Editing
The Selected Non Fiction of J.G. Ballard
Looking for a library-based project in 2020, I’d started compiling a bibliography of all of Ballard’s non fiction – I wrote my Master’s thesis on The Atrocity Exhibition, I’ve long been a Ballard enthusiast and occasional scholar, and I’d exchanged correspondence with him before he died. I quickly discovered that I was reinventing the wheel – David Pringle’s bibliography had been published in a book I already owned, the catalogue of the 2010 show Crash at the Gagosian gallery in London.
The next obvious step was a new collection of his non fiction, which was extensive. I proposed it to MIT Press, met with the Ballard estate, and got the go-ahead. The book took a couple of years to complete, and my share of the spoils as editor was slight, but I learnt the ins and outs of scholarly editing on the job and working on Ballard for that length of time was a pleasure and a privilege. The resulting book is a gem, I think/hope.
Below is my introduction, which gives a flavour of what to expect from it.
Introduction
J. G. Ballard was a journalist for as long as he was a professional writer of fiction. In November 1956, his short story “Prima Belladona” was published in Science Fantasy. Around the spring of the following year, John “Ted” Carnell, the editor who’d bought that piece for £8, found him a job as an assistant editor on a trade journal, British Baker. In the autumn, he moved on to work for the Society of the Chemical Industry: “I had heard that there was a vacancy as assistant editor at Chemistry & Industry, at a much better salary, so I went there . . . I was there for three or four years as assistant editor. I did practically everything.” He remembered the job fondly, recalling that he “devoured” the scientific magazines that came into the office, and worked across the process of magazine production, subbing, editing, and pasting layout. “I enjoyed being at the centre of a huge information flow.” The salary enabled him to support his young family and to continue to contribute stories to Ted Carnell at Science Fantasy and New Worlds.
In April 1962, his essay “Which Way to Inner Space?” was published in the May issue of New Worlds as a guest editorial, a statement of what Ballard saw as a fresh direction for SF. Declaring that “earth is the only truly alien planet,” “Which Way” began the staking out of territory for what would come to be called the New Wave of science fiction, a loose collection of writers, as much as a movement, who were reinventing the form and content of a genre that had been dominated by its debt to H. G. Wells, to alien planets, rocket ships, and tales of interstellar adventure.
In February 1964, New Worlds was sold, and the twenty-three-year-old Michael Moorcock took over as editor on Ted Carnell’s recommendation. Moorcock, who described Ballard as “Trotski” to his Lenin, set about transforming the magazine. While Ballard’s own stories mutated into the condensed fictions that would be collected as The Atrocity Exhibition, a series of review-essays appeared, directing readers’ attention to an alternative canon: the art of Salvador Dalí and the surrealists, the experimental fiction of William Burroughs, and the satires of Wyndham Lewis. Alongside these were provocative reviews; of Mein Kampf, and a dissection of an example of what Ballard termed “invisible literature,” in the form of a popular sexual self-help manual..
The jobbing journalist, meanwhile, continued to operate alongside the polemicist. In 1962, Ballard had begun reviewing books for Chemistry & Industry, eventually contributing twenty-three pieces to the journal by 1965. From 1965 to 1967, he contributed sixteen reviews to the book pages of the Guardian, predominantly round-ups of science fiction, but with a revealing foray into nonfiction territory: Michael Siffre’s account of living in a cave for several months was an exemplary exploration of the “inner space” Ballard had declared the concern of his fiction. From then on, allowing for a couple of hiatuses, he was barely out of print in the British broadsheet newspapers until his last piece was published in the Guardian in late 2007, a year after the publication of his final novel, Kingdom Come (2006).
The first part of Ballard’s biography is well known, mythologized in the quasi-autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun (1984) and Steven Spielberg’s 1987 film adaptation. James Graham Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, where his father ran the China Printing and Finishing Company, a subsidiary of the Calico Printers Association. He grew up just beyond the official boundary of the International Settlement.
In 1937, Japan invaded China and the occupying forces captured Shanghai. The Ballards moved to the safer French Concession, and while the international city was left to its own devices, the brutality and violence of the occupying Japanese was visible at the perimeter of their lives. In December 1941, immediately following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japanese troops seized the International Settlement, and in March 1943 the Ballard family were interned in the Lunghua civilian camp, where they remained until August 1945.
Following the end of the war, Ballard shipped back to England, where he encountered a “derelict, dark and half-ruined” country. He was sent to board at the Leys School in Cambridge. In 1949, he began studying medicine at King’s College, Cambridge University, dropping out after completing the anatomy course at the end of his second year. He spent two terms studying English literature at Queen Mary’s College, then worked as an advertising copywriter, as a porter at Covent Garden Market, and for a period selling the Waverley Encyclopedia door-to-door in the West Midlands. In 1954, he signed on for the RAF, undertaking basic training in Lincolnshire before shipping to Canada for six months flight training in Moosejaw, Saskatchewan.
Looking back on this early life, the writer would identify the formation in these experiences of ideas and images that informed his life’s work: the idea that civilization was a stage set, and that at any time the apparent reality of normal life could be stripped away; that powerful unconscious forces could drive entire populations to acts of irrationality and violence; the symbolic resonance of drained swimming pools, atomic bombs, grounded pilots, and enclosed communities. Inspired by the science fiction magazines he read during his downtime in Canada, he landed on a field of literature in which his imagination could work with these impulses.
Shortly after returning to England in 1955, he married Mary Matthews, and early the next year, their son, James, was born. Their daughters Fay and Bea followed in 1957 and 1959.
Despite early rejections from the American magazines he’d read in Canada, Ballard’s short fiction soon found a home in New Worlds and Science Fantasy, where Ted Carnell championed its innovation: as early as 1957, Carnell was styling him “one of Britain’s most promising new writers.” Obsessed with the “inner space” of his characters’ psychology, conscious and unconscious, and how they responded to the physics of the universe and the mysteries of “deep time,” Ballard’s short fiction explored the intersection of extreme psychic states and alienated landscapes—deserts, bases, atolls, and resorts.
His first novel was written in a two-week holiday from work in order to slingshot his professional career. In 1961, To Reap the Whirlwind was sold to Berkley Books in New York, published as The Wind from Nowhere in 1962. The Drowned World, published in the United States later the same year, and at the beginning of 1963 by Victor Gollancz in the United Kingdom, was the true career breakthrough, attracting the admiration of the British novelist Kingsley Amis, who became a friend and champion in the early years of Ballard’s career. In May 1965, The Drought was published in the United Kingdom, and The Crystal World in 1966. Between his first four novels, Ballard had imagined a world consumed by wind, flood, drought, and, finally, transformed into crystal, as well as a suite of characters who wished to merge with these metamorphic environments.
Just as his career was taking off, his young family suffered the shock of the sudden death of Mary following a rapid illness during a holiday in Alicante, Spain, in 1965. Ballard drove his three children home to bring them up as a single father.
If his work of the preceding decade had taken on the SF establishment, the series of nonlinear, “condensed novels” written between 1966 and 1969 and collected as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) were yet more confrontational. Loosely bound by a series of repeating characters, these borrowed vocabularies from the invisible literatures of scholarly psychology papers and scientific manuals and, using avant-garde cues and techniques, treated celebrities from the media environment and obscene imagery as elements in a clinical collage.
In January 1968, the Unicorn bookshop in Brighton was raided by police, and among the publications seized was a pamphlet copy of one such piece, “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.” Ballard agreed to appear as a witness for the defense in the subsequent obscenity trial but was stood down on the grounds that he did indeed intend his work to be obscene. The belated discovery of the same piece in the proposed first US edition of The Atrocity Exhibition by publisher Nelson Doubleday precipitated the pulping of the entire run.
Through the late 1960s, Moorcock, Ballard, and New Worlds were contributors to a thriving counterculture. As fiction editor at Ambit, where a number of The Atrocity Exhibition pieces had first been published, Ballard ran a competition for the best short story written under the influence of drugs. The winning piece, by Ann Quinn, was written while the author was using the birth control pill. By the end of the decade, Ballard was following a new obsession. In April 1970, he exhibited three wrecked cars at the New Arts Laboratory in Camden, as a way of testing the waters for the book that was coming. The drunken opening night confirmed his suspicion that the car crash was a fertilizing libidinal force.
Crash (1973), in which a group of middle-class professionals pursue anatomical sexual fantasies by instigating collisions and accidents to fuse their bodies with those of cars, described by Simon Sellars as “the blackest intellectual meat,” was the first in the “urban disaster trilogy” of the 1970s. Notoriously, a reader for publisher Jonathan Cape reported that “the author is beyond psychiatric help.” Next came Concrete Island (1974), a Robinsonade in which an architect becomes marooned in the wasteland below the Westway motorway with a tramp and a prostitute. High-Rise (1975) imagined the social breakdown of a hierarchically organized tower-block and the changes among its inhabitants as they create new lives within the malfunctioning society. All three novels were characterized by a nerveless refusal to blink from an extreme logic.
At the end of the decade, The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) seemed to mark a new phase in his work, turning his hometown of Shepperton into a tropical phantasmagoria, a shifting superfluity of desire, dream, and nature, fertilized by its narrator’s unconscious. Hello America (1981) transformed the United States into an entropic wasteland ruled by a despot called Charles Manson. The Day of Creation (1987) and Rushing to Paradise (1994) described ecological fever-dreams of African rivers and Pacific islands. Among these, the novel that made him a household name, Empire of the Sun, and its first-person sequel, The Kindness of Women (1991), reimagined his own autobiography as mythologized fiction.
A new experiment, Running Wild (1988), an illustrated crime novella in documentary form describing the investigation into murders committed by children in a gated community, anticipated his final quartet of novels. Glossy covers disguised Cocaine Nights (1996) and Super-Cannes (2000) as airport reads for unwary holidaymakers. Millennium People (2003) and Kingdom Come (2006) brought closer to home his final, enduring theme, of the cosseted middle classes seeking relief from the boredom of insulated contemporary life in acts of violence.
The reputation and influence of Ballard’s body of work has increased since his death. The contemporary art world paid handsome tribute with the exhibition Crash at the Gagosian Gallery in London in early 2010, conceived as a response to his “enormous cultural significance.” With Ballard’s own Project for a New Novel billboard pieces (1958) at its heart, Crash collected work by artists most admired by Ballard—Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Delvaux, Francis Bacon—alongside that by contemporary artists directly responsive to his writing—pieces such as Tacita Dean’s Teignmouth Electron, Cayman Brac (Ballard) (1999), Ed Ruscha’s Fountain of Crystal (2009), and Jake and Dinos Chapman’s multiple edition, the paperback Bang, Wallop, By J&D Ballard (2010).
Fan communities, centered around a core of enthusiasts and collectors, active mailing lists, and numerous websites, have flourished. Simon Sellars’s Ballardian.com was a hub from 2005 to 2020 and spawned two books: Extreme Metaphors (2012), coedited with Dan O’Hara, which collected Ballard’s interviews, “a second sun” in the context of his written corpus, that displayed a “disarming mix of full-frontal future-shock and old-world, erudite charm.” Sellars’s “theory-fiction” Applied Ballardianism, a fantastical, hybrid account of his obsession with and academic thought about Ballard’s work, was published in 2018. At “The Digital Ballard,” Mike Bonsall maintains an online concordance and links to his several twitter bots. The para-academic Deep Ends annual issue, published by the collector Rick McGrath since 2014, continues to present work by artists, scholars, and enthusiasts responding to Ballard, providing an ongoing catalog of research and miscellany. Serialized in its pages since the 2015 issue, David Pringle’s detailed chronology of Ballard’s life and work provides the most comprehensive biographical resource yet published.
Ben Wheatley’s critically acclaimed High-Rise (2015) was the first new film adaptation of a Ballard novel since Jonathan Weiss’s 1998 version of The Atrocity Exhibition, a low-budget piece warmly welcomed by the author, who contributed a commentary to the DVD. Wheatley’s movie, with its A-list cast, reignited discussions of the political valences of Ballard’s 1970s novel at a time when austerity policies in the United Kingdom had resurfaced questions of social inequality. At the time of writing, two new screen adaptations are hotly anticipated: Brandon Cronenberg, the son of director David Cronenberg, whose own adaptation of Ballard’s Crash was the source of bitter controversy, will helm a serialized Super-Cannes. The Road director John Hillcoat is making a feature film of Running Wild.
The ripples of cultural impact do not end there. In the tradition of the alternative musicians of the 1970s who found inspiration in The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash—Joy Division, Gary Numan, and The Normal—contemporary releases by bands such as Squid, Danny Brown, and TVAM have continued to pay tribute. Even the fashion industry has signed up to Ballard fandom, with a number of high-profile designers referencing his work.
As indicative of influence as these are, the listing of cultural productions can only take us so far. Writing in the catalog to the Crash exhibition, Will Self observes: “When Ballard died, the location of his ‘influence’ in this genre or that medium was a relatively easy task to undertake; what was more difficult for commentators to grasp was how insidiously in the preceding five decades the Ballardian had become the commonplace.” As a writer, Ballard had staked out a distinct territory: the suburbs, the rise of “politics conducted as a branch of advertising,” the alienating effects of technologies, and the idea that boredom would drive the middle classes to acts of violence. For many observers, reality has mapped onto the ground he had already occupied.
Examples have not been hard to find as reality television stars have become presidents and the health of prime ministers has been tracked in real time in TV chyrons. Self was among the commentators quick to identify the parallels between Ballard’s work and the experiences of enforced isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic, addressing BBC R4’s flagship news program Today. The next riot in a shopping mall seems perpetually five minutes into the future.
Rare are the writers whose careers span so many phases or endure for half a century: from leading genre writer and reformist, through confrontational avant-gardist and countercultural provocateur to garlanded mainstream novelist. Rarer still are those whose aesthetic is so distinct it spawns a commonly used adjectival form. The indexing of a career’s worth of obsessions presents an acute difficulty, and if we are to ask what it is about Ballard’s work that has achieved this level of imaginative reach and prescience, his short nonfiction is an essential resource.
This collection comes about to answer a need. Exploring the archive of papers donated to the British Library in 2010, I happened across a print-out of a catalog essay for a Robert Smithson exhibition, shared with the artist Tacita Dean, with whom Ballard had been corresponding. The piece “Robert Smithson as Cargo Cultist” is a rich appreciation of the canonical works of the land artist, displaying some typical Ballardian nonfictional strategies: a pair of provocative, suggestive, and eloquent questions open an engagement with Smithson’s work from within the imaginative world of that work: “What cargo might have berthed at the Spiral Jetty? And what strange caravel could have emerged from the saline mists of this remote lake and chosen to dock at this mysterious harbour?”
The Smithson piece had never been collected and was only available in its original publication in an obscure catalog, which is why he had sent a copy to Dean. I began to consider what else might be hard to locate or uncollected. David Pringle’s bibliography, including 236 items of short nonfiction, revealed how much new journalism was published in the late 1990s and early 2000s and had therefore escaped capture in the only previous collection, A User’s Guide to the Millennium (1997).
A new collection, bringing together more of this dispersed writing in a new arrangement, provides a selection of materials to illuminate the full range of Ballard’s activities as a reviewer, essayist, journalist, commentator, memoirist, provocateur, compiler of lists, and talking head. The categories under which it is organized have been devised to assist easy navigation; on occasion the hybridity of certain pieces has suggested multiple possible categorizations and, in such instances, the reader’s patience is begged: chapter headings are aids and are not intended to be secure or definitive.
The first such categorization is perhaps the most contentious. None of four pieces in the opening section, “Statements,” were explicitly issued as manifestoes (though one of them is undeniably a credo). Ballard refused the idea that he had such a formalized approach to his work, responding to Mark Dery in interview: “Some of your questions seem to challenge me on the grounds that I don’t have a complete manifesto, a party platform that will address all questions—you know, ‘What are your views on the common-market agricultural policy? What are your views on abortion?’ I don’t have set-piece answers; I have question marks.” Yet the work he and Moorcock were undertaking in New Worlds was admittedly polemical in nature.
What is indisputable is that a number of pieces have become key points of reference for framing Ballard’s work at different stages in his career. These have been pulled out to the front of the book to give a snapshot not just of the concerns of Ballard’s work at the points in time at which they were written, but also a taste of the formal variety that the collection will encompass. These statements provide helpful conceptual orientation: Ballard will refer frequently in his early reviews and essays to “inner space,” while the “death of affect,” a muting of emotional response to an oversaturated mediascape, becomes a guiding principle for understanding his protagonists. The surrealists, whose images and ideas nourish his oeuvre, will jostle throughout.
Of the manifesto form, Mary Ann Caws writes: “The manifesto was from the beginning, and has remained, a deliberate manipulation of the public view. Setting out the terms of the faith toward which the listening public is to be swayed, it is a document of an ideology.” Presented in the first section of this collection is a selection of pieces in which Ballard set out the terms of his faith.
Context and chronology are the guiding principles of organization throughout, and for that reason the remaining New Worlds pieces clamor to be collected together. This collation allows us to consider the specifics of New Worlds, including its transformative approach to publishing SF during Moorcock’s tenure as editor, reflected in the design and layout of the magazine, which under Charles Platt’s art direction experimented with typography and the space of the page. That visual character cannot be translated into this collection, but it is hoped that the textual flavor of these pieces is concentrated by grouping them together.
Given the canon-making impulse in the “New Worlds” section, the natural successors are the “Commentaries” Ballard wrote for the writers and artists whose work he admired, most often in the form of forewords or catalog essays, but also, on occasion, as newspaper or magazine articles. These allow the visual artists to be promoted to the prominent position they held in the Ballardian imaginary and for patterns of reciprocity to begin to emerge. Introductions and glosses to his own novels and stories give insight into his views on his own practice.
Longer-form “Features and Essays” include a report, commissioned by the AA’s Drive magazine, of piloting a vintage Mercedes across Europe; speculative pieces for Vogue; a travel feature for The Mail on Sunday; an account of a visit to an exhibition of the work of Edward Hopper at the Musée Cantini; and essays on airports, cities, directors, and modernist architecture. The sophisticated cultural analyst and theorist apparent from his interviews has considerable free rein in the longer form.
“Lists, Captions, and Glossaries” occupy a significant place in Ballard’s work, as the proliferation of lists in The Atrocity Exhibition attests. An experimenter in the forms of print media—interview answers divorced from their questions and the paratextual play of an index to an imagined biography are exemplary of the many uses and subversions of textual formats to be found in both his nonfiction and hybrid experiments—Ballard took perfectly seriously the opportunity to indulge this favored form of magazine editors, and later commissioners sought him out for his expertise in the mode to provide glosses or captions.
The “Reviews” come next. To allow space for other sections, these are greatly reduced in number from A User’s Guide to the Millennium (1996) and aim to give an exemplary selection from Ballard’s forty-five years as a professional reviewer. The criteria for selection have been chronological range, the durability of the films, titles, or authors under review, the inclusion of autobiographical detail, and a spread across publications. There are fewer group reviews, because these tend not to allow the space for a reviewer to hit a stride. Here, we read early approaches to SF, engaged but skeptical reviews of books by futurologists, and anecdotes about Steven Spielberg and Quentin Tarantino. Close attention reveals a broad erudition and range of reading. Quotations come from far and wide: the psychoanalyst Edward Glover, William Blake, and Woody Allen.
The peri-millennial run of pieces for the New Statesman, published both in print and online, is permitted its own gated environment in which Ballard’s legendarily gimlet eye is turned to the state of the United Kingdom around the year 2000. These provide a cultural historical parallel to the final pair of novels, Millennium People (2003) and Kingdom Come (2006), a user’s guide to the birth of the next millennium.
As with “Lists,” “Capsule Commentaries” should not be mistaken as superficial in the context of the work of an author who had mastered condensed lexia. Being J. G. Ballard was an essential part of the work and a continuation by different means of the questioning of the boundary between fiction and nonfiction. Ballard seemingly enjoyed appearing straight as a talking head as much as he enjoyed playing provocateur. If you want a snapshot of how he imagined the world might end, his favorite beach, or the state of the room in which he wrote, head straight here, but don’t expect the standard fare. Ballard never just dialed it in, even when dialing it (or faxing it) in.
Finally, “Memoirs and Tributes” closes out the collection with a series of generous and modest retrospections. Here he remembers episodes from his life, his friends, and his influences. Among these supplements to the succinct autobiography Miracles of Life (2008), readers will also find referents for fictionalized events narrated in Empire of the Sun (1984) and The Kindness of Women (1991).
The question of scope in this collection is an existential one. In the context of the work of J. G. Ballard, peppered with characters called Jim, Ballard, or simply B, what is fiction and what is nonfiction? It is a question that this edition has to consider carefully, and one that Ballard’s work continually posed of its readers. In his “Introduction to the French Edition of Crash!,” Ballard set out a theory: “We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.”
This wasn’t simply an observation, but a driving impetus behind his work, resulting in a number of pieces that trouble the fiction/nonfiction border in distinct ways and have caused critics to respond with a mixture of admiration and wariness. Roger Luckhurst summarizes this succinctly: “It seems to me that Ballard . . . exposes the hidden assumptions behind the secure categorizations of literature and literary judgement. . . . The Ballard oeuvre is nothing other than a prolonged meditation on the questions of protocols, boundaries, frames, and the evaluations they set in train.”
Two examples of pieces that lie outside the scope of this collection illustrate the manner in which such work operates to test standard protocols. “The Secret Autobiography of J. G. Ballard” is a vignette imagining a character called B. settling into life as the sole inhabitant of a deserted world. Despite declaring itself an autobiographical piece, it does not describe the lived events of a life, but rather a fantastic or imagined scene: a dream autobiography, perhaps. “The Side-Effects of Orthonovin G,” meanwhile, is composed from a pair of found, first-person texts written by American women who had taken a specific birth control pill. These do describe the empirical events of real lives, but they are not those of the purported author, who contributes only the title and his byline.
Should we characterize the former as nonfiction because it is so identified by the author? Or the latter as fiction because it is signed by J. G. Ballard and set out as a prose poem? Which—if either—should be included in an edition of nonfiction? “The Side-Effects” at first glance has the strongest claim, in that its main texts certainly are nonfictional. Would it be right, however, to include it in a collection of selected nonfiction of J. G. Ballard? What would the true authors of these texts make of that? We are thrown, instead, into questions of authorship and propriety.
The response taken here is to keep in mind such pieces and the questions they pose, while holding them in the wings, allowing only “What I Believe” a starring soliloquy as the sole representative of these hybrids.
Another thorny obstacle for an edition such as this is where to locate itself in relation to scholarly study of Ballard’s work. Read his disdainful response to the editors of Science Fiction Studies and you are left in no doubt of what he thinks of SF scholarship: “bourgeoisification in the form of an over-professionalized academia with nowhere to take its girlfriend for a bottle of wine and a dance is now rolling its jaws over innocent and naive fiction that desperately needs to be left alone. You [sic] killing us! Stay your hand! Leave us be!”
Those who would follow the word of Ballard should look away now. The scholars vociferously warned off have declined to heed him, with increasing resources available through which to consider his legacy. The archive of his papers at the British Library, while carefully curated, allows researchers to read original manuscripts of his novels and to study his process. Archivist Chris Beckett has used this material to publish a richly illustrated Collector’s Edition of Crash and a number of genetic studies. The cataloging of Ballard’s personal library, not deposited with the archival papers, has led to fresh consideration of his idea of invisible literatures by Catherine McKenna.
Building on the influential studies of scholars such as Roger Luckhurst and Jeannette Baxter, Ballard’s work is increasingly read in English Literature Departments in the context of courses on modern and contemporary literature, science fiction, and eco-criticism, a field whose foundational documents consider his first quartet of novels against the backdrop of climate crisis. Architectural scholars have studied his fictional buildings as a critical reflection on, and speculative intervention into, the built environment. A brutalist reading group at the Barbican Centre in London focused on Ballard’s interest in modernist architecture, ran in 2018. The political historian Duncan Bell has used Ballard’s nonfiction writing to essay an analysis of his politics. Research that reconsiders New Worlds as a fertile seedbed for the 1960s avant-garde has expanded the view of that magazine as contributing to both visual and literary culture.
For these interdisciplinary approaches, the nonfiction provides a crucial context against which to read both the fiction and the formation of the Ballardian imaginary. Where books reviewed provide a partial record of Ballard’s reading during any given period, his commentary pieces extend, in a more formal register, the opinions expressed in interview. For literary historians and close students of Ballard, a fresh look at the nonfiction provides another opportunity: to reconsider his active image-management and mythmaking.
Perhaps now is the time to regard the warning to keep our tanks off his lawn as an invitation, instead, to perform a finger-tip search.
Whether analysts or fans, readers will recognize in these pieces the work of a stylist who honed phrases until they were operating like surgical instruments, and could be redeployed several times over: take, as just one example, from the “Introduction to the French Edition of Crash!,” the construction “in sex as the perfect arena, like a culture-bed of sterile pus, for all the veronicas of our own perversions.” Appearing twice in this collection and used also in the piece “Tolerances of the Human Face,” it is a typically arresting combination of subject, metaphor, and diagnosis, deploying biological and emotional vocabularies with care and precision to produce something equally disturbing and delicious.
Repetition is a strategy in Ballard, both practical and determined, at the levels of language, structure, and narrative: it did not impress reviewers of A User’s Guide to the Millennium, who felt shortchanged, and can either cast a glamour over or frustrate readers of the fiction, who experience the unnerving sense that they’ve read this one before. The current book allows conscious repetition its head so that it may perform its incantatory function, and enable comparison of key variants, but reduces multiple approaches to topics from the same perspective. For this reason, for example, while Ballard wrote several reviews of books by or about William Burroughs, only the New Worlds essay-review “Myth-Maker of the 20th Century,” a review of the biography Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs by Ted Morgan, and an obituary piece are included, allowing us to read the evolution of his relationship with Burroughs’s work across his career.
To enthusiasts it might seem redundant to observe that Ballard was unusually quotable, but newcomers may not be aware of how luminous his phrase-turning could be. The book J. G. Ballard: Quotes (2004), published by Re/Search, ultimately functions as a nonfiction collection, so many passages of vivid phrasing and acute observation does it identify and isolate. Keep an alert eye open when reading opinion columns and you may be surprised how frequently journalists reach for a Ballard line. A joy for any reader of the current edition will be to set to the text with a pen and underline the slogans and crisp, killer lines that just keep coming: “We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind”; “Architecture is a stage set where we need to be at ease in order to perform”; “Psychopathology is fun”.
The adman and caption writer folded this technique into the descriptive language of his fiction, at turns painterly and scientifically accurate. Readers will not want for examples of accomplished figurative prose style. Consider his lilting description of the experience of the female inhabitant of an immersive living/media environment of the future for Vogue readers: “The delicate quicksilver loom of her nervous system as she sits at her dressing table, the sudden flush of adrenaline as the telephone rings, the warm arterial tides of emotion as she arranges lunch with her lover . . . The spherical mirror forms the wall of our universe, enclosing us for ever at its heart . . .”
Polemics, lyrical visions, droll anecdotes, incisive analysis, and tender tributes. The unconscious, the history of the twentieth century, the phenomenon of celebrity, the impact of technology and the media landscape on the human subject. Access pieces at random or proceed with a linear reading. It matters not. You are inside a spherical mirror.