J.G. Ballard, in 1960, posing in front of his ‘experimental billboard fiction’.
On 5 May 2007, ‘From Shanghai to Shepperton: An International Conference on J.G. Ballard’, apparently the first-ever conference on the work of Ballard, will be held at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. Guest speakers include the novelist Toby Litt; Roger Luckhurst, author of the exhaustive Ballard work, The Angle Between Two Walls: The Fiction of J.G. Ballard
NOTE: proposals for papers and panels for the conference are still being accepted.
Simon Sellars
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Jeannette, how did you come to Ballard’s work?
I first encountered Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women as a postgraduate student at UEA, and I was drawn immediately to the irreverent nature of those novels, specifically the way they flaunt, formally and contextually, the instability of monolithic structures such as truth, history and reality. Intrigued by Ballard’s idiosyncratic visions of contemporary history and culture, I read the rest of his novels and short stories, and, much to the delight of Lorna Sage, who was my tutor at the time, I shelved my plans to write a thesis on African-American women’s writing. I went on instead to write a PhD on Ballard and Surrealism, which I’m revising as a book.
And the conference — how did it come about?
Well, even though I’ve just spent the last few years working almost exclusively on Ballard, I’ve realised that I’m more interested in his writing than ever, so a conference seemed like the next step. My ambition for the day is really quite modest, namely to get as many Ballard readers (be they academics, students or general readers) together in order to discuss the work of one of the most significant and popular contemporary authors.
Why is the time right?
A conference on Ballard is not only long overdue (to my knowledge the event at UEA is the first of its kind), but, as Roger Luckhurst reminded me recently, it’s also 50 years since the publication of Ballard’s first short story, ‘Prima Belladonna’. To have sustained a highly successful literary career for more than half a century is a magnificent achievement, and I’d like to see the conference as something of a celebration of that. It’s just a shame that Ballard will not be coming along to join in the event with us. I did invite him, but he joked that he was too old and infirm to travel all the way to Norwich!
Your list of guest speakers features a strong professorial focus. Do you feel that the conference will be, or should be, accessible to the layperson? Will there ever be a day when Ballard’s work is discussed by doctors, pilots, architects, psychologists, S&M mistresses etc?
There’s certainly nothing exclusive about the conference. I really hope that anyone with an interest in Ballard’s work will feel that they can participate in it. As for whether Ballard’s work will ever be a topic of conversation amongst doctors, pilots, architects etc, I think that it already is (and, indeed, has been for a long time). One only needs to visit the various internet sites, such as your excellent Ballardian.com, to gain a sense of the diversity of Ballard’s audience.
‘SF was ALWAYS modern, but now it is “postmodern” – 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 an innocent and naive fiction that desperately needs to be left alone. You are killing us! Stay your hand!’ ”
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J.G. Ballard. A Response to the Invitation to Respond (Science Fiction Studies, #55 = Volume 18, Part 3, Nov 1991).
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Why is Ballard notoriously intemperate when it comes to academia? What do you make of his riposte to the Science Fiction Studies crew [above]?
I suspect that Ballard’s attitude towards academia arises, in part, from the belief that the literary imagination is in danger of being compromised, and even tamed in some way, when it became the focus of academic discourse. Ballard’s attack on the “postmodernisation” of SF, for instance, seems to suggest that academic jargon might be nothing more than a linguistic strategy for explaining a text away without engaging with what that text is actually saying. Indeed, the example you cite is part of a larger dialogue which features a much-debated instance of critical theory overriding the literary imagination. I’m referring to Jean Baudrillard’s essay ‘Crash’ (which is in Simulacra and Simulation) in which he hijacks Ballard’s novel as the platform from which to launch his own theories of hyperreality and simulation. Although massively compelling, Baudrillard’s thesis pretty much erases Ballard’s novel altogether, and the reader is left wondering whether the critic has read the text at all. Having said all of this, however, I’m very pleased to say that Ballard has just agreed to work with me on an edited critical collection of his work, so I think it’s safe to say that he hasn’t written academia off altogether!
That does sound exciting. Can you tell us more about it? How will Ballard be working with you? Will he have a hand in the selection process?
I’m co-editing a series of books on contemporary British authors called Contemporary Critical Perspectives. I’m overseeing the Ballard volume which is one of three (the other two are on Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro) to be published by Continuum Press in 2008. As well as covering Ballard’s major works (from the early SF through to Kingdom Come), the volume will look at Ballard’s short stories, his collection of non-fiction writings and the translation of his novels into film. Ballard hasn’t been involved in the selection process (although he was extremely impressed with the line up of topics and contributors), but he has agreed to give an interview for the volume, and I’m also hoping that he’ll be involved in the brief biographical section which I’ll be putting together.
For the conference, your call for papers features a long and eclectic list of suggested topics. Why do you think Ballard resonates so deeply and so widely across so many disciplines and areas of enquiry? Do you think any other writer has come even close to matching this?
Yes, the list is rather long, but it really could have been much longer! As you’ve suggested to me before, there’s simply so much to consider when one thinks about Ballard. He is an incredibly diverse author, and I think his range of insights stems, in part, from his own voracious reading of what he terms ‘invisible’ literatures — scientific journals, pharmaceutical company brochures, think-tank manuals, copyright guidebooks, marginalia, telephone directories — the kind of literatures, in other words, which construct the realities that we inhabit on a daily basis, but which we either don’t have access to, or never think of reading. Ballard simply has a different reading list to most of us (it begs the question as to how he gets his hands on these materials), and it is this, together with his indefatigable desire to question and penetrate the myriad surface realities of our disturbed modernity, which gives his writing such breadth and depth. Ballard is in a category of his own, I think, in terms of the formal and contextual eclecticism of his writings, and also for the sheer tenacity of his imagination.
You list ‘humour in Ballard’ on the conference site as an ‘especially welcome’ topic. Will Self once wrote, ‘I think the big difference between me and Ballard is that there are no jokes in his books at all, or at least not intentionally any jokes,’ which I certainly don’t agree with. What are your thoughts on Self’s comment?
I don’t agree with Will Self either. Ballard is a very funny writer and humour has, I believe, a strong critical function in his work. Whilst texts such as Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition flaunt dead-pan observations on sex, death and historical violence in order to confront the reader with the nightmare realities of late C20th history, other works such as Running Wild and Millennium People employ surrealist black humour as a force of critical resistance. When Ballard’s pseudo-revolutionaries (in MP) draw an analogy between the Olympia Cat Exhibition and the eugenic cruelties inflicted by Joseph Mengele on concentration camp victims of Auschwitz, one has to laugh out loud. But this is not a reaction to authorial bad taste (which Ballard has been accused of many times). Rather it’s an example, I think, of how Ballard employs black humour in order to expose the absurd sense of historical relativism which the middle-class revolutionaries of Chelsea Marina display, as they hijack historical atrocities for purely aesthetic purposes. Like you, I find the role of humour in Ballard’s writing absolutely fascinating, yet little consideration has been given to it so far.
Do you find Ballard to be an especially British writer? Why is it that his commercial appeal is largely limited to the UK?
Ballard’s novels are certainly concerned with exploring notions of ‘Britishness’ – from the post-imperial narratives of The Drowned World, The Crystal World and Empire of the Sun which set out, in part, to dismantle Imperial mythologies, right through to the more recent works, Millennium People and Kingdom Come, which pose a number of urgent questions about the erosion of social, political and national identity within C20th and C21st Britain. At the same time, of course, there’s nothing distinctly ‘British’ about the high-tech business parks, ultra-modern shopping malls, sprawling motorways, or vast media-landscapes which Ballard writes about. In an age of globalisation and consumer-capitalism, Ballard presents a version of British society which is largely indistinguishable from other consumerist societies such as America and Japan, and that, I presume, is part of his critique.
I suppose one explanation for Ballard’s lack of commercial appeal outside of the UK may go back to your earlier question about humour. I remember talking to Ballard about this, and he said how the ‘over-moralistic Americans’ were unable to locate the humour in his work because it is so often deadpan. Their perception of him, he believes, is that he is pessimistic and utterly humourless. As for Ballard’s popularity in other countries I’m not really sure. I know that Crash was a huge success in France, but I don’t know how his other works have fared. How commercially successful is Ballard in Australia?
In Australia? Not very. His name gets blank stares most of the time I mention it. I don’t really know what sells well here in Australia; probably cricket and fishing books. Among those that do know his work, there are some interesting reactions. For example, ever since I first took an interest in Ballard, I’ve been accused a few times of ‘playing with toys for boys’, the implication being that Ballard, via Crash especially, is some kind of misogynist.
Yes, this is a question which has occupied me (and indeed it still does) because I’ve been looking at Ballard in relationship to the Surrealist group (which has also been accused, historically, of being a club for the boys). I do not think that Ballard is some kind of misogynist. I read earlier works such as Atrocity and Crash more as critiques of contemporary representations of violence against women than anything else; extreme acts of violence against the female body are either imagined or they operate metaphorically in these texts. This is, of course, the Surrealist position, and I do recognise the convenience of this deferral to the imaginary and the metaphoric. There is more to it than this, I think, but I haven’t quite teased it out yet.
What’s the key Ballard text for you?
This is a difficult one, because the key Ballard text always seems to be the one that I’m reading. However, if I had to choose one it would be The Atrocity Exhibition. For me, this is the most relentless of Ballard’s fictional enquiries into the deviant logics and emerging psychopathologies of late C20th history and culture. From the very first fragmented paragraph, Ballard plunges his reader into an extraordinary range of desultory narratives – post-war history, pornography, violence, technology, sex and death – and he challenges us to get our hands dirty. I like the discomfort of reading the text, the way it hits the reader with an overwhelming proliferation of atrocious images of war, torture, mutilation, celebrity culture, and offers us no place to hide. I also thought that the annotated version of The Atrocity Exhibition was a work of brilliance. I love the explicatory pretence of Ballard’s marginal scribbles, and all of those disturbing black and white images – Gloeckner’s pseudo-pornographic medical illustrations, and Barrodo’s photographs of anonymous bombs. I haven’t managed to see the film of The Atrocity Exhibition yet, have you? What do you make of it?
Still from The Atrocity Exhibition (dir. Jonathan Weiss)
Yes, I have seen it — I actually interviewed the director, Jonathan Weiss — and I felt the film was half-successful. Which brings me to something I must ask every interviewee, as it’s a bit of a pet subject of mine: what Ballard book would you like to see filmed, and who would you like to see film it?
I’d like to see David Lynch have a go at translating Super-Cannes onto the big screen. The physical and psychological landscapes of that novel are utterly unnerving, and I’d like to see how Lynch would try to sustain the atmosphere of unease.
What’s your opinion of the Empire and Crash films, purely in terms of the Ballardian effect they induce?
The film of Empire wasn’t as saccharine as I had expected, but I was frustrated by the way in which Spielberg contained Ballard’s representations of the sheer horrors of war within a series of pseudo-surrealist images. The film lost a good deal of power and momentum through this act of taming – but I suppose that’s a market-led decision. As for Crash, I felt utterly numb at the end of Cronenberg’s version which I suppose is an indicator of the film’s success.
What did you think of Kingdom Come? It received some dull reviews, but I liked the book and I saw it as a shift in execution — Ballard parodying himself — rather than a ‘lazy rehashing of themes’, which seemed to be the standard response.
Yes, I now what you mean about self-parody. I had a distinct feeling of déjà vu when reading this novel. I especially liked the image of Brooklands being dominated by huge conceptual adverts of the kind that Ballard published back in the late 1960s. In some ways, Kingdom Come might be regarded as a shift in direction from the last three novels. Only content appears to matter in this text. Iain Sinclair made the astute observation that Kingdom Come could have been pared down into a series of essays on contemporary consumer culture with a few dramatic events in the middle. I agree with him. Ballard is a novelist of ideas, and things like character development simply aren’t important beyond the need to articulate those ideas. But Kingdom Come is more blatant in this respect than say Cocaine Nights, which is wonderfully complex and elusive in its narrative structure, and for that reason I found Kingdom Come to be one of the most detached works that Ballad has produced in a while. For me, only the ideas remain, but that might just be the point.
In The Age of Unreason, your interview with Ballard, you asked, ‘Is [Ballard’s] prescience born out of prophecy, or is it the product of something else?’ Two years later, are you any closer to answering that?
I see Ballard as something of a flâneur who is engaged in a prolonged exercise in the close reading of contemporary culture in all of its absurdities and vulgarities. As Will Self once put it, ‘Ballard doesn’t describe; he anticipates.’ Ballard pays attention, he reads the signs around, and subsequently he manages to keep one step head of the rest of us.
Note: Dr Baxter is still accepting proposals for papers and panels for the conference. The deadline is 1 February 2007 has been extended to 15 February 2007. Individual requests from international delegates who require earlier notification of acceptance (for funding applications etc) are welcome. See here for more information on submitting proposals.
..:: LINKS
+ From Shanghai to Shepperton: An International Conference on J.G. Ballard