ORR: You were talking about the role of the science fiction writer – how does that affect your style? You write in a style that is very difficult, I would say. For instance, the Kennedy piece [‘Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy’] from The Atrocity Exhibition.
BALLARD: Some of my experimental speculative writing is at first glance difficult, but in fact it’s merely unfamiliar. One could find analogies all over the place – in the visual arts, say, when a new school of painting appeared on the scene. When the cubists first arrived, everyone was appalled. What were they doing? Why didn’t they paint like the Impressionists? (Who, in their turn, in the late 1870s, horrified everybody who looked at their paintings.)
Look at every new school of painting in the same way as aboriginal peoples look at photographs and are unable to identify what’s in them because the visual conventions are so strong. Our whole perception of the visual world around us is based on a whole system of conventions that help us distinguish a door or a window, or a flat tyre, or what have you. Once you begin to provide a new set of conventions, a new set of objects, everybody is thrown into confusion.
ORR: Are you writing strictly in that style now, or in the style of The Crystal World?
BALLARD: My last two books have been written in a completely straightforward style. When I was writing about the Kennedys I was writing about the world of the 1960s, a world of multiplying confusions of every conceivable kind, and I used an episodic and, if you like, non-linear technique appropriate to the sort of television landscapes that we were living in then. Now, in Crash, my book about the motor car – and my next book, Concrete Island, about a man who’s marooned on a traffic island in a rather large city – I’m using what I think is the appropriate technique, straightforward narration, simply because the ideas themselves, particularly in Crash, are so unexpected, and incomprehensible to some people – challenging, if you like. The best way of expressing them is in a straightforward way.
ORR: You talked about whether or not there was a positive aspect to the automobile crash. Is man by nature a killer? Does he in fact want to improve his future?
BALLARD: That’s a very good question. I myself think that man, if you like, is a naturally perverse animal, that the elements of psychopathology or perversity or moral deviancy are a very large part of his character. I don’t think that can be changed. I think attempts in the past to provide a very rigid moral framework succeeded to some extent. I think they’re going to break down now, simply because the opportunities for limitless freedom are so great.
One is moving into a realm where one will be able to practise all kinds of perversions, perform all sorts of psychopathological acts without any feeling of corruption, or without any kind of sense of moral failure. One will be genuinely free to perform, to behave in ways that now seem perverse, just as we ourselves now in the mid-seventies have a degree of freedom, feel entitled to behave in ways that, say, our parents would be deeply shocked by.
I think we’re moving into a realm where moral yardsticks won’t apply anyway. These words, ‘psychopathology’, ‘moral perversity’ and the like, are so heavily loaded in their own disfavour, as it were, that it’s very difficult to use them. There simply isn’t any other vocabulary. But I think one’s got to face an event like the car crash – it does obviously satisfy people in ways they aren’t prepared to recognise. There might be something about violence that provides a necessary salt in our psychic diet. And this is the sort of thing people find very difficult to accept.
ORR: Well, whether you’re right or wrong it certainly means that you must ask the question if you are prescribing for the future. Does collective humanity want to improve its lot? In reading your novel The Drought, it seems to me that the character Ransom expresses that kind of ambiguity.
BALLARD: Right. I think we are on the threshold of a total moral ambiguity where it will be impossible to make a value judgement – yes or no, bad or good – in large areas of behaviour, because those areas aren’t going to be amenable to the conventional wisdom and morality of the past. Most of our behaviour now takes place in the realm of our own completely private worlds, where our imaginations can have full play, where there are no yardsticks to apply – one can behave in any way one wishes. I think this is the big change that is coming, made largely possible by our increased wealth. I mean, we all spend less and less of our lives actually supplying the basic necessities of food and shelter – most of our spending is discretionary, more and more in the field of what one could call entertainment, or of intelligent pleasure. This is indeed a realm where anything is possible.
ORR: In classic political theory, you could attribute it to the rise of the middle class.
BALLARD: Maybe. I think you are probably right. In Europe we have seen the decline of the so-called ‘working class’. In many countries of western Europe – Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavian countries – one has the impression that there is no working class, or there’s a very small manual or labouring class. Most people are middle-class. I think the same is sort of true of North America. But I think we’re moving into a realm where the middle class will be the next to go. To use a class terminology, everybody will be upper-class, everybody will be rich. We’re moving into a realm where it will be like, say, California.
It sort of ties in with the doomsday idea. People have had this obsession at various periods that the world was coming to an end, and in the last ten years the backlash against technology and all the anxieties about pollution and the energy crisis and so on tend to feed this doomsday obsession. I find highly unlikely the notion that Western civilisation as we know it is going to be over in ten years time, as various people – what I call ‘airport thinkers’ – pronounce it. No, man is much too aggressive and self-seeking and determined a character to go down that easily. I mean, if you ask me if there’s going to be a doomsday at all I will say ‘no’. I don’t think there’s going to be a doomsday.
If we could see the future fifty years from now, I think we’d all be absolutely shocked. We might regard it as absolute Babylon, in the same way that, let’s say, an Anglican clergyman of fifty years ago would regard life in England as being very close to that of Babylon – fifteen-year-old girls in miniskirts having their second abortions, that sort of thing. The whole freedom of the so-called permissive society would appal such a man, would have appalled my grandparents. Would have appalled my parents when they were my age.
I think we’d be shocked by the future, but I don’t think people living in the future – and this is the real criterion you must apply – in the time of this emotional doomsday would regard it as such. I think they’ll probably regard that doomsday in the same way the inhabitants of Las Vegas regard their city. And I think the future is going to be like Las Vegas, one enormous jukebox playing some very strange tunes. But it won’t be doomsday to the people living there then.
ORR: I wonder about some of your characters. The ‘Woman in White’ keeps reappearing, of course, and in some of the stories I have read she always seems to be more a part of the landscape than her own self. Is that a sort of ‘future’ person?
BALLARD: I think so. If you ask me for a visual picture of the future, I think it’ll be increasingly lunar. The psychological landscape is going to be somewhat like the physical landscape of the moon. It’s going to be a matter of sharp edges, of a very sharp and