James Graham Ballard was born on 15 November, 1930 in Shanghai, China. The son of a managing director for a subsidiary of a Manchester textile firm, Ballard grew up in an expatriate suburban idyll, a comfortable enclave of large houses, swimming pools, servants and chauffer-driven Packards. At that time, Shanghai was an American zone of influence, and the young Ballard's cultural diet was a peculiar mix of classic children's literature (Alice in Wonderland, Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels), American comics and magazines (Collier's, Life), and American cinema. Ballard was educated at the Cathedral school in Shanghai, but his comfortable colonial life-style came to an abrupt end in 1942 when, in the aftermath of Pearl Harbour, Ballard was interned with his parents and his younger sister by the Japanese in Lunghua Civilian Assembly Centre. The three years (1942-1945) which Ballard spent in Lunghua C.A.C. form the basis of his semi-autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun (1984). The experience of war was a fiercely confusing, dislocating and transformative one for Ballard, and as his privileged life in Shanghai hollowed out before his very eyes, he concluded that reality, to borrow one of his favourite metaphors, was nothing more than a stage set which could be dismantled over night; it is this common belief in the permanence of appearances which Ballard's writing sets out obsessively to dismantle.
Ballard returned to England in1946 with his mother and sister (his father remained in China until 1950) and they settled briefly near Plymouth in the West Country. From 1946-1949 Ballard attended the Leys School in Cambridge, an experience which he disliked enormously. However, the school's proximity to Cambridge Arts Cinema and to Cambridge University's many cultural and social outlets went some way to compensating its own lack of imagination and creativity. As a teenager, Ballard soaked himself in experimental and German Expressionist films of the 1920s, French films of the 1940s, and Hollywood Noir thrillers. At the same time, he developed an early interest in psychoanalysis, devouring the works of Sigmund Freud and Karl Jung, and he went on to read medicine at King's College, Cambridge with the view to becoming a psychiatrist.
Whilst studying at University, Ballard was writing experimental or avant-garde fiction which was heavily influenced by surrealist painters such as Max Ernst, Salvador Dali and Paul Delvaux. The seduction of surrealist art for Ballard lay in its overtly imaginative charge, and in its propensity to shock and to provoke. With its obsessive and lurid enquiry into the irrational and the perverse, surrealism lay outside of the fold of critical respectability, and this was an edge of indecorousness and impropriety which the seditious young writer particularly admired. In 1962 for example, Ballard courted controversy when he refused to delete references to the surrealist school from his novel, The Drowned World. His publisher at the time, Victor Gollancz, felt that this kind of textual acknowledgement to the underground movement would diminish the achievement of Ballard's own writing. The author refused flatly and the references remain.
In 1952 Ballard abandoned his medical studies at Cambridge. The urge to write was pressing, and after two years of studying anatomy, physiology and pathology Ballard began a degree in English literature at the University of London, but after just one year he was asked to leave. Ballard then took a series of odd jobs which included writing copy for the advertising agency Digby Wills Ltd, and selling encyclopedias door-to-door. A two-year stint in the RAF followed at the RCAF flight training base at Moosejaw, Saskatchewan, Canada (1953-54), and it was here that Ballard first discovered and devoured American science fiction magazines such as Galaxy and Astounding which published stories by Ray Bradbury, Frederick Pohl, James Blush and Robert Scheckley. It was whilst stationed at RAF Booker, a base for cashiered or reject aircrew, that Ballard wrote his first science fiction story “Passport to Eternity”, a pastiche of the American science fiction which he had read whilst stationed in Canada.
Ballard married Helen Mary Matthews in 1955, and a year later their first child, James Christopher, was born. Living in Shepperton, home of the famous film studios, Ballard worked in various public libraries and wrote short stories in his spare time. He published his first science fiction story, “Prima Belladonna”, in the December issue of New Worlds which marked the beginning of an extremely profitable relationship between Ballard and Edward Carnell, editor of New Worlds Science Fiction and Science Fantasy. For Ballard, science fiction, or science-fantasy writing, was a potentially subversive literary form which was better equipped to articulate the protean identity of contemporary culture than the measured perspective and linear chronology of the traditional mainstream or realist novel. But science fiction also had its own limitations: Ballard felt that science fiction (and especially American sf) had become a closed literary form and he realised that the science fiction idiom had to evolve if it was to transcend restrictive categories of genre, and if it was to realise its wholly imaginative and literary potential. Ballard articulated his personal vision for the future of science fiction in a guest (and first) editorial for New Worlds in 1962. Ballard's manifesto, “Which Way to Inner Space?”, called for an inversion and, in some cases, a rejection of traditional ideas and conventions such as hard science facts, outer space, extra-terrestrial life forms, and interplanetary fantasies. The only alien planet, Ballard still insists, is earth, and it is inner space, not outer, that needs to be explored. Ballards thematic and stylistic overhaul of the science fiction genre set the precedent for the emerging strain of science-fiction writing called “New Wave Speculative Fiction” (1962-78) which was to hit both sides of the Atlantic in the 1960s and in which Ballard was a prominent British voice.
In the same year Ballard published his first novel, The Wind From Nowhere (1962), which he wrote during a two-week break from his editorial job at the journal Chemistry and Industry (1957-62). A conventional piece of disaster fiction, The Wind from Nowhere was, on the author's admission, a piece of hackwork which allowed him to make the transition to becoming a full-time writer. With the transition complete Ballard embarked upon a fiercely productive period which saw the appearance of two short-story collections, The Voices of Time (1962) and The Terminal Beach (1964), and three more novels, The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (published as The Burning World in America, 1965), and The Crystal World (serialised as Equinox in 1964 before being expanded to book length in1966). The Wind from Nowhere, The Drowned World, The Drought and The Crystal World, which are often referred to as the “Global Disaster Quartet”, meditate upon the physical and psychological metamorphoses of man in the face of environmental apocalypse. Most significantly these four novels mark Ballard's radical departure from traditional science fiction as he journeys into the infinite realm of inner space – that unique Ballardian topography where the outer world of reality and the inner world of the psyche meet at confusing angles and with startling results.
Just as Ballard's career as a full-time writer was gathering impetus his personal life was cruelly stopped in its tracks when Mary Ballard died of pneumonia in 1964, leaving her husband to face the prospect of bringing up three children (James, Fay and Beatrice) on his own. After a hiatus of a year or so, Ballard returned to the literary scene with three collections of short stories The Day of Forever, The Disaster Area and The Venus Hunters (originally published as The Overloaded Man, 1967).
In 1970 Ballard achieved a literary watershed with the publication of The Atrocity Exhibition, an extremely controversial text whose obsessive exploration into the all-pervading violence of the modern world left a bitter after-taste in the mouth of British literary sensibility. Pornography, sexual perversion, the myth-making powers of the media, psychopathology, car-crash victims, the Vietnam war, and dead American icons (JFK, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean) are the subject matter of Atrocity's 15 non-linear and fragmented prose sections or condensed novels. Unsurprisingly perhaps, Atrocity has a troubled publishing history. One chapter from the novel, “Why I want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” (which Ballard wrote in 1967 and which prophesised the rise of Ronald Reagan from Hollywood Cowboy to American President) was the subject of an obscenity trial in England when it was published as a separate booklet by the American poet Bill Butler in 1968. Ballard's imagination was on trial alongside that of William Burroughs and George Bataille, but charges against the Reagan piece were eventually dropped on the grounds that it was generically science fiction. On the other side of the Atlantic, the publishers Doubleday withdrew the text before the first print run had been distributed. It was not until some years later that The Atrocity Exhibition, renamed Love and Napalm: Export USA, was to be distributed in America by the Grove Press with a preface by that other great outlaw of convention, William Burroughs.
Riding the tide of controversy, Ballard went on to stage his own atrocity exhibition when he organised a display of crashed cars at the New Arts Laboratory (April 4-28) in 1970. The exhibit, self-consciously titled “Crashed Cars”, was a speculative illustration of the section “Crash” (taken from The Atrocity Exhibition), and its purpose was to explore the latent sexual content of the car crash. The findings of Ballard's research appeared some three years later in the form of the novel Crash which hurtled onto the literary scene much to the horror of one publisher's reader who returned Ballard's manuscript with the following health warning: “This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish!” With its obsessively violent cocktail of blood, semen and engine coolant Crash tests most vehemently Ballard's hypothesis of the “Death of Affect”, a phrase which he coined in The Atrocity Exhibition and which refers to the loss of ability to feel or empathise which haunts modern consciousness. Ballard's Crash is a wake-up call, an extreme metaphor for extreme times. Shortly after completing his provocative novel, Ballard was involved in a rather serious car crash of his own; a bizarre case if life imitating art? or an instance of the author putting his own hypothesis to the test?
The notoriety which Ballard achieved with the novel Crash returned in 1996 in the shape of David Cronenburg's film version which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival amidst yet another flurry of sensationalist media myths. Although Cronenburg's Crash was awarded a special jury prize for originality, daring and audacity, Ballard was, once more, called forward to defend a cinematic adaptation of a novel which he had written over twenty-five years earlier. Despite the author's protestations that neither the book nor the film of Crash set out to celebrate the car crash as a vehicle for exploring deviant sexual parameters, the film was still banned by four English councils on the grounds that it was beyond the bounds of depravity, and its release in the UK was delayed by 18 months.
Between atrocities and crashes, another short story collection appeared, Vermilion Sands in 1971. But the early to mid-seventies were characterised by Ballard 's concrete and steel phase, a dark period of dehydrated and relentlessly urban prose novels such as Concrete Island (1974) and High Rise (1975). Concrete Island is a modern-day tale of Robinson Crusoe with an urban twist: Ballard's protagonist, Robert Maitland, crashes his car and is stranded on a derelict road junction on the M4, but why does he choose to stay there? Ballard's painfully compressed prose circles around the themes of alienation and the redundancy of the individual in an increasingly and intrusively technological landscape. Similarly, High Rise hones in on the sterility of modern urban life. A community of well-to-do, urban professionals inhabit a luxurious, hi-tech apartment block which caters for their every whim. Leisure comes at a price though; the self-contained, self-reliant environment also promotes isolation and anonymity amongst its residents. Life in the high-rise is too ordered, too functional, too civilised, and in a desperate reaction to this arid and affectless life, the residents initiate social breakdown; they revert to tribalism, to barbarism and, in the end, to utter savagery as a means of self-expression.
After a gap of almost 4 years, Ballard closed the seventies with The Unlimited Dream Company (1979), a remarkably poetic and visionary novel which marked a radical transformation in Ballard 's authorial style. The harsh, external landscapes of the previous novels soften into a fluid, internal mindscape whose mutating images liquefy with the same ambiguity as Dali's soft watches. Reminiscent of Golding's Pincher Martin or Lessing's Briefing for A Descent into Hell, Ballard narrates a dizzying tale in which a psychopathic pilot (Blake) crashes into the River Thames only to resurrect and reinvent himself as a Pagan God in order to transform the drab suburban town of Shepperton into an exotic paradise of endless posssibility. Romantic and Surrealist influences infuse this novel at every turn; dominant themes include a preoccupation with transcendence, the transforming power of the imagination, the fusion of physical and psychological landscapes, fantastic and metamorphosing biologies, dreams, visions and hallucinations. The surreal humour which floats throughout The Unlimited Dream Company is a welcome contrast to the harder, deadpan jokes which characterised Ballard's earlier novels, and his next work, Hello America (1981) continues in this surrealistically funny vein. Set in 2030, the world's fossil fuels have long expired and America has been turned into a vast desert; the American dream finds itself locked in a vacuous nightmare, and the streets which were once paved with gold are now covered with rust. A scientific expedition arrives from Europe with the hope of regenerating and recreating its own visions of America, but the team encounter resistance in the form of the self-appointed 47th President of the United States, an escaped psychopath who believes he's Charles Manson, and his loyal puppet master who is repopulating the country with automated copies of America's lost icons – the other 46 Presidents of the United States (Lincoln, the Kennedy's, Nixon, Carter etc), Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, and John Wayne to name just a few. Hello America explores the fact / fiction, reality / image dialectics in a series of satirical jokes whilst posing serious questions about the mediated culture of America with its vulnerable icons of power, liberty and freedom.
Another collection of short stories, Myths of the Near Future, appeared in 1982 and included the piece called “The Dead Time” (written in 1977) from which Empire of the Sun was to grow a few years later. Short-listed for the Booker prize, and a winner of the Guardian Fiction and the James Tate Black Memorial prizes, Empire of the Sun (1984) is Ballard's most critically acclaimed novel to date, and its adaptation to screen by Steven Spielberg in 1987 brought Ballard's story to an even wider audience. Empire tells the story of Jim, an English school boy who is lost in war-torn Shanghai before he is eventually captured and imprisoned by the Japanese. Based partly on Ballard's own experiences of World War II and his internment by the Japanese in Lunghua camp, Empire is a haunting and mesmeric vision of how social reality is stripped bare by the illogical and meaningless nature of war. Ballard rewrites the traditional war novel with honesty, intelligence and humour as notions of heroism, selflessness and sacrifice are quickly displaced by the real tools for survival – selfishness, mendacity, pragmatism and self-preservation. A remarkably intricate fusion of history, autobiography and fiction, Empire of the Sun, resists and challenges the authority of realist-historical documentation to represent the myriad atrocities of the twentieth century.
Over the next few years, Ballard published another novel The Day of Creation (1988), a psychological detective novella, Running Wild (1988), and another collection of short stories War Fever (1990), but these works received a rather muted reception after the chorus of approval that greeted Empire. Indeed, it wasn't until the appearance of Ballard's semi-autobiographical sequel, The Kindness of Women, that the author returned to the media spotlight. A collection of short stories (or chapters), The Kindness of Women narrates selective key incidents and experiences in the author's life and career (internment during World War II, the assasination of JFK, the death of Ballard's wife, Spielberg's adaptation of Empire). Some critics have claimed that, when read in conjunction, Empire and Kindness, offer a way of decoding Ballard's earlier, and often elusive, fictions. Such an approach, however, runs the risk of placing undue emphasis on the autobiographical elements of the two works, whilst also overlooking the playful and overtly self-conscious textures of Ballard's writing; for instance, the author's life stories weave constantly between fact and fiction, and, at times, openly rewrite, contradict and negate each other, which suggests that, for Ballard at least, truth and fiction are indistinguishable and interchangeable.
Written in the same vein as Golding's Lord of the Flies, Ballard's next novel, Rushing to Paradise (1994), is a satire on the dangers of Utopian visions; megalomania, radical environmental politics, militant feminism and psychopathic dreams of dictatorship are, Ballard suggests, the stuff of which a brave new world is made. And they are also common themes which Ballard later visits and revisits in A User's Guide to the Millenium (1996). A collection of essays, journalistic writings and reviews written between 1962 and 1995, A Users Guide demonstrates Ballard's unprecedented ability to write with equal facility about popular culture or high and low-brow art and literature. Ballard moves with humour and ease through topics as disparate as the Gulf War, Surrealism, Hitler, Mickey Mouse, Cinema, Science fiction, Elvis Presley and Norwegian Lobsters in a pacey and dazzling collection which stands as a testament to Ballard's prescience and acuity as a social critic.
The commercial and critical success of Ballard's two latest novels, Cocaine Nights (1996) and Super Cannes (2000), confirm him as one of the most important voices in contemporary British fiction. Cocaine Nights is a generic mix of science fiction and the detective novel, and it has already acquired something of a cult status. Set in Estrella del Mar, a leisure-dominated society where people retire at 40, Cocaine Nights recalls the thematic obsessions of work and leisure which Ballard explored in his earlier short stories such as “Having a Wonderful Time” and the Vermilion Sands collection. By the time we reach Cocaine Nights, though, Ballard is uncovering a darker, more calculated side to the agency / inertia dialectic as he tests the controversial theory that crime, violence and corruption are legitimate correctives to social inertia. Super Cannes has been read by some critics as a sequel or companion piece to Cocaine Nights, and in many ways Ballard is continuing his interrogation into the horrors of social zombification, but he does so from a slightly different angle. Super Cannes is set in a high-tech business park, Eden Olympia (a fictional version of Sophia Antipolis, built the hills above Nice in southern France), where work has become the new leisure, and the office has become the new home. The corporate dream is shattered when a mild-mannered English doctor murders10 people before turning the gun on himself. More of a why than a whodunnit, it is left to the reader to unearth the motive behind the madness, and along the way Ballard lets us chew over the complex relationships between sanity and pathology, between madness and transgression. Ballard's earlier meditations on the suburbanisation of the soul have metamorphosed here into an enquiry into the corporatisation of the soul as he asks if we can be programmed to meet the abstract targets of the multinationals without compromising our humanity. Ballard does not have any right answers, but, as always, he offers the reader a series of dangerous and controversial possibilities.
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Citation: Baxter, Jeannette. "J. G. Ballard". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 05 November 2001; last revised 28 April 2009. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=235, accessed 26 January 2025.]
