Ballardian

‘It would be a mistake to write about the future’: J. G. Ballard in Conversation with Jörg Krichbaum and Rein A. Zondergeld

Translation by Dan O’Hara.

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

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

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

Dan O’Hara.

LEFT: JGB in 1975.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JGB: Really?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JÖRG & REIN: …the real essence.

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

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

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

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

JGB: Of course.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JÖRG & REIN: …why Conrad?

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

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

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

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

JGB: Yes, that could happen.

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

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

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

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

JÖRG & REIN: Therefore only as an object.

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

JÖRG & REIN: A change of aesthetic dimension.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JGB: You’re thinking of Huysmans here?

JÖRG & REIN: Also.

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

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

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

JÖRG & REIN: …a truly optimistic view!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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