Conclusion: Ground Zero



So, at Ground Zero, in the rubble of global power, we can only, despairingly, find our own image. Jean Baudrillard (2003)[1]


Ballard’s writing is a record of his persistent documenting and analysis of the technological environment he inhabits. To confirm how accurately he has done this, ‘like a cruise missile, followed the contours of the period’, and traced the shape of human subjectivity, one may observe the links between Ballard’s latest novel, Millennium People (2003), and work written nearly forty years previously. Both works connect with the omphalos, the psychic zero of the desert, the place of detonation.

Deserts significant places in the modern history of technology as the sites of weapons testing: Alamogordo, Eniwetok, Nevada. They are places of violence, explosion and secrecy, and the metaphors that inform Ballard’s textualisation of desert spaces come from the key technological achievement of the twentieth century, the nuclear bomb. The nuclear explosion provides a numbing metaphor of transformation, and its detonation is where the process of transformation is enacted. It is a moment of collapse and generation that leads to the other transformations. For Paul Virilio, ‘The desert is the coinciding of the beginning of the end’,[2] and Ballard’s landscape of the desert is also both end and beginning.

Ballard’s fiction returns to desert places after detonation, while the emptiness of detonation still presides over the scene, to view them as remade spaces, as crime scenes, like ‘still-life arranged by a demolition squad’.[3] Deserts are spaces of silence and stillness, the De Chirico landscapes where time has been sucked out of the air in an explosive moment triggered by detonation, as occurs, for instance in ‘The Day of Forever’ (1966), where the protagonist Halliday hopes to reanimate time:

The clocks, set to the imperceptible time of the forever day, he had bought with him to North Africa in the hope that here, in the psychic zero of the desert, they might somehow spring to life. [4]

As he does in all his mental landscapes, Ballard makes his fictional deserts from different sources: from actual places — such as Mediterranean resorts or the gravel pits and quarries of Shepperton — and from television and surrealist paintings.[5] Ballard’s deserts are shopping malls, holiday resorts, highways, gravel lakes or disused quarries. Shepperton has been his temporary habitat, in which he has marooned himself, never far from the shipping lanes of every aspect of contemporary culture. It is a place to write in, a bunker or camera obscura of the suburbs, in which he has access to images and objects from which he can textualise the landscapes of his fiction. It is accordingly a dual habitation of the real and the imagination in which he is able to make his fictions of attenuated desert landscapes and their marooned inhabitants, fiction which textualises the conditions of his existence. For Ballard this desert landscape is a textual space in which to calculate ‘the most commonplace elements of reality’.[6] He exposes the violent potential of this reality, and its technological underpinning. This reality, however, is also the reality of Ballard’s most recent fiction. He sets Millennium People (2003) in an environment left by the backwash of twentieth century history, in the ‘psychic zero’ of the near future, against the background of 11 September 2001. He begins the story, in a typical manner, in media res, as the protagonist, psychologist David Markham, views another post-detonation scene of destruction at Chelsea Marina, ‘an apocalyptic vision deprived of its soundtrack’.[7] He has been caught up in the rebellion of middle class professionals against boredom and psychic entropy, while searching for the key to his ex-wife’s death in a bombing at Heathrow:

A terrorist bomb not only killed its victims, but forced a violent rift through time and space, and ruptured the logic that held the world together. For a few hours gravity turned traitor, overruling Newton’s laws of motion, reversing rivers and toppling skyscrapers, stirring fears long dormant in our minds. [8]

The attacks on the World Trade Center towers refigured technological relations as the Cold War dissolved into the so-called ‘War on Terror’. Ballard responds to this, not by writing a thriller about murderous Islamicist fanatics, but about the domestication of the logic of disorder, disaffection and violence, in the ridiculous Chelsea Marina uprising. Eniwetok is translated into a landscape consisting of a middle class gated estate. Its topography includes Heathrow — ‘beached sky-city, half space station and half shanty town’[9] — the suburbs — where the flat of a bomb-maker is ‘a nightclub at noon’[10]— and the Thames embankment, the site of the Tate Modern and the Millennium Wheel. In a gondola of this ‘white latticework cut from frost’ Markham watches as the fires he had helped to set at the National Film Theatre:

lit the night air and seemed to burn on the dark water of the Thames. A huge caldera had opened beside Waterloo Bridge and was devouring the South Bank Centre. Billows of smoke leaned across the river, and I could see the flames reflected in the distant casements of the Houses of Parliament, as if the entire Palace of Westminster was about to ignite from within.[11]

Viewing this Turneresque cityscape, in an obvious quotation from The Third Man, he is confronted by Gould, the shadowy and ambiguous archangel of Ballard’s fiction, who tells him:

The attack on World Trade Centre in 2001 was a brave attempt to free America from the 20th century. The deaths were tragic, but otherwise it was a meaningless act. And that was its point.[12]

Gould later comments:

To keep the world sane we depend on motive, we rely on cause and effect. Kick those props away and we see that the meaningless act is the only one that has any meaning.[13]

Ballard shows how the conditions for this situation are set up early in the Cold War. In ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1963/1964), one of over fifty stories Ballard wrote in the first decade of his career, the marooned, attenuated character is Traven,[14] a protagonist who reappears in two chapters from The Atrocity Exhibition, ‘Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A.’ (1968), and ‘The Assassination Weapon’ (1966). Like B. Traven, Ballard’s protagonist isolates himself. He wanders among the deserted bunkers on the island of Eniwetok, the site of Cold War hydrogen bomb testing. He is lost in a space where technology’s violence is most obviously articulated. It is also a space defined by memory, dreams and paranoia. Around him he sees that ‘the landscape of the island was covered by strange ciphers’. He follows the vitrified caterpillar tracks of a heavy vehicle, as though in ‘the footfalls of an ancient Saurian.’[15] His memories have been filled with ‘images of burning bombers falling through the air around him’, as the dreams of Traven in ‘Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A.’ are filled with ‘visions of helicopters and the D.M.Z.’.[16]

Ballard textualises the landscape of Eniwetok as a technological grammar. It is a paranoiac-critical experiment, a delusional system that may be analyzed as though it were what Dr Osborne, a scientist visiting the island, called ‘a state of mind’.[17] The island is a ‘synthetic landscape’.[18] Traven recognizes it as:

a man made artifact with all the associations of a vast system of derelict concrete motor-ways.… Traven recognized: if primitive man felt the need to assimilate events in the external world to his own psyche, 20th century man had reversed this process; by this Cartesian yardstick, the island at least existed, in a sense true of few other places.[19]

Eniwetok is exemplary, like Hiroshima, Alamogordo, and other ontological space-time collisions — originary explosive events. It is the place where Ballard demonstrates his project for an analysis of the outer realm as though it were inner space. He presents the devastated reality of Eniwetok as a dream of explosion. It is ‘fossil of time future’.[20] The story is another simulation; Traven is the ‘subject’ of the experiment. Ballard applies his analytical strategies to Eniwetok, already an experimental site, to investigate the ground zero of the late twentieth century and to remythologize loss and desire in the perfect technological space. The island is a frottage of technology’s power, one in which time is withdrawn or condensed into concrete blocks and sand. It is thus a place where he can experiment with affect. Traven discovers:

the bodies of what at first he thought were the former inhabitants of this ghost town–a dozen life-size plastic models. Their half-melted faces, contorted into bleary grimaces gazed up at him from the jumble of legs and torsoes.[21]

They are part of the Eniwetok experiment at another level. In the story the concentric circles of experimentation telescope into the no time of the ‘ultimate circle, below ground zero’. Ballard’s levels of experiment are textualisation, fiction, explosion and image, the concentric circles of the bull’s eye, where Traven observes the dummies as the reader observes him. Further, the concrete walls of recording towers at Terminal Beach are themselves the ground of reproduction. ‘On their grey walls were the faint outlines of human forms in stylized poses, the flash-shadows of the target community burnt into the cement.’[22] These are the test dummies, captured at zero time in the postures of quotidian life, a section, or lithochronic model of modern experience.

The concrete blocks on Eniwetok are technological versions of Traven’s own vertebrae — his ‘spinal landscape’, and the bunker is an enclosed space of technological reproduction — a place where the equipment may be protected from the blast that it records. It is also a camera obscura, from which, through magazine images and other fragments Traven, like Ballard, makes collages to chart the outside world:

In the field office he came across a series of large charts of mutated chromosomes. He rolled them up and took them back to his bunker. The abstract patterns were meaningless, but during his recovery he amused himself by devising suitable titles for them. (Later, passing the aircraft dump on one of his forays, he found the half-buried juke box, and tore the list of records from the selection panel, realizing that these were the most appropriate captions. Thus embroidered, the charts took on many layers of associations.) [23]

The story is also about affect and desire. Traven acts out the Orphic drama of loss and grief of twentieth century deracination, and Ballard images in mythic terms the subterranean channels of memory and experience forever exploded and buried at Eniwetok. An instance of this effect also occurs when Traven observes the figure of Osborne’s female pilot in the shattered mirrors of a solar device, one of Ballard’s dream women, fated to leave and always belonging elsewhere. This type of woman is a recurring figure in Ballard’s work — a figure of sexual interest to the protagonist but also a kind of independent older sister, who shows forbearance up to a point and then moves on, like Kay Churchill in Millennium People. She is a corollary of the Eurydice figure of the protagonist’s wife in this and other stories.

Ballard describes Traven’s sustained observation of ciphers, like the crescent shadow of the dune, in which he is able to locate himself in a quantum universe, to know himself to be constituted paradoxically — his existence is both accidental and real. He is a corollary of the figures of accidental and meaningless life and death in Millennium People.

The corpse Traven discovers is Japanese — not a soldier or pilot encountered in other stories, but emphatically ‘a male Japanese of the professional classes…. Traven guessed that the Japanese had been a doctor or lawyer’.[24] The dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have evolved to the modern professional class. The corpse provides the occasion for the play of affect in a context of total destruction. Dr Yasuda tells Traven, ‘It seems to me you are hunting for the white leviathan, zero.’[25] Traven later sets up the corpse of Dr Yasuda as ‘a dead archangel’ to guard the entrance to the Blocks, and then waits for the approach of his wife and child, ‘as waves broke on the distant shore and burning bombers fell through his dreams.’[26]

In ‘The Terminal Beach’, under the heading ‘The Pre-Third’, Ballard writes of the post war period as:

characterized in Traven’s mind above all by its moral and psychological inversions, by its sense of the whole of history, and in particular of the immediate future–the two decades, 1945-1965–suspended from the quivering volcanoes lip of World War III. Even the death of his wife and six-year-old son in a motor accident seemed only part of this immense synthesis of the historical and psychic zero, the frantic highways where each morning they met their deaths the advance causeways to the global armageddon.[27]

Ballard recasts this synthesis ‘of the historical and psychic zero’, in recurring clusters of ideas, themes and images in his work. The Terminal Beach is a glacier in which technology’s effects are frozen. In this fossil landscape Ballard traces the palaeontology of the Cold War subject, but the passage is reiterated forty years later in the context of ‘9/11’ in Millennium People:

The airliner soared over Twickenham, undercarriage lowered, confident that firm ground waited for it at Heathrow, Still unsettled by Laura’s death, I imagined a bomb exploding in the cargo-hold, scattering the scorched lectures on the psychology of the new century across the rooftops of west London. The fragments would rain down on blameless video shops and Chinese takeaways, to be read by bemused housewives, the fading blossoms of the disinformation age.[28]

Accordingly, Ballard reveals how Eniwetok and 9/11 are related, not necessarily through politics and history in the usual sense, but in terms of a psychoanalysis of technology’s power to inform and shape the subject. Discussing the 9/11 attacks in an interview with Jeanette Baxter, Ballard comments that the attackers:

had not spent the previous year squatting in the dust on some Afghan hillside with a rusty Kalashnikov. These were highly educated engineers and architects who had spent years sitting around in shopping malls in Hamburg and London, drinking coffee and listening to the muzak. There was certainly something very modern about their chosen method of attack, from the flying school lessons, hours on the flight simulator, the use of hijacked airliners and so on. The reaction they provoked, a huge paranoid spasm that led to the Iraq war and the rise of the neo-cons, would have delighted them.[29]

Ballard does not need to write about such characters in his fiction. They are generation two of the subject born at Los Alamos. He has already mapped their genesis in work written from the 1950s to the early years of the twenty-first century, a period marked by the trajectory of the Cold War to the War on Terror. Ballard achieved this by matching his own obsessions to the relentless persistence of technological change. The patterns that have emerged from his writing are those of the history of the period.

Ballard’s proxy in ‘The Terminal Beach’, Traven tells the character Dr Osborne, who visits the island and attends to his injured foot, ‘For me the hydrogen bomb was a symbol of absolute freedom. I feel it’s given me the right—the obligation, even—to do anything I want.’[30] Eniwetok is the place where all inhibitions were exploded, dissolved. By entering its labyrinth Traven can access the future. When asked what he is looking for on the island Traven replies ‘the tomb of the unknown civilian, Homo hydrogenensis, Eniwetok Man’. Osborne’s last diary entry is significantly dated 6 August.

Ballard shows how the Cold War reproduces itself in the rusting edifices of its own technologies. The potential of the near future in the machines of menace and death is visible in their dereliction. Traven asks: ‘What sort of people would inhabit this minimal concrete city?’[31] Ballard answers in his fiction by demonstrating that it is anyone who lives in the suburbs of a modern western city in the post-war period. The conditions of this life are the conditions of ‘the thermonuclear noon’, the ‘man made artifact with all the associations of a vast system of derelict concrete motorways’.[32] The development of the nuclear bomb and its explosion both mark and produce the beginning of the end of patriarchy, which is replaced with technocracy–-the reification of patriarchy in technological systems whose quotidian manifestation is Ballard’s ‘man sitting in a car, driving down a superhighway’.[33]

The work of J. G. Ballard thus offers a field guide to the Cold War and its cultural productions. He charts its phyla, and treats its evolving phenomena as a problem in taxonomy. He constructs sets of documents, charts and descriptions that open up to forensic inspection the violent fusions, the unquestioned imperatives of the era. His use of the ‘ideological DNA’[34] of his time is the key to understanding the second half of the twentieth century, and the present day. The new creature, the Cold War, imprinted its presence on the physical and psychic landscapes of its time. Ballard is actively aware of this process, and has made it the subject of his textual practice. He assembles, orders and identifies his frottages of the mineralized Cold War imprint, or biopsies of its remnants, and exposes the conditions that gave rise to the technological subject of the late twentieth century, and its progeny in the twenty-first.




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] ‘Hypotheses on Terrorism’, The Spirit of Terrorism: and Other Essays, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2003) 59. The term ‘ground zero’ is used in documents related to the testing of the first nuclear device in June 1945, at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The various bunkers, observation points and placements of experiments for the Trinity blast were measured in relation to a point called Zero. There are some declassified contemporary accounts which use the term ‘Ground Zero’ as early as 1945. For example, the records of scientist Henry H. Barschall, dated 16 June 1945, are quoted in an account of an archaeological survey of the site by Thomas Merlan, The Trinity Experiments, Prepared by Human Systems research, Inc. for White Sands Missile Range, (New Mexico, 1997), 57.

[2] Paul Virilio, ‘The Twilight of the Grounds’, The Desert, Foundation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000).

[3] J. G. Ballard, interview with BBC Radio 3 (Nightwaves, 30 October 2001).

[4]‘The Day of Forever’, (The Impossible Man, 1966), The Complete Short Stories, 683-96, 669.

[5] Ballard commented in an interview that he did not ‘really live’ in Shepperton. ‘Interview by A. Juno and V. Vale), 1982, in Juno and Vale, J.G. Ballard, 14. He also states that he got the cultural input for writing Hello America from ‘Kojak and Vegas and The Rockford Files’, 34, and in a note to ‘The Summer Cannibals’ he says of the Costa Del Sol, ‘My dream is to move there permanently. But perhaps I already have.’ The Atrocity Exhibition, 59.

[6] ‘The Coming of the Unconscious’, in The User’s Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews, 84-88, 88.

[7] Millennium People (London: Flamingo, 2003), 7.

[8] Ibid. 182.

[9] Ibid. 25.

[10] Ibid. 77.

[11] Ibid. 124-5.

[12] Ibid. 139-40

[13] Ibid. 255

[14] Named for the author B. Traven. Berick Traven Torsvan (1890-1969), was a prolific author best known for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1927, trans. 1934), which was made into a film by John Huston (1947). He lived and moved around under various pseudonyms and was extremely protective of his privacy. As a young man he went under the name of Ret Marut, and published an anarchist magazine in Germany called Der Ziegelbrenner, (The Brick Thrower).

[15] ‘The Terminal Beach’, (New Worlds, 1964), The Complete Short Stories, 589-604, 589.

[16] The Atrocity Exhibition, 93.

[17] ‘The Terminal Beach’, 590.

[18] Eniwetok Atoll (now Eniwetak) was the site a number of nuclear tests between 1948 and 1952. There are no tests recorded for Eniwetok itself, rather other islands in the Atoll were used, in particular the island of Elugelab, where the 10.4 Megaton Mike shot was conducted in 1952. Thirty surrounding islands were used for experimental data stations — bunkers, instruments and so forth. Rhodes, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, 498 ff.

[19] ‘The Terminal Beach’, 590.

[20] Ibid. 591.

[21] Ibid. 592.

[22] Ibid. 594.

[23] Ibid. 596.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Ibid. 603.

[26] Ibid. 604.

[27] Ibid. 591.

[28] Millennium People, 28-9.

[29] Interview by Jeanette Baxter, Pretext 9: Not of an Age, Pen & Inc Press, published in Guardian, Tuesday June 22, 2004.

[30] Ibid. 599.

[31] Ibid. 590.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Interview by Dr Chris Evans, excerpt quoted in ‘Quotations by Ballard’, V. Vale and A. Juno, 154-164, 157.

[34] Hello America (London: Jonathon Cape: 1981; London: Vintage, 1994), 5.