Ballardian

Image from Antiflaneur.

This is an English translation of an interview with J.G. Ballard by Alexander Gutzmer, originally published in German by Welt am Sonntag, 3 June 2007. The translation, by John Carter Wood, appears here with Alexander’s permission.

BRITISH AUTHOR J. G. BALLARD IS A BLEAK VISIONARY OF THE PRESENT. IN HIS WRITINGS, HE DEPICTS A SENSELESS WORLD FULL OF EXCESSIVE VIOLENCE. AN INTERVIEW ABOUT THE EROTICISM OF TERROR ATTACKS, POST-BLAIR BRITAIN, AND AMERICA’S DESIRE TO BE LOVED.

Hardly any author can move among genres so ably as J. G. Ballard, who has created historical novels, science fiction and ‘anti-utopias’. Again and again, he has turned his psychological gaze toward violence and collapsing worlds.

GUTZMER: Mr. Ballard, in your novel Crash you carry the fetishisation of the automobile to an extreme and speak of the eroticism of auto accidents. Today, a different form of violence dominates the media – terror. Does that also have an erotic component?

BALLARD: It certainly has an element of erotically charged perversion. The last will of Mohammad Atta is full of erotic fascination with his own body. Atta found his sexuality as irritating as it was fascinating.

The German essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger sees the attackers at the ultimate losers…

They are. They experience a failure of modernity and modernity as failure. Particularly those who are raised in the West. Consider the London bombers: they wore trainers, listened to Walkmen but were at the same time trapped in another value-system.

Is the West experiencing – as in Crash – a fascination with being attacked, with its own vulnerability? Is there even something inherently erotic about the Iraq War?

For America, the invasion of Iraq was a frustrated reaction: the US was lashing out because it had to recognise that it was no longer the world’s favourite nation. With terror, that time is over. Iraq was punished as a stand-in for the rest of the world.

Then why did Britain participate in the war? After all, it’s a well-liked country.

I don’t think that we Britons are all that popular. No former colonial power is truly well liked. I believe that through the war we wanted to satisfy our craving for emotions. We want cheap emotions. ‘Big Brother’ is just one example of that.

Critics say that Tony Blair had something of the actor about him…

Blair is an actor: a bad one. It’s precisely for that reason that we Britons loved him for so long. For that and for his promises, which everyone knew that he could never fulfil: such as a better health system without higher taxes. We were lied to.

Is Gordon Brown also a bad actor?

No, he’s not an actor at all. He’ll probably stay true to his Scottish-Protestant background; with him we can expect the return of honesty to politics.

Many of your books criticise Western capitalism. In Super-Cannes for example, a resident of an ultra-modern industrial park runs amok. Shouldn’t the novel have been set in London?

Super-Cannes alludes to an actual business park, to Sophia-Antipolis. In the end, it’s not France but rather a placeless, completely globalised assemblage. Americans, Britons, Germans and French work and live there. But you’re right: London is probably the most impressive financial centre in the world today. And it’s thereby losing its character as an English city.

Architecturally too, London is changing its character too, through more and more skyscrapers…

They’re trying to Manhattanise London. I’m not fundamentally against tall buildings, but they depress me in Manhattan. Perhaps as an author, you need to be surrounded by shorter buildings. We always want to see the sky.

Sounds romantic. When one reads your books, it’s easier to think that you’re inspired by ugliness.

I’m very inspired by beauty! I’m not a pessimist. I see my books as warnings. I’m the man who stands on the side of the road and yells ‘Slow down!’

Oh, come on, you’re also fascinated by the absurdities of our time.

As an author, sometimes you work through how people in extreme situations would behave.

An example of such extreme situations in your books involves coldly Modernist architecture.

Yes, Modernism brings with it an emptiness that seems dangerous. It’s not for nothing that 20th century dictators were fascinated by it.

Is it this emptiness that brings out the madness in Super-Cannes?

Modernism brings out the dark drives that slumber in us. It reserves no place for the unexplainable or the mysterious – and for precisely that reason causes a return to barbarism.

Because it shows everything…

Exactly. We need mystery, that little bit of poetry. Seeing everything makes you sad.

You were raised in Shanghai. Your books were based upon this outsider perspective on the West. Now Shanghai is a prototype of capitalist building. Is the circle complete?

Yes. However, before Mao, Shanghai was not a counter-example to the West. In my childhood, Western styles were wildly mixed there – German Bauhaus, French art deco, English Tudor. You’ll find such a mix of architecture in only one other place: Beverly Hills.

That fits: Shanghai and Beverly Hills, the dream factories of the world.

Exactly. At the same time, both cities are marked by nostalgia. That is revealed by the retro-buildings: people flee where they come from – and rebuild it in a new place.

Still, Western nations are impressed by China.

I see Shanghai as unique, not as a global model. We Europeans cannot afford the social costs of turbo growth. We have other strengths.

And they are?

We are orderly, civilised. Especially the Germans.

Is Shanghai the future?

Only partly. Maybe the future will be very different – more orderly, conformist. Like a suburb of Düsseldorf.

A publisher’s reviewer once said that you were beyond psychiatric help. Is that true?

I saw that as an absolute artistic triumph. But thanks for asking: all things considered, I’m fine.

..:: Previously on Ballardian: ‘Who sees everything, becomes sad.’