The final chapter of JG Ballard’s recent memoir reveals that he has terminal cancer. I think this was already public knowledge, and I had heard that this was likely to be his last book, but I hadn’t previously known the details of his illness. I will miss him greatly. No writer has so incisively anatomised post-war western culture: the fascination of technology, the eroticisation of violence and consumerism, the cult of celebrity. If his aim was not as unerring in his later work, it remained proof that fiction was capable of more revealing insights into the human condition than anything offered by the literary herd that clogs the review pages and the 3 for 2 tables.
Miracles Of Life is in some respects a peculiar memoir, losing steam rapidly once Ballard’s career as a writer begins, and tailing off with a few fragmentary episodes from the last decades of his life, many of them already described in similar terms in past interviews. It could be that his failing health began to take more of a toll in the later stages of writing the book. More likely he recognised that the life of a professional writer, more particularly one who is also bringing up three children as a single parent, tends to the repetitive and the mundane. It’s clear that his childhood in Shanghai and experience of internment during the Second World War have been the dominant influnces on his writing. For a long time I was leery of reading Empire Of The Sun, assuming that as a Booker nominee it had to be a distinctly more conventional novel than Crash or High Rise. Now I would consider it the vital counterweight to those books, precisely delineating the buried incidents that gave rise to the key motifs and themes in Ballard’s books. This is where the visions of drained swimming pools and abandoned aircraft on runways originate, this is where he develops his convictions about the atavistic urges that motivate humans, and the precariousness of the veneer of civilisation that disguises them.
The same source material reappears in the memoir but, freed from the strictures of the novel, it has a clarity that seems almost distilled. This is some of Ballard’s best writing, as lucid and compact as ever, and every sentence is telling. It also has a personal and emotive quality that is often missing from his fiction. His novels pay little attention to character, the same types reappearing under similar names in book after book, with only a few blank and abstracted references to their feelings. It’s fascinating then to see him describing his relationship with his family, his regret at the distance that existed between him and his parents, and the obvious love and pride he has for his children and his partners.
I have come to think that human rationality is in many ways a chimaera, that the reasons we give for our actions are frequently post-hoc rationalisations for what we have done, rather than the motivation for those actions. We assume too great a gulf between ourselves and the rest of the animal world - even if (and I mean if) human intelligence is of another order than the rest of the mammals, we can’t have evolved so far from them as to be entirely free of instinctive behaviour, to be free of primitive impulses. Yet we like to think that we have freed ourselves of the drives that preserved our place in the process of natural selection because in the short period of our written history reason and technology have proven such effective tools. Ballard’s conviction that the atrocities he witnessed during the war are evidence that in large part humans have a taste for violence rings true. Civilisation survives because we can be trained like any other animal. We can imbue ourselves with responses that go against the grain, but any theory of human society that does not take into account the non-rational side of our being is doomed to failure.
Our experience of consciousness as being continuous is another rationalisation, the mind papering over the cracks and discontinuities of daily experience in the attempt to shoehorn it all into an explicable schema. Perhaps this is what is so often unsatisfying about conventional literary fiction - these microscopically parsed descriptions of personality, experience, psychology are descriptions of just such a rationalisation. In their focus on conscious experience they fail to put their finger on the unconscious urges that drive us, nor can they accommodate the jagged, allusive, irrational complexity of our immediate response to raw experience. The images of the surrealists have been co-opted by commerce and neutralised through familiarity but their attempt to drop stones into the well of the unconscious and see what rises to the surface must continue to be combed for insights. Likewise, the uncanny power of Francis Bacon’s best work must not be simply boxed-off, remarked upon yet essentially ignored. If literature and the visual arts have given up on this project, if psychoanalysis has not yet produced convincing understanding of the mind, we can still look at the empirical study of the unconscious that is advertising. We can read the writing on the wall in the shit that the advertising companies throw at it.
And we can’t ever forget about Ballard, and what the disconcerting power of his work implies about what we are. I would love to see this memoir followed up by some substantial critical work, taking in his entire oeuvre. Equally I’d like to see something synoptic on the whole cavalcade of experimental SF writers that centered around New Worlds and Michael Moorcock. Maybe these books already exist and I am simply unaware of them - I’d welcome any recommendations in the comments. In the meantime, the essential source for all material relating to Ballard on the web is the excellent Ballardian.
“When the tribune Gabinius after the introduction of his proposals appeared in the senate-house, the fathers of the city were almost on the point of strangling him with their own hands, without considering in their zeal how extremely disadvantageous to them this method of arguing must ultimately have proved.”