Chapter Seven, Part I:


'Signs and wonders': the motif of flight in Ballard's fiction

In those days, you must remember, an aeroplane was a sign and a wonder. H.G. Wells [1]

Airports and airfields have always held a special magic, gateways to the infinite possibilities that only the sky can offer. In 1946, when I first came to England, a dark and derelict shell of a country, I used to dream of the runways of Wake Island and Midway, stepping stones that would carry me back across the Pacific to the China of my childhood. At school in Cambridge, and later as a medical student at King’s College, I would flee all that fossilised Gothic self-immersion and ride a borrowed motorcycle to the American airbases at Mildenhall and Lakenheath, happy to stare through the wire at the lines of silver bombers and transport planes. Airports then were places where America arrived to greet us, where the world of tomorrow touched down in Europe. J.G. Ballard (1997) [2]

Part I. Flying machines

Flight is one of the imperative facts of the twentieth century. The history of flying machines is like a metonym for the technological history of the century. Aircraft have been part of the fetishizing structure of technology from the first ‘signs and wonders’ to the ‘vehicles without wings’[3] of manned spaceflight. The trajectory of this development, from the Wright Brothers to September 11, 2001, took 98 years.

In the 70s and 80s Ballard writes fiction where he uses images of flight to signal the near future, and a novel, Empire of the Sun (1984), where the near future of his adult life enters his own childhood. He catches the trajectory of the flight of aircraft at a particular point in its history, to engage with technology’s operations in time. Aircraft are part of Ballard’s natural history of technology, one display case in his museum of objects, revealing a moment of metamorphosis.

Ballard has long been interested in flight, and he explains the appearance of ‘images of flight’ in his writing as a reflection of a commonly held desire to find ‘a vertical route out’. His obsessions emerge to coincide with ‘the atmosphere’ of a particular time, to give him the opportunity to write about aircraft. The images of flight in his writing textualize the negotiation between his memories, the technologies of flight that he observes around him, and his experience of the quotidian:

But I don’t know –- I’ve tried to follow accurately, like a cruise missile, the contours of the period in which I am living. Perhaps if images of flight have begun to appear in my fiction they may reflect something in the atmosphere that we all breathe. You know –- we’re all looking for some sort of vertical route out of the particular concrete jungle that we live in. [4]

Ballard uses images of flight in his fiction much as he deploys other signs and images, as a set of his instruments of investigation, to provide the conditions necessary to reveal the presence of the near future, and to refigure human relations to technology.



Part II. ‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’ (1974)

Ballard fictionalizes aircraft as catalysts of psychic evolution. The distant, frequently wounded pilot of a low-flying aircraft is a silent archangel, drifting in and out a protagonist’s vision, a past or future self who escapes time. His characters are sometimes astronauts, pilots of ‘vehicles without wings’, as they were during the heroic period of the 1950s and 60s space programme. He uses these characters in The Atrocity Exhibition and other earlier stories, where they are usually drifting on the edge of his mental landscapes rather than flying planes.

In other stories Ballard uses characters who live in a dream state of confused identity in which memories of the past and future converge. The character’s consciousness becomes confused with that of other characters, or they believe their own memories belong to others. This corresponds to Ballard’s idea of his writing as being about a connection between his own memories and obsessions, and the ‘atmosphere of his time. Melville, the protagonist of ‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’ (1974), is an example of this confusion. He is another of Ballard’s experimental characters, used as a fictional decoy, but also suggestive of the paranoid tenor of Cold War subjectivity:

Already other memories were massing around him, fragments that he was certain belonged to another man’s life, details from the case-history of an imaginary patient whose role he had been tricked into playing. As he worked on the Fortress high among the dunes, brushing the sand away from the cylinder vanes of the radial engines, he remembered other aircraft he had been involved with, vehicles without wings. [5]

Melville’s ‘confusion’ is underpinned by the dislocation generated by the story’s title. Despite the first-person voice of the title, ‘My Dream of Flying’ — which may echo H.G. Wells’ ‘My First Aeroplane’ — the story is told in the third-person, effecting a fracturing of consciousness and point of view, and is another strategic move in Ballard’s collection. He comments that his ‘imagination as a writer is a continuation of the dream time’.[6] The dream of flying is his ‘unacted desire’:

A classical 19th-century novelist would have thought it very bad form to have intruded his own particular quirks and obsessions upon the subject matter. But I think the contemporary writer must do so—it is, after all, why he’s writing. It’s his only key. If he has a key to unlock the universe and decipher all these codes around him, then it’s his own obsessions and the particular bent of his own nature that’s going to provide that key. So I accept that, but then again I don’t regret that at all. [7]

Ballard invents Melville as a figure in the media landscape of his time. Like Jim in Empire of the Sun he is dissociated by technology, and is a cipher for its effects, an exemplary figure for the intersection of technology and the human. He is the ‘first astronaut to suffer a mental breakdown in space’. His ‘nightmare ramblings had disturbed millions of television viewers as if the terrifying image of a man going mad in space had triggered off some long-buried innate releasing mechanism’.[8] He is a character who has been caught in a particular moment of technology’s power.

To establish the textual conditions for events to occur, Ballard assembles a collection of references, names and motifs. These are also drawn from his own memories, and from the period in which he is writing. The protagonist shares Ballard’s autobiographical details, a childhood in the Far East (Manila rather than Shanghai) and a father in the textile business. The physician who is charged with observing his recovery is called Dr Laing. Laing, whose name is very likely borrowed from the famous radical psychiatric clinician of the 60s, has a solarium, a kind of biosphere of semblance in which the ‘real’ is replicated. The few visitors who inhabit the island are middle class professionals or advertising people (agents and consumers of the media landscape) and a dentist aviatrix in a low-flying Cessna, Helen Winthrop. Other Ballardian properties of this landscape are sports cars, and the ‘chromium rat’ that Melville seems to Laing to be hunting.

The protagonist is convalescent, recovering from an aviation accident. Ballard sets out the beach landscape with its derelict buried aircraft, a mise en scène that moulds him. The mental landscape he inhabits is an almost deserted beach resort in the English Channel, littered with the refuse of World War II aircraft. The aircraft are discovered in their burial ground, the evolutionary liminal space of the beach, like that deployed in ‘The Reptile Enclosure’. Laing emphasizes the palaeontological dimension of Melville’s activities when his says to him, ‘“A hundred years ago you’d have been digging a diplodocus out of a chalk cliff”’.[9] The difference is that Melville, like Ballard, is bringing together his own memories with the objects of the informing technologies of the late twentieth century.

Ballard also uses the beach as a littoral of memory, where tides reveal and then bury the scattered remnants of World War II. Digging for these remnants distracts Melville from ‘the sharp frontal migraines that had begun to affect him again’.[10] Melville’s dream, also buried, re-emerges when he discovers the crashed aircraft, and is ‘a compass bearing of sorts’, allowing him to locate himself. When asked why he chose this particular Pacific island, he tells Laing, ‘Only Wake has real time.’[11] Wake Island for Melville is a ‘zone of tremendous possibility’.[12] The flight to Wake Island will somehow resolve psychic instability, the external journey a parallel to that taken ‘across the planets of his mind’.[13]

Melville carries with him tattered photographs of the ‘man-made landscape’ of Wake Island and X-rays of his own head, as though there is a correspondence –- and interchangeability –- between the two. Like the other photographs discussed earlier, the X-Rays are frottages which chart a topography of desire. (They are reminiscent of the X-Rays exchanged by the patients in the sanatorium in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and suggest a similar coding of human interactions by technology.) They are used to image the otherwise latent truths of aerial technology, exposing its informing power in the shape of human consciousness. Melville’s obsession with the X-Rays shows the ways in which aircraft become figures of desire through the displacing processes of fetishism. Melville also carries these objects and images because he can use them to set up the conditions for his own release from time. He is doing what Ballard does as a writer — regrouping the objects and images that have been disordered by technology to promote liberating taxonomies of them.

In this story Ballard creates a typical crisis of subjectivity promoted by technology. Melville’s encounters with the derelict flying machines of World War II set off his fugues and his ‘dream’, his ambition to pilot a light plane to Wake Island. Tennant, a retired advertising executive and his team lower Melville into the cockpit of a disinterred Messerschmitt which brings on his first fugue. Melville’s memories are re-activated by this experience, a result of the violence that Ballard describes in derelict objects, and their discharge of psychic energy. This effect can is achieved in objects that are already in the process of break down:

You need that violent dislocation which time itself will bring. Because to dismantle all those stage sets around us — violence plays a part in that. [14]

Ballard’s assemblages involve the violent actions that are required when intervening in a fetishistic order of things. Later, Winthrop flies her single-engine aircraft low over Melville, ‘throttling up her engine as if trying to din something into his head’.[15] This noise disturbs him ‘as if the furniture of his brain was being shifted around behind some dark curtain’.[16] This derangement of the objects of his psyche is a catalyst to his discovery of the buried B-17. Melville and Helen Winthrop enter the carapace of the fallen B-17, which to Melville is ‘like a magical arbour, the grotto-like cavern within some archaic machine’.[17] It is one of the time traps and zones of dangerous possibility that Ballard builds in his fiction.

After a storm ‘he stepped on to the beach and walked across the ruffled sand, counting the fragments of carburettor and exhaust manifold, trim-tab and tailwheel that lay around him as if left here by the receding tide of his dreams.’[18] The fragments of his past from which he is dissociated, or perhaps someone else’s past, surface as the remnants of World War II aircraft are exposed on the beach. His dream of flying to Wake Island is linked to his paranoid belief that he had murdered a mysterious fourth figure on his space flight, a figure, like Blake in The Unlimited Dream Company, which is ‘either man or bird’.

When Winthrop leaves for Africa ,‘Traces of her over-hurried departure, a suitcase of clothes and a spare set of rescue flares, lay among the empty oil-drums.’ [19] Here Ballard uses the same syntax, as he does in other lists of objects assembled in exhibitions and therapeutic experiments. The objects, dislocated from their owner, have new meanings and possibilities. Melville’s unmediated engagement with collections of objects of this kind is therapeutic, as it is for Dr Nathan’s patients in The Atrocity Exhibition. The arrangement of these objects is an attempt to replicate the investigative potential of Freudian dream analysis. Melville is Ballard’s experiment, an explorer who continues to disinter the B-17, ‘sustained by the huge bulk of the Flying Fortress, whose cockpit he never entered, and by his dream of flying to Wake Island.’

The displacements, conjunctions and drifts of this story and others like it are produced by the emerging fragments of technological artifacts that characters encounter. Ballard’s characters are not psychologically motivated, however, but are like the characters Breton recommends in his recipe for a ‘false novel’. They are ‘endowed with a tiny number of physical and moral characteristics’ who ‘deviate not one iota from a certain line of conduct’ [20] determined by the grammar of their technological surroundings. Aircraft are potent ‘active verbs’ in this grammar whether they are emerging from their burial place under the sand or flying low towards or past the protagonist.

Aircraft are catalysts that stir the psychic composure of the mental landscape, tapping or disturbing latent forces or providing still points within the rush of time for the mind to respond to a technological imperative. Ballard again shows the modern subject to be technologically constituted, both consciously and unconsciously. Characters are apparently informed by patterns of consciousness, as though their psyches remember the evolutionary vestiges of technological flight. Ballard sets up the conditions which show how technology’s relation to humans may be analyzed in terms of evolutionary memory. This assemblage operates like a museum taxonomy, anatomizing the conditions of human relations to technology, space, and time. The dream of Wake Island is a station in the journey to be taken — not just to a childhood in the East — but to a moment in technological and psychic history.



Part III. Low-Flying Aircraft (1975)

In ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’ (1975) Ballard writes about the possibility of new morphologies –- the advance shadowing of the future, a future requiring a completely new vision to make sense of its shapes. It begins with a reprise of a scene from The Drowned World (1962), a novel which first charts the morphologies of the psyche as it dissolves and remakes itself at a particular moment in time. In a chapter of the novel titled ‘Carnival of the Alligators’, Kerans, attracted by the drone of an aircraft, stands on his hotel balcony and observes:

a huge white-hulled hydroplane speed by around the lagoon…. He caught a glimpse of a tall broad-shouldered man in the cockpit, wearing a white helmet and jerkin, standing upright at the controls.[21]

In ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’, a couple stands on the hotel balcony in an almost deserted Spanish resort and watches what they believe to be the antics of a foolhardy pilot. He is taking off on a collapsing concrete runway:

‘One of these days he’s not going to make it – I’m certain that’s what he’s waiting for…’ Without thinking Forrester climbed from his deck-chair and pushed past the drinks trolley to the balcony rail. The aircraft was now moving rapidly along the runway, tail-wheel still touching the tarmac marker line. Little more than two hundred feet of concrete lay in front of it…. in the absence of any maintenance, the concrete pier jutting into the sea had been cut to a third of its original length by strong offshore currents. [22]

Here Ballard revisits a balcony viewpoint of aircraft; one of his memories is of ‘looking down at them from the second and third floor of buildings during air raids’.[23] The collapsing concrete pier, that Gould chooses to use over ‘any one of a hundred abandoned roads’, is a last crumbling gateway to the future. Its derelict condition suggests an imminent separation between the present and the future into which he is temporarily flying. Ballard represents aircraft as bridges between present and future, as signs of the near future. Its pilot, also a doctor, appears as reckless and menacing as Strangman in The Drowned World, and he is both distant and audacious. He also bears the name that Ballard has since used for the outlaw pediatrician Gould, in his latest novel, Millennium People. Time is running away, but the audacious pilot has a key to what is happening. Forrester, the protagonist, is drawn to him, however, to the point where he travels with him, sharing the risky take-off from the crumbling runway.

Ballard parallels the entropy of the runway and resort to the rapid decline of the population. Although there is a high fertility rate, children are born deformed, with ‘defective eyes, in which the optic nerves were exposed, and even more disturbing, their deformed sexual organs — these grim parodies of human genitalia tapped all kinds of nervousness and loathing.’[24] They are killed at birth, not by the agents of some ‘Brave New World’ fascist dictatorship, but with the permission of the parents by medical assistants who nurse the expectant mother. Judith Forrester and her husband hope for ‘good news’ as they await the results of an amniotic scan of their unborn child. Around them the resort is returning to beach as the dunes invade the streets, burying abandoned cars. The technologies of death that figure in the twentieth century still provide the metaphorical structure for this future world. As Forrester wanders in the empty resort he recalls ‘the Club Nautico, presiding like an aircraft-carrier over the bars and night-clubs of Ampuriabrava’ and the beach sand is ‘as clean and soft as milled bone’.[25]

Again Ballard arranges the details of the mental landscape to generate an atmosphere of latent violence. He employs many of the features of a thriller to do this: a mysterious shawled figure, flight and pursuit, abandoned bars and night clubs, sexual intrigue, and a reckless swaggering Mercedes-driving antagonist. Gould is also a kind of artist-writer, who paints his flying jacket and suit silver, and makes marks with silver paint ‘at various points around the town’, ‘elements of a cryptic private language’.[26] He also collects artworks from abandoned museums. Forrester has ‘a potent vision of this solitary doctor, piloting his light aircraft in a ceaseless search of the Mediterranean littoral, building up a stockpile of art treasures in case the world opened up for business again.’[27]

Forrester encounters Gould, in a deserted Dali Museum from which the pilot takes works to decorate his hotel room. He has been viewing Dali’s paintings of ‘flaccid embryos and anatomical monstrosities’ as though they provide the textbook underpinning to his medical practice. Forrester calls them ‘newsreels from Hell’, and Gould agrees they are ‘a sharp guess at the future’, but adds portentously, ‘The ultimate dystopia is the inside of one’s own head’.[28] This aphoristic judgement could have come from Dr Nathan, Vaughan or Ballard. It figures Gould as Ballard’s fictional hired hoodlum, sent in to do the observation, analysis and reordering to make Ballard’s mental landscapes achieve their purpose — a radical refiguring of conditions to make the near future visible. Dali’s paintings anatomize the conditions of the time, which is also the near future, as does Ballard’s story.

As Forrester approaches Carmen, the ‘dark-robed figure of a young woman’ he has observed, unaware that she is ‘deformed’, as his own child will be, he accidentally daubs himself with the silver paint that will allow her to see him.[29] This leads to the mistaken encounter with her that alarms them both but brings him more tightly into Gould’s orbit. Forrester becomes a traveller in the low-flying aircraft, in the front cockpit, ‘with the draught of the propeller full in his face’.[30]

They fly low over the landscape where Gould sprays the luminescent paint to assist blind mutant cattle to find feeding grounds. Gould reveals to Forrester the new world, soon to be inaccessible, but where he is attempting to leave some mark, some action that will promote the future. He is painting the roads to lead the way:

Gould banked the aircraft and flew low over the valley floor, not more than twenty feet above the creature. Forrester was speculating on how this sightless creature, clearly a mutant, had managed to survive, when there was a sudden jolt below his feet. The ventral spraying head had been lowered, and a moment later a huge gust of silver paint was vented into the air and fanned out behind them. It hung in a luminescent cloud, and then settled to form a narrow brush-stroke down the side of the mountain. [31]

Gould and Forrester do not touch down in this landscape, however, and Ballard inflects the figure of ‘low-flying aircraft’ in a new way, as a viewpoint of an unattainable landscape, that is also to be seen in Dali’s paintings.[32] It is as though Gould collects these paintings as maps or contours to follow, or as pavilions of the future. They are maps of the spaces of desire that Ballard also makes with his description of the low flight over the valley. Despite the fact that they will not see the future that Gould is mapping, they are touched by its distant vision. When the two of them return from their flight, ‘Gould’s helmet, and flying-suit, and his own face and shoulders, shone like mirrors, as if they had just alighted from the sun’.[33]

Gould has discovered that the exposed optic nerves and deformed genitalia of the newborns is an evolutionary adjustment to prepare for ‘some overlit world’ to come. He tells Forrester that Carmen ‘has a huge collection of watches with luminous dials, hundreds of them, that she’s been filching for years from the shops. She’s got them all working together but to different times, it’s some sort of gigantic computer.’[34] Carmen has made her own time machine, a computer of luminous watches. She will inherit a future to which the Forresters and Gould will have no access.

Ironically, Forrester works for a United Nations agency ‘making inventories of the huge stockpiles of foodstuffs, pharmaceuticals, consumer durables, and industrial raw materials that lay about in warehouses and rail terminals’.[35] He, like Ballard, is a list maker, but his lists are useless in the context of a population apparently unconcerned about its demise. ‘For thirty years they had been matter-of-factly slaughtering their children and closing down the western hemisphere like a group of circus workers dismantling their tents and killing their animals at the season’s end.’ [36] His lists are inventories of the past, used to anchor the population to the ground that has already shifted.

The title of the story focuses the image of aircraft that Ballard uses to bring together memory, sex, desire, the near future and the death of affect. Forrester secretly gives their deformed newborn child to Carmen. The story does not speculate about what might happen in the future; it comments on the near future, a present where all the requirements for survival are in oversupply, but the dislocation of affect in the technological present brings death. The images of an aircraft, taking off from the crumbling runways, and its low flight over a new country to mark the causeways into the future, are Ballard’s interventions in the technologically figured landscape of the time.



Part IV. ‘The Ultimate City’ (1976)

Ballard wrote his futuristic story ‘The Ultimate City’ in 1976, at the time of the international energy crisis and the growth of ecological and ‘back to nature’ movements. In this story Ballard works the future back into the visible zone of the near future. It deals with its implications for industrial technology, and compares the ‘pastoral paradise’ of Garden City — the ‘shot-gun marriage of Arcadia and advanced technology’ — with the derelict technologies of the twentieth century. The story’s protagonist, eighteen-year old Halloway, builds a glider from blueprints left by his father and flies across the sound that separated the ‘scientifically designed agrarian society’ from the glass towered city, which had been abandoned when fossil fuel supplies were exhausted. Despite the sustainability and sophistication of the solar and wind powered technologies that support the inhabitants of Garden City, the heroic technologies of the past intrigue Halloway. They inspire him to make the flight to ‘the ultimate city’. As a child he had watched his father working with his collection of old internal combustion engines and had been fascinated by their power:

Once, as a boy of ten, he had entered his father’s workshop and found him running an old gasolene [sic] engine. The violent but controlled noise, the juddering motion that shook the work-bench, and timber walls, and the heady fumes like a black gas –- an intoxicating smell at once dirty and exhilarating –- had almost knocked him off his feet. What he remembered above all, before his father switched of the engine and crated it away for the last time, was the overwhelming energy of this machine, the power and excitement beyond anything else in their sophisticated Arcadia. And yet, as his father told him, this was no more than the power unit of a small lawn-mower. [37]

This scene is a fractured prelude to the ‘primal scene’ of the death of Halloway’s parents, who are burned to death in their sauna, killed by ‘the over-loaded circuitry’ of the solar device that powered the house. Halloway bitterly recalls the fact that there is no vehicle fast enough to transport his dying parents to hospital in time to save them. He avoids returning to his home after their deaths:

The charred remains of the sauna where his mother and father had died lay untouched below the derelict sail of the solar rig. The hundreds of occluded mirrors, fused by the intense heat of the fire, towered fifty feet above the calcinated roof tiles, an all too melancholy memorial. [38]

The destruction of his parents leaves Halloway outside the protection and order of the family. Like Jim in Empire of the Sun he is an experimental figure, a character Ballard deploys in a situation to observe the outcome. Both characters partly escape the rule of their fathers, and are attracted to the glamour of the near future. In Halloway’s case this means a return to the futurism of the high-rise city. Fatherless, but using his father’s designs, he constructs his own wings to return to its forbidden labyrinth. This is an ironic inversion of the Icarus myth, and, as Umberto Rossi points out, ‘an ironic, deranged re-reading of Shakespeare’s The Tempest’.[39] He is inspired by the relics of the ‘petroleum age’ and the ‘half-completed skeleton of a small glider’ he finds in his dead father’s workshop, and by the memory of the ‘power and excitement’ he had experienced years before.[40] Although the city had ground to a halt, it is ‘an abandoned dream waiting to be re-occupied’.[41] Flight to the ultimate city, is, like the imagined flight of Melville in ‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’, a journey to the origins of the modern self.

Ballard creates a topography of this story that is similar to that of Lunghua camp and the towers of Shanghai that he writes about eight years later in Empire of the Sun. Garden City is comparable to the Civilian Assembly Centre, and the ‘Ultimate City’ to the modernist city of Shanghai. Garden City, with its false innocence and the CAC are like theme parks, communities of rules, roles and delusion.

Instead of the sound that separates Garden City from the ultimate city, there is a dangerous territory of canals and burial grounds at Lunghua. Halloway’s relationship to his community is also not unlike that of Jim Graham to the adults in the camp in Empire of the Sun. Each has a place in the community but unparented, neither is locked into his place. These comparisons add to the Freudian tenor of ‘The Ultimate City’, in which the exhilaration of flight is associated with the compulsion of the power of the engines. Ballard describes his flight using figures from World War II as Halloway flies his glider above the beaches of Garden City:

Looking down at the spectators with their picnic hampers among the dunes, the officials gazing at the sky from their canvas chairs, Halloway imagined himself as a World War II fighter ace, diving out of the sun and raking these amiable neighbours with bursts of machine-gun fire. The whole bucolic landscape of Garden City, this elegant but toy-like world of solar sails and flower-filled gardens, the serene windmills and gently nodding reduction gear of the tidal-power machines –- all these cried out for a Pearl Harbour. [42]

Halloway’s adolescent fantasies have their origins in, and derive their imagery from, the technological spectacle of the war. They are accessible though flight as it is flight that brings the images into being.

Early in his travels in the Ultimate City, Halloway comes across a scene of destruction:

When he reached the side-street he found the roadway littered with human figures. Masonry and broken glass sections of store window as large as his sailplane’s wings, lay among the crushed flowers. Most of the clothing stores that lined both side of this narrow street had been attacked, their glass fronts and window displays ripped out by some giant implement.

Everywhere the plastic mannequins lay in the sunlight, limbs crushed by the tracks of the machine, polite expressions looking up from the glass and masonry. [43]

In their stillness and silence these moments transvalue objects, enabling the connection to be made between their role as fetishes of consumer culture and the origins of destructive technologies.[44] This is a familiar scene in Ballard’s fiction. He uses it again in ‘News From the Sun’ (1981), in which Franklin, upon finding an arrangement of mannequins left by his antagonist Slade, comments that they are:

The timeless people, the only mementoes of homo sapiens when we’ve all gone, waiting here with their idiotic smiles for the first stellar visitor. [45]

Ballard may have encountered the aftermath of the bombing of Avenue Edward VII, Shanghai, in 1937, although, as Pringle points out, it is unlikely that he would have done so on his own.[46] It is more likely that he encountered newspaper or other images of the bombing, and overheard adult conversations about it at the time. The potent image of the dead as mannequins, in which there is a doubling back of imagery (the dead become mannequins which become the dead) traces the relationship between consumer culture and technological death. The mannequin thus functions rather like the kamikaze pilot prefigured in Ernst’s cyborg collage Untitled (Aeroplane) (1920), it is a hybrid form, except that the human flesh is displaced or concealed by the artificial. It remains as potential, however, to reveal the way that war requires a technological spectacle of itself.

Another strategy that Ballard employs to drive his experiments is to make his characters both ingenuous and devious. Olds, whom Halloway encounters in the abandoned city, is damaged and disfigured by being run down by a car, the ‘last traffic accident casualty’ at the end of the twentieth century. Like other pilot figures in Ballard’s fiction he is scarred, and his injuries have compelled him to adapt to the new conditions. Like the recurring figure of the H-bomb pilot he is a human-technological hybrid. The tension in this figure is also that of the figure of man-powered flight. The injuries he suffers are, however, transformative. A cross-pollination of technology and flesh has taken place to produce this new hybrid, who has evolved to survive. He is a distant figure, an archangel whom Halloway finally realizes he must follow. As Olds prepares for flight he creates an electronic taxonomy of birds, moving from flightless birds to ‘eagle, osprey, falcon… Fulmar, albatross, flamingo, frigate-bird, condor.’[47] This taxonomy is listed with the instructions for flying the powered aircraft that Olds finally commands. It charts the relationship between ‘nature’ and technology in such a way that it releases Olds from the trap of the consumer city. That is to say, his taxonomy refigures the order of things to shake loose the power of the fetish.

The aircraft is one that Halloway’s father has designed but Halloway does not realize its potential until Olds points this out. Olds is necessary to the final completion of the initial project of flight. His scarring and injuries are marks of his transformation from paternal figure (Halloway’s father) to mute archangel of machine technologies. Halloway’s parents are burned to death, but Olds flies from the flames ‘into the secure sky’. The story is both a wry comedy about the adolescent Halloway’s inability to deal with his own Oedipal relations — the hideous primal scene of his parents’ death by fire in the sauna — and a comparative analysis of technologies. Flight is a motif that ties these two tendencies together. Halloway becomes obsessed with the notion of recovering the derelict city, even though its finitude is undeniable. Garden City, on the other hand, is a paradoxical place. It is a place of ‘renewable’ power, but the death that lives in this Arcadia makes the finitude of human existence all the more obvious. As the American environmental artist Robert Smithson points out in a commentary on landscape and art, ‘The certainty of the absolute garden will never be regained.’[48] Ballard argues in this story that only the redefinition of technology’s place in the ecology of all things is liberating:

Wings?
Mixture rich, carburettor heat cold.
Sparrow, wren, robin, hummingbird… [49]

All kinds of flight or machines of flight, space flight, the flight of powered machines and the derelict shells of military aircraft, and ultra-light craft have a role to play in the evolution of the psyche in Ballard’s fiction. Etienne Marey’s ‘analysis of the different acts in the flight of the bird’ and his attempt ‘to be able to imitate, more or less imperfectly, this admirable type of aërial locomotion’ is also a figure of this impossible contradiction — or figure of desire — to escape the limitations of the human. Man powered flight is the archaeopteryx, the dream figure that links them, and is an exemplary figure of the relationship between humans and technology. It is the essential contradiction in that humans must overpower nature in order to fly, but they must also achieve the impossible and imitate nature to do so. This is the meaning of Olds’ taxonomy, which neatly bypasses this opposition by awarding everything the same status. Nonetheless, as observed in Crash, intervention in the relationship between humans and technology is also an intervention into the realm of affect.



Part V.  ‘News from the Sun’ (1981)

The recurring character of the deranged pilot is both menacing and appealing to the protagonists of Ballard’s fictions. They frequently negotiate their relationships through a female character and a flying machine. Ballard anatomizes these characters and displays their distinct selves to expose the currents of attraction and repulsion running between them. He thus presents an anatomy of desire, the traces of which are the tracks of the technological in human life. His method is illuminated in the imagery of multiplication and replication that appears in the stories.

Like Melville, in ‘My Dream of Flying’, the characters in ‘News From the Sun’ (1981) experience the gradual draining of time in the form of fugues. The equivalence of flight and fugue is both alarming and appealing. The flight, in this case a year-long space flight, has ‘cracked the cosmic hour-glass’. The story is accordingly another example of Ballard’s ‘attempt to get beyond Time into a different Realm’.[50] The central character is not a pilot but a doctor, and Ballard creates a mental landscape of a clinic in the desert to experiment with the possibility of the removal of time and its effects. Flight, in this case space flight, is the evolutionary catalyst in this:

After his arrival at the clinic Franklin’s first patient was a badly burned fighter pilot who had taxied his jet through the doors of the hangar. The second was one of the last of the astronauts, a former naval captain named Trippett. The pilot was soon beyond reach in a perpetual dusk, but Trippett had hung on, lucid for a few minutes each day. Franklin had learned a great deal from Trippett, the last man to have walked on the moon and the last to hold out against the fugues – all the early astronauts had long since retreated into a timeless world. The hundreds of fragmentary conversations, and the mysterious guilt that Trippett shared with his colleagues, like them weeping in his dreams, convinced Franklin that the sources of the malaise were to be found in the space programme itself. [51]

As in other stories flying figures menace the peripheral vision of the main character, and threats of kidnap and other treachery add intrigue to the plot. A Ballardian set of antagonisms and alliances structures the character relations. The protagonist Franklin[52] is a physician at a clinic dealing with the victims of ‘space sickness’. The clinic, like the laboratories of other Ballardian settings, is a provisional, experimental setting. It is in the desert, guarded by cameras and populated by experts, pseudo experts and the wandering patients. Trippett, a former astronaut, whose name clearly echoes that of Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay, is one of these. He is a kind of Lear figure, nursed and protected by his daughter, Ursula, on this beach of time, the desert. Franklin’s antagonist, the menacing Slade, pilots the low-flying aircraft of this story, pursuing Franklin and eventually kidnapping Trippett.

Slade’s aircraft is described as an irritant, ‘a demented gnat, minute engine buzzing up a storm, its wired wings strung around an open fuselage’.[53] Although a ‘failed astronaut’, barred from space flight, Slade bears the signs of other kinds of flight:

His eyes surveyed Franklin with the ever-alert but curiously dead gaze of the psychopath. His pallid skin was almost luminous, as if after ending his career as an astronaut he had made some private pact with the sun. A narrow lap belt held him to the seat, but his shoulders bore the scars of a strange harness ‑ the restraining straps of a psychiatric unit, Franklin guessed, or some kind of sexual fetishism. [54]

Although he is a psychopath, or because he is a master of fiction, Slade has the ability to identify and articulate the conditions of other characters in the form of the ‘shrines’ he constructs at the clinic. These assemblages are ‘relics of a yet to be experienced future’, and the one which is associated with Franklin is preserved after Slade is expelled from the clinic:

Franklin opened the centre drawer of his desk and stared at the assemblage laid out like a corpse on its bier of surgical cotton. There was a labelled fragment of lunar rock stolen from the NASA museum in Houston; a photograph taken with a zoom lens of Marion in a hotel bathroom, her white body almost merging into the tiles of the shower stall; a faded reproduction of Dali’s Persistence of Memory, with its soft watches and expiring embryo; a set of leucotomes whose points were masked by metal peas; and an emergency organ-donor card bequeathing to anyone in need his own brain. Together they formed an accurate anti-portrait of all Franklin’s obsessions, a side-chapel of his head. But Slade had always been a keen observer, more interested in Franklin than in anyone else. [55]

Ballard’s writing is obsessively concerned with the permeability of the membrane between humans and the outer realm, the traffic of images through this, and the frottage that results. His objects and groupings in Slade’s shrine indicate the conditions of Franklin’s existence, like other assemblages in his fiction, and suggest more broadly the late twentieth century conditions of thought, action and desire.

Similarly the perimeter camera is a transformative device used to establish the correspondences between the patients at the clinic and the surrounding landscape. Franklin considers whether they could ‘take an aerial photograph of the Sahara and Gobi deserts, reverse the process and reconstitute the vast figure of some sleeping goddess, an Aphrodite born from a sea of dunes’. He photographs objects and the naked patients ‘in the hope of finding the dimension of time locked in those undulating spaces’.[56] The figure of simultaneity further helps to keep the membrane permeable. The removal of ‘clock time’ from the consciousness of characters establishes the possibility of movement out of time. In the photographs of the patients:

Their splayed features and distorted anatomies resembled the nightmarish jumble seen by all patients if they were deliberately roused from their fugues by powerful stimulants or electric shock – oozing forms in an elastic world, giddying and unpleasant. Without time, a moving face seemed to smear itself across the air, the human body became a surrealist monster. [57]

As the sickness progresses the characters have access to the ‘real world beyond the clock, serial time gave way to simultaneity’. One palm tree becomes many, and the figure of Trippett’s daughter Ursula multiplies among the palm trees as Franklin approaches the paradise that has appeared in the desert. Ballard’s methodology is again that of the scientist-curator, displaying cultural and natural objects in all their comparative possibilities. As in The Atrocity Exhibition, the experimental characters experiment on each other to produce the effect of a mise en abŷme.

Franklin’s wife Marion is moved in and out of Franklin’s field of vision. She is figured against the bathroom mirror or tiles, and, like Karen Novotny in The Atrocity Exhibition, is deployed experimentally. Like so many of the female characters in Ballard’s fiction she is frequently distant, on the one hand a figure to be rescued or recovered, on the other she is a co-incidence of angles and relationships giving definition to architectural and natural spaces. Franklin observes her trying to extract a contact lens from her eyelid:

Franklin waited for her to reply, but Marion sat raptly in front of the mirror, lens case in one hand, fingers retracting her upper and lower eyelids around the trapped lens. Fused with her own reflection in the finger-stained glass, she seemed to be shooting the sun with a miniature sextant, finding her bearings in this city of empty mirrors. [58]

He then considers how he can use her to help him escape:

The planes of her thighs and shoulders were segments of a secret runway along which he would one day fly to safety. [59]

Ballard arranges female bodies textually, to analyze, in their fetishization, the psychoanalytical relations between characters. In order to do this, he presents relationships between male and female characters as articulated by technology. Usually presented from the male character’s point of view, his female opposite is distant, enchanted or sleeping, or in some way estranged. Not quite an archetypal seductress, mother or Beatrice figure, she is nonetheless figured in mythic terms, as in the recurring Orphic scenes. The reiterative association between female bodies and technological landscapes or interiors in his writing is an artificial strategy. It reveals that estrangement is the general condition of all relationships, and this estrangement is an effect of technology.

Other passages in ‘News From the Sun’ suggest correspondences or continuities between flesh and landscape, and imminent evolutionary change. Earlier Trippett is revived by his desert excursion where he has:

taken a touching pleasure in the derelict landscape, in the abandoned motels and weed-choked swimming pools of the small town near the air-base, in the silent runways with their dusty jets sitting on flattened tyres, in the over-bright hills waiting with the infinite guile of the geological kingdom for the organic world to end and a more vivid mineral realm to begin. [60]

Franklin suspects that the terrifying changes that are occurring as a result of humans’ ‘breach of the rules governing the tenancy of the universe’[61] and that the loss of time is an appropriate punishment for this breach. Nonetheless he also wonders if the changes are not an indication of a positive evolutionary movement. He writes in his diary:

Must get out of this motel more often. A curious by-product of the fugues is that I am losing all sense of urgency. Sat here for the last three days, calmly watching time run through my fingers. Almost convinces me that the fugues are a good thing, a sign that some great biological step forward is about to take place, set off by the space flights. [62]

He reflects that time is simply a means of coping with the vastness of the ‘event system’ that surrounds man. Not only is man different from other creatures in his notion of time, but parts of his own physiology understand time differently: The body is itself a museum of evolution.[63]

Even the materials of my body and the lower levels of my brain have a very different sense of time from my cerebrum – that uninvited guest within my skull. [64]

He considers the past, and its manifestation in dust and dried leaves, ‘part of an immense granary of past time whose doors we can open with the right key’.[65] But he feels a ‘nostalgia for the future’, which is contained in the present in the form of ‘near future’:

In our lives we try to repeat those significant events which have already taken place in the future. [66]

These ideas arise from Franklin’s attempts in his diary to maintain some kind of hold on his consciousness as his daily loss of time increases. He is then drawn to the desert commune of Soleri II and is cared for by Ursula until the dramatic apotheosis of Slade and Trippett. Franklin returns to the air base clinic, where he waits alone, above the empty runways ‘learning the language of the birds, waiting for his wife to emerge from the runways and bring him news of the sun.’[67]

In ‘News From the Sun’ space flight is shown, as elsewhere in Ballard’s fiction, to produce ‘space sickness’. Flight, however, is liberating when it is achieved through the reordering of the phyla of technology and nature. The power of technology to do harm is dissolved when the opposition between nature and technology is deconstructed and difference is dispersed into a taxonomy that does not assign power differentially:

All the light in the universe had come here to greet him, an immense congregation of particles. [68]



Go to: Part II of Chapter Seven

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] H. G. Wells, ‘My First Aeroplane’, (Strand Magazine: 1910; London: Ernest Benn Ltd, 1927), 627.

[2] J. G. Ballard, ‘Airports: The Cities of the Future’, Blueprint: Architecture, Design and Contemporary Culture, September 1997, No. 142, 26-29, 26.

[3] ‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’, (Ambit, 1974), The Complete Short Stories, 811-19, 817.

[4] Interviewed by David Pringle, Thrust, Winter 1980, excerpt quoted in ‘Quotations from Ballard’, V. Vale and A. Juno, (eds.) J.G. Ballard, RE/Search no. 8/9, (San Francisco, RE/Search, 1984/1991), 154-164, 164.

[5] ‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’, 817.

[6] In Sam Scoggins’ film, The Unlimited Dream Company, (1983), ‘Quotations from Ballard’, 162.

[7] J. G. Ballard ‘Interview with Graeme Revell’, (1983) in V. Vale and A. Juno, 42-52, 44.

[8] ‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’, 818.

[9] Ibid. 819.

[10] Ibid. 811.

[11] Ibid. 813.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid. 818.

[14] ‘Interview with Graeme Revell’, 47.

[15] ‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’, 814.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid. 817.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid. 819.

[20] André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: Ann Arbor Paperbacks, University of Michigan Press, 1972), 31-2.

[21] The Drowned World, 83-4.

[22] ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’, (Bananas, 1975), The Complete Short Stories, 828-40, 828.

[23] Interview in Runcie, Shanghai Jim.

[24] ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’, 833.

[25] Ibid. 832.

[26] Ibid. 830.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Perhaps Ballard was thinking about this when, to the embarrassment of his teenaged daughters, he strolled around Shepperton in his silver painted shoes. Beatrice and Fay Ballard interviewed in Runcie, Shanghai Jim.

[30] Ibid. 837. This flight prefigures the ride in the Millennium Wheel taken by the protagonist of Millennium People, (London: Flamingo, 2003) with the Dr Gould of that novel. 123-5

[31] Ibid. 838.

[32] Ballard repaints Dali’s landscapes in the story from memories of his holiday visits to the setting: ‘If you can afford to rent a car you can go to Figueras, which is not that far—about 100 miles. It’s Dali’s home town, with a Dali museum. If you go about 10 miles further you can go to Cadaques, where Dali lives, which is worth visiting for its own sake. All the landscapes resemble the giant, lizard-like forms that you get in Dali’s paintings — you actually see them: “My god, he just sat on his porch and just painted those ancient rocks!”… We’d go to a place called Roscas, near Cadaques, which Dali has used in several of his paintings.’ ‘Interview with J.G. Ballard’, V. Vale and A. Juno, 24.

[33] ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’, 838.

[34] Ibid. 839.

[35] Ibid. 833.

[36] Ibid. 833.

[37] ‘The Ultimate City’, (Low-Flying Aircraft, 1976), The Complete Short Stories, 873-924, 878-9.

[38] Ibid. 874.

[39] Umberto Rossi, ‘Images from the Disaster Area: An Apocalyptic Reading of Urban Landscapes in Ballard’s The Drowned World and Hello America’, Science Fiction Studies, No 62, Volume 21, Part 1, March 1994 reproduced at http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/62/rossi62art.htm

[40] ‘The Ultimate City’, 879.

[41] Ibid. 876.

[42] Ibid. 875.

[43] Ibid. 885.

[44] Another moment occurs in the aftermath of the atomic bomb explosion witnessed by Jim at the Olympic Stadium. See above, Chapter 3.

[45] ‘News From the Sun’, (Ambit, 1981), The Complete Short Stories, 1010-1036, 1024.

[46] David Pringle, ‘Fact and Fiction in J. G. Ballard’s The Kindness of Women’, JGB News Number 20 August 1993

[47] ‘The Ultimate City’, 921.

[48] Robert Smithson, (1968), ‘A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects’, Vanishing Points, (Stockholm: Stockholm Moderna Museet, 1984), 180.

[49] ‘The Ultimate City’, 921.

[50] J. G. Ballard, Interview by Catherine Bresson, Métaphores, 1983, ‘Quotations from Ballard’, 163.

[51] ‘News from the Sun’, 1019.

[52] The name is suggestive of the nineteenth century polar explorer John Franklin, just as ‘Melville’ invokes maritime romance.

[53] ‘News from the Sun’, 1013.

[54] Ibid. 1013-14.

[55] Ibid. 1016.

[56] Ibid. 1018.

[57] Ibid. 1019.

[58] Ibid. 1023.

[59] Ibid.

[60] Ibid. 1011.

[61] Ibid. 1019.

[62] Ibid. 1025.

[63] This idea, that the residues of evolutionary history are registered in human anatomies, in particular in the supposed development of the embryo through stages from fish to mammal, is an old one. The discredited theory of ‘recapitulation’ that is, that ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’ was formulated in Haeckel’s Law. The similarities between phylogeny and ontogeny are only superficially demonstrated. In ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ Dr Nathan writes of Travis’s reflections on ‘Goethe’s notion that the skull is formed of modified vertebrae–similarly, the bones of the pelvis may constitute the remains of a lost sacral skull’. The Atrocity Exhibition, 14.

[64] ‘News From the Sun’, 1025.

[65] Ibid.

[66] Ibid. 1026.

[67] Ibid. 1036.

[67] Ibid.

[68] Ibid.