Forget Lewis Carroll and his psychedelic musings through the looking glass, years from now Surrey residents will be strolling past ivy-green statues of mutilated car crash victims, insomniac physicians and middle-class fashion icons tearing each other to pieces. Welcome to the disturbing world of JG Ballard, Surrey’s late master of the surreal.
Having moved to Shepperton in 1960, Ballard began a transgressive writing career that was to shock, divide and inspire fans of post-war literature. He fronted the ‘Second Wave’ science fiction movement, a cult genre that was popularized by William S. Burroughs seminal novel Naked Lunch. Along with other giants of the scene such as Philip K. Dick, Ballard demonstrated to readers how the bizarre could co-exist and merge with the rational; dystopias not built on the hyperbolic satire of Orwell but darker, primitive urges that subconsciously break through the veneer of sexual and political conformity. Ballard’s satire was acute and uncomfortably relevant, building on the ideas of Aldous Huxley that our obsessions with technological advancement sometimes overreach themselves.
So why does this postmodern fascination with excess and perversity deserve a place in our culture? In the Seventies, Ballard was panned by mainstream critics and publishers, first for his experimental work The Atrocity Exhibition and again for his infamous novel Crash: a graphic metaphor of man’s literal fetish for destruction. Many of his short stories are equally uncompromising, leading to rejection by publishing houses who warned that the author was “in need of psychiatric help”, and condemning his work to cult-status.
However, Ballard is now regarded as an essential literary figure, giving birth to the official term ‘Ballardian’: a concept of psychological repercussions regarding our incessant development in all walks of society. Thom Yorke has openly admitted that his music is thematically ‘Ballardian’, clearly cited in Radiohead’s 1997 masterpiece OK Computer, whilst the Klaxon’s Myths of the Near Future is a title lifted straight from Ballard’s fiction. Our headlong plunge into urbanization is also strictly Ballardian, serving as an accurate description of our surveillance culture and conflict with climate change.
He may have passed away in April 2009, but the relevance of Ballard only becomes more inherent as we step further into the unknown. The concerns of today such as class angst, sexual politics and environmental uncertainty illustrate just how precarious society really is. It takes the Ballardian warning to imagine, with terrifying clarity, the ramifications should it come tumbling down.
Tom Goulding
