Miracles of Life: J.G. Ballard's Pre-posthumous Memoir

J.G. Ballard, the forensic pathologist who autopsied the 20th century, has turned his scalpel on himself — pre-posthumously. In his new autobiography, Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton (released last year in the U.K. but without a U.S. publisher for now), Ballard dissects the extraordinary life behind Empire of the Sun, his earlier, fictionalized account of coming of age in a World War II internment camp for British residents of Japanese-occupied Shanghai.

Readers who discovered the 78-year-old novelist through the uncharacteristically naturalistic — and, thanks to the 1987 Spielberg film based on the book, uncharacteristically best-selling — Empire will be surprised to hear Shanghai Jim’s adventures in the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Center retold in the first person, without the deadpan-Surrealist voice-over and with an unflinching self-analysis that cuts to the bone, lightened by flashes of wit.

Illustration by Kyle T. Webster
J.G. Ballard’s pre-posthumous memoir
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In Miracles, Ballard plays analyst to an engagingly garrulous and profoundly self-aware patient named James Ballard. It is a role he would have played in real life if the typewriter had not beckoned. Having returned to England with his mother and sister after the war (his father stayed behind in Shanghai), Ballard encountered Freud and, in books on abnormal psychology, Freud’s unruly grandchildren the Surrealists. Both landed in the drawing room of his middle-class English mind like “a stick of bombs,” he recalls. “I felt, and still do, that psychoanalysis and surrealism were a key to the truth about existence and the human personality, and also a key to myself.” In 1949, he began his studies at King’s College, Cambridge, with the intention of becoming a psychiatrist, but after two years, realizing that he was more interested in writing than psychiatry, he dropped out.

Still, shrinks abound in Ballard’s work, many of them poker-faced mouthpieces for the author’s ironic polemics: Dr. Wilder Penrose in Super-Cannes (2001), arguing that “a perverse sexual act can liberate the visionary self in even the dullest soul”; Dr. David Markham in Millennium People (2003), coolly observing that in Blair’s England “a vicious boredom ruled the world for the first time in human history, interrupted by meaningless acts of violence”; Dr. Tony Maxted in Kingdom Come (2006), opining that psychopathy is “the only guarantee of freedom from all the cant and bullshit and sales commercials fed to us by politicians, bishops and academics.”

In a very real sense, Ballard did become a psychiatrist, albeit a dryly ironic one, at ease with his philosophical bipolar disorder — now profoundly moralistic, now exuberantly amoral, now both. All of his dystopias are in truth pathological utopias; Ballard rejoices in the breakdown of bourgeois morality and the Return of the Repressed. Like the Freud of Civilization and Its Discontents, he can always hear the scrabbling of our sublimated instinctual drives behind Western society’s liberal-humanist facade. But unlike Freud, and like R.D. Laing, Norman O. Brown and other radical Freudians of the ’60s, Ballard is equally wary of the soft fascism of our master-planned, socially engineered age, with its megamalls and Club Meds, its gated communities and New Urbanist retrovilles. “In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom” is a copyrighted Ballard quote.

Ballard’s genius lies in his metaphoric use of scientific jargon and an antiseptic tone, somewhere between the dissecting table and the psychopathic ward, to psychoanalyze postmodernity. Long before deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida were slinging around references to the “decentered” self, Ballard is talking, in his trenchant introduction to Crash (1973), about “the most terrifying casualty of the century: the death of affect” and about “the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods.” Before postmodernists like Jean Baudrillard were announcing the Death of the Real and its unsettling replacement by uncannily convincing media simulations, Ballard is claiming that “we live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind” — advertising, “politics conducted as a branch of advertising,” P.R. “pseudo-events,” et al. — where “Freud’s classic distinction between the latent and manifest content of a dream, between the apparent and the real, now needs to be applied to the external world of so-called reality.” And before neo-Marxists like Fredric Jameson and Mike Davis were pondering the deeper meanings of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel and Frank Gehry’s Hollywood library, Ballard is pondering the psycho-spatial effects of the built environment: the experience of swooping around a freeway cloverleaf; of walking through a cavernous, empty multistory parking garage; of waiting, alone, in an airport departure lounge; of walking the privately policed streets of an obsessively manicured exurban community. How, Ballard wonders, is our sense of our selves as social beings and moral actors — our very understanding of what it means to be a self — being transformed (deformed?) by the whip-lashing hyperacceleration of technology and the media, the blurring of the distinction between real and fake? Ballard was the first to ask how we became posthuman.

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In Miracles, however,he turns his gaze inward. Or maybe he’s just X-raying his own life in order to diagnose the everyday pathologies of 20th-century parenting and the diseases of the English psyche. In the affluent expatriate community of prewar Shanghai, Ballard’s father, a chemist for a textile manufacturer, and his mother, a Lady Who Lunches, orbit past young Jim on the social whirligig of life, hosting “elaborately formal dinner parties” or playing cricket at the Country Club. “Children were an appendage to the parents, somewhere between the servants and an obedient Labrador.”

But the Japanese occupation of Shanghai made a mockery of the societal super ego of British empire, and Lunghua, where the guards were the only power that mattered, rendered parental authority impotent. Jamie the uniformed English schoolboy morphs, before our eyes, into Shanghai Jim the wild boy, idolizing the wisecracking American merchant seamen interned at Lunghua, befriending the young Japanese soldiers (whose warrior code impresses him), and “tucking in lustily” to his plate of boiled rice and what his mother euphemistically called “weevils” but were more likely maggots, an important source of protein for internees on starvation rations.

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J.G. Ballard’s pre-posthumous memoir
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For the irrepressibly optimistic Ballard, his two-and-a-half years in Lunghua were profoundly liberating. “Lunghua Camp may have been a prison of a kind,” he writes, “but it was a prison where I found freedom” — freedom from class anxiety, emotional repression and other neuroses of the English psyche. He socializes freely with people of every age and class. But “the most important consequence of internment was that for the first time in my life I was extremely close to my parents” — literally, since he “slept, ate, read, dressed and undressed within a few feet of them” in a tiny room.

But even the forced intimacy of Lunghua couldn’t entirely thaw the emotional frigidity between the young Jim and his parents. “Lying in bed at night, I could, if I wanted to, reach out and touch my mother’s hand,” he writes, adding, in one of the book’s most painfully poignant afterthoughts, “though I never did.” By the very nature of the situation, his parents were powerless, with “no say in what we ate, no power in how we lived or ability to shape events.” This sows the seeds of an estrangement that lasts long past Lunghua, to the end of his parents’ lives — an ache Ballard seems to feel, even now. (When he publishes his first novel, his father, by then a distant mirage, calls to congratulate him, “pointing out one or two minor errors that I was careful not to correct. My mother never showed the slightest interest in my career until Empire of the Sun, which she thought was about her.”)

Nonetheless, his brief-lived intimacy with his parents in Lunghua profoundly shaped the unabashedly affectionate father he would become to his three children — the “miracles of life” to whom he dedicates the book. In contrast to the hushed mausoleum of his boyhood home in Shanghai, Ballard’s house in the London suburb of Shepperton “was a chaotic, friendly brawl, as a naked parent dripping from the bath broke up a squabble between the girls over a favorite crayon, while their brother triumphantly strutted in his mother’s damp footprints. Mayhem ruled.”

In 1964, after his young wife Mary dies suddenly from pneumonia, Ballard — pardon the pop psych — becomes the dad his father never was. (Freud may have served as a surrogate, as Ballard hints when he notes that “Freud’s serene and masterful tone, his calm assumption that psychoanalysis could reveal the complete truth about modern man and his discontents, appealed to me powerfully, especially in the absence of my own father.” Italics added.) Fathers singlehandedly raising their children were “extremely rare in the 1960s,” writes Ballard, but he delighted in the role. “Some fathers make good mothers, and I hope I was one of them,” he writes, “though most of the women who know me would say that I made a very slatternly mother, notably unkeen on housework, unaware that homes need to be cleaned now and then, and too often to be found with a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other — in short, the kind of mother, no doubt loving and easygoing, of whom the social services deeply dis[…]

HT @bruces Downloading Ballard's 1992 Desert Island disc session

"The article provides an overview of the archive of J. G. Ballard, acquired by the British Library in 2010. The successive drafts of Ballard’s novels, in manuscript and typescript, comprise the majority of the archive, with the exception of Ballard’s first novel (The Wind from Nowhere) and The Unlimited Dream Company. Ballard’s many short stories, including The Atrocity Exhibition, are not present in the archive, although the papers include an unpublished story, in draft, set in Vermilion Sands. The archive is a rich textual resource, spanning synopses to final texts, which reveals the decisions of composition and indicates the development of Ballard’s distinctive prose style. The article discusses the process of composition, illustrated by textual examples, with particular reference to passages from the autograph manuscript of Empire of the Sun."

"It is surprising how few people anticipated the rise of the entertainment economy. Those who did were rarely social theorists or economists, or for that matter academic intellectuals of any variety. Perhaps the most clear-sighted vision of what was to come can be found in the work of J G Ballard, who predicted Ronald Reagan’s rise to president in a short story published in 1967, and whose experimental novel The Atrocity Exhibition - a visionary anticipation of the role of images of catastrophe and violence in the new media economy- was, astonishingly, first published in 1969. Around the same time, Guy Debord, the most gifted thinker of the group of provocateurs and avant-garde artists who called themselves situationists, developed the theory of the society of the spectacle. … Commodities are sold not simply as new products, but as new experiences that will somehow attach themselves uniquely to each consumer."

"One has to foster one’s own imagination to a very intense degree, far more than most people realize. … people will really need to look inward far more. One will not be able to trust the external environment to provide all the necessary cues for a rich and fulfilling life. This has already happened. … people these days have retreated far more into their own homes, because much less depends on public forms of entertainment … The retreat is not just necessarily their own homes, but a retreat into their private lives far more than they used to … when the home was a place where one slept and serviced one’s body, while generally speaking one went out to find paid entertainment. … People are now pulling back from that sort of thing. … There are huge industries that are satisfying every conceivable whim. If people are going to survive they will need to do this on the plane of the imagination much more than they have done. Otherwise, they’ll simply become a mark on some consumer chart."

"Light, time, the attempt to break out of the metaphysical structures that lock us all into our little rooms and mental cubicles and categories — it’s a strain that runs through all of my work. … In the 1970s, I was invited to make a trip across Germany from Bremerhaven to Stuttgart — this as part of a journalistic junket sponsored by Mercedes-Benz … I suddenly realized that the future of this planet was not going to be like New York City or Tokyo or London or Moscow but rather like a suburb of Dusseldorf. And you know, most of the Baader-Meinhof gang in fact grew up in these suburbs, and I realized why that kind of terrorism erupted from this kind of landscape. Because in that world, madness is the only freedom. … The challenge is for each of us to respond, to remake as much as we can of the world around us, because no one else will do it for us. We have to find a core within us and get to work. Don’t worry about worldly rewards. Just get on with it!"

"filling stations or high rises, flyovers or shopping malls … Wrenched from routine perception, they become as mysterious as Stonehenge. … Heathrow Airport is "a beached sky-city, half space station and half shantytown". Dust on a coffee table is "a nimbus that seemed like an ectoplasmic presence, a parallel world with its own memories and regrets". … Experimenting with science fiction, quasi-autobiographic realism and, more recently, the thriller, he has given us a rendition of the contemporary scene that is unsurpassed in its clairvoyant exactitude. In Crash, he announced the marriage of celebrity and sudden death that, more than a quarter-century later, was to give us the Diana cult. … Millennium People dissects the perverse psychology that links terrorists with their innocent victims. This is news from the near future, another despatch from one of the supreme chroniclers of our time."

"suburbia and exurbia … - that’s the real place needing attention and study, and perhaps design intervention, not groovy hipster city districts or grimly fascinating favellas"

"Astana, it is the world's latest example of a rare but persistent type, the capital from zero. It is in a line that includes St Petersburg, Washington DC, Canberra, Ankara and Brasilia and like them it provokes a question: can a city, in all its teeming complexity, really be planned? Or does the attempt lead only to a synthetic simulacrum, a kind-of city that is not quite the real thing? To look at, Astana is so strange that it has one grasping for images. It's a space station, marooned in an ungraspable expanse of level steppe, its name (to English speakers) having the invented sound of a science fiction writer's creation. It's a city of fable or dream, as recounted by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan. Except it's not quite so magical: it's also like a battery-operated plastic toy, all whirring noises and flashing colours, of a kind sold by the city's street vendors."

"People my age are products of the culture of the capital-F Future. The younger you are, the less you are a product of that. If you’re fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. … This newfound state of No Future is, in my opinion, a very good thing. It indicates a kind of maturity, an understanding that every future is someone else’s past, every present someone else’s future. Upon arriving in the capital-F Future, we discover it, invariably, to be the lower-case now. The best science fiction has always known that, but it was a sort of cultural secret. … at the very end of the 70s, I was fortunate to have been taught, as an undergraduate, that imaginary futures are always, regardless of what the authors might think, about the day in which they’re written. … Hadn’t J.G. Ballard declared Earth to be the real alien planet? Wasn’t the future now?"

"an eclectic and extensive exhibition that can be hard to take in, with its almost random sensory overload. … Crash’s real triumph is the handful of pieces that marry both a deep, unequivocal connection with Ballard and artistic brilliance." "It is Warhol’s brilliant translation of the changes around him that connects him to Ballard and makes “Green Disaster (Green Disaster Twice)” the most important work in the exhibition. Both men represent a mature artistic culture that distanced itself from the political hectoring of pre-WWII art, and absorbed and translated a world of rapid change with cool detachment. The exhibition’s motorways, cars, aircraft and sexual imagery are only superficially Ballard. Tucked away on a back wall, in a small and at first insignificant-looking work, is where you find the essence of Ballard’s work presented succinctly by another twentieth-century great."

"only a commercial gallery of this pulling power could manage the loans to flesh out Ballard’s text so grandiloquently; no museum could have responded so quickly, or quirkily, to the novelist’s death last year. The idea of a visual tribute to a writer is so marvellous and generous that one wishes it was as standard as a memorial service or an obituary."

"How can anyone imagine that the dream-driven human animal will suddenly become sane when its environment starts disintegrating? … A change of sensibility in the arts would be highly desirable … the opposite of apocalyptic. Neither Conrad nor Ballard believed that catastrophe could alter the terms on which human beings live in the world. Both writers were unsparing critics of civilisation, but they never imagined there was a superior alternative. Each had witnessed for himself what the alternative means in practice. … our present environmental difficulties are not solvable problems, but are inseparable from our current way of living. When confronted with problems that are insoluble, however, the most useful response is … to do whatever can be done, knowing that it will not amount to much. … stoicism will be needed if civilised life is to survive an environmental crisis that cannot now be avoided". via Matt (Twitter)

"One of the more enduring misconceptions surrounding the work of J.G. Ballard is that it operates in the classical dystopian narrative mode, supposedly mining pessimism, repression and the negativity of a post-industrial age. … However, as this paper will argue, to locate Ballard within this literary tradition is a fundamental misreading."

"Science is a new religion waiting to be born. Infinitely more important than literature, which is an old religion—poetry—waiting to die."

“Ballard's most appropriate epitaph, perhaps, is one that could well be directed at game designers who are tempted to copy what the other side is doing, or to bend to commercial pressures, or to try to make their game the "best fit" in genre conventions. It's a message that confirms that we cannot allow corporate checklists to oversee creativity, or to outline our projects of fantasy creation and fulfilment. It could be pointed at gamers who get shy when asked about their love of the escapist, fantasy-clad medium. It is perhaps the best piece of advice I have ever found, as applicable to gamers, and game creators, as anywhere else: “My advice to anyone in any field is to be faithful to your obsessions. Identify them and be faithful to them, let them guide you like a sleepwalker.” Live like that, I say, and boredom becomes little more than a dream.”

"The future”, said JG Ballard, who died this week, “is going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.” All that was left of British culture, he told me years ago when we met in his Crittal-windowed semi in Shepperton, is “consumerism”, a compelling and malevolent force replacing art and culture. ... “I’ve always treated England as a strange fiction”, he said. ... In a way Ballard’s is an old theme. “All Middlesex is ugly,” wrote William Cobbett in his pugnacious Rural Rides of 1830, meaning that this deeply rural county of market gardens had been given over to mean, suburban villas, toll roads and sheer sprawl. ... Ballard believed that we are seduced by “mod cons”, by the promise, however absurd, of ever-easier, more instantly gratifying ways of life."

"Ballard brought ... shamanistic skills. He kept asking: what effect does the modern setting have on our psyches - the motion sculpture of the highways, the airport architecture, the culture of the shopping mall, pornography & technology? The answer to that question is a perversity that takes various mental forms, all of them extreme. When he broke away from rigid SF, Ballard said that he was rejecting outer space for "inner space". This has always been his arena. Ballard will be remembered as the most original English writer of the last century. He used to like saying that writers were "one-man teams" & needed the encouragement of the crowd (ie, their readers). But he will also be remembered as a one-man genre; no one else is remotely like him. He was a talisman. Very few Ballardians (who are almost all male) were foolish enough to emulate him. He was sui generis. What was influential, though, was the marvellous creaminess of his prose, & the weird & sudden expansions of his imagery."

"The Westway motorway flyover in West London- ‘a stone dream that will never awake’"

James Graham Ballard, novelist, born November 15 1930, died 19 April 2009

"His first published story, a tale of singing plants called Prima Belladonna, appeared in the magazine Science Fantasy in 1956, the same year as an exhibition at the Whitechapel gallery which marked the birth of pop art. In this and the work of the surrealists such as Max Ernst, René Magritte, Salvador Dali and Paul Delvaux he found the inspiration for what he later called a "fiction for the present day". The young science fiction author "wasn't interested in the far future, spaceships and all that", he explained; rather he was interested in "the evolving world, the world of hidden persuaders, of the communications landscape developing, of mass tourism, of the vast conformist suburbs dominated by television – that was a form of science fiction, and it was already here". ... His later work continued to subject modern life to its own extremes ... But the label of science fiction writer still stuck, much to Ballard's irritation, partly as a way of "defusing the threat"."

"'We live inside an enormous novel', observes Ballard in the introduction to his most controversial novel Crash (1973), 'The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality'."

"David Pringle has generously allowed all 25 issues of his JGB newsletter to be reprinted. They stretch from 1981 to 1996, and report on a fascinating period of JGB's career. Text transcribed by Mike Holliday and David Pringle."

EotS talks of "premature, traumatic death of the inner child ... explicit in the scene which ... condenses the essence of his novel: the attempt at resurrecting the dead kamikaze pilot who, for a few seconds, becomes the corpse of the child Jim once was"

Bruce Sterling: "Ballard never predicted events or devices; instead, he described future sensibilities--how it might feel, what it might mean. ... I daresay that's the best the SF genre will ever do--and no more should ever be asked of it."

"The gifts of modern life ... that have brought a kind of freedom to the inhabitants of the western world, "are gifts that come in poisonous wrapping paper. One has to handle them very carefully. But that's true of most of the valuable things in life.""

" Interview conducted by Thomas Frick in 1983 and published in the Paris Review #94 (Winter, 1984)"

"JG Ballard was a complete genius because he understood early on that the future might be dated. For him, Cape Canaveral was already a modernist ruin. He never bought the idea that technology equalled progress."

"On the one hand ... 'a writer devoted to predicting & if possible, provoking change'; on the other ... a fairly deep-seated commitment to continuity. The tension between these competing instincts is surely one of the sources of the power of his fiction"

"literature other than SF ... oriented towards the past ... [SF] interprets the present day in terms of the future ... oriented towards the world of tomorrow, with all its science, its technology & ... developments in politics, sociology, advertising"

"Simon Brook certainly deserves his place in the pantheon of unsung directors of JGB, alongside Potter, Cokliss, Scoggins and Cazals. It’s not all Cronenberg and Spielberg, you know…"

psychogeography — all a muddle …

"a Ballard interview from the BBC’s latest round of promotions surrounding Miracles of Life, this time from the Nightwaves program on Radio 3. ... focuses on the really interesting strata of the autobiography where new & revealing information is found"

"I’d like to organize a Festival of Home Movies! ...Using modern electronics, home movie cameras and the like, one will begin to retreat into one’s own imagination. I welcome that…""

"Anyone interested in Ballard must get used to the idea of repetition, after all, in all its guises and in every iteration; multiple personas are the key to Ballard’s fractured take on supermodernity."

when "scarcity has been overcome, what is most threatening is the loss of desire ... Ballard's achievement is not ... any kind of political position ... [but] to have communicated a vision of what individual fulfilment might mean in a time of nihilism"

"Existence, in Cronenberg's eyes, is the ultimate pathological state. He sees us as fragile creatures with only a sketchy idea of who we are"

Olly's read this in proof and praises it highly.

see, too, Nicholas Ruddick, Ballard/Crash/Baudrillard, http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/58/ruddick58art.htm

"Chris Auty thinks that the British find the problem problematic because the Protestant world has no surrealist tradition within which to place or make sense of it"; Ballard, "I think of Crash as the first film of the next century"

"epitomises Ballard’s ‘death of affect’ theories ... Inner Space in perpetual motion. The media landscape, with its aestheticising of violence, is the novel’s main character. The car, the first & still most recognisable symbol of mass production"

"being the first — pre-Cronenberg, pre-Weiss — is worthy in itself, but Cokliss’s film has something even more prized, something else the other two could never have: it stars J.G. Ballard"

"Modernism brings ... an emptiness that seems dangerous ... the dark drives that slumber in us. It reserves no place for the unexplainable or the mysterious – & for precisely that reason causes a return to barbarism. ... Seeing everything makes you sad"

is "the action ... in the "real" world or simply in the protagonist's head. Cronenberg ... ... ask[s] if there is a difference ... JG Ballard has said, "All of Cronenberg's films [ask 2 qns] ... who are we & what is the real nature of consciousness?"

"Fourth Estate is also re-issuing five of Ballard’s backlist in February next year: Millennium People; The Crystal World; The Drought; The Drowned World; and The Unlimited Dream Company. They will be promoted alongside the autobiography."

"what we need to do is realise how consumerism has become violence, and nothing but violence. ... What seems, to me, to have changed is an unmistakable feeling that unless the victim is seen to be suffering, a prank isn’t really funny."

"what happened at C&I codified the tropes Ballard was to return to throughout his career — the scientific, technical and imaginative motifs that shape the very essence of what we’ve come to know and love as ‘Ballardian’."

"Of particular interest are the book reviews initialled by JGB. Most are factual — short, dry reviews of long, dry technical reference works that seem little more than fillers. But one longer review stands out, where even Papa Freud gets a mention…"

"I prefer Un Chien Andalou, but in L'Âge d'Or there is the same sense that everyday reality is only a hand's breadth away, but will never be reached. In short, rather like life today. Welcome to the surrealist world, which you never knew you inhabited"

"lines of family tombs resemble cheerful vacation bungalows, airy structures of white walls & glass that might have been designed by Le Corbusier or Richard Neutra. One could holiday for a long time in these pleasant villas, & a few of us probably will"

"Will Self has said, ‘I only have to look at a few paragraphs of Crash to feel I am in the presence of an extreme mind, a mind at the limits of dark imagination.’ He meant this as a commendation."

"[called] his works "theory fictions" ... the present is always more fantastical than the most lurid science fiction, "theory" must compete with it on an imaginative level. ... Crash ... "the first great novel of the universe of simulation""

'Simulacra and Science Fiction' and 'Ballard's 'Crash''; via http://www.ballardian.com/rip-jean-baudrillard/

"JG Ballard talks to Jeannette Baxter about globalisation and terrorism, government and the media, the internet and intimacy"

lots in this …

J G Ballard: "We no longer live in a literary culture and have not for some while … Literary culture was based on certain notions about social reality. … The most important thing now is a celebrity chav called Jade Goody.”

"The infamous Texas Book Depository window, and the fatal frame from the Zapruder JFK assassination film", The Warren Commission’s Report and more