Diary: Deborah Levy on J. G. Ballard
Diary: Deborah Levy on J. G. Ballard
Ballard always insisted he was more interested in inner space than outer space.
J. G. Ballard, England’s greatest literary futurist, changed the coordinates of reality in British fiction and took his faithful readers on a wild intellectual ride. He never restored moral order to the proceedings in his fiction because he did not believe we really wanted it. Whatever it was that Ballard next imagined for us, however unfamiliar, we knew we were in safe hands because he understood “the need to construct a dramatically coherent narrative space.”
When I was a young writer in the 1980s, Ballard first came to my attention after I read his luminous, erotic story collection, The Day of Forever. It was so formally inventive that I would not have guessed it had been published in 1967. Nor did I know that the baffled conservative literary establishment of his generation had tried to see off his early work as science fiction. Ballard always insisted he was more interested in inner space than outer space.
When it came to anything by Ballard, genre really did not matter to me; his fiction could have been filed under “Tales of Alien Abduction” or “Marsh Plants” and I would have hunted it down. Despite our difference in generation, gender, and literary purpose, it was clear to me that he and I were both working with some of the same aesthetic influences: film, surrealist art and poetry, Freud’s avant-garde theories of the unconscious. I was just starting to write but Ballard made me feel less lonely. Perhaps more significantly we shared the dislocation of not being born in Britain. Home was the imagination. I too was attracted to the paintings of de Chirico and Delvaux, with their dreamplaces—empty, melancholy cities, abandoned temples, broken statues, shadows, exaggerated perspectives. Ballard was going to make worlds we had not seen before in British fiction. When asked, after the success of Empire of the Sun, why it took him so long to write in a less disguised way about his childhood experience at the internment camp in Lunghua, his beautiful answer was that it took him “twenty years to forget and twenty years to remember.” Of course, images from Shanghai and the war were laid forever inside him. I have always thought that his books, with the exception of Crash, which seems to me an abstract attempt to grieve for his dead wife, were already written in that one room he shared with his parents between 1943 and 1945. The reach of his imagination was never going to fit with the realist literary mainstream but I was always encouraged by his insistence that he was an imaginative writer.
I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.
Good on you, Jim.
His highly imagined landscapes and abandoned aircraft and stopped clocks and desert sand were located in his head—and anyway he preferred driving fast cars to walking. He once sent me a photograph of the Heathrow Hilton and told me it was his spiritual home. What was it that Ballard offered to me as a young female writer? It is more to do with what he did not offer. He preferred social theory to social realism. I was not going to run to Ballard’s books to learn how to write a “well-rounded” character, for God’s sake. His characters are more like tannoys to broadcast his arguments and ideas. But I did love his gloomy, unbelievable male psychiatrists, cinematically lit, groomed, suave and perverse, sipping a stiff gin and tonic while they observe (and possibly medicate) everyone else freaking out around them. The well-mannered narrators in the later novels (Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes, Millennium People, Kingdom Come) are mostly mild, middle-class, manly men. Their destiny is to become inflamed Nietzschean men, excited to finally understand that they too would like to punch their fists through the boredom of the empty, greedy, good life with its fragile veneer of civilization.
I have always regarded Ballard as quite a paternal writer, steering us through the ruins of his dystopias via the mind-set of his apparently rational avatars—always endearingly baffled to discover their own suppressed urges. I enjoyed his noirish female characters, too (many of them doctors), enigmatic instead of domestic, emotionally unavailable, sexually experimental, sometimes tanned and thuggish, as in Cocaine Nights, or vulnerable and corruptible as in Kingdom Come—but the great thing is that they do not want the male lead to marry them and are never about to roast a chicken.
I believe in the beauty of all women, in the treachery of their imaginations, so close to my heart.
All these years later, I still marvel at the eerie poetry of Ballard’s prose. It lingers like a strange perfume over his concise, matter-of-fact sentences, more heightened in the earlier novels and short stories, but the bottom notes (petrol, anguish, desire, nightmares) are still present in the first three lines of his final and most didactic novel, Kingdom Come:
The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world …
It seems that for Ballard, the labyrinthine Metro-Centre mall at the heart of Kingdom Come is as enthralling as de Chirico’s brooding Italian archways and piazzas.
Deborah Levy writes fiction, plays, and poetry. Her books include the novels The Man Who Saw Everything, Hot Milk, and Swimming Home; the story collection Black Vodka; and the three-part autobiography, Things I Don't Want to Know and The Cost of Living and Real Estate. This post is drawn from her new book, The Position of Spoons and Other Intimacies.
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Yes, even though it seems reductive to say that there is a "skeleton key" to any artist, with Ballard it's so clear that his feral childhood in the Shanghai internment camp shaped his life's work .
I like what Anthony Burgess said about Ballard: "Ballard considers that the kind of limitation that most contemporary fiction accepts is immoral, a shameful consequence of the rise of the bourgeois novel. Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination."