After it was published Ballard always referred to Atrocity as a ‘novel’, but as this fascinating insight into his method demonstrates, the idea of a sustained narrative binding the chapters was but a glimmer in his eye at this time, albeit a persistent one. Elsewhere, there are penetrating remarks about the ‘non-linear’ nature of 1960s life and ideas that point towards Crash’s artistic breakthrough, such as when he declares that ‘the fictional elements [of today] have overwhelmed reality’, an observation paraphrased in Crash’s introduction. [SS]
MACBETH: You have been writing science fiction short stories and novels for several years now, but your story ‘You and Me and the Continuum’ is one of a recent group which, I think, in structure are really quite different from your earlier ones. Perhaps the most striking feature to someone reading ‘You and Me and the Continuum’, for example, for the first time, is that it is constructed not in continuous narrative, but in a sequence of short paragraphs, each of which has a heading – in fact, they’re arranged in alphabetical order. But the key point, I think, is that they are broken up. Why did you move on to using this technique of construction?
BALLARD: I was dissatisfied with what I felt were linear systems of narrative. I had been using in my novels and in most of my short stories a conventional linear narrative, but I found that the action and events – of the novels in particular – were breaking down as I wrote them. The characterisation and the sequences of events were beginning to crystallise into a series of shorter and shorter images and situations. This ties in very much with what I feel about the whole role of science fiction as a speculative form of fiction. For me, science fiction is above all a prospective form of narrative fiction; it is concerned with seeing the present in terms of the immediate future rather than the past.
MACBETH: Could I break in there? Would you contrast that with what the traditional novel does in the sense it’s concerned with perhaps the history of a family or a person?
BALLARD: Exactly. The great bulk of fiction still being written is retrospective in character. It’s concerned with the origins of experience, behaviour, development of character over a great span of years. It interprets the present in terms of the past, and it uses a narrative technique, by and large the linear narrative, in which events are shown in more-or-less chronological sequence, which is suited to it. But when one turns to the present – and what I feel I’ve done in these pieces of mine is to rediscover the present for myself – I feel that one needs a non-linear technique, simply because our lives today are not conducted in linear terms. They are much more quantified; a stream of random events is taking place.
MACBETH: I’d like to ask you a question here about the characters in these stories. Of course, you’ve written as well as ‘You and Me and the Continuum’ three or four others which have already been published in New Worlds, Impulse and Encounter, and one feature of them is that certain characters seem to recur from story to story. When I call them ‘characters’, they are not always perhaps, to the reader, immediately recognisable as characters so much as named areas of consciousness.
BALLARD: Yes, I don’t see them as ‘characters’ in the conventional sense of the term; they are aspects of certain character situations. They haven’t got the same name, but they have variations of the same name.
MACBETH: I remember a case of this myself. There’s a character called Tallis in one story and a character called Traven in another, and they seem to have something in common.
BALLARD: In effect they’re the same character, but their role in the stories is not to be characters in the sense that Scobie, let’s say, in [Graham Greene’s] The Heart of the Matter, or any other character in the retrospective novel is a character, an identifiable human being rather like those we recognise among our friends, acquaintances and so on.
MACBETH: Could we take a specific case from ‘You and Me and the Continuum’ here – Dr Nathan, who seems to be, as far as the reader or listener can put a label to him, a psychiatrist? Could you elaborate on what his function is in the story?
BALLARD: He serves the role of analysing the events of the narrative from the point of view of the clinical implications. He represents the voice of reason, whatever the limitations of that term might be.
MACBETH: The central ‘consciousness’ or area of character in the story is sometimes a composite one in some ways; somebody who has gone through an extreme situation or a psychological crisis or a public crisis; somebody in a mental hospital who might also be the pilot of a crashed bomber; and so on. What are you trying to do with this sort of merged consciousness?
BALLARD: All these characters exist on a number of levels. I feel that the fictional elements in experience are now multiplying to such a point that it is almost impossible to distinguish between the real and the false, that one has many layers, many levels of experience going on at the same time. On one level one might have the world of public events, Cape Kennedy, Vietnam, political life; on another level the immediate personal environment, the rooms we occupy, the postures we assume. On a third level the inner world of the mind. All these levels are, as far as I can see them, equally fictional, and it is where these levels interact that one gets the only kind of valid reality that exists nowadays. The characters in these stories occupy positions on these various levels. On the one hand, a character is displayed on an enormous billboard as a figment in a Cinemascope epic; on another level he’s an ordinary human being moving through the ordinary to-and-fro of everyday life; on a third level he’s a figment in his own fantasies. These various aspects of the character interact and produce the main reality of the fiction.
MACBETH: Yes, I think this element of layers also comes out in the density of some of the stories – the way you seem to link together references from a wide variety of fields. I quote if I may, as an interesting example, one passage from ‘You and Me and the Continuum’, which is the kind of passage that recurs in a number of these stories:
Kodachrome. Captain Kirby, MI5, studied the prints. They showed: (1) a thick-set man in an Air Force jacket, unshaven face half-hidden by the dented hat-peak; (2) a transverse section through the spinal level T-12; (3) a crayon self-portrait by David Feary, 7-year-old schizophrenic at the Belmont Asylum, Sutton; (4) radio-spectra from the quasar CTA 102; (5) an antero-posterior radiograph of a skull, estimated capacity 1500 cc.; (6) spectro-heliogram of the sun taken with the K line of calcium; (7) left and right handprints showing massive scarring between second and third metacarpal bones. To Dr Nathan he said: ‘And all these make up one picture?’
BALLARD: Exactly. They make up a composite portrait of this man’s identity. In this story I was examining the particular role that a twentieth-century messiah might take, in the context of mid-twentieth-century life. I feel that he would reappear in a whole series of aspects and relationships, touching an enormous range of events; that he wouldn’t have a single identity, in the sense that Jesus had – he would have a whole multiplex of contacts with various points.
MACBETH: I see this, but why do certain particular kinds of imagery recur? You may claim that these are the appropriate and inevitable ones, but you do seem as a writer to have a sort of ‘thing’ about certain kinds of imagery; for example, certain kinds of landscape – landscapes which involve sand keep recurring. Can you give any further explication of why these come in?
BALLARD: I think that landscape is a formalisation of space and time, and the external landscapes directly reflect interior states of mind. In fact, the only external landscapes which have any meaning are those which are reflected, in the central nervous system, if you like, by their direct analogues. Dali said somewhere that mind is a state of landscape, and I think this is completely true.
MACBETH: You do literally, in many of these stories, draw connections between pictures of parts of the human body and certain landscapes, don’t you?
BALLARD: