Читать книгу Extreme Metaphors - Simon Sellars - Страница 14

Originally published in Foundation, The Review of Science Fiction 9, November 1975. Translated by Peter Nicholls

Like Jannick Storm, editor and translator Robert Louit played a critical role in promoting Ballard’s work beyond the English-speaking world. Louit lived in London in the early 1970s and translated many of Ballard’s novels into French (as well as some by Philip K. Dick), and, again like Storm, he was there at the birth of one of Ballard’s most significant works. According to Ballard’s then agent John Wolfers and Ballard archivist David Pringle, Louit played a major part in editing the original, extensive manuscript of Crash down to a publishable size.

This interview first appeared in April 1974 in Magazine Littéraire, with Louit translating Ballard’s answers into French. The version here is a back-translation by science fiction critic Peter Nicholls, who, in an earlier review of Crash, wrote that Ballard was ‘advocating a life style quite likely to involve the sudden death of yourself or those you love’. When Nicholls came to realise that Ballard’s aims were less shock tactic and more social commentary, he decided as editor of Foundation to correct that earlier assessment by reprinting the Magazine Littéraire interview alongside Ballard’s introduction to the French edition of Crash (again, back-translated by Nicholls from the Louit version). In his original introduction, Nicholls relates that Ballard had told him ‘a number of interesting things … about the reception of Crash! [sic]. He commented that it had been received less enthusiastically in the USA, and more enthusiastically in France, than he expected. He now believes this is because “there is a tradition of intellectual pornography in France, while in America pornography is still disreputable”.’

The interview covers Ballard’s views on science fiction, the experimental nature of The Atrocity Exhibition, the commodification of surrealism and the increasing dominance of television. At this stage, Concrete Island had been published but was yet to appear in France, so Louit made no mention of it. Note the exclamation mark in Crash’s title, consistent with the French publication. [SS]

LOUIT: What’s your position today with respect to science fiction?

BALLARD: When I began writing, towards the end of the fifties, science fiction was the only branch of literature which permitted speculative writing making evaluations of human reaction to the various upheavals, scientific, technological, political, which were happening them. I turned naturally towards the genre. I’m tempted to say that half of my work preceding The Atrocity Exhibition was science fiction; the other half belongs to fantasy or to allegory pure and simple – for example, my short story ‘The Drowned Giant’. I consider that I left the genre completely with The Atrocity Exhibition, but I don’t have any substitute terminology to offer you for what I actually write. Crash! is not a science fiction novel, but could nevertheless be read as one, because it contains elements of political and ‘sociological’ thought which one finds in certain works of the genre. I wouldn’t want a reader tackling Crash! to let himself be fenced in by the limitations (which don’t, however, necessarily imply a pejorative judgement) that are habitually attributed to science fiction.

LOUIT: You once defined science fiction as ‘the literature of technological optimism, born in America in the twenties’. It seems to me that your work takes the exact opposite course to the one implied by this. Perhaps the subject matter remains to a certain extent technological, but you are less occupied in speculating on the future than on the present, whose strangeness and fascination you unveil. The result is not always optimistic.

BALLARD: Exactly. I don’t see much I could add to that description. For some years I have been trying to show the present from an unusual angle.

LOUIT: This evolution of yours culminates in the ‘fragmented’ stories of The Atrocity Exhibition.

BALLARD: In effect. The determining factor for me was the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963: it is, among other things, the subject of The Atrocity Exhibition. I wrote a lot about the Kennedys at that time because they seemed to me a kind of twentieth-century House of Atreides. Their history illustrates particularly well the way in which, little by little, the fictional elements of everyday reality have ended up by completely masking the so-called ‘real’ elements. It’s the same in politics: presidential elections in the USA are nothing less than the crashing together of two spheres of fiction, like the collision of two galaxies. As to private life, it too is obedient to the influence of images projected by newspapers, television, advertising posters, etc. These can be sensed in the way people decorate their homes, the way they dress, in the whole apparatus of their relation to others. To speak of this new world I was led, in The Atrocity Exhibition, to fragment contemporary reality so that I could reassemble its elements paragraph by paragraph and show its springs. This method allowed me to examine simultaneously the different strata that make up our own experience of the actual world: the level of public events such as war, the conquest of space or the story of Kennedy; the level of everyday life, of people who get into the car every morning, work at the office, convalesce in a hospital etc.; and the level of our fantasies. In The Atrocity Exhibition, then, I tried to blend these three levels just as we constantly do in life, every day. The conventions of the ordinary ‘realistic’ novel don’t allow this approach. Linear narrative is like a railway running from one point to another from which one cannot deviate; it prevents simultaneous perceptions. Now, my aim is to show that these three levels, public, private and fantastic, cut backwards and forwards across one another: that points of intersection exist between them. In spite of the linear aspect of its narrative, Crash! relies equally on this technique, which you could compare to a kind of radar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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