Chapter Two, Part I:


Into the near future: the development and preoccupations of Ballard’s fiction
The subject matter of SF is the subject matter of everyday life: the gleam on refrigerator cabinets, the contours of a wife’s or husband’s thighs passing the newsreels on a colour TV set, the conjunction of musculature and chromium artefact within an automobile interior, the unique postures of passengers on an airport escalator… J. G. Ballard, 1971 [1]

Part I. This is tomorrow

In 1956, the same year as he had two stories — ‘Escapement’ and ‘Prima Belladonna’ — published by E. J. Carnell, Ballard saw the exhibition This is Tomorrow, at the Whitechapel Gallery. This exhibition was central to the development of British Pop Art. Richard Hamilton’s Just What It Is That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing, a key work in this exhibition, articulates the arbitrary but imperative presence of technology in daily life. The central image — a woman with a Hoover vacuum cleaner was originally promoted as Mrs 1970. The near future was beginning to appear. Hamilton’s reported method; which consisted of a ‘random’ selection from popular imagery, was suggested by his study of Duchamp. It is a close visual equivalent to Ballard’s writing, for instance, the stories which speculate about future possibilities — the genetically engineered clothing worn in ‘Passport to Eternity’, or in the peculiar singing flowers in ‘Prima Belladonna’ — but also in such stories as ‘The Overloaded Man’ (1961).

The first paragraphs of ‘The Overloaded Man’ demonstrate how Ballard simply gathers objects from a contemporary domestic space and describes the character’s relationship to them as meaningful because she is acting as their operator. This action is described from the point of view of a man who has decided to dislocate himself from all the objects in his life:

Faulkner was slowly going insane.

After breakfast he waited impatiently in the lounge while his wife tidied up in the kitchen. She would be gone within two or three minutes, but for some reason he always found the short wait each morning almost unbearable. As he drew the Venetian blinds and readied the reclining chair on the veranda he listened to Julia moving about efficiently. In the same strict sequence she stacked the cups and plates in the dishwasher, slid the pot roast for that evening’s dinner into the auto-cooker and selected the alarm, lowered the air-conditioner, refrigerator and immersion heater settings, switched open the oil storage manifolds for the delivery tanker that afternoon, and retracted her section of the garage door.

Faulkner followed the sequence with admiration, counting off each successive step as the dials clicked and snapped.

You ought to be in B-52’s, he thought or in the control house of a petrochemical plant. In fact Julia worked in the personnel section at the Clinic, and no doubt spent all day in the same whirl of efficiency, stabbing buttons marked ‘Jones’, ‘Smith’, and ‘Brown’, shunting paraplegics to the left, paranoids to the right. [2]

After this detailed access of objects, the story tells of Faulkner’s experiment, an attempt to detach himself from his environment. ‘Anchored to reality’ only by a wrist alarm, he ‘began to switch off the objects around him’, to the point where ‘abstract masses of colour dissolving, drawing Faulkner after them into a world of pure psychic sensation, where blocks of ideation hung like magnetic fields in a cloud chamber….’[3] Like the character Pangborn in a later story, ‘Motel Architecture’ (1978),[4] he dislocates the soundtrack from the images he watches on television, telling his wife, ‘“It makes more sense.’”:

He watched the characters mouthing silently like demented fish. The close-ups in melodramas were particularly hilarious; the more intense the situation the broader was the farce. [5]

Eventually he turns this demolition process onto his wife:

For a few minutes Faulkner examined the discrete entity she familiarly presented, the proportions of her legs and arms, the planes of her face. Then, without moving, he began to dismantle her mentally, obliterating her literally limb by limb. First he forgot her hands, forever snapping and twisting like frenzied birds, then her arms and shoulders, erasing all his memories of their energy and motion. Finally, as it pressed closer to him, mouth working wildly, he forgot her face, so that it presented nothing more than a blunted wedge of pink-grey dough, deformed by various ridges and grooves, split by apertures that opened and closed like the vents of some curious bellows. [6]

In his attempt to escape meaning Faulkner ultimately drowns himself in the garden pond, but this story is not so much about madness as it is an experiment in testing the possibilities of meaning in objects. Ballard matches language to objects and images as though cutting them from their context, letting them float free, to show how their meaning comes from use. He returns to this idea in other stories, for example in ‘The Enormous Space’ in 1989. Its protagonist decides one day never to leave his house again. In this case he deliberately maroons himself with the aim of moving ‘into a different realm’:

I feel tremendously buoyant, almost lightheaded. Nothing matters any more. Think only of essentials: the physics of the gyroscope, the flux of photons, the architecture of very large structures. [7]

In this case, the protagonist experiments with the relationships between himself and objects. By gradually reducing his own contact with the world — ‘that overworked hologram called reality’[8] — he enlarges the ‘light, time and space’ around him. Ballard’s use of the present tense gives immediacy to the protagonist’s experience. As in a number of similar stories, he moves inexorably towards death, but is happy in the world he has created. He ends up in the empty pantry with his back to the freezer where the body of his assistant, who came to enquire after him, lies comfortably:

Covered by a jewelled frost, she rests quietly in the compartment of the freezer, a queen waiting one day to be reborn from her cryogenic sleep. [9]

Ballard’s random expansive attitude to the media environment as a source of insight into human encounters with technology and its effects was nurtured by his experience firstly as a technical writer for McLaren’s, which published technical and trade journals, and as assistant editor on Chemistry & Industry, a journal published by the Society of Chemical Industry, in Belgrave Square. He worked there for three or four years, where he gathered some of the material he used in later works.[10]

This experience also gave him a vocabulary, or field of dictions, from which to make his fiction. As in the above quotation from ‘The Enormous Space’, Ballard’s diction is not just Latinate, with all its power to suggest mutability, inflection and transformation, but is also drawn from the discourses that use Latin as their currency, precisely because its structures are themselves taxonomic. His language, perhaps paradoxically, is also provisional. He deploys a range of set constructions, moving them in and out of his prose like stage properties. One trigger for this is his frequent use of ‘some’ as an indefinite article, which as Angela Carter points out, is ‘used so often it becomes incantatory’ and is ‘a formal rhetorical sign to tell you that this is not normal prose’.[11] Another is a frequent use of the relative pronoun ‘this’ with adjectives and nouns to form constructions such as ‘this beautiful young woman,’[12] ‘this intelligent and likeable woman’[13] ‘this nondescript suburb’,[14] ‘this dead creature’, [15] ‘the silhouette of this slim sentry and his rifle’,[16] ‘the reversed tones of this unknown man and woman’[17] and so forth.

The narrator of ‘The Enormous Space’ is a demonstrator presenting the object or person to the reader, but the word ‘this’ also suggests interchangeability, that is to say, ‘this woman’ but there are others, a reminder that, like all specimens, images belong to a category.[18] On the one hand therefore it implies specificity, that is to say ‘this’ woman, not another one, on the other there is a distance suggested by the tone, as though the narrator is both surprised and perplexed by the presence of ‘this’ woman, man or object. In the latter case the similarity between its use and that of ‘some’ is evident. The constructions in which Ballard uses ‘of’ to produce a metaphoric connection adds to the ‘incantatory’ effect that Carter notes. Three examples occur in a paragraph of The Concrete Island: ‘the thousand and one emotionally loaded transactions of his childhood’; ‘the high-priced counters of these relationships’; and ‘within the empty city of his own mind’.[19] The result is both precise and provisional, and enables an interchange in his work of latent and manifest meanings.

Evidence of Ballard’s return to particular subjects and phrasing appears in a comparison of passages from two stories about the return to earth of capsules containing dead astronauts, ‘‘The Cage of Sand’ (1962), and ‘The Dead Astronaut’ (1967/1968). The rhythm of a passage from ‘A Cage of Sand’, describing the return to earth of the capsule is measured and paced, and obsessive:

With a deep metallic sigh, the burning catafalque of the dead astronauts soared overhead, a cascade of vaporizing metal pouring from its hull, filling the sky with incandescent light. Reflected below it, like an expressway illuminated by an aircraft’s spotlights, a long lane of light several hundred yards in width raced out into the desert towards the sea. As Bridgman shielded his eyes, it suddenly erupted in a tremendous explosion of detonating sand. A huge curtain of white dust lifted into the air and fell slowly to the ground. The sounds of the impact rolled against the hotel, mounting in a sustained crescendo that drummed against the windows. A series of smaller explosions flared up like opalescent fountains. All over the desert fires flickered briefly where fragments of the capsule had been scattered. Then the noise subsided, and an immense glistening pall of phosphorescing gas hung in the air like a silver veil, particles within it beading and winking. [20]

Ballard’s returns to this phrasing in ‘The Dead Astronaut’, written five years later. The repetition of diction of light and energy deployed here, with the addition of the simile of ‘powdered bone’ that is also used elsewhere,[21] emphasizes its textuality.

With a low metallic sigh, the burning capsule of the dead astronaut soared over our heads, the vaporizing metal pouring from its hull. A few seconds later, as I shielded my eyes, an explosion of detonating sand rose from the ground behind me. A curtain of dust lifted into the darkening air like a vast spectre of powdered bone. The sounds of the impact rolled across the dunes. Near the launching gantries, fires flickered where fragments of the capsule had landed. A pall of phosphorescing gas hung in the air, particles within it beading and winking. [22]

Ballard’s experimental textualizing of the material world and to release the psychic energy that keeps its vision together is demonstrated in ‘Zone of Terror’ (1959/1960). In this story Larsen, the protagonist, is recuperating from exhaustion in a chalet in the desert, observed by the psychologist Bayliss, who is staying in an adjacent chalet. Bayliss has given Larsen Kretschmer’s An Analysis of Psychotic Time to read. Dissociated by doses of barbiturates, amphetamines, coffee and whiskey, Larsen is terrorized by a figure, who turns out to be the trace of himself from a few minutes in the past. These figures eventually multiply and Larsen observes them running, crouching, or standing and staring as he has done minutes before upon seeing the first figure. In an effort to elude the figures Larsen has changed his appearance by shaving off his moustache, slicking his hair back and wearing a dark suit, but the figure replicates this change.

The original blue-suited figure still stood there, staring out into the sunlight.

There was not one double now, but two.

For a moment Larsen stared helplessly at the two figures, standing on either side of the apron like half-animated dummies in a waxworks tableau. [23]

Bayliss comments that Larsen ‘looks like a cheap detective’, but the other image invoked here is that of the single or multiple figures of Magritte’s paintings, especially when they are set against the desert backdrop of Ballard’s landscape.

The apparent reason for this experience is explained by Larsen’s work:

For three months he had been working without a break on programming the complex circuitry of a huge brain simulator which the company’s Advanced Designs Division were building for one of the major psychiatric foundations. This was a complete electronic replica of the central nervous system, each spinal level represented by a single computer, other computers holding memory banks in which sleep, tension, aggression and other psychic functions were coded and stored, building blocks that could be played into the CNS simulator to construct models of dissociation states and withdrawal syndromes – any psychic complex on demand. [24]

Just as Franklin and Ballantyne dismantle their semiotic worlds, so this machine dismantles the central nervous system, finding technological equivalents for its parts. It is Larsen’s close and fixed attention to this that has flipped open one of Ballard’s doors in time — spaces through which characters enter different perspectives of time. The visions are not, in the end restricted to Larsen; ultimately Bayliss also sees them.

The structure of the story is typical of Ballard’s writing, in that the reader is led straight into a scene, frequently of inertia, boredom or suspension: ‘Larsen had been waiting all day for Bayliss, the psychologist who lived in the next chalet, to pay the call he had promised on the previous evening.’[25] A short way into the story there is a brief explanation of the background of the scene, sometimes relayed through the protagonist’s memory. In this case it is managed through a shift in verb tense to the past perfect — ‘He had arrived at the chalet five days earlier…’[26] This narrative strategy invokes questions of time and memory, and presents these as crucial to human orientation in a world which has the potential to fly apart given the right conditions. This is the mental landscape that Ballard textualizes.

Ballard explores and experiments with the fragility of the environment through other situations. The novels published during the 1960s, The Drowned World (1963), The Drought (1964), and The Crystal World (1966), concern the ways in which a protagonist makes the imaginative adjustments necessary to survive ecological or other catastrophes. These are not romances of escape from the material world, but textual epiphanies of adaptation to changing circumstances, of transformation made possible in a mental landscape. Like Ballantyne in ‘The Enormous Space’, characters are rewarded with visions of the immensity of creation if they are prepared to stick by their obsessions.

Similarly, images suggestive of generation, such as the dust of the long dead astronaut orbiting a planet, or the crystalline transformation of living matter, recur in Ballard’s stories such as ‘The Voices of Time’ (1960) ‘The Cage of Sand’ (1962), ‘A Question of Re-entry’ (1962/1963), ‘The Illuminated Man’ (1964), and ‘The Dead Astronaut’ (1967/1968). The almost neurotic, persistent repetition of this imagery and motifs such as references to the dead, to gaps or reversals in time, marital estrangement, flight, derelict architecture or aircraft or space technologies, and desert or jungle landscapes, and of diction and stylistic constructions enables a continual interplay between dreams, the ‘exterior’ world and the materials of the body and psyche. Ballard was less interested in adventures in outer space than in what he calls ‘inner space’[27] to describe the mental landscape of textual speculation:

I christened the new terrain I wished to explore inner space, that psychological domain (manifest, for example, in Surrealist painting) where the inner world of the mind and the outer world of reality meet and fuse. [28]

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Ballard’s writing brought him closer and closer to the near future in such works as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), and then Crash (1973), The Concrete Island (1973), and High Rise (1975). The Atrocity Exhibition, a novel made of ‘condensed novels’ written between 1965 and 1969, reorders both the form of the novel and the relationship of reader to text.[29]

Time is accordingly both a preoccupation of, and a key to, Ballard’s experiments. He slows time down, stretches it to accommodate ‘parallel’ narratives, and conflates it with technology through a series of themes such as flight (in, for example, ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’, 1975, Empire of the Sun,1984, ‘The Ultimate City’ 1976), atomic explosion (Empire of the Sun, ‘The Terminal Beach’, 1964), the space race and the Cold War (‘Myths of the near Future’, 1982, ‘Memories of the Space Age’, 1982, ‘The Terminal Beach’), architecture (High-Rise 1975, ‘The Summer Cannibals’1969) popular culture, film and television (The Atrocity Exhibition, 1970, ‘Motel Architecture’1978, ‘The Screen Game’, 1963, ‘Escapement’, 1956, ‘The Intensive Care Unit’), pornography (Crash, 1963, The Atrocity Exhibition, Cocaine Nights,1996), and cars (Crash, The Concrete Island, 1974). In so doing he recasts and textualizes the events of the later twentieth century.



Part II. The Bomb and the Death of Affect

Aware of her hold over me, and eager to get out of Cambridge for a few hours, I bought a Triumph motorcycle and began to ride into the flat countryside to the north of the city, a realm of fens and water-courses that vaguely resembled the landscape around Shanghai. Behind the hedges lay forgotten wartime airfields, from which the bombing offensive against Germany had been launched, but there were new and larger bases where nuclear bombers were parked in their fortified dispersal bays. American military vehicles patrolled the runways, and the stars and stripes flew from the flagstaffs by the gates. Chryslers and Oldsmobiles cruised the country lanes, sudden dreams of chromium, driven by large, pensive men and their well-dressed wives, who gazed at the surrounding fields with the confident eyes of an occupying power. From their closely guarded bases they were preparing England, still trapped by its memories of the Second World War, for the third war yet to come. Then the atomic flash that I had seen over Nagasaki would usher these drab fields and the crumbling gothic of the university into the empire of light. J. G. Ballard, The Kindness of Women, (1991) [30]

As an adolescent, Ballard encountered surrealism in magazines, newspapers and galleries. Its presence in London, in the Tate and private galleries, helped to calibrate his ‘anamorphic’ viewpoint, a viewpoint across the surface of things, revealing patterns that were not otherwise recognized. His upper-middle class upbringing[31] early in his life and his colonial experience had already placed him at odds with the cultural mainstream of post war England.[32] While he had long working friendships with authors and editors with medical and psychiatric backgrounds like Dr Martin Bax and Dr Chris Evans, and later with the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, by the time he was writing published fiction he was married and living in the suburbs. If an account from Brian Aldiss can be relied upon, Ballard did not settle into the sci-fi milieu:

The grand occasion in 1957 was the holding of the World Science Fiction Convention in London – the first time this annual event had been allowed to stray outside the North American continent…

Was that nondescript year really 1957, and not 1947? The convention was held in a terrible hotel in the Queensway district. A distinctly post-war feeling lingered. Bomb damage was still apparent…

I went to the bar and bought a drink. Standing next to me was a slim young man who told me that there were some extraordinary types at the convention, and that he was thinking of leaving pretty smartly. He introduced himself as J. G. Ballard. [33]

Ballard’s distance provided the scope for imaginative engagement, a critical counterpoint and context for the Cold War as it was inscribed throughout British culture and daily life. He speaks in 1982 about the American military presence in Britain:

Here there’s a big controversy about cruise missiles which are being allowed to be sited. The whole point about these cruise missiles is: they’re going to be mounted on trucks, and in the event of a worsening of relations with Russia and a nuclear confrontation, these trucks will charge all over the country with cruise missiles on their backs to secret dispersal points which won’t be targeted by the Russian attack system. And various CND speakers said at the time, “Who will want these cruise missiles at the bottoms of their gardens”? I felt like putting my hand up and saying, “Yes, I want a cruise missile stationed here!” (I also want three American technical sergeants smoking their Lucky Strikes and eating their hamburgers, or asking me where they could buy a decent hamburger.) This beautiful bird sitting there waiting to fly towards the air will give me a real sense of involvement with the world. I want my own cruise missile at the bottom of my garden. (1982) [34] [emphasis added]

This attitude, and Ballard’s position on the use of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs distinguishes him from many artists and writers of his time. It is in part personal, a position arrived at from his experience of the Japanese military during his family’s internment at Lunghua. Without the bomb, he argues, all prisoners of the Japanese would have been killed before the American invasion of China:

American power had saved our lives, above all the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Not only our lives had been spared, but those of millions of Asian civilians and, just as likely, millions of Japanese in the home islands….

During their long advance across the Pacific, the American armies liberated only one large capital city, Manila. A month of ferocious fighting left 6000 Americans dead, 20,000 Japanese and over 100,000 Filipinos, many of them senselessly slaughtered, a total greater than those who died at Hiroshima.

How many more would have died if the Americans and British had been forced to fight for Singapore, Saigon, Hong Kong and Shanghai? Huge Japanese armies were falling back to the mouth of the Yangste and would have turned Shanghai into a vast death-ground. The human costs of invading Japan became clear during the fierce struggle for Okinawa, an island close to Japan, when nearly 200,000 Japanese were killed, most of them civilians.

Some historians claim that the war was virtually over, and that the Japanese leaders, seeing their wasted cities and the total collapse of the country’s infrastructure, would have surrendered without the atom-bomb attacks. But this ignores one all-important factor – the Japanese soldier. Countless times he had shown that as long as he had a rifle or a grenade he would fight to the end. The only infrastructure the Japanese infantryman needed was his own courage, and there was no reason to believe that he would have fought less tenaciously for his homeland than for a coral atoll thousands of miles away. [35]

Ballard’s position here is not so much a political stance, as it is a statement of fact based on his ‘real sense of involvement with the world’. It is this interest in the facts of his existence — the ‘beautiful bird sitting there waiting to fly towards the air’ that enables him to textualize the conditions of technological death. This is not a matter of aesthetics, but is about the imaginative possibilities suggested by the bomb. Ballard re-appropriates the ‘extreme metaphor’ of the atomic explosion and its associated technologies and thus takes back the power to represent this event and others in the drama of human relations with technology. His viewpoint is thus a refracted version of the cultural standpoint of Pop Art, very close to that of Eduardo Paolozzi, whose work he first encountered in the 1950s and with whom he collaborated in the late 1960s and 1970s. Paolozzi’s prints and sculpture collapsed the imagery of technology and high and popular culture into collages of universal equivalence via models and procedures drawn from archaeology and palaeontology. Ballard shares with Paolozzi an interest in the forms of culture as natural science, an interest that informs his fiction.

Attention to the recurrences of particular images in Ballard’s writing is fruitful because for him they have the force of primary personal obsessions. Although it was not until nearly twenty years into his writing career that Ballard wrote fiction directly derived from his memories of imprisonment and the War in Shanghai, such works of the sixties as ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964), and ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ (1966), ‘The Assassination Weapon’ (1966) and ‘Tolerances of the Human Face’ (1969) from The Atrocity Exhibition make reference to either Shanghai, Nagasaki, Hiroshima or Eniwetok. The aftermath of nuclear explosion, in particular the landscapes produced by atomic events, are an imaginative presence in much of Ballard’s fiction.

The nuclear bomb is the key technological achievement of the last century. The first atomic device which was exploded at Alamogordo in July 1945 had the power of 20,000 tons of TNT, and turned the desert at ‘ground zero’ to glass. After this, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki three weeks later, the nuclear explosion became a metaphor of sophisticated transformation, involving both implosion and explosion, and generating the mutative effects of radiation. As the most powerful metaphor of the century it also diminished the power of metaphor, as though the science and technology of this event appropriated language and imagery to its own ends in one momentous displacement of energy. While this effect may not have been immediately apparent, the development of nuclear weapons had the effect of ‘reordering’ experience. Ballard’s idiosyncratic, revelatory fiction shows that all the conditions of post-war, Cold War life, arise from this.

The ‘death of affect’, the condition of the ‘ambiguous world’ born of ‘the marriage of reason and nightmare’[36] that Ballard observes in The Atrocity Exhibition and specifically articulates in his introduction to the French edition to Crash, was the necessary consequence of ‘the nuclear reality’ — ‘technological rationality’ taken to its extreme. Ballard’s term implies a total paralysis of empathy and colonisation of desire generated by ‘sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy.’[37] He argues that the media landscape of the post-war period provides the vectors for their entry into everyday life and its dreamscapes.

Across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermonuclear weapons systems and soft drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudoevents, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century –- sex and paranoia. Despite McLuhan’s delight in high-speed information mosaics we are still reminded of Freud’s profound pessimism in Civilization and its Discontents. Voyeurism, self-disgust, the infantile basis of our dreams and longings–these diseases of the psyche have now culminated in the most terrifying casualty of the century: the death of affect. [38]

The death of affect is then defined as the loss of responsiveness that results from total enclosure of human experience by the media landscape. This is more than just a matter of persuasion by advertising, as the media is an instrument of the domestication of technology to the point of so-called ‘life-style’, that is to say, the complete appropriation of lived experience by consumerism among all classes with varying degrees of ‘comfort’, security or pleasure.

Ballard makes use of the imaginative possibilities of this condition, using his fiction as a place in which he can experiment textually with ‘dangerous’ ideas and images, with the ‘moral freedom to pursue our own psychopathology as a game’.[39] This is evidenced when he speaks of the possibilities enabled by the developments of home computers and video equipment:

For the first time it will become truly possible to explore extensively and in depth the psychopathology of one’s own life without any fear of moral condemnation.… I am not talking about criminally psychopathic acts, but what I would consider as more traditional psychopathic deviancies. Many, perhaps most of these, need to be expressed in concrete forms, and their expression at present gets people into trouble. One can think of a million examples, but if your deviant impulses push you in the direction of molesting old ladies, or cutting girls’ pigtails off in bus queues, then, quite rightly, you find yourself in the local magistrate’s court if you succumb to them… But with the new multi-media potential of the computerized TV studio, where limitless simulations can be played out in totally convincing style, one will be able to explore, in a wholly benign and harmless way, every type of impulse –- impulses so deviant they might have seemed, say to our parents, to be completely corrupt and degenerate. [40]

Ballard’s fiction is a public textual exploration of the ‘psychopathic deviancies’ of his time. He pursues this project in the clinical style he sometimes deploys, especially when writing of death, wounding or sex, using a pseudo-scientific diction to remove traces of affect from the language. His subject matter matches this as he experiments with situations, observing the possible results of the death of affect, for example in Running Wild, where bored and pampered children murder their parents, or in The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) where the protagonist, Blake, attempts to rape young children, and also in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), Crash (1973), High-Rise (1975), Running Wild (1988), Cocaine Nights (1996), and Super-Cannes (2000).

Neither cautionary nor libertarian, Ballard’s fiction uses to advantage the tension between the terror provoked by the death of affect and the opportunities it offers for imaginative exploration. He constructs a particular kind of situation and character to explore the death of affect, setting up extreme situations, attenuated landscapes, in which characters also are gradually reduced to a set of primal responses, not only physical but also psychic. The protagonist will become disaffected, unable to feel the loss or grief he would otherwise suffer, but is nonetheless responsible, that is to say, he answers particular calls to act in situations where affect would make action repugnant. In these cases the lack of feeling is an advantage. The character would not be responsible if he was not also disaffected. These characters are frequently marooned, or in other ways exiled, like Kerans in The Drowned World (1962), Maitland in The Concrete Island (1974), Wayne in Hello America (1981), or Jim in Empire of the Sun (1984). They negotiate the gap between disaffection and responsibility, and they may be used to identify a new technologically defined subject, at the same time as they are positioned to stand outside its limits. The pursuit of their obsessions is frequently the pursuit of death, but their eccentricity is revelatory. Ballard uses them to show the ways in which the constitution of the contemporary subject is refigured by technology, textualizing the constellations of images, sensations, memories and dreams that operate on him in a technological context.

Ballard’s writing can be analysed to explore the implications of nuclear ‘reality’ and the Cold War. Two events of World War II, the Holocaust and nuclear explosion are frequently seen as interchangeable, but different, extreme metaphors generated by the 1940s and 50s. The image and the reality of nuclear explosion and the possibility of total annihilation problematised the ability of language to structure and articulate knowledge, culture and quotidian experience. For example, the development of the nuclear bomb and its explosion both mark and produce the beginning of the end of patriarchy. Patriarchy is replaced with technocracy –- the reification of patriarchy in technological systems. The symbolic ‘big Other’ is destroyed in a manner that guarantees what Zizek calls ‘the demise of symbolic efficiency’. Zizek argues, the ‘symbolic fiction which confers a performative status on one level of my identity determining which of my acts will display “symbolic efficiency” is no longer fully operative’.[41] Technocracy requires no deference to the ‘big Other’ since technocracy is the operation of power itself.

Ballard’s life experience and his commitment to pursuing the obsessions of his time lead him to challenge the received representations of powerful technologies and technologies of power, to reappropriate language and imagery and to seek more extreme metaphors than those that structure contemporary experience. He wrests fiction from the grip of both the technocrat and the literary moralist. In his fictions such as The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash in particular, Ballard deploys language and imagery to attempt to force ‘even more extreme metaphors’ and to respond to the deep ramifications of technological change at their end point in the everyday. The luminary, repetitive quality of Ballard’s writing parallels the reiterative, neurotic monolith of Cold War imagery, reordering it to give the reader a sideways view of the machine at work. One of the aims of this dissertation is to analyse the extent to which he achieves this.


Go to: Part II of Chapter Two

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] ‘Fictions of Every Kind’, a review of The Shattered Ring, by Lois and Stephen Rose, Books and Bookmen, February, 1971, repr. in V. Vale and A. Juno (eds.), J.G. Ballard, RE/Search, no.8/9 (San Francisco: RE/Search, 1984), 1991), 98-100, 100.

[2] ‘The Overloaded Man’, (New Worlds, 1961) The Complete Short Stories, (London: Flamingo, 2001), 244-254, 244.

[3] Ibid. 249.

[4] This story is discussed in Chapter Eight.

[5] ‘The Overloaded Man’, 250.

[6] Ibid. 253.

[7] ‘The Enormous Space’, (Interzone, 1989), The Complete Short Stories, 1130-1138, 1131.

[8] Ibid. 1133.

[9] Ibid. 1138.

[10] J. G. Ballard interviewed in James Runcie, (director) Shanghai Jim. (London: BBC, 1991). See below, Chapter Three, II.

[11] Angela Carter, ‘Weaver of Dreams from the Stuff of Nightmares’, a review of The Unlimited Dream Company, Arts Guardian, October 26, 1979, quoted in ‘Critical Excerpts’, V. Vale and A. Juno, J. G. Ballard, 138-141, 140.

[12]The Unlimited Dream Company, (London: Jonathon Cape, 1979; London: Flamingo, HarperCollins, 1992), 98.

[13] High-Rise, (London: Jonathon Cape, 1975; London: Flamingo, 1993), 38.

[14] The Unlimited Dream Company, (London: Jonathon Cape: 1979; London Flamingo/ HarperCollins, 1992), 68.

[15] Ibid. 214.

[16] Empire of the Sun, (London: Victor Gollancz, 1984; London: Flamingo, 1994), 108.

[17] Concrete Island (London: Jonathon Cape, 1974; London: Vintage, 1994), 65.

[18]  This is a common strategy for subjects in Pop Art painting, such as David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash, 1967.

[19] Concrete Island, 142.

[20] ‘The Cage of Sand’, (New Worlds, 1962), The Complete Short Stories, 355-372, 370.

[21] It registers traces of death and decay in ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’, The Drought and Empire of the Sun for example.

[22] ‘The Dead Astronaut’, (Playboy, 1968), The Complete Short Stories, 760-768, 776.

[23] ‘Zone of Terror’, (New Worlds, 1960), The Complete Short Stories, 137-149, 147

[24] Ibid. 139-40.

[25] Ibid. 137.

[26] Ibid. 139.

[27] Ballard uses the term in The Drowned World (1962). Roger Luckhurst points out that it comes from Priestly’s 1953 article, ‘They Come From Inner Space’, Luckhurst, ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard, (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997), 49.

[28] Introduction to the French edition of Crash, (1974), in original English in Foundation, No. 9, November, 1975, repr. in V. Vale and A. Juno, 96-98, 97.

[29] The first American edition, titled Love and Napalm: Export USA, was pulped by the publisher Doubleday over anxiety about the piece ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’. (Ballard’s note to revised edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, 105-6).

[30] (London: HarperCollins, 1991), 71.

[31]His family were among the expatriate ‘Taipan’ class in Shanghai; his forebears, however, were non-conformist northerners.

[32]He is sufficiently outside the culture not to be mentioned in Jeff Nuttall’s Bomb Culture (London: MacGibbon & Kee, Ltd, 1968), but writes about similar phenomena.

[33] Brian Aldiss, The Shape of Further Things, (1970), Chapter 11, interpolated in ‘From Shanghai to Shepperton’, V. Vale and A. Juno, 112-124. 122.

[34] J.G. Ballard, in ‘Interview by A. Juno and Vale’, (29 October 1982), V. Vale and A. Juno, 6-35, 27.

[35] ‘The End of My War’, in A User’s Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews, (London: HarperCollins, 1996), 292-3.

[36] Introduction to the French edition of Crash, 96.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Ibid.

[40] Interview by Dr Chris Evans, excerpt quoted in ‘Quotations by Ballard’, V. Vale and A. Juno, 154-164, 159.

[41] Slavoj Žižek, The Demise of Symbolic Efficiency, in Chapter 6, ‘Wither Oedipus’, The Ticklish Subject: the absent centre of political ontology, (London: Verso, 1999), 322-334, 330.