Extreme Metaphors by J.G Ballard & Simon Sellars & Dan O’Hara

Author:J.G Ballard & Simon Sellars & Dan O’Hara [Ballard, J.G]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
Publisher: Harper Collins, Inc.
Published: 2012-09-27T03:00:00+00:00

1991: Jeremy Lewis. An Interview with J.G. Ballard

Originally published in the Mississippi Review, 20: 1/2, 1991

In 1981, Philip K. Dick wrote a letter to Roger Zelazny, describing the moral confusion engendered by the experience of cognitively dissonant images: ‘Two items were presented to me for my inspection within a period of fifteen minutes: first, a copy of WIND IN THE WILLOWS, which I had never read … A moment after I looked it over someone showed me a two-page photograph in the current Time of the attempted assassination of the President [Ronald Reagan]. There the wounded, there the Secret Service man with the Uzi machine gun, there all of them on the assassin. My brain had to try to correlate WIND IN THE WILLOWS and that photograph. It could not. It never will be able to.’

In the following interview, conducted in 1990, Jeremy Lewis provokes Ballard into an incisive analysis of this kind of dissonance as the quintessential experience of the media landscape. Drawing an analogy between the laboratory scientist and the consumer of pornography, who both isolate the object of their desire from the world of which it is a part, Ballard suggests that the unconscious mind inevitably invents its own narratives from the dehumanised elements of our piecemeal, channel-surfing, sensation-hungry mode of perception. It is Ballard’s sensitivity to these unconscious ‘hidden agendas’ of the media landscape that permits him, eerily and proleptically, to imagine a catastrophe at the World Trade Center – a catastrophe that, by being repeatedly ‘marketed’ by the media in a predetermined fashion, will serve only to deaden our sensibilities and our sense of the value of the individual. [DOH]

LEWIS: I find The Atrocity Exhibition requires an entirely new approach to reading.

BALLARD: What you have got to do is not read more than a chapter at a time, and don’t try to read it as if you are trying to read a conventional short story, or a conventional narrative. The dramatic connections between the characters and events are all very important and all have a strong story, oddly enough.

LEWIS: The Atrocity Exhibition has a different title in the States. What was the background of that?

BALLARD: It was first published as The Atrocity Exhibition in 1970 by Doubleday, but they pulped the entire edition three weeks before publication. I’m told that one of the senior members of the Doubleday firm, Nelson Doubleday, actually opened a copy and saw the Ronald Reagan story and he just sent the order out to destroy the entire edition. Only about six copies survived, of which I’m glad to say I have one, and then one or two other firms thought of publishing it and then finally Grove Press (which had a chequered publishing career) published it in something like 1972 or ’73.

They retitled it Love and Napalm: Export USA for some reason – against my wishes. They wanted to cash in on the Vietnam War, but I didn’t really have much choice in the matter. I protested strongly that was the wrong title, totally wrong.

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