Chapter Seven: Love and Napalm, J.G. Ballard

J.G. Ballard remains one of the most controversial writers in speculative fiction, possibly in general fiction as well. Ballard invented his own style, viewpoint, and even his own brand of romanticism. While other writers' characters flee from disaster, Ballard's watch and even conspire with the apocalypse. The inner man, not the outer reality, remains Ballard’s constant concern, even obsession. His vivid images remain particularly apt for the twentieth century. While many critics disagree with Ballard's views, all respect the skill with which he presents them.

Ballard's early childhood accounts for much of the darkness of his works. He grew up in Shanghai, and during World War II experienced its consequest and brutal rule by the Japanese. This vision appears in the recent movie Empire of the Sun scripted by Ballard. Ballard elaborates on the importance of this early experience:

Ballard later served in the Canadian Air Force in the 1950s before making his first regular sales to Ted Carnell's New Worlds and Science Fantasy magazines. Ballard's later stories sold mostly to Moorcock's New Worlds, Science Fantasy, and Amazing though some of his seventies fiction appeared in mainstream magazines as well. He currently reviews for the New Statesman and lives outside London. Destroyed cities and landscapes, as well as total world inversions, haunt Ballard's work.

Ballard does not even attempt to portray real worlds; rather he presents projections from the unconscious, making him the prominent surrealistic in speculative fiction and putting his work more in a category with Salvador Dali than Robert A. Heinlein. The future and the strangeness he presents as essentially undying, "truer" projections of the present. Whereas one might implicitly find this quality in the work of a Philip K. Dick or self-consciously in the myth recreations of a Zelazny, Ballard simply dispenses with any pretense at portraying any reality other than this "truer" inner space. Again, he credits his Shanghai experience as the inspiration for his surrealism:

In Ballard's work, conventional story lines mean little. The plot typically remains simple. The character, and the audience as observers, learns a new way of viewing the world. The main character either survives psychologically, or he does not. However being doomed is not necessarily unfortunate in Ballad's inverted fictional world. Characters seeks psychological, not material, fulfillment, providing Ballard his primary defense against critical charges of pessimism:

"It's a fiction of psychological fulfillmentAll my fiction describes the merging of the self in the ultimate metaphor, the ultimate image, and that's psychologically fulfilling. It seems to be the only recipe for humiliation." (3)

Ballard's style evolved as he gradually attempted to explore more the fully the society that effects and impinges upon the psyche. Early, fairly conventional stories used traditional science fiction objects and plots. Gradually, however, Ballard began to develop his own language of images. "Disaster Area" came to signify zones in which psychological dangers challenge a character. "Crashes" confronts characters as readily as automobiles and offers sexual connotations. "Inner space" signifies the inner self or id. In Love and Napalm he used a new medium he called the "condensed novel" consisting of images/scenes that show the inner action and its effect on the characters.

Surprisingly, given his obsession with inner space, Ballard does not excel in characterization. His characters too often only merely observe and function as symbols, yet he uses only a fairly limited set of symbols and a limited gallery as well. His characters usually include an Anglo-American self-made man, who wishes to dominate his inner self. Other characters fall under the domination of their id; they often become total animals. Some characters seem to exist in Ballard primarily to become bizarre images.

Ballard's "protagonists," and this terms needs loose application for his works, all seem rather the same, average males, often intelligent members of society. Through experience, they learn to know and appreciate theirs ids, to accept death, to see life with a sensual eye, and to stoically oppose reactions against life. Though essentially a romantic, Ballard lacks the faith in a bountiful nature that characterizes the movement. As critic and friend Biran Aldiss points out, Ballard's novels all suffer from the fact that it's more difficult to make inner life interesting than external. (4)

Ballard's worlds, despite his eschewing the importance of science fiction world creation, remain among the strangest and memorable in speculative fiction. The typical Ballardian novel takes place in a dying place corrupted by man's presence and haunted by nature's imminent return. His worlds resemble those of Franz Kafka, Edgar Allen Poe, and the Joseph Conrad of Heart of Darkness more than any modern science fiction writer's. The closest comparison comes with Thomas M. Disch (chapter 4) in the Genocides and Philip K. Dick and Michael Moorcock at their darkest. In this world nightmare, it seems odd, but Ballard’s heroes find something to savor and absorb as if Kurtz and the narrator in Heart of Darkness embraced and danced together in a waltz.

In an era which saw the importance of the short story dwindle, Ballard, to a surprising degree, single-handedly kept it going as a creative force. Ballard's short stories explore inner space. Lack of action matters less in a short story; at the same time, however, the format allows a lot less room for character evolution. Basically, Ballard's stories make an effect, draw an image, and stop. Most of Ballard's works remain out of print, but The Short of Fiction of J.G. Ballard (1977) and Chronopolis (1971) offer representative selections. Low-Flying Aircraft (1976) offers his latest all-new collection.

Vermilion Sands (1971) shows another side to Ballard's short story writing. It consists of nostalgic, sentimental stories occurring in a decadent, futuristic resort in the desert, Vermilion Sands. Ballard returned to these stories throughout his career as though on a kind of personal vacation as well as observing his characters in one. The mood and setting come closer to Bradbury than Ballard, and the stories contain more humor than satire. Less important to Ballard's career perhaps, they do form an effective counterweight to the devastating, grotesque horror of Love and Napalm and the disasters in the novels below.

For my version of a Ballardian short "disaster" refer to "Surf's Up" in The Plastic Tomorrow.

Ballard's first four novel share a similar premise and structure. In each, the author "destroys" his world in a different way. Together they comprise the four elements of the ancient world. Surprisingly, no one has yet issued them as a single volume. Of the four, The Crystal World, remains in print in the United States, demonstrating Ballard's relative lack of popularity in the United States.

The Wind from Nowhere (1962) went into print first and offers the weakest vision of the four. For no good scientific reason, the winds of the world suddenly, slowly, and dramatically increase. Civilization breaks down and a crew of conventional characters, perhaps drawn from Wyndham and John Christopher, find themselves unable to cope with the situation. Ballard, however, manipulates fortune so that Maitland, his protagonist, views the physical destruction that fills the novel. One female character briefly offers defiance to the survival instinct, but nature literally sweeps her away. Nature speeds the passage of the destructive influence of time. Hardoon, a kind of antagonist or at least someone not simply fleeing, counters the wind by building his own personal pyramid. Control of nature symbolizes modern man as Hardoon's speech shows.

He exhibits all of the traits as well of the traditional science fiction hero with his ambition, drive, and command of resources. In a more mainstream novel than Ballard's he would almost certainly prevail. Hardoon, however, builds his pyramid albeit on symbolically loose soil. Like Ahab, he goes down fighting, and like the Pharoahs, the winds of change sweep away his pyramid.

With Hardoon destroyed, the winds begin to subside.: Man learns his own relative lack of worth and weakness. Not Ballard's best treatment of this concept, the novel lacks interesting characters and situations other than Hardoon, the prototypical Western man, who only appears as a main focus and foil near the end. Already, however, Ballard's work displays something of his later concern with social change and his bitter, macabre sense of humor. One character, for examples, asserts, "so much life in the States-and over here for that matter--could use a strong breath of fresh air." (6) The Wind from Nowhere makes some interesting departures from the disaster tradition it continues but does not number among Ballard's best novels.

The Drowned World (1962) makes for more interesting reading. As the title suggests, the water gradually overcomes the earth as increased heat melts the icecaps. In another novel, this might make for an environmentally cautionary novel; in Ballard’s the actual cause of the disaster stays in the background. Kerans, the reluctant Ballardian protagonist, however, studies the paintings of the surrealists (always a good strategy in a surrealistic Ballard novel) and comes to accept the approaching reality. Strangman, like Hardoon, tries to stave off the effects of the disaster. He temporarily repulses but does not stop Kerans in his quest for his inner self. Kerans travels south at the end of the novel into the disaster zone, the post-diluvian world which becomes a projection both of his subconscious and the womb of childhood:

Ballard recreates this drowned world with some of his best images. Kerans, however, does not come across as a totally convincing protagonist, if such a thing exists for Ballard, as he represents the exception rather than the rule among men since he seems to make his decision to embrace the catastrophe before the novel begins. Ballard, however, manages to introduce more action into this work and some haunting scenes. In his acceptance of his animal nature, Kerans rejects his rational self, a choice later Ballad's protagonists do not always need to make. The Drowned World probably comes across as the most convincing and best of the quartet with its portrait of mankind in search for something it lost.

The Burning World (1966) introduces social and environmental concerns into the Ballardian formula. Pollution creates this burning, water-starved world of the future. Man becomes the enemy of nature. Groups struggle for survival amid the deserted ruins of their social and personal lives. In a dramatic scene, a character learns his carefully restored auto lacks any meaningful function. Social units, such as that formed by the water-owner Whitman, prove useless. Quilter, the novel's natural man, kills Whitman when the latter drains Quitler's water in a futile attempt to assert ownership. The survivors group around Quilter in a new co-operative based on mutual respect rather than wealth-based power. Ransom, the hero, accepts the catastrophe as he accepts his own separation from his wife, whose love only satisfied a convention. Nature, i.e., the author, approves his choices:

The Burning World intrinsically draws the reader because the protagonist himself does change. The reader learns to accept the changes imposed by Quilter and his wife. The Burning World, however, shows Ballard's increased interest in the reactions of society to the transformed hero. Failure to understand the animal in man, Ballard implies, can tragically destroy civilizations.

The Crystal World (1966) caps and finishes the "series." Deep in the African continent, Dr. Edward Sanders discovers that the entire world will rapidly crystallize. The horrors of that process brings out the subconscious in Sanders. He discovers that precious gems reverse the process; the product of civilizations, these gems temporarily stem the inevitable decay of death. Several incomplete characters, including the rationalist Thorenson and the romantic Ventress, confront each other. They find union in love for the same woman, immortalized for all time in the crystal forest when she crystallizes. A priest merges with the catastrophe, stating that "in this forest we see the final celebration of the Eucharist in Christ's body." Everything joins together in a last marriage of space and time, i.e. like the Apocalypse depicted in revelations. Kearns, himself, gives in to the temptation of this union:

The most accomplished of the group, The Crystal world proceeds from modern reality into surreal world. The narrator, as well as those he observes, experiences the disaster and reacts to it. Further, the symbolic union of people and time seems more optimistic though not necessarily more "realistic" than its predecessors. Characters function better as both symbols and individuals, attaining a better balance between the two. The Crystal World offers a fitting transcendent conclusion to the set.

Love and Napalm: Export USA (1969) contains Ballard's inter-connected "condensed novels." It offers a startling condemnation of modern Western, and more specifically American, society. A single character, Tallis, tries to retain sanity while "experimenting" with his own mind through experiencing some of the art and ideas of the insane. A symbol of the conscious mind, Dr. Austen, another doctor, tries to explain the acts of the psychotic, Travis, to his wife. The explanations he provides for the other's conduct show the insane man's attempts to construct an art form composed of images he sees around him and their corresponding social connotations. A crash, for example, must represent a sexual act because of American's obsession with cars (which also seems to inspire Ballard as well) and relative ignorance of each other. These images continue to condemn society as much as they frighten. The commentary of Nathan provides Ballard's critique of Western society. For example, Tallis assembles a set of items, paper, etc. that constitutes a girl "kit" and Nathan explains:

As the novel progresses, Nathan's explanations of his patient become absurd excuses for an entire set of cultural values and icons. Nathan's apologies for Vietnam, for example, hold about as much logic as those of Dean Swift's "A Model Proposal:"

By the end of the novel, Dr. Nathan, having succumbed to the logical structure above, does almost all of the writing. Ballard's implies that only in this bizarre way can anyone justify Vietnam. Tallis, however, recovers enough of his own sanity to cry for help, which he does in the chapter hearing about the paragraph-long sections of condense novels

"In his dream of Zaprude frame 235/Tallis was increasingly preoccupied/By the figure of the President's wife/The planes of her face, like the/cars of the abandoned motorcade/mediated to him the complete silence/ of the plaza, the geometry of a murder/ At night these visions of helicopters and the D.M.Z. fused in Traven's mind/The lantern of her face/ hung among the corridors of sleep/ warning him, she summoned to her side/ all the legions of the bereaved./ By day the overflights of B-52s/crossed the drowned causeways of the delta,/ unique ciphers of violence and desire./ Each afternoon in the deserted cinema/ Tallis was increasingly distressed / by images of colliding motor cars./ Celebrations of his wife's death,/ the slow motion newsreels/ recapitulated all his memories of childhood,/ the realization of dreams/ which even during the safe immobility of sleep/ would develop into nightmares of anxiety./ During these assassination fantasies/ Tallis became increasingly obsessed / with the pudenda of the Presidential contender/ mediated to him by a thousand television screams./ The motion picture studies of Ronald Reagan created a scenario of the conceptual orgasm,/ a unique ontology of violence and disaster." (13)

In the novel's final section, "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race," Ballard presents a surrealistic version of th Dallas killing and asks: "Without doubt Oswald badly misfired. But one question till remains unanswered: who loaded the starting gun?" (14)

Ballard suggests that American society loaded the gun. The book literally explodes or rather implodes with images of America from automobiles to Ronald Reagan. The fragmented, insanely erratic conditions of the novel match those of its main character. Ballard's humor, Swiftian, manages to shock the reader. Love and Napalm numbers among the most experimental, powerful, and thought-provoking books of speculative fiction, and it well deserves a reprint. Even those who totally disagree with the Ballard's conclusions in the book will still want to read it if only enough to repudiate it.

More recently, Ballard wrote three novels that resemble the earlier quartet of disasters but concern urban settings: Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1973), and High Rise (1975). The upper class owner of the building and the lower class social climber clash in the latter novel. Meanwhile, civilization reverts to barbarism and cannibalism. The battles give Ballard something to show his reader, and he also makes it ironically clear that these battles really mean nothing, though the combatants may imagine they do. Both class symbols die, Ballard's hero retreats to an inner world occupied by only his wife and sister and insists "things are returning to normal." He shows that class warfare also means nothing but illusion; each must prepare for his own psychological survival.

His most recent novel, The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) he describes as "an upbeat fantasy of life-force and fulfillment, expressed in characteristically surreal images." (15) His most recent works show his ability to transfer his social and philosophical concerns to an environment closer to his reader.

Like Dick, the mainstream world apparently caught up with Ballard to some degree. His novel of youth, Empire of the Sun, made it to the big screen. To some degree, it gives something of the Ballardian vision when, in the midst of World War II, an American plane appears overhead and for a moment the audience has no idea whether the British boy will react with glee or horror.

E. Conclusion

Ballard remains one of the most intriguing and unique writers in speculative fiction. Though others copied him, no one matches his surreal power. His quest for the true, his deep explorations into the nature of society and individual, his stylistic invention, and his strange, inverted inner imagery make his works among the most important in speculative fiction today. One can only hope that American editors will reprint more of his works.