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
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
