Dystopian dreamer

Next to William Burroughs, one of the chief subversives of 20th-century fiction was J.G. Ballard, a British novelist who veered between sci-fi and dystopian imaginings of our future. Ballard, who died a week or so ago, was best known for two books — Crash and Empire of the Sun — both of which have been turned into films, and they couldn’t be further apart, visually or texturally.

Crash is the more notorious book of the two: published in 1973, it’s a hallucinogenic sci-fi vision of man merging with machine, sex merging with death. In it, Ballard imagined a world where people experience their deepest eroticism during the impact of car crashes. His metaphor fused the violence of 20th century technology with the desensitization of our voyeuristic impulses: the phrase “as fascinating as a car crash” encapsulates the blur of that century best, echoed in everything from Andy Warhol to the Internet. In a way, Crash now seems to have anticipated the Internet age, a time when technology and human interests mash together constantly in sometimes progressive, usually uninteresting or mundane ways.

I remember reading J.G. Ballard’s Crash when I was about 16, and couldn’t quite make out what all the mad mashing up of sex and car interiors was about. I recall the sex parts being pornographic, and the car descriptions being precise and detailed, like an auto brochure.

This turned out to be part of Ballard’s method. A good peek into the author’s aesthetics comes in A User’s Guide to the Millennium, his 1996 collection of essays and book reviews, where he claims his favorite book to be the Los Angeles Yellow Pages (a telephone directory), followed by The Black Box, a collection of transcripts taken from airplane cockpits, some involving plane crashes, some not.

Technical literature may serve another purpose for Ballard: in imagining worlds below the surface of what we consider “reality,” he often turns to confidential papers, things not meant to be published or widely read:

I have always been a voracious reader of what I call invisible literatures — scientific journals, technical manuals, pharmaceutical company brochures, think-tank internal documents, PR company position papers — part of that universe of published material which most literate people have scarcely any access but which provides the most potent compost for the imagination.

With his focus on mechanical detachment, Ballard was also a guide for cyberpunk writers to come (like William Gibson, or Michael Moorcock) as well as punk and alternative bands. Ian Curtis named one of Joy Division’s songs after Ballard’s cut-up novel The Atrocity Exhibition (1969); Thom Yorke of Radiohead raves about Ballard’s 2006 novel Kingdom Come on his website, and some of Ballard’s detached critique of consumerism seems to infuse the band’s aesthetics. Even Madonna gets into the act, naming the opening track on her “Ray of Light” album Drowned World/Substitute for Love, after Ballard’s apocalyptic novel from 1962, The Drowned World.

Ballard has said his two favorite artists were Burroughs and Salvador Dali. Surrealism was a key to the 20th century, according to Ballard (“The dominant characteristic of this movement is its sense of individual isolation, its mood of introspection and alienation, a state of mind always assumed to be a hallmark of the 20th-century consciousness”), and he feels the Spanish painter was never given his due. Ballard often goes for a similar level of surrealist detachment in his writing: he renders scenes of almost hallucinatory power while his protagonists remain strangely unaffected, or powerless to act. The stuff of dystopian dreams.

Burroughs was a more direct influence. By embracing elements of sci-fi, detective fiction and other “lesser” genres in his experimental work, Burroughs opened the door for later writers to breathe life into fictional forms that had long been snubbed as pulp territory. Naked Lunch also showed Ballard a literary model in which the body could be viewed as a machine, with certain needs that could be manipulated. This proved to be a fascination for Ballard, leading up to Crash and other dystopian visions.

Dystopia has been a standby of literature for centuries, whether in sci-fi or in moralistic fiction. It’s interesting that we’ve reached a point where dystopia may not even be necessary as a literary genre: there’s so much in our midst that’s clearly not working, one doesn’t need to imagine decaying worlds, they’re here already. Some of Ballard’s visions have taken concrete form, while others seem dated, but he’s continued to influence a generation of speculative fiction writers — France’s enfant terrible Michel Houllebecq, for one, seems obsessed with some of Ballard’s themes of transaction, sex, isolation and the doubtful future of mankind. 

On the other hand, Ballard was the boy who was raised in Shanghai, father of a chemist, during the Japanese war occupation. His experiences make up the nostalgic, though crystal-clear Empire of the Sun (1984), where he remembers day-to-day life in a concentration camp. Yet things always seem better during childhood, under the gauze of nostalgia. As he says in a 1982 interview: “I have — I won’t say happy — not unpleasant memories of the camp… I remember a lot of the casual brutality and beatings-up that went on, but at the same we children were playing a hundred and one games all the time!”

In A User’s Guide to the Millennium, Ballard looks back on those days in Shanghai, still with warm memories:

That first day I moved around Shanghai in a daze. Memories jostled me like the Chinese crowds who surrounded the film crew. I remembered the Shanghai of gangsters and beggar-kings, prostitutes and pickpockets. I had opened a door and stepped into a perfectly preserved past, though a past equipped with a number of unattractive reflexes of my own.

Memory can be a Pandora’s Box. And so can fiction. Perhaps Ballard meant to prepare us for the coming millennium by pointing out where we have been — the 20th century, with all its technological concerns, as a kind of child’s playroom, loaded with toys that instruct, toys that distract, and toys that destroy.