by Mike Holliday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The panel. From left to right: Sellars, Sterling, Vale, Costa. Photo by Martí Pons, courtesy CCCB 2008.

“Hello Barcelona. I hope everyone there is enjoying the show, if I’m allowed to call it that. Vale is taking charge of everything, and I leave him to represent me.”

J.G. Ballard, from Vale’s opening video.

Two years ago, I appeared on a panel, ‘Myths of a Near Future’, with writer Bruce Sterling and V. Vale of RE/Search Publications to discuss the work of J.G. Ballard. Held at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) as part of the Kosmopolis 08 literary festival, the panel was chaired by the Spanish critic Jordi Costa, the driving force behind the CCCB’s magnificent ‘JG Ballard – Autopsy of the new millennium‘ exhibition.

Jordi began with a Spanish-language introduction, and then Vale followed with a 15-minute video detailing his relationship and collaborations with Ballard. Jordi’s questions were in Spanish, and they were translated for us and the audience via earpiece. Our friend Tim Chapman was in the audience and he has kindly transcribed the discussion from his recording, although his Spanish was not sufficient to recall Jordi’s questions in English.

So here it is, two years late, but hopefully still of interest: ‘Myths of a Near Future’.

Jordi Costa: [a question about the definition of 'Ballardian']

Bruce Sterling: I’m of the school who believes JG Ballard really is a science fiction writer, and I think he made very wise choices in the sciences he was interested in. He did in fact work on this engineering and technology publication for quite a while. He was famous for saying that the rubbish can of science was the gold mine of science fiction. That’s certainly something I learned a lot from. But while a lot of science fiction writers were interested in topics like space flight and robots and atomic power and nuclear physics, Ballard was always interested in medicine, and psychotherapy, and extremes of human behaviour, and hysteria, and panic, and weapons.

I think his chosen scientific topics had more literary value than the ones that were chosen by his colleagues in science fiction. That’s why his work has lasted, and that’s why he was able to capture something about the nature of society that lets us use terms like ‘Ballardian’. He just had a better literary understanding than most of his colleagues, a better set of tools, deeper insights that were better expressed, and that’s why he’s a major cultural figure while most science fiction writers are genre writers.

Sellars, Sterling, Vale, Costa. Photo by Martí Pons, courtesy CCCB 2008.

Costa: [another question about the definition of 'Ballardian']

Simon Sellars: I think the adjective ‘Ballardian’ will become immortal, because I think that, to take what Bruce has said about the way Ballard turned from the traditional notion of science fiction from outer space to inner space, I think that was a very prophetic move. He saw the way technology was heading. There’s a famous phrase of his that he wanted to explore the next five minutes rather than the next 500 years. To me, that says that he saw that technology was creating a turning inward in a psychological sense. He saw the democratisation of technology, in terms of technology that – in a phrase of Bruce’s from the cyberpunk era – would stick to the skin rather than being something else. He would write about this stuff rather than the modernist aesthetic of rockets and outer space. I think that was a very prophetic move.

Also, he saw the way that we’re entering this globally homogeneous space, a sort of eventless present as he likes to call it, where you virtually can go to any country in the world. He talks about the areas around motorways and airports as a metaphor for this homogeneous space, and I think he saw the implications of where this is all heading. He also reacted against it, so I see his work as a resistance against this sort of corporate culture, and against the drive of, I guess, late capitalism to classify and categorise everything.

To me, the most important thing about Ballard is providing this space that he evokes, that preservation of inner spaces and autonomous zones. I’ve been reading a lot of mainstream newspaper articles recently, talking about the colonisation of inner space and the way we’re really crowded with information. The terms that were used and the arguments they were making were the things that Ballard was talking about in the ’60s. In that sense, I’d say there was this philosophy of resistance to a political culture. To me, that’s a sort of ideal for living.

Costa: [a question about future perceptions of Ballard]

Sterling: I think what you’re asking there is, like, is his work due to date because he’s a period figure. No, I don’t think so. Like the work of William Burroughs, there are aspects of Ballard’s work which will be very frightening and even astonishing to people in a hundred years. It’s true that some things that he foresaw have become everyday things among us, but there are aspects of Ballard’s work which are really intensely visionary and are never going to be seen in everyday experience, like say The Crystal World disaster novel, or something goes wrong with the structure of time and people are overwhelmed by this cosmic disaster. As a young man, that was one of the touchstones of my literary experience – it’s by no means a realist novel, but it had a really powerful, emotional, liberating effect on me as a teenager, just because it was showing me the scope of things that it’s possible to imagine.

Ballard has a tremendous power of imagination which the passage of time is not going to be able to dim. There are topics of his which will become out-dated, like Marilyn Monroe or John F Kennedy that are going to be period figures. In a way he’s a lot like Kafka – even though Kafka writes about the experience of the 1930s, when we say ‘Kafkaesque’, we know what that means, that no real bureaucracy will be as ideally horrible as a Kafka bureaucracy, no disaster (although we have plenty) can ever be as ecstatic and total as a Ballard disaster.

Costa: [a question about the Ballardian implications of the global financial crisis]

V. Vale: You know, Ballard is a very wise man in his judgement, and I’m thinking that of course when he starts taking in the input of information about the financial crisis, what is he thinking about. He’s not really thinking about himself, he’s thinking about the welfare of his children and grandchildren, I think. Also, he knows who his audience is. I’m also a parent. This may sound strange, but he actually heartened me with his response. He more or less said to me, regarding the current state of financial chaos, downturn, whatever you call it – he said you know, I remain optimistic. I was really happy about that, regardless of whether there’s any foundation or not.

I think it is important to preserve a sense of optimism and hope. In many situations, I think, one can only hope. There certainly isn’t any point in just becoming very depressed, because that takes away your power, especially the power of your imagination which Ballard himself has demonstrated and incarnated in his life. He walks down the street and every time he does, it might be the same street but the street is transformed in his imagination. This is something we can all do – we don’t have to take reality at face value. There has to be another dimension of inner space and inner strength we can tap, and that’s got to be built up in each one of us by a sustained exercise – daily, hourly, minutely – of the imagination. Please, never take anything at face value, you never accept any of these mass media notions of reality.

Sellars: I think that’s true, and that’s why Ballard’s books are optimistic. It’s a misreading when people say they’re a negative vision of the world – you hear that so often about Ballard’s work. But for the reasons you say, the characters are trying to make sense of chaos, and that transforms the world.

Sterling: I completely agree. He is a fantasist, he’s not a realist writer. I find his work attractive because of the sense of liberation and inspiration and release that he gives me. Really, as a young man of imaginative bent, when I was reading these early books of Ballard in the 1960s, I was never depressed or upset by them for a moment. To me, they were one torrent of good news. They were like sunlight through a [brick?] wall in the existence I had as a young teen in a small Texan industrial town.

This is someone who really is a grand master of the imagination. Yes, he does have black humour, and yes he very much enjoys pulling the legs of the bourgeoisie, he likes to make harsh jokes at the expense of power figures, and he’s really a clinician of the psychopathology of everyday life. There are a lot of things that people do in our society which are irrational and bad for us. He had a great deal of personal experience of that, and there are aspects of his own experience which are universal.

Sellars, Sterling, Vale, Costa. Photo by Martí Pons, courtesy CCCB 2008.

He’s not a tremendously popular figure, he’s not the author of Harry Potter, but he’s by no means a minor figure. Certainly, in the circle of American science fiction writers of my generation – cyberpunks and humanists and so forth – this was a towering figure. We used to have bitter struggles over who was more Ballardian than whom. We knew we were not fit to polish the man’s boots, and we were scarcely able to understand how we could get to a position to do work which he might respect or stand, but at least we were able to see that the peak of achievement that he had reached. It was not like the slough of despond, that’s just a rhetorical tactic.

To call Ballard depressing, it’s like a Christian fundamentalist who says ‘If I didn’t believe Jesus was watching me, I’d kill myself’ who then argues that therefore you must be suicidal because you don’t have Jesus to help you make breakfast. You’re not suicidal if you understand JG Ballard. On the contrary, this guy’s a consummate survivor. Burroughs and his friends and the beatnik movement had a tremendous casualty list, whereas Ballard and his friends in the British New Wave movement and the Pop Art scene were actually fairly solid, well-balanced if unconventional individuals – people with jobs and children, they were not reedy figures. This is a towering oak tree of a writer, who wrote many volumes of consistently good, accomplished work.

Many science fiction writers have – even [Homer?] nods, it’s common for a writer to do something unworthy of himself and you have to overlook that. In Ballard’s case, I can’t think of a single work. Even his minor work is very polished, very assured – he’s never hasty, he’s a consummate professional, he’s really in charge of every sentence on the page. It’s really no accident that he’s being honoured at this event. I must say that I am enjoying the show, as he urged me to do, it’s a lot of fun to see this happen.

Vale: I think another thing about Ballard is, during my 32 years in publishing I’ve pretty much concentrated on the interview or the conversation format for a very simple reason. You don’t give the questions in advance, and you just use your intuition to listen carefully and observe how the author responds in real-time to something completely unexpected and how they improvise answer. You’re not even improvising if you’re JG Ballard, this is just coming out of you without pause.

Really, the amount of editing I’ve had to do on all the people I’ve recorded and transcribed, the amount of editing was absolutely the least I’ve ever had to do with JG Ballard and, of course, William S Burroughs. Their conversations are practically extensions of their writing. I wish we could all be like that.

Sellars: Vale, can I ask did you get the sense through the interviews that Ballard was testing ideas that he would later come back to in his writing?

Vale: I don’t think he tests, I really think there’s almost a perfect marriage in his soul between – as soon as he starts talking and thinking and expressing himself, it’s beyond some rational process level. It’s just coming out, he has such an incredibly detailed and complete philosophy, such an evolved vision of the universe, unlike most of us he doesn’t have to censor himself or choose his words carefully or any of that, it just comes out. One reason I like him so much is because you really think that he’s considering your feelings, you really think that unlike 99 per cent of writers out there, he just tells the truth. I can’t explain it any other way. I mean, how rare is that?

Costa: [unknown question]

Sterling: Well, I wouldn’t call Crash a jolly book by any means. It’s a very sinister work which is well informed by a deep understanding of human psychopathology. In some ways, it’s like expecting a medical textbook to be optimistic. If you read a medical textbook, it’s usually a long list of terrible things that can go wrong with people. By the time you reach the end of a medical textbook, you’re looking at yourself for symptoms – is it my liver, could it be my eyeballs?

I don’t think that work in itself is a happy work, but when you put it down the sense of escaping that world gives you a strange uplifted feeling. It’s like being subjected to a really violent massage, something on the edge of pain, and when it stops you have this sense of achievement and joy. It’s like, what’s the worst thing that can happen to me during the rest of my life? Will I be involved in a sexual cult involving crashed automobiles? Probably not, you know, and that’s another reason to go on.

Vale: A writer often takes you – if you have an idea or a fantasy, I think you ought to take it to the utmost limit. It’s only writing, it’s not real life. In writing, you can kill people, you can do sexual things that you might not do in real life, but it’s just writing, it’s just words on paper. I think you have a duty to yourself to carry an obsession, any obsession is valid, to its utmost extension in writing, on paper, in the realm of the imagination – I’m not saying to do any of that in real life.

Ballard and Vale, in a still from Vale’s opening video. Photo by Martí Pons, courtesy CCCB 2008.

Sterling: I really don’t think that’s the ultimate extension of this particular problem. There are probably people in Nascar who are worse off than the characters in that. There are probably fans of monster racers in the United States who are more psychopathological than the characters in Crash.

To me, the thing that I find really useful about that book is that most science fiction writers, if you asked them to write science fiction about cars, would write about, say, a flying car or a car that’s also a submarine. They would not write about an intense psychosexual fixation with cars, or the car as another method of being, or people who are so dependent on cars they can’t get through a day without cars. They certainly would not illuminate the truth about cars, which is they kill more of us than wars.

There’s probably not a person in this audience who hasn’t had a loved one injured or maimed or killed in a car. That’s just the truth about cars, but we are very rarely shown that truth. Certainly not by the car industry. Sometimes there will be a mention of car safety in a car commercial, like your child is safe in the back seat, but you will never see a major car company of any description, from Fiat to Toyota or General Motors, apologising to the people who die in their vehicles, any more than you would see an armaments manufacturer saying, you know, I’m sorry people were killed by handguns. But it’s true. It’s not even like sort of true, it’s kind of like a vast open scandal in our society that so many of us are murdered, I mean just slaughtered, by cars.

Sellars: But it’s very ambiguous with Ballard, isn’t it, because he’s also aware of the seductive nature of cars and technology and speed.

Sterling: Well, we love our cars. But there’s something wrong with a society that is so in love with something so destructive. I don’t even know if it is wrong, it’s a statement about the nature of mankind that we love that which destroys us. We’re more interested in poisonous snakes than we are in rabbits, we’re fascinated by things with the potential for menace, we find them arousing and exciting. The same goes for political leaders. Really, someone who promises to simply pave our streets and look after our children will be immediately thrown aside for a person who promises us blood and sweat and tears and toil and death and a sense of exultation. Ballard talks about this openly many times, about the attractive psychopathology of cult leaders. They have command over us because they can tap into our urge to harm ourselves, and we do.

Costa: [a question about Ballard's methods]

Vale: Well, there’s a huge component of theatre in everyone’s life. Ballard was the first that I read to point out how the invention and widespread adoption of the cellphone has led to almost everyone becoming a sort of actor. As they talk on their cellphones in public, they’re acting a lot of the time, with their gestures, and it is kind of shocking to me how cellphone users will talk about the most intimate details of their lives while other people can overhear them.

The thing is, what a book can do, it can, like, let you know in a pretty universalising way that you’re not alone in any of your sexual fantasies or whatever, no matter how extreme you might have thought them. Your participation, even if just in your imagination, with these theatrical fantasies, you’re just not alone. I suppose it’s a form of justification to make your life easier for you. We do look to writers, I think, for help in navigating very perplexing times such as now when we have so many options for everything in our lives. What are some core values which can last when we’re assaulted with so many contradictory media images, and they’re usually either sexual or violent in nature, how do you sustain some kind of inner compass or barometer so we can survive all this?

Left: Bruce Sterling. Photo by Martí Pons, courtesy CCCB 2008.

Sterling: Some of Ballard’s greatest inspirations were surrealists in the 30s and pop artists in the 60s, and they were both very big on the power of the unconscious and the libido and urges which did not surface within consciousness. There was an ideal there that if you could speak to these urges directly and break the code of bourgeois behaviour and liberate something deep.

Ballard is not a sex writer in the way that say Henry Miller was a sex writer, I don’t really think that’s one of his major interests. He mentions it, he’s kind of deploying it in the way that Max Ernst might put a nude in a collage, but there aren’t really long intimate sex scenes in Ballard novels, he’s not really that interested in what happens between individuals. It’s more like his lasting interest in celebrity worship, which is something that shows up in his work all the time. It’s like some kind of very intense social, emotional, sticky and vaguely unhealthy allegiance between people’s unmet emotional needs and a figure like Jackie Kennedy or Marilyn Monroe or Princess Di. It’s somebody you’re never going to actually have sex with, but it’s somebody who’s going to come up in your erotic imaginations sort of like the Loch Ness Monster.
That’s the kind of thing that Ballard finds as a totem and a touchstone. He’s kind of deploying these things against us – he wants us to disrupt our sleep with these images, he’s not trying like Miller to get to the core of the erotic impulse, that’s not really his major line of work.

Sellars: He also foresaw that whole anti-celebrity thing, that celebrities now don’t have the lustre or starpower they used to. Those surgical fictions with Princess Margaret and Mae West where it’s cutting up these celebrities in a very clinical medical way, it’s very prophetic of the end of that particular paradigm.

Sterling: I’ve been saying Paris Hilton is a very Ballardian figure. Here you have somebody whose major reason for being a celebrity is this kind of unsought sexual transgression which was blown up through the media. It’s not really like that fantastic an act of sex that Paris Hilton has, it’s not like she’s a sexual athlete of some kind, it’s merely that she’s a minor celebrity who became a major celebrity and was able to work it, to industrialise that and build upon it with the perfume and the record and clothing line and the Los Angeles celebrity life, really just construct a life out of elements of 1960s transgression.

Costa: [unknown question]

Sellars: It’s a kind of system of circular time that Ballard uses, that sort of eventless present that’s always a symbol of oppression in Ballard’s work. He reuses events from history and his own personal history and re-inhabits them and re-interprets them throughout his whole career, and I think that’s a very liberating force as well. It becomes a sort of parallel history in a sense, something that runs counter to the main narrative.

Sterling: I think Ballard knows a great deal about the work of the surrealists in the 20s and 30s. So much so, that he is almost a surrealist writer. He quite frequently chose surrealist canvases for his own work, and they make a lot of sense. I think he also has a deep knowledge of modernist design and urbanism and architecture. He’s very aware of the roots of that in the 20s and 30s and how it developed, and the successes of the modernist programme and the failures of modernism, and the oncoming and rush of postmodernism. To be a good futurist, you need some kind of roots in the past. I think those are his roots, and those are the things he was looking at when he was quite young and he really is a scholar in those fields, and I think that has helped him a lot in his prognostications.

Left: Simon Sellars. Photo by Martí Pons, courtesy CCCB 2008.

Costa: [a question about Ballard's influence on visual art]

Sellars: I think it’s like Bruce and Vale have said, that Ballard has a surrealist background, has a very visual mindset. I think that aside from using that to explore his ideas of the subconscious and inner space, I think that in the 60s he saw how advertising was becoming basic in how we were shifting towards a visual culture. He has sort of encoded this into his writing. As we’re starting to see this happen, I think that aspect of his work is becoming more and more influential and people are really picking up on that.

He is a visual person to the extent that he’s created his own collages, he’s starred in his own film, and I think he was working on a theatre play in the 60s, so he was really interested in breaking the frame of his fiction to create something that was in a sense a prototype for a multi-media society, and he was doing that a long time ago. If you look at that visual work that Ballard did today, the collages, they’re still very strong graphic works that really re-use the tricks of advertising against itself. When I started up the website, that’s an aspect that really interested me a lot, and we started to find a lot of examples of people who were really quite influenced by that. We’re still continuing to find a lot of people who are really influenced by that aspect.

Sterling: I think he has a great friendliness for the artist. Like his short story collection Vermilion Sands is set in a future art colony and he takes artistic work seriously. I think artists and musicians respond to that. When they find a novelist who thinks that painters are important, they think well of him. Whereas most science fiction writers are much more in love with scientists than they are with artists, Ballard is the kind of guy who would actually go hang out with pop artists and go to their openings and befriend them and be kind to them and chat things over with them and learn with them and trade things with them. He was never a philistine, he’s actually quite sophisticated in that way, and still has the dapper look of a ’60s pop artist gentleman in his neat little kitted-out white suit and snappy white fedora. He’s won the friendship of people in other lines of work.

Vale: He has constructed a whole universe and whole world, and the world always needs a soundtrack. What would this be – it would not be something mainstream so much as something unusual. Grace Jones at one end and you could have Joy Division at the other, and in the middle there’s the Teddy Bears Picnic. The thing is, the spectrum of music is – I have to confess I’m going to reveal a small secret, I hope she doesn’t mind, but Claire Walsh [Ballard's partner] did tell me that she suggested one of the numbers on the [Desert Island Discs] list, one of the 10 pieces on the list was actually suggested by Claire Walsh as a sort of prank. They certainly puzzled me, those two classical pieces, which is where it’s at to me. You always want to have an aspect of mystery about everything you do, even if it’s by chance that something happens. I think Ballard, again as a surrealist, is very open to the miracle of a chance encounter or a chance suggestion. He is open to that, in the same way the surrealists were.

Sterling: He’s someone who doesn’t just facilely admire Dali or Ernst, he’s actually read Dali and frequently quotes Dali. I think he probably learned quite a lot from Andre Breton. Similarly, I read Andre Breton because I thought Ballard took him seriously. Many people say Breton was a rather downbeat figure as well, but that was certainly not what occurred to people in Breton’s immediate circle. They all called him the torch who lights our steps, they considered him an organising and enlightening figure, not someone who was on the fringe of society but someone who was leading them into sunlit uplands.

I think that comes across very strongly in his work, he’s not really interested in the arts, he’s interested in how artists think and how they approach reality, and that’s what gives him a well-rounded sensibility. There are a lot of pop writers and comicbook writers and so forth who are very into pop music, and heaven knows cyberpunks love rock and roll, but to have a whole wider sensibility that really appeals to a great many people in many different lines of creative work, it’s more like surrealism which is almost a philosophy, a way of life, rather than a painting, a poetry, a form of sculpture, a form of music, that’s a way of being.

Left: V. Vale. Photo by Martí Pons, courtesy CCCB 2008.

Vale: I agree with that. Surrealism is definitely a way of life, a philosophy, a consciousness with historical art roots that’s something living, the potential is far from extinguished. You just have to read the hundreds of books, that’s a start. Most people – they didn’t get taught surrealism in my art history class. I hope things have advanced since then.

Costa: [unknown question]

Sterling: Stunned, the audience stares at one another…

Audience question: [about preventing horrible futures]

Sellars: Only if we read more Ballard books, it’s the only way…

Sterling: I really think probably the critical moment in Ballard’s literary life was the two years he spent in Canada, when he was in the Royal Air Force in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. He described his period at this air force base as being paralysingly boring, and the only outlet he found there were copies of these American pulp science fiction magazines which by some strange accident had ended up on this military base. You have to imagine this young very asocial man who’s basically flunked out of medical school and joined the military, and having lived in China is now in an icy camp somewhere in Canada reading American science fiction for a lack of any other alternative. From that experience which is frankly rooted in boredom we get the greatest literary artist of the science fiction genre, and probably the most visionary science fiction writer of the 20th century. Boredom can be the seed of great things.

Vale: Well, the imagination is obviously the antidote to any boredom, and it’s always there ready to be deployed. Imagination and brains are our secret resource which makes everyone in the audience an artist, because in your dreams you’re a complete film director, you’re the scriptwriter, you’re the set designer, you’re the make-up person, you create everything and it’s all happening when you dream every night. It’s really kind of a miracle.

Audience question: [about film adaptations]

Sterling: I know he enjoyed appearing as an extra in his own film. In Empire of the Sun, there’s a period where Ballard appears in the movie as an older figure. He’s always lived in Shepperton which is quite close to the Shepperton film studios which in Britain are famous for the films that are made and the sets that are made. But I don’t think he’s either disturbed or enthusiastic about it, I think he’s had a very mature response to his unsought cinematic success. I don’t think he was either disappointed or shocked or chagrined. He did the wise thing by letting Hollywood do what it wanted.

Costa: [closing comments]

[applause]

…:: Previously on Ballardian:

+ ‘Unblinking, clinical’: From Ballard to cyberpunk
+ Kosmopolis 08: Landing Gear
+ Kosmopolis 08: Switching stations
+ Negative acoustic space: Ballardian sound art
+ Rick McGrath’s Letter from Barcelona: The Exquisite Corpse, An Autopsy of the New Millennium
+ Ballardoscope: some attempts at approaching the writer as a visionary
+ J.G. Ballard: In the Raw
+ J.G. Ballard, Autopsy of the New Millennium: Press Release
+ Autopsy of the New Millennium: JGB exhibition opens tomorrow in Barcelona
+ ‘Child of the diaspora’: Sterling on Ballard

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.

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

All photography by Rick McGrath.

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

Dear Simon,

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

Left: Toby Litt.

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

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

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

Claire Walsh.

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

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

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

THE PUBLIC

Will Self.

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

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

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

THE PERSONAL

Fay Ballard.

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

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

Michael Moorcock.

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

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

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

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

Left: V. Vale. Right: Bea Ballard.

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

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

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

THE PSYCHE

Left: Bill Spencer.

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

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

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

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

Left: Iain Sinclair.

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

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

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

Cheers,
Rick.

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

Michael Butterworth in the Savoy office, 1998 (photo by Ben Blackall).

Interview by Mike Holliday.

This is the first of a proposed 3-interview series. Parts 2 and 3, featuring David Britton and John Coulthart, will discuss Savoy’s musical, spoken word and visual/comics/graphics output. To coincide with this series, please enter the Savoy Books Microfiction competition! Win super-rare Savoy books, comic books and CDs by writing a short story of 100 words or less on ‘Savoyesque’ or ‘Ballardian’ themes. Details here.

Savoy Books, which bills itself as “England’s only truly alternative and autotelic publishing company”, was started by David Britton and Michael Butterworth in 1976. For more than 30 years, Savoy have published books based on the sole criterion of admiration for the content or the author, and their roster includes many writers who appeared alongside Ballard in the heady days of New Worlds magazine — Michael Moorcock, Harlan Ellison, Charles Platt, Samuel R. Delany, Langdon Jones, and M. John Harrison.

By 1980, Savoy were publishing almost 20 titles a year and would surely have been a good match as a publisher of Ballard, but alas it was not to be. Savoy had the bad luck to be based in Manchester, whose Chief Constable — ‘God’s Cop’, James Anderton — had the looks of a biblical prophet and was prone to righteous denunciation of what he saw as good, old fashioned sin. Helping to fund Savoy’s publishing were a string of bookshops, and these quickly became a target for Manchester’s Vice Squad, suffering more than fifty raids over a period of 20 years, during which time David Britton served two sentences in Strangeways prison for selling obscene publications. By 1981 the combined effect of the police raids and the collapse of a distribution agreement had forced Savoy’s publishing business into liquidation, just as they were planning a U.K. paperback edition of William Burroughs’ Cities of the Red Night.

LEFT: David Britton.

Whilst Ballard was being embraced by the mainstream following Empire of the Sun, Savoy were moving in the opposite direction, becoming near-untouchable mavericks of the publishing world. By 1984, Britton and Butterworth had entered what they termed their ‘moral ambiguity’ phase, and Savoy had transmuted into a rather different creature, concentrating for the next ten years or so on records — many featuring vocals by P. J. Proby — and comics rather than books, although there was, of course, Lord Horror (1989), written by Britton with assistance from Butterworth, an extreme and deliberately distasteful novel about fascism and those aspects of the twentieth century that contributed to it. Lord Horror was the last novel to be successfully prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Acts as likely to corrupt and deprave those who read it (the decision was finally overturned on appeal). In addition, over the years Savoy have re-published the likes of A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay, Henry Treece’s Celtic fantasy novels, Ken Reid’s ‘Fudge and Speck’ cartoons from the Manchester Evening News and Maurice Richardson’s compendium of light-hearted surrealist tales The Exploits of Engelbrecht (one of Ballard’s favourite books)

The links between Savoy and Ballard are not immediately obvious, but run deep. In this interview, Michael Butterworth discusses Savoy’s adventures in book publishing, starting with the late 1960s, when both he and Ballard wrote for New Worlds. Later interviews will look at Savoy’s musical and spoken word recordings, and at their visual/comics/graphics output, especially the work of the illustrators Kris Guidio and John Coulthart, who joined forces with Britton and Butterworth during the 1980s.

Savoy’s books, comics and records/CDs are available directly from the publishers.

Mike Holliday.

J.G. Ballard, 1974. Photo from Corridor magazine (#5), published and edited by Michael Butterworth.

MIKE HOLLIDAY: Michael, several of your own short stories appeared in New Worlds between 1966 and 1970: to what extent did Ballard influence you at that early stage?

MICHAEL BUTTERWORTH: It’s more a question of how he didn’t influence me! Coming across his work for the first time in the mid-60’s, I remember thinking, ‘He’s saying what I didn’t know I wanted to say!’ I read ‘The Voices of Time’, and ‘Mr F is Mr F’ and other stories, which led me to discovering The Wind From Nowhere and The Drowned World, and later his ‘fractured’ narratives: ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’ and ‘The Terminal Beach’. These stories crossed the blood-brain barrier. They seemed to step right inside me, to be totally relevant to my experiences as an individual and what I was striving after as a writer. Between Ballard and Burroughs, and Moorcock (his Elric short stories), and small amounts of Borges, I was ‘catered’ for, and looking back it did lessen the imperative to find a vehicle of my own, perhaps inducing a kind of complacency.

The things in Ballard’s work with which I identify are the ‘psychological landscapes’ – the deserted swimming pools and lagoons – and the outgrowths of time in The Crystal World. But what makes him compelling is the fact that despite the cataclysms, people are still able to lead recognisable lives. His stories mirrored my own obsession with post-atomic fantasy landscapes, in which the narrator is freed from the humdrum world. The backdrop of nearly all my New Worlds stories, mostly written when I was seventeen or eighteen at a time when you went to sleep at night wondering whether you would wake up to World War Three, were concerned with just this kind of survival and the resulting creative possibilities. They were written very coolly, very detachedly, very sardonically – saying, well if this is what you, mankind want to do with the world, then this is how it will be.

As a writer I was strongly attracted to what I call ‘simplified emotional landscapes’, end-scenarios where there is the opportunity for clarity of feeling and thought and picaresque happenings; or, as in Ballard’s stories, where you can just sit and stare into the setting sun above a flooded basin, becoming increasingly internalised. Reading Ballard and Burroughs, and entering into these landscapes myself, was a way of freeing the mind of complexity.

I first heard about Burroughs’ cut-ups about the same time as Ballard’s ‘fragmented’ stories began appearing. Cut-up became terribly exciting for me: it was a new way of ‘breaking out’, a way of actually embracing complexity instead of fleeing it. There seemed to be a correlation with the emergence of South American concrete poetry, which I had also just discovered. As Jim pointed out, writing was now beginning to catch up with art. A post-Duchamp New Wave of conceptual art was happening in the late 60’s and early 70’s … and probably we were all running off the same energies and currents. But there was little conscious interaction between all these practices, and looking back the New Wave of SF could have had more of an influence on the mainstream at that point. Ballard’s advertisements and crashed car exhibition at the ICA in the late 60s pointed to it.

Letter from Ballard (1967), discussing the editing of Butterworth’s stories (click to enlarge).

I believe there was collaboration with Ballard whilst you were writing your ‘Concentrate’ stories. How did that come about?

I was Ambit’s Manchester and Salford distributor for quite a few years until I got fed up tramping round, and I knew Jim was the Prose Editor, and I sent some pieces to him. Through appearing in New Worlds I’d met him at least once, at one of the New Worlds parties, where he had urged me just to be ‘more prolific’. He responded very positively to my work. A correspondence began, and he took the time to edit some of the longer pieces I had sent him. He was generally very kind to me, showing how Burroughs ‘subbed down’ his work from much longer pieces. He went through my manuscripts with a pen, underlining the sentences he thought ‘worked’. No one of his competence had taken this time with me before, and we ended up with half a dozen pieces. Martin Bax, the editor of Ambit, didn’t like them enough to publish them, and they ended up appearing in New Worlds instead, in three parts.

By the early 1970s, both yourself and David Britton were publishing amateur or semi-professional magazines under a variety of titles — Corridor, Weird Fantasy, Crucified Toad, and so on. To what extent were you aiming to fill the gap left by the demise of New Worlds as a large-format magazine in 1970? Presumably it was a strong influence at this stage — you had written for the magazine, and several of the first books that Savoy published were by authors who had appeared in its pages – Charles Platt’s The Gas, Langdon Jones’ The Eye of the Lens, Delany’s Tides of Lust, and several titles by Michael Moorcock.

We weren’t consciously trying to fill a gap — some of the contributors were the same because I knew many of the New Worlds writers and artists. Rather, we were inspired by New Worlds, and had started the zines when it was still in its prime — I published Concentrate in 1968, and David published Weird Fantasy in 1969. Concentrate was distributed inside New Worlds and Ambit, as a give away. All things Moorcock were in our blood. I first encountered his work in Science Fantasy magazine in the early 1960s, but it was through Charles Platt (who I met at school) that I was introduced to him. David was a reader from even earlier, from Michael’s own amateur press days, and had met him to speak to at early science fiction conventions.

ABOVE: The first (and only) issue of Michael Butterworth’s magazine Concentrate (1968).

The second issue of David Britton’s ‘Weird Fantasy’ (1971).

What was it that brought yourself and David together as book publishers? Or did you start the bookshops before going into publishing?

The publishing came first. Then, around 1972 David started the House on the Borderland bookshop in Manchester. This was down a back street in central Manchester, and happened to be close to where I worked as a copywriter. I became in the habit of spending my lunch breaks in the shop, although we didn’t know each other personally until our printer, the printer-publisher John Muir, introduced us. When David moved to a busier location in 1974, changing the name of the shop to Orbit Books, turnover increased and more serious publishing became a possibility. For the fourth issue of Corridor, in 1972, I had got hold of an original Jerry Cornelius story from Michael Moorcock, ‘The Swastika Set-Up’, which David illustrated. David published #4 of his magazine and then became the Art Editor of Corridor. By Corridor #7, in 1976, we had become co-publishers. Around the same time, David published an oversized graphic work, Stormbringer. Adapted by James Cawthorn from Moorcock’s story, this was the first Savoy book, and led to us doing The Jewel in the Skull, the first UK graphic novel, in 1978.

Poster (1972) for David Britton’s first shop, House on the Borderland.

So we became full partners around 1976/77. David had the Stormbringer title under his belt, a very productive cash-generator in the form of a bookshop, and he had the beginnings of a publishing ideology worked out. I had a name, and knew Michael Moorcock and the New Worlds writers. As a single parent, having started a career as a freelance writer so I could work from home, I also had some experience of the mainstream publishing world, and had made a few business connections. From the outset we were both of one mind; we wanted to publish books, and wanted to see how far we could go.

The bookshops were a lot more than just books and magazines, weren’t they? You also stocked records, tapes, and videos, especially hard-to-find material. How did running the shops influence the way you went about the publishing business?

To pay for Savoy, the bookshop had to be expanded, and as Savoy grew, we opened more of them, until we had a string of bookshops across the North West of England, selling comics, science fiction, horror, rock books, back issues, rare books, adult mags, bootleg records and all the perennially cult works and authors like A Clockwork Orange, the Illuminatus trilogy, the NEL Richard Allen Skinhead books, and so on. David operated a ‘part-exchange’ policy as well as selling new titles, so across the counter came a very wide mixture of things. Seeing all this material gave us ideas, of course, especially in the way we packaged our books, but the shops’ main purpose was to provide for Savoy financially, which they did right up until the final one closed around 2005 in Leeds. They also acted as shop windows for our titles and for authors we admired.

Basement Books in Manchester, one of the shops which helped fund Savoy’s publishing.

What lessons had you taken from Savoy’s difficulties of the early 80s? And what drove the two of you to keep going?

Savoy went into liquidation in 1981. I was bankrupted the same year. David was jailed in 1982. With those events, the first phase of Savoy was over. After a period spent packaging books for other publishers, in the year of Orwell’s Big Brother we published Savoy Dreams, which unconsciously signposted the way forwards for us. Looking back, it is a watershed book, half catalogue, half anthology, that provided a résumé of what we had achieved and, at the same time, by reprinting Kris Guidio’s comic strips of the Cramps and introducing P J Proby, we sounded our intentions for the future. This was also the book that contained the last stand-alone piece of fiction I published.

The second Savoy anthology, Savoy Dreams (1984), which included a selection of the letters which Michael Moorcock wrote to J G Ballard from Los Angeles (later published as Letters from Hollywood), with the drug references left in.

David’s term of imprisonment had been for 21 days, but the real aim of the police raids was books such as Charles Platt’s The Gas, Samuel Delany’s The Tides of Lust and Jack Trevor Story’s Screwrape Lettuce, a satirical story about the police that Jack had written (and David had illustrated) following a terrible ordeal Jack had at the hands of the London police during the Christmas of 1968. The police used ‘back door’ tactics against us, so that while making it plain that it was Savoy material they were concerned about (by seizing it and eventually destroying it after due process of law), they actually prosecuted us for other material we had on sale in the shops, a series of Grove Press ‘readers’ that had long passed their sell-by date, which the police had seized from us on numerous different occasions and returned — but after we had published The Gas they needed to make something stick. These were American books, so could be made to look like clandestine imports. The police were convinced we were major publishers of erotica, that they had stumbled on an international distribution network of pornography.

Savoy erotica: The Gas by Charles Platt (1980).

The main lesson we took from David’s imprisonment was really taken by him. He used the opportunity to rein in and focus down on the people and things that really mattered to him. Before this, I think, the publishing direction had largely been left open, as I attempted to build something he wasn’t really happy with — a mainstream publishing house. We had assembled a raft of writers and genres, ranging from science fiction, historical fiction, erotica — even a Savoy cookery line — to my real interests, Burroughs and Gysin. But these all got lost in the reorganisation. In our insolvency we lost control of our published titles, and the main lesson we learned was to, in future, own the copyright on everything we did, even if it meant creating the books ourselves. We have always regarded ourselves as creative publishers, and the direction we then embarked on saw David’s blossoming as a writer. Being in prison had also helped; in some ways, the experience had done him a favour, as it made him realise he didn’t want to waste more of his life on ‘inconsequences’, as he saw it.

Hours passed.

A sickly light, errant and pellucid, thrilled above him. In a drama close to somnia turbula, ganglias of cables and wires, nerve fibres and raunchy buzzing lights radiated down at him from a ceiling, meshed together in a flue. His body felt tropical, infusing him with a chimerical dread.

He woke fitfully, his limbs heavy and somnambulant. He was back in his room. During the long night the hotel’s central heating had switched itself on. The heat was terrific. His head throbbed, full of virulent stuffs and old memories. He thought he could hear the sound of boiling broth close by. Sulphurous fumes filled the room, and a bittersweet almond taste prevailed in his mouth.

He peered from a single drained eye. His room at the Chelsea looked as though the mad hand of a god had transposed it into an everglade sarcophagus. He lay on his side, his head awkwardly positioned on a once-white pillow. Stuck next to him was a single hank of hair that pushed an umber stain into the cotton. He tried to lift his left hand to remove the hair. The hand moved slowly, as though pulling through treacle, then stopped. He raised his head slightly and peered over his naked white shoulders down the length of the bed. Despite an intense light, he could not see clearly. From his chest downwards he appeared to be encased inside a blackish nitrate crust similar to a moth’s chrysalis. Beneath this dark surface he could feel a moist second layer that pressed warmly against his skin, snugly cocooning him.

Futilely, Horror tried to rise up from his bed of excrement. The chrysalis skin broke, and the smell almost made him faint. From his neck he retched a yellow waxen glue. Defeated, he lapsed back in his warm prison.

During the night, monstrously huge poppies, torture-coloured roses and pain-white petunias had grown around him. At his feet, nettles had sprouted from the dark skein. Weeds muffled the metallic clicking of shite flies. Dung beetles scurried everywhere over the crust’s surface.

Neon tubes wrapped in bald flex pushed through the shite and added their burning light to the room. Myriad phalanxes of wasps had taken possession of the upper cornices. They swarmed about the ceiling like dense waves of black hair. For a moment, he thought he was mad, lying with fallen soldiers in the fields of Flanders, Ypres or the Somme.

The bed giggled and sighed. It heaved with an almost sentient life. It let off a series of swaggering farts that echoed ominously round the room in search of an exit.

The lights shook, and a swell of steam rose from the bed. Back it came to him. He remembered packing the enema bags tightly about his body before falling asleep. In the hothouse of the night, they had burst.

Excerpt from David Britton’s novel Lord Horror, published in 1989 by Savoy Books of Manchester, England.

The (somewhat) tongue-in-cheek map of influences leading up to Britton and Butterworth’s Lord Horror (click to enlarge)

Can I move on to Lord Horror, which in a way was a response to the police raids and David’s first spell in prison. This is a novel whose subject matter includes Nazism and racism, yet I was struck by the lack of any explicit moral position within the book. This reminded me of Ballard’s comment that Crash would have been meaningless if he had incorporated some sort of explicit moral justification: the whole point of Crash was to get the reader to consider for themselves tendencies that already exist within the world that we live in, and therefore any moral framework has to be provided by the reader. And in fact Crash appears in the map of influences for Lord Horror.

As soon as you define something, it becomes that thing. We wanted to write something that wasn’t definable, and in a weird way more true. Although, like Crash, Lord Horror is composed in conventional narrative, it is not what it seems; it is an intricate tableau, or rather a series of tableaux, a florescence from a central idea, which we expanded into picaresque forms that really make no overall narrative sense. It was also David’s first novel. He isn’t, any more than I am, a natural storyteller. He would hand me very dense pages of text, together with dislocated dialogue, actually descriptions of ‘pictures’ that he was seeing in his head. I had to open this up, and make it run in sequence. Lord Horror took four years and twelve rewrites on a portable manual typewriter to get it exactly as we wanted it.

The stories I wrote for New Worlds leave the reader to deduce how the post-disaster deserts came about. They are ironic metaphor, in the sense that the first person narrator accepts the devastation as a given, and by being so cool he is actually conveying the opposite of what he really feels. This ‘double distancing’ protects from the horror, but it also enables the reader to interpret what is really being said. In Lord Horror, morally, it’s crucial that what results from the actions of its characters is presented in a similar way, as a given — and on top of this to keep an ironic or sardonic tone. The characters themselves aren’t morally defined, as they are in a work like, say, Maus. Making it clear that Lord Horror is ‘bad’ would have lost the possibility of empathy, and therefore the point of the novel. It would have perpetuated the image of Hitler-as-universal-scapegoat. Of course, it might also have appeased the judges and prevented much angst for David and I.

The faith in reason and rationality that dominated post war thinking struck me as hopelessly idealistic, like the belief that the German people had been led astray by Hitler and the Nazis. I was sure that the countless atrocities in eastern Europe had taken place because the Germans involved had enjoyed the act of mass murder, just as the Japanese had enjoyed tormenting the Chinese. Reason and rationality failed to explain human behaviour. Human beings were often irrational and dangerous

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

John Coulthart’s portrayal of the death camps in Hard Core Horror #5. The text panels are deliberately left blank … words are superfluous.

I’d like to mention here Brian Stableford’s suggestion that Lord Horror is actually designed ‘to excite revulsion and anxiety’. In effect, it’s an invitation to the reader to reflect on just what it is in the book that causes those feelings. For example, when I asked myself some months after first reading the novel what it was that I found repulsive about it, the thing I recalled was the use of racist epithets… Which is really rather strange, I mean here we have a book that looks at the reasons behind the deaths of millions in the Nazi concentration camps, a book which contains lengthy descriptions of people being abused, dismembered, murdered in the most foul ways, even eaten, yet what seems to cause me difficulty is the use of certain words. It’s an extreme reductio ad absurdum, but one in which the reader does not sit above what’s going on, nodding and smiling to himself, but actually inside the bloody thing, with all the stress and confusion that’s implied by being part of it. That is similar, it seems to me, to another of Ballard’s comments about Crash: ‘I wanted to write a book where the reader had nowhere to hide.’

In Lord Horror, not only does the reader have nowhere to hide, but also, if he or she perseveres with the book — which Colin Wilson famously wouldn’t — they find that they are at risk of becoming the character, which can be even more discomforting. The protection offered by the third person narrative breaks down in several places, with what seem to be very brief passing racist comments of the author casually inserted, a technique that is more refined in the third novel in the ‘Horror’ sequence, Baptised in the Blood of Millions. In Lord Horror they are so brief that you may at first miss them, or perhaps think they are typos. But it soon becomes apparent that this may be happening deliberately, and readers may find themselves in the uncomfortable dilemma of deciding whether they should continue reading the book, and if so how are they to read it? Is the author a racist, or isn’t he? Should I continue to be amused by his black-humoured jokes, or are his detractors right: is this just poor art, camouflaged by quasi-learning, as the magistrate decisively pronounced of the Hard Core Horror comics? A nihilistic, sadistic ‘playfulness’ operates at every level in the book, even in the narrative conventions. Further, the author seems not to care, to subvert whatever credibility the bravest readers and critics give to him.

Lord Horror broadcasts to the people (from Reverbstorm #6): art by John Coulthart (click to enlarge).

The novel is designed to be morally offensive, and also physically offensive. It is highly visceral, often repellent, as when the dried outer skin of the shit cocoon encasing Horror cracks open. When at work on the book, it was a common experience to feel queasy. With succeeding Lord Horror works, each one aims to out-do the preceding one in grossness. If you read one of David’s later books, Motherfuckers: The Auschwitz of Oz and Baptised in the Blood of Millions, and nod sagely, thinking that a clue may now be found that will dispel the cloud of ambiguity hanging about the author, you will not find it. Every chink has been firmly filled, hasn’t even been allowed to be open in the first place. There seems to be, at every turn, an imperative to escalate the crudity of the violence and racism — to avoid numbing the reader, to find ways of not allowing the writing the dread anathema of becoming safe.

Ballard’s work has always reflected his interest in surrealist art. And in a way, Lord Horror is a surrealist text, possibly more so than anything by Ballard, who’s always been concerned to ‘tell a story’. A penis that grows so large as to encompass the Earth; a person being devoured whole — that isn’t exactly fantasy, it seems to me … it’s surrealism. The same applies to the way in which the book is written, with rapid stylistic changes — from philosophical disquisition to horrific description — and paragraphs of text lifted from elsewhere and put into the mouths of the characters. To me, the book makes more sense considered as a surrealist novel; if it’s read as an alternative-history fantasy, or as a satire, then I think the reader misses much of what is in there.

Writing about Lord Horror in A Serious Life, Dave Mitchell compared the book to Bataille and Lautréamont and de Sade, and he may be right, but we see ourselves as belonging more in the absurdist camp, with nods to surrealism. Before we knew each other, two of our heroes were Alfred Jarry and P J Proby. I was also influenced by satirical writers like Rabelais, where key figures are exaggerated to ludicrous extremes. David’s ‘surrealism’ was more William Hope Hodgson and Frank Randle than the more formal manifestations in Max Ernst or Salvador Dali. Francis Bacon has always been a strong muse for him, and latterly Paula Rego has excited us both. Michael Moorcock threw in Maurice Richardson, while I also brought the sometimes existentialist bizarreness of the Beats. The ‘absurdism’ of ordinary life, and popular culture such as fifties rock’n’roll and Creole patois was another rich source for Lord Horror — you know, ‘Sleepin’ on his mugwump, playing on his Jew’s harp, music crawlin’ into your skin, Daddy in his Zoot suit, mammy playin’ skin flute, sister makes a swine-hair grin, Doin’ that crazy Cajun cakewalk dance!’ What could be more ‘surreal’ than that? The Mugwump character in Lord Horror is from P J Proby, not Burroughs.

David Britton’s first novel, Lord Horror (1989).

So Lord Horror could be seen a ‘surrealist’ novel, but it is a very personal surrealism, I think, with specifically working-class Manchester roots. William Hope Hodgson once rode a bicycle down the steepest steps in Blackburn. David once saw Roy Rogers riding Trigger through cobbled, terraced streets in North Manchester in 1951. These must have seemed like eruptions from a different universe. The ‘alternative history’ theme, as you have correctly seen, is not the book’s main point; for us it’s a purely theatrical device. And the book isn’t intended as satire. It is more Grand Guignol than satirical.

To our initial mystification, Ballard didn’t like Lord Horror. Possibly it had far too much gaudy end-of-the-pier working-class English ‘surrealism’ for him, rather than the purer, more polite surrealism he did like.

Reverbstorm #4. Cover art by John Coulthart (after Burne Hogarth).

What about Ballard’s use of unconventional narrative structure? I’m thinking particularly of The Atrocity Exhibition, and of Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius stories, where iconic personalities and historic events appear, bringing along their own narratives. There’s a lot of that, it seems, in Savoy’s work – especially in the Reverbstorm magazines, with the cultural references incorporated into John Coulthart’s artwork, and dialogue consisting largely of quotations … so that the reader is no longer spoon-fed a narrative but has to do most of what Ballard once referred to as ‘the hard work’.

If ‘fragmentation’, non-linear and cut-up writing are responses to complexity as I have suggested, then Reverbstorm is certainly this. The ‘story’ of Reverbstorm, like the ‘story’ of The Atrocity Exhibition or Naked Lunch or Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica, is really its form. It is emblematic of a certain time in the 20th Century and in the mental processes of David, John and I. The use of such forms by Ballard and Burroughs was a way of dealing with personal trauma, but such new chaotic forms in literature and art seemed to suggest that by ‘breaking down reality’, more appropriate new ways of looking at it might be found.

John Coulthart’s artwork from the Reverbstorm magazines, of which Alan Moore wrote: ‘Like Baudelaire, Beardsley and Breughel meeting in a crack house, “Reverbstorm” presents, with diamond focus, a portrait of the incoherent, incandescent rot at the heart of the Twentieth Century. Highly recommended.’ (Click to enlarge.)

But there’s a difference here, isn’t there, to using a ‘cut-up’ technique? How would you characterize that distinction?

In Moorcock’s multiverse, fragmentation occurs during the mixing up of narrative threads, due to the way the threads appear and reappear in space-time from the perspective of an observer. But the results of this apparently random selection are very controlled. I don’t know how Ballard went about achieving non-linearity, but his experiments also seem very controlled. Even Burroughs’ cut-up techniques are controlled because, as Jim showed me, they are edited afterwards, and so they are narratives assembled from cut-ups. Much editorial control and direction is shown in works like Nova Express. Between cut-ups and Ballard’s non-linear experiments, or Moorcock’s multiverse stories, there are big differences in technique in the way material is gathered together, although the outcome can often be the same.

For almost a decade after first reading Burroughs, I could not read linear writing. But I did find that I got very adept at writing in cut-up; I could mimic the ‘unintelligibility’ of random cut-up, and produce text that had randomness to a varying degree. It was this ‘stream of consciousness’-kind of writing I was producing that Ballard helped me to edit, which became the Concentrate pieces.

The final ‘Concentrate’ piece: written by Butterworth, edited by Ballard and published in New Worlds #197 (click to enlarge).

David was originally the artist and yourself the writer, yet it’s Dave’s writings that have appeared in Savoy from Lord Horror onwards. How did that reversal come about?

To write well, you need to be driven by anger or some other strong emotion. What drove me in my earlier days was anger I felt at mankind’s failings, but this voice I’d found was already fading by the time David and I met. David’s anger is different — he has never given it up. He has always been angry per se, at existence. Though he is ultimately optimistic he feels a great frustration at life. His perception has always been of the glass half-empty variety. I am the opposite.

The turning point for me as a writer was Lord Horror. It was a collaborative book, and was to have been published under a joint byline, but at the last moment, I gave David the byline. At the end of my last published piece of fiction, written under my own name (‘A Hurricane in a Nightjar’, Savoy Dreams 1984), I wrote directly from the postatomic deserts to the reader: ‘For the time being, thank you’. I knew my voice had gone, although I hoped it wouldn’t go for good. But though it hasn’t returned, happily it has led me to other things.

The result of the publication of Lord Horror and the associated Hard Core Horror and Meng & Ecker comics was another series of police raids, and the prosecution of Savoy under the Obscene Publications Acts. The charge was justified in Court on the grounds of the anti-Semitism displayed in the publications, a rather strange claim since the racial hatred laws were designed specifically for such purposes but were ignored by the police and prosecutors. There was then yet another prosecution, for non-Savoy material kept in the shops, as a result of which David spent a second period in Strangeways prison. How did Savoy cope with this second ‘crisis’? The changes in the business seem to have been less dramatic than those in the early ’80s…

The second time David was jailed, it was his reward for writing Lord Horror. The book was seized and found to be obscene by the magistrates. I conducted the appeal with Geoffrey Robertson and this resulted in the charge against it being overturned. The local Vice Squad were very bitter about this. Early in the proceedings, two members were caught airing their views about Lord Horror in an ‘undercover’ interview for The Observer, saying there was an urgency to act against Lord Horror because they ‘might be the last generation with a moral viewpoint’ and therefore the last people with the capability to do it. They were officers, guys in their 30s, saying they had a moral sense that might be denied later generations, therefore they had a duty to act now to protect ‘common decency’ on behalf of the public. That was their reason for banning the book. They were hoping for the heaviest penalty. At about the same time as the Observer article we were hauled to the main police headquarters, Stretford House, and grilled separately about our publications, both books and comics. We were told we were racially and morally degenerate. We ran some of this interview in one of the Meng & Ecker comics. Later, we heard that Chief Constable Anderton himself had been listening in to the interview, overseeing it, in fact, in his office above where we had been sitting.

It was quite clear to us that the target was Savoy and not, as the police were continually maintaining, what we were selling in the shops – which was largely mainstream fiction, literary, fantasy, rock books, bootlegs and so on. Only a very small percentage of the shop stock was erotica, and none of this was what was called ‘hard’. But because of the unusual zero tolerance climate being generated in Manchester by police Chief ‘God’s Cop’ James Anderton, they could get away with doing us for it.

Anderton was a creature that could only have existed in the slightly surreal atmosphere of Thatcher Britain; repressively conservative, of dubious competence, and given to worrying statements about hearing God’s voice while Manchester filled up with guns and pushers. LORD HORROR was strong drink, to be sure: a hallucinated vision of Lord Haw-Haw, the English traitor who broadcast Nazi propaganda into Britain during World War 2. It was difficult, horrifying work, the Nazi atrocities made superreal with the tools of DeSade and Bataille, very much an extension of the “New Worlds school” and its intent to use fantasy as a way to present the real world in a new light for our consideration. Britton is neither a self-hating Jew nor a childish monster. He is clearly haunted by the pre-1945 world.

And they sent him to prison.

Warren Ellis.

‘God’s Cop’: Chief Constable James Anderton.

The police prosecuted us for Lord Horror on the grounds of obscenity because that was the decision taken by the local office of the DPP (Director of Publication Prosecutions). Many people thought it strange, but he thought the Crown stood a better chance of prosecuting us that way. The DPP only charged us under Section 3 of the obscenity laws, which allowed Lord Horror to be condemned by the magistrates but did not allow us the option of a jury trial. However, under Section 3, they could only destroy the book — we could not be jailed. The police used the same tactics as in 1981, trumping-up charges on non-Savoy material that was really very tame, and it was these which led to Dave’s second prison sentence. After the experiences of Lady Chatterley and Last Exit to Brooklyn, they knew that if they went after our more literary titles then the attack would backfire on them; as indeed proved to be the case when they went after Lord Horror and we won the appeal.

LEFT: Raided! One of the Savoy shops in the late 80s.

This time David’s imprisonment was for four months, and we coped less well. We were in the middle of an intensive phase of work rather than at a natural turning point as we had been on the previous occasion, and our fighting spirit wasn’t the same. I had managed to make publicity out of the Lord Horror case, but the victory we’d won felt hollow. On the previous occasion there had been genuine surprise by all parties, even by the prosecution, that the judge had thought to jail David — something rarely done — rather than fine him.

Prison terms are automatically reduced by a half; you only do the full term if you misbehave. Although David did not do the full four months, it was still a very long time. One hour is a long time in a place where anything can go wrong, and where few may know if it does. How best to survive, where survival is a moment-to-moment question? There were no changes to Savoy; when David was released we had a gathering of the clans in the local Pig and Porcupine, and then just carried on. If anything, it had the effect of firming our resolve, so possibly the one ‘change’ we made was — never to change!

Our final large court case directly involved Savoy titles — the Meng & Ecker and Hard Core Horror comics that the police seized when they seized the novel. The authorities felt themselves to be on much firmer ground with these, because of the ‘link’, as they saw it, with children. They even returned to conduct a second raid before the outcome of the first was known, and seized thousands more comics. I conducted the defence for this also, and took the case as high as I could. It dragged on for six years, but at its end, in the High Court in London, the local Manchester magistrate who had originally found the comics obscene was vindicated — even though a child has never read them and never will.

You’ve spoken out in previous interviews about the politically correct mindset of both left and right — and Savoy has suffered from both versions, rejected by Compendium Books and by Rough Trade Records at the same time as it was being raided again and again by the Manchester Police. Ballard labeled the growth of this type of reaction in the 1980s ‘the New Puritanism’. How do you see the position in 2009 — is there more timidity, more unthinking rejection, than there was 20 or 30 years ago?

We haven’t had a police raid in ten years — after twenty-five years of constant raids. On the last raid, in 1999, the police personally admitted that their game with us was over. Their concerns about Lord Horror and the Meng & Ecker comics had been eclipsed by the Internet and world events. Until Lord Horror, it was popularly believed that the successful Last Exit to Brooklyn appeal in 1968 was the final nail in the coffin of police repression of serious books, but it wasn’t. When the magistrate’s charge of obscenity against Lord Horror was overturned in the High Court in 1992, that genuinely was the end, in the UK.

You don’t see the same kind of heavy-handed repression happening here now. Rather than laws dealing with reading matter, there are laws restricting movement and access, something Iain Sinclair is documenting. There is also less inclination on the part of writers to go over the same ground. ‘Taboo’ books may not be progressive or relevant any more.

In his history of Savoy, A Serious Life, D. M. Mitchell suggests that the police raids and obscenity trials have directed attention away from your wider achievements, such as the publication of The Exploits of Engelbrecht, A Voyage to Arcturus, Henry Treece‘s Celtic Tetralogy, and the work of Ken Reid and of Langdon Jones. To what extent do you think this is true, and if so, are you bothered by it?

The court cases diverted attention away from our early intentions as publishers and writers, and I think they still colour public perception. I think the police raids stopped us in our tracks at a pivotal moment, and for me it was a great frustration. In 1981, when we went in liquidation, we were poised to become mainstream publishers. Up until this time I was still convinced that we could do so, but in the end our uncompromising, eclectic natures and the politically incorrect nature of the bookshops, meant we couldn’t. After the ‘Savoy Wars’, as we termed the skirmishes during the 80s, we found ourselves stuck in ‘a weird place, like one of those soldiers lost in a forest and still fighting the war after it’s over’, to quote Keith Seward).

Certain critics can’t get past the subject matter, or they don’t see the work as being part of a literary tradition. We’ve been defined at a very simple level as transgressors who got into trouble with the law — it’s much easier to understand us this way — or one-offs who shouldn’t be paid serious attention. In our earlier bookshop days, we were cast as pornographers and bootleggers who had fallen foul of the law. This can work for us, of course, and means we are at least assured of a lasting profile of a kind. We have a cultural trademark, like P J Proby’s split trousers or Fenella Fielding’s husky voice.

John Coulthart’s portrayal of the 20th-century city in Reverbstorm #6.

All along, you’ve published authors whom you admire, especially where their work is otherwise unavailable or unduly neglected. But is there, do you think, some element in common between the authors and artists that Savoy publish or with whom you collaborate? Is there something that links Michael Moorcock and P. J. Proby with Henry Treece and Fenella Fielding?

That ‘element’ is something we’ve tried hard to define in books like A Serious Life. As in anything, it is who and where — who you grow up with, and where you grow up. Being Mancunians, David and I were both exposed to the work of people like Ken Reid, whose 3-panel Fudge and Speck strips appeared nightly in the Manchester Evening News when we were kids. As we got older, we both became aware of Proby, a stricken star who had fallen to earth in the Northern workingmen’s club scene, who became an equally potent conductor for fantasies skewed from the mainstream. Ours has not been the normal ‘expression’ of growing up — our allegiance has been to too many ‘odd’ things for that. Savoy is a stitch of David and I. David’s obsession to preserve youthful influences and to put a different emphasis on the art and culture of his time to the one that has become the consensus; my desire for the radical and new — these link the various, on the surface, disparate Savoy writers, artists and artistes.

A Serious Life: D M Mitchell’s marvelous history of Savoy — the books, the records, the comics, plus interviews with Butterworth, Britton and Coulthart.

Did you have much in the way of dealings with Ballard after starting Savoy? You haven’t published anything by him, unlike Moorcock and other New Worlds writers, though I believe a limited edition of Crash was suggested at some point.

We began by publishing Michael Moorcock, and we just seemed to go along that axis. Plus the fact that Jim wasn’t in need of a publisher, so he didn’t fall into our other category of books at that time: he wasn’t a neglected giant of fantasy, as we saw it, like Henry Treece or Jack Trevor Story. Nor was he in the position of Burroughs, whose ‘lesser’ books like The Job or Dutch Schultz, I thought, were in need of greater exposure, or Brion Gysin, who was in need of documenting as an artist in his own right. David Pringle, and later Vale at Re/Search, were documenting Ballard’s work. And as time went by, our options ran out anyway. When I finally did figure out a way of publishing Burroughs and Gysin, the police raids on Savoy reached a crescendo, and I had to relinquish them.

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

We saw Crash as part of a new Savoy deluxe hardback fantasy reprint series we had started, with new editions of Maurice Richardson’s The Exploits of Engelbrecht (2000) and David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus (2002). We sent Jim the finished reading, together with samples of these books, with a proposal to release it together with a special edition of Crash. But he claimed that he had always disliked ‘book worship’ in any form, and did not subscribe to the ‘industry of limited editions’; he thought books should be mass-produced and disposable. When I asked whether he would mind us releasing just the Fielding reading on its own, he said not, preferring that ‘a book should just be a book’. He was very courteous and kind, asking me not to take this the wrong way, but I did come away with the feeling that the Savoy chemistry was wrong for him and that we had misjudged him once again — he had reacted very similarly to Lord Horror. It sounds silly, but the incident increased my feeling that in some way I had not lived up to his expectation, after he had gone out of his way to encourage my early writing. I had not received such encouragement or understanding off my own father, and when Jimmy passed away it felt like a father had gone.

The Exploits of Engelbrecht, republished by Savoy in 2000, with this commendation on the cover from Ballard: ‘The Exploits of Engelbrecht is English surrealism at its greatest. Witty and fantastical, Maurice Richardson was light years ahead of his time. Unmissable.’

Mike Moorcock has said that one of his ambitions for New Worlds was to cross-fertilize the popular and literary traditions. I take it that’s an aim with which you’d concur?

Yes, but that’s something that was always going to come much more easily to Michael than to us! For a start, as a writer he is a natural storyteller. Audience is very important to him. In his publishing projects he took over existing magazines with ready audiences rather than attempt to start up something from scratch.

His charismatic personality had attracted to New Worlds already-established authors, Ballard, Aldiss, et cetera. When Savoy began, influenced by New Worlds or, more particularly, by Michael’s enthusiasm for certain writers — Jack Trevor Story, M John Harrison, Langdon Jones — these writers readily allowed us to do their books as paperbacks. As we developed, we became a more gaudy, cross-pollinating rock’n’roll publishing/recording outfit, top-and-tailing Ken Reid and T S Eliot, P J Proby and New Order, or joining up like-minded souls, Burne Hogarth and Cawthorn, Fielding and Colette, The Tides of Lust and The Gas. Gradually, we seemed to find an identity. It perhaps helped that we stayed in the North, away from the temptations of the London publishing scene. On the other hand, if we had carried the battle South we might perhaps have succeeded as a legitimate company. Who knows.

To consciously set out to marry the popular with the literate is beside the point, really. Did Dickens set out to do that? He just did it. A basic rule of adventurous writing is to leave in a certain amount of cliché, so you don’t lose the reader. I think that was something Michael Moorcock taught me: you should not take people too far too quickly or you will lose them. But I think if you are a truly great writer — or a great editor or publisher — you will naturally have popular appeal. Once Michael had ‘trained’ his initial SF readership and attracted new readers — each issue contained a reducing amount of traditional SF — New Worlds became a blend of the popular and literary quite naturally. It was second nature to everyone involved: editors, designers, artists and writers. By contrast, the much later Modern Review, say, which had a declared policy of mixing high and low, seemed contrived.

New Worlds was dependent on its editor’s vision and drive, and when he decided to move on it lost its direction. Charles Platt ran it well for a while, but then he also moved on, alas. Just think what could have been achieved had Michael been able to devote his time to keeping New Worlds going as a monthly magazine, acting as a kind of mainstream Counterblast to the various movements and groups that have come and gone since the sixties.

Only one alternate history series confronted Nazism with appropriate originality and passion. Published by the independent Manchester firm Savoy, David Britton’s surreal Lord Horror and its sequels entered the mind of a deranged surviving Hitler whose visions grew increasingly insane… Soon after they appeared, Hard Core Horror and Lord Horror were seized by Manchester’s vice squad. The books were destroyed and their author went to Strangeways, suggesting that successful Nazi alternate histories must take profound psychological, moral and physical risks.

Michael Moorcock, The Daily Telegraph.

What about the future? How much have Savoy got in the locker? There’s a collection of Mike Moorcock’s non-fiction due for publication, I believe. And what about the final issue of the Reverbstorm series — will that actually be published? It’s been ‘forthcoming’ for several years!

There is a lot left in the locker, but whether we produce it or not is a question of what financial resources we have left. Since losing the bookshops we have been forced to raise money in less exciting, more legitimate ways. As a result we are vulnerable to things like economic recessions, and this present one has hit us badly as it has hit others. David and I are both now in our sixties. But while we can, we will keep going. John Coulthart is designing Into the Media Web, the collection of Moorcock non-fiction, at the moment. We hope it will appear in 2010, together with the promised second Savoy edition of Engelbrecht. John is also at work re-mastering the Reverbstorm part-series as a graphic novel. This will contain the long promised final installment. A collection of articles about Savoy is underway, Tales From the Savoy, as is David’s newly completed Lord Horror novel, La Squab: The Black Rose of Auschwitz, which will be illustrated by Kris Guidio. He is also at work on a new novel, more a short coda to the other books, called Invictus Horror. Plus all the work we did with Fielding is still to be released: Fenella Fielding: The Savoy Sessions (a new album of songs, and companion album to P J Proby: The Savoy Sessions), a double album reading from Colette, as well as readings of Four Quartets and La Squab.

Finally, you’ve also been involved, outside of Savoy, with the launch of a new magazine, Corridor8, which revives the title of your early magazines but concentrating on contemporary visual art. How did the new magazine come about, and what are your hopes for it?

It grew out of an interest in conceptual art, and wanting to do a magazine again. I’d begun publishing a small line of print-on-demand books featuring work which didn’t fall into Savoy’s remit, but which I was in the habit of being offered from time to time by people who knew I was a publisher. One of these books was an interview with Colin Wilson by the writer and journalist Brad Spurgeon, about Wilson’s philosophy as an optimist. Another, which arrived anonymously one morning, was a surreal oddity — a full libretto for an imaginary musical about Jackson Pollock written by an artist friend, Roger McKinley. Although his libretto took the conventional form of a book, it worked as a piece of conceptual art, and it was seeing the possibilities of this that got me interested.

When my father died, my partner, Sarajane Inkster, who had once interviewed David and I after Burroughs’s death about our meeting with him in the Bunker in the early 80s, in a mood of mad creativity generously suggested I use part of my inheritance to produce a magazine. Corridor8 derives its name from the small-press magazines I started out doing, and the first issue is dedicated to J.G. Ballard and New Worlds, although I wouldn’t say it is recognisably in the Ballard/New Worlds or even Savoy moulds.

Michael Butterworth’s new magazine, ‘Corridor8′, launched in July 2009.

Corridor8 appears annually — the next issue comes out September 2010 — and the intention is to make its publication an event. The launch this year had a talk by Iain Sinclair, who used Issue 1 as a springboard for a new work set outside the capital, and also an art installation by the arte povera maverick Michelangelo Pistoletto. As subsequent issues appear, I can see the ‘launches’ growing and becoming more like mini-arts festivals. The magazine itself will continue to be North-of-England-based, on a speculative tip with an international outlook and still focusing on contemporary visual art and writing. Issue 1 focuses on art inside Will Alsop’s ‘SuperCity’ — Alsop’s concept of a linear city running raggedly across the neck of England from Liverpool to Hull and beyond. Sinclair’s work in the same issue explores the corridor in two long psychogeographical journeys, East-West by car and then West-East by bus pass, debunking Alsop’s concept. It was also the first time Alsop’s work as a canvas artist was featured in-depth, since when he has announced that he has retired from his architectural practice to devote his time to painting.

There are also interviews with Peter Saville about his new position as Creative Director of Manchester, and with Yorkshire artist and art catalyst Paul Bradley who produced the Pistoletto installation for us, an article by Jon Savage about the Haçienda nightclub, another article about the Danish art group Superflex’s project ‘tenantspin’ — a web-based television venture to empower residents in Liverpool tower blocks threatened with demolition — as well as, all importantly, profiles of eight artists who live and work in the SuperCity region. For Issue 2, we plan to move the geographical focus further north, towards Cumbria, Newcastle, and the Scottish borderlands — it will have a borderland theme — and on artists who work outside the centre. I am hoping one of the artists will be David Hockney, while the main writer for this issue I hope will be Jenny Diski, another favourite writer, who has some thematic similarities with Sinclair.

Thank you, Michael Butterworth.

Don’t forget the Savoy Books Microfiction competition! Win super-rare Savoy books, comic books and CDs by writing a short story of 100 words or less on ‘Savoyesque’ or ‘Ballardian’ themes. Details here.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ James Cawthorn, RIP: 1929-2008
+ Ballardcraft: Ballard/Lovecraft
+ ‘Get Lost’: Burroughs on Curtis
+ Bunker Tales
+ Horror Panegyric
+ A Home and a Grave: Mike Holliday on The Unlimited Dream Company
+ Angry Old Men: Michael Moorcock on J.G. Ballard

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

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

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

And then came Burroughs…

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

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

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

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

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

Illustrations by Mike Saenz for two Ballard stories in Semiotext(e) SF: ‘Jane Fonda’s Augmentation Mammoplasty’ and ‘Report on an Unidentified Space Station’.

Rudy Rucker’s wonderful reminiscences about the early days of cyberpunk (‘it felt like being an early Beat’), Bruce Sterling (who ‘loved all things Soviet’) and William Gibson (the man with the ‘flexible-looking head’) got me thinking once again about Ballard’s role in the shaping of the cyberpunk mythology.

In his introduction to the Mirrorshades anthology, Sterling wrote: ‘The cyberpunks are perhaps the first SF generation to grow up not only within the literary tradition of science fiction but in a truly science-fictional world… the techniques of classical “hard SF” … are not just literary tools but an aid to daily life. They are a means of understanding, and highly valued.’ Sterling’s reference to ‘hard SF’ — time-honoured narratives infused with the spirit of scientific investigation — suggests an affinity with the traditions of the genre, a love of the dizzying ideas and sheer scope of the best SF writing. However, his positioning of the cyberpunk movement as ostensibly a form of realism indicates a shift in the genre’s relationship to the technology it once idealised:

‘Science fiction — at least according to its official dogma — has always been about the impact of technology. But times have changed since the comfortable era of Gernsback, when Science was safely enshrined — and confined — in an ivory tower. The careless technophilia of those days belongs to a vanished, sluggish era, when authority still had a comfortable margin of control.

For the cyberpunks, by stark contrast, technology is visceral. It is not the bottled genie of remote Big Science boffins; it is pervasive, utterly intimate. Not outside us, but next to us. Under our skin; often, inside our minds.’

Sterling, introduction to Mirrorshades.

Early Sterling (photo courtesy Rudy Rucker). ‘He dug the parallel world aspect…’.

For Sterling, there was no doubt as to Ballard’s importance in shaping this attitude, when he called attention to the latter’s ‘unblinking, almost clinical objectivity’, which makes him an ‘idolized role model to many cyberpunks’. He reiterated this impact at the recent Kosmopolis panel on Ballard:

In the circle of American science fiction writers of my generation — cyberpunks and humanists and so forth — [Ballard] was a towering figure. We used to have bitter struggles over who was more Ballardian than whom. We knew we were not fit to polish the man’s boots, and we were scarcely able to understand how we could get to a position to do work which he might respect or stand, but at least we were able to see the peak of achievement that he had reached.

Sterling at Kosmopolis.

Another cyberpunk link worth noting is the inclusion of two Ballard pieces, ‘Jane Fonda’s Augmentation Mammoplasty’ and ‘Report on an Unidentified Space Station’, in the anthology Semiotext(e) SF (1989), edited by Rucker, Peter Lamborn Wilson (the man behind ‘Hakim Bey’) and Robert Anton Wilson. Alongside Ballard there appeared writing from the three editors, and from Sterling, Gibson, Ian Watson, William Burroughs, Colin Wilson, Robert Sheckley, Philip José Farmer and others. The introduction to Ballard’s stories acknowledges a clear debt:

Without J.G. Ballard, none of this would exist. We’re weak on SF history, but we think it fair to say that Ballard was among the first world-class writers (perhaps along with the Soviets) to realize that SF was no longer merely a pulp genre, but had become the only possible vehicle for a mythos of the modern world, that it had replaced the psychological novel as the central artwork of our culture.

Anonymous, Semiotext(e) SF.

In the Acknowledgements, Bey/Wilson writes: ‘Despite the already daunting size of the anthology, I feel compelled to mention some writers who should be in it, but, for various reasons, aren’t… Samuel Delaney and Thomas Disch … Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss…’ These names suggest Wilson’s desire to replicate the strategies not only of Ballard but also of New Worlds, which is further reflected in the anthology’s collage illustrations, concrete poetry and impressionistic typesetting. The intent is clear and the inclusion of Gibson and Sterling, alongside Burroughs and Ballard, made it plain: for the editors, cyberpunk was the New Wave updated for a new era, its relevance as enduring as ever. And for Wilson, as it was for Sterling, Ballard remained the key, a writer able to straddle eras with deep insight into the increasingly science-fictional nature of day to day life.

Peter Lamborn Wilson at Living Theatre, NYC. Photo: amc.

The influence of Ballard on Semiotext(e) is also underscored by the anthology’s inclusion of Michael Blumlein’s story ‘Shed His Grace’. It features a character called ‘T’, who sits before a bank of TV screens displaying various broadcasts from TV and cinema, distorted and magnified many times over. When T selects clips of President Ronald Reagan and the First Lady and freezes on their smiles, he strips naked and projects live-action images of his genitals onto the middle screens. Absorbed inside televisual reality, he then amputates his penis while the Reagans ‘watch’, with T apparently unaware of the consequences to his body in the real world. This seems both homage to and reimagining of Ballard’s own character (often referred to as ‘T-’) in The Atrocity Exhibition — who of course was obsessed with the then-Governor Reagan. But Blumlein updates the template for the 80s, when Reagan’s presidency was seen as a farce of sickly emotion masking devastating consequences for ordinary people. The story also echoes Ballard’s ‘Motel Architecture’ (1978), which features a character obsessed with a bank of TV monitors, similarly oblivious to the destruction he performs on his own body, so lost is he in the ‘gaze’.

Back in the New Worlds era, in 1964, Ballard noted the SF elements in Burroughs, which: ‘play a metaphorical role and are not intended to represent “three-dimensional” figures. These self-satirizing figments are part of the casual vocabulary of the space age’. For Ballard, Burroughs’s importance is that he ‘illustrates that the whole of SF’s imaginary universe has long been absorbed into the general consciousness, and that most of its ideas are now valid only in a kind of marginal spoofing’. This then provided a test bed for Ballard’s own work, in which ‘the next five minutes’ was to be the focus rather than the next 500 years, documenting the SF of today, so thoroughly absorbed and integrated into our everyday lives as to go unnoticed.

Early Gibson (photo courtesy Rudy Rucker). ‘High on some SF-sounding substance…’.

It was a move demonstrably ahead of its time. Almost 50 years later, when asked if the present day had caught up with his work, Gibson replied: ‘I thought that writing about the world today as I perceive it would probably be more challenging, in the real sense of science fiction, than continuing just to make things up… I don’t know if I’ll be able to make up an imaginary future in the same way… things are changing too quickly… you don’t have any place to stand from which to imagine a very elaborate future’.

Today, people continue to reignite heated debate about the worth of SF – re-asking the question ‘Does the future have a future?’, to quote Ballard. But anyone who has absorbed Ballard’s work has been privileged to know the outcome of such a debate for quite some time.

That is, ‘no’. The answer is No. No future for you.

‘William Burroughs at his writing machine, New York, fall 1953. One of numerous, rarely seen photographs taken by Allen Ginsberg that feature in a special Gallery section of Naked Lunch@50, here Ginsberg’s Kodak Retina records a crucial moment for Burroughs, as he worked on the manuscripts of “Queer” and “Yage” before heading off towards Tangier and the writing of Naked Lunch… (Courtesy of the Allen Ginsberg Trust and Stanford University Library.)’

[In 1960] a friend of mine had come back from Paris where Naked Lunch had been published by the Olympia Press, which was a press that specialized in sort of low-grade porn, but also published what were then banned European and American classics. Henry Miller, for example, was first published in the Olympia Press. And Nabokov’s “Lolita” was first published by the Olympia Press.

Anyway, it was a rather low time for me. I had just started out as a writer. I hadn’t written my first novel. And this was the heyday of the naturalistic novel, dominated by people like C. P. Snow and Anthony Powell and so on, and I felt that maybe the novel had shot its bolt, that it was stagnating right across the board. The bourgeois novels, the so-called “Hampstead novels” seemed to dominate everything.

Then I read this little book with a green cover, and I remember I read about four or five paragraphs and I quite involuntarily leapt from my chair and cheered out loud because I knew a great writer had appeared amidst us. And I, of course, devoured the book and every Burroughs novel. I think there were about three or four then in print from Olympia Press. I knew that this man was the most important writer in the English language to have appeared since the Second World War, and that’s an opinion I haven’t changed since. It was an encouraging moment. I mean, although my writing has never been along the lines that Burroughs set out, his example was a huge encouragement to me.

J.G. Ballard, 1997.

Ballard has made no secret of his admiration for Burroughs, and for Naked Lunch in particular. Can it really be 50 years since this alien work was first unleashed? I’m still trying to imagine the shock of coming upon a book like that in 1959. And I think I know where my next holiday will be…

According to nakedlunch.org:

2009 will see the 50th Anniversary of the first edition of Naked Lunch published in Paris in July 1959 by Olympia Press, which will be celebrated by the publication of Naked Lunch@50: Anniversary Essays, edited by Oliver Harris and Ian MacFadyen and published by Southern Illinois University Press. The book, the first ever dedicated entirely to the study of Naked Lunch, includes contributions by over twenty writers, scholars, musicians and artists, and will be launched in Paris at the University of London Institute in Paris on June 30th 2009. The Launch will include a special concert by acclaimed singer and writer Eric Andersen, a contributor to the Anniversary book.

July 1-3, 2009 — there will be concerts, readings, and performances in a club in the Latin Quarter, as well as exhibitions in homage to Burroughs and his masterpiece. An important three-day critical symposium will take place at the University of London Institute featuring an international range of scholars and writers. The celebratory events will include dérives around the city and visits to key sites including rue Git-le-Coeur, home of the old Beat Hotel, and the Musée Eugène Delacroix, the artist’s last studio and a testament to the enduring influence of Moroccan culture on generations of artists and writers.

All these events will be taking place on the left bank of Paris, only a few hundred yards from where Burroughs, fifty years earlier, completed the manuscript of Naked Lunch. In July 2009, as an homage to Burroughs’ great work, the streets of Paris are the place to be…

nakedlunch.org is a website designed to mark the occasion, a collaboration produced by Oliver Harris and Ian MacFadyen, editors of Naked Lunch@50: Anniversary Essays, and Supervert 32C Inc., creator of the William Burroughs site RealityStudio. It promises a near-future bounty of essays, testimonials, scene-by-scene analyses, discographies and bibliographical resources. Keep an eye on it.

By the way, I never knew until recently that Bowie based Diamond Dogs on The Wild Boys. I always thought he thought he was plundering Nineteen Eighty-Four…

But then again, I don’t recall Orwell writing about dog-men with huge genitals.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ ‘Get Lost’: Burroughs on Curtis
+ Bunker Tales
+ Horror Panegyric
+ William Burroughs:Preface to The Atrocity Exhibition

Myself and Dr. Shivdeep Grewal have organised a half-day conference with the title ‘J.G.Ballard: imaginary scientist’ that may be of interest to some of your site users. It is intended to be the first of a series of half-day conferences on ‘writers of wrathful science’ (others are Houellebecq, Burroughs, and Ernst Jünger). It is from 1 – 5 pm at Brunel University on 7th September, 2008. The website for further details is: thinklink.capcog.com.

Writers of ‘wrathful science’
If you are interested in crossovers between literature, science, and philosophy then you may be interested in this series of half-day conferences on ‘writers of wrathful science’ such as J.G. Ballard, Michel Houellebecq, William Burroughs, and Ernst Jünger.

First conference …
13:00 – 17:00 hours, 7th September 2008 at Brunel University, Fee: £10

J. G. Ballard: imaginary scientist
J. G. Ballard is a prominent chronicler of the near future.
He may also be thought of as an ‘imaginary scientist’.
This conference will focus on his role as a writer of ‘wrathful science’.
Programme Details

To register for this conference …

by email (easiest & preferred): thinklink@capcog.com with jgb as the subject
by phone: 0560-065-5277 and leave contact details incl. email address
by SMS (i.e., mobile text message): 07786200161 (prefix your message with 30120259 ) and leave contact details incl. email address

More details at thinklink.

Photograph: Eamonn McCabe.

There’s a new interview with JGB in the Guardian, conducted by James Campbell. It’s short, it lazily rehashes the same old stuff about Ballard’s house and (perhaps as a result) it is filled out with asides from M. John Harrison, Iain Sinclair and others.

James Graham Ballard is a large man with mischief in his eye and the social manner of a retired civil servant. At 77, he is portly, with grey hair curling on to his shirt collar. He has a full-on way with a good chablis – “More! More!” – but is considerate enough to inquire of his guest: “Do you have a motor car out there? We don’t want you to be killed.”

Ballard encountered Burroughs, whom he greatly admires as a writer, on a number of occasions. “A very strange chap.” Sinclair feels that “the two men, respectful and appreciative, never quite understood each other when they met. Both were set so deep in their visions. Other figures are aliens or rivals.”

He explains that his most recent novel, Kingdom Come (2006), “posed the question: could consumerism turn into fascism? The underlying psychologies aren’t all that far removed from one another. If you go into a huge shopping mall and you’re looking down the parade, it’s the same theatrical aspect: these disciplined ranks of merchandise, all glittering like fascist uniforms. When you enter a mall, you are taking part in a ceremony of affirmation, which you endorse just by your presence.” Consumerism “has to a large extent replaced art and culture in this country. The principal entertainment industry nowadays is soccer which, with its marching supporters’ groups, is not that far removed from fascism.”

Every now and then I get sent links to articles about Ian Curtis that mention Ballard. While I find Curtis interesting I try to refrain from posting about him as I don’t really think there’s much to be said about the Ballard connection that hasn’t been said before. Curtis nicked the title to the Joy Division song ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ from Ballard but wrote the lyrics before he’d read the book. An early New Order song called ‘The Him’ takes its title from a passage in The Atrocity Exhibition (the book, not the Curtis lyric) but is supposedly a tribute to Curtis, not Ballard. Crash is on Curtis’s bookshelf in Anton Corbijn’s recent biopic. I accept that for Curtis, Ballard was more of a portal than a direct influence so really what else is there left to say?

But Curtis and Burroughs seems a different story, perhaps more substantial, certainly less well worn. Over at Reality Studio a fat dossier has been compiled to flesh this out, drawing on previously published documents as well as new research and email questionnaires with the likes of David Britton of Savoy Books and Richard Kirk of Cabaret Voltaire.

The dossier pays special attention to the infamous moment when Joy Division and Burroughs found themselves on the same bill at a gig in Belgium. Curtis approached Burroughs, who, so the story goes, told him to ‘get lost’. As RealityStudio notes (and subsequently interrogates):

To anyone familiar with Burroughs, the thought of him telling a fan to get lost is perplexing. Burroughs tended to be unfailingly courteous, even a touch “old world” in his manners. Typically he was generous with fans and admirers, particularly with young men as handsome as Ian Curtis. What could have prompted such an exchange? Was Curtis insulting? Burroughs in a bad mood? Were there mitigating circumstances?

Take note, too, of Britton’s snarky dismissal of the Curtis legend:

I’m afraid Joy Division never meant anything to me… My cronies and I thought it was “crying shit in your underpants” music. Student angst. A glib dismissal, I knew at the time, but it was a comfort to think like that. Despite what [Jon] Savage says I’m pretty sure that Ian wasn’t much of a reader. A skimmer at best, but with the ability to read the right stuff and quote from it. For a Macclesfield lad, quite an achievement, I suppose… [But] JD have stood the test of time and have proved to be something far more substantial than I at first perceived. But can one be wrong, and also be right? Is it “Transmission” or “Papa Oom Mow Mow“? But at least it’s better to have JD representing Manchester music than Freddie and the Dreamers.

Also on offer at RS are the interviews Burroughs and Joy Division gave just before the gig to En Attendant magazine, available in both French (JD; WSB) and English (WSB; JD) versions.

All of this, as usual, is well worth checking out. The RealityStudio empire has really been cranking up the volume of late.

Further to yesterday’s post on Lord Horror, I urge you to follow it up with a reading of this interview with Britton and Butterworth over at Reality Studio. It’s about the Savoy duo’s meeting with Burroughs in 1979 and is in two parts, the first conducted by Sarajane Inkster in 1997 and the second following up that theme — Burroughs/Britton/Butterworth — from March this year with Keith Seward.

It’s full of fabulous detail. Britton and Butterworth’s admiration for the great man is etched into every word:

Butterworth: His best poetic writing, especially his depiction of things gone, in broken, fragmented images — a yearning for the absolute, and at the same time an intense sadness or grief for man’s inability to attain ’something’ lost — produces an acute nagging pain inside me. It is like the worst love sickness, a terrible ache in the stomach, a feeling of fragility. I sense his loss, his fear. I pick it up off him like a worrying parent does off a child. Of course, if his writing did just this, that would not make it great. What makes it great is the way he is able to use this peculiarly intense emotion to describe reality, unbearable beauty and awfulness of the universe, of distant galaxies as well as the human life processes.

Indeed, Burroughs remains an endlessly fascinating character after all this time. I enjoyed the descriptions of his home, aptly dubbed “The Bunker”:

Britton: My memories of William Burroughs at that date are mixed up today with the images you see of him on film. You know — “Did I really meet him, or was it the dream celluloid Burroughs who sat opposite drinking tea?” However, I do remember thinking that the Bunker was definitely an extension of Burroughs’ personality. Burroughs added ambience to the place, which was an old gymnasium — the sort you would see depicted in gangster films set in the Brooklyn of the ’30s, where Pat O’Brien plays the honest priest, and all his young punks are working up a sweat in the gym — Huntz Hall, Leo Gorcey, etc. You could just see Burroughs as the Daddy, The Bowery Daddy, and the Dead-End Kids as his private street gang. Even their name sounds like one of his creations.

There was a flight of long stairs up to the Bunker which was a long room with a couple of side-rooms and a kitchen. I remember the “john” — a partitioned-off area with a row of old-fashioned tiled urinals, which had the sort of sleazy sex connotations you would expect of Burroughs’ living quarters.

Butterworth: There were no windows. It was where Burroughs lived, slept and worked — like a bunker.

I wasn’t aware that Savoy had planned on publishing Burroughs until I read this, missing out on the deal after the cops rained down heavy on them. Savoy has definitely had more than its share of bad times:

Unknown to them in 1979 — the time of their visit to the Bunker — they were soon to be dealt a body blow. Returning to England, after successfully contracting to publish the paperback edition of [Burroughs'] Cities of the Red Night, Savoy was hit by the first of three big raids. (Two other raids, in 1989 and 1990, concerned the publication of their novel Lord Horror and various graphic works.) Led by “God’s Cop” Police Chief Constable James Anderton, this raid was a co-ordinated simultaneous swoop on their main retail and publishing premises, and almost achieved the intention of shutting down their company. It was the culmination of many smaller raids. In total, hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of stock were seized and not returned, including Savoy-published titles by Samuel Delany, Charles Platt, and Jack Trevor Story. At the same time, an unrelated action by the Times Mirror Organisation in America dealt a body blow to the publishing house New American Library. This had a knock-on effect on Savoy’s distributor-publishers, New English Library, who went into liquidation. Savoy was forced into temporary bankruptcy in 1981, and in 1982 David Britton was jailed — the first of two jail sentences connected with his publishing which he had to endure. Savoy lost Cities to another publisher.

It strikes me on reading this passage that the police — via this and further raids on Savoy — rather than suppressing the message of Lord Horror, actually proved its thesis, for these are the actions of a fascist state apparatus by any other name. In fact, I am struck by the number of works that paint England in this light, sort of like Philip K. Dick’s alternate-history classic The Man in the High Castle applied over and over to the British Isles instead of the US: the Allies lost, the Nazis won, they are here in your backyard and you don’t even know it. Let’s see, what have we? It Happened Here; Privilege; A Clockwork Orange; Children of Men; V for Vendetta; and Lord Horror, towering above all.

Aside from that I was heartened by the interview, with Britton and Butterworth, these apparent scourges of the English way of life, admitting to a bad case of nerves upon meeting Burroughs, the Literary Outlaw himself. I know how they feel. When I interviewed Ballard in 2006, although it was over the phone I was sick with worry, chiefly about matching wits with someone of his calibre and falling woefully short of the mark (at the time I put on a bit of bravado and bluster to anyone who asked me about the interview, so it’s only now I can reveal the truth!). I’ve never been one to put artists of any sort on pedestals and I’ve never really had a hero of any kind, unless you count Peter Shilton, Kenny Burns and John Robertson in the 1980 European Cup Final, but Ballard’s work changed my worldview a long time ago. In this respect I can only concur with Butterworth:

Regardless of what you manage to take away intellectually, you get something else off these great people. As Andy Warhol once said, it’s best you DON’T KNOW THEM in any way, because that way they still have an aura to touch you with.

Butterworth also talks of meeting Ballard at a New Worlds party, but he froze:

I went to several of the parties, unfortunately not the ones Burroughs attended. I lived too far away to go to more than a few, and only learned afterwards in agonised constriction that Burroughs had been to the ones I missed. Jimmy Ballard attended some, so it’s very likely he met him there.

My memories (as a 20-year-old) of Ballard are frustrating. I didn’t know what to say to him, even though he was there in front of me at a party and was talking to me and only me. By the time I met Burroughs I was twelve years older and had brought Dave as cover, so got slightly more out of that.

Butterworth also tells the story of how Burroughs was introduced to Arthur C. Clarke by Mike Moorcock, which ended with them getting along famously. I’ve always loved the delicious image of Clarke attending New Worlds parties amidst all these young rebels, and especially so after reading Moorcock’s piece on Clarke in the Guardian earlier this year:

I was a very young journalist of 17 or so when Arthur C. Clarke invited me to celebrate his birthday before he returned to Ceylon, where he had recently settled… A bottle in my pocket, I knocked at the door to be greeted by Fred. “It’s round the corner,” he said. “I’m just off there myself.” He turned a thoughtful eye on the bottle. “I don’t think you’ll need that.”

Promising, I thought. Ego (Arthur’s nickname since youth) has laid everything on… we arrived at a church and one of those featureless halls of the kind where the Scouts held their regular meetings. Sure enough, inside was a group of mostly stunned friends and acquaintances holding what appeared to be teacups, one of which was shoved into my hand as I was greeted by Arthur in that Somerset-American accent that was all his own. “Welcome,” he said. “Got everything you want?”

“Um,” I stammered. “Is there only tea?”

“Of course not!” beamed the mighty intelligence, who had already published the whole concept of satellite communications on which our modern world is based.

“There’s orange juice, too.”

Read the rest of the Britton/Butterworth chat over at Reality Studio. It’s good stuff.

Keith Seward, aka Supervert, is a writer based in New York. He also runs Reality Studio, a website and forum devoted to Burroughs. Reality Studio has had a big impact on ballardian.com in that it’s a template for how to present an intelligent and provocative site about a major cultural figure without descending into the worst excesses of fandom. There is much discussion of Ballard over at Reality Studio’s forum, and some crossover the other way: Supervert submitted an entry to our Ballardian Home Movies competition and occasionally pops up in this site’s comments box, as do other RS regulars. At some stage I hope to conduct an interview with Seward, in which the Ballard/Burroughs nexus will be analysed along with Keith’s various writing projects (but as always with this site finding the time is the factor, although I hope the interview will not be too far away).

I have Supervert’s two books, Necrophiliac Variations and Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish, and I find them to be hilariously challenging examinations of the nature of sexuality. Careening through outright farce to science fiction and beyond, these self-published, thoroughly subversive gems have been around for a few years, appreciated by the likes of Mark Dery and i09′s Annalee Newitz.

Dery even managed to draw Ballard into the frame:

Things are getting weird out there, so much so that imaginary obsessions such as exophilia, the “abnormal attraction [to] beings from worlds beyond earth” that is the subject of the underground novel Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish, are starting to sound downright plausible. Can we be far from the future foretold by J.G. Ballard, where car-crash enthusiasts get off on vehicular manslaughter and fans of Space Age snuff thrill to footage of astronauts being roasted alive during re-entry? In the introduction to his 1974 novel Crash, Ballard wondered if the android numbness induced by media bombardment—the “demise of feeling”—would open the door to “all our most real and tender pleasures—in the excitements of pain and mutilation; in sex as the perfect arena…for…our…perversions; in our moral freedom to pursue our own psychopathology as a game.”

Now Keith has a new book out, a limited-edition hardcover called Horror Panegyric. Published by Savoy Books, this is Seward’s apppraisal of Savoy’s notorious Lord Horror novels by David Britton and Michael Butterworth. The novels tell the story of Lord Horror, who, Seward writes, “is based on a historical personage: Lord Haw-Haw, aka William Joyce, British fascist and radio announcer”. The books are alternative histories of a fascist England, brutal, bloody, highly confrontational and shot through with a violent Surrealism.

According to Seward:

Lord Horror takes the repository of symbols bequeathed by World War II and pours it into a cauldron boiling over with pop culture. Bigots and death camps get cooked up with rock and roll, comic strips, esoterica. It’s a “what if the other side had won the war” trip like you’ve never seen before.
…
Constant harassment — which continued into the late 1990s — from an obsessed constabulary would have quashed most publishers, but Britton and Butterworth operated under a maxim more along the Nietzschean lines of “what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” Far from folding up shop or retreating into less controversial publications, the two launched an all-out assault. Though the novel Lord Horror was effectively suppressed and remains difficult to find even today, the character Lord Horror multiplied, made appearances in different media, spawned other characters who in turn featured in their own books, comics, music. In short, the death of the book was the birth of a twisted empire, a reich of deviant imagination that neither Allied nor Axis powers would ever have recognized.
…
Their franchise of Lord Horror productions is provocative, original, visionary, and contains at least one outright masterpiece (Motherfuckers). Young writers should be looking at it the same as they do Naked Lunch, i.e. as a work that shows them what the possibilities are in the hands of a master. Academics should be crawling all over it with their magnifying glasses trying to figure out what it means and what it says about society. Anyone interested in literature should be reading and experiencing the damn thing. A few cognoscenti are there already, snapping up the first editions of Lord Horror before everybody else catches on and prices them out of the market. But the victory celebration hasn’t happened yet, and it is hard to understand why.

The Lord Horror books are now difficult to find, but following Seward’s essay in Horror Panegyric are excerpts from the works that are guaranteed to stoke the fire. Perhaps you might even find yourself sharing Colin Wilson’s reaction:

I think that, as an exercise in Surrealism, Lord Horror compares with some of the best work that came out of France and Germany between the wars, for example Georges Bataille… Britton is undoubtedly brilliant, but when I came to the bit about Horror hollowing out a Jewess’s foot and putting it over his penis, I started skipping. With the best will in the world, I couldn’t give his brilliant passages the attention they deserve because I kept being put off by this note of violence and sadism. No doubt it is because I belong to an older generation that is still basically a bit Victorian.

Horror Panegyric is available online at supervert.com or can be purchased in hardcover. The latter is worth it for the great cover art and design by John Coulthart.

…:: Previously on Ballardian:

+ J.G. Ballard: the Visual Tribute (including work from John Coulthart)
+ The 1st Annual Ballardian Home Movies Competition (featuring Supervert)
+ A Home and a Grave (Mike Holliday’s essay on Ballard’s Unlimited Dream Company, analysing it as a “fascist novel” with similarities to Lord Horror)
+ J.G. Ballard: The Corridor Interview (a republishing of a 1974 Ballard interview from Corridor, Michael Butterworth’s early fanzine)

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

RE/Search Publications are currently offering 25% off on a pack of their four Ballard titles: RE/Search 8/9, the illustrated Atrocity Exhibition, J.G. Ballard Conversations, and J.G. Ballard Quotes. The four would normally sell for US$80, but are being offered for US$60.

They’ve also onlined a series of colour photos of Ballard from 1982 and 1987, some recognisable as accompaniments to the interviews in RE/Search 8/9. They’re great shots, featuring Ballard clowning around in his living room under his aluminum palm tree (hardly a suitable image for the storied, psychopathic genital mutilator of Crash, now is it?), in his study, and with RE/Search publisher Vale in JGB’s backyard.

There are also lots of photos detailing the contents of JGB’s very disorganised bookcase, significantly featuring a load of art books (Dali, Picasso, Bacon, Munch, Ernst, Delvaux), Le Corbusier, a few Burroughs, Hitchcock by Truffaut, and a book on Crash Injuries. There’s nary a novel in sight, including his own. There are some novels in sight, including his own!

J.G. Ballard, 1982. Photo courtesy RE/Search Publications.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MF: And I think published in about 1962?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Damme, Ackroyd just keeps pumping them out doesn’t he? He must have a whole crew of cheeky culture vulture mudlarks and fey, fettlesome and febrile Oxonians slaving away in the secret cellars of his Limehouse Penthouse. He makes James Michener look like some lollygaggin’ Yankee.

I always liked what the real magus of secret London, Iain Sinclair, said about Peter Ackroyd. “He’s Colonel Mustard and he did it in the library with a research assistant.” And Ackroyd does look a lot like the good Colonel Moutard.

Yes, Ackroyd’s written some brilliant books. Hawksmoor, The House of Dr Dee, Chatterton, are all superbly written and psychically charged tales about the hidden human bones of London. And Albion: History of English Imagination is the best book ever about a subject no one realised existed until he wrote about it.

But both Ackroyd and the other strange geomancy warlock of English letters, JG Ballard, are now in their own deadpan, sly and slightly bitchy english way, sorta coughing and nudging their audiences towards Iain Sinclair.

It’s like a quincunx (cue Durrell, Fowles and Golding. Fellow magicians but self-imposed exiles from Old Lud). Currently you have Ackroyd, Ballard, Amis fils (although his batteries are ebbing a bit) and Alan Moore setting up the four points of blokish energy (This is a male incantation thing. I’m sure you chicks are up to equally weird shit with the London Energy. Looking at you in particular Miss Angela Carter. Death is no excuse) and in the centre is Iain Sinclair assome kind of lightening rod cum Leyden Jar for it all.

Fuck it. FDB, just read Downriver for starters. Imagine if Burroughs was a Londoner with Blake’s gift of transcendental vision. Whether you love it or hate it, you’ll know you’ll have read something by someone really plugged into that big grim green secretly exuberantly and dourly surrealistic metropolis spawning ever outwards from a river named after time.

A city where a statue of a (Darkest) Peruvian bear greets you at the Heathrow train terminus at Paddington Station while it’s biggest folk hero is a mass murderer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dominika Oramus, 2007.

..:: Back to Part One.

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

ENDNOTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dominika Oramus, 2007.

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

NOTE: Part Two is now available.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cover: New Worlds #179, Feb. 1968.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

J.G. Ballard: photo by Eamonn McCabe.

The division of Ballard’s career into periods is also based on the genre of criticism. Here Pringle distinguished an early ‘romantic’ stage, when Ballard published in the science fiction press stories concerned with the inner landscapes of characters’ minds, and the post-science fiction period. It was then that Ballard shifted his interests to outer landscapes, abandoned science fiction conventions and embraced the avant-garde and literary periodicals. This is a ‘dark’ period of formal experiments and of bitter criticism of the violence intrinsic to contemporary life. Pringle also suggests that Ballard is at the beginning of yet another period, one of writing present-oriented fiction describing technological environments: ‘he has also made larger concession to social realism — he is trying to become more of a novelist‘ (ibid.: 50).

Pringle explains that last statement by saying that Ballard is trying to construct rounded characters, while in his early prose his characters are symbolic ‘figures in an inner landscape’ (ibid.: 51). He classifies these symbolic figures according to Jungian archetypes as the lamia, the jester and the king — and most Ballardian characters are demonstrated to belong to one of the categories. A similar symbolic key is used to deal with Ballardian themes (the categories are: Imprisonment [14], Flight, Time Must Have A Stop And Superannuation) and to classify his obsessively recurrent images [15]. Ballardian mythology is four-fold: Pringle distinguishes four groups of symbols representing mythical meanings of water, sand, concrete and crystal. Water stands for the past and the return to previous stages of evolution, sand and dryness are in the future of the human race when only the exhausted shell of the planet will remain. Further, concrete is the world of the present day — the urban culture, while crystal, like a Jungian mandala represents oneness with the Universe.

Generally speaking, Pringle’s book represents Jungian criticism (though once he very rightly remarks, albeit in passing, that Ballard’s references to Jung and Freud are mixed), and as such is it usually quoted. Pringle is also the first critic to mention Ballard’s biography in the context of his fiction and to announce Ballard’s affiliation to the avant-garde. In the following years Pringle remained Ballard’s major critic, but more and more scholars interested in both science fiction and mainstream literature began to approach Ballard’s books, often trying to ascribe his writing to some larger cultural frame. In The Hidden Script (1985), for example, David Punter discusses Ballard’s fiction in the section ‘Narratives and the Unconscious’, showing (in reference to psychoanalytic theories) the interrelation of the internal and the external spheres in his fiction.

The short chapter ‘J.G. Ballard: alone among the murder machines’ is an excellent analysis of the metaphoric space Ballardian characters inhabit (e.g., in Atrocity Exhibition, High-Rise, Concrete Island, Hello America and The Unlimited Dream Company). This territory is nightmarish and ruled by man-made machines, ‘the lurking engines of destruction which keep us pinned down’ (Punter 1985: 11), and people strive to regain a spiritual hold on objects, but they are in fact helpless victims of their own psychopathologies. Surrounded by technology and advanced communication systems, Man loses the ability of expression: ‘the areas of language already colonised by the public media too developed to allow for more than the slightest insertion of a discourse of individual desire’ (ibid.: 10). Punter goes on to define Ballard’s oeuvre in relation to contemporary culture and, although his analysis was written a quarter of a century ago, it is still very illuminating:

Where character is concerned, Ballard is one of the few writers who can be sensibly termed post-structuralist: the long tradition of enclosed and unitary subjectivity comes to mean less and less to him as he explores the ways in which a person 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 in human agency (ibid.: 9).

In Twentieth Century Science Fiction Writers (1981), edited by Curtis C. Smith, a lexicon of those authors whose work goes beyond realism (even if they usually are not referred to as science fiction writers), the entry ‘J.G. Ballard’ presents him as an original and distinctive writer whose style is described as idiosyncratic ‘as a signature’ and shaped by the painter’s eye of the author. [16] The stress falls on Ballard’s intellectual fascinations: ‘masterpieces of literature (from Homer and the Bible through Shakespeare to Coleridge and Melville) and the arts (from Bosch to Dali and Leonor Fini)’ (Smith 1981: 31). His early fiction is called romantic and exuberant science fiction rich in intertextual allusions, where bizarre landscapes ‘reflect and amplify the inner and mutual conflicts of glamorous lamias and their suicidal wooers, in a baroque symphony of art, love, and death’ (ibid.: 31). 1966 is given as the turning point after which Ballard abandons science fiction and starts to describe the contemporary world and to criticize its technology, violence and perverted entertainment. Such a present is just a fossil of the future, and his interest in science fiction gives Ballard an ability to look at social life in a detached, scientific way. Beyond that, Ballard’s style changes abruptly: all exuberance is gone and instead we read about people like us, with popular names, living in real cities and made to cope with an inhuman urban existence.

It is interesting to juxtapose this entry with a later one hailing from the prestigious The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993, revised 1999), edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls. ‘J.G. Ballard’ by David Pringle is a long entry and, for the first time, the author is presented not primarily as a science fiction writer (despite the very character of this Encyclopedia). Indeed, stress falls on those aspects of Ballard’s output which transgress the standards of the genre. Even the earliest stories are shown as eschewing traditional science fiction themes and instead concentrating on ‘near-future decadence and disaster’. We learn that Ballard was severely criticized by fans as a pessimist and a life-hater, that the science fiction world wrote him off, and that he never won a single science fiction award. Pringle also describes the hostility with which editors treated his later prose (the entire Doubleday edition of Atrocity Exhibition was printed only to be pulped just before publication) because he used people such as Ronald Reagan, the Kennedys and Marilyn Monroe as characters. Pringle ends by presenting Ballard’s psychological war novels and by briefly characterizing his biography — these are the beginnings of the legend of J.G. Ballard, his war and the impact it had on his imagination. Pringle concludes:

J.G. Ballard: photo by David Levenson.

Although most of his longer work of the past decade has been outside the field, the originality and appropriateness of his vision continue to ensure JGB’s standing as one of the most important writers ever to have emerged from sf (Clute and Nicholls 1993: 85).

When in 1994 Simulacra and Simulations (1981) by Jean Baudrillard was translated into English, the prose of J.G. Ballard found a new and influential advocate. In a chapter devoted to Ballard’s Crash (which had previously been translated and reprinted in Science Fiction Studies) Baudrillard calls Ballard’s book one of the masterpieces of contemporary literature, one which shows the world of today as it really is, the simulated, unreal projection of mass culture and sophisticated hi-tech. Science fictionalizes reality, the world of cyber-technology is by nature fictitious and Ballard’s prose is a rare example of the conscious exposure of the simulacra-ridden mediascape.

Generally, in the late nineteen-eighties [17] the status of ambitious science fiction changed. On the one hand some of the very good science fiction writers elevated the genre to the status of intellectually provoking, erudite reading, yet on the other hand many postmodernist writers began to apply science fiction conventions. Used as sophisticated literary trope, science fiction was no longer associated solely with an adolescent male audience and acquired the ambiguous status of ‘a game with the reader’ or ‘a play with a convention’. ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’ The Fiction of J.G. Ballard (1997) by Roger Luckhurst, the best critical book on Ballard to date, is devoted to the role Ballard’s output plays in the contemporary discussions about literary genres. Luckhurst’s major thesis is that Ballard evades any and all classifications and that, moreover, his writing produces an effect of unease just because it exposes the binary, opposition-based categories we apply when reading. Ballard’s books (especially Crash and Atrocity Exhibition; other works are either but mentioned or discussed in brief subchapters) are for Luckhurst a pretext to expose contemporary reading protocols defining what is post-modern, what is modern, what is science fiction and what is avant-garde.

Luckhurst begins by showing Ballard as a fringe writer living literally in the suburbs of London and figuratively outside literary London and outside the Academia of English studies (a little like Ian Sinclair and, once, Angela Carter). His key to Ballard is the notion of la brisure (according to deconstruction, this is the point in any structural system that makes the working of the system at once possible and impossible), and in his analyses he most often refers to Derrida [18]. The choice of deconstruction as his approach is dictated by Ballard’s paradoxical proliferation in recent criticism:

The mainstream post-war novelist of increasing import; the aberrant foreign body within science fiction; the belated voice of a science fiction modernism; the anticipatory or timely voice of a paradigmatic postmodernism; the avant-garde writer of extreme experimental fictions; the prophet of the perversity of the contemporary world (Luckhurst 1997: xii).

Deconstruction exposes binary oppositions we constantly use while thinking and thus allows Luckhurst to subvert generic codes and frames of recognition that allow readability, and to ‘speak from a structurally similar space of the between‘ (ibid.: xiii). Such a critical standpoint sometimes makes his text a little enigmatic and focused not on Ballard’s output but on the reader’s (and critic’s) response to it. Nevertheless, Luckhurst’s study is very erudite, well grounded and full of insights into Ballard, the most valuable of which is the observation that Ballard’s text anticipates its interpretations. ‘His work at once constantly activates theoretical models, but it is also awkward, didactic, and overtheorized, tending to evade or supersede the theories meant to ‘explain’ it’ (ibid.: xvii).

Luckhurst proves his thesis on Ballard’s fiction as exposing reading conventions by discussing in subsequent chapters the disaster story convention, surrealist writing, postcolonial writing, and theories of avant-garde and of contemporary reality as simulation. In each case Ballard’s books are shown as both transgressing genres and subverting the oppositions they are based on. The conclusion is, expectedly, that Ballard’s ‘oeuvre will not give up its irreducible core’ (ibid.: xix), which very well sums up over forty years of critical discussion of Ballard’s place on the twentieth-century literary map.

Nowadays Ballard is recognized as a major contemporary English novelist by the critical establishment and he is usually referred to as an author writing across high and low, literary and popular paradigms. His website page in the Internet, www.jgballard.com, is frequently visited by numerous fans from all over the world and apart from publicity material — book covers, offers, etc., one can find links there to numerous texts originally written for various newspapers and magazines, forming a complex body of inter-related discourses to do with Ballard and his career. A closer look at the website shows that the more ambitious texts might be categorized into four groups: reviews of novels, longer articles summarizing Ballard’s oeuvre, interviews, and Ballard’s own press articles dealing with issues such as war in Iraq, terrorism, urban architecture and consumerism. [19]

Photographer unknown. Details welcome.

Some of the reviews offer interesting insights into Ballard’s prose. For example, Chris Hall in ‘Future Shock’ discusses Crash in a text written just after David Cronenberg made his film based on it and points out that the novel defamiliarizes the violence omnipresent in the Hollywood convention of family films [20]. ‘White Line Fever’, by David B. Huingstone, shows that Cocaine Nights is an exposition of our cultural unconscious, while Marcos Moure in ‘Desert Island Disaster’ compares Rushing to Paradise to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. It is also worth mentioning two reviews by L. J. Hurst: ‘The Dark Side of the Equinox’, which interprets The Crystal World as a metaphysical thriller, and ‘Through the Crash Barrier’, which is a Shakespearean reading of Concrete Island.

To give samples of longer presentations of Ballard’s literary output, Richard Behrens’s ‘J.G. Ballard’ concentrates on surrealism in his writing and Gary Evans in ‘J.G. Ballard: a Crash Course in the Future’ analyzes the future psychology of Ballardian characters. The most comprehensive in this category of texts is Roger Bazzeto’s ‘J.G. Ballard L’écrivain, auter de Science-Fiction ‘, an academic account of Ballard’s prose comparing Ballard to Andy Warhol. Bazzeto claims that the world in Ballard’s novels is three-fold: mythologies of media legends, everyday life in post-modern society, and urban nightmares.

The most interesting articles are perhaps interviews with Ballard, who often speaks about contemporary phenomena as reflected in his novels. In ‘Flight and Imagination’ he shares with Chris Hall his opinions on the relation of late capitalism, psychopathology and violence, and in ‘Not a Literary Man’ (by Marcos Moure) he discusses the decline of science fiction. To David Gale’s ‘Grave New World. Interview with J.G. Ballard’ I am indebted for the title of my thesis; in this very revealing interview Ballard explains what his radical vision of the future is.

Even a short look at these texts about and by Ballard shows that his name is no longer associated with ‘fringe’ or ‘marginal’ literary life, but is a part of the legitimate centre — he has found his way into the histories of contemporary literature. Currently a number of theses devoted to Ballard are being written at English universities by doctorate students, some of whom, like Sam Francis from the University of Leeds, publish their papers in international reviews of science fiction. A good example of critical evaluation of Ballard is a monograph published in the prestigious British Council-sponsored series Writers and Their Work, which is meant to briefly present the most important British authors to the reading public. J.G. Ballard (1998) by Michel Delville is a very good, concise account of all his most important works. Arranged in chronological order, it retraces subsequent stages in Ballard’s career and attempts to show this diverse oeuvre as an example of artistic evolution. Delville is aware that critical assessment of Ballard is very heterogeneous:

At least three J.G. Ballards have so far been championed in critical studies and literary histories: the science fiction writer, famous for his disaster novels and stories of entropic dissolution; and admirer of William S. Burroughs and author of scandalous tales remarkable for their sexual frankness and eccentric violence; and the Booker Prize nominee, whose account of a boy’s life in Japanese-occupied wartime Shanghai in Empire of the Sun was published to great acclaim in 1984 (Delville 1998: 1).

Delville is aware of the temptation to draw a clear-cut line between Ballard’s ambitious popular fiction and his mainstream novels. He is also careful not to reduce Ballard to a case of the prolonged artistic maturation of a science fiction writer who finally manages to disentangle himself from the immature genre. Instead he treats Ballard’s obsessive and imaginary writing as a means to reflect the violent paradoxes of life in the twentieth century that escape less anxious discourses.

In 2005 another monograph under the same title, J.G. Ballard, was published in the new series ‘Contemporary British Novelists’ by the Manchester University Press. Written by Andrzej Gasiorek, this book (second in the series, after Aaron Kelly’s Irvine Welsh) is a presentation of Ballard’s oeuvre and a critical response to it. Like the whole series, it aims at disclosing controversies in contemporary literary life and theory. Just like Luckhurst, he reads Ballard in the context of surrealism, Pop Art and science fiction. Gasiorek’s book is very recent and marks the growing critical interest in Ballard’s writing. He shows Ballard’s output as ‘a symbolic rejection of the familiar heritage’ (Gasiorek 2005: 2), writing against the tradition, against ‘Englishness’, against ‘a socially rooted fiction based on psychological realism’ (ibid.: 3), and against legitimate traditional literary genres.

The way the above critics approach Ballard seems to me very fair and it is quite similar to my own critical standpoint (I side especially with David Punter and Michel Delville). But as there have been so many exhaustive studies devoted to assimilating Ballard to generic categories (or abolishing the notion of genre fiction), I would rather refrain from repeating their arguments, and discuss what to my knowledge has not yet been discussed — the picture of The Decline of the West seen from the perspective of both his fiction as a whole and that of theorists of civilization. Before embarking on that intellectual voyage, we need first look at the way Ballard constructs his own persona.

..:: Part Two is now online.

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

ENDNOTES

[1] This phrase comes from an interview Ballard gave to David Gale: ‘Grave New World. Interview with J.G. Ballard’, BBC Radio 3, 10 November 1998 ( www.jgballard.com, on: 20 August 2006).

[2] As late as in 2004 in an appendix to his novel Millennium People J.G. Ballard gives Huxley’s Brave New World at the very top of the list of books he advises to read for those who have liked his novel (Ballard 2004: Appendix 16).

[3] For Ballard the plausible candidate is the invention and use of the nuclear bomb. For the first time in history the human race acquired the means to realize its latent propensity for self-destruction. Men have always been violent creatures unconsciously dreaming of death and war, something which culture has tried to cover up for thousands of years. Once the true human nature was revealed, there is no turning back and human destiny — destruction for internal reasons — is going to happen sooner or later.

[4] In one of Freud’s essays that Ballard often quotes, Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud calls human civilization a mistake. Ballard’s fiction is devoted to the descriptions of this mistake.

[5] An experimental artistic movement in the French cinema associated with the films of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut.

[6] It may be interesting to note that in 1993 Ballard wrote a review of this Encyclopedia. Published in the Daily Telegraph, that article was re-printed in Ballard’s collection of journalism, A User’s Guide to the Millennium. Ballard speaks in favour of the Encyclopedia and science fiction in general, noticing that in the second part of the 20th century more and more mainstream writers (such as Angela Carter, Anthony Burgess, Doris Lessing and Kingsley Amis) turn to science fiction, which is the true folk literature of the century, with ‘folk literature’s hotline to the unconscious’ (Ballard 1997b: 193). Science fiction has the power to design the future, and to tell us what life might be like in some years’ time. He also writes that in the mid-century, after the Moon Landing and during the space race, everybody was interested in the future and the conquest of space and in trying to imagine what the year 2000 would bring, while at the real end of the Millennium People forget all about that. Certain crazy millenarian cults are treated in the same way, such as fitness fanatics, or animal-rights activists and New Agers — and they in fact deserve no better, which is a telling sign of our spiritual deterioration.

[7] As one can see in the quote above, Merril’s technique is to cut into pieces different texts and mix the cuttings irrespectively of syntax., the only differentiation between them is in the shape of print (I preserve Merril’s bolds and margins to show how difficult it is to read her).

[8] In 1973 Brian Aldiss published Billion Year Spree, a history of science fiction. In the last chapter, devoted to the newest phenomena in the field, Ballard is described in the following way: ‘His ferocious intelligence, his wit, his cantankerousness, and, in particular, his extraordinary rendering of the perverse pleasures of today’s paranoia, make him one of the grand magicians of modern fiction. His is an uncertain spell, but it spreads; far beyond the stockades of ordinary science fiction’ (Aldiss 1973: 343).

[9] Ballard is the most prominent among them, but there are many others, for example: Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss, D.M. Thomas.

[10] Greenland is now a prominent science fiction scholar and an author of highly regarded fantastic books.

[11] Many years later Shippey remembers how science fiction critics were treated in the 1960s and 1970s by Academia: ‘A further way of putting this is to say that during my science fiction ‘lifetime’ (1958 to now) being a science fiction reader was rather like being gay. In both cases, one could say, drawing out the similarities: *there was a definite pressure, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, not to admit the fact; *there were social penalties if you did; *you got used to hiding the fact’ (Slusser and Westfall 2002: 8). Note: Volumes of criticism containing the essays, papers, and interviews which are quoted in the text of the present study are identified in the footnotes and then listed in the biography in alphabetic order under the name of the editor. The same is true for the prefaces and introductions which precede books written by some other author: in the footnotes the edition is identified and listed in the biography under the name of the author.

[12] Disappointed by the space programme and disinterested in conquering the Universe, the ‘New Wave’ writers produced anti-space fiction and were much more interested in the inner space of the human psyche.

[13] In 1973 David Pringle, a scholar specializing in writers associated with the field of science fiction, together with James Goddard edited J.G. Ballard — the First Twenty Years, a book which is not a monograph but a collection of texts consisting almost entirely of previously-published material by notable figures.

[14] Pringle is the first to explain Ballard’s obsession with imprisonment by his personal experience of the three years spent in the Japanese prison camp. Such explanations in the nineteen-eighties became critical cliché.

[15] Pringle enumerates typically ‘Ballardian’ images: ‘concrete weapon-ranges, dead fish, abandoned airfields, radio telescopes, crashed space-capsules, sand-dunes, empty cities, sand reefs, half-submerged buildings, helicopters, crocodiles, open-air cinema screens, jewelled insects, advertising hoardings, white hotels, beaches, fossils, broken juke-boxes, crystals, lizards, multi-storey car-parks, dry lake-beds, medical laboratories, drained swamps, motorway flyovers, stranded ships, broken Coke bottles, vegetation, high-rise buildings, predatory birds and low-flying aircraft’ (Pringle 1979: 16). This list is highly insightful; indeed, Pringle succeeds in pinpointing what the critics all vaguely describe as Ballard’s unmistakable style.

[16] The entry is written by George W. Barlow and in its bibliography all critical essays are by David Pringle. Currently (summer 2006) Pringle is preparing a new edition of J.G. Ballard: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography, which is going to be very important to every Ballard scholar.

[17] In 1983 Ballard was contacted by V. Vale and the rest of RE/Search group, avant-garde publishers from San Francisco who became advocates of Ballard in the USA. In 1984 a special Ballard issue of their magazine RE/Search was published. In the following years they also re-published other of Ballard’s works in America. For instance, RE/Search published an annotated version of The Atrocity Exhibition. Ballard wrote commentaries to each chapter of this difficult but very important book. In recent years they published two important Ballardiana: J. G. Ballard Quotes and J.G. Ballard Conversations. The first is a collection of one-line aphorisms taken from Ballard’s books, the latter is a compilation of interviews given by him to different journalists (mostly from the RE/Search group).

[18] Jacques Derrida has the largest number of references (of course after Ballard) in the index and the bibliography.

[19] A good example of such an article is ‘Going Somewhere?’ (www.jgballard.com, on: 20 August 2006). Ballard writes about the role airports have in contemporary life and city architecture. Himself an inhabitant of Shepperton, a distant London suburb near the London airport, he describes the unreal landscape of post-modern concourses and by-ways in his neighbourhood and then generalizes and writes about tourism, the cosmopolitanism of the affluent West and aircraft. This short text is therefore informed by subjects recurrent in his prose: futuristic enclaves, a nation of people in the air, and global culture.

[20] For all Internet sources in the following text www.jgballard.com, on: 20 August 2006.

Ballardian fave Cousin Silas mentioned in our recent interview that he had a new CD on the way:

SS: As far as your compositional style goes, were you inspired in any way by Ballard’s experimental techniques, for example, the cut-up nature of Atrocity, or the collages and fake ads he produced around the same time?

CS: I have done the odd cut up, using a variety of sounds. I must be honest, though, I was probably thinking of Burroughs rather than Ballard, although I’ve never been too happy with the results. My new CD on Earthrid is a collaboration with Kevin Busby, recorded under the name Abominations of Yondo, named after a short story by Clark Ashton Smith. I used isolated and combined phrases from that story as inspiration when recording, and I guess that could be classed as a kind of cut up (although I left the ‘cutting up’ to Kevin!). However, I have often been accused of writing pieces which are too short. In my defence I have always maintained that these pieces say it all — any longer and it would lose its way. I guess the same could be said for the pieces in The Atrocity Exhibition: any longer and they wouldn’t be condensed novels. It wouldn’t be The Atrocity Exhibition!

The CD has just been released on Earthrid. You can download it as a free archive, or buy the CD and support the artist and label.

Interview by Simon Sellars

Cousin Silas is a producer of dark-ambient soundscapes. He has five albums to his name and a few EPs, spiking the vein of glacial electronica. His work evokes Edward Artemiev and Brian Eno. In fact, for afficionados drawing inspiration from Eno’s most influential ambient works (Music for Airports, say, through to Thursday Afternoon), pleasure may very well be derived from the work of Silas. These textured pieces can be gently iterative, building ambience and atmosphere systematically; they can be as tenuous as ectoplasm, barely there; and they can be dramatically reductive, sloughing layers to reveal roiling depths beneath, echo sounding in waves of sound.

I spoke to Cousin Silas about Ballard, Lovecraft, Forteana, Moorcock, Eno, Tarkovsky — all the essentials.

Simon Sellars

SS: What inspired you to create two volumes of Ballard Landscapes?

CS: I’ve read a lot of fiction over the years, mainly science fiction. I began with Mike Moorcock’s Stealer of Souls, and then it was the odd name-dropping of Ballard that intrigued me. My first Ballard book was The Atrocity Exhibition, and I haven’t looked back, really. Out of all the authors I’ve read, Ballard is the only one who consistently hits the mark when it comes to events, situations and descriptions that I can relate to. A good example is his story, ‘Low Flying Aircraft’. When I read that, I think I was — still am — more impressed with the colours rather than the full picture. I was totally enmeshed — it didn’t take any imagination whatsoever to go deeper into the landscapes of that story, due to my childhood.

As a kid I spent a lot of time at my Grandma’s caravan. Being an only child, much of that time was spent playing on the dunes and beach. Out of season, the local Lido pool was always empty. There were always busy shipping lanes off the beach, mainly oil tankers, and on the way to and from the caravan we passed a place called RAF Binbrook, an air force base which had been abandoned. Empty caravans and beach huts, disused coastal railways, the fog drifting in from Immingham — it made isolation a byword. Also, in the Colne Valley, a lot of the textile industry went into slow decline. As a result the valley became full of empty mills, stagnant canals and rusting equipment — all the Ballardian icons were there. Plus the M62 was being built around the time I began to take notice of things happening off my street!

The short answer is that there’s something that inspires me in almost every paragraph of Ballard, let alone the chapters or novels, and the hard part was making a conscious decision to stop (maybe) at two volumes.

SS: Why not ‘Lovecraft landscapes’, after another of your literary influences?

CS: Lovecraft can’t be read quite the same. Sure, there’s the odd story that contains some marvellous moods — for example, his description of Innsmouth, or the landscapes he describes in ‘Dagon’ or ‘Dunwich’. Damn, those things inspire some amazing images. But a lot of Lovecraft’s imagery has dated — well, it’s his writing style — whereas Ballard’s is just so ‘now’, and yet so retro in some respects.

Lovecraft was a writer I really had to work at. A few years ago I used to write SF, and among the circle of friends and co-writers I became involved with, some were always going on about him. I eventually read a Lovecraft short-story collection and found it pretty damn good, and then I read At the Mountains of Madness, which took some time to get going. I think it was my third or fourth attempt. I kept saying that there simply MUST be something here… Anyway, I did eventually finish it and I really did enjoy it. Since then I’ve read more or less all he wrote. Some of it is terribly dated, but when Lovecraft was on form, he was simply astounding. Like Ballard, though, it was the geography and landscapes that inspired me, rather than the characters. Unlike Ballard, Lovecraft’s hit rate isn’t as high.

Image from Ballard Landscapes cover art.

SS: Your online bio says, ‘When the occasion arose, he found that sound alchemy was more expressive and exploratory than writing.’ That’s intriguing — can you elaborate?

CS: As I said, I used to write a few years back, same as I still (try) and play the guitar, but I found that the Silas material was far more expressive and creative. With Silas there’s only one real limitation, and whilst it might sound pretentious, it’s imagination. With writing there are certain basic rules and with a guitar, to be good, you have to be absolutely brilliant. With ‘sound alchemy’, you don’t even have to know the first thing about writing music, or even reading music, only ‘does it sound ‘right’ for what you’re doing?’ If the answer is ‘yes’, go for it. Obviously having a basic understanding of chords and pitch with the guitar does help, but it’s not essential. Much like the punk ethos, get up and have a go!

SS: Was your SF writing influenced in any way by Ballard?

CS: Initially I was inspired by Moorcock, but gradually I drifted into Ballard territory. I did two stories that were directly influenced by J.G., one was called ‘The Song Of The Shapes’ and I can’t remember the title of the other one. ‘The Shapes’ was basically about floating sounds, like bubbles. The other story was basically an exodus of humans going back into the sea. And to my credit, they were both published. To be fair, though, it wasn’t ‘strictly’ Ballard, but the whole New Worlds thing. I loved the freedom and no-holds-barred that existed in the fiction. I haven’t really written fiction for years now. I find I don’t have the imagination for actually writing like I had, or the time.

SS: It’s no surprise to learn you also draw inspiration from Fortean events. Listening to your soundscapes is very much like tuning into some kind of spectral presence, or even something less metaphysical but still intensely dislocating, like voices drowned in static. There’s that steady hum in your work, and then something unsettling going on in the background, hustling in at the edge of consciousness.

CS: I’ve always had an unhealthy interest/curiosity in most things Fortean. I’m an avid reader and subscriber of Fortean Times, and I’ve even got two CDs worth of material currently being considered/reworked and going under the working title of The Fortean Project. There’s material there that’s been inspired by unidentified underwater objects, objects landing in remote woods, Borley Rectory, poltergeists, strange sounds, EVP, all the usual suspects. Also, ‘Necropolis Line’, the title track on my Earthrid CD, was inspired directly by an article in Fortean Times. There are quite a few other tracks of mine that have been inspired either directly or otherwise by Forteana.

I’m inspired by the strangeness, the mystery, and the downright weirdness of all these unexplained and odd happenings. I don’t especially enjoy reading about the whole world of Forteana, but I am interested in things like Electronic Voice Phenomena, strange moorland lights, places where ill feelings occur, anomalous artefacts. Some stuff I find a little tedious and totally uninspirational, like crop circles and UFO abductions. Even though I inherently know that some of the topics and situations that come under the slowly expanding umbrella of Forteana is bollocks, it can still create certain feelings. The inspiration is rather difficult to describe really — again, it’s moods and feelings and trying to convey these into sound. Naming these pieces does hopefully help the listener to ‘attune’ to what I’m aiming for.

SS: The presence of the paranormal in Ballard is something I’ve been taking an interest in.

CS: Oddly, I’d never really seen the parallel. Then again, thinking about it, these Fortean themes crop up in any number of SF stories, they’re not the exclusive domain of J.G. People out of place, or displaced momentarily in time, visions of Godlike entities, time travel, and even resurrection can be found all over the place. I suppose it’s because of the way these ‘ideas’ are presented. If they’re presented as fact, then it opens all kinds of doors for discussion, study and speculation. However, if they’re in fiction, then, well, it’s fiction! Perfect example is War of the Worlds. Anyone who’s read the book hasn’t rushed out to find if they’re there, or packed the family and belongings into a car and set of for the hills. And yet, when Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre did a ‘play’, and produced it for radio in a documentary, on-the-spot news type thing, there was mass panic. Same story, different presentation.

SS: With the tracks on Ballard Landscapes 1 & 2, did you choose the title first and fit the music to suit, or did the music suggest a title?

CS: If I remember rightly, I think with the majority of the Ballard tracks I had an idea of the titles first. Some are direct, others less so. It was a case of trying to convey in sound what these images mean to me. Obviously the titles are like an aide memoir, and it could be argued that if ‘Rusting Gantry’ had been called, oh, I dunno, ‘Formless Clouds’, then the imagery and imagination of the listener would be taken somewhere else. I like to think that the titles and the pieces work well together.

Image from Ballard Landscapes cover art.

SS: Judging from those titles, it’s clear you place equal importance on Ballard’s worth as a short story writer. There seems to be as much, if not more, reference to his shorts than his novels.

CS: Probably more. Being inspired by Ballard’s short stories is easier than novels. With a short story, they’re usually on one level, and get to the point and conclude relatively quickly. A novel is obviously longer, and has a lot more going on. But for me, Ballard’s short stories are more essential than his novels for a variety of reasons — from the late 50s to the early 90s they are just stunning and contain some of the most powerful, experimental and genre-melting fiction this side of the Big Bang. A lot of the ideas that went into his novels were played out in short story form. Plus, in some short story collections such as Vermilion Sands and The Atrocity Exhibition, the boundaries between shorts and novels are somewhat blurred.

Unfortunately, since Empire of the Sun, which put Ballard firmly in the ‘general’ public arena, especially after the film arrived, his short stories seem to have been somewhat ignored. Plus, his actual output of short stories has abated over the last decade. Mind you, there isn’t really the market now that there was back then.

SS: An oft-stated criticism of Ballard, especially his later novels, is that they would have worked better as short stories.

CS: Short stories and novels are two quite separate forms of story telling. Some would argue that a short is never ‘allowed’ to develop, whereas a novel requires more skill in keeping the reader interested. For me there’s just as much skill if not more with a short story. You have to have more acute pacing, deviations from the ‘main’ story aren’t as flexible and there’s not as much time for full character-building as such. As I said above, some of his short stories were developed into novels, so in some respects you can judge the two mediums and the difference between them.

SS: When I interviewed Simon Reynolds, he said that Ballard and Brian Eno are ‘the two greatest British thinkers of the second half of the 20th Century.’ Given that Ballard and Eno are two of your major influences, do you agree with him?

CS: I’ve never really considered Ballard or Eno as thinkers. To me one writes incredibly atmospheric music, the other writes incredibly atmospheric fiction. Both Ballard and Eno are probably my strongest influences, but their influence is very tenuous, difficult to explain. They both invoke that certain mood of isolation. Isolation is a funny thing: it can be forced upon one, or be self-invoked. It seems in today’s world, the last thing you’d really expect is isolation, and yet even in the busiest of places, there are attributes and situations where one can feel it totally. Self-invoked isolation is where the person chooses to step back, away from all the social interaction and so on, to become, in some respects, a suburban exile. I can relate to a lot of Ballard’s fiction and it’s much the same with Eno’s music, although to a lesser extent — Eno isn’t as consistent, and his vocal albums are something else. I don’t mind them, but for me it’s stuff like Music for Films, Apollo, Another Green World, plus a couple of his ambient albums and the two he did with Harold Budd that contain some of the most moody and atmospheric music there is.

SS: You have two albums available for purchase at Fflint Central and one at Earthrid, but Ballard Landscapes is available for free through Earth Monkey. Do you occupy similar ideological ground to Cory Doctorow, who makes his stories and novels available for free online, justifying it like so: ‘Most people who download the book don’t end up buying it, but they wouldn’t have bought it in any event, so I haven’t lost any sales, I’ve just won an audience.’

CS: Simple answer: he’s hit the nail on the head. A while back I got an email from Earth Monkey, basically asking for contributions to a new net label. I simply thought, ‘why not’? If accepted, it would underline the fact that there’s not just maybe six people who like Cousin Silas, but also, it may well bring in a few more sales for the guys at Fflint and Earthrid. Plus, I’m not exactly in it for the money, but for the simple fact that even if one person ‘got’ or enjoyed Silas, then for me that’s a good return. It does sound awfully clichéd, but it’s how I feel.

SS: Tell us about the process of making the Ballard Landscapes. Do you use field recordings? I hear water drips, factory sounds, electrical hums and glitches.

CS: On some of the material I’ve done, I’ve used the odd field recording: a steam train on ‘Necropolis Line’, a dog barking on ‘John Wayne Gacy Contemplates’, plus a few tracks here and there have had either rain, or drops or a gunshot. The glitches, machinery and hums are all created with synths, editing or processing. You’d be quite surprised at what some of these sounds started as!

SS: A bit like Ballard, then, where you’re never quite sure what’s simulation, what’s ‘authentic’.

CS: I guess I could try and be clever by saying that there are a lot of real vs. artificial oppositions in his fiction, but again, it’s the geography, the ‘feel’, the atmosphere, moods and landscapes I try and convey. A kind of aural texture.

Image from Ballard Landscapes cover art.

SS: I’ve absorbed a lot of Ballard-inspired music and I see two distinct strands in sonic interpretations of his work. There’s the world-music camp that picks up on the lush, exotic, jungle tropes. Then there’s the ominous, insidious, unsettling, isolationist elements that appeal to a whole other subset of musicians. You’re aligned with the latter: do you see Ballard as an essentially dystopian, dark fantasist? Or do you, like Ballard himself, see something affirmative in this darkness — a willingness to ‘embrace the catastrophe’ in order to fulfil personal psychological needs?

CS: Maybe I’m just a superficial reader, maybe I don’t really go too deep in what writers are ‘saying’. Then again, if I did, would I lose that certain magic that writers like Ballard give me? I certainly pick up on the isolationism, and the alienation. With Ballard I think he totally disseminated the phrase ‘One Man Against The World’. He created situations where the man was turning his back against the world, or the world was turning its back on him, many variations that basically culminate in isolation. And sure, there are many dark areas in Ballard’s writing — that’s what inspires! To me, though, there’s a point where fiction and music (indeed, most of the ‘arts’) become lost in translation, as it were. I think when ‘deep’ questions are asked about the whys and wherefores, and ‘what does he really mean’, the whole point seems to become lost and diluted.

SS: Do you have a favourite Ballard novel or short story?

CS: That’s a really difficult question to answer. It’s like favourite music and albums — they change weekly, if not daily. Plus, due to his developing writing style, it would be unfair to choose. His earlier period was pretty different and whilst some of his icons and fixations were there, books like The Wind From Nowhere are more akin to John Wyndham. More often than not, I can rest assured that anything by Ballard will get my attention. I have recently been digging out a load of his novels to reread, some I haven’t read in over twenty years. At the time I bought it, I wasn’t too taken with Hello America, but after reading it again I realised what a fine book it is. I was probably overdosing on Ballard back then. I guess, if pushed, I’d have to pick either The Atrocity Exhibition and/or The Terminal Beach, purely for nostalgia, as they were the first ones I read and perhaps had the biggest impact. Then again, The Unlimited Dream Company was a voyage through one hell of a strange landscape… Must read that again soon.

SS: As far as your compositional style goes, were you inspired in any way by Ballard’s experimental techniques, for example, the cut-up nature of Atrocity, or the collages and fake ads he produced around the same time?

CS: I have done the odd cut up, using a variety of sounds. I must be honest, though, I was probably thinking of Burroughs rather than Ballard, although I’ve never been too happy with the results. My new CD on Earthrid is a collaboration with Kevin Busby, recorded under the name Abominations of Yondo, named after a short story by Clark Ashton Smith. I used isolated and combined phrases from that story as inspiration when recording, and I guess that could be classed as a kind of cut up (although I left the ‘cutting up’ to Kevin!). However, I have often been accused of writing pieces which are too short. In my defence I have always maintained that these pieces say it all — any longer and it would lose its way. I guess the same could be said for the pieces in The Atrocity Exhibition: any longer and they wouldn’t be condensed novels. It wouldn’t be The Atrocity Exhibition!

SS: Is the composer Edward Artemiev an influence? You have a track called ‘Leaving Solaris’ on the Necropolis Line album, plus the Ballard track ‘Flight over Abandoned Village’ reminds me of that very displaced feel that Artemiev achieved in his soundtracks for Tarkovsky.

CS: Edward Artemiev hasn’t inspired me as much as his son, Artemiy, who has a label called Electroshock — I keep threatening to send him some material! Solaris was a film that did kind of inspire. I remember Brian Aldiss saying it was one of his fave films so I made a note and can remember watching it many years ago late one night. Stalker was on around the same time as well but I find it difficult sometimes with films like these, especially Stalker. The imagery is just outstanding, but you’re flitting between that and the subtitles so the full impact isn’t what it should be.

SS: You take your name from a Pete Sinfield lyric for King Crimson (‘Cousin Silas grew a beard, drew another flask of weird’). But you’re such a minimal stylist — so how did you name yourself from one of the most bloated songbooks in rock?

CS: It goes back to my mid-teens. I’d picked up a copy of (I think) Sounds, a music mag. With it came a free flexi disc, featuring Emerson Lake & Palmer. The first track was called ‘Brain Salad Surgery’, and then there was a fairly long piece with a load of cut ups/highlights of tracks from the actual album. It was my first foray into ‘proper’ rock music. I bought the album a couple of weeks later and then began a quest! I read up all there was on ELP, and began buying their previous albums. Along this voyage of discovery it came to light that Emerson had been in The Nice, Greg Lake in King Crimson and Carl Palmer did a brief stint with Arthur Brown. I bought some Nice, and Crimson, and then discovered Sinfield had been involved with early Crimson. These days I still listen to Crimson, and still reckon that those first few albums, In the Court of the Crimson King through to Islands, are peerless. I even bought Pete Sinfield’s only solo album, Still. Halcyon days! So, because I am an avid Crimson fan, and one of my fave albums is Lizard (which contains ‘Happy Families’, the song featuring, albeit briefly, Cousin Silas) it was a natural choice. To be fair it wasn’t me who chose the name. I had been ‘named’ something else, I can’t remember what it was but I know I wasn’t too keen on it. Cousin Silas was mentioned and I thought what the hell!

SS: I like Crimson, but I’ve never been able to get on with Sinfield’s imagery. A bit too pompous for me.

CS: Ironically enough, a few mates and myself were on about this the other night! Comparing Sinfield’s lyrics to Jon Anderson’s on ‘And You And I’ and Topographic Oceans, we wondered what ‘really’ was going on in those songs. I always think of Sinfield along the same lines as Fred Frith. On some releases, at face value, Frith ‘sounds’ like he’s not quite got the grip of how the guitar works, and yet on others he plays like a genius. Both of them experiment with their art (indeed, like Ballard in his condensed novels). And, to be fair to Sinfield, he has been behind some incredibly beautiful lyrics. His first foray, In The Court Of The Crimson King, has some great ones, In the Wake of Poseidon less so, and then we get Lizard, which is an album of opposites: some make sense, some don’t. Islands is kind of back on track again. Out of context (sometimes even in!) some make very little sense, but it’s the ‘whole’ that works. And don’t forget, he did write lyrics for Bucks Fizz and Cher!

SS: He even made an album with Eno, based on a Robert Sheckley book.

CS: Here, did you know Brian Eno has only ever acted once, and it was in Father Ted! He played, originally enough, Father Brian Eno.

SS: He did not!

CS: He did. I was watching a batch of Father Ted (the whole three series, actually) and in the last episode, ‘Going to America’, I saw his name on the final credits. I ran it back, and there he is, very briefly. I thought, well, I know he’s done a lot of soundtracks, I wonder how many times he’s actually acted. And if you go on IMDB, there’s only the one entry for him, in Father Ted. I was going to say that this was another thing that Ballard and Eno shared: that they’ve only ever acted the once. But with Ballard, on IMDB, there’s no entry for ‘acting’. However, I remembered the early Crash! thingy… it isn’t even mentioned on IMDB. I was sure he appeared (maybe as himself or a very, very close character) in an old black and white film. I remember him stood near a car, and an actress slightly out of shot in the background. So I looked on YouTube, and there it was. Followed the link, and had a good read on some website or other… Ballardian.com, I think it was. Tee hee.

SS: Will there be a Ballard Landscapes 3?

CS: Don’t tempt me! I honestly could spend the rest of my Silas years doing nothing but pieces inspired by Ballard. I feel as though I’ve only scratched the surface. Trouble is, where do you stop? With folks wanting more, and with no more on offer, would that enhance the stuff that’s already there? It’s the Fawlty Towers/Father Ted question: would more have diluted the lasting impact?

..:: TOP 5 BALLARD-RELATED TRACKS FROM COUSIN SILAS, AS CHOSEN BY SILAS HIMSELF

CS: When asked to name a top 5, I chose two and picked three others that are the most popular, judging by Last.fM and other download sites.

‘Vermilion Drift’ (from Ballard Landscapes 2)

CS: Obviously inspired by Vermilion Sands. I loved the way that you could go from the large dunescapes to being shut away inside one of those beach properties.

‘Concrete Islands’ (from Ballard Landscapes 2)

CS: The whole obsession with roads, motorways and cars has featured a lot throughout Ballard’s fiction. As I mentioned, I can remember them building the M62, and once in Madame Tussauds in Blackpool, as a kid, I went into the horror section and saw a mock up of an accident. It left a terrible impression on me for years. I think a motorbike had come off a flyover and hit a car. Nasty… For all that, there is a dark beauty about major roads and motorways when they’re quiet.

‘Empty Airport’ (from Ballard Landscapes 1)

CS: If I remember rightly, there are only two ‘sounds’ on here. I felt that any more would destroy the mood. Indirectly inspired by Ballard’s obsession with airports, and my idea of what one would be like when it’s empty.

‘Bikini Atoll’ (from Ballard Landscapes 1)

CS: I was well into the whole mystique of atomic bombs as a kid, where the results were contrasting in complete opposites: the destruction, with the strangely beautiful blast clouds (check out the mushroom blast of the first H bomb). The secrecy, the technology, the complete warping of nature was fascinating. It was only afterwards when the dust, literally, had settled, that it was revealed how these early tests had totally devastated these small islands of paradise. Earth Monkey put visuals to this track and it’s on Youtube. They did a phenomenal job.

‘Crashed Bomber With Weeds’ (from Falling: An Earth Monkey Sampler)

CS: Okay, so this isn’t on either of the Ballard albums. However, as you might gather from the title, it does have links with ol’ J.G. The Pennines run close to where I live, and from Sheffield, over towards Manchester, that whole backbone has, like iron filings to a magnet, attracted hundreds of air crashes over the years. In the valley, one of these sites witnessed the crash of a flying fortress. I remember looking at the crash site on a web page, and it was literally, a crashed bomber with weeds.

Also, it might be worth mentioning the Geographics album on Earth Monkey [also a free download]. I feel there is a definite link between the Ballard albums and Geo. As I said in the interview, a lot of the empathy I have towards Ballard’s landscapes (airports, airfields, roads, dune, beaches, etc.) come from my own experiences and memories. I try and ‘realise’ these on Geographics. Tracks like ‘The Fog From Immingham’, ‘Abandoned Airfield’, and ‘Cathedral Arch Of Trees (Lincolnshire)’ are all in effect realities, whereas by definition, the Ballard soundscapes are fictions…of a kind.

..:: MORE INFO
+ Cousin Silas at MySpace, including six unreleased tracks.

Above is the cover for J.G. Ballard’s forthcoming autobiography, to be published by Fourth Estate (and previously announced here).

Meanwhile, the Burroughs crowd over at Reality Studio are having spirited words about the chosen title… They’ve also voiced an intriguing proposition, a ‘what if’ scenario to get the good old synapses firing: imagine if Ballard were to write a memoir of William Burroughs?

It’s divided into six channels: (1) J.G. Ballard Interviews; (2) J.G. Ballard Documentaries; (3) J.G. Ballard Adaptations; (4) J.G. Ballard’s Top Ten Science Fiction Films; (5) Ballardiana; and (6) Ballardian Sound Art/Music. Access them via these links or the players below.

For now I’ve been adding clips uploaded by other users that fall under the ‘Ballardian’ rubric. There are interviews with J.G. Ballard and most of the adaptations of his work, plus other objects like Chris Marker’s La Jetee and bits and pieces from Sinclair, Moorcock, Tarkovsky, Foxx, Burroughs and others in the orbit. I’ll soon be uploading artefacts of my own: more rare Ballard interviews, maybe some car crash test footage, cadavers, airports, news from the sun, architectural geegaws, etc. If anyone has suggestions for what to include, please be in touch. The only rule is that the subject of the artefact (or creator of the artefact) has to have been mentioned in a reasonably significant fashion on this site, or at least have been significantly overlooked. If you’d like to be notified of further updates and additions, please subscribe to the playlist of your choice.

Thanks to the YouTube community for the uploads.

J.G. BALLARD INTERVIEWS
Ballard interviews.

J.G. BALLARD DOCUMENTARIES
Ballard docos.

J.G. BALLARD ADAPTATIONS
Ballard adaptations including ‘making of’ docos.

J.G. BALLARD’S TOP TEN SCIENCE FICTION FILMS
JGB’s ten, as reported in the Independent newspaper, 2005.

BALLARDIANA
Filmic artefacts inspired by, sharing similar concerns with, or pointing to memes in Ballard’s work.

SOUND ART/MUSIC
Music and sound art artefacts inspired by or sharing similar concerns with Ballard’s work.

ABOVE: Crash! on YouTube

by Simon Sellars

CRASH! (1971)

Director: Harley Cokliss
Writer: J.G. Ballard
Starring: J.G. Ballard & Gabrielle Drake

I wasn’t satisfied by just writing SF stories, you see. My imagination was eager to expand in all directions.”

J.G. Ballard. ‘From Shanghai to Shepperton’, 1982.

Leached away by the camera lens, the dimension of depth is missing from the room, and the two figures have an increasingly abstract relationship to each other, and to the rectilinear forms of the settee, walls and ceiling. In this context almost anything is possible, their movements are a series of postural equations that must have some significance other than their apparent one.”

J.G. Ballard, ‘The 60 Minute Zoom’ (1976)

..:: MORE: Ballardian.com transcript of the film’s voiceover and meta-narration.

When Paul Haggis won the Best Picture Oscar in 2005 for a film called Crash, fellow Canadian David Cronenberg wasn’t among the well-wishers. In fact Cronenberg was positively livid, accusing Haggis of ‘functional stupidity’ for allegedly stealing the title of the Baron of Blood’s 1996 Ballard adaptation. But funnily enough Cronenberg wasn’t the first to direct a film called Crash. He wasn’t even the first to direct a Ballard adaptation called Crash. That’s a title claimed 25 years earlier (allowing for the presence of a rogue exclamation mark) by Harley Cokeliss (formerly known as ‘Harley Cokliss’), who made the 1971 short film ‘Crash!’ from fragments found in Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition (including the film’s title, punctuation and all, lifted from the title of an Atrocity chapter). Of course, Cokliss also pre-empted Jonathan Weiss’s feature-film version of Atrocity, released in 2000.

That achievement, of being the first — pre-Cronenberg, pre-Weiss — is worthy in itself, but Cokliss’s film has something even more prized, something else the other two could never have: it stars J.G. Ballard. With his brooding, hypermasculine presence, Ballard plays a version of Atrocity’s ‘T’ character alongside the actor Gabrielle Drake, her own role a composite of the book’s archetypal ‘sex-kit’ women.

The film was a product of the most experimental, the darkest phase of Ballard’s career. It was an era of psychological blowback from the sudden, shocking death of his wife in 1964, an era that had produced the cut-up ‘condensed novels’ of Atrocity, plus a series of strange collages and ‘advertisers’ announcements’. One of the ‘ads’ featured a bondage photo of a bound and ball-gagged woman set to inscrutable text: ‘In her face the diagram of bones forms a geometry of murder. After Freud’s exploration within the psyche it is now the outer world of reality which must be quantified and eroticised.’ Later there were further literary experiments, concrete poems and ‘impressionistic’ film reviews, as well as an aborted multimedia theatrical play based around the car crash. After that came an actual gallery exhibition of crashed cars, replete with strippers and the drunken destruction of the ‘exhibits’ performed by the enraged-for-real audience.

Then came Cokliss’s ‘Crash!’.

In all of these experiments, aborted works, happenings, events, the motif of the car crash is crucial. Ballard sought to understand the role that automobile styling, and therefore mass consumerism, plays in our lives. His sights were set on the built-in death drive that technology embodies, the effacing of identity, the shutting off of our neurological systems. Our willingness to submit to the amniotic bliss of the technological womb. Of course, today we know where all this would eventually beach: his 1973 masterpiece, Crash. But in 1971 Ballard was still pushing the farthest limits of his obsession, refining riffs and routines, expanding the parameters of the car crash as far as popular culture would allow. Crucially this was far beyond the stuffy confines of ‘literature’, which Ballard has never had much time for, and into visual art and film: the realm of the popular imaginary.

‘On 12 February 1971 … the Radio Times announced, for 8.30pm on BBC2, ‘Crash!’. To be introduced by James Mossman. ‘For science fiction writer J.G. Ballard, the key image of the present day is the man in the motor car. It is the image that represents the dreams and fantasies that all too easily can turn into nightmares. In a film for Review Ballard explains the beauty and fascination of this potentially deadly technology.’

Quoted in Crash: David Cronenberg’s Post-mortem on J.G. Ballard’s ‘Trajectory of Fate’, by Iain Sinclair (1999).

J.G. Ballard and Gabrielle Drake in ‘Crash!’ (1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

‘Crash!’ is rather a strange film. It doesn’t have a title sequence, there are no credits and there is no explanation of who Ballard is (although perhaps this was provided by the aforementioned Mr Mossman). It begins with Gabrielle Drake in profile, turning to the camera as a discordant oscillator tone is heard. Then we see Ballard, his strident gaze alighting on his natural environment: the rooftop of a multistorey car park.

Next we hear a meta-narration enacted by a plummy BBC type, as vintage crash-test footage plays. Old, finned American cars collide in slow motion. Plastic dummies are expelled through windows and doors, gracefully shattering into smithereens. The narration is a slightly edited version of a passage in Ballard’s ‘You, Me and the Continuum’ (1966), one of the Atrocity texts. But it’s a tougher version. The original told us the crashing cars were ‘worrying each other like amiable whales’ but there’s nothing of the kind here, just a pure litany of impact zones, flying fenders, severed torsos, dummies disintegrating in a ‘carnival of arms and legs’.

I remember seeing some films on television of test crashes a few years ago. They were using American cars of the late 50s, a period I suppose when the American dream, and American confidence, were at their highest point.”

J.G. Ballard, voiceover from Crash! (1971).

Intercut with the crash tests are subliminal glimpses of Ballard and Drake, before Cokliss switches to Ballard cruising in his large vehicle. Crucially it’s an American model, a left-hand drive, and in it our man rumbles down motorways and feeder roads, down the Westway, on the M41 towards Shepherds Bush. There are some heavy-handed repeats set to phased sound effects: motorway signs looped over and over like the revolving backdrop in a Warner Bros cartoon. The meta-narration gives way to Ballard’s own voiceover: first person, in a tone you just don’t hear from him in interviews or in person. In Iain Sinclair’s book on Cronenberg’s Crash, which features a discussion of the Cokliss film, Sinclair describes Ballard’s voice here as ‘a schizophrenic buzz’. To me he sounds weary, almost jaded, maybe a little disgusted, as he tells us that that ‘the key image of the 20th century is the man in the motor car’ (see the appendix for a full transcript of Ballard’s voiceover and of the meta-narration).

His aim, Ballard suggests, is to home in on the ‘marriage of the physical aspects of ourselves with the imaginative and technological aspects of our lives’. It’s a key point, a partner to his assertion later in the film that ‘we only make sense of ourselves in terms of these huge technological systems’. Indeed, the egocentric popular culture of today, the all-invasive media landscape in which the private becomes public — the Myspace glossolalia of intimate, private space projected onto a global screen — can perhaps be understood in these terms, a result of what Ballard sees as ‘the shared experience of moving together through an elaborately signalled landscape’.

All filtered via this very 70s incantation of cocooned drivers in a ‘metallised dream’.

J.G. Ballard in ‘Crash!’ (1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

The point made, the music returns, edgy and stressed, perhaps synthesised (maybe Mooged) but also sounding like plucked, discordant violins. Ballard, the driver, turns to his right and sees Drake, the woman, in the passenger seat. He blinks, looks again and she’s gone. We now know what she represents: our ‘strange love affair with the machine, with its own death’, according to his voiceover. There’s a clunky edit and the music cuts (well, I say ‘music’ but it’s ‘sound design’ — it serves as pure atmosphere and is as functional as stage-set mise-en-scene). Ballard walks around a new-car showroom admiring Pontiacs, Cadillacs — the kind of American cars that add so much gravitas to Atrocity. Ballard’s voiceover tells us that ‘the styling of motor cars, and of the American motor car in particular, has always struck me as incredibly important… I’m interested in the exact way in which it brings together the visual codes for expressing our ordinary perceptions about reality. For example, that the future is something with a fin on it’.

But acolytes know you’ll never find a tail fin in Ballard’s future, for his future is an anti-Gernsback continuum that has no need for sci-fi trappings because science fiction, for Ballard, is the stuff of the everyday. Ballard’s future is a fiction of the next five minutes, of the spinal landscape, of our bodies tracked and extended into utterly banal technology. Cokliss knows it too, and he shifts gear, treating us to canted tracking shots of fetishised car grilles. The sequence is hypnotic, lasts a few minutes, before Ballard, his chest thrust out, walks on by with the stride of a man on a mission. He stops at one particular vehicle, looks in the window, jaw set.

J.G. Ballard in ‘Crash!’ (1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

At this juncture, let’s reflect: Ballard knows exactly where the camera is. He’s a natural. In this film, he’s an actor. He has presence, undeniably. Wearing his ‘drunk tank Haiti suit’ (as Sinclair describes it), he sees the woman inside the car and there’s a musky erotic charge as her coquettish gaze returns Ballard’s smouldering stare. There’s a close up: her hand is between her thighs and we recall the second of Ballard’s ‘advertiser’s announcements’ for Ambit magazine, with its coded message: ‘Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?’. The merging of our bodies with technology; the manner in which even our most banal and everyday actions are super stylised in the face of an enveloping technological reality — it’s all here in this film. Importantly, the film is a continuum with Ballard’s earlier works, with the multimedia experiments outlined earlier.

LEFT: Gabrielle Drake’s hand in ‘Crash!’ (1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).
RIGHT: detail from Ballard’s second Ambit ‘advertisement’ (1967).

[Harley Cokliss] was an American who was over here. He made a number of documentaries for the BBC. Then he went to the States. He made a thriller with Burt Reynolds and one or two other films. I don’t know what he’s doing now.

J.G. Ballard, quoted in Sinclair’s Crash (1999).

In an interview for Sinclair’s Crash book, Chris Petit is dismissive of Cokliss, saying ‘I was amazed that Harley had read Crash, because he’s not a big reader. Although he never particularly had a career, he was a major hustler’ (of course, Cokliss’s film is based on Atrocity, not Crash). Sinclair asks if Cokliss had ‘any status as a director’; Petit replies, ‘Not really, no.’ But a quick web check of Cokliss’s career reveals some interesting tidbits that aren’t in the Sinclair book. Yes, Cokliss was ‘on the verge of making it as an exploitation director’, as Petit terms it. But he was also studio second-unit director on The Empire Strikes Back, so his stocks must have been reasonably high at some point. And he’s forged a successful latter-day career as a director of children’s fantasy adventure. But most importantly, for the time frame under discussion, Harley Cokliss actually had form; he had the inclination. Just after ‘Crash!’, he made a documentary on Eduardo Paolozzi, an important figure in the Ballardian universe, and he filmed and interviewed Philip K Dick, too.

Admittedly, on a technical level some of the pacing in ‘Crash!’ seems a bit off, as in the moments after we’ve submitted to the dramatic tension of the rather effective sound design and the charged interplay between Ballard and the woman, only to be shoehorned into, well, something else: a clumsy jolt into Ballard’s voiceover and a scene of spaghetti junctions. But aside from that, conceptually, either Cokliss has done his homework (and, yes, read the books) and has absorbed Ballard’s texts thoroughly, or Ballard is the invisible guiding hand behind the camera. Either way the film deserves serious appraisal, rather than languishing as a footnote to a ‘failed exploitation’ career.

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

J.G. Ballard, quoted in Sinclair’s Crash (1999).

My thoughts are that Ballard is in control. It’s very much his film and he knows it. His voice takes command. His body language dominates. As I said before, here Ballard was testing riffs (‘routines’, as Sinclair calls them, after Burroughs) that would, in time, become familiar. Don’t treat this phase of Ballard’s career lightly: it contains the seeds of what we’ve come to know and understand as ‘Ballardian’. There are fragments of quotes that we now recognise from Ballard’s famous introduction to Crash, regarding Freud and the distinction between the inner world of the mind and the outer world of reality. His evocation of an ‘elaborately signalled landscape’ would later be recycled into the 1994 introduction to Concrete Island. Elsewhere in the film, Ballard spits out his by-now familiar assertion that if all human life on the planet was to vanish overnight, the psychology of the human race could be reconstituted from the technological detritus. (Yes, spits. As before, Ballard’s voiceover verges on disgust; there’s a rather large bee in his bonnet, it seems). The subtext is: to visiting aliens, stumbling across our discarded playthings, we’d be pegged as a band of proto-cyborgs.

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in ‘Crash!’ (dir. Harley Cokliss, 1971): ‘the complexity of movement when a woman gets out of a car’.

ABOVE: Rosanna Arquette as Gabrielle in Crash (1996; dir. David Cronenberg).

Ballard’s voiceover tells us he’s ‘fascinated with the complexity of movement when a woman gets out of a car’ and you can see the fruits of that complexity, the literalisation of an obsession, in the character Gabrielle in the book Crash, and in Cronenberg’s Crash. This severely crippled character, her every movement a complex cryptogram of prosthetics, flesh and leather that isolate her body parts into a perverse geometric grid, was, according to Sinclair, named by Ballard after Gabrielle Drake, the woman in Cokliss’s film.

And it makes sense, especially as Ballard’s voiceover, that eulogy to the complexity of the woman/car, gives way once more to the meta-narration, the plummy Englishman, who verbalises another Atrocity text, this time the list-paragraph entitled ‘Elements of an Orgasm’. It’s found in Ballard’s 1969 piece, ‘The Summer Cannibals’, and it’s actually an inventory, a sex kit, a focus on a woman decommissioned, fragmented, magnified, then reordered by technology:

NARRATOR: Her ungainly transit across the passenger seat through the nearside door. The overlay of her knees with the metal door flank. The conjunction of the aluminized gutter trim with the volumes of her thighs. The crushing of her left breast by the door frame, and its self extension as she continued to rise. The movement of her left hand across the chromium trim of the right headlamp assembly. Her movements distorted in the projecting carapace of the bonnet. The jut and rake of her pubis as she sits in the driver’s seat. The soft pressure of her thighs against the rim of the steering wheel.

The sequence is overlaid with an ascending sound design, with staccato percussion fills, and there are some disorientating slow-motion close ups of knees, a breast, her hand on the gear stick. It’s phallic, yes, and obvious, but actually subtle in contrast to the remarkably similar, though overcranked scene in Mike Hodge’s Get Carter (released in the same year, 1971), in which Carter’s female rescuer changes gears with increasing speed and furtiveness while Michael Caine silently watches with smouldering lasciviousness in the passenger seat. Is Cokliss sending up Hodge’s macho anti-hero — Caine’s Carter? Is the parody an intentional counterpoint to Ballard’s more cerebral dissection of the cheap sex of the automobile?

Again Ballard is driving solo. He pulls into a car wash, gets out, stares unblinkingly as the vaginal parting of the brushes slowly come together to engulf the vehicle. Sinclair writes that Cokliss’s film subverts Cronenberg’s, that there are ‘disquieting parallels’, and nowhere is that more so than here (there are also ‘disquieting parallels’ with Weiss’s Atrocity film, but I’m saving that for another essay). In the Cronenberg there is of course a supercharged carwash scene, in which Vaughan fucks Ballard/Spader’s wife in the back seat while Spader/Ballard drives. Vaughan brutalises her, rearranging her body into death-driven accident postures: cracking her neck sideways, in weird angles, violently splaying her body across the seat as if she’s just been crushed by a car accident. She’s a living crash-test dummy and Vaughan literally fucks the life out of her.

ABOVE: The empty car-wash scene in ‘Crash!’ (1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

ABOVE: Brutalised sex in Cronenberg’s car wash (Crash, 1996; dir. David Cronenberg).

But Cokliss (the ‘interestingly named Harley Cokliss’, as Sinclair calls him) sexually frustrates this earlier Ballard. The woman is of course glimpsed subliminally once again, but the focus is more on Ballard, who glares, fuming, wordless, until the brushes wipe the window and block him from view. He literally sees sex in the motor car, yet he’s frustratingly displaced from it, as his voiceover links the ‘relationship between sexuality and the motor car body’. Cut to a long, voyeuristic shot of Ms Drake taking a shower. Graphic matches pit her body parts with various automobile parts: the point of her nipple, for example, fading to reveal the tip of a manufacturer’s medallion. It’s a bit obvious but it’s nicely shot, and Gabrielle Drake writhes nakedly, and in the end it makes the point well.

Now we’re on the home stretch, as Ballard walks through a junkyard, admiring the car wrecks, the ominous sigils of consumerism representing what his voiceover tells us are our ‘arranged deaths’. As an aside, I like how Ballard, although jaded, disdainful, offers his own opinion as if it’s just that: his own. The point is never forceful (although the tone may appear to be): ‘Have we reached a point now in the 70s,’ his voiceover asks, ‘where we only make sense in terms of these huge technological systems? I think so myself…’

‘I think so myself.’

(Under all circumstances, no matter how taxing — in person, in interview, in this film — Ballard is never less than unfailingly polite and generous with his time. Truly, it’s the mark of the man.)

Then there’s that long oscillating tone again and it signals Gabrielle, bloody in the car, her head smashed on the steering wheel. Just as there was no sex in the car wash, Cokliss here denies us the car crash, the real money shot, which Cronenberg supplies in spades of course (oh, and in Spader, if only in dry humps). She opens the door, falls out, and the meta-narrative intones the third and final passage from Atrocity. As before, it’s taken from ‘The Summer Cannibals’ (or at least the first half is; the second half appears to have been written exclusively for the film).

‘Regaining consciousness,’ the meta-narrator tell us, ‘she stared at the blood on her legs. The heavy liquid pulled at her skirt. The bruise under her left breast reached behind her sternum, seizing like a hand at her heart.’

In shock, perhaps close to death, she turns and stares ‘at the waiting figure of the man she knew to be Dr Tallis’.

Ballard is Tallis. She turns to look at him, at JGB.

Gabrielle Drake in ‘Crash!’ (1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

This detail is a curious inclusion. The ‘T’ figure in Atrocity, variously known as Tallis, Traven, Talbot and so on, is a psychiatrist suffering a mental breakdown; the fractured narrative is delivered via his fractured psyche. But up until now the narration in this film has been divested of its context in the book. Ballard, and perhaps Cokliss, have simply chosen the most evocative passages to do with the car and the role of the car crash (and in that sense, it’s more of a prototype for the Cronenberg film than the Weiss film, as Sinclair correctly identifies). There’s been no mention of character names, no anchoring to a world outside the film. Why mention Tallis, then, at this late stage? This would make no sense to an audience — a mainstream BBC audience — unfamiliar with one of Ballard’s least commercial works.

Never mind. There’s more test crash footage and a sound design of tortuously slowed down metallic crunching to go with it, like a contact mic lowered into the depths of hell. Ballard offers a summation: ‘Filmed in slow motion, these crashes had a beautiful stylised grace’. Yes, we realise, they’re important because they show us how ‘everything becomes more stylised, cut off from ordinary feeling’. Of course, both Cronenberg and Weiss also make effective use of test-crash footage; the motif is an important key to Ballard’s work, and worthy of an essay in its own right (which I am working on; stay tuned).

Crash-test footage in ‘Crash!’ (1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

There are an enormous number of multi-storey car parks in Watford, I discovered. It’s the Mecca of the multi-storey car park. And they’re quite ornate, some of them. They played a special role in The Atrocity Exhibition. They were iconic structures. I was interested in the gauge of psychoarchitectonics and its canted floors, as a depository for cars, seemed to let one into a new dimension. They obviously decided they had to beautify these structures. They covered them in strange trellises. It was a bizarre time.”

J.G. Ballard, quoted in Sinclair’s Crash (1999).

Finally Ballard’s car ascends up the ramp of that wonderful multi-storey car park, truly a work of art, in a sequence that’s again strangely similar to a parallel scene in Get Carter (which of course makes great use of its ‘grim up north’ Newcastle urbanism). But in Cokliss/Ballard, the car park becomes psychogeography, not merely ominous mise-en-scene like in the Carter/Caine, but a mapping of the affective behaviour of the structure — of the fiction of the world around us, this ‘enormous novel’, as Ballard calls it.

‘One of the most mysterious buildings ever built’… (‘Crash!’; dir. Harley Cokliss).

Ballard, in voiceover, asks us to:

Take a structure like a multi-storey car park, one of the most mysterious buildings ever built. Is it a model for some strange psychological state, some kind of vision glimpsed within its bizarre geometry? What effect does using these buildings have on us? Are the real myths of this century being written in terms of these huge unnoticed structures?

Then at last he emerges onto the rooftop into daylight, out from the dank cavernous bowels, as he watches the woman down below, who walks away, while his voiceover intones a scenario of ‘modern technology reaching into our dreams and [changing] our whole way of looking at things: forcing us to contemplate its world instead of ourselves’.

And that’s it — the film’s over.

What to make of it? Well, can we say that Ballard was obsessed at this time? Losing himself in the mantra of repetition? Hypnotising himself with the ritual significance of automobile trauma? Exploring it from every conceivable angle in theatre, exhibitions, visual art, film? (In anything but straight writing, it seemed, at least between Atrocity and Crash.) And isn’t it often the case that such artists — or mediators between worlds, if you like — lose themselves in the glare and (excuse the cliché) fly far too close to the sun? As Sinclair asks in the Crash book, regarding the uncanny similarities between the death of Princess Di and Ballard’s work: ‘Had he activated a demonic psychopathology that could only be appeased by regular sacrifices?’

For incantations of this kind, repeated often enough, sometimes bring something back with them when the voyager, the cosmonaut of inner space, re-enters the world. There are ruptures in space-time. Matter collides and there is fallout, like a Sumerian demon woken from the dead and hungry for souls.

Refer back to the film, where Ballard tells us that:

The car crash is the most dramatic event in most people’s lives, apart from their own deaths, and in many cases the two will coincide. Are we just victims in a totally meaningless tragedy, or does it in fact take place with our unconscious, and even conscious, connivance? … Are these arranged deaths arranged by the colliding forces of the technological landscape, by our own unconscious fantasies about power and aggression, our obsessions with consumer goods and desires, the overlaying fictions that are more and more taking the place of reality?”

LEFT: J.G. Ballard in ‘Crash!’ (1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

And so it happened that shortly after the publication of the book, Crash, in 1973 — two years after the Cokliss film — James Graham Ballard rolled his Ford Zephyr on a divided motorway after a blow out forced the vehicle into oncoming traffic. The car landed upside down with petrol leaking everywhere and Ballard was trapped: the roof had jammed down and the doors wouldn’t budge. Panicked and frozen, with the apocalyptic scent of fuel filling his nostrils, the shouts of ‘Petrol! Petrol!’ from onlookers filling his ears, and the realisation that the car could explode any second swamping his mind, he managed to reach deep within himself, eventually pulling body and mind together to somehow force down a window and escape before he was engulfed in the heat-death of full-tilt autogeddon.

POSTSCRIPT: In a neat Ballardian trick that moment would be immortalised in Cronenberg’s Crash, where the director, digging deep into JGB’s own real-life mythology, fashioned a scene in which the film’s Ballard, played by James Spader, suffered that same scenario and that same subsequent swerve into oncoming traffic. Except this time Holly Hunter playing Helen Remington slammed into James Spader/’James Ballard’. Hunter/Remington’s husband was killed, and Ballard/Spader took his place, and the cycle began again. For J.G. Ballard’s sins we were given a new crash (a new ‘Crash’), a new ‘Ballard’, a new director, a new film, and a reiteration of circular time, as Ballard and his ghastly obsession became reborn in the heat-death of repetition. As Sinclair says: ‘The same crashes happen over and over as new victims are initiated into the vision.’

Simon Sellars, 2007.

APPENDIX
+ Crash! Voiceover Transcription (1971)

REFERENCES
+ Ballard, J.G. The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).
—————- Crash (1973).

+ Ford, Simon. ‘A Psychopathic Hymn: J.G. Ballard’s ‘Crashed Cars’ Exhibition of 1970′ (2005). /seconds magazine.

+ Juno, Andrea & Vale. ‘J.G. Ballard: Interview by A. Juno and Vale’. RE/Search 8/9: J.G. Ballard (1984). In which Ballard relates the circumstances of his car crash, alongside accompanying photos of his ruined car.

+ Sinclair, Iain. Crash: David Cronenberg’s Post-mortem on J.G. Ballard’s ‘Trajectory of Fate’ (BFI Modern Classics; 1999).

MORE INFO
+ Harley Cokeliss Filmography

J.G. Ballard in 1960. In the background is a poster of his ‘Project for a new novel’, made two years earlier.

Chemistry & Industry … was a good place to work because, of course, the office of any scientific magazine is the most wonderful mail drop. It’s the ultimate information crossroads. Most of it went straight into the wastepaper basket, but en route I was filtering it like some sort of sea creature sailing with jaws open through a great sea of delicious plankton. I was filtering all this extraordinary material.”

J.G. Ballard, ‘Shanghai Jim’ (BBC documentary, dir. James Runcie, 1990).

From 1958 to 1964, J.G. Ballard worked as deputy editor and part-time writer at Chemistry & Industry, the journal of the Society of Chemical Industry. When he started he was also a struggling, disillusioned writer of science fiction; by the time he left C&I he was a successful full-time novelist. MIKE BONSALL discovers exactly how that transition occurred, as he delves into the archives at C&I to uncover ultrarare Ballardiana, including Ballard’s earliest non-fiction reviews, the text of which we present here in full — never before seen outside the magazine itself. As Mike argues, what happened at C&I codified the tropes Ballard was to return to throughout his career — the scientific, technical and imaginative motifs that shape the very essence of what we’ve come to know and love as ‘Ballardian’.

J.G. BALLARD’s grim war experiences were followed by grim experiences in post-war Britain. He dropped out of medical school after two years, then dropped out of English after a year; he quit his flying career similarly. After that came a succession of short-lived, low-level jobs: encyclopaedia salesman, porter and copywriter.

Ballard married in 1955, and his first child in 1956 was followed by two more soon after; he was under serious financial pressure and help was given only stintingly by his disapproving parents. During this time he had sold a couple of short stories to Ted Carnell, who must have twisted his arm to come to the World SF Convention in London, in 1957 — the year of Sputnik, the apogee of space opera. Carnell himself was Chair of the convention and John W Campbell was guest of honour and prize speaker. It was the height of ‘hard SF’ and Campbell was the champion of Space Opera, and therefore the scourge of the New Wave — and Ballard. As JGB later said about the convention, ‘That shattered me, and then I dried up for about a year. For over a year I didn’t write any SF at all. I was disillusioned and demoralized.’ But Ballard would find a host of new ideas, new techniques and new ways of creating within the stuffy confines of Chemistry and Industry.

LEFT: Cover of C&I, 12/7/58. When Ballard began his tenure there, it was a fairly dour journal, still mired in the post-war years.

C&I was an ideal place for Ballard to make a new start: the hours were lax and he was even able to do some creative writing there. Ballard later said, ‘One of the reasons my fiction of the early 60s has a high science content is because I was immersed in scientific papers of all kinds continually’.

The editor of the journal was a chemist rather than a journalist, so, as Ballard later recounted, ‘I did all the basic subbing, marking copy up for the typesetter … doing make-up and paste-up … I used to go on works visits, visits to laboratories and research institutes. I wrote a few articles — scientific reporting — and I reviewed scientific books.’ Ballard’s time at C&I is key to his development as a writer: he learned new skills, was given the freedom to experiment, and had time to shake off the feeling that hard SF was the only kind of speculative fiction that was acceptable.

The C&I Offices in Belgrave Square (photo by Tim Chapman, who held Ballard’s former job in the 1990s and may even have inherited Ballard’s desk!).

In 1958 Ballard made a series of photocopied collages — ‘Project for a new novel’ — that were, he says, ‘sample pages of a new kind of novel, entirely consisting of magazine-style headlines and layouts, with a deliberately meaningless text, the idea being that the imaginative content could be carried by the headlines and overall design, so making obsolete the need for a traditional text except for virtually decorative purposes.’

The few pages he did actually produce are obviously influenced by his new-found skills in layout work:

Detail from Ballard’s ‘Project for a new novel’ (1958).

Ballard has said he was inspired by the bold typography of C&I’s sister journal, Chemistry and Engineering News (C+EN), the journal of the American Chemical Society, and that he used text from this journal as ‘filler’ in his collages.

Detail from Ballard’s ‘Project for a new novel’ (1958).

I was fascinated by the possibility of disassembling these Burroughsian ‘cut-ups’ into their original forms, and by the possibility of seeing the roots of some of Ballard’s earliest and most lasting obsessions.

Detail from ‘Project for a new novel’ (1958).

Although influenced by C+EN, Ballard’s typography seems rather to prefigure advertising from a later C&I (2/6/62):

Detail from ‘Project for a new novel’ (1958).

Ballard later said, ‘I was very proud of those pages. Moorcock published them in New Worlds three or four years ago. They were like chromosomes in a way, because so many of the subsequent ideas and themes of mine appeared in those pages. Kline, Coma, Xero — they’re all there. I don’t know. I used to make these things up!’

The pages were in fact published in a special New Worlds edition of mostly visual material in summer 1978, where they are described as ‘displays’. (Interestingly the middle two pages are transposed in New Worlds compared to the photograph of the hoarding at the start of this article.)

Detail from ‘Project for a new novel’ (1958).

Sadly, despite a thorough search, and although the body text of the pieces is obviously taken from an American chemical journal, I was unable to find any evidence of them in back editions of C+EN from that time.

About this ‘filler’ text, Ballard later said, ‘Curiously enough, far from being meaningless, the science news stories somehow became fictionalised by the headings around them.’ This is the kind of technique Ballard was to return to repeatedly, for example in his ‘plastic surgery’ pieces [collected in RE/Search's reprint of The Atrocity Exhibition], where the insertion of a celebrity name transforms the banal medical text, or his short fictions which masquerade as psychiatric reports [eg 'Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan'] or war journalism [eg 'Theatre of War'].

I have always been a voracious reader of what I call invisible literatures — scientific journals, technical manuals, pharmaceutical company brochures, think-tank internal documents, PR company position papers — part of that universe of published material to which most literate people have scarcely any access but which provides the most potent compost for the imagination … ‘

J.G. Ballard. ‘The Pleasures of Reading’.

And there is potent compost indeed in C+EN. The erotic beauty of the tail fin, for example, is much in evidence:

Advertisement from C+EN, 14/4/58.

And there is a near car-crash:

Advertisement from C+EN 14/7/58.

Did Mr F start out as Hydrogen Fluoride, which forms the most corrosive of acids?

Advertisement from C+EN 14/7/58; plus detail from Ballard’s ‘Project for a new novel’ (1958).

Could the name ‘Kline’, a recurring Ballard character, be taken from Smith, Kline and French, as suggested by Tim Chapman?

Advertisement from C+EN 27/1/58.

Or is he part of the electromagnetic spectrum? In ‘You and Me and the Continuum’, from The Atrocity Exhibition, one of the objects mentioned is a ‘spectro-heliogram of the sun taken with the K line of calcium’:

Advertisement from C+EN 6/10/58.

There is also an appearance of that most enigmatic island, Eniwetok, a recurring motif in Ballard’s work. The ‘pace of missile firings quickens’ must have speeded Ballard’s pulse:

Advertisement from C+EN 4/11/57.

Eventually he would abandon the task, and sit down in the dust, watching the shadows emerge from their crevices at the foot of the blocks. For some reason he invariably arranged to be trapped when the sun was at zenith — on Eniwetok, the thermo-nuclear noon.”

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

As Catherine Austin walked around the converted gymnasium these bizarre images, with their fusion of Eniwetok and Luna Park, Freud and Elizabeth Taylor, reminded her of the slides of exposed spinal levels in Travis’s office.”

J.G. Ballard. ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ (ch. 1), in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

Some of the C&I adverts from Ballard’s time are also worth noting, as copywriters were looking forward a decade to the fashions of the 60s:

Advertisement from C&I 28/2/59.

Some of the advertising took a slightly surreal turn in Ballard’s later years at the journal, like this example, featuring an oddly disturbing schoolgirl’s biochemical interventions:

Advertisement from C&I c.1962.

Here’s an earlier ad from Chemical & Engineering:

C+EN 19/05/1958.

Desperately trying to make chemicals interesting… ‘Here comes the Managing Director. Anybody want a bloodstained copywriter — immediate delivery?’ (shades of Super-Cannes?):

Advertisement from C&I 30/5/59.

In the second half of his employment at C&I, JGB went part-time and one of his duties was to write short book reviews. Most are factual — short, dry reviews of long, dry technical reference works that seem little more than fillers. But one stands out and is worth quoting in full. Ballard’s review of The Science of Dreams is his longest and most enthusiastic by far:

The Science of Dreams. By Edwin Diamond. pp. 246. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode Ltd. 1962. 21s.

The universal experience of dreams, and the conviction that they conceal part of man’s essential image of himself, have made them a subject of unfading interest throughout history, to the most primitive societies and the most sophisticated. One of the oldest written documents in existence, a papyrus of the 12th Dynasty, is an Egyptian book of dream interpretations, and to Freud, in the present century, the dream was “the royal road to the unconscious.” Within the last 20 years the orthodox Freudian view generally accepted in Europe and America has been amplified by work carried out by experimental psychologists in the United States. A popular account of this work is given in “The Science of Dreams.”

The hypothesis that the rapid eye movements observed at intervals throughout sleep might indicate the occurrence of a dream was apparently confirmed by the ability of subjects roused during these periods to recount their dreams with remarkable clarity and detail; this occurred in the case of persons who claimed they had never previously dreamed. Subsequent work suggested that everyone has an average of five dreams per night, each lasting 20 minutes; that contrary to popular belief digestive or emotional upsets do not affect the length or intensity of dreams, but only the ease with which they are recalled; that the majority of dreams are unpleasant and grow more so with increasing age; that even intense professional and domestic anxieties play little part in the subject matter of dreams; and that the congenitally blind experience “tactile” dreams. A curious discovery was that the deliberate deprivation of normal dreaming produced tension and irritability, even during an otherwise adequate period of sleep, and that hallucinations and psychotic collapse eventually resulted.

Despite the ingenuity and patience of the experimenters, the nature of the mechanisms generating dreams remains as elusive as ever. If anything, these studies suggest that for all its beguiling mystery the dream is merely a low-level psychic activity of little significance, perhaps similar to certain types of childhood play, and that its content, although cast in dramatic form, is of less importance than the act itself. Only where marked aberrations occur is a careful analysis of individual dreams of value to the physician. Even here, as in the experiments described, the role of the observer remains profoundly equivocal.

In view of the vast number of dreams experienced during a single lifetime, the catalogue of dreams which have furnished any major scientific revelation remains remarkably meagre; Kekulé’s vision of the benzene ring is among the few examples. Undeterred, however, the author offers his readers a simple conundrum (complete the series O, T, T, F, F,-,-) by which they can test the deductive powers of their own sleeping intelligences. No more than 15 minutes immediately before and after sleep should be devoted to the problem. Evidently some 80% of subjects tested dreamed of the problem, and a few even solved it during their dreams.

Those readers who fail to solve it may be interested to know that the Abundavita Corporation of America offers a $395 hypnopaedic “package” consisting of a gramophone, speaker and a 25-lesson course on such topics as “Money–What It Is and How to Have Plenty of It.”

J.G.B.

This appeared on 9th February 1963 and has echoes of JGB’s short story ‘Manhole 69′, published six years earlier, in which a group of volunteers have their ability to sleep removed and slowly descend into madness. Even Papa Freud gets a mention in this review. The article is unusually light and jokey, and the very appearance of a book on dreams is unusual — surely it would never have been sent for review to a journal of industrial chemistry? Was it given to Ballard by his friend Dr Christopher Evans, whose ‘computer memory-purging’ theory of dreaming also seems to make an appearance in the review? After this effort, JGB’s reviews begin to appear more sporadically and eventually petered out altogether. Did this unusual review lead to him having his freedom curtailed?

(See the appendix for the full text of Ballard’s initialled reviews).

A particularly significant article appeared in C&I on 1 June 1963, a lovingly illustrated, nine-page article about the brand new Road Research Laboratory:

C&I article, 1/6/63.

Ballard spoke of writing some C&I articles — did he have a hand in writing or subbing this one? While authorship was credited to the laboratory’s then director, Sir William Glanville, Ballard would certainly have seen the article, as there is one of his less-interesting book reviews in the same issue. Was the young Ballard given the perk of a trip out to Crowthorne to see the Road Research Laboratory for himself? Only a few miles west of London, it would not have been out of his way.

With its Observation Towers, Underground Laboratory, Gatehouse, Control Building, banked bend and even a ‘Terminal Area’, the test track at Crowthorne is a gloriously Ballardian territory:

Taken from the C&I article on Road Research Laboratory, 1/6/63.

And the laboratory certainly keeps rearing its head in Ballard’s fiction:

The Impact Zone. At dusk Talbot drove around the deserted circuit of the research laboratory test track. Grass grew waist high through the untended concrete, wheel-less cars rusted in the undergrowth along the verge. Overhead the helicopter moved across the trees, its fans churning up a storm of leaves and cigarette cartons. Talbot steered the car among the broken tyres and oil drums. Beside him the young woman leaned against his shoulder, her grey eyes surveying Talbot with an almost minatory calm. He turned on to a concrete track between the trees. The collision course ran forwards through the dim light, crushed cars shackled to steel gondolas above a catapult. Plastic mannequins spilled through the burst doors and panels. As they walked along the catapult rails Talbot was aware of the young woman pacing out the triangle of approach roads. Her face contained the geometry of the plaza. He worked until dawn, towing the wrecks into the semblance of a motorcade.’

J.G. Ballard. ‘The University of Death’ (ch.2), The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

Surely Vaughan himself would have attached himself to the ‘team of experts’ in this extract:

Taken from the C&I article on the Road Research Laboratory, 1/6/63.

Through Vaughan I discovered the true significance of the automobile crash, the meaning of whiplash injuries and roll-over, the ecstasies of head-on collisions. Together we visited the Road Research Laboratory twenty miles to the west of London, and watched the calibrated vehicles crashing into the concrete target blocks. Later, in his apartment, Vaughan screened slow-motion films of test collisions that he had photographed with his cinecamera. Sitting in the darkness on the floor cushions, we watched the silent impacts flicker on the wall above our heads. The repeated sequences of crashing cars first calmed and then aroused me. Cruising alone on the motorway under the yellow glare of the sodium lights, I thought of myself at the controls of these impacting vehicles.”

J.G. Ballard, Crash (1973).

Ballard would have had a good excuse to ask for the Crowthorne job — it’s practically on the way home. In this Google map, the upper right blue flag is the C&I offices, the middle flag is Ballard’s home in Shepperton and the upper flag at bottom left is the Road Research Laboratory:

As an interesting aside, what bizarre ley line must exist in Berkshire to have three ‘total institutions’ in a line within a few miles of each other? The three flags on the left are: the Road Research Laboratory, Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane (which also features in Ballard’s work), and Sandhurst Royal Military Academy – all richly Ballardian territories.

But I digress. I hope this article has shed some light on the mass of ‘invisible literature’ and ‘delicious plankton’ that passed before Ballard, the embryonic writer, and helped form the obsessions that were to feed his imagination and stay with him throughout his life. I think the materials and the new journalistic skills that Ballard discovered at C&I gave him an escape route from the impossibility of writing straight SF and suggested new outlets for his burgeoning creativity.

Mike Bonsall, July 2007.

Thanks to Alex and Will Knight, Tim Chapman, Simon Sellars and other members of the JGB Yahoo group for help with research.

..:: REFERENCES
+ Ballard, J.G. (1997), ‘The Pleasures of Reading’ in A User’s Guide to the Millennium.
+ Pringle, D. (ed.) and Ballard, J.G. (1982). ‘From Shanghai to Shepperton’, in RE/Search 8/9: J.G. Ballard (eds. Vale and Andrea Juno). pp. 112-124.

..:: APPENDIX
+ Complete text of Ballard’s book reviews for C&I.

In his latest book, Black Mass, the philosopher John Gray traces the history of Western millenarianism … For Gray, it is utopianism itself that is the problem. He suggests that ‘it is dystopian thinking we most need.’ We must, if we seek to understand our present condition, he says, ‘turn to Huxley’s Brave New World or Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Wells’s Island of Dr Moreau or Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Zamiatin’s We or Nabokov’s Bend Sinister, Burroughs’ Naked Lunch or Ballard’s Super-Cannes — prescient glimpses of the ugly reality that results from pursuing unrealisable dreams.’

Actually, there’s not even a need to trawl back five or so years to the publication of Super-Cannes, stunning a read though it is. Dystopian futures have of late become a staple of mainstream contemporary literature. While Ballard is for me quite possibly the pre-eminent living English novelist, he has long been considered as foremost a sci-fi writer rather than a proper literary type, with only his naturalistic memoirs Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women awarded the unequivocal reverence all his work deserves. Suddenly, though, sci-fi has acquired literary credibility. We are now so comfortable with the idea of a post-apocalyptic future that such subject matter has seamlessly become part of the until-now unyieldingly naturalistic mainstream English literary scene.”

[thanks, Mike]

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Interview by Mike Holliday
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Michael Moorcock has been a prolific writer and editor for the last five decades. Born in London, he was editing his first magazine by the age of seventeen, and started writing genre fiction professionally as soon as he left school. In 1964 he took over the editorship of the British science fiction magazine New Worlds, gradually transforming it into an outlet for imaginative fiction that caught the contemporary zeitgeist. Under his editorship, New Worlds published many of J.G. Ballard’s most innovative stories, including several of those that would later be included in The Atrocity Exhibition.