It was a tremendous pleasure to find The Guardian holding forth on JG Ballard earlier this month. John Gray and China Mieville, among others, put pen to paper to mark the fifth year since Ballard's passing. I've long been a fan of Ballard and my blog has been a platform for posts on his work from time to time. Below I have reproduced Zinovy Zinik's interview with JG Ballard from 1998. This is one of many fascinating back-and-forths to be found in 'Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with JG Ballard, 1967-2008' (2012). It's an enthralling read and carries great insights into the work of one of the most significant writers of post-war Britain. Here we find Ballard's perspective on the Soviet Union and the Cold War, as well as more broadly his own political beliefs.
ZINIK: Has the
end of communist Russia marked the end of two centuries of social engineering?
BALLARD: The end
of social utopia? Yes, and many of my left-wing friends felt a distinct pain
when it all ended with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, etc. I did so too
myself, since heroic experiments have to be admired despite sometimes vast
human cost. I even remarked to my ex-CP girlfriend, “Now’s the time to join the
Communist Party,” only to be told by her rather bitterly that there wasn’t one
to join – in the UK. (I was actually a great if partial admirer of Margaret
Thatcher for her attempt to Americanise the British people.) Bourgeois life has
triumphed, and the suburbanisation of the planet and the universal acceptance of
the shopping mall have now virtually put an end to politics. What we have is
the commodification of everything, including ideologies, and government by
advertising agency – as in Blair’s New Britain.
I think we’ve now gone beyond politics into a new and
potentially much more dangerous realm where non-political factors will pull the
levers of power – these may be vast consumer trends, strange surges in the
entertainment culture that dominates the planet, quasi-religious eruptions of
the kind we saw at Diana’s death, mass paranoia about new diseases, aberrant
movements in popularised mysticism, and the growing dominance of the aesthetic
(which I prophesied twenty years ago). The only ballot box common to all these
is the cash register, an extremely accurate gauge of consumer preference in the
very short term but useless beyond the next five minutes.
All this leaves the human race extremely vulnerable to any
master manipulator. I’ve remarked elsewhere that messiahs usually emerge from
deserts, and I expect the next Adolf Hitler or Mao to emerge from the wilderness
of the vast North American and European shopping malls. The first credit-card
Buddha, at its best, or, at its worst, the first credit-card Stalin.
ZINIK: To what
extent was Soviet communism unique – or was it rather yet another example fo
the tyrannical manipulation of human idealistic urges and instinct for
survival, too familiar to the Western mind through two thousand years of
Christianity? With your childhood experience in China under the Japanese, how
familiar does the proverbial Soviet horror seem to you?
BALLARD:
Tyrannies usually self-destruct in years rather than decades, at least in the modern
epoch, and the survival of the old Soviet Union for the greater part of the
last century is a remarkable event. Stalin dominated much of that time, and he
was lucky to have had so many enemies. I see him primarily as a war leader,
first raging [sic] war against large elements of his own people, then leading
the battles against Hitler and the unbeatable USA. Presumably the Soviet system
delivered more than people give it credit for – the whole country organised
like a vast internment camp, with all the boredom and dulling of hope and
enterprise but an underlying sense of security.
Despite World War II, a reasonable level of prosperity
reached the Russian masses, but of course the constraints of the system
prevented them from ever moving beyond the subsistence level. I remember
driving through Yugoslavia in 1962 and seeing a complete new town of handsomely
landscaped apartment blocks, all modelled on the enlightened post-Corbusier
pattern, with the ground floor divided into a dozen or so shopping units. Unhappily
these concrete cells were empty, since the consumer infrastructure didn’t exist.
It was a desperate place and the dirt-poor people would stare at the European
cars on their way to Greece, dreams of the West in their eyes. But after a
while the dream either breaks free or dies, and people settle for the third
best. Six months after the end of World War II British internees were still
living in my camp outside Shanghai, subsisting in their shabby quarters on a
diet of American C-rations. They had been institutionalised.
ZINIK: Most of
your novels deal with different types of black utopia, with the transformation
of human society and human nature into something unpredictable, mostly
monstrous. Has Soviet communism (as an example of social engineering gone
wrong) ever been on your mind when you contemplated such transformations in
your novels? What is your attitude to anti-utopian classics such as Aldous
Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four?
BALLARD: It was
difficult for a writer like myself, who began in his career in the 1950s, not
to be aware of the Soviet Union, and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four confirmed one’s fears that tyrannies can play
upon people’s deep-rooted masochistic needs. One could see the Soviet Union as
a kind of Sadean society of torturers and willing victims.
In the same way the Nazis seem to have exploited the latent
docility of their victims. Everyone who has served in the armed forces knows
that there are military bases where the regime of discipline and brutality is
far more excessive than it needs to be, and yet doesn’t provoke any revolt and
may even satisfy some need to be brutalised. The whole socialist project may
fit into the same scheme. Where socialist systems endure for decades, as in
China and the Soviet Union, they do so because people unconsciously want things
to get worse, rather than better.
Brave New World, a
masterpiece of a novel, takes the process one step farther and is uncannily accurate
in its prediction of the society we are now becoming: soma, feelies, test-tube
babies. I’ve always suspected that the Soviet Union was the last of the
old-style authoritarian tyrannies. The totalitarian systems of the future will
be obsequious and subservient, plying us with drinks and soft slippers like a
hostess on an airliner, adjusting our TV screen for us so that we won’t ask
exactly where the plane is going or even whether there is a pilot on board.
ZINIK: The Soviet
utopia, unlike the utopian dreams of the English sectarians of the seventeenth
century, was born out of the French as well as the German idea of the
collective, of the state being responsible for the individual. You have witnessed
the collective dance of the ‘flower power generation’ in the swinging 60s in
London, as well as French intellectuals’ obsessions with the Chinese notion of
the rule of the collective. Did it affect at all your mode of thinking? Reading
your novels, one comes to the conclusion that the human mind, with its innate
propensity for barbarism, is always in need of some kind of irritant drug, some
black territory of total anarchy, and a zone in which it could play out its
fantasies, including social experiments. You once said that we live in the age
that gave birth to the cross-breed of reason and nightmare. The Soviet nightmare
was very much an illustration of this idea. How come you never refer to the
Soviet experience in your prose?
BALLARD: If I
haven’t referred to the Soviet experience it is partly because I’ve never been
there, and chiefly because I’ve been more interested in the latent pathology of
the consumerist West, which is where the entire planet seems to be heading.
Also I am not sure if the Soviet Union was a special case. Did
Russia industrialise too quickly? Did it educate its population too quickly?
Did it place too great a reliance on science? Did it make a mistake abolishing
religious practice? Its tragedy was that it was obliged to fight the bloodiest
war in history against an advanced nation in the grip of ideological madness. But
for Hitler and the Nazis, could Stalin and the Soviet leaders have maintained
their brutal grip for so long?
Is a communist system inherently dependent on the creation
of enemies to justify its repressions, given that communism runs counter to almost
all human social tendency? If you want to destroy the economy of an advanced
nation, introduce it to socialism, say American supply-siders led by Milton
Friedman et al., and they may well have a point.
ZINIK: Do you see
Russia as one of those zones where the Western mind can go and experience
something which is unacceptable in one’s own country? How would you describe
the type of society that attracts minds which are usually either bored, lonely,
excited, disrespectful of moral implications, or naïve and idealistic, blind to
the nastiness behind the bright façade?
BALLARD: One has
to remember that despite the antagonisms of the past half-century and the
threat of nuclear war, a huge reservoir of goodwill towards the Russian people
exists in the West. This is quite unlike some Western responses to the Germans,
who are not much liked by their European neighbours and certainly not trusted. Memories
of the Franks go back a long way, all the way to the Romans, who never
conquered them and, if I remember correctly, received a chilling shock when
several of their legions made the mistake of crossing the Rhine and were
massacred to the last man.
But Russians are perceived in a very positive light, as
affable and likeable people. I have known a good number of Russians in my life:
during my Shanghai childhood I had several White Russian nannies, and many
White Russian men were employed as garage owners, dentists, doctors and so on,
as well as foremen and drivers. They were all likeable characters. If Western
visitors are going to Russia to gaze at the relics of socialism for reasons of
nostalgia, that amazes me.
ZINIK: Could one
speculate about some kind of energy points (‘G-spots’ in social structures)
without which humankind withers and dies in passivity? Is Russia one of those
points on the political map of the world, which provokes, like infection,
self-destructive urges in some people? Is it possible to describe such a
temperament? Do you recognise among your characters those who might be
attracted to Russia?
BALLARD: I
suppose, from the standpoint of evolutionary biology, there must be a reason
why a huge and diverse nation with a highly educated elite should choose to
enslave itself for seventy years, but it’s hard to find one. Perhaps,
historically, Russia was very late in developing a middle-class, so that until
the start of the twentieth century there was almost nothing between aristocracy
and the rural and urban working-class, a set-up that stops the clocks, as you
can see in any banana republic or oil sheikhdom. The USA and Japan are the
exact opposite, almost entirely composed of the middle-class, who are intensely
insistent on their civic rights, like any Whig mercantile class. I’m afraid my
characters would not be attracted to Russia, since all my heroes are mavericks.
ZINIK: You once
remarked that Marxism is a philosophy for the poor and that we need to develop
a philosophy for the rich. We shouldn’t forget, of course, the fact that the
ideas of the French Enlightenment and French Revolution are as much responsible
for the creation of the Soviet utopia as they are – in a more immediate sense –
responsible for the birth of the United States of America.
The cherished Russian notions of suffering and sacrifice in
the name of collective welfare were historically juxtaposed in the twentieth
century to those of American self-promotion and happiness. One could say the
Cold War was fought over the wrong interpretation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Do you
see these two types of ideals as mirroring each other? Is the brainwashing by
commercial advertising comparable to that by Soviet ideology, the living dead
of American consumerism not dissimilar to the victim of the Soviet
totalitarianism?
BALLARD: You use
the word ‘utopia’ a lot in connection with Soviet history, but this only
applies in the most abstract and notional sense. For most of the time the
former Soviet Union was a dystopia of alarming durability. Having myself experienced
cold, hunger and disease during the war, I can’t imagine how they could ever
serve a glorious end, and there is no way in which Russian suffering is some
kind of mirror image of American consumer plenty. Eastern Europeans and
Russians, like people from the developing world, have always been astonished by
American plenty, by vast supermarkets and shopping malls crammed to the ceiling
with a king’s ransom of consumer goods.
They fail to realise that Americans themselves are not in
the least awestruck by their own superabundance, and in fact take it completely
for granted. They expect a refrigerator to have an automatic ice-cube maker,
just as they expect a car to have a powerful heater and a four-speaker sound system.
The richest society is one where everyone is a millionaire but is unaware of
the fact; a state that already exists on the Upper East Side of New York.
Sadly, Russians will probably still feel poor even when
surrounded by a lavish consumer culture. There are Marxist interpretations of
American consumer culture, which believe that American capitalism has entrapped
and pacified the working-class by beguiling them with the opium of meretricious
consumer goods. But this analysis seems desperate to me and ignores the fact
that the basic needs of the working-class, e.g. for personal transport and food
refrigeration, are fully genuine needs, and the cars and refrigerators in
question are superb functional examples of their kind.
The same applies to advertising, which people in the
developing world assume Americans are brainwashed by. In fact Americans are
scarcely aware of the advertising around them. Today’s Russian intelligentsia would
make a huge error if they equated American consumerism with Soviet
totalitarianism. They would make the same mistake if they assumed that
Americans, Europeans and others in the developed world are brainwashed by the
dominant entertainment culture of Hollywood films, TV and popular music. All this
is merely a sea in which everyone floats.
In fact, I often wonder if people here rare really immersed
in this sea at all. It forms the background to their lives, like a TV set left
on in a room that no one is watching. This explains the apparent contradiction
of these comments with those I made in answer to your opening question. The consumer
and entertainment landscape dominates everything, but it’s nothing but
wallpaper.
ZINIK: On the other
hand, what about the need for an enemy which satisfies the no less acute urge
for self-righteousness among us? With the end of the Cold War, what would
replace Soviet totalitarianism in the role of intellectual enemy?
BALLARD: The real
problem is that it (the consumer and entertainment landscape) is the only
wallpaper – every other form of competition for people’s attention and
imaginations has been vanquished. If people were alert and critical of their
consumer environment there would be some hope that they might change or
penetrate it.
Similarly, if there were a conspiracy by manipulators behind
the scenes there would be the hope that people might wake up. But there is no
conspiracy. This leaves people in a valueless world, wandering like aimless
Saturday crowds through the great supermarket of life. Under the placid surface
of their minds, dreams stir the strange phantoms and pseudo-religions that we
spelled out earlier.
