Simon Sellars - Extreme Metaphors

BARBER:You don’t think, like McLuhan, the writer’s becoming obsolete because people won’t read any more?

BALLARD:They probably won’t read in the future. At the moment they are reading, but they’re reading different things. They’re reading pornographic magazines, a huge range of magazines and periodicals which offer them an instant replay and comment on their own lives. Not books – the technology of the book publisher is so out of date, he hardly has a technology. You think of the idea you want to write about, you take perhaps a year before the book is finished, you then send it through your agent to a publisher and a certain amount of wheeling and dealing goes on. Perhaps a year later – that’s two years after you thought of it – the book is finally published in hardcover. Two years after that it goes into paperback. So it’s four years before a large (so-called large) audience reads the book. Well, that’s the time it takes for a signal to come from the nearest star ! So most of my writing is done for magazines because there the feedback of response from editor and readership is much quicker. Also you appear sandwiched between advertisements for motor cars and brassieres and this context is much more exciting than marbled endpapers.

BARBER:This interest in advertising, brand names, etc., seems to echo the pop painters.

BALLARD:Absolutely. I feel a tremendous rapport with pop artists and in a lot of my fiction I’ve tried to produce something akin to pop art. For instance, I’ve just published a piece in New Worlds called ‘Princess Margaret’s Facelift’, in which I’ve taken the text of a classic description of a plastic surgery operation, a facelift, and where the original says ‘the patient’, I’ve inserted ‘Princess Margaret’. So I’ve done precisely what the pop painters did, using images from everyday life – Coca-Cola bottles, Marilyn Monroe – and manipulated them. The great thing about pop painters is their honesty. They’ve turned their backs on the traditional subject matter of the fine arts – which had hardly changed since the Renaissance – and looked at their own environment and decided: yes, the shine on domestic hardware, like the refrigerator or the washing machine, the particular gleam on the mouldings of a cabinet, the moulding of door handles, are of importance to people, because these are the visual landscapes of people’s lives, and if we’re going to be honest we’re going to use reality material instead of fiction. I want to do the same.

BARBER:Have you ever been involved in a car crash – you seem preoccupied with car crashes recently.

BALLARD:No, I’ve never been in one. Serious car crashes take a very long time to recover from, and if I’d been in one I’d probably have a different view of them. But the car crash is probably the most dramatic, perhaps the only dramatic, event in most people’s lives apart from their own death, and in many cases the two will coincide. It’s true people are dying in Vietnam and people are being involved in all kinds of other violence, but in America something like 35,000 people die in car crashes every year, and about 7,000 over here, and about 12,000 in Germany. And the totals are rising. It’s a tremendous dramatic event, fascinating and even exciting. That’s why all safety campaigns which aren’t backed up by penal legislation are doomed to failure.

A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinaesthetic factors, the stylising of motion, consumer goods, status – all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really, a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing). That’s why the death in a crash of a famous person is a unique event – whether it’s Jayne Mansfield or James Dean – it takes place within this most potent of all consumer durables. Aircraft crashes don’t carry any of these elements whatever – they’re totally tragic and totally meaningless. We don’t have any individual rapport because we’re not moving through an elaborately signalled landscape when we go aboard an aircraft: it’s only the pilot who’s moving through that. It’s like people who are good chess players watching top chess players play chess. When one player defeats another, the good chess player understands what has happened, whereas you and I wouldn’t have a clue.

Really, it’s not the car that’s important: it’s driving . One spends a substantial part of one’s life in the motor car and the experience of driving condenses many of the experiences of being a human being in 1970, the marriage of physical aspects of ourselves with the imaginative and technological aspects of our lives. I think the twentieth century reaches just about its highest expression on the highway. Everything is there, the speed and violence of our age, its love of stylisation, fashion, the organisational side of things – what I call the elaborately signalled landscape.

BARBER:Surely the twentieth-century image ought to be something like a computer?

BALLARD:I don’t see that. Computers may take over that role in fifty years’ time, but they certainly don’t play it now. Most people have no first-hand contact with computers yet. My bank balance may be added and subtracted by a computer but I’m not aware of it.

BARBER:How do people respond to your car crash theory? How did they react to your exhibition of crashed cars at the New Arts Lab this spring?

BALLARD:People used words like ‘cynical’ or ‘perverse’ or ‘sick’. There’s a whole series of subjects people are not really honest about. Violence is another one. Most people take the view – I would myself – that violence is wholly bad whatever form it takes, whether it’s the huge violence of Vietnam or the violence of, say, police brutality. But the point is that we’re also excited by violence, and if we are attracted to it, it may be for good reasons. If we were honest about the Vietnams of the world, the real appeal of these events, we’d see them in a totally new light and they might never happen again.

Honesty always enriches our lives, just as it has in the area of sex. I think it’s good to explore it, to find out why Mondo Cane movies are such tremendous successes, why the newsstands of Japan and America are loaded with sadistic literature. Obviously this serves some sort of role. Conrad said: ‘Immerse yourself in the most destructive element’ – if you can swim, fine. I just want to know why people need violence and how can one come to terms with this thing. The Vietnam War clearly fulfils certain needs and one must be honest and work out what they are. We’ve all taken part in this war, given the tremendous TV coverage; we’re all combatants.

BARBER:Surely the point is that we’re not being shot, we’re just enjoying the show.

BALLARD:Absolutely right. The important thing is that it is a show. All of us have made the world in which we live – we’re not forced to watch the newsreels on television, we don’t have to look at the pictures in illustrated magazines. This war, if it is a show, is a show at which we are the paying audience, let’s remember that. All I’m saying is that one ought to be honest about one’s responses. People didn’t in fact feel the kind of automatic revulsion to the Biafra war that they were told they should feel. They were stirred, excited, involved. It may be that one needs a certain sort of salt in one’s emotional diet.

BARBER:Perhaps these overexcited responses come from leading sheltered lives?