The Strange Visions of J.G. Ballard
IN 1984 A NOVEL TITLED ‘EMPIRE OF THE SUN’ was published in England and the United States to great critical acclaim. (“An astonishing piece of adventure fiction,” said the London Sunday Times. “A profound and moving work of imagination,” said the Los Angeles Times Book Review.) This partly autobiographical work describes the life of an eleven-year-old boy named Jim who lives with his British parents, nine servants and a chauffeur-driven Packard in Shanghai at the outbreak of World War II; his incarceration in a Japanese concentration camp; his witnessing – as if it were a hallucination – of the soundless light of the “second sun” of the atomic bomb at Nagasaki; and his reunion with his missing parents and his plan to return with his mother to England at the end of the war. Steven Spielberg read the book and decided to make a movie of it. Filmed in Shanghai, Spain and England, Empire of the Sun is Spielberg’s first directorial effort since The Color Purple and is scheduled for an early December release. The novel was a fascinating choice for a film. But who, many people in the United States might ask, is its author, J.G. Ballard?
J.G. Ballard is best known in science-fiction circles for his close to twenty quasi-sci-fi novels and story collections, which are filled with strange and memorable images. He lives alone – his wife died many years ago, and his three children are grown – in suburban Shepperton, England, a fifty-minute train ride from London. “In a way,” he told the San Francisco publication Re/Search, “a suburb like this is the real psychic battleground – it’s on the wavefront of the future, rather than a city area…. . . I would almost call it an airport culture that’s springing up in suburbs like this – a very transient kind of world. It’s interesting to watch.”
“We live inside an enormous novel,” J.G. Ballard once wrote. “For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.” A student of medicine between 1949 and 1951, Ballard has always been fascinated by advances in science. In the mid-Sixties, for example, he arranged with one of his computer-scientist friends to send him the contents of his wastepaper baskets, which included printouts, scientific handouts, giveaway magazines and laboratory detritus. “These strange crossovers from the communications world,” Ballard has said, “were psychopathology, experimental applied psychology, commercialism – you know, the latest stuff the computer firms are trying to sell you…. . . . All those, overlaid together, provided a wonderful sort of compost which my imagination could feed on.”
Ballard has stated that his two favorite books are the Warren Commission report (“There’s an obsessive concentration on little details”) and Crash Injuries – a medical textbook that Ballard calls his bible (“One should approach the material as, say, an engineer approaches stress deformations of aircraft tail-play – as a fact of life…. . . . The human body may crash, so let’s look at it anew. Texts like that are a way of seeing the human self anew“).
Ballard’s controversial novel Crash, in fact, is a work about the psychosexuality of car wrecks (“In his vision of a car-crash with the actress, Vaughan was obsessed by many wounds and impacts – by the dying chromium and collapsing bulkheads of their two cars meeting head-on in complex collisions endlessly repeated in slow-motion films . . . by the compound fractures of their thighs impacted against their handbrake mountings, and above all by the wounds to their genitalia, her uterus pierced by the heraldic beak of the manufacturer’s medallion, his semen emptying across the luminescent dials that registered for ever the last temperature and fuel levels of the engine”).
The novel was praised by William Burroughs and called a masterpiece by the Parisian newspaper Le Monde, but the reader for Ballard’s London publisher wrote, “The author of this book is beyond psychiatric help.” Ballard responded, “The person who wrote that was the wife of a psychiatrist and had some psychiatric training herself…. . . . For a psychiatrist to say, ‘You’re beyond psychiatric help’ – in a way, that’s the greatest compliment you can be paid! You’ve achieved freedom then – absolute freedom.”
J.G. Ballard is a master of several genres – the s.f. novel and story, the “technological” works like Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition (from the late Sixties) and the more recent, visionary novel The Unlimited Dream Company, in which an aviator, after having crashed his small plane in the Thames, becomes a pagan god and turns the town of Shepperton into a garden of earthly delights.
The following interview with J.G. Ballard took place in the writer’s small study, which is simply furnished with a silver-foil palm tree, several chairs – each teeming with books – an overstocked bookshelf and a desk with a manual typewriter.
Dominating the room is a five-by-four-foot copy of a painting by the Belgian surrealist painter Paul Delvaux. It depicts statuesque nudes in a dreamlike landscape. Ballard commissioned it from a London artist (the original was destroyed during the London blitz). These nudes in frozen motion seemed to watch over us as we talked.
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