When Ballard started publishing in the late 1950s, his work was generally treated as genre fiction and deemed unworthy of critique by the literary establishment. This ensured that he was not fully engaged with until at least 1979, when his preoccupation with the nascent media culture of postmodernity was becoming de rigeur. However, from his first forays into the novel form it is clear that Ballard self-consciously sought to formulate a style that frustrated expectations from both sides of the divide between cultural legitimacy and inadmissibility. Indeed, an important legacy of his role in the New Wave of British SF, which centred on Michael Moorcock’s editorship of New Worlds between 1964 and 1971, was an eagerness to reject many of the conventions of both literary realism and popular generic style, and to synthesise others. His
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first considered offering is a case in point. The Drowned World (1962)66 is set on an Earth that is undergoing a massive ecological shift which has rendered everywhere but the planet’s poles uninhabitable. Global temperatures are rising along with sea levels, mammalian fertility is declining and the novel is heavy with the implication that humanity is in the process of becoming extinct: “[M]ankind was systematically pruning itself, apparently moving backwards in time, and a point might ultimately be reached where a second Adam and Eve found themselves alone in a new Eden” (Ballard Drowned 23). This excerpt aptly summarises the novel’s thesis that, contrary to bourgeois assumptions regarding humanity’s (or at least Western humanity’s) inevitable progress, given the appropriate circumstances we could become complicit in our own degeneration and death. Its protagonist, Kerans, is a government scientist and one of a platoon led by Colonel Riggs conducting an ecological survey around an abandoned city that turns out to be London. As the heat and humidity rise, the team is forced to retreat to its base in Greenland but Kerans insists on staying behind along with Bodkin, a military doctor, and his onetime lover Beatrice Dahl. The three are left alone at opposites ends of a tropical lagoon, unwilling to engage even with each other, and wait for their impending psychic devolution to open up a new mode of consciousness. Before long a treasure hunter named Strangman turns up with an entourage of subordinates who set about looting the city. Kerans is bemused by Strangman’s search for material goods that no longer bear any value, and the latter struggles to comprehend the scientist’s search for a new identity in his primordial past. Their relationship becomes increasingly suspicious, and when Strangman drains the lagoon in a bid to to expose the city’s streets and “rediscover” civilization they are brought into open conflict. Bodkin is shot dead and Beatrice is kidnapped; Kerans rescues her before being cornered by the treasure hunters, who are finally fought off by the returning platoon. Beatrice leaves with Riggs but Kerans rejects the offer of passage northwards, and the novel ends with him striking out south, alone, to an
66 Since this investigation concentrates on novels I will not be commenting on Ballard’s short stories,
which are popularly perceived to represent some of his best work. By contrast, the first novel he published—1961’s The Wind From Nowhere—was written in two weeks and aimed solely at establishing a readership. It was later disowned by its creator.
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inevitable death, “a second Adam searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn sun” (175).
Most of Ballard’s appraisers view his career in terms of polyptychs of three or four novels that obsessively revisit similar landscapes in which near- identical social and psychic avatars respond to similar circumstances in only slightly differing ways. This strategy is present from The Drowned World— whose theme of ecological disaster and devolution is continued in The Drought (1965) and The Crystal World (1966)67—and it demands that any reader of Ballard’s fiction must treat the novels less as discrete narratives and more as one stage in a process of hermeneutic distillation. All of these novels offer a challenge to hierarchical orders of cultural legitimacy in that their characters possesses none of the complexity we customarily expect of realist novels.68 For instance, in The Drowned World, Strangman’s function as an avatar for imperialism is implied simply by emphasising his whiteness: the “man with the white smile” dressed in a “crisp white suit” (Drowned 90); similarly his second- in-command is represented as “a bare-chested Negro in white slacks and a white peaked cap” (89). This representational strategy can strike the reader as lazy, even objectionable, as it relies on an instrumentalised approach to character which appears more mythic than novelistic—indeed, which the novel as a form is usually expected to challenge. Ballard’s readers are never asked to identify with complex characters who are subject to comprehensible motivations and react in predictable ways to commonplace occurrences that take place in recognisable settings. Instead they are offered a detached, almost forensic analysis of perversely reductive types, or symbols, or—most appropriately of all—specimens, who respond in barely fathomable ways to extraordinary events. At the same time, even as he relies on certain SF topoi—such as the embattled
67 After which Ballard’s obsession shifts towards the psycho-sexual barbarism of modern
architectural and social technologies, which provides the subject matter for Crash, Concrete Island (1974) and High-Rise (1975).
68 This is not to say that they do not address issues of subjectivity and consciousness; rather, they
approach these issues in terms that are, as W. Warren Wagar suggests, “fundamentally topographic”, via “explorations of landscape, both external and internal” rather than character in the sense usually encountered in the realist novel (Wagar 53).
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community subsisting in a post-apocalyptic mise-en-scène—Ballard deploys expository devices that had not been typical in SF genre writing up until that time, such as a self-consciously dense prose style and a heavy use of allusion, both literary and scientific. Upon publication the novel was compared to Heart
of Darkness (1902), an analogy that has stuck: as Patrick McCarthy writes, “[T]he
resemblances between Conrad’s story of atavistic regression in the Congo and Ballard’s vision of a world reverting to a prehistoric ecology are so striking as to suggest at least an indirect connection between these narratives” (McCarthy 302). Indeed the connection goes beyond their superficially similar settings. The prevalence of symbols, the reliance on environment as a means of manipulating mood and meaning, the emphasis on topographies of mind and landscape (as well as an erosion of the boundary between the two)—all of these Conradian strategies are present in The Drowned World, and imply a bid to escape conventional realist modes of representation as well as an attempt to reach beyond the confines of generic SF.69
There is a substantial body of criticism dealing with SF’s cultural legitimacy, and much of this hinges on its relationship with postmodernism. Roger Luckhurst’s contributions to this debate are particularly useful, as he is keen to single out Ballard as a figure who frustrates “literary/institutional determinations of [...] acceptable taste” (Luckhurst “Border Policing” 358). For instance, Luckhurst dismisses in quite cutting terms the suggestion by Brian McHale that SF should be seen as postmodernism’s “noncanonised or ‘low art’ double” (qtd. 361), an essentially pulp genre that mirrored but in no way facilitated the shift in “legitimate” culture away from a modernist preoccupation with epistemology towards postmodernism’s ontological concerns.70 But while
69 In a 1975 interview Ballard claims not to have read Heart of Darkness before writing The Drowned
World (McCarthy 302), but while the Conradian influence must be kept in perspective, McCarthy
identifies other references to Dante, Shakespeare, Defoe, Keats, Eliot, Joyce and even Kierkegaard. Far from being putative influences, he claims that many of these figures are baldly invoked and evidence Ballard’s highfalutin aspirations.
70 Luckhurst parries: “This reaffirmation of the low status of SF is nevertheless disturbed by one
name: J.G. Ballard. Ballard is seen [by McHale himself] to lead SF out of the ‘subliterary’ and into the mainstream. The Atrocity Exhibition, with its ‘ontological’ concerns, is a ‘postmodernist text based on science fiction topoi’. This is something of a quantum leap, for McHale characterizes
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he resists the argument that SF and postmodernism developed similar interests in complete isolation from one another, he does not appear to disagree that they share an interest in the ontological. And in light of Ballard’s reductive approach to characterisation this raises some challenging questions regarding the latter’s politics—specifically his identity politics.71 Put bluntly, we might ask whether the representation of Strangman and his entourage satirises the West’s (then ongoing) colonial enterprises with sufficient trenchancy; whether Beatrice Dahl’s portrayal early on as the object of Kerans’s libido and latterly as a damsel- in-distress is not just a little problematic. These questions are answered in part Ballard’s early work as definitively SF, although with some mainstream pretensions; The Atrocity
Exhibition has become a mainstream text with SF residua. Given that McHale absolutely insists on
SF and postmodernism’s ‘parallel development, not mutual influence’, Ballard’s sudden leap is nothing short of extraordinary” (Luckhurst “Border Policing” 362). What is most relevant here is not the critique of McHale’s antiquated attitudes where canon-formation are concerned, or his insistence that SF developed alongside postmodernism but never directly affected it. Rather it is the suggestion that Ballard’s presence in the post-war literary landscape cannot be fully appreciated if we force his work to cohere with vertically ordered conceptions of generic legitimacy. This applies to all of his work, including the two novels in which Ballard most conspicuously adopts a realistic mode: Empire of the Sun (1984) and The Kindness of Women (1991).
71 The question of politics in postmodern SF has been visited many times, and one of the genres that
has received a great deal of attention is cyberpunk. Despite the genre’s ostensible focus on outcasts and resistance, Nicola Nixon still feels the need to ask the question, “[I]s cyberpunk realizing a coherent political agenda? Is it indeed, ‘preparing the ground for a revolution?’” (Nicola Nixon 221). Her answer is less than enthusiastic: “In Gibson’s fiction [and the “Sprawl” trilogy in particular] there is […] absolutely no critique of corporate power, no possibility that it will be shaken or assaulted by heroes who are entirely part of the system and who profit by their mastery within it, regardless of their ostensible marginalization and their posturings about constituting some kind of counterculture [...T]he idea that computer cowboys could ever represent a form of counterculture is almost laughable; for computers are so intrinsically a part of the corporate system that no one working within them, especially not the hired guns of Gibson’s novels, who are bought and sold by corporations and act as the very tools of corporate competition, could successfully pose as part of a counterculture, even if they were sporting mohawks and mirrorshades” (230-231). This appraisal could be accused of missing the point somewhat, as one of the most challenging political questions to emerge out of the 1980s was whether resistance is still possible in increasingly totalised social systems. In situating their heroes in compromised positions relative to the corporate power they wish to resist, Gibson’s novels could be argued to articulate this question in a productive way.
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by Ballard’s repeated suggestion that seeing the assumptions of his parents’ expatriate community in Shanghai shattered with the onset of World War II— during which he was imprisoned in the Lunghua Civil Assembly Centre— equipped him with an unshakable belief that reality was entirely mutable. To an extent, this short-circuits any critique that focuses on his reductive approach to characterisation, because any such accusation is forced to admit of the existence of essentialism even if it seeks to condemn it, where Ballard’s fiction rejects the possibility of a stable reality altogether. This places him at odds with the likes of Winterson and Kureishi, whose fiction—even as it explores the interstices of reductive binaries and unconditionally celebrates cultural indeterminacy—can still be argued to rely on a binary politics that opposes contingency to essentialism and subjugates the latter to the former. By contrast, in Ballard’s work there is nothing beyond the contingent; it is simply presumed, without having any moral or political value attached to it.
However, even if this explanation softens the charges above it still renders his fiction profoundly ambivalent, and goes some way in explaining why he is sometimes perceived to resist progressive appraisal. As W. Warren Wagar writes:
Critics on the left are not happy with messiahs such as Ballard. While applauding his satirical jabs at modern bourgeois existence, they cannot take satisfaction in his evident lack of sympathy for, or interest in, working people. His failure to develop a political line, to speculate about social and economic structures, to see the possibility of anything but inward, psychic transformations, leaves them understandably cold. (Wagar 65)
If nothing else, Ballard’s admiration for Thatcher—frequently articulated in the most unpalatable of terms—is enough to make anybody approaching his work from a leftist perspective shudder.72 And one such appraiser, Peter Fitting, barely
72 In interview Ballard once announced, “I’m in love with Margaret Thatcher—I want her to be my
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stops short of condemnation. Situating developments in SF within the socio- political history of the mid-century, Fitting suggests that the various emancipatory movements of the 1960s provided the New Wave with a powerful impetus that manifested itself in two distinct ways. The first revolved around “the belief that the present sorry state of affairs [was] due exclusively to the bankruptcy of the established moral and ethical values of our society, a bankruptcy which [could] only be resolved on the individual and spiritual level”. The second “took the form of […] a new aesthetics—the search for new literary forms and techniques adequate to dealing with what was perceived as the changed reality of the 1960s” (Fitting 66). Fitting chooses J.G. Ballard as representative of this second inclination and argues that the strategies deployed in his fiction, such as those outlined above, evidence a dangerous tendency to aestheticise the challenges of the 1960s in a way that was politically fruitless. He focuses on The Crystal World (1966), which is set in a former French-African colony where the jungle is undergoing a process of crystallisation that effectively freezes time. The novel’s narrative arc is nearly identical to that of The Drowned
World: a scientist visits a site of ecological catastrophe only to become
fascinated by and ultimately complicit in his own psychic devolution and death. And, witnessing once again what he perceives to be Ballard’s implication that “human problems will be solved not through resistance, but through an acceptance of the aesthetic and reconciliatory dimensions of the cataclysm”, Fitting objects that “both the hero’s emotional problems and the larger racial tensions of the African continent are understood finally as aesthetic problems— as ‘problems of lighting’” rather than problems of human society, polity and so forth. As such, he argues, “the ‘speculative’ nature of much of [Ballard’s] writing lies not in the exploration of new social and human possibilities, but in the discovery and uses of various modernistic literary techniques” (67).
immensely... for sexual reasons. I admire her for mythological and sexual reasons. When I say this, people are totally fazed—they can’t understand what I’m talking about”. With scant regard for the facts, he goes on: “[H]er economic liberalism has led to the regeneration of British industry— there’s no doubt about that […] The economic ‘Thatcher miracle’ has brought terrific economic prosperity, simply because all the bureaucratic restraints have been lifted” (Ballard to Vale and Reuther 308, emphases in original).
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Such a reading lends resonance to the parallels that have been drawn between Ballard and Conrad; however, while the tendency of some modernist figures to aestheticise political problems has been the source of critical anxiety, the rigid distinction Fitting locates between aesthetics and politics within the New Wave has not gone unchallenged. For instance, Wagar considers Fitting’s use of Fredric Jameson in order to explore the utopian impulse in post-war SF to be particularly problematic. Jameson argues that attitudes towards utopianism have “undergone a dialectical reversal”: where Engels once denounced the utopian impulse as “a diversion of revolutionary energy into ideal wish- fulfillments and imaginary satisfactions”, in a time characterised by capitalist hegemony “the Utopian concept […] embodies the newest version of a hermeneutics of freedom”; “practical thinking”, by contrast, now “represents a capitulation to the system itself” (Jameson qtd. in Fitting 59).73 To the extent
73 It should be acknowledged that Jameson’s comments on the relationship between SF and utopia are
a little more complex than this. To Jameson it is no coincidence that the growth of SF coincided with the precise moment when the historical novel “ceased to be functional” as a form that provided cultural ballast for the concept of progress, which was a sine qua non of the development of capitalism during the nineteenth century (Jameson “Utopia” 150). Prior to the rise of capitalism, cultural forms had tended to consider the past to be “essentially the same as the present”; the historical novel thus served an important role in meeting capitalism’s demand for “a
memory of qualitative social change, a concrete vision of the past which we may expect to find
completed by that far more abstract and empty conception of some future terminus which we sometimes call ‘progress’” (149). When the historical novel lapsed into nostalgia this commitment to progress fell into doubt, and SF stepped into the space it left behind, providing “mock futures” that serve to transform “our own present into the determinate past of something yet to come” (152). However, rather than simply replicating the obfuscatory strategies of the historical novel, SF contained within it a certain amount of subversive potential, since it served “to defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present” in a way that actually drew attention to the politically necessary relationship between capitalism and the concept of progress (151, emphasis in original). It thus functions counterintuitively not “to keep the future alive, even in the imagination”; rather “its deepest vocation is over and over again to demonstrate and to dramatize our incapacity to imagine the future” (153). Likewise, Jameson argues, the “deepest vocation” of utopia “is to bring home, in local and determinate ways, and with a fullness of concrete detail, our constitutional inability to imagine Utopia itself” (153); to this extent, the content of utopian fictions—unlike the historical novel—is often a “perpetual interrogation of its own conditions of possibility”, and these fictions thus “find their deepest ‘subjects’ in the possibility of their own production, in the interrogation of the dilemmas involved in their own emergence as utopian
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that it anticipates this shift, Wagar suggests that Ballard’s work is more amenable to a radically left-wing reading than Fitting realises. Ballard always resisted the suggestion that his fiction is dystopian, claiming instead that it “is optimistic because it’s a fiction of psychic fulfillment” (qtd. in Wagar 56), and as far as his earlier work is concerned this would seem to be an accurate