Читать книгу Extreme Metaphors - Simon Sellars - Страница 17

Originally published in German as ‘Es wäre ein Irrtum, über die Zukunft zu Schreiben: J. G. Ballard im Gespräch mit Jörg Krichbaum und Rein A. Zondergeld’, Franz Rottensteiner (ed.), Quarber Merkur: Aufsätze zur Science Fiction und Phantastichen Literatur, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979. Translated by Dan O’Hara

This interview, conducted at Shepperton on 1 March 1976, was first published in German in the science fiction magazine Quarber Merkur, and later republished in a paperback collection of articles from the magazine in 1979. In retranslating it into English, I’ve strayed from the rather formal style of the German version, trying to recover a little of the feel of Ballard’s own intonations and rhythms. Naturally this involves some distortion of the literal meaning conveyed in the German, but by the same token, it also involves the elimination of some of the more prolix distortions of Ballard’s original phrases.

Ballard’s comments on Russian writers and his explanation of his own use of specific filmic techniques are perhaps quite novel. His concern here is to define the uniqueness of his own work, set against the kind of science fiction favoured in Germany at the time, such as that by Stanislaw Lem (in fact, many of the other articles in this collection are by or about Lem), and he does this by implicitly dismissing both utopian and dystopian modes, especially where they deal with the future. What he emphasises instead is how he takes the stuff of the contemporary world as his subject, repeatedly mentioning ways in which he derives his techniques, formal methods and diction from the present. [DOH]

KRICHBAUM/ZONDERGELD: Before we talk about SF in England and America, in eastern Europe there’s also a great tradition of SF, Lem, for example, or the Strugatskis. What do you think of them?

BALLARD: To be honest, I find Lem rather hard going. His whole attitude towards the subject matter is entirely different from my own. He has something so demonstratively scientific and … messianic. In my work I proceed analytically, whereas he assembles vast systems synthetically. There’s something reminiscent of Star Trek in his work, ‘The Big Concept’. I don’t like Russian SF, or at least not that which I’ve read. Previously I often wrote reviews for the newspapers here. And I would sometimes get a Russian anthology sent to me, but I found it lacking in imagination. I say it reluctantly, but it was as if the spark was missing. It was never exciting, all grey on grey.

KRICHBAUM/ZONDERGELD: This style of grey mediocrity, which is also the principal quality of official socialist-realist literature …

BALLARD: Right, that’s exactly what I meant. You know, you always get these stories in which people are sitting around in tiny flats in Moscow. And then: ‘Agricultural Controller Woroschilow said …’ or some computer specialists bustle about the prose, you know. They rarely get off the ground, there’s something dead in it, like the regime of Soviet style. SF needs these old-fashioned things: the consumer society. It needs the media, which trickles slowly down to us. In SF it’s not a matter of science, but of pop science, and that’s something entirely different. Pop science, in how it’s transmitted for a mass audience through the media, TV and newspapers, through encyclopedias, which are published in a series of volumes. That’s the wave that carries SF. If one doesn’t have this whole mass media, then the material of SF is simply missing. It’s a peculiar thing.

KRICHBAUM/ZONDERGELD: In your earlier books, an interesting thing there is the relation between painting and literature, especially the relation to surrealist painting. Could you perhaps briefly say something about the possibilities of one artistic discipline influencing another? In your case, this seems particularly clear.

BALLARD: Yes, that’s true, actually. The surrealist painters have strongly influenced me. I don’t believe I’ve been influenced in this way by other literature. It’s been said that I was influenced by Joseph Conrad …

KRICHBAUM/ZONDERGELD: … why Conrad?

BALLARD: … but when the critics wrote that, I had still never read anything by Conrad. I first began with him a few years ago. But the surrealist painters were important. The essence of the surrealist imagination is its ability to translate the apparent forms of the world, the outer forms, into inner ones, into mental forms. The surrealist painter doesn’t seek to interpret the outer world as the classic schools of painting did, the Impressionists or the cubists or what you will; these painters analyse the real world without violating its integrity, although the techniques can vary greatly. But the surrealists recreate the outer world, completely, in fact! And this was exactly the right method for SF, which needs something very similar. I used this concept of ‘psychological space’, and that again I found in surrealist paintings. I thought to myself, that’s exactly what we need in science fiction.

KRICHBAUM/ZONDERGELD: The combining of elements which don’t necessarily seem to be heard together.

BALLARD: Right. This traditional division between the inner and the outer world, between the mental, and the reality surrounding us, becomes fully abolished. There’s no longer any dividing line, it’s all a continuity. And this method is the most fertile for a writer, because the outer world nowadays so resembles a dream. We live as though in an immense novel and therefore can only approach things in this way.

KRICHBAUM/ZONDERGELD: Could you imagine that your work might have influenced painters in return?

BALLARD: Yes, that could happen. You know, surrealism is without a doubt the most important direction in painting before the war; cubism is all well and good, but we had that already during the First World War, after which surrealism was dominant for decades. But the next development, therefore after the Second World War, that was most especially important for writers was pop art. Many authors were influenced by that.

KRICHBAUM/ZONDERGELD: In your later books like The Atrocity Exhibition, but also already in The Four-Dimensional Nightmare, you seem at times to have adopted filmic structures. Could you say something about that?

BALLARD: There are many connections there. I’ve transferred what one in film calls the ‘cut’ into my literary work. I also use various other filmic methods: like the close-up, slow motion and similar. I wanted to apply equivalents of these methods in the novel. In the traditional novel the close-up means that one looks somebody in the eye and starts to study their mental state, their motives and so on, whereas in film a close-up doesn’t have to mean anything that corresponds to this level of depth. It can be that one wants to show only the skin of the face, its condition. In spaghetti westerns, for example, you see a close-up of Charles Bronson waiting at a station, that is, you see only a shot of the back of his head, with a fly crawling around it. Such a kind of close-up isn’t intended to explain anything about the man’s personality, it shows only a detail. And in The Atrocity Exhibition I use close-ups that for example show only a girl’s arm against the background of an automobile.

KRICHBAUM/ZONDERGELD: Therefore only as an object.

BALLARD: Only objects, exactly. Like in a Hitchcock film, where one catches sight of a close-up of some object on a table, of a fried egg on a plate or a pair of spectacles, for purely atmospheric reasons! That applies also to slow motion, which is very significant, as it sometimes transforms an intrinsically violent piece of action, for example the collision of two automobiles, into a ballet of great elegance and beauty.

KRICHBAUM/ZONDERGELD: A change of aesthetic dimension.

BALLARD: Right, but a complete change. These filmic techniques can be used by a writer; they powerfully extend the resources at his disposal.

KRICHBAUM/ZONDERGELD: Have you had no desire to make a film yourself?

BALLARD: Oh, quite, I’d like to very much. But I lack the technical essentials.

KRICHBAUM/ZONDERGELD: Is there not perhaps one director with whom you’d like to work?

BALLARD: Oh, there are many directors I admire. Kubrick, for example, he’s a great director. And Godard, who’s also very important, albeit in a different way.

KRICHBAUM/ZONDERGELD: Godard uses almost the same techniques as you.

BALLARD: That’s true, yes. I also like Antonioni a great deal. But it’s hard to give a plain answer. I’ve never really considered it.

KRICHBAUM/ZONDERGELD: Is there a film script written by you?

BALLARD: I wrote a script from my novel Concrete Island, that a French director wanted to film. That was last summer. I don’t know if he’ll actually make the film. And then I once also wrote a script from my early novel The Drought, which was bought up for TV by David Frost, but he’s never used it. I am actually interested in film.

KRICHBAUM/ZONDERGELD: Up to now we still haven’t mentioned your Vermilion Sands stories. It seems as if there the influence of decadent literature makes itself felt, of the fin de siècle.

BALLARD: You’re thinking of Huysmans here? Yes. You know, Vermilion Sands corresponds to my vision of the future. It will not be like Nineteen Eighty-Four, but rather like Vermilion Sands. If one goes to the Mediterranean coast in the summer, one sees the future there already. Half of Europe finds itself in this linear city that runs from Gibraltar to Athens. A city that’s three thousand miles long and a hundred metres wide. And that is, in my opinion, the future.

KRICHBAUM/ZONDERGELD: In your books there are many technical terms from the various scientific disciplines, from medicine, climatology, physics and geology, for example. Don’t you think that this fact could complicate the reading process for many of your readers?

BALLARD: There’s something in that. As it is, I try not to use so much of this kind of terminology. But on the other hand I think that people nowadays have such a level of general knowledge …

KRICHBAUM/ZONDERGELD: … a truly optimistic view!

BALLARD: You know, everyone has a little bit of knowledge about these fields. Doctors are always complaining about the fact that their patients read more medical journals and know more about medicine than they do themselves. All things considered, I don’t think that my stuff is incomprehensible.

KRICHBAUM/ZONDERGELD: You don’t therefore consciously write for a wholly special kind of reader, for a smaller public than most SF authors?

BALLARD: No, I write for all readers; at least, I try to.

KRICHBAUM/ZONDERGELD: Is there a book or a film which has made an especially strong impression on you or by which you’ve been particularly influenced?

BALLARD: Now, I admire William Burroughs, for example, and I greatly love Genet’s book Notre dame des fleurs, and many older authors, Huysmans and his À rebours, to give just an example. I found Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove outstanding, a masterpiece, absolutely overwhelming. Recently I saw Fellini’s Dolce Vita again on the TV, and again this film made a great impression on me.

KRICHBAUM/ZONDERGELD: It’s interesting that you mention Genet and Burroughs, because both those authors write books without conventional plots. There is no more plot, or not as one normally understands it. In your case, it’s hardly conceivable, however, that you could abandon tight structuring and plot. Your books function too hermetically, they’re too self-contained.

BALLARD: Right, I need a convincing plot to write in my way, a clear structure. Even in the latest books. Those are very highly developed stories. Sometimes I also try to conceal the story, but there has to be something like a bridge, otherwise everything falls apart.

KRICHBAUM/ZONDERGELD: One could imagine a hopefully purely hypothetical situation in which, if your development took yet another turn in an experimental direction, you might one day find yourself without publishers. Or do you not have this worry?

BALLARD: Up to now I’ve had a lot of luck with my publishers. Certainly the latest books weren’t printed in Germany, but in England the latest books were also very successful. Crash, it’s true, was no success in America, but it was an immediate bestseller in France, which was a considerable surprise to me as I’d expected quite the reverse.

KRICHBAUM/ZONDERGELD: If one takes into account the success or absence of real success, for example in West Germany, one must surely conclude that certain books are simply flops in certain countries.

BALLARD: That’s surely not wrong. National psychology is a particularly difficult field.

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

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