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 Chapter Three, Part I: ‘Amorous Memories’: Surrealism and Ballard’s ‘disaster trilogy’
Part I. Introduction: natural histories Ballard returns to the subject of surrealism frequently in his interviews and critical writing.[2] He has a particular interest in ‘chrono-visual’ effects in art, commenting, for example, on the ‘the time-saturated’ works of the Surrealists.[3] In the early 1980s he recalls the fascination he had with surrealism in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a time that he claimed was marked by an English lack of interest in it:
Ballard’s memories of the reactions to surrealism in some ways echo Herbert Read’s comments in his introduction to his book Surrealism,[5] which was published in response to The International Surrealist Exhibition, held over ten years before Ballard’s first encounter with surrealism, at the Burlington Galleries, London in 1936. Read comments:
Read goes on to discuss the positive public reactions to the show, but this is presented in the context of England’s ‘electrifyingly dry intellectual atmosphere’. The exhibition stirred ‘our sluggish minds to wonder, enchantment and derision’. Surrealism, despite its English adherents and practitioners, is thus figured as something other, foreign and challenging. Ballard exaggerates this as a means of distinguishing his own practice from that of much English post-war writing. Doubtless he read Surrealism, which contained ninety-six black and white plates. These include Max Ernst’s Two children menaced by a Nightingale (1922), Human Figure (1931), Garden Aeroplane-trap (1934), The Chinese Nightingale (1920), and a sculpture, Tête double (1936). One of the works reproduced in the book was René Magritte’s La femme introuvable, (1928) which was shown in the Lefevre Gallery in 1953, an exhibition seen by Ballard.[7] Other Magritte paintings, Quand l’heure sonnera, (1933), On the Threshold of Liberty (1930), and The Red Model (1935), were reproduced with works by Miro, Duchamp, Dominguez, Tanguy, Picasso, Arp, Klee and Man Ray. British artists whose works were reproduced included Henry Moore, Roland Penrose and Paul Nash. The exhibition also included a number of De Chirico works, and four by Salvador Dali. These were Daybreak (1930), La profanation de l’hostie (nd), Suburbs of the paranoiac-critical Town (1935) and Drawing (1936). But for the absence of works by Delvaux, Read’s Surrealism made a considerable volume and range of representative works accessible to any member of a public library in the forties and fifties.[8] Surrealism continued in its British form through the persistent sponsorship of Read, and the work of Roland Penrose, Conroy Maddox and others in the forties and fifties. The latter held meetings and exhibitions in London, and in Birmingham, where Ballard stayed with his grandparents after the war. There was an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in April 1953, called The Wonder and Horror of the Human Head: An Anthology, which showed some surrealist work, including Magritte’s Le viol (1934), and L’avenir des statues (1931). In the early sixties several galleries (Obelisk 1961, Brook Street 1962, and Hanover, 1964) held exhibitions of surrealist works. Ballard’s memories are partly substantiated in that surrealism is, by definition, a radical movement. Nonetheless it was not inaccessible in the period of Ballard’s late adolescence and early adulthood, and its British protagonists, though eccentric, were respected critics and collectors. Among the art of the Surrealists that intrigued Ballard, Ernst’s work and its effects were important to his creative synthesis of surrealism and other later movements like Pop Art, and Situationism. He comments on the ‘time-saturated’ quality of Ernst’s frottages, and works which deploy a development of this method, such as decalcomania or grattage, in which the artist uses traces of pre-existing surfaces and textures to produce images. Breton describes decalcomania as taking:
Ballard comments on the effects of this method in a note ‘The Assassination Weapon’ in The Atrocity Exhibition:[10]
Ernst describes frottage and its effects:
Ernst writes that his frottage involves ‘the intensification of the irritability of the mind’s faculties by appropriate technical means’.[12] It is the ‘true equivalent of that which is already known as automatic writing’. It does not stop at this, however. The method enables the artist to ‘project what is visible within him’ but implies an open traffic between inner and outer worlds. Ernst would mark the paper in some way, and work creatively against the marks, enabling the persistent rush of images to appear like ‘amorous memories’. He describes the method in violent terms, and frottage implies violence in its suggestion of chafing, irritation or abrasion. The floorboards first used by him are worn with ‘a thousand scrubbings’, the ‘irritability’ of the ‘mind’s faculties’ is intensified, and the use of paint in the method involves ‘scraping pigment on to a colour-prepared foundation placed on an uneven surface’. The violence is in the creative process; which is threefold. Firstly there is the rubbing, secondly the peeling of the image to expose the ‘monstrous soul’ of what is ‘visible within’, and thirdly, as in decalcomania, the imaginative investigations and formations of the artist or viewer, or ‘spectator’ at ‘the birth’ of the work, which may sadistically violate the image that results from the original action. This process also underpins the making and effects of Ernst’s collages, which may be read through an understanding of the physical processes of frottage or decalcomania. Collage is used to provoke associations and to suggest contradictions and thus makes visible what is otherwise ideologically elided. In contrast to the collage now commonly seen in advertising, shocking or appealing new juxtapositions of objects are not the only aim or result in Ernst’s work. In collage, the violent or erotic relocation of objects carries with them the memory of their origins, and of the spaces from which they come, revealing the relations between the body, the visual, and the technological, and the play of power through these. In Ernst’s books, La Femme 100 Têtes (1929) and Le Semaine de Bonté (1934), a natural history of capitalism in which he dislocates bourgeois domestic scenes and juxtaposes them to elemental and other imagery. Ballard similarly textualizes the impressions that literalize one of our most entrenched metaphors for perception and memory. These methods clearly appeal to him in his fictions, where he too collapses the boundaries between inner and outer worlds to create an ‘inner space’, not a space of pure interiority, but one in which the traffic between these worlds can be observed. It is emphatically the domain made visible by the textualization of colliding worlds of another kind, of human flesh and technology. A direct comparison may be made of Ballard’s textualizing of colliding worlds and Ernst’s method, which is in part devised in response to ‘a virginity complex’, Ernst’s stated fear of ‘an empty space’.[13] The space is a screen in the sense that it is the ground upon which the intersection of inner and outer occurs, and it is the screen that conceals, until it is peeled back by the process of making. In using pre-existing materials, be these collage images or the rubbings of frottage, Ernst is giving himself something to work against, and a way of maintaining in his work a dialogue with the outer world. Ernst’s method is dialectical, in the sense that it brings together contradictory elements, and the dialectical process is generative, giving the two-dimensional space of the page the power to create a diagram of the contact between the human psyche and the outer world. This is what Ballard uses in his fiction making. Freudian psychoanalytical ideas are omnipresent in surrealism. The imagery of the Oedipus Complex, or of primal scenes and of dreams, such as in Two children menaced by a nightingale (1922), recurs throughout Ernst’s work and that of other Surrealists. Desire and obsession drive Surrealist methods and the content of their writing and image making. Ballard adapts these Freudian ideas to deal with the post-war technological environment. For Ballard, the Oedipus Complex is recreated by ‘coming to terms with the angle between two walls—that’s where the Oedipus Complex resides today: in the styling of an automobile dashboard.’[14] The myth of Euclidean order is counterpoised to organic forms to suggest that to separate the two would be a wrench of flesh and blood, dismemberment or wounding, that Ballard textualizes in The Crystal World (1966) and other fiction. The outer world is technological, and is frequently expressed in Ernst’s work by means of disturbing perspectives of domestic interiors. These perspectives locate and relocate the ‘natural’ material of leaves, birds, animals and the human figure, and time moves through the intervening spaces, sometimes trapped, at others soaring in a vertiginous spiral. Ballard writes using the devices of collage to produce the effects of frottage. He gathers details, images, dictions, events and situations, and orders them so as to display their imprint as mental landscapes. Like Ernst and other surrealists he reveals the connection of human action and desire to technology at a particular moment, and both exploits and demonstrates a basic contradiction in human experience:
He works with this tension between the facts experienced by human beings and the knowledge that life is itself an accident.[16] His method uses the juxtapositions and contradictions revealed in Ernst’s frottage. Like Ernst in his ‘natural history’, Ballard uses a scientific model to describe fiction:
Writing about Ernst’s landscapes, Ballard states that the ‘neural counterparts of these images must exist within our brains’.[18] That is the attraction for Ballard, the idea that the latent quality of things may be made manifest in writing and painting. Ballard’s method is to analyse and to imagine the physical and physiological world as though it is a dream, and to arrange its parts so as to reproduce the dreamwork of condensation and displacement, as in a collage. His writing is a map, or a medical scan of the impact of the world outside the body on the blood, tissues and electrical impulses of the brain and cerebral cortex. Ballard uses a variation of Ernst’s method for making his texts. He takes existing material, for example myth, literature, historical events, television images, surrealist painting, suburban experience, and works with (and about) these, to enable the same compulsive erotic rush of amorous memories. The reader encounters this mix, which is part of the creative process by which the work is made. Above all Ballard insists on the pursuit of his own obsessions, which he understands to be those of his time. He can thus work as a maker of myths. Myths occur at the intersection of inner and outer worlds, the zone of subjectivation, in Ballard’s work. His surrealism charts this process in a myth of the present, set in the not-to-distant future, where the instability of technological modernity manifests itself. He places humankind in geological history, acknowledging the significance of human time, but negotiating the difference between this and the terrifying distances of geological time. Mythmaking can be defined as the negotiation of the relationship between human consciousness and its experience of the outer world, whether it be ‘a mythology that starts now and runs forward’,[19] or a mythology of origins. Myths coalesce with their repetitions and Ballard makes his myths to form patterns that reveal recurring encounters between humans and technology. He makes this relationship obvious in fictions of ecological events. Ballard’s novels The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1964), and The Crystal World (1966), form a trilogy of environmental disaster.[20] In the first of these he presented the future in terms of an amniotic past, applying the psychoanalytic methods usually used to investigate the past, to examine a possible future. In the second, he drained this world to expose its geometry, to quantify the conditions of human existence. In the third, he returned to the jungle setting that also appealed to the Surrealists, and established a mental landscape of contagion, a place where he could explore the meaning of time and its effects. Ballard’s disasters are not the cautionary disasters of dystopic science fiction, but rather textualize the conditions of existence. He uses them to expose an encounter between flesh and technology that is made visible in extraordinary conditions. They are a pretext for his reworking of myths and memory. In his frottage, myths and memory are patterns of repetition and obsession that emerge in the incessant traffic between inner and outer worlds. They are the fictions of the persistence of certain images and ideas in his fiction, a textualized coalescence of his personal experience and the events of his time. Part II: ‘Hot Cauldron of Time and Myth’: The Drowned World
Ballard wrote The Drowned World,[22] in the early 1960s during a period of heightened Cold War paranoia. In the novel, scientists, including the protagonist Kerans, are conducting a biological survey of a flooded city, under military supervision.[23] An inundated world heated by an expanding sun offers scope for a range of fantasies and dream scenarios, and for a traffic of memory and myth to move between the body and psyches of characters, and the world that they inhabit. Ballard connects with the obsessional images of his time by specific strategies. He arrives at his collage method in a non-literary context. Using the metaphor of the sea creature, as he does later in The Unlimited Dream Company,[24] he speaks of his appropriation of scientific material from the waste paper basket of the Chemistry Society journal Chemistry & Industry, where he was assistant editor in the 1950s:
Ballard also feeds on the plankton of mythology. Myths of return to amniotic origins, underworld figures, myths of transformation, images of half-human, half-animal figures, and scenes that appear as images of Greek or Roman myth, are used for their psychoanalytic properties, and as fragments of Ballard’s collage. The novel’s landscape is a littoral zone — its first chapter is titled, ‘On the Beach at the Ritz’. The city of London is a series of lagoons, protected from rising seas by walls of silt aggregated by buildings, and invaded by iguanas and other tropical fauna and flora. Beneath the water, the cityscape is a perfect inverse trace, ‘reserved almost intact, like a reflection in a lake that has somehow lost its original.’[26] It is at the intersection of transitional space and time, populated with amphibian life, a context for accelerated change, or in some cases, devolution. This liminality is sometimes identical with the hypnagogic states of surrealism, the spaces between wakefulness and sleep that in Ballard’s case are suggested by his luminary, repetitive Latinate diction, as evidenced in a passage where Kerans looks at an Ernst painting that seems to echo the landscape outside:
In this novel as in The Crystal World, Ballard also demonstrates an interest in the strategies and preoccupations of Joseph Conrad whose Latinate prose style similarly tends to the mesmerising rhythms conducive to hypnagogic states. For example, in Heart of Darkness, ‘shortly after midnight’ Marlow hears the drums which he confuses with his own heartbeat, and leaves the boat to go ashore.
In the chapter ‘Descent into Deep Time’ Kerans experiences the call of the Triassic sun, and feels:
Ballard’s incantatory repetition of participles like ‘beating’, ‘baying’, ‘pounding’ and ‘thudding’, and the erotic diction of rhythm and seduction, ‘pulse’ and ‘mesmeric’, is comparable to such repetitions in Conrad. Kerans wakes later in his cabin:
Less interested than Conrad in the moral adventures of his characters, the contest between good and evil, Ballard rather pursues the ways that characters are prepared to acknowledge and respond to the opportunities for psychic exploration offered by the extreme situations that he textualizes.[31] With the added freight of the history of twentieth century technology, Ballard establishes his narratives within liminal moments, to make visible the informing structures of subjectivity in his replication of the effects of memory. This takes the form of an amniotic dream that is expressed in images of inundation. Ballard positions his characters in relation to a set of images and references to which they and the reader may respond. The allusions to Conrad are part of this set, which includes explicit references to Surrealist works and to myths. Ballard makes a collage of these. He thus writes about surrealism, and uses its methods to produce mental landscapes, the imaginative spaces by which he shapes his characters. Ballard provisions these landscapes with a surrealist grammar in which images are connected to language like ideographs. Paul Nash’s Harbour and Room (1936), which is reproduced in Read,[32] with its angular architectural perspectives juxtaposed to water that intrudes into the foreground, could almost be an illustration to The Drowned World, where ‘the half-submerged white-faced buildings of the 20th century still reflected together in the dark mirror of the water, the two interlocking worlds apparently suspended at some junction in time.…’[33] Ernst’s images of the sun and jungle are explicitly referenced in Ballard’s landscapes of ‘strange mournful beauty… the sombre green-black fronds of the gymnosperms, intruders from the Triassic past’.[34] For example, Kerans watches the sunrise, in a relationship to the sun that anticipates Jim’s solar observations in Empire of the Sun, but which here is an homage to Ernst’s paintings of suns pressing towards the viewer over jungle horizons:
Ballard also draws on the strategies used by Ernst in the water collages from Le Semaine de Bonté, to make myths of time and memory, frottages where he juxtaposes images of water to architecture and human presence, to see what memories might emerge. The effect is similar to that achieved from a close obsessive gaze on the marks made by ‘throwing a sponge soaked with different colours at a wall’,[36] which Ernst links to his own strategies in frottage. One starts to see things. In the case of this novel, the landscape becomes increasingly ‘time saturated’, and filled with zoological promise:
The Drowned World is psychoanalytical in its subject matter of dreams and its descriptions of delusional states. Ballard simulates the delirium of the paranoiac-critical method of surrealism, the ‘Spontaneous method of “irrational knowledge” based on the critical and systematic objectification of delirious associations and interpretations’,[38] in his style and imagery. For example Kerans observes a derelict cemetery, undermined by water, ‘its leaning headstones advancing to their crowns like a party of bathers’[39]. This association of death with bathers, and thus with recreation and leisure recurs in Ballard’s later short story ‘The Dead Time’ (1977). These are images of underworld myth, baptism and judgment, in a paradoxical post-Lapsarian Eden, or the stone paintings of Magritte:[40]
The spilling over, of death into life is one of Ballard’s preoccupations. Images of the dead are again devices that open the borders to inner space, as suggested in their recurrence in the work of Delvaux, whose painting Kerans observes in the apartment of Beatrice Dahl, the only female character in the novel: [42]
Ballard here collages ‘spectral bone-like landscapes’, common in surrealism, with the jungle imagery of Max Ernst. Like the surrealist imagery he deploys in other passages it replicates delirious states. For example Kerans recalls the terror of giant reptiles he has seen, and observes that he exists in a state where the ‘normal’ screens of dreamwork condensation and displacement have been removed:
The world is dissolving back into a huge Mesozoic lake, but while life devolves, the recent past remains present under the surface. The conditions in this narrative are such that the usual barriers of time may be poetically breached, allowing the near future to be accessed by means of compelling amorous memories — images and myths latent in the landscape. Ballard chooses his imagery because it is available in Ernst’s frottages and collages, but also because they are images of inverse nostalgia. Kerans is drawn to travel southwards by the drumming of an inner Triassic sun, which corresponds to the expanding sun in the novel’s landscape, rather than to retreat to the North which is the past. The drowned world is a dream of submersion that paradoxically introduces the future. It is a fantasy of amniotic dissolution, desire and terror. These amorous memories are the cathectic discharge of the landscape that Ballard releases in his insistent imagery and style, his surrealist groupings, juxtapositions and intense looking. Ballard’s diction, with its use of participles to suggest process and persistence, structures the presentation of the self as an object of distance and observation. The body, and the psyche, obey evolutionary rules which the protagonist notes scientifically:
Ballard persists with this idea in other stories; for example, two decades later, in ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (1982), the protagonist Mallory, surrounded by the contagion of ‘space-sickness’, counts his own ribs ‘aware that for the first time he could feel his own kidneys’.[46] This is another tactic Ballard uses to structure his writing as experiment. The reader is presented with figures of observation, documentation and analysis to which in later works like The Atrocity Exhibition, everything is potentially subject. Just as some of his characters experiment with the dismantling of the world around them, Ballard anatomizes his landscapes and characters, to suggest, through repetition, that each fragment, every gesture, shape or volume may be doubled, paired, or otherwise reconfigured in collage.[47] For example he describes a helicopter crash in obsessive detail. This happens in a De Chirico or Magritte-like cityscape consisting of:
The helicopter, ‘with its unstable, insect-like obsessiveness’[49] is a figure of predatory menace, used in the pursuit of the character Hardman. Ballard describes the crash as an unravelling of its structure and power, an obsessive fantasy of technology which he repeats in the crash of the deliquescing helicopter in The Crystal World. These details, lists, inventories and anatomies are part of the dissolution that presents itself in geological and organic transformation, to which characters are physically and psychically subject. Kerans recognizes in his own behaviour a ‘careful preparation for a radically new environment, with its own internal landscape and logic, where old categories of thought would be merely an encumbrance.’[50] Ballard figures a meteorological situation, a ‘specific enabling occasion’, to borrow Said’s phrase,[51] in this case a condition of existence over which one has no control, and to which the characters must adapt or perish, but which also provides an opportunity to make visible the conditions of that struggle. Within these mental landscapes Ballard figures his characters in experimental relationships to one another, and as museums of evolution, ‘experimenting with themselves as if they were dreaming’.[52] Lieutenant Hardman is first to acknowledge the call of ‘neuronic time’ — the temporal version of a mental landscape, ‘where the massive intervals of the geological time-scale calibrated [his] existence.’[53] Kerans observes his ‘accelerated entry into his own “zone of transit”’. [54] Ballard uses his typical strategy of dividing the experiment between two characters, one distant and one close. Hardman is the distant character who leads Kerans into the future. Like the protagonists of The Atrocity Exhibition, he is the subject of psychological experiments, and he is the catalyst to Kerans’ action. Ballard uses him as a forerunner, to lead Kerans to travel ‘the causeways of the Sun’. Kerans is the observer of Hardman and the reader of his messages and the other signs he leaves. They are also models of Ballard the writer, functioning in a dualism of experimenter and subject, ingénue and mentor, in the obsessive pursuit of a shadowy but compelling figure (frequently a pilot or astronaut) that recurs in his work. Ballard’s style in the series of adverbial and participial phrases such as the sentence describing Kerans’ observations of Hardman, produces an incantory effect that matches Hardman’s steady colonisation by the mythology he charts: ‘long after midnight’ — ‘standing in the moonlight’ — ‘beside the helicopter’ — ‘on the roof of the base,’ — ‘looking out across the silent lagoon’.[55] Ballard’s sentences are usually periodic; they tend to consist of a series of phrases containing participial adjectives that modify the sentence, and their full effect is not generated until their conclusion. For example:
Ballard’s imagery adds to the incantory effect, as when Kerans becomes aware of junctures between self and environment, and longs for an immersion or dissolution in nature, to ‘dissolve himself and the ever-present phantoms which attended him like sentinel birds in the cool bower of its magical calm, in the luminous, dragon-green, serpent-haunted sea.’[57] Sometimes these sentences end with a simile left hanging to double the effect of the language that came before it:
In the following case the simile is drawn from the diction of zoological monstrosity, and the image itself is one of repetition; the architecture of the city becomes a terrifying mirror:
In all of these examples the diction is chosen to suggest an amniotic cauldron. Like Ernst, Ballard continually returns to ‘natural history’ for his mythmaking. In the ecological disaster novels, this natural history is that of geology, botany and zoology. In other novels, such as Crash, High-Rise, or Concrete Island, this becomes more specifically the evolution of technology. Ballard describes both in terms of natural forms, where an obsessive tone is produced through repetition and return of diction. Images that document Ballard’s taxonomy predominate. Words like ‘neuronal’, ‘silt’, ‘green’, ‘silent’, ‘drumming’, and so on are repeated, as are words and phrases concerned with water and heat, time and dreams. The Drowned World is about an environment in which things are made and remade. It is the hot cauldron of investigations into the time signatures of the psyche. It is built around the central image of the city as a ruin, preserved in its own dereliction like a specimen in formalin. This image is a fantasy of suspended time, mythic, mysterious and alluring. The city as a matrix or uterine environment produces the conditions for the characters’ psychic and mythic adventure. In Kerans’ dreams the relationship between the man-made world and its geological equivalent is imaged in the ‘long limestone cliffs which had taken the place of the ring of white-faced buildings’ and Kerans is drawn by the booming pulse of the Triassic sun to enter the lake, ‘whose waters now seemed an extension of his own bloodstream’. The white-suited piratical albino Strangman,[60] like Ballard’s other Conradian pirates, is a disaffected pragmatist and a psychotic visionary, and his experiments or interventions, such as that of draining the lagoon, are those of power. In Kerans’ first glimpse of him, he is imaged as a white-helmeted D’Annunzio figure, landing a hydroplane on the central lagoon of London, and later paralleled to albino reptiles. Like the deranged psychiatrists and psychopaths of Ballard’s later fiction, he is a figure of mythological underworld menace. Commanding the steamboat in his white suit, with his attendant circus of thugs and crocodilia, he is like such megalomaniacal characters of popular culture as Ian Fleming’s Dr No. He also reminds Kerans of the figures of death in the Delvaux painting in the apartment of Beatrice Dahl, the aptly named potential inamorata whom Kerans seeks to protect, and whom the ‘callous and vulpine’[61] Strangman tries to seduce.[62] In his whiteness he is figured as Death and attributes his power over his men to the fact that they think he is already dead.[63] There is a contest between Kerans and Strangman over the definition of human desire and representation. Although Strangman is contemptuous of Kerans, he becomes the architect of his experimental entry into ‘the pool of Thanatos’. He does this because he has the technology, but Kerans is complicit in the ‘staging’ of his own suicide. Kerans’ dive is presented as a homage to and extension of Salvador Dali’s 1936 London diving suit performance, at the International Surrealist Exhibition.[64] Dali delivered his ‘Fantômes paranoïaques authentiques’ dressed in a diving suit and helmet. The diving suit is the protective armour that enables a controlled investigation into a space that is conventionally figured as ‘the depths’ of the unconscious, and protects the wearer from their dangers. As such it makes its wearer amphibian, and emphasizes the project of the novel as an exploration into liminal life. It is a version of the alligator head worn by Strangman’s general, Big Caesar, and later thrust onto Kerans,[65] and of the crystallized crocodile skin worn in The Crystal World. The alligator is a specific image from his childhood that Ballard recalls not long after the novel’s publication:
The alligator of Ballard’s memory significantly swims in the refuse of the present. It is dislocated, an anachronism, but hints at the possibility of a time machine, something to enable a passage from one time to another. It stands for the vestige of past and present, enables a convergence of different times. Strangman superimposes Freudian time (the time of one individual’s psychic gestation) onto geological time by commenting to Kerans that ‘leaving the sea two hundred million years ago may have been a deep trauma from which we’ve never recovered’.[67] He jokes that Kerans, clad in the diving suit, looks like ‘the man from inner space’. It is as though Strangman is sending him off in a time machine to see if he can find a way out,[68] and Kerans appears like a parodic sci-fi spaceman in his reflected image, who is transformed into ‘a man in an immense ballooning space-suit… white bubbles streaming from his frog-like head, hands raised in an attitude of menace, a blaze of light pouring from his helmet.’[69] At this point, he hears Strangman’s voice ‘closer than the whisper of his own consciousness.’ In the submerged planetarium Kerans is the subject of imaginary observation: ‘Standing on the dais, he looked around at the blank rows of seats facing him, wondering what uterine rite to perform for the invisible audience that seemed to watch him’.[70] The narrative motifs of the imperial adventure story, a form familiar to Ballard from childhood,[71] also appear, except that, in an inversion of Conrad, Kerans becomes the brown man subjected to the psychotic impulses of the white man. Ritual humiliation and attempted murder of Kerans as Neptune, master of the water that Strangman wants to control, follows. It enables a further attenuation of his body and psyche. Kerans, is like Conrad’s ‘utopist’ Axel Heyst in Victory who is described as ‘a prisoner captured by the evil power of a masquerading skeleton out of a grave’.[72] He becomes more reptilian, however, and remarkably survives the heat to which he is subjected, suggesting an acceleration of evolutionary processes. He escapes from the mock throne where Strangman has exposed him, after Strangman’s danse macabre, and like Axel Heyst, he attempts to rescue his female companion. Further echoes of Conrad occur as Kerans encounters the cigar smoking Admiral:
Conrad deploys the masculine suggestiveness of the cigar also, but as the following passage from Lord Jim illustrates, he uses it to establish a mood where time may be traversed and where dark and distant tales may be told:
Ballard shows imperial obsessions in their erotic manifestation. The image of Beatrice, enthroned among the looted jewels, ‘her blue brocade dress … spread out like a peacock’s tail’, is reminiscent of Lena in Conrad’s Victory ‘as if enthroned, with her hands on the arms of the chair. She was in black: her face was white, her head dreamily inclined on her breast’.[75] Mythic figures associated with the sea, such as Acis and Galatea (which Conrad invokes in Victory), and Neptune, are gathered and deployed as part of Ballard’s collage. The adventure story continues with the last minute intercession by Colonel Riggs, except that Kerans will not be rescued. Like a comic strip hero, like Ransom in The Drought, and Sanders in The Crystal World (and like Conrad’s Kurtz), he must turn his back on humankind, to be pursue his obsessions, obsessions he has discovered through his observation of Hardman. Towards the middle of the novel, in a flight and pursuit passage that is later reiterated in Kerans’ flight, Kerans and a search party chase Hardman southwards across the ‘endless banks of the inland sea … merging at their edges into the incandescent sky so that to Kerans he seemed to be walking, ‘undeterred by the furnace-like heat … across dunes of white-hot ash into the very mouth of the sun.’[76] In a wasteland of heat, but otherwise like Frankenstein’s creature, Hardman ‘was dragging the catamaran across the caking banks of silt, the tow-rope over his shoulders, jerking its bows into the air with demoniac energy.’[77] This allusion shows the obsessive adventure of human encounters with technology, and the vertiginous flight of the imagination that is part of this adventure. As Ballard states: ‘Part of the job of the imagination is to remind us of the marvelous’.[78] The heat and light of the atomic furnace of creation is counterpoised with the biological swamps of evolutionary origins. Decay and dereliction, and nature’s violent encounter with human structures predominate in the form of a marriage of technology and biology. This novel is a fictional model of Ballard’s own textual project, and Kerans stands in for Ballard to test the water in his first full length fiction. Ballard says that he wanted to:
Ballard’s ‘experimental derangement’ — a collage of references to myth, science, literature and pop culture, and the frottage of exposure in the attenuation of characters’ physical and mental condition—allows amorous memories — the erotic and obsessional images of a jungle landscape, to flood the scene. But these are ultimately memories of the future. In his journey south, Kerans encounters the terminal beach of this future, where the effects of radiation mark permanent changes on the body and psyche, and where his character can find ‘psychic fulfilment’.[80] He is ‘living out the logic of his own mythology’,[81] and like Ballard, goes where the pulses of the imagination will take him. Go to: Part II of Chapter Three 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] ‘The Coming of the Unconscious’, A User’s Guide to the Millennium, 86. [2] J.G. Ballard identifies the following as the key paintings of surrealism: De Chirico, ‘The Disquieting Muses’, Max Ernst. ‘The Elephant of Celebes’, Magritte, ‘The Annunciation’, Dali, ‘The Persistence of Memory’, Oscar Dominguez, ‘Decalcomania’, Ernst, ‘The Eye of Silence’. ‘The Coming of the Unconscious’ A User’s Guide, 86-7. In 1969, Ballard writes of Salvador Dali: ‘With Max Ernst William Burroughs he forms a trinity of the only living men of genius. However, where Ernst and Burroughs transmit their reports at midnight from the dark causeways of our spinal columns, Dali has chosen to face all the chimeras of his mind in the full glare of noon.’ From ‘The Innocent as Paranoid’, New Worlds, 1969, repr. in A User’s Guide to the Millennium, 91. [3] From ‘The Thousand Wounds and Flowers’, a review of The Voices of Time by J. T. Frazier in New Worlds (1969). repr. in A User’s Guide to the Millennium, 161. [4] ‘From Shanghai to Shepperton’, V. Vale and A. Juno, 112-124, 115-6. [5] Herbert Read, Surrealism, (London: Faber & Faber, 1936). [6] Ibid. 19. [7] ‘I remember going to an exhibition of new Magrittes in a little gallery near Berkeley Square — this was something like 1955 which included many paintings of his which are now world famous.’ ‘Interview by A. Juno and V. Vale’, 29 October 1982, in V. Vale and A. Juno, 6-35. 116. On the evidence supplied in David Sylvester, Réné Magritte: Catalogue Raissonné, (London: Philip Wilson, 1994-98), the Lefevre show in 1953 is likely to be the one Ballard saw. [8] Read’s book also made it to the colonies. The University of Western Australia has a copy date-stamped 20 July, 1937. [9] André Breton, in Marcel Jean, ed. The Autobiography of Surrealism, (New York: Viking Press, 1980), 341. [10] This note appears in the revised edition with a passage describing Dominguez’ work. ‘Thoracic Drop. The spinal landscape, revealed at the level of T-12, is that of the porous rock towers of Tenerife, and of the native of the Canaries, Oscar Dominguez, who created the technique of decalcomania and so exposed the first spinal landscape.’ The Atrocity Exhibition, 31. [11] Max Ernst, Beyond Painting (1936), in Patrick Waldberg, Surrealism, (London: Thames & Hudson, 1965), 96-100, 97. [12] Ibid. 98. [13] ‘All my life I have suffered from what you might call a “virginity complex” when faced by a white canvas. When I stand in front of a white canvas, to begin something, to paint something, I simply found it impossible to put down the first mark. I had to find some way of overcoming it. And I did.’ Spoken by Ernst and translated into English in Max Ernst, a film directed by Peter Schamoni, (Munich: Peter Schamoni Film, 1991). [14] ‘Interview by Graeme Revell’, (1983), V. Vale and A. Juno, J. G. Ballard, 42-52, 49. [15] Ibid. 44. [16] It is here that ideology gains its power, hence the surrealist interest in accident and chance to obtain ‘the light of the image’, (Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, 37), a spark to reveal that which ideology otherwise effaces. [17] J. G. Ballard, in a collage published in Ambit, No. 33 in 1967, reproduced V. Vale and A. Juno, 149. In this collage Ballard suggests the idea of frottage. The transposition of ‘nerve and blood vessels’ becomes for the reader and writer the ‘written mythologies of memory and desire’. [18] Ballard’s note to revised edition of ‘The University of Death’, The Atrocity Exhibition, 21. [19] ‘Interview by Graeme Revell’, 42. [20] Ballard’s first novel The Wind from Nowhere, (New York: Berkley, 1962; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), was also a ‘disaster’ story. It was, as Michel Delville says, ‘disowned by its author’. Delville, J. G. Ballard, (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1998), 7. [21] ‘The Coming of the Unconscious’, 86. [22] A development of a novella of the same name written in 1961 and published in 1962. [23]The relationship between science and the military is common in popular texts—film and television in particular — during the Cold War. [24] In a chapter called ‘I Swim as a Right Whale’, the protagonist frolics in the Thames for the people of Shepperton, (The Unlimited Dream Company, 87-8). [25] Ballard interviewed in Runcie, Shanghai Jim, (London: BBC, 1991). [26] The Drowned World, (London: Victor Gollancz, 1964; London: The Science Fiction Book Club, 1964) 19. [27] Ibid. 29. [28] Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, (1900; New York: Norton, 3rd Norton edition, 1988), 63-64. [29] The Drowned World, 71. [30] Ibid. 71. [31]J.G. Ballard’s story ‘A Question of Re-entry’ (Fantastic Stories, 1963), about an expedition on the Amazon River to recover the remains of an astronaut and space capsule, shows Ballard’s interest in Conrad very clearly. [32] Read, Surrealism, plate 63. [33] The Drowned World, 11. [34] Ibid. [35] Ibid. 7. [36] Ernst, Beyond Painting, 96. [37] The Drowned World, 53-4. [38] André Breton, What is Surrealism, in Selected Writings, edited and introduced by Franklin Rosemount, (London: Pluto Press, 1978), 136. [39] Ibid. 63. [40] Magritte’s painting is also suggested in the story ‘The Dead Time’, which I discuss in Chapter Four. [41] The Drowned World, 63. [42] I have not been able to identify this particular painting, which seems to be an imaginative pastiche of Delvaux images. [43] The Drowned World, 29. [44] Ibid. 74. [45] Ibid. 11. [46] ‘He and Anne had each lost more than thirty pounds, as if their bodies were carrying out a re-inventory of themselves for the coming world without time. But the bones endured. His skeleton seemed to grow stronger and heavier, preparing itself for the unnourished sleep of the grave.’ (The Complete Short Stories, 1037-1060, 1037-8). [47] This also occurs in Ballard’s list-making, which, as he says of ‘Passport to Eternity’, carried the real story. See below, Chapter One, III. [48] The Drowned World, 67-8. [49] Ballard’s note to revised edition in ‘The University of Death’, The Atrocity Exhibition, 22. See below, Chapter 7, 204. [50] The Drowned World, 14. [51] This is used to describe Conrad’s ‘situations’ in ‘Conrad: the Presentation of Narrative’, The World, the Text and the Critic, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1983), 94. [52] Ballard interviewed in Runcie, Shanghai Jim. [53] The Drowned World, 48. [54] Ibid. 35. [55] Ibid. 35. [56] Ibid. 98-99. [57] Ibid. 56-7. [58] Ibid. 101. [59] Ibid. 39-40. [60] The name may be associated with ‘strong man’ or ‘strange man’. [61] The Drowned World, 123. [62] The myths of loss and grief which recur in Ballard’s fiction usually emerge in relation to a distant female figure. The ritualistic nature of the draining of the pool, and Strangman’s use of it to attempt to seduce Beatrice Dahl, invokes a number of myths, for example Persephone, Eurydice and Orpheus, and Acis and Galatea. [63] This idea of a character being already dead recurs in Empire of the Sun (1984), and is a sign of the absence of affect, associated with the white light of the airborne dust or the after effects of nuclear explosion. Tamás Bényei comments on this effect. See below, n. 164. [64] Presented at the Burlington Galleries, London, July 1, 1936. [65] The Drowned World, 103. [66] ‘Time Memory and Inner Space’, in The Woman Journalist, Spring 1963, repr. in V. Vale and A. Juno, J. G. Ballard, 100-101, 100. [67] The Drowned World, 96. [68] Ballard replays this scene in Empire of the Sun (1984), when Basie sends Jim through the perimeter zone of the camp, ostensibly to set pheasant traps, but Jim knows it is to test the area for mines so Basie can plan his escape. Strangman’s diving suit experiment also anticipates Chris Marker’s La Jetée, in which the prisoner is sent backwards and forwards in time to help his technocratic captors escape their subterranean world. [69] The Drowned World, 107. [70] Ibid. 109. [71] See Part IV of this chapter. [72] Joseph Conrad, Victory, (1915; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963, 1980), 312. [73] The Drowned World, 148. [74] Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim. (1900; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957, 1981), 31. [75] Joseph Conrad, Victory, 313. The loot collected by Strangman and his men is a motif repeated in the Shanghai Stadium scenes of Empire of the Sun. [76] The Drowned World, 69. [77] Ibid. [78] ‘Interview by V. Vale and Andrea Juno’, 51. [79] Interview by Brendan Hennessy, Transatlantic Review, No. 39, Spring 1971, 60-64, 61. [80] Interview by Catherine Bresson, Métaphores, (1983), excerpt quoted in ‘Quotations by Ballard’, V. Vale and A. Juno, 154-164, 161. [81] J. G. Ballard in Runcie, Shanghai Jim. |
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