‘The Index’ by J. G. Ballard

J. G. Ballard conceptualizes the book index as an autobiography in ‘The Index’. A brief prefatory note from an editor designates the index as all that remains of a autobiography by “Physician and philosopher, man of action and patron of the arts, sometime claimant to the English throne and founder of a new religion, Henry Rhodes Hamilton.” Immediately, the mystery of Hamilton’s person draws us into reading the index creatively, and engaging it narratively. Ultimately, Hamilton is who you make him, depending on how you connect references as disparate as:

“Berenson, Bernard, conversations with HRH, 134; offer of adoption, 145; loan of
Dürer etching, 146; law-suits against HRH, 173-85
Bergman, Ingrid, 197, 234, 267
Ecclesiastes, Book of, 87
Eckhart, Meister, 265
Hiroshima, HRH observes atomic cloud, 258
Hitler, Adolf, invites HRH to Berchtesgaden, 166; divulges Russia invasion plans, 172; impresses HRH, 179; disappoints HRH, 181”

A play on paranoia and conspiracy, this is Ballard at his disruptive best, challenging post-Enlightenment notions of individual selfhood by forcing us to define a person entirely by his quoted relations to others.

Published in The Paris Review, 1991 and available to subscribers here. Collected in The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Volume 2, Fourth Estate, 2014

‘The Terminal Beach’ by JG Ballard

At night, as he lay asleep on the floor of the ruined bunker, Traven heard the waves breaking along the shore of the lagoon, like the sounds of giant aircraft warming up at the ends of their runways.

The key moment in Ballard’s fragmented evocation of a man’s anguished exploration of an abandoned atomic test site, vainly searching for his dead wife and child, is when a scientist he comes across tells him: “This island is a state of mind.” Ballard’s modus operandi is right there. He uses the blasted landscape of Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands – concrete bunkers, submarine pens and blast pans filled with deformed test dummies – to convey the shattered mentality of mankind in the post-nuclear age (the ‘Pre-Third’ as it is called in the story). Ballard is often criticized for the weakness of his plots and characterisation but here it doesn’t matter. Traven may be a cypher but Ballard locates him in an unforgettable landscape, haunted and dreamlike, and in his dilemma makes a compelling diagnosis of the human condition in the aftermath of the bomb.

First published in New Worlds, March 1964, and collected in The Terminal Beach, Gollancz 1964. Also in The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Volume 1, Fourth Estate, 2014

‘The Enormous Space’ by J.G. Ballard

I first read this story while I was studying architecture at university and it made the whole thing feel redundant. It showed me that rather than design buildings you can just see the ones that already exist in a different way—Perec came next, intensifying the realisation. It’s still building and the best way to do it is by writing.

My copy of this story, in War Fever, is littered with so many notes that it runs the risk of sprouting a novel. It came later in Ballard’s writing career when the stories got better by dispensing with narrative in a more traditional sense, and the premise is simple: one morning a man decides not to leave his suburban home. The fallout is anything but, domestic space is a desert island traversed by a lone explorer, the house dilating with psychological proximity and distance, between agoraphobia and claustrophobia. The result is mesmerising, a mix between Caspar David Friedrich and potholing.

Nobody else has demonstrated so powerfully how the imagination can remake the world, while also showing that utopias can only really exist in our own heads, and it’s in there where they can quickly turn on us. Dali invented The Paranoid Critical Method but Ballard did it better.

First published in Interzone, 1989, and collected in War Fever, Collins 1990, and the Complete Short Stories Vol 2, Fourth Estate, 2014

‘Having a Wonderful Time’ by J G Ballard

J G Ballard is rarely conventional, but his more experimental work tends to be found in his short stories. One of my favourites is ‘Having a Wonderful Time’, written, as the title suggests, as a series of postcards. Diana and her husband Richard head off to Las Palmas for two weeks of sun and sand in July, only to discover that, when the time comes to return to England, their departure has been delayed, first by a day, but soon indefinitely. Diana adapts, pursuing amateur dramatics as well as a crush on Beach Counsellor Mark, but Richard claims the holiday complexes are “human reserves” and intends to form a resistance group. Written in the clipped, upbeat tone of the typical postcard (for those old enough to remember) Richard’s desperate rebellion plays out against Diana’s rehearsals.

First published in Bananas, Spring 1978 and collected in Myths of the Near Future, Jonathan Cape, 1982, and now available in The Complete Stories of J G Ballard Volume 2, Fourth Estate, 2014

‘The Intensive Care Unit’ by J.G Ballard

‘The Intensive Care Unit’ is a beautifully paced dystopian text written by Ballard in 1977, the very dark tale of a physical family reunion. Against all government recommendations, and having spent a lifetime only communicating via screens – in courtship, marriage, pregnancy and child-rearing – two parents and their children finally get together, for the first time, in real life.

The result, well, I think I should let you imagine how J.G. Ballard would write such a scene of unbounded love…

In terms of pyrotechnics, there is an article dealing with this subject entitled: How to Light Fireworks at Home – Without Getting Dead.

In Myths of the Near Future, Jonathan Cape, 1982. Also in The Complete Stories, Vol 2, Fourth Estate, 2014 and English Short Stories from 1900 to the present, Everyman Classic, 1988

‘Mr F is Mr F’ by JG Ballard

This early tale by Ballard is a Freudian nightmare. Charles Freeman is rapidly losing weight, getting smaller and looking younger. At first, he believes this alarming physical transformation is psychosomatic and attempts to hide it from his pregnant wife. As the story unfolds his metamorphosis begins to limit his freedom, sap his energy and change the way people respond to him. The narrative style is more traditional than that of Ballard’s later stories, but it exhibits the same economy and energy of language. It also exhibits the author’s lifelong fascination with the overlap of weird and mundane aspects of perception. A crazy but strangely convincing story – once read never forgotten.

First published in Science Fantasy, Vol 16, No 48 in August 1961, and collected in The Complete Short Stories of JG Ballard: Volume 1, Fourth Estate, 2014

‘1974: How to Face Doomsday Without Really Trying’ by JG Ballard

Twenty or thirty years ago [Ballard said this in 1974, to CBC interviewer Carol Orr] the elements of fiction … occupied a much smaller space. … But now I don’t think this is the case. I think we have seen the invasion of almost every aspect of our lives by fictions of one kind or another. We see this is people’s homes – the way they furnish their houses and apartments. Even the sorts of friends they have seem to be dictated by fictions, fantasies, by standards invented by other people to serve various ends, not necessarily commercial. But we’re living more and more in a hot mix of fictions of every kind.

In this interview, Ballard casually limns the next fifty years of human development, dismissing the contemporary obsession with nuclear war and instead pointing to the way that computers would transform human experience and that information technology would seep into our identities. “We are moving into a realm,” he says, “in which inner space is no longer just inside our skulls but is in the terrain we see around us in everyday life.” Fiction was taking over, and to cope we could not turn our backs on technology, but had to learn to cope with it. As prediction, it is extraordinary – and as a benchmark for the powers of a writer’s imagination, it is without equal.

In Extreme Metaphors, 4th Estate, 2012, edited by Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara.

‘The Greatest TV Show on Earth’ by JG Ballard

This was my first and still my favourite Ballard story. I think I read this when I was around seventeen years old and I’d only really read books like Of Mice and Men and The Remains of the Day at school. I wasn’t a big reader until I got to my late teens – too busy kicking footballs, throwing cricket balls and playing with my own balls to care about literature. Essentially, I had no idea that you could write like this – with a total lack of characters or plot, no dialogue and certainly no particular literary merit to speak of. What I love about this story is that the concept (time travel meant you could make TV news set in the past by travelling there and filming it) rules the entire six pages. It’s bold and Ballard is clearly just sketching out an idea without needing such bourgeois complications like characterisation. Little did I know that absolutely everything he wrote is like this and it does get tiresome if you binge on it. But this story, it’s still my first love, and it always will be.

1972, from The Complete Short Stories Volume 2, Harper Perennial 2006

‘The Voices of Time’ by JG Ballard

Like Truth (though, whatever anyone says, it rarely deserves a place in that category, and a good thing too), the best imaginative or fantastic fiction comes up out of the well in a bad mood, from a place of struggle, rage and uncontrollable, deeply unsentimental weirdness, ready to sort you out. In ‘The Voices of Time’, the clock is running down. The genetic code, so recently discovered, is wearing out. Powers the doomed neurologist watches as his specimens–a brain damaged monkey in a jet pilot helmet, a sea anemone that has built itself a new nervous system, a spider that can only see gamma radiation–evolve to deal with a nascent yet still unimaginable future. Meanwhile, the great bowls of the radio telescopes sieve the sky for clues to the real time in the Universe. There’s a drained swimming pool and a woman called Coma. At the age of seventeen I couldn’t imagine anything more savagely exciting. This story doesn’t try to be science fiction. Instead it tries to make science fiction a poetics, and infuse it into the reader’s way of getting knowledge. This is the thing Ballard did so well. I was sad when he moved along, but contemporary fiction needed a sardonic, threatening, intelligent–if by then more easily measurable–darling, and from the 1970s on he was perfect for the part.

First published in New Worlds, October 1960. Collected in The Complete Short Stories Vol 1, Flamingo, 2001

‘Jane Fonda’s Augmentation Mammoplasty’ by JG Ballard

In the mid-to-late 1980s, the publisher Semiotext(e) was publishing punky editions of critical theorists and philosophers such as Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio. These ‘Foreign Agents’ paperbacks were pocket-sized, with black and neon covers, and you’d be more likely to find them reviewed in the books sections of the style press than the broadsheets. In 1989 Semiotext(e) published an anthology of science fiction short stories, and I was working as a bookseller in Foyles on Charing Cross Road, so ordered a copy. Of all the stories in Semiotext(e) SF, ‘Jane Fonda’s Augmentation Mammoplasty’ by JG Ballard is perhaps the most radical, and is striking for the insight it offers into Ballard’s process, the starkness of the transaction, and – unfortunately – the slightly predictable default sexism of its gender politics. A scientific account of a surgical procedure is augmented by Ballard’s substitution of the name ‘Jane Fonda’ for whatever anonymized subject designation (‘Patient X’?) had been used in the original of what appears to be an otherwise unaltered text. That’s it. That’s all, or appears to be all this story is: a single found text, altered only by the systematic addition of the name of a Hollywood star, transforming it into a kind of minimalist star vehicle.

Collected in Semiotext(e) SF, edited by Rudy Rucker, Peter Lamborn Wilson, Robert Anton Wilson, Semiotext(e), 1989

‘The Intensive Care Unit’ by JG Ballard

Soon after I graduated from my BA I sent a short story – my first – to Ambit magazine and received a hand-written rejection note from the fiction editor, JG Ballard: “well writ but not good enough.” I was thrilled. I’d recently read The Atrocity Exhibition and decided that he was my new favourite author. Written in the more realist mode of his earlier and later novels, the story ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ is typically prescient, and typically Ballardian in its tropes of surveillance, violence, perverse science, and desire mediated by technology. In this story all human interaction, including family life, is conducted remotely by “television hook-up”, until the narrator – a doctor, of course – makes the mistake of arranging finally to meet his wife and children in the flesh. There is a lot of flesh.

In Myths of the Near Future, Jonathan Cape, 1982. Also in The Complete Stories, Vol 2, Fourth Estate, 2014

‘The Concentration City’ by J.G. Ballard

In 1969, in his essay ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, Michel Foucault claimed that, “Perhaps one day this century will be known as Deleuzian.” Let us allow Gilles Deleuze the 20th century and strike a claim as early as 2018 for the 21st being Ballardian. Of course, Ballard owed much to earlier speculative fiction, to Kafka (the two main characters in this short story are called Franz and Gregson), Jorge Luis Borges, and even to Philip K. Dick. But Ballard’s “inner space”, his domestic dystopias and his triumvirate of doctor, desirable woman and psychopath (or an amalgamation of all three in different personae) circumscribe personal and narrative loci while synchronously shattering our given ideas on family, sex, violence and society. To add an autobiographical note, I grew up five miles from where Ballard lived – Old Charlton Road in Shepperton – so I knew Ballard’s topography, cycled its roads, watched planes land and depart, walked around the reservoirs. I think I was about eighteen when I summoned up the courage – or had quaffed enough pints of lager – to phone Mr. Ballard (his number was in the book) to ask him for an interview. He was very polite but declined, saying that he had a deadline – no doubt with a large glass of scotch and soda. So I took to walking past his house with its yellow door and overgrown front garden, hoping to catch a glimpse through the dingy net curtains of Jim or at least his reproductions of Paul Delvaux’s ‘The Violation’ and ‘The Mirror’, apt descriptions of Ballard’s prose with its doubles and perversions, its violence and psychological/pathological reflection. ‘The Concentration City’ is a very early Ballard story and on re-reading it I was struck again by its dystopian vision of an over-populated and extensively built world, a premonition of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz and Planet of Slums, but saw anew how it prefigured William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy.

First published, under the title ‘Build-Up’, in New Worlds volume 19 number 55 in January 1957. Collected in The Disaster Area, Jonathan Cape, 1967, and The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Volume 1, Fourth Estate, 2014. Online here

‘The Terminal Beach’ by JG Ballard

‘The Terminal Beach’ marks a watershed in Ballard’s writing. It’s the first story he wrote in which the events it describes are separated out and then studied from various angles in what he described as a “very abstract, almost cubist way”. This style, in which fiction becomes a kind of report on itself, proved fruitful for him throughout the late-1960s, reaching its apogee in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970). In the story, Traven, who is also the protagonist of that later work, finds himself on the deserted Pacific atoll of Eniwetok, an H-bomb test site. It is a landscape of manmade blocks – a “minimal concrete city” – designed to help measure the force of the explosion, an airstrip, submarine pens, and dozens of B-29 bombers lying across one another “like dead reptile birds”.

Traven’s wife and son are dead, and he has come to Eniwetok to conduct some kind of irrational hunt for them. ‘“This island is a state of mind’”, he is told at one point, which gets to the heart of things: “if primitive man felt the need to assimilate events in the external world to events in his own psyche”, Traven thinks, “20th century man had reversed this process; by this Cartesian yardstick, the island at least existed, in a sense true of few other places”. So Eniwetok is an extension or projection of Traven, and in this way for me it becomes paired with the Upper Peninsula in Michigan, the setting of Ernest Hemingway’s story about a fishing trip, ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ (1925), in which Nick Adams’s physical journey through the landscape also becomes a psychic one, the enactment of his struggle to come to terms with his experiences in the First World War.

This idea of the space of the story being the physical expression of a mental state is integral to a significant number of short stories, or perhaps it’s more true to say that I read a significant number of short stories in this way. Grace Paley said that every story consists of “two events or two characters…bumping against each other”, and in his ‘Theses on the Short Story’, Ricardo Piglia writes, “a short story always tells two stories… the point where they intersect are the foundations of the story’s construction”. And what is the subconscious if not a constant second story, set to a lesser or greater extent askew from consensus reality? I like Ballard’s stories for the directness with which they use this doubleness as their material. One almost always feels, reading him, that the setting and the events are projections of a protagonist’s inner life – which is perhaps why those protagonists are themselves relatively blank: all their inside is thrown outside.

Traven begins spending more and more time within the network of concrete blocks scattered across the island. The more lost he gets, the calmer he feels. “Somewhere in the centre of the maze”, Ballard writes, “he sat with his back against one of the concrete flanks, his eyes raised to the sun. Around him the lines of cubes formed the horizon of his world. At times they would appear to advance towards him, looming over him like cliffs, the intervals between them narrowing so that they were little more than an arm’s length apart, a labyrinth of corridors running between them”. That “advance towards him” links ‘The Terminal Beach’ with Kipling’s ‘The Gardener’ (also 1925, like the Hemingway), in which Helen Turrell travels to Hagenzeele to visit the grave of her nephew. Climbing the steps to the cemetery, she meets “the entire crowded level of the thing in one held breath. She did not know that Hagenzeele Third counted twenty-one thousand dead already. All she saw was a merciless sea of black crosses, bearing little strips of stamped tin at all angles across their faces. She could distinguish no order or arrangement in their mass; nothing but a waist-high wilderness as of weeds stricken dead, rushing at her”.

The moment is one of horror. Helen, like Traven, is searching for a dead loved one. She, like him, is perhaps mad with grief: she has a vision of Jesus, while Traven sees his wife and child across a lake, “beckoning to him” (a step too far, probably, to think here of the first sighting of Miss Jessel beside the lake in The Turn of the Screw, but you can’t deny the mind its associations, least of all when reading Ballard). Like Nick Adams, who puts off fishing the swamp, the locations in which these characters are situated reflect and express their internal condition. Traven’s bombed and deserted island, on which tall palms reach “into the dim air like the symbols of a cryptic alphabet”, is a landscape encoded with trauma and grief.

From The Terminal Beach, Gollancz 1964