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Interview [published November 2000]
J.G. Ballard: Flight And Imagination
Chris Hall talks about the dark side of capitalism and the deceptions
of reality with J.G. Ballard
Walking along Oxford Street the day after I finished
reading J.G. Ballard’s new novel, Super-Cannes, it
struck me, literally, the total acceptance of the substrate
of violence in consumer societies when it manifests
itself. A silent, monolithic crowd hurtled down
either side of the road as I walked from Centrepoint
to Oxford Circus. I counted the number of times that
I was physically forced to move out of the way or get
hit head on (five). I counted the number of times I was
pranged, bumped or rear-shunted (four). It’s said that
London traffic moves at an average speed of 11mph,
but pedestrian traffic can’t be far behind. Indeed, it’s
not too fanciful to see in these crowds how the car
has influenced our spatio-temporal perception. You
see overtaking manoeuvres, you see people checking
their rear views, as it were, with a glance behind before
moving out. There is the same frustration at slow
moving traffic: the same parameters of territoriality
are in operation.
My shopping trip reminded me of a passage from the
book in which Wilder Penrose, the resident psychologist
of the business park Eden-Olympia, says “Our
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and
latent psychopathy is the last nature reserve, a place of
refuge for the endangered mind. Of course, I’m talking
about a carefully metered violence, microdoses of
madness like the minute traces of strychnine in a nerve
tonic.” And that’s just what that experience felt like:
small, discrete moments of psychopathy.
It was with this in mind that I spoke to J.G. Ballard,
who’d granted me the last interview on the round
of publicity he’d been doing for Super-Cannes with
the nationals. Unlike most people who interview
Ballard, I wasn’t worried about whether he would
be cold and distant or abstract, but simply that there
wouldn’t be enough time with the Seer of Shepperton.
I was right not to worry about any of those
things. His voice has a rhythmic, musical quality,
and his laughter is warm and inclusive. He gives the
impression of an eccentric school master with, yes,
a slightly abstracted air; a patrician whose sentences
end with a heavy emphasis. Ballard is clearly used to
developing an idea without interruption.
“The main theme of Super-Cannes,” he says, “is
that in order to keep us happy and spending more
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