GODDARD:
How do you view your books since The Atrocity Exhibition in the greater science
fiction context, in which you maintain they still have a
niche?
BALLARD:
You're entirely right, and I've said so myself, they do still have a niche. I
was tremendously exhilarated when I started reading American science fiction -
the excitement, the enormous power of imagination, etc. But I felt they weren't
really making the most of their own landscapes and subject-matter. Right from
the start what I wanted to do was write a science fiction book that got away
from spaceships, the far future, and all this stuff which I felt was basically
rather juvenile, to writing a kind of adult science fiction based upon the
present. Why couldn't one harness this freedom and vitality? SF is a form,
above all else, that puts a tremendous premium upon the imagination, and that's
something that seems to have left the English novel in the last 150 years.
Imagination is enormously important, and I felt that if one could only harness
this capacity to think imaginatively in an adult SF, one would have achieved
something. Right from the beginning ] tried with varying success 10 write a
science fiction about the present day, which is more difficult to do than one
realizes. because the natural tendency when writing in a basically allegorical
mode is to set something at a distance because it makes the separateness of the
allegory that much more obvious. I wanted to write about the present day, and I
think Crash, Concrete Island and the book I've just finished, which are a kind
of trilogy, represent the conclusion of the particular logic I've been trying
to unfold ever since I began writing. Are they SF? I don't know - maybe the
science fiction of the present day will be some-think like Crash. They come
into the category of imaginative fiction, don't they? With a strong moralistic,
cautionary and exploratory note. But I don't know whether they're SF or not.
PRINGLE: What do you mean by
'moralistic'?
BALLARD: Trying to say something about the quality of one's moral direction in
the ordinary sense of the term.
PRINGLE:
There's one thing that people who dislike your work often talk about, and
that's a lack of moral standards, a lack of some sort of touchstone, where you
stand....
BALLARD: I would have thought there was too much moralizing in my stuff.
PRINGLE: .... this disturbed a lot of people who
reviewed Crash.
BALLARD: They were supposed to be disturbed. When I set out to write
Crash, I wanted to write a book in which there was nowhere to hide. I wanted
the reader, once I'd got him inside the book, never to lose sight of the
subject-matter. As long as he continued reading he was face to face with the
subject-matter. It would have been very easy to write a conventional book about
car-crashes in which it was quite clear that the author was on the side of
sanity, justice and against injuring small children, deaths on the road, bad
driving etc. What could be easier? I chose to completely accept the demands of
the subject-matter, which was to provoke the reader by saying that these
car-crashes are good for you, you thoroughly enjoy them, they make your sex
life richer, they represent part of the marriage between sex, the human
organism, and technology. I say all these things in order to provoke the reader
and also to test him. There may be truth in some of these sentiments,
disagreeable though they are to consider. Nobody likes that they'll think 'God,
the man's mad', but any other way of writing that book would have been a
cop-out I think.
GODDARD: Was Crash in any
way an experiment in self-exorcism? I believe you did experience a serious
car-crash once.
BALLARD: Yes, but that was after I'd finished the book. One's
attitudes and feelings to a whole range of human activities are ambiguous
aren't they? This is the whole problem - what one's real motives are. There are
elements of self-exorcism, I suppose. I'm an introverted person, my real life
is going on inside my head. Obviously I can see that in writing Concrete Island
and describing a man who resembles me to some extent, I am playing on my
awareness of my own obtuseness. ] probably wouldn't mind being marooned on a
desert island, or put in solitary confinement as much as a lot of other people.
There's an element of that, but the books are not, in any way, biographical
pieces.
GODDARD: Why did you call the protagonist of
Crash, 'Ballard'?
BALLARD: Well, that was part of the whole business of being
absolutely as honest as I could. I wanted a first-person narrator to stand
between Vaughan and the reader - the honest thing to do was to give him my own
name. Although the superficial landscapes of the book's 'Ballard' and my life
are different, there are many correspondences. Also, I wanted to anchor the
book more in reality; I had a named film-star, who never speaks, of course. The
constant striving of the writer over the last few years has been to lower the
threshold of fiction in what he writes, to reduce the amount of fiction. One's
seen this in the theatre over the last fifteen years, and in the visual arts it
started a long, long time ago. The move is to reduce the fictional elements in
whatever one is doing and get it to overlap reality as much as possible, rather
than keep it separate from reality and ordinary experience.
GODDARD: How do you react to criticism of
your books? I'm thinking particularly of inane criticisms. Going back to Martin
Amis and his review of Crash - he said something like: 'he uses the word penis
147 times'.
BALLARD:
I didn't read that. I didn't read any of the reviews of Crash in this country.
There didn't seem any point after the reviews of The Atrocity Exhibition -
nobody read the book. Having been a reviewer myself, I can always tell when
somebody has stopped reading the book he's reviewing. As for criticism in
general, well, science-fiction writers have always been handicapped by a lack
of intelligent critical response. That's why it's so encouraging to find
intelligent magazines like Cypher around now, and intelligent critics like
David Pringle here - they didn't exist ten years ago. On the other hand, in
America particularly, the critical response to SF has got totally out of hand.
Now and then someone shows me a copy of The New York Review of Books, and I
recently saw an ad for some of the most extraordinary stuff, either a series of
lectures someone was giving, or a series of publications - sort of Levi-Strauss
and Heinlein's such and such - all of them sounding like self-parodies, the
application of serious literary criticism to popular SF authors.
GODDARD: In Billion Year Spree, Brian
Aldiss said of your early work that you had never resolved the problem of
writing a narrative in which the central character pursues no purposeful course
of action. That seemed rather harsh.
BALLARD: It ties in with what I was
saying earlier. I think Brian is at heart an SF fan, and he approaches my stuff
- about which he is very generous and always has been - like an SF fan. He
judges what he sees. To him, these books have a sort of vacuum at their centre
- the character's behaviour superficially, seems to be either passive or
meaningless in the context of the events. Why don't they Just run for the hills
? Why don't they head north ? There won't be a problem - there won't be a novel
either, of course. Therefore I think he fails to realise that, in a novel like
The Drowned World - and this applies to all my fiction - the hero is the only
one who is pursuing a meaningful course of action. In The Drowned World, the
hero, Kerans, is the only one to do anything meaningful. His decision to stay,
to come to terms with the changes taking place within himself, to understand
the logic of his relationship with the shifting biological kingdom, and his
decision finally to go south and greet the sun, is a totally meaningful course
of action. The behaviour of the other people, which superficially appears to be
meaningful -getting the hell out, or draining the lagoons - is totally
meaningless. The book is about the discovery by the hero of his true compass
bearings, both mentally and literally. It's the same in the others: in The
Crystal World the hero decides to go back and immolate himself in a timeless
world. In The Terminal Beach why does the man stagger ashore on an abandoned
island, what is he doing there ? I can well understand that to the SF fan his
behaviour is meaningless or lacks purpose - this, I think, means that Brian may
have read too much SF.
GODDARD: He goes on to
say, in the same book, that the stories of your Terminal Beach period will
probably be best remembered.
BALLARD: Which stories does he
mean?
GODDARD: Well, he says
your Terminal Beach period - that came about '62 or '63, so I suppose he means
the stories you were writing around the late '50s and early
'60s.
BALLARD: What he means, I think, is that
the traditionally constructed stories will last the longest. A lot of American
and British SF is extremely well-written, well constructed, really very
old-fashioned in construction. They're all based on the author's early reading
of Maupassant or Somerset Maugham. All SF is really constructed in the
classical mould - stories like that do tend to survive, not because they're
particularly important or anything like that, but because they're well
told.
PRINGLE: Can you tell
us about your physical methods of writing, and whether they've changed over the
years?
BALLARD: They haven't changed. I don't
find that I work late in the evening now unless I really have to. My eyes are
tired. But basically I haven't changed my approach. I set myself a target,
about a thousand words a day - unless I just stare out of the window, which I
do a lot of anyway. I generally work from a synopsis, about a page when I'm
writing a short story, longer for a novel. Unless for me the thing works as a
story, unless it works on the anecdotal level, unless I feel it holds the
attention of the reader, I don't bother with it. It's got to work on that
level, as a pure piece of storytelling. If it does I begin writing. I spend a
tremendous amount of time, I won't say doing research, but just soaking myself
in the mental landscapes, particularly of a novel. Most of the time I'm
thinking about what I'm writing, or hope to write. Particularly with Crash and
The Atrocity Exhibition. I was carrying these for something like six or seven
years. I was totally immersed mentally in this very overcharged world. It was
an exciting time, but very tiring.
PRINGLE: Did you actually visit motorways and inspect the
landscape?
BALLARD: Oh yes, I did a lot of
research of that kind. I photographed this, that and the other.
PRINGLE: Was the inspiration for Concrete
Island an actual place?
BALLARD: No. I've always
been interested, since it was built, by the Westway motorway near Shepherd's
Bush, where I set the novel. It always struck me, driving around these complex
interchanges, what would happen if someone stood by the wayside and tried to
flag you down? Of course, nobody would stop. You can't stop - you'd just have a
multiple pileup You'd be dead if you tried to stop. France is a much more
technologically oriented country than England, with the big high-speed
boulevards that circle Paris. You can drive on the motorway from the Channel -
it's not the outskirts of Paris by any means, you can see the Eiffel Tower half
a mile away - on their equivalent of our circular road. You can circle Paris if
you want to, and you can pick up the motorway going south without stopping at a
single traffic light. It's an enormous complex of interchanges and multilevel
high-speed avenues, and the French seem to drive much more aggressively than
people do over here. It often struck me there, every summer if you were
marooned up on one of those balustrade ramparts - it's not just a
two-dimensional island, they've got three-dimensional islands up in the
air-you'd never get off. The traffic seems to be flowing 24 hours a day. The
French are ruthless, they don't stop for anybody. Jesus Christ himself could be
crucified by the wayside and nobody would stop. It was an obvious sort of idea
to have. What's so interesting about the technological landscape is the way it
plays into people's hands, people's possibly worst motives. It's difficult to
maroon yourself on the A1, but much easier to maroon yourself on
Westway.
GODDARD: Would you
care to tell us something about what your future plans are?
BALLARD: Well, I finished a novel about three weeks ago, and since
then I've written a couple of short stories and am writing a third now, and
just catching my breath a bit.
PRINGLE: What's the new novel called?
BALLARD: I call it The High Life provisionally. I may change it, I
may stick to it. I don't know.
PRINGLE: And you've written some short stories?
BALLARD: A couple have been published.
PRINGLE: I've seen one in Ambit called
'My Dream of Flying to Wake Island'.
BALLARD: I
only wrote that about a month ago! That was quite extraordinary. Martin Bax,
the editor, wanted me to write a short story for his sixtieth number. I wrote
that in about one day, from a standing start. I think I wrote it on the
Saturday, and 1 got the copy through the post on -something like Wednesday. An
incredible turnaround, and very exciting when that happens. One of the nice
things about writing for magazines is that there is always such a tremendously
quick feedback. I wrote another -'The Air Disaster' - for a girl I know called
Emma Tennant who's just published a new magazine called Bananas.
GODDARD: You've no plans for another
trilogy of novels on the lines of the last three?
BALLARD: I just tend to write whatever comes mentally to hand, and
what I find interesting at a particular time. These decisions as to what one's
going to write tend to be made somewhere at the back of one's mind, so one
can't consciously say: 'that's what I'm going to write'. It doesn't work out
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