Nicolas Labarre Maîtrise d’Anglais, 2000-2001

Tuteur : Pierre-Yves Le Cam Université de Rennes 2

Four Visions of the Apocalypse

Disintegration in the Early Work of J.G. Ballard

Contents

I NTRODUCTION 4

I. T HREE ELEMENTS FOR AN INITIAL APPROACH 7

A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF SCIENCE-FICTION AND OF THE NEW-WAVE 9 CHRONOLOGY 9 A DEFINITION 16 IN A WORD 18A DRIFT AWAY FROM THE DISASTER STORIES 19 A DEFINITION 20 THEMES, METHODS AND BALLARD'S APPROACH 20 A COMPARISON BETWEEN THE DROWNED WORLD AND THE KRAKEN WAKES 24 IN A WORD 26WORLD WAR II AS A BACKGROUND 27 SOME BIOGRAPHICAL ELEMENTS 27 THE ISSUE OF THE SOURCE 28 A THEMATIC INFLUENCE 29 AN AESTHETIC INFLUENCE 31 IN A WORD 34SEEING THE FRAMEWORK 35

II. D ISSOLUTION, REGRESSION? 37

THE BOURGEOIS HERO AS A SUBJECT OF EXPERIMENT 39 CONSUMERISM AND LOGIC 40 IMMOBILITY, ENTROPY 42 AN ESCAPE THROUGH THE LANDSCAPE 46 IN A WORD 47DESTRUCTION, A STEP TOWARDS MATURITY 48 ARMAGEDDON AS A MERE BACKGROUND 48 AN UNDERLYING OPTIMISM 51 SELF DISCOVERY: KERANS' ITINERARY IN THE DROWNED WORLD 52 IN A WORD 56THE INFLUENCE OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 57 SELF-CONSCIOUS CHARACTERS 58 JUNGIAN THESES, IRONICAL USAGE AND REAL INFLUENCE 60 IN A WORD 63AN ORGANISED DISSOLUTION 65

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III. D ESTRUCTION AS A TOOL FOR THE ARTIST 66

LACK OF REALISM, OF LOGIC: A REVERSE CONSTRUCTION 69 INVOLUNTARY MISTAKES 69 DECONSTRUCTED REALITY 71 BUILDING AROUND THE LANDSCAPE 74 IN A WORD 76INNER AND OUTER LANDSCAPE, SURREALIST INFLUENCE 77 REFERRING TO THE SURREALISTS 77 THE SURREALIST METHOD 80 INNER SPACE AND OUTER LANDSCAPE 82 IN A WORD 84LOOKING FOR A MEANING 85 EVEN MORE REFERENCES AND THEMES 86 PERVERSE IRONY 89 IN A WORD 91

C ONCLUSION 92

A PPENDIX 1 - SUMMARIES OF THE PLOTS 95

THE WIND FROM NOWHERE 95THE DROWNED WORLD 96THE DROUGHT (ALSO PUBLISHED AS THE BURNING WORLD) 97THE CRYSTAL WORLD 98

A PPENDIX 2 – MENTIONED SURREALIST PAINTINGS 99

B IBLIOGRAPHY 102

THE NOVELS 102 ESSAYS AND INTERVIEWS 102 ADDITIONAL RESOURCES 102 INTERNET RESOURCES 103

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Introduction

They say you can already tell the difference between a novel that is written on a word-processor and a

novel written on a conventional typewriter. You'll notice this particularly in commercial fiction – what

you have is excellent paragraph-by-paragraph editing, grammar, structure and all the rest, but very

loose overall chapter-by-chapter construction, and this is because you can't flip through 100 pages on

a word processor the way you can with a pile of typescript. So the detailed structure is tight and

elegant, but the overall structure is weak. That is interesting!1

Judging from the impressive amount of studies dedicated to J.G. Ballard, there can be little

doubt that he is at last acknowledged as one of the major writers of the late 20 th century. Few writers

have succeeded like he has in becoming underground icons while being recognised by the public at

large. The eclecticism of his work - from his novelised autobiography Empire of the Sun to the ever

disturbing Crash - has of course played an essential role in this general appraise. However, it is to be

noted that Ballard has never used this eclecticism as an artificial way to reach a wider audience. On

the contrary, the coherence of his work from his early novel to Super Cannes is remarkable, up to a

point where it is possible to identify his writings with a quasi-certainty from the very first lines of any

of his novels or short-stories.

However, this general appraise strangely does not extend to Ballard's first novels. Published

between 1962 and 1966, The Wind from Nowhere, The Drowned World, The Drought and The Crystal

World nevertheless brought him an initial recognition both from the public and the critics. Yet, those

early science fiction novels seem to have been re-evaluated in the light of his later works, and for

many critics, they are now considered as minor, notably in comparison with the masterpieces of late

1960's and the early 1970's. Actually, there is some truth in this statement, for it is certain that The

Wind from Nowhere, for example, does not compare well to The Atrocity Exhibition, but this does not

seem to be the main reason for this ostracism. Indeed, the critical disdain seems to originate mostly

from the fact that those novels are classified as science fiction, a genre often regarded as a sub-cultural

ghetto, unable to produce any work of importance.

This is one of the clichés that we will try to take down in the course of this study.

A careful reading of those four novels reveals that they are much richer than they seem, and can

legitimately been considered as the foundations of Ballard's later works. Some of his favourite themes

and images may have been developed more subtly in other novels, but they are already present and

identifiable. In other words, there is no ground to consider that they are a distinct and minor part of

Ballard's writings; they are arguably not as achieved as his later production but are certainly not

1 A. Juno and Vale, 'Interview with JGB', RE/Search n° 8/9 (1984), 17

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devoid of literary values. Besides, those novels do not only exist as an interesting introduction to

Crash or to The Atrocity Exhibition. They can be taken on their own, without considering the totality

of Ballard's work, and still have an undeniable interest for the reader and the analyst.

To a certain extent, they form a coherent tetralogy, with strong thematic links, and above all, the

presence of the catastrophe, which shapes them all. Disintegration of the society, of the individual

psychology, of the narrative itself: the presence of the catastrophe is felt at every level of the stories.

This disintegration or collapsing therefore constitutes a coherent axis around which a study of those

too-often despised or ignored novels can be conducted.

Surprisingly, critics have often tried to reduce the interest of those four works to a few easily

spotted elements, such as their genre, or their autobiographical trends. Obviously, these novels are

shaped by Ballard's conscious efforts to write science fiction, within the peculiar domain of the

disaster story: the codes and conventions of the genre and sub-genre therefore play an undeniable role

in the construction of the narratives. Similarly, it has often been pointed out that Ballard made an

extensive use of his memories of the Second World War to create some of the most striking characters

and images of those novels. Since he has often acknowledged this influence in interviews, it would be

pointless to deny it. However, reducing the tetralogy to those codes and influences would be overly

simplistic. We will demonstrate that Ballard does not allow those conventions and memories to limit

his narratives, but that he consciously play with them, without surrendering his control over his stories.

Those influences are worth mentioning, but they certainly do not sum up the richness of any of the

four novels.

Having dispelled this misconception, we will be able to focus on the real subject of this study:

the notion of disintegration. The main characters of the four novels are bourgeois heroes, worshipping

material goods and logic, and it is not surprising that they should be strongly affected by the coming of

the catastrophe. Yet, within his description of the collapsing of the society, Ballard displays a discreet

optimism, that goes against the immediate feeling of utter destruction. The influence of psycho-

analysis, and Jung in particular, is patent in the psychological evolution undergone by those main

characters. The catastrophe appears as the catalyst of already existing entropy, a force of evolution

rather than destruction.

Eventually, this will lead us to focus on the role of the catastrophe as powerful way to create

what Coleridge called 'the willing suspension of disbelief'. While this notion applies to most works of

fiction, it is especially relevant in the case of Ballad's novels, where logic and plausibility are often

ignored; they seem to be constructed around a central and dominant vision, and not as linear stories.

The influence of the surrealist painting brings a new light to this method of construction, and will lead

us to see the major part of those novels as empty shells, whose only functions are to bring the reader to

the aforementioned central vision. Finally, even Ballard's use of numerous quotations and references

in order to dissimulate this emptiness goes back to the surrealist influence, if we read it as an ironical

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comment on what he perceives as the semiological saturation of modern society. This construction is

to be linked with his famous affirmation that we are ‘surrounded by fictions of every kind’, which can

serve both as a post-modern creed and as an adequate summary of most of his work.

The final disintegration would therefore be that of the narrative itself, through the accumulation

of significant elements.

The following abbreviations will be used throughout this work, for quick references:

WN: The Wind from Nowhere

DW: The Drowned World

DR: The Drought

CW: The Crystal World

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I. Three Elements for an Initial Approach

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Extensive studies have been dedicated to the work of J.G. Ballard, which have led to an

increasingly complete comprehension of his work. From Escapement his first short story, to Rushing

to Paradise, his next to last novel (Super Cannes was only published a few months ago) all his works

have been thoroughly analysed, criticised and put in relation with one another.

While this has the obvious advantage of providing the would-be analyst with a satisfying

quantity of easily accessible material, it is also excessively frustrating, in that it makes it really

difficult to provide a new angle on the author's work. Obviously, one of the most difficult tasks of this

aforementioned would-be analyst is to find a starting point. Since we will not deal with Ballard's short

stories, a purely chronological approach is out of the question. It would be equally awkward to start

with a biography, considering that we focus on a very short period of Ballard's life.

Therefore, rather than walking in already over-popular paths, we will try to start by providing an

introduction to three of the most salient characteristics of the four works we are to study. Actually,

those four novels are so often despised by critics that they are frequently presented as the mere sum of

those three characteristics: they are science fiction stories, belonging to the sub-genre of the disaster

novel, and display patent autobiographical trends, focusing on Ballard's memories of the Second

World War.

We will take some time to analyse the relevance of those three affirmations, as well as their

value in the context of a more global study of those four novels. Not surprisingly, we will thus

demonstrate that reducing the four novels to those three axes is not only inaccurate but also grossly

wrong. Those three elements indeed constitute the framework around which Ballard's work is

constructed, but they are only a step towards a comprehension of the nature of those novels.

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A Brief Overview of Science-Fiction and of the New-Wave

I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear, that everything

has happened; nothing exciting or new is ever going to happen again.... the future is just going to be a

vast, conforming suburb of the soul...2

Ballard has always defined himself as a science fiction writer. And indeed, although his latest

works may seem to belong to what is usually called "mainstream" novels, they still bear the mark of

the thematic and of some of the methods associated with the genre. Empire of the Sun, for example,

although it was published in 1984, is divided into short chapters, reminiscent of the popular novels

serialised in magazines. Other similarities, less obvious but probably more meaningful will be

mentioned later.

However, while there has been many debates about whether Crash, for example, belonged to

the science fiction genre, this issue has never been raised regarding the novels studied in this memoir.

Neither Ballard himself nor any of his analysts have ever tried to negate their belonging to the genre.

All four of them are even classified in a sub-category of the genre called the "disaster novel".

This simple literary conventions sums up perfectly the ambiguities underlying Ballard's work.

The label of 'science fiction' is indeed a convenient one, referring to a seemingly simple corpus, but a

close study reveals the complexity of this topic. It soon becomes apparent that defining science fiction

(not even to mention disaster novels) is a much harder task than it may appear at first glance. Although

many critics and writers have attempted to elaborate a comprehensive definition, those efforts have

apparently been wasted so far, for there is no such thing as a universally accepted definition of science

fiction.

However, since this notion of genre is an all-important component of Ballard's work, we will do

our best to understand what science fiction is, and what it has come to mean over the years.

Considering the complexity of the issue, it is a logical initial step to get a historical perspective of the

genre, before tackling the problem of its definition.

Chronology

It is commonly accepted that the first science-fiction novel was Frankenstein: or The Modern

Prometheus, by Mary Shelley, back in 1817 (both Brian Aldiss in The Billion Year Spree and Ballard

in A User's Guide to the Millennium3 agrees on this starting point). It is hardly a coincidence if this

2 A. Juno and Vale, 'Interview with JGB', RE/Search n° 8/9 (1984), 8 3 James Ballard, A User's Guide to the New Millennium, London: HarperCollins (1996)It is henceforth to be referred to as UGM. This work being a collection of articles and essays, all quotations can also be found in the original material, which will be mentioned when relevant.

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date coincides roughly with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, science fiction, at least

in its early form, can be considered as an outburst from the mid-19 th century society, in which science

rapidly replaced religion as the dominant ideology.

Yet, even the precursors of the genre rapidly shifted away from the naive kind of futurology

which one may expect from what was then called 'scientific anticipation'. While Jules Verne, for

instance, was clearly fascinated by the boundless possibilities of science, some of his novels are darker

than what his reputation might suggest. 20,000 lieues sous les mers is not only a fascinating

description of an early submarine, it is also a reflection on the dangers of modern weaponry, which

allow a misanthrope to become a mass murderer much more easily than in the past. This concern with

the possible misuse of science is even more obvious in Verne's last works, notably La journée d'un

journaliste en 2889 (1899), which displays a sharp pessimism, bordering on dystopian preoccupations.

However, the author who really defined the role of science fiction is undoubtedly Herbert

George Wells. While some of the early writers of the genre had already tried to convey a message, a

reflection about the values of the society in which they were written, Wells was the first one to use

those preoccupations as the main subjects of his novels. Admittedly, philosophical issues are being

discussed in both Frankenstein or Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, but it has to be noted that those two works

were originally written as fantastic allegories, while Wells consciously integrated those concerns in a

genre from which they had until then been absent. Far from trying to extrapolate a plausible future

from scientific bases, Wells tried to portray the defects and the absurdities of his own society through

the imaginary events and inventions of his novels. Whoever has read The Island of Dr Moreau should

not forget easily the vivid pictures of the human-beasts, warped monsters created by uncontrolled

science, that eventually destroy their creator. The theme is reminiscent of Frankenstein, but in Well's

novel, all the romantic languor which impregnated Shelley's work is replaced by a deep irony, which

draws the attention on the underlying sociological message.

However, the most influential of Wells' books is not The Island of Dr Moreau, not even The

Time Machine, but undoubtedly The War of the Worlds. Though it focuses on a subtle description of

the collapse of civilisation, this was the novel which created the long-lived equation: science fiction =

space + monsters. To put it in Ballard's words: 'Great writer though he was, H.G. Wells has had a

disastrous influence on the subsequent course of science fiction' (UGM 197).

And indeed, most of Wells' successors failed to grasp the essence of his fictions; instead, they

imitated his themes and the images he created, exploited them and generally produced adventure

stories that could have taken place in any kind of background (western, notably) barring some minor

semantic adjustments. This was in the twenties, and it lasted for almost twenty years: a period

generally known as that of the 'pulps'.

What were those 'pulps'?

Originally those stories were published in magazines printed on low-quality paper made of

wood pulp. This was a medium fit for popular tales, in all kind of genres, and this is exactly what the

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science fiction authors of the time (Burroughs, Hamilton, E.E. Smith...) were producing. The concept

of 'space opera' – exotic planets, laser guns, and spaceships – was invented (although the name was

forged only in 1941), and used in countless stories whose only ambitions were to be enjoyable and

entertaining. In the meantime, other writers such as H.P. Lovecraft or Franz Kafka were producing

deeply influential works, but it would take several decades before their works were officially reunited

with Wells' and Verne's.

In 1926, Hugo Gernsback invented the term 'scientifiction', which rapidly became 'science

fiction', and thus marked the official birth of the genre. Incidentally, most of the stereotypes associated

with it also appeared in those years: the covers of the pulps were notably famous for their huge bug-

eyed monsters chasing an innocent (but sparsely dressed) astronaut girl.

Twelve years later, in 1938, John Campbell became the editor of Astounding Stories, and started

what is often known as the 'Golden Age' of science fiction. It lasted for then years. According to Isaac

Asimov, the stories published by Campbell added one element to the genre as it was known:

'sophistication'. And indeed, while the novels and short-stories of that period often borrowed themes

from the previous decades, such as the concept of a galactic empire, they treated them in a very

different way. Instead of just trying to build exotic backgrounds for conventional warfare, the Golden

Age authors found the right question to ask themselves: 'What if ?'. What if there were mutants among

us (Slan, by Van Vogt)? What if robots had to follow three basic rules that prevented them to harm

human beings (The Robots, by Asimov)? What if dogs eventually replaced mankind as the dominant

specie on Earth (City, by Clifford D. Simak)?

All those questions may seem naive, but what really matters here is the method: take an

imaginary starting point, and try to extrapolate logically what may happen next. This interrogation is

at the heart of the science fiction. Yet, somehow, those writers chose to ignore some of the

possibilities of the path of investigation they had discovered. Because of the origin of the genre, they

usually tried to focus on the future, on scientific discoveries, not realising that the same method of

analysis could also be applied to much more varied postulates. Asimov's definition of the genre

perfectly sums up this narrow conception: 'Science fiction is that branch of literature that deals with

human responses to changes in the level of science and technology'4.

Science fiction has never since been more popular than it was at that time (in the U.S.A. at

least), but it has to be noted than the texts published in Astounding or Amazing during these ten years

were also more achieved from a literary point of view than those of the previous decades. Thus, in a

way, around 1950, the genre as a whole had rediscovered the essential qualities of the stories Wells

produced as early as 1895, rich, meaningful and relatively well written (although very few science

fiction writers can really be compared to Wells in that respect).

4 Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (Mar-Apr 1978)

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The Golden Age is usually said to have ended around 1948 (the year when 1984 was published),

but at that time, it had already been drawing towards its unavoidable conclusion for nearly three years.

In 1945, the explosion of the atom bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki had shaken apart all the

premises on which the science fiction stories of the Golden Age had been built. Progress was no

longer an obvious ideal, and it suddenly became futile to consider the future of mankind in a few

millenniums. Besides, according to Ballard, the authors of the Golden Age had exploited their method

to its limit: 'the imaginary universe invented by these writers is self-defined and self-limited; the

greatest weakness of this particular science fiction is that its writers have been able to define it so

exactly' (UGM 193).

For those reasons, and also because the readers were eager to discover something new, science

fiction changed once more. The writers tried to adapt to new territories, new subjects, often trying to

create stories focusing more on their characters than on the background or on broad ideas. Logically

enough, sex and humour both made their appearances in the genre, through short stories by Phillip

Jose Farmer, Frederic Brown or Robert Sheckley notably.

During fifteen years, those preoccupations cohabited with that of the previous generation of

authors, who did not feel it to be appropriate to revise their objectives, or who were unable to do so.

Because of this contiguity of two generations, it is hard to describe this period accurately: Heinlein

wrote his best novels, but they could have belonged to the Golden Age, while Theodore Sturgeon and

others opened the way to a redefined conception of the genre. Eventually, though, the beginning of the

Space Age in 1957, with the first flight of Sputnik sealed the victory of the new generation over the

old concerns.

In the meanwhile thanks to its newly reached maturity the popularity of science fiction extended

towards a wider scope of readership, although the popular support started to decrease slightly. 1984

was considered as brilliant even by critics whose idea of the genre was limited to the cover of the

pulps, and in France, Boris Vian translated Van Vogt novels, just like Baudelaire had translated Poe

sixty years before. At last, science fiction as a whole was recognised as a valuable literary form, and

not just a commercial stratagem to satisfy the popular demand for a new kind of exoticism.

Then, as mentioned above, with the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957, the real life invaded the

favourite territory of science fiction: outer space. It may seem strange that this materialisation of the

dreams of so many writers and readers should announce the end of the genre. Yet, Sputnik meant that

space was not a frontier anymore, despite what Kennedy would announce a few years later, and as

such, it became a setting for mainstream literature. Besides, its effect was to contradict what most

science fiction writers had heralded, from the pulps to the late sixties: space was not glamorous, it was

not out of reach, it was just black and cold. It is especially striking to realise that while several huge

attempts to write a coherent history of the future had taken place before 1957 (Asimov's Foundation,

Heinlein's History of the Future...), very few appeared after Sputnik. The role of old school science

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fiction had come to an end, at the very moment when it was at last recognised. It became 'mainstream',

in every meaning of the word.

Therefore, a new science fiction had to be invented. The authors able to achieve this shift had

been writing for several years when the Space Age began, but only then could they fully express their

ideas. While Kennedy was defining space as the new frontier, authors like Phillip K. Dick or Theodore

Sturgeon were already stretching science fiction far beyond its former limits. The term of 'speculative-

fiction', invented by Heinlein to replace the old denomination - inherited from the pulps - found its

proper use when applied to those new stories in which the notions of future and science were only

minor elements5.

Interestingly enough, Ballard published his first story in 1956, and immediately adopted a very

'speculative fiction' tone, with short-stories usually devoid of a single scientific element (see The

Drowned Giant, in the collection The Terminal Beach, for example), and often not even situated in the

future. Actually, Ballard became an initiator of a major step in the history of science fiction, a radical

affirmation of the changes taking place within the genre: the New Wave.

The name comes from the Nouvelle Vague of the French cinema, but also refers to the

magazine in which most of the New Wave authors were published, New-Worlds. As mentioned above,

the process of reshaping the genre had started as early as the fifties, and had already been developed

by talented individual writers, but only in 1964 did this new approach found a dedicated medium to

express itself. This year, Michael Moorcock became the editor of New-Worlds, an English magazine

which had been in existence more or less regularly since the 1940, and decided to turn the respectable

publication into a realm of experimentation.

Moorcock’s essential task was to define clearly what science-fiction meant to him (much like

Anthony Boucher had done in the US several years before): he wanted texts with a real literary

quality, which would not follow the path of the production of the previous forty years. In doing so, he

attracted (converted?) a number of writers who could identify themselves with these objectives, as

well as some enthusiastic beginners. Ballard, Spinrad, Disch, Aldiss, Moorcock himself… all of them

functioned as a coherent creative group, working together, sharing themes, techniques, even borrowing

characters from one another (Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius, for example).

As we shall see later, when we focus on Ballard’s work, their writings were deeply influenced

by pop-art and by the surrealists, from Andy Warhol and Dali to William Burroughs. Those influences

as well as their conscious search for a deeper approach of the science fiction led them to experiment

both with the themes and the form of the genre. Linearity, for instance, was no longer an absolute rule;

Aldiss, notably, tried to apply a 'cut-up' construction to some of his production, while several other

writers successfully intermingled different stories in a single narrative. As to the themes, the New

Wave approach could probably be summed-up by its focus on what Ballard calls the 'inner space', the

5 However, for convenience sake, I will continue to use 'science fiction' as a general denomination. The reason for this is that after the sixties, as we shall see, pretty much all the so called 'science fiction' stories contained distinctive elements of the speculative movement

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relationships between the individual consciousness and the 'real' world. Psycho-analysis, drugs, mass-

media, poetry, music, linguistic… all those devices implying a shift from the individual mind to the

outer world were regularly used, analysed and turned into writings by the New-Wave authors. If a

similar list of interests were set up for the works published during the Golden Age, it would probably

read: history, sociology, geography, physics, logic… This may be slightly exaggerated, but the fact

remains that it is hard to conceive a more significant departure from the old stereotypes than the one

which took place in Great Britain at that time.

Ballard played a major role in this redefinition of the genre, and as early as 1962, published in

New-Worlds a detailed account of his notion of science fiction:

I'd like to see more psycho-literary ideas, more meta-biological and meta-chemicals concepts, private

time-systems, synthetic psychologies and space-times, more of the sombre half-worlds one glimpses

in the painting of schizophrenics, all in all a complete speculative poetry and fantasy of science.

(UGM 198)

Obviously, this reshaping was not accepted at once, and some critics accused the New Wave

authors of having produced 'shock tactics […], obscurities, obscenities […] and left-wing politics' 6, in

other words, pseudo-experimental writings, sheltered behind the reassuring label of the genre.

Needless to say, this is a rather naive and ill-aimed attack, proved wrong by the long-lasting influence

of Moorcock’s editing choices. If further evidence was needed, it was provided in 1966 with the

publication of Dangerous Visions in the US, under the direction of Harlan Ellison. This anthology and

its sequel – Again, Dangerous Vision (1972)– were meant as a manifesto of the new American science

fiction, with texts by Dick, Priest, Le Guin, or Knight among others. Less daring than their English

counterparts (very classical form, many 'old-school' authors), albeit more provocative (i.e. more

obsessed with sex and death), those short stories confirmed the mutation of the genre. From that

moment onwards, science fiction ceased to be an exclusively popular genre, and reached a more

mature readership. This shift had started almost ten years earlier, but reached its full effect at the time

the anthology was published. In that respect, Ellison’s work could be considered as more important

than Moorcock’s influential editing, which produced impressive texts only for a small audience, with

New-Worlds on the verge of bankrupt during most of those years. However, whatever their respective

merits can be, it is undeniable that both Moorcock and Ellison played a major role in helping science

fiction to acknowledge its new form, even if they did not really 'create' this new form.

It has to be mentioned that, during the sixties, other writers also had a deep influence on the

genre, by reshaping it from the outside. They did not define themselves as science fiction authors, but

they used its thematic and its methods to produce works often regarded as 'mainstream', thus

reinforcing the links that the genre had started to create with established literature. We already

6 Kingsley Amis, in The Golden Age of Science Fiction, quoted by Ballard in UGM, 190

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mentioned William Burroughs, whose Naked Lunch is undoubtedly a science fiction book although it

is seldom classified as such, but Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange) and Robert Merle (Un

animal doué de raison) are other convincing examples of this process of assimilation.

Not surprisingly, though, the New Wave did not last long as a coherent movement. This is in

part because of New-Worlds financial difficulties but also because the radicalism of their affirmation

was hard to sustain when their ideas became widespread; similarly, Dangerous Visions remained an

isolated attempt, and did not create a new school of writings. Thus, as early as the beginning of the

seventies, the development of science fiction was left once more to the inspiration of individual writers

rather than to organised groups. However, the genre was profoundly affected by those few. The

discovery of its potentiality, both formally and thematically, as well as some of the experimentation

led by Moorcock and the others became mainstays of the stories written afterwards. Of course, it is in

the later works of the New Wave writers that the inheritance of this period is the more obvious.

Ballard’s work of the early seventies and later, for instance, are directly connected with his early short

stories and novels, especially with The Atrocity Exhibition, published in 1968.

It took some time for science fiction to come over the trauma caused by this radical re-

enunciation of its code, though. For approximately fifteen years, nothing really new was produced

within the genre. Established writers produced some of their best work - the names of Dick, Brunner,

Disch or Ballard come to mind - and promising newcomers appeared like Gene Wolfe (arguably the

best stylist that the genre ever produced) or Joe Haldeman (The Forever War). However, on a more

global scale, the genre stagnated for an unusually long amount of time. Up to a point where the major

science fictional event of the period was undeniably a movie: Star Wars, which reinstated the

popularity of the genre, while displaying one of the most dreadfully simplistic scenario ever written.

At that point, science-fiction was considered to be almost clinically dead as a creative literary form:

exhausted by the experimental writing which drew the readership away, unable to exist in its Golden

Age form anymore, brought back to its pulp clichés for the public at large…

Fortunately, the Cyberpunk movement came to stop the decline. Although it takes its origin in

works by authors from the two previous decades, the movement only took a definite form in 1984 with

the publication of Neuromancer, the extraordinary novel by William Gibson. Resorting to the thematic

of the New Wave, notably the issues of the role mass-media, of drugs and of the exploration of inner

space, the Cyberpunks (a very inappropriate denomination, by the way) chose to expose them with a

very frontal approach. No digression, no stylistic experimentation, no explicit philosophy: instead,

they presented the reader with a very raw and matter-of-fact description of the near future, more

reminiscent of crime-stories than of the classical forms of science fiction. Pretty much like the New

Wave, the movement lasted only for a few years, but it has had a deep influence on the genre as a

whole ever since. The greatest achievement of the Cyberpunks was to prove that science fiction could

still be used as a viable method but also as a powerful device to analyse and depict the failure of the

15

contemporary society. Not since Orwell had this quality of the genre been more obvious. Additionally,

the Cyberpunk imagery is so powerful that it quickly became an aesthetic reference well outside the

traditional audience of the genre. Together with the accurate predictions about the near future to be

found in the best books of the movement (notably concerning virtual reality and computer networks),

those aesthetic qualities gave back to science fiction as a whole the respect it had lost at the end of the

seventies. Indeed, the ubiquity of the science fiction imagery in most popular culture productions

nowadays, be it cinema, television, toys or video-clips can legitimately be considered as an aftermath

of the Cyberpunk shock wave.

Since the beginning of the nineties, no other coherent movement seems to have manifested itself

within the genre. The inheritance of the Cyberpunks has been integrated, and can be traced notably in

what is often considered as the latest masterpiece of the genre, Hyperion, by Dan Simmons. However,

the lack of perspective makes it difficult to discern global trends in the sum of works published during

the last decade…

Having completed this chronology, the task of actually defining the genre can be considered in

reverse. We know what is considered as science fiction, and therefore, it should be possible to spot the

common elements of all those works.

A Definition

The conclusion to be drawn from the historical approach above is that the definition of science

fiction has undergone profound changes ever since the genre appeared. Up to the 20 th century, there

was no label to identify what was not then perceived as a coherent movement (usually, it was regarded

as a deviant branch of fantasy), and therefore, no real attempt to define it was made.

However, when Gernsback invented the term of 'scientifiction' in 1926, he had to explicit what

the word meant to him: ' By "scientifiction" I mean the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe

type of story – a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision' 7. This

approach is obviously restrictive and a bit naive, but it is to be noted that even at that time, it was not

very strictly elaborated. Why should Poe be included in this list, while the only story he wrote that can

loosely be linked to Wells' or Verne's is The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym? Yet, the historical

importance of this first attempt is undeniable, since, for the first time, it set the boundaries of the

genre, allowing it to be acknowledged as a whole, and not as a collection of individual works.

Indeed, this first definition was so important that it remained a reference for a whole generation

of writers, up to the end of the Golden Age. See for example another definition of the genre by Isaac

Asimov, as late as 1953: ' Science fiction is that branch of literature which is concerned with the

impact of scientific advance upon human beings'8. This approach is roughly the same as Gernsback's,

7 Amazing Stories n°1 (1926)8 Modern Science-Fiction (1953)

16

with this slight difference that Asimov perceived the importance of the genre as a sociological tool.

Despite this nuance, Asimov's definition is still overly restrictive, and does not account for such novels

as 1984 (published five years before), for example, where 'scientific advance' is clearly not an essential

component.

Thus, as the genre evolved, analysts realised that this old conception had to be somewhat

broadened, if it was not to be discarded entirely. Not surprisingly, this shift occurred around the end of

the Golden Age, coinciding with the new forms of expression appearing at the time. While Asimov

was promoting his old-school view of the genre, L. Sprague de Camp suggested a more accurate

approach, which still appears to be quite relevant:

We might try to define science fiction in this broader sense as fiction based upon scientific or pseudo-

scientific assumptions (space-travel, robots, telepathy, earthly immortality, and so forth) or laid in any

patently unreal though non-supernatural setting (the future, or another world, and so forth).9

While the inheritance of the previous conception of the genre is patent in the reference to

scientific elements, most science fiction stories fit in either aspect of this twofold description.

Yet, the authors of the New Wave made the task of defining the genre even more difficult, since

for them, the setting was not what really mattered (and De Camp's definition actually only deals with

setting). Thus, the definition had to be broadened once more, not so much because the previous one

was not accurate, but because it did not convey the proper approach. A fine example of this is to be

found in The Billion Year Spree, published in 1973, and written by Brian Aldiss: 'Science fiction is the

search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but

confused state of knowledge (science), and is cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mould'. As noted

before, this does not contradict De Camp's approach, but merely put the emphasis on a different set of

elements, notably stylistic ones. This being said, it is surprising that Aldiss should have included this

remark on the Gothic influence on the genre, since this influence is absent from a wide variety of

novels and short stories (Phillip K. Dick's for example). Notwithstanding this approximation, Aldiss

definition is actually broad enough to encompass the whole genre. The problem is it is so broad that it

also includes most of the literary works ever published.

This pit-trap has led many authors to adopt a fairly cynical attitude, well summed up by John

Clute: 'Science fiction is a label applied to a publishing category and its application is subject to the

whims of editors and publishers'10. This approach, accurate as it stands, is unfortunately not really

useful or relevant in helping us to understand the theoretical foundations of the genre. Ultimately, this

may be the only kind of globalisation worth remembering, but we will bear a few approximations in

order to get a usable background.

9 Science-Fiction Handbook (1953)10 The SF Book of Lists (1982)

17

In a Word

If we try so sum up all the definitions given above, it is clear that science-fiction is a genre

dealing with the effect on mankind of an alternative environment, and following a logical development

(the main difference with fantasy). The New Wave's approach does not contradict this, it merely takes

another angle, by focusing more on the system and on the aesthetic than on the nature of this altered

environment.

Of course, this attempt to get a global conception of science fiction would not be complete if it

did not include Ballard's own view on the subject, which is, after all, what really matters if we are to

analyse his affection for the genre. Surprisingly enough, it is rather conservative (the excerpt below

dates back from 1974), especially compared to his radical positions at the beginning of the New Wave:

Since its beginning [...], science-fiction has been distinguished by two features: first, its imaginative

response to science and technology; and second, its attempt, now more or less abandoned by the so-

called mainstream novel, to place some kind of metaphysical framework around man's place in the

universe (UGM, 204).

Ballard's fondness for science fiction is reinstated by the fact that he helped to provide the genre

with a whole new conception of itself. There is little doubt that what he was writing in the early sixties

(i.e. the novels of our study) belongs to what he perceived as science fiction, although it may have

been seen as a marginal outburst of the genre at the time. Thus, it is legitimate to consider that science

fiction is one of the major elements through which those four novels can be analysed.

18

A Drift Away from the Disaster Stories

I would guess that from man's first inkling of this planet as a single entity existing independently of

himself came the determination to bring about its destruction, part of the same impulse we see in a

placid infant who wakes alone in his cot and sets about wrecking his entire nursery. (UGM 208)

Disaster stories have been a part of science fiction since the early days of the genre. The earlier

occurrence of the theme is commonly thought to have taken place in 1805, with Le dernier homme, by

Jean-Baptise Xavier de Grainville. This early date may seem a little awkward, considering that we

have chosen Frankenstein to mark the birth of science fiction, with Mary Shelley having only written

her masterpiece in 1818. Actually, the reason for this discrepancy is that Shelley's novella is only

given as a landmark, the moment when modern science fiction really came to existence. This choice,

convenient as it stands, does not take into account other works that should probably be related to the

genre, from the Bible to Sir Thomas More's Utopia, and unfortunately leaves alone a few novels that

arguably belongs to the genre. As a side note, it would also be possible to see in Plato's description of

the fate of Atlantis the real precursor of the disaster stories.

Let us just consider that the disaster novel is, indeed, a sub-categorisation of science fiction. The

assumption would definitely be worth discussing, but it is widely accepted and as such, should be

accepted, if only as a useful convention.

This assumption brings along another issue, strongly similar to the one we just treated in the

first part: what exactly is a disaster novel?

When we tried to provide a valid definition of science fiction, the main problem was that there

were too many of those, and that choosing one meant dismissing a lot of seemingly valid approaches.

In other words, so many things had been written about the genre that they ended up contradicting each

other (besides, as mentioned earlier, the evolution of the genre with the twentieth century led to

several re-evaluations of old definitions). When dealing with the disaster novel, we are faced with

exactly the same issue (i.e. finding a suitable general definition) in an exactly opposite context: next to

nothing has been written on this particular sub-genre. Strangely enough, it seems that the label of

'disaster story' is considered as self-explanatory, thus suppressing the need for a precise bounding and

definition. The four novels on which this memoir focuses, for instance, are unanimously considered to

belong to this category, whatever the exact label used to designate it (see below).

In order to have a more accurate vision of the sub-genre, and how it interconnects with Ballard's

peculiar case, let us try to analyse what are those disaster novels, their themes, and their interests. As

for the case of science fiction itself, understanding the nature of this categorisation is essential to

comprehend why Ballard purposefully chose to adopt this set of conventions for his writings.

19

A definition

As a first rough approximation, we could say that 'disaster story' is a generic term to refer to

those narratives in which the civilisation as we know it is shaken apart by an outside factor, in a

violent way. Most of the time, this implies the death of the better part of the population, and affects the

whole world.

It is important to note that even the very expression of 'disaster novel' is not a universally

approved label. The stories belonging to that category are also often called 'cataclysmic' or

'apocalyptic', since the scale of the destruction in usually pretty high (the Earth usually, up to the

whole universe...) and sometimes 'post-apocalyptic', when they deal specifically with the aftermath of

the disaster. From this point on, we will consider the disaster novel as a broader category, including

both 'apocalyptic' and 'post-apocalyptic' stories (respectively set during and after the disaster), and

dismiss the 'cataclysmic' denomination as being redundant.

Furthermore, it has to be mentioned that in this chapter, we will deal only with novels and short-

stories clearly akin to science fiction, as opposed to hypothetical literary transpositions of the so-called

'disaster movies' (Airport, for example).

Themes, Methods and Ballard's Approach

The basis of a disaster story is obviously a disaster.

Things get more complicated right after this statement, since the nature of the disaster is very

often the only original aspect of otherwise pretty similar works. Therefore, writers usually try to come

along with never-seen-before disasters, which tends to make the analyst's task even harder. Yet, there

are broad categories into which most of these disasters can be classified:

- Extraterrestrial Invasion: for a while, they came from Mars, then, as astronomy progressed, their

origin became less precise. Not all the extraterrestrial invasion stories belong to the disaster sub-

genre, though; Well's The War of the Worlds being a famous borderline case.

- Human Error: atomic war is the mots common approach here, but imaginative authors have come

with more original errors. In Arthur C. Clarke's The Nine Billion Names of God, for example:

when a computer hired by Tibetan monks prints out all the names of God, the universe ends as

the stars go out one by one.

- Cosmic Disaster: during the nineteenth century, a popular fear was that a comet could hit the Earth

and destroy it, but other cosmic disasters have been imagined since. La fin du monde, by

Camille Flamarrion (1893) is one of the first known examples to this category.

20

- Natural Elements: destructive winds, everlasting drought, rise of the water level, wild animals... an

almost infinite variety of possibilities. Rosny Aîné's La mort de la Terre is a classic example.

Three of the four novels studied in this memoir also belong to this category (the exception being

The Crystal World). The theme of the hostile mutated animals is of course a cliché of the

American cinema of the fifties, but it also has some interesting literary illustrations.

There is also a sixth category, into which we have to include a number of stories whose

disasters are simply unique. This is the case, for instance of Barjavel's infamous Ravage

(disappearance of the electricity), of Cooper's All Fools Day (infectious insanity), or of one of the

novel we are studying, Ballard's The Crystal World (although it could probably be included in either

the 'Natural Elements' or the 'Cosmic Disaster'). However, most stories belong to one of the first five

categories, and even seemingly original ones are often variations on those well-known themes.

As usual, those labels only have an indicative value, and in many cases, several disasters appear

at the same time, intermingle, or even cause each other. It would not be an easy task, for instance, to

classify Keith Robert's The Furies, with its giant extraterrestrial wasps, in any of the above categories.

Yet, they are useful to provide an approximation of the variety of the sub-genre.

In doing so, it also points out the fact that Ballard’s objective was not just to produce a quartet

of 'disaster novels', for if it had been the case, he would certainly have exploited the full range of

possibilities offered by the sub-genre. Instead, he purposefully chose to focus on 'natural' disasters. In

other words, disasters for which nobody can be blamed or fought. Admittedly, in The Drought, the

explanation given for the disappearance of the rain refers to pollution:

Covering the off-shore waters of the world's oceans, to a distance of about a thousand miles from the

coast, was a thin but resilient mono-molecular films formed from a complex of saturated long-chain

polymers, generated within the sea from the vast quantity of industrial wastes discharged into the

ocean basins during the previous fifty years. This tough, oxygen-permeable membrane lay on the air-

water interface and prevented almost all evaporations of surface water into the space above (DR 31)

Yet, as it is apparent in this extract, the responsibility is still very diffuse, almost abstract. The

use of a passive form sums that up perfectly: nobody is to blame, it just happened, and it is therefore

difficult to incriminate human activity. Critics of the seventies who often mentioned the ecological

awareness expressed by The Drought missed the point of the novel. While Ballard has often expressed

his dislike of the consumer society (as we will see in part II), he has never seemed overly preoccupied

with ecology, and one of his latest novels, Rushing to Paradise (1994), even expresses a clear distrust

towards the green activists.

21

This lack of responsibility, of a definite cause is even more obvious in the three other books of

the tetralogy. In The Drowned World, for instance, the whole mechanism of the 'gigantic upheavals

which had transformed the Earth's climate' is explained in less than a page, starting with this sibylline

pseudo scientific sentence:

A series of violent and prolonged solar storms lasting several years caused by a sudden instability in

the Sun had enlarged the Van Hallen belts and diminished the Earth's gravitational hold upon the outer

layers of the ionosphere (DW 21)

In the remaining two novels, this disappearance of the cause is even more complete, since no

explanation is provided, apart from the raw description of the phenomenon. This is not to say that

there are no reasons for the catastrophe, only that they are to be found in the speculations of the

characters rather than in purely demonstrative paragraphs, as in other disaster novels.

This is one of the main differences between conventional disaster narratives and Ballard's

works. Usually, the catastrophe per se is the main interest of the novel. For example, it is very

common in disaster novels to see whole chapters, if not whole stories, devoted solely to an extensive

description of the disaster itself, and/or of its global consequences. Of course, the exact focus of this

description varies from book to book, paying more interest to the origins of the catastrophe (The Nine

Billion Names of God), to its consequences (La mort de la Terre) or to the event itself (The Poison

Belt, by Conan Doyle), but the overall philosophy remains the same. Namely, the catastrophe is seen

as global, with the behaviour of the characters serving only as an allegory of the actions of humanity at

large. It is very common, for example, to have groups of survivors from different origins overcoming

their initial differences to resist together to the threats that surrounds them. A good example of this

kind of allegorical value can be found in the microcosm who escapes destruction in The Poison Belt.

This leads us to another characteristic feature of the disaster novels: the instinct of survival. In

most of the books mentioned above, the main occupation of the characters is to rationalise their way of

life, in order to survive. In Robert Merle's Malevil, for instance, the only woman who survived an

atomic explosion wilfully has sexual relationships with all the male characters, within a given

schedule, so as not to arise tensions within the group. More generally, the main events described in

disaster stories, apart from the disaster itself, are usually the desperate efforts of the character to live as

long as possible, and eventually to find a solution to their problem. If we refer once more to The

Poison Belt, Challenger's friends take all the conceivable precautions to avoid being killed by the

mortal gas that surrounds the entire Earth. Eventually, when they are about to die from asphyxia,

running out of the oxygen they had stored, they decide to open the windows... only to discover that the

gas merely caused a profound sleep, and that no one is dead. However, once more, the most famous

example of this survival obsession is to be found in The War of the Worlds, with the hero desperately

struggling to escape the Martians for as long as he can in a devastated England. Eventually, when he is

22

about to be crushed by the difficulties of this life, salvation comes in the form of a virus, which kills

all the invaders.

Three different examples, but only one phenomenon: it is hardly conceivable that characters

might resign before having tried all the possible means to escape their fate. Then, once they have

performed this ordeal, the author as a deus ex machina generally grants them with an unexpected

solution to their problems. Obviously, this idea bears strong Christian connotation: the characters have

to expiate their faults before being redeemed, and being rewarded by a miracle. A very interesting

parallel can be made between most post-apocalyptic novels and the myth of Noah's Ark, for instance.

Caves or fall-out shelters replace the Ark itself, but the survivors (carefully chosen, of course)

nonetheless have to stand their confinement before being allowed to come-out in a new world.

Not surprisingly, this survival instinct, with its religious and conservative undertones, is not

Ballard's main interest. The most immediately striking features of three of the four novels we are

studying here is indeed this curious lack of self preservation instinct that seems to afflict Ballard's

characters. We will have a closer look at this phenomenon in the subsequent parts, but we can already

notice that, with the exception of the Wind from Nowhere, those novels present us with characters who

accept the disaster as unavoidable, after an initial resistance, and try to merge with it rather than to

resist. This process is especially obvious in The Drowned World, with Kerans consciously rejecting his

chances to survive, but is also easily spotted in The Crystal World and The Drought:

Ransom was not surprised to find that Quilter's food stores consisted of barely a day's supplies, nor

that he was becoming progressively less interested in replenishing them. He seemed to accept that the

coming end of the water in the reservoir would commit him finally to the desert, and that the drained

river would now take him on its own terms. (DR 166)

This refusal of one of the strongest society's conventions can be paralleled with the objectives of

the New Wave writers to free themselves from the conventions of the genre. Thomas Disch's

Genocide, written in 1966, presents us with a very similar resignation on the part of the survivors

(giant plants are growing everywhere), who eventually abandon their hope to see the catastrophe come

to an end.

To sum this up, we could say that the originality of Ballard's disaster lies in that they are not

allegories. The characters do not have a metonymical value, and their errands are not to be related to

anything else than their own psychological progressions. Admittedly, some characters can be seen as

portrays of a generic class, such as Lomax, the tycoon in The Drought, but most of the time, they exist

as individuals rather than stereotypes. Eventually, we could even be led to think that the disaster itself,

is only related to an individual, closely linked to the mental state of the main character, with its generic

consequences being only side-effects of this peculiar experience.

23

Once more, though, it is important to notice that The Wind from Nowhere does not follow this

pattern. It is in many ways a fairly classical disaster novel, with people trying to survive, cautious

descriptions of the destruction caused by the wind, and so on. The main reason for this seems to be

that the novel was one of Ballard's first productions, although it was published only in 1962, the same

year as The Drowned World. The story – the first novel that Ballard ever wrote with publication in

mind - was written over a two-week holiday. He considered it as his final attempt to become a

professional writer, after having written only short stories for six years. This may explain why he tried

to stick to the conventions of the sub-genre, whose most important writers in those years happened to

be another Englishman, John Wyndham (The Day of the Triffids...), aiming for a commercial success

rather than trying to promote his creativity.

However, although they tend to be blurred by the weight of the conventions of the sub-genre,

The Wind from Nowhere presents us with some of the themes that Ballard developed in his later

novels. There is, for instance, this two-ways link between the wind and Hardoon, who is building a

pyramid to his own glory, evocative of Ballard's later heroes ambiguous relationships with the

disasters around them. There is also this strange apathy which prevents Maitland to achieve anything

of importance, an apathy which finds an echo in the behaviours of Sanders, Kerans and Ransom.

Therefore, to a certain extent, it is legitimate to consider that The Wind from Nowhere is a part of a

tetralogy, and not an isolated effort, although Ballard's most original features are certainly harder to

spot than in his other novels11.

A comparison between The Drowned World and The Kraken Wakes

A few paragraphs ago, we mentioned John Wyndham, as one of the major disaster stories

writers. To continue our exploration of the ambiguous relationships between Ballard's writings and the

sub-genre, it seems interesting to compare one of his novels, The Drowned World, with one of

Wyndham's most famous works, The Kraken Wakes. This comparison appears all the more relevant

since the two novels take place in a similar background: London almost entirely drowned in the ocean

(actually, only a third of Wyndham's novel takes place there, but this is the part we will focus on).

The Kraken Wakes was first published in 1953, nine years before The Drowned World, at a time

when Wyndham was already a widely popular writer, thanks to The Day of the Triffids (1951), one of

the best-known disaster novels. The plot of The Kraken Wakes is deeply reminiscent of Wells' The

War of the Worlds, and presents the reader with a first person account of the invasion of the Earth by

creatures from outer space. Strange fireballs fall into the deepest part of the oceans, and soon

afterwards, ships are attacked. The humans retaliate with new inventions, to regain the advantage at

sea. However, the invaders, the 'bathies', starts striking on the coasts and taking prisoners, with organic

11 However, we shall see in part III that this initial judgement might have to be re-evaluated in the light of a more detailed analysis of the construction of the four novels.

24

tanks and engineered jellyfish. Once again, measures are taken, and the attacks stop. Later in the

novel, it is discovered that the invaders have initiated the melting of the Arctic ice, causing the water

level to rise all over the world. Eventually, as Michael – the narrator – and his wife are struggling to

survive in a non-submerged part of Cornwall, they learn that the invaders have been defeated, thanks

to ultra-sonic waves, and that the British government is active again.

At some point, during the rise of the water, Michael and his wife live in the highest floor of a

building in London, while the water level is rising. It is conceivable that this vision might have

inspired Ballard, when he decided to set the action of The Drowned World over a submerged London.

However, those similar settings only underline the originality of Ballard's vision, and its refusal of the

conventions of disaster stories. This appears clearly in the two following extracts, where the two

authors describe superficially similar scenes:

Further away, fountains, lamp posts, traffic lights, and statues thrust up here and there. On the far side,

and down as much as we could see of Whitehall, the surface was as smooth as a canal. A few trees

still stood, and in them sparrows chattered. Starlings had not yet deserted St Martin's Church, but the

pigeons were all gone, and on many of their customary perches gulls stood, instead. (The Kraken

Wakes, 221-222)

Screeching like a dispossed Banshee, a large hammer-nosed bat soared straight out of the narrow

inlets off the creek and swerved straight towards the cutter. Its sonar confused by the labyrinth of

giant webs spun by the colonies of wolf spiders, it missed the wire hood above Kerans' head by only a

few feet, and then sailed away along the line of submerged office blocks, gliding in and out of the

huge sail-like fronds of the fern-trees sprouting from their roofs. Suddenly, as it passed one of the

projecting cornices, a motionless stone-headed creature snapped out and plucked the bat from the air.

(DW 17-18)

Even in those few lines, Ballard's choices are made apparent. While Wyndham considers the

catastrophe as a layer over the natural order of things ('instead'), Ballard's landscape has its own logic,

its own food chain, in other words, it exists by itself, and not in reference to the past. This, in turn,

explains that Ballard's characters do not really intend to restore the world to its previous state. Not

only are they profoundly unable to do so, but they also realise that this previous state does not exist

anymore. Wyndham's heroes, on the other hand, never abandon their conventional representation of

the world, even when this image should be shattered by the events. It is symptomatic that they still

refer to the place they see as 'Whitehall', while Kerans has to asks himself whether the city he lives in

'had [...] once been Berlin, Paris or London ?'(DW 9).

Similarly, those extracts present us with the issue of the focus. Wyndham's novel uses a first-

person narration, but the hero happens to be a journalist. Thus, all the events are described in a purely

objective way, with the emotions of the characters being limited to very generic feeling (impatience,

25

fear, excitement...). Throughout the book, this initial choice is even reinforced by the frequent use of

pseudo articles or discourses, a device frequently found in other disaster novels. The objective here is

obviously to recreate an 'objective' reality, through a familiar tone, while providing the largest possible

scope on the events.

Ballard, on the contrary, opts for a third person narrative, but even in this short extract, it is

obvious that the narration is biased by Kerans perceptions ('screaming like a dispossed Banshee').

Besides, everything we are shown or described is also seen, heard or felt by Kerans. The only

exception takes place between page 21 and 23, when Ballard describes the events that have led to the

rise of the water level. Those three pages could actually belong to either book, and they betray

Ballard's effort to attach his novel to a recognisable sub-genre, to provide the reader with a landmark,

in an otherwise disorienting novel. Overall, this choice of focus is not only a stylistic option, since it

also indicates the kind of link the characters have with their environment. Kerans literally create the

landscape around him, since he shapes our perception of this landscape, Wyndham characters are only

used as the literary equivalents of cameras: their only function is to provide us with a picture.

This comparison and those two extracts confirms the main differences we had already spotted

between Ballard's narratives and the conventions of the disaster novel:

- the catastrophe is conceived as a new reality, not as a modification of what existed beforehand

- the story focuses more on the character and on individual behaviour rather than on global events

In a Word

It would be logical to wonder if, after all, Ballard's four novels belong to the disaster sub-genre,

since they depart from a fair number of its conventions. However, despite their peculiarities, it is hard

to deny them this classification. Ballard does refuse a fair number of the clichés and distinctive

features of the sub-genre, yet he does use this unique characteristic of the disaster stories: the disaster

itself. Obviously, the main interest of the tetralogy does not lie in its belonging to a given sub-genre,

but it is nevertheless a powerful influence on his writing (especially, as we have seen, on The Wind

from Nowhere), that is not to be ignored.

Ballard himself acknowledged this inheritance when he accepted to write an introduction to the

'Cataclysms and Doom' section of The Visual Encyclopedia of Science-Fiction, in 1977. His short

analysis begins with these words: 'Visions of world cataclysm constitutes one of the most powerful

and most mysterious of all the categories of science-fiction...' (UGM, 208)

26

World War II as a Background

War: The possibility at last exists that war may be defeated on the linguistic plane. If war is an

extreme metaphor, we may defeat it by devising metaphors that are even more extreme. (UGM 279)

As we saw in the first part, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were at the heart of most

of the changes that science fiction underwent during the second half of the twentieth century. Actually,

the tremendous moral revaluation that took place during the war would probably have been sufficient

to bring important changes to the genre, even without the advent of the atom bomb itself.

In the case of the disaster novel, this influence of WWII is especially noticeable, since the war

provided the writers with a fearful approximation of what a realistic major-scale catastrophe would

look like. Therefore, the disaster novels written after 1945 can all be said to take their roots in the

second global conflict, whether directly (all the stories revolving around an atomic apocalypse) or

more subtly, through their imageries and sets of reference (see the title of Disch's Genocide, for

example).

Ballard's writings are no exception to this rule; on the contrary, the influence of the Second

World War on them is especially strong. Up to the point where it becomes the underlying reference of

all the catastrophes depicted in his tetralogy. In that sense, his memories of WWII can be seen as an

important boundary of this early work, one of its shaping components.

It goes without saying that our goal is not seek to prove that Ballard's novels contain explicit or

implicit autobiographical elements. Not only would it be quite redundant, for Ballard admitted this fact

himself on several occasions, but it would also be pointless. A literary work is always, to a certain

extent, connected to or inspired by the life of its author.

Instead, we will try to show that the references to the Second World War – or, more accurately,

to Ballard's experience of it – are one of the defining elements of the four novels of our study.

Therefore, pointing out those references and their function in those novels allows us to understand

better the framework within which Ballard installed is creation. We already studied the major

component of this framework, through the notion of genre (and sub-genre), and this chapter will allow

us to complete our description. Once this initial analysis is complete, we will be able to expand our

analysis in the rest of the memoir, after having shown that this framework is a mere guideline to

Ballard's writing, and is by no mean sufficient to understand it fully.

Some Biographical Elements

It would obviously be absurd to discuss the autobiographical aspects of Ballard's novel without

providing some information about his life. Fortunately, Ballard himself has written a lot about his

27

childhood during the war. However, he consciously altered most of this material to turn it into two

novels, Empire of the Sun12 and The Kindness of Women13. We will discuss later the peculiar problem

arising because of those alterations, but it is important to mention already that those novels will have

to be our primary sources for the rest of this chapter. Notwithstanding this problem, some reliable data

are available about the general facts of Ballard's life:

He was born on 15 November 1930, in China. He was the son of a managing director for a

subsidiary of a Manchester textile. In 1942, he was interned in a camp of prisoners of war in Lunghua,

near Shanghai, where he stayed until the end of the conflict. He then went to England, studied

medicine, then English, before abandoning his studies to join the Royal Air Force, for two years. His

first short-story was published in 1956, and he finally became a professional writer in 1962, after the

publication of The Wind from Nowhere. It is also worth mentioning that his wife died in 1964 (they

had been married for nine years), that he has three children, and that he is still alive to this day. There

would of course be a lot more to say about his life, but nothing really relevant for this part of the

study.

We will especially focus on those three years he spent in the prisoner camp, while he was

between twelve and fifteen, although for him the war started in 1937, when the Japanese invaded

China. Ballard has often affirmed that an important part of his recurring visions were born during

those few years in Shanghai and in Lunghua. This impregnation can legitimately be said to shape

Ballard's work, aesthetically and thematically. However, as a preliminary step, it is necessary to

address the issue of the origin of the information about his life.

The Issue of the Source

One of the major problems with all biographies is that they have to rely a lot on what the person

has to say about himself or herself. This is all the more true when those biographies deal with wart-

time events, when witnesses and external confirmations are often very difficult to find.

Therefore, it is not surprising that most of the material at our disposal should come from Ballard

himself, and from his own description of his early years. Some of this information is almost fully

reliable, assuming that Ballard's memories are accurate. This includes articles published in

newspapers, or answers given in interviews, where there are no reasons to think that he may be lying

or altering the truth. From these sources, we can gather the biographical elements provided above, as

well as a few interesting details. However, those accounts are often very short (especially during

interviews), or pretty synthetic, which makes them useful to discover the raw facts, but next to useless

when it comes to understanding the profound effects those facts had (and still have) on Ballard's

writings. The only notable exception is a rather long article published in the Sunday Times, and

12 James Ballard, Empire of the Sun, London: Victor Gollantz, 198413 James Ballard, The Kindness of Women, London: HarperCollins, 1991

28

entitled 'The End of My War', which provides a detailed summary (but still only a summary), of his

life up to 1945.

Because of this general lack of information, it will be necessary to put to use the most extensive

collections of war-time memories that Ballard ever wrote, the diptych Empire of the Sun and The

Kindness of Women. Two novels. This presents us with a delicate problem, since it makes it necessary

to be extremely cautious, even suspicious, when dealing with materials coming from any of these two

books.

At first glance, Empire of the Sun may look like a reliable autobiography. Though its form is

that of a novel, it focus on the life of a character named Jim (or Jamie), aged 11 in 1941, just like

Ballard was. However, important anomalies soon appear, that dispel this initial impression. The role of

Ballard's parents, for example, is noticeably different from what it was in reality; they are absent from

the prisoner camp, while they do not seem to have been separated from their son during the actual

events. Overall, the global events mentioned appeared to be accurate (or at least coherent with what is

otherwise known of Ballard's life), but the details are altered or entirely made up. Ballard himself

summed up his intent in an interview about The Kindness of Women:

It's partly fictional. I'd say the backgrounds are generally true to the way they were in real life, as in

the case of Empire of the Sun; but the foregrounds, particularly the characters, are inventions. It's a

matter of trying to reach some sort of psychological truth that you can't get in a real life biography.14

This quotation actually helps us a lot, for it allows us to consider that the psychological issues

described in the two novels are 'accurate'. In other words, it is legitimate to use them to support our

arguments as long as they are not related to really specific characters or events. This does not mean

that we can forget to question Ballard's frankness, but it does allow us to use those two novels as

relevant material to a certain extent.

A Thematic Influence

As we mentioned earlier, Ballard's wartime memories supplied him with a good deal of the

theme and imageries that impregnates his work. We will see later how peculiar visions of his

childhood were transferred into his writing, but first, it is interesting to note that the plots of our four

novels often mimic episodes of Ballard's real life.

On the most global scale, those novels describe places of modern and organised life that become

suddenly deserted when the catastrophe occurs. The characters then try to survive before

understanding that they have to adapt to the new situation in a way or another. Ballard experienced a

similar discovery when the Japanese invaded the international settlement, and sent him to the prisoner 14 'Interview with J.G. Ballard', Albedo 1, No 2, Autumn 1993

29

camp after few days. The general structure of Empire of the Sun is effectively the same as that of the

novels we are focusing on. However, since this brings us back to the ambiguity we just mentioned

about the nature of Empire of the Sun and its ‘sequel’, it seems less risky to focus on more

dissimulated and precise motifs.

The most apparent and recurrent of these motifs is that of the prisoner camp/ghetto/prison. In all

four novels, the characters find themselves imprisoned or living in a camp at some point. In The Wind

from Nowhere, Maitland, Lanyon and Olsen are sequestrated by Hardoon's private army, in chapter

eight. In The Drowned World, multiple episodes of imprisonment and detainment arise, and in the

central scene of the novel, Kerans is held prisoner by Strangman. In The Drought, there are two main

apparitions of this obsession with the imprisonment: first, when Ransom and the others want to reach

the sea, and are stopped by a 'double wire fence' (DR 93), guarded by the army and the police. Then,

another camp appears a few chapters later, on the salt flats, halfway between a prisoner camp

(complete with a wire fence and a dictatorial leader), and a shelter. Finally, the plot of The Crystal

World revolves around a leper hospital, isolated in the jungle, and once more delineated by a

'perimeter fence' (CW 130).

Strikingly enough, in many cases (notably in The Drought and The Crystal World), those camps

have a twofold role: they prevent people from coming out, but also from coming in. This fact

strengthens the parallel we have been drawing with the Lunghua camp a lot, for Ballard often

described his prisoner camp as a shelter (notably at the end of the war) as well as a device of

internment. This ambiguous relationship has an important dramatic function in Empire of the Sun, but

he also mentioned it in his non-fictional comments about his life. See for instance this quotation from

'The End of My War': 'I looked back at the camp, at the intense, crowed world that had been my home.

[...] I ran back to the wire, glad to be within the safety of the camp again' (UGM 284).

In a similar way, and no matter how far-fetched it may seem, there is reasonable ground to think

that Ballard drew from his own reaction to the war to elaborate the psychological profile of his main

characters. On a superficial level, the main characters of the four novels can be described as oblivious

to the disasters that surround them, once they recover from the initial shock. They try to adapt to those

disasters rather than to understand them or to fight them. James/Jim in Empire of the Sun and The

Kindness of Women adopts a similar attitude. His first impression of the war is a fine example of his

impressive detachment: 'Had the war really started? I was expecting something [...] organised and

disciplined'15. If we refer back to Ballard's wish to attain a 'psychological truth', there can be no doubt

that James's attitude reflects his own to a wide extent. The conclusion of 'The End of My War'

confirms this identification, through its chilling last sentence: 'But to survive war, especially as a

civilian, one needs to accept the rules it imposes and even, as I did, learn to welcome it.' With a

minimal semantic adaptation, this motto would equally suit Kerans, Ransom, or Sanders.

15 The Kindness of Women 19

30

Thus, while Ballard's heroes are not to be mistaken with their creator, it seems hardly deniable

that their reactions and defining features were elaborated from first-hand experience.

An Aesthetic Influence

It is far from surprising that Ballard's wartime memories should have modelled the mood and

the obsessions of his novels, given the importance of those events on his own psychological

development. On the other hand, it is more unexpected that those memories also provided him with

recurrent images and visions. Those images have impregnated his work ever since, but are especially

present in his first novels. Interestingly enough, some of them images have actually become a kind of

trademark, an enduring motif serving as a code between the writer and its reader. It is commonly

believed that Ballard created those images to strengthen and illustrate his stories while in fact they pre-

existed to those stories and as such, they shaped them instead of being created by them.

We have already alluded to the atmosphere of emptiness and desolation found in Ballard's

disaster novels as well as in his autobiographical efforts. This atmosphere is, in both cases, created

through specific graphic elements, whose origin can often be traced back to authentic memories. Let

us just consider the description of Hamilton, the small town in The Drought, after most of its

inhabitants fled to the shore:

Most of the houses were empty, windows boarded and nailed up, swimming pools emptied of their

last reserve of water. Lines of abandoned cars were parked under the withering plane trees and the

road was littered with discarded cans and cartons. The bright flint-like dust lay in drifts around the

fences. Refuses fires smouldered unattended on the burnt-out lawns, their smoke wandering over the

roofs. (DR 25)

All the elements here serve a dramatic purpose, and seem fairly logical in the context of a dry

and deserted town. In other words, the image seems to serve the story, to arise from it as a natural

evocative device. Yet, in an utterly different setting, The Drowned World presents us with a similar

scene, when Strangman starts to drain a lagoon (the action itself evokes the 'drained swimming pool'):

He gazed out brightly at the emerging streets in the dim light around them, the humped back of cars

and buses appearing through the surface. Giant anemones and starfish flopped limply in the shallows,

collapsing kelp straggled out of the windows. (DW 122)

While the context and the background are utterly different, Ballard's description and

associations are almost unchanged, barring a few concession to the plot (the burnt-out lawn are turned

into starfishes). This tends to prove that this image of empty streets with drained swimming-pools is

31

indeed exterior to those two novels, and the connection with Shanghai is soon made apparent when

studying the rest of Ballard's work. In Empire of the Sun, a whole chapter is even entitled 'The Drained

Swimming Pool', which comprises a paragraph where Jim cycles past 'parked Opels and Mercedes'

(Empire of the Sun 67). The aforementioned 'The End of My War' article also brings us a final

confirmation about the authenticity of this image, although its origin slightly differs from the one

suggested in Empire of the Sun. 'Neglected by its owner, the swimming pool had begun to drain.

Looking down at its sinking surface, I felt than more than water was running away' (UGM 287).

Overall, there can be no doubt that this image was strong enough to lead Ballard to include it,

consciously or not, in most of his novels. In The Crystal World, for example, its echo can be found in

the multiple allusions to 'drained fountains'. It is however absent from The Wind from Nowhere.

Another recurring figure, less striking but nonetheless present, is that of the mad dandy, wealthy

or impressive characters who seem to have succumbed to a peculiar kind of mental disease in the light

of the catastrophe. Their literary prototype is of course Kurtz, from Conrad's Heart of Darkness, but

there is more to this recurring character than a mere reference to one of Ballard’s favourite authors 16.

While they borrow some traits from Conrad's emblematic character, they bear a resemblance to

Yrkoon - Elric's cousin in Moorcock writing – with their delusion about their own greatness – and

have their own peculiarities, which can not be explained by literary influences.

The most kurtzian of those dandies, in our four novels, is undeniably Strangman, from The

Drowned World. Accompanied by his gang of black looters/servants/adepts, he possesses all the

characteristics of Kurtz. Like him, he is a white man (actually an albinos) leading a tribe of

superstitious black men, like him he has impossible projects (draining the lagoon, surviving the

coming of the storm), and above all, like him he appears to have lost his mind during the catastrophe.

Needless to say, he always dresses in clean and elegant suits, to add a final touch to his deranged

colonialist appearance and bearing.

In the other three novels, the 'mad dandies' owe less to Conrad, probably because their

respective stories would not allow such a character to exist. Yet, they share distinctive traits with

Strangman. In particular, they are possessed by an illusion about their own grandeur. In The Wind

from Nowhere, the character of Hardoon is obsessed by his building of a pyramid as a challenge to the

wind. In that sense, he behaves exactly like Strangman, who tries to drain the lagoon, to beat back the

disaster, and like him, he eventually fails. In The Drought, Richard Lomax embodies yet another

similar character. He challenges the drought by staying in a deserted town, surviving with his Caliban,

Quilter, thanks to water drained from hidden sources. Eventually, the water will run out. It is important

to notice that the three of them fight the disaster, but still adapt to it a lot better than most of the

protagonists. Finally, in The Crystal world, the 'mad dandy' archetype is slightly less important, but

still present in Thorensen, who survives in the heart of the crystallised forest.

16 When Ballard came back to Shanghai in 1991, he playfully announced to his host, James Runcie: 'Hello James, Mr Kurtz returns to the Heart of Darkness' (UGM 173)

32

Those four characters have similar obsessions, but they also have other common features. They

are rich, they have servants (event though their relationships with them are often ambiguous), they

wear expensive European clothes ('Fabergé style' DR 40)... They are also characterised by the

arrogance of their lodgings, from Hardoon's pyramid to Lomax's villa and Strangman's over-furnished

boat. Despite the fact that they are not physically described (or maybe because of this non-

individuation), it is hard to ignore that they are reflections of the same original character or archetype.

Applying the same logic as before, we can infer from this that this character pre-exists those

novels, and comes from an outer source. It would be temping to see in it a mere reflection of Kurtz,

but this hypothesis would not account for some common points of the four characters that are not to be

found in Conrad's creation. Besides, Empire of the Sun, presents us with a Mr. Maxted, who possesses

most of the physical and psychological peculiarities of our quartet. He dresses well, he is an architect

(like Hardoon), he has a fascinating house, and he also appears as a kind of free spirit, by whom Jim is

somewhat fascinated: 'Jim admired Mr. Maxted, an architect turned entrepreneur who had designed

the Metropole Theatre and numerous Shanghai nightclubs. [...] Mr. Maxted was the perfect type of

Englishman who had adapted himself to Shanghai'17. Unfortunately, this character is not mentioned

anywhere in Ballard's non-novelised comments about his life, or in The Kindness of Women, apart

from a short reference to an architect in 'The End of My War'. We can therefore not be assured of his

existence, or of the veracity of his portrayal. However, the ground seem sufficient to affirm that

Maxted and the other four 'mad dandies' are based on an actual individual, or on a combination of

several of them. At the very least, they were created as a reaction to the stereotype of the British living

in pre-war Shanghai 'Many of [them] had been intoxicated for years, moving through the day from

office to lunch to dinner and nightclub in a haze of dry martini' (UGM 291). As such, it can

legitimately be considered as another instance of Ballard’s use of his memories as material for his

fiction.

Other characters are also repeated throughout the disaster novels, whose origins can be traced

back to Ballard's wartime acquaintances, although with even less certainty. The recurrent priests and

preachers (the Reverend Johnstone in The Drought, Balthus in The Crystal World) for example, seem

to have their origin in the 'ferocious English clergyman' (UGM 179) who served as a headmaster in

Shanghai.

In a Word

Overall, there can be no doubt that Ballard used his memories from his childhood during the

war as one of the main sources for his novels. Situations, characters, landscapes... even in the short

analysis conducted here, we spotted a number of motifs whose repetitions and resemblance with actual

17 Empire of the Sun 27

33

events can not be held for a coincidence. This goes far beyond the simple notion of inspiration and

autobiographical bias that can be found in most novel. And it is noteworthy that this is a very self-

conscious method, which Ballard led to its logical conclusion when he wrote Empire of the Sun.

This novel constitutes the definite proof that he deliberately used and reused those peculiar

memories to give his novels the shape of a disguised autobiography. When he eventually wrote

Empire of the Sun, more than twenty years after The Drowned World, it is symptomatic that he chose

to adopt exactly the same structure as in his initial works, thus acknowledging their precursor roles.

34

Seeing the framework

When trying to describe Ballard's early works, it is often tempting to categorise them broadly, if

only for the sake of simplicity. And this tendency is even reinforced by the fact that his writings

shifted further and further away from the conventions of genres towards the end of the sixties, making

those first attempts seem pretty straightforward in comparison. In an oversimplifying reverse

movement, critics have tended to consider those more classical first attempts as purely conventional.

To use Michel Delville's words, the first Ballard is known as 'the science-fiction writer, famous for his

disaster novels and stories of entropic dissolution.'18 If we add to this definition the heavy influence of

his wartime memories on his early novels, it could be tempting to believe that we have reached a

sufficient, albeit superficial, comprehension of what those early novels are made of.

However, as Delville himself points out later in his introduction, 'Ballard does not let himself be

assimilated to traditional generic categories either within or outside the boundaries of so called "genre"

fiction'19. This is what we tried to demonstrate in the first two parts of this study: Ballard wrote science

fiction, but he also redefined it radically, along with the other authors of the New Wave. In a way,

what he wrote belongs to science fiction only because the modern definition of the genre was adjusted

to include his writings. The same logic prevails with the disaster novel, as a sub-genre. There is no

doubt that he consciously chose to write within this peculiar set of conventions, which was a kind of

British tradition, but he did so in a very non-traditional way. Our comparison with The Kraken Wakes

showed us to what extent he ignored or reshaped the conventions of the sub-genre.

Finally, regarding the importance of his wartime memories, it has to be noted that Ballard

voluntarily made them apparent instead of just including them among the various elements that

constituted his inspiration. He used them consciously, almost analytically, so as to establish precisely

the importance they should take, from negligible in The Wind from Nowhere to dominant in The

Drowned World. This is the reason why it is so easy to spot those elements, to organise them and to

trace them back to the original events or persons that inspired them. Ballard not only chose to use

those memories, he made them apparent (the drained swimming pool has even become a favourite

target for unsatisfied critics).

The idea that he was aware of the importance and the role of those elements can actually be

applied equally to his use of the notions of genre and sub-genre. Ballard chose to write science fiction

and more precisely disaster novels exactly as he chose to use his own memories: as literary tools. In

other words, he did not lock himself into a genre or into a heavily autobiographic trend, but he used

those as the starting points from which he would be able to elaborate his personal work.

This is the reason why trying to define Ballard's early writing in term of broad categories can

only be the expression of a deep misunderstanding. At best, it is a huge approximation. Science

18 Michel Delville, JG Ballard, Plymouth: Noycott House (1998), 119 Ibid, 2

35

fiction, the disaster novel, his childhood memories... those are not the boundaries of Ballard's work; on

the contrary, they are at the heart of his work, the starting point around which he created his first four

novels (and some subsequent ones as well, High-Rise notably). Thus, trying to define the construction

of those novels as the sum of these three elements is as useful a saying that Empire of the Sun is a

novel about the Second World War, it is true, but grossly inaccurate, and it also misses the point

entirely. Ballard’s novels are just too complex to be summed up in one sentence.

This is after all, the reason why this memoir exists.

36

II. Dissolution, Regression?

37

In the already mentioned introduction to his essay on Ballard, Michel Delville describes the

author's quartet of disaster novels as 'stories of entropic dissolution'. This qualifies adequately the

content of those four stories, but unfortunately, it could also be applied to pretty much all the disaster

novels ever written. And while Delville amply proves later on that he has a clear understanding of

what Ballard's writing is about, his initial description needs to be considerably refined.

In the first part, we studied the axes around which Ballard's early work is organised, and tried to

analyse the common mistake which leads to reducing his first four novels to their most salient

characteristics. In the course of this analysis, we discussed the correspondence between those stories

and the stereotypes of the disaster novel; in this part, we will try to refine our initial observations, by

describing and understanding Ballard's treatment of the crumbling apart of civilisation.

An especially interesting and original aspect of this treatment is the choice of a recurrent

bourgeois hero, be it a scientist or a doctor, as a symbol of the established society. This is also, of

course, to be connected to the recurrent opponents that those 'heroes' will have to face, who also

belong to the bourgeois culture, although they are noticeably better off than the heroes.

However, surprisingly, the psychological developments of those heroes in the course of the

novels do not parallel the stereotypes of the dissolving civilisation. If we assume that the hero is

indeed a symbol of the modern civilisation, or, more accurately, of the potentiality of this civilisation

(this is science fiction, after all), then Ballard's stories become far more ambiguous that they seem to

be at first. The apparent regression and collapse of both the society and the main characters come to be

seen as mere accidents in the quest for a new reality, a new psychology.

Obviously, this interpretation (confirmed several times by the author himself) can only be

understood as an alternative psychoanalytical theory, and as such, needs to be replaced in a more

global context. Ballard has often affirmed his conviction of the deep influence of psychoanalysis on

his writing as well as on the world at large, and it was one of the main interests of the New Wave:

'After Freud's exploration within the psyche, it is now the outer world which will have to be eroticised

and quantified' (UGM 88). Interestingly enough, this quotation is taken from a text originally

published in New-Worlds in 1966, the year when Ballard published The Crystal World, the last book

of the disaster tetralogy. We will try to underline and understand how he applied this definition of a

'new frontier' to his writing.

38

The Bourgeois Hero as a Subject of Experiment

I think most people realise that for all its complexity contemporary society is an artificial construct

that can be moved offstage at a moment's notice, as people find at times of war, as I found during the

Second World War as a child in Shanghai. You know, reality is just a stage set that can be pushed

aside, and a very different set of rules can then apply.20

In the previous part, we characterised the recurrent characters present in the four novels, and

described most of them as reflections of a small number of actual individuals, taken from Ballard's

memories of his childhood. However, during this analysis, we purposefully omitted to mention another

of those recurrent characters, who nevertheless happens to be the most important aspect of those four

novels. This character is obviously the hero himself.

Let us have a first look at the description of the main characters of each story, as provided early

in the four novel:

- Dr. Donald Maitland, in The Wind from Nowhere. As the novel begins, we learn that he has

just left his wife, that he is about to fly away from her to Montreal, and incidentally that he works as a

researcher in a hospital.

- Dr. Robert Kerans, in The Drowned World. In the submerged and tropical world of the novel,

Kerans is the closest possible approximation of Maitland. He works at the biological station, under the

supervision of the army, and sleeps in a suite at the Ritz (or rather what is left of it).

- Dr. Charles Ransom, in The Drought. As the drought slowly progresses, he lives in a

conformable houseboat, on a river, with ample provisions of water. He used to work at the Mount

Royal hospital before it closed (hence his title of 'doctor'), and he is separated from his wife.

- Dr. Edward Sanders, in The Crystal World. A fourth doctor. Unlike the other, Sanders is still

in activity at the beginning of the story, though. He is on his way to a leprosy near Mont Royal (!) to

rejoin a couple of friend, Suzanne and Max. He has had an affair with Suzanne, until a few months

earlier, but Max does not know about it.

The similitude between those four characters does not stop there, but it would be fastidious to

provide more details, since it is fairly obvious that they are all, once more, reflections of a single

archetype. Apart from 'Maitland', their last names are even almost anagrams. Four doctors, four well -

established characters displaying all the symptoms of a deep integration in the most futile aspects of

the modern life, sentimentally as well as materially. Symptomatically enough, they are all presented

on a boat or in a taxi, as if to underline their dependence on artificial ways of producing movement.

And even more significantly, those modern means of transportation are all brought to an unnatural

20 'Grave New World', interview by David Gale, on BBC3 (1998)

39

state of immobility when we are introduced to the character (Maitland cannot fly away from England,

Kerans and Ransom are moored into harbours, and Sanders is stopped for a passport control). The

symbolic charge, here, is too obvious not to be noticed. Those pure products of an established

civilisation are all in a situation of failure, which should bring them to move away from their previous

life, and they have to resort to artificial ways of escape. Unfortunately, those modern means of

transportation can not provide the needed help, because of an inherent loophole: being part of the

system (the established civilisation), they can not carry anyone outside this system. From this point on,

it seems logical that the only way for the characters to escape from their problems will be to alienate

themselves from the norms of the society, to seek a new way out. Since civilisation has conquered the

whole world, the way out is to be searched through an inner travel.

Let us retrace this itinerary step by step, first by studying the multiple characteristics of

Ballard's vision of the modern hero. First come two attributes that can arguably be considered to

define the post-war occidental civilisation.

Consumerism and Logic

It is quite clear that those attributes are very significant to Ballard, judging from the heavy

emphasis he puts on them during his initial descriptions of his heroes.

Consumerism, to start with it, is to be taken in the widest possible acceptation. We do not try to

suggest that the Ballardian heroes are manic consumers, only that they fully accept the logic of the

consumer society. Ballard underlines this by describing their attachment to specific goods or places.

Ransom, in The Drought, provides us with an interesting demonstration of this ambiguous

relationship with material goods. His houseboat, for example, is contrasted from the very beginning of

the novel with the 'derelict barge' (DR 1) in which Quilter and his mother live, thus defining the

character through the richness of his home. The beginning of the second chapter ('Mementoes'), is

however a much stronger hint at Ransom's intimate relationships with his belongings: 'Helping himself

to what was left of the whisky in the galley cabinet, Ransom sat down on the edge of the sink and

began to scrape away the tar stains on his cotton trousers' (DR 12). This sentence sets the mood of the

two-pages chapter, entirely devoted to an extensive description of the way Ransom got to acquire his

houseboat, and to a meticulous enumeration of its content (books, photographs, paintings). Throughout

this enumeration, it is explicitly stated that Ransom's acquisitions and belongings are the receptacles of

his memories. Ransom, as a character, is defined by the sum of the material goods he owns.

40

The past had slipped away, leaving behind it, like the debris of a vanished glacier, a moraine of

unrelated mementoes, the blunted nodes of the memories that now surrounded him in the houseboat.

[...] Here, his half-conscious memories of childhood and the past had been isolated and quantified,

like the fragments of archaic minerals sealed behind glass cases in the museum of geology. (DR 13)

As the story goes by, the references to Ransom's link with material goods become less and less

frequent, with the exception of his recurrent concern about water, which can be seen as a minor

concession to the needs of the plot.

In the other three novels, there is no such explicit passage as this short chapter, but Kerans,

Sanders and Maitland all share this attachment for their belongings. See for instance the violent way in

which Sanders reacts when he discovers that a stranger, Ventress, has hidden a gun into his suitcase.

He sees the intrusion as an exposure of his secret motivations, a powerful sexual symbol. Here again,

the identification of the psychology of the character with his belonging is patent. 'The smuggling of

the pistol unknown to himself seemed to symbolise, in sexual terms as well, all his hidden motives for

coming to Port Matarre' (CW 25).

As to Kerans, this attachment/identification is to be found mostly in his relationship with his

still munificent room at the former Ritz hotel. Maitland, for his part, is presented to us as a fairly

materialistic character from the very beginning of The Wind from Nowhere, reflecting on the salary he

could have earned if he had chosen another field of study, while the world collapses around him.

This preoccupation with material belongings actually reflects a metonymical process often used

in disaster movies, with the destruction of buildings and monuments hinting at the collapse of the

whole civilisation. Nevertheless, Ballard's choice of individual representatives of the consumer society

adds a critical overtone to what could otherwise have become a mere cliché. It emphasises the

philosophical questioning at hand, by making consumerism appear as a case-by-case choice rather

than as the natural and unquestioned state of the civilisation

Next come the second precept of modern life, rationality.

Rationality is indeed, a defining attribute of Ballard's main characters. All four of them are

doctors, the official guardians of science, honoured by the system. Logic is, by many aspects, the

leitmotiv of their lives, at least until the beginning of the disaster.

Kerans stands as an exception in the quartet, because of his self-awareness. He is conscious

from the beginning of the novel that his scientific universe is in an advanced state of decay.

'Rationalising, Kerans told himself that he had been wise to remain in the hotel [...] but he knew that

his real motive was his acceptance that little now remained to be done' (DW 8).

The other three, however, do not share this realisation, and resort to logic to justify their

decisions, no matter how stupid or impractical they may otherwise sound. Maitland's departure from

England, for instance, is described as having been 'long pondered'(WN 10), while it is quite obvious

41

that he is only adopting the easiest way to get away from his wife. The same kind of erratic behaviour

can be found in The Drought, when we are explained that Ransom moored his houseboat 'on the

exposed bank, below the motorway', because 'the slip road near by gave him a quick access to

Hamilton and the hospital' (DR 12). The logic of an increased mobility leads him to accept

remorselessly the numerous contrarieties of the place, including the smell of rotting fishes, or the

cigarette ends thrown from the bridge.

Even more significant is the way those characters hang on to logic when they see their universes

starting to crumble around them. Even as Sanders sees a satellite passing by, infected by the

'crystalline disease', he can only conjure scientific images to reassure himself: 'Thinking lamely that

perhaps the balloon might be breaking up, forming a cloud of aluminium like a gigantic mirror,

Sanders watched the satellite setting in the south-east' (CW 39). However, just like Kerans and the

others, he will have to revise his relationships to science and logic.

The questioning of the value of rationality is even more patent than the attack on consumerism.

Science is totally helpless in front of the catastrophe, and is even at its origin in The Drought.

Significantly enough, although the characters are supposed to be scientists, their particular talent is

shown as totally useless once the disaster begins. Sanders, for example, causes the horrible death of

Radek when he tries to save him from the 'crystalline disease', while he is supposed to be a doctor.

Overall, like consumerism, logic is attacked both as a global value, and as a personal philosophy,

failing in both cases to provide satisfying answers.

Incidentally, the term of 'bourgeois' appears as quite accurate to describe Ballard's main

characters. According to The Cambridge International Dictionary of English, the word means

'belonging to the middle-class [...] esp. in supporting established customs and values, and/or having a

strong interest in money and possessions'. A definition that fits Maitland and the others almost

perfectly, at least at the beginning of their respective novels. Besides, the connotations carried by the

word 'bourgeois' reflects the ambiguous role these characters have to play. The bourgeois is supposed

to be at the same time fairly individualist and well-integrated within the society, in the same way that

the characters stand for the society at large to a certain extent, while retaining an independence that

allows them to exist on their own. This independence is to a large extent what gives Ballard's novels

their dynamic, and, as we saw in the first part, it is one of the crucial differences with the conventions

of the disaster novel.

Immobility, Entropy

'Usually, Kerans woke at five, and reached the biological testing station in time to do at least four or

five hours work before the heat became intolerable, but this morning, he found himself reluctant to

leave the cool, air-curtained haven of the hotel suite.' (DW 7)

42

The opening scene of The Drowned World provides us once more with an interesting summary

of one of the theme of the story, a theme that can also be found in the other three novels, although

seldom expressed so clearly. The modern civilisation that is about to be shaken apart by the

catastrophe is portrayed as a realm of immobility and stagnation.

In The Drowned World, this theme is so important that it impregnates the whole setting, with its

endless lagoons, its silt bank and the impressive efforts required in order to move from one building to

another. The most recurrent lexical field, early in the novel, is that of a rotting, immobile world, with

its 'sluggish alligators' (DW 8), and its 'archipelagos that coalesced to form the solid jungles of the

southern massif' (DW 20). Kerans himself, as well as the other characters, are well aware that they are

trapped in a zone of immobility, perfectly symbolised by Kerans's room at the Ritz, from which he

refused to move.

In the other three novels, similar phenomenon occurs. Ransom, in particular, is especially

apathetic when it comes to leaving his houseboat and Mount Royal. He only resolves to do so after

almost everyone else has fled away to the sea. Even then, his progress is constantly impeded by the

remnant of the collapsing civilisation ('the tyres were punctured by the glass and metal on the road'

(DR 86)). Eventually, when he reaches the sea, he falls back into an even deeper state of immobility

and crystallisation, in the 'zone of nothingness' (DR 103) of the dunes, strikingly reminiscent of the

'time zone' (DW 97) into which Kerans enters after the departure of Riggs. His description of this zone,

without time or shape, where the notion of distance is abolished ('Even after an hour walk [...] the sea

remained as distant as ever' (DR 103)) locates it between a 'purgatory' (DR 113) and a repetition for

the thermal death of the universe.

In The Wind from Nowhere, this thematic is less prominent (as usual), but still discernible in the

numerous accounts of the difficulties encountered by the characters whenever they want to move from

one place to another. As the novel goes on, those travels become slower and slower, and their

increasing impracticability (Maitland uses a taxi, then a heavily armoured vehicle...) even becomes of

the motifs of the story. Eventually, like Kerans and Ransom, Maitland will have to stop moving

entirely, when he is sent to Hardoon's prison.

Finally, The Crystal World presents us with a background similar in many ways to what is to be

found in The Drowned World. Here, immobility is everywhere, in the crystallised forest. From the

very beginning, Sanders is stopped for a passport control, then he is stuck in Port Matarre, while

everybody seems to be wondering why he even considers moving away ('We don't want people

rushing there' (CW 28)). He does try to go on, but when he enters the forest, it becomes obvious that

he has to slow down, that the 'disaster' is bringing him slowly to a halt, just like the other three

characters. Unlike the others, though, Sanders resist the process of immobilisation, and only is right

arm is temporarily stuck in a 'frozen gauntlet' (CW 149). However, the end of the novel makes it quite

43

clear that he is about to go back to the crystallising forest, and probably settle there in another 'zone of

nothingness'.

The notion of 'bourgeois hero' itself is also linked with this notion of immobility, of stagnation,

through the connotation of the word, assimilated to political conservatism.

What is really interesting here is that although all the characters reach perfect immobility at

some point, they all begin their respective novels by an attempt to escape. More accurately, they try to

escape from the life they were living until a few years/months/weeks earlier, most of the time for

sentimental reasons.

This implies that those four characters are conscious that something is wrong with their lives,

and have been aware of this for some time when their respective story begin. Yet, when we get to

know them, they have not really changed, they are still representative examples of a privileged

middle-class, with a fair number of certitudes. In a word, they are still bourgeois. Besides, although

they have settled on boats, or have tried to take a plane, they have not moved geographically. Even

Sanders perception of Port Matarre is that of a 'nondescript port' (CW 16), complete with a 'Hotel

Europa', a town probably not that different from Fort Isabelle which he just left. When the novels

begin, those attempts to escape have already failed, and to a large extent, the characters are resigned to

their fate. At that point, their whole universes appear to have reached their ends, since they cannot

hope to change anymore. This triggers the process of crystallisation, of immobilisation that we

described earlier. This physical coming to a halt is of course paralleled by the appearance of more

subtle psychological numbness. As the civilisation grinds down to a halt (in The Drought in

particular), the characters gradually dissolve, until they reach a state of insensibility, where they are

immobile and emotionless. Only Sanders never quite reaches this state, but this is caused by the

narrower range of events described in The Crystal World than in the other three novels, and it does not

go against the general tendency.

The psychological pendant to the physical stagnation of the characters has often been called 'the

death of the affect', from Ballard's own words. Ransom and Kerans both reach this state, which is at

the heart of the collection of short stories The Atrocity Exhibition21, published a few years later. They

sink deeper and deeper into themselves, up to a point when they do not react as individuals anymore,

but as automatic devices, unable of experiencing any real emotion. Ransom tries to prevent this for a

long time, while on the beach, by living with Judith: ' only with each other could they keep alive some

faint shadow of their former personalities, [...] and arrest the gradual numbing of sense and identity

that was the unseen gradient of the dune limbo' (DR 113). However, he eventually realises that what

he 'feels' for her has been 'decided by wholly impersonal considerations', and reaches a point where his

former personality does not exist any longer.

21 See Michel Delville's analysis of this collection of 'condensed novels' in his essay on Ballard. The chapter is entitled 'The Death of the Affect'.

44

Kerans reaches this state in a more erratic fashion. His first attempt to bury his old personality,

after Riggs' departure, is disturbed by the arrival of Strangman and his crew, and he has to play a

social game for a little longer. Yet, when Strangman decides to have him tortured, Kerans ceases to be

human, and becomes a messianic figure, a 'stranded Neptune' (DW 139). From that point on, his

behaviour is mechanical, efficient, and freed from remorse or moral issues, although his previous

personalities makes a few cameo appearances (notably to settle his relationships with Beatrice). He

ceases to be a bourgeois hero.

An analogy can be made between this evolution towards a complete immobilisation of the

characters (both physically and psychically, as we have seen), and the notion of entropy in

thermodynamic. It is commonly accepted that in a system, the entropy can only become increasingly

important, until the whole system is homogenised, at which point nothing moves or exists per se

anymore. Applied to the most global conceivable system, this leads to the theory of the 'thermal death'

of the universe. What Ballard does here, is try to describe the progression of the entropy in the system

of our modern civilisation, or more accurately, in the smaller system of the civilisation as conceived

by a bourgeois hero.

This restriction is important, since it explains why Ballard's disaster novels do not have this

global range often associated with the genre. At the beginning of the novels, the system of values of

the heroes are in correlation with the society at large, but as the stories go on, their private systems

evolve much more rapidly than the civilisation at large. Under the pressure of the catastrophe, the

entropy progresses faster in the micro-universes centred on them than for the rest of the population.

The characters that are caught in these micro-universes, like Bodkin in The Drowned World, can

somehow understand the process at work, but for the outside observers, the heroes are becoming

increasingly stranger. Their micro-universes are not synchronised with the conventional rhythm of

time anymore, and they truly are alienated from the world.

Several elements confirm that this relation to time is the key of the evolution of the characters.

We have already mentioned the 'Time Zone' that Strangman's crew paints on the buildings in The

Drowned World, and the timelessness of the beach in The Drought, but the importance of the time

factor is made even more explicit in The Crystal World. The first extensive description of the

'crystalline disease' that infects the forest is pretty straightforward:

It is as if a sequence of displaced but identical images of the same object were being produced by

refraction through a prism, but with the element of time replacing the role of light. (CW 66)

At the beginning of the second part, we are presented with a letter from Sanders, where he

supposes that the forest could be a memory of some 'ancestral paradise where the unity of time and

space is the signature of every leaf and flower' (CW 83). This unity of time and space, frozen in amber

appears as another incarnation of the dimensionless emptiness experienced by Kerans and Ransom.

45

However, in this case, the appearance of the catastrophe is proleptic of its final result. The disaster

exclusively produces the entropic stasis that was only a side effect in the other two novels. Arguably,

the formation of crystal does not appear as very 'entropic'. Yet, from a strictly physical point of view,

since those crystals are vulnerable to real jewels – the only known formations in which entropy is non-

existent – they can legitimately be considered as akin to an entropic effect.

The Crystal World also emphasises the existence of individual time-scales, which were only

hinted at in the other novels. Sanders is able to fight back the crystallisation of his body when he runs

through the forest, while others decide to let the process overwhelm them. In a sense, the novel has

exactly the same pattern as The Drought or The Drowned World, except that this time, the story is

focused on one of those secondary characters who witness the disaster, but can not accept its effect

entirely. The Drowned World would probably have a similar structure if the story were told from the

point of view of Beatrice instead of Kerans.

Ballard's dark irony is patent in this intricate way to deal with his heroes. Through the

acceleration of the entropic process, he offers us an opportunity to witness what is, according to him,

the future of the bourgeois mentality: stagnation, isolation and death of the affect. Although he does

not directly refers to it, this judgement can equally be applied to the modern civilisation at large...

eventually, all the external stimulus that it is able to provide will dry out. Ballard dwelt longer on this

subject in his work of the seventies, where characters desperately try to create new stimuli ( Crash!) to

avoid complete alienation, but it is already present in those early novels.

Yet, neither The Drought nor The Drowned World end after the death of their character as a

conventional individual, suggesting that the process is not entirely over.

An Escape through the Landscape

There seems to be a failure in Ballard's logic regarding his heroes. After having exhausted all

the possibilities of their system, after having reached a point where they are barely human at all, one

could expect Ransom or Kerans to sit where they are and wait to die. Instead, they set for improbable

destinations (up the river, down in the jungle), with a renewed energy, and a determination that they

never displayed up to that point.

However, the apparent flaw of the logic is only a misunderstanding of the role assigned by

Ballard to the catastrophe. It does not merely accelerate the entropic process at work by providing an

external pressure as we saw earlier. More importantly, its role is to allow the emergence of a new

logic, a new system, after having wiped away what was there before.

Sanders, towards the end of The Crystal World catches a glimpse of this new universe and

understand its promises, although he is not able to free himself from his previous set of values: 'there

is an immense reward to be found in that frozen forest' (CW 169). Kerans and Ransom, for their parts,

46

are allowed to complete their itinerary, and understand that a new logic has replaced the civilisation

they used to know.

This discovery of new possibilities past the thermal death actually rejoins another recurrent

theme of Ballard's, that of the landscape as a language. This is a concept he exploited mostly in later

novels, like High-Rise and Concrete Island, but traces of it can be spotted throughout our four novels.

In The Drought, the landscape acquires a life of his own towards the end of the novel, with fires

starting without any apparent reason, and the windows of abandoned bus are 'eyes [...] set like mirrors

of an interior world' (DR 143). The landscape is coming to life, just as it is alive from the beginning of

The Drowned World, with its oncoming tempests and the haunting cries of the iguana.

This brings an elegant solution to the logical issue we discussed earlier. For by accepting their

death as individuals, their 'careful preparation for a radically new environment' (DW 14), Kerans and

Ransom have effectively left humanity, and become part of the landscape. Strangman and his crew

seem to have an instinctive understanding of this, that they display by dressing Kerans as Neptune, the

water-god, the living embodiment of the landscape that surrounds them. Yet, since this landscape is

alive and expressing itself, our initial contradiction between the renewed liveliness of Ransom and

Kerans and their assimilation to the natural reign just disappears.

In a word

While it is true that Ballard chose 'bourgeois heroes' as main characters, it would be

oversimplifying to see in his novels mere satires, where the consumer society would meet its end.

There is an undeniable amount of social critique in his work, coherent with his distrust of his

contemporary society (that is, the society of the sixties), but he does not indulge in an easy array of

devastation. Instead, he presents us with this pessimistic yet very soothing vision of a slowly freezing

world, so closed and self-contained that it eventually runs out of stimuli.

Then, logically, he introduces what can only be seen as the solution to this state, the emergence

of a new system, as seen through the psychological evolutions of the main characters. This is what we

are to analyse in the subsequent part.

47

Destruction, a Step towards Maturity

Rain is a thing of the past. Radio-active waste has stopped the sea evaporating.

The sun beats down on the parching earth, and on the parching spirit of man. A warped new mankind

is bred out of the dead land – bitter, murderous, its values turned upside down.

Idiots reign. Water replaces currency and becomes the source of a bleak new evil...

If it ever happened, it could be very like this. (DR back cover, author non-credited)

Somehow, this summary of The Drought makes it rather explicit that the editor of the novel did

not see it as an overly optimistic story. On the other hand, it may have just been an effort on his (her)

part to recreate the kind of cheap thrills that used to be associated with the previous title of the novel,

The Burning World. Whatever his or her exact reasons, this summary is useful to us in that it

exemplifies the usual reaction associated with Ballard's early novel: tales of destruction, of 'bleak new

evil' and of death.

Admittedly, this is not an entirely wrong approach.

However, there is much more to them than this all-out pessimism. Our study of the destiny of

the bourgeois hero has already provided us with some indications that Ballard's stories may be more

positive that they first seem to be. This is especially true if we consider that they really focus on the

destiny of a few characters, and treat the rest of humanity as a mere background, from which those

characters are increasingly alienated. From that point of view, the catastrophe which affects the

majority of humanity takes a relatively minor importance compared to the evolution of the characters.

With this approach, it becomes possible to affirm that Ballard's novels are tales of personal

achievement rather than stories of destruction and death, or, to be more accurate, that this destruction

is only an element of a maturation process, involving the main characters. While this does not

contradict entirely the initial approach mentioned, this position certainly displaces the problematic of

Ballard's novels away from such questions as 'Would man be swept from the face of the planet? Or

could a way be found to fight the relentless fury of Nature gone mad?' (WN back cover).

Armageddon as a Mere Background

One Ballard's major achievement in his disaster tetralogy is to have transformed a catastrophe

affecting the humanity at large to the status of an anecdotal background element.

To this effect, he uses a number of devices, that tend to put the emphasis on the foreground (a

handful of well defined although fairly archetypal characters), while rejecting the background (pretty

much everyone else), in a somewhat unidentified blur. This strategy is of course something common

in literature, in order to help the reader focus on the main events, but Ballard pushes the effect to its

48

limit. This maximum exploitation of the phenomenon indeed appears as a necessity, considering the

range of what he has to make seem negligible.

The first way to tend to achieve this is through the focalisation of the narration. We already

discussed this briefly in the first part (I.2), but a short reminder can be useful. To sum it up, there are

two main approaches to write 'classical' disaster novels. One option is to use an omniscient narrator,

totally non-diegetic, who will provide the reader with an overview of the disaster. This is by far the

easiest way to recreate vast scenes of panic, huge-scale destruction, and in general, to achieve the most

spectacular effects, although they tend to be rather impersonal. Then, a fairly common approach is to

use a first-person narrator, involved in the events, who will provide an account of his adventures. Very

often, in this case, the plot has this narrator witness the most important aspects of the disaster (as in

The Kraken Wakes), or allows him to have access to external sources of information. This way, the

author can avoid what could be a major flaw of this option, dullness. Indeed, a huge majority of the

population would probably not witness anything interesting during a major catastrophe (not to mention

the fact that a fair amount of people usually dies very quickly in most disaster tales), but adopting such

a point of view would not make for a particularly thrilling story.

The objective of those two approaches is to give the most precise and interesting accounts of the

disaster, by putting it at the very heart of the narration.

Ballard does exactly the opposite. He dismisses those two conventions to adopt an external

point of view (non-diegetic narrator), that is focused almost exclusively on the main character. This

causes a phenomenon of recognition, that tricks the reader into believing that the story is told by a

totally neutral omniscient narrator, as in the classical approach mentioned above. And Ballard

playfully reinforces this confusion by inserting very early in all his novels a short chapter describing

'objectively' the disaster taking place. However, afterwards, the focus comes back to the main

character, and never shifts away from him, while the reader is constantly anticipating the re-apparition

of the global pictures that come with this kind of approach. Thus, Ballard reverses the convention to

his own profit, by forcing the reader to regard the fate of the lead characters just like he would regard

the catastrophe in another novel: these destinies acquire a cosmic dimension. For instance, Hardoon, in

The Wind from Nowhere, eventually gets to be described as 'a Wagnerian super-hero in a besieged

Valhalla' (WN 156). Considered in a more general way, this novel also exemplifies well the device

described above. While there is no evidence at all that Hardoon's pyramids is linked with the wind, the

mere fact that Ballard spends most of his novel describing his behaviour (or hinting at it) leads us to

conclude that he actually has a personal connection with the disaster. This works mainly because in a

conventional disaster novel, the author would definitely not waste his time with such a character if he

did not have an essential role in the events at work. In the Kraken Wakes, for example, a similar

insistence on the character of an eccentric scientist finds its justification when we learn that he

eventually invents a weapon to destroy the invaders.

49

Next to this first strategy, that tends to make the characters bigger than life, Ballard also uses a

complementary device, in order to lessen the importance of the events, or at least to minimise their

impact on the reader.

The short chapters that sum up the situation in the four novels have a crucial role to play in this

strategy (just as in the previous one). They are necessary, in order to make the dynamics of the novels

believable, but their coldness and their brevity confers them an almost abstract quality. In The Crystal

World, in particular, the first explanation of the phenomenon at work is strikingly removed from the

'reality' of the African jungle:

Apparently, at the Mount Hubble Observatory in the States, they have seen distant galaxies

efflorescing! [...] Tatlin believes that this Hubble effect, as they call it, is closer to a cancer than

anything else – and about as curable – an actual proliferation of the sub-atomic identity of all matter.

(CW 66)

Besides, this account is made even stranger by the fact that it is provided to Sanders in a totally

non-plausible way, by a military man who reveals confidential information to him without much

difficulty. In the other three novels, Ballard uses this effect more conservatively, but the abstraction of

the catastrophe – reduced to its notion – is still noticeable.

The catastrophe (or at least the catastrophe seen as a global phenomenon) being reduced to a

concept, the next step is to reduce the impact of its consequences on the reader, to makes them appear

negligible. This is a subtler task, for it requires minimising the importance of the devastation without

sounding overly cynical, as it would be the case if the casualties were purely ignored. Once more,

Ballard’s solution to this dilemma is to treat the population at large as a concept rather than as a

collection of individuals, of potentially interesting characters. Again, this is a flagrant violation of a

convention of the disaster novel. Usually, the writer does his best to attract the reader's attention on the

fate of the poor victims, so as to get him (her) emotionally involved in the story, like H.G. Wells in the

famous and much imitated opening of The War of the Worlds. Unusually enough, The Wind from

Nowhere provides us with one of the most impressive examples of Ballard's 'dehumanisation' of the

disaster, with this purely mathematical account: 'Venice: 176mph. City abandoned. Casualties: 2000'

(WN 45). Throughout the novel, the population is constantly referred to as a mere statistic, while most

of the deaths we come to witness are the product of human behaviour, and not of the wind. In the other

three novels, Ballard uses various other tactics to have the population dissolve in the background. The

easiest to spot is the scarcity of the references to its fate. A few lines in The Drowned World, the scene

of the arrival at the beach in The Drought, and the quasi-absence of casualties in The Crystal World...

clearly, Ballard does not spend more time than strictly necessary on those elements. Similarly, in those

three novels, very few characters actually have a name, whether they are 'a middle-aged man' (DR 92),

'Strangman's men' (DW 90) or 'a native police sergeant' (CW 35), the others are carefully denied any

50

real identity if they do not play a major role. Overall, less than two dozen proper names are mentioned

in each of these novels.

Thus, by putting forwards the main characters, and simultaneously dissolving the catastrophe

and its effects in a blur, Ballard effectively focuses the reader's attentions on what could otherwise

appear as minor events.

Consequently, it becomes possible to consider those stories not just as overly pessimistic tales,

for if the characters are larger than the background, then their fate – not the theoretical extent of the

destruction – is what really set the mood of the novels.

An Underlying Optimism

But are these deluges and droughts, whirlwinds and glaciations no more than over-extended

metaphors of some kind of self-suicidal hate? Though I am even more suspicious of my own motives

than of other people's, I nevertheless think not. On the contrary, I believe that the catastrophe story,

whoever may tell it, represents a constructive and positive act by the imagination rather than a

negative one. (UGM 208-9)22

This sounds like a provocative answer to the critics who accused Ballard of writing overly

depressing and pessimism novels. Aside from the dramatisation with purely commercial purpose that

we mentioned in the introduction of this part, this kind of reproach has been issued repeatedly by

critics, who saw in Ballard's novels overly nihilists and emotionless works. Robert Platzner (quoted by

Michel Delville in his essay), for example, sees in those novels 'visions of irreversible, regressive

transformation', bathed in 'apocalyptic anxieties'23. This issue is somewhat different from the question

of whether the very subject of Ballard's novels implies a mandatory pessimism – the problem we just

solved. Here, the critique is more fundamental, since it attacks Ballard's philosophy, or what he

expresses of it in his novels, through a judgement that is appropriately detached from any

consideration of genre or conventions. Admittedly, Ballard's characters have a real tendency to

embrace the catastrophe as a revelation or even a blessing, while it threatens the life of thousands of

other people. This can easily be read as an expression of misanthropy, or a profound cynicism

(although, as we have seen earlier, Ballard does his best to prevent this misunderstanding), or even of

badly refrained suicidal tendencies.

Being conscious of this ambiguity, Ballard has often stated in interviews that he did not think of

his work as a pessimistic one. 'I think all my fiction is optimistic, because it's a fiction of psychic

fulfilment. The characters are finding themselves, which is after all the only definition of real

22 Originally published as an introduction of the 'Cataclysms and Doom' section of the Visual Encyclopaedia of Science-Fiction (1977)23 Robert L. Platzner, 'The Metamorphic Vision of J.G. Ballard', Essays in Literature, 10:3 (1983), 209 and 210.

51

happiness'24. He also publicised his conviction that the most satisfying endings for the readers were not

necessarily the most satisfying for the characters, and since the story is that of those characters, then

their needs have to prevail25. This declaration is of course slightly hypocritical, but is a useful reminder

that the choices of the characters are not to be equated with the opinion of the author.

However, Ballard's main argument here is that his characters are allowed to find a mental

fulfilment in the new environment created by the catastrophe. Since they are placed at the heart of the

novel (as demonstrated earlier on), their fulfilling of their need has to be considered as the major event

of the said novels. Therefore, despite the destruction, despite the morbid fascination for the disaster,

despite even the 'death of the affect' phenomenon, the objective outcome of each story is that the main

character has gone from a state of unhappiness to a new life where he feels more at ease. See for

example the conclusion of Ransom's travel in The Drought: 'To his surprise, he noticed that he no

longer cast any shadow on the sand, as if he had completed his journey across the margins of the inner

landscape he had carried in his mind for so many years' (DR 176).

We have to agree with Ballard when he considers this to be an optimistic outcome, whatever we

would think of the situation if we were to take the place of the main character.

Furthermore, both The Drought and The Wind from Nowhere end on an indisputable positive

note, even according to conventional standards, with the disasters unexpectedly coming to an end. As

if they had played their roles, by allowing the heroes to (and Hardoon, in The Wind) to complete their

itineraries, and were therefore not needed anymore. However, those final twists are only minor

additions to the novels, and if they do allow them to conclude on an explicitly positive note, they do

not affect the overall atmosphere created. Incidentally, this also demonstrates the extent of the fading

of the background: the end of the catastrophe seems utterly disconnected from the fate of the

population at large.

Yet, this anecdotal disappearance of the catastrophe does take the reader's attention away from

the real 'happy end', just like the references to the disaster novel genre could mislead him earlier on.

Therefore, only one of the novel presents us with a 'pure' plot, where the conclusion of the inner travel

is not obscured by any other consideration (The Crystal World being excluded because of the limited

range of its plot): The Drowned World.

Self Discovery: Kerans' Itinerary in The Drowned World

Our study of the notion of bourgeois hero already revealed Ballard's irony towards modern

civilisation. In The Drowned World, Kerans is shown as being aware of the malfunctioning of his own

24 Juno, A. and V. Vale, RE/Search, 8:9 (1984), 161.25 From the French edition of the Visual Encyclopaedia of Science-Fiction:Brian Ash, L'encylclopédie visuelle de la science-fiction, (Paris: Albin Michel, 1979), 240

52

society, a radicalised microcosm which reproduces most of the characteristics of the 'real world', as

described in the other three novels of the tetralogy. His relationships with Beatrice, isolated in her

hotel room, are fairly similar to the bonds between Ransom and his ex-wife in The Drought, for

instance. This is, of course, another aspect of the parallels carefully drawn by Ballard between all his

novels and characters. Interestingly enough, this parallelism means that, providing minor adaptations,

the conclusions drawn from this study can be transposed to the whole tetralogy.

From the beginning of The Drowned World, it is apparent that Kerans is not exactly unhappy,

but expecting a radical change, which would free him from the increasing dullness of his work and

surrounding.

The biological mapping had become a pointless game, the new flora following exactly the emergent

lines anticipated twenty years earlier, and he was sure that no one at Camp Byrd in Northern

Greenland bothered to file his reports, let alone read them. (DW 8-9)

The notion that nothing remains to be done is of course cosubstantial of the dereliction of the

society that we studied in the previous part. What is interesting here is that the character is aware of

the larger trends at work around him, while he obviously has no way to have a global perception of his

environment. This brings us back to the idea that the environments of the main characters essentially

reflect their mood and desires (in particular in Kerans’ case), instead of being the product of a whole

society. Those micro-universes are indeed made especially perceptible in The Drowned World by the

water separating the buildings where the different characters choose to live.

Even from this early stage of the novel, Ballard hints at the fact that what Kerans is actually

looking for is an idealised past, a past full of diversified and intense stimuli, at least in comparison

with the hot dullness of his current surrounding. This leads him to appreciate the artefacts of

disappeared activities, no matter how inappropriate they may be in his world: 'the cupboards and

wardrobes were packed with treasure, ivory-handled squash rackets and hand-printed dressing gowns'

(DW 10). Ironically enough, this lively past Kerans is dreaming of happens to be our modern world, so

eagerly criticised and ruined in the other three novels. In his hotel room at the Ritz, Kerans savours

'the subtle atmosphere of melancholy that surrounded [the] last vestiges of a level of civilisation now

virtually vanished forever' (DW 10). This is another occurrence of the humour of Ballard, who has his

character dream of the 20th century world, while he precisely lives in an abstracted and stylised

representation of this world.

However, those two simultaneous sensations, the prescience of the 'thermal death' and the

longing for the past, are not fully understood by Kerans. He prefers to see them as minor mental

adjustments, that do not challenge his integration in his own society, but only makes it a bit more

constraining. Watching himself in the mirror, he can perceive the emergence of a new individual, 'a

personality that had remained latent during his previous adult life', only to conclude that he has

53

evolved in his way to apprehend the games of sociability. 'If he kept himself aloof from Riggs and his

men, this was simply a matter of convenience rather than of misanthropy'; this assertion shows the

extent of his self-delusion, since later in the novel, he will take extreme measures to ensure that Riggs

leaves him behind.

At this point of the story, it is clear that Kerans has intuitions about what is to come, yet refuses

to draw the proper conclusions and to make the requisite adjustments. This goes on for a while, with

episodic moments of clarity, immediately challenged by the need to act like a normal and social

human being. On of them occurs when Riggs announces him that they are about to leave for Northern

Greenland:

[Kerans] had only managed to survive the monotony and boredom of the previous year by deliberately

suspending himself out the normal world of time and space, and the abrupt return to earth had

momentarily disconcerted him. (DW 15)

Immediately after this introspection, though, Kerans finds himself chatting calmly, ironising

about his 'fin-de-siecle temperament', not yet realising that this announcement will trigger the events of

the rest of the novel. At this point, even his prophetic and metanarrative 'I'm casting myself in a new

role' (DW 23) is still only a joke. Only with Beatrice Dahl is he able to start analysing his own

motives, since she too is playing a formalised version of the social game with increasing stiffness.

Kerans acknowledges this similitude by equating his reaction with hers, while she uses all her

privileges (being a woman, being rich...) to get rid of Riggs and of his men. Yet, even in her company,

he is not able to fully accept the changes taking place within him. While he wants to stay behind when

Riggs leaves, he tries to convince himself that 'satisfying one's emotional needs is not enough' (DW

28). Eventually, the key of this attitude is provided to us through another occurrence of Kerans' self

analysis habit, during which he, at last, get rid of all his bad motives: 'he knew that the sight of [the

base] sailing off would act as a wonderful catalyst for emotions of fear and panic, and any more

abstract motives for staying behind would soon be abandoned' (DW 31)

Two events, however, will help him to repel this fear of leaving the base and, more importantly,

society as it is generally conceived. The first one is the flight of lieutenant Hardman. Hardman is sick,

retreating from the society, entering a 'zone of transit' just like Kerans himself, and not surprisingly, it

is Kerans who causes his flight by revealing him that they are about to leave. He is then able to

observe Hardman's reaction, to use it as an example of appropriate behaviour in response to this new

information: '[Kerans] realised that he had told Hardman deliberately, unconsciously hoping to elicit

precisely this response' (DW 39).

The second event is the coming of the dreams, in the chapter 'Descent into Deep Times'. Kerans

finds himself dreaming of Triassic landscapes, when giant lizards roar to the sun. It soon appears that

apart from Riggs, most people at the base (notably Bodkin and Beatrice) have been having similar

54

dreams, and that they were the reason why Hardman lost sleep and isolated himself in the first place.

Those dreams parallel and reinforce Kerans' longing for a return to the past, while simultaneously

revealing him clearly the intolerable burden laid upon him by modern civilisation, metaphorically

represented by 'the suffocating metal box of his cabin' (DW 71). Bodkin later explains him that most

people had those dreams a long time before him because of 'the strength of [his] preconscious filters',

precisely the same kind of filters which could have prevented him from staying behind, in spite of his

intuition.

Those two events (chapters four and five) mark the point where Kerans frees himself from the

boredom that pervaded the beginning of the novel. For the first time, he appears relieved, at ease with

his environment. Eventually, when Riggs leaves, and Kerans and the others realise that they do not

even want to live with each other, this realisation sounds as the counterpart of Kerans' initial self-

delusion: 'it was not simply for reason of convenience that they would live apart'.

Strangman's arrival causes a pause in the process of self-containment for the three main

characters, and for Kerans in particular, but simultaneously it reveals the depth of the changes they

have undergone. Kerans' former admiration for the artefacts of the 20th century, for instance, has been

replaced by a kind of veiled contempt, apparent through his description of Strangman's boat and of his

looted treasures. 'They're like bones' (DW 95).

Strangman acts as a catalyst for Kerans' self-discovery process. By draining the lagoon, he helps

Kerans to realise what his real environment now his, while simultaneously displaying the rotten

remnants of civilisation. Eventually, his decision to torture Kerans, to murder Bodkin and to detain

Beatrice triggers the last step of Kerans' transformation, by forcing him to act according to his new set

of values, instead of passively letting events happen as he did when Riggs left. This evolutionary

process first allows him to survive torture: 'like the reptiles which sat motionlessly in the sunlight, he

waited patiently for the day to end' (DW 139), then turns him into a supernatural being. Over a few

pages, Kerans is transformed from a passive doctor into an efficient man of action, sufficiently

detached from his previous self to consider his situation with irony, and when he finally kills a man, it

is obvious that he has freed himself from all his previous bonds.

Riggs' arrival then appears as a final opportunity for Kerans to alter his course, but eventually, it

only reassesses the failure of modern civilisation, when Riggs announces him that he does not have the

right to arrest Strangman, despite his deranged behaviour. When it becomes evident that Riggs along

with what remains of society supports the draining of the lagoons, the resurrection of a 'nightmare

world' (DW 159) (to be compared with the world of the dreams in which Kerans now lives), Kerans'

choice become easy.

This time, though, he is not afraid anymore to leave the base, his mind is 'clear and co-

ordinated'. Before leaving, he undoes Strangman's deed, by reflooding the lagoon, and takes pleasure

in the destruction caused by the rushing water. At last freed from all his previous inhibitions

(destroying, enjoying the landscape more than the other people, taking radical measures...), Kerans is

55

ready to sail to 'The Paradises of the Sun' (the title of the last chapter). The radical changes in his

personality seem to have arisen mainly from his new desire to act, instead of just waiting. While one

could doubt that those changes are indeed enjoyable, Ballard gives us our only direct insight at

Kernans' mind, in the next to last paragraph of the novel: '27th day. Have rested and am moving south.

All is well. Kerans.'

In a Word

Although this is not the final sentence of the novel, it does sum up its philosophy. The disaster

is a powerful force, and the troubles it causes may be horrendous, but eventually, once all those brutal

changes have been integrated, after 'a new psychology' (DW 30) has been defined, then only the result

matters, and this result is 'all is fine'. The same conclusion applies to The Drought, The Crystal World

and to a lesser extent, to The Wind from Nowhere.

56

The Influence of Psycho-Analysis

'In the future everyone will need to be a film critic to make sense of anything.'

'Not a psychologist?' His remark surprised me. 'Surely you...?'

'No, I think the psychologist has had his day...' (The Kindness of Women 200)

In this quotation, James – Ballard's stand up in the novel – is the one surprised about his friend's

aphorism, and not the one foreseeing the disappearance of the psychologist. It would be quite

surprising to see those roles reversed, for psychoanalytical preoccupations played a major role in his

early writings, and have continued to do so in his latest work (especially in The Kindness of Women

itself, obviously).

As usual, it could be argued that psychoanalysis has had a deep influence on most recent literary

works, from Virginia Woolf to Paul Auster. However, as usual, Ballard's use of this material is still

peculiar enough to deserve a closer study.

Unlike many of his peers, Ballard does not try to use the work of Freud and his consorts for his

own profit. He does not elaborate carefully drawn characters by resorting to psychoanalytical theories

to make them more believable. Instead, every time he uses such elements, he does it overtly, almost

theoretically. Thus, logically, his characters are also aware of the existence of psychoanalysis, and

while they constantly fail to analyse their motives, they keep trying to decrypt their own behaviour, to

deconstruct it with the appropriate (albeit simplified) tools. Similarly, when Ballard decides to use and

exemplify Jungian theories, as in The Drowned World, he does it so explicitly that the reader keeps

wondering when the name of the philosopher will at last appear.

Jung indeed appears as one of the dominant influences in Ballard's work, with many of its theses

being exploited more or less literally, in the four novels we are studying, from the notion of collective

unconscious, to the existence of archetypes (the anima in particular). Those give shape and explicit

some of the author's recurrent obsessions. Not surprisingly, the most Jungian aspects of Ballard work

are also among the one who drew the more criticism; one can think of his abstracted and stiff

representation of women, for example.

However, much like it would have been absurd to reduce Ballard's writings to their

autobiographic connotations or to the genre they are supposed to belong to, it would be simplistic to

see in them mere transpositions of psychoanalytical considerations. What Ballard does here is fairly

similar to what we saw in the first part: by acknowledging his references, he transforms them into an

exterior influence, that gives shape to his work but does not define it. Up to a point where some critics

have affirmed that his references to Jung are more ironical than deferent.

57

Self-conscious Characters

Whenever Ballard's characters find some time to think, they appear to be preoccupied mainly

with themselves, trying to analyse their own motives and actions. Most of the time, they also fail to

understand themselves, and only through the interpretation of other characters do they find the

solution of their private enigma.

In the first part of The Crystal World, Sanders provides a brilliant example of this useless

introspection. Until he actually reaches the crystallised forest, his main activity is to act as a paranoid,

whose only goal is to discover his own hidden motives, as well as those of the other characters. Three

pages into the novel, the first occurrence of the word 'motive' appears, and it is already associated with

'ambiguous'. A while later, after having spotted 'private difficulties' (DW 14) in Balthus, and a 'hidden

brilliancy' (DW 16) coming from the forest, Kerans comes back to his own case, and has to admit that

he does not understand 'his present motives'. However, the real expression of the intensity of his

introspective mood only occurs two pages afterwards, after he has read again Suzanne's letter:

For some time, he had suspected that his reasons for serving at the leper hospital were not altogether

humanitarian, and that he might be more attracted by the idea of leprosy and what it unconsciously

represented than he imagined. Suzanne's sombre beauty had become identified in his mind with this

dark side of psyche, and their affair was an attempt to come to terms with himself and his own

ambiguous motives. (DW 19)

While Kerans carries on in the same mood during approximately a third of the novel, he never

expresses again so clearly the dichotomy of the Ballardian hero: he is rational, educated, and yet

unable to apply his analytic method to himself. Besides, in the case of Kerans, this inability to

understand himself is doubled by his blindness to other people's motives as well. Ventress, Balthus,

even Aragon (the owner of the ship that will carry him up the river) are all subjected to his

observations to no avail, while Sanders seems to be satisfied by his own impotence: 'Sanders guessed

that [Aragon] was drawn back to this focal area by motives as uncertain as his own' (CW 55). For him,

the realisation of his own incomprehension is in itself a valuable evaluation, as L.J. Hurst points out,

in his study of the novel26. 'Like many Ballardian protagonists, Sanders is a professional man, blind to

self-knowledge, a man who has in effect wasted his life because he has not thought about it, although

he has thought about his not-thinking.'

We have already discussed lengthily the psychological itinerary of Kerans, from The Drowned

World, but it has to be noted that he too spends most of his time analysing himself. Just like Sanders,

though, his introspection is far from fruitful, and he only gets to know himself through the analysis of

the other characters, Hardman, Bodkin, Strangman and Beatrice. This impotence is made evident by

26 L.J. Hurst, 'The dark side of the equinox: A Reading of J G Ballard's The Crystal World' (1996) – available on the Internet, http://ds.dial.pipex.com/ljhurst/crystalw.htm

58

the failure of his introspection process when he is left to himself. Even though his dreams seem to lead

him to a better understanding of his emergent personality, he can only interpret them through the filter

of Bodkin's theory. Furthermore, it is only with Strangman's arrival that he is at last able to confront

his new reality. As Strangman himself notices: 'Your motives seem complex, Doctor, but perhaps

you've given up hope of understanding them yourself. We shall label them the total beach syndrome

and leave it at that' (DW 90).

Whether this reference to a 'total beach' is a coincidence or not, it leads us directly to The

Drought, and in particular to Ransom. Just like his mirror images, Ransom devotes a lot of time to the

analysis of his own psyche. In the second chapter of the novel 'Mementoes', he reflects upon himself,

in a scene reminiscent of Kerans self-inspection at the beginning of The Crystal World, but unlike his

other incarnation, he is able at least to classify and order his emotions. The objects accumulated in his

houseboat appears to him as incarnations of 'his half-conscious memories of childhood and of the past'

(DR 13), that help him to reconstitute his 'new persona' (DR 12). However, and although he is aware

that his personality is 'a pleasant masquerade', he does not have the insight to push his investigation

any further, and seems unable to reflect on what he calls his 'gratuitous impulses'. Overall, and despite

a far better understanding of his fellow characters than either Sanders or Kerans, Ransom still appears

to suffer from the same incapacity to grasp people's motives.

Not surprisingly, in The Wind from Nowhere, the rapid succession of events leaves little space

for introspection, as the characters tend to spend most of their time trying to survive the disaster. Yet,

on the few occasions when he can take a break and think for a while, Maitland appears very similar to

the other Ballardian heroes. As early as the first chapter, we learn that what he calls 'a pondered and

planned' decision, 'culmination of endless heart-searching' (WN 7) is actually a banal flight away from

his wife, Susan. Furthermore, despite having spent two or three years with her, he still does not know

her enough to understand the motives that will lead her to passively commit suicide, later in the novel.

Overall, the Ballardian heroes have with psychology the same relationships as with all the

important aspects of their environment: they are aware of its importance (and their insistence on this

appears very metanarrative), they have some tools to analyse it (just as they have some sociological

tools to describe the global trends at work around them), but they do not understand it. Most of the

time, they are also unable to apply their methods to other people, an incapacity which places them in a

position where they are more often studied (by Strangman, Bodkin, Lomax...) than studying. This in

turns mirrors the attitude of Ballard as a writer, who, despite his psychoanalytical awareness, admits

that he still 'does not know the truth about himself' (UGM 271). It also recalls the classical relationship

between the subject and the analyst, with the latter being necessary to bring up associations latent in

his patient's mind.

Finally, Ballard's affirmation that 'psychiatric studies of the fantasies and dream-life of the

insane show that ideas of world-destruction are latent in the unconscious mind' (UGM 209) provides

us with another interpretation of his character's inability to analyse themselves. The four disasters of

59

the novels can very well be seen as projections of a deranged mind, generating a way to escape 'the

inflexibility of this huge reductive machine we call reality' (ibid). This would explain simultaneously

why the characters are aware of the importance of their psyche, as well as why they are unable to

decrypt it.

However far-fetched this last hypothesis might seem (and although the dream-like imagery of

many passages tend to support it), it is hardly deniable that Ballard placed the issue of the sanity and

self-analysis of his heroes at the heart of his first four novels. It would also be difficult not to see the

influence of Jungian theories in the way he apprehends those psychoanalytical elements.

Jungian Theses, Ironical Usage and Real Influence

In his interviews, Ballard does not mention Jung as often as Salvador Dali or William

Burroughs, for example. Yet, the influence of the Swiss philosopher on his early writing is hard to

deny, and has often been pointed out by critics and analysts. An interesting aspect of this influence is

that Ballard seems to acknowledge it in The Drowned World, but also let it run through his other three

novels almost unnoticed. This contrasts with the usage he makes of the notion of genre, for example,

with which he openly plays at all time, as if Jungian philosophy was at the same time a domesticated

influence (similar to those we described in the first part) and a more profound component of his

writings.

The Drowned World has already received a lot of attention in this memoir, but once more, it

provides us with an interesting case for our study, since it is in this novels that Jung's 'analytical

psychology' is exploited the more openly by Ballard.

Every step we've taken in our evolution is a milestone inscribed with organic memories – from the

enzymes controlling the carbon dioxide cycle to the organisation of the brachial plexus and the nerves

pathways of the Pyramid cells in the mid-brain, each is a record of a thousand decisions taken in the

face of a sudden physico-chemical crisis. Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic

situation in order to release the repressed material, so are we now being plunged back into the

archeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs. (DW

43-44)

As usual, Ballard is nice enough to offer us this lengthy metanarrative comment to make his

intentions perfectly clear. Here, Bodkin provides Kerans with a summary of the theory of a collective

unconscious, transfigured by the scientific bias of the orator, thus making sure that the reader will

understand the multiple references to 'biological memories' or 'the neuronic past'. For Jung, the

collective unconscious was a pool of experience accessible to all humans through history, which lies

below the personal unconscious. From this collective unconscious arises the archetypes, which are

60

neither images nor ideas but, rather, fundamental psychic patterns common to all humans into which

personal experiences are organised. Those archetypes are also alluded to by Bodkin, a bit obliquely,

when he quotes 'the universal but completely groundless loathing of the spider, only one species of

which has ever been known to sting'.

In other word, Bodkin advocates a scientific version of Jung's theory, made all the more relevant

by the fact that in the novel, this theory takes the form of observable events (the resurgence of past

species, the womb-like atmosphere of the drowned world). This is especially interesting when we

consider that 'Jungian theory understands the psyche as containing a drive toward balance and

wholeness, differentiating and incorporating the various elements of the personal unconscious and

establishing access to the collective unconscious.'27 This description applies to a large extent to

Kerans, who will seek this union with a world seen as a vast metaphor of the collective unconscious.

Jung himself stated that the resurgence of this collective unconscious was nature's solution to solve the

great problem of modern civilisation: the domination of the 'Luciferian' mind over the soul, of

rationality over creativity. Furthermore, for him this lost creative mind was to be searched in the depth

of water28.

The correlation between this analysis and the plot of The Drowned World is almost too obvious.

In our study of the bourgeois hero, we detailed Kerans's shift from an overly rational behaviour (what

Jung calls a 'Luciferian' mind) to a determined and ironic course of action, as he progresses in his

union with the drowned world around. Soon after Bodkin's exposé, he even realises that: 'a more

important task than mapping the harbours and lagoons of the external landscape was to chart the

ghostly deltas and luminous beaches of the submerged neuronic continents' (DW 45). Thus, the

assimilation of the Jungian imagery reaches its completion, through this explicit association of the sea

with the (collective) unconscious.

However, this assimilation might even be too complete. Ballard usually does not provide the

key of his narrative so easily. Instead, whenever he offers us explicit information about his sources or

the 'meaning' of some passages, it tends to imply that there is more to his text that this 'obvious'

explanation. Of course, this could only be a tactic to suggest the existence of a deeper meaning in an

otherwise plain text, but here, it does not appear to be the case. In his analysis of The Drowned World,

L.J. Hurst demonstrates that Ballard's illustration of the Jungian theories is indeed undermined by a

deep irony, revolving mainly around the materialisation of Jung's metaphors 29. This irony culminates

in Kerans's description of Hardman's behaviour, towards the end of the novel. Considering that

Hardman has followed thoroughly the Jungian precepts by immersing himself in his dreams and by

trying to restore his 'wholeness', the result does not appear to raise Ballard's enthusiasm. 'Kerans felt

27 Marilyn A. Geist, 'A Brief Introduction to C. G. Jung and Analytical Psychology' (1998) - available on the Internet, http://www.cgjungpage.org/articles/geist1.html28 Etienne Pierrot, 'Jung (C.G)', CD-Universalis 4.0 (1998)29 L.J. Hurst, ' The Material World - J. G. Ballard's The drowned world' – available on the Internet, http://ds.dial.pipex.com/ljhurst/crystalw.htm

61

that Hardman's real personality was submerged deep within his mind, and that his external behaviour

and responses were merely pallid reflections of this, overlaid by his delirium and exposure symptoms'

(DW 173)

However, this should not be interpreted as a negation of Jung's influence on Ballard. It only

demonstrates that he was aware of this influence, and had enough detachment to play with it in the

same way that he played with other mental structures (his own autobiographical tendencies, for

example). This reflection did not prevent him to make use more subtly of Jungian theses in his other

novels, but in those cases, he took the precaution to bury them far deeper in his narrative structure than

he did in The Drowned World.

The most distinctively Jungian feature to be found in the four novels of our study is

undoubtedly the notion of the 'archetypes'. They are alluded to by Bodkin in The Drowned World, but

never become as overexposed as the notion of collective unconscious for example. If we adopt the

definition of the archetype as the psychical equivalent of biological instincts, as symbolic

representations of models of behaviour, then the connection with the construction of Ballard's novels

immediately appears. The recurrent characters that we studied briefly in the first part can legitimately

be seen as Ballard's interpretation of this notion of archetypes, despite the fact that Ballard modelled

most of them after actual persons from his childhood. This is not as contradictory as it seems, and it is

even coherent with Jung's conception of the role of the archetypes. For him, the mental representation

that one can have of a given person is a specification of the archetypes associated to him or her (a

major difference with Freud's approach). Besides, Jung elaborated his theory of the archetypes notably

by observing that recurrent symbolic characters kept appearing in all kind of literary work, and it

probably stimulated Ballard's irony to reverse the process by consciously using those archetypes to

create characters.

Incidentally, while for Jung, the very existence of the archetypes is subordinated to the

hypothesis of the collective unconscious, Ballard does not seem to agree with this. This is even one of

the major differences between the philosophical issues of his work and Jung's approach: although they

try to achieve harmony with their surroundings, Ballard's characters reach this goal as individuals, not

as parts of a totality.

Among all the archetypes, there is one to which Jung devoted a lot of time, the anima (and its

pendant, the animus). Not surprisingly, the anima is also a powerful motif of Ballard's work, probably

the element that initially drew the critics' attention on the Jungian subtext of his early novels.

Essentially, the anima is a feminine archetype, whose role is to uproot man from his rational universe,

a role which can make her seem frightening or even evil-minded. She is an initiator, the absolute and

idealised idea of femininity. Does it sound familiar? Nearly all the important feminine characters

correspond to this description, in the four novels of our study. Susan, Beatrice, Catherine, Louise and

Suzanne are all incarnations of the anima, with all its implication (notice the recurrent French names).

They help their respective heroes to accept the changes taking place in him (even Maitland's

62

'adolescent whim', at the beginning of The Wind from Nowhere, is a consequence of Susan's

behaviour), and always incarnate this idea of an alternate vision of reality. In The Crystal World,

Claire literally embodies this 'other vision'; she is a journalist, she wears glasses (and discuss their role

with Sanders (CW 36)), and what is more, she opens Sanders eyes, and is conscious of her role: 'at

least you can choose, Doctor, that's one thing. Nothing is blurred or grey now' (CW 37). Also, just like

the other incarnations of the anima, she represents a kind of idealised, seducing, potentially

threatening and overall utterly non plausible idea of woman. This representation reaches its limit in

The Drowned World, with Beatrice Dahl, locked up in her hotel room, who spends her days next to the

swimming pool, drinking cocktails, seducing people and offering Kerans a few pieces of advice.

Besides, to create a negative feminine character, Ballard just elaborates a kind of anti-anima,

devoid of all the charms of her model, without even being aware of it. This produces Miranda Lomax,

at the end of The Drought: 'She was now as fat as a pig, with gross arms and hips, hog-like shoulders

and waist. Swaddled in the fat, her small eyes gazed at Ransom from above her huge cheeks' (DR

156)30.

This repeated usage of the anima as a model for his feminine characters has attracted much

criticism on Ballard. Michel Delville, for example, deplores his 'failure to create sophisticated female

characters'31, while others have gone as far as accusing him of misogyny32. His later works and notably

The Kindness of Women have proved that this last reproach is far from being justified, but it is

undeniable that for a long time, Ballard experienced real difficulties with his feminine characters.

Even in those rare cases where they are not actually incarnations of the anima, they still appear as

mere stereotypes, like Quilter's mother in The Drought.

In a Word

It appears that Ballard's treatment of the psychological evolutions of his characters is deeply

influenced by psychoanalysis, in many respects. Paralleling his own interest in Jungian theories, those

characters keep trying to understand their own mental structures, without being able to comprehend

them. Psychoanalytical elements thus appear both within the diegesis and as part of the structure of the

novel.

Those embedded reflections and structures are interesting in that they contradict the initial

impression of chaotic regression suggested by the thematic of the different novels. The idea of

regression is often associated with a notion of erratic behaviour and mental collapse, but here, the

evolution of the different characters is severely guided by well-defined theories. In other words, the

30 Incidentally, the chapter named 'The Androgyne', with the description of Lomax regression can be seen as another display of irony towards the Jungian's conception of self-achievement.31 J.G. Ballard 4732 The same reproach was also made to Jung, and for the same reasons.

63

disorder is only an apparent one, which does not pervade the structure or the philosophy of the

different novels. As we said in our introduction, this definitely makes psycho-analysis one of the

shaping elements of Ballard's narrative. While it may not be as apparent as the codes of the disaster

novel, for example, it does provide a guideline, which does not 'explain' the novel but provides one of

the axes allowing to understand it more deeply.

64

An Organised Dissolution

Overall, the structure of the four novels of our study appears much more complex than what a

first overview could suggest. The theme of disintegration does appear, as expected, but it is paralleled

and complemented by a simultaneous development of the perception of the heroes.

Actually, disintegration only affects the crystallised structures of authority and moral. The

conventional values of the modern society are torn apart along with the population that supported

them. Similarly, Kerans and the others are dispossed of their certitudes and of their materialistic

visions of the world. The disintegration affects all the manifestations of our modern civilisation,

presented by Ballard as being on the verge of stagnation. For the heroes, this implies a drift towards an

alternate vision of society, which alienates them from the other characters. The main casualty of the

disaster appear to be human relationships as a whole, with the hostility growing in the books as the

conventions of the life in community are shaken apart. This is what Ballard called the 'death of the

affect'.

Yet, if human intercourse is reduced to its symbolic value, ('with Beatrice [...], there was an

intact underlying union, a tacit awareness of their symbolic roles' (DW 84)), this disappearance allows

the individual to discover themselves outside the frame of social conventions. This self-discovery is

shown as a gradual but steady process, leading to an optimistic conclusion in most cases. This process

comes as a complement for the disintegration described earlier, as its natural consequence (and even,

to some respect, as its cause).

What we have here is a global movement divided in two distinct but equally necessary phases,

with a previous and out-dated philosophic system being replaced by a radically new conception. The

symptoms of disintegration are only a part of this process of renewal. Ballard radically emphasises this

fact by downplaying his descriptions of the destruction caused to the world at large, and by focusing

on the positive consequences on the mental state of his heroes.

Eventually we showed that Ballard used psychoanalytical theories to shape and define those

four novels. The mental changes underwent by the characters indeed follow to a large extent the way

of self-integrity as defined by Jung. The backbone of the disintegration/individuation process is thus

based on a very detailed theory (even if Ballard adapted it to suit his own conception), without any

element of randomness.

Therefore, it appears that the striking disintegration of the society described by Ballard is only

one element of a more global structure. Far from being a dominant theme of the stories, it only

constitutes one of the tools of the author. It does not even affect the narrative or intellectual structure

of those novels. Disintegration, be it physical or psychological, is no more than a enclosed sub-

phenomenon of Ballard's writings.

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III. Destruction as a Tool for the Artist

66

In the previous part, we demonstrated that the importance of the notions of destruction and

disintegration in Ballard's tetralogy were far from being as important as could be expected. We

subsequently reached the conclusion that Ballard made use of this thematic as a mere tool to elaborate

his stories. Yet, apart from its obvious value as a shocking and thrilling element, we have not yet

described the function of this tool.

The aforementioned glamorous value, as illustrated by the summaries on the back-covers, is

probably what allowed those novels to be published in the first place, since the successful description

of a major cosmic disaster was sure to gather at least some readership. It allowed Ballard to sneak into

a popular genre, a Trojan Horse to convey his more elaborated messages. In that sense, this is the first

function of the destruction as a tool for the artist: ensure his living (this is all the truer in the case of

The Wind from Nowhere, if we remember why and how it was written).

Then, of course, there are others, more subtle uses for such a powerful device as mass

destruction. Its most important is undeniably to stimulate the 'willing suspension of disbelief'

described by Coleridge. Indeed, the catastrophe itself requires a major suspension of the reader's

incredulity, since he has to be convinced of the plausibility of a disaster affecting the whole world,

with dramatic consequences. While Ballard's explanations for such a phenomenon are not utterly

ridiculous (they are even quite convincing in The Drowned World), they do not seem very plausible, or

detailed enough to convince anyone not prepared to accept them willingly. In other words, any reader

going as far as the sixth chapter of The Drought without any impulse to close the novel and to do

something better with his time can be considered as ready to accept whatever Ballard will reveal

afterwards. Or more accurately, his capacity for disbelief will be reduced to such a level that even the

most succinct explanation will be sufficient to convince him.

This is a powerful tool.

Ballard uses it appropriately, he does not hesitate to 'dismantle the formal structure of time and

space' (UGM 209) knowing that the reader will follow him, however incoherent the events described

might have seemed in another context. This leads him to dismiss logic, causality and plausibility

whenever he thinks appropriate to do so. At the centre of this seemingly incoherent construction, the

landscapes – the striking visions that constitutes the most salient point of the last three novels of the

tetralogy – provide a node of meaning, which in retrospect sheds a new light on many of the logic

incongruities we noticed so far.

Ballard also uses this suspension of disbelief to introduce in his novels a notion that will take

more and more importance in his later works, the correspondence between inner and outer landscape,

one of the theories upon which the whole New Wave was based. This theme is more apparent in High-

Rise or Concrete Island, where it is at the hearth of the narrative, but it is also present, in a somewhat

attenuated way, in those first four novels. Of course, its origin is much older than Ballard's novels,

since it can be traced back to the work of the surrealists, and especially of Salvador Dali.

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Eventually, this leads us to reflect on the nature of those four novels, which seem to be

constituted mainly of meaningful and symbolic elements. While they appear as relatively classical

narratives, even after several readings, there is ground to consider that they constitute an ironical

comment on the process of writing, on the semiological saturation of our society. In that sense, they

are close to Godard's vision of the cinema, to the pop art and especially to Ballard's masterpieces of

the early seventies, The Atrocity Exhibition, Vermilion Sands and Crash.

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Lack of Realism, of Logic: a Reverse Construction

If anything, surrealist painting has one dominant characteristic: a glassy isolation as if all the objects

in its landscape had been drained of their emotional associations, the acretions of sentiment and

common usage. What they demonstrate is that the most commonplace of reality [...] may have very

different meanings by the time they reach the central nervous system. (UGM 88)

Ever since its beginning, science fiction in general has often been accused of being a genre

where the coherence of the plot is not a pre-requisite. This could have something to do with the

recurrent time-travel, metamorphosis and weird inventions that impregnated it during its early years...

However, while a huge effort has been made to fill the logical gaps that corrupted the stories of

the precursors, Ballardian novels do not really fit in that mould. Incoherence, logical lapses,

incomprehensible behaviours of the characters... those reproaches may be exaggerated, but they have a

solid ground. Yet, thanks to the ever useful 'suspension of disbelief', those flaws are less apparent that

they would be in other circumstances, and most readers do not even notice them.

Since we are not this average reader, we shall try to categorise those 'mistakes', the reason of

their existence and the effect they produce. Some of them seem to be real mistakes, especially in The

Wind from Nowhere, probably caused by a lack of attention. Yet, not surprisingly, most of those

logical flaws are integrated deeply in the plot, carefully hidden or not, and eventually, it appears that

the plot as a whole is not 'logic' in the common acceptation of the word (although, as we saw earlier, it

follows a method). If we try to find a literary antecedent for such a conception of the narrative, the

surrealist movement is an obvious choice, although some individual works like Alice in Wonderland

also come to mind. However, Carroll's works did not have this central vision, which gives Ballard's

method its ground: the 'landscape of the mind'.

Involuntary Mistakes

Fortunately, the suspension of disbelief dissimulates intentional flaws of logic as well as purely

accidental one. It is fortunate indeed, for some passages of Ballard's novels could use a careful reading

to eliminate some strange mistakes that pervade them, while not playing any observable role. Of

course, it is not easy to spot those mistakes and to be absolutely certain that they are unintentional, but

in several cases, there is no real ambiguity.

The objective of this small part is not so much to build a catalogue of those 'errors' but to

classify them, so as to differentiate them from the much more interesting category of the intentional

lapses of logic.

69

The Wind from Nowhere is a good example in that respect, since it contains examples of most of

the small mistakes made by Ballard, and very few of the intentional plays with conventional logic

found in later works. Due to its more anecdotal and quickly written nature, it epitomises the

involuntary trends of Ballard rather than his researches of alternate construction.

As soon as chapter two, we have a blatant display of incoherence. The entire chapter is devoted

to a 'rescue operation' from Genoa to Nice, to pick up Van Damm, a general whose plane has crashed

in Paris. While it turns out that the general is dead, it still does not account for the fact that whoever

transported his coffin from Paris to Nice was unable to take him a few miles further to the submarine

anchorage. Similarly, there is no real explanation to the mooring of the submarine in Genoa rather than

Nice itself (although it is mentioned that the harbour in Monte-Carlo is 'full of smashed up rafts' (WN

25)).

The description of the effects of the wind also varies considerably from one chapter to another.

While it is already terrifying for everyone in London, at 55mph, it does not seem to be a major

disturbance in Nice at an impressive 125mph, where hotels and bars are still open. A bit later in this

second chapters, two people can safely wait outside in the wind, with their suitcases (!) without any

particular difficulty (incidentally, Lanyon is also able to spot the airline stickers on those obviously

heavy suitcases while peering through a periscope). A few minutes later, the wind is again strong

enough to topple a heavy troop carrier.

Also, from a more mathematical point of view, it is interesting to notice that while the speed of

wind increases of roughly 5mph each day, it only reaches 125mph more than three weeks after it

began to be a worry (' "It'll probably start slacking off today". [...] "That's what they've been saying for

the last three weeks" ' (WN 25)). In other words, it started to be a worry even for submariners at the

impressive speed of 20mph.

Examples like this abound in The Wind from Nowhere, with the ones above found only in the

first two chapters, but they are also present in the other novels of the tetralogy. The funniest one can

be found in The Drowned World, with the roaring of the iguanas, while in 'real life' iguanas do not roar

at all, but merely produce a quiet rasping sound. This serves the purpose of creating a parallel between

those iguanas and dinosaurs, but it nonetheless appears as a mistake, or a lack of verification to say the

least. In the same novel, one can also be astonished to find out that solar energy is utterly neglected,

and that despite the impossibility to exploit oil pits for the last few decades, helicopters and boats still

use petrol-powered engines.

This kind of errors do not really take away from the interest of the novels, although it tends to

reduce their efficiency as plain narratives (but it should be obvious by now that Ballard's writings are

not to be read as plain explicit stories). Actually, minor mistakes or approximation like those can be

found in most narratives, and especially in the field of science fiction, where, often, so many themes

collide that it is nearly impossible for an author to keep everything in control. However, in Ballard's

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case, noticing those errors, mostly based on scientific approximations, is relevant to this study in that it

allows us to differentiate them from intentional lapses of logic.

Deconstructed Reality

We mentioned in the introduction the 'suspension of disbelief', as one of the essential

explanations for the success of Ballard as a popular writer. The examples quoted above would

probably be sufficient to illustrate this affirmation, but Ballard's use of the reader's willingness to

accept whatever the writer suggests goes a lot further than those minor approximations.

The very existence of the catastrophes is an example of this strategy. Sure enough, Ballard

provides some explanations about them, going as far as detailing the long process having taking place

before the action starts in both The Drought and The Drowned World. However, those explanations

are so stiff, so badly incorporated in the novel (we already mentioned the shift of focus during those

passages), and overall so little convincing that they come to appear as arbitrary. In other words,

Ballard plays a deus ex machina, who does not hesitate to generate a disaster for the pleasure of seeing

what happens next.

This is especially obvious in The Wind from Nowhere, where the cataclysm adopt the mask of

logic, with the detailed accounts of its progression, with statistics and broadcast, while its origin

remains conspicuously unmentioned. Even stranger, the characters never seem to notice that they are

totally ignorant of this origin. The issue is discussed only once, and is dismissed with a baffling

promptitude: ' "What do the weather experts think has caused it?" [...] "None of them seem to know. It

certainly has some unusual feature" ' (WN 18). The reason for this obtuseness only appears much later

in the novel, in the last chapter to be accurate, with the co-ordination between the end of the wind and

Hardoon's death. Although it is never said explicitly, the reader is supposed to understand that in a

mysterious way, the death of the Tycoon who wanted to challenge nature has tamed the disaster. To

achieve this effect, and to bring a personal touch in an otherwise rather classical novel, Ballard did not

hesitate to manipulate the reader through the characters. However, only through the 'suspension of

disbelief' can he prevent this reader from realising at once that the behaviour of those characters

displays a suspect ignorance. Besides, this is not the only major logical flaw of the novel: if Hardoon's

arrogance is supposed to have started the cataclysm (as is suggested in the end), how could Ballard

explain that he started to build his pyramid after the beginning of the storm? Obviously, Ballard does

not have any valid explanation for this, for if he had, then the ambiguity he carefully created would be

destroyed immediately.

This is one of the first occurrences of Ballard's willingness to dismiss logic in order to improve

the effect of his novel, knowing that most readers will not notice it, and that even if they do, that they

will not care. Yet, The Wind from Nowhere is far from being Ballard's most achieved work, and it

71

could be argued that the logical loop involved here is only the expression of a badly constructed

narrative, and that he could (and would) have changed it if he had been aware of the problem. While it

may be the case, I think there are good reasons not to agree with that. First, any supplementary

explanation would have taken away from the last scene, which is obviously meant as the climax of the

novel. Then, Ballard has shown on other occasions that he did not hold conventional narrative

causality to be an essential component of a literary work:

For science fiction, the lesson of Burroughs's work is plain. It is now nearly forty years since the first

Buck Rogers comic strip, and only two less than a century since the birth of science fiction's greatest

modern practitioner, H.G. Wells, yet the genre is still dominated by largely the same set of

conventions, the same repertory of ideas, and, worst of all, by the assumption that it is still possible to

write accounts of interplanetary voyages in which the appeal is to realism rather than to fantasy.

(UGM 129)

Fantasy rather than realism. The main argument for Ballard's manipulation of the structure of

his novels is appropriately summed up in these four words. In this article33, Ballard clearly advocates

the submission of 'realism' and of the narrative conventions to the effects that the writers want to

produce. This may seem obvious, for even in 'mainstream' literature, the perception of reality is

constantly altered to suit the author's conception of his story, but Ballard pushes this logic to an

extreme point.

A striking example can be found in the importance assumed by chance meetings, and apparently

random events in the progression of the plots of his novels. This kind of device is usually considered

as an expression of the author's laziness or incapacity to write a convincing narrative. This conception

of the novel, inherited from a rationalist approach, is indeed so commonly accepted that plots built

around coincidences have become a trademark of second-rate films and novels.

Yet, Ballard does not hesitate to elaborate his plot around loosely connected events, most of

which even appearing completely random. In The Drowned World, for instance, no real explanation is

provided for Strangman's appearance in the exact period between Riggs's departure and the inevitable

death of Kerans, Bodkin and Beatrice. The event seems about as improbable as the presence of

Beatrice Dahl in the remnants of London, thirty years (!) after the beginning of the emigration towards

Greenland. No explanation is provided either about the way Strangman and his crew manage to

survive in this deserted world. Sure enough, they are said to search for 'heavy specialised machinery'

(DW 89), but Strangman seems to be interested exclusively in artistic treasures, without any direct

commercial value in this context.

In The Drought, the coincidences are to be found mostly in Ransom's relationships with the

other characters. Although he does not seem to be very charismatic or efficient (he cannot even save

33 'Myth Maker of the 20th Century' (1964), a review of William Burroughs's Naked Lunch originally published in New-Worlds, the same year The Drought was published.

72

Phillip Jordan's swan), he seems to know all the important characters of the novel from its very

beginning. He even gets to see them all just before his departure, for futile matters (Lomax's headache,

for instance). Later, he is not be surprised when the initial group (Mrs Quilter, Phillip Jordan,

Catherine Austen and him, minus Mr Jordan) spontaneously reforms for a journey backwards, after

more than ten years in the 'dune limbo'. Thus, the impressive symmetrical and integrated structure of

the narrative is only achieved thanks to a long chain of coincidences that contradicts the usual notion

of 'realism' or plausibility.

In The Crystal World, the range of coincidences and improbable events combines the

characteristics of The Drought and The Drowned World. Not only are the motives of a number of

events left in a blur (why does the soldier explain everything he knows to Sanders? Why was Louise

sent to a remote village in Africa to study a phenomenon also taking place in Florida?), but like

Ransom, Kerans also gets to know 'by chance' all the characters who will play a role later in the

narrative (Father Balthus comes to mind). This combination also underlines the fact that The Crystal

World is chronologically the last book of the tetralogy, which can explain that Ballard made use of all

the techniques learnt from his previous experience. Whatever the exact reason, the compactness of the

events described in the novel makes its lack of inner logic even more significant. The travel up the

river strongly evokes Heart of Darkness, obviously, but while Marlowe's adventures followed a

straigthforward pattern (sailing up the river, to Kurtz), Kerans's are strikingly more erratic. Not only

does his travel start in the 'heart of darkness' instead of ending in it (' "The light at Port Matarre is

always like this, very heavy and penumbral' " (CW 13)'; "Port Matarre has more than a passing

resemblance to purgatory" ' (CW 30)), but significantly enough, Sanders goes up and down the river

several times in the course of the novel. This refusal of the usual travelogue form adopted by Conrad,

with its explicit linearity can be read as a manifesto of Ballard's will not to follow a classical pattern of

causality, a refusal that has even more weight considering his admiration for Conrad.

So far, we have seen that this refusal of 'realism' was used to add some ambiguity as to the

motives of the characters, and their relationships with the disaster, as well as to create an elaborate

structure, in which all the events and characters interact and connect at some point. To a certain extent,

all four novels present those two aspects, with one or the other being emphasised in a given story.

However, Ballard's refusal of realism is not focused only on the characters and their behaviour.

It expresses itself even more freely when it comes to the elaboration of the landscape, and even finds

its justification in it.

Building around the Landscape

Ballard's method finds its demonstration in the landscape of his four novels. Often pointed out

as major components of his writing, they are indeed unforgettable visions, which give to their

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respective narratives a unique flavour in spite of the recurrent events and characters. To underline their

importance in the tetralogy, one needs only to quote the title of the novels; The Wind from Nowhere

may not be that evocative, but the other three (including The Burning World, the original title of The

Drought) immediately calls to mind unearthly pictures of alternate worlds. Even before starting any of

those novels, the potential reader is warned of the central importance of the visual aspect of the story

he will be told. He should therefore be keener on accepting some compromises with the construction

of the narrative, provided they reinforce the aesthetic impact of the novel.

The brief 'scientific' explanation of the disaster after a few chapters is one of the motifs of the

tetralogy. The description of the landscape created by this disaster appears as the counterpart of this

motif (thus becoming one itself), and their relative importance once more underlines the little

consideration that Ballard has for the scientific elements of his novels.

Like an immense putrescent sore, the jungle lay exposed below the open hatchway of the helicopter.

Giant groves of gymnosperms stretched in dense clumps along the rooftops of the submerged

buildings, smothering the white rectangular outlines. Here and there, an old concrete water tower

protruded from the morass, or the remain of a makeshift jetty still floated beside the hulk of a

collapsing office block, overgrown with feathery acacias and flowering tamarisk. (DW 52-53)

Nowhere was there a defined margin between the shore and sea, and the endless shallows formed the

only dividing zone, land and water submerged in this grey liquid limbo. At intervals the skeleton of a

derelict conveyor emerged from the salt and seemed to point towards the sea, but then, after a few

yards, sank from sight again. Gradually the pools of water congregated into larger lakes, small creeks

formed into continuous channels, but the water never seemed to move. (DR 103)

The fences along the road were so heavily encrusted that they formed a continuous palisade, a white

frost at least six inches thick on either side of the palings. The few houses between the tree glistened

like wedding-cakes, their white roofs and chimneys transformed into exotic minarets and baroque

domes. On a lawn of green glass spurs a child's tricycle glittered like a Fabergé gem, the wheels

starred into brilliant jasper crowns. (CW 75)

Three different landscapes (The Wind from Nowhere is devoid of a similar scene), and yet, they

share many important elements. The first thing to notice is their lack of plausibility. Although they all

refer to realistic and observable landscapes (a tropical jungle, a sand desert, a frozen forest), this

natural reference is lost in the baroque exaggerations ('putrescent sore', 'liquid limbo'...) and, more

importantly, in the reminiscence of the artefacts of civilisation. This is not a coincidence if in all three

cases, those artefacts are 'submerged', or sink under the sand, for the landscapes are literally built upon

and around those artefacts. To some extent, it is easy to see in them visual transpositions of the failure

of this civilisation as Ballard conceives it. The depth of water extending between the individuals, the

74

erosion of the notion of time (similar to the notion of the capitalism seen as 'the end of history'), and

the crystallisation of the artefacts into baroque but lifeless version of themselves are all easily

interpretable images. However, it would be reducing to see those landscapes only as metaphorical

representations, for their role is much more important. They are the culmination of Ballard's view of

the narratives as a way to convey 'fantasy' rather than 'realism'.

Ballard himself expressed this prevalence of the landscape on the story in an article about The

Drowned World34:

In many respects this fusion of the past and present experience, and of such disparate elements as the

modern buildings of central London and an alligator in a Chinese zoo, resembles the mechanism by

which dreams are constructed, and perhaps the great value of fantasy as a literary form is its ability to

bring together apparently unconnected and dissimilar ideas. (UGM 200)

In spite of its apparent neutrality, this affirmation provides important clarifications about the

role and origins of those landscapes.

First of all, it confirms their central position in the narratives, since the effect they produce is

termed 'the great value of fantasy'. Secondly, it tells a lot about the way they were constructed. While

it may be tempting to see in them purely fantastical landscapes, along the line of Edgar Rice

Burroughs (in his John Carter cycle) or Frank Herbert (Dune), Ballard considers them as a

superposition of meaningful elements fused through a dream-like logic. While it applies to The

Drowned World (about which the article above was written), it also sheds a new light on the

description taken from The Crystal World quoted above. Each metaphor, each object is connected to

the rest of the narrative, to the social critic that runs throughout the four novels, to Ballard's own

memories, and even to his other novels (the 'Fabergé gem' going back to Lomax's 'Fabergé style' in

The Drought).

The obvious implication of this is that Ballard's landscapes are not conceived as devices to

reinforce their respective narratives. On the contrary, having realised their importance, and their

undeniable complexity, there is ground to suppose that the novels are built around those impressive

visions.

The process of creation therefore appears to be reversed entirely, and explains in retrospect

many of the incongruities that we noticed earlier on in our study. Most of all, this interpretation

provides a satisfying explanation of the relationships that Ballard's novels have with the notion of

genre. We already said that the codes out science fiction and of the disaster novel were used in a very

conscious way, with Ballard borrowing heavily from the codes of the genre and sub-genre while

simultaneously redefining them to a large extent. This can be understood in a much more satisfying

way if we consider that the genre was indeed used as a mere tool. Ballard chose it because it allowed

34 'Time, Memory and Inner Space', originally published in The Woman Journalist (1963)

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him to build a narrative into which he could fit his initial enthralling vision. Knowing this, he was able

to borrow only what he needed from the conventions of the genre (which he knew intimately, having

written more rather 'classical' short stories earlier in his career), enough elements to reassure his

readers and editors while remaining free to adapt his universe to his ideas. Above all, the disaster story

provided him with a 'suspension of disbelief' pushed to its limit, which smoothes the unavoidable

logical approximations on the way to the central vision that shapes the novel. Once this effect is

achieved, Ballard gladly gets rid of the sub-genre, and only alludes to it for coherency's sake.

The archetypal nature of the characters can also be seen as a way to draw the reader's attentions

to the central element of the narrative, the landscape. The main characters all start as mere stereotypes

(and not archetypal like the secondary characters), and only become complex individuals when they

come in contact with the central vision of the narrative. This individuation confirms the role of the

vision ('landscape' is a bit too restrictive: Strangman and his crew are part of the central vision of The

Drowned World, for example) as the central element of meaning in the narrative. This meaning or, to

be more accurate, this accumulation of meanings can therefore be reinvested in the characters when

they eventually get to mimic it and understand it. In a slightly more anecdotal way, this method of

construction in reverse also accounts for some of the oddities within the plot of the three novels. The

symmetry between the beginning and the end of The Drought and, to a lesser extent, of The Crystal

World appears as consequences of a development around a nodal point.

In a Word

Eventually, this part of our study brings about the main difference between The Wind from

Nowhere and the other three novels. While there are some strong connections between this first novel

and the others (as we amply demonstrated in the previous parts), The Wind was obviously not

conceived around a central vision (unless you consider Hardoon's pyramid) or to convey a specific

image. The linear structure, the lack of 'intentional' plays with logic, and the overall feeling of

classicism of the novel all come from this crucial conceptual difference.

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Inner and Outer Landscape, Surrealist Influence

We have just shown the crucial importance of the 'central vision' in three of the four novels of

our study. However, while its function has been analysed, there remains a lot to be said or written

about its nature.

A first approximation would be to consider it (as we have) as the visual representation of a

number of superimposed meaningful elements coming from various origins. Some of those elements

are metaphoric, while others, such as the crocodile mentioned by Ballard, are images from the 'real

world' and integrated in this composite landscape. This philosophy could be summed up by what

Odilon Redon described as placing 'the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible'35.

However, this accurate description is made even more interesting by the fact that it was not

meant to describe Ballard's system, but the work of the surrealist painter. The confusion is not a

fortuitous one, for Ballard has often expressed his admiration for the movement created by André

Breton, as well as its influence on his own work. He is especially interested in the production of the

surrealist painters like Dali, Ernst or Tanguy, who often make cameo appearances in his novels.

For Ballard, the great achievement of the surrealists was to have established the connection

between the inner world of the artist, its subconscious, and the outer world, where our usual notions of

perception apply. Along with Michael Moorcock, he used a similar principle to establish the

theoretical basis of the New Wave, but renamed those two fields of enquiries inner and outer space.

However loosely his stories appear to be constructed, they tend to suggest a correspondence between

the mental evolution of the characters and their environment (the 'central vision'), and thus deal with

this issue of defining the interactions between inner and outer space.

Referring to the Surrealists

Ballard never tries to dissimulate the influence at work within his novels. In The Drowned

World, Jung's theories are enunciated so clearly (although his name is never mentioned) that they

sound almost ironical, and the shadow of Heart of Darkness is hard to miss in The Crystal World.

However, when it comes to the surrealist painters, this acknowledgement is pushed even further, since

their names are quoted in full on several occasions, even with precise references to their most relevant

works in the context of the novel. Not surprisingly, though, such references are absent from The Wind

from Nowhere, a fact which confirms the essential difference between that novel and the other three.

In The Drowned World, which is probably the most reference-filled novel that Ballard ever

wrote, Beatrice has several surrealist paintings on the wall of her room, that she inherited from her

grandfather.

35 Quoted in UGM 'The Coming of the Unconscious', 84

77

Over the mantelpiece was a huge painting by the early 20th-century Surrealist, Delvaux, in which

ashen-faced women danced naked to the waist with dandified skeletons in tuxedos against a spectral

bone-like landscape. On another wall one of Max Ernst's self-devouring phantasmagoric jungles

screamed siltently to itself, like the sump of some insane unconscious.

For a few moments Kerans stared quietly at the dim yellow annulus of Ernst's sun glowering through

the exotic vegetation, a curious feeling of memory and recognition signalling through his brain. (DW

29)

In those few sentences, Ballard provides several explanations about his novel. Not only does he

acknowledge his debt to the surrealists by allowing them to be the only surviving work of art in his

submerged world (the others, such as Strangman's treasure, are always described as indistinct and

irrelevant relics), but he also expresses their influence on this peculiar story. The ironic last-sentence,

an obviously metanarrative comment, draws our attention to this connection, but the description of

Delvaux's painting also finds an echo in the body of the novel. Bodkin's comment on the apparent

travel backward in time that 'If we return to the jungle, we'll dress for dinner' (DW 42) appears as a

reminiscence of the 'dandified skeletons in tuxedo'. Later on, Sanders makes this link even more

explicit 'they moved at night like the phantoms in the Delvaux painting' (DW 81). Incidentally,

Beatrice's habit of being dressed almost exclusively in swimsuit is a satisfying approximation of

'naked to the waist' women.

Those connections with the story denote the role of the paintings as not only a remote source of

inspiration, but also as a direct influence on the plot, and thus reproduce in an attenuated way the role

played by Ballard's central vision. Besides, it is hardly deniable that this central vision is influenced by

the paintings mentioned. This is coherent with Ballard's way to acknowledge his source: he uses them

to elaborate his own philosophy, his own vision, but also mentions them and exemplifies the role they

played in his creative process.

The same kind of reference can be found in The Crystal World, when Balthus and Sanders first

meet. ' "The light at Port Matarre is always like this, very heavy and penumbral – do you know

Bocklin's painting Island of the Dead, where the Cypresses stand guard above a cliff pierced by a

hypogeum, while a storm hovers over the sea?” '

Although Bocklin is not exactly a surrealist, they mentioned him along with Gauguin and

Moreau as one of the precursors of their movement. The inclusion of the description in the story is

fairly similar to what we observed in The Drowned World. Its tone is so different from the rest of the

narrative that it seems almost extra-diegetic, Ballard's vision rather than Balthus', with its precious

'hypogeum'36 and its discreet wordplay ('hover over'). Through these incongruities, Ballard emphasises

the very peculiar role of this painting, once more the only work of art mentioned in the novel, and

36 An underground tomb

78

makes it stand out as an outside element rather than a component of the story. The beginning of

Balthus's sentence also makes it explicit that the painting served as a visual reference for the

descriptions of the town. While Port Matarre is not the central visual element of The Crystal World,

the process here is fairly similar to what we observed previously: a conscious attempt to acknowledge

an important source of inspiration.

However, it is in The Drought that Ballard states the most clearly the role played by the

surrealists in his own creative process. Like Beatrice Dahl, Ransom has some paintings on the wall of

his houseboat (although unlike Beatrice, he chose them himself):

On the left was a snapshot of himself at the age of four, sitting on a lawn between his parents before

their divorce. On the right, exorcising this memory, was a faded reproduction of a small painting he

had clipped from a magazine, Jours de Lenteur by Yves Tanguy. With its smooth, pebble-like objects,

drained of all associations, suspended on a washed tidal floor, this painting had helped to free him

from the tiresome repetition of everyday life. The rounded milky forms were isolated on their ocean

bed like the houseboat on the exposed bank of the river. (DR 13)

There is a noticeable difference between this description and what we saw in the other two

novels. Here, the reaction to the painting really belongs to Ransom, and not only to Ballard. It is

purely diegetic, although it also announces the 'dune limbo' of the second part of the story. The links

created with the actual landscape of the narrative are also stronger than in the other cases, with a direct

comparison between the subject of the painting and the situation of the character, while the links

between The Crystal World and Bocklin's work were of a purely aesthetic nature. The main reason for

this difference is that the whole conception of The Drought is based around Tanguy's painting, while

the importance of The Island of the Dead is much smaller.

Actually, Jour de Lenteur literally frames The Drought, since the title of the painting

(mentioned as early as chapter 3), is also the title of the final chapter of the novel. The description of

the landscape as Ransom progresses towards the heart of the catastrophe – reaching the end of his

inner travel into a half-formulated desire for suicide – becomes noticeably reminiscent of Tanguy's

painting.

Smoothed by the wind, the white dunes covered the bed like motionless waves. He stepped among

them, following the hollows that carried him out of sight of the shore. The sand was smooth and

unmarked, gleaming with the bones of untold numbers of fish. (DR 176)

The painting is also present in the description of the 'dune limbo' towards the middle of the

novel, as Ransom himself notices (DR 113). It is therefore clear that the 'central vision' Ballard had for

this novel derived from Tanguy's work, although he combined this original element with his own his

images, his personal vision (obviously present in his description of the painting). Even Ransom's

79

acceptance of his fate and of his almost certain death seems to have originated to a certain extent in the

'rounded milky forms' to which he associates himself when we are introduced to the painting.

Another strong influence on The Drought is certainly to be found in Dali's Persistence of

Memory, although it is not mentioned directly. The visual correlation between the painting and the

landscape of the novel would be sufficient to suggest this association, but the description Ballard later

made of the painting dispels any remaining doubt: 'The empty beach with its fused sand is a symbol of

utter psychic alienation. Clock time here is no longer valid, the watches have begun to melt and drip'

(UGM 87). There is even an oblique allusion to the title of Dali’s most famous piece after Ransom's

discussion with Judith: 'for Ransom, the only final rest from the persistence of memory would come

from his absolution in time' (DR 34). This may be a coincidence, but the expression is not so common

that Ballard would have used it without noticing its allusive value.

Those associations draw our attention on the nature of the 'central visions' around which Ballard

stories are constructed. It may not always be as obvious as in The Drought, but in all three novels, the

surrealist influence defines Ballard's aesthetic and their method is the basis for the elaboration of his

'central visions'.

The Surrealist Method

The correspondence between Ballard and Tanguy's works is not only an aesthetic convergence,

a set of visual elements. It also reflects a deeper convergence between Ballard's conception of art, and

the whole surrealist movement.

It is difficult to find an appropriate definition of surrealism, all the more so since its main

advocate, André Breton, changed his mind about the nature of the movement several time, whenever

he found it necessary to eject a member of the group. However, if we go back to the first Manifeste of

the movement, written in 1924, we can find this approach:

Tout porte à croire qu'il existe un certain point de l'esprit d'où la vie et la mort, le réel et l'imaginaire,

le passé et le futur, le communicable et l'incommunicable, le haut et le bas cessent d'être perçus

contradictoirement. Or c'est en vain qu'on chercherait à l'activité surréaliste un autre mobile que

l'espoir de détermination de ce point.37

Even this first definition could serve as the proof of the influence of Breton and consorts on

Ballard's writings. Apart from the 'haut et le bas' couple, all the dualities quoted there appear in one

form or another in the last three novels of our tetralogy, and in every case, they are one of the major

issue of the narrative. Indeed, those dilemmas appear only when the characters come in contact with

the central vision of their respective novels, and originate in those nodal points, in those surrealist-37 André Breton, Manifeste du Surréalisme (1924)

80

looking landscapes. The aesthetic convergence noted and acknowledged in the novel is thus mirrored

by a philosophic one.

Ballard himself has a lot to say about the role of the surrealist conception on contemporary

fiction in general, and on his work in particular. We mentioned earlier his conviction that the major

role of fiction is to bring about unlikely and stimulating associations. In an article published in 196338,

he affirmed that science fiction was an especially appropriate method to construct alternate universes,

where, 'dreams and reality become fused together, each retaining his own distinctive quality and yet in

some way assuming the role of its opposite, and where by an undeniable logic black simultaneously

become white' (UGM 200). This does not only illustrate the parallel between his own method and that

of the surrealists, but also indicates hat he had probably read André Breton at that time (the similitude

between the two definitions is striking). We can therefore admit that The Drowned World (written the

year before) and the following novels were elaborated with a conscious integration of the surrealist

theories, in addition to his admiration for their aesthetic.

Yet, in spite of this acknowledged admiration, Ballard does not use the literary techniques of the

surrealists. He does admire Dali's autobiography (which he cites among his favourite books ever),

Lautréamont or Apollinaire (those two being ancestors of the movement rather than part of it), but it is

quite obvious that for him, the real interest of the movement lies in its painting rather than in its

literary production. Up to a point where he makes it clear on several occasions that to his mind, the

surrealist painting really is surrealism. 'Surrealism is the first systematic investigation of the most

unsuspected aspects of our lives – the meaning, for example, of a certain horizontal perspective, of

curvilinear or soft forms as opposed to rectilinear ones' (UGM 88)39. This may be the reason why

Ballard never claimed to be a surrealist himself. While he adheres to their philosophy, he never

adopted the technique of the movement (cut-ups, automatic writing...), but instead tried to conceive a

literary equivalent to their pictorial production. This is not to say that he dislikes the use of random

elements to let unsuspected meanings appear (he admires the technique in Burroughs work, for

example), simply that it does not correspond his taste for carefully conceived work. Writing about

Dali, he underlines the 'hallucinatory realism of his renaissance style' as the appropriate way to

connect the surrealist experiments with 'our ordinary reality' (UGM 93)40. His refusal of the most

abstract surrealist technique to adopt a rather anonymous type of narration can be seen as an attempt to

mimic this peculiarity of Dali's work: the classical form helps to put forward the radically innovative

content.

Combining images and sensations to create unlikely associations is only an aspect of the

surrealist method. The collages were one of their favourite creative devices, but it is a technique rather

than an objective. The self-assigned goal of surrealism is to free the unconscious from the dictatorship

of the dialectic of reality: 'L'idée de surréalisme tend simplement à la récupération totale de notre force

38 'Time, Memory and Inner Space', in The Woman Journalist (1963)39 'The Coming of the Unconscious', in New-Worlds (1966)40 'The Innocent as Paranoid', in New-Worlds (1969)

81

psychique par un moyen qui n'est autre que la descente vertigineuse en nous'41. While Ballard may not

agree with the means to reach this objective, he definitely accepts the idea that art is a search for the

hidden possibilities of the unconscious, although not in a psychoanalytical way. However, for him, the

straightest way to the unconscious is to try to represent it, rather than to hope it will express itself

spontaneously (as in automatic writing for instance). This prevalence of the representation over the

expression lead him to adopt the metaphor of the 'inner space' to describe the unconscious without

resorting to the usual psychoanalytical terminology. The pictorial equivalence of this 'inner space' can

of course be found in the drained landscapes of Dali and Tanguy.

This association brings us back to the central role of the landscape in his novels, in which he

invests the ambiguous relationships that this 'inner space' has with the so-called real world. If Jour de

Lenteur is the description of an 'inner space', and simultaneously provides the inspiration for the main

feature of The Drought, then the nature of this main feature, what we called the 'central vision'

becomes rather explicit.

Inner Space and Outer Landscape

The first occurrence of Ballard's theory about inner space can be found, not surprisingly, in an

article published in New-Worlds in 1962, the year when The Drowned World was published and called

'Which Way to Inner Space?' He does not mention directly the surrealists, but his allusion to 'the

experimental enthusiasm which has characterised painting, music and the cinema during the last four

or five decades' (UGM 197) seem to be an indirect allusion to the movement, born fifty years before

that date. The article sets the major landmarks of the theory, but is more a manifesto ('If this sounds

off-beat and abstract, so much the better') than a detailed analysis.

However, in subsequent publications, Ballard explained and refined this initial outburst, a

process almost completed in 1963:

Without in any way suggesting that the act of writing is a form of creative self-analysis, I feel that the

writer of fantasy has a marked tendency to select images and ideas which directly reflect the internal

landscapes of his mind, and the reader of fantasy must interpret them on this level, distinguishing

between the manifest content, which may seem obscure, meaningless or nightmarish, and the latent

content, the private vocabulary of symbols drawn by the narrative from the writer's mind. (UGM 200)

However convincing it may seem, this explanation - voluntarily presented in a general way –

does not account for Ballard's own creative process. In particular, his awareness of the mental process

at work certainly allowed him to work around the personal involvement he described here. Instead of

revealing his own inner space through his novels, he chose to create an alternate inner universe,

41 Collective text, in La Révolution Surréaliste No 9-10 (1927)

82

borrowing from many sources (such as Ernst in The Drowned World) and combining those outer

elements with more personal ones. There is little doubt that Ballard was aware of the approximation in

what he wrote above (barring an interesting paradox), but it is hard to spot the exact reason for this

dissimulation.

The manifestation of this theory in the three novels of our study (The Wind from Nowhere is still

excluded from those considerations) takes various forms. The most common one can be spotted in the

hints that the landscape contains a message, that the characters painfully try to grasp, since they realise

that the key of their own psyche may be hidden around them. It is commonly admitted that these

ubiquitous cryptic messages signify that the landscape is a projection of the characters' minds. For

Michel Delville, for example, there is no real ambiguity about this relationship: 'these images of silent

unthinking permanence are meant to convey the characters' acceptance of an ontological state of

isolation'42. However, to be logic with our interpretation of the construction of Ballard's novels, we

have to consider this link the other way round: the characters are projections of the landscape.

Whatever the exact nature of this cause/consequence ambiguity, it is hardly deniable that the

landscape and the unconscious of the characters are deeply linked, to a point where they interact on

one another. The Drought is probably the novel in which this symbolic value of the surrounding has

the most importance; at least, it is definitely the novel in which the characters are the most aware of its

significance. As soon as the first chapter, Ransom seems to understand it almost completely, the

failure of his marriage appears 'less a personal one than that of the urban context, in fact a failure of

the landscape' (DR 11). Incidentally, this tends to confirm that the landscape presides over the destiny

of the characters and not the other way round. A bit later, at the conclusion of this first chapter,

Ransom realises that the disappearance of the river is about to trigger a major change, 'with the death

of the river, so would vanish any contact between those stranded on the drained floor'. This

premonition will prove to be accurate, as violence will rise in the subsequent chapters, up to a point

where he too will have to leave. This is the first occurrence of this kind of omen read in the landscape,

but other examples arise as the story unfolds. The most striking one being found when the Johnstones

leave Mount Royal, and Ransom evokes the nature of his link with Vanessa: 'From now on, they

would both have to create their own sense of time out of the landscape emerging around them' (DR

70).

Kerans and Sanders do not have this conscience of the importance of the landscape around

them, at least at the beginning of their respective novels. Soon, however, they come to the realisation

that their environments have to be explored thoroughly if they are to understand themselves. At the

end of The Drowned World, Sanders is convinced that the 'missing fragments of himself' can be found

'somewhere in the crystalline streets of Mont Royal' (CW 174). Kerans for his part expresses this dual

nature of the landscape around him through a synthetic metaphor, just after Riggs departure. Thinking

42 Michel Delville, J.G. Ballard, 12

83

of Beatrice, Bodkin and himself, he comes to the conclusion that 'each of them would have to pursue

their own pathway through the time jungle, mark their own points of no return' (DW 81).

This rejoins what Ballard said about the 'hallucinatory realism' of Dali's painting: in his novels,

he creates unlikely yet carefully described world into which his characters will be able to wander at

will, in order to decrypt their own inner universe. Coming back to The Drought, it becomes quite clear

towards the end of the novel that Ransom fully understands the nature of this landscape, and the

significance of his variations. Ballard's illustrates this in a way that is reminiscent of his comment on

Dali: 'the lack of movement gave to even the slightest disturbance an almost hallucinatory quality' (DR

145). Understanding that he is surrounded by his own hallucinations, Ransom 'has completed the

journey across the margins of the inner landscape he had carried in his mind so many years', and

immediately after it is 'as if the whole of the exterior world were losing its existence' (DR 176). By

resolving this conflict, and this final dissolution, Ballard dispels any surviving ambiguity about the

nature of the world he created in the novel, an oversized inner world perfectly adapted to a two-

hundred-page introspection.

Obviously, the same conclusion can be reached for the other two novels, which use the same

structure, although it tends to be slightly less explicit.

In a Word

Thus, Ballard achieves the goal of the surrealism, in creating a device to explore the

unconscious through art. Unlike his inspirers, however, he does not proceed openly, but try to hide this

exploration under the cover of a classical narrative. The mask may be easy to remove for anyone used

to deciphering sub-texts, but it is nonetheless there. This ambivalence raises some doubts about the

significance that the author intended to give to these works.

84

Looking for a Meaning

For Dali to be able to paint soft watches, it was necessary that the 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 invasion of reality by fiction; the roles have been reversed.43

In the course of this study, we have enumerated a number of influences and conventions that all

played their role in the elaboration of Ballard's first four novels. Not only are they quite numerous, but

they are also much more explicit than in most narratives, from the name of the surrealist painters to the

transparent allusions to the Jungian theories. This accumulation creates an increasingly disturbing

feeling of artificiality, as if the true nature of those four novels (especially the last three) were

dissimulated behind this thick patchwork of references and tributes.

Ballard never implied that it could be the case, but we already found many evidences of his

irony, as well as a proof that he has not always been honest in his explanation of his work. Thus, it is

legitimate to wonder whether the conception of his narratives could actually carry an ironical subtext,

carefully elaborated through the superabundance of acknowledged influences and references.

To reinforce this thesis, it is useful to notice that despite our careful study, we left an impressive

number of allusions unmentioned so far. The Drought for example refers heavily and explicitly to The

Tempest and The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, in addition to the other sources we already pointed

out. Similarly, we left aside several recurring images and interpretations that appear in all three novels,

such as the duality between sun and water, or the theme of the mirror image. There would also be a lot

to write about the significance and connotations of the names of the characters, ranging from simple

anagrams to more cryptic historical allusions.

However, while it is useful to notice those supplementary references, and to pay them a closer

look, it soon appears that the accumulation of meaningful elements invalids the usual analytical

method. While most novels revolve around a fairly small number of symbols and allusions, it seems

that Ballard's novels are constituted entirely of such material. This can be seen as an expression of the

richness of the sub-text, and of the author's culture, or it can legitimately be considered as confusing

and self-contradictory. However, in the light of Ballard's later works, there is ground to affirm that

those three novels are in fact ironical comments on literature and on the contemporary society. Their

resistance to a classical method of analysis then appears as one of their defining qualities.

43 Interview by Robert Louis, Magazine Littéraire n°89 (1974), mentioned in RE/Search n°8/9, 157

85

Even More References and Themes

Despite the numerous references analysed and explained in the course of this study, we left

several of them aside, for various reasons. Some of them did not fit in the thematic, some of them were

specific to a given novel, some were too obscure, and some were probably missed altogether.

In order to have a more complete vision of Ballard's work, it is time to come back to those

disparate elements, to mention them briefly at least once.

The Tempest, by Shakespeare is one the pervading influence on the three novels, along with

Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which we mentioned earlier. The play is alluded to several times in The

Drought (in which the symbolism is often more explicit than in the other two stories). Lomax, the rich

eccentric is associated to Prospero, while Miranda's name clearly links her with the magician's

daughter. Quilter, for his part, plays the role of Caliban ('deformed skull and Caliban-like appearance'

(DR 11)), but slowly metamorphoses into the elemental power of Ariel (DR 63). However, this

running reference - which frames the novel - is tainted with Ballard's usual dark irony. Prospero is

exiled near a pool of water instead of an island, Miranda becomes a hideous caricature of herself and

most of all, Caliban-Quilter becomes the leader of this insane kingdom and even wins Miranda. The

title of the novel itself is another example of this ironical perversion of the classical play, with The

Drought being the obvious counterpart to The Tempest. The storm at the end of the novel brings a final

touch to this reversal, closing the story in the way the play begins.

Since the relationships between the main characters echo from one novel to another,

Shakespeare's play also influences The Drowned World and The Crystal World. Strangman, for

example, is another occurrence of a reversed Prospero (in addition to its Kurtzian qualities). Like the

magician, he welcomes the stranded characters in his magical world, like him, he has a hideous yet

powerful servant ('a giant grotesque parody of a human being' (DW 90)), and like him he commands

the forces of nature (the alligators, the draining of the lagoon). Beatrice, for her part is a conventional

Miranda, isolated on an island, with a luxury provided by her father, and her ambiguous relationship

with Strangman reflects this almost incestuous link between them (' "Darling, leave me here! I don't

think Strangman will hurt me!" ' (DW 150)).

In The Crystal World, this Prospero-Miranda duet is once more embodied, this time by

Thorensen and Serena. Actually, there is an ambiguity about the identity of the Prospero of the story,

since it is apparent that both Ventress and Thorensen (with his black Caliban) would like to play the

role of Ferdinand, while they both behave partly like Miranda-Vanessa's father. Thorensen's

affectionate lies ( ' "What were you shooting at?" [...] "Just a crocodile, Serena." ' (CW 108)) directly

recalls Prospero's at the beginning of the play ('Tell your piteous heart/There is no harm done' 44).

However, his description of Ventress suggests that he may not be the only incarnation of the magician:

44 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, I.2

86

'He isn't trying to help Serean, he just wants to take her back to his crazy house in the middle of the

swamp' (CW 109). In any case, the incestuous link between those Propero figures and Miranda-

Vanessa is put forward with a frankness that would probably have amazed Shakespeare. As in The

Drowned World, the irony towards the original play is not patent, but nevertheless suggested through

those slight alterations.

In the second part of this study, we saw to what use Ballard put Coleridge's notion of the

'suspension of disbelief'. His affection for the English poet is confirmed by his use of several

references to The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. The poem notably makes a cameo appearance in The

Drought, providing a set of situations and characters, as well as the material for even more ironical

juxtapositions (about Miranda: 'the yellow-locked, leprous skinned lamia who had pursued the Ancient

Mariner' (DR 49)). The title of a chapter ('The Lamia') even refers directly to this episode of the poem,

and emphasises the humorous value of such a reference in a waterless world. Coleridge's poem does

not appear in the other two novels, though45.

In his essay, Michel Delville notices Ballard's frequent use of 'primal narratives' as an indication

of his will to 'make archetypal figures of the past relevant to our present conditions' 46. The most

important of those 'primal narratives', a category which includes Shakespeare's play as well as

Coleridge's poem, is undoubtedly the Bible. Not surprisingly, this constitutes an especially rich

material for Ballard to exploit, and references to this founding work of fantasy abound in his novels.

The Drowned World, for instance, has a strong biblical connotation; with its biologists referencing life

forms on a boat after a major rise of water, it is hard not to notice the similarities (and once more with

semi-ironic intentions) with Noah's ark during The Flood. Later on, the reference becomes even more

explicit and irreverent, with Ransom becoming a self-created 'second Adam, searching for the

forgotten paradises of the reborn sun' (DW 175).

The Drought, as usual is especially rich in this kind of symbolism, and The Bible is mentioned

or alluded to several time. It even becomes the only literary work to be quoted within any of the three

novels, with the sermon of the Reverend Johnstone, from the Chapter IV, verse 8 of the Book of

Jonah: 'And it came to pass, when the sun did arise, that God prepared a vehement east wind; and the

sun beat upon the head of Jonah, that he fainted and lived in himself to die, and said, It is better for me

to die than live.' (DR 37). Furthermore, between a character named Jonas, the 'perverted cherub face'

(DR 49) of Miranda Lomax and the 'purgatory' of the dune limbo, the biblical references provides a

fair part of the novel's imagery.

In The Crystal World, the allusions to the Bible are also all important. Because of their

repartition, and of the attitude of Balthus, they make it clear that the world of the catastrophe (the inner

45 It does appear in many short-stories of the same period, as shown in the collection Vermilion Sands (1971)46 Michel Delville, J.G. Ballard, 47

87

space) is a place where religion can only play a minor role, if at all. Balthus, for example tries to re-

enact the cleansing of the temple episode at the market of Port-Matarre, but once he is confronted with

the disaster itself, there is nothing he can do. The crucifix he gives to Sanders even loses all its jewels,

a metaphor of the impotence of the religious symbol, bound to fail eventually. Even Balthus has to

acknowledge this failure: ' " I fear the Church [...] may have outlived its function" '(CW 162).

This implicit criticism of Religion as an restraint to the freedom of the unconscious could be

attributed to the inheritance of the surrealists: 'Chaque fois que dans la rue vous rencontrez un

serviteur de la putain à barbe de Nazareth, vous devez l'insulter sur un ton qui ne laisse aucun doute

sur la qualité de votre dégoût'47. However, Ballard's attacks tend to be subtler, and to use a different

register than that of Breton's peers. Rather than providing personal explanation for this concern, he has

affirmed on several occasions that such a criticism is a characteristic of science fiction as a genre,

'those critics in the past who have found mystical strains at work have been blinded by the camouflage'

(UGM 206). Yet, this generalisation does not account for the fact that he is much more concerned by

this subject (and makes a more frequent use of the Christian imagery) than most science-fiction

writers.

Aside from those cultural and literary references, Ballard also develops a number of themes that

have only been alluded to so far in this memoir. The duality between the sun and the water, for

example, is an important element in The Drought as well as in The Drowned World or The Crystal

World, with the sun seen as a unbearable and intimidating power, while the water offers the

opportunity of a rest and of comfort. In The Crystal World, this is exemplified by the episode when

Sanders brings Radek back to the river, in the hope that it will cure the 'crystalline disease'. However,

in all three novels, the characters eventually turn away from water ('the dark womb of the ocean

mother' (UGM 199)), when they come to realise that they do not need this comfort anymore. This is

especially obvious at the end of The Drowned World, when Kerans finds the will to leave his lagoon

and to seek the 'paradises of the reborn sun' (DW 175), but it can also be found in The Drought, when

Ransom leaves the beach. Even in The Crystal World, which starts on a boat, Sanders comments

towards the end the 'efflorescence of the sun' (CW 169).

Similarly, the names of the characters of the different novels would probably require a detailed

study by themselves. Ransom, Sanders and Kerans are almost anagrams, but it is also noteworthy that

the name of Kerans was taken from the captain of HMS Amethyst, who ran the communist blockade

on the Yellow River through Shanghai in 194948. We mentioned that 'Miranda' was reminiscent of The

Tempest, but 'Lomax' is although obviously a play on word: low-max. The irony of naming a priest

'Balthus', while the painter was renowned for the eroticism of is work is also a mark of irony that has

47 Jean Koppen, 'Comment accomoder le prêtre', in La Révolution surréaliste No 12-15 (1929)48 According to L.J. Briggs, 'The Material World - J. G. Ballard's The Drowned World' (1997)

88

to be understood in order to comprehend the novel at large. It would be tedious and nearly impossible

to enumerate all the double-meanings and connotations of those names, but it is important to notice

that most of them are meaningful.

This issue of the origin of the names also has the advantage to sum up adequately the

complexity of the sub-text of Ballard's novels. Considering that it is nearly impossible to get the full

meaning of this single aspect of his work, how could the analyst hope to understand the totality of the

implicit content of those stories?

Perverse Irony

In 1966, a year after having completed his tetralogy of disasters, Ballard wrote an article in New

Worlds about the surrealists, named the 'Coming of the Unconscious'. In this article, he detailed some

of the landmarks of the surrealist painting, such as The Persistence of Memory, or Magritte's The

Announcement, before commenting on the value of the movement in general. This strategy of a

detailed enumeration is also the one we adopted in the 'Even more References and Themes' subpart.

To carry on with this parallelism, it therefore seems appropriate to comment on the value of Ballard's

work as exemplified by those three plus one novels.

Here is what the author had to say about the value of the surrealist painting:

The technique of surrealism have a particular relevance at the moment, when the fictional elements in

the world around us are multiplying to the point where it is almost impossible to distinguish between

the 'real' and the 'false' – the terms no longer have any meaning. (UGM 88)

Fortunately for the coherence of our analysis, this comment is also relevant to the analysis of

Ballard's own work. We mentioned the accumulation of references, tributes and citations that pervade

the last three of his disaster novels, from Shakespeare to Salvador Dali, via The Bible or his own

autobiographical elements. We also realised in the second part of this memoir that the construction of

those novels revolved around a central vision, a surrealist landscape conceived as a projection of the

unconscious in a way so literal as to adopt the appearance of the outer world.

Yet, even then, we noticed that Ballard did not merely 'explore the unconscious', as he claimed 49

to, but instead elaborated a simulacrum of psyche, an artificial unconscious to build around. Strangely

enough, Ballard was not keen on admitting this (at least in a 'mainstream' magazine such as The

Woman Journalist), which created some suspicion about the motives of such a dissimulation.

Considering his undeniable ability for self-analysis (see the brilliant The Kindness of Women), and the

49 'Time, Memory and Inner Space', in The Woman Journalist (1963) – UGM 200-201

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intricacy of his mental constructions, it seems doubtful that he could have abused himself with such an

approximation. Therefore, we can only infer that he voluntarily provided the readers of The Woman

Journalist with false information about the way to analyse his work, by presenting himself strictly as

an heir of the surrealists. There are many possible reasons for this, one of them being a desire to

simplify an otherwise complex method, in order to convince a readership for whom science fiction

was still associated with Asimov, Heinlein and the galactic empires of the Golden Age50. This is

plausible. However, another explanation would be that he knew that this approximation was meant to

illustrate and enlarge the purpose of his novels...

When we realised that the three novels were built around a central vision, we also considered

that this inner landscape was a node of meaning within the story (the characters come to understand

themselves thanks to this landscape), but also in an extra-diegetic way (the narrative is a mere tool to

introduce this landscape). This implies that the better part of the novels - everything not directly

connected to this inner landscape – is just an envelope, which may be well-written and breath-taking,

but is still devoid of any deep meaning. Its function is to bring about the inner landscape and to

describe its effect on the psyche of the characters, nothing more.

However, Ballard does his best to convince us that this empty shell is indeed what his novels are

about. To reach this goal, he does not hesitate to ornate and decorate it, hoping that this increased

complexity will dissimulate its emptiness. In literature, there are many ways to 'ornate' a given passage

of a novel. The most evident one is probably the style, and Ballard achieves impressive effects through

his images and his obvious writing skill. See for instance the introduction of The Drought: 'The caking

mud-bank was speckled with pieces of paper and driftwood, and to Ransom, the dream-faced figure of

Quilter resembled a demented faun strewing himself with leaves, mourning the lost spirit of the river'

(DR 7). However, if it were only a stylistic matter, there would be little point in analysing this

phenomenon of 'ornamentation'. However, Ballard uses a much more original way to enrich his empty

narrative: he provides it with external elements of meaning.

At last, this brings us back to what we noticed earlier, the abundance of citations and references.

Those are the materials that Ballard uses to dissimulate the vacuity of a vast part of his novels. In a

sense, he borrows meaningful elements, and thus creates some meaning where there was only a

functional narrative. The introduction of The Drought, for instance is fairly straightforward, but

transformed into a baroque comedy by the tension between the Shakespearean pagan references and

the numerous allusions to Christian myths. The same is true for most of the influences we spotted in

the course of our study. Ballard's childhood memories did play a role in the elaboration of the various

inner landscapes described, but the recurring characters taken from these memories are used to create a

purely extra-diegetic echo: the story itself is not made richer, it just seems richer to an educated reader.

50 Ballard uses the word 'fantasy' instead of 'science fiction' several times, probably in order not to frighten his potential readership away.

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This 'educated reader' is of course Ballard's main target, since his novels are not meant to

function if taken literally. However, what we just showed is that they do not function either if taken on

the usual level of analysis, where you look for themes, references and such. Ballard's technique of

importing symbols and meanings totally short-circuit this analysis. It saturates the would-be analyst

with so many meaningful elements that it becomes impossible to organise or understand them all. In

other words, Ballard makes fun of the conventions of literature by producing novels almost devoid of

significance, that nevertheless appear saturated with meaning to a conventional analysis. His comment

to The Woman Journalist can therefore be understood as an additional way to trick the readers, by

pretending to reveal them the inner logic of the novels, while he just enrich and perpetuates the

illusion created within those novels.

Artificial and meaningless constructions. This would be a very harsh judgement on those

novels, if we did not account for Ballard's intentions when he created these analytic traps. 'The

fictional elements in the world around us are multiplying to the point where it is almost impossible to

distinguish between the "real" and the "false" '. This is exactly what he exemplifies through his novels.

Thus, by multiplying the meaningful and symbolic elements, Ballard demonstrates his accusation on

the semiological saturation of the modern society.

In a Word

Eventually, these four novels (more so the last three of them) disclose their true and only

significance. They are ironical comments, sombre and pessimistic as pop-art masterworks, and only

reveal their importance through meta-analysis. A trend that Ballard will push to its conclusion in The

Atrocity Exhibition, with his 'condensed novels', where every single word is deeply meaningful but

eventually loses its significance in a chaotic saturation of the analytical process.

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Conclusion

The light failed, and the air grew darker. The dust was dull and opaque, the crystals in its surface dead

and clouded. An immense pall of darkness lay over the dunes, as if the whole of the exterior world

was losing its existence.

It was some time later that he failed to notice it had started to rain. (DW 176)

As we reach the conclusion of this study, it may be strange to evoke again the simplistic

assumption that Ballard's tetralogy of disasters could constitute a minor work. Admittedly, The Wind

from Nowhere is severely flawed, and can be considered as a failed attempt, but the other three

deserve more respect than this inadequate summary.

The position we assumed in the last part – seeing the novels as purely meta-literary objects – is

of course somewhat excessive, and Ballard himself may not approve it, but the mere fact that it is

plausible tends to show that the depth of those novels extend far beyond that of most works of fiction.

Besides, the strong unity between those novels is a clear enough demonstration that they exist as a

coherent construction, a threefold attempt to explore a unique thematic. In that sense, those novels are

not only the precursors of Ballard's major works, they are self-sufficient.

However, to be fair, we have to mention that The Crystal World in particular, but also The

Drought, derives a good part of their notoriety from the fact that they announce some of the author's

later obsession. Ransom's comment on his ex-wife, 'it was as if her face carried the injuries of an

appalling motor car accident that would happen somewhere in the future' (DR 34), as well as Sanders

fascination for Suzanne's scars announces both Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition. Yet, those themes

are only sketched, and not fully developed, since the novels focus on other issues. Ballard's later works

are not reinstatements or expansions of those early attempts, they complement them by exploring

connected issues.

Among the most surprising conclusions of this study is the role played by the notion of

disintegration. We saw that this disintegration is down-played when the reader would expect to find it,

in particular in the descriptions of the destruction caused by the various disasters, and that, on the

contrary, it appears in unexpected circumstances. The disappearance of human relationships, the 'death

of the affect' is one example of those circumstances. However, it is perhaps more striking to realise

that the same process affects the narrative as a whole. In the light of the surrealist influence on

Ballard's work, we could expect the stories to be disjointed and chaotic, yet they take the appearance

of perfectly conventional stories, complete with well-structured paragraphs and chapters.

Simultaneously, we showed that Ballard annihilates the function and meaning of the major parts of

those narratives, through a flawed logic and an overabundance of external references.

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In both cases, the author consciously plays with the expectations of the reader, and questions the

value of the conventions he refers too. We also showed that he uses the same kind of reversal in order

to reflect upon the role and the credibility of psychoanalysis or of his own childhood memories. This

questioning is probably what makes those novels much more than commercial products within a

commercial genre. They are self-conscious attempts to re-define the themes they deal with, to make

their readers reflect upon the nature of what they read, and in a more general way, upon the nature and

the function of any fictional production. Thus, they can truly be considered as modern works of

science fiction, if science fiction is a literature whose role is to question the present through a fictional

world.

It is only fair that the final word on this subject should be by Ballard himself, a definite proof of

his awareness of the depth and complexity of the issues he raised in his novels:

'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.'51

51 'The New Science Fiction' a conversation between JGB and George MacBeth on BBC Radio (1967), quoted in RE/Search n°8/9, 158

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Appendix 1 - Summaries of the Plots

The Wind from Nowhere

As the novel begins, Donald Maitland - an English doctor - is coming back from Heathrow

Airport. He has been unable to catch his flight to Canada, because of a strong wind that has been

blowing for a few days. After a short and uncomfortable interview with his wife, he is welcomed by

some friends of his, the Symingtons. There, he learns that the wind accelerates regularly, and that it

might become a real danger.

Later, Lanyon, an American submariner undertakes a perilous trip from Genoa to Nice, in order

to rescue a general and bring him back to his submarine. When he gets to Nice, he learns that the

general is dead, and that he is supposed to take back his body. During the way back to Genoa, he

rescues two stranded American tourists, including Patricia Olsen, a journalist. Soon afterwards, their

armoured carrier capsizes, and only Lanyon and Patricia succeed in reaching a shelter.

Back in London, we learn that the wind has caused considerable damages. It has become

increasingly difficult to go from one place to another. Meanwhile, a private militia seems to be

preparing an important operation, which requires equipment and weapons.

Maitland finds himself stuck in the open after an accident. His wife dies before his eyes, and

while looking for a shelter, he finds himself entrapped in a tunnel.

Near Genoa, Lanyon and Patricia succeeds in going back to the submarine, with the help of a

network of Italian looters.

In London, the whole city is collapsing, and we learn that the private army belongs to Hardoon,

a tycoon. Symington is taken to him, after witnessing the murder of some of his colleagues by one of

Hardoon's men.

Meanwhile, Maitland has been rescued. He is to go to the submarine base in Portsmouth as a

doctor. He meets Lanyon and Patricia, who take the same carrier as he does. On their way, they learn

about what happened to Symington, and decide to pay a visit to Hardoon.

It turns out Hardoon has built himself a huge concrete pyramid. They go in, but are captured by

the tycoon's militia, and brought to the owner of the place. Hardoon explains to them that he has built

this pyramid as a challenge to the wind, thus establishing himself as the champion of mankind against

nature.

However, after five days, the pyramid begins to topple. Lanyon, Maitland and Patricia succeeds

in escaping. Eventually, though, the pyramid falls sideways, with Hardoon still inside.

Then, the wind comes to a halt.

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The Drowned World

The story takes place after a huge rise in the level of the oceans around the earth, due the

melting of the polar ice-caps, which was itself caused by a rise of the temperature around the earth.

After seventy years, the surviving population has settled itself in Greenland, while the planet has

become an immense tropical lagoon.

Doctor Kerans and his colleague, Doctor Bodkin, are supposed to study the new biology in what

was once London. They work under the supervision of a military detachment lead by colonel Riggs. In

the nearby lives Beatrice Dahl, a young woman whose main occupation seems to be resting near her

swimming pool. When the story begins, Riggs, Bodkin and Kerans are about to leave and go back to

Greenland.

Hardman, one of Riggs' men, is suffering from a strange malaise, apparently caused by the

environment and strange dreams. When he learns that they are about to leave, he tries to escape by

stealing a boat and setting towards the South. Kerans and some soldiers almost catch him, but he slips

away from them.

The night after this escape, Kerans dreams of prehistoric times, with roaring iguanas and a

blazing sun. The same dream that led Hardman to half-madness. It turns out that most of the crew

(including Bodkin and Beatrice, but not Riggs) have had those dreams. Bodkin explains to him that it

is actually an 'ancient organic memory millions year old' (DW 74). Kerans, Bodkin and Patricia decide

to hide themselves and to stay behind when Riggs and his men leave.

After a while, their self-immersions (they do not even try to see each other) are shattered by the

arrival of a boat of looters, led by Strangman, a frightening white man. Along with his crew of black

sailors, they organise a diving party, during which Kerans almost dies, but discover the name of the

city above which they stand.

Then, Strangman has the main lagoon of the area pumped out, and his crew starts looting the

once submerged building, while Beatrice, Bodkin and Kerans wander in what appears to them as an

alien place. Soon afterwards, Bodkin tries to sabotage the dam, but is killed in the attempt. Kerans is

then captured and tortured, as a possible accomplice, but also because Strangman obviously covets

Beatrice, and want to have her for himself.

However, Kerans succeed in escaping his torturers, and rescue Beatrice as well. Riggs' arrival

prevents them from being recaptured. Yet, Kerans is convinced that he has to set to the south, and he

does so, after having destroyed the dam, and re-flooded the lagoon.

During his trip, he stumbles upon Hardman, blind, almost dead, but nevertheless carries on

towards the south, towards the oncoming storm, 'a second Adam searching for the forgotten paradises

of the reborn sun' (DW 175).

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The Drought (also published as The Burning World)

Doctor Ransom lives in a houseboat moored at the entrance of a lake, near the small town of

Mount Royal. His closest neighbours are Quilter and his mother, who live in a ramshackle barge next

to his. Among Ransom's other neighbours are Catherine Austen, who lives by the river, Richard

Lomax, a wealthy man living with his sister Miranda in an impressive house, complete with a

swimming pool, and Phillip Jordan, a strange boy, apparently homeless.

As the story begins, the world is experiencing a severe drought. Pollution has created a thin

layer over the ocean surface, which prevents the water from evaporating. As temperature rises and

water becomes increasingly scarce, most people are moving towards the sea.

Leaving his houseboat for his former house, downtown Mount Royal, Ransom meets his ex-

wife, about to leave to the shore. In town, reverend Johnstone seems to be trying to establish some

order. Yet, while he is paying a visit to Lomax, Ransom notices some unrest among the fishermen,

who see the lake and the river disappearing with apprehension.

Indeed, soon afterwards, he is captured by them, and barely escapes (with some help from

Quilter and Jordan). A night of violence follows, culminating with the burning of the church, and

gunfire is heard. The day after, the Johnstones set to the sea.

After barely escaping another attack from the fishermen, Ransom, Catherine and Phillipe Jordan

decide to leave as well. They take with them Phillip's 'father' – an old black man – and Quilter's

mother. However, when they arrive, after a difficult trip, a huge crowd is gathered next to the beach,

which is defended by the army. After a while, a general assault from the crowd overwhelms the

military, and people start settling on the beach.

Ten years have gone by when the second part begins. Salt dunes extend indefinitely, and it has

become incredibly difficult to find water and food. Ransom survives with Judith (his ex-wife), while

most people have gathered in a camp ruled by the Johnstone family. Exhausted by his life, Ransom

consider joining the camp, but he is rejected. Together with Catherine, Mrs Quilter and Phillip, they

catch a glimpse of a lion escaped from the zoo of Mount Royal, and realise there must be some water

between the beach and the city. They decide to go back there.

Behind them, unexplained fires start in the abandoned cities, while they progress slowly towards

Mount Royal. When they arrive there, Ransom discovers that Lomax and Miranda are still there,

around a full swimming pool; they are both under the domination of Quilter, with whom Miranda has

had three children. After a while, Lomax gets killed after having drained the water reservoir. Ransom

decides to leave once more, searching for a new river, at peace with himself.

As he crosses the drained lake, it starts raining.

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The Crystal World

The story begins with the arrival of Doctor Sanders in Port Royal, Africa, a town next to the

rainforest. He has been summoned there by a letter from Suzanne Clair, with whom he has had an

affair a few months before. She invited him to come and see her husband and herself in the leprosy for

which they work, in Mont Royal, not far from Port Matarre. On the boat, he meets Ventress, a sneaky

man, and Father Balthus, a priest.

Sanders soon realises that it is impossible to access Mont Royal. A French journalist, Louise

Peret, explains to him that a new viral disease is infecting the forest: it seems to be covered with

strange jewels or crystalline formations. The same phenomenon also affects an artificial satellite,

which can be seen glittering in the night. Ransom also catch a glimpse of Ventress, pursued by

mulattos, and help him to escape his aggressors.

The day after, a drowned man whose arm is caught in a crystalline gangue is discovered in the

harbour. It turns out to be Louise's colleague, that she was trying to find. Along with Sanders, she

hires a private boat owner to take them up the river to Port-Matarre.

They quickly run up into an army barrage, but the soldiers agree to show them the crystallised

forest. They also learn that a similar phenomenon is occurring in Florida and in Russia. However, an

accident happens in the forest - the crystalline disease moves like waves - and Sanders start wandering

in the frozen landscape. In a crystallised house, he stumbles upon Ventress. Much speculation occurs

on the nature of the phenomenon, which seems to be an alteration of time rather than space.

It soon becomes obvious that Ventress is engaged in a confrontation with Thorensen, a mine

owner. During a chase, Sanders is captured by Thorensen's men, and discover that he is detaining

Ventress' wife, Serena, who appears to be badly sick. Gems seem to cure her, though, and she seems to

be happy to be with the mine-owner rather than with Ventress.

Eventually, Thorensen's men lead Sanders to Mont-Royal, where he is reunited with Louise and

with the Clairs. During dinner, he realises that Suzanne has become a leper. He decides to stay for a

few days, but Louise wants to gets back to Port Matarre. That night, he meets Suzanne, and they make

love, despite her illness.

Soon afterwards, he learns that she has gone into the crystallised forest, and go to search her

there. He comes in the middle of a fight between Ventress and Thorensen, and while crouching on the

ground, his arm starts to crystallise. He then flies away, until he finds a remote church occupied by

father Balthus, in the middle of the frozen landscape. The jewels and gem present there prevent the

disease from entering the building. When he leaves, eventually, Bathus stays behind. Thorensen is

dead, crystallised next to Serena, and Ventress still wanders in the forest.

The story closes with Sanders having escaped the forest, but ready to go back there, while the

crystalline disease keeps expanding.

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Appendix 2 – Mentioned Surrealist Paintings

Salvador Dali – The Persistence of Memory

Max Ernst – Silence(interestingly enough, the first edition of The Crystal World used this painting as cover art)

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Böcklin – Island of the Dead

Paul Delvaux – Venus Endormie

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Yves Tanguy – Jour de Lenteur

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Bibliography

The Novels

- James Ballard, The Wind from Nowhere, New-York: Berkeley (1966)

(The second American edition of this hard-to-find novel)

- James Ballard, The Drowned World, London: Indigo (1997)

(Ugly cover. Indigo has reprinted most of Ballard short-stories collections as well)

- James Ballard, The Drought, Harmondsworth: Penguin (1974)

(Third English Edition. Brilliant cover by David Pelham, reproduced on page 66)

- James Ballard, The Crystal World, London: Harper & Collins (2000)

(H&P reissued several Ballard novels when Super Cannes came out, in fall 2000)

Essays and Interviews

- Michel Delville, J.G. Ballard, Plymouth: Northcote House (1998)

(A clear analysis of Ballard's work, rich, insightful and convincing)

- Juno & Vale, RE/Search n°8/9 (1984)

(Interviews, essays, photos... a collection that truly captures the essence of the author)

- James Ballard, A User's Guide to the New Millenium, London: Harper and Collins (1996)

(Ballard writes about what he likes, about himself, about anything... collected by David Pringle)

Additional Resources

- James Ballard, Empire of the Sun, London: Victor Gollantz, 1984

- James Ballard, The Kindness of Women, London: HarperCollins, 1991

- John Wyndham, The Kraken Wakes, Harmondsworth: Penguin (1963)

- Jean-Luc Rispail, Les Surréalistes, Paris: Gallimard (1991)

- Stan Barets, Le Science-Fictionnaire, Paris: Denoel (1992)

- John Clute, SF, the Illustrated Encyclopedia, New-York: DK Publishing (1995)

- Brian Ash, Encyclopédie Visuelle de la Science-Fiction, Paris: Albin Michel (1977)

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Internet Resources

- The ultimate science fiction web guide – (a very useful and complete database)

http://www.magicdragon.com/UltimateSF/SF-Index.html

- JGBallard.com – (numerous links to articles and interviews)

http://www.jgballard.com

- Marilyn A. Geist, 'A Brief Introduction to C. G. Jung and Analytical Psychology' (1998)

http://www.cgjungpage.org/articles/geist1.html

- Several articles by L.J. Hurst, about The Drowned World and The Crystal World

http://ds.dial.pipex.com/ljhurst/

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