An Endless Almanac Of Terrifying Wounds

I grew up along a main road, among concrete monstrosities that once appeared pregnant with mystery and possibility (but in retrospect were bloody tragedies). Like many others living near a city centre, I witnessed my fair share of motor accidents, both minor and horrific. Even now, cars bring to mind the stench of eye-watering emissions, small animal carcasses and ominous smears of blood along the kerb: brands of unearned power over nature and the fragile pedestrian (another vulnerable constituency neglected by neoliberalism). Every triumphant roar replaced by a new one, as traffic proceeded on its predatory journey, oblivious to it's own final destination. As a virginal teenager, it was perhaps unsurprising that J.G. Ballard's Crash would strike such a nerve. A pornographic, but highly unerotic, novel centered around the allures and traumas of motoring held a perverse glamour. To this confused adolescent, the popular obsession with the motorcar was as mysterious and ominous as sex itself. The destructive - or of course liberating - potential of both leads western societies to mystify them with layers of distorted exchange value; not least with their taunting promises of plentitude. Our lonely, Faustian trade between alienated desire, the consumer spectacle and the infernal machines of capitalism are even more starkly apparent in this century of fractured communities, economic pillage, and wars of peak oil denial.

Although often regarded as a cold, clinical author, I'd argue that Ballard is anything but. The supposed 'blankness 'of his prose opens up caverns of unspoken yearning and a need for human connection. A widower for most of his adult life, there's a recurring sense of loss to his stories. His extended autopsies on "the death of affect" are thinly-veiled acts of mourning, made explicit in later autobiographical works. Crash is a typical example of his characters compensating with flights of creative hubris, according to technology and its audiovisual sermons (or 'the media landscape'). His innerspace visionaries and 'hoodlum priests' invariably fall to earth with burnt wings, his survivors remaining as seduced observers. Not so much scarred by their (sexually ambiguous) love triangles, as by the environments within which this desire operates. Ending on notes of muted sadness and resignation, the Spectacle remains as impregnable and distant as the intimate, but alien, landscapes that negotiate the desires of his characters. For all of Vaughn's grand claims, he climaxes as an anonymous victim to the Elizabeth Taylor of his fantasies. The pornographic imaginary ultimately answers to the faceless technology that generated it (a motif of Ballard's beloved surrealists). For stories set in the present, this entropy is largely private, internal. If technology dictates the inner world, then humanity as whole is dwarfed by unpredictable nature. Explicitly so in his 'disaster cycle', and other futuristic stories where it overwhelms the grandest of human designs. For Ballard, the future is haunted by the imaginative consolations to be found within departures. Emotion is replaced by theory, a coping strategy in denial of the remorseful, vulnerable mechanics of being human. A resource with which to steer around trauma:

The above film was directed by Harley Cokliss, a name suggestive of some pornographic car part. Older readers may also recognise Gabrielle Drake, Crossroads heroine and sister of Nick. This was actually broadcast before publication of Crash the 1973 novel, inspired by the Atrocity Exhibition passage that preceeded it. Unlike many 'name' novelists, Ballard actually talks like he writes. Always a comfortable and engaging television presence, he aquits himself well in this 'adaptation'. It's also a relic of the days when pulp, public television and the avant-garde would cross paths for a general audience. It has an atmosphere of reverence and horror for the urban environment, an approach common to early 70s British culture. Later, and in tune with the rise of Thatcherism, this became supplanted by revulsion at the population as well as the design of urban Britain. The New Right ethos paradoxically promoted the car as a means to belong in a society that was "no such thing"; with Thatcher famously dismissing public transport passengers as 'losers'. In line with this paradox, 80s advertising tended to promote the car as protective rather than free; concealing its sexual appeal within promises to prevent against mingling. Somewhere along this intersection lay Crash's status as the cult novel for post-punk subcultures, appropriate to their consumerist ambivalence and morbid sexual mores. 

                     

For a writer of supposedly 'narrow' concerns, Ballard is someone I return to far more than other teenage favourites (you can guess the usual suspects - I am a cliche). Despite reoccuring obsessions, his passive dialogue opens more room for speculation on the part of the reader than, say, Burroughs (infected as he is with a distinctly macho insistence on writerly authority). Indeed, Ballard's obsessions are feasible basis for an always interesting blog. Perhaps time will embed his more trans-literary qualities. As with Don Quixote, Gulliver's Travels, Peter Pan, Frankenstein, The Trial, 1984, Waiting For Godot etc. his stories could acquire the texture of fable, where the strength of concept can outweigh literary merit. It's somewhat surprising how rare film adaptations of Ballard's work have been. Compared to his Burroughs misfire (or anything starring Jeremy Irons), David Cronenberg's Crash has aged surprisingly well. It captures that removed sense of emotional desperation so common to Ballard. However, its location neglects a central underlying theme: how the British middle-class are, well... fucking weird. Perhaps compelled by the post-war welfare consensus (and experience of total war), enough of its cultural producers were once aware of this; unafraid to document it from a variety of angles. Nowadays, they appear too preoccupied with celebrity evisceration, narcissistic self-surveilance and fetishised motorist entitlements to notice anymore.

Contexts

Martin Bax, paediatrician.

When I moved into a 1974 building a few months back, the seventies objects I’ve been carrying around with me since my sister and I sold our family home a couple of years ago started to seem newly apt. It’s mostly my dad’s stuff that fills the boxes upon boxes we’ve gone to great lengths to hang on to, and the seventies was unquestionably my dad’s decade. Maybe he was a sixties child in some respects – hedonistic, a Hendrix fan – but most of his musical and literary heirlooms are from the subsequent ten years or so (from circa 1969 to 1981). So there are records by Neu!, Uriah Heep, Floyd, Fairport, Amon Düül II, Tangerine Dream, Suicide, old copies of Melody Maker and NME, and a wonderful signed letter from J.G. Ballard, in which the great man politely declines to take part in a conference on psychology and science fiction convened by my dad at Newcastle Poly in 1979.

Surrounding myself with these objects in a Brutalist university building feels apt but also weird. Is this a bizarre atavistic father-son thing? Am I gravitating toward places and things that recall my dad’s PhD years as I enter the exact same phase out of some suppressed instinct of quasi-religious remembrance? Is this what hauntology really is – mourning rituals coming back to bite us in the ass, memory and meaning fighting to get out of inert matter in an age of amnesiac secularism? My generation doesn’t so much suffer from a generation gap as from an uncanny over-familiarity with our parents.*

Anyway, sorting through psychology textbooks, dust-covered copies of New Worlds, and novels by Ursula Le Guin and Christopher Priest just before Christmas, I lighted on this excellent book, published in 1976:

Perhaps people who were actually alive in the seventies can tell me whether or not this is a well-known text. It’s certainly not one I’d heard of, and not one that seems to pop up in received histories of the decade. Some very cursory internet research reveals that Martin Bax was a consultant paediatrician in London (apparently until very recently), but he’s better known for founding Ambit, a still flourishing literary/arts journal, which Bax now co-edits with middlebrow-poet-turned-monarchy-apologist Carol Ann Duffy, amongst others. Since the Hospital Ship he’s written only one more book, 2005’s Love on the Borders, which is a shame, because his debut really is a belter.

An early-seventies edition of Ambit. Ballard, Bax, and friends ogle some poor lass.

The plot is a simple one. After an apocalyptic disaster a renegade “hospital ship” sails around the planet spreading a gospel of free love that is part hippyish ethos, part experimental psychiatry. There are some evocative Children of Men-style scenes involving human crucifixion, which is taking place on dry land at the behest of an unspecified genocidal tendency. Survivors are rescued and revived by way of the ship’s sex therapies. Some atrocities are experienced first hand. Relationships burgeon and evolve. That’s pretty much it.

Ballard was a friend of Bax’s – there’s an endorsement of his on the blurb – and his influence is clearly discernible throughout. The other notable presence is William S. Burroughs; the structure of the novel utilizes Burroughsian cut-up, largely as a means of incorporating copious borrowings from medical journals and psychoanalytic texts. (In fact, take away the scientific material and you would have a novella of less than 100 pages.)

I’m not quite sure what I find so winning about this formula. I think it has something to do with the effortlessness of the outré aesthetic, the sense that writing an experimental, socially provocative novel was just something one had to do during this period, not because of ego or careerism (Bax could presumably have ditched the day job for a glamorous literary career), but out of sheer natural curiosity, a basic scientific-imaginative desire to synthesize and to create new creative compounds, new stylistic worlds, new social solutions. There’s a very moving valorization of capital L Love as a societal panacea that is utterly unimaginable in the twenty-first century, and the sometimes embarassing sex episodes are forgivable in this context. The book has a standard sci-fi premise but it’s charmingly scrappy, oblique, rough-edged, unprofessional and optimistic.

It’s all about the context isn’t it? In other words, Bax is clearly the product of an avant-garde with a clear-ish sense of what the whole point of writing experimental fiction is. The Hospital Ship reads like the product of a very seventies milieu, a counterculture entering its final phase, one that had Ballard, music, experimentation, sex and science at its centre, one that managed to enlist all these things in the service of an unequivocally progressive and even sometimes sentimental (from today’s vantage point) vision. This sort of world is vaguely familiar to me, the eighties kid, because it’s invariably what I think of when I think about my dad the psychologist/omnivorous reader/purchaser of willfully obscure records.

As a postscript, if you want an illustration of how important milieu (or a lack of it) can be on an artist, take the example of Martin Amis. Now, I’m a diehard Amis-hater, but I picked up a copy of Success (1977) on holiday last year (the book was short, I was bored), and I have to say, I thought it was pretty good. This makes sense though when you consider that Amis was, throughout the seventies, a part of (or at least on the peripheral fringes of) the same countercultural milieu populated by figures like Ballard and Bax. This was where early Amis derived almost all of his fictional energy from, and you can clearly see the negative effect on his writing of his gradual estrangement from this context as he enters the eighties and begins his journey from the Webbite soft-left through the neoliberal centre to the Bushite neo-con right.

But in Success he still seems to have a tendentious grasp of the notion that, to write blackly satirical neo-Dostoyevskyian fiction, you probably have to have some sort of fundamental sympathy with the artistic margins, some sense of basic antipathy to the liberal establishment and the metropolitan literary set (even as you drink/shag/play tennis with its doyens in your off-hours). When you lose sight of this context, you really are fucked creatively. I read The Rachel Papers (1973) years ago, and I remember it having an ebullient, Chattertonian anarchy about it, not really experimental or avant-garde by a long stretch, but informed by a sort of dark, youthful malevolence (like much of the best rock music of the period, I suppose). This angry-young-man-meets-Pynchon mode seems to reach a delicious urban-gothic peak with Success, but by the time of Money (1984), which rehashes Success’s themes, the focus on excess and deviousness has already begun to tip into over self-indulgence and narcissism (but without the knowing bathos that had hitherto made these qualities seem acceptable), the literary equivalent of a bloated mid-eighties guitar solo.

Again, maybe there’s a personal context here. Perhaps I’m viewing Amis’s pre-eighties oeuvre in a slightly forgiving light because, there on the epigraph page of my dad’s 1977 psychology PhD thesis is a quotation from Amis’s Dead Babies (1975): I don’t know much about science, but I know what I like. Somehow, it all seems part of the same seventies context in my head.

*Maybe this is ultimately what resonates in late-eighties films like BTTF and Blue Velvet – see W. Kasper’s fine post over at Faces.