J.G. Ballard

The First Post-Industrial Author

Post-modern is a term that gets bandied about quite a bit when talking about various art forms. Back in art school during the later 1970s, I remember having to raise my hand to get an explanation when those words were first thrown at me. Being a thieving magpie already, it was easy to understand and see how much of the world had already become post-modern. As I use to say about my old job, it's all about shuffling clichés, a blunt way of describing 'borrowing' from older existing forms to try and create something new. It works until you start borrowing from an already post-modern form; then you run the risk of creating a mobius strip up your own sphincter.

Growing up, I noticed a world that was increasingly post-modern. It often feels as if nothing new is being created, that we are feed a steady diet of recycled ideas. Yet as we grow older there is a greater reluctance to accept anything different than that with which we are comfortable. This poses a strange Catch 22; being the problem while complaining about the results. But sometimes there is something so sideways that it pops out as neither new or old, just different.

I read J.G. Ballard early, and I felt a strong kinship to his material. Notice that I didn't say that I enjoyed his books and short stories. I could go to Robert E. Howard or H.P. Lovecraft if I wanted to enjoy a good read. Ballard was completely different, and it worked at a level beyond merely like or dislike. It was strong stuff, to be pondered. The imagery seemed to come from my own life, like scenes lifted from my memory.

It wasn't exactly science fiction, although Ballard was often grouped in with those writers. Speculative fiction works better; there was a 'new wave' of writers who used the trappings of science fiction to explore the human condition instead of postulating about technological breakthroughs. During the 1950s and 1960s a number of new writers came up. Some, like Harlan Ellison and Phillip K. Dick, were locked in the SF ghetto; others, like William Burroughs and Kurt Vonnegut, wound up as major Avant Garde or mainstream authors.

Ballard was something else, the last author to have a book banned in the United States, yet managing to have one of his works turned into a movie by Steven Spielberg. He wrote not about outer space but inner space instead, the world inside our minds. England has a long history with dystopian end-of-the-world fiction, from 'War of the Worlds' to 'Day of the Triffids'. In Ballard's future, the world doesn't end with a bang, but a very long whimper indeed. His first four novels were written closely together in the space of a few years; 'The Wind from Nowhere', 'The Drowned World', 'Drought' and 'The Crystal World'.

It was enough to establish JG as an author to watch, at the vanguard of English science fiction in the early 1960s next to a young Michael Moorcock. Joseph Conrad's influence can be felt, but instead of white men in exotic locations going a little weird in the head, it was white locations gone exotic, with the locals still going off by the end. "The Drowned World'  was particularly effective, London gone tropical from global warming, a swampy lagoon with a few disaffected survivors hanging on, working at cross purposes.

'The Crystal World' was the breakthrough, a psychedelic 'Heart of Darkness', crystal leprosy taking over the darkest jungles of the world, slowly spreading. A doctor goes to treat the patients, witnessing strange human behavior, and barely escapes with his life. Puzzled but attracted to what he see, he is compelled to return, doing what he had seen the others had done. The ending is strikingly similar to Kurt Vonnegut's 'Cat's Cradle', but instead of a cosmic joke, it becomes a metaphor for all those impulses; the imps of the perverse we cannot control. It is a beautiful and frightening work.

Ballard had a unique upbringing; raised in Shanghai, he was separated from his parents and survived the Japanese internment during World War II, first scrounging around the abandoned European sector, then in an concentration camp. Feeling an outsider when sent back to Britain, he wound up in the RAF, helping Strategic Command from frozen wastelands in Canada. The feeling of civilization in ruins as well as the attraction to vast empty spaces remained with him for the rest of his life.

Like many other fledging science fiction authors of the time, JG worked as a technical writer for scientific journals. Unlike most of them, he was also extremely attracted to experimental art and was fundamentally left wing in nature, although not any more communist than democratic. Knowledgeable about the Surrealists as well as the Beats (especially Williams Burroughs), Ballard managed to incorporate all of these influences into his stories while making them more commercial and almost mainstream. Almost.

After his wife died in a car crash in 1964, Ballard began writing a series of very Avant Garde short stories both in reaction to becoming the single father of three young children and as a way to explore his most extreme experiments in fiction. These shorts were not narratives in the normal sense, more like articles written for scientific journals, but combining the most outrageous pop culture subjects possible. Later gathered together as a novel-of-sorts called 'The Atrocity Exhibition', just a list of the titles will give you some idea of the insane level of provocation in these pieces:

The Atrocity Exhibition
The University of Death
The Assassination Weapon
You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe
Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown
The Great American Nude
The Summer Cannibals
Tolerances of the Human Face
You and Me and the Continuum
Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy
Love and Napalm: Export USA
Crash!

The Generations of America

Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan

The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race

It was the story about Ronald Reagan, first published twelve years before the former actor's ascendancy to the Presidency of the United States, that caused Doubleday Books to destroy the entire first American edition. Talk about predicting the future! It's a difficult read; the stories all do relate to each other and have the same protagonist, but are not told in a reader-friendly manner. Nonetheless, it fuses Surrealist writing technique with Ballard's inner space exploration. Somebody even tried to make a film of it thirty years later, a somewhat futile exercise.

The next novel, 'Crash', went back to a more linear narrative but kept the extreme content in place. It expanded on one aspect of the previous book, creating a tale so strange that even twenty five years later, when David Cronenberg adapted it into a fairly faithful movie, people were still freaking out about the plot line, trying to ban the film in England. Ballard managed to weaponize popular culture, to turn it into a destructive force to attack the very thing he was writing about. 'Crash' isn't a pleasant read but it is an unique and vital story.

'Concrete Island' followed, a short novel about a man crashing his vehicle, breaking a leg, and finding a microcosm of society living in the traffic island where he is stranded. It merges themes from his earlier catastrophic novels with themes from 'Crash' and the 'Atrocity Exhibition', and it paved the way for his real masterpiece, 'High Rise'. Ballard was concentrating on mankind's unlimited talent for self-destruction now, a theme that he focused on for the rest of his life. He had found his muse and would follow it until his death in 2009.

'High Rise' is strong stuff, a solid narrative about the descent of an entire apartment block into savagery, detailing every small step. The narrator, like all Ballard's heroes, can be surprisingly passive, but survival instincts kick in when needed. What starts out as a shining example of social engineering turns into a tribal nightmare, everyone living like primitive cave dwellers by the end. It was a giant influence on punk rock, the Clash in particular mentioning the novel frequently.

A comparison of two covers shows how the publishing houses were completely confused by Ballard's writing. Should they try and exploit the more extreme story features or treat this as high art? That was a dilemma that would face JG for the rest of his life. The English press praised him generally, calling him the 'Seer of Shepperton'. He lived a safe suburban life but constantly showed how fragile the social norms that tied us together were; a few simple events can strip away the veneer of civilization to display us at our most voracious.

Ballard hit the big time in the 1980s; his fictionalized account of his youth and internment in Shanghai,  'Empire of the Sun', was first an international best seller, then a major motion picture with Steven Spielberg directing. 'Empire of the Sun' shows the underpinning of JG's obsessions and made him a wealthy man. Yet he continued to support Avant Garde magazines like 'Ambit' and write disturbing novels like 'Hello America' and 'The Day of Creation'. He never abandoned his dystopian themes, and he may very well be the first person to view the modern world with a wistful glow of contemporary nostalgia, such as in 'Memories of the Space Age'. By the time he died, there was a robust collection of both essays and short stories to examine, both probably easier to assimilate for a first time reader than some of Ballard's more challenging novels.

From when I first read these pieces, both novels and shorter pieces, I felt a kinship with the imagery and the world view. I grew up in a world where the infrastructure was collapsing. In the next town over on Long Island, Jamaica, what was once the largest bakery in the world was an abandoned factory, now the playground for all the kids in the neighborhood.  Across the expressway, Belmont Racetrack was closed for six years while the stands were torn completely down and rebuilt, giving us another place to sneak into and wander at will amidst the ruins.

These huge empty post-industrial sites were burnt into my brain in youth, and it would only get worse. The most striking example of this crumbling society happened right around the time I moved out of the New York City area, in 1973. The West Side Elevated Highway in Manhattan, also called 'Death Avenue' because of it's terrible design and construction, collapsed. I visited it shortly after; it was an abandoned structure next to rotting wharves near the West Greenwich Village gay community, not a location that you would feel safe in for very long. It was also the direct inspiration for 'Escape From New York' and every other post-apocalyptic movie, since it sat there for well over a decade before being removed. It looked like the aftermath of World War III.

The only person who contemporaneously addressed these issues and used these images in their art was J.G. Ballard. He wrote about the post-industrial age, turning it into something interior well before anyone else, and he kept doing it his entire career. As society fell to pieces during the 1970s, as the government had a president resign and the military abandoned a murderous foreign entanglement, I had to find a way to cope with the world that I was inheriting. The only way that I could process this information was through the fiction of J.G. Ballard.

Ballard was the only thinker who treated the current day as well as the future as archaeology, not being blinded by the promises of tomorrow but constantly reminding us of the destructive nature of mankind, when ever and where ever humans might me. He clearly saw into the heart of darkness, and recognized the wreckage of past generational hopes laying around us all. I recognized myself in those narratives, another wanderer in strange desolate landscapes both exterior and interior. You didn't need to be Conan to be a barbarian; you could be a happy suburban resident just like me and be equally as savage, given the right set of circumstances.

If you think that you can handle something outside of your normal comfort zone, I cannot recommend J.G. Ballard enough. Sure, things have gotten better, at least on the outside. The West Side of Manhattan has been turned into a series of waterfront parks. My wife and I had a delightful stroll along it for miles, both impressed by the urban renewal and the magnificent views of New Jersey across the Hudson. But the visions of youth stay, and anyone who could turn the uncertainties of the world around us into such unique art as Ballard deserves the highest praise. And I still insist of viewing both the present day and the future as a series of ruins slowly happening before our eyes.