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imagination begins to think in terms of short stories
rather than novels.”
For a writer who responds very much to social change,
what does he feel will be the qualitative break between
the 20th and 21st centuries? “If the 21st century represents
a radical break with the 20th century then I don’t
think that we’d be able to spot it. It might be something
totally unexpected. It might be that our children and
grandchildren vigorously reject the 20th century and
everything it stood for. They may look back on it aghast
and say ‘Who were these people? They spent all their
time killing each other! Why?’ If consumer capitalism
gets a little out of hand, and there are signs of resistance
to the Americanisation of Europe, you might get
absolute idealism in the young.
“The big change I assume is that there will be no
more world wars, partly because no one will be able to
borrow enough money from the World Bank to finance
it. Now this changes the game enormously, it’s rather
like playing chess and the rules being changed by the
International Chess Federation ‘You don’t have to mate
the king anymore’. ‘God, what do we do now!?’ I think
the knock-on effect will be vast.” There is a certain glee
with which Ballard accepts these changes, a state of
grace that his protagonists strive towards.
“The decline of political ideology also changes
things. There’s no real ideological clash between Dubyah
and Gore for example. The decline of religion
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and
is also a factor. You do your triangulations and all we
have left is consumerism, what I call the ‘suburbanisation
of the soul’. That’s frightening. It may trigger all
sorts of unconscious reactions. As someone in Super-
Cannes says, in a totally sane society madness is the
only freedom.”
This line has come up before in Running Wild for
example? “Yes, I am tending to repeat myself in order
to get the damn message home!” he says with slow emphasis
before that gasping, generous laugh reverberates
down the line.
Consider the word “triangulation” that Ballard uses.
It’s a trope that almost uniquely marks out a Ballardian
sentence with its three seemingly unrelated objects
or events; as if he’s forcing the unconscious mind to
construct a narrative to explain them. Take an example
from Super-Cannes:
“Were assassins aware of the contingent world? I
tried to imagine Lee Harvey Oswald on his way to the
book depository in Dealey Plaza on the morning he shot
Kennedy. Did he notice a line of overnight washing in
his neighbour’s yard, a fresh dent in the nextdoor Buick,
a newspaper boy with a bandaged knee? [my italics]
The contingent world must have pressed against his
temples, clamouring to be let in. But Oswald had kept
the shutters bolted against the storm, opening them for
a few seconds as the President’s Lincoln moved across
the lens of the Zapruder camera and on into history.”
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