Extreme Metaphors. Simon Sellars

      KRICHBAUM/ZONDERGELD: Is there for you a special relationship to America?

      BALLARD: Oh yes, I’ve always been greatly interested in America. There, I find the landscapes of my books, about which we already spoke earlier. But on the other hand I’m sure that in some twenty or thirty years a new renaissance will take place in Europe. Now that borders are gradually being abolished and we’re getting away from the past, there will be quite a bit of change. The new developments, of this I’m sure, will come from Europe and not from America.

       1978: Jon Savage. J.G. Ballard

      Originally published in Search & Destroy 10, 1978

      In 1978 journalist Jon Savage interviewed Ballard at Shepperton for Search & Destroy, a fanzine about the American punk scene. Search & Destroy was published by the enigmatic V. Vale, who would go on to achieve acclaim as the head of RE/Search Publications, publisher of subversive books about underground culture, including four volumes on Ballard. Savage brought a new sensibility to Ballard interviews. He was young, he didn’t have a literary or science fiction background (although he was well read in the genre) and he wrote almost exclusively about music. However, he connected the dots between punk’s self-conscious urban anomie – manifest in songs about bleak overpasses and run-down high-rise blocks – and similar imagery in Crash and High-Rise. In turn, Ballard betrays his own interest in the terms that propelled the punk scene to notoriety. Consequently, he spends more time discussing social conditions and the new consumerism than he does his actual books, although there is a fascinating glimpse into an incident he witnessed on holiday that would spark the creation of High-Rise.

      Ballard is as perceptive as ever. He predicts the end of the novel – ‘the form of the extended narrative’ – in an age of short attention spans, the almost immediate recoupment of rebellion by consumerism, and perhaps most strikingly a near future in which every home would have a computer terminal, allowing us to record and broadcast intimate details of our lives, dismantling the power and authority of old media. There is also a perhaps surprising personal revelation, when he discloses that the reason he hadn’t been to America for twenty-five years was the increasing violence he had heard was occurring there.

      Savage would go on to write England’s Dreaming (1991), the definitive analysis of the English punk scene, in which the tower blocks of High-Rise and the motorways of Crash would become touchstones in both his investigation and the recollections of the musicians he interviewed. [SS]

      SAVAGE: I’ve just been reading High-Rise. What interested me was the idea of a modern sort of barbarism in the midst of technology, or the fact that technology is creating a situation for that. It seemed very much what’s happening now, in microcosm, because coming on the way here on the M3 [motorway], I noticed it was all very beautiful, all these beautiful new gleaming buildings, despoiled by graffiti – very strange.

      BALLARD: Yes, apparently the events I described in that novel have taken place. There’s a cluster of blocks near Manchester which are scheduled for demolition because they’re just not viable social structures. But I was trying to point out that people discover there’s some dubious pleasures of life tapped by advanced technology. They canalise and tame and make tolerable perverse impulses that in previous societies would’ve been nipped in the bud. Modern technology makes possible the expression of guilt-free psychopathology – I really feel we’re moving towards that. In Crash, I tried to show the first signs of a sort of institutionalised, morally free psychopathology emerging, in which people will be able to, almost encouraged by the nature of the societies in which they live, give vent to all sorts of perverse impulses which won’t be socially damaging!

      SAVAGE: An interesting thing I noticed in the book: it was much more of an American high-rise situation. In England the high-rises are usually council. I presumed that was a sort of vehicle, a way of doing it.

      BALLARD: Funny enough, the idea of High-Rise came to me way back fifteen years ago. My parents had a flat in Red Lion Square, Victoria. There’s a little complex of office blocks, and there’s one block of flats – mostly rich business people live there, with Rolls-Royces and immodestly appointed flats, huge rents. The women (they were the ones at home) spent all their time bickering with one another, complaining about small things constantly: ‘Who’s going to pay for the maintenance of the potted plant display on the seventeenth-floor landing?’ and ‘So-and-so’s curtains do not match’. The most incredible triviality.

      Then, about five years ago, I was in Spain. I rented a flat for a month close to the Costa Brava; really it’s a French resort, near Dali’s place. Most of the people there were French middle-class professional people – they all had their bloody boats. And they spent an enormous amount of their time bickering about things. I remember one of the residents was standing with his back to the sea, looking up at this big block, about twelve storeys high, with a camera. I thought, ‘What is this – this man’s a peeping tom!’, because my girlfriend was walking around in the nude. But there was an enormous amount of antagonism between the people in the lower floors and the people in the top. Because there was this constant onshore wind flow, cigarette ends in particular, flung down into the flats and also water – some child would kick over a bucket of water – the whole damn lot would come down over everyone else’s balconies.

      A notice went up saying, ‘Residents are asked not to throw cigarette ends over their balconies’. This chap said in his notice, ‘I am taking photographs of any offenders and these photographs will be pinned on this noticeboard’. I remember thinking, ‘This is unbelievable, I think I’ll keep this – who would believe it?’ A holiday in this expensive block, and here’s this guy so upset with the misbehaviour of those people on the twelfth floor that he stands with his back to the sea with his camera, waiting to catch somebody in the act. Some guy who’s probably a dentist, so obsessed with the sort of hostilities that are easily provoked.

      SAVAGE: You were talking earlier about this sort of new class.

      BALLARD: A new professional class, right. If you take a thirty-five-year-old working-class dentist from Lyons – he has more in common with another thirty-five-year-old dentist of the whatever class than he has with someone who grew up in the same street. Members of a professional caste, or whatever you like to call them – social group – in an elaborately signalled landscape where they understand all the codes that govern, and once they’ve mastered the system of codes, they become sort of a separate social group. The old caste criteria don’t apply.