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Written in 1997 by John Griffiths, university of colorado student.
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J.G. Ballard
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In 1966 critic Algis Budrys stated that "a story by J. G. Ballard, as you know, calls for people who don't think." This is, perhaps, an unfair judgment, especially considering that the bulk of Ballard's work has been written since that time. But in some ways I think Ballard might agree with the statement--not that his work requires a nonthinking audience, but that it demands a reader to think differently. His stories, like fevered dreams, are set in vaguely familiar, yet disturbingly altered landscapes. His characters do not react to these situations like we think they should. They are "mysteriously obsessed or bewildered . . . in situations filled with enigmatic events to which they respond with an acceptance of some ultimate failure in themselves or humanity or the universe." So we are made uncomfortable--and that's exactly what Ballard wants.
In a recent interview Ballard asserted that "we take our everyday external reality very much for granted . . . but in fact it is, literally speaking, an illusion generated by our central nervous system." The illusion, he goes on to explain, that is no more tangible than the virtual reality landscapes of cyberspace. He claims that his task as a writer is to present the
"different planes of spatial reality that are intersecting . . . within our minds. . . . I've tried to decode that mutileveled space that we create."
Ballard's turbulent early life almost certainly contributed to his unique vision of reality. Born in Shanghai in 1930, the first son of a British colonialist family, he enjoyed a privileged childhood until the Japanese occupation of China in 1939. His interment in a Japanese prisoner of war camp during this period of his life provided the material for his semi-autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun. For several nights following the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, it was possible for the prisoners of the camp to see glows from the fires burning in the city. Ballard later expressed a sense of guilt and dismay over the fact that such a horrible event probably saved his life.
After World War II he returned to England with his mother and sister, and attended the Leys School in Cambridge. He studied medicine for a time at Cambridge University, but soon turned to copywriting and scriptwriting to support himself. In 1953 he volunteered for the Royal Air Force and was stationed in Moosejaw, Canada. Ironically, Ballard, who would write in detail about planetary destruction, soon found himself flying around in a plane loaded with nuclear bombs.
In 1956 Ballard published his first short story, "Prima Belladonna," in Science Fantasy magazine. The piece would later appear in the collection Vermilion Sands, and it, along with the other stories in the volume, typify his early work. Because of his scientific training, these stories exhibit a technical authenticity that is lacking in much of the science fiction of the same era. This is not to suggest that their content was banal or stilted. Indeed, the presence in the stories of such elements as singing plants, jewel-encrusted arthropods, and cloud-sculpting artists, corroborates Ballard's claim that he was influenced by artists such as writer William S. Burroughs and surrealist painter Salvador Dali.
These stories are not merely mind candy. Ballard had a project in mind when writing them. The physical and spiritual adaptations the characters (and even the inanimate objects) develop to deal with a stark, post-apocalyptic world, reflect Ballard's assertion that his fiction is intended to portray humans "coming to terms with various forms of isolation."
When his wife died in 1964, however, Ballard retreated into himself, and his writing began to reflect this introversion. His novels and stories began to resemble what critic Brian Ash calls "slow choreographs of physical and mental disintegration." Foremost among these "slow choreographs" is The Atrocity Exhibition, his 1970 novel (or perhaps "antinovel") that William S. Burroughs called "a profound and disquieting book," in which there is a breakdown between inner and outer landscapes."
Experimental in style, The Atrocity Exhibition relates the story of a psychiatrist named Travern who is slowly going insane and records the process in a disturbingly detached, clinical manner. Filled with images of contemporary media figures such as Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and Ralph Nader, Traven's short entries are not always linearly coherent, but do provide verbal tone paintings that illustrate a startlingly demented sagacity. Ultimately the narrative culminates in what Peter Briggs calls "Traven's 'work in progress' as he goes insane."
Ballard's obsession with media figures, as well as his scientific training, are evident in the following passage from a chapter entitled "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan." This chapter, incidentally, caused the first edition of The Atrocity Exhibition to be destroyed by the publisher.
Amazingly, the quote below was written a decade before Ronald Reagan would become president:
Motion picture studies of Ronald Reagan reveal characteristic patterns of facial tonus and musculature associated with homo-erotic behaviour. The continuing tension of buccal sphincters and the recessive tongue roll tally with earlier studies of facial rigidity (cf., Adolf Hitler, Nixon). Slow-motion cine-films of campaign speeches exercised a marked erotic effect upon an audience of spastic children.
Though a departure from the traditional themes of science fiction itself, and Ballard's earlier short stories in particular, The Atrocity Exhibition still includes enough of the fantastic to be labeled as science fiction.
This is not necessarily true of Ballard's most recent works, especially Empire of the Sun, a novel that was made into Stephen Spielberg's 1987 film. Awarded The Guardian newspaper's "Best Novel" prize in 1984, Empire of the Sun is loosely based on Ballard's own childhood experiences in China.
Many hard-core Ballard fans dismiss his later works as being too mellow, claiming that he "sold out" in his old age. I tend to disagree with these critics. Taken as a whole, Ballard's body of writing shows a natural progression from youthful excess, through adolescent melancholy and rage, to an ultimately mature sense of insight that still forcefully displays an "underlying dismay at the violent foolishness of modern reality."
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