New Ballard video interview
Author: Simon Sellars • Jan 25th, 2008 •Category: Ballardosphere, Shanghai, Shepperton, WWII, autobiography
Still from Hari Kunzru’s interview with J.G. Ballard. © Waterstone’s Books Quarterly.
Waterstones is featuring a video interview with JGB, conducted by Hari Kunzru to promote Miracles of Life. There are no surprises here. Kunzru asks Ballard about the relationship of Miracles to JGB’s semi-autobiographical novels, Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women, and Ballard replies that, of course, the novels are filtered versions whereas Miracles is something like the unvarnished truth.
Ballard also repeats old anecdotes familiar from Empire and the various interviews surrounding that book, including his view of wartime Shanghai as a stage set, the way in which slums challenge teenage boys to become dominant, his distaste for notions of ‘Englishness’ and for the class system, how he admired the Japanese during the war, how he views the distinction between inner and outer space, and how humans are dangerous with their reserves of psychopathic behaviour bubbling below the surface. But there is one memorable quote:
I was very attracted to science fiction because it had huge vitality. Meeting British and American SF writers of the period I felt a sort of ferment of ideas and possibilities which I never had meeting mainstream English novelists. All they induced was a kind of overpowering headache and a wish to leave for the South Seas.
Kunzru’s interrogation is not especially challenging, repeating questions that have been asked many times before, so it’s not surprising they receive stock answers. However, tempering that, Ballard is noticeably weary, distracted and drawn as a result of his illness; there’s clearly not a lot of time to engage in lengthy discussion.
I don’t believe we can expect any new revelations from Miracles, but never mind. Anyone interested in Ballard must get used to the idea of repetition after all, in all its guises and in every iteration — for multiple personas are the key to Ballard’s fractured take on supermodernity.
Instead, I’m looking forward to Miracles for the fact that it is a precise summing up of the career of a writer who has had a profound impact on my life and work. As John Gray so astutely recognises, ‘Ballard’s achievement is not to have staked out any kind of political position. Rather it is to have communicated a vision of what individual fulfilment might mean in a time of nihilism.’
That is precisely the guidance I receive from Ballard’s work.
And so the new book means that, reassuringly, that pulse — that jolting, sharding signal disturbing the atmosphere and breaking up the vertical hold — is still beaming out from Shepperton to the global dystopia, however weakened the signal is these days (whether through JGB’s illness or his marginalisation in the strange scheme of literary mores).
Weakened it may be, but that only reinforces the fact that this pulse must nonetheless be tapped, trapped and magnified, and passed on by all who read this new work.
Are you with me?
Author:
Simon Sellars
Find all posts by
Simon Sellars
Newer: La Jetée ciné-roman back in print »
In reading this point, the more I realize Ballard is somewhat like a literary Philip Glass (or vice versa). There are an incredible number of parallels in their work, despite the totally different medium. I should probably write about this at some point!
Do it, Peter. You have a forum, here — meaning, I’d willingly publish something that had something challenging to say on that score.
To Andy, if you’re reading this (I don’t have your contact details): many thanks for fixing up the photo credit on the Waterstones page. You needn’t have mentioned the interview, as I was really just bringing attention to Paul’s photo, but it’s much appreciated in any case. Cheers and thanks for a great Ballard resource.
Ballard never really seems to hit his stride in this piece. The whole thing is sort of forced. I found myself trying to read all the book titles on the shelf behind JGB…. Mostly art books: Giotto, Donald Judd, Art Since 1900, Ken Silver’s Esprit de Corps (I studied with Silver at college, which is why I recognize the spine of the book)… Are those copies of Miracles of Life on the shelf behind him?
I believe that this interview was conducted in the Shepherds Bush apartment of Ballard’s partner Claire Walsh, so the books on display may well be hers.
Having just finished reading a proof of ‘Miracles of Life’ I can confirm that it a remarkably candid and revealing piece of work, pretty much what one would expect from JG.Not only does he discuss his longstanding relationship with Ms.Walsh (a generous,intelligent and supportive woman) but also his illness. Apparently the cancer spread from the prostrate to his spine and ribcage and Ballard placed himself in the care of one the leading cancer specialists who has made Ballard’s last few years as painless as possible, enabling him to embark on what may well be his last book. Although the author appears characteristically optimistic I fear that the recent cancellation of public events to promote his new work implies a worsening of his condition.Sadly hee may not have much longer…
Thanks Phil, that’s a great overview that has really stirred my appetite. How did you get your hands on a proof?
I only learned of JG Ballard’s illness last night on Radio 3, in the interview on Night Waves. It’s a real shame that recent interviews with Ballard have tended to retail the same, stock themes – the psychopathology of middle class life; the feeling that (to paraphrase Ballard) the normality of things could be overturned at any moment; that no one is in control; that bourgeois English politeness conceals violent pathologies – though it’s of course good to see writers like Kunzru promoting Ballard’s work in this way. What fascinates me about Ballard is the way he handles transgressive ideas stylistically in his more recent work, in which the flatness of his tone is almost ‘mock-bourgeois’ (particularly in ‘Millennium People’). Compare the recent work to his first short story, ‘Escapement’, and you might say that stylistically he’s come full circle. It’s a shame that so many recent interviews concentrate on the content of his writing rather than its style. Maybe there’s still time…
Intriguing — how do you mean that Ballard has come full circle? I think something similar, but I’m not sure I go back that far to ‘Escapement’…
And ‘mock-bourgeois’ is a great way to describe it, which is why it really irritates me when people describe Ballard as a ‘middle-class snob’ — as Rod Liddle did in his tirade against Kingdom Come.
PS: it’s pedantic I know, but just out of interest, there’s debate about whether ‘Escapement’ or ‘Prima Belladonna’ is his first story. They both came out in December 1956 in different magazines, but I’m told ‘Prima Belladonna’ was probably slightly ahead in hitting the racks.
Ah, I stand corrected. And maybe I was being a bit rhetorical by saying that he’s come ‘full circle’. I think what I really mean is that, in terms of that mock-bourgeois tone, ‘Escapement’ is up there with anything he’s written. And so original, too – I mean in the way that the magnitude of this vague cosmic event is dealt with in an entirely domestic setting: a husband and his wife just watching telly. Like an episode of Eastenders. It’s hilarious. HG Wells does a similar thing in ‘The New Accelerator’, which is almost as funny.
On the subject of Ballard as a ‘middle-class snob’, maybe Liddle just didn’t get the humour, didn’t get the ‘mock’ part of the mock-bourgeois tone. Having just finished the tetralogy that culminates in ‘Kingdom Come’, I think can see the problem that some readers would have with the way that humour is deployed in these books. The reason, I think, why some readers just don’t get the humour, is that the novels are too long. There’s so much methodical plotting and narrative teleology, that the deadpan delivery gets lost. Much of Ballard’s humour relies on ‘reporting’ something absurd in a super-objective tone. But this objectivity often gets absorbed into the objectivity of the narrative teleology – how he gets the reader from one thing to another etc. For me, he got it just right in High Rise, when he opens with the description of the main character eating his neighbour’s Alsatian. And the deadpan humour is integrated better into the structure of this novel – maybe because its shorter than those that comprise the tetralogy.
My girlfriend works at Waterstones and was therefore able to nab an early proof of the book for me back in December. I actually picked up a copy of the finished copy in my local bookstore last Monday so it’s finally hit the shelves here in the UK. The proof did have a lot of errors and the photos from JG’s archive were not well reproduced…
sean, ‘escapement’ may very well be the first, i don’t really care myself, just pointing it out… i see your point, though, very interesting. myself, i tend to agree, but like i say, i don’t go back that far. instead, i see kingdom come as a return to the ‘culture jamming’ aesthetic of atrocity exhibition, i’ve written on this, it just needs more development before i post it here on the site…
in any case, ballard is always doubling back on himself, reiterating, rebirthing, repeating, restating…he’s done it right from the start. as i posted a while back in the bowels of this site, i even see similarities with the death scene in his student story, ‘the violent noon’ (1951), and a remarkable scene of carnage in crash.
multiple personas, identities, personalities are commonplace these days, mediated by cheap technology and virtual communities and digested via palatable marketing, not so common (or recognised, in a mascult sense) in the early 60s, when ballard was hitting his stride…marking his foresight as all the more remarkable…
as for liddle, he just doesn’t get it full stop, he’s far too busy deploying the working-class-hero gambit.