On J.G. Ballard's Google Earth Worldview
An Introduction
I wrote this introduction to a book of essays about Ballard.
After interviewing Jim (he insisted on Jim) for Waterstones magazine, and being interviewed about him for Ballardian.com, I was becoming one of the Ballard gang.
Unlike that interview, which I shared yesterday, I think this introduction is okay. (Apart from the use of the word quiddity.)
I managed to say something I had been thinking about for a long time. I think it’s still true.
This is why Ballard is still a key writer — his Google Earth view of things, of human priorities.
It’s a commonplace that any human society builds its tallest buildings in tribute to what it values most — emperor, God, finance, leisure.
But there’s also the mere fact of surface area. How defining cars are of the whole United Kingdom, especially England. How, if looked at from above, you would see upon it almost everywhere those parallel ribbons of grey, those single strips of black, those dry patches of grass.
But which other novels apart Crash and Concrete Island get anywhere near this?
Maybe some of the action has now moved online. Maybe that space is now infinitely bigger. Materially, though, this is where we live — Autopia.
Recently, I caught the wrong bus (a number 21) from Norwich City Centre to the University of East Anglia — where the conference at which the following papers were first delivered took place, in May 2007. Instead of heading to the campus directly, up the beautifully named Unthank Road, the bus went via Bowthorpe — it also went via Ballard.
Our slow, winding, doubling-back route took in Norwich Research Park and the recently-built Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital. A bright low sun reflected off the artificial lakes, at least I assumed they were artificial. Most of the houses we saw, as we crawled along, were on the peripheries of housing estates — facades of pale pink brick and thickly double-glazed windows, lawns which give nothing away and decals on the bedroom windows of suicidal teens. A pregnant woman with a bindi got on; a research scientist I had taken for a student got off. Eventually, the bus arrived at the UEA campus, famous for its unapologetically concrete architecture, especially the stack-box ziggurats in which first year students are accommodated. We had arrived, also, at Ballard.
Sometimes, when I think about J.G. Ballard the man, I find it hard not to suspect that — somehow or other — he gained access to Google Earth over forty years ago. His fictional project seems to have been based on a cold assessment of what (apart from woods and fields) takes up most of our country’s surface area, what is most obtrusive when viewed from space. Hence, carparks and motorways, airports and their runways, high rise buildings, suburban housing estates, psychiatric hospitals, shopping centres. No other novelist has paid such close attention to the quiddity of where we now live and work — in all its recalcitrant mundanity. The rest of us, for the most part, pass through these spaces with the thought, ‘What could possibly happen in this emptiness?’ The Ballard bluff, or double bluff, has always been that he actually likes it here, not least because he sees it not as void but as unbounded plenitude. Everything can happen here. At the end of his introduction to Vermillion Sands, he mischievously writes of his guess-at-the-future, ‘I wait optimistically for it to take concrete shape around me.’ This way, or so he insists, is his; the technological, the surface-loving, rather than all the possible others: atavistic, cthonic, nostalgic, theistic.
What we lack in the United Kingdom is any glamour of our present selves. (America, by contrast, suffers from the opposite problem: glamour-dazzle.) But, as an outsider-insider, or an insider-outsider, Ballard manages to see what we can’t. He has no interest in our history or, even worse, our heritage. This, in itself, is remarkable.
One of the thought-experiments I play with any British writer is to reimagine them as coming from another country. For example, I refigure Graham Greene as a French writer. How much more seriously he would have been taken, as an existential thinker. Then I move to Muriel Spark, and sense how the distance-travelled of translation from German to English would bring her metaphysics so much closer. Then I turn to Ballard. A French Ballard, I think, would be a normalized, de-radicalized Ballard. His characters behave, anyway, more like characters in French art movies than in other British novels contemporary to his own (let alone the ooh-er-missus intersex relations of British cinema 1950-1980). But how about a full-on German Ballard? – with autobahns for motorways, with the motorik regularity of his sentences, with Hitler as an unforgettable erotic backdrop. That has an eerie rightness about it.
As another thought-experiment, I find it suggestive, following Deleuze-Guattari’s approach to Kafka[i], to speak not of Jim Ballard but of the Ballard Writing Machine (sweet echoes of the Burroughs Adding Machine). This might take away the taint of Shepperton but it might also take away the tang of Shepperton.
How does the Ballard Writing Machine work?
It has a definite prediliction for certain formalities. For example, the form of titles, both book and chapter, is very often Definite Article plus Adjective plus Noun (from The Drowned World to The Atrocity Exhibition) although later this becomes Adjective plus Noun (from Concrete Island to Super-Cannes).
It favours a conservative structure. The novels come with numbered, titled chapters. Even the Machine’s most extreme production, The Atrocity Exhibition, does not deviate from this template.
The contents page of a BWM novel, therefore, manages to suggest something both opaque and transparent. No plot developments are given away, but – if we have encountered the Machine’s work before – we already know the parameters of the likely action.
There will be a building-up which is, at the same time, a breaking-down. People collectively will become involved in some regularized mania, within the elaboration of which the actions of the main characters will prove decisive but from which they themselves will remain essentially detached.
The BWM-men will have affairs with the BWM-women. These will start and end abruptly, without great difficulty or regret. Sex will occur but it will be less focussed upon, in the writing, than those moments when the dreamworlds of the lovers co-incide most closely. The Machine is more interested in the jerky choreography of meeting and parting than the flowing entanglement of hearts. I don’t believe any BWM novel features a couple who meet, marry and remain faithful unto death. The lovers are, in a sense, too easily distracted for that; not immoral, just unfocussed. Often, it seems almost as if they never come to full consciousness, they are always half-dreaming one another.
But let’s stop the Machine and return Ballard’s humanity to him, if only for the sake of some slightly less inelegant sentences.
Despite Ballard’s insistence upon the parapsychological (see V. Vale’s Quotes and Conversations), it seems to me as though he has no interest in the Freudian subconscious as such. His interchangeable heroes — only a couple of short steps away from the active, square-jawed ciphers of 1950s sci-fi — do not have rich mental lives. But as soon as one takes the external world which they inhabit as their subconscious, as soon as one sees sublimation as being replaced by efflorescence, by architecture, then one begins to see Ballard aright. In this reading, there remains no barrier between external and internal worlds.
Ballard is a true Surrealist. But his distance from the originals of that movement is made clearer when you realise how useless a tool automatic writing would be to him. Either all his writing is automatic, or none. And, either way, it accesses the same wellsprings.
Whilst reading Ballard, I don’t generally feel — as I do with other writers — that this or that passage has come from some deeper place within the psyche. Ballard’s explorations are relentlessly horizontal — until, with the internal/external flip, one realizes that they have all along taken the horizontal for the vertical. (Here, he co-incides with Warhol.) There follows a moment of vertigo: instead of driving, one has been flying; instead of exploring, one has been perpetually plunging. This simultaneous effacement and enactment of depth is one of Ballard’s greatest achievements.
In fact, the post-Warholian displacement of depth, the removal of it as an aesthetic criterion, is one of the qualities most important in Ballard. As far as I’m aware, he did not spend a moment mourning it. Nor does he, like the 1980s Brat Pack writers, allow a satire of vacuity to be deduced by morally sophisticated readers. Patrick Bateman may be the genetic successor of Ballard’s emptied heroes, but Ballard is never so obvious as to leave behind a trail of eviscerated bodies. He is, instead, strangely gentle with his characters, even when injuring them – almost, at times, courteous in his approach to their demise.
In Ballard’s writing, there are things which are there, which fill page-space, but which function only to assert their own irrelevance. That the male and female characters are sexually attractive is, after you’ve read a book or two, taken as a sine qua non. This is the libidinal economy within which the Ballardian exchanges take place. It is a post-pill world. No female character can get pregnant, because that would impede the narrative flow; and if any woman does get pregnant, she must have an abortion immediately, silently. Children rarely feature as important characters. What can happen sometimes, without ever mattering, is love. Though it is very likely to be over before it is described as such. All emotions go nowhere, unless they hasten destruction or self-destruction.
In a Ballard novel we expect certain events, and expect them not to bother us particularly; we are instead reading for the rhythm – it is in the wavelength or the pulse of each novel that its true meaning lies. Ballard’s periodicity has always been spot-on: he leaves out exactly the right things. Technology is central to his vision, but, at the same time, entirely irrelevant to it. The plots of his stories and novels almost never depend upon a recent invention (unless the automobile is recent). It is new conditions rather than new devices which he perceives; services rather than goods.
There is a particular Ballard-sentence. They lead up to and then away from the comma. Very often, the first half of the sentence gets the respectable, necessary job of narration out of the way. There follows a pause, after which the dreamworld of the novel floods through, most often in simile. Each book has its parallel world, from which its comparative imagery is drawn. But also, in some novels, there is a closed-circuit of reference, where a simile in one part of a book (Crash is perhaps the strongest example of this) refers or seems to refer to an object or incident at the other end of the book. On a level of similitude, it is emphasized that – from this particular world — there is no escape.
The works of few living writers could withstand the attentions of a two day academic conference. That, at the end of “From Shanghai to Shepperton”, it still felt as if there was much more to be said, as if we had only started to establish a basic knowledge of the territory, was an indication of the enduring strangeness of Ballard’s world.
From J.G. Ballard: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Jeannette Baxter, continuum, 2008.
[i] Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, University of Minnesota Press, 1986