J. G. Ballard
Conversations
by V. Vale,
Editor
RE/Search Publications, San Francisco,
2005
360 pp., illus. 50 b/w. Paper, $19.99
ISBN: 1-889307-13-0.
Reviewed by John F. Barber
Digital Technology and Culture, Washington
State University--Vancouver
jfbarber@eaze.net
J[ames]. G[Graham]. Ballard is a UK writer
well known for his moody painterly eye,
especially with regard to technology and
deserted and wrecked landscapes, both
internal and external. One does not have
to read Ballard's entire corpus to get
at his most salient ideas, however. RE/Search
Publications, the San Francisco publisher
behind the Modern Primitives series,
has issued a series of collected interviews
with Ballard. J. G. Ballard Conversations
is the latest of these collections. In
this collection of compelling interviews,
Ballard lives up to his title "The Prophet
of the 21st Century" as he
illuminates the human condition across
a variety of topics.
Ballard's conversational topics in this
collection are numerous: the neo-conservatives
and George W. Bush, the destruction of
the World Trade Center, globalization,
religion, the triumph of emotions over
rationalism, corporate media, surveillance
and control, the death of cinema, the
colonizing of our existence, the end of
the Age of Reason, the Internet, and the
ascendance of machine morality.
Speaking of morality, Ballard says, "We
seem to have subcontracted out the moral
dimensions of our lives. We rely on someone
else to make moral decisions for us. .
. . The fewer moral decisions we make,
the better." Moving through life with
decisions made by others, we can, Ballard
says, "get on with the business of unwrapping
the latest piece of candy" (73).
The price to be paid for a lifestyle free
of moral responsibility is boredom, says
Ballard, and a great deal of current cultural
attraction with "reality" in any form,
from television shows to driving an SUV,
is a desperate search for something that
is not packaged and contrived, something
that is authentic. "I'm frightened that
the possibilities of a genuine dystopia
may be much more appealing than any utopian
project that people can come up with,"
Ballard concludes (74).
Rather than existentialism, Ballard talks
about religion, but not in a religious
way. Instead, according to his archivist
David Pringle, "Foundationally, he's like
the best Surrealist poets. Yet what's
amazing is how he has annexed cutting-edge
science and technology into his writing.
And he's a philosopheryou find these
stand-alone philosophical observations
that rank with the best by Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche. . . . [For example when
he says] 'The unseen powers of universe'
[he] doesn't mean any conventional idea
of 'God,' but rather this sense of the
mystery of the universe" (214).
On more pragmatic issues, Ballard is equally
thought provoking. For example, of the
current conflict in Iraq, Ballard says
there seems to be no connection between
Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, "so what
we have is a sort of substitute phenomenon.
"Saddam is a substitute target" (87) and
the invasion of Iraq is "a kind of compensation
activity [meant to] assuage all that repressed
anger and frustration stemming from not
being able to find bin Laden. It's a sort
of surrogate activity, a substitute activity"
(104). Even as a substitute activity,
the invasion of Iraq was sold to the people
of the United States and United Kingdom
as a moral imperative. Leaders of both
nations felt compelled to attack for religious
reasons, says Ballard, and this eliminated
many of the avenues for productive dissent,
as there is little if any defense when
emotionalism overcomes reason. Such use
of enlightened reason does not bode well
for the future where crimes will be committed
"for the most enlightened reasons. When
the crimes are committed by the most high-minded
people for the best reasons, you have
no defense, do you? That's the real threat.
And that will come" (292).
There are other conversational threads
in J. G. Ballard Conversations,
all circling around Ballard's main concern
with a psychopathic future where sexuality,
human relations, the economy, communications,
and technology are all going haywire.
Overall, Ballard's tone is hopeful: "I've
always thought that my fiction on the
whole presented a kind of optimistic message"
(186). That message is that we can remake
the world around us through the power
of imagination, "which after all is all
we've got. I mean the central nervous
system is faced with a world of Marriott
hotels and ex-actors turned world leaders,"
he says (276). This collision of private
and public imagination, both subject to
manufacture by mass media, presents a
distinct challenge to the imaginative
writer. No longer will overlays of, say,
classical Surrealism work to help one
discern the "real" from the manufactured.
Instead, says Ballard, one has to approach
obliquely, "he's got to get behind
everything; somehow find a door out of
the movie set and get behind it." Getting
behind everything means getting hard-edged
information, hard facts, hard news, "the
sort of things that really do feed the
imagination" (178).
In the end it is the churning imagination
that provides significance to one's work,
says Ballard. Inventing alternate worlds,
some completely fictional, others close
to the reality of one's life is a mysterious
business, one that often reveals that
"so many of the ordinary things that fill
our lives are rather bizarre" (188). The
temptation is to live in "provinces of
the imagination without facing the central
challenges of the day" (198). But, as
J. G. Ballard Conversations makes
quite clear, effective use of speculation
and imagination gives one the power to
remake the world, to get as close as possible
to reality, to foster truth, to hold back
the night.