The Complete Short Stories: Volume 2

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There is no single way of talking about the collected stories of J. G. Ballard. They are so various that no one reading will contain them. When talking about this giant oeuvre, it’s better to borrow terms from geology, and other sciences of natural phenomena; better to talk of strata, or of eras.

And a preliminary summary of these epochs in one paragraph might go something like this …

First there is the era of what might be called, for useful shorthand, science fiction: where the nature of Nature has undergone sinister changes, and become strangely technological. In these stories, many of which take place in a warped version of Palm Springs, the reader will find sonic sculptures, and singing flowers, among other curiosities. In the second era, the modulations Ballard enjoyed performing on the natural world became grander: now these modulations affected the deep conditions of being: his material became time and space. In the third era, his imagination became more and more apocalyptic, replete with visions of environmental disaster. And all these eras were ones of dense and hectic composition – the 750 pages of this complete edition’s first half move only from 1956 to 1964. Its second half, of equal length, takes in the greater time span of 1964 to 1992. And it was somewhere in the late 1960s that a new and final era emerged: where the cosmic alterations now took place in an atmosphere of late modernity – computerised finance, terror, dictator politics, and flat pornography. It was this landscape that formed the last and longest era of Ballard’s stories – a shiny, dilapidated vista of motels, space voyages, assassination attempts.

In other words, Ballard’s stories constitute a corpus that is unlike anything else in twentieth-century British fiction. This corpus is unique.

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Interviewed by George MacBeth in 1967, Ballard tried to define the difference between his fiction and that of his contemporaries. ‘The great bulk of fiction still being written,’ he observed, ‘is retrospective in character. It’s concerned with the origins of experience, behaviour, development of character over a great span of years. It interprets the present in terms of the past, and it uses a narrative technique, by and large the linear narrative, in which events are shown in more-or-less chronological sequence, which is suited to it.’ Whereas, he then continued: ‘when one turns to the present – and what I feel I’ve done in these pieces of mine is to rediscover the present for myself – I feel that one needs a nonlinear technique, simply because our lives today are not conducted in linear terms. They are much more quantified; a stream of random events is taking place.’

It has a charming grandeur, this giant theory, but I’m not sure it’s precisely right. Or at least, it may be right, but it’s only a tentative sketch. The diligent reader also needs to consider some sober literary history.

For these stories in no way follow one dominant strand of the short story: the realist ironic tradition of Chekhov and Maupassant. Instead, these are stories of the high imaginary, and fantastical. The best short stories, Ballard once noted, were those of ‘Borges, Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allen Poe’. And his own stories, similarly, feature universes stretched beyond their normal limits. But to name this tradition is not quite a solution, either. Italo Calvino once wrote an essay on fantastic literature, and he offered the following definition of its underlying philosophy:

The problem of the reality of what we see – both extraordinary things, which may be just hallucinations projected by our mind, and ordinary things, which perhaps conceal beneath the most banal appearances a second nature that is more disturbing, mysterious, terrifying – is the essence of this literature of the fantastic, whose most powerful effects lie in this hovering between irreconcilable levels of reality.

And at once, the diligent reader has a problem. Maybe for Edgar Allen Poe, sure, this might be a workable definition. But it in no way helps when considering Ballard’s inventions.

At which point, this ideal reader should maybe pause: and consider a particular example.

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One of Ballard’s greatest stories is called ‘The Voices of Time’. Its manner is not the manner of the usual avant-garde. Its early pages contain dialogue that is notable for its strained formality. (‘“What are you doing with yourself, Robert?” he asked. “Are you still going over to Whitby’s lab?”‘) Judged on its stylistics, the mode seems to be the usual mode of a certain deadbeat realism. (‘He smiled sympathetically at Powers across the desk, wondering what to say to him.’) And yet the reader looking for the usual story and backstory will soon find the conventional fictional perspectives subtly altered. Some names are strange – like Kaldren, and Coma. While the backstory that is hinted at – and this is one of Ballard’s constant techniques – is vast with inexplicability: not just isolated details (‘the derelict gold-panning equipment abandoned over eighty years ago’), but also the blank precision of the vocabulary, the strange ‘camera towers’ and ‘glass polyhedrons’ of this landscape, and the intricacy of the scientific terms, which go way beyond the usual assumptions of a reader’s everyday knowledge: ‘the protein lattices in the genes were building up energy in the way that any vibrating membrane accumulates energy when it resonates …’

It is a future that could also be a present – everything is scrambled – and the reason for this confusion is the meaning of the story. Its surface plot seems to be about the strange discoveries which Whitby, a biologist, has been making in the field of silent gene activation. His colleague, Powers, is dying – and in the time he has left he is trying to think through the implications of Whitby’s experiments, where an organism’s latent future comes to life. And the answer seems to be contained in an odd undertaking of Whitby’s in the summer before his suicide: ‘the strange grooves the biologist had cut, apparently at random, all over the floor of the empty swimming pool. An inch deep and twenty feet long, interlocking to form an elaborate ideogram like a Chinese character Eventually, Powers decides to build a version of Whitby’s diagram, in concrete, in the middle of a salt lake. When it is finished, it is revealed as a ‘mandala’ – a miniature diagram of the universe. And Powers walks out to its centre. ‘Above him he could hear the stars, a million cosmic voices that crowded the sky from one horizon to the next, a true canopy of time.’

For this story’s theme is entropy. And therefore its perspective is not just the entropy of the human body, but also of the dying stars, and the dying planet. Which is why the story’s unwobbling pivot is this strange mandala. As Powers dies, ‘the image of the mandala, like a cosmic clock, remained fixed before his eyes …’

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No wonder Ballard felt he was beyond the usual retrospective psychology! In his list of favourite books, there are predictable literary precursors – the short stories of Hemingway, Alice in Wonderland, Naked Lunch – but two items stand out for their strange abstraction: recordings of cockpit conversations retrieved from the black boxes of airplanes; and the Los Angeles Yellow Pages. The LA Yellow Pages, he once wrote, was the only book he had ever stolen – and then he added: ‘What is interesting about the LA Yellow Pages is the picture it gives of real life in Los Angeles, so different from the glitzy world of film premieres, stars and directors. There are more psychiatrists listed than plumbers, and more dating bureaus than doctors, and more poodle parlours than vets. Like the classified advertisements in newspapers, which provide a picture of the readership, the Yellow Pages of any great city reveals its true underside. The Los Angeles Yellow Pages is richer in human incident than all the novels of Balzac.’

What is a character? Or what is a motivation? The usual human motivations still exist in Ballard’s stories, but only nostalgically – in the background, like herms or hilltop cities in the old landscapes. And the reason for this relegation was a phenomenon which Ballard named the Death of Affect – the twentieth century had invented such large atrocities, not only Hiroshima and the Holocaust, but also the virtual worlds of computers and high finance, that the old human categories were no longer relevant. To argue over the rightness of such a theory is not the point. The point is that it allowed Ballard to invent fictions of a startling originality. In his strangely formal prose, he described what character might look like when all the traditional formalities had disappeared.

Rather than subjects, Ballard has a system of recurring tropes. And so in ‘The Voices of Time’, the reader will discover reworked versions of previous stories: an obsession with sound and soundwaves that is also present in ‘Venus Smiles’, or ‘The Sound Sweep’; the new planets of ‘The Waiting Grounds’; the sleeplessness of ‘Manhole 69’. But in each case, the tropes are rearranged to create a new original. You can call this system mythic, but I think the truth is stranger. It might be more precise to say: the basis of previous fiction was the isolated self, and its various particularities of politesse and ego, whereas in Ballard’s fiction the protagonists turn out to be much larger entities – the impossible and ignored coercions of society, or the environment. For this is, according to Ballard’s redefinition, how the contemporary self now lives: always blurring into a herd, or crowd. And that’s why comparing him to Borges or Kafka or Poe is not quite useful. The texture of his writing is much more deliberately contemporary than theirs – and therefore is always grainy with a faint satirical tone. Famously he claimed that he was not writing about the future but about the ‘visionary present’ – and it is the urgency of that present moment which makes his metaphysical writing so disturbing. If he resembles anyone, I sometimes think, it is the great visionary Jules Verne. In both writers, the chic and the modern – submarines, space ships, X-rays, gene theory – is revealed to be glowing with a much larger, more sinister significance.

Every writer of fiction invents the places they describe, whether ostensibly real or not. ‘It had taken me some forty years to invent Russia and Western Europe,’ wrote Nabokov in his afterword to Lolita, ‘and now I was faced by the task of inventing America.’ And Ballard is one of the great inventors of places in fiction. This ferocious analyst of the totalitarian was one of the experts in fiction’s own totalitarian nature: the way it so easily can dictate its own terms. Imperiously, Ballard invents unexplained acronyms, or distorts vocabulary – a technique already baroquely visible in the first story collected here, ‘Prima Belladonna’: ‘Before he came to Vermilion Sands he’d been a curator at the Kew Conservatoire where the first choro-flora had been bred …’

But his success at this place-invention is so striking because he is always, simultaneously, describing our own habitat. He is a writer of collective motivation, collective character, precisely because existence in the twentieth century was in the process of transforming itself into larger atmospheres: not just the general conditions of nature, but also the pervading clouds of advertising, stock exchanges, computerised reality. He is the great describer of the lawning of our era – the embankments and swathes of abstract space that compose our giant suburbs. Such everyday abstraction, the absence of particulars, is Ballard’s chosen locale – whether it is incarnated in a concrete beachfront with palmettos, an extra planet, or the laboratories of future technological advances.

Although I think it’s also important to point out that, for all the international roaming of his fiction, from the Apartamentos California to Cannes, the true location is always, somehow, Britain. Just think, even, of ‘The Voices of Time’: that entropy is cosmic, sure, but it is also the entropy that Ballard discovered in the postwar suburbs of a dying empire. Britain, in fact, was the most modern country on earth, precisely because it was the world-leader in entropy – and therefore also the leader in ressentiment, rancour, sadness, twilight, concrete. Dystopia! You only needed to look around you: among the flyovers and multi-storey car parks in the rain.

In his later stories, this strange form of visionary politics became more and more pronounced, culminating in the late novels, beyond the chronology of this collection: his studies of financial hyper-reality in Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes, then the bourgeois darknesses of Millennium People and Kingdom Come. And it came with a technical shift. The interest in vocabulary formation that had marked his early stories gradually became a more overt interest in the general culture’s linguistic deformations. Ballard became the impresario of official registers: a story could be a simple exercise in style – like the punk brilliance of ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’, which he wrote in 1968, soon after Reagan became Governor of California. The story is a carnival of vocabularies – the medical, the psychoanalytic, the opinion poll – gleefully stuffed with impermissible fantasy: ‘Multiple-track cine-films were constructed of “Reagan” in intercourse during (a) campaign speeches, (b) rear-end auto-collisions with one and three-year-old model changes, (c) with rear-exhaust assemblies, (d) with Vietnamese child-atrocity victims.’

With that kind of shock tactic, Ballard offered new possibilities to the short story: beyond the intricate psychology of the Chekhovian mode.

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For instead, Ballard’s subject was the system: physically, the vast urban spaces and their freeways, and mentally the vast interior landscapes of psychosis and neurosis. In his Ronald Reagan extravaganza, Ballard first perceived how the era’s separate preoccupations converged, and were even mutually complicit: the virtual worlds of cinema, of politics, of analysis, were all forms of the same violence. And that’s why his late style is so tonally acrobatic. Each closed system was revealed as a version of another.

One of his last stories, ‘The Object of the Attack’, was written in 1984. As always, it has its patina of genre fiction (‘Events are moving on apace.’). But in this story of an assassination attempt, the reader can observe all Ballard’s obsessions reacting with each other, as inside some miniature and hyper-modern laboratory: the outward tone – British, and bourgeois – encloses violent energies, where the Royal Family, the American Presidency and Space Travel are ways of encoding a manic form of pathology.

But then, why not? A mandala is an image of the world, so in a way every story is a mandala, too. Which would mean, according to the terms of Ballard’s fiction, that every story is therefore also a cosmic clock – counting down the minutes to the final catastrophe.

London,2014

PRISONER OF THE CORAL DEEP (#ulink_8be3d421-2e63-59a9-831d-8e3907b9af30)

I found the shell at low tide, lying in a rock-pool near the cave, its huge mother-of-pearl spiral shining through the clear water like a Fabergé gem. During the storm I had taken shelter in the mouth of the cave, watching the grey waves hurl themselves towards me like exhausted saurians, and the shell lay at my feet almost as a token of the sea’s regret.

The storm was still rumbling along the cliffs in the distance, and I was wary of leaving the cave. All morning I had been walking along this deserted stretch of the Dorset coast. I had entered a series of enclosed bays from which there were no pathways to the cliffs above. Quarried by the sea, the limestone bluffs were disturbed by continuous rock-slides, and the beaches were littered by huge slabs of pockmarked stone. Almost certainly there would be further falls after the storm. I stepped cautiously from my shelter, peering up at the high cliffs. Even the wheeling gulls crying to each other seemed reluctant to alight on their crumbling cornices.

Below me, the seashell lay in its pool, apparently magnified by the lens of water. It was fully twelve inches long, the corrugated shell radiating into five huge spurs. A fossil gastropod, which had once basked in the warm Cambrian seas five hundred million years earlier, it had presumably been torn loose by the waves from one of the limestone boulders.

Impressed by its size, I decided to take it home to my wife as a memento of my holiday – needing a complete change of scene after an unprecedentedly busy term at school, I had been packed off to the coast for a week. I stepped into the pool and lifted the shell from the water, and then turned to retrace my steps along the coast.

To my surprise, I was being watched by a solitary figure on the limestone ledge twenty yards behind me, a tall raven-haired woman in a sea-blue gown that reached to her feet. She stood motionlessly among the rock-pools, like a Pre-Raphaelite vision of the dark-eyed Madonna of some primitive fisher community, looking down at me with meditative eyes veiled by the drifting spray. Her dark hair, parted in the centre of her low forehead, fell like a shawl to her shoulders and enclosed her calm but somewhat melancholy face.

I stared at her soundlessly, and then made a tentative gesture with the seashell. The ragged cliffs and the steep sea and sky seemed to enclose us with a sense of absolute remoteness, as if the rocky beach and our chance encounter had been transported to the bleak shores of Tierra del Fuego on the far tip of the world’s end. Against the damp cliffs her blue robe glowed with an almost spectral vibrancy, matched only by the brilliant pearl of the shell in my hands. I assumed that she lived in an isolated house somewhere above the cliffs – the storm had ended only ten minutes earlier, and there appeared to be no other shelter – and that a hidden pathway ran down among the fissures in the limestone.

I climbed up to the ledge and walked across to her. I had gone on holiday specifically to escape from other people, but after the storm and my walk along the abandoned coast, I was glad to talk to someone. Although she showed no response to my smile, the woman’s dark eyes watched me without hostility, as if she were waiting for me to approach her.

At our feet the sea hissed, the waves running like serpents between the rocks.

‘The storm certainly came up suddenly,’ I commented. ‘I managed to shelter in the cave.’ I pointed to the cliff top two hundred feet above us. ‘You must have a magnificent view of the sea. Do you live up there?’

Her white skin was like ancient pearl. ‘I live by the sea,’ she said. Her voice had a curiously deep timbre, as if heard under water. She was at least six inches taller than myself, although I am by no means a short man. ‘You have a beautiful shell,’ she remarked.

I weighed it in one hand. ‘Impressive, isn’t it? A fossil snail – far older than this limestone, you know. I’ll probably give it to my wife, though it should go to the Natural History Museum.’

‘Why not leave it on the beach where it belongs?’ she said. ‘The sea is its home.’

‘Not this sea,’ I rejoined. ‘The Cambrian oceans where this snail swam vanished millions of years ago.’ I detached a thread of fucus clinging to one of the spurs and let it fall away on the air. ‘I’m not sure why, but fossils fascinate me – they’re like time capsules; if only one could unwind this spiral it would probably play back to us a picture of all the landscapes it’s ever seen – the great oceans of the Carboniferous, the warm shallow seas of the Trias …’

‘Would you like to go back to them?’ There was a note of curiosity in her voice, as if my comments had intrigued her. ‘Would you prefer them to this time?’

‘Hardly. I suppose it’s just the nostalgia of one’s unconscious memory. Perhaps you understand what I mean – the sea is like memory. However lost or forgotten, everything in its exists for ever …’ Her lips moved in what seemed to be the beginnings of a smile. ‘Or does the idea seem strange?’

‘Not at all.’

She watched me pensively. Her robe was woven from some bright thread of blue silver, almost like the hard brilliant scales of pelagic fish.

Her eyes turned to the sea. The tide had begun to come in, and already the pool where I found the shell was covered by the water. The first waves were breaking into the mouth of the cave, and the ledge we stood on would soon be surrounded. I glanced over my shoulder for any signs of the cliff path.

‘It’s getting stormy again,’ I said. ‘The Atlantic is rather bad-tempered and unpredictable – as you’d expect from an ancient sea. Once it was part of a great ocean called –’