Andrzej Gasiorek is a Reader in Twentieth Century English Literature at the University of Birmingham. He took a Sabbatical from his work in autumn of 2003 and was awarded a grant of £13,625 by the Arts & Humanities Research Council of England in 2004 to allow him the time he needed to research Ballard’s complex prescience fictional oeuvre. And this has definitely been (an obvious great deal of) time well spent, because the end product is a fascinating, in-depth, revealing and rewarding work loaded with literary and psychological insight into the notorious and notoriously difficult subject matter at hand.

Gasiorek’s analysis (helped along by a selection of quotes from Freud, Jung, Nietzsche, Baudrillard, Foucault and others sprinkled through the text) starts with Ballard’s initial ‘natural disaster’ trilogy of novels (‘The Drowned World’, ‘The Drought’ and ‘The Crystal World’) and goes right through until his latest triptych of psychopathology-embracing-defective-detective novels (‘Cocaine Nights’, ‘Super-Cannes’ and ‘Millennium People’), tracing the different permutations the ex-concentration-camp prisoner’s obsessions with sex, violence and the effects of technology and the media on the contemporary psyche (amongst other things) have taken over the decades.

The two main works Ballard will be most remembered by to the general public are ‘Empire of The Sun’ and ‘Crash’, because of the movies made of them. The sections in ‘JG Ballard’ on both works are enlightening and very well argued (as indeed is the rest of the work, if occasionally being a bit dense and slightly over-academic in places). Gasiorek reads ‘Crash’ (in one of several readings possible) as work of commodity fetishism taken to the nth degree, filled with solipsistic sociopathic protagonists so affected and infected by the numbing media land(slide)scape and its consumerist fantasies of life as lived through the owning of goods that they take the fantasies promoted by the car industry to their (il)logical pathological end point and fuse and destroy themselves with their beloved-over-all-else, horsepower-ad-fed, status-symbol vehicles in car crashes. These crashes serve as both autoerotic endgame and potential curative. The people surviving the crashes come to a new understanding of themselves, and thus their (literal) death-drive fetish is seen as a search for an understanding of and remedy for their pathologies through the fantasy-piercing trauma of pain and injury.

This critical text illuminated something for me I had never quite understood about Ballard (who trained in psychiatry for a while, as his work often betrays; recall seeing a quote of him talking about this study, saying “it was a case of ‘physician, heal thyself,’” which is very telling) and his protagonists with their will-to-pathology-power and why they always want to go deeper into their sickness(es) instead of backing away from them. Psychologists and psychiatrists are always advocating that a person go back into whatever pains them and trying to understand and grasp it and thus be able to negate and heal it. Ballard sending his characters even deeper into their debilitating pathologies is thus just truncated textbook psychology and therapy; if they were to go into their true natures and come out the other end (as they don’t often do, but their journey is actually optimistic in nature, in that they’re trying to understand and heal themselves, or at least grasp some truth about themselves and their natures) with their new insight, they would be much healthier and happier people.

But let’s face it, too, the ‘demolition derby text’ (as Gasiorek brilliantly puts it) ‘Crash’ is a deeply sick, frightening, extreme work of madness, and one I wouldn’t personally want to read again. Even this notorious book’s author himself doesn’t seem to quite know what to make of the sex-equals-death syllabic monster (as Ballard put it on the classic nihilist Manic Street Preachers album ‘The Holy Bible’, which has a quote of his on it: “I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit, I mean force it to look in the mirror” – only thing is, it’s his mirror we’re looking in, not necessarily that of the whole human race) his head breech-birthed. And that’s hardly surprising, given what lies between the covers of the work.

As Gasiorek puts it on P18: “Ballard’s own uneasiness about ‘Crash’ is clear from his shifting pronouncements about it; he himself can never quite decide if it is a cautionary tale with a moral purpose, a deeply immoral and corrupting book, or a dispassionate forensic examination of a repressed cultural logic.” Personally, I wouldn’t say it’s ‘dispassionate,’ because there’s undoubtedly passion there, it’s just that it’s a passion for challenging the reader with a deeply disturbing text of insane erotica and hyper-violence, pure literary frottage to a degree. Not entirely for nothing does the man identify with the extreme works of his old literary partner in theoretical and literary crime William S Burroughs, after all.

The chapter on ‘Empire of The Sun’ is a brilliant work of analysis and thematic extrapolation. Gasiorek here identifies the wellsprings of Ballard’s later writing obsessions and methods (in his madness) of presenting them. He teases revealing quotes from the text constantly, presenting us a portrait of a somewhat deluded, confused young man in a concentration camp with a developing psyche struggling to come to terms with the horrors and deviant (il)logics of war unfolding around him, never quite figuring out whether to embrace them wholeheartedly (Stockholm Syndrome methodology) or to go deeper and further into his head and imagination to escape from the realities of what he is experiencing. One telling passage from the book, as highlighted by Gasiorek on P157, could almost serve as a template for Ballard’s psyche, to a degree, in general:

“But Jim’s manic restlessness and hyper-vigilance tell another story. His inability to slow down, to take pause, or even to be temporarily calm reveal someone trying to hold himself together through a ceaseless activity that must fill up every waking moment. The novel suggests that he has not been able to face up to the present in quite the way he imagines. His confusion is disclosed through a preoccupation with cognitive mapping – an attempt to find some way of orientating himself within a situation he is not equipped to understand. Borrowing from (adult Ballard) James, one could say that Jim’s apprehension of events is stronger than his producible vocabulary and that the text depicts him struggling to discover a vocabulary adequate to his experiences. A self-conscious fascination with words plays a large part in his development, and is often the source of textual ironies that elude him:

‘You did your schoolwork today, Jim? You learned all the words?’

“I did Basie. A lot of Latin words.’ Basie was intrigued by Jim’s command of Latin, but easily bored. So he decided not to recite the whole passive tense of Amo. ‘And some new English words. “Pragmatist”, he suggested, which Basie agreed with gloom, ‘and survivor”.’

‘”Survivor”?’ Basie chuckled at this. ‘That’s a useful word. Are you a survivor, Jim?’

‘Well…’ Dr Ransome had not meant the term as a compliment. (ES 218)”

“There are several possible imaginative responses to the disgust occasioned by this kind of violence. In Ballard’s work two predominate. On one hand a powerful redemptive strain of almost mystical proportions characterises some of his work, envisaging the transfiguration of the world and the humans who desecrate it. On the other hand, a strong urge to escape from and even destroy a world seen as irredeemable is also manifested in his writing; in this vein he produces works which, as David Pringle observes, recognize ‘that we long for an empty world, a total cataclysm’.

The works that are orientated to visions of metamorphosis destabilize the familiar lineaments of the visible world by interpreting it in terms of the unconscious, thereby prising open the habitually closed portals to the inner psyche and thus ensuring that empirical reality is no longer seen in conventional terms. This process requires a radical break with history and previous psychological investments: the old models of subjectivity must be destroyed, an emergent reality accepted, and a new identity – described in ‘The Drowned World’ as a ‘total reorientation of the personality’ (DW 44) – re-assembled.

The flip-side of this transfigurative dream is a pessimistic reading of human life that is characterised by biomorphic horror and existential dread. A profound alienation of the subject from its physical being, its identity, and the public realm in which it must perforce live are the features of a complete turning away from sociality and inter-subjectivity. Here it is the theme of escape that predominates.”

Wee imaginative imprisoned Jim Ballard, dreaming confused escape velocity fantasies from the war-torn charnel house of childhood innocence in daily shattered evidence all around him, the making and breaking and remaking of a bruised genius psyche that would struggle for decades to put itself back together in a meaningful-cum-meaningless way after the horrors it had witnessed during formative informative Chinese-water-torture-drip years of trials and tribulations. Gasiorek points out that the last three books Ballard has written are all concerned with the escape of the individual from late capitalist conformity and character-and-psychological deformity through random acts of meaningless violence whose pointlessness is their very point. But these acts are tantamount to a tortured ape flinging its own feces through the bars of its existential cage at people looking at it because it knows it can’t escape smothering bombarding life; the violence has no consequences in the alienated psyche of the asocial modern sociopath, with their absolute refusal to accept personal responsibility for their acts (violent or otherwise) and how they affect other people. As Gasiorek puts it in the last paragraph of the book on P212 with reference to ‘Millennium People’:

“By blowing a hole in space-time, terror announces in as visceral and public a manner as possible its revolt against sociality itself. Neither the Professor nor Gould has any political programme, and both are driven by monologic and deeply infantile conceptions of the world that refuse to acknowledge the inescapability of contingency and shun the claims of intersubjectivity. All that is then left are solitary id-driven wills proclaiming their right to assert themselves through acts of motiveless violence in which any notion of ethical truth or programmatic social change has long since been obliterated.”

You wonder if this, nearing the end of his literary career, is what Ballard truly believes about life and the future of the human race. You hope not. Otherwise all that is left is to eat the gun – or turn it on others, because killing them makes absolutely no difference whatsoever in a world without meaning or affect or love or compassion or sympathy or beauty or hope or sanity. And who would want to live in a world like that, where psychological casualties of the very society these damage cases would claim to be freeing themselves of make things worse for others with their psychotic misanthropic hatred and random acts of ‘energizing’ violence?

There’s always been an element of the blackly humorous tease about Ballard. He never quite shows you what side he’s on, plays somewhat disturbing highbrow mindgames (like appearing to endorse genocide in, say, ‘Rushing to Paradise,’ as represented by the insane female doctor figure – it has to be said that most people are too cowed by Ballard’s awesome intellect to ever really disagree with a truism – or untruism – of his) to see what he can stir up, Rorschach-like, from the psyches of his readers. He’s never fully to be trusted, and has said as much. So let’s just hope he’s wrong on this future human direction, otherwise we’re all screwed from start to finish.

Ballard himself has said that the books an author writes are not necessarily to be placed in the order they come out in. So maybe we should shuffle the author’s works and the order they come in, finishing instead, to my mind, with the superb work of beautiful prose poetry ‘The Unlimited Dream Company’. Anybody saying that Ballard is a cool, clinical, unemotional writer need only read this one-time-only-emotional-release visionary work (which I read as a wistful elegiac record of his wish to be reunited his long-deceased wife Helen Mary) to know that, in this instance at least, they are wrong. And this would make for a much more comforting and appropriate terminus, I think, for the man whose work has given us so much insight into the good and the bad and the ugly of eternal human nature.

In closing: kudos to Andrzej Gasiorek for a brilliant, extremely stimulating work of literary criticism. This book should become a definitive textbook for those wishing to study JG Ballard, his work’s major themes and their execution. Gasiorek is clearly a very intelligent man with a great deal of piercing literary and psychological insight into the subject at hand. You wonder what Ballard himself would make of this book. That hardly matters though. If you’re looking for a good proto-map of the neurons and synapses constituting the mercurial vermilion sands of the terminal beaches of James Graham Ballard’s new clear bomb imagination, look no further than this excellent work. You will not regret it.

Graham Rae is a Scottish scribbler from the cheery charming picture-postcard-perfect post-industrial up-and-coming internationally renowned tourist destination of Falkirk, now resident in the US. He has been writing for as long as he can remember (started at any early age, carving graffiti into womb walls) and am halfway through my first novel (well, third, but the other mishmash misfires don’t count),’ Weekend Warriors.’ He has been writing about film for various electronic and print publications for 18 years now, and you can see a sporadically entertaining eclectic selection of his ramble/rantings at www.filmthreat.com

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.