Slip-case designed by David Pelham for a Penguin boxed set of four 1974 Ballard reprints.

by James Pardey

The idea that the world and everything in it is made from the four ‘elements’ of earth, air, fire and water endured among philosophers from antiquity to the Renaissance. All things, they said, were a combination of these four building blocks, and whether something was one thing or another – a rock, say, or a leaf – depended only on the relative amounts of each element in it. The idea was not so naïve as it seems, for when wood burned it was seen to release fire, air and water, as steam, until only earth remained as ashes, and in one sense the philosophers were not so very wide of the mark, since nowadays these ‘elements’ are known as solid, liquid, gas and energy.

It has often been said that J G Ballard’s quartet of disaster novels published in 1962–66 draws on these four classical elements for the natural catastrophes that destroy civilization in each of the books. In The Wind From Nowhere a global super-hurricane (air) reaches speeds of several hundred miles an hour, toppling trees, reducing cities to rubble, and darkening the skies with debris and topsoil. In The Drowned World rising sea levels (water) have flooded most of the Earth’s populated areas, and London lies submerged beneath steaming lagoons and primeval swamps that are ringed by jungle and overrun with reptiles. The Drought presents a future where rain is a thing of the past and the Sun (fire) has dried up the lakes and river beds, creating a parched landscape of ghost towns and burning cities. And in The Crystal World a bizarre transmutation of matter (earth) is turning everything into a coruscating mineral realm where plants, animals and people are mutating into sculptures of glass and quartz.

This analogy is almost always noted without further comment, although in fact it may be taken further. For just as Plato and Aristotle had posited the existence of a mysterious and immaterial fifth element, or quintessence, that suffuses all things, so something similar pervades much of Ballard’s early fiction, which, in addition to the four novels, includes two collections of short stories, The Four-Dimensional Nightmare in 1963 and The Terminal Beach in 1964. So what in a Ballardian context is this quintessential element?

Ballard himself pre-empted the question in a guest editorial that he wrote for the British science fiction magazine New Worlds in 1962. In it he argued that it was time for sf to turn its back on outer space and its standard paraphernalia of rockets, ray guns and aliens, and strike out in a new direction that, by analogy with outer space, had become known as inner space. This was not a reference to the hollow earth stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs as Brian Aldiss later quipped[1]. The term had previously been used in 1953 by the English novelist J B Priestley whose essay, They Come From Inner Space[2], presented a critique of sf as he saw it at the time. Priestley argued that the move into outer space was a move ‘in the wrong direction’ and maintained that sf should instead be ‘moving inward’ to explore ‘the hidden life of the psyche’. He singled out the American writer Ray Bradbury as a pioneer of inner space[3] and added that although Bradbury used traditional sf motifs such as spaceships and Martians, he did so in order to ‘show us what is really happening in men’s minds’. Priestley held that men are not as rational as they like to think they are, but are also driven by the desires, urges and irrational instincts of the subconscious mind. For Priestley, the idea that people’s actions are dictated solely by their conscious selves was akin to the equally fallacious assumption that ‘what can be seen of an iceberg is all there is of it’.

April 1974 Penguin reprint with a cover design by David Pelham.

Priestley saw the flying saucer legend and sf’s other trademark tropes as a product of society’s collective unconscious. Rocket ships, he wrote, ‘no longer represent man’s triumphant progress’ but instead have come to symbolize his attempts ‘to escape from himself’. Likewise for aliens, which as metaphors for humanity’s ‘deep feelings of anxiety, fear, and guilt’ can be traced back to the scientific romances of the nineteenth century[4]. So inner space is not a physical space at all but a psychological one. It is the dimensionless world of the subconscious mind or, as Priestley called it, the Unconscious.

Ballard’s editorial, Which Way to Inner Space? [5], did not mention Priestley’s essay but may nonetheless be regarded as a sequel to it, for he took up where Priestley left off, describing Bradbury as ‘a poet’ and reiterating that ‘it is inner space, not outer, that needs to be explored’. But Ballard did more than merely echo Priestley. He also argued that for sf to avoid falling by the wayside it must discover new routes to inner space that draw on more abstract, speculative and experimental techniques like those used in other media such as modern art. As such, he was not just offering a commentary on the state of sf, he was issuing a manifesto that would need to be adopted if the genre was to secure its place as ‘the literature of tomorrow’.

Ballard ended his editorial with an anecdote about Salvador Dalí delivering a lecture in a diving suit. When asked how deep he proposed to descend, the artist had announced, ‘To the Unconscious!’ and Ballard’s editorial was a unilateral declaration of his intent to follow Dalí there[6]. That he was true to his word may be seen in the novels and many of the short stories that followed, though by the time his editorial appeared he had already made a few forays into inner space with stories such as ‘The Waiting Grounds’, ‘The Voices of Time’ and ‘The Overloaded Man’. A notable exception is his first novel, The Wind From Nowhere, which was also written before his New Worlds editorial but was structured as a conventional action adventure. Ballard later disowned it and referred instead to The Drowned World as his first novel, and it is here that inner space comes to the fore as a quintessential force in his fiction.

The Drowned World is a lushly atmospheric novel that takes Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to the lagoons and jungles of post-diluvian London, where half-submerged hotels and office blocks rise out of the water, and cars sit rusting in the streets sixty feet below the water’s surface. Reptiles now dominate the submerged city and the jungle teems with an even greater profusion of wildlife. Alligators patrol the lagoons and iguanas bask three deep in the upper windows of department stores. With humans gone, the flora and fauna are reverting to that of the Triassic period some 250 million years earlier.

Cover painting: The Palace of Windowed Rocks by Yves Tanguy. Penguin Books, 1965 paperback edition.

Amidst this febrile environment, Dr Robert Kerans and several other members of a survey team begin to experience strange dreams, like distant echoes of their surroundings, prompting one of them to ask, ‘Is it only the external landscape which is altering? How often recently most of us have had the feeling of déjà vu, of having seen all this before, in fact of remembering these swamps and lagoons’. From this the realisation follows that the dreams are being triggered by primitive organic memories within their collective unconscious. These ‘neuronic’ memories were encoded in the nervous systems of man’s earliest ancestors during the original Triassic period and have endured at a cellular level through the ensuing epochs of human evolution. But now, in response to the emergence of a new Triassic age, these dormant memories are finally resurfacing, leading the earlier questioner to conclude that ‘we really remember these swamps and lagoons’.

As these dreams and memories take hold so those affected become increasingly introverted, and when the survey team departs these few individuals remain behind. Left alone, they avoid each other and withdraw into their own internal worlds, accepting that ‘their only true meeting-ground would be in their dreams’. Thus they regress through ‘archaeopsychic time’ and ‘a succession of ever stranger landscapes’ towards the prehistoric past of their cellular evolution, until ‘the terrestrial and psychic landscapes were now indistinguishable’.

This exploration of inner space continues in The Drought, a novel that is thematically similar to The Drowned World and may even be seen as a reworking of it with a new catastrophe, a change of location and other nominal differences. For example, Dr Robert Kerans is now Dr Charles Ransom, and the deluge has become a drought that has scorched the earth and turned the landscape into a cracked desert of dead trees, long- gone lakes and empty rivers. Dust chokes the air, as do clouds of ash and smoke from the burning towns and cities whose populations have departed in a mass exodus to the coast. Here they eke out a hand-to-mouth existence in makeshift settlements around the water desalination plants that the government has set up.

But beneath this superficial similarity there is a deeper divergence, for while The Drowned World describes the internal landscapes of Kerans and his colleagues, The Drought takes a more oblique approach as Ballard turns his attention outwards to focus instead on the external landscape and the wreckage that is strewn across it. This change of perspective is echoed by the reader, who switches from an observer of The Drowned World to a participant in The Drought. As an observer, the reader is psychologically detached from Kerans and reads his dispatches from inner space like those of a Reuters correspondent. Ransom, however, has less to say about his state of mind in The Drought and is more like a tour guide, taking the reader with him during his journey to the coast, his ten years of ‘dune limbo’ and his eventual return inland to the ruins of the town in which he once lived. It is a desolate journey, fraught with danger, through an alien environment ravaged by destruction and decay. Abandoned vehicles clutter the highways, boats sit high and dry on the sun-baked river beds, and everything that was once familiar is now being destroyed. This in itself is bad enough but in fact it merely sets the scene, for the novel’s core concern is existential and its theme is the uncertainty of physical and psychological survival. Death lurks everywhere, and prowls the landscape in the form of wild animals that were once caged in zoos, while psychosis threatens in the unpredictability of others – men whose minds are disintegrating like the world around them. As such, The Drought does not present a single, Ballardian version of inner space like the neuronic memories and archaeopsychic time of The Drowned World. Instead it sends its readers there, for it is their responses to this nightmarish world that the novel elicits, their feelings of alienation and vulnerability that it evokes, and their inner spaces that it explores. Like The Drowned World, The Drought is a psychic odyssey, but one that must now be undertaken by the reader.

Having examined inner space in terms of both its internal and external landscapes, Ballard adopted an altogether different approach in his next novel. The Crystal World is an extended version of ‘The Illuminated Man’ which had appeared in his second collection of short stories, The Terminal Beach. In the story a man named James B— travels to the Florida Everglades to investigate reports of a bizarre phenomenon that is turning the region and everything in it to crystal. Similar outbreaks have been reported in the Pripet Marshes of Byelorussia and the Matarre region of Madagascar, and it is the Matarre to which Dr Edward Sanders travels in The Crystal World, although by then Ballard had relocated the Matarre into Cameroon in a move that recalls the story’s famous precedessor, as Sanders journeys upriver through the steaming jungles of West Africa towards a new Heart of Darkness.

Cover painting: The Eye of Silence by Max Ernst. Panther Books paperback edition, 1968.

The crystallization process is similar to a cancer and seemingly unstoppable. As the ground underfoot and the slow-moving waters of the river begin to vitrify, so too do the flora and fauna. Like a game of animal, vegetable or mineral with only one outcome, everything succumbs and nothing is immune. This strange metamorphosis is in some way connected to reports by astronomers that distant galaxies are ‘doubling’ – a phenomenon that is dubbed the Hubble Effect and attributed to the mutual annihilation of matter and anti-matter. These subatomic events are cancelling out the equivalent temporal components of time and anti-time, thereby ‘subtracting from the universe another quantum from its total store of time’ and depleting ‘the time-store available to the materials of our own solar system’. So time is quite literally running out, and as it does the plants, animals and people in each affected area change into scintillating new forms that freeze them in ‘a landscape without time’.

This emphasis on time is a recurring theme in Ballard’s fiction. He had given notice of it in his New Worlds editorial, where he cited time as ‘one of the perspectives of the personality’ and it is this subjective sense of time that shapes The Drowned World, as archaeopsychic time, neuronic time and a ‘descent into deep time’. It is present in The Drought to a lesser extent, but in The Crystal World it again takes centre stage, transforming the external landscape as vividly as it does the dreamscapes of Kerans & Co. in post-apocalyptic London.

The Crystal World is also an intensely visual novel and the inspiration for it is easy to establish. For in 1966, the year that the novel was first published, Ballard wrote an article for New Worlds titled The Coming of the Unconscious[7] in which he equated ‘the images of surrealism’ with ‘the iconography of inner space’. It was a view he reiterated in his 2008 autobiography, Miracles of Life, describing inner space as, among other things, ‘the psychological space apparent in surrealist painting’[8]. But this belief that surrealism offers a window onto inner space was not confined to two statements made more than forty years apart. His writing repeatedly references artists such as Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Paul Delvaux, Giorgio de Chirico and Yves Tanguy[9], and their paintings feature frequently in his fiction. Notable examples include a cameo for The Persistence of Memory, Dali’s famous painting of melting clocks, in ‘Studio 5, The Stars’ and an appearance by The Echo, Delvaux’s time-lapse painting of a ‘triplicated nymph walking naked among the classical pavilions of a midnight city’ in ‘The Day Of Forever’[10]. Likewise ‘The Overloaded Man’, which extends the images of inner space to the neo-plastic compositions of Piet Mondrian. These provide a powerful metaphor for the mental breakdown suffered by the story’s protagonist as ‘object by object, he began to switch off the world around him. The houses opposite went first. The white masses of the roofs and balconies he resolved quickly into flat rectangles, the lines of windows into small squares of colour like the grids in a Mondrian abstract’[11].

As in his short stories, so in his novels. The Drowned World features a Delvaux painting ‘in which ashen-faced women danced naked to the waist with dandified skeletons in tuxedos against a spectral bone-like landscape’ while on another wall ‘one of Max Ernst’s self-devouring phantasmagoric jungles screamed silently to itself, like the sump of some insane unconscious’. Later in the novel Kerans reflects on how the jungle around him increasingly resembles the one in Ernst’s painting, while the dreams that he and his colleagues are experiencing are ‘the common zone of twilight where they moved at night like the phantoms in the Delvaux painting’. With Ernst and Delvaux[12] featuring prominently in The Drowned World, the use of a Tanguy painting, The Palace of Windowed Rocks, on the cover of the paperback edition published by Penguin Books in 1965 might have seemed off-key were it not for The Drought which also appeared that year. Two of the novel’s chapters, Multiplication of the Arcs and Jours de Lenteur, take their titles from paintings by Tanguy, and like The Drowned World there is a feeling that the external and painted landscapes are converging, as Ransom sees in his surroundings the ‘drained beaches, eroded of all associations, of all sense of time’ in Jours de Lenteur.

Given these and other references to art and artists, their absence from The Crystal World may at first seem surprising. Readers who have come to expect such references may see in the novel’s two main themes a tacit connection between ‘the petrified forest’ and Ernst’s painting of the same name, or an allusion to Magritte’s Time Transfixed in the depiction of a world without time, but the novel makes no mention of these or any other paintings and the reason for this soon becomes apparent. Ballard excluded the art of others because its presence would have obscured the bigger picture that he was creating, for if a picture paints a thousand words then in The Crystal World it is the other way round and greatly magnified. The novel reads like a journey through a surrealist canvas, and its resemblance to one in particular seems more than coincidental. In The Coming of the Unconscious Ballard had singled out Max Ernst’s painting, The Eye of Silence, as one of ‘the key documents of surrealism’ with ‘a direct bearing on the speculative fiction of the immediate future’. For Ballard, the painting’s ‘frenzied rocks towering into the air above the silent swamp’ have ‘the luminosity of organs freshly exposed to the light. The real landscapes of our world are seen for what they are – the palaces of flesh and bone that are the living façades enclosing our own subliminal consciousness’. With this in mind it is hard to ignore the resemblance of Ernst’s jewelled ceramic structures and bright green biomorphic forms to Ballard’s crystalline forest ‘loaded with deliquescing jewels’ and living statues ‘carved from jade and quartz’. The painting is suffused with a timeless, dream-like quality that is shared by Ballard’s novel as the forest and everything in it slowly solidifies. This convergence of painted and written landscapes recalls those in The Drowned World and The Drought, though unlike these two novels it is not made explicit. As time is removed from The Crystal World it becomes increasingly surreal, until finally all movement ceases and like Ernst’s painting there is silence. If, as Ballard believed, the painting is a window onto inner space then Sanders in the novel climbs through it, pulling aside a curtain of tinkling lianas and shimmering glass foliage to penetrate deep into the heart of the petrified forest. He eventually re-emerges, but at the end of the novel he is seen heading back upriver, and it is tempting to imagine what he might discover on his return. For somewhere, glimpsed perhaps through a gap in the trees, there is surely a remote clearing surrounded by organic rocks and vitrified vegetation. It is the source of the outbreak, and it looks just like The Eye of Silence.

Given this similarity between Ernst’s painting and The Crystal World it was no surprise that when the novel was first published it was The Eye of Silence that filled the dust jacket, as it did the front, back and spine of the paperback edition published by Panther Books two years later in 1968. It was an improvement over the lurid sf imagery used on other covers[13] though it was not without precedent. The idea had first been introduced in 1963 when Penguin Books launched a new sf series. Penguin’s then art director, Germano Facetti, had noticed a similar connection between The Eye of Silence and A Case of Conscience by the American writer James Blish and used a detail from the painting on the book’s front cover. This use of twentieth-century art became a defining feature of the Penguin sf series and, in addition to the pairing of Ballard and Tanguy mentioned earlier, Facetti studiously matched Ray Bradbury’s The Day it Rained Forever with Ernst’s Garden Aeroplane Trap, Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity with Tanguy’s The Doubter, Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle’s Fifth Planet with Magritte’s The Flavour of Tears and so on, extending the idea to other artists such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró and Picasso[14].

April 1974 Penguin reprint with a cover design by David Pelham.

For Ballard the images of surrealism served a more specific purpose as one of many possible routes to inner space. Such images informed one aspect of his fiction but they were not its raison d’etre. That was inner space in its wider, quintessentially Ballardian form and to capture this required something other than reproductions of surrealist paintings on the covers of his books. This was the challenge facing David Pelham, the art director at Penguin Books from 1968 to 1979, when, in 1974, four of the five Ballard titles in Penguin’s back catalogue came up for reprint. Pelham was responsible for numerous covers at any one time and would often commission other designers and illustrators to produce the artwork, but the Ballard covers he designed himself. The books were sold individually or as a boxed set in a slip-case that Pelham also designed, and it is these iconic images that have become most strongly associated with Ballard’s fiction.

So why is this? The answer is three parts English to one part French. First, Pelham was already familiar with Ballard’s work and a great admirer of it, being drawn to what he later described as its ‘apocalyptic imagery’ and ‘depiction of technological and human breakdown and decay’[15]. Second, it no doubt helped that Ballard and Pelham were friends, having been introduced some years earlier by the artist Eduardo Paolozzi. The three men met regularly at Ballard’s home in Shepperton, a suburban town south-west of London near to Heathrow Airport and the M25 motorway so, third, Pelham was able to discuss his ideas for these new covers with the author himself. Add to this Pelham’s fourth ingredient – a generous amount of je ne sais quoi – and the results were more than merely eye-catching.

Pelham’s covers featured a crepuscular sky above a barren expanse of water, sand or sunbaked earth as the backdrop for an artefact of twentieth-century industrial or military technology. According to the September 1974 issue of Science Fiction Monthly[16], these machines depict ‘the debris of our society’. Pelham, the article explained, ‘finds romance in seeing the future as if it were already the past – in visualizing ruins created from the artifacts we are manufacturing now’. But the paradox of Pelham’s artifacts is that they are not in ruins. His are pristine machines at odds with their apocalyptic settings. Half buried or submerged, they stand as tombstones to ostentation and brutality. They are icons, but only of man’s arrogance.

An American WWII bomber lies abandoned and half-buried by the shifting sands on Pelham’s slip-case[17] while its payload – a sister to the atom bomb that destroyed Nagasaki and the mother of all UXBs – rests nose down in the sand flats of The Terminal Beach. The bomb’s tail-box tilts skywards like the flower of a strange fruit whose hard shell hides an exotic interior. In the belly of the bomb are the seeds of mass destruction, two stones of a ripening plutonium core waiting for the conditions that will trigger them to germinate. But unapproachable and unknowable the bomb is quantum uncertainty writ large; it is Schrödinger’s cat inside Pandora’s box. This atom bomb sitting in the sand is as surreal as Dalí’s melting clocks or Einstein’s theory of relativity, for all are part of the same chain reaction. As mankind cowers with his fingers in his ears and his eyes squeezed shut, so both bomb and slip-cased bomber have their heads buried in the sand, as if in denial of this nightmarish world and the roles they have played in its creation.

April 1974 Penguin reprint with a cover design by David Pelham.

In contrast to this The Drowned World presents a peaceful scene. The surface of the water is flat as a millpond, a sea of tranquillity broken only by the art deco spire of the Chrysler Building which, like the crown of a colossal King Canute, bears silent witness to the deluge that has turned Manhattan into a man-made reef and New York into a new Atlantis. Elsewhere The Wind From Nowhere makes a mockery of a spotless Centurion tank, while The Drought has turned a Cadillac Coupe de Ville into a memorial of chrome and streamlined angularity, its rocketship rear styling and flared tail fins an epitaph to the flamboyance of the American automobile.

The use of such icons to signify apocalyptic ruination is nothing new of course. The Statue of Liberty, in particular, has borne the brunt of numerous cataclysms that have left it in various stages of burial, collapse or decapitation. Ballard himself could not resist the temptation in The Wind From Nowhere, while the Statue’s cameo in the final scene of the 1968 movie, Planet of the Apes, is one of the most memorable denouements in cinematic history, a classic twist in the tail that still cools the blood today. Such images may thrill and perhaps even shock, but the explanation is invariably straightforward because the machine, the artifact, the icon is in ruins. Where Pelham’s images differ is that they defy such explanation. The scene is apocalyptic but the machine is immaculate, and the two are not easily reconciled. Aesthetically these images mesmerise, and on closer inspection they tantalise, but as in Ballard’s fictional worlds, answers are avoided and ambiguity abounds. And this is perhaps the key to Pelham’s images, for they occupy a twilight zone between the landscapes of the outer world and those of inner space. Like the contemplation of a surrealist painting it may take several attempts to ‘get’ Ballard, but Pelham got him to perfection, creating a union of text and image that has never been bettered. With these classic covers the art of J G Ballard reached its apotheosis.

April 1974 Penguin reprint with a cover design by David Pelham.

This article first appeared in the Autumn 2009 issue of Vector magazine. Reproduced with permission.

NOTES

[1] Brian Aldiss. Billion Year Spree. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973, p.162.
[2] ‘They Come From Inner Space.’ In: J B Priestley. Thoughts in the Wilderness. London: William Heinemann, 1957, pp.20-6.
[3] Ray Bradbury may have been the first sf writer to visit inner space but an earlier pioneer outside the genre was Joseph Conrad in his 1902 novel, Heart of Darkness.
[4] Perhaps the best example is the invasion of Earth by murderous Martians in H G Wells’ 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds, which reputedly caused widespread panic in the USA when a radio adaption narrated by Orson Welles was broadcast in 1938.
[5] ‘Which Way to Inner Space?’ New Worlds, May 1962. Reprinted in: J G Ballard. A User’s Guide to the Millennium. HarperCollins, 1996, pp.195-8.
[6] Ballard playfully alludes to Dalí’s lecture in his novel, The Drowned World. As the central character is putting on a diving suit he is told that he looks ‘like the man from inner space’ and is warned not to ‘try to reach the Unconscious’ as the suit ‘isn’t equipped to go down that far!’.
[7] ‘The Coming of the Unconscious.’ New Worlds, July 1966. Reprinted in: J G Ballard. A User’s Guide to the Millennium. HarperCollins, 1996, pp.84-8.
[8] J G Ballard. Miracles of Life. HarperCollins, 2008, p.215.
[9] Mike Bonsall’s concordance of Ballard’s oeuvre lists 110 references to Dalí , 40 to Ernst, 22 to Magritte, 14 to Delvaux, 11 to Chirico and 9 to Tanguy (http://bonsall.homeserver.com/concordance).
[10] J G Ballard. The Complete Short Stories, Volume 2. HarperCollins, 2006, p.151.
[11] J G Ballard. The Complete Short Stories, Volume 1. HarperCollins, 2006, p.336.
[12] Paul Delvaux was a particular favourite of Ballard’s and in 1986-87 he commissioned the artist Brigid Marlin to reproduce two Delvaux paintings, The Rape and The Mirror. Both were painted in 1936 but were thought to have been destroyed during the Blitz in 1941. In fact The Mirror had survived the war and was auctioned by Christies of London in 1999 for a hammer price of almost £3.2 million. Marlin’s portrait of Ballard, also painted in 1987, is at the National Portrait Gallery in London.
[13] Many of Ballard’s book covers are displayed in Rick McGrath’s Terminal Timeline at www.jgballard.ca/terminal_collection/terminal_timeline.html.
[14] The relationship between text and cover art in Penguin’s sf series is explored in a series of three articles in The Penguin Collector; see ‘Not Quite Nowhere Backwards’ at www.penguinsciencefiction.org.
[15] David Pelham, speaking at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, in June 2005. A transcript of this talk appears in Penguin by Designers. London: The Penguin Collectors Society, 2007, pp.127-53.
[16] Science Fiction Monthly, September 1974, pp.6-7.
[17] In 1974, the year that Penguin published this boxed set, a short story by Ballard appeared in Ambit magazine. ‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’ tells of the first astronaut to suffer a mental breakdown in space and his convalescence at an abandoned resort where he becomes obsessed with excavating an American B-17 Flying Fortress that lies buried beneath the sand dunes.

+ More by James Pardey on David Pelham’s cover designs for Penguin’s Ballard reprints.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Collapsing Bulkheads: the Covers of Crash
+ ‘Woefully Underconceptualised’: Rick McGrath on J.G. Ballard’s Cover Art

interview by Simon Sellars.

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

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

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

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

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

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

SS: Do you still return to his work?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘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’

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

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

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

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

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

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

LEFT: Solveig Nordlund (photo by Rick McGrath).

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

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

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

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

– Rick McGrath.

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

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

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

Do you remember when you first became aware of Ballard?

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

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

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

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

Was he as you expected?

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

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

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

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

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

How did Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude come about?

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

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

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

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

How did you choose the cast and crew?

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

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

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

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

From nowhere especial. Just sounded right.

How often did you consult with Ballard over the film?

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

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

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

Has J.G. seen it?

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

She is fantastic. How did you find her?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you influenced by any particular filmmakers?

I admire Alain Resnais’ Muriel and Providence.

Do you think your film has a happy ending?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think he knows and agrees.

What appeals to you most about JGB?

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

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

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

Interview by Rick McGrath, 2008.

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

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

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

review by Jamie Sherry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

… MORE INFO:

+ Information on Grande Anarca at Opificio Ciclope

… GRANDE ANARCA:

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

+ English translation of the voiceover.

Over at Fantastic Journal, Charles Holland has a fabulous post that begins with a rumination on the 1:43 scale model of JFK’s presidential limo sitting on his mantelpiece, and makes its way to a very perceptive analysis of the nature of conspiracy theory as it applies to Ballard’s Atrocity short, ‘The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’:

Ballard’s story differs from conspiracy theory in an important respect. Although, like them, it uses collage and displacement – the sliding in one of one scenario for another, storylines and characters cut and pasted from alternative worlds* – it works through absurdity, highlighting the seam between the accepted reality and the absurd version he posits in its place. Ballard’s story uses collage as an avant garde device of radical disjunction and violent displacement… Conspiracy theory strives for truth, but one that always slips away. By casting doubt on truth in the first place it inherently unbalances itself. Despite its controversy at the time of writing, Ballard’s story is as much a satire on conspiracy theory as it is a tasteless deflation of the importance of the event itself.

More at Fantastic Journal.

ABOVE: Jorge Luis Borges and J.G. Ballard, somewhere in the 60s possibly in 1972 (many thanks to Lucho G. in Argentina for supplying this scan).

Borges writes what he calls ‘condensed novels’. He argues, with some truth, that since the essence of most novels can be told in a few minutes … it shouldn’t be necessary to give the whole book but only a description or review of it or essay about it.

James Colvin [pseudonym for Michael Moorcock], ‘Mainly Paperbacks’, New Worlds #160, 1966.

These condensed novels [in The Atrocity Exhibition] are like ordinary novels with the unimportant pieces left out. But it’s more than that — when you get the important pieces together … not separated by great masses of ‘he said, she said’ and opening and shutting of doors, ‘following morning’ and all this stuff — the great tide of forward conventional narration — it achieves critical mass as it were, it begins to ignite and you get more things being generated. You’re getting crossovers and linkages between unexpected and previously totally unrelated things, events, elements of the narration, ideas that in themselves begin to generate new matter.

Ballard, interviewed by James Goddard and David Pringle, ‘An Interview with J.G. Ballard’, J.G. Ballard: The First Twenty Years, 1975.

At my age nobody loves you for your prose style, just as nobody loves a beautiful woman for her kind nature. Obviously, I’m not the first writer to reach a larger part of the audience because of the movies. That’s happened many times before with many other writers. Serious writers, as opposed to popular writers, who have become well-known without movies being made from their books, are very rare. It’s only a writer like Borges whose fame is not dependent on any movie.

Ballard, interviewed by Richard Kadrey and David Pringle, Interzone #51, September 1991.

Short stories are the loose change in the treasury of fiction, easily ignored beside the wealth of novels available, an over-valued currency that often turns out to be counterfeit. At its best, in Borges, Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe, the short story is coined from precious metal, a glint of gold that will glow for ever in the deep purse of your imagination.

Ballard, introduction to the Complete Short Stories, 2001.

I certainly began as a short-story writer — the best way of learning one’s craft as a writer and something denied to so many young novelists today, when the short story seems, sadly, to be heading for extinction… Sadly, I think most people have lost the knack of reading them, perhaps under the baleful influence of TV serials and their baggy, unending narratives. The greatest short stories, by Borges, Edgar Allan Poe and Ray Bradbury, are nuggets of pure gold that never lose their lustre.

Ballard, interviewed by Sebastian Shakespeare, ‘Pure imagination, the most potent hallucinogen of all’, The Literary Review, 2001.

MH: You’ve already mentioned Burroughs. Which other authors did you most admire at that point, and how do you believe they influenced what yourself and Ballard were writing?

MM: Burroughs, like Borges, showed us what it was possible to do. Neither Borges nor Burroughs were available to us until about 1960 or so. I first heard Borges’s stories related to me by a Spanish-speaking Swede while hitch-hiking from Uppsala to Paris. It was a while before City Lights, I think it was, brought out the first translations. Burroughs wasn’t a disappointment, when we finally met him, but Borges was. Burroughs pretty much lived as he wrote, while Borges was a rather conservative man with a keen interest in G. K. Chesterton.

Michael Moorcock, interviewed by Mike Holliday about Ballard and New Worlds, ‘Angry Old Men: Michael Moorcock on J.G. Ballard’, Ballardian, 2007.

In Crash, there is neither fiction nor reality — a kind of hyperreality has abolished both… After Borges, but in a totally different register, Crash is the first great novel of the universe of simulation, the world that we will be dealing with from now on: a non-symbolic universe but one which, by a kind of reversal of its mass-mediated substance (neon, concrete, cars, mechanical eroticism), seems truly saturated with an intense initiatory power.

Jean Baudrillard on Ballard’s Crash, ‘Two Essays: 1. Simulacra and Science Fiction. 2. Ballard’s Crash’, SFS, 1991.

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

Translation by Dan O’Hara.

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

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

Dan O’Hara

Many thanks to Michaela Pape for proofing these interviews.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And of course the nascent space age.

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

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

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

What about Philip K. Dick? And Theodore Sturgeon?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then what are these novels and tales?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A very trenchant thesis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Many thanks for the chat, Mr. Ballard.

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

In true Ballardian fashion, there is more than a touch of megalomania to him and it becomes clear that HRH has his own plans for world domination. Believing himself to be telepathic and claiming the existence of extraterrestrials, he forms a religion called the Perfect Light Movement and is compared to Jesus Christ by André Malraux, eventually using his growing power and influence to sieze the UN where he attempts to spark off world war against the US and the USSR. Eventually he is incarcerated on the Isle of Wight where it’s presumed he wrote his life story.

The story’s conceit is that it is typeset like an index, apparently the only surviving fragment of HRH’s “unpublished and perhaps suppressed autobiography”, and all of the plot details above, plus much, much more, can be gleaned from the brief fragments in the index itself. It’s a format that allows for some humourous moments, as in this entry, in which we discover that Hitler impressed and then disappointed HRH within the space of two pages, an arc of disillusionment that reflects the greatest schism of the 20th century yet comically reduces it to just one line:

Hitler, Adolf, invites HRH to Berchtesgaden, 166; divulges Russia invasion plans, 172; impresses HRH, 179; disappoints HRH, 181

Eventually we come to learn that the story, despite the form of the piece, actually unfolds in a linear fashion from “A” (including Avignon, HRH’s birthplace) to “Z”. In the entries for “U”, “V” and “W”, for example, HRH’s downfall is revealed:

United Nations Assembly, seized by Perfect Light Movement, 695 – 9; HRH addresses, 696; HRH calls for world war against United States and USSR, 698
Versailles, Perfect Light Movement attempts to purchase, 621
Vogue (magazine), 356
Westminster Abbey, arrest of HRH by Special Branch, 704
Wight, Isle of, incarceration of HRH, 712 – 69
Windsor, House of, HRH challenges legitimacy of, 588

While the very last entry is revealed to be that of the indexer himself:

Zielinski, Bronislaw, suggests autobiography to HRH, 742; commissioned to prepare index, 748; warns of suppression threats, 752; disappears, 761

Thus in one fell metaphysical stroke the indexer actually indexes himself out of existence, causing the editor to speculate, “Perhaps the entire compilation is nothing more than a figment of the over-wrought imagination of some deranged lexicographer”.

But what’s really going on in this story? Did HRH really play a part in changing the course of human affairs, with all facets of his existence covered up to the general public? Is this index then a giant conspiracy of which now have only vague, shadowy knowledge? As the editor again speculates, “A substantial mystery still remains. Is it conceivable that all traces of his activities could be erased from our records of the period? Is the suppressed autobiography itself a disguised roman a clef in which the fictional hero exposes the secret identities of his historical contemporaries?” Or has HRH somehow collaged himself into world affairs, rewriting postwar history with himself in a starring role? The latter would then beg the question: is Woody Allen a JGB fan? For by now you must have detected the obvious similarities to Allen’s film Zelig, made six years after this story was published.

Funnily enough, “The Index”, for all its brilliance, seems to be an extension of ideas first aired in two earlier, markedly less successful Ballard shorts: “Minus One” (1963), in which the existence of an asylum patient is inferred (and then covered up) from a few scraps of medical papers, and “Now: Zero” (1959), in which the reader, like the “deranged lexicographer” in “The Index”, obliterates himself via the act of participation. I guess this only goes to show that Ballard never wastes an idea, or that he really is writing the same story over and over (the latter is not a criticism in my view, I must add).

“The Index” is also in a direct continuum with The Atrocity Exhibition, whose central character, T-, represents all sides of the equation. On the one hand, T-, like the reader of “The Index”, feels as though he is amidst a vast conspiracy, the conspiracy of existence itself. But T-, driven mad by the new communications landscape fracturing the late 1960s, forms a strategy, as HRH possibly did, cutting and pasting the cultural and political events of the late 1960s into a bricolaged version of reality playing inside the cinema of his mind — with himself in the lead role. Eventually, T-, like HRH, is indexed into his own storyline, even appearing in one chapter as a fragmented, diffuse entity, aligned to Christ, again like HRH:

Readers will recall that the little evidence collected seemed to point to the strange and confusing figure of an unidentified Air Force pilot whose body was washed ashore on a beach near Dieppe three months later. Other traces of his ‘mortal remains’ were found in a number of unexpected places: in a footnote to a paper on some unusual aspects of schizophrenia published thirty years earlier in a since defunct psychiatric journal; in the pilot for an unpurchased TV thriller, ‘Lieutenant 70’; and on the record labels of a pop singer known as The Him — to instance only a few. Whether in fact this man was a returning astronaut suffering from amnesia, the figment of an ill-organized advertising campaign, or, as some have suggested, the second coming of Christ, is anyone’s guess.

Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition.

Thus it’s not completely accurate to say that Ballard abandoned the methodology of Atrocity in the 1970s, as many commentators do. As “The Index” shows, his experimental bent was still evident, and as always aligned to a strong storyline. I have read a few pastiches of Atrocity and the importance of plot is something that their writers do not fully grasp for the most part: it’s not enough to pay homage to JGB by simply cutting up text and fiddling with form and structure. Underpinning Ballard, always, is the bones of a strong plot that can be summarised in a linear synopsis and “The Index” (and Atrocity) is no exception. But this sparse framework also makes the work a “readerly” text, in which inference allows the reader to substantially flesh out the bones. In this respect, I see “The Index” as the logical, extreme outcome of the experiment began by Atrocity, in which the text is pared back as far as possible without sacrificing narrative legibility.

This is especially apparent in light of comments Ballard made in a 1983 interview:

In a sense, I’m assembling the materials of an autopsy, and I’m treating reality — the reality we inhabit — almost as if it were a cadaver… the contents of a special kind of inquisition. We have these objects here — what are they?

If you move into a house that hasn’t been properly cleaned up, you find these strange unrelated items: a pen, a hair clip, a copy of Auden’s poems, and without even thinking you begin to assemble from these materials some sort of hypothesis about the nature of life that was lived in this house, or the nature of people who’ve left this debris on the beach after they’ve vanished in a plane crash or what have you.

I assemble materials and I draw from them. I treat the reality we inhabit as if it were a fiction — I treat the whole of existence as if it were a huge invention.… this huge network of ciphers, and encoded instructions — perhaps — that surround us in reality.

“Interview by Graeme Revell”. RE/Search #8/9: J.G. Ballard

Now, having reflected on one of my favourite Ballard stories, I am therefore naturally delighted to report that Lucy Vickery in The Spectator recently ran a competition to “submit a revealing fragment from an index which is all that remains of the autobiography of someone who has privileged access to the great and good”.

Lucy writes:

To give you an idea of what I was after, here are a couple of snippets from J.G. Ballard’s ‘The Index’, a story implied through an index, which is the only surviving part of the unpublished autobiography of Henry Rhodes Hamilton: ‘Churchill, Winston, conversations with HRH, 221; at Chequers with HRH, 235; spinal tap performed by HRH, 247; at Yalta with HRH, 298; ‘iron curtain’ speech, Fulton, Missouri, suggested by HRH, 312; attacks HRH in Commons debate, 367’.

But as she admits this was a pretty tough ask and subsequently “entries were thin on the ground”. However, Lucy did manage to unearth four winners who received £30 each, with a “bonus fiver” going to G.M. Davis. I’ve run two Ballard-inspired competitions here at ballardian.com, and I’m insanely jealous I didn’t think of this for the third — it’s a brilliant idea.

Reproduced below is G.M. Davis’s entry (which includes an entry for Will Self’s “snoring”), but special mention must also go to Basil Ransome-Davies, whose submission featured this hilarious detail: “Eagleton, Terence. Asks me to smooth his way with the Vatican, 246″.

G.M. DAVIS:

Mandela, Nelson, surprisingly short when you meet him, 526; political errors of, 828
Miners’ strike, author’s resolution of, 917–8
Mosley, Max, ‘kindred spirit’, 42; ‘Nazi pervert’, 1620
Nabokov, Vladimir, aesthetic fallacies of, 301
New Statesman, author’s rejection of editorship, 559; sales slump, 560
Portillo, Michael, deaf to good counsel, 338
Price, Katie, seeks author’s advice on mammary enlargement/reduction, 844
Prince Charles, personal hygiene problem, 208; bares soul, 443
Principia Mathematica, discussion of with Allen Ginsberg, 71; author’s refutation of, 113
Quantum theory, author’s contribution to, 12, 19, 47, 77, 101–114, 298–306
Rice, Condoleezza, ‘not so black as she’s painted’, 866; good in bed, 992–4
Rooney, Wayne, spotted by author as four-year-old, 1083; ingratitude, 1119
Sarkozy, Nicholas, requests author’s help in drafting European constitution, 1443
Scorsese, dissuaded from abandoning cinema, 636; as drug-crazed egomaniac, 665
Scotland, faulty central heating at Balmoral, 460; as failed state, 700
Self, Will, snoring of, 1757

The rest of the entries can be found at The Spectator.

Panels from Death Note 0, by Tsugumi Ohba (writer) and Takeshi Obata (illustrator).

Deep assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences.

J.G. Ballard, 1990.

Earlier, I noted the similarities between the manga New Engineering and Ballard’s first novel, The Wind from Nowhere. This is a connection that was flagged by the minicomic artist Tom Kaczynski. When I pressed Tom on this, he told me that although he wasn’t quite sure the similarities were deliberate, he thought they were still remarkable enough to be unpacked.

Wind is the ugly duckling of Ballard’s novels. With its generic plot and decidedly rushed feel, it’s been disowned by its author, left to feed off the crumbs of Ballard supporters looking to drill further down into the man’s back catalogue. Which is why I was amazed at the thought that something so obscure and unloved could have inspired anything let alone a node of the total cultural fission that is Japanese manga.

You wouldn’t think it could happen again, would you? But over at sub_divided, they’re claiming that Ballard’s 1959 short story “Now: Zero” is the basis for the 2003 manga Death Note! Unlike Tom Kaczynski, sub_divided doesn’t merely see this as an interesting coincidence; no, sub_divided is claiming direct inspiration:

“Now: Zero” was published in Japanese. Recently, in fact. Apparently, the connection between it and Death Note is not unknown to Japanese fans. There go my dreams of groundbreaking investigative journalism.”

Of Ballard’s shorts, “Now: Zero” is perhaps Wind‘s equivalent, described by John Boston as “about as inconsequential a story as Ballard has published”. It tells the tale of an office milquetoast who discovers that if he writes about someone, they die, so he sets about eliminating his enemies via the act of writing. The twist at the end of the story is that the reader is supposed to die, too. As John remarks, there are Poe overtones, notably in the air of supernature and in the ornate language, yet there are also sub-Ballardian themes, almost but not quite hatched, including intertwingled concepts of the tyranny of time and the erosion of free will and the notion of the writer bringing into being parallel worlds of the imagination that challenge the structural integrity of the real. Plus, when the protagonist tries to wipe out the inhabitants of the town where he was born, a faint whiff of the messianic madness of The Unlimited Dream Company might take you. I also like how the twist in the tail is one that actually kills the reader, corny in itself but clever if you look at it as revenge on the type of story Ballard might have felt obliged to write at this stage of his career, the type that would only be bought by a magazine if it had the twist, a device demanded by readers of the day. But I’m stretching, because the 29-year-old Ballard was clearly still finding his voice and this story is, formally at least, an experiment that would soon be abandoned.

Panels from Death Note 0, by Tsugumi Ohba (writer) and Takeshi Obata (illustrator).

Now read sub_divided’s full post for some interesting commentary on the ways “Now: Zero” collides with Death Note, including this:

In the pilot, there’s a mention of an incident that occurred in the mid-seventies in which a bank branch was forced to close after a series of ‘accidental’ deaths. The first two people to die were the branch manager and assistant manager, both from heart attacks. The rest of the employees all died in accidents until, finally, the last remaining employee of the branch committed suicide. After the last employee died, it was found that a lot more people involved with the employee (but completely unrelated to the bank) had all died in accidents. It’s only very briefly mentioned so that two detectives have an incentive to further investigate a series of heart attacks that happened at a school in Tokyo. But it just strikes me as being quite similar to the beginning of Now: Zero from what I’ve read here.

And this:

[In "Now: Zero"] you have:

1. A cowardly person with a tedious desk job who uses a notebook to kill people. This person doesn’t have the sense/imagination/diabolic mind to disguise what he’s doing, and only thinks of killing his coworkers and other people who have personally affected him.
2. Police who suspect that these “accidental” deaths are too coincidental to be accidents, and who suspect that the killer was someone who knew the victims.
3. Main characters who panic when the police start asking questions about them and resolve to get rid of the evidence. In both cases, they decide to burn the notebook.
4. Surprise “meta” twists at the end.

Then combine the company that shuts down, and…can there be any doubt? It seems like the only really new thing in the Pilot is the idea of different people using the notebook in different ways. One policeman says he’d use it to rise in the ranks (like in Ballard’s story) and one says he’d use it to improve the world, the way Light attempts to in Death Note proper. It’s presented as a flawed idea — but it seems like the author has to think about it for a moment, which is honestly kind of scary.

The comments provide further hardcore analysis and plot detail of both works, even if a good deal of the readers hadn’t heard of Ballard before. That’s OK, I hadn’t heard of Death Note either, but those comments almost had me convinced that Tsugumi Ohba knows his Ballard.

Luckily, I’ve found an online archive of all Death Note manga, including the pilot story, which is apparently the one with all the “Now: Zero” protein. I’ve flicked through the pilot and I can tell you that there are definite similarities, even though the nerd is now a Japanese schoolkid who is bullied and the supernatural elements have been enhanced to include a demon from the netherworld who lost his “book of the dead”, which the schoolkid finds and which she believes to be a blank diary someone has lost. It could be influenced by Ballard, or it could be a coincidence. I’m not positive there’s conclusive evidence either way, especially given that, as sub_divided points out, Death Note focuses on the eerie quality of the notebook whereas:

“the focus in Ballard’s story is not really the notebook (it’s an old one the narrator digs out of his closet). The focus is really the concentrated resentment of the narrator — what if his outlet, his written fantasies, really did have the power to kill people. So, although the narrator himself eventually concludes that the problem lies with the notebook, and resolves to burn it, you can say that the notebook isn’t really the issue at hand.”

I’ll get back to you after I’ve read Death Note‘s pilot in full.

But for now there’s one bizarre assertion that sub_divided makes that I feel I must set to rights to preserve Ballard’s good name. Sub_divided claims that “One of the websites I was reading observes that Ballard was an alcoholic and that this is reflected in his characters’ relationships, which are generally ‘pleasant in the morning, argumentative in the afternoon, and abusive at night.’”

Hmmmmm, I know Ballard likes a Scotch but he’s no alcoholic from what I’ve read. And can you imagine his passive cypher-characters getting into an abusive argument? After digging I find that in fact sub_divided is referring to crime writer Jim Thompson, who, according to Wikipedia:

“drank heavily; the effects of alcoholism often featured in his works… Donald E. Westlake, who adapted The Grifters for the screen, observed that alcoholism had a great role in Thompson’s literature, though it tended to be inexplicit. Westlake described typical personal relationships in Thompson novels as pleasant in the morning, argumentative in the afternoon, and abusive at night; behavior common to the alcoholic Thompson’s style of life, but which he ellided from the stories.”

Sort yourself out, sub_divided!

Here are the opening paragraphs:

On Midsummer’s Eve a small circus visited the town in the West Country where I was spending my holiday. Three days earlier the large travelling fair which always came to the town in the summer, equipped with a ferris wheel, merry-go-rounds and dozens of booths and shooting galleries, had taken up its usual site on the open common in the centre of the town, and this second arrival was forced to pitch its camp on the waste ground beyond the warehouses along the river.

At dusk, when I strolled through the town, the ferris wheel was revolving above the coloured lights, and people were riding the carousels and walking arm in arm along the cobbled roads that surrounded the common. Away from this hubbub of noise the streets down to the river were almost deserted, and I was glad to walk alone through the shadows past the boarded shopfronts. Midsummer’s Eve seemed to me a time for reflection as much as for celebration, for a careful watch on the shifting movements of nature.

J.G. Ballard, ‘The Recognition’ (1967).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The little I’d read about the exhibition made me naively expect a large pile of sand in the midst of a damp and mouldy cellar. While the mould is indeed resplendent (the smell, appropriately grotesque) the approach is not explicitly interpretative or collaborative. Rather, the installation is more of a pastiche of individual artists’ impressionistic reactions to the text: childlike sketches of the giant’s body parts; a line of disembodied footprints trailing down a staircase to nowhere; an audio reel of violent retching juxtaposed with a projection of a CCTV video of a massive construction site, with scrolling text across a PC screen providing commentary.
…
Ballard’s text itself gets slightly short shrift – my word-centric brain would have appreciated some notes on how the artists worked with the narrative as their point of departure. But despite this, the exhibit evoked exactly the same guttural, unsettled feeling in me that the story does. Rather than find the experience didactic, I’m prompted now to read the story yet again and see how my own response has now been altered.

Forwarded message from Valentina Ferrandes:

“12 Steps Down”
Shoreditch Town Hall, London, 16th to 20th January

Private view
16th January 2008, 6-10 pm

The body of a giant is found on a beach. Curious about the event, a small crowd from the nearby city, gathers to observe the process of decomposition. If the first reaction is surprise and reverential respect, as days and weeks go by, the citizens’ explorative interventions become increasingly frequent and invasive. Graffiti swastikas appear on the giant’s body, his limbs amputated and trucked away for fertilizer, his dry bones dismembered to reappear as gigantic architectural ornaments. A miraculous event becomes object of exploitation, abuse, and eventually of no consequence.

25 artists have been invited to produce a site-concerned work inspired by the short story “The Drowned Giant” by J.G. Ballard and by the labyrinthine, vernacular architecture of Shoreditch Town Hall’s basement. The result is a stunning exhibition that exploits the dialogue between space and narrative through Ballard’s concerns. Decay, fragility and relativity of human morality, as well as representation of body through architecture, violence and sanity are some of the conceptual directions taken by the artists.

Justyna Borucka, Valentina Ferrandes, Kiwon Hong, Clare Wallis, Daniella Hutchinson Kemall, Beth Collar, Hugo Sterk, Cat Vitebsky, Charlie P, Clive Rowat, Dorothea Magonet, Eirini Bachlitzanaki, Elizabeth McTernan, Gareth Barnett, William Brock, Graham Hughes, Giles Hinchcliff, Matt Blackler, Hannah Newell, Mathilda Homqvist, Keiji Ishida, Alice Evans, Henrietta Hall, Michael Pollard, Tom Walker, Hannah Terry, Valentina Lari, Paul Good, Kirsty Wood.

The Basement
Shoreditch Town Hall
380, Old Street, EC1 V9LT

Info:
Valentina Ferrandes
(e): terminalbunker@gmail.com
(ph): +44 0792 9248657

By Underground or rail: Liverpool Street or Old Street stations (10 minutes walk from either).
By Bus: Routes 5, 22A, 35, 47, 48, 55, 67, 78, 149, 242 and 245 stop nearby.

Image from ‘Future Ruins’
by Michelle Lord

Inspired by author J.G. Ballard’s literary visions of modernist architectural design and his prophetic views on the technological demise of the urban environment, Future Ruins is a photographic critique of the urban planning of the 1970s and Ballard’s novels of the same period.

Image from ‘The Drowned World’
by Jon Cattapan

I suppose it’s got two points of genesis. The first is that it came from a body of work I started in the early 90s which has become known as the City Submerged and that body of work came about literally because I was thinking very much about the idea of the city as a place that was deluged with information. So it was the start of that framework that’s been in my work for some time. The second genesis of the title is that I’m a complete JG Ballard nut, and the curator has known that and he also is a very big fan, and Ballard’s book The Drowned World actually…it was for me a fairly seminal text in a lot of ways and it pinpoints a lot of the ideas that I’m kind of interested in.

Image from the Metro-Centre website
by the Harper Collins design team

A site for the book Kingdom Come by J.G. Ballard.

‘Matteo Bittanti’s Crash’
by Matteo Bittanti

I love the idea of gamics, but I’m not really interested in storytelling, so for my first experiments, I decided to cut-and-paste various popular artifacts. “CRASH” is what happens when you play too much Burnout while reading JG Ballard’s stories…

‘High-Parkade’
by Rick McGrath

Announcing the winner of our J.G. Ballard Pastiche competition, sponsored by the kind people at Harper Collins. Picture an alternate universe where Jim Ballard achieved his early goal of becoming a screenwriter, becoming so successful that he relocated from Shepperton to Hollywood. The task: write an imaginary 500-word extract from an imagined novelisation of Starsky and Hutch…as written by J.G. Ballard.

J.G. Ballard Flickr Pool
various photographers

And finally: here’s a slideshow that loops images from the incredible J.G. Ballard pool over at Flickr — over 2000 photos and counting. Click an image for photographer details etc.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

..:: FURTHER
+ J.G. Ballard: The Visual Tribute, Part 1

This gallery is in two parts: 1) Work that hasn’t been featured on this site (below); 2) and work previously featured.

‘Crystal Forest’
by Maia Valenzeula

Based on the book “The Crystal World” by JG Ballard.

‘Crash’
by Marie Meier

A little tribute to J.G. Ballard and David Cronenberg.

‘The Drowned Giant’
by Shafeen Alam

This is a story moment I chose to illustrate in which the main character, a young librarian, sees the Giant for the first time, days after it had washed ashore and the excitement over it had died down. I submitted my work on ACME and have gotten some really helpful comments from the pros. So here is my revision as a result.

Illustrations by James Nicholls

ABOVE: ‘The Terminal Beach’ by J.G. Ballard.

LEFT: ‘The Drowned Giant’ by J.G. Ballard. RIGHT: ‘Billennium’ by J.G. Ballard.

Ridgewell WWII Airfield: ‘Now little more than a collection of old huts, the area is haunted by the sounds of crashing WWII aeroplanes, shouting airmen, and other noises.’ (from paranormaldatabase.com).

Heuristic England is an interesting new blog exploring dreams, parapsychology, spectral presence, Freud, Jung … and Ballard. In a couple of recent posts, the blog’s convenor, Dr. Champagne, voiced something that has long intrigued me, too: paranormal symbolism in Ballard’s work.

According to the good doctor:

I am always struck by the fact the JG Ballard refutes the significance of the paranormal while his stories are replete with the spectral presence of dead airmen and military personnel (most explicitly perhaps in a piece like “One Afternoon at Utah Beach”).

The post then goes on to detail a ‘strange database of aviation ghosts which reads like a rather Ballardian catalogue of dead airmen’, found at paranormaldatabase.com, which includes these chilling apparitions:

Headless Airman Wanting Lift
Location: Hadstock – The B1052 leading into Hadstock
Type: Haunting Manifestation
Date / Time: Unknown

Further Comments: After losing his head in a flying accident, the apparition of an American pilot has been seen thumbing a lift on the roadside.

Hitchhiker
Location: Felixstowe – Crossroads controlled by lights
Type: Haunting Manifestation
Date / Time: Unknown

Further Comments: For several days, a car driver found himself giving a lift to a World War 2 pilot, who would suddenly appear in the back seat of his car when he reached a certain point of his journey. This stopped once the driver started taking a different route.

Dr. Champagne compares the database with a passage from “You and Me and the Continuum”, one of Ballard’s Atrocity chapters, stating that “my feeling is that this excerpt would fit seemlessly into the aviation ghosts database”.

Here’s the Atrocity excerpt:

Lieutenant 70. An isolated incident at the Strategic Air Command base at Omaha, Nebraska, December 25th, 197-,when a landing H-bomber was found to have an extra pilot on board. The subject carried no identification tags and was apparently suffering from severe retrograde amnesia. He subsequently disappeared while being X-rayed at the base hospital for any bio-implants or transmitters, leaving behind a set of plates of a human foetus evidently taken some thirty years previously. It was assumed that this was in the nature of a hoax and that the subject was a junior officer who had become fatigued while playing Santa Claus on an interbase visiting party.

Of course, there’s plenty more of the same in Ballard, along with a rich catalogue of dead, dying and ghostly astronauts, plus explicit communion with the dead in the short stories ‘The Terminal Beach’ and ‘The Dead Time’. Then there’s The Unlimited Dream Company, which on one level can be read as the dying-brain fantasy of the crashed airman, Blake, and on another level as his spiritual rebirth.

The doctor’s assertion that JGB ‘always refutes the significance of the paranormal’ also intrigues me. Is this strictly true? I can’t recall an interview in which either Ballard or the interviewer mentions such concerns, but if anyone knows of anything please do let me know. Having said that, I do recall that Ballard touched upon ‘the occult’ in the interview I conducted with him last year:

The earliest horror films I saw were Dracula movies — never liked those. The whole idea of horror, particularly wrapped up in touches of the occult — ugh. They’re saturated with the fear of death and displaced sexual anxieties. No, thank you. Not for me.

But back to Dr. Champagne: I really hope s/he goes on with this line of enquiry, as it is yielding intriguing cross-chatter, such as this latest post:

It’s interesting to note in Ballard’s condensed chapter “Lieutenant 70″, that the isolated incident at the strategic air command takes place on December 25th, 197-. Of course the allusion is that the mysterious figure is Christ, “with the set of plates of a human fetus evidently taken some thirty years previously”. But also are there not some neat correspondences with the Rendlesham incident, which took place on December 25th 1980… another example of JGBs precognitive powers. Further, the human fetus could also relate to the ufo abductee experience. Michael Persinger has suggested that the fetal like appearance of aliens in ufo encounters might be as a result of the neurophysiological phenomenon of self proprioception of memories of the womb. Further doesn’t LAM also exhibit fetal like qualities. Finally, JGB just misses the Qabalistic figure of LAM by 1, LAM being 71 and his lieutenant being 70, though no doubt with a little bit of creative qabalistic accounting we could make sense of that too…

+ Previously, students from Digital Media Design, St East Lancs, Institute of Higher Education at Blackburn College, gave us the title sequence created for a fictional movie based on JG Ballard’s ‘A Guide To Virtual Death’.

Now they’ve come up with this, ‘a title sequence created for a fictional movie based on a short story by JG Ballard, ‘The Illuminated Man’.’ I like this. Its dark-ambient sound design appeals (Aphex Twin, apparently), as do the disorientating images of cellular division and the snatches of voices over the airwaves (‘The Illuminated Man’ was the seed of what later became The Crystal World; the cell stuff is therefore appropriate). Conversely, the use of Creedence’s ‘Bad Moon Rising’ in the ‘Virtual Death’ sequence did me no good; I like my Ballardian musical cues to be dark, glacier-slow and artificial — *as well as* completely fucked up (which ‘Bad Moon’ undoubtedly is).

While I think Jonathan Weiss’s film of Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition was successful in its own right, I still believe there’s potential for a version (maybe not a straight adaptation, perhaps an obliquely angled ‘nod and a wink’; maybe even a sequel) that updates the notion of celebrity culture, that takes up the direction hinted at in the book’s second-last chapter, ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’. A version that replaces Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears.

In ‘Fuck Reagan’, ‘patients in terminal paresis’ are encouraged to devise the ‘optimum sex-death of Ronald Reagan’. A ‘unique ontology of violence and disaster’ takes shape, as the ordinary public — the patients suffering from paresis; impaired movement, paralysis — reanimate by tearing down the lustre surrounding celebrity culture, the forcefield that has prevented the ‘little people’ from realising their full potential.

In Ballard’s piece, originally published in 1968, the cultural class system that has impaired, or paralysed, ordinary people with feelings of guilt and inadequacy in the face of a galaxy of radiant stars is destroyed in a savage, air-strike of the imagination:

Patients [placed] Reagan in a series of simulated auto-crashes, e.g. multiple pile-ups, head-on collisions, motorcade attacks… Subjects were required to construct the optimum auto-disaster victim by placing a replica of Reagan’s head on the unretouched photographs of crash fatalities.”

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J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (165).
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This literally is SLASH fiction. Blood drips from it.

‘Fuck Reagan’ marks a distinct break from the rest of The Atrocity Exhibition, in which, despite the instability of the central character’s fantasies, there was a certain awe underlying his imaginative sorties into the world of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, John F Kennedy and so on — an awe that prevented him from making the final leap. It’s also present in the character Vaughan, in Crash, who yearns of killing Elizabeth Taylor in a celebrity car crash but ultimately ends up annihilating only himself, terminally unfulfilled (along with a busload of innocent bystanders who got in his way).

In ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’, Ballard tested the wind, pushed the equation to its outer limits, predicted the rise of a new kind of ‘celebrity uncontaminated by actual achievement’ (as Ballard later termed the second wave of celebrity culture), a celebrity that causes resentment when ‘ordinary people’ finally have the means to dismantle the image, trying it on for themselves like a serial killer tries on a woman’s skin. There is no further truck with reification, with celebrity-deity because ordinary people have built a web 2.0 culture (or have been given the power, the means to build it) that will answer back and that will destroy those who seek to involve an unwilling public in their fantasies.

In further studies sadistic psychopaths were given the task of devising sex fantasies involving Reagan… Patients were encouraged to devise the optimum sex-death of Ronald Reagan.”

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J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (168).
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But a web 2.0 culture doesn’t need to employ technology — doesn’t need the web, even — to do so. So, let’s use this term ‘web 2.0′ to denote a free-for-all that translates into the real world, an attitude that’s hardwired into the brain through constant exposure to the media landscape. As Ballard clearly outlines, the media colonisation of all available public and personal space means that there is nowhere to go, nothing to do but feed on the corpses…

Fame and celebrity were again on trial, as if being famous itself was an incitement to anger and revenge.”

——————————————————-
J.G. Ballard, Millennium People (2003).
——————————————————-

…spiraling down a black hole eating white stars, ported into Second Life, which lies just below the whirlpool, landmarked over there.

Paris Hilton is being consumed as we speak, just another star imploding. The savage public will not be placated by her talk of finding God in a jail cell. The savage public will not be wooed with her repentance and renunciation of vacuity. The savage public wants to feast on the corpse of empty celebrity. The savage public wants revenge. Like an anonymous would-be web 2.0 commenter leaving bile in the comments box of some blog that’s got too big for its boots, the savage public wants to break through the screen, wants to pierce the rump of unattainable stardom until blood oozes through the pores. So the savage public goes further, building its own ‘blog’ that becomes a destroying machine that becomes the body, drinking the blood and becoming infested with the knowledge that no one is better than ‘me’. The savage public wants to wank over serial killers and murderers, taking revenge for celebrity being attached to the cult of death. The savage public devours torture porn, bathes in the Bathory blood of actresses hogtied upside down. The savage public ensures that the most searched term leading to this very website is, in fact, the term ‘Princess Diana car crash’ and its multiple variations: ‘Di death fuck’; ‘sex Di death crash’; ‘fuck exhaust sex Di car Dodi died’.

The savage public wants to kill kill kill until there is nothing left, just a flat, smoking wasteland.

The savage public demands that torture porn be indistinguishable from snuff.

The savage public has no imagination and will feed off that corpse before turning on you, too.

Without doubt Oswald badly misfired. But one question still remains unanswered: who loaded the starting gun?”

——————————————————-
J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (173).
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————————————————————————————————————–
…:: ATROCITY II: Notes Towards a Sequel
————————————————————————————————————–

+ ‘R.P.M’ by Chris Nakashima-Brown
+ Invisible Celebrity Literature
+ Gallery of the Absurd by ’14′
+ The Brangelina Exhibition
+ ‘Chariot of Fire: Preliminary Analysis & Damage Reconstruction of the Death of Diana, Princess of Wales’ by Annik Hovac
+ ‘Fantasy Kits: Steven Meisel’s State of Emergency’ by k-punk

‘Thirteen to Centaurus’, directed by Peter Potter, is an adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s 1962 short story of that name, produced as part of the BBC’s Out of the Unknown series of science-fiction dramatisations. But at that time film and television was just not capable of delivering the frisson that the best SF literature provided (it would be arguably six years into the future before that could occur, with the dawn of Kubrick’s 2001), and Ballard’s suave imagination was clearly leaps and bounds ahead — as this adaptation demonstrates.

In Ballard’s story, we are introduced to a space station with a crew of thirteen, including the 16-year-old wunderkind, Abel, a boy given to questioning every facet of his existence. Abel is aware that there’s something beyond the limits of his perception, some vital key of knowledge that will explode the received worldview controlling life on the station. Yet every time he’s on the verge of a cognitive breakthrough, his logic blurs and fades, held back by the ‘conditioning’ that each crew member must undergo. This involves being subjected to ‘subsonic’ instruction — brainwashing — as the crew are kept in stasis, their minds preoccupied purely with the present and the working ritual of maintaining the station. Their conditioning ensures that the past, and indeed the future, is forever out of reach.

Yet Abel perseveres, conducting various experiments. He tells the onboard psychologist, Dr Francis, that he’s worked out the station is actually revolving, but he just can’t make that final mental leap to determine what that actually means as ‘his mind always fogged at a question like that, as the conditioning blocks fell like bulkheads across his thought trains (logic was a dangerous tool at the Station).’

Donald Houston as Dr Francis (still from Thirteen to Centaurus; dir. Peter Potter, 1965).

At this stage Dr Francis has no choice but to reveal to Abel the ‘truth’: the Station is actually a ‘multi-generation space vehicle’ on its way to Alpha Centauri. He tells him that generations have lived and died aboard the ship on a voyage that will take hundreds of years to complete, with only the remnants of the last generation living to see their destination. The coverup, that the space ship is in the guise of a space station, is presented to Abel as a necessary psychological safeguard to ensure the crew does not go mad with the knowledge that they will never live to see Alpha Centauri.

Ballard then introduces a rather clever double twist, a further layer to be unpeeled: we come to understand that the ‘space ship’ is actually a self-contained dome on Earth, an experiment conducted to test the psychological effects of space travel before an actual mission to Alpha Centauri is sent. The ‘conditioned’ crew of course are blissfully unaware of this, simply believing that they are on a ‘station’ of some kind out in space, with their sole purpose simply being to maintain it. This is not really a spoiler: it’s a necessary detail revealed at the beginning of the story, as the narrative switches to the government nabobs outside the ‘ship’. As they endlessly discuss the merits of the experiment, which has been going on for 50 years, and whether it should be discontinued, Dr Francis comes in and out of the ‘ship’ as he pleases, unbeknownst to the crew. He’s in on the experiment, which is being followed closely by the public, who, Ballard writes, are beginning to ‘feel that there’s something obscene about this human zoo’. There are further twists in the tale, which I won’t spoil for those who want to watch the adaptation or read the story for the first time. However, it should be clear that the notion of a group of people living and working together under the public glare is remarkably prescient with regards to the current reality TV/Big Brother phenomenon.

The story also puts me in mind of Philip K Dick. The very idea of an artificial world presided over by god-like technicians and featuring a protagonist slowly becoming aware that his perception is a construct — all of it beamed to the world at large — is of course a feature of Dick’s novel Time Out of Joint (1959) and the film that ripped it off, The Truman Show (1998). But more than that, a spaceship crew immersed in artificial stimuli is the conceit of one of Dick’s most corrosive, darkest visions, the 1970 novel A Maze of Death. In all of these sources, potent philosophical debates — free will; the illusion of choice — are always whirling around the narrative core.

‘Centaurus’ is a curious entry in Ballard’s career because on one level it seems generic; then when further layers are unpeeled, its narrative texture feels a little derivative, in a Phildickian manner of speaking. Yet like a fragment of a hologram, encoded within this seemingly minor entry in the Ballardian canon is the data that would inform Ballard’s entire career right through to the present day. Ultimately it is unmistakably, undeniably Ballardian.

Ballard has often spoken of how his childhood in Shanghai was ripped asunder by the advent of war and his family’s incarceration under the Japanese, an experience that taught him that ‘reality is little more than a stage set, whose cast and scenery can be swept aside and replaced overnight, and that our belief in the permanence of appearances is an illusion’. This faith in illusion — or rather, this willingness to accept the logic of illusion — is the subject matter of ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’. Another thing: when Abel chooses to write an essay on the station, entitled ‘The Closed Community’, the resonances with the gated communities of Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes echo throughout the decades.

James Hunter as Abel (still from Thirteen to Centaurus; dir. Peter Potter, 1965).

But the kicker is when Dr Francis willingly becomes an astronaut of inner space. Defying his superiors’ orders, he re-enters the ‘spaceship’, having made the decision to live and work with the crew for ever more (he won’t be able to leave again, as the penalty for unauthorised entry into the station is 20 years in jail). When Colonel Chalmers tells Francis he’ll be ‘deliberately withdrawing into a nightmare, sending yourself off on a non-stop journey to nowhere’, Francis replies, ‘Not nowhere, Colonel: Alpha Centauri’. Francis, therefore, is the classic Ballardian protagonist, deliberately immersing himself into the realm of the mind, casting off the restraints of reality and authority, in order to see what brand of human emerges on the other side. However, he discovers there’s far more to Abel than he ever thought…

‘Thirteen to Centaurus’ was published in the same year as Ballard’s classic novel The Drowned World. They are very different in subject matter, of course, but there is one startling similarity: both Kerans in The Drowned World and Abel are haunted by dreams of a beating, burning, amniotic sun that threatens to overwhelm their senses and, indeed, reality.

We’ll come back to that burning sun, but now let’s move on to the TV adaptation. Scriptwise, it’s a very faithful translation of the story, although the sets have about as much imagination as a caravan site. Still, there are some campy thrills to be had from the slightly spooky scene in the recreation room, where the crew relax and work out on ‘futuristic’ gym equipment while a spooky authorial voice intones maxims like ‘There is no other world than this. There are no other creatures but the Chosen Ones’. It seems a conscious Orwellian reference that wasn’t there in the original (the brainwashing occurs on a subsonic, subliminal level in Ballard’s story).

‘There are no other creatures but the Chosen Ones…’ (still from Thirteen to Centaurus; dir. Peter Potter, 1965).

James Hunter, who plays Abel, looks good — he’s so pretty as to be unearthly — but over eggs the pudding with his stiff facial expressions and wooden bodily movements. I would have thought a little more subtlety would have been required to play such a complex creature as Abel. Plus he flubs his lines on occasion, prompting me to wonder whether the show was shot live — does anyone know? Meanwhile, Donald Houston plays Dr Francis with a drunken, shouty bluster, whereas the Francis of Ballard’s story is more thoughtful and low key. There are also some funny moments where you can just tell an actor is waiting around the corner to walk on and speak their line; at one stage Hunter blunders into a scene a second or two before cue.

There’s also some heavy-handed religious symbolism glued onto the dialogue that wasn’t there in the short story. At one stage, Abel refers to himself in the third person, saying the burning disc of his dreams is ‘the Eye of God and Abel is his servant’. In actual fact there’s a good deal of secular weirdness in Ballard’s slow-burn original, and it’s tempting to imagine what contemporary American science-fiction series like The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits might have done with the story in terms of lighting, set design and even acting.

All the same there’s some very effective ambient sound design throughout, and an abstract-jazz score by Norman Kay over the striking pop-art credit sequences — the music is redolent of Krzysztof Komeda’s scores for the early Polanski films and that’s high praise indeed. There are also a few narrative nips and tucks in Stanley Miller’s script that actually improve on Ballard’s story. In the source material, Francis lets slip that there are 14 on their ‘way’ to Centauri, prompting Chalmers to wonder aloud if Francis is adding himself to the original crew of 13. In the adaptation there are 12 crew members, with Francis’s slip of the tongue making it 13; this of course adds far more gravitas, more ambiguity, to the story’s title, ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’. There’s also more material linking Abel’s first incarnation as the questioning, naive innocent to his metamorphosis as the driving force behind the virtual world of the ship; in the story Ballard jumped from one to the other with little regard for continuity (but maybe this was the literary equivalent of the Godard jump-cut, and thus forgiven…). Abel is much more messianic in the TV version, and in this regard James Hunter’s acting is far more effective as his Abel gleefully turns the tables on Dr Francis than it is portraying the young innocent.

Staring at the sun: scene from Sunshine (dir. Danny Boyle, 2006).

There are some hyper-current resonances in both adaptation and source that are worth noting. I was struck for example by the scenes in Danny Boyle’s 2006 film Sunshine, where a couple of crew members are haunted by dreams of the sun. This seems more than a coincidence and more like a homage to Ballard, especially since elements of Sunshine have been lifted and stitched together, Frankenstein style, from various SF influences (Solaris, Dark Star, Alien, 2001). And especially since the screenwriter is Alex Garland, an avowed Ballard acolyte. Garland has said that the idea for his previous script — for Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) — came from Ballard, while his 1998 novel The Beach is virtually a rewrite of Ballard’s Rushing to Paradise. You’d think, given the sun dreams, that the obvious reference point would be the more well-known source — The Drowned World. But what I want to know is this: since Sunshine is set on a spaceship peopled with a psychologically damaged crew, haunted by dreams of the sun, is it actually a homage to ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’? If so that’s the most obscure Ballard nod I’ve ever seen. Kudos to Mr Garland!

Finally, let’s make like Dr Francis and step back into the real world, where we learn that:

The European Space Agency (Esa) is after volunteers for a simulated human trip to Mars, in which six crewmembers spend 17 months in an isolation tank. They will live and work in a series of interlocked modules at a research institute in Moscow. Once the hatches are closed, the crew’s only contact with the outside world is a radio link to “Earth” with a realistic delay of 40 minutes.

But, while Esa says it will do nothing that puts the lives of the simulation crew at unnecessary risk, officials running the experiment have made it clear they would need a convincing reason to let someone out of the modules once the experiment had begun.

“The idea behind this experiment is simply to put six people in a very close environment and see how they behave,” Bruno Gardini, project manager for Esa’s Aurora space exploration programme, told BBC News.”

That sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it? Might I suggest that Mr Gardini reads ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’ (not to mention the mind-blowing A Maze of Death) before the project gets underway?

It might just come in handy when things go pear-shaped.

Simon Sellars

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..:: MORE INFO
+ ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’ — BBC site.
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Recently I directed your attention to Xander Walker’s no-budget adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s ultra-sardonic short story, ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’.

Now we have this, a ‘title sequence created for a fictional movie based on a novel by JG Ballard, ‘A Guide To Virtual Death’.’ As part of this conceit, that ‘Virtual Death’ is actually a novel rather than short story, you’ll see they’ve imposed the title onto the cover of one of the recent Collected Short Story volumes.

This is a product of students from Digital Media Design, St East Lancs, Institute of Higher Education at Blackburn College.

Simon Reynolds is one of the most recognisable music critics around — or at least his style is, not least for its willingness to tackle pop music as an art form worthy of sustained intellectual discourse rather than as a fleeting moment of adolescent flash. Reynolds breaks new ground, melding unbridled enthusiasm with a robust theoretical framework in a body of work that is thrilling for its eclecticism alone: he’s never less than compelling writing about hip hop, Britney or rave, as he is about grunge, prog or grime.

Reynolds has also invoked Ballard in past interviews regarding his own formative influences, so the stage seemed set for Simon to appear here on Ballardian. I wanted to chat to Reynolds when Rip It Up was published, but the moment slipped away for various reasons. But now, with the release of Simon’s latest collection, Bring the Noise, here’s a chance to put that right.

Simon Sellars.

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LEFT: Ballard (photo courtesy Fine Line Features).

SS: You were into Ballard before you were into music. What attracted you to his writing?

SR: A better emphasis would be to say I was into science fiction before I was into rock music, and that Ballard was one of my favourite SF writers. Obviously I always loved music but it was things my parents had introduced me to, like Beethoven, or Hollywood musicals, plus stray things I’d heard on the radio like the Beatles. And then aged fifteen or so I was inducted into that whole rockist apparatus of taking music – pop culture, youth culture, rock criticism – seriously. And the thing I was into on a fanatical level immediately before entering rock culture was science fiction; the new fanaticism displaced the prior fanaticism — not immediately, there was an overlap — but eventually totally. At one point I wanted to be a SF writer and then the next major ambition I had was to be a music journalist. Which is where I stuck!

I kinda half-forgot about Ballard along with other SF writers that were key for me: Frederick Pohl & CM Kornbluth, Alfred Bester, John Brunner, Philip K. Dick, to name just a few. Ironically this was at a time, the very end of the 70s and the early 80s, when Ballard’s influence was as strong as it’s ever been in music, with postpunk.

SS: Are you still sweet on Ballard today?

SR: It’s quite a common syndrome for people to grow out of SF and suddenly drop it as juvenile, and I’d always swore I’d not be one of those, but it happened. Really though it was because a whole set of other obsessions crowded SF out: music, rock journalism, politics and philosophy, critical theory. It’s really in the last decade or so that I rediscovered an interest in SF and particularly in Ballard, who now seemed to me to be clearly the most advanced writer and thinker in that field. I also read more of his critical thinking, his interviews and journalism, and become more and more impressed by him. He seems a much more towering figure now than he did when I first read him as a teenager.

The coveted Penguin editions (designer David Pelham).

SS: Which of his books rocked your world?

SR: In some ways the one that grabbed me most and has yet to relinquish its hold was the first one I read, The Drowned World. Penguin used to do these great paperback editions of SF and they had one series with really evocative paintings – glossy, garish, almost hyper-realist – on the covers. The Drowned World, The Drought and The Wind From Nowhere were all in that series and looked particularly good [ The Terminal Beach was in there too; SS ]. But with The Drowned World, the severity and fixatedness of Ballard imagination was what hooked me, and just the idea of the protagonist who – as with all the Ballard cataclysm novels – is perversely drawn towards the heart of the catastrophe, goes the opposite direction to everybody else, and really finds his true self in the transformed landscape. That really grabbed me. Also, the whole idea of the world you knew being drastically transformed… I lived near London, in a commuter town thirty miles north of the capital, and went up to the city quite frequently, so to imagine it submerged was exciting.

SS: Has he influenced your work in any way — as a cultural critic, say, rather than stylistically?

SR: Not really. The influences on my writing and thinking come from a totally different place, although there’s certain affinities maybe. A sense of the power of the irrational, these atavistic drives pulsing inside culture. I’ve long felt that pop music is driven by some pretty ambivalent, sometimes outright antisocial or malevolent energies. But I’ve probably derived that more from various French thinkers and Nietzsche, also from certain rock writers. And also just listening closely and honestly to my own responses to music. Still you could see that idea of music as fitting a Ballardian worldview to some degree. The idea of human culture as fundamentally perverse.

There’s another parallel actually, which applies to SF in general as well as Ballard in particular: that’s the extreme degree of self-reflexivity that you get within rock criticism. Or at least the zone I move within and which has now broken out into the blog world. It’s very similar to SF, or at least how SF was when I started reading it, which would have been in the years coming out of the whole New Wave of SF. SF writers seemed to have been really into analysing the genre, talking about what defined it as a field of writing and how that related to other forms. And that was largely because – just like rock criticism – its status was contested, it was very much an underdog genre that didn’t get the respect or acceptance from the literary establishment, give or take a Kingsley Amis or an Anthony Burgess who talked about being SF fans and had a go at the genre themselves now and then.

LEFT: New Worlds; new wave.

So SF, like rock writing, had this mixture of inferiority complex and superiority complex. SF writers loved to see SF as the one really crucial, relevant, truly contemporary form of literature. A literature of ideas, which was exactly what drew me to, the element of speculation, as well as the estrangement effect. Rock critics are just the same: they both crave that validation from the mainstream of arts criticism but they also kinda like being the renegade form. As well as novels and story collections, I would sometimes read books of critical essays by SF writers. It seemed like an exciting little subculture, especially the New Wave writers who always seemed to be having workshops and conferences! Ballard exemplifies that meta aspect of SF, although he goes beyond it to be just a great cultural critic.

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

SR: After the disaster novels I think I read the mid-Seventies urban breakdown ones like Concrete Island and High-Rise, both of which I liked a lot, and also a couple of collections of short stories. And it’s the Ballard shorts that, with my critic’s hat on, I think are his supreme achievement – so magisterial, so distilled and precise and atmospheric and unsettling. In fact, my getting back into Ballard came about through a collection originally published in 1978 but reissued by Picador USA in 2001, The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard. My wife was working as a book reviews editor and it turned up in her mail and I was like, ‘I’m having that’. So many of the classic Ballard short stories are in there, some I’d read before in The Terminal Beach and similar collections I’d have got out of Berkhamsted Library as a teenager. There was one called Low-Flying Aircraft I particularly liked, especially the first long story in it, almost a novella [ 'The Ultimate City' ], about a young man who lives in a near-future where it’s very green-conscious and placid and dull so he goes to the deserted city and starts up urban life again, gets the generators going, and misfits start to flock in from the eco-communes and garden towns, but of course it all goes haywire.

The Best Short Stories collection has a few things from the Atrocity Exhibition era, and writing and reading them as a thirty-something I appreciated them more. But it wasn’t so much the experimental Atrocity-era stuff as the stories he did that are quite close to conventional hard-science SF, but with that extra dimension of interiority and the collective unconscious – all the inner space, psychological aspects that you associate with the New Wave of SF. Back in the day, I didn’t really get on with the experimental writing side of Ballard. I still haven’t read all of The Atrocity Exhibition I’m ashamed to admit, and only a few years ago finally read Crash all the way through. I’d had a go as a teenager but failed. The impetus to finally read it came from doing the book on postpunk, Rip It Up and Start Again, wanting to understand why it was such a big influence on certain bands. And for sure, it’s fantastic writing, and fantastic as thought, too.

There’s certain SF writers I can’t get on with, like Samuel Delaney, often the ones who are doing overtly experimental writing. Nor am I that crazy for the side of Philip K. Dick that’s all about multiple levels of reality, what is real and what’s hallucination. So similarly I prefer Ballard’s post-cataclysm novels and his short stories to the Atrocity Exhibition type stuff. I think maybe it’s that I like that thing where realism as a literary mode is applied to something with a SF or alternate history premise. In a way, I prefer the side of Ballard that relates to a writer like John Wyndham than the side that relates to Burroughs. I like that dour, flat Britishness confronted by something alien or catastrophic.

SS: You mention the influence of Ballard on postpunk. As someone who grew up with this music, Ballard was always a vague referent on the edge of my consciousness, glimpsed through obscure Cabaret Voltaire or Ultravox! interviews, so I appreciated the way Rip It Up took the time to unpack the connection. But what about today’s crop?

SR: Ballard allusions had become a bit of a cliché by the time I started writing about music professionally in the mid-80s – I did a piece on this post-Cabaret Voltaire, Sheffield outfit called Chakk and gave the singer a slightly hard time for overdoing the Ballardisms. Since then I’m hard pressed to think of Ballardisms coming through in music, although this very year The Klaxons put out an album called Myths of the Near Future [ also the title of a Ballard short-story collection ]. But the Ballard homage seems fairly cosmetic in this case.

SS: But there’s also kode9 and Burial, right? Every second review I read of their albums last year seemed to invoke the dreaded word ‘Ballardian’ – it seemed to become as much a cliché as it was during the postpunk period.

SR: That relates more to Spaceape’s contribution to the Kode 9 album, Memories of the Future. His lyrics and delivery – they’re a bit like Linton Kwesi Johnson reading excerpts from The Atrocity Exhibition. With Burial, the connection is that his album is supposed to be a concept record about South London becoming flooded when the Thames Barrier breaks in the global warmed near future. I think Katrina and New Orleans is more likely to be the inspiration, but there’s an obvious parallel there with The Drowned World.

LEFT: Spaceape and kode9 (photo via 3Voor12).

There is also an urban psychogeography thing going in Burial’s music (and dubstep generally) that recalls Ballard in Crash. The album draws a lot from South London, this interzone of semi-suburbia between Brixton, where the tube line stops and Croydon which is on the periphery of London, maybe a dozen miles from the centre. So it’s a hinterland probably not unlike the outer London areas near Heathrow where Ballard situated Crash. A real anomie zone, but possessed of a certain desolate beauty. Burial has also talked of putting his tunes through ‘the Car Test’, driving around South London playing the music in his car to see if it has the atmosphere he wants, the ‘distance’ in the music he’s looking for.

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

SS: You casually injected something interesting into our correspondence — that you see Ballard and Brian Eno as ‘the two greatest British thinkers of the second half of the 20th Century.’ I’m now going to pin you down and ask you to elaborate.

SR: That’s slightly over the top, isn’t it? I wonder if it really stands up. Then again,
as thinkers specifically about culture, in the British context, I can’t honestly think of too many rivals. Certainly as people who came out of the Sixties but came into their prime – as artists and as influences – in the Seventies, they are these towering figures, I think.

One of my fantasy projects that I toyed with for a while was a book on Ballard and Eno. They do seem of a type in some ways and they are patron saints of postpunk to an extent. But the project founders immediately owing to the fact that they are so eloquent about what they do and such brilliant writers, that there’d be zero role for any critic or commentator. There’d be very little to mediate or interpret, as they’ve said it all, so much better. They know what they are doing. I suppose you could historicize them, contextualise them. Ballard with the milieu he emerged out of in the Sixties, which was based around the ICA, right? And Eno with the UK art schools.

In some ways the affinity seems as much temperamental as anything ideas-based. There’s this wonderful Englishness. You imagine they would get on like a house on fire, trading ideas over whisky and soda in the Shepperton living room. One thing they both do is take ideas from science and set them loose in culture, find applications. Ballard is like a British McLuhan, except much better because he’s a far better writer, and a better thinker too – more original, more convincing. Eno is almost like a British Barthes, in some ways.

SS: Explaining his collage method in The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard said he wanted to produce ‘crossovers and linkages between unexpected and previously totally unrelated things, events, elements of the narration, ideas that in themselves begin to generate new matter.’ To me this seems strikingly similar to Eno’s formulation of generative music.

SR: I’m not sure about that. It seems more related to Burroughs and perhaps also to Ballard’s artistic debt to Surrealism, which I really appreciated a few years ago when I read him talk about it in that RE/Search collection of interviews. I liked the fact that J.G. would stick up for Dali and the rest. Surrealism and Dada is big teenage impact thing for a lot of us I think, until we learn to say ‘ooh Chagall, so much better than Dali.’

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

LEFT: One Brain (Eno portrait by Paris Rebel Richens).

SS: Alright, then, try this: both Ballard and Eno inverted, retooled, then abandoned the genre they started out in. As Richard Sutherland wrote, ‘to call Ballard’s work SF is a bit like describing Brian Eno’s music as rock ‘n’ roll.’

SR: Yes and no. Eno is like the culmination or extension of certain ideas within rock to the point where they verge on un-rock. But when he started out there were obvious debts to Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, a certain English kind of psychedelia. And he could do the ‘idiot energy’ thing with ‘Third Uncle’. I think he shifts the emphasis so it’s the noise or the mechanistic insistence of rock that’s retained and amplified, but he sheds the passion, the ego drama, the theatre of rebellion. Later there is the entropy of ambient, which as much as it’s un-rock is also the furthest extension of the psychedelic principle.

As for Ballard and SF – I see him having lots in common with the best people in the genre. I mentioned John Wyndham, who’s under-rated I think, and then people like Dick, Bester, Pohl. But really there are lots of SF people, especially in the Sixties and Seventies, who weren’t doing corny pulp nonsense. To elevate Ballard by divorcing him from his genre is unnecessary. The methodology in the disaster stories and the bulk of the short stories is totally SF.

SS: Spoken like a true SF fanboy! OK, as you said earlier, people tend to drop SF as ‘juvenile’; similarly, people often say that writers should grow out of writing about music. How do you maintain your interest?

SR: It doesn’t take any effort! It’s a compulsion, nothing I can do about it. Although there are lull years – and indeed the last few years have been slimmer pickings than for a long while. The Nineties were an insanely exciting time and that spilled over into the early part of this decade but now it feels like a number of sonic-cultural narratives have petered out. Hip hop in particular seems to be in deadlock. But still I can’t shake this gut belief that popular music is the place where the most exciting cultural energies and ideas get played out.

But maybe this feeling is just a hangover from having grown up during the postpunk era and then living through the hip hop Eighties and rave Nineties. Maybe that conviction can no longer be substantiated by what music is coming up with. It could be the ‘vibe’ has moved elsewhere. Certainly the art world seems to have resurged as a place where there’s a lot of energy and a lot of really interesting conversations are taking place. And television I think still has that function where it is where the society examines itself and talks about the issues. It generates an insane amount of rubbish but it’s always interesting, revealing rubbish. And the quality television is really our modern high culture I think, stuff that nearly everybody is plugged into and where a collective conversation goes on.

But if this is the case – that pop music is no longer where it’s at – I would be saddened because I think it’s a much more democratic zone than the art world or films or TV. The start-up costs are so much lower.

SS: You mentioned the blog world earlier; all-pervasive connectivity means that everyone’s a critic, these days. Any thoughts on that?

SR: Blogging’s too huge a subject really, because it goes into the whole nature of what music criticism is and what it’s for, and also the whole scarily transforming nature of the media, the future of magazines. But I was very excited about the music blogging scene when it emerged in the first years of this decade, and got even more excited when I joined in – there was some really great energy flowing back and forth in this circuit of blogs that I participated in, which is really just one small ‘hood in the universe of music blogs, itself a modest galaxy in the vast blogosphere.

Now I’m significantly less excited, while still finding more to read and be inspired by in the non-professional blog world than in music magazines. What I enjoy most, and what has dimmed quite a bit since ‘the golden age’ a few years ago, is the conversational aspect – people riffing on other people’s riffs, that whole argumentative side. But with a few exceptions people seem to have retreated back into a more solitary, monologue-like thing.

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

SR: Is it growing? The only music blogs I can think of that go for real hardcore theory are k-punk and… that’s it really. There are blogs that are primarily philosophy and/or art blogs who also deal with music now and then, like Sit Down Man, You’re A Bloody Tragedy or Poetix, but I don’t think people would think of them as music blogs. Actually k-punk isn’t just a music blog either, although music is a privileged area of culture for Mark. You get music blogs that do music criticism in a high-powered form or go deeply into the minutiae of subgenres and esoteric knowledge. But I can’t think of that many who are applying concepts from critical theory.

I’d make a distinction here between theorising about music and using critical theory and applying it to music. The former goes on a lot, obviously – and you could argue that any critical position is at some level theoretical, it relates to an idea of what music should be and how it works. But there is plenty of theorisation about music going on. What I don’t see a lot of is people using ideas from critical theory or philosophy and so forth and using them to explicate pop music. Even I don’t do nearly as much as I used to. But I certainly still generate theorems and analytical ideas that go beyond the thumbs up/thumbs down consumer guidance aspect.

SS: OK, but it wasn’t so long ago that if you mentioned the word ‘scopophilia’ in a film review, for example, people would have thought you were referring to what Richard Gere allegedly did to some unfortunate gerbils (this actually happened to me — the misunderstanding, not the gerbil abuse). Now, if you drop it in a review, people groan because they’ve heard it all before; the word’s become such a cliché that you’re automatically a bit of a poser for using it. In music criticism, ‘hauntology’ seems to be gaining similar mass. But you were there from the start. So, what is hauntology, in musical terms, and why has it lit up the blogosphere the way it has?

SR: Well I think it was me who first broached the idea of ‘hauntology’ as a rubric for this loose network of contemporary bands who were playing with the cultural imagery of ghosts, spectres, the uncanny, the return of the cultural repressed, memory, and so forth, while also trying to make genuinely eerie music. But I didn’t particularly intend for there to be a tight correlation between Derrida’s concept of hauntology and what these bands were trying to do. It was just a convenient and cute term, ‘haunt’ referencing ghosts and ‘-ology’ suggesting the image of crackpot scientists working in the sound laboratory. There are certain affinities with Derrida’s ideas as elaborated in Spectres of Marx.

LEFT: Mordant logo.

Some of the groups – specifically The Focus Group and Belbury Poly of the Ghost Box label, and Mordant Music – are concerned with ideas of a lost futurism, a spirit of utopian idealism that seems to have faded away in recent decades but which they associate with post-WW2 modernism in architecture, the early days of electronic music, grand public works of amelioration and edification. So there’s a kind of radical nostalgia, a looking back to looking forward. But Spectres of Marx was a very specific intervention in a tradition of philosophy and political thought, and I feel there’s nothing to be gained by aligning what these groups are doing with Derrida’s ideas in some tight doctrinal way. Especially as none of them have read Derrida as far as I can tell!

The word ‘hauntology’ has got a lot of traction, though, because it chimes in with things that are going on in modern art (the trend for work based around the concept of the archive and dealing with questions of collective memory) and in academia (with the boom of studies related to the spectral and uncanny, work on ruins, remains and rubbish, mourning and memory work, nostalgia for the future). Even just on the level of the word ghost or its homonyms popping up across popular culture in countless band names, album titles, novels and non-fiction books, et al – something is going on.

With the ghostified bands specifically, I think what has grabbed some of us (apart from the music, which is fantastic) is that these are musicians who have tons of ideas both musical and non-musical. They tend to be very well read and thoughtful, real autodidacts with a passion for esoteric knowledge and bizarre historical arcana. They are making connections between music, film, books, TV, the occult, history, design… and their records also have a highly developed visual aesthetic. For me personally, a big thing is the Britishness of Ghost Box and Mordant Music, the way they are plumbing the nation’s collective unconscious. I’m become very interested in nationality, which is not to be confused with nationalism.

SS: To close, let’s discuss your latest collection, Bring the Noise, which has just been released. It collects your writings on alternative rock and hip hop — why did you bring these disparate musical enclaves together?

SR: I felt it was time to do a collection of all this stuff I’ve been writing for the last 20 years, but there was a problem in that Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock, which is an essay collection published in 1990, corralled a lot of the late-80s stuff I did, and then Energy Flash (aka Generation Ecstasy), while not a collection, is based on the rave and electronic music journalism I did in the Nineties, there’s a lot of remixing and sampling from my own pieces. So I didn’t want to overlap too much with Blissed Out or Energy Flash, and what was left was all the writing I did on alternative rock and on hip hop, which I wrote about almost the moment I started out professionally in 1986 – I wrote about Schoolly D, interviewed LL Cool J and Public Enemy, and so forth. And then a theme leap out at me, looking at the relationship between bohemian rock and black street music — this alternately fraught and fertile relationship, with the white underground sometimes trying to catch up with or incorporate ideas from hip hop, and sometimes going its own way. And hip hop referring to not just rap but the whole spectrum of street sounds: dancehall, R&B, grime. There are some pieces on rave in there but usually where it relates to the black/white theme. So it’s Bring the Noise: 20 Years of Writing About Hip Rock and Hip Hop. The ‘hip’ before ‘rock’ is kinda jokey but also accurate, in a way, since nearly all the rock bands in the book are or were hip in some sense, like Nirvana or PJ Harvey. Whereas I’ve nothing on, say, Bon Jovi in there!

It’s actually longer than 20 years since the first piece is from Monitor in 1985 and the last is from 2006. I have been around for ever, churning the stuff out. This book is 400 pages long and it is truly a tiny fraction of my output. But this particular slice through the corpus tells a story; it does work as a kind of history of the last couple of decades of pop culture. I’ve brought out the narrative and the theme by having little commentaries after the pieces that make connections and thread things together. So I think you could read it and get a pretty good picture of what happened in music, starting from when Rip It Up and Start Again ends, 1985, and going up to the present.

——————————————————————————————————
Thank you, Simon Reynolds.
——————————————————————————————————

..:: MORE INFO
+ blissblog: Simon’s blog
+ Simon’s Rip It Up blog
+ Simon’s Bring the Noise blog
+ Blissout, Simon’s dance-music archive

..:: INTERVIEWS IN THIS SERIES
+ Bruce Sterling on J.G. Ballard
+ John Foxx on J.G. Ballard
+ Iain Sinclair on J.G. Ballard
+ Toby Litt on J.G. Ballard

Jeannette Baxter, organiser of this weekend’s J.G. Ballard Conference at the University of East Anglia, delivers a challenging examination of Surrealist influences in Ballard’s Running Wild for Issue 5 of the online journal, Papers of Surrealism.

‘The Surrealist Fait-Divers: Uncovering Violent Histories in J. G. Ballard’s Running Wild’: Abstract

In this paper I read J.G. Ballard’s illustrated novella, Running Wild (1984), as a subversive example of the surrealist fait divers. One of the most ethically challenging fragments in Ballard’s often controversial oeuvre, this modified detective fiction presents the reader with a catalogue of contemporary atrocities – parricide, political assassination and terrorism, acts of random violence – and challenges us, the readers, to get our hands dirty. I explore how Ballard negotiates the cultural and historical consequences of global capitalism in Running Wild, and how he tests, through fiction, the controversial theory that moral and social transgressions are legitimate correctives to psychological and social inertia. In this context, Ballard incorporates a variety of surrealist texts (paintings, photographs, collages) into his fait divers, I suggest, in order to open up moments of critical and ethical reflection, and to provoke the reader into a confrontation with the deviant logics and violent psychopathologies which operate below the polite surface of contemporary history and culture.

[ Thanks, Gwyn ]

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+ AUTOEROTIC

The Guardian newspaper, picking up on our breaking news about the forthcoming Ballard World attraction, says this:

A new theme park – Dickens World – is to open in England. Not to be outdone, the sardonic fansite, www.ballardian.com, announces “Ballard World”. It will, we are told, open in 2008 … the site reports, with the straightest of faces … And, down the line, there’s “Burroughs World”, with rumpus rooms where customers can hang out (literally) and experience the novel pleasures of autoerotic asphyxiation, before joining the mugwumps in the slime pool.

Hmmm. Even though this is ostensibly a Ballard site, I must say Burroughs World sounds like the most fun.

——————————————————————————————————-

+ BALLARD CONCORDANCE

The indefatigable Mike Bonsall, the man behind the generative Another Atrocity mash up on this site, has been at it again. Mike, who teaches new technologies at Sheffield Hallam University, is ‘exploring the use of corpus linguistics analysis on Ballard’s uniquely resonant use of language’.

For his latest project, which takes a scalpel to Ballard’s Complete Short Stories volumes, he tells us:

“I’ve made a concordance of (nearly) all of JGB’s short works. Perhaps the best way to understand it is to have a play with it (you can for example see the whole of the wordlist in the left panel in one go by clicking ‘show undivided list’). Example of use; in the short works JGB mentions Ernst 12 times, and his ‘Garden Airplane Traps’ is mentioned in the shorts; Notes Towards…, Atrocity Exhibition and The Assassination Weapon.

I had to sacrifice second-hand copies of the short stories and AE to the scalpel, the scanner, the OCR and the text-editor. About two thousand pages in all, a real labour of love. I’ve held back from making the full text visible as I think JGB deserves every penny of his royalties and it would be an obvious breach of his copyright – though I think the concordance itself is fair use.

I’m now working on the novels – Enjoy!”

Not content with that, Mike also reports that he’s ‘been immersed in my latest project on Ballardian psychogeography. This is a mash-up of all the places JG mentions in the complete short works, displayed on a GoogleMap. I’ve only done A to C so far but you can already see the man’s imagination is global.’

Finally, Mr Bonsall will be delivering a paper at the JGB Conference, which explores the ‘obsessions and archetypes that echo through Ballard’s work’ deriving from Ballard’s time as assistant editor at the journal Chemistry and Industry, from 1958-64, a period when Ballard was ‘working on his first novels, a number of short stories and a series of collages he called ‘Project for a New Novel’, partly inspired by the typography of his sister journal Chemical & Engineering News.’

[ via the JGB Mailing list ]

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+ SAINT PETIT BALLARD

Still from Radio On (1980; dir. Chris Petit).

Chris Petit reviews Tony Saint’s book, The Asbo Show, with ‘obligatory Ballard references’:

The result … remains an interesting mix: of Ballard’s global suburbia, with its interzones watched by security cameras; a dash of Buñuel, in its gleeful loathing of the bourgeoisie; and something more parochial and English, in its understanding of humour as a reactionary force.

[ thanks, Ben ]

As a filmmaker and novelist, of course, Petit has never been backward about the influence of Ballard on his own work; his Robinson remains the best book JGB never wrote. And Petit’s film, Radio On, has at last been given a DVD release; set among England’s motorways and service stations, you just know it will be Ballardian – and rather good, as well. See Lyle Hopwood’s excellent, evocative review of the DVD.

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+ SELF-HEALING HOUSE STRAIGHT OUT OF VERMILION SANDS

Researchers are working towards building a ‘self healing’ house that repairs itself during an earthquake. According to the research team, the house is on the lines of the story ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’ by British writer J.G. Ballard, where the author describes a psychotropic house that changes its shape, protects itself and even heals itself, reports Livescience.

The house walls are made of nano polymer particles. When squeezed under pressure during an earthquake, the nano polymer particles flow into cracks and harden to form a solid material. This apart, the walls also boast of unique load bearing steel frames and contain wireless, battery less sensors and RFID tags that help collect data about stresses and vibration, temperature and humidity over time.

NMI chief executive Professor Terry Wilkins said: “What we’re trying to achieve here is very exciting; we’re looking to use polymers in much tougher situations than ever before on a larger scale. If there are any problems, the intelligent sensor network will alert residents straightaway so they have time to escape”.”

[ via Yahoo News India ]

This is Xander Walker’s excellent no-budget film of Ballard’s dark, scathing short story ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’ (one of the last shorts JGB ever wrote, unfortunately):

For reasons amply documented elsewhere, intelligent life on Earth became extinct in the closing hours of the 20th Century. Among the clues left to us, the following schedule of a day’s television programmes transmitted to an unnamed city in the northern hemisphere on December 23, 1999, offers its own intriguing insight into the origins of the disaster.”

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J.G. Ballard. ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’ (1992).
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Mike Holliday has uploaded J.G. Ballard — A Collector’s Guide, an in-depth information resource designed “as a ‘helping hand’ to anyone interested in collecting books, stories, and other material by the British author J. G. Ballard”. There’s a lot of detail here for those interested in tracking every filament of Ballard’s work, including what I consider to be one of the most fascinating periods of JGB’s career: the “miscellaneous media” he produced during the late 1960s, including a series of collages (termed “advertiser’s announcements”) for Ambit magazine that continue to exert a strange power over me. (This blend of experimental prose poetry and conceptual art is true slipstream “fiction” and there’s nowhere near enough discourse on it; with that in mind, I’ll be posting more on Ballard’s miscellaneous media at some vague point in the future.)

Mike also notes that Ballard’s first published story, “The Violent Noon” (1951) has been onlined by Rick McGrath, just about the only place you’ll find this ultra-rare twig of the tree. The piece, written by the 20-year-old medical student “J. Graham Ballard”, was the winner in a crime-story competition run by Cambridge University’s student newspaper, Varsity, where it was published. It’s a “Hemingwayesque pastiche written to please the jury” (according to Wikipedia), and takes place during the Malayan Emergency, when the guerrilla forces of the Malayan National Liberation Army battled British, Malayan and Commonwealth forces from 1948 to 1960. It’s worth reviewing, considering that JGB has said that winning this competition was just the impetus he needed to give full-time writing a proper go.

“The Violent Noon” describes a sneak “terrorist attack” on a British officer, Michael Allison, and his wife and child. The attack is described in gory detail, with Allison dying “in a foam of blood that bubbled out of his mouth and the wound in his face”, while Mrs Allison looks up “blankly from the pulped face of her baby”. It’s interesting to note that even then Ballard had an eye for surrealistic imagery embedded in violent death, a type of suspended animation that he has continued to refine in story after story, novel after novel. After the insurgents take off, Mrs Allison, her front teeth knocked out, kneels on the seat of the car alongside another officer, Hargreaves, with her dead husband beside them:

Mrs Allison was … calmly peering out through the rear window … quiet and composed. Neither of them made any attempt to move the bodies in the front seat. They just sat there, in the shambles of the chaos that had exploded about them … Mrs Allison watching out of the window, until a lorry passed by half an hour later.”

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J.G. Ballard. “The Violent Noon” (1951).
————————————————————

Reading this passage, I was struck by the similarities with the scene in Crash where Helen Remington loses her husband in a car crash with the narrator, “James Ballard”:

Apart from a bruised upper jawbone and several loosened teeth, she was unharmed. … We looked at each other through the fractured windshields, neither of us able to move. [She] sat behind her steering wheel, staring at me in a curiously formal way, as if unsure what had brought us together.”

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J.G. Ballard. Crash (1973).
———————————————–

This “curious formality” of violence and death — this dispassionate narrative effect that’s a feature of Ballard’s airless worlds, and the media landscape that “factors death out of our lives” — of course derives from Ballard’s childhood in Shanghai, as has been well documented, where he witnessed the horrors of war first hand. “The Violent Noon” adds more fuel to that fire, with its bitter description of “Chinese gangsters and gun-happy roughnecks, no-goods from the villages, hopped up by agitators from the slums of Canton and Shanghai, promising prosperity to the people and then threatening them and pillaging their homes, slashing the rubber trees, madly shooting harmless women and children, filling the streets with frantic gunflame and death.”

As Ballard has said of his time at medical school:

The experience of war is deeply corrupting. Anybody who witnesses years of brutality can’t help but lose a sense of the tragedy and mystery of death. I’m sure that happened to me. The 16-year-old who came to England after the war carried this freight of ‘matter-of-factness about death’. So spending two years dissecting cadavers was a way of reminding me of the reality of death itself, and gave me back a respect for life.”

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J.G. Ballard, “Raising the Dead”, excerpted in J.G. Ballard: Quotes
(RE/Search Publications, 2006).
———————————————————————————————–

“The Violent Noon”, written just four years after “the 16-year-old came to England” is a fascinating Polaroid of the young JGB’s mindset, before the cadavers had reset his emotional circuitry.

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NOTES:

1) Here’s Varsity’s blurb, worth regurgitating for the fact that it effectively contains Ballard’s first published interview as an author…

“J. Graham Ballard who shares the first prize of ten pounds with D. S. Birley in the “Varsity” Crime Story Competition is now in his second year at King’s and immersed in the less literary process of reading medicine.

He had, in addition to writing short stories, also planned “mammoth novels” which “never get beyond the first page.”

2) The publication of “The Violent Noon” also led to (effectively) Ballard’s first review. Varsity promised that “the summing up by the judges…will…be available next week on this page”. And so in the June 2, 1951 edition, we find, as David Pringle informs me:

“an unsigned summary of the judges’ reasons for picking the two winners, ‘The Violent Noon’ by J. G. Ballard and ‘Seance’ by D. S. Birley. Of Ballard’s tale, they say: ‘… ‘Violent Noon’ was the most mature story; it contains patches of high tension, the characters come to life, and the ending is brilliant in its cynicism. The author should, however, avoid a tendency to preach.”

Considering what came after — a body of work with politics that could perhaps best be described as “ambivalent” — we can only surmise that JGB heeded the advice to cut the preaching. I do wonder what became of D.S. Birley, though…
—————————————————————————————————————-

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

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

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

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

As Ballardian reader Mike Holliday points out:

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

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

From Amazon:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

..:: BUY THE BOOK

On 14 September 2006 JG Ballard gave a reading from his new novel, Kingdom Come, and talked to Robert McCrum of the Observer at the Institute of Education, London — the evening was presented by Blackwell. Looking rather dapper and displaying a sharpness and wit that puts people half his age to shame, Ballard talked about his childhood and influences before touching on some of the big questions of our age: consumerism, Islamic terrorism and the communications revolution.

Ben Austwick

——————————————————————————————–
STOP PRESS: Rattling Other People’s Cages, Ballardian’s new interview with J.G. Ballard, is now online.
——————————————————————————————–

ROBERT McCRUM: Your books are very funny.

JG BALLARD: I tend to be a bit on the deadpan side I think, to put it mildly. The surrealists use a sort of serious humour, and I flatter myself to think I’m in that area too. But it’s a dangerous area to be in. Americans in particular find my stuff very confusing: “What, is he serious?”

There’s one passage in Kingdom Come about a hostage siege in the Metro Centre. This must have been informed in part by your experiences of the war. Do your experiences of China and Shanghai in the Second World War still resonate in your work?

Well, they probably do, even though it was a long time ago. People do get over unhappy experiences in their childhood. War is a terrific revelation, there’s no doubt about it, whether you’re a civilian or a combatant. In many ways I think it’s more of a revelation if you’re a civilian because you’re so powerless.

I had the most comfortable, ex-pat life in the Far East then abruptly woke up one morning — the morning of Pearl Harbour — and everything had changed. Seeing my parents frightened was an education in its own right, and being interned in the camps made such an impression. It’s something very few children know in the West. It separated those who could cope from those who couldn’t. People were sort of boiled down to their reduced essence: meanness, courage, generosity, eccentricity. I think the whole idea of life as a sort of stage set, which it is, registered itself forever in my brain.

‘I feel like I’ve stepped into a time capsule…’
JG Ballard, on his return to Shanghai (still from the BBC documentary ‘Shanghai Jim’, 1991)

At that point, at the age of eleven or twelve, did you know you wanted to be a writer?

Yes, I did. But I was writing even before the war, in the late 1930s.

My mother based her whole life as far as I know on playing bridge and drinking large martinis. She died at the age of 93, a wonderful advertisement for the misspent life. I mentioned the two-martini lunch to her and she said, “Two martinis? Five martinis”. She never worked, of course — I don’t think the idea ever entered her mind. Her job was to run the home and arrange dinner parties.

She spent an enormous amount of time playing bridge and gossiping, real character assassinations, whilst passing this small child around. I didn’t know who the heck they were talking about, but was fascinated by the game and its bidding system — two hearts, three no-trumps and so on — and I thought, ‘what on earth does all this mean?’ It was a sort of code and I wanted to figure it out. So I asked my mother to explain the conventions. She did and I thought ‘my God!’ I was so inspired that I actually wrote a little book on how to play contract bridge. I think the gigantic moralistic strain in my fiction that everyone comments on probably stems from that first effort to set the world to rights.

And when you were that age, what was the young JG Ballard reading?

I was reading everything.

To come back to Kingdom Come, for those of you haven’t read it yet, in a way it’s in the genre of the detective story.

Detective novels are a genre I’ve never really read. I’ve read Raymond Chandler, but I never read all the classic Agatha Christie novels that were published at the time I was growing up.

What did you read at the time?

I read children’s versions of Robinson Crusoe, Alice in Wonderland and so on. I read boy’s annuals and Boy’s Own paperbacks. I read American best sellers: extraordinary books like All this and Heaven Too, which most of this audience will be too young to have read, but is an amazing, emotional novel. Even at the age of nine I could see that. I read American comics. I devoured magazines: Time, Life, the Saturday Evening Post. I was a real magpie.

Some writers have said — I’m thinking of VS Naipul here, and there are a number of others — that when one has grown up in the British Empire, one knows England through pictures, through books, and the extraordinary shock of coming to London and seeing the city which they’d read about, which they’ve seen through the eyes of Dickens or whoever it may be. When you came to England, was it a shock?

Yes, it was. It was a huge shock. From reading the Just William books and Winnie the Pooh I thought everybody lived in Kensington. But there was something wrong: not only had three quarters of the population never even been referred to, but large parts of the place had been bombed to the ground. I found it extremely difficult to cope, frankly.

I’m going to quote back to you something you wrote in Kingdom Come: “Like English life as a whole, nothing in Brooklands can be taken at face value”.

Oh, that’s true. Everything — when I arrived, and to some extent now — was coded. It was all a matter of private languages and house rules. It didn’t matter where you were, there was a way of paying a bill, a way of ordering a meal in a restaurant, a way of buying tickets at a ticket office. Everything was calculated to convey a message of some sort — social status, generally speaking.

You were figuring out how to live here.

Still am, still am.

Let me just say at this point, it’s the 50th anniversary today of the publishing of Jim’s first story, ‘Prima Belladonna’, in 1956 in a magazine called Science Fantasy.

I didn’t know!

How did you get to the point where you writing stories like ‘Prima Belladonna’?

I read medicine at Cambridge University, working with cadavers and so on, which was a very important experience. It gave my imagination a huge repertoire of images that have sustained my fiction.

But I knew I was going to become a writer. The problem was in those days it was very difficult to make a start. I wasn’t anywhere near ready to write a novel. I had all this extraordinary experience from the war, but I wasn’t anywhere near making sense of it all.

I read Horizon, which was a very serious literary journal. I read New Statesman, the Observer, and I thought this was what writing was about. You doffed your cap to the grand practitioners of modernism: James Joyce, Kafka. I thought a writer, a serious writer, was someone who wrote within that sort of context. The problem was, when I wrote in that sort of way it wasn’t very good, or original, and I couldn’t get it published.

When I was in the RAF, based in Canada, at about 24 years old, I came across a science fiction magazine — lurid cover, a space monster grappling with a half-naked blonde — and when I turned the pages, inside I found the stories were far more serious than you might think. These were the sort of stories that Kingsley Amis, to his credit, realised constituted a kind of invisible literature. I felt a sort of jolt of recognition. Here’s a fiction about the present day that owed nothing to aping past models. It had vitality, endless vitality, which was absent from the then British literary scene. The serious writers I admired, Lawrence Durrell, Graham Greene, later Anthony Burgess, all lived abroad, and I sort of understood why.

Here was a fiction about advertising, the media landscape, television, the threat of nuclear war, and I thought, ‘this is something I’ll have a go at’. I thought there’s endless possibilities with this fiction — something can be done with it, and this is my job. For the first ten to fifteen years of my career I couldn’t believe I was seen as being a science-fiction writer, because in the science-fiction field I wasn’t that at all –they loathed me. I was a virus that had entered their immaculate cell, infiltrating their cellular machinery to create this cancerous monster. I was Public Enemy Number One. I went to one or two science fiction conventions and was almost physically assaulted.

In one of the editions of Crash, you write, “The fiction is already there. It is up to us to invent the reality”.

I think that is pretty true on one level. We live in a world of entertainment culture that’s informed by relentless television, hundreds of channels, by advertising, by politics conducted as a branch of advertising, by consumerism as a whole. It’s seen as a reality because people are quite serious about it, but it’s completely devoid of real elements.

My father as a young man, or my grandfather as a young man, or my grandmother, would have recognised reality. They had a clear understanding that reality was work. That isn’t true any more. The whole thing is a huge fiction. This is why we’ve sort of lost our direction as a nation. We assume that everyday reality is as real as in our grandparents’ time. I think even our present Prime Minister is to some extent a prisoner of his own fantasy world, who doesn’t realise it and has started to believe his own fictions.

I don’t think it can be reversed — the other world, the reality, has become so fictionalised. Any points of reality we have are in our own heads. Our obsessions. Nodes of anger, greed, hope, the need to remythologise our lives — these are the only realities we have. To my father’s and grandfather’s generation all that was just nonsense. ‘You’re dreaming boy. Go to work. Wake up’. There’s been a sort of switch of polarities.

I want to ask how important your writing style is. Is it something you’re aware of?

I don’t give much thought to style, which is probably a fault.

The message seems to be much more important than character.

Yes. I’m not really interested in characterisation, I’m much more interested in psychological roles.

It’s something you’ve been criticised for.

Yes, and it’s probably too late to change. I’ve always loved case histories. The sort of things you get in textbooks, you know: ‘Mrs Ash was sitting on a train from Potter’s Bar to Paddington, when she noticed that God was sitting opposite her’. The textbook takes this very seriously. It’s governed by the situation. Her basic situation, the psychological role this woman finds herself in, is very interesting. There’s nothing about her mother in law, or her role in the Women’s Institute, because she’s seen God! That’s what’s interesting about this woman: a psychological revelation. That’s much more interesting than any trivia about where she buys her shoes.

We actually know very little about the characters in our lives, the people we deal with. Every husband in the land I’m sure has woken up next to his wife after five years and thought, ‘I hardly know her and I share a bed with her’. But they’re very happily married. We can be very close to people and know next to nothing about them. Character doesn’t reveal itself that obviously. To create a fully rounded character takes an enormous amount of time. It’s not a matter of just a few little flicks of the wrist.

You’re always described as the Seer of Shepperton.

Well, that’s a joke.

In 1967 you wrote a story called “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan”, in which you predicted the Reagan presidency. And of course there’s Crash which predicts all kinds of things, so you have foreseen a few things.

I don’t know. I haven’t done a count. I see myself as a weatherman. I look at the sky, read the weather — that’s all I think I’m doing actually. I can see a storm coming. I think we live in frightening times.

Going back to your last book, Millennium People, which deals with a kind of terrorism, when you were writing it were you tempted at all to write about the War on Terror, or even allude to it?

The thing about the War on Terror and Islamic terrorism is that so far — thank God — it’s had a very limited scope. Whereas there’s a strange, cultural shift that I’ve been watching over the last 45 years since I came to England: the airport culture, the motorway culture, CCTV cameras, all the rest of it. People like alienation, curiously enough. They like disposability. Friendships that last half an hour. Things have changed, and one can’t help but notice.

Here and there in the novel I talk about inner London, what I call heritage London, by which I don’t just mean Bloomsbury, the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey — I mean Muswell Hill, Holland Park. A middle-class London held together by dinner-party culture. I admit I’ve been part of it. It sustains a view of England as a place of Georgian rectories and so on. It is not. If you want to see the real England, go out to the M25 motorway towns, where it’s almost impossible to buy a book, say a prayer. The old civic virtues have gone and we have a throwaway, disposable culture — which is prone to takeover, frankly. There’s been a sort of shift.

‘Every car had a St George’s flag’. Photo by Simon Crubellier.

The takeover would be what you call soft fascism?

Yes. It could happen. I live in Shepperton, a small town. There’s about forty or fifty shops on the high street. During the World Cup every one of them had a large St George’s flag in the window; every car had a St George’s flag flowing from it. One of my neighbours erected a flagpole. I looked out of my bedroom window and I saw a flagpole! Where do you get a flagpole? I wouldn’t know where to start.

I thought, ‘something’s happening here’. I’ve speculated that the white working class is tribalising itself. Waves of immigration have been coming here for the last forty or fifty years — black, Asian, Kosovan, Polish — and the white working class are saying, ‘remember us’. I don’t think it’s racist — not yet. But there’s something going on, and sport could be a catalyst.

There are references in Kingdom Come to Goebbels, the Fuhrer, etc. It seems that the message in Kingdom Come has been conditioned by your childhood.

I’ve never taken the view that the two huge totalitarian systems that dominated the twentieth century, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, just arrived out of the sky and after leaving tens of millions of people dead just vanished. I think there’s something uniquely dangerous about human beings. We’re the only animal species that in its ordinary, everyday condition is mad. We aren’t overrun by mad alligators or mad squirrels. I think we’re a very dangerous species.

We should take some questions from the audience now.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Could you expand on what you said about Tony Blair not living in the real world?

I wasn’t making a political point. I just think that he is a rather sad and deeply unhappy man. Something’s gone seriously wrong. He’s a person who needs to be liked, and that’s part of his strength. I go along with the general view that his big mistake was to get too close to the American president and enter the Iraq war. The problem is we don’t trust him any more. We see him as a bit of a fantasist. Whether we’re going to be happy with his successor is a different matter.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: What happens next for a consumerist society? Will there be a post-consumerist phase that you anticipate?

Well, I wouldn’t know. There are some very strange movements afoot. Religious revivalism for one, in the States in particular. There was a graph in the Times a couple of days ago that showed that something like 98% of Americans believe in God. One shouldn’t interpret that too literally — at least I hope not — but there are some very strange currents in society. The problem is, modern technology allows change to take place at an enormously fast pace. A suspicious substance is found in a bungalow in Bishop Stortford, and the next day the entire airline system of the West is more or less shut down. Everything’s so volatile. I hope my wildest dreams don’t come true.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I’d like to ask what inspired The Drowned World.

I think there’s no doubt that The Drowned World, my first novel, was unconsciously inspired — though it took me a long time to realise it — by Shanghai during the annual spring floods, when the Yangtze overflowed and the streets of Shanghai were a foot deep in water. As a boy I thought, ‘this is a bit weird’.

English novelists over the past two or three hundred years have made a specialty of stories of world destruction — cataclysmic novels. It’s never been that popular in America but it’s intensely popular here. English novelists have destroyed London by every conceivable means. It’s an interesting strain in our character. If you put too many rats in what they call a rat universe, the rats after a while separate off into little clubs, then they start attacking each other — then they start attacking themselves. Maybe there’s something about overcrowding here.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: In some of your novels you talk about random acts of meaningless violence making us feel more I alive. I was wondering how you’d apply this to the July 7 attacks in London?

In many ways that wasn’t an act of meaningless violence. The people who perpetrated it knew what they were doing. Suicide bombing is a sign of despair. The men who crashed planes into the World Trade Centre knew they’d never defeat America. The Chechnyan terrorists know they’ll never beat Russia. I’ve got a feeling that many of these young Islamic terrorists know that Islam is too deeply rooted in the past to defeat the West, and it’s a tragedy of gigantic proportions. I fear huge numbers of people are going to die before there’s any resolution because these people are absolutely desperate — they don’t see any way in which Islam is going to be reconciled, so they retreat into fantasies of violence that tragically kill large numbers of people. It’s something we have to live with.

At the end of the last century, people would ring me up and ask me my views about the future. I said I can sum up the future in one word — it’s going to be boring. Vast suburbs that extend around the planet: utter boredom, broken by acts of unpredictable violence. The man in the supermarket who opens fire with a machine gun. And the suicide bomber, a man who has nothing, setting off a bomb in a desperate way to prove himself. The idea of meaningless violence, which I looked at in my previous novel Millennium People, has a huge appeal. I can understand that. It’s in the roots of one’s childhood — all children smash their toys. The trouble, of course, is that people get killed.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Is your work a critique of modernism?

I think modernism shot its bolt. There’s something about modernism that’s too self-immersed and neurotic. I think people prefer confusion.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You talked about 50s science fiction as having great vitality. Where do you see that same vitality now? Is it in internet culture, or is it still fiction?

I think internet culture does have that vitality, from what I see over my partner’s shoulder 18 hours a day. She retrieves the most extraordinary things from the internet. I think internet culture is the most vital culture today. I don’t think there’s anything remotely rivalling it. It’s so democratic. Where it’ll go I don’t know. I’ve got a terrible fear that big corporations will start blocking off larger and larger areas of it. But that hasn’t happened yet as far as I know. I think it’s a wonderful force.

——————————————————————————–
..:: LINKS
+ Rattling Other People’s Cages Ballardian’s newest interview with J.G. Ballard

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plus the obligatory endorsement:

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

Nicholas Royle, Guardian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I call that a missed opportunity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

..:: CONTENTS

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

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

..:: BUY VOLUME 1

..:: BUY VOLUME 2

J.G. Ballard used to explain UFO sightings of the ‘Prophet Yahweh’…

So, I’ve seen the video, and this guy stands in a park in a city underneath some major military and commercial air traffic routes, and “summons” UFO’s.

Now, there is a short story by J. G. Ballard (“Empire of the Sun”, “Crash”, etc.) contained in his book of short stories “The Terminal Beach”. (I forget the actual name of the specific story.) In that story, an explorer in the amazon rainforest comes across a white man worshipped as a god or prophet by the natives around him because he has the power to “summon” spirits from the sky.

These explorers, not convinced, secretly search the “prophets” personal belongings and find an almanac detailing projected satellite times for the whole region. The “Prophet” was merely waiting for the correct times a satellite would be visible in the night sky and taking his followers out to the area the almanac indicated and uttering some nonsense.

Now, what exactly is stopping this “Prophet Yahweh” from getting a hold of such a book, or even simpler, a flight schedule for Las Vegas airport, identifying a particular frequent route where the airplane flies at an altitude high enough to make it look like a sliver of light as it reflects the sun? If the flights were frequent enough, which they easily could be, it wouldn’t be too hard to make it look like you were “summoning” them on demand.”

The Ballard story referred to here is of course ‘A Question of Re-entry’.

"Keep it brief’: A new £15,000 prize for short stories suggests Britain is finally getting over its obsession with the novel. And not before time, says Aida Edemariam

… [William] Boyd identified seven types of short story, beginning with the "event-plot story", one of its earliest forms, in which "the skeleton of plot is all important, the narrative is shaped, classically, to have a beginning, middle and end". But there are six others: the self-explanatory "Chekhovian story"; the "modernist story" – Hemingway, for example; the "cryptic/ludic story – Nabokov and Borges; the "mini-novel story" – Chekhov again; the "poetic/mythic" – Dylan Thomas, DH Lawrence, JG Ballard, Ted Hughes and Frank O’Hara; the biographical – Borges again and Boyd himself.
…"

“We only just got around to seeing Peter Watkins’ Punishment Park – we figured we’ve waited for 35 years… what’s another week or so matter. Now we’re kicking ourselves for not getting along to the ICA sooner so we could recommend this to you guys earlier. We caught the very last screening yesterday afternoon, but we still want to mention the film as it’s due for a DVD release in the Autumn.

It’s what Watkins describes as a psychodrama as the cast are mostly not actors and the script tended to be improvised and mirrored the beliefs of those voicing them. The exception to that were some of the right-wing authority figures who were played by ex-policeman and on the whole believed that the characters portrayed in the film were a danger to society.

Society was scared enough to not watch the film again for almost four decades.

The set up is reminiscent of a couple of JG Ballard short stories in which BBC crews follow both sides of an American anti communist war that has spilled over into Britain. Where Ballard envisaged an escalation of the Vietnam war forcing a civil war over here Watkins took what was happening in the States and turned everything up a notch or two. What he came up with was the idea of Punishment Parks – vast tracks of desert where the police and national guard could practice their law enforcement techniques on political dissidents as a way to alleviate prison overcrowding. The idea is that those convicted of crimes against their country are offered the choice between lengthy jail time and a few days in the Park. Naturally most people choose the Park.”

More here.