263- ] English Literature
J. G. Ballard
British author
James Graham Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April
2009) was an English novelist and short-story writer, satirist and essayist
known for psychologically provocative works of fiction that explore the
relations between human psychology, technology, sex and mass media. with the short-story
collection The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which includes Ballard first became
associated with New Wave science fiction for post-apocalyptic novels such as
The Drowned World (1962). He later courted controversy the 1968 story "Why
I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan", and later the novel Crash (1973), a story
about car-crash fetishists.
In
1984, Ballard won broad critical recognition for the war novel Empire of the
Sun, a semi-autobiographical story of the experiences of a British boy during
the Japanese occupation of Shanghai. Three years later, the American film
director Steven Spielberg adapted the novel into a film of the same name. The
novelist's journey from youth to mid-age is chronicled, with fictional
inflections, in The Kindness of Women (1991), and in the autobiography Miracles
of Life (2008). Some of Ballard's early novels have been adapted as films,
including Crash (1996), directed by David Cronenberg, and High-Rise (2015), an
adaptation of the 1975 novel directed by Ben Wheatley.
From
the distinct nature of the literary fiction of J. G. Ballard arose the
adjective Ballardian, defined as: "resembling or suggestive of the
conditions described in J. G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially
dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes, and the psychological effects
of technological, social or environmental developments". The Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography describes the novelist Ballard as preoccupied
with "Eros, Thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies".
Life
Shanghai
J.
G. Ballard was born to Edna Johnstone (1905–1998) and James Graham Ballard
(1901–1966), who was a chemist at the Calico Printers' Association, a textile
company in the city of Manchester, and later became the chairman and managing
director of the China Printing and Finishing Company, the Association's
subsidiary company in Shanghai. The China in which Ballard was born featured
the Shanghai International Settlement, where Western foreigners "lived an
American style of life". At school age, Ballard attended the Cathedral
School of the Holy Trinity Church, Shanghai. Upon the outbreak of the Second
Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), the Ballard family abandoned their suburban
house, and moved to a house in the city centre of
Shanghai
to avoid the warfare between the Chinese defenders and the Japanese invaders.
After
the Battle of Hong Kong (8–25 December 1941), the Imperial Japanese Army
occupied the International Settlement and imprisoned the Allied civilians in
early 1943. The Ballard family were sent to the Lunghua Civilian Assembly
Centre where they lived in G-block, a two-storey residence for 40 families, for
the remainder of the Second World War. At the Lunghua Centre, Ballard attended
school, where the teachers were prisoners with a profession. In the
autobiography Miracles of Life, Ballard said that those experiences of
displacement and imprisonment were the thematic bases of the novel Empire of
the Sun.
Concerning
the violence found in Ballard's fiction, the novelist Martin Amis said that
Empire of the Sun "gives shape to what shaped him." About his
experiences of the Japanese war in China, Ballard said: "I don't think you
can go through the experience of war without one's perceptions of the world
being forever changed. The reassuring stage-set that everyday reality in the
suburban West presents to us is torn down; you see the ragged scaffolding, and
then you see the truth beyond that, and it can be a frightening
experience." "I have—I won't say happy—[but] not unpleasant memories
of the camp... I remember a lot of the casual brutality and beatings-up that
went on—but, at the same time, we children were playing a hundred and one games
all the time!" In his later life, Ballard became an atheist, yet said:
"I'm extremely interested in religion ... I see religion as a key to all
sorts of mysteries that surround the human consciousness."
Britain
and Canada
In
late 1945, Ballard's mother returned to Britain with J. G. and his sister,
where they resided at Plymouth, and he attended The Leys School in Cambridge,
where he won a prize for a well-written essay. Within a few years, Mrs Ballard
and her daughter returned to China and rejoined Mr Ballard; and, whilst not at
school, Ballard resided with grandparents. In 1949, he studied medicine at
King's College, Cambridge, with the intention of becoming a psychiatrist.
At
university, Ballard wrote avant-garde fiction influenced by psychoanalysis and
the works of surrealist painters, and pursued writing fiction and medicine. In
his second year at Cambridge, in May 1951, the short story "The Violent
Noon", a Hemingway pastiche, won a crime-story competition and was
published in the Varsity newspaper. In October 1951, encouraged by publication,
and understanding that clinical medicine disallowed time to write fiction,
Ballard forsook medicine and enrolled at Queen Mary College to read English
literature. After a year, he quit the College and worked as an advertising
copywriter, then worked as an itinerant encyclopaedia salesman. Throughout that
odd-job period, Ballard continued writing short-story fiction but found no
publisher.
In
early 1954, Ballard joined the Royal Air Force and was assigned to the Royal
Canadian Air Force flight-training base in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada. In
that time, he encountered American science fiction magazines, and, in due
course, wrote his first science fiction story, "Passport to
Eternity", a pastiche of the American science fiction genre; yet the story
was not published until 1962.
In
1955, Ballard left the RAF and returned to England, where he met and married
Helen Mary Matthews, who was a secretary at the Daily Express newspaper; the
first of three Ballard children was born in 1956. In December 1956, Ballard
became a professional science-fiction writer with the publication of the short
stories "Escapement" (in New Worlds magazine) and "Prima
Belladonna" (in Science Fantasy magazine). At the New Worlds magazine, the
editor, Edward J. Carnell, greatly supported Ballard's science-fiction writing,
and published most of his early stories.
From
1958 onwards, Ballard was assistant editor of the scientific journal Chemistry
and Industry. His interest in art involved the emerging Pop Art movement, and,
in the late 1950s, Ballard exhibited collages that represented his ideas for a
new kind of novel. Moreover, his avant-garde inclinations discomfited writers
of mainstream science fiction, whose artistic attitudes Ballard considered
philistine. Briefly attending the 1957 World Science Fiction Convention in
London, Ballard left disillusioned and demoralised by the type and quality of
the science-fiction writing he encountered, and did not write another story for
a year; however, by 1965, he was editor of Ambit, an avante-garde magazine,
which had an editorial remit amenable to his aesthetic ideals.
Professional
writer
In
1960, the Ballard family moved to Shepperton, Surrey, where he resided till his
death in 2009. To become a professional writer, Ballard forsook mainstream
employment to write his first novel, The Wind from Nowhere (1962), during a
fortnight holiday, and quit his editorial job with the Chemistry and Industry
magazine. Later that year, his second novel, The Drowned World (1962), also was
published; those two novels established Ballard as a notable writer of New Wave
science fiction; he also popularized the related concept and genre of inner
space.: 415 : 260 From that success followed the publication of short-story
collections, and was the beginning of a great period of literary productivity
from which emerged the short-story collection The Terminal Beach (1964).
In
1964, Mary Ballard died of pneumonia, leaving Ballard to raise their three
children, James, Fay and Bea Ballard. Although he did not remarry, his friend
Michael Moorcock introduced Claire Walsh to Ballard, who later became his
partner. Claire Walsh worked in publishing during the 1960s and the 1970s, and
was Ballard's sounding board for his story ideas; later, Claire introduced
Ballard to the expatriate community in Sophia Antipolis, in southern France;
those expatriates provided grist for the writer's mill.
In
1965, after the death of his wife Mary, Ballard's writing yielded the
thematically-related short stories, that were published in New Worlds by
Moorcock, as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).[citation needed] In 1967, the
novelist Algis Budrys said that Brian W. Aldiss, Roger Zelazny, Samuel R.
Delany and J. G. Ballard were the leading writers of New Wave Science Fiction.
In the event, The Atrocity Exhibition proved legally controversial in the U.S.,
because the publisher feared libel-and-slander lawsuits by the living
celebrities who featured in the science fiction stories. In The Atrocity
Exhibition, the story titled "Crash!" deals with the psychosexuality
of car-crash enthusiasts; in 1970, at the New Arts Laboratory, Ballard sponsored
an exhibition of damaged automobiles titled "Crashed Cars"; lacking
the commentary of an art curator, the artwork provoked critical vitriol and
layman vandalism. In the story "Crash!" and in the "Crashed
Cars" exhibition, Ballard presented and explored the sexual potential in a
car crash, which theme he also explored in a short film made with Gabrielle
Drake in 1971. Those interests produced the novel Crash (1973), which features
a protagonist named James Ballard, who lives in Shepperton, Surrey, England.
Crash
was also controversial upon publication. In 1996, the film adaptation by David
Cronenberg was met by a tabloid uproar in the UK, with the Daily Mail
campaigning for it to be banned. In the years following the initial publication
of Crash, Ballard produced two further novels: 1974's Concrete Island, about a
man stranded in the traffic-divider island of a high-speed motorway, and
High-Rise, about a modern luxury high-rise apartment building's descent into
tribal warfare.
Ballard
published several novels and short story collections throughout the 1970s and
1980s, but his breakthrough into the mainstream came with Empire of the Sun in
1984, based on his years in Shanghai and the Lunghua internment camp. It became
a best-seller, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and awarded the Guardian
Fiction Prize and James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. It made Ballard
known to a wider audience, although the books that followed failed to achieve
the same degree of success. Empire of the Sun was filmed by Steven Spielberg in
1987, starring a young Christian Bale as Jim (Ballard). Ballard himself appears
briefly in the film, and he has described the experience of seeing his
childhood memories reenacted and reinterpreted as bizarre.
Ballard
continued to write until the end of his life, and also contributed occasional
journalism and criticism to the British press. Of his later novels,
Super-Cannes (2000) was well received, winning the regional Commonwealth
Writers' Prize. These later novels often marked a move away from science
fiction, instead engaging with elements of a traditional crime novel. Ballard
was offered a CBE in 2003, but refused, calling it "a Ruritanian charade
that helps to prop up our top-heavy monarchy". In June 2006, he was
diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer, which metastasised to his spine and
ribs. The last of his books published in his lifetime was the autobiography
Miracles of Life, written after his diagnosis. His final published short story,
"The Dying Fall", appeared in the 1996 issue 106 of Interzone, a
British sci-fi magazine. It was later reproduced in The Guardian on 25 April
2009. He was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery.
