Chapter Four:


‘Photo Death’: 'The Time Tombs (1963) and 'The Dead Time' (1977)

Dear Family. Such sights as I have seen in the hospital today: the dead body of a little boy aged seven who had been stabbed by a bayonet in the abdomen four or five times and whom they were not able to save. I saw a little girl of ten who was standing with her father and mother near a dugout in the refugee zone watching the Japanese soldiers enter. They killed her parents and gave this little girl a horrible stab in the elbow, which will cripple her for life. Reverend John Gillespie Magee, Nanjing Massacre Witness and Filmmaker

…but these pictures my father took are living proof that these terrible things did indeed happen. John Magee, son of the Reverend John Gillespie Magee [1]

Part I. Atrocity images

Ballard enters landscapes of loss and death to gather the facts of technology’s violence, and to illuminate what he refers to as the ‘thousand year movie’[2] that begins with the Cold War. He describes conditions in which technology appropriates the organs of perception violently and by stealth, and the way that mechanical repetition elides the relationships between images and their origins, producing the conditions for the death of affect. The ecology of the post-war period was technological, and mass-produced images were and remain omnipresent in the machinery of everyday life. The experience of the modern subject is apprehended through these discontinuous or fragmented images, which are the subject matter of Ballard’s fiction. He writes about them to expose the violence that is concealed, but always present, in consumer culture, persistently confronting the facts of quotidian existence to produce an anatomy of suffering, ‘living proof’, in the images of our time.

Mass produced images of atrocities are both the conscience and the wallpaper of the twentieth century. Their iconography is borrowed from that of sacrifice, grief or suffering, which, codified by classical sculpture, informs Christian iconography from the period of the early Church to the seventeenth century. This imagery becomes secularized in the modern period with the emergence of the nation state, which is itself often the perpetrator of atrocities. Atrocity images sometimes depict the effects of famine, pestilence or natural disasters, but are frequently about war. They deploy Christian imagery from such figures as the pietà, the mater dolorosa, the crucified, wounded and dead Christ, but this iconography loses its coherence with the dissolution of the Christian and Humanist symbolic order that began in World War I. The reproduction and transmission of images of suffering became more common at this time, through magazines, newsreel films, in popular photographic exhibitions and later, on television. They are ‘living proof’, to use John Magee’s term, but the mass production of these images is for Ballard a factor in the ‘death of affect’. Ballard also suggests, however, that the ‘death of affect’ is part of a psychic evolutionary process, and that it is necessary to pursue this in a very direct way:

I think we’re all perhaps innately perverse, capable of enormous cruelty and, paradoxically (this is difficult to put into words), our talent for the perverse, the violent, and the obscene, may be a good thing. We may have to go through this phase to reach something on the other side, it’s a mistake to hold back and refuse to accept one’s nature … We’re living in an abstracted world, where there aren’t any values, where rather than fall back, one has to, as Conrad said, immerse oneself in the most destructive element, and swim. [3]

Ballard acknowledges here the difficulty of expressing an idea that affronts good taste or good sense. His fiction, however, is a direct engagement with this very difficulty. What he struggles to state, at least rhetorically, in commentary such as this, is textualized in his fiction, where all images are treated as atrocity images, and where atrocity images are made familiar.

In a 1991 review of a book of Robert Capa’s photographs, Children of War, Children of Peace, Ballard discusses images of children affected by war, and distinguishes this representation of affect in these children from the sado-obsessional fetishism of ‘the death of affect’:

They wander around the debris of war, and sit aside the tank turret or the fuselage of a downed bomber as if these were the commonplace furniture of everyday life. Even those playing their games in peacetime seem wary of the sky over their heads, as if watching for a flight of approaching enemy aircraft…. Above all they seem to be aware that they exist outside time, and have only a confused and not-to-be-remembered past and a future on which they can never rely….

… Television has glamorized war for us, whether the movie drenched jungle palette of the Vietnam newsreel or the sinister black-and-white film relayed to our living rooms from the nose-cone cameras of Desert Storm’s smart bombs, which almost incite the television viewer to become a cruise missile. [4]

The appeal of Capa’s photographs for Ballard may be explained by his comment that ‘Capa tended to photograph peace as if it were another kind of war’.[5] That is to say, Ballard recognizes in Capa’s work a version of the pataphysical analysis he aims for in his own — the application of ‘the logic of the visible to the invisible’, the investigation of the apparently normal state of things as though it were strange, to reveal its laws. He also draws attention to a duality in the photographs. On the one hand they show that images enable insight, and on the other, that technology appropriates memory and vision. This duality is the subject of Chris Marker’s film, La Jetée (1962), whose surrealist series of stills makes meaning in a zone between film and photography, a matrix of time and movement. Ballard writes of this particular mental landscape in his 1966 review of the film:

The jetty of the title is the main observation platform at Orly Airport. The long pier reaches out across the concrete no-man’s land, the departure point for other worlds. Giant jets rest on the apron beside the pier, metallic ciphers whose streamlining is a code for their passage through time. The light is powdery. [6]

In this review Ballard draws attention to Marker’s use of time, codes, technology and significantly, the ‘powdery light’ that he also describes in his own work.[7] In the film, a child sees a man fall at Orly airport, and remembers a woman’s face. After a devastating war, as an adult, he is held in an underground bunker. His compelling memories allow him to be used as a ‘time machine’. After days of experiments where ‘images begin to ooze like confessions’,[8] he can return to the past from the ruins of the future for brief moments — to a woman he remembers. He must then be moved to a dark future from where he can bring back the technology for the survival of future beings. He returns to his prewar past, but at the film’s conclusion he is tracked down and killed; he is the figure of the falling man of his memory. It is a condition of the future existence of humans that he has memories to which he can return. His death is inescapable, but it is linked to the memory that makes life possible. Marker’s film, like Capa’s photographs as Ballard elucidates them, reveals the way that the evolution of technology traps humankind in a reiterative nightmare.

Accordingly for Ballard the peace is ‘another kind of war’, and World War III begins when World War II ends. This arises in part from his experience of continued fighting following the official Japanese capitulation, but it is also emphasizes the violence that he sees structuring modern life. This is more than an acknowledgement of the presence of the Cold War and of specific wars in various parts of the world; it defines the encounter with technology that informs late twentieth century experience as war.

The mass grave, or the image of ‘bodies stacked like firewood’,[9] is one of the defining images of the twentieth century. Film and photography are used to recover the dead, and they also stand in for the living. What is the viewer seeing in films and photographs of the mass dead? The implications of these images are not clear. This is perhaps why the reproduction of images of mass graves, with all their potential as evidence, seems to change nothing — genocide continues. The effect of these films and photographs may be compared to the effect of the blast of an atomic bomb. There is a fusion between viewer and object, victim and perpetrator, or referent and vehicle, which diminishes the potential for action in the world.[10] This is more than the effect of content. The technology of photography in itself produces the effect of ‘the subject who feels itself become an object’, as Barthes comments in Camera Lucida, ‘I then live in a micro-experience of death (of parenthesis): I become truly a ghost’.[11]

Susan Sontag writes of three different forms of acquisition in photography, firstly ‘surrogate possession of a cherished person or thing’, secondly, ‘a consumer’s relation to events’ and thirdly, ‘through image making and image-duplicating machines, we can acquire something as information (rather than experience).’[12] There is, however, considerable instability in these categories. Some of the photographs taken by Japanese soldiers of their own atrocities during the ‘Rape of Nanjing’ were published in Look and Life magazines in the years following the massacre, no doubt as evidence, or as ‘information (rather than experience)’. Here, these images were not used as they were intended. The Nanjing snapshots also possibly function as ‘the consumer’s relation to events’, like the snapshots of the tourist. Images made by Nazis of ‘experiments’ render the victims ‘as information’[13] but this information in its dehumanizing form may become the documents that bear witness to crimes. Might the atrocity image, which is also forensic, then provide yet another entry point into the void of war, and are these images the means by which, like the protagonist in La Jetée, people can relocate themselves in the time and space of a community of memory?

When atrocities are screened on television news, the audience likes to think it is getting the real thing, and simultaneity is confused with immediacy, so that a neurotic, reiterative pattern of imagery persists until interrupted only by the novelty of another air strike or Pentagon briefing. Sontag sees this as leading to the deadening of conscience; it corresponds to Ballard’s principle of the ‘death of affect’. She argues:

To suffer is one thing, another is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more — and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize…

The same law holds for evil as for pornography. The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wears off after one sees a few more… The vast photographic catalogue of misery and injustice throughout the world has given everyone a certain familiarity with atrocity, making the horrible seem more ordinary—making it appear familiar, remote (“it’s only a photograph”), inevitable. At the time of the first photographs of the Nazi camps, there was nothing banal about these images. After thirty years, a saturation point may have been reached. In these last decades, “concerned” photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it. [14]

As Ballard might ask, what evolutionary pressure is operating in this process of the deadening of conscience, and how can this be examined? To address this question, he takes this ‘familiarity’ and uses it to show what the subject matter shares with other familiar material of quotidian experience. Advertising’s use of atrocity images makes the link between suffering, pornography and the quotidian obvious. Just as this use of atrocity imagery in advertising is criticized, to expose atrocity images too much is to ‘go too far’, to make it too familiar. Such use reveals the true nature of advertising, as Ballard draws from an incident he recalls:

After a dinner party in the 1970s I almost came to blows with a prominent New York poet (in fact I tried playfully to run him down in my car, if such an act can be playful). He had derided my observation that cruel and violent images which elicit pity one day by the next afternoon have been stylised into media emblems. Yet the tragic photograph of the Saigon police chief shooting a Viet Cong suspect in the head was soon used by the London Sunday Times as a repeated logo keying its readers to Vietnam features in the paper. If I remember, the tilt of the dying man’s head was slightly exaggerated, like a stylised coke bottle or tail-fin. [15]

In the context of the moral panic arising from the proliferation of both pornography and ‘meaningless’ violence, Ballard has the nerve to persist with a sharp and detailed analysis of the images in the ‘media landscape’, and treat them as though they are all atrocity images. By relocating some of the images which have become banal he remakes them. In his account of the famous media image of the summary execution of the suspected Viet Cong fighter, Ballard establishes the link between consumerism, technology and cruelty, and relocates this image. It is then neither ‘only a photograph’, nor is it aestheticized, but it is rather an object in a technological field and may be subjected to the analysis of what Breton would call a ‘methodical examination’.[16]

The viewer sees the photographic image of an atrocity usually because she or he does not see the event, although she or he may be compelled to imagine it. The photograph of an atrocity works through absence, and it is this absence that informs the consumer, but it may also provide the means of returning to the scene of the crime, as it were. Barthesian ‘photo-death’[17] is about the loss of immediacy, a loss produced by the conception of the self as consumer, but the tension between presence and absence in the atrocity image may enable critical insight, such as may be found in Ballard’s work. The atrocity image is a membrane between affection and disaffection, marking the point at which meaning can be made, or not, as the case may be. Ballard writes along the seam marking the ‘death of affect’.[18] He sees his role as a writer of science fiction ‘to document the uneasy pleasures of living within this glaucous paradise’ that ‘the demise of feeling and affection’[19] has generated. To do this he must bypass the controls and conventions which order perception. The ambivalence of atrocity images enables this, as he observes in an interview:

The mere existence of our own sort of musculatures, the particular skeletal morphology of the mammal, not to mention the whole vast system of inventions and dampers and blocks and subterfuges of various kinds — elaborate mental languages and mental systems that operate on all sorts of borders on the brain, which is in itself an incredibly elaborate structure — if you could only shine a light through the whole of it, existence would seem as bright as the sun! As shocking as a blast of sunlight, or a vast blare of noise. [20]

This ‘elaborate structure’ is, according to Ballard, the architectonics of human subjectivity, the structure that orders the subject’s psychic and somatic life, and the epistemological organization by which the subject knows itself. Ballard’s metaphor of the x-ray is another way of imaging the ‘elaborate mental languages and mental systems’, the cultural DNA, he decodes.

Ballard’s writing accordingly enables us to go beyond the documents of the period, to return to the ‘living proof’ of the cruelty and suffering that results from the marriage of technology and barbarism, of the twentieth century, but also, of the effects of technology in the quotidian. To do this he writes in a way that is informed by both the technology and the content of photographs, and makes visible the operations of both. The motif of the recovery of the dead as individual figures or as a group recurs in his writing. He uses images of mass death and parades of the living dead to effect these ideas of transposition and displacement. He shows the way the subject moves back and forth from the state of the living to that of the dead, investing atrocity imagery of his time with new meaning, by experimental dissection and exhibition, and by means of characters that move strangely between dissociation from themselves and their surroundings, and responsibility for what is happening around them. He identifies atrocity images that are familiar from newsreels and photographs, and invents his own, reading the past as forensic evidence of the future in a surrealist manner.

The conception of the ‘surrealist subject’ as a ghost and as yielding substance arises from the technology of photography. Indeed ghosts and phantasmagoria have been a theme of photography from its earliest popular use. Photography is itself a medium of the encounter, in that it enables a registering of the surreal in the traces of everyday experience. Photography and frottage are both concerned with traces; in the former, the violence of the method is sublimated by technology. Both can be used to make visible that which is not otherwise seen. The transposition of the living and the dead which makes them interchangeable is similar to the effects produced in the filmic and photographic superimposition and other methods of capturing and projecting traces of human or ghostly presence. The technologies which structure the making and perception of images facilitate Ballard’s imagery in stories of the living dead. These technologies, whether destructive or creative, necessarily invoke death. It is at the point of the production of the image that the production of subjectivity is made visible. An analysis of two stories, ‘The Time Tombs’ (1963) and ‘The Dead Time (1977), through the metaphor supplied by photography, shows this effect.



Part II. Death, the photograph and the bomb

Since, for the new illuminati, ghosts were phenomena of electrical energy, why should they not also give off light and even be photogenic. After the Franco-Prussian War Leymarie, the editor of Revue Spirite, called on the professional assistance of Buguet to photograph the first ghosts—in reality, overexposures superimposed on images of ‘the living’ in such a way that they appeared among ordinary mortals as they passed through the darkroom. Leymarie was convicted of fraud and was sentenced to a year in prison plus a fine of five hundred francs.… Given the high rate of mortality at that time, the customers who ‘bought’ the apparition were forging often tragic relations with the image itself. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema [21] [my emphasis]



Part II. i ‘The Time Tombs’ (1963)

Ballard reorders and rearranges the figure of the body most emphatically in The Atrocity Exhibition, but the creative imagination that informs this work and the method by which he makes it, are suggested in his earlier stories. He recasts the figure of the screen goddess and the pin-up version of her body, stripped of its proper dimensions, in the image of the entombed princess of ‘The Time Tombs’ (1963).[22] Atrocity imagery is latent in the imagery of this story, with its expansion and contraction, its disturbed and disturbing perspectives. It is a story of the ghosts generated by technology, and encounters with the dead, a play of eroticism and authority. Ballard sets up patterns of menace, desire, death and images in the same way as Chris Marker in La Jetée, and co-incidentally writes a case study of Barthes’ ‘photodeath’.

The mental landscape of the distant and derelict planet in ‘The Time Tombs’, where these ghosts appear, allows Ballard to speculate about the relationship between objects or people, and their reproduced images. He presents his material in a system of collection, analysis and museology. The story is an archaeology of the culture of the present, or indeed of the ‘near future’. Past, present and future are fused in the goblets, statuary and desolate landscape of this stage set, a space of desire. The protagonists seek re-entry into time by pillaging the remnants of the past, which are also remnants of an advanced future. The antiquity of the setting and imagery and the reliquary nature of the entombed princess’s figure suggest an archetypal symbolism reminiscent of the romances of Rider Haggard and others of the colonial and imperial culture that informed Ballard’s experience. The planet Vergil, the desert, the pavilions, and the night time expeditions to the underworld of the tombs, invoke romance and adventure, the genre of mercantile and maritime capitalism, but it is also about the ordering and attribution of culture. While the desert is empty and dead it is also the place of suspension of life and potential for return, the site of the tomb of the mummy, or other forms of the uncanny that await the conditions of reanimation. Like Rider Haggard’s eponymous Ayesha, however, the disturbed entombed princess finally dissolves into air. Memory is here a commodity to be stolen, destroyed, bought and sold or encoded in data. Shepley encounters this memory as a museum object, and his seduction by it is fatal.[23] In this case Ballard’s use of the adventure story form and Orphic myth articulates the way that culture is preserved, transcribed, entombed, stolen, bought and sold. In particular, Ballard shows the way it is transposed and reproduced in images.

The protagonist, Shepley, is a criminal-psychiatric patient who is on Vergil to find the money that will allow him to return home ‘on probation’.[24] He is enthralled by a ghost, of the past and of the future, a female figure in the shape of a winged victory. He and other grave-robbers raid desert tombs containing the ‘cyber-architectonic ghosts’ of beings dead for five-thousand years. He observes the coalescence of desire and speed in the form of the princess. To further the sense of displacement and distance, Ballard employs a recurring stylistic motif, that of comparing something to that which it almost is:

She lay in the centre of what seemed to be a sphere of softly luminous gas, inclined against a massive black catafalque, from the sides of which flared two enormous heraldic wings. The woman’s copper hair was swept straight back from her forehead, some five or six feet long, and merged with the plumage of the wings, giving her an impression of tremendous contained speed, like a goddess arrested in a moment of flight in a cornice of some great temple-city of the dead.[25] [Emphasis added]

The woman exists for Shepley, but she is also only technologically preserved data. He has uncovered a mortuary tomb. Her ‘molecular transcriptions’ were encoded after her death. Her beauty is ‘skin deep… No nervous system, no musculature or internal organs — just a beautiful golden husk.’[26] The meaning of this is illuminated by Virilio’s commentary on the ‘pin-up’. This allows a comparison of the molecular transcription of the figure to the transcription of the body in the mass-reproduced pin-up images in wartime. Virilio links this process to the technological violence of war:

Again, it is no accident that one of the last stars, Marilyn Monroe, was discovered by a US army photographer at the height of the Korean War…

The power of Marilyn and her ‘sisters’ lay not only in their perfectly photogenic bodies but also in the fact that their pictures were not life-sized. Always in exile from its immediate, natural dimensions, never seeming connected to anything else, Marilyn’s body was at once expandable like a giant screen and capable of being folded and reproduced like a poster, a magazine cover or a centre-spread. This helps to explain the passion with which agents subsequently insisted on their stars’ ‘real’ dimensions: bust, waist and hip measurements became necessary for proper appreciation of the picture, just as the scale reference on a headquarters map enabled it to be read and interpreted by a military user…

The cinema made no mistake with its publicity. Once the star had been named ‘body’ and her picture painted on bombs and bombers, this body with no stable dimensions would soon be offered up in ‘fragments’ to the audience, in a repetition of the heterogeneous perception of the military voyeur. [27]

Ballard articulates the tragedy of the loss produced by the technology of death in this story of the ‘molecular transcription’ of the body. The tension between dissociation and responsibility is also emphasized as Shepley’s companion, the more experienced ‘Old Man’ advises him that ‘the woman doesn’t exist, any more than a painting’.[28] The ‘proper’ response to the image of the woman is hidden in the conundrum of her simultaneous presence and absence. When the ‘tape’ canisters that contain the woman’s records are destroyed, Shepley, like Orpheus, views her image for the last time:

Still magnificent upon her bier, the enchantress lay back between the great wings. Motionless for so long, she had at last been galvanised into life, and a jerking, syncopated rhythm rippled through her body. The wings shook uneasily, and a series of tremors disturbed the base of the catafalque, so that the woman’s feet danced an exquisitely flickering minuet, the toes darting from side to side with untiring speed. Higher up, her wide smooth hips jostled each other in a jaunty mock tango.

He watched until only the face remained, a few disconnected traces of the wings and catafalque jerking faintly in the darkness, then he made his way out of the tomb. [29]

This strangely erotic image is, in its abstraction, sadistic necrophiliac pornography, albeit rendered less overt by its mythic stage properties. The entombed princess is an antique pin up for Shepley.

‘The Time Tombs’ was written in 1961,[30] when Ballard was also writing The Drowned World. He was clearly thinking about the psychic implications of time and its possibilities in fiction, of memory and perception. In ‘The Time Tombs’ he experiments with time as it is related to desire and ultimately to inner space. The desert planet Vergil is the ideal place for this experiment. In this underworld setting Ballard shows how desire is produced in the space between human memory and technology — and is captured in images. As in Marker’s La Jetée, the issue of memory and its relation to images is raised in a context of cruelty and menace. Technology lays deadly traps for those who are seduced by the image, which may be just a set of codes. Shepley will be forever trapped in the fatal inertia generated by technology.



Part II. ii ‘The Dead Time’ (1977)

In the story ‘The Dead Time’, Ballard returns to the setting of his later childhood, a dreamscape in the outskirts of Shanghai at the end of the Pacific War. This is the space that he also draws upon in his review of Capa’s photographs, the space where children, ‘gaze in an undemonstrative way at passing parades, stare up at approaching bombers or trudge with their small suitcases along the refugee road to the nearest frontier, unaware of the significance of the events that have shattered their lives.’[31] In ‘The Dead Time’, the protagonist crosses the desolate but potent landscape of Ballard’s childhood with delusions that he will ‘seed the dead’, with whom he communes.[32] European civilian prisoners have been abandoned by the Japanese guards, but are still threatened by Kuomintang, Communists and various other warring forces in the area. American aircraft fly overhead but despite the official surrender desperate Japanese soldiers still patrol the landscape between Shanghai and the camp. This story, different versions of which appear in Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women, is a romance or rite of passage, presented as a game, an experiment analyzing the material world as fiction. The narrator, a twenty-year-old Englishman, tells of how he and an older man, Hodson, are compelled to load about fifty dead civilians onto two trucks and drive them to the Protestant cemetery at Soochow. The narrator sees this as an opportunity to be reunited with his parents, from whom he has been separated since the attack on Pearl Harbour signaled the re-entry of Japanese forces into Shanghai.

The ‘I’ of the narrator is transfigured through his encounter with the dead. The representation of this ‘experience’ is achieved by means of surrealist effects, are presented through images of the ‘innocent’ dead which reproduce the familiar twentieth century images of mass death.

Stretched out on the frayed grass were some fifty corpses, laid out in neat rows as if arranged with great care and devotion. All were fully dressed and lay with their feet towards us, arms at their sides, and I could see from the bright pallor of their faces that these people, whoever they were, had only recently died. I paused by a young nun wearing a full habit and wimple whose broad mouth had only just begun to take on its death grimace. Around her, like the members of her flock, were three children, heads to one side as if they had fallen asleep before death. [33]

The protagonist observes that they had probably been killed by American bombing, although he is also unsettled by the possibility of plague or epidemic. The relatively peaceful image of death in which ‘at first sight’ only two of the bodies ‘revealed any sign of violence’, is gradually replaced as the protagonist transports the bodies, described here with the details of putrefaction, stench and flies, and the horror of ‘bodies sliding about as if in some huge scrimmage’. This movement from relative calm to horror is an example of Ballard’s shifts between the latent and manifest content of images. It is as though he takes a photograph of ‘peaceful’ death but then runs through a series of time lapse images to show the true violence behind the image.

The journey in a dream landscape is surreal, the narrator starving, exhausted, and emotionally volatile. His relationship to the bodies is ambivalent. He is dissociated by privation, but still capable of response; he functions in the tenuous and dangerous space between disaffection and responsibility. At one point he and Hodson dump the bodies in a canal, only to find that further down the road the floating corpses, like the return of the repressed or the persistence of a figure in a dream, have blocked a crossing to the canal, preventing their further passage. The narrator and Hodson are ordered by the Japanese patrol at the crossing to reload the bodies, which begin to show signs of reanimation:

Needless to say, Hodson and I were obliged to lift the bodies out ourselves. They lay on the bank like a party of exhausted bathers, in a strange way almost refreshed by their journey down the canal. The blood had been washed from the jaw-wound of the elderly woman, and I could see for the first time the image of a distinct personality. The sunlight lit the line of moist faces, illuminating the exposed hands and ankles. [34]

Ballard frequently uses the imagery of recreation or leisure to represent death. A number of his stories imply a similarity between holiday resorts and prison camps,[35] or as Ballard comments, mausoleums:

It would be intriguing to construct a mausoleum that was an exact replica, in the most funereal stone, of one’s own home, even including the interior furniture (reminiscent of Magritte’s strange stone paintings, with their stone men and women, stone trees and stone birds). One could weekend in this alternate home, and probably soon find oneself stepping out of time.

On the mortuary island of San Michele, in Venice’s lagoon, a gloomy and threatening place that inspired Arnold Böcklin’s “Island of the Dead”,[36] one comes across an extraordinary parade of ultra-modern bungalows among the graves and tombs, with white walls and wrought iron grilles, like demonstration models of a Spanish-style nightclub waiting shipment to the Costa del Sol. These are family mausoleums, and it’s touching to see the coffins sitting together in the breakfast rooms. [37]

He suggests that the technologies which enable modern consumerism produce a ghost life for modern humans. The delirium of the narrator allows this connection, or rather this transposition, to be effected. Like people on holiday, out of time, the dead prisoners appear ‘refreshed’.

Ballard’s narrator journeys with his cargo of the dead and becomes familiar with the corpses. He even adds Hodson’s ‘fair share’ of them to his load. With a strange ambivalence of affect, he later joins the dead, lying in the circle of corpses he has dumped from the truck. This scene of a character lying down with the dead is another recurrent motif in Ballard’s work and is in itself a performance or experiment, a false death, as well as a subterfuge. For example, a version of it occurs in ‘The Terminal Beach’, when the protagonist Traven lies among a jumble of discarded test dummies to avoid a search party:

He had hidden in one of the target basins, lying among the broken bodies of the plastic models. In the hot sunlight their deformed faces gaped at him sightlessly from the tangle of limbs, their blurred smiles like those of the soundlessly laughing dead. [38]

The landscape of the protagonist’s dream of death is open and exposed except for sugar cane plantations, strewn with the remnants of war, and intersected by railway lines and brown canals. Ballard returns to the submerged tombs Kerans observes in The Drowned World in the form of burial mounds, mud, water and the debris of modern technology that exist together in the silence and slow time of aftermath. Ballard’s surreal, paranoiac-critical effect is emphasized by the presence of American aircraft, which ‘endlessly crossed the sky’, but which do not land at the nearby airstrip, and by the effects of light in the derelict landscape:

In the afternoon haze the surface of the road seemed to be speckled with gold, nodes of bright light reflected from hundreds of spent cartridge cases. [39]

Ballard images a delirious interplay of light and shadow, life and death. As well as the ‘companions’ of the narrator, other dead are also present in the surroundings, alongside the fossil remains ‘of a reconnaissance aircraft shot down by the Americans’.[40] He doubly invokes the dead, by his writing of images and by the protagonist’s actions in summoning them.

The semi-autobiographical nature of ‘The Dead Time’, its obsessive return and longing to return, and its fantasy of death and desire invites comparison, with some aspects of André Breton’s Nadja (1928), a novel of death, desire and place, with which Ballard would no doubt be familiar. In this work, Breton published photographs of places and objects his narrator visited or encountered, and so connects writing with images, and with the hypnotic drawings he describes. This encounter is central to Surrealism, through which the artist as writer becomes the sensitive material upon which traces may be left, and writing becomes frottage. Memory and writing are related, as Margaret Cohen argues in her study of Walter Benjamin, Profane Illumination:

In the practice of the encounter, the paradigmatic surrealist act of representation is not to hold a mirror up to the world. Rather, the surrealist presents the world with a yielding substance where traces can be left. Breton’s Parisian prose trilogy makes the central yielding substance the surrealist himself. [41]

Breton’s writing and the photographs in Nadja are connected, and this is further echoed in the relationship between the narrator, Nadja, and the ghosts and memories of the cityscape through which they pass. The narrator describes the forlorn, mysterious and uncanny nature of some of these places and things, their histories and effects on their inhabitants. The figure of Nadja, ‘a soul in limbo’,[42] is photographic, an atrocity image and witness, in her tracelike registering of the past:

She is disturbed by the thought of what has already occurred in this square and will occur here in the future. Where only two or three couples are at this moment fading into the darkness, she seems to see a crowd. “And the dead, the dead!” [43]

The figure is a medium through which Breton’s narrator seeks to locate himself. He tells of how he too is only identifiable as a living ghost; he can only know himself incompletely: The word ‘haunt’:

means much more than it says, makes me, still alive, play a ghostly part, evidently referring to what I must have ceased to be in order to be who I am. [44]

Ballard’s story involves a similar passage through memory and death. Towards the end of the story, the protagonist picks up a wounded Chinese man and his granddaughter. He walks with the child through a landscape of transition, where the old order is submerged, as it is in The Drowned World:

Together the child and I walked down to the concrete ramp of the naval air base. In the deep water below the wharf lay the drowned forms of hundreds of cars rounded up from the allied nationals in Shanghai and dumped there by the Japanese. They rested on the river bed twenty feet below the surface, the elements of a past world that would never be able to reconstitute itself now that I and my companions, this child and her grandfather had taken possession of the land. [45]

He identifies the visible codes of the new technological order above them, but this obsessional fantasy is linked to a denial of material need:

I patiently taught her that food was no longer necessary to us. Fortunately I was able to distract her by pointing out the different marks of American aircraft that crossed the sky. [46]

As he approaches the camp where he expects to find his parents the protagonist strips himself naked, and bows in front of the boiling radiator of the truck. In his delusional state the narrator sees himself as a mythic figure of renewal:

Naked, I knelt in front of the vehicle, raising my arms to my congregation in the fields around me, like a king assuming his crown at his coronation. Although still a virgin, I exposed my loins to the Chinese watching me as they lay quietly in the fields. With those loins I would seed the dead. [47]

Surrounded by death, and aware of the stillness of the internment camp he approaches, he carries the child:

The child lay motionless in my arms. As I knelt with her in the centre of the road, wondering if it were time for her to join my companions, I noticed that her lips still moved. Without thinking, giving way to what seemed a meaningless impulse, I tore a shred of flesh from the wound on my arm and pressed it between her lips.

In its inversion, this Pietà suggests the transposition of the living and the dead, and the structure of the technology of photography. The protagonist has become, in Barthes’ words, ‘the subject who feels itself become the object’.[48] In terms of both content and method, the story is enabled by photography. It supplies the metaphor, not just of trace, but of transposition.

As in ‘The Time Tombs’, the characters in ‘The Dead Time’ occupy a sparse, derelict landscape where only the shades of the living wander momentarily. It is a ‘free association ‘landscape’, presented through Ballard’s recollections of his Shanghai childhood, to which he returns briefly in The Atrocity Exhibition:

The melancholy back of the Yangtse, a boom of sunken freighters off the Shanghai Bund. As a child he rowed out to the rusting ships, waded through sedans awash with water. Through the portholes, a regatta of corpses sailed past Woosung Pier. [49]

Ballard comments on the inclusion of this memory:

The many lists in The Atrocity Exhibition were in effect free-association tests. What I find striking after so many years is how they anticipate the future themes of my fiction. Item 1 [of the list in ‘Landscape of the Dream’] shows my wartime experience in Shanghai surfacing briefly, before disappearing again for nearly two decades. Heaven alone knows what will surface in the future. [50]

Memory, a counterweight to technology, functions here as collective as well as autobiographical, so that Ballard not only tells his own story, but textualizes the effects of the mass death of others in his time. He returns to his own past to the event that matches images of mass graves for its stultifying effects, textualizing the explosion of the Nagasaki bomb in a chapter from Empire of the Sun.

The flash of the atomic bomb momentarily displaces the sun as the central symbol of energy and violence in this later novel. The glamour of the old order of the British Empire is mocked as the ‘pale sheen’ generated by the dying light of the bomb illuminates the looted objects in the stadium. Here Ballard reopens the split between referent and vehicle which is otherwise sealed by the annealing heat of the atom bomb. His return to the sites of extreme measures rescues meaning that has been vitrified or fused by military technology. This is the moment that Jim defines as the beginning of World War III, the period ruled by the new technology, ‘peace as if it were another kind of war’,[51] as Ballard says of Capa’s photographs.

Disembodied technology, master of all, produces a series of images, and the lives of the colonial British are over. The new empire of the nuclear age and the power of American technology displace them. This is not the usual imagery associated with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is because of the context of this story and Ballard’s experience and memory. Silence, momentary loss of sunlight and a ludicrous museum display of a doomed empire replace the usual terrifying images of burnt bodies and grotesquely mutilated men, women and children. The stadium becomes figuratively a ‘furnace heated by a second sun’, with all the suggestions of alchemical and Blakean creation. The space in which the atomic blast is registered and recalled is the crucible of memory, a camera obscura of the mind, comparable to, but not the same as, the ‘deserted newsreel theatre’ of Jim’s ‘crowded head’.[52] As in ‘The Dead Time’, the young protagonist comes to believe he can reanimate the dead. His hands and shoulders are ‘electrified by the discharge that had passed through them, the same energy that powered the sun and the Nagasaki bomb whose explosion he witnessed’.[53] He is an exemplar of the reordering of relations to the material world that is instigated by technology.

In ‘The Dead Time’, hallucination is the dominant mode of perception throughout the story. The protagonist’s imagined sacrifice seems like a mirage produced by privation, but Ballard’s surrealist method reopens wounds to restore memory, as though the wound is the passage between life and death. In the first Surrealist Manifesto Breton writes: ‘Surrealism will introduce you to death, which is a secret society. It will glove your hand, entombing there the consummate M with which the word Memory begins.’[54] Ballard’s characters, enter this ‘secret society’, in this case a dreamscape of war where the living and the dead co-exist, to allow ‘the true function of thought’[55] to appear. He traces the path between life and death as a surrealist experiment, in the dangerous ‘demilitarized zone’ between disaffection and responsibility, and reveals the transitional movement between these states, and the implications of technology in this movement:

At last, through this child and my body, the dead were coming to life, rising from the fields and doorways and coming to greet me. I saw my mother and father at the gates of the camp, and knew that I had given my death to them and so brought them into this world. Unharmed they had passed into the commonwealth of the living, and of the other living beyond the dead.

I knew now that the war was over. [56]

Like Nadja, ‘The Dead Time’ is not just autobiographical but tells of a broader culture and its memory. In these encounters with death in war Ballard textualizes that which is unspeakable, making visible a collective autobiography of loss and alienation, through the reanimation of the dead. The stories discussed here are encounters with death and desire. In them Ballard produces images that counter the tendency to make cataclysmic human suffering a subject of silence.


Part III. The dreamwork of pornography

Pornography is specifically epiphanic, in the sense that it is about showing. It is atrocity imagery from a different angle, as the images of the ‘Rape of Nanjing’ suggest, and the same rules of desire, consumption and information apply. Pornography is specifically technology’s ordering of the erotic, involving the violent disassociation and re-association of people and objects, achieved through photography and mass reproduction. Pornography is frequently made by bringing together things that are not usually associated. These form a nexus of fetishism, and the patterns and structures of pornography are held in place by a violent interlocking of sex and technology. Like advertising, pornography is demonstration of the fact of technology’s fracturing of humans’ relations with each other and with the material world. Pornography illustrates fetishistic behaviour, and is fetishistic in itself, but only in the way that other consumer items — coke bottles, refrigerators, or sunglasses for example — are fetishistic.

In his fiction, Ballard both describes pornography and uses its devices. One of these is its relentlessness or obsessive persistence — one image follows another, frequently the same or similar. Repetition leads to the boredom with pornography reported by both Sontag and Ballard. The latter recalls being ‘stunned, absolutely stunned’, upon seeing his first ‘explicit hardcore’ pornographic films at the ICA in the mid-60s, ‘But, after about half an hour boredom sets in’.[57] Repetition, however, also eroticizes the images as William S Burroughs points out in his preface to The Atrocity Exhibition: ‘sexual arousal results from the repetition and impact of image’.[58]

As Burroughs comments, he also makes use of pornography’s explosive methods, ‘literally blowing up the image. Since people are made of image’. This assists in the navigation of the psychic landscape; the exploded body is also an eroticized body.[59] This enlargement is identical to the dissection of bodies and other matter to reveal their relationships and their inner workings. A corollary of this explosiveness is the effect of mise en abŷme. The vertiginous inward collapse of images is countered, however, by an outward movement. An erotic telescoping, in and out of close-ups, zooms, and long shots reveals the structures informing our relationship to the world, not so much outside us, but continuous with us. This cinematic effect is one that enables Ballard to textualize vision in his fiction.

Ballard accordingly remakes pornography in order to use it strategically in his writing. He constantly shifts the angle and focus of his pornography to exploit the effect of boredom, maintaining its distancing effect and allowing its erotic possibilities. He manages to hold the attention of the reader for as long as it takes to bring them to a point of detonation — a space and time of total emptiness in which the ‘money shot’ of pornography is identical with ‘ground zero’. The weapons testing ranges of his landscapes are the aftermaths that, like Sebald’s buildings,[60] bear the signs of a future of desolation. Pornography also delays, defers and withholds, and Ballard uses this strategy to structure The Atrocity Exhibition, a novel of the delays, repetitions, false starts, deferrals and displacements that structure pornographic films.

Just as Ballard turns Freudian psychoanalysis, surrealism, and myth, to his ends, so he observes and deploys the methods and contents of pornography to present the facts of existence in this ‘overlit realm’. In that one of the side effects of its processes is the absence of affect, pornography is also a kind of dreamwork. If condensation and displacement in dreams paradoxically allows access to repressed desires and anxieties, then pornography can have the same function. Ballard uses this quality of pornography to shift affect from its objects, to achieve the radical displacement and associations of his work. He uses ‘the death of affect’ as a strategy.


Table of Contents:
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Conclusion
Bibliography
Acknowledgements



Footnotes:

[1] From a letter to his family, quoted in Nancy Tong and Christine Choy, In the Name of the Emperor, a documentary film on the Nanjing Massacre (New York: 1995). Magee was an American Episcopal missionary who helped to set up refugee camps during the Japanese invasion of Nanjing. He secretly filmed atrocities in the street and at the hospital where victims were brought. Although he was invited to testify at the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, his films were not shown as evidence.

[2] Ballard’s term for the threat suggested by Ronald Reagan as ‘the compelling example he offers to future film actors and media manipulators with presidential ambitions’ in his note to ‘The Secret History of World War 3’, in revised edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, 119.

[3] J. G. Ballard interviewed by Alan Burns in The Imagination on Trial, ed. Alan Burns and Charles Sugnet, (London: Allison and Busby, 1981), 14-30, 23.

[4] ‘The Last Real Innocents’, a review of Children of War, Children of Peace, in The New York Times, 1991, A User’s Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews, (London: HarperCollins: 1996), 82-83, 82.

[5] Ibid. 83.

[6] ‘La Jetée’, a review of La Jetée, first published in New Worlds, 1966, reprinted in V. Vale and A. Juno, J. G. Ballard, 101 and A User’s Guide to the Millennium, 28-29.

[7] See Bényei’s discussion of this light in ‘White Light: J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun as War Story’, The Anachronist. The Literary Journal of the Department of English Studies, (Online journal of the Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary) Issue 2000, 249-275. Accessed February, 2002.

[8] From English language narration of Chris Marker’s La Jetée, (Paris: Argos Films, 1962).

[9] This is a common cliché in descriptions of the mass dead, and Ballard uses it in ‘The University of Death’: ‘dead Japanese stacked like firewood in L.C.T.s off Woosung Pier.’ Revised edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, 24.

[10] As Virilio argues: ‘The danger of the nuclear weapon, and of the arms system it implies, is thus not so much that it will explode, but that it exists and is imploding in our minds.’ Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotex(e), 1986). 150.

[11] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, here translated and quoted by Margaret Cohen, in Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) 71. In Richard Howard’s translation, the term is ‘spectre’. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 14-15.

[12] Susan Sontag, On Photography, (New York: Dell, 1977), 155-6.

[13] Ibid. 155-6.

[14] Ibid. 20-21.

[15] Ballard’s note to revised edition in ‘The University of Death’, The Atrocity Exhibition, 21.

[16] ‘When the time comes when we can submit the dream to a methodical examination, when by methods yet to be determined we succeed in realizing the dream in its entirety (and that implies a memory discipline measurable in generations, but we can still begin by recording salient facts), when the dream’s curve is developed with unequalled breadth and regularity, then we can hope that mysteries which are not really mysteries will give way to the great Mystery. I believe in the future resolution of these two states—outwardly so contradictory—which are dream and reality, into a sort of absolute reality, a surreality, so to speak.’ André Breton, ‘The First Surrealist Manifesto’, in Waldberg, Surrealism, 66-75, 68-70.

[17] ‘And the person or thing photographed is the target, the referent, a kind of little simulacrum, any eidolon, emitted by the object, which I should like to call the Spectrum of the Photograph, because this word retains, through its root, a relation to “spectacle” and adds to it that rather terrible thing which is there in a very photograph: the return of the dead.’ Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 9.

[18] Introduction to the French edition of Crash, (1974), in original English in Foundation, No. 9, November, 1975, repr. in V. Vale and A. Juno, 96-98, 96.

[19] Ibid.

[20] ‘Interview by A. Juno and V. Vale’, V. Vale and A. Juno, 6-35, 21.

[21] Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans Patrick Camiller, (London: Verso, 1984/1989), 29

[22]‘The Time-Tombs’, (Worlds of If, 1963), The Complete Short Stories, 459-471.

[23] The museum is also a kind of mausoleum, where meaning is preserved and remade through memories of the dead. La Jetée, a film which is also about the recovery of time through images, may be read as using the museum in this way.

[24] ‘The Time Tombs’, 459.

[25] Ibid. 465.

[26] Ibid. 470.

[27] Virilio, War and Cinema, 25-26.

[28] ‘The Time-Tombs’, 465.

[29] Ibid. 470-71.

[30] According to J. G. Ballard’s list of stories in the order they were written in ‘Chronological Listing of Stories’, James Goddard, J. G. Ballard: A Bibliography (Lymington: Cypher Press, 1970).

[31] ‘The Last Real Innocents’, A User’s Guide to the Millennium, 83.

[32] Two years later Ballard takes this fantasy to the suburbs in The Unlimited Dream Company, (1979).

[33] ‘The Dead Time’, (Bananas, 1977), 928-9.

[34] Ibid. 933.

[35] This is most explicit in ‘Having a Wonderful Time’ (Bananas, 1978), in which a series of postcards gradually make apparent that their author is trapped forever in a resort.

[36] Magritte’s L’annonciation, an homage to Böcklin’s painting, is listed by Ballard as one of the key paintings of surrealism, and was one of the works in the Lefevre Exhibition in London that Ballard saw in 1953. (See Chapter Three, n. 7).

[37]Ballard’s note to revised edition in ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’, in The Atrocity Exhibition, 41.

[38] Ibid. 600.

[39] ‘The Dead Time’, 935.

[40] Ibid. 931.

[41]Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution, 134.

[42] André Breton, Nadja, (1928) trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove, 1960), 71.

[43] Ibid. 83.

[44] Ibid. 71.

[45] ‘The Dead Time’ (1977), 938.

[46] Ibid.

[47] Ibid. 939.

[48] Barthes, Camera Lucida, 14.

[49]Landscapes of the Dream’ in ‘The Great American Nude’, The Atrocity Exhibition, 53.

[50] Ballard’s note to revised edition in ‘The Great American Nude’, Ibid. 53. Ballard exaggerates the time between this reference to his childhood and the next reference. ‘The Dead Time’ is dated 1977 and Empire of the Sun is published in 1984.

[51] A User’s Guide to the Millennium, 83.

[52] Empire of the Sun, 11.

[53] Ibid. 340.

[54] Breton, ‘The First Surrealist Manifesto’, Waldberg, 75.

[55] Ibid. 72.

[56] ‘The Dead Time’, 939.

[57] ‘Interview by A. Juno and V. Vale’, V. Vale and A. Juno, 19.

[58] William S. Burroughs, Preface to Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A., repr in revised edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, 7.

[59] Ibid.

[60] Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell, (London: Penguin, 2001), 23-4.