Extreme Metaphors. Simon Sellars

posters, etc. These can be sensed in the way people decorate their homes, the way they dress, in the whole apparatus of their relation to others. To speak of this new world I was led, in The Atrocity Exhibition, to fragment contemporary reality so that I could reassemble its elements paragraph by paragraph and show its springs. This method allowed me to examine simultaneously the different strata that make up our own experience of the actual world: the level of public events such as war, the conquest of space or the story of Kennedy; the level of everyday life, of people who get into the car every morning, work at the office, convalesce in a hospital etc.; and the level of our fantasies. In The Atrocity Exhibition, then, I tried to blend these three levels just as we constantly do in life, every day. The conventions of the ordinary ‘realistic’ novel don’t allow this approach. Linear narrative is like a railway running from one point to another from which one cannot deviate; it prevents simultaneous perceptions. Now, my aim is to show that these three levels, public, private and fantastic, cut backwards and forwards across one another: that points of intersection exist between them. In spite of the linear aspect of its narrative, Crash! relies equally on this technique, which you could compare to a kind of radar.

      LOUIT: So the construction of your latest books exactly reflects our way of seeing the world every day.

      BALLARD: Yes. It’s a little as if I were leading the reader to a deserted laboratory, and that I put a collection of specimens and all the necessary equipment at his disposal. It’s his job then to relate these elements together and create reactions from them. I believe that contemporary fiction has to direct itself more and more in this direction. The novelist must stop looking at things retrospectively, returning to past events which he lays out meticulously as if he were preparing a parcel which he will afterwards deliver to the reader, telling him: ‘It was like that’. The essence of the traditional novel is in the formula ‘that’s what happened’. I believe that today it’s necessary to write in a more speculative way, to write a kind of ‘investigation novel’ which corresponds to the formula ‘this is what’s happening’ or ‘this is going to happen’. In an enterprise of this kind, the author doesn’t know in advance what he’s going to produce. He loses his omniscience.

      LOUIT: For the classical novel, which is an object enclosed and complete within the spirit of its author, you substitute an open narrative in which the act of reading itself becomes part of the creative process, or rather the process of investigation.

      BALLARD: That’s it. In Crash! I’m content to give the reader a spectrum of possibilities, but it’s up to him to choose between them. In the classical novel, we can discover the moral, political and philosophical position of the author in every event described. In Crash! my position hasn’t been clarified, since I’m content to supply a cluster of probabilities. It’s the reader’s reactions that assure the functioning of the book: in the course of the story, everyone has to reach a limiting position beyond which he is not able to accept what is proposed to him. I don’t say that I expect the world to end in a sort of automotive apocalypse fed on sex and violence; I offer this vision as one extreme hypothesis because it seems to me inscribed in the present.

      LOUIT: In Crash! you systematically establish correspondences between parts of the body, parts of the automobile, elements of the landscape, real people and the mythical images of the media.

      BALLARD: I wouldn’t want to give the impression of being excessively schematic, but I’m convinced that when an event takes place on one of the three levels of reality we spoke about earlier, it necessarily affects the other two in a more or less perceptible way. So, when I evoke the suicide of Marilyn Monroe in The Atrocity Exhibition, it’s because it doesn’t appear to me as simply the death of a woman, but as a kind of space-time disaster, a catastrophe which created a rupture in our perception of time and space, as if we saw the abrupt subsidence of an immovable object before our very eyes. In effect, Marilyn Monroe, the Kennedys, the astronauts, are part of our mental landscape with as much right as the streets and houses that we frequent.

      LOUIT: I feel bound to repeat the celebrated epigram of Dali, made from the same perspective: ‘The soul is a condition of landscape’.

      BALLARD: That seems a very important point to me. I’m very interested in a certain period of surrealism, particularly among the painters, for it seems to me that I recover from them a demeanour of the spirit close to my own. Dali splits up the elements of reality and assembles them to constitute a kind of Freudian landscape. We entertain certitudes about the subject of reality which permit us to live: I’m sure that there is an elevator at the end of this corridor which will bring me to a level whose solidity is not in doubt. The work of Dali and other surrealist painters is to undermine these certitudes. There again, it’s necessary to propose an extreme hypothesis.

      LOUIT: This surrealist influence applies especially to your work before The Atrocity Exhibition.

      BALLARD: But surrealism itself is behind us today; it is a finished period. For Dali to be able to paint soft watches, it was necessary that real watches be hard. Now today, if you ask someone the time in the street you might see the effigy of Mickey Mouse or Spiro Agnew on the dial. It is a typical and entirely commonplace invasion of reality by fiction. The roles have been reversed, and from now on literature must no so much invent an imaginary world as explore the fictions that surround us. I realise that I am hesitating more and more to invent things when I write. In Crash! I reduced the number of characters and situations to the minimum, because from now on it seems to me that the function of the writer is no longer the addition of fiction in the world, but rather to seek its abstraction, to direct an enquiry aimed at recovering elements of reality from this debauch of fiction.

      LOUIT: The first part of your work seems directly inspired by painting, while your more recent books find their sources in photography, the cinema and television. This corresponds also to a change of construction material: you are moving from the beach sands of Vermilion Sands to the motorway concrete of Crash!

      BALLARD: The reason for this change is that until The Atrocity Exhibition I was describing imaginary places. Afterwards, I turned to the landscape of technology and the communications industry. And it’s photography and the cinema above all which provide us with reflections of this landscape. Television seems to me to play a particularly important role, in the continuous flood of images with which it inundates our brain: it perceives things on our behalf, and it’s like a third eye grafted on to us.

      LOUIT: You even integrate certain specifically cinematic techniques, such as slow motion, into your writing.

      BALLARD: Slow motion introduces a different sense of time, a fresh perception of things – often associated today with acts of violence, or more or less physical excitements. It happens in the violent episodes in the films of someone like Sam Peckinpah, and in the sports programmes on television, where important incidents of a contest are shown a second time in slow motion only an instant after they have taken place. A moment of terrifying violence like the collision of two cars hurtling together at full speed can in this way be metamorphosed into a kind of slow and gracious ballet. What interests me in this technique is that while it suppresses the classical emphasis on character, it brings about a stylisation of events which confers on them a formidable weight.

       1975: Philippe R. Hupp. Interview with J.G. Ballard

      Originally published in French as ‘Entretien avec J.G. Ballard’, Magazine Littéraire 96, January 1975. Translated by Dan O’Hara

      Ballard’s novels have always been translated into French with alacrity. Concrete Island was already in translation in time for review in the January 1975 edition of Magazine Littéraire, and Antoine Griset’s review was both penetrating and positive. Griset immediately connected the predicament of Ballard’s protagonist, stranded on an urban desert island between motorway intersections,