J.G. Ballard (1930 - 2009)

British writer J.G. Ballard died on Sunday 19 April 2009. Ballard, who had been diagnosed with prostrate cancer in June 2006, was 78 years old. Among his best-known novels are such as Crash, High-Rise, Empire of the Sun, and Super-Cannes.

Though usually cited as a science fiction writer (he was one of the vanguards of the "New Wave" of sci-fi coming into prominence in the 1960s with such celebrated magazines as New Worlds, which he also contributed), Ballard's main theme was the psychopathology of contemporary society. The writer inspired by French Surrealists of the early 20th century, Ballard's works usually were about the civilisation crumbling but also mutating into something else, creating its own beauty and serenity. His psycho-geographical landscapes were inhabitated by alienated but inquisitive characters obsessed by a combination of technology, celebrity cult, sex and violence; all of which they worshipped with a religious fervour and even some sort of strange dignity.

Crash (1973) is about a small cult of people sexually obsessed with becoming injured or even dying in car accidents, preferably featuring some celebrity figures such as Elizabeth Taylor. Concrete Island (1974) describes a modern-day Robinson Crusoe, who finds himself helplessly stranded on a traffic island in the abyss of a spaghetti junction, his pleas for help ignored by passing cars. As with film director Luis Buñuel, Ballard's works could often be seen as surreal satires of the "discreet charm of bourgeoisie", and High-Rise (1975) shows a group of people consisting of highly-paid professionals and inhabiting an ultra-modern tower block degenerate into a constant life of violent orgy. In The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) an aviator crashes his plane in a suburb town of the Thames Valley, becoming a sort of Messiah with supernatural powers in a tale which might be or not only a final fantasy of a dying man. Ballard's late quadrology Cocaine Nights (1996), Super-Cannes (2000) (these two being actually companion pieces, so similar they are in their themes), Millennium People (2003) and Kingdom Come (2006) also show these same upper-middle class people instigating absurd violence to alleviate the boredom and social friction in their tightly guarded resort communities, business parks and shopping malls.

In a perfect world, the Nobel Award for Literature would have been Ballard's, but science/speculative fiction has never really fitted the appetites of that venerable election committee, not to speak about the controversial nature of his works. It would perhaps be preposterous to call Ballard's works prophetical, but I'm quite sure in the years to come more and more resonance will be found with his works and how the world around us turns out to be. No, as it already is: Ballard's dystopias took place not in some far future or a faraway country, but here and now.

In popular culture, J.G. Ballard has been for years a hip name to throw around and his works have inspired countless other writers, film-makers, artists and musicians. Empire of The Sun, an autobiographical book on Ballard's childhood years in the Japanese-occupied Shanghai, was filmed by Steven Spielberg in 1987. The Crash film version by David Cronenberg (whose earlier works such as Videodrome had a definite Ballardian tone) stirred some controversy in 1996.

Daniel Miller, the founder of Mute Records, recorded in 1978 under the alias of The Normal 'Warm Leatherette', a song based on Ballard's Crash. The Normal's electronic contemporaries such as Gary Numan ('Down In The Park') and John Foxx (Metamatic) have read their Ballard, too. Joy Division's late frontman Ian Curtis took the name for one of their songs, 'The Atrocity Exhibition', from a short story collection of Ballard.


The Normal: 'Warm Leatherette' with film clips from Crash adaptation by David Cronenberg

Ballardian.com - a Website dedicated to all things J.G. Ballard

Obituaries & tributes:

BBC News

Feuilleton

Helsingin Sanomat (in Finnish)

Michael Moorcock @ Ballardian

Salon (by Simon Reynolds)

"Only Neurotics Will Survive The Future..."

"It is now obvious that only neurotics will survive the future. Only fragmented personalities will be able to withstand the fragmented world produced by our over-sophisticated technology. What we consider today as pathological thoughts and behaviours are actually evolutionary advances that allow people to cope with urban alienation and its barrage of movie/video icons, computerised surveillance systems and nuclear threats. In place of raw emotion and instinct, we are increasingly compelled to cultivate a repertoire of artificial responses, amending the noble savage with a neurasthenic itinerary that consists of obsession, introversion and paranoia."

- Joseph Lanz at RE/Search #8/9: J. G. Ballard (RE/Search Publications, 1984)

J.G Ballard: BBC Profile

J.G. Ballard: BBC Profile (36:30)

BBC Four Profile

Wikipedia

J.G. Ballard: Millennium People

I just read the British writer J.G. Ballard's two books, Cocaine Nights (1996) and Millennium People (2003) in a row. Last year I was very impressed by Ballard's Super-Cannes (2000) which he wrote in between these two mentioned books, and all three can be even seen as a sort of a trilogy.

Even though Cocaine Nights as such is a fine book, I read it merely as a sketch for the themes and ideas Ballard fully and wonderfully developed only in Super-Cannes, the similarities between two books being remarkable; both taking place in the Mediterranean area and depicting the "discreet charm of the bourgeoisie" (as it was known in Luis Buñuel's satirical/surreal treatment), when the boredom and ennui of upper-middleclass professionals leads into a psychopathology of senseless violent outbursts chronicled in the form of a quasi-detective story.

Instead, in Millennium People Ballard returns back to his native England, where the writer, nevertheless, depicts again the violent underbelly hiding underneath the well-organised surface of Western bourgeois and middle-class civilisation.

Millennium People's narrator David Markham is a psychologist who lives in London's St. John's Wood (a traditional upper-middleclass living area) supported by his wife Sally, a rich man's daughter still suffering from a hypochondriac condition left by a tram accident in Spain, and therefore refusing to give up her walking sticks, now unnecessary; Sally's being crippled being more of a mental than physical sort. David finds out his ex-wife Laura has been killed by a bomb planted in Heathrow airport, and he embarks on a confused journey to find the killer. At the same, London's Chelsea Marina area, a middle-class dwelling place, is in a turmoil, when its residents complain having become "the new poor" under the tightening economical living conditions. David starts infiltrating this subversive movement, learning to know its spokeswoman Kay Churchill, an ex-film lecturer on a crusade against Hollywood, and other outcast figures of the former middleclass. Together they get involved in such (eventually futile) acts as storming the BBC building, burning down the National Film Theatre (Britain's Film Archive), smokebombing video stores, fatal bombing in Tate Gallery, and finally the police siege of Chelsea Marina, a sort of a bourgeois re-run of the 1871 Paris Commune. There is also a paediatrician, Dr. Richard Gould, a benefactor for the fatally ill children whose motives will be found more sinister as the book progresses.

This is another cruel social and psychopathological satire from J.G. Ballard, in the spirit of such fellow sardonic and idealist-as-a-cynic British storytellers as Jonathan Swift (OK, he was actually Irish but a classic of English literature nevertheless), William Golding of The Lord of the Flies and Anthony Burgess of A Clockwork Orange (as famously filmed by Stanley Kubrick).

Ballard's leitmotif going all through his published output seems to be that there's a vast irrational, psychosexual and violent understructure beneath our so called civilized culture -- what could be a more appropriate observation post to this than the (superficially) mild and polite middleclass British mindset where most Ballard's books take place -- and the more we try to suppress it, the more it is only prone to surface. Ballard's message seems to be that despite of boasting our sophisticated technology and advanced culture, we are still savages underneath.

Ballard's vision appears to be all the more crucial against the current political and socioeconomic climate, when even the traditionally stable middleclass has to struggle in the throes of neo-liberalist politics threatening to narrow the living space of anyone else than the ultra-rich elite of society (recent France's and Holland's "No" votes in the referendum about the European constitution were just one symptom of this growing concern). About the backgrounds of this book, Ballard himself said in a November 2003 interview for The Age (Australia) that:

"There is a lot of dissatisfaction among the middle classes today in England, the salaried middle class -- doctors, solicitors, middle managers, civil servants, academics, teachers -- that their salaries have not kept pace with inflation, that they are over-taxed. They have lost a lot of the status they once had, they've lost their job security and the kind of core beliefs that have always sustained the middle class: a sense of civic responsibility, the importance of education. Education is more and more perceived as a sort of con. It deludes the middle class into thinking that they have some sort of special skill. It doesn't guarantee anything. An arts degree is like a diploma in origami. And about as much use.

[...]

You get middle-class people together, and their conversation is dominated by finding schools and thinking about private health care, housing.

[...]

So there's this huge dissatisfaction and it could reveal itself in civil unrest. It could happen. [The middle classes] are the keel and anchor of society. Once their sense of civic responsibility is discarded, everything will collapse, literally. Water won't run through the taps.

[...]

I think the class system has begun to break down. We're in a time of major changes. The huge range of protest movements that we see -- they are the millennium people because they're shouldering the burden of protest. They're aware that something is deeply wrong and that something needs to be done about it."

"Desperate people -- and the middle classes are now desperate, or may soon become desperate - will seek desperate remedies, and desperate remedies to a certain kind of mind have an appeal all their own. It may be that sex is triggered by, or should be -- it's possible -- by strains of violence that are definitely in our make-up."

"These last three books [The Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes and Millennium People] have all been looking at human psychopathology, which has been fenced off very carefully by all the civilising forces that make up our lives today. This reservoir may appear more and more attractive to all sorts of agencies, from political parties to commercial concerns to religious groups to criminals to philosophers. I mean, this has happened before in history many times. The last occasion was, of course, the German Nazi party, which openly tapped psychopathic strains in human nature to create a vast sadistic ideology."

"In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom, and the more civilised we are, the more ruled by reason, the greater the unconscious need for some sort of irrational outbreak grows within us. But the fathers of the Enlightenment never accepted that.

[...]

The Enlightenment view of mankind is a complete myth. It leads us into thinking we're sane and rational creatures most of the time, and we're not."

Links:

Millennium People @ andthegoat.com
Millennium People @ BBC Collective
Millennium People @ blackstarreview.com
BBC Four Profile of J.G. Ballard
Millennium People @ culturecourt.com
Millennium People @ encompassculture.com
Millennium People @ track0.com

J.G.Ballard.com - an extensive unofficial site
J.G. Ballard Quotes @ researchpubs.com

Bedtime For Bonzo

WHY I WANT TO FUCK RONALD REAGAN [1967] by J.G. Ballard

RONALD REAGAN AND THE CONCEPTUAL AUTO DISASTER. Numerous studies have been conducted upon patients in terminal paresis (GPI), placing Reagan in a series of simulated auto crashes, e.g. multiple pile-ups, head-on collisions, motorcade attacks (fantasies of Presidential assassinations remained a continuing preoccupation, subject showing a marked polymorphic fixation on windshields and rear trunk assemblies). Powerful erotic fantasies of an anal-sadistic surrounded the image of the Presidential contender.

Subjects were required to construct the optimum auto disaster victim by placing a replica of Reagan's head on the unretouched photographs of crash fatalities.

In 82% of cases massive rear-end collisions were selected with a preference for expressed fecal matter and rectal hemorrhages. Further tests were conducted to define the optimum model-year. These indicate that a three year model lapse with child victims provide the maximum audience excitation (confirmed by manufacturers' studies of the optimum auto disaster). It is hoped to construct a rectal modulous of Reagan and the auto disaster of maximized audience arousal.

Motion picture studies of Ronald Reagan reveal characteristic patterns of facial tones and musculature associated with homo-erotic behaviour. The continuing tension of buccal sphincters and the recessive tongue role tally with earlier studies of facial rigidity (cf., Adolf Hitler, Nixon). Slow-motion films of campaign speeches exercised a marked erotic effect upon an audience of spastic children. Even with mature adults the verbal material was found to have a minimal effect, as demonstrated by substitution of an edited tape giving diametrically opposed opinions.

INCIDENCE OF ORGASMS IN FANTASIES OF SEXUAL INTERCOURSE WITH RONALD REAGAN. Patients were provided with assembly kit photographs of sexual partners during intercourse. In each case Reagan's face was super imposed upon the original partner. Vaginal intercourse with "Reagan" proved uniformly disappointing, producing orgasm in 2% of subjects.

Axillary, buccal, navel, aural, and orbital modes produced proximal erections. The preferred mode of entry overwhelmingly proved to be the rectal. After a preliminary course in anatomy it was found that the caecum and transverse colon also provided excellent sites for excitation. In an extreme 12% of cases, the simulated anus of post-costolomy surgery generated spontaneous orgasm in 98% of penetrations. Multiple-track films were constructed of "Reagan" in intercourse during (a) campaign speeches, (b) rear-end auto collisions with one and three year model changes, (c) with rear exhaust assemblies.

SEXUAL FANTASIES IN CONNECTION WITH RONALD REAGAN. The genitalia of the Presidential contender exercised a continuing fascination. A series of imaginary genitalia were constructed using (a) the mouth parts of Jacqueline Kennedy, (b) a Cadillac, (c) the assembly kit prepuce of President Johnson...In 89% of cases, the constructed genitalia generated a high incidence of self-induced orgasm. Tests indicate the masturbatory nature of the Presidential contender's posture. Dolls consisting of plastic models of Reagan's alternate genitalia were found to have a disturbing effect on deprived children.

REAGAN'S HAIRSTYLE. Studies were conducted on the marked fascination exercised by the Presidential contender's hairstyle. 65% of male subjects made positive connections between the hairstyle and their own pubic hair. A series of optimum hairstyles were constructed.

THE CONCEPTUAL ROLE OF REAGAN. Fragments of Reagan's cinetized postures were used in the construction of model psychodramas in which the Reagan-figure played the role of husband, doctor, insurance salesman, marriage counsellor, etc.

The failure of these roles to express any meaning reveals the nonfunctional character of Reagan. Reagan's success therefore indicates society's periodic need to re-conceptualize its political leaders. Reagan thus appears as a series of posture concepts, basic equations which reformulate the roles of aggression and anality. Reagan's personality. The profound anality of the Presidential contender may be expected to dominate the United States in the coming years. By contrast the late JFK remained the prototype of the oral subject, usually conceived in pre-pubertal terms. In further studies sadistic psychopaths were given the task of devising sex fantasies involving Reagan. Results confirm the probability of Presidential figures being perceived primarily in genital terms; the face of LB Johnson is clearly genital in significant appearance -- the nasal prepuce, scrotal jaw, etc. Faces were seen as either circumcised (J.F.K., Khrushchev) or uncircumcised (L.B.J, Adenauer). In assembly-kit tests Reagan's face was uniformly perceived as a penile erection. Patients were encouraged to devise the optimum sex-death of Ronald Reagan.

Super-Cannes by J.G. Ballard

"Release the fiend that lies dormant within you..."
- The Process Church of the Final Judgment

No one else has described the psychopathology of modern society as well as the English writer J.G. Ballard (b. 1930). His 1970s masterpieces such as The Concrete Island, Crash and High-Rise are accurate chronicles of the deepest and darkest violent and erotic urges that lurk beneath the glossy chrome surface of consumer society.

Here are excerpts from J.G. Ballard's Super-Cannes, Chapter 29 (2000). Eden-Olympia is a fictional business park of professionals working for international mega-corporations.


"Work dominates life in Eden-Olympia and drives out everything else. The dream of leisure society was the great twentieth-century delusion. Work is the new leisure. Talented and ambitious people work harder than they have ever done, and for longer hours. They find their only fulfilment through work. The men and women running successful companies need to focus their energies on the task in front of them, and for every minute of the day. The last thing they want is recreation. [...] Creative work is its own recreation."

[...]

"People at Eden-Olympia have no time for getting drunk together, for infidelities or rows with the girlfriend, no time for adulterous affairs or coveting their neighbours' wives, no time even for friends. There are no energies to spare for anger, jealousy, racial prejudice and the more mature reflections that follow. There are none of the social tensions that force us to recognize other people's strengths and weaknesses, our obligations to them or feelings of dependence. At Eden-Olympia there's no interplay of any kind, none of the emotional trade-offs that give us our sense of who we are."

[...]

"The social order must hold, especially where elites are involved. Eden-Olympia's great defect is that there's no need for personal morality. Thousands of people live and work here without making a single decision about right or wrong. The moral order is engineered into the lives along with the speed limits and the security systems."

[...]

"A sense of morality can be a convenient escape route. If the worst comes to the worst, we tell ourselves how guilty we feel and that excuses everything. The more civilized we are, the fewer choices we have to make."

[...]

"A moral calculus that took thousands of years to develop starts to wither from neglect. Once you dispense with morality the important decisions become a matter of aesthetics. You've entered an adolescent world where you define yourself by the kind of trainers you wear. Societies that dispense with the challenged conscience are more vulnerable than they realize. They have no defences against the psychotic who gets into the system and starts working away like a virus, using the sluggish moral machinery against itself."

[...]

"The moral perception was so eroded that it failed to warn them of danger. Places like Eden-Olympia are fertile ground for any messiah with a grudge. The Adolf Hitlers and Pol Pots of the future won't walk out of the desert. They'll emerge from shopping malls and corporate business parks."

[...]

"The ultimate gated community is a human being with a closed mind. We're breeding a new race of deracinated people, internal exiles without human ties but with enormous power. It's this new class that runs our planet. To be successful enough to work at Eden-Olympia calls for rare qualities of self-restraint and intelligence. These are people who won't admit to any weaknesses and won't allow themselves to fail."

But there's something very wrong with these people:

"Classical psychoanalysis starts with the dream, and that was my first breakthrough. I realized these highly disciplined professionals had very strange dreams. Fantasies filled with supressed yearnings for violence, and ugly narratives of anger and revenge, like the starvation dreams of death-camp prisoners. Despair was screaming through the bars of the corporate cage, the hunger of men and women exiled from their deeper selves."

[...]

"Today we shun the psychopathic, the dark side of the sun and those shadows that burn the ground. Sadism, cruelty and the dream of pain belong to our primate ancestors. When they surface in a damaged adolescent with a taste of strangling cats we lock him away for good. The run-down chief executives with their hives and depression were sane and civilized men. Maroon them on a desert island after a plane crash and they'd be the first to perish. Any perverse elements in their lives would have to be applied externally, like a vitamin shot or an antibiotic. [...] Let's say, a carefully metered measure of psychopathy."

[...]

"Sex is such a quick route to the psychopathic, the shortest of short cuts to the perverse. We aren't running an adventure playground, but a forcing house designed to expand the psychopathic possibilities of the executive imagination. It needs to be carefully monitored. Sadomasochism, excretory sex-play, body-piercing and wife-pandering can easily veer of into something nasty."

[...]

"The twentieth century was an heroic enterprise, but it left us in the dark, feeling our way towards a locked door. [...] The twentieth century ended with its dreams in ruins. The notion of the community as a voluntary association of enlightened citizens has died forever. We realize how suffocatingly humane we've become, dedicated to moderation and the middle way. The suburbanization of the soul has overrun our planet like the plague."

"Sanity and reason are unworthy us?"

"No. But a vast illusion, built from mirrors that lie. Today we scarcely know our neighbours, shun most forms of civic involvement and happily leave the running of society to a caste of political technicians. People find all the togetherness they need in the airport boarding lounge and the department-store lift. They pay lip service to community values but prefer to be alone."

[...]

"Homo sapiens is a reformed hunter-killer of depraved appetites, which once helped him to survive. He was partly rehabilitated in an open prison called the first agricultural societies, and now finds himself on parole in the polite suburbs of the city state. The deviant impulses coded into his central nervous system have been switched off. He can no longer harm himself or anyone else. But nature sensibly endowed him with a taste of cruelty and intense curiosity about pain and death. Without them, he's trapped in the afternoon shopping malls of a limitless mediocrity. We need to revive him, give him back the killing eye and the dreams of death. Together they helped him to dominate this planet."

[...]

"We're creatures of the treadmill: monotony and convention rule everything. In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom. Our latent psychopathy is the last natural reserve, a place of refuge for the endangered mind. Of course, I'm talking about a carefully metered violence, microdoses of madness like the minute traces of strychnine in a nerve tonic. In effect, a voluntary and elective psychopathy, as you can see in any boxing ring or ice-hockey rink. [...] in the armed forces [...] you know that recruits are deliberately brutalized -- the drill sergeant's boot and the punishment run give back to young men a taste for pain that generations of socialized behaviour have bred out of them."

[...]

"Remember your childhood -- like all of us you stole from the local supermarket. It was deeply exciting, and enlarged your moral sense of yourself. But you were sensible, and kept it down to one or two afternoons a week. The same rules apply to society at large. I'm not advocating an insane free-for-all. A voluntary and sensible psychopathy is the only way we can impose a shared moral order."

"And if we do nothing?"

"Danger will rush up to us and put a knife to our throat. Look at the century that lies ahead -- an upholstered desert, but a wasteland all the same. An absence of faith, except for a vague belief in an unknown deity, like the sponsor of a public-service broadcast. Wherever there's a vacuum, the wrong kind of politics creep in. Fascism was a virtual psychopathology that served deep unconscious needs. Years of bourgeois conditioning had produced a Europe suffocating in work, commerce and conformity. Its people needed to break out, to invent the hatreds that could liberate them, and they found an Austrian misfit only too happy to do the job. Here at Eden-Olympia we're setting out the blueprint for an infinitely more enlightened community. A controlled psychopathy is a way of resocializing people and tribalizing them into mutually supportive groups."

[...]

"Violence is spectacular and exciting, but sex has always been the main hunting ground of psychopathy. A perverse sexual act can liberate the visionary self in even the dullest soul. The consumer society hungers for the deviant and unexpected. What else can drive the bizarre shifts in the entertainment landscape that will keep us 'buying'? Psychopathy is the only engine powerful enough to light our imagination, to drive the arts, sciences and industries of the world."


See also:

J.G. Ballard: Millennium People