007) in Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings, op cit.

[20] Gray summarises modus vivendi as follows: ‘The aim of modus vivendi cannot be to still the conflict of values. It is to reconcile individuals and ways of life honouring conflicting values to a life in common. We do not need common values in order to live together in peace. We need common institutions in which many forms of life can coexist. … A theory of modus vivendi is not the search for an ideal regime, liberal or otherwise. It has no truck with the notion of an ideal regime. It aims to find terms on which different ways of life can live well together.’ ‘Modus Vivendi’ (2000) in Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings, op cit.

[21] Among those who interpret Straw Dogs as a retreat into nihilistic anti-humanism are George Kateb (‘Is John Gray a Nihilist?’, in John Horton & Glen Newey (eds.), The Political Theory of John Gray, op cit) and Glen Newey (‘Gray’s Blues: Pessimism as a Political Project’, also in The Political Theory of John Gray, op cit). My summary of Gray’s political theorizing owes a debt to that in Glen Newey’s ‘Gray’s Blues: Pessimism as a Political Project’, op cit.

[22] See J.G. Ballard, Miracles of Life, Fourth Estate (London), 2008, Chapter 5.

[23] J.G. Ballard, ‘Interview by Graeme Revell’ Re/Search 8/9: J G Ballard, Re/Search Publishing (San Francisco), 1984.

[24] John Gray, ‘Appreciation: J.G. Ballard’, op cit.

[25] John Gray, ‘Modernity and Its Discontents’, op cit.

[26] From the Introduction to Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings, op cit, pp. 12-13. See also ‘The Original Modernisers’ (2003) in Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings, op cit, and the Introduction to Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions, op cit.

[27] John Gray, ‘Santayana’s Alternative’ (1989) in Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings, op cit.

[28] J.G. Ballard, ‘Which Way to Inner Space?’, guest editorial in New Worlds #118, May 1962.

[29] In The Drought, Ransom seems to positively desire the erasure of memory and feeling that the burning world will provide: ‘At first Ransom had assumed that he himself, like Philip Jordan and Mrs Quilter, was returning to the past, to pick up the frayed ends of his previous life, but he now felt that the white deck of the river was carrying them all in the opposite direction, forward into zones of time future where the unresolved residues of the past would appear smoothed and rounded, muffled by the detritus of time, like images in a clouded mirror. Perhaps these residues were the sole elements contained in the future, and would have the bizarre and fragmented quality of the debris through which he was now walking. None the less they would all be merged and resolved in the soft dust of the drained bed.’ The Drought, Cape (London), 1965, pp. 202-203.

[30] Ballard’s audio-commentary for Jonathan Weiss’s film of The Atrocity Exhibition, Reel23 DVD #1, 2001.

[31] John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, Allen Lane (London), 2007, pp. 204-206.

[32] Ballard’s audio-commentary for Jonathan Weiss’s film of The Atrocity Exhibition, op cit.

[33] ‘The New Science Fiction: A conversation between J G Ballard and George MacBeth‘ in Langdon Jones (ed), The New SF, Hutchinson (London), 1969, pp. 51-52.

[34] Interview on BBC Radio 4 on 21 September 2000; the words quoted are Gray’s.

[35] John Gray, Straw Dogs, op cit, pp. 198-199; Black Mass, op cit, pp. 206-207.

[36] J.G. Ballard, The Kindness of Women, Harper Collins (London), 1991, p. 106.

[37] John Gray, Straw Dogs, op cit, pp. 193-194.

[38] ‘An Interview with J. G. Ballard: By James Goddard and David Pringle 4th January 1975′, op cit.

[39] J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World, Gollancz (London), 1962.

[40] J.G. Ballard, The Crystal World, Cape (London), 1966, p. 102, my emphasis.

[41] A.C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China, Open Court (Illinois), 1989, pp. 232-234.

[42] John Gray, Straw Dogs, op cit, pp. 112-115.

[43] A.C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China, op cit, pp. 102-103.

[44] A.C. Graham, Chuang-Tzu: The Inner Chapters, Mandala/Unwin Paperbacks, [1981]/1989, p. 7.

[45] An adaptation of A.C. Graham’s phrase in Chuang-Tzu: The Inner Chapters, op cit, p. 49.

[46] The most explicit example of Ballard’s affinity with the Taoist concept of wu wei – ‘doing nothing’ – occurs in his introductory comments to the short story ‘The Waiting Grounds’, where he refers to ‘the old conundrum of the ant searching hopelessly for the end of the infinite pathway around the surface of a sphere. “The Waiting Grounds” offers it a solution, implies that instead of crawling on and on it will find the pathway’s end if it just sits still’ (New Worlds #88, November 1959).

[47] ‘An interview with J.G. Ballard‘, Mississippi Review Vol. 20 #1-2, 1991.

[48] From the Introduction to Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings, op cit, p. 16.

[49] See, in particular, John Gray, Black Mass, op cit, Chapter 6, and ‘Evangelical Atheism, Secular Christianity’ (2008) in Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings, op cit.

[50] J.G. Ballard, ‘All praise and glory to the mind of man‘, The Sunday Telegraph, 20 March 1994.

[51] J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, Cape (London), 1970, p. 29, and Crash, Cape (London), 1973, p. 109. Both these books contain numerous examples of religious imagery, as do The Drought and The Crystal World. For Ballard on Crash as a psychopathic hymn, see his discussion with Will Self in the latter’s Junk Mail, Bloomsbury (London), 1995; and for Ballard on the use of religious imagery in the work of Salvador Dali, see ‘Goodbye Dali’, Science Fiction Eye #5, July 1989.

[52] John Gray, Straw Dogs, op cit, p. 126.

[53] ‘John Gray: Forget everything you know‘, an interview by Will Self in The Independent, 3 September 2002.

[54] J.G. Ballard, ‘Interview by Graeme Revell’, op cit.

[55] ‘The Strange Visions of J.G. Ballard‘, an interview in Rolling Stone, 19 November 1987.

[56] J.G. Ballard, ‘Interview by Graeme Revell’, op cit.

[57] ‘The Strange Visions of J.G. Ballard’, op cit.

[58] John Gray, Straw Dogs, op cit, pp. 58-59.

[59] John Gray, Straw Dogs, op cit, p. 110, my emphasis.

[60] John Gray, ‘An Agenda for a Green Conservatism’ (1993) in Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings, op cit.

[61] Panel discussion at the Kosmopolis 08 international literature festival, based at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, 25 October 2008; quoted at http://www.ballardian.com/myths-of-a-near-future-sellars-sterling-vale.

[62] Glen Newey, ‘Gray’s Blues: Pessimism as a Political Project’, in The Political Theory of John Gray, John Horton & Glen Newey (eds.), op cit.

[63] It is interesting to compare Gray – who has had to reject the epithets of pessimist and nihilist – with Ballard, who was frequently seen as a cold, analytic writer of dystopian fictions, despite his protestations to the contrary. For Gray’s rejection of the notion that he is a pessimist or a nihilist, see the profile by Will Self in The Independent, 3 September 2002, and ‘Reply to Critics’ in The Political Theory of John Gray, John Horton & Glen Newey (eds.), op cit. Gray himself is well aware of the misinterpretation of Ballard as a pessimistic writer – see his review of Super-Cannes in the New Statesman, 11 September 2000. For a recent view of Ballard as a dystopian writer, see Dominika Oramus, Grave New World: The Decline of the West in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard, University of Warsaw, 2007.

[64] ‘J.G. Ballard at Home’, an interview in Métaphores [University of Nice] #7, 1983.

[65] John Gray, Straw Dogs, op cit, p. 128.

[66] From the Introduction to Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings, op cit, p. 17. Those familiar with Ballard will note the similarity between Gray’s position and Ballard’s refusal to set out a moral framework for his own writings, particularly the more extreme ones such as Crash. It is up to the reader, Ballard suggests, to decide what conclusions, moral or psychological, might be drawn from his ‘extreme hypotheses’; see ‘Interview by Graeme Revell’, op cit, and Ballard’s comments on David Cronenberg’s film of Crash in Index on Censorship, Vol.26 #3 (1997).

Modelling and photography by Nicholas Cobb.

This was the first office building to be constructed at the business park, but after a bombastic overture the architecture that followed was late modernist in the most minimal and self-effacing way, a machine above all for thinking in.

J.G. Ballard, Super-Cannes.

Recently, London’s Royal Academy of Arts hosted the symposium Ballardian Architecture: Inner and Outer Space:

Acclaimed writer JG Ballard derived inspiration from aspects of the built environment that architectural convention and critics tend to overlook. His novels offer many insights into the flaws and consequences of the shopping centres, car parks, hotels, office towers and housing projects that make up so much of contemporary architectural endeavour. This forum traces several themes in Ballard’s literary analysis of the contemporary built environment, including the concept of spectacle and role of the media in contemporary society, and how “invisible literatures” such as scientific journals, technical manuals, pornography, advertising copy can be seen as a literary counterpart to pop art and the “brutalist” aesthetic of modernity.

Three longer papers are followed by a series of brief but powerful commentaries which each open up particular insights into Ballard’s work, and together explore how Ballard’s perceptions may challenge and inform contemporary architecture.

Film has now been posted online of each discussion, and we have reproduced the presentations below. You can also download mp3s of the talks.

The event was chaired by Jeremy Melvin. Speakers included John Gray, Nic Clear, David Cunningham, Nigel Coates, Matthew Taunton, Chris Hall, Joanne Murray, Dan Holdsworth, Tim Abrahams and Claire Walsh. Thank you to Static TV for supplying the footage.

..::: Previously on ballardian.com:

+ Re-Placing the Novel: Sinclair, Ballard and the Spaces of Literature, by David Cunningham
+ A Near Future: Nic Clear’s Tribute to JG Ballard
+ Stereoscopic Urbanism: JG Ballard and the Built Environment
+ ‘Architectures of the Near Future’: An Interview with Nic Clear
+ ‘Because we’re fucked’: Skinner vs Gray

Ballardian Architecture 1: John Gray

Ballardian Architecture 1 – John Gray from static tv on Vimeo.

John Gray, author and philosopher, identifies correspondences between Ballard’s work and Guy Debord’s notion of the spectacle, discussing certain ramifications for contemporary economic and social phenomena.

Ballardian Architecture 2: Nic Clear

Ballardian Architecture 2 – Nic Clear from static tv on Vimeo.

Nic Clear, architect and lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture, delivers a paper entitled ‘J.G. Ballard is an Enemy of the Architectural Profession’.

Ballardian Architecture 3: David Cunningham

Ballardian Architecture 3 – David Cunningham from static tv on Vimeo.

David Cunningham, University of Westminster, examines architectural aspects of Ballard’s prose, exploring corresponding tendencies in the writings of Iain Sinclair and W.G. Sebald.

Ballardian Architecture 4: Session 1 Discussion

Ballardian Architecture 4 – Session 1 Discussion from static tv on Vimeo.

Session 1 concludes with a discussion featuring speakers John Gray, David Cunningham and Nic Clear. The discussion is chaired by Jeremy Melvin, and features contributions from members of the audience.

Ballardian Architecture 5: Nigel Coates

Ballardian Architecture 5 – Nigel Coates from static tv on Vimeo.

Nigel Coates, architect and lecturer, discusses the influence of Ballard’s writings upon a number of his architectural projects, as well as reviewing work by some of his students at the Royal College of Art.

Ballardian Architecture 6: Matthew Taunton

Ballardian Architecture 6 – Matthew Taunton from static tv on Vimeo.

Matthew Taunton, author and academic, investigates Ballard’s 1960 short story ‘Chronopolis’, highlighting Ballard’s engagement with modernist urbanism and his response to Taylorism and Fordism.

Ballardian Architecture 7: Chris Hall

Ballardian Architecture 7 – Chris Hall from static tv on Vimeo.

Chris Hall, journalist and writer, analyses architectural aspects of Ballard’s short story ‘The Terminal Beach’.

Ballardian Architecture 8: Joanne Murray

Ballardian Architecture 8 – Joanne Murray from static tv on Vimeo.

Joanne Murray, lecturer and Birkbeck PhD candidate, discusses formal characteristics of Ballard’s art and writing in relation to New Brutalist architecture.

Ballardian Architecture 9: Dan Holdsworth

Ballardian Architecture 9 – Dan Holdsworth from static tv on Vimeo.

Dan Holdsworth, artist, discusses his photographs, highlighting architectural motifs and visual tendencies that reflect aspects in Ballard’s prose.

Ballardian Architecture 10: Tim Abrahams

Ballardian Architecture 10 – Tim Abrahams from static tv on Vimeo.

Tim Abrahams, journalist and Associate Editor of ‘Blueprint’ magazine, discusses Ballard’s Shanghai-set, semi-autobiographical novel ‘Empire of the Sun’ in relation to the Shanghai Expo 2010.

Ballardian Architecture 11: Session 2 Discussion

Ballardian Architecture 11 – Session 2 Discussion from static tv on Vimeo.

Session 2 concludes with a discussion featuring speakers Dan Holdsworth, Nigel Coates, Tim Abrahams, Chris Hall, Joanne Murray and Matthew Taunton. The discussion is chaired by Gavin Parkinson, and features contributions from members of the audience.

Ballardian Architecture 12: Claire Walsh

Ballardian Architecture 12 – Claire Walsh from static tv on Vimeo.

Claire Walsh, editor, researcher and J.G. Ballard’s partner, discusses Ballard’s life and interests in a presentation that closes the proceedings of the forum.

The Bentall Centre. Photo by Fr3d.org. Reproduced under Creative Commons.

by Mike Holliday

Why do I dislike the Bentall Centre so much? Because it’s so… cretinous. [The consumers] seem to be moving though a kind of commercial dream space and vague signals float through their brains.

J.G. Ballard in interview, 2006.[1]

Ballard’s final novel, Kingdom Come, a dystopian account of consumerism as a type of ‘soft fascism’, [2] received lukewarm reviews and suggestions that the author was, perhaps, finally losing his touch – that the metaphors seemed strained, the text confusing and ambiguous.[3] M John Harrison, one of Ballard’s fellow authors in New Worlds back in the 1960s, commented that ‘Perhaps, after all, it is not the consumers who have fallen for the dream of the Metro-Centre; it is the alienated intellectual of the London suburbs … For the old metaphorista, perhaps, the hidden terror of the shopping centre is that it is just somewhere people go to shop’.[4] Other commentators were eager to point to parallels between Kingdom Come and events in the world around us – aggressive car commercials, racist behaviour by sports fanatics – but appeared reluctant to delve into the novel’s theses in any depth. In this article, I re-examine Kingdom Come and ask: can we really equate consumerism with fascism?

How you convert a metaphor into the arming device of a political conspiracy, or how the consumerist dream might be co-opted to produce the kinds of hard results associated with the nationalist dream of the 1920s and 30s, Ballard seems less sure. In reality, there are only a lot of people buying American sports utility vehicles, Tanzanian fish, Chinese teddy bears, French five-hob stoves … Do unconscious dreams of mass violence need to figure?

M John Harrison, ‘Narratives of the mall’.[5]

The elements of Kingdom Come are taken straight from the world that the author would have seen around him … a giant shopping mall (loosely based on the Bentall Centre in Kingston) which is not just a place to buy things but somewhere to take the family for a day out; low-level racist behaviour against ethnic minorities in the suburbs of West London; an upsurge in interest in sporting events such as the World Cup that enable displays of national or tribal identity. These realistic components can prompt a straightforward reading of the novel: Kingdom Come is rendered as the idea that consumerism in 21st century England can be seen – with the help of a modest dosage of imagination and metaphor – to be a type of fascism. Such realist readings appear to lie behind M John Harrison’s complaints, as well as Rod Liddle’s attack on the book as ‘deeply silly and patronising’.[6]

The Bentall Centre. Photo by Joanne Murray. Reproduced with permission.

‘I remember four or five years ago going into the Bentall Centre, a huge shopping mall in Kingston, a town I hate. It was before Christmas, and there were these three gigantic bears on a plinth in the centre of this huge atrium … automatons, moving to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The place was packed; crowds looking up at them. And I thought, God, these people have left their brains somewhere. What’s going on here? And then I noticed that my head was moving, too. I thought, Jesus, get out fast.’

Ballard in interview, 2006.[7]

If Kingdom Come is a realistic reading of the English suburbs, then various of its details fail to convince. It seems odd to emphasize the violence of spectator sports when the most popular, soccer, has become far less brutal, among both participants and spectators, than was the case 25 or more years ago. And the portrayal of ethnic minorities as antipathetic to consumerism seems equally unrealistic, and risks an accusation of the very racism that the author wants to attack – for implying that they aren’t interested in consumer goods or sport because their culture is different from ours.[8]

Beyond the details, there seems to be a conspicuous problem with the novel’s underlying theme, since fascism was always anti-consumerist in its temperament. As Peter N Stearns puts it in his review of Consumerism in World History: ‘For fascist leaders, modern society had become too disunited and individualistic. Consumerism was a fundamental part of modern degeneracy’.[9]

But any such straightforward reading of Kingdom Come surely founders on the fact that Ballard is simply not, and never has been, a realist writer. Deeply influenced by the surrealist artists, and by Freud’s distinction between manifest and latent content, Ballard’s descriptions are no more ‘realist’ than Dali’s clock-faces or Delvaux’s mysterious women. He described his semi-autobiographical novel, Empire of the Sun, as an effort to reach some sort of psychological truth, as opposed to a depiction of actual events in the camp at Lunghua in which he was interned, and Kingdom Come is perhaps best viewed in like manner, as a surrealistic attempt to discover the latent psychological meaning behind consumerist society, rather than as a portrayal, however exaggerated, of the behaviour of sports fans and visitors to shopping malls.

Dali’s ‘The Persistence of Memory’.

Ballard in front of his commissioned reproduction of a lost painting by Delvaux. Photo: David Levenson.

This still leaves us with the underlying concept, reiterated by Ballard in contemporaneous interviews, of consumerism as a soft fascism. An obvious temptation is to interpret Ballard as agreeing with the frequently articulated view that modern consumerist societies are totalizing – enclosing individuals in a perpetual obligation to choose, but allowing no alternative ways of living outside of the marketplace and the media – and concluding that therefore such societies can be regarded as fascist.

If there is no principle restricting who can consume what, there is also no principled constraint on what can be consumed: all social relations, activities and objects can in principle be exchanged as commodities. This is one of the most profound secularizations enacted by the modern world … [and] places the intimate world of the everyday into the impersonal world of the market and its values. Moreover, while consumer culture appears universal because it is depicted as a land of freedom in which everyone can be a consumer, it is also felt to be universal because everyone must be a consumer: this particular freedom is compulsory.

Don Slater, ‘Consumer Culture & Modernity’.[10]

But seen as an interpretation of Kingdom Come, this makes little sense. Ignoring Ballard the surrealist, it instead concentrates on an all-too-easy transition from ‘totalizing’ to ‘fascist’, a transition which effectively empties the term ‘fascist’ of meaningful content and historical context. Yet Ballard’s novel is full of such context – from the explicit references to the Third Reich in the set-speeches, to the marching groups of supporters and over-lit sports stadia, and even to small details such as the cable-TV presenter naming his new Mercedes limousine ‘Heinrich’. On the proposed interpretation all this detail becomes mere window-dressing, and the novel adds little or nothing to the political critique on which its main thesis supposedly rests. I therefore suggest that Ballard really does intend arguing for the more substantive, if less obvious, notion that modern consumer societies can mutate into something best understood in terms of 1930s Nazi Germany.

To see how this might be the case, I think we should start by recognizing that Ballard’s understanding of society is principally in terms of psychology, and that Kingdom Come re-emphasizes, and links together, two of his long-standing motifs – that the future will be boring, and that humans are dangerous and violent animals.

Consumerism rules, but people are bored. They’re out on the edge, waiting for something big and strange to come along. … They want to be frightened. They want to know fear. And maybe they want to go a little mad.

Ballard, Kingdom Come.[11]

Lying behind Ballard’s expectations of a boring and empty suburban world is the notion of human reality as a constructed reality, the roots of which seem to lie with his early grasp, as a child in Shanghai, of the everyday world as a stage-set.[12] For Ballard, the human brain has presented us with ‘a kind of ramshackle construct’ suitable to the lives of all those countless ancestors who were engaged in the struggle for food, shelter, and safety. But we no longer live in an age of day-to-day scarcity and insecurity, and as a result the external world no longer forces its interpretation upon us. Therefore the conventional ways in which we viewed the world, which had been buttressed by traditional social structures and conforming behaviours, have weakened their hold over us. The external environment has become fictionalized, and ‘reality’ – that which is of most significance in our lives – has retreated inside our minds, to be represented by our hopes, desires and obsessions.[13] One way in which we establish meaningful relationships between events and objects is via our our notion of time, by working out causal relationships and by connecting the present to the past through memories, either individual or social, or to the future through our intentions and expectations. However, as Ballard has emphasized, the past as a guide and the future as a destination no longer have much meaning for us.[14] Nowadays, an understanding of events and objects cannot simply be read off from the external world, nor can we link them in a straightforward temporal manner.

The Bentall Centre. Photo by elyob. Reproduced under Creative Commons.

The retreat of past and future and the internalization of reality – both of which are ultimately grounded in increased prosperity – are viewed by Ballard in two very different ways. On the positive side, our freedom and possibilities for fulfillment are enhanced. But, because we lack the sense of meaning provided by a stable external reality and by an awareness of time, we can experience emptiness and boredom. In the 1960s and 1970s, Ballard chose to emphasize the use of our imaginative powers as a way of providing us with different perspectives and of transcending our conventional outlook on the world. But the way Ballard told it to Carol Orr in 1974, this seemed a demanding and daunting task: ‘people will behave in a very lunar way, very isolated from each other. Does that appeal to me? Yes, it does, because I think people will have more freedom there. I mean, the freedom of isolation, the freedom of complete choice in one’s behaviour.’[15] Fifteen years later, there was more urgency in his comments to Rolling Stone: ‘the suburbanization of the soul [forces] the individual to recognize that he or she is all he or she has got. And this sharpens the eye and the imagination. The challenge is for each of us to respond, to remake as much as we can of the world around us, because no one else will do it for us. We have to find a core within us and get to work. Don’t worry about worldly rewards. Just get on with it!’[16] Using the imagination and following one’s obsessions may, perhaps, be rewarding, but it certainly doesn’t sound easy psychologically, more like hard work. By the early 1990s the warning was starker: ‘If people are going to survive they will need to do this on the plane of the imagination much more than they have done. Otherwise, they’ll simply become a mark on some consumer chart.’[17]

The reasons for concern are clear: if we do not use our imaginations and obsessions, we are at risk of being governed by forces outside ourselves which still operate, such as capitalism or purposeless social conformity. Ballard has drawn attention to the way in which moral structures and decision-making powers have been externalized out into the environment by technology – from traffic lights to CCTV cameras – providing us with a safe passage through our lives,[18] and in like manner we may find it psychologically easier to decline the freedom to utilize the imagination that comes with a safe and prosperous, but individualistic, society. People might instead be content to be governed by forces of social conformity, and to let themselves be directed by their emotions – which Ballard thinks of as tending to reinforce existing social conventions and as restricting, rather than expanding, the possibilities for action.

It may be that we thrive when certain of our relationships are drained of emotion, that we may then be able to explore our lives more fully, because emotions tend to act as a brake. They reinforce the status quo. They set up a kind of tyranny rather like the psychology of a very small child, which may be entirely governed by passionate emotions that are in fact very limiting. It’s only when the child learns to control its emotions that he can begin to explore all sorts of interesting possibilities at the other end of the nursery.

Ballard in interview, 1997.[19]

If this is the bare bones of the psychology that underpins Kingdom Come, we can perhaps add some flesh by considering the social aspects of consumerism. Peter Stearns points out that the growth of consumer behaviour was closely connected with the decline of long-established social structures under the pressures of industrialization and urbanization. In earlier times, social hierarchies were much more rigidly observed, and any crossing of social boundaries or individualistic behaviour tended to be viewed negatively, especially by the upper-classes. The latter had luxury, i.e. their wealth was displayed, rather than consumed, and in standard formats with an absence of individuality or any concern about fashion.[20] However, once this social edifice began to lose its grip, consumer behaviour helped people cope with the resulting uncertainty and insecurity about social status, and with the disruption to established patterns of behaviour, by providing alternative ways of fulfillment and by enabling an individual to demonstrate personal achievement, no matter how limited. This was particularly the case in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the growth of large firms meant that many in the middle-classes found themselves working for others rather than themselves and in jobs with a high degree of routine: satisfaction and success were no longer an integral element of their occupation, and had to be sought elsewhere.[21]

Utama shopping centre, Malaysia

But there is a malign dialectic at work here. I buy things in order to try and reassert my identity, but as the marketplace grows I am offered an increasing variety of goods and services, and associated ways of living, from which to choose. Now my identity is even more in question, because it is something that I myself have to select and realize. The impact is heightened as the material prosperity of society increases – even something as basic as food becomes no longer a matter of survival and physical well-being, but a decision about life-style.[22]

Yet coherent identity seems to be precisely the main problem of modern existence and is itself something to be chosen and achieved. … Consumerism simultaneously exploits mass identity crisis by proffering its goods as solutions to the problems of identity, and in the process intensifies it by offering ever more plural values and ways of being. … That the self must be a project is dictated to us by a pluralized world and must be pursued within that pluralized world. This entails a high level of anxiety and risk. In terms of consumer culture, there is high anxiety because every choice seems to implicate the self: all acts of purchase or consumption, clothing, eating, tourism, entertainment, ‘are decisions not only about how to act but who to be’.

Slater, ‘Consumer Culture & Modernity’.[23]

To make matters worse, the psychological support that might have been available from kinship ties, the local community, religion, voluntary organizations, and such like, is now much weaker – in fact, involvement in these is as much a life-style choice as everything else. Yet the evidence is that people with a rich variety of social connections are less likely to suffer depression and anxiety than those without.[24] As well as support that I might obtain directly from others, I am better able to cope if I am ‘not just the local lawyer, but also the coach of the cricket team, the friendly neighbour, and the person who always sings at the christmas party’, as a setback in one role is of less significance to my sense of identity and self-esteem.[25]

Without a traditional social fabric around me, I live in a world of endless possibilities but any failure to find fulfillment in my life must somehow reflect my own inadequacies. Hence, as Zygmunt Bauman suggests, we are nowadays more likely to suffer from depression – caused by the fear of inadequacy in the face of endless possibilities – than from neurosis arising from guilt caused by the transgression of prohibitions.[26]

The more we are allowed to be the masters of our fates, the more we expect ourselves to be. We should be able to find education that is stimulating and useful, work that is exciting, socially valuable, and remunerative, spouses who are sexually, emotionally, and intellectually stimulating and also loyal and comforting. Our children are supposed to be beautiful, smart, affectionate, obedient, and independent. And everything we buy is supposed to be the best of its kind. … [Hence,] almost every experience people have nowadays will be perceived as a disappointment, and thus regarded as a failure – a failure that could have been prevented with the right choice.

Barry Schwartz, ‘The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less’.[27]

In such circumstances, the temptation is to seek comfort and easy pleasures. But experimental psychology suggests that the systems of the brain which control desire are not the same as the systems that control pleasure.[28] Hence, some things – sex, good food – will both activate desire and bring pleasure, but others – such as a bigger, higher-definition TV – may provoke desire but not add much to our happiness. Biologically speaking, happiness is a spur to action, not some end-state that we are programmed to seek out, and this is reflected in the wealth of data indicating a lack of correlation between absolute levels of income and happiness (other than at extremely low levels of income), whether it be between different societies, different individuals in the same society, or individuals over time.[29]

Ballard’s recognition that we ‘construct our own reality’ implies an understanding that happiness is not some ‘default’ or natural state, and that nowadays we have to create the conditions for our own satisfaction and fulfillment; failure to do this in a world that does not impose its meanings on us will lead to emptiness, boredom, and anxiety. What we seem to have, therefore, are the possible conditions for a social crisis rooted in personal reactions to the complexity and uncertainty inherent in a prosperous, individualistic, consumer society, exacerbated by the lack of established social structures that might provide support. And here we can make start to make the connection with fascism …

Given the near unintelligibility of the Nazi regime,[30] any interpretation of its causes needs to explain why it developed in Germany (and not, say, the U.S.A. or France) and in the 1930s (rather than some earlier or later date). Generic explanations based on the ‘German psyche’, or some form of ‘moral crisis’ in modern capitalism, fail to convince precisely because they have no answer to these questions.

Under a leader who talked in apocalyptic tones of world power or destruction and a regime founded on an utterly repulsive ideology of race-hatred, one of the most culturally and economically advanced countries in Europe planned for war, launched a world conflagration which killed around 50 million people, and perpetrated atrocities – culminating in the mechanized mass murder of millions of Jews – of a nature and scale as to defy imagination.

Ian Kershaw, ‘The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems & Perspectives Of Interpretation’.[31]

No explanations I’ve seen are ever convincing of why cultivated and intelligent people like the Germans and Italians should plunge into this insane world-view.

Ballard in interview, 2006.

A promising approach is to start from the idea that inter-war Germany was suffering from a crisis that was simultaneously political, economic, social, and existential. Fascism is then seen to result from a generalized sense of trauma, where stresses in one arena – say the economic or the existential – cannot find an outlet in another, such as the political or social. Such an explanation of fascism owes a debt to Erich Fromm’s prognosis in his 1941 book Escape from Freedom, where he described the fascist regimes, and Nazi Germany in particular, as resulting from the isolation, powerlessness, and anxiety that people felt following modernization and industrialization in countries where traditional structures had lost much of their strength, and which had suffered hyper-inflation and extremely high unemployment.[32]

By the early decades of the 20th century, the German economy was the most developed in Europe and becoming dominated by large organizations: the local boss whom the worker knew on a personal basis was being replaced by distant and amorphous management, and the individual’s sense of their place in the whole was increasingly opaque. In politics, the parties of the new Weimar democracy were concerned with large-scale, intractable issues at the federal level, weakening the significance of local or work-place participation in political or trade union affairs; and the advent of radio was about to kick-start the transformation of politics into a form of advertising and manipulation of the emotions – as the Nazis were quick to realize.

Hitler practices his acting skills. ‘Apocalyptic, visionary, convincing’: three photos by Heinrich Hoffman from 1925.

The individual was no longer compensated for a lack of security and purpose by the strength of those long-standing and powerful elements of German society to which he had been accustomed. The monarchy had been abolished; the military (who had virtually run the country during 1914-1918) had been defeated in a war largely of their own devising; the once all-powerful German state could no longer even honour the commitments on its own bank notes as a result of massive inflation which had destroyed middle-class savings – together with the resulting bourgeois sense of certainty and security; rapid political change, military defeat, and economic problems had left the older generation lost in the world and the young looking elsewhere than to tradition and family. The lack of – or decline in – local social participation and intermediate-level structures, such as voluntary organizations, led to what Gino Germani referred to as ‘street corner society’.[33] And there were all too many whose recourse was to the street – unemployment rose following the 1929 Wall Street Crash until by 1932 an estimated one-third of the workforce were without a job.[34] To many, the world no longer made sense, and in the words of the Marxist historian TW Mason: civil society was no longer able to reproduce itself.[35]

In such circumstances, one psychological recourse for the individual is to seek to give up their independence and to fuse with somebody – or something – else, in an attempt to somehow recreate the lost bonds that had existed at societal level. Hence the attraction to many of an authoritarian party, such as the Nazis, with a clear leader on whom the party member or citizen could project qualities which – especially in the case of Hitler – they clearly lacked, but which were the counterpart of the psychological needs of the adherent. As Ballard once put it: ‘It’s almost as if what [a politician] needs is sort of a reverse charisma now. Not a light that shines outwards, but the ability, like a black hole, to draw light inwards! You’ve got to be able to draw other people’s fantasies to you’.[36] For the disciple, doubt is assuaged by accepting the opinions and directions of others, and uncertainty is conquered by relying on the conviction of the emotions instead of trusting in rational thought and debate – in a world that no longer makes sense, emotions appear a surer guide than reason. As Michael Burleigh puts it in The Third Reich: A New History: ‘Nazism was truly ahead of its time … This was politics as feeling’.[37]

Not a light that shines outwards, but the ability, like a black hole, to draw light inwards! You’ve got to be able to draw other people’s fantasies to you.

Ballard on the requirements for modern politician, interview, 1997.

Hitler himself understood all this perfectly well, as he displayed in Mein Kampf: ‘The mass meeting is necessary if only for the reason that in it the individual, who in becoming an adherent of a new movement feels lonely and is easily seized with the fear of being alone, receives for the first time the pictures of a greater community, something that has a strengthening and encouraging effect on most people. … If he steps for the first time out of his small workshop or out of the big enterprise, in which he feels very small, into the mass meeting and is now surrounded by thousands and thousands of people with the same conviction … he himself succumbs to the magic influence of what we call mass suggestion.’[38]

Fascist ideology was therefore concentrated on a mythic core constituted by the image of the nation reborn, purified, and following its ‘destiny’,[39] and practical politics accordingly relied heavily on symbols, mass spectacles, and a continuously reiterated vocabulary of basic ideas.

A dreadful mass sentimentality, compounded of anger, fear, resentment and self-pity, replaced the customary politics of decency, pragmatism, property and reason … Belief, faith, feeling and obedience to instinct routed debate, scepticism and compromise. People voluntarily surrendered to group or herd emotions … Among committed believers, a mythic world of eternal spring, heroes, demons, fire and sword – in a word, the fantasy world of the nursery – displaced reality. Or rather invaded it, with crude images of Jews, Slavs, capitalists and kulaks populating the imagination. This was children’s politics for grown-ups, bored and frustrated with the prosaic tenor of post war liberal democracy, and hence receptive to heroic gestures and politics as a form of theatrical stunt.

Michael Burleigh, ‘The Third Reich: A New History’.[40]

Fascism therefore offers an irrational escape from apparently intractable difficulties. As Ballard pointed out long ago, in his review of Mein Kampf for New Worlds,[41] Hitler was successful precisely because he dispensed with any rationalization of his prejudices, and was therefore able to tap directly into the unconscious of his followers.

More prosaically, a sense of place and safety could be supplied by hierarchy and control: a 1938 decree introduced general labour conscription by forcing people to work wherever the State decreed, but this effectively gave the well-behaved worker job security, in stark contrast to the early 1930s and to other countries;[42] and the small-holding farmer was tied to the soil just as much as a feudal serf, but was protected against creditors forcing him to sell his property.[43] Independent groups and sources of power which were not destroyed were assimilated into the system: Nazi ideology did not consider a person to have an identity separate from their obligations as a citizen, and it followed that if one was, say, an engineer, a mother, or a writer, one’s own particular concerns could be most effectively met within the context of the Nazi regime. Organizations such as employee associations or trade unions, or women’s and children’s groups, were therefore effectively incorporated into the party or the administration. For example, sports and recreational societies all functioned under the Kraft durch Freude (‘Strength through Joy’) organization, and one of the tasks legally accorded to the Reich Chamber of Commerce was to ‘gather together the creative artists in all spheres into a unified organization under the leadership of the Reich [which] must not only determine the lines of progress, mental and spiritual, but also lead and organize the professions’.[44]

The Nazi’s ‘Metro-Centre’? A detail from an illustration for an article in the propaganda magazine Signal c. 1941, describing the organization of the Nazi Party: ‘Any creative initiative to be introduced in health and hygiene, the training of youth, welfare work on behalf of the working man … whatever revolutionary idea is to be introduced into the crafts, industry, trade or among the peasantry, all flows through the channels of the Party organization’.

The Nazi state was not a completely controlled society, but rather one where existing societal organizations were subject to a form of ‘capture’. Hence, Germany was no longer a pluralist society in the sense of accepting variation in aims, opinions, and interests; variety could exist but it was merely a functional variety – a diversity in unity. As Kevin Passmore puts it: ‘civil society was absorbed into fascism’.[45] The sense of community was now workers and managers marching in the same procession or rally, all shouting Heil Hitler together whilst feeling the same emotions.[46] One advantage of such a non-pluralist society was that it was able to limit the extent to which the functional and social complexity of modern societies impacted on human subjectivity: common activities and emotions, communal gatherings, signs and slogans, all represented psychological simplifications that helped nullify the difficulties of a complex, modern world. The result of this reliance on myth, symbols and emotions was that fascism transformed consciousness rather than society: ‘The idea of the “national community” was not a basis for changing social structures, but a symbol of transformed consciousness. … [Nazism's] intentions were directed towards a transformation of value- and belief systems – a psychological “revolution” rather than one of substance.’[47]

So there are indeed similarities between inter-war Germany and 21st century consumerist societies: in particular, people can feel they live in a world without meaning and have somehow lost control of their lives. Obviously there are also major differences – one could hardly suggest that boredom and ennui were a major factor in 1920s Germany, for example, and the economic backgrounds are dissimilar – but these can obscure the psychological resemblances.[48] In both cases, customary social and political structures are debilitated, providing little tangible or intangible support, and the sense of community is weakened. Traditional politics are viewed as irrelevant or with contempt: there is an absence of debate and we are left with politics as emotion and advertising.

A Nazi mass gathering: the 1937 Reichsparteitag at Nuremberg, including a spectacular performance from the young girls of the ‘Glaube und Schönheit’ (‘Belief and Beauty’) organisation.

The ‘solutions’ in the two cases are analogous. A sense of pseudo-community is created through common activities and attendance at mass spectacles, by the channeling of emotions into a narrow range, and through a strengthening of the sense of commonality by means of an emphasis – vague but insistent – on ‘outsiders’. Community and a shared-culture may still be with us, but no longer based on locality or history: ‘What’s the point of privacy if it’s just a personalized prison? Consumerism is a collective enterprise. People here want to share and celebrate, they want to come together. When we go shopping we take part in a collective ritual of affirmation. … Shared dreams and values, shared hopes and pleasures’, claims Sangster in Kingdom Come.[49]

The concept of ‘us’ implies a ‘not-us’ … an age-old and reliable way of putting strength back into weakening societal bonds: ‘David Cruise casually referred to the ‘enemy’, a term kept deliberately vague that embraced Asians and east Europeans, blacks, Turks, non-consumers and anyone not interested in sport. New enemies were always needed’.[50] To the extent that I am not an individual but part of a commonality, you are not an individual either, but a category; in Nazi Germany, one was ‘no longer a person, but an anti-social, criminal, Gypsy, homosexual, Jehovah’s Witness, Jew or political, in involuntary anticipation of modern identity politics, with their replacement of persons by categories’.[51]

The effect of this growth in pseudo-community is the same in Kingdom Come as in Nazi Germany, as Ballard himself described in a discussion with Jeannette Baxter, when he referred to ‘the positive features of the new regime [of the Metro-Centre] – the self-disciplined and healthily glowing families, the sense of a revived community with a new confidence and purpose in life (in short, that “accommodation” made by so many in the 1930s in England and Germany who should know better)’.[52]

‘I like the music,’ I commented. ‘Though maybe it’s a little too martial. Somewhere in there I can hear the Horst Wessel
song.

‘It’s good for morale,’ Carradine explained. ‘We like to keep people cheerful …’

Ballard, Kingdom Come.[53]

Symbols and myths – reaching almost religious significance – start to predominate. ‘Politics’ mutates into something else, a mixture of emotion, myth, and violence that comes close to madness. In Kingdom Come, Sangster is convinced that ‘some kind of insanity is the last way forward’, and the psychiatrist, Maxted, draws the parallel with Nazi Germany: ‘The Germans were desperate to break out of their prison. Defeat, inflation, grotesque war reparations, the threat of barbarians advancing from the east. Going mad would set them free, and they chose Hitler to lead the hunting party.’[54]

But what of psychopathology and violence, which I referred to earlier as another of Ballard’s long-standing themes that runs through Kingdom Come? He has always held – based in part on his childhood experiences in Shanghai and Lunghua – that the human psyche has dark and dangerous depths, including an attraction to violence. On Ballard’s conception, mankind has natural psychopathic tendencies which, although they may not come to the fore in all societies, cannot be eradicated … a view which has some support from the anthropological and historical evidence, which indicates that hunter-gatherer and primitive agriculturalist societies often had far higher male mortality rates from violence than did Europe and North America in the 20th century, despite our technologies of destruction and two world wars.[55]

When I refer to my own childhood, and how people behaved in the Far East during the Second World War, it seemed that some people simply enjoy killing and tormenting others. … To use a term like ‘sadism’ and to construct an elaborate psychological machinery to explain this behaviour, however, is to miss the point. The fact is, we are violent and dangerous creatures. We needed to be to survive all those hundreds of thousands of years when we were living in small tribal groups, faced with an incredibly hostile world. And we still carry those genes.

Ballard in interview, 1997.[56]

For the majority of the time that people have lived in crowded urban environments, any proclivity for violence was – probably of necessity – contained by social arrangements and by a widely accepted system of morality. However, both of these types of constraints are weakening, something which concerned Ballard as early as this 1974 interview: ‘I myself think that Man, if you like, is a naturally perverse animal, that the elements of psychopathology or perversity or moral deviancy are a very large part of his character. I don’t think that can be changed. I think attempts in the past to provide a very rigid moral framework succeeded to some extent. I think they’re going to break down now, simply because the opportunities for limitless freedom are so great.’[57]

The risk is that the erasure of meaning in modern societies produces boredom and emptiness, a gap which a dormant psychopathology can readily fill, fuelled by a preference for emotion over cognition. Hence Ballard frequently links boredom and psychopathic behaviour in his later books and interviews: ‘My real fear is that boredom and inertia may lead people to follow a deranged leader … that we will put on jackboots and black uniforms and the aspect of the killer simply to relieve the boredom.’[58] The descriptions of brutality in Kingdom Come – racist attacks and violent sports events – are simply taken from Ballard’s perception of the world around him. Their significance lies not, I suggest, in the precise content, but in their latent meaning: within the absences which permeate both society and our own minds, ‘violence and hate, as always, were organizing themselves’.[59]

Aggressive advertising: For Mercedes-Benz, from the Nazi propaganda magazine ‘Signal’, c1943; and, below, for Hummer SUVs in Australia, 2008.

How might we view consumerism – and in particular the totalizing aspects of a consumerist society – as a result of this analysis of Ballard’s vision of a ‘soft fascism’? Consumer behaviour is an exercise in choice, and can therefore infiltrate other aspects of our lives, replacing the traditional but declining forms of morality and politics, both of which are essentially ways of choosing between alternatives. This presents us with an obligation to choose from what is on offer, and thereby effectively closes off the possibility of exiting the system – something that Pearson discovers in Kingdom Come on his first visit to the West London suburbs: ‘I moved through the darkened streets, searching for a signpost to guide me back to London. But here by the M25, in the heartland of the motorway people, all signs pointed inwards, referring the traveller back to his starting point’[60] (my emphasis). The fictionalization of the external world means that Ballard’s ‘exit door’ through the use of our imaginative faculties is gradually closing, as these powers of the imagination become colonized by the fantasies around us and by our own emotions. This enables consumerism to satisfy our needs, not directly via the goods and services that we purchase, but indirectly by meeting our psychological requirements through our involvement in the activities of consumer society – shopping, media, leisure. The disassociation between our desires and pleasures – which might be seen as threatening the consumerist system once we discover that satisfying our desires is unfulfilling – can now be bridged: we desire the goods and buy them, but our rewards come from elsewhere, from our very participation in the system itself … from our attendance at Ballard’s Metro-Centre.

This totalizing effect of consumerism, whereby everything is absorbed into it in much the same way as existing organizations and groupings were subject to ‘capture’ by the Nazis, is perhaps reflected in some of those elements of Kingdom Come which perplexed reviewers: Are the group led by the local solicitor Fairfax really opponents of the Metro-Centre, or are they just trying to use it for their own purposes? How much can we trust what the main protagonist, Pearson, says – or should we regard him as an ‘unreliable narrator’? Why is it not clear, even at the end of the book, whether Pearson really regrets getting involved with the Metro-Centre?[61] The ambiguity of Ballard’s narrative is in keeping with the self-reflexive nature of the society that he is describing, where the transgressive gesture rapidly becomes another media item that can be purchased for cash, and an attempt at escape puts you right back at the centre. Any effort at political action or opposition becomes pointless, because this is not – on Ballard’s view – a conspiracy of false needs and false consciousness: by accepting the emotional lie and the feel-good fairy story, we are ourselves complicit in the consumerist society. But if this is right, then we can see the point of Ballard’s long-held insistence that we must, as he puts it, immerse ourselves in the most dangerous elements and hope that we can swim to the other side[62] – a view that infects both the ‘extreme hypothesis’ of Crash and the studied ambiguity of Kingdom Come.

Finally, what does Ballard’s novel tell us about fascistic activity and what it represents? As I have described it here, fascism arises as a result of a generalized sense of crisis in prosperous, complex societies, whereby tensions in each sphere – the economic, the social, the political, and the personal – cannot find relief, but actually amplify each other. The result is an escape to pseudo-community, and a surrender to the emotions and to psychopathic urges. This suggests a close similarity to Daniel Woodley’s recent discussion of the links between fascism, modernity, and capitalism:

Modern [critical] theorists have abandoned class reductionism for a more sophisticated account of fascism as a political commodity, a form of ideological production in postliberal capitalism based on the aestheticization of politics and the mobilization of emotion. … postliberal capitalism entails new forms of ideological justification based on the bureaucratization and societalization of economic life. These structural tendencies increase the pressure for collective solutions to political integration, resulting in a panoply of new ideologies aimed at addressing atomization. … [Fascism's] timely appearance and reappearance is rooted … in the aestheticization of depoliticized politics and the fetishization of communal identities which conceal the true nature of the commodity as a structured social practice.

Daniel Woodley, ‘Fascism and Political Theory: Critical Perspectives on Fascist Ideology’.[63]

What I have tried to show in this article is that in Kingdom Come Ballard has attempted to unearth this ‘latent content’ of fascism by means of his well-honed forensic tools of imagination and surrealistic description.[64]

NOTES

[1] ‘JG Ballard: The Comforts of Madness’, interview in The Independent, 15 September 2006.
[2] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, Fourth Estate (London), 2006, pp 167-169.
[3] See, for example, Ursula K Le Guin, ‘Revolution in the aisles’, The Guardian, 9 September 2006.
[4] M John Harrison, ‘Narratives of the mall’, The Times Literary Supplement, 6 September 2006.
[5] M John Harrison, ‘Narratives of the mall’, op cit.
[6] Rod Liddle, ‘Our simple pleasures go up in smoke’, Times Online, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/columnists/rod_liddle/article1267260.ece, accessed 5 May 2010.
[7] ‘From Here to Dystopia’, interview in the Telegraph Magazine, 2 September 2006.
[8] A similar sentiment is displayed here: ‘A mastery of the discontinuities of metropolitan life has always been essential to the successful urban dweller … A failure to master these discontinuities, whether social or genetic in origin, leaves some ethnic groups at a disadvantage, forced into enclaves that seem to reconstitute mental maps of ancestral villages.’ JG Ballard, ‘Airports: Going somewhere?’, The Observer, 14 September 1997.
[9] Peter N Stearns, Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire (2nd edition), Routledge (New York & London), 2006, p 72.
[10] Don Slater, Consumer Culture & Modernity, Polity Press (Cambridge), 1997, p 27.
[11] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, op cit, p 101.
[12] JG Ballard, Miracles of Life, Fourth Estate (London), 2008, pp 58-59.
[13] Some of Ballard’s clearest comments on the fictionalization of the external world and the interiorization of reality as a consequence of increased prosperity are to be found in an unpublished interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, c1974, available at http://www.jgballard.ca/interviews/jgb_cbc_ideas_interview.html, accessed 6 May 2010.
[14] Unpublished interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, op cit.
[15] Unpublished interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, op cit.
[16] ‘The Strange Visions of J. G. Ballard’, interview in Rolling Stone, 19 November 1987.
[17] ‘An Interview with J. G. Ballard’, Mississippi Review Vol. 20 #1-2, 1991, p 32.
[18] ‘Interview by Graeme Revell’, Re/Search 8/9: J. G. Ballard, Re/Search Publishing (San Francisco), 1984, p. 46.
[19] ‘Dangerous Driving’, interview in ‘Frieze’ magazine #34, May 1997.
[20] Peter N Stearns, Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire (2nd edition), op cit, pp 1-14.
[21] Peter N Stearns, Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire (2nd edition), op cit, pp 32-34, 60-62.
[22] Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics, Polity Press (Cambridge), 1994, p 224.
[23] Don Slater, Consumer Culture & Modernity, op cit, p 84-85.
[24] Michael Marmot, Status Syndrome: How Your Social Standing Directly Affects Your Health, Bloomsbury (London), Chapter 6; Robert H Frank, Luxury Fever: Money and Happiness in an Era of Excess, Princeton University Press, 1999, pp 86-88.
[25] Daniel Nettle, Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile, Oxford University Press, 2005, p 180.
[26] Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life, Polity Press (Cambridge), 2007, p 94.
[27] Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, Harper Perennial (New York), 2004, pp 210-211.
[28] For example, when rats have their brains stimulated to eat food, they don’t show the typical ‘liking behavior’ that normally accompanies pleasurable activities – indeed, if anything, they show ‘disliking behavior’. Conversely, the rats can be drugged so that they have no desire to eat, but show liking behavior when a sweet solution is put onto their tongue. See also Daniel Nettle, Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile, op cit, Chapter 5.
[29] Daniel Nettle, Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile, op cit, pp 48-52, 70-75; Robert H Frank, Luxury Fever: Money and Happiness in an Era of Excess, op cit, pp 71-74.
[30] Although the reference is to the generic term ‘fascism’, I shall limit my historical discussion to the Nazi Party and the German Third Reich – as does, by and large, Ballard..
[31] Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems & Perspectives Of Interpretation (4th edition), Hodder Arnold (London), 2000, p 4.
[32] Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom, Routledge (London), 1960, pp 106-116, 180-188 (originally published as Escape from Freedom, 1941).
[33] See S J Woolf (ed), The Nature of Fascism, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968, pp 107-108.
[34] Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History, Pan Books (London), 2001, p 122.
[35] T W Mason, ‘The Primacy of Politics – Politics and Economics in National Socialist Germany’, in S J Woolf (ed), The Nature of Fascism, op cit, p. 171.
[36] In a conversation with Mark Pauline c1987, published in J. G. Ballard: Conversations, RE/Search Publications, San Francisco, 2005, p 136.
[37] Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History, op cit, pp 210-211.
[38] Quoted in Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom, op cit, p 193.
[39] Roger Griffin (ed), Fascism, Oxford University Press, 1995, pp 3-4.
[40] Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History, op cit, pp 8-9.
[41] JG Ballard, ‘Alphabets of Unreason’ in New Worlds # 196, December 1969, p 26.
[42] William L Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Arrow Books, [1960]/1998, p 265.
[43] William L Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, op cit, p 258.
[44] For the Nazi assimilation of intermediate-level organizations, see William L Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, op cit, pp 241-267.
[45] Kevin Passmore, Fascism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2002, p 128.
[46] SL Andreski, ‘Some sociological considerations on fascism and class’, in S J Woolf (ed), The Nature of Fascism, op cit, pp 100-101.
[47] Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems & Perspectives Of Interpretation (4th edition), op cit, pp 174, 179.
[48] It is the psychological similarities that Ballard stressed in an interview with James Campbell: ‘… could consumerism turn into fascism? The underlying psychologies aren’t all that far removed from one another. If you go into a huge shopping mall and you’re looking down the parade, it’s the same theatrical aspect: these disciplined ranks of merchandise, all glittering like fascist uniforms. When you enter a mall, you are taking part in a ceremony of affirmation, which you endorse just by your presence.’ The Guardian, 14 June 2008.
[49] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, op cit, p 85. It is interesting to note that Fromm uses the term ‘automaton conformity’ to describe the form that the attempt to escape from freedom takes in modern democracies (as opposed to fascist dictatorships); see Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom, op cit, pp 159-178.
[50] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, op cit, p 189.
[51] Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History, op cit, p 204.
[52] ‘Kingdom Come: An Interview with J. G. Ballard’, in Jeannette Baxter, J. G. Ballard: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, Continuum (London & New York), 2008, p 127.
[53] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, op cit, p 39.
[54] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, op cit, pp 102, 168.
[55] See, for example, Azar Gat, War in Civilization, Oxford University Press, 2006, Chapters 2, 6 and 9; also Steven LeBlanc, with Katherine Register, Constant Battles: The myth of the peaceful noble savage, St Martin’s Press (New York), 2003.
[56] ‘Dangerous Driving’, interview in ‘Frieze’ magazine #34, May 1997.
[57] Unpublished interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, op cit.
[58] ‘Age of Unreason’, interview published online by the The Guardian, 22 June 2004; available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/jun/22/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.jgballard (accessed 13 May 2010).
[59] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, op cit, p 191.
[60] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, op cit, p 35.
[61] After all that’s happened, Pearson still has positive feelings for the people of the Metro-Centre: ‘Leaving Sangster and his self-hating motives to one side, I admired Carradine and his mutineers, and the robustly physical world they had based on their consumerist dream. The motorway towns were built on the frontier between a tired past and a future without illusions and snobberies’ (Kingdom Come, op cit, p. 266). And on the penultimate page, there’s the following, rather astonishing, meditation from Pearson: ‘The cable channels had reverted to an anaesthetic diet of household hints and book-group discussions. Once people began to talk earnestly about the novel any hope of freedom had died. The once real possibility of a fascist republic had vanished into the air …’ (Kingdom Come, op cit, p. 279, my italics). This appears to mourn the failure of fascism, but I prefer to think of as reflecting Ballard’s oft-mentioned idea of ‘immersing oneself in the most dangerous elements and swimming’. Just to confuse matters further, on the following (and last) page of the book, Pearson turns pessimistic again and ruminates that ‘In time, unless the sane woke and rallied themselves, an even fiercer republic would open the doors and spin the turnstiles of its beckoning paradise’ (Kingdom Come, op cit, p. 280).
[62] See, for example, ‘An Interview with J. G. Ballard’, Mississippi Review op cit, p 33. And the following brief quote well-illustrates Ballard’s reasoning: ‘I certainly do believe that we should immerse ourselves in the destructive element. Far better to do so consciously than find ourselves tossed into the pool when we’re not looking’, interview in The Paris Review #94, 1984, p 143.
[63] Daniel Woodley, Fascism and Political Theory: Critical Perspectives on Fascist Ideology, Routledge (London & New York), 2010, pp 14-18.
[64] c.f. Ballard on the distinction between manifest and latent content: ‘Freud pointed out that one has to distinguish between the manifest content of the inner world of the psyche and its latent content, and I think in exactly the same way today, when the fictional elements have overwhelmed reality, one has to distinguish between the manifest content of reality and its latent content’, from ‘The New Science Fiction: A conversation between J G Ballard and George MacBeth’ in Langdon Jones (ed), The New SF, Hutchinson (London), 1969, p 50.

The author of Lord Horror.

Interview by Simon Sellars.

This, the second of our three-interview series with Savoy luminaries, covers the company’s musical and spoken-word output. Part 1, with Michael Butterworth, discussed Savoy’s publishing arm, and part 3, with John Coulthart, will cover Savoy’s visual/comics/graphics output. To coincide with this series, we also ran a Savoy/Ballardian Microfiction competition.

This interview is in two parts. In the first, David Britton discusses PJ Proby, Ballard, Fenella Fielding, Ian Brady, Michael Moorcock, New Worlds magazine, Heathcote Williams and his own upbringing. In the second, he discusses New Order, Joy Division, punk, Manchester music, Kingsize Taylor, The Cramps, Zappa, Beefheart and Springsteen. Interspersed throughout both parts are sound clips from Savoy releases [NOTE: sound clips don't work in Google Reader].

..:: Don’t forget Part 2 of this interview!

Excerpt from forthcoming release: Fenella Fielding reading from JG Ballard’s Crash. Courtesy Savoy Records (2010).

Savoy music and talking books can be purchased from eMusic, iTunes and Savoy Books.

IN PART 1 OF THE SAVOY INTERVIEWS with Michael Butterworth, we learnt all the gory details about Savoy Books, “England’s only truly alternative and autotelic publishing company”, founded by Butterworth and David Britton in 1976. The Savoy roster includes many writers who appeared alongside Ballard in New Worlds magazine — including Michael Moorcock, Harlan Ellison, Charles Platt, Samuel R. Delany, Langdon Jones and M. John Harrison — and the company itself has been hit by multiple scandals, including the imprisonment of Britton twice on obscenity charges. But what about the musical arm of this black empire? Savoy Records is the company “responsible” for resurrecting the career of PJ Proby, the trouser-splitting redneck-rock anti-hero from the 60s and repackaging him as a return-of-the-repressed Frankensteinian monster. It’s the company that claimed Madonna guested on one of its records with Proby, singing a song that “glorified sex with young girls”. It’s the company that used a “quote” from Prince Charles on one of its record sleeves, in which the Bonny Prince was alleged to have said: “Only dickheads die from cocaine. The best people used it and are still using it”. It’s the company that turned horrorshow characters from its demented comics into recording “stars”. And today, it’s the company attempting to resurrect (despite her apparent protests) the actress Fenella Fielding’s career, with a covers record of modern-day pop songs and — of all things — her spoken-word rendition of Ballard’s Crash. Nestled like toad in the hole among all that headspinning madness is a brace of great tunes, embracing muscular dance, redneck folk and way-more-punk-than-punk theatrics. Stuff New Order, Joy Division, Ballard, Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, Prince Charles, Lord Haw-Haw, the Queen, the IRA, Bowie, Phil Collins, Proby, the Cramps, the Stooges and Prince into a blender filled with flesheating worms, and the brown goo flowing from the nozzle is nothing less than Savoy Records. But handle with extreme caution, for the worms will still be alive.

LEFT: PJ Proby and Peter Hook of New Order in Suite 16 recording studio, Rochdale, circa 1984. From the “Love Will Tear Us Apart” sleeve.

Savoy Records seems to anticipate, heighten or subvert certain commercial trends. The work they did with Proby ironically comments on all those cynical marketing exercises whereby old has-beens like Tom Jones re-record hip songs like “Kiss” by Prince. But instead of trying to revive old careers, Savoy amplifies all the reasons why these “has-beens” fell from favour. The furore surrounding the sleeve of the Lord Horror record, with its fake Prince Charles quotes and other unspeakable anti-semitic rants attributed to nasty Savoy characters, seems to say that punk never went far enough. For Savoy, the equation could be something like this: “Siouxsie Sioux and Sid Vicious wore swastikas on their clothing, but it was only for show. They were never really interested in pushing people’s buttons. If punk really wanted to shock with Nazi imagery, this is how it should be done”. Here is a parallel universe where punk was always shocking, and never mere window dressing for clothes horses.

In part 2 of the Savoy interviews, we have David Britton himself to tell us all about the music biz, in what amounts to only the second full-length interview he’s ever given. David is very much a man of mystery — not only does he rarely speak on the record, but to this day, as far as I know, there have been no adult photos of him published. It was with that puzzle in mind that I went to sleep one night in 2008, when I first had the idea of approaching these people for their story, thinking intently about the Savoy empire and what it all meant…

That night I dreamt a very strange dream, which I recall very well. David Britton and Michael Butterworth had invited me to their glamourous beach shack. After a few drinks, they gave me a rather expensive surfboard and, smitten with the board, I excused myself, took my leave and paddled out to sea. But I pushed out too far, and being a hopeless swimmer panicked and turned back. The water was red by the way, but it wasn’t blood — that’s just how it was in this world. On the way back I noticed a crack in the board. I was apprehensive but felt that David and Michael wouldn’t mind, and that they would understand that it was a design flaw rather than my clumsiness that had cracked it.

When I got back to their shack, they had, according to a note from David, decided to go on holiday, although they had left me keys and the note said to let myself in and make myself at home. I remember thinking that although I had met Michael before in the dream world, David always kept himself hidden when he spoke to me, talking from behind doors and curtains. When I opened the door, they were inside after all — they were running late, and were still packing. And I had to catch my breath because there, right in front of me, was the mysterious David Britton! Returning early from the water, I had caught him by surprise, and he hadn’t had time to hide himself from me. In fact, he was frozen in mid-stride like a statue — having heard the door open, he was attempting to run for cover behind the curtain. I took in the sight of something I’d never seen before: David Britton. He turned out to be very tall and lean, although not skinny, more the naturally athletic type, with swept-back medium length hair. He was wearing shorts and had some kind of snake tattoo on his lower legs and ankles. He seemed very graceful and, after he had relaxed from being caught out, said hello to me in a cultured English accent.

Then Michael offered to sell me some books, David some records, and I woke up…

Two years later, I conducted this interview with David Britton by email. I still have no idea what he really looks like.

Prince’s “Sign O’ Times”, performed by PJ Proby. Courtesy Savoy Records (1989).

SIMON SELLARS: David, in our interview with Michael, he said that New Worlds was the inspiration for Savoy Books. Looking back at New Worlds, there seems an obvious rock ‘n’ roll aesthetic through the magazine — a savage blend of experimental pop culture shot though with various rock allusions. Was this in turn an influence on Savoy Records?

DAVID BRITTON: In the 1960s, New Worlds was the literary equivalent of the Beatles. That decade produced some fine magazines, literary ones like Evergreen, Transatlantic Review and Encounter. Only New Worlds possessed the true primogeniture of a rock ‘n’ roll quality. In my mind it sat well with the music experiments of the day, and had a harder edge than the best of the underground magazines — Oz, IT and so on. It was rock ‘n’ roll in literary form, and to me Ballard and Moorcock were as revolutionary and exciting as Beefheart and Zappa. As a boy I’d been very taken with Weird Tales. Its pulp ambience, Virgil Finlay’s illustrations and the writer-triumvirate of HP Lovecraft, Robert E Howard and Clark Ashton Smith held a special appeal. To find a magazine in the 60s that seemed as exciting as Weird Tales must have been in the 30s was a real inspiration. To perhaps overstretch an analogy, you might say that Ballard was the equivalent of Lovecraft, Moorcock was Howard and, at a push, Aldiss was Smith. Michael Butterworth had already made his presence felt in New Worlds. I’d seen advertisements around Manchester for readings he did with New Worlds regulars such as Libby Houston, and I was conscious at the time of being an onlooker staring through a window into a creative world out of my reach. Michael had been at the heart of New Worlds at the peak of its run; I was jealous of that but also inspired that a writer from Manchester had actually made it. When I met up with him in the early 70s, I began to feel that my time might be coming.

LEFT: David Britton’s copy of Passort to Eternity.

SS: Michael detailed in length the influence of Ballard on his own writing. Was it the same for you?

DB: As a teenager, Ballard’s short stories constantly looped through my mind in a way his novels did not. The “compact” novels with their strange, evocative compelling prose were both adult and original. I was familiar with some of them from Ted Carnell’s New Worlds/Science Fantasy magazines, but they didn’t properly come into focus for me until I read them collected together in the Berkley paperbacks — The Voices of Time and Passport to Eternity — which I read while living in my North Manchester home, in Blackley, going to and from work in a rather pointless way.

On my route to the factory to combat the boredom that lay ahead, I played games, giving certain plots of ground “Ballardian” qualities. A grass verge, so nondescript, became significant. The steep incline in Victoria Avenue concealed the approaching ocean from “Now Wakes the Sea”. The dead waters of the Rhodes Wood Reservoir, ringed with poinsettia, twinkled alienly. These internal miseries came to be a ticking clock of my life, a way of measuring the passage of time. Later came the more intense fiction of “The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race” — Ballard rewriting a hero of mine, Alfred Jarry — and the one piece that really connects to Lord Horror, Ballard’s article “The Alphabets of Unreason”, the first piece I’d read that put a modern finger on the appeal of the Third Reich and Hitler. No moralising, just a recognition of the Reich’s genuinely seductive theatrical power: “The psychopath never dates”; “Hitler is completely up to date”; “Hitler’s revulsion against the Jews was physical, like his reaction against any peoples, such as the Slavs and Negroes, whose physique, posture, morphology and pigmentation alerted some screaming switchboard of insecurity within his own mind”. This was powerful stuff in 1967, and it came courtesy of New Worlds. The only other person whose force of opinion hit me that hard was Professor George Steiner, many years later, talking on The Late Show about Leni Reifenstahl’s Triumph Of The Will. Very eloquently he said that while the appeal of Reifenstahl’s film was beguiling and the imagery of the Nazi state sucked you in, the correct response to it was a very emphatic, “Thank you, but no.”

In my writing, however, Moorcock had been more of an inspiration to me than Ballard, and I played to that influence in the early manifestations of Savoy; you might say Michael Butterworth filled a gap in the Savoy ethos with his own Ballard influence. Our collaboration on Lord Horror came out of the editing partnership on the small press magazines, and developed with the founding of Savoy. M John Harrison worked with us for two years and his presence was probably as much of a catalyst for Lord Horror as my later imprisonment in Strangeways; these things opened the doors to my beginning in writing. Harrison was a friend and an inspiration, I’ll be forever grateful to him for that. It’s frustrating that Lord Horror never appeared in New Worlds; I’d come of age too late to be a part of those wonderful heady days. But the novel is inspired by the New Worlds philosophy. It’s a homage, and an attempt to continue the tradition of Ballard and Moorcock, Harrison and Langdon Jones. The connection was continued when we published Lang’s story collection, The Eye of the Lens, and later hired him to proofread Motherfuckers.

SS: How did growing up in Manchester influence your worldview?

DB: There’s a notorious — to us — moment in the TV interview which Ballard gave to Jeremy Isaacs on Face to Face where he says that his writing career took the imaginative route it had because of his childhood in Shanghai, and he doubted if he would have become a writer if he had grown up in a suburb of Manchester. Well, he’s on record all over as saying the dullness of the suburbs gives birth to anarchy and strange impulses — that’s the entire subject of The Unlimited Dream Company — so, actually, I think he would have faired better than he thought. Though I spent nearly all my younger life trying to escape it, determining that it would not be my limit, North Manchester in the 50s and 60s where I was born and grew up is, in a sense, my Shanghai. By my teens, its terraced slums had been razed and replaced with a nondescript mess growing into a landscape of quiet desperation, a bleak “Ballardland”, artistically and spiritually, that pushed me to make the local library a second home in search of a richer imaginative life. I did escape, finally. But since I have left, its disaffected characters and its underbelly of absurdity, grimness and black humour has risen in significance in my mind, providing an unlikely creative font that I drew on for Lord Horror and all my subsequent books.

Springsteen’s “I’m On Fire”, performed by PJ Proby with the Savoy Holman Hunt African Orchestra. Courtesy Savoy Records (1990).

SS: What was the impetus behind Savoy branching out into making records?

DB: Michael had been friendly with Heathcote Williams and his London-based anarchist press, The Open Head Press, in the 1970s. Open Head were releasing records, and one of their 45s, “Sid Did It”, an anti-punk song, was a truly demented parody of the Sex Pistols. That had a big influence on us: a book publisher releasing records. Also, the biography we were meant to be doing with PJ Proby wasn’t getting anywhere, and I began to realise we were being irrevocably drawn into recording him.

“Shoot Yer Load” by Meng & Ecker. Courtesy Savoy Records (1989).

SS: Is there a conscious continuity between Savoy books, records and comics, aside from the integration of characters like Meng, Ecker and Horror?

DB: Rock ‘n’ roll’s spirit is hopefully always with us. It’s the bottom-line inspiration for Lord Horror, Meng & Ecker, La Squab and everything I’ve written. The rhythm of psychomorphic Horror is set to a rock ‘n’ roll beat. Rock ‘n’ roll and Auschwitz spell Lord Horror. To me, there’s inevitability in their blending. The bittersweet euphoria of rock ‘n’ roll with the most perverted campaign of terror in the history of the world. One breeds heightened life, the other depletes the human spirit. Positive and negative in the extreme.

The seeds were all there from the beginning. I don’t know how conscious a process it was, but I didn’t see there were boundaries. We were already mixing genres. It was a mindset we had together, and the multi-media approach unfolded quite naturally. Jack Trevor Story’s novel Man Pinches Bottom has a central character that comes from the world of Fleetway comics. The main protagonist in Nik Cohn’s novel I am Still the Greatest Says Johnny Angelo was a rock singer amalgam of PJ Proby and Elvis. All the threads of Savoy — books, music, graphics — can be knitted together to make a matching coat of its colourful contributors, real or imagined. You could easily place PJ Proby into the Meng & Ecker comics without it seeming contrived. The real life William Joyce/Lord Haw-Haw had been a comic character in Radio Fun in the 1940s, so right there Horror had visual ancestry. During the Second World War, Joyce’s radio broadcasts came from the Nazi station Reichsrundfunk via Radio Luxembourg. Ten years after Haw-Haw, Luxemburg happened to be the station from where young cockney Gus Goodwin, the first English rock ‘n’ roll disc jockey, beamed out his loon-a-tickery to grateful teenagers. Simultaneously, Alan Freed was banging his shoe on the table, also broadcasting on Radio Luxembourg, exhorting his clarion call to “get with it”. Gradually, through a glass darkly, the real and the unreal intertwined. It was a logical if deviant sideways step to have Haw-Haw by way of Horror broadcasting rock ‘n’ roll from Auschwitz into Albion. It doesn’t matter whether they’re from the world of comic, books or music or real life.

The authors co-opted by Savoy — Henry Treece, Heathcote Williams, Harlan Ellison, Ken Reid, David Lindsay, Maurice Richardson — dance to the same magical fugue. As we went along, it became more of a conscious process. We set out to replace what we saw as a bogus mainstream with an alternate reading list. Membership to the Savoy Irregulars was regulated stringently. It was an elite membership, with no room for a “Martin Amis”, a “Bono” or an “Art Spiegelman”. Moorcock probably supplied the blueprint here. Over his career he championed so many eclectic people, joining them together in New Worlds and in his own fiction.

Image from PJ Proby promotional booklet, Savoy 1984.

Iggy’s “The Passenger”, performed by PJ Proby. Courtesy Savoy Records (1995).

SS: What’s remarkable about Proby’s story? What does he signify to you?

DB: Proby’s appearance and general demeanour coincided with the psychology of a particular group of 1950s American actors and singers who appealed to me during my formative years. They conveyed the image of the romantic rebel that belonged to a world so remote from the everyday world of North Manchester. That “Rebel Without a Cause” sneer of Dean, Brando, Dennis Hopper, Rod Lauren and Vic Morrow. The pedigree extends to Lash LaRue, Johnny Weissmuller and Buster Crabbe, and is rockabilly’d up further in pre-army Elvis, Eddie Cochran, Johnny Burnette, Gene Vincent and, the honorary overseas member, Vince Taylor. They had a mean-as-shit hero/hoodlum look, the wild kind of chaps that creep through a David Lynch film. The attitude is no better formed than in PJ Proby. When our paths finally crossed, I had a first-hand chance to experience the most charismatic, angry, anguished and flawed man I’d ever encountered.

“A very good friend of ours”: The Beatles introduce PJ Proby in 1964.

PJ Proby: Three-week Hero. Part 1 of a short film about the man himself. Part 2 is here.

Proby was, still is, a very talented individual, who had the top of the showbiz world dangling just out of reach whilst being psychologically incapable of controlling himself. He was a redneck visionary who ran out of his natural decade into another, even stranger one — the 1960s. Nik Cohn’s take on him in Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, the first serious book on rock ‘n’ roll, is a perfect summation, encapsulating what was so great about him. A magnetic ball of self-destruction, a swaggering egomaniac who could have been the greatest star in the world. He either had it all taken away from him by internal psychosis, or he was a joke that misfired. He could have joined the Beatles or Led Zeppelin, taken the Elvis route or, completely at home, sauntered into William Burroughs’s world. He could have been tattooed with William Blake’s The Red Dragon and given Hannibal Lector a run for the aperitifs. He was Dennis Hopper out of Blue Velvet displaced to Manchester and the Yorkshire Moors.

In 1985 [Proby] was living in the Yorkshire village of Haworth, home of the Brontës, when he was visited by the founders of Manchester-based Savoy Books, Mike Butterworth and his partner David Britton, who has devoted his life to blasphemous sedition. Britton wrote the notorious novel Lord Horror, most copies of which were seized, on publication in 1990, by the Greater Manchester Police

“Jim was lying low, after the affair with Alison,” says Butterworth. “We wanted to relaunch his career.”

PJ Proby’s collaboration with Savoy produced a number of intriguing recordings, including his versions of “Anarchy In The UK” and TS Eliot’s The Wasteland.

“I had no idea who TS Eliot was,” says Proby. “But the more I do The Wasteland, the better I get.”

“One day the world will realise what a genius he is, and by then it will be too late,” Britton said. “Proby is a walking piece of art. His talent needs preserving for future generations.”

After Britton’s mother died, the three gathered at her house at Saddleworth, overlooking the scene of the Moors Murders. There, with Proby larking about on the Zimmer frame that had belonged to the deceased, they worked on his single “Hardcore”, which, unless I’ve missed something, remains the most offensive record ever released. (“Everything y’all think is fun,” Proby once said, “I think is boring.”)

Butterworth says Savoy stopped working with Proby, “because he asked for £2,000 to read one poem. I said: ‘Jim: it’s only nine lines.’ He said, ‘Maybe – but you will have my voice forever.’”

Robert Chalmers, “PJ Proby: Could the now-penniless singer be ready for a comeback?”, The Independent, 30 September, 2007.

SS: Proby lived in Manchester — an intriguing prospect. Tell me about it.

DB: By the 1980s, Proby was moving between bedsits and squats and sleeping on pub floors in the same North Manchester streets I’d been born in. How incredibly coincidental is that? What force of fate had dragged him from Texas to 1950s Hollywood, then over to England in 1964 and dropped him twenty years later in the arsehole of England? Mr Teen Spirit comes to Oldham, marching pie-eyed down Brompton Street, once the home of William Joyce/Lord Haw-Haw. Another coincidence. Joyce wasn’t physically a presence during my youth — he had lived around Shaw, Mumps and Oldham in the early 1920s and was hanged as a traitor after the Second World War –– but he was a local legendary bogeyman. What Proby and these kinds of outsiders signify for me has induced much speculation, but a common factor seems to be the need to transcend the normal in all of its ambivalent complexity. These dark pilgrims must fascinate anyone with a fiery imagination, even if in reality you wouldn’t like your life to go down some of the paths they tread. Above Oldham, for example, on the looming moors, lies the everlasting presence of another disenfranchised North Manchester man, Ian Brady.

RE/Search publisher V. Vale & J.G. Ballard, 1982. Photo courtesy RE/Search Publications.

SS: Is it too farfetched to draw a connection between Brady and the environment he grew up in?

DB: Brady lived alongside me. He, and I — as a very young man growing up in the slums of North Manchester (Harpurhey and adjacent Gorton) — never met, but geographically we were separated by only a couple of miles. His world was my world, annexed between factories, offices and abattoirs. Both of us faced a life of futility with few options and seethed together in our impotency, disenfranchised by inclination from what was on offer around us. I lucked in, escaping into books; Ian lucked out, performing the ultimate act of alienation.

Excerpt from forthcoming release: Fenella Fielding reading from JG Ballard’s Crash. Courtesy Savoy Records (2010).

In the first of the Ballard RE/Search books, Ballard commented that he found Brady’s juxtaposed tape-recording of “The Little Drummer Boy” with the cry of a tortured child significant, something new on the annals of crime, the bringing of electronic technology into the act of murder. He believed Brady had subsided into a deep depression, and was totally institutionalised. But nothing could be further from the reality. Over the years, I’ve struck up a correspondence with Mr Brady, and he remains articulate, well informed. He knows who Mr Ballard and Mr Burroughs are, and has come to some kind of terms with the way his life has played out.

A Texas boy, a Glasgow boy, a local boy: at overlapping times we have inhabited the same two square miles of the city, and have all run foul of authority. Lord Horror was banned in the courts, Proby was banned from stage and television, a complete blackout that ended his career, and Brady is in prison for killing children. And Joyce. That a traitor to England, the writer of Lord Horror, the infamous killer of children and a doomed rock ‘n’ roll showman have voyaged through the same miniscule wasteland is a beguiling fact. There’s something of Iain Sinclair’s psychogeographical potency about it.

SS: Do you have a favourite Proby story? Something that sums up the man’s essence?

DB: Jim Proby came up with the best epitaph in the history of the world. When asked by an Irish reporter what he would like engraved on his headstone, he instantly replied, “Rather be here than with you, cocksucker”.

Excerpt: PJ Proby reading from Lord Horror. Courtesy Savoy Records (1999).

SS: What was the approach with recording the Lord Horror reading? How did Proby feel about such extreme material? When he breaks out laughing, is he in character, or is he amazed at what he was been given to read?

DB: He spoke the words to Lord Horror as easily as pulling on an overcoat. When Michael and I were writing Lord Horror I was in weekly contact with Proby, and his personality was a constant in my mind. I attempted to carry his schizoid menace into the book. When Jim reads the dialogue “Move now, or I’ll release you right here”, that gives life to a whispering, serpentine intonation of his that I’d transferred into the book. I rhymed the words, the inflections suggested in them, to mirror his real-life speech patterns. When Jim came to deliver these lines and others, it was no surprise that they sounded exactly as I imagined they would. Nothing over-the-top disturbs PJ Proby. During the recording, which took two days, for sure he laughed often, and welcomed the excesses of the book. It didn’t strike him as being beyond the pale. God bless the man and his good heart!

Fenella Fielding at Strongroom Studios. Photo courtesy Savoy.

PiL’s “Rise”, performed by Fenella Fielding, from the as-yet-unreleased Fenella Fielding: the Savoy Sessions. Courtesy Savoy Records (2010).

Fenella Fielding IS! A 21st Century Goddess of Audio Art and Noise Illusion!
…
Her Succulent/Velvet-Blue-Saloon vocal tones made me believe I was having Naked Lunch in a Berlin bubble-bath, next to Marlene Dietrich… Somewhere in Berlin, circa 1928-1932.

Hence, we have a message in a bottle, from a 21st Century, Axis Sally/Tokyo Rose: Fenella Fielding.

Bring on the smelling salts! Then give me the Silver-Spoon and Golden Needle, so I can blend into the Wonder-Word Void, where Ms Fielding must surely reside.

Excerpted from Kim Fowley’s liner notes for the as-yet-unreleased CD, Fenella Fielding: the Savoy Sessions. Courtesy Savoy Records (2010).

SS: I think I can guess why you got Kim Fowley in to do the liner notes for the new Fenella Fielding CD… There’s something Probyesque about him, isn’t there?

DB: Kim Fowley is another of rock ’n’ roll’s mavericks, with an appreciation of culture that goes a lot farther than the music scenes to which he’s been attached over several decades. We needed someone who could put Fenella’s Savoy recordings in an imaginative context, and recognise the impulse behind such atypical compositions. There is also a whacky menace to Fowley. You find that in the music which birthed his persona — “Esquirita and the Voola”, “Rockin’ Bones”, “Alligator Wine” — at the head of which is the surreal snake of “Papa Oom Mow Mow”, which he produced. He’s also responsible for the daffyness that is “Alley Oop”.

I’d followed his progress since he came to England with Proby in the mid-60s. Zappa’s first album, Freak Out, used Kim’s spooky vocals. His “Help, I’m A Rock”, was the high point — and the strangest — of a very strange album. A few years ago I downloaded some interviews and part of his self-penned history from Rock’s Backpages. Was there ever a more astute all-seeing chronicler of the rock ‘n’ roll business, I thought? The man could write as insightfully as Nick Tosches and as colourfully as Hunter S Thompson. Kim had another unique quality. He wrote from the inside out, almost without peer, documenting rock history firsthand. In one of the articles he says this: “I’m not a purist.… In other words, I do all this stuff for reasons that nobody else makes records. I think, ‘What would happen if Vera Lynn sang “Louie Louie”?’ Well, I’m the kind of person who’d find Vera Lynn and persuade her to record ‘Louie Louie’ and then I’d make a better record of Vera Lynn doing ‘Louie Louie’ than the Kingsmen would’ve ever done, y’know what I mean?”

We’d approached the Fenella and Proby projects in exactly this manner. When I re-read that quote last year, it was obvious that he was the man for the job.

It’s fairly easy to grasp — if not necessarily empathise with — the inflammatory aims of [Savoy's] most controversial book. Britton was driven, among other things, by a desire to bait his long-standing enemy, the then-chief constable of Manchester, James Anderton. In Lord Horror, one of Anderton’s homophobic outbursts is replicated with the word “homosexuals” replaced by “Jews” throughout. Britton was duly rewarded with a four-month sentence, served in Risley Remand Centre and Stafford Prison. The overall tone of some passages of Lord Horror is such that reproducing quotations in a family newspaper is simply not an option. As I recently explained to Britton, my own preference, if I ever find the copy that is festering somewhere on my shelves, would be to incinerate it rather than sell it for the £300 that the edition now fetches.

Britton says he was interested in the “subtext of menace” in Fielding’s voice. The actress, for her part, says she knows nothing about Lord Horror, but does add, “Historically, I have never thought of the police as great literary critics.”

Robert Chalmers, “The lady vanishes: What ever happened to Fenella Fielding?”, The Independent, Sunday, 24 February 2008.

SS: How did you come to work with Fenella? Obviously, she’s a very charismatic person, but how does she fit into the Savoy story?

DB: It was in the Savoy offices, sometime at the beginning of the new century, a winter fire blazing. “We should do a reading of the ‘Oi Swiney’ chapter from Motherfuckers,” Michael said casually. “And get Fenella Fielding in to do the dirty deed,” I replied. Laughter. Twenty minutes later. “You know, that’s not a bad idea,” Michael eventually says. So that was the start.

I’d heard her on Radio 4 performing Noël Coward, and on BBC 2 providing the narration for a version of Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin. Jonathan Meades had also used her voice for one of his BBC films so we knew she had a formidable character. But it took us two years to bargain with her before she came into the studio. Wisely, we decided that “Oi Swiney” was a non-starter for such a refined lady of the theatre and the BBC. We decided it was more appropriate for her to read the first couple of chapters of La Squab, the new Lord Horror novel, more quirky, not as scatological. She came into the studio professionally prepared and did the most magnificent reading — Art Nouveau by way of Wind in the Willows, with a drip of steel in her voice. Totally spellbinding. It sent a chill up our spines and we fell in love with her. How lucky, so late in the day, we were to come into contact with yet another charismatic performer, this time one with such a deep understanding of culture, opera, theatre and literature. Here was an opportunity to take Savoy in a fresh direction and for us to learn new tricks.

Fenella Fielding on the Morecambe and Wise show, 1969.

Her first reading at the Strongroom, Shoreditch, impressed us so much we doubled her fee and proposed a new commission, Eliot’s Four Quartets, which she subsequently recorded. Over the next couple of years we did extracts from various books. Her reading from Love, Moorcock’s forthcoming memoir of Mervyn Peake, was a high point, as were her takes on “Pale Roses” and extracts from An Alien Heat, which opened out the stories and truly capture the prose. We then moved operations to Lisa Stansfield’s studio in Rochdale, and after a further year spent on and off there the Fenella project came to a sudden end. She decided after all that work that she didn’t want a music album we’d done with her to be released.

Even at this late date I’m still not exactly sure what she objected to, but the door is not completely closed.

Excerpt from forthcoming release: Fenella Fielding reading from JG Ballard’s Crash. Courtesy Savoy Records (2010).

SS: But her reading of Crash will be released?

DB: Yes — it’s just a question of timing.

Fielding has the allure of Hollywood about her, while having an eccentric English demeanor, and has what we think is the perfect voice for reading Crash. It took us a great deal of effort to get her to do it. At first, she was cautious, because she didn’t want to do anything that she thought might demean women. After protracted discussion, which went on for about a year, she finally took the advice of an ex-BBC director friend, who assured her that it would be OK. She did the reading, but would not read some of the more violent heterosexual sex scenes involving women.

Michael Butterworth.

SS: Michael explained in his interview a little of the circumstances behind the Crash reading. It’s a strange mix, but she pulls it off really well. That steely ambivalence in her voice, especially describing some of Ballard’s more outre passages, seems made for the job. Could you tell us whether you instructed or directed Fenella in any way, or was it just a matter of her voice being suitable for the project as is?

DB: Right from the start, she was on top of the material. We respected her, and encouraged her to go as far as she could. In the end, she went farther than she, or us, thought. Her Crash reading had the same quality as her Four Quartets — it was perfect naked. To put on a musical backing would dilute the words and lessen the power of her reading.

SS: As the author of Lord Horror, do you see any affinity between that work and what Ballard was trying to do with Crash — in the sense of offering a provocation so shocking and alienating, yet one shot through with an undeniable, if undoubtedly perverse, logic?

DB: Shortly after first reading Crash in the early 1970s, I’d seen Dr Chris Evans [Ballard's long-time friend; SS] give a talk at an SF convention. It was quite a revelation: here in the flesh was Vaughan in all his feral erotic intensity. Evans prowled the stage just oozing sexuality. He wore a black biker’s jacket and a blue denim shirt open to the midriff. You might have got into a car with the Doctor, but you wouldn’t have accompanied him up a dark alley. Of his talk, I can’t remember anything, just his physicality remains in my mind. No doubt this subjective observation made by a stranger isn’t a full picture of Evans’s personality, but I’m sure it was this aspect of his friend that Ballard homed in on. Evans had been one of the catalysts for the book, lifted from life and conjured into a deviant Minotaur by Ballard’s imagination. A sweet image to me: Evans and Ballard haunting the motorways of England for auto-sensation.

Crash and Empire of the Sun are probably Ballard’s best books because both are based to a greater or lesser degree on real people: Evans and Ballard himself. In Ballard’s other books, the central characters tend to be ciphers rather than real individuals. They’re still great works but don’t possess that extra quality that gives authority to Crash and Empire of the Sun. Using real people and recreating them as fiction is, of course, not original, but Ballard’s use of Evans stayed a potent one with me. Perhaps it was at the back of my mind when William Joyce — as Lord Haw-Haw — came into focus. Certainly, Crash was the yardstick book for Lord Horror. Ballard showed great courage in following through with a book that has transcended every other English work of groundbreaking fiction. It’s the rock upon which every “dangerous” book published since has foundered. How inauthentic American Psycho and its ilk look next to Crash!

SS: Could you offer any other thoughts on Ballard’s legacy?

DB: His legacy? Perhaps trying to encourage Will Self that he is capable of writing a convincing novel.

Excerpt from forthcoming release: Fenella Fielding reading from JG Ballard’s Crash. Courtesy Savoy Records (2010).

..:: Now move on to part 2 of the interview, in which David discusses New Order, Joy Division, punk, the Manchester music ‘scene’ in general, more Proby, Kingsize Taylor, The Cramps, Zappa, Beefheart and Springsteen. Interspersed throughout are more sound clips from Savoy Records releases.

JG BALLARD, 1930–2009

Originally published in Architectures of the Near Future: Architectural Design (ed. Nic Clear), September-October 2009. pp. 5, 6-11. Reproduced with permission.

James Graham Ballard was one of the most original and distinctive authors of the last part of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. His writing encompassed topics as diverse as ecological crisis, technological fetishism, urban ruination and suburban mob culture, and he pursued these topics with a wit and inventiveness that is without equal.

Ballard’s understanding of architecture and architects, and his prophetic visions, made him one of the most important figures in the literary articulation of architectural issues and concerns.

From the description of futuristic houses that empathise with their inhabitants, to the bleak characterisation of gated communities consumed by sex, drugs and violence, Ballard’s world is highly prescient and ruthlessly unsentimental. At a time when architectural discourse has become wholly subsumed by the moneymaking pre-occupations of the architectural profession, the writings of JG Ballard serve as reminder that architecture is about people, the things that they do and the places where they do them. Sometimes architecture will involve terrible people doing terrible things in terrible places, but the enduring nature of the human species is that we will always carry on; there is, after all, always the future.

Nic Clear, 2009.

Introduction: ‘A NEAR FUTURE’, by Nic Clear.

Of all the arts, architecture is the closest constitutively to the economic, with which, in the form of commissions and land values, it has a virtually unmediated relationship.

Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1991, p 5.[1]

Later, as he sat on the balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.

JG Ballard, High-Rise, 1975, p 7.[2]

Architectural design is always about the future; when architects make a proposition they always assume that it takes place in some imagined future. Architects nearly always assume that this future will be ‘better’ than the present, often as a consequence of what is being proposed. Architecture is, by its very nature, utopian.

Contemporary architecture, unlike earlier models of ‘utopian’ architecture, or perhaps because of the stigma attached to those models, has resisted an explicitly social and political agenda. Instead it has become driven by ‘ideal’ formalist agendas facilitated by the ‘shape-making’ potential of new computer-based design tools and funded by speculative finance.

Indeed, the most important transformations that have occurred in architecture over the last 30 years have not been in the shifts in fashion marking out new typologies, new forms of representation, new materials or new forms of manufacture; the biggest single shift has been in the new economic relations within the building industry and the new forms of contractual relationships that this has brought about. The rise of fast-track construction in the 1980s heralded a major change in the motivations for construction and brought about a homogenisation of building output largely predicated on maximising the economic value of the project, often with little regard for its social value.

And with the introduction of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) the current UK government has turned even health-care and educational building programmes into a speculative enterprise. PFI has always been presented as a cost-effective way of financing large infrastructural projects; however, like the government’s recent bail out of the banks, it works on the principle of the public financing the risk while the private sector skims off the profit.[3]

For a number of years the single model that has shaped the type of future that the architectural profession has based its assumptions on is one of unfettered consumer expansion. The majority of recent architectural debates have not tried to call into question the economic imperatives of late capitalism that drive financial speculation and generate the context within which private development is presented as the only option. Even the avant-garde architectural firms of the 1980s are now operating as large international commercial practices, and the Deconstructivists have proved to be more than enthusiastic capitalists. The critical and intellectual ambitions inspired by Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Guy Debord have been replaced with the monetarist ideologies of Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan.

The architectural profession has embraced the late capitalist model enthusiastically and uncritically, while all the time pandering to the concepts of social and environmental responsibility. The fact is that this model has been funded through speculative investment, and now that the money has run out the profession is bereft of alternatives.

The promise of an ‘urban renaissance’ has left buildings empty and negative equity is becoming once again the dominant economic value across the property world.

The architectural world has proved completely incapable of suggesting what the future may hold; can one still believe in the shiny renders of the corporate architectural complex when this world has replaced a vision of the future with an image of the future?

But the profession is resourceful and in the same way that all contemporary architects play the ‘sustainability’ game, whether they are designing sustainable airports, sustainable shopping centres, sustainable luxury hotels, sustainable office blocks, sustainable cities in the middle of deserts or sustainable single private dwellings for the ultrarich, we will, no doubt, see a gritty ‘new realism’ starting to appear in architectural discourse that responds to the new economic conditions.[4]

Exactly how these new imperatives will drive the formal shape- making methodologies that have filled so many glossy pages for so long we shall see; and how will the interactive and responsive landscapes interact with, and respond to, bankruptcy, increasing unemployment and a general sense of despair?

Nic Clear, ‘Game with Vestiges: After Ballard Triptych, 2009′. The series of drawings here was set up in the same way as any standard CAD drawing in VectorWorks using layers, classes and libraries of objects. The drawings work as a narrative triptych, bringing together a number of elements — cityscapes, high-rise buildings, surrealist curios, fetish and banal objects — all in keeping with the memory of ‘Jim’, to whom the drawings are dedicated.

Progress
Contemporary culture has put its faith in the ideology of progress; progress will make things better, as well as making things faster and smaller (or bigger depending on the value system). This faith in progress and betterment fails to ring true in the light of economic downturn, environmental catastrophe, increased levels of crime, the threats of terrorism and global pandemics.[5] If the future cannot be guaranteed, where does that leave architecture?

However, a loss of faith is only a problem if that faith exists in the first place.

Within literature there is a major strand that looks at the future in a completely different way; science fiction can also be seen as a ‘utopian’ genre,[6] and in works by writers ranging from Jules Verne and HG Wells, through to Aldous Huxley and George Orwell and more latterly Philip K Dick, JG Ballard, Neal Stephenson and William Gibson, the future is depicted in a variety of different hues, not all of them as rosy as the futures promised by the architectural profession. As a result such speculations are often more believable.

While these writings appear to reflect on the future, more often than not they are actually concerned with issues contemporaneous to their production. To cite two obvious examples, Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Orwell’s 1984 (1949) are political reflections on the societies around them, and in Huxley’s case it is not altogether clear whether he is entirely critical of the world that he describes.

However, the writings of JG Ballard are of particular interest here as they filter through a number of the texts contained in this issue, either directly or lingering in the background.[7] Ballard is of special significance largely due to the fact that in so much of his writing architecture and architects play such a pivotal role.

The prescience of Ballard’s writing is obvious; his early works encompass environmental disaster, both drought and flooding; in the 1970s, novels such as Crash[8] and High-Rise[9] dealt with technological fetishisation, urban anomie and alienation, and, long before such issues hit the mainstream, he looked at the links between consumerism and social collapse. In his recent writings, Millennium People[10] and Kingdom Come,[11] Ballard depicts a Britain bereft of social values other than those of daytime TV and the shopping centre, and while his central characters can lack credibility his general description of the cultural landscape is far more accurate than almost anything that has been published in the pages of any recent architectural publication.

The future as presented by Ballard is often stark, bleak and uncompromising. There are few happy endings in his future. However, his faith in our collective ability to endure almost any hardship, drawn almost certainly from his experiences in Shanghai during the Second World War, leads us to believe that despite whatever is thrown at us we will adapt and we will survive.[12]

Like Ballard, let us not despair; though the future may be uncertain, uncertainty is not without its attractions.

The current economic situation offers great potential for developing a new agenda in architecture. The fact that the discipline of architecture has become synonymous with the architectural profession is something that will no doubt become contested as unemployment rises throughout the building industry[13] — those of us who can remember previous recessions can also remember them as highly creative periods. The fact that architects may have to redefine their operations is potentially a wonderful opportunity to recalibrate and reconsider who and what architecture is actually for.

This will bring to life the obvious gulf between expectation and reality that permeates architectural practice. Architecture is a wonderful discourse and training; however, it can be a very tedious job. Of course it does not have to be like this. Freed from the limitations of the profession, architectural projects can offer fantastic opportunities to develop narratives that can help us understand why we are doing the things we do.[14]

The fact that architects may have to redefine their operations is potentially a wonderful opportunity to recalibrate and reconsider who and what architecture is actually for.

In particular these uncertain times may be a blessing for a younger generation of designers; equipped with a vast array of technical skills and understanding they are almost certain to cope with the vagaries of future practice. As the skills demonstrated in many of the projects collected in this issue suggest, future architects may be just as adept at web design, graphics and film-making as they are at producing information for buildings.

The last few years have witnessed a gradual disenchantment within architectural education with the goals espoused by the architectural profession. Increased levels of student debt coupled with a creeping homogenisation of architectural practice have resulted in there being a darker aspect to student projects. Rather than shrinking away from the potential difficulties, the younger generation of architects may use information technologies to create new sites of architectural endeavour and give a whole new meaning to the term ‘architectural design’.

The essays and projects gathered together here cover a wide variety of positions. Many develop the themes suggested by Ballard and others, while some give the current situation a broader historical perspective, suggesting that certain of the scenarios that we face are not without precedent.

Nic Clear, ‘Game with Vestiges: After Ballard Triptych, 2009′. The series of drawings here was set up in the same way as any standard CAD drawing in VectorWorks using layers, classes and libraries of objects. The drawings work as a narrative triptych, bringing together a number of elements — cityscapes, high-rise buildings, surrealist curios, fetish and banal objects — all in keeping with the memory of ‘Jim’, to whom the drawings are dedicated.

Matthew Gandy’s ‘Urban Flux’ gives a historical perspective to our current situation and argues that we need to recover the urban imagination in order to enrich 21st-century public culture. Michael Aling returns to his home town of Swindon, statistically the most average town in Britain, to find people sharing identities, stricken with gout and going to a deserted shopping centre for no real reason other than to fulfil a forgotten collective desire. And John Culmer Bell looks at the nature of electromagnetic radiation as a shaper of 19th- and 20th- century urban form, provocatively questioning whether sacrificing the pleasures of ‘noctambulism’ simply on environmental grounds is actually a good thing.

Bastian Glassner of uber-trendy video directors Lynn Fox presents a series of luxurious images, hybridising the body as meat, a clear homage to Francis Bacon (pun intended) with a bit of Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse thrown in.

Soki So reimagines Piranesi’s Carceri as a near-future Hong Kong with a series of appropriately spectacular and sumptuous images that also address real concerns over the concept of urban intensity and vertical sprawl. Rubedo send out a provocative declaration concerning the omnipresence of technological systems and the necessity of developing transdisciplinary tactics to negotiate the immersive hybridised spaces of late capitalism.

Richard Bevan constructs a worryingly believable scenario whereby Heathrow airport becomes a carbon casino trading in carbon credits with air-mile-hungry oligarchs gambling to stay aloft, and Geoff Manaugh explores and questions the use of the term ‘feral city’. In ‘London After the Rain’, Ben Marzys presents a beautiful graphic Surrealist landscape, a posthuman picturesque. In ‘L.A.W.u.N Project #21: Cybucolia’ the Invisible University suggest that the near future may carry with it many of the seeds sown with 19th-century Romanticism; and Dan Farmer suggests that the near future may be all in the mind with excerpts from his research on cortical plasticity. Ben Nicholson reflects on his 2004 book The World Who Wants It?, one of the finest pieces of satirical writing of recent years, and presents a series of images that were absent from the original publication.

Simon Sellars and George Thomson explore the most explicitly Ballardian line, with Sellars looking at the aural nature of the urban environment, beautifully illustrated with Michelle Lord’s exquisite assemblages, and Thomson reimagining Ballard’s ‘Sound-Sweep’ as a community occupying a derelict M25.

Finally, Art in Ruins show work from installations that are 20 years old, an important conceptual reminder that none of the ideas in this issue are particularly new.

This issue was first conceived in 2007; the proposal was put forward in early 2008 and most of the text written late 2008/ early 2009. You will be reading this, at the very earliest, in autumn 2009. Like any other architectural project its relevance is shaped by a number of external forces far beyond the control of its authors; the economic events that are taking place as this text is being written (and rewritten) make any allusion to future certainties look foolish. The severity of the current economic situation makes any attempt to try to predict what light, if any, is at the end of this particular tunnel seem absurd. However, what happens if we imagine a number of scenarios, not necessarily the usual convivial scenarios that mainstream architecture usually relies on, but scenarios where the traditional certainties are replaced by something less predictable? Like the heroes of many of Ballard’s stories, the authors of the essays in this issue face the future with a sense of resigned stoicism and the ability to create beauty wherever they find it.

In many ways the near future could be very much like the past, with one obvious exception — it will be completely different.

Notes
[1] Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 1991, p 5.
[2] JG Ballard, High Rise, Jonathan Cape (London), 1975, p 7.
[3] See George Monbiot, ‘The Biggest Weirdest Rip Off Yet’, Guardian, 7 April 2009. In this article, Monbiot references a paper published in 2002 in the British Medical Journal in which five key criticisms were made of the PFI funding of hospitals: 1) that PFI brings no new capital investments; 2) that the assessments of value for money are skewed in favour of private finance; 3) the higher costs of PFI are due to financing costs which would be incurred under public financing; 4) any PFI schemes only show value for money after ‘risk transfer’, for risks that are not justified; 5) PFI more than doubles the cost of capital as a percentage of annual operating income. From Allyson M Pollock, Jean Shaoul and Neil Vickers, ‘Private finance and “value for money” in NHS hospitals: a policy in search of a rationale?’, BMJ, Vol 324, 18 May 2002, pp 1205–09.
[4] One can imagine that such texts have already begun to emanate from Rotterdam and Boston.
[5] For a critique of ‘progress’, see John Gray, Heresies Against Progress and Other Illusions, Granta Books (London), 2004.
[6] See Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, Verso (London and New York), 2005.
[7] Ballard has been a central interest of my diploma unit at the Bartlett School of Architecture where I have been running a programme entitled ‘Architecture of the Near Future’ for several years. The work of Michael Aling, Richard Bevan, Dan Farmer, Ben Marzys, Soki So and George Thomson, all contributors to this issue, came out of this programme.
[8] JG Ballard, Crash, Jonathan Cape (London), 1973.
[9] JG Ballard, High Rise, op cit.
[10] JG Ballard, Millennium People, Flamingo (London), 2003.
[11] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, Fourth Estate (London), 2006.
[12] Beautifully described in his memoir Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, Fourth Estate (London), 2008.
[13] Job losses in architecture between February 2008 and February 2009 were reportedly up by 760%. See Will Hirst, ‘Architect Job Losses up by 760%’, Building Design, 20 March 2009, p 3.
[14] The drawings that accompany this essay come from my sheer enjoyment of producing CAD drawings simply because they are something I like doing.

Text © 2009 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Nic Clear.

Nic Clear, ‘Game with Vestiges: After Ballard Triptych, 2009′. The series of drawings here was set up in the same way as any standard CAD drawing in VectorWorks using layers, classes and libraries of objects. The drawings work as a narrative triptych, bringing together a number of elements — cityscapes, high-rise buildings, surrealist curios, fetish and banal objects — all in keeping with the memory of ‘Jim’, to whom the drawings are dedicated.

…:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Stereoscopic Urbanism: JG Ballard & the Built Enviroment
+ ‘Architectures of the Near Future’: An Interview with Nic Clear

Information on Architectures of the Near Future: Architectural Design.

In this highly pertinent issue, guest-editor Nic Clear questions received notions of the future. Are the accepted norms of economic growth and expansion the only means by which society can develop and prosper? Should the current economic crisis be making us call into question a future of unlimited growth? Can this moment of crisis – economic, environmental and technological – enable us to make more informed choices about the type of future that we want and can actually achieve? Architectures of the Near Future offers a series of alternative voices, developing some of the neglected areas of contemporary urban life and original visions of what might be to come. Rather than providing simplistic and seductive images of an intangible shiny future, it rocks the cosy world of architecture with polemical blasts.

* Draws on topics as diverse as synthetic space, psychoanalysis, Postmodern geography, post-economics, cybernetics and developments in neurology.
* Includes an exploration of the work of JG Ballard.
* Features the work of Ben Nicholson.

Editorial (Helen Castle ).
Introduction: A Near Future (Nic Clear).
Urban Flux (Matthew Gandy).
Postindividualism: Fata Morgana and the Swindon Gout Clinic (Michael Aling).
Urban Otaku: Electric Lighting and the Noctambulist (John Culmer Bell).
The Groom’s Gospel (Bastian Glassner).
Hong Kong Labyrinths (Soki So).
Distructuring Utopias (Rubedo: Laurent-Paul Robert and Vesna Petresin Robert).
The Carbon Casino (Richard Bevan).
Cities Gone Wild (Geoff Manaugh).
London After the Rain (Nic Clear).
L.A.W.u.N. Project #21: Cybucolia (Samantha Hardingham and David Greene).
Cortical Plasticity (Dan Farmer).
The Ridiculous and the Sublime (Ben Nicholson).
Stereoscopic Urbanism: JG Ballard and the Built Environment (Simon Sellars).
The Sound Stage (George Thomson).
Recent History – Art In Ruins (Hannah Vowles and Glyn Banks/Art in Ruins and Nic Clear)

Practice Profile.
Snøhetta (Jayne Merkel).
Interior Eye.
Biochemistry Department, University of Oxford (Howard Watson).
Building Profile.
St Benedict’s School, West London (David Littlefield).
Unit Factor.
Migration Pattern Process (Simon Beames and Kenneth Fraser).
Spiller’s Bits.
Mathematics of the Ideal Pavilion (Neil Spiller).
Yeang’s Eco-Files.
Computational Building Performance Modelling and Ecodesign (Khee Poh Lam and Ken Yeang).
McLean’s Nuggets (Will McLean).
Userscape
Scaleable Technology for Smart Spaces (Valentina Croci).

Rick McGrath’s Letter From London: The JG Ballard Memorial

All photography by Rick McGrath.

Sunday, November 15, 2009, 3:45pm, The Founders Pub, London.

Dear Simon,

Greetings from London! Hope all is well with you. I’ve just attended the long-anticipated JG Ballard Memorial celebration at the Tate Modern and now I’m catching my breath — and a few beers — at a nearby Thames-side pub with fellow Ballardians David Pringle, Mike Holliday, Vale, Marian Wallace and Gee Vaucher. We’re having a wonderful time — wish you were here.

Left: Toby Litt.

But let’s start at the beginning. We have time to order some Alsatian off the barbie. For the first two days in London I actually wondered if somebody’s god was sending us a message, as the elements did their best to batter us with the kind of weather that resembled a vicious blend of The Drowned World and The Wind From Nowhere. Running from doorway to doorway in search of a tube entrance, I kept stumbling through the usual detritus: soggy cigarette ends, broken umbrellas, empty condom packs. I kept wondering where JG might have visited to inspire The Drought. Certainly nowhere in the UK.

The day of the Memorial, however, broke bright and sunny and warm — a good sign and a fitting description of the events to follow.

The plan was for everyone to meet at the Tate Modern at 11am for an 11:30 start. I overtook a walking Toby Litt about a block away and together we made our way to the top floor of the Tate’s east wing where a substantial crowd had already gathered, spritzers in hand, strung out along a glass and steel corridor that emptied to a large anteroom with a commanding view of old London to the north and the high tech security guards of Canary Wharf to the east. I kept looking down to the Thames, though, hoping to see a bit of wing floating by from a light airplane. Not today. The venue might also have reminded some of Royal’s penthouse suite in High-Rise, but regardless of the number of people fighting their way up the stairs it was an appropriately Ballardian venue, made even more so by the Tate’s current show of “Pop Life: Art in a Material World”, featuring Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. Synchronicity? Perhaps.

Claire Walsh.

It was in this enormous space the 100 or so celebrants convened for the Memorial – tributes to The Man from JG’s family, friends, colleagues and admirers on what would have been his 79th birthday. The area was liquid with light and the format was a simple stage and microphone with flanking video screens. We sat in chairs that fanned in a wide arc along the length of the room. Our mistress of ceremonies was Bea Ballard, and after thanking the event’s organizers — her sister Fay, Claire Walsh and JG’s agent, Maggie Hanbury — away we went.

Our speakers — 13 in all, four reporting in by video — gave us a wonderfully Ballardian triad of facts, stories and myths about JG, and I couldn’t help thinking that once again Life is reflecting Art, unconsciously reproducing his Atrocity Exhibition structure of the public, the personal, and the symbolic. His work, his life, and his myth were the topics we wanted to hear about, and Simon, no one was disappointed.

Hold on. We’ve just had a discussion here at the pub, and Mike has suggested that this three-part structure may also be the most appropriate for this re-telling. Vale? Dave? You agree? OK. Planes do intersect.

THE PUBLIC

Will Self.

The celebration of JG’s work is also the celebration of his deep impact and the shock waves he sent through the literary community, emphasis on the later generations. And then there was that second wave of carpet bombing in the 1970s, the one that resonated with punk, with the abandoned, with RE/Search, with architecture, with the whole explosion of everyone’s quantification and eroticism of the “outer world of reality”. Unfortunately, Simon, the room held mostly literary types, so JG’s influence on the Ballardian arts was not addressed. Never mind. What was missing in breadth was made up in breath. “A touchstone of authentic genius,” Will Self intoned in his best British boom, “my single most important mentor and influence.” Will also commented about the length and consistency of JG’s oeuvre (pronounced as if it had 14 syllables), and how JG rarely left the road he most preferred, the one where he was caught in the wet headlights ironically waving a warning flag to a population already asleep at the wheel. He’s been at it, Will said, from his early changing planet stories to his last four novels of wacky westerners, that quartet or warnings about the dangers of boredom associated with living behind gated minds and programmed lives.

Not to be outdone, but still a tad cagey about it, Martin Amis beamed in on video to announce JG was “uniquely unique”, and spoke at length about JG’s art and his high place in the pantheon of imaginative writers. He was the only speaker who basically concentrated on JG the writer, rather than the man, and it was good to have him there even in video, although the final effect was a bit Intensive Care Unit, if you know what I mean.

JG’s life story has long been part of the public domain, and The Man did make an appearance, appearing onscreen in segments from the BBC documentary of his 1991 return to Shanghai. We see an obviously emotional JG standing in the yard of his family home on Amherst Avenue, wandering through the rooms, wondering about that second life he might have had if the war had not occurred and he stayed in the terrible city. Then the famous scene at Lunghua where he stands in the cramped room in G Block his family of four called home for three years. This is the closest thing to what I call home, JG told us, “I came close to an adult mind” here. We were treated to one other bit of Ballard before the day was over: the organizers had obtained a video of the What I Believe light display shown at Barcelona, and once again we were all reassured the power of the imagination can remake the world. In a way, that’s why we were there.

THE PERSONAL

Fay Ballard.

Here’s the heart of the matter. The angles between the walls. Let’s start with the daughters, Fay and Bea. Both talked exclusively about their relationship with ‘Daddy’ and their rather envious home life among the muck, movies and manuscripts. Fay, the artist, spoke first, and I was amazed and amused when she announced she would simply read out a series of thoughts, a verbal collage of unstructured memories. Perfect, I thought. It’ll be just like an Atrocity Exhibition list. And it was. Bea, also, offered up her remembrances, but took a more organized approach, mixing the humour with tales of darker times, such as the passing of her husband, and how she relied on JG’s help and experience from his own tragedy, and now even that support is gone. Sobering. And from Bea we have another inkling of JG’s self-deprecatory nature when he described himself as domestically “slattern”, when in reality the organisation level was probably at full Lunghua. “You can clean a house in five minutes if you don’t make a fetish of it”, JG once told her. I got the feeling the regimen was simply an extension of JG’s life: work hard, play hard.

Other Jimbits? JG never or rarely replaced or updated anything in the house. Nor did he throw much out, viz a peeled orange that had stood on the mantelpiece for 40 years. The daughters remember the clacking old typewriter and JG perched over it, speaking aloud the words he’s typing. Spending an entire summer naked in his back yard. Watching a tape of Double Indemnity together on TV, all the lights out, and talking about Civilization and Its Discontents. JG doing surrealist paintings! Constant encouragement for all their enthusiasms. Acceptance of a menagerie of pets, including Bea’s rat. Chinese dinners with — get this, Simon — lobster and noodles. A serious approach to education. Bear hugs. The unicycle. Trips to the movies after school. Ahh, memories.

Michael Moorcock.

Mike Moorcock stayed on this plane for his presentation, too, after he managed with some difficulty to negotiate passage to the stage with his crutches, and then actually alight it. Mike stayed Mike, fumbling thru masses of folded paper to find his notes, and then regaling us with stories of domesticity rather than literary appreciation and New Worlds gossip. It was very interesting to hear stories of JG’s early days, and nowadays Mike treasures most his memories of their times in restaurants, pubs and kitchens, wives at one end, Mike and Jim at the other, with all “forever arguing”. Mike had to put up with “cobblers” from his wife, JG with “you know that’s not true, Jim” from Mary. If you were eavesdropping you might think they were plotting the overthrow of SF, except nothing happened because no one could agree. Alpha males, no? When Mary died Mike was there for JG, not only helping him out of his “closed down” fugue, but ultimately introducing him to Claire — “the best possible choice for Jim” — and finally becoming each other’s editors — “logrolling”.

By far the most famous of the name-brand personalities to attend was Steven Spielberg — I got to sit right beside him! Ha, just kidding. Steve and the two Empire producers also attended, albeit in pixilated form, and gave an obviously glowing, but also somewhat underwhelming appreciation of their brief time together. They liked having JG around to help in the “dimensionalizing” of the book, whatever that means, and, of course, they had lots of fun shooting him in the Shanghai party scene, even if that clip was cut.

Steve’s warm memories of JG were also shared by Crash producer Jeremy Thomas, who recalled JG was unusually generous to his film adaptors. His memories involved food and cars, the former being a meal he enjoyed with JG in Cannes after Crash was panned, or should we say skewered? The latter involves a ride he gave JG in a Ferrari, and The Man reaching out to fondle the dashboard leather. A fellow “petrol-head” Jeremy called JG, a secret connoisseur of car magazines, “the equivalent of centerfolds in Penthouse”. I think he’s confusing the author and character here a wee bit, no?

Thomas made way for the enthusiastic and entertaining V Vale, who flew in from his RE/Search offices in San Francisco to breathlessly relate his stories of how he first became aware of JG and his immense appreciation for The Man: “He’s the Shakespeare of the Twentieth Century, the bard of Shepperton”, Vale pronounced, much to the glee of the audience. I’m toasting Vale right now, Simon, for that great line! Dressed in his trademark all black (as he still is), Vale began by confessing he started off as a Burroughs man, and first became aware of JG in 1974 when someone told him Bill had written a preface to a book called Love & Napalm: Export USA. He read it and experienced a life-changing moment. In 1978 Vale interviewed both Bs for the 10th issue of his seminal punkpaper, Search and Destroy. He then realized he had “spent his entire life preparing to meet JG Ballard”, and Burroughs slipped to second place. Cheers, Vale, and thanks for pointing out the obvious to the locals.

Left: V. Vale. Right: Bea Ballard.

After Vale the long, lean and lanky body of Will Self undulated itself to the microphone, and Will amused us all by reading out a handwritten letter –- actually, two of JG’s ubiquitous postcards — he received 16 years ago. Will had written JG, tentatively suggesting he might be the man to write a screenplay for Crash. The reply was short on encouragement, but long on suggestions: JG recommended Will immediately go out and buy a book called The Black Box, which featured the final recordings of crews involved in aircraft crashes. “I’m thinking of writing a novel based entirely on black box recordings,” JG enthusiastically wrote, then suggested it might be a technique Will might try. “He was always suggesting story ideas to me,” Will intoned in a lazy, eccentric drawl oddly reminiscent of JG’s dulcet tones. “I knew it was because he had already thought about it and had abandoned the concept”. Much laughter. Will also revealed a bit of JG’s horror of all things literary and fête. When JG won a PEN Award four months before his passing, it was Will who accepted on JG’s behalf. When he delivered the award, JG took pains to warn Will about the “tweedy” side of the literary world — “It’s very good of them to give me the award but we must always remember” (here, Will’s voice drops conspiratorially) “they are the enemy”.

Left: Jonathan Waxman. Centre: Chris Petit. Right: James Ballard, Jnr.

A very interesting speaker was Professor Jonathan Waxman, JG’s oncologist, who movingly re-emphasized JG’s stoicism and bravery, usually expressed as endless concern for others rather than himself. I kept wondering if this Doctor was anything at all like the endless Doctors who passed through JG’s fiction. He didn’t look like he’d ever been to Africa, though. We learned of the closeness between JG and Claire near the end, although even these emotional moments were subject to JG’s wicked one-liners, such as the time Jonathan called up to see how things were going. “Claire’s been absolutely magnificent,” JG replied, “but then I have to say that, as she’s sitting opposite me cradling a Luger in her lap”. Or his description of chemotherapy being akin to “continually eating bad oysters”.

THE PSYCHE

Left: Bill Spencer.

This is where these planes intersect, and images are born. Or, in this case, reinforced, as blending the public and private in JG is essentially the basis of his creative technique. JG has said himself his greatest story is his life, and the image I think we all will carry forward is of a bifurcated genius — generous family man on the one hand, hard-drinking shockwave rider of a writer on the other. Unique, to paraphrase Amis. My takeaway image was the vid of JG at Lunghua, white hat, white suit, looking suspiciously like someone who firmly expects to see their 14-year-old self appear around a corner. When I got home I patted my brick from G Block.

And that was basically it for the tributes, although they might have gone on all afternoon given the guest list, which included Iain Sinclair, Chris Petit, Toby Litt, Tom Sutcliffe, Maggie Hanbury, Marian Wallace, Joan Bakewell, Solveig Nordlund, Peter York, and JG’s friend from his Cambridge days at the Copper Kettle, Bill Spencer, looking sharp in a hot pink bow tie. Yowsers!

Direct family members who were in attendance but didn’t speak included James Ballard, Jr. — who shares many physical similarities with JG — and JG’s sister Margaret.

Absent or unable to attend were Brian Aldiss, Emma Tennant from Bananas, Hilary Bailey, Martin Bax and Michael Foreman from Ambit, and academics such as Roger Luckhurst, Jeanette Baxter and you.

Left: Iain Sinclair.

What else did I find out during the informal chit-chat afterwards? A few items you may find interesting. Remember all those stories about JG taking his manuscripts out to his back yard and burning them after the book was published? I asked Bea Ballard about this, and she looked at me like I had been in the care of Dr Nathan. No, they haven’t been burned — the girls have all that stuff. Good news. Toby Litt was saying he’s heard the ICA is negotiating with the CCCB in Barcelona in an attempt to get the Autopsy exhibition in London. Their space is quite a bit less than the 90,000 square feet the CCCB lavished, so we’ll see what transpires. I was also approached by Claire Walsh and Gee Vaucher regarding another proposed Ballard exhibition the ladies are planning for a subterranean exhibition at Waterloo. So, perhaps things are picking up in the UK after all.

The memorial ended as these events normally do, Simon, with a sort of time trickle of people down to the remaining few — us, of course — followed by a vote to repair to the nearest bar to discuss the experience, which we’re now doing. Interestingly enough, all of us at the table agree the event was also a sort of Rubicon, a boundary we have now crossed which marks the end of mourning JG’s passing to celebrating his extraordinary life, his loving and generous personality, and, of course, his amazing legacy of work.

It was a helluva day. I’m glad I was there.

Cheers,
Rick.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ ‘What exactly is he trying to sell?’: J.G. Ballard’s Adventures in Advertising
+ ‘Like Alice in Wonderland’: Solveig Nordlund on J.G. Ballard
+ Rick McGrath’s Letter from Barcelona: The Exquisite Corpse, An Autopsy of the New Millennium
+ Review: Grave New World
+ It’s An Ad, Ad, Ad World
+ ‘Woefully Underconceptualised’: Rick McGrath on J.G. Ballard’s Cover Art

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simon Sellars, June 2009.

Still from La Jetée (1962), dir. Chris Marker.

If you’re in Melbourne this Thursday, come and say hello! I’m giving a paper on Ballard, circular time and the nouvelle vague this Thursday, October 1, at 3pm 3.45pm at ACMI in the city. It’s part of the time.transcendence.performance conference, held over three days at ACMI and Monash University’s Caulfield campus. Guests include Stelarc (very exciting, for me), Brian Massumi and more. Here’s the conference blurb, followed by the abstract for my paper:

time.transcendence.performance brings together artists, designers and thinkers who work with time, to explore how they might inform each other. How do performers think time? How do thinkers perform time? What shared or different understandings are at work in the different practices?

Even before Aristotle wrote that time is the number of motion with respect to before and after, and Heraclitus observed that it was impossible to step into the same river twice, philosophers – Eastern and Western – have wondered about time. Is it real or just an abstraction? Is it reversible? Does it pass? Do we experience it directly? Is it relative or constant? Does it exist? So far, the consensus is that we do not have satisfactory answers to these questions.

More than an academic conference: the three-day program features public performances, exhibitions, installations, screenings and workshops.

‘CONFRONTING OURSELVES’: J.G. BALLARD & CIRCULAR TIME
Dr Simon Sellars
School of English, Communication & Performance Studies
Monash University, Clayton

J.G. Ballard’s oeuvre features numerous examples of self-contained societies that many critics perceive as disguised versions of Lunghua, the insular WWII camp he was interned in as a child. His novel, Empire of the Sun, widely seen as Ballard’s ‘authentic’ autobiography and the key to decoding his fiction, activated this perception. However, by cross-examining his body of work, I will argue that there is no definitive reconstruction of this wartime experience – rather, Empire should be viewed as Ballard’s life seen through the holograph of his fiction – and that, moreover, this holistic recycling of memory forms the model for a program of resistance to late capitalism. In wider terms, Ballard positions time as an artificial construct imposing control on the chaotic subconscious: the clock stops, past and future collapsed in the drive to homogenise the planet. Liberation derives from circular time – revisiting memory – and even sideways time, restaging and reinhabiting parallel worlds.

To illustrate this, the paper analyses Ballard’s affinity with nouvelle vague cinema — non-linear film technique, which, incorporated into the fabric of his work, reveals the ‘true’ nature of perception, time and memory. Ballard’s fiction is the fictional doubling of Deleuze’s work on the cinema of the ‘time-image’: both locate ‘nodes of resistance’ in post-war cinema, deploying the nouvelle vague as revealing the truth of the merger between the virtual and the actual. Focusing on repetition and déjà vu, the critical concept of revisiting and reinhabiting memory emerges in Ballardian and Deleuzian philosophy. Ballard’s malleable, circular Lunghua memories become a mutant psychopathology that focuses on inner mental states as reality and the external world of media and consumerism as irreality – a reversal that his work posits as the only viable antidote to an increasingly stylised and mediated post-war realm, the only effective form of resistance to totalising, naturalised systems of control.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ ‘Confronting Ourselves’: Ballard and Circular Time
+ Ballard and the Vicissitudes of Time

ABOVE: The Terminal Beach. Photo courtesy Brookings: “Beneath this concrete dome on Runit Island (part of Enewetak Atoll), built between 1977 and 1980 at a cost of about $239 million, lie 111,000 cubic yards (84,927 cubic meters) or radioactive soil and debris from Bikini and Rongelap atolls. The dome covers the 30-foot (9 meter) deep, 350-foot (107 meter) wide crated created by the May 5, 1958, Cactus test. Note the people atop the dome”.

This essay was first published in Colloquy no. 17, August 2009, pp. 44-61. Reprinted with permission.

One of the more enduring misconceptions surrounding the work of J.G. Ballard is that it operates in the classical dystopian narrative mode, [1] supposedly mining pessimism, repression and the negativity of a post-industrial age. Robert Collins’s commentary is typical, placing Ballard’s Crash (1973) at number three in a list of “the top 10 dystopian novels”:

Fictional dystopias are almost always cautionary tales – warnings of where our political, cultural and social surroundings are taking us. The novels [on this list] share common motifs: designer drugs, mass entertainment, brutality, technology, the suppression of the individual by an all-powerful state – classic preoccupations of dystopian fiction. These novels picture the worst because, as Swift demonstrated in his original cautionary tale, Gulliver’s Travels, re-inventing the present is sometimes the only way to see how bad things already are. [2]

However, to locate Ballard within this literary tradition is a fundamental misreading. The “state,” for example, barely features in his writing, and politicians or any kind of external authority are almost wholly absent. This is amplified to comical proportions when the police make a token appearance in High-Rise (1975), which depicts the breakdown of the social order in a high-tech apartment block. At first suspicious about the building’s car park, with its damaged vehicles and debris thrown from balconies, they are quickly turned away by a group of residents, who set about “pacifying the policemen, reassuring them that everything was in order, despite the garbage and broken bottles scattered around the building”; [3] the police duly leave and are never seen again, even as the high-rise descends further into anarchy. The residents prefer to remain within their “dystopia,” rather than reacting against it, embracing the “brutality and technology” that Collins suggests they should be reacting against – there is no external “Big Brother” forcing their hand. For the residents:

even the run-down nature of the high-rise was a model of the world into which the future was carrying them, a landscape beyond technology where everything was either derelict or, more ambiguously, recombined in unexpected but more meaningful ways. [4]

This dynamic is even more apparent in the subset of “Pacific fictions” in Ballard’s oeuvre, stories set on abandoned Pacific islands where there is no need to even allude to the presence of the State, for these are stateless worlds – “between owners.” They are neither straight utopia nor classical dystopia, but an occupant of the imaginative space between: what might be termed “affirmative dystopias,” which reach similar conclusions as to the question of how to “revive the spirit of utopia” that Fredric Jameson does in his exhaustive study, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. As such, they provide an enduring template for Ballard’s more well-known urban works, of which Crash is the exemplar.

Ballard’s fascination with the Pacific stems from his childhood in Shanghai, where he was born and where he lived until he was 16. His semi-autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun (1984) draws on his experiences as an internee in the Lunghua civilian camp, and it ends with Jim (the character based on the young Ballard) witnessing the atomic flash over Nagasaki, enabling a potent metaphor for the post-war era that Ballard would consistently return to throughout his career:

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. [5]

ABOVE: Wake Island. Photo courtesy USMCFLYR: “A boom from a KC-135 Stratotanker over Wake Island”.

In Ballard’s short story “My Dream of Flying to Wake Island” (1974), he returns to these “extreme states of possibility,” which overwhelm the account. The story remains in perpetual fugue – a concrete narrative arc never coalesces, and there is perpetual yearning enveloping the central character, Melville, a former astronaut who flew a solitary mission in space, during which he suffered a mental breakdown broadcast live to millions of viewers on Earth. Humiliated, he resolves to fly to remote Wake, fascinated by the island’s geographical isolation and “psychological reduction” (deriving from its real-world role as a former World War Two military base; Wake has never had a permanent indigenous population), which mirrors his own. For Melville, Wake Island is a portal. Referring to photographs of the military airstrip, he enthuses: “‘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’.” [6] The story is indicative of Ballard’s deployment of the rich seam of metaphor provided by the region, and the manner in which he uses abandoned Pacific islands as sites of radical reinvention, imagistic buffer zones representing the sovereignty of the imagination.

According to the anarchist author Hakim Bey, classical utopias – “from Plato’s republic to Brook Farm” – depend on abstraction, which renders them susceptible to “a correspondingly high level of authoritarian control. As a result, most Utopias in practice have proven oppressive and deadening – ‘social planning’ would seem to be an offense by definition against the ‘human spirit’.” [7] In the novel Rushing to Paradise (1994), Ballard is also concerned with social planning, which, similarly, is seen as eventually numbing and destroying the human spirit. In fact, the novel indicts the very idea of utopia.

Rushing to Paradise is set on the remote (and fictional) Pacific atoll of Saint-Esprit, claimed by France as a site for possible nuclear testing, where the renegade Dr Barbara has gathered a ragtag crew on the premise of saving the island’s endangered albatross (the French have relocated the original inhabitants and set up their nuclear equipment, but abandoned the island for Muroroa). Although the mission is initially pitched as environmentalist, each crewmember has wildly differing, concealed motives for making the journey, thus rendering impossible the idea of a genuinely shared utopia. The Hawaiian, Kimo, dreams of establishing an independent Hawaiian kingdom, “rid forever of the French and American colonists,” [8] while the boy Neil is obsessed with the relics of a bygone nuclear age, and excited by the news that the French might be returning to the island for testing:

For all Dr Barbara’s passion for the albatross, the nuclear testing-ground had a stronger claim on his imagination. No bomb had ever exploded on Saint-Esprit, but the atoll, like Eniwetok, Muroroa and Bikini, was a demonstration model of Armageddon, a dream of war and death that lay beyond the reach of any moratorium. [9]

Dr Barbara has her own, highly secretive, and ultimately destructive, reasons – not to save the albatross, but to establish Saint-Esprit as a radical feminist enclave. She is determined to achieve this by any means: “If Saint-Esprit, this nondescript atoll six hundred miles south-east of Tahiti, failed to match her expectations, it would have to reshape itself into the threatened paradise for which she had campaigned so tirelessly.” [10] Superficially, this echoes Ballard’s Concrete Island (1974), in which the architect Robert Maitland, after a car accident, is stranded on a triangle of wasteland underneath a busy motorway. Feverish from his injuries, he imagines the physical environment as an outcrop of his psyche: “More and more, the island was becoming an exact model of his head.” [11] Yet the fundamental difference is that Dr Barbara wants the island of her mind to reshape everyone else’s reality, too. This makes Rushing to Paradise, at one level, an allusion to utopian gurus such as David Koresh and Jim Jones, similarly charismatic leaders who built isolated, essentially micronational, communities and coerced others into joining them, before destroying everything as the authorities closed in. As one character says to Neil, after the boy asks whether Dr Barbara’s mission is how new religions start: “there’s nothing new here. It’s the oldest religion there ever was – sheer magnetic egoism.” [12]

In Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson devotes considerable space to analysing failures in the wider utopian imagination. In his attempt to re-map the potential of utopian desire, he concludes:

What is Utopian becomes … not the commitment to a specific machinery or blueprint, but rather the commitment to imagining possible Utopias as such, in their greatest variety of forms. Utopia is no longer the invention and defense of a specific floorplan, but rather the story of all the arguments about how Utopia should be constructed in the first place. It is no longer the exhibit of an achieved Utopian construct, but rather the story of its production and of the very process of construction as such. [13]

Re-placing Rushing to Paradise within Jameson’s framework, it becomes possible to read the story of Saint-Esprit as “the story of all the arguments” about how the Pacific should be constructed.

The region has always had an unstable identity and an especially volatile sense of nationalism, from perpetually coup-ridden Fiji in the South Seas to the perpetually colonised islands north of the equator. The Republic of Palau in Micronesia is sometimes cited as an archetypal tropical utopia, but could in fact embody the root definition of “utopia,” as “no place.” It has been used as a pawn by various colonial powers almost continuously since the late 17th century, rapidly lost its traditional culture and become a melange of other cultures. It has changed hands between Spain, which enforced Christianity on the Palauans; Germany, which commanded them to work as plantation slaves; Japan, which forced them to speak a subservient form of Japanese and turned the main island into a closed-off, heavily fortified military base; and the US, which bombed the islands to get at the Japanese in a series of bloody World War Two battles and then claimed them as American territory until 1994.

Mimicking the Pacific’s jagged history, Ballard populates Saint-Esprit with idealistic Germans, scientifically-minded Japanese and single-minded Americans, as well as Kimo, symbol of an oppressed indigenous people, Dr Barbara, an archetypal British colonialist, and, crucially, Neil, an echo of young Jim himself, both teenagers obsessed with dreams of nuclear war and of holding their own among deluded and dangerous adults in an artificial community. After the death of the character Mark Bracewell, the American, Carline, verbalises a metaphor that neatly sums up these duelling versions of utopia:

Contrary to the general belief, no-one’s death diminishes us. Nature in its wisdom created death to give each of us our unique sense of life. We’re not part of the main. Each of us is an island, every bit as real as Saint-Esprit, and death is the price we pay to keep ourselves from drowning in the larger sea. Like Kimo here, we’re all island people … especially young Neil, dreaming about another kind of island. Mark Bracewell lived for twenty-seven years, and his island still floats in the sea of time and space. [14]

This seems to correspond with Jameson, who proposes to “think of our autonomous and non-communicating Utopias … as so many islands: a Utopian archipelago, islands in the net, a constellation of discontinuous centers, themselves internally decentred.” [15] This discontinuity suggests the ideal resting state for Ballard’s ideal of a neural, free zone of the imagination – a “morally free psychopathology of metaphor, as an element in one’s dreams,” [16] which, although powerful and liberatory, has a dark underside. If one tries to apply it to other people, then Micronationalism [17] – the utopian imagination, no less – turns into dangerous cultism through which lives can be destroyed, a very real danger that arises when the metaphor is literalised into “the domain where it has no place, an id-driven psychopathology that lays waste to human life.” [18] Neil’s surreal, internalised visions of nuclear war therefore contrast markedly with Dr Barbara’s hard, external authoritarianism, further corresponding to Jameson’s conception of utopian desire, which “must be marked as Utopian and thereby as partaking in a specific and very special kind of aesthetic unreality: otherwise it falls into the world and, particularly if realized, spells the end of Utopias in the way wryly distinct from the usual prognoses of their current disappearance.” [19] Subsequently, the novel sours traditional utopian thought by highlighting the oppressive hypocrisy of its “abstracted authoritarianism,” to appropriate Bey’s term. Once Kimo has used his muscle to build the community and Neil his youth to impregnate the idealistic women who flock to the island, they become expendable, with no place in a feminist paradise.

Indeed, Dr Barbara manages to kill off almost all the men (although Neil survives) when they contract fever and she administers fake medicine. By the novel’s end, she is feverish and hiding out in the forest, burrowing deeper and further away from the French authorities that have come to retake the island. This seems a deliberate reference to the legendary stories of Japanese soldiers hiding out in the Pacific jungles of Guam long after the war had ended, terrified, as is Dr Barbara, at the prospect of an imperialism perishing with the onslaught of newer, more localised and “internally decentred” voices, American-led globalism, no less – overrun by an “anti-anti-utopian” imagination (again, after Jameson, in opposition not to straight dystopia, but to unworkable utopia) that has evolved organically from the discontinuities and disjunctions of the modern world, and that is centrally represented by Neil. As Jameson writes of the wider dynamic:

Multiplicity becomes the central theme of this imaginary resolution, whose conceptual dilemma remains that of closure. Yet we may well suppose that this new development will have had some impact on the Utopian form itself, accounting for the seeming extinction of the traditional kinds and the emergence of newer more reflexive forms. [20]

ABOVE: Observers at Operation Hardtack nuclear test (1958) on Enewetak.

Neil, with his dreams of nuclear war, symbolises this “more reflexive form” and the perverse and paradoxical “absolute freedom” it brings. He comes to embody the “anti-anti-utopian” spirit of the book, or, more accurately, he embodies the Ballardian sense of “affirmative dystopia,” a sense of which is given by Gregory Stephenson’s overview:

The themes of transcendence and illusion inform nearly all of Ballard’s work, and have often been misconstrued by critics as representing a nihilistic or fatalistic preoccupation on the part of the author with devolution, decay, dissolution and entropy … these themes represent neither an expression of universal pessimism nor a negation of human values and goals, but, rather, an affirmation of the highest humanistic and metaphysical ideal: the repossession for humankind of authentic and absolute being. [21]

Rushing to Paradise is not a disaster novel per se, but in his reimagining of the apocalypse, Neil virtually wills the disaster to happen. In so doing, he does not “colonize the future with Utopian blueprints,” as the Pacific’s invading powers have so wilfully done (indeed, as Dr Barbara has done), but rather, embodies what Jameson defines as:

Disruption … the name for a new discursive strategy … which insists that its radical difference is possible and that a break is necessary. The Utopian form itself is the answer to the universal ideological conviction that no alternative is possible, that there is no alternative to the system. But it asserts this by forcing us to think the break itself, and not by offering a more traditional picture of what things would be like after the break. [22]

Jameson briefly touches upon this strain of disruption in Ballard, without referring directly to the stories under discussion here: “Ballard’s work – so rich and corrupt – testifies powerfully to the contradictions of a properly representational attempt to grasp the future directly.” [23]

Extrapolating from there, my contention is that, in his Pacific fictions, Ballard “forces us to think the break” by repeatedly drawing on the spectre of nuclear testing, of which there are numerous real-world examples in the region. French Polynesia, for instance, was employed as a testing site for almost 10 years, with the result that high radiation levels were detected 4,500km away in Fiji. Bikini Atoll was rendered uninhabitable by American nuclear tests, its inhabitants forcibly relocated, like those of Saint-Esprit, never to return. The inhabitants of Eniwetok were also forcibly relocated in 1948 to make way for American atomic bomb tests; only comparatively recently has the US government, under overwhelming global pressure, cleared the island of active waste, allowing the islanders to resettle the southern part of the atoll after 33 years in exile. In Ballard, the thermonuclear age brings with it an advanced technology that renders objective perception meaningless, thus beginning the era of simulation, an increasingly abstracted, stylised and mediated realm, riding on the decline of Japanese imperialism and the rise of American-led globalisation.

ABOVE: Nuclear testing on Bikini Atoll. Music by Cousin Silas.

To examine this motif, it is interesting to contrast Ballard’s reworking, and remapping, of the region to that of the travel writer Simon Winchester, whose The Pacific provides a thorough history of changes since the war. Ballard has written: “I used to dream of the runways of Wake Island and Midway, stepping stones that would carry me back across the Pacific to the China of my childhood.” [24] Compare with Winchester’s account of American mariners at the start of the 19th century, seizing and settling “Midway, Wake, Guam … thus creating a series of stepping-stones, a lifeline of tropical islands that led all the way to that greatest and most elusive prize, the Middle Kingdom, China” [25] – a process that leads eventually to the bombing of Japan and subsequent irradiation of Pacific islands like Eniwetok. The similarities (references to Wake Island, Midway, China, especially “stepping stones”) are startling, yet these positions are opposed nonetheless. Ballard wants to resettle, and bulwark, the imagination, where the American forces wanted to colonise and wipe clean whole territories. One wishes to explore hidden folds within the map, the other to claim every available point on the map; both coexist in paradoxical dreams of the Pacific. The paradox is even rooted in temporal reality, as Winchester notes, when he visits the island of Tonga. There, he ponders the arbitrary division of the dateline, which ensures that Tonga sees the world’s first dawn each day:

I had imagined … that I would be able to catch a glimpse of Mount Silisili [in Samoa] … just a few miles away across the water. [It] would be enjoying precisely the same clock time as here in Tonga, but exactly one day before. The simultaneous sighting of two periods of time separated by an entire 24 hours seemed a paradox well worth experiencing. [26]

In Ballard, these paradoxical time tracks form a lasting metaphor for a certain nexus of confusion in the post-war world, a notion made explicit in the note that begins Empire of the Sun: “The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour took place on Sunday morning, 7 December 1941, but as a result of time differences across the Pacific Date Line it was then already the morning of Monday, 8 December in Shanghai.” [27] For Ballard, the bomb signifies the end of history and the coming of an age of surfaces, a recombinant age of planing identities, as he makes clear in the introduction to Crash, which applies the metaphor of chronological confusion to the mediated reality of the Western world:

Increasingly, our concepts of past, present and future are being forced to revise themselves. Just as the past, in social and psychological terms, became a casualty of Hiroshima and the nuclear age, so in its turn the future is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all-voracious present … Options multiply around us, and we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly. [28]

The past “as a casualty of the nuclear age” would be reframed 11 years after Crash, in Empire of the Sun, the latter part of which is set in a destroyed stadium filled with prisoners and the detritus of war. Suddenly, the stadium is illuminated by light from the atom bomb exploding on Nagasaki – a blinding, overwhelming orb. Andrés Vaccari correctly identifies the world “presided over by this nuclear sun” as the “real Empire of the Sun. It is the metaphoric birth of the post-war world, the omnipresent subject of Ballard’s fiction” [29] – the coming of a nihilistic world with no boundaries, no spatial coordinates except those of inner space, the cognitive remapping of a world that has lost its bearings in time and space. [30]

ABOVE: The Cactus Dome on Runit Island, part of Enewetak Atoll. Photo courtesy Artificial Owl.

This notion of planing identities (planing time tracks) is also embodied in Ballard’s short story “The Terminal Beach” (1964), set on Eniwetok (also known as ‘Enewetak’), in which the character Traven, an ex-air force pilot, finds himself similarly searching for identity among the island’s abandoned concrete bunkers and blockhouses, which have been used for thermonuclear trials. He comes across plastic, human mannequins used in the weapons testing, with their “half-melted faces, contorted into bleary grimaces [gazing] up at him from the jumble of legs and torsos.” [31] Attempting to escape from US servicemen who appear on the island, he hides “in one of the target basins, lying among the broken bodies of the plastic models. In the hot sunlight their deformed faces gaped at him sightlessly from the tangle of limbs, their blurred smiles like those of the soundlessly laughing dead.” [32] When he scavenges among “the litter of smashed bottles and cans in the isthmus of sand separating the testing ground from the air-strip,” [33] we find layers of recent cultural history, buried and then recovered as if in an archaeological find. Confronted with this effacement of geographical and human boundaries (the latter effectively represented by the undifferentiated slagheap of molten mannequins), Traven is, in a sense, reborn, scrambling for meaning among the detritus of the old world.

The effect is replicated in Concrete Island, in which the patch of underpass comes to symbolise the archetypal liminal space of Ballardian fiction. It is a zone of buried layers of urban cartography comprising “the unintended, forgotten, abjected corners of town planning.” [34] In the fragmented post-war world, with its shifting national boundaries and national identities, Ballard seems to suggest the only effective strategy is to remake the world through bricolage, or what Andrzej Gasiorek terms “a kind of fugitive reappropriation of an otherwise seemingly monolithic set of structures and relations.” [35] In Concrete Island, Maitland, the architect, was all too willing to submit to the conformity of capitalism, favouring the demands of finance and big business over any sense of public obligation or civic duty. Gasiorek observes that he had “a predilection for modernism,” specifically “hard, affectless architecture” and “stylised concrete surfaces,” marked as “hostile to the forging of human relations … a kind of dead end for life.” [36] Before his crash, Maitland seemed a ruthless autocrat forcing people into inhumane living conditions to justify his ego, but he is confronted with the underside of this “dead end for life” when, marooned on the concrete island, he is required to come to terms with the tradition he wilfully discarded in his work. Like Traven, he uncovers historical layers paved over by the demands of the motorway system – the strictures of advanced technology:

Parts of the island dated from well before World War II. The eastern end, below the overpass, was its oldest section, with the churchyard and the ground-courses of Edwardian terraced houses. The breaker’s yard and its wrecked cars had been superimposed on the still identifiable streets and alleyways.

In the centre of the island were the air-raid shelters among which he was sitting. Attached to these was a later addition, the remains of a Civil Defence post little more than fifteen years old. [37]

Maitland meets the human equivalents of this discarded landscape in the form of Proctor and Jane, two homeless dwellers who have made the island their own, both on the run from oppressive systems of control. Jane is a victim of patriarchy, hiding from an apparently abusive husband and bitter memories of her father, and now working as a motorway prostitute. Proctor is an old tramp who has suffered ritual humiliation at the hands of the local police. The island, reconfigured by Ballard as a container of social debris (both geographical and human, as in “The Terminal Beach”) becomes a space where social relations can begin again, where the social order is decommissioned, recombined, reconstructed and reshaped in ways that subvert dominant systems of thought. Maitland comes to see the island much as Proctor and Jane do, as a psychic “go-zone” where he can escape the pressures of his relationships with his wife and mistress and of his job – free “to rove forever within the empty city of his mind.” [38]

In his later career, immediately after Rushing to Paradise, Ballard embarked on a cycle of novels in which he would explore a much harder version of micronationalism, manifest in the savage gated communities of Cocaine Nights (1996) through to Kingdom Come (2006). It would no longer be necessary to look to mythical lands to remake and remodel maps of alienation – instead he began to focus on a parallel examination of the type of urban “non-place” that has come to be associated with the anthropologist Marc Augé. For Augé, our world is so saturated by superabundant fictions that it produces a conception of simultaneous time, representative of a homogenous, mediated society. The physical result is non-place, transitional zones detached from history and culture, inorganic, in-between zones where individuals are linked by this superabundance of information and technology rather than community or historical awareness, which paradoxically creates a pervasive sense of inwardness and isolation. Examples of non-place include motorways, hospitals, airports (especially duty-free zones), gated communities, business parks and housing estates – rich Ballardian territory, as the “urban disaster trilogy” of Crash, Concrete Island and High-Rise makes abundantly clear.

Ballard anticipates Augé, whose anthropological studies turned away from the “foreign field [towards] more familiar terrain,” due to the fact that “the contemporary world itself, with its accelerated transformations, is attracting anthropological scrutiny: in other words, a renewed methodical reflection on the category of otherness.” [39] In “The Terminal Beach,” Ballard describes Eniwetok as “synthetic, a man-made artefact with all the associations of a vast system of derelict concrete motorways.” [40] This is a description that foreshadows Concrete Island, and in the introduction to the latter, Ballard makes the link explicit: “The Pacific atoll may not be available, but there are other islands far nearer to home, some of them only a few steps from the pavements we tread every day. They are surrounded, not by sea, but by concrete, ringed by chain-mail fences and walled off by bomb-proof glass.” [41]

ABOVE: “A clip of the Hydrogen Bomb test at Enewetak Atoll on November 1, 1952, and the first time one was exploded. The fireball was big enough to cover most of Manhattan Island. This clip shows more of the aftermath of the nuclear cloud than most films.”

Just as Traven declares Eniwetok a “state of mind,” [42] so, too, does Maitland, indirectly, in Concrete Island when he insists: “I am the island.” [43] Here, “state” has a double meaning, as a condition of being, but also as a sovereign, independent territory. Both locations are potent symbols of the post-war era: Eniwetok, a tabula rasa of nationalism and patriotism; the motorway underpass, the archetypal non-place of supermodernity. As Traven’s existence in Eniwetok’s “thermonuclear noon” becomes increasingly hallucinatory (it is not clear whether he is dead, dying or feverish from irradiation), he finds that by saying goodbye in his mind to the disasters of the external world, he can come to terms with it. Standing among the abstract concrete blocks of the testing bunkers, he produces a strange incantation:

“Goodbye Eniwetok” … Somewhere there was a flicker of light, as if one of the blocks, like a counter on an abacus, had been plucked away.
Goodbye Los Alamos. Again, a block seemed to vanish. The corridors around him remained intact, but somewhere in his mind had appeared a small interval of neutral space.
Goodbye, Hiroshima.
Goodbye, Alamogordo.
Goodbye, Moscow, London, Paris, New York … [44]

The opening up of this “small interval” of neu(t)ral space represents a kind of psychological DMZ, an imaginative form of resistance that, along with Neil’s apocalyptic dreams, symbolises an intent that is the polar opposite to that of Dr Barbara (who, we recall, literalised a megalomania that proved unstoppable, and fatal). Traven surmises that time on Eniwetok has become “quantal,” an eternal present obliterating past and future. But is Ballard’s sense pejorative? [45] As Traven declares: “For me the hydrogen bomb was a symbol of absolute freedom. I feel it’s given me the right – the obligation, even – to do anything I want.” [46] This may well be the defining statement of the author’s career, brought into sharp relief by John Gray’s perceptive appraisal that Ballard’s “achievement is not to have staked out any kind of political position. Rather it is to have communicated a vision of what individual fulfilment might mean in a time of nihilism.” [47] It is a concept Ballard has alluded to in interview, when asked if his writing is interested in decadence:

Decadence? I can’t remember if I ever said I enjoyed the notion, except in the sense of drained swimming pools and abandoned hotels, which I don’t really see as places of decadence, but rather … as psychic zero stations, or as “Go,” in Monopoly terms. [48]

Here, Ballard appears to inform the concept of the “Temporary Autonomous Zone” (TAZ), codified by Bey in 1985 and enormously influential on anarchists, musicians and a myriad of underground artists. The TAZ calls for a mode of radical intervention in the form of creation of temporary spaces – whether “geographic, social, cultural, imaginal” [49] – that will serve to confound formalised control systems. Bey’s main focus was on the liberation of mind states, what he terms “psychotopology (and -topography)” as an antidote to the State’s “psychic imperialism”:

Only psychotopography can draw 1:1 maps of reality because only the human mind provides sufficient complexity to model the real. But a 1:1 map cannot “control” its territory because it is virtually identical with its territory. It can only be used to suggest, in a sense gesture towards, certain features. [50]

This particular strategy within the TAZ can be traced to Alfred Korzybski’s oft-repeated remark that “the map is not the territory,” since duplication is simply simulation, and able to be recouped as such. In opposition, Bey suggests that these sovereign mindscapes are enfolded within the folds of the cartographical matrix: “We are looking for ‘spaces’ with potential to flower as autonomous zones – and we are looking for times in which these spaces are relatively open, either through neglect on the part of the State or because they have somehow escaped notice by the mapmakers, or for whatever reason.”[51]

Ballard actually paraphrases Korzybski in Empire of the Sun: “Never confuse the map with the territory,” [52] while the patch of underpass in Concrete Island, built over the leavings of industrial culture, has been neglected by the State, and is so far off the map as to be invisible. Moreover, Maitland liberates an area of land or imagination (depending how we read the novel), without ever engaging directly with systems of control, with the State. As Ballard makes clear in the introduction: “What would happen if, by some freak mischance, we suffered a blow-out and plunged over the guard-rail onto a forgotten island of rubble and weeds, out of sight of the surveillance cameras?” [53] For Bey, confrontation with the State occurs through “the Spectacle,” in Guy Debord’s sense, where images rule by virtue of their monopoly of social space. Because society defines itself through the dissemination and experiencing of this space, the process appears natural, a self-contained feedback loop: “What appears is good; what is good appears.” [54] Such confrontation is doomed to failure since the machinery of simulation will merely absorb any display of “spectacular violence”. For Bey, as for Ballard, radical action therefore lies not in the deployment of spectacular violence, but in withdrawal, in becoming invisible, in merging with, and therefore rehabilitating, the by-products of supermodernity.

ABOVE: Sonsorol. Photo by Hisayuki Kubota.

Elsewhere, Ballard’s prototypical Pacific fictions seem an obvious influence on Bey’s “Visit Port Watson!,” [55] which uses their cue to forecast similar micronational and imaginative possibilities in the region. Written as a faux travel guide, it describes the micronation of Port Watson on the Pacific island of Sonsorol (the island actually exists – it is part of Palau – but Port Watson does not). Bey charts the history of Sonsorol and its colonisation by Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, New Zealand and Australian forces. He writes that when the island finally gained independence, the Port Watson enclave was set up by the island’s “Sultan” (a legacy of Sonsorol’s fictional 17th-century invasion by Moorish pirates), who had been influenced by libertarian-anarchist philosophy while studying in America. Offshore banking funded the enclave: “the creation of wealth out of nothing, out of pure imagination.” [56] Port Watson therefore develops as a libertarian-anarchist micronation with no laws or currency save for a “computerised” barter system, where a hamburger stand is called “McBakunins,” most people refuse to work since everyone has stakes in the banking system, and “public fucking” is encouraged.

This notion of a libertarian-anarchist enclave powered by “pure imagination” has clear Ballardian overtones, [57] especially in light of Ballard’s career-long “libertarian and anarchic stance … [a] scepticism about all communal laws.” [58] As Ballard himself wrote in Empire of the Sun: “After three years in the camp the notion of patriotism meant nothing.” [59] And, like Ballard, Bey’s external mapping of utopian space can in fact be read as a travel guide to inner space, unlocking the potential of the imagination to transcend laws, authority and corporate structure, all built upon the metaphorical/micronational possibilities of the Pacific. In “Visit Port Watson!,” this is consummated in the final paragraph, where Bey “quotes” an editorial from the local gazette, written by the Sultan, in answer to whether such a utopia can exist only on a tropical island: “Sonsorol could be created anywhere – nothing stands in the way but false consciousness and the grim power of those rulers who feast on false consciousness like vampires … ‘Don’t despair: Port Watson exists within you, and you can make it real’.” [60]

This internal collapse – this conflation of inner and outer space – reminds us of the power of Ballard’s original Pacific fictions, which reinhabit the frame to present a clearinghouse in which corporate and national governance is overthrown and regoverned as a “state of mind” – dystopia becomes the real utopia, and utopian ideals, typically represented as a stifling of the imagination, the true dystopia. But Ballard’s insistence that the imagination must remain sovereign territory – the “last nature reserve,” as he has termed it [61] – also aligns him once more with Jameson, who describes “anti-anti-utopian” thought as:

a new form of thinking … a new dimension of the exercise of the imagination. It’s only when people come to realize that there is no alternative that they react against it, at least in their imaginations, and try to think of alternatives … [affording] a process where the imagination begins to question itself, to move back and forth among the possibilities. [62]

Ballard’s reimagining of the Pacific archipelago – as a vast, disjunctive region of abandonment and reinvention, with multiple islands floating in the “sea of time and space” – and its subsequent superimposition onto urban landscapes, provides an excellent example of a pluralism of utopias (multiple subjectivities) steeped in an “aesthetic unreality”: affirmative dystopias that are finally, unmistakably, Ballardian.

ABOVE: Enewetak today. Photo by Brad Templeton.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ My Dream of Flying to Tinian Island
+ How to Build a Utopia in your Spare Time

NOTES

[1] According to Tom Moylan: “The critical logic of the classical dystopia is … a simplifying one. It doesn’t matter that an economic regime drives the society; it doesn’t matter that a cultural regime of interpellation shapes and directs the people; for the social evil to be named, and resisted, is nothing but the modern state in and of itself.” Tom Moylan, “‘The moment is here … and it’s important’: State, Agency, and Dystopia in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Antarctica and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Telling’ in Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, eds Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan (New York and London: Routledge, 2003) 136.
[2] Robert Collins, “Robert Collins’s top 10 dystopian novels,” The Guardian, 24 August 2008, date of access: 29 November 2008, < http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/aug/24/top10s.dystopian.novels >.
[3] J.G. Ballard, High-Rise [1975] (London: Flamingo, 1993) 131.
[4] Ballard, High-Rise 47. David Cronenberg, discussing his film version of Crash, identified this dynamic as a cornerstone of the Ballardian technique: “The police are a very minor presence in the book and in the film, because the exercise is not to see what would happen realistically now if people did this, it’s to allow them to do it unhindered, to see where it takes them psychologically … it’s still legitimate to say that the movie is not to be taken literally or realistically but as more metaphorically.” Chris Rodley, “Crash Talk: David Cronenberg and J.G. Ballard in conversation with Chris Rodley,” Guardian Lecture [transcript], British Film Institute, 10 November 1996, date of access: 29 November 2008, .
[5] J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition [1970] (London: Flamingo, 2001), annotations 52.
[6] J.G. Ballard, “My Dream of Flying to Wake Island” [1974], The Complete Short Stories: Volume 2 (London: Flamingo, 2001) 337.
[7] Anonymous, “Visit Port Watson!” in Semiotext(e) SF, eds Rudy Rucker, Peter Lamborn Wilson and Robert Anton Wilson (New York: Autonomedia, 1989) 317.
[8] J.G. Ballard, Rushing to Paradise [1994] (New York: Picador, 1996) 12.
[9] Ballard, Rushing to Paradise 15-16.
[10] Ballard, Rushing to Paradise 10.
[11] J.G. Ballard, Concrete Island 1974] (London: Vintage, 1994) 69.
[12] Ballard, Rushing to Paradise 94.
[13] Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions [2005] (London and New York: Verso, 2007) 217.
[14] Ballard, Rushing to Paradise 74.
[15] Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future 221.
[16] Graeme Revell, “Interview with JGB by Graeme Revell” in RE/Search #8/9: J.G. Ballard, eds V. Vale and Andrea Juno (San Francisco: Re/Search Publications, 1984) 47.
[17] In a forthcoming essay, I examine in detail Ballard’s mapping of micronational space, which I describe as “predicated on a vocabulary of secession, and … filled with depictions of colonies, anomalous enclaves, virtual city-states, ‘zones of transition.’” To quote further from that piece: “The political (or, rather, anti-political) potential of these spaces is interesting, since their structure and interaction with the outside world strongly parallels the successes and failures of the real-world phenomenon of micronations. The term ‘micronation’ refers to an attempt, usually by small groups of individuals, to found small, often ephemeral ‘nations’, often without land, but sometimes claiming the types of ‘non-space’ Ballard describes. Micronational enterprises can be satirical, or a component of an art project, but occasionally they can have serious political intent. Micronations are sometimes called ‘model nations’, since they mimic the structure of independent nations and states, but are not recognised as such by established states.” Simon Sellars, “‘Zones of Transit’: Micronationalism in the work of J.G. Ballard” in J.G. Ballard: “From Shanghai to Shepperton,” eds Jeannette Baxter, Mark Currie and Rowland Wymer (Palgrave, projected date of publication: 2009).
[18] Andrzej Gasiorek, J.G. Ballard (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005) 212.
[19] Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future 234.
[20] Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future 216.
[21] Gregory Stephenson, Out of the Night and Into the Dream: A Thematic Study of the Fiction of J.G. Ballard (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1991) 2-3.
[22] Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future 231-2.
[23] Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future 288.
[24] J.G. Ballard, “Airports,” The Observer, 14 September 1997.
[25] Simon Winchester, The Pacific (London: Arrow Books Limited, 1991) 17.
[26] Winchester, The Pacific 12.
[27] Ballard, Empire of the Sun [1984] (London: Grafton Books, 1988) 5.
[28] J.G. Ballard, “Some words about Crash!: 1. Introduction to the French edition of Crash! [sic],” Foundation, The Review of Science Fiction 9 (November 1975) 47-8.
[29] Andrés Vaccari, Awakening the Entropy Within: The Novels of J.G. Ballard, unpublished monograph, 1996.
[30] This is core subject matter that would endure right across Ballard’s career, beginning with his 1962 short story, “Thirteen to Centaurus,” and his novel from the same year, The Drowned World. While treating very different subject matters, both feature central characters haunted by dreams of a beating, burning, amniotic sun, a super-enhanced inner landscape of the mind that begins to merge with the burning sun of the external, overheated world.
[31] J.G. Ballard, “The Terminal Beach” [1964] The Complete Short Stories: Volume 2 33.
[32] Ballard, “The Terminal Beach” 44.
[33] Ballard, “The Terminal Beach” 30.
[34] Gasiorek, J.G. Ballard 110.
[35] Gasiorek, J.G. Ballard 212.
[36] Gasiorek, J.G. Ballard 120.
[37] Ballard, Concrete Island 69.
[38] Ballard, Concrete Island 142.
[39] Marc Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans John Howe (London and New York: Verso, 1995) 23-4.
[40] Ballard, “The Terminal Beach” 30.
[41] Ballard, Concrete Island 4.
[42] Ballard, “The Terminal Beach” 30.
[43] Ballard, Concrete Island 71.
[44] Ballard, “The Terminal Beach” 45-6.
[45] Augé argues that non-space is a negative aspect of supermodernity, as Gasiorek indicates in his overview of Augé’s links to Ballard’s work: “[In] Ballard [the] future is a dead zone already destroyed by the relentless drive to reduce everything to the present moment and thus to collapse all the time that has passed and is still to come into the tyrannic embrace of the ever-same now, hence his claim that “the future is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all-voracious present” … Augé’s contention that the question of space has come to the fore because it is ‘difficult to make time into a principle of intelligibility, let alone a principle of identity’ fits well with Ballard’s concerns.” Gasiorek, J.G. Ballard 110.
[46] Ballard, “The Terminal Beach” 43.
[47] John Gray, “Modernity and its discontents,” New Statesman (10 May 1999) 42.
[48] Thomas Frick, “The Art of Fiction: J.G. Ballard,” Paris Review, 94 (1984) 138.
[49] Hakim Bey, “The Psychotopology of Everyday Life” in The Temporary Autonomous Zone (New York: Autonomedia, 1985), date of access: 29 November 2008 .
[50] Bey, “The Psychotopology of Everyday Life.”
[51] Bey, “The Psychotopology of Everyday Life.”
[52] Ballard, Empire of the Sun 129.
[53] Ballard, Concrete Island 5.
[54] Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle [1967], trans Ken Knabb (London: Rebel Press, 2006) 9-10.
[55] Although this piece was published anonymously, it is generally agreed that Hakim Bey wrote it, given the identical stylistic and thematic consistencies to his work (“Hakim Bey” is the pseudonym of the Semiotext(e) SF co-editor, Peter Lamborn Wilson).
[56] Anonymous, “Visit Port Watson!” 317.
[57] The fact that “Visit Port Watson!” was published in an anthology along with two Ballard stories, along with an editorial acknowledgement of Ballard’s influence on the writers within, also seems to affirm, as with the links with the TAZ, Ballard’s shaping of Bey’s worldview.
[58] Gasiorek, J.G. Ballard 1, 2.
[59] Ballard, Empire of the Sun 169.
[60] Anonymous, “Visit Port Watson!” 330.
[61] J.G. Ballard, Super-Cannes [2000] (New York: Picador, 2002) 264.
[62] Quoted in Joshua Glenn, “Back to utopia: Can the antidote to today’s neoliberal triumphalism be found in the pages of far-out science fiction?,” The Boston Globe (20 November 2005).,” The Boston Globe (20 November 2005).

‘Iterative Architecture: a Ballardian Text’

by Brian Baker

Instructions/ Introduction

Readers hoping to solve the mystery of J.G. Ballard’s ‘The Beach Murders’ may care to approach it in the form of a card game. Some of the principal clues have been alphabetized, some left as they were found, scrawled on to the backs of a deck of cards. Readers are invited to recombine the order of the cards to arrive at a solution.* Obviously any number of solutions is possible, and the final answer to the mystery lies forever hidden.

Brian Baker, 2009

Originally published in 21: Journal of Contemporary and Innovative Fiction, Issue 1 (autumn/winter 2008/09). Reproduced with permission.

♣♠♥♦

Architecture (A♣). Physical space is crucial to the Ballardian imaginary, from the eponymous tower block in High-Rise (1975) to the ‘gated communities’ and science parks of Super-Cannes (2000) and Millennium People (2003). Counterposed to images of flight and transcendence found in many of his stories, the urban environment is often an imprisoning space. In his article ‘J.G. Ballard and the Architectures of Control’, Dan Lockton argues that ‘One of the many ‘obsessions’ running through Ballard’s work is what we might characterise as the effect of architecture on the individual’, while complicating his argument by acknowledging the mutual implication of inner and outer, psychological and environment: this blurring being Ballard’s method of ‘reflecting the participants’ mental state in the environment itself’. [1] Lockton also suggests that ‘[t]he architecture […] acts as a structure for the story’ in locating the protagonist and ‘plot’ firmly in an ‘obsessively explained and expounded’ architecture. I would like to develop this argument by suggesting that the informing structural principles of Ballard’s short stories, particularly that of the period beginning with ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964) and embracing The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) but also later short fictions, are spatial and iterative: geometry and algebra.

Ballardian (2♣). On the BBC Radio 4 arts review programme Front Row, presenter Mark Lawson, in introducing a discussion of Ballard’s autobiography Miracles of Life, suggested that ‘he’s one of the few writers to have become an adjective — Ballardian’. [2] An author who attains the status of an adjective runs the risk of reduction to culturally received ideas of their work (often erroneous and masking the texts themselves) or, worse still, it makes them the object of caricature or burlesque. To become an adjective suggests a certain kind of cultural visibility (or even cultural power), but also indicates a possible ossification through repetition: another reduction, to a set of representative images, ideas and tropes. In this case, ‘Ballardian’ signifies a recurrent set of narrative structures, characters, and particularly iconic places and things, many of which were identified by David Pringle in his groundbreaking critical work of the 1970s:

Such things as concrete weapons ranges, dead fish, abandoned airfields, radio telescopes, crashed space-capsules, sand dunes, empty cities, […] beaches, fossils, broken juke-boxes, crystals, lizards, multi-storey car-parks, dry lake-beds, medical laboratories, drained swimming-pools, […] high-rise buildings, predatory birds, and low-flying aircraft. [3]

To assert a ‘Ballardian’ imaginary is to suggest a limitation to his work, a finite set of materials out of which a range of texts are worked (and re-worked). It is a critical commonplace to note the ‘obsessional’ return to key images, objects and concerns in Ballard’s work – from emptied swimming pools to a desire to transcend time – that could have reduced his texts to a set of symptoms of an identifiable pathology (and did, in the notorious judgement on Crash by a publisher’s reader). At best, Ballard’s ‘obsessional’ return to a limited creative palette can be used to articulate a consistent and particular vision of the world – what Mark Lawson, characterising ‘Ballardian’, called a ‘way of looking at the world and describing it’ – or is, at worst, a boring and repetitive re-working of the same old material by a ‘minor’ (genre) writer who lacks a wider engagement with human life. ‘Ballardian’ is perhaps best understood (a) as a symptom of genre, and the repetition-with-difference pattern of much genre fiction; and (b) as an effect of Ballard’s structural reliance on iteration.

Confetti Royale (9♣). The original title of the story collected in the 2001 Collected Short Stories as ‘The Beach Murders’ is ‘Confetti Royale’, signifying its intertextual relation to Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale (1953) and the Cold War spy or espionage narrative. The impenetrable motivations of the characters in ‘Confetti Royale’ – two Russian agents, on CIA operative, an ‘absconded State Department cipher chief’ and ‘American limbo dancer’ (whose actions entirely exceed this belittling characterization) – both anticipate the labyrinthine logic of Le Carré’s espionage fiction and compromises the more straightforward and linear adventures of Fleming’s secret agent. There has been some recent speculation on the Ballardian website about the connection between Ballard and Fleming, particularly with regard to The Wind from Nowhere (Ballard’s 1962 ‘disowned’ apprentice novel) and its megalomaniacal industrialist Hardoon, who could be seen as a an analogue of the Bond super-villains who seek the chimera of ‘world domination’. [4] While ‘Confetti Royale’ is a playful iteration of espionage fiction, its card-game structure raises to a formal principle the centrality of the game between Bond and Le Chiffre in Casino Royale. Here, the 27 textual elements (Introduction plus 26 alphabeticized titled paragraphs) are strewn as ‘confetti’, compromising the ordering principles of the baccarat tables or Cold War ideologies.

Diamonds Are Forever (6♣). The 1969 James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (OHMSS) was the first to be made without Sean Connery. The opening 15 minutes is suffused by a self-reflexivity which marks out the problematic nature of generic repetition-with-difference. The new Bond, George Lazenby, looks directly at the camera at the end of the pre-credits sequence, when the ‘girl’ he has been fighting for drives off, and says ‘This never happened to the other fellah’; the film’s title sequence replays scenes from earlier Bond films; and when Bond ‘resigns’ and clears his office drawer, key objects from earlier films are introduced with aide-memoire musical leitmotifs from previous Bond films overlaid on the soundtrack. Anxiety-provoking difference is suppressed by reference to the recognisable and familiar, even at the risk of disrupting the film diegesis. In 1971, not only did Bond return, but so did Connery. Diamonds Are Forever is Bond’s ‘revenge’ mission for the death, in OHMSS, of Bond’s wife Tracey (the ‘girl’ who escaped him at the beginning), and is largely set in Nixon’s USA. A morally rotten, bloated film (featuring two sadistic homosexual assassins as an index of its gender sensitivities), Diamonds Are Forever’s main location is Las Vegas, the ‘old’ Vegas of the Dunes and the Sands, the excessive, corrupt Vegas of Bugsy Siegel and the Mob.

Diamonds Are Forever plays the megalomaniacal Blofeld – murderer of Bond’s wife and manipulator of the diamond trade to create a laser-bearing ‘killer’ satellite – against one ‘Willard Whyte’, a helpful billionaire resident of a Las Vegas penthouse suite. This character’s good-ole-boy persona fails to mask the fact that he is a Whyte-washed reiteration of a real-life Las Vegas resident, Howard Hughes, who in real life more nearly approximated Blofeld. Unlike Fleming’s Casino Royale (1953) and the 2006 film version of this Bond narrative, where the high-stakes card games function as a trope for ideological conflict and the dangerous fluidity of capital markets and financial flows, Diamonds Are Forever makes little or no play with the casino chronotope. Ballard’s own Las Vegas novel is Hello America (1981), the most generically ‘science fiction’ of his later works. This novel narrates a journey by a European exploratory mission to a depopulated, post-apocalyptic United States, where they find a self-anointed (and self-named) President Charles Manson, who has assumed command of the remainder of America’s nuclear arsenal. Hello America uses the Las Vegas gambling icon of the roulette wheel, rather than the card table, to critique the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction. As Ken Cooper suggests, ‘self-destruction […] is the inevitable payoff of atomic roulette’. [5]

Experimental Fiction (7♣). Ballard’s most formally experimental period lies between ‘The Terminal Beach’ and The Atrocity Exhibition. Although his later novels are iterative in their narrative and textual patterning, they are much closer to ‘mainstream’ literary fiction’s spatial continuity and temporal causality. However, in his short fiction Ballard did return to formally experimental or innovative texts, often playing with textual conventions. ‘The Index’ (1977) consists of just that, ‘the index to the unpublished and perhaps suppressed autobiography of a man who may well have been one of the most remarkable figures of the 20th century’, one Henry Rhodes Hamilton, but the mystery of who he was and the status of the text remains unresolved; ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’ (1976) consists of annotations to the subtitle of the story (‘A discharged Broadmoor patient compiles “Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown”, recalling his wife’s murder, his trial and exoneration’), each word of which is footnoted; and in ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ (1985) the respondent implies that he has assassinated the second incarnation of Christ in 100 ‘answers’. [6] These texts are organised by absence or ellipsis, the architecture of the stories signifying a missing central element or text that reader must configure or enunciate for herself/himself. Non-linear, spatial in design, Ballard’s later experimental short stories are textual games that posit a foundational enigma, a mystery that the reader must work to decode.

ABOVE: Artwork by Jeffrey K. Potter for ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (commissioned for the collection Memories of the Space Age).

Fugue Fiction (5♣). The ‘fugue fictions’ are three connected short stories that Ballard published around the turn of the 1980s: ‘News from the Sun’ (1981), ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (1982) and ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (1982). A close examination of these stories discloses the iterative principle at work even in Ballard’s later texts, where formal fragmentation has given way to more linear narrative models. A paragraph from ‘A Question of Re-Entry’ (1962) pinpoints the shared emphases of these stories:

The implication was that the entire space programme was a symptom of some inner unconscious malaise afflicting mankind, and in particular the Western technocracies, and that the space-craft and satellites had been launched because their flights satisfied certain buried compulsions and desires. [7]

In ‘Memories of the Space Age’, the protagonist Mallory, a doctor in the NASA program, confesses to his unconscious complicity in the first orbital murder, by a borderline-disturbed astronaut named Hinton. This act produced a kind of ‘space-sickness’ of fugue-states and loss of temporal awareness that is centred on Cape Canaveral: ‘he had torn the fabric of time and space, cracked the hour-glass from which time was running’. [8] The fugues experienced by Mallory and the protagonists of the two other stories are a kind of congealing of time, a transcendence of clock time; in ‘News from the Sun’, these fugues are explicitly typed as a return to a pre-lapsarian state of consciousness. In ‘Myth of the Near Future’, the protagonist Sheppard pursues his terminally ill wife to Canaveral, where the time-effect may ultimately revivify her. All three stories are patterned on a triangulation between the protagonist, his wife (or lover), and an antagonist; a fourth figure is present, outside of the primary triangulation, who is either an astronaut or connected to the space program.

‘News from the Sun’: Franklin-Ursula-Slade (Trippett)
‘Memories of the Space Age’: Mallory-Anna-Hinton (Gale Shepley)
‘Myths of the Near Future’: Sheppard-Elaine-Martinsen (Anne Godwin)

The triangulations suggests a geometric/architectural emphasis, but the sense that these three fictions, published in sequence, are reworkings of the same conceptual material and re-deploy the same motifs (flight, the space programme, fugue states and time) signifies their centrality to the Ballardian iterative complex.

Gemini. (4♣) The Space Age is a crucial source for the Ballardian imaginary, from the negotiations of cargo-cult imperialism in ‘A Question of Re-Entry’ (1963) to the assassination of a messianic astronaut in ‘The Object of the Attack’ (1984). The icon of the astronaut is central to the ‘fugue fictions’ and their sense that NASA’s manned space programs were a cosmic transgression, an hubristic leap out of biological time which has catastrophic psychological consequences. Many of Ballard’s texts are centred on Cape Canaveral, from ‘The Illuminated Man’ (1964) (itself later incorporated – reiterated – into The Crystal World (1965)), where time crystallizes, to ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (1982), where the Cape is the epicentre of a kind of ‘space sickness’. However, it is not Apollo imagery – the Moon landings – that regulate Ballard’s Space Age imaginary. His astronauts have orbital trajectories. In ‘The Dead Astronaut’ (1968) and ‘The Cage of Sand’ (1962) orbiting capsules containing dead astronauts form a kind of artificial constellation in the night sky, while the protagonists wait at Canaveral for their orbits to decay. It is not Apollo, but the Mercury and Gemini programs – manned orbital missions that grew in complexity and duration, but stayed within the ambit of Earth – that provide the backdrop for Ballard’s Space Age. This is no New Frontier, no ascension to other planets, but a limited, problematic endeavour.

Hearts and Minds (8♣). The title sequence of the 2006 Casino Royale plays with the centrality of the card game and the casino to its narrative. In motion-capture animation (where computer-generated graphics are overlaid on live action), a silhouetted polygon Bond fights, shoots, and is finally shown (in a live-action ‘reveal’) to be Daniel Craig, the ‘new’ Bond. The roulette wheel becomes a sniper-scope target in these graphics, as clubs, diamonds and spades become weapons embedded in the torsos of antagonists, ‘blood’ flowing across the screen from their wounds. Bond is himself ‘cut’ by playing cards in one animated sequence, but is invulnerable; no blood seems to flow there. The interrelationship of the casino, the roulette wheel and the playing card with the neo-colonial adventurism represented by the Bond imaginary invites us to read the film itself as a kind of spectacle or game, masking its ideological premises.

Iterative (3♣). Crucial to the idea of a ‘Ballardian’ text is patterning or what I have suggested as iterability. It would be difficult to deny that Ballard returns to similar ideas, or narrative structures throughout his work: it is the effectiveness of the patterning that is crucial, the combination and re-combination of elements to work through a coherent world that provides Ballard’s texts with imaginative power. David Punter, in Modernity, concurs, stating: ‘What is most significant […] is that Ballard is a repetitive writer, a writer of repetition.’ [9] The first formally ‘iterative’ Ballard short story is ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964), in which the textual fabric of the story is fragmented, split into 22 sections (21 of them subtitled), echoing the psychological fragmentation of the protagonist Traven (the earliest incarnation of the ‘T-‘ figure who recurs, as ‘Tallis’ or ‘Talbot’ or ‘Trabert’) who can also be found in Ballard’s iterative masterwork, The Atrocity Exhibition. ‘The Terminal Beach’ and particularly the Atrocity Exhibition texts are non-linear and non-causal in terms of narrative; in ‘The Terminal Beach’, the concrete blocks of the nuclear testing site Eniwetok Island form a maze, ‘their geometric regularity and finish [seeming] to occupy more than their own volumes of space, imposing on him a mood of absolute calm and order.’ [10] Here the spatial ordering of the text is more properly geometric rather than algebraic (iterative), but the repetitive, disorienting regularity of the field of blocks is a figure for a space that repeats itself endlessly. This motif can also be found in the more classically dystopian short story ‘The Concentration City’, where the urban ‘build-up’ has no boundary, no end, and a train journey to find its limits returns the protagonist to the starting point is a regressive, looping trajectory; and in the repeated face of Cordobès on the deck of cards placed upon Quimby’s balcony table in ‘Confetti Royale’.

James (10♣). J.G. Ballard’s first names are James Graham. Only in his Crash alter-ego is Ballard ‘James’, a knowing self-implication in that text’s transgressive sexual material; he was ‘Jimmy’ as a boy, ‘Jim’ to his adult friends. The diminutive, ‘Jim’, humanises Ballard, and it is this name which is given to his ‘autobiographical’ selves in Empire of the Sun (1985) and The Kindness of Women (1991). Opposing this is the self-alienated ‘J.G.’, a not-quite nom de plume that masks the ‘real’ Jim Ballard. Ballard’s textual interrogation of unitary subjectivity is reflected in this circulation of names, and the surnames of his protagonists – Sheppard, Maitland, Franklin, Sinclair – are themselves iterative signs. James Bond, by way of contrast, is never ‘Jimmy’, ‘Jim’ or ‘Jamie’: always ‘James’.

Kennedy (J♣). After his assassination in 1963, President John F. Kennedy’s name was given to the Cape where the NASA space program still has its operational base: Canaveral. This naming has now been reversed, but the Space Center still bears JFK’s name. It is Kennedy who is seen to be the ‘author’ of Apollo, giving the political and economic impetus to reach the Moon through the rhetoric of the ‘New Frontier’ and a sustained arms race (symbolically as well as militarily), though it could be argued that it is Lyndon Johnson who was most committed to the American space program in the 1950s and 1960s. Kennedy’s assassination is, in some sense, a ‘ground zero’ for contemporary American culture, and he looms large in the algebra of icons that Ballard constructs in the period of The Atrocity Exhibition, along with the president’s widow, Jackie. The implication of glamour, celebrity and violent death is embodied in the icon of JFK; in ‘The Assassination of John F. Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’, a key text in The Atrocity Exhibition, the moment of assassination also becomes a fatal game.

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

Lunghua (Q♣). With the publication of Ballard’s autobiography, Miracles of Life, it became apparent that, as much as I would like to resist a biographical reading of Ballard’s work, it is Ballard’s own childhood that has had a fundamental regulatory effect on the Ballardian imaginary. In Empire of the Sun, Ballard playfully encouraged the reader to ‘spot’ the Ballardian icon in an autobiographical context – the drained swimming pool, the crashed plane – while simultaneously denying that autobiography provided any kind of key or code to understanding his work. His life, as represented in both Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women, is filtered through the medium of fiction. In the light of Miracles of Life, I would now like to suggest that it is Lunghua, the resettlement camp into which he, his parents and his sister were interned during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai in World War Two, that is the model for the Ballardian social environment. Lunghua is enclosed, fenced off from the outside world; it is a place where work is scarce; where a system of social codes and conventions regulate personal interaction; where games, hobbies, organised events schedule the lives of its inhabitants; and where existence shades inevitably into a slow decline unto death. A place to rebel against, if space can be found; a space to escape from, if escape is possible. Lunghua is the model for the high-rises, gated communities, science parks and suburban dormitory towns of Ballard’s later fiction.

Metacriticism/metatext (K♣). ‘What is distinctive about The Arcades Project – in Benjamin’s mind, it always dwelt apart – is the working of quotations into the framework of montage [….] the transcendence of the conventional book form would go together, in this case, with the blasting apart of pragmatic historicism – grounded, as this always is, on the premise of a continuous and homogenous temporality. Citation and commentary might then be perceived as intersecting at a thousand different angles, setting up vibrations across the epochs of recent history, so as to effect “the cracking open of natural teleology.” And all of this would unfold through the medium of hints or “blinks” – a discontinuous presentation deliberately opposed to traditional modes of argument.’ [11]

Spades ♠

(A♠) Macro-economic tidal systems. B sat down in the oak-panelled room of state opposite Sir Richard Markham. Markham assessed this loose-limbed man in the ragged flying jacket. A constellation of scars around his mouth and jaw-line traced the trajectory of his chequered history as an agent. Markham accepted the logic of the situation – an agent lasted a few years in the field, no more – but B had gone further than most, much further in many ways. The grey, haunted eyes that looked through Markham scanned the ocean bottom of his psyche, cut adrift from the time system of Whitehall.
‘You’ve been away, B,’ said Markham.
B’s eyes refocused.
‘In a manner of speaking.’

(2♠) Auto-intentional displacement. B realised, as he stood on the moving walkway in the inner hub of Charles de Gaulle airport, that the geometry of the architecture expressed a latent psychopathology. The concrete tunnels of the travellators indicated a profound desire to return to the amniotic peacefulness of the womb, the octagonal central atrium and suspended Perspex walkways revealing a fascist worship of the late General in the form of an architectural homage to his nasal septum and zygomatic arch. B found himself profoundly identifying with the unknown would-be assassin who had missed his opportunity to be the French Oswald in 1965. It was clear to him that the French, for all their insistence on grands projets like CDG, inhabited a fundamental and psychotic cultural landscape in which the tension between their embrace of modernity and their nostalgia for empire went unresolved.

(3♠) Goldeneye. As he dipped the clutch of the Aston and thrust the gearstick into fifth, B remembered the death of his wife. It was, he now understood, a special form of automobile accident. Blauveldt and Blunt, whom he had previously recognised as enemies, were in fact the agents of an underlying logic of necessity. Since the death of his wife, B had slipped further and further out of time, occupying fugue states where hours slipped by. Now, as blades of sodium light accelerated across his windshield, B felt himself again returning to the fugue state that had plagued him since her death, the Aston congealing in a viscid block of time.

(4♠) Operation Grand Slam. B opened the attaché case. In it he found what Markham had called his ‘assassination weapon’. It consisted of: (a) reproductions of Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’; (b) a pulp spy novel by one Richard Markham; (c) Eadweard Muybridge’s series photographs of horse and rider; (d) soft inner flying helmet and communication rig of B-29 navigator, USAAF issue; (e) November 1963 edition of Time magazine; (f) an unused prophylactic wrapped in a tin foil sachet; (g) black-box voice recording of co-pilot, Concorde air disaster, Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris; (h) .25 Beretta pistol.

(5♠) Heliotropic. Dr Catherine Penny waited in the secure car park of the Jodrell Bank radio telescopes, as the man in the ragged flying jacket paced the grounds, where the massive volumes of the dishes sprouted like some monstrous alien crop. Dr Penny thought of B‘s grey, haunted eyes, and turned the heating in the MGC up a notch. What B was looking for, he could not find amongst the files and despatch boxes of Whitehall. Could he find it here, among the constellations?

(6♠) Index of Alienation. B calculated the angle between Dr Penny’s rigid torso and her splayed thighs, as she sat like an ill-propped mannequin on the edge of his bed. The conjunction between her naked body, the vintage bottle of Bollinger and the torn foil of the prophylactic sachet brought back disconcerting memories of the buckled armcove on Monaco race day. He turned back to the light box he was building to display x-ray plates of his own fractured clavicle, femur, and kneecap.

(7♠) Quantum theory. ‘Pay attention, B,’ said Quinn, the head of the special quartermaster stores. ‘One day these things could conceivably save your life.’
He placed another card on the desk and invited B to respond.
‘Come on,’ said B. ‘What will it be next? Solitaire? The Tarot pack?’
‘This is for the good of your health, not mine,’ replied Quinn, ‘though God knows it’s difficult enough to tell the difference these days. How did you find Switzerland?’
B smiled. ‘The facilities were excellent. The doctors pronounced me in fine physical shape.’ The lie was automatic, almost unconscious, thought Quinn.
B’s eyes defocused, the deck of cards indecipherable sigils beneath his hands.

(8♠) Beretta .25. Sitting on the balcony of his room in the Loew’s hotel in Monte Carlo, B watched the workmen fix road markings for the motor racing that would take place next week. The late afternoon sun painted the harbour with gold as he finished the club sandwich and drained the last of the glass of Johnny Walker Black Label. On his knees was the conference pack of the neurosurgery symposium he was attending, where he hoped to catch up with Blufeldt. Blufeldt had assumed the legitimate identity of a specialist doctor and had attached himself to a radical clinic in Bern, Switzerland. He was giving a paper on neurology, brain injury and fugue states. B stood up, brushed the crumbs from his knees, and pinned his identification tag onto his shirt. At least the others would know who he was supposed to be.

(9♠) Jackie O. As B entered Catherine Penny from behind, he registered the way her hips, flaring out from the waist, repeated the sensual curves of the mouthpiece of the telephone. Her back, bent rigidly over Markham’s desk, echoed the planes of the reclining chair that sat, as in a psychiatrist’s consulting room, to one side of the grand office. As he moved inside her, B thought of the coil that sat in Catherine’s womb like an ironic plastic echo of the DNA double-helix. He held Catherine’s hips as if he were piloting the Aston at high speed down the autobahn between Köln and Berlin.

(10♠) Neverland. ‘Blaufeld is in Florida,’ said Markham, looking at B carefully. ‘Down at the Cape, the disused launch site. We don’t think he’s interested in the physical possibilities of the gantries, but…’
‘I always wanted to be an astronaut,’ said B. ‘The NASA program drew a lot of astronauts from Navy fliers, like Sheppard. I met him once. A difficult man. He told me flatly that no Royal Navy Commander could ever make NASA grade.’
‘Space,’ Blaufeld had said, ‘is money.’

(J♠) Solar Transits. The strip lighting haloed from Bluffield’s large, pink, shaven skull as he looked up at B from under cerebrotonic brows.
‘You’ve never understood my work, James. God knows I’ve tried to explain. But I knew you’d come. Particularly here, of all places.’
B looked out of the office windows and saw the rusted, half-ruined gantries propped like a disused stage-set against the Florida sky. He could feel the .25 Beretta in its clam-shell holster beneath his left arm, but knew he would never use it now. The cool afternoon seemed to stretch forever, like the nearby glades.
‘How long have you been having these fugues, James?’ asked Bluffield.

(Q♠) Restitution. Karen Blunt sat astride the Yamaha, revving it slowly, her aviator shades reflecting the parking lot where B sat in the open-top Pontiac. One side of B’s face was turning coral in the intense afternoon sun, as he lived out a waking dream, his memory tapping out the algebra of his past. Karen’s dark hair cascaded onto her sturdy shoulders and chest, which were buttoned up in a grubby NASA flight suit scavenged from Kennedy. Here at Cocoa Beach, outside the bar where the astronauts once dreamed of flight, B and Karen pitched in the oceanic tides of time.

(K♠) Pinewood to Shepperton. In the attaché case B found his instructions from Markham, consisting of a sequence of defaced postcards posted to B by Bloveldt, from Cape Kennedy, Florida; the Alamagordo testing grounds, New Mexico; Utah Beach, Normandy, France; and Fort Knox, Kentucky. They read, in date order: ‘(1) Maiden flight of Concorde (2) Abbey Road (3) Rolling Thunder (4) Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong walks on moon (5) The Wild Bunch (6) Inauguration of President Richard Milhous Nixon (7) Medium Cool (8) d.o.b 20 March (9) Let It Bleed (10) The Stones in the Park (11) Tommy (12) The election of French President Georges Pompidou, succeeding General de Gaulle (13) Woodstock (14) Altamont Speedway (15) On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (16) The Atrocity Exhibition.’

..:: CONTINUED: >> Part 2 ::…

‘Iterative Architecture: a Ballardian Text’

by Brian Baker

..:: CONTINUED from >> Part 1 ::…

♣♠♥♦

The Joker. The Joker in the pack is the card that, in some games, can replace (or substitute for, take the place of) any of the others. In this sense, the Joker is the empty sign.

♣♠♥♦

(A♥) Time Drill. ‘I don’t remember much about my father,’ replied B.
‘No, I’m sorry, you misunderstand,’ said Bluefield. ‘I meant Markham, Sir Richard Markham.’
‘Ah…’ B looked a little confused, then passed a thin, sunburnt hand across his eyes. Bluefield thought B looked exhausted after his ordeal in the Pontiac. Karen Blunt had finally rescued the half-blistered scarecrow figure in his ragged flying jacket, and at least the soft flying helmet had prevented too much sunstroke. Even now, after a week’s rest and medical attention, Bluefield could see the sores around B’s dirty neckline, beneath the leather collar of his jacket.
‘Are you really a doctor?’ asked B, looking up.
‘Of a special kind.’

(2♥) Unwritten histories. ‘You’ve been in Florida before?’ asked Karen.
B was surprised to hear her speak in light, rather melodious accentless English.
‘Yes, some time ago. I met a man by the name of Scaramanga.’
Blowfield smiled gently and looked down at his large, soft hands. Pink and scrubbed, they looked out of place on the dusty grey melamine table-top. They sat in a red vinyl horseshoe-shaped booth in the abandoned diner, three Coca-Colas in green bottles growing ever closer to blood heat in front of them.
‘I read that case,’ said Blowfield. ‘You weren’t quite yourself to begin with, I recall.’
B’s eyes flickered as he began to enter another fugue.
‘And who am I now, doctor?’

(3♥) Whisky and soda. The fugues seemed to take the place of any true dream sleep, but that afternoon B drew up a sun-lounger beneath an overgrown palm, and drifted to sleep by the side of the drained swimming pool. He dreamed of flight. Propeller blades flashed from his shoulders in the golden sunlight as he ascended into the Florida sky, below him the gantries and concrete aprons of Canaveral. A space-age archangel, clothed in light, he rose until he could see the curvature on the blue rim of the earth and the vault of the sky deepened to a crushing black. Turning on his back, in coronation armour flashing like a new star, he awaited blissful deliverance.

(4♥) Kuomintang. B sat in the wrecked Aston, its red leather trim burst like a rotten scarecrow. He toyed with the broken instrument stalk as he stared at the cracked dials and buckled binnacle, the Aston’s instruments frozen at the crash speed of a hundred and twenty. Feeling his cracked kneecap, B pressed down on the accelerator pedal and saw, through the frosted windshield, the roads of the International Settlement in Shanghai, where he sat on his father’s lap as they drove down empty boulevards in the grandiose Packard that his father bought to impress high-ranking Chinese officials.

(5♥) Viennese Benediction. ‘Who do you want to be, James?’ asked Blovelt.
‘Is it a matter of choice, doctor?’
‘For you, it’s a matter of necessity,’ said Blovelt, drawing aside the Styrofoam cup of coffee.
‘I think you may have the question wrong, if I may say so,’ said B. ‘It’s not a matter of who do I want to be, but why?’
Blovelt slowly traced the parabola of his pink skull with his left palm.
‘Have you seen her, again?’
B seemed, with an effort of will, to come to himself, and looked searchingly at Blovelt, certainty and horror at home in the grey eyes.
‘She’s out there on the gantries, doctor,’ said B. ‘She keeps escaping me, and I don’t have much time left. But I’ll find her.’

(6♥) X-1. In one of his increasingly rare periods of physical activity, B walked towards the Apollo gantry and heard the spluttering engine of the Cessna. Through the cockpit window, as the aircraft circled the gantry, B could make out the habitual white coat, red shirt and pink skull of Blyfield, the man who had murdered his wife, but who had now somehow brought her back to him. Blyfield was waving, pointing to the top of the gantry, and as B looked up, he saw a figure clambering among the rusted geometry of the access platforms. There she was. As B made his way to the stairwell on aching, sore legs, he heard the Cessna’s engine cut out, and watched as Blyfield wrestled the aircraft to a controlled crash landing on the concrete apron.

(7♥) Cobalt Blue. B and Blueweldt met in the mezzanine of the Monte Carlo convention centre, which presented itself as a provincial casino without the formal wear. The foyer was crowded with middle-aged men in light summer suits.
‘Dr. Blueweldt, I assume?’ asked Bond, peering at a name tag.
‘My dear James! How lovely to see you here!’ Blueweldt warmly clasped B’s hand. ‘How have you been?’
B looked searchingly into Blueweldt’s eyes for signs of dissimulation.
‘Have you been to any of the panels?’ asked Blueweldt ruefully. ‘Second rate, to a man. As you can see, they all look like middle-management executives. Appearances, in this case, are not deceptive.’
Blueweldt’s own light-blue three-piece blended him in perfectly with the crowd, but B’s worn leather jacket, cracked aviator glasses and khaki pants identified him either as a media don or a stray patient. B opened his conference pack and scanned the schedule of panels.
‘Nothing of interest next, doctor. Shall we step outside for a sundowner and a talk?’

ABOVE: Artwork by Jeffrey K. Potter for ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (commissioned for the collection Memories of the Space Age).

(8♥) Yarrow Stalks. As he finally stepped onto the access platform near the top of the rusting Apollo gantry, legs shaking and a fugue beginning to come on, B saw his wife looking at him from a pool of silver sunlight. His wife pointed away from Canaveral, out into the light and air. He wondered if she was beckoning him to step out into the æther and join her. He edged further along the platform towards the open end, feeling the pull of the light airs that breathed past the gap. As he approached, time slowing, he realised what his wife was pointing towards – there he seemed to see, in the far distance, the light shining on the Everglades, a burnished mirror of the sun. He stared, the reflected light searing an image onto his retina. Turning, slowly turning, he realised that his wife had gone.

(9♥) Dilation of the Iris. Ordinarily, B only found motor vehicles interesting if he was behind the wheel, and despite the glamour of the grand prix circus that had now arrived in Monaco, this week was no exception. He had lost track of Blaufield some time before the end of the neurology conference, having become bored by the presentations of the delegates and unimpressed by the exhibits and displays. He had drifted off into strolling the streets of the city principality, unwilling to return to London and admit – perhaps to himself most of all – that he had lost the urgency of the hunt. He haunted the harbour, obsessed with the Mediterranean light playing upon the water and the large white motor yachts that now filled the marina. Time, here in this piece of France that was not France, seemed to stretch into a long, martini-filled afternoon.

(10♥) Emergency Procedures. Using his conference accreditation to flash the security staff, B made his way with the crowd onto the deck of a large motor launch and accepted a glass of champagne from a waiter. His worn leather jacket and aviator sunshades gave him just the right kind of down-at-heel glamour so that the crowd accepted him as an out-of-work American character actor or throwback racing driver, scion of a far less technical and bureaucratic age. Bored by the upscale small talk, he drifted to the stern rail of the launch and looked back across the marina. At his elbow, a young woman in matching aviator glasses coughed slightly, and said, ‘Thinking of jumping?’
He turned and looked at the self-possessed young woman in the pale blue silk dress who leaned into him, looking up, and saw his own rather ragged features reflected in her glasses. She was a head shorter than B, but held herself with a kind of rakish confidence that marked her difference from the crowd behind them.
‘No, of flying,’ he said.
‘You’re not a race driver, then?’
‘I can’t say I’m much of anything.’
‘You do, however, have a name?’
‘It’s James. James B.’

(J♥) Facts in the Case. They stood arm in arm as the fumes from the high-octane engines hazed the sidewalk, pressed as it was with spectators. Their ill-timed stroll had locked them into the very circus they had hoped to avoid. The falsetto roar of the factory-team racing cars blasting past the barriers stilled their conversation, and they communicated by way of near-hysterical mime, raised eyebrows, pointedly directed eye movement and clasps of the hand. Both wore smiles that the crush and the noise could not erase. B motioned with his head to cut past the end of a run-off area to walk away from the crowds and up into the town away from the circuit. As they disengaged themselves from the crowd and walked past a race marshall frantically waving a red flag, B was suddenly conscious of a blast of engine-hot air that lifted him bodily then slammed him back onto the asphalt. Time and space wheeled like a burst tyre. His ears full of the roar of the dying high-performance engine, he turned his head to the right and saw her propped up against the buckled armcove, smiling slightly at him and tenderly brushing away the drops of blood that spilled from a graze in her scalp onto the white cotton dress.

(Q♥) Left Luggage Office. ‘Come in,’ said Markham.
‘Thank you,’ replied Professor Blowfield with a slight bow. ‘You would like to discuss the case of James B?’
‘Yes. Although when he came back from Switzerland, he professed the desire to return to active service, his behaviour has been erratic to say the least. Here is a record of the surveillance that one of our top female operatives has been conducting.’
Blowfield took up the file that had been slid across the desk to him, and scanned down the list of B’s movements and activities. His eyebrows, beneath the dome of his naked forehead, raised in surprise once, then again. ‘Here?’
M smiled ruefully. ‘I thought that once B’s dalliance with a wife had been ended, he would come back to us. It seems he has, in fact, gone much further away. Is there anything else we can do?’
Blowfield winced, and dipped his head. Looking up at Markham, he said, ‘There’s one more thing we can try. After that…’

(K♥) Zoëtropic. B drove out to one of the abandoned small towns on the edge of the glades, looking for an airboat. He finally found one in the late afternoon, one that started after a little tinkering, and seated high in the driver’s chair, he powered up the caged propeller and swung the airboat out into the middle of the reed-choked creek. He throttled back and let the engine idle as the boat skimmed out into the glades proper, skirting the causeway he had driven on. Once out into flat water, he opened the airboat up, skimming at a speed that seemed literally unearthly, a dream of flight, airborne on water, airborne on light. He glanced to his left and saw his wife sitting beside him looking forward into the sun, dark hair streaming behind her, light cotton dress swept against her breasts and torso. He looked ahead, feeling the fugue coming on him again, and pointed the airboat towards the sun that dipped molten gold into the Everglades.

Diamonds ♦

New Worlds (6♦). Under Michael Moorcock’s editorship from 1964, New Worlds magazine became the home of the science fiction ‘New Wave’. The archetypal New Wave science fiction story was textually experimental and formally and/or generically self-conscious; alienated from the mores and conventions of contemporary mainstream culture (and mainstream ‘literary’ writing); and infused with a cynical, dystopian or counter-cultural politics, signified in the recurrent use of the scientific concept of entropy. Moorcock has written about New Worlds:

Style and technique was merely a means to an end – frequently a very moral means to some very moral ends. We were looking at the Vietnam War, Kennedy’s assassination, the computer revolution, the armaments industry, the manipulations of the media, the profound hypocrisies of the liberal bourgeoisie, the appalling condition of the majority of human beings on the planet, the useless currency of outmoded or inappropriate political language. But our response was scarcely a puritan one and neither did we recoil from experiencing our subject matter. We relished and embraced change, we celebrated the advent of new technologies and theories which opened up the multiverse for further exploration, which helped us understand our own behaviour and which provided us with some profound and spectacular metaphors! If the world was going to hell, we were determined to see how, but we were also determined to enjoy it while it was happening. Our curiosity was considerably greater than our uncertainty. [12]

The iterability of Ballard’s work makes him a central player in the ‘New Wave’ and in New Worlds.

Out There (8♦). James Bond is crucially implicated in the social and ideological practices of tourism and consumerism; but Bond is ‘at home’ anywhere, as in From Russia, With Love, where he is accepted in the Turkish gypsy caravanserai as a kind of ‘brother’ and is even accorded the honour of judging the outcome of a dispute between women. As Vivian Halloran notes in ‘Tropical Bond’, the issue of ‘passing’ for local recurs in Bond texts which consistently, she argues, ‘complicate Bond’s whiteness’; following Edward Said’s argument about Kipling’s Kim in Culture and Imperialism, I would like to stress here that Bond can ‘pass’, even as a non-white other, where the ethnically troubling ‘villain’ (from Dr No onwards) most assuredly cannot. [13] Ballard’s protagonists are alienated everywhere, even ‘at home’; the fragmentation of the Traven/ Talbot/ Tallis figure is of a different order to the disguises that Bond affects, under which the ‘real’ James Bond still exists. In The Atrocity Exhibition, there is no such foundational unitary subjectivity. Where the Ballardian protagonist travels to different parts of the world, he only ‘passes’ in that the indigenous people recognise such a radical psychological dislocation in him that he is not really there at all.

Pleasure Periphery (7♦). Ballard and Fleming share an interest in what Michael Denning calls the ‘pleasure periphery’, ‘the tourist belt surrounding the industrialized world’: the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, or certain parts of East Asia. The centrality of tourism and travel to Bond texts is echoed in such Ballard texts as ‘Having a Wonderful Time’ (1978) or, more importantly, Cocaine Nights (1996). Denning writes, after quoting from a scene in Fleming’s From Russia, With Love:

Here we find the epitome of the tourist experience: the moment of relaxed visual contemplation from above, leaning on the balustrade; the aesthetic reduction of a social entity, the city, to a natural object, coterminous with the waves of the sea; the calculations of the tourist’s economy, exchanging physical discomfort for a more “authentic” view; and the satisfaction of having made the ‘right’ exchange, having “got” the experience, possessed the “view”. [14]

It is no coincidence, argues Denning, that the Bond narratives find their location in the ‘pleasure periphery’: Fleming’s texts articulate the ‘tourist gaze’ (analysed by John Urry), the mobile gaze of consumption embodied by jet-age travellers to ‘exotic’ tourist destinations. [15] In Ballard’s fictions, the ‘pleasure periphery’ is the location for what Andrzej Gasiorek diagnoses as ‘a world dominated not by work but by leisure’, although in Kingdom Come (2007) and elsewhere, the ‘pleasure periphery’ has now been imported to the centre. [16]

Queens and Kings (3♦). In ‘Confetti Royale’/‘The Beach Murders’, Quimby, who is identified several times as the ‘dealer’ of the deck of cards that ‘he set out […] on the balcony table’, both plays a card game alone (with which he ‘amused himself in his hideaway’) and, by extension, with the other characters in the story. [17] Each card has two aspects: the number or face upon it (denoting its value), and on the reverse or back, a picture of the bullfighter Cordobès, whose image is thereby repeated fifty-two times across the table, another figure of iteration. There are no easy homologies between Queen, King and Jack and the characters in ‘Confetti Royale’, however (even though there is a Princess): what is important is the role of the dealer, and the game itself. The game as metaphor for espionage informs this short story as it has the spy genre since Kipling’s Kim (1901) and the colonial ‘Great Game’ played by Britain and Russia for domination of the Indian subcontinent. Kim’s fluid and liminal subjectivity is an index of the instability of the spy-subject at the centre of espionage narrative: the secret agent becomes the ‘double agent’. [18]

Illustration by Michael Foreman for the original Doubleday edition of The Atrocity Exhibition.

Reified Subjects (4♦). David Punter, in The Hidden Script, identifies the centrality of subjectivity to Ballard’s concerns in his fiction. Punter writes:

The long tradition of enclosed and unitary subjectivity comes to mean less and less to him as he explores the ways in which person [sic] is increasingly controlled by landscape and machine, increasingly becomes a point of intersection for overloaded scripts and processes which have effectively concealed their distant origins from human agency. [19]

Punter’s assessment of Ballard’s critique of subjectivity can be exemplified most clearly in The Atrocity Exhibition, where the Traven/Tallis/Talbot figure, whose ‘breakdown’ is materialised in the fragmented form of the text and in the iterated (‘obsessional’) motifs, is a liminal or fractured subject. Ballard’s critique of contemporary life is articulated largely through his destablisation of unitary subjectivity, a fragmentation which leads to the release of ‘unconscious’ forces and desires which remain obscure (as conscious ‘motivation’) to the subject that enacts them. Figures for the fragmented or replicated subject can be found in ‘Confetti Royale’, for instance, in the repeated image of the bullfighter Cordobès on the backs of the cards, or in the first paragraph, where Princess Manon sees herself in the mirrors: ‘In the triptych of mirrors above the dressing table she gazed at the endless replicas of herself’. [20] Ballardian subjects are rarely agents in their own narratives; agency is displaced on to the ‘provocateur’ antagonist, Vaughan or Wilder Penrose, the third point in the Ballardian triangulation.

Secret Agent (5♦). Fleming’s Bond, by way of contrast with the Ballardian subject, seems all agency, however ‘secret’. Bond, though, is acted upon in the death of his wife in OHMSS, and is subjected to a beating of his genitals, administered by Le Chiffre, in Casino Royale. There are limits to Bond’s agency. Also in Casino Royale, Bond is at first ‘defeated’ by Le Chiffre and the cards and is only saved in his mission by the offer of ‘Marshall aid’ (American finance) by the CIA operative Felix Leiter. His rescue from Le Chiffre is also ex machina, as a Smersh agent enters and kills Le Chiffre and his crew, only to leave Bond alive as he has no orders to kill the British agent. The fantasy of total agency represented by the figure of Bond, an expression of Cold War and decolonisation-era anxieties about Britain’s geopolitical role and influence, is destabilised by the texts themselves.

The Beach Murders (2♦). At the missing centre of ‘Confetti Royale’, the 1966 short story that was renamed ‘The Beach Murders’, is Quimby, the ‘absconded cipher chief’ from the US State department, who is the ‘dealer’ of the pack of cards that feature throughout the narrative. Quimby is an encoder, the master of this textual game, though he himself remains an enigma (his motivations obscure even to himself: ‘what these obsessives in Moscow and Washington failed to realize was that for once he might have no motive at all’). [21] The retitling of the story – the text becoming its own double – emphasises the murders rather than the Cold War espionage milieu, placing the enigma ‘who killed?’ at the heart of the generic recoding: the text becomes a detective fiction rather than a spy fiction. As the ‘Introduction’ to the text suggests, the form of the story is an invitation to the reader to decode the narrative, recombine the 26 alphabeticized paragraphs and narrative events to resolve the text by identifying the murderer(s). No such resolution can take place. Of the murders, the following can be stated:
1. the Russian agent Kovorski murders the Romanoff Princess Manon (with certainty: her death is described).
2. the ‘American limbo dancer’ Lydia is killed (accidentally) by a bomb planted in the CIA agent Statler’s Mercedes by Kovorski (paragraph ends at the point at which she presses the starter and sets off the device)
3. Quimby kills the Russian agent Raissa (less certain, but probable)
4. Kovorski is shot and killed by an unknown assailant
5. Statler is killed in an unknown manner by an unknown assailant
6. Quimby and Sir Giles are left alive at the end of the narrative (probable, because there is no narrative of their deaths)

Of the murders, then, one is known; two are probably ascribable; two remain mysteries. The fate of two characters, including Quimby the ‘dealer’, in unknown. The recombinatory game ‘fails’ because there is, and can be, no solution to this criminal narrative. We might suspect that Quimby, as the ‘dealer’, is responsible, but the murderer(s) might also include Sir Giles or other (unknown) figures. The ‘Introduction’ also suggests that the textual game of deduction is doubled: the ‘solution’ to the ‘mystery of the Beach Murders’ requires a ‘key’, perhaps the very phrase that Lydia lifts from Kovorski’s Travel-Riter ink ribbon. As the text foregrounds from the very beginning, ‘any number of solutions is possible, and a final answer to the mystery […] lies forever hidden.’ [22]

Upwardly Mobile (10♦). James Bond is a curiously classless figure, despite the over-coded aristocratic connoisseurship purveyed by the Roger Moore film incarnation. In the film of Casino Royale, Bond and Vesper Lynd travel by high-speed train to Montenegro (the re-location of the casino). After dinner, the two swap character assessments/ character assassinations. After Bond essays a rather trite analysis of an anxious, beautiful-but-brainy femininity, Lynd reverses the trick: Bond is an orphan, the product of a public school and Oxford education (where he never ‘fitted in’), and MI6 via the SAS. Lynd then asks how his lamb was for dinner; ‘Skewered,’ says Bond. ‘One sympathises.’ Bond may be embarrassed by the ease in which Lynd is able to ‘skewer’ his character, but its detail signifies how dis-located he is in terms of social structures: he is an outsider, ‘maladjusted’, a status which in fact generates his mobility as a secret agent. Bond’s popularity can partly be read as a reflection of the aspirational, economically mobile, consumption-oriented imperatives of the British middle class in the 1960s and afterwards – the period of the Bond film phenomenon. Ballard’s own life history echoes Bond’s: not an orphan, but with distanced parents and Chinese servants in loco parentis; public school in England post-war (the Leys School in Cambridge), then Cambridge University; a short spell in the RAF, then marriage and life as a professional writer. Ballard’s connection to, and insight into, the mores and aspirations of the affluent British middle class is clear throughout his writings. Ballard is, in some ways, as exemplary a twentieth-century Englishman as is Bond, even though both are ‘outsiders’.

Vesper Lynd (Q♦). The second point of the Ballardian narrative triangulation, the wife or lover, is often unfaithful or even lost to the protagonist. Even Crash’s Catherine Ballard is no femme fatale, however; sexual infidelity is less a matter of betrayal than of a mirror-image of the protagonist’s own personal trajectory of (self)alienation and (self)discovery. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, drawing upon the critical work of Rene Girard in her text Between Men, writes of an ‘erotic triangle’ in texts, where the (unspoken) relationship between two rival males predominates over, and regulates, the relationship each has with the ‘third’ point of the triangle, the female. The female thus becomes a counter or marker in a system of exchange: a medium or locus of repressed male desire. [23] Ballard’s triangulations are a geometry of homosociality and homoeroticism, made most explicit in Crash, but present everywhere.

War Fever (J♦). The title of Ballard’s last short story collection, ‘war fever’ symbolises the underlying pathology at work during the Twentieth century: an implication of desire, destruction and death.

X = ? (A♦). Ballard’s texts tend to work particularly through the recognition of the component. This is most evident in The Atrocity Exhibition, where each chapter is itself a ‘condensed novel’ and each titled paragraph thereby a ‘chapter’. Here, the architectural/ iterative imperatives of the Ballardian text are at their fullest extent. Brian McHale, in Postmodernist Fiction, suggests that ‘a pattern of repetition-with-variation’ is a central compositional motif in Ballard’s 1960s disaster fiction, and goes on to propose that ‘a fixed repertoire of modules, many of them repeated from the earlier apocalyptic novels, are differently recombined and manipulated from story to story’. ‘All this suggests,’ argues McHale, ‘the game-like permutation of a fixed repertoire of motifs – “art in a closed field”’. [24] Ballard’s ‘modular’ texts are therefore devices to work another iteration on the Ballardian algebra, the triangulation of protagonist, wife and provocateur/antagonist. Where P is the protagonist, A is alienation, V is the provocateur, W is the wife, and T is time:

X (Transcendence, Escape, Death) = ((P/A x V) +/- W) –T

It is not the aesthetic of the fragment that is central to the Ballardian text; it is the algebra of the iterative component or module.

You Know My Name (9♦). The title song of the 2006 Casino Royale was written by Chris Cornell and David Arnold, and performed by Cornell. Its rock dynamics give the title sequence a kinetic edge, and is one of the more memorable of recent times. Its title and refrain, ‘You Know My Name’, signifies that the Bondian imaginary, like the Ballardian, is recognisable without (necessarily) being explicitly named.

Zones of Transit (K♦). The Ballardian protagonist is often in movement, physically and metaphysically; between one place and another, between one state and another. Cast in the role of detective in Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes and Kingdom Come, what is revealed by the protagonist’s investigations is of less importance than the progressive shedding of the layers of repression, self-delusion or unknowingness that constitute the protagonist’s world-view, compromised by the experiences the investigation leads him into. Just as there is no solution to ‘The Beach Murders’, only a game to be played, Ballard’s texts remain unresolved, in transit.

♣♠♥♦

The Joker. There are two jokers in the pack; like Gemini, twins, red and black. They do not conform to one of the four suits, but take their colours. They are part of the pack but not part of it, always present but unused in many card games. The extra two cards, a kind of supplement, disrupt the seductive numerology of 13 that otherwise attends the ‘French deck’ of cards: 52 cards, in 4 suits, 13 to a suit; 13 x 2 = 26, the letters in the alphabet; 13 x 4 = 52, the number of weeks in a year; 13 is the number of disciples present at the Last Supper, the unluckiest of numbers. The extra two cards, the jokers, the twins, indicate that all this significance is but a game. The jokers are the fly in the ointment, the empty sign, the absent code.

♣♠♥♦

Notes

[1] Dan Lockwood, ‘J.G. Ballard and the Architectures of Control’, Ballardian: The World of J.G. Ballard, 3 January 2008 . Accessed 18 February 2008.
[2] ‘Obeying the surrealist formula’: Iain Sinclair & Hermione Lee on Ballard’, Ballardian: The World of J.G. Ballard, transcription of discussion between Mark Lawson, Hermione Lee and Iain Sinclair on Front Row, broadcast BBC Radio 4 5 February 2008 . Accessed 18 February 2008.
[3] David Pringle, Earth is the Alien Planet: J.G. Ballard’s Four-Dimensional Nightmare (San Bernadino CA; The Borgo Press), p.16.
[4] Simon Sellars, ‘My name is Maitland, Donald Maitland’, Ballardian: The World of J.G. Ballard, 9 February 2008 . Accessed 19 February 2008.
[5] Ken Cooper, ‘“Zero Pays the House”: The Las Vegas Novel and Atomic Roulette’, Contemporary Literature 33:3 (Fall 1992), 528-544 (p.539).
[6] J.G. Ballard, ‘The Index’, The Complete Short Stories (London: Flamingo, 2001), pp.940-945; ‘Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown’, The Complete Short Stories, pp.849-855; ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’, The Complete Short Stories, pp.1101-1104.
[7] J.G. Ballard, ‘A Question of Re-Entry’, The Complete Short Stories, pp.435-458 (p.453).
[8] J.G. Ballard, ‘Memories of the Space Age’, The Complete Short Stories, pp.1037-1060 (p.1049).
[9] David Punter, Modernity (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2007), p.137.
[10] J.G. Ballard, ‘The Terminal Beach’, The Complete Short Stories, pp.589-604 (p.595).
[11] Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, ‘Translator’s Foreword’ to Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge MA and London: Belknap Press, 1999), pp.ix-xiv (p.xi).
[12] Michael Moorcock, ‘Introduction’ to The New Nature of the Catastrophe, Moorcock and Langdon Jones, eds. (1993) (London: Orion, 1997), pp. viii-ix.
[13] Vivian Halloran, ‘Tropical Bond’. Ian Fleming and James Bond: The Cultural Politics of 007, Edward P. Comentale, Stephen Watt and Skip Willman, eds. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005), p. 158-177 (p.165).
[14] Michael Denning, Cover Stories: Narrative and ideology in the British spy thriller (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), p. 105; p.104.
[15] John Urry, The Tourist Gaze, 2nd edition (London: Sage, 2002).
[16] Andrzej Gasiorek, J.G. Ballard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p.26.
[17] Ballard, ‘The Beach Murders’, The Complete Short Stories, p.663.
[18] See Brian Baker, Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Representing Men in Popular Genres 1945-2000 (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), chapter 2.
[19] David Punter, The Hidden Script (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), p.9.
[20] Ballard, ‘The Beach Murders’, The Complete Short Stories, p.663.
[21] J.G. Ballard, ‘The Beach Murders’, The Complete Short Stories, pp.663-668 (p.664).
[22] Ballard, ‘The Beach Murders’, The Complete Short Stories, p.663.
[23] I have myself written on this in relation to Crash: Brian Baker, ‘The Resurrection of Desire: J.G. Ballard’s Crash as a Transgressive Text’, Foundation 80 (November 2000), pp.84-96.
[24] Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Methuen, 1987), p.69; p.70.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ The ‘DNA of the Present’ in the Fossil Record of the Cold War Through the Imagery of JG Ballard, Related Sources and Documents in Various Media
+ ‘My name is Maitland, Donald Maitland’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LEFT: Image by Rick McGrath.

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

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

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

LEFT: Image by Simon Sellars.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REFERENCES

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

Growing up [in Shepperton] from 1987–1998 I knew the mysterious J G Ballard lived in the house next door to my sister’s best friend Tara. Your beautiful photographs bring back so many memories for me, especially the curly bridge from the end of my road. Living there and walking past his house every day I never once laid eyes on the man himself but so many stories circulated about him that he was almost like a mythical character. We believed he was a billionaire but he refused to leave his semi in Shepperton and that he had a car in his living room. I’m sure there were some nudist rumours too. Does he still live there?

A billionaire! Not quite…

One of the things I really love about Thomas Cazals’ Ballard docudrama is the way it taps into this mythical strata, exaggerating it for supreme comic effect (but still with all the affection due our favourite writer). I think I agree with Toby Litt, who said on his panel at Kosmopolis that he sometimes wishes Ballard had never excavated at length his Shanghai background in interviews.

What would we be left with? How should we fill in the gaps, answer the questions asked of us by his work, without the distorting lens of biography? With musings similar to Vicky and Thomas, trying to make sense of this warped genius who seems to have drifted into our reality from a parallel dimension, where he is indeed enjoying a hearty laugh at our expense.

by Rick McGrath

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

Hola, Simon, and buenos dias from Barcelona.

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

It’s a great place to be…

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

OK, you ready? Visitor’s pass showing?

ABOVE: CCCB exterior.

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

ENTERING THE EXHIBITION

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

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

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

ABOVE: Martin Amis pontificates; the media records.

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

AUTOPSY #1: What I Believe

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

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

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

AUTOPSY #2: From Shanghai to Shepperton

ABOVE: After the 1937 bombing.

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

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

ABOVE: Watching Shanghai Jim.

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

AUTOPSY #3: Landscapes of Dream

ABOVE: From the surreal image “machine”.

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

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

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

ABOVE: From the surreal image “machine”.

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

AUTOPSY #4: Inner Space

ABOVE: Pixelated Ballard.

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

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

ABOVE: From Rick’s JGB collection.

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

AUTOPSY #5: Disaster Area

ABOVE: Drought car in sand.

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

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

AUTOPSY #6: Technology and Pornography

ABOVE: Cronenberg’s Crash.

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

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

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

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

ABOVE: The big visual wall display.

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

AUTOPSY #7: Asepsis and Neobarbarism

ABOVE: Infinity drenched in blue.

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

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

AUTOPSY #8: The Ballard Library

ABOVE: From my JGB collection.

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

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

ABOVE: Donovan Wylie’s photography.

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

AUTOPSY #9: Ballardian Art

ABOVE: Michelle Lord with her Ballard-inspired art.

I believe in nothing.

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

ABOVE: Mike Bonsall’s Ballardian home movie.

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

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

You can keep the surgical mask as a souvenir.

THE MEDICAL TEAM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that, Simon, is just about it.

From Barcelona, adios!

– Rick.

Rick McGrath 2008.

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

…:: FURTHER INFO:

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

…:: Previously on Ballardian:

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

BALLARDOSCOPE: SOME ATTEMPTS AT APPROACHING THE WRITER AS A VISIONARY

by Jordi Costa

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: Eltham Lido, by Gigi Cifali.

Curiously, the house we moved to had a drained swimming pool in its garden. It must have been the first drained pool I had seen, and it struck me as strangely significant in a way I have never fully grasped. My parents decided not to fill the pool, and it lay in the garden like a mysterious empty presence. I would walk through the unmown grass and stare down at its canted floor. I could hear the bombing and gunfire all around Shanghai, and see the vast pall of smoke that lay over the city, but the drained pool remained apart. In the coming years I would see a great many drained and half-drained pools, as British residents left Shanghai for Australia and Canada, or the assumed ‘safety’ of Hong Kong and Singapore, and they all seemed as mysterious as that first pool in the French Concession. I was unaware of the obvious symbolism that British power was ebbing away, because no one thought so at the time, and faith in the British Empire was at its jingoistic height.

J.G. Ballard, Miracles of Life (2008).

Here are some more Ballard-evoking images: drained swimming pools as photographed by Gigi Cifali in his Absence of Water series.

Via BLDGBLOG:

The photos here are all by Gigi Cifali, who originally trained as a topographer, from a series called “Absence of Water.” The images document the disused pools of London – and there are many more of these photos to be seen over at Polar Inertia or on Cifali’s own website.

I’m reminded, though, of a great line from J.G. Ballard’s novel Empire of the Sun:

“Jim watched Mr. Maxted sway along the tiled verge of the empty swimming pool, curious to see if he would fall in. If Mr. Maxted was always accidentally falling into swimming pools, as indeed he always was, why did he only fall into them when they were filled with water?”

Why, indeed.

ABOVE: Erith Pool, by Gigi Cifali.

Royal, eyes almost closed, one hand gripping Laing’s shoulder, pointed towards the swimming-pool.

In the yellow light reflected off the greasy tiles, the long tank of the bone-pit stretched in front of them. The water had long since drained away, but the sloping floor was covered with the skulls, bones and dismemb