JG. Ballard famously characterised himself as a weatherman:
“I read the sky and see the coming storms.” But, like Walter
Benjamin’s tragic “angel of history”, he has been forced to look
backwards at the cataclysmic storm behind him. For Ballard, that
storm is the Pacific War, the source of the questions with which he
has grappled so creatively all his life. It is no surprise that it
should occupy such a central place in this autobiography.
Readers of Ballard’s loosely autobiographical novel, Empire
of the Sun, will recognise the panorama that emerges of the
full-bore, laissez-faire capitalist enclave that was Shanghai:
European and Chinese glitterati, revolutionaries and refugees,
gangsters and warlords, British, American and Japanese soldiers,
sailors and washed-up drifters and the mass of Chinese peasants
uprooted by years of civil war eking a living in the grinding
poverty of the streets.
It’s easy to see why young James Graham Ballard thought this
cruel yet enthralling phantasmagoria a “magical place”. His home
life was cold and emotionally sterile; children were “somewhere
between the servants and an obedient labrador”. The family’s social
circle was occupied with bridge, gin and gossip punctuated by the
occasional trip to a civil war battlefield to collect souvenirs and
observe the rotting Chinese corpses. Insulated, incurious and
assured of their natural superiority, they appeared blissfully
ignorant of the forces at work outside until the Japanese forced
them into Lunghua internment camp.
As much for its casual cruelties as its sheer destructiveness,
war was a revelation to James. It stripped things down to their
essence; even the most stable worlds were shown to be contingent,
transitory and little more than a “stage set that could be
dismantled, swept away into the debris of the past”. It also gave
him a repertoire of imagery that would fill his novels: empty
swimming pools, deserted cityscapes, abandoned prizes of bourgeois
life strewn across devastated landscapes.
Coming “home” to an England he knew only from A. A. Milne and
Just William, Ballard found a grey, defeated country ruled
by mysterious social codes, where even “hope itself was
rationed”.
Freudian psychoanalysis and surrealism’s rejection of
rationality - “where the deep revolutions of the psyche matter more
than the cosy dramas of everyday life” - exerted the most powerful
intellectual influence. He loved American film noir with its “hard
and unsentimental image of the primeval city”.
But it was in science fiction that he found an arena. Ballard
had little in common with orthodox American sci-fi with its heroic
imperial displacements into outer space. He was concerned with
inner space and the psychopathological impulses he glimpsed beneath
the gleaming surfaces of modern technology. What did the nascent
culture of advertising, consumerism and entertainment presage? And
what was its relationship to the “dead Chinese . . . in their
ditches” and the weapons that would make World War II seem like a
preamble?
Ballard’s most controversial novel, Crash, is a kind of
ideas laboratory where an intuition about the unconscious links
between cars, sex and death could be tested. This “psychopathic
hymn” was confronting in 1973 but in 1996 - the year before
Princess Diana’s death - reaction to David Cronenberg’s film was
even more strident. Perhaps the outcry tells us as much about a
failure of cultural imagination as it does about the
psychopathology of everyday life.
An audience accustomed to the conventions of good, old-fashioned
English realism and the redemptive tales supplied by an
all-pervasive entertainment industry was ill equipped for Ballard’s
surrealist parable. Though it was well received in France.
If Ballard’s books, particularly the early ones, can be thought
of as thought-experiments, it’s also true that his protagonists are
often more case history than character. The Drowned World
might seem prescient now, but Ballard was not concerned with global
warming any more than he was worried about the organic world
becoming crystalline in The Crystal World: he wants to
observe people reacting to catastrophe. This is the nature of his
craft and is what is so intriguing about his novels.
But this lack of regard for that centrepiece of contemporary
fiction - the self - is also what makes Ballard’s autobiography, at
times, unsatisfying. He can’t shift register from dispassionate
observer to emotionally involved participant.
We learn in a perfunctory manner about the death of his first
wife, Mary, and that he brought up three children as a sole parent.
People can do extraordinary things while their kids are asleep, but
few men, particularly in the 1960s, would have responded so
admirably to the discipline of “the pram in the hall”. This
explorer of psychotic currents beneath modern life, this sometime
inspiration for an acid-fuelled, counterculture, was a
whisky-and-soda family man dedicated to raising his kids in
suburban Shepperton.
In the final chapter, almost in an afterthought, Ballard tells
us that he is dying of cancer and that this will, in all
likelihood, be his final book. Valedictory maybe, but certainly not
self-indulgent. Miracles of Life is very much the
biography of the thinking writer, rather than the feeling man.
Ballard has spent his life thinking about the relationship
between the human psyche, violence, and the nature of technology,
and in so doing created an original, disturbing and influential
body of work. And I, for one, can’t look at a freeway, a mall or an
airport without some part of me registering a disquiet that I can
only describe as Ballardian.
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