J G Ballard, page 2 of 6

After the literary “incident” (to use the terminology of motorway signage) of Crash in 1973, 1974’s Concrete Island, in its slightness, can come across as something of a leftover, a using up of spare energies — the literary equivalent of a hubcap still trundling along the tarmac in the wake of a major collision. It’s the second volume in what has been called Ballard’s “urban disaster triptych” — the others being Crash and High-Rise (1975) — but aside from the fact it starts with a car crash and takes places in a concrete-bounded patch of wasteland, as a novel it doesn’t really share those two longer books’ future-shock levels of deadpan, maxed-out satire. Concrete Island isn’t, in the end, about the modern world, but, as with Ballard’s early, landscape-based fantasies (The Drowned World, The Crystal World), it’s about a retreat into the inner landscape of its protagonist.

The story begins with 35-year-old architect Robert Maitland emerging from a feeder tunnel adjoining the Westway/M4 [correction: A40(M), see comments] interchange when a tyre blowout throws him off the road into a triangle of long-grassed wasteland bordered on two sides by steep motorway embankments, and on the third by an impenetrable chainlink fence. Recovering from the accident, he finds his leg injured, perhaps broken, and when he struggles up the loose soil of the embankment to try to flag down a passing car, soon realises nobody’s going to stop — they’re all going too fast — and almost gets himself run over for his troubles. Retreating, exhausted and injured, he returns to the “island”, as he terms it, and starts working out how to get help, as well as how to survive on his limited resources in the meantime.

After a period of hunger and fever, punctuated by the constant frustration of his every attempt to signal for help, he begins to explore the island and finds it anything but barren. Beneath its long grass it’s “a labyrinth of depths and hollows”, containing the vestiges of some Edwardian terraced houses, a World War II air-raid shelter, the basement of a ruined post-war cinema, and an abandoned printer’s shop. Far from empty, the island — “this immense green creature eager to protect and guide him” — is almost alive. What’s more, he’s not its only inhabitant.

Despite its harking back to those earlier inner-landscape novels, to me there’s also a feel of hints, in Concrete Island, of new directions in Ballard’s writing. Jane Sheppard, one of the two people Maitland finds living in what he’d assumed to be a wasteland, is different from the usually cool, mature and glamorous fifties-Hollywood-style femmes fatale Ballard presents us with as the female lead/object of obsession in his fiction. Rather, she’s young, spiky, and dresses like a “cheap tart”; she swears and smokes pot. About the only thing she shares with Ballard’s usual female characters is that’s she’s clearly damaged, but unlike the overly-cool, deeply traumatised Giocondas he usually produces, Jane makes no attempt to hide it. Writing in 1980, David Pringle said this character was “the nearest thing to a ‘well-rounded’ female character in all [Ballard’s] novels”.

Another hint of something new comes when, at one point, Jane breaks into a stream-of-consciousness rant — but it turns out (from an interview reprinted in Extreme Metaphors) these passages were the result of Ballard transcribing a recording he’d made of a real-life angry outburst from his girlfriend. Nevertheless, these passages come across as a rare moment of stylistic wildness in Ballard’s usually very controlled prose, an opening up to something new.

The other character on the island is Proctor, a clumsy, wounded ex-acrobat with the intellect of a child. Proctor, and the way Maitland takes command of him, makes it easy to suggest some parallels for Ballard’s novel: Robinson Crusoe (with Proctor as Man Friday), or The Tempest (Proctor as Caliban). In which case, is Jane, with her ability to leave the island, Ariel? (At one point I found myself wondering if Jane’s name didn’t suggest Maitland as a sort of Tarzan of the urban jungle, with Proctor as the chimp Cheetah.) And there’s the inevitable feeling, as with High-Rise, that this might devolve into a sort of inner-city Lord of the Flies, with Maitland hoping to be rescued while trying to fend off the breakdown of even this little, three-person social structure, before it murders him.

But Maitland, it turns out, was already living on a sort of island. He’d carefully arranged his life to keep a certain distance between himself and everyone else. He won’t be missed after his accident because his wife (the “cool, formal house with its large white rooms” he shares with her gives a good idea of the temperature of that relationship) will assume he’s with his mistress, and his mistress will assume he’s with his wife; meanwhile, his son will make his own way home when he’s not picked up from school, and his office is too used to his not turning up for days at a time to be concerned.

The roots of this isolation are deep. The concrete island begins to remind Maitland of the main image he has of his childhood, of him playing alone in a high-walled garden. Are, then, Jane and Proctor some warped evocation of his divorced parents? Is Proctor an image of himself as an un-grown-up child in an adult body, socially awkward and clumsy? Is Jane some confused mix of all the women in Maitland’s life, the caring then suddenly distant mother, the coolly transactional lover, and the vulnerable, damaged little girl?

There’s definitely a feeling that what’s going on here is not some moral fable about the disconnection of modern life, but a psychodrama with its roots in childhood. (John Baxter, in his biography of Ballard, calls this book “the most overtly self-analytical of his novels”, but to me it doesn’t really come across as especially personal to Ballard — though perhaps that’s just in retrospect, with the Empire of the Sun a couple of novels away.)

Maitland, it seems, was only too eager to find himself marooned on this concrete island, and once he is, his real work is not to be rescued, but to let these nagging figures that the accident has shaken free from his brain — whatever they represent — run through their dramas until, played out, they leave him genuinely alone at last. Concrete Island, then, is about a man in search of a moment of inner peace — even if it takes a car crash, fever, and near starvation to achieve it.

The book has an interesting writing history. After its first draft, Ballard wrote a screenplay (now housed in the British Library) adapting what he’d written. He then went back to the novel and revised it extensively into its final, published form. The screenplay went unfilmed, but seems to have acted as a way of getting perspective on the novel prior to honing it into its final shape.

It remains something of a minor Ballard novel, lacking the iconic feeling of those books that grapple with the sort of archetypal (modern or timeless) landscapes found in The Drowned World, The Crystal World, Crash and High-Rise. But the book’s touching on childhood, in combination with its protagonist’s extended periods of hunger and fever, point towards it being another step closer to his autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun. After all, once the post-collision hubcap stops rolling and comes to halt, its bright chromium surface provides a perfect little mirror for what Ballard is doing here: a moment of self-reflection after some traumatic event.

Izumi Suzuki was part of what sounds like Japan’s post-60s New Wave of Science Fiction, in which (as in the UK at the same time) the country’s authors made a conscious attempt to move away from the commercial American style. Hers in particular became known as the “SF of manners”, though I’ve a feeling that phrase loses a lot through translation.

Born in 1949 (making her a contemporary of Haruki Murakami, whose world of jazz cafés and disaffected twenty-somethings she shares), she moved to Tokyo after winning recognition for some of her early writing, and there became a stage and film actor, as well as posing for the art-and-bondage photographer Araki. (That’s her, by him, on the cover of Terminal Boredom.) She was apparently introduced to SF in 1970, and began publishing it starting with “Trial Witch” in S-F Magazine in 1975. Her writing career seems to have gone into overdrive after the death of her ex-husband, the experimental jazz saxophonist Kaoru Abe, with whom she had a daughter. (A 1992 novel and 1995 film, Endless Waltz, depicted a fictionalised version of the couple’s stormy relationship.) Her health declined, though, and she eventually took her own life in 1986.

Terminal Boredom, published this year by Verso Books, is her first English-language collection, with seven stories by almost as many translators (Daniel Joseph, David Boyd, Sam Bett, Helen O’Horan, Aiko Masubuchi, and Polly Barton). There’s no indication of when the Japanese originals first appeared, which is a pity, as I like to at least guess at a writer’s development from knowing which are the earlier stories, but perhaps seven stories is too small a selection for that, anyway.

The opening story, “Women and Women”, is set in a future where “Women have been left carefully husbanding the scant resources of a planet stripped bare by men.” The few remaining males — essential for purposes of reproduction — are housed in an area known as the GETO, the Gender Exclusion Terminal Occupancy Zone. Suzuki gets round the traditional SF exposition problem by having her narrator, a teenager in this mostly-manless world, share the sort of wildly speculative myths about adulthood teenagers in any age do. To her, “Men are an offshoot of humanity… but they’re a deviant strain. They’re freaks…”

“Which is exactly why the males have to be kept in the GETO. If they were allowed to roam free, the radiation or whatever it is they emit would make all the women around them pregnant.”

But when she sees what she just knows to be an actual boy, of her own age, passing her home one night, she’s fascinated, and starts leaving messages for him to find.

Male-female relations — always of a distinctly ambivalent kind, making me think of a less intense version of that from Angela Carter’s Heroes and Villains — form the core of the book’s preoccupations, but it soon becomes clear the emotional disconnection that characterises these relationships extends to those between women, too. For instance, in “You May Dream”, the narrator too-casually agrees to the request of a friend, whom she spends most of the time feeling vaguely irritated by, to enter her dreams. This is a future where over-population has resulted in lottery-chosen people being suspended in cryosleep until enough spaceships can be built to take them off-world. Sleepers can bond with one chosen person and take up residence in their dreams. The narrator thinks of her friend as her opposite, even her Jungian shadow, which might make her sound like ideal dream material, but it turns out they’re totally incompatible: “She infused a syrupy wetness into my world.” The narrator soon finds herself reluctant to sleep, because of the burden of her friend’s too-different personality.

Perhaps the best story for capturing Suzuki’s tone is the last one, “Terminal Boredom”, set in a future where mass unemployment has resulted in a habitually bored young populace too unmotivated to remember to even feed themselves regularly. “Everyone,” the narrator says, “lives in a happy-go-lucky depression”, more (but only slightly more) engaged in what they see on TV than in reality:

“Ever since I’ve been old enough to really understand the world (these past two years or so), I’ve never once cried at a scene in real life. Whenever something serious happens, I just convince myself it’s no big deal… I’ve been fooling myself this way for long enough that it’s become a habit, and now nothing affects me.”

When a woman is murdered right next to her and the boyfriend she mostly can’t be bothered to meet, they can’t quite grasp what has happened, until they see it again, on camera. It starts to feel like the sort of world J G Ballard was always predicting — a future of boredom through enforced leisure relieved by explosions of violence — only, it doesn’t have the levels of wealth he assumed would go with it.

Suzuki’s is a world that seems particularly post-counter-cultural. The book flap describes her stories as “punky and pitch-black”, but the punkiness is most definitely of the “pretty vacant” rather than pogo-dancing variety. Characters don’t have friends so much as people they habitually hang out with, and get vaguely irritated by, though not enough to make them seek out other people:

“What are your relationships usually like?”
“Totally throwaway. I anticipate the break-up and hint towards it to prepare for a smooth exit.”

Some of Suzuki’s characters (if not all of them, at some level) are just as dissociated from themselves. In “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”, one of the narrators is a woman prematurely aged by a drug she overused, who approaches the still-young man she once had a relationship with, only to find he doesn’t recognise her, or at most thinks she might be his ex-girlfriend’s mother. In “That Old Seaside Club”, the narrator says she’s 19, but is haunted by a failed adult life she surely has not yet lived. “Night Picnic” is about a family who think of themselves as the last surviving human beings on a distant, non-Earth planet, desperately trying to cling to supposedly authentic human ways my mimicking what they see in old movies and read in old books. (As all the cultural references in this story were American, I wondered if this might have been a satire on US culture taking over Japan’s.) In “Forgotten”, the key difference the narrator’s alien boyfriend notes between humans and his own kind is that humans forget while Meelians don’t, which is why “we haven’t had a war on my planet for two millennia”. “Whose life is this? It’s completely empty,” says one narrator, of her own life, and it’s a quote that could fit any of her stories.

I’d like to read some more stories by Suzuki, though perhaps I wouldn’t read them back-to-back, as that malaise of disaffection can be hard to read too much of. A biographical introduction would be nice, too.

(Another story, “The Walker”, translated by Daniel Joseph, is available at Granta, though it’s quite different in feel from all the stories in Terminal Boredom.)

I’ve always loved good fantasy & SF cover art (frequently buying a book for its cover and considering that to be money well spent, even if the book itself proves disappointing), and I’ve always liked poring over books of fantasy art, be it the 1970s Ballantine Frazetta collections, Froud & Lee’s Faeries, or almost any of Paper Tiger’s albums. I never looked for the sort of thing I liked in “art-world” art, because the two seemed so far apart. Fantasy art was illustrative, even if it was frequently more inventive and expressive than the books it illustrated. It sought to create a convincing (either realistic or stylistic) representation of a fantastic world, while the more serious, non-commercial sort of art was more interested in stretching the boundaries of the medium, or in saying something. (Not that fantasy art wasn’t saying something. But usually it said something like: “Look at this awesome dragon!”)

So, I was surprised when I found that, for one brief period at the end of the 19th century, serious, mainstream art was actually producing the sort of images the fantasy art lover in me liked. The movement — though perhaps it was more a moment than a unified movement — was known as Symbolism, though it initially called itself “Ideist” or “Idealist” art. I first heard about it thanks to J G Ballard’s essay “The Coming of the Unconscious” in his 1966 short story collection The Overloaded Man, though this was mostly about Ballard’s artistic obsession, Surrealism. (Symbolism and Surrealism have a lot of territory in common, most obviously their shared distrust of reality. But where Symbolism sought to provide an alternative to reality by depicting strange inner worlds, Surrealism sought to undermine reality with a head-on assault. Surrealism grew out of the absurdism of Dada and had a sense of humour; Symbolism would have hated Dada, and doesn’t seem to have had any sense of humour at all.)

I immediately looked out for books on Symbolism, my first being Edward Lucie-Smith’s Symbolist art from Thames and Hudson (sadly, mostly black and white, and small, while Symbolist art wants to be gorgeously-coloured and immersive), and my second being the far more expensive Symbolism, from Taschen, which was at least large and in full colour, even if author Michael Gibson was disdainful of the art itself, finding it solipsistic, neurotic, perverse and withdrawn, a wounded response to the modern era’s erasing of certainties (“Symbolism was imbued with a powerful nostalgia for a world of meaning which had disintegrated in the space of a few brief decades.”). Gibson’s seemed to be the general attitude of the academic, English-speaking world at the time (the 1990s), but more sympathetic were non-English writers (particularly Philippe Jullian, the first to write at length on Symbolist — or Decadent, as he had it — art, who mocked their excesses and revelled in them to an equal degree), and writers of books published in the 1970s (after Symbolism had a brief, psychedelically-tinged revival).

Having found this new source of fantasy art, I set about reading as much as I could about it. Not just to find more art, but also to understand, first of all, how a mainstream form of serious art had come to embrace such brazen fantastic imagery; and secondly, why it had gone away.

The short answer to the first: a reaction against the 19th century’s growing faith in realism, rationalism, and materialism. The short answer to the second: Freud, Marx, and two World Wars.

Symbolism (which flourished in the last decade of the 19th century, at the same time as the archetypal texts of modern horror were being written) was, at first, driven by the same forces that produced Impressionism. Photography meant there was no longer any call to merely depict reality; and where Impressionism found its new endeavour in depicting the experience of seeing something rather than its literal depiction, Symbolism burrowed into the inner realm of dreams, visions, and the belief in actual other worlds, to find something that could not be photographed. Though, ironically, it was perhaps the first art movement to really benefit from photography, as this allowed its ideas to spread internationally. As Jullian says:

“While the Impressionists had nothing to gain from a process which could not render colour, the literary painters to whom line was more important, benefited enormously from photography.”

Symbolism, though it was often stylistically inventive, wasn’t about style. It was, as Gibson says, “Less an artistic movement than a state of mind.” It sought to say something new, something that could not be said by depicting the same old mythic or historical subjects. Nor was it using symbols in the allegorical manner of medieval artists. The symbols in Symbolist art didn’t have specific literal meanings, but pointed to an evanescent aesthetic mood or an entire inner reality, and had to be grasped in one go or not at all. As Maurice Denis, an artist of the time, put it:

“…the symbol reaches the soul without having to go through the rational mind.”

Or, from Norbert Wolf (in Symbolism, 2009):

“…a Symbolist picture, a Symbolist sculpture remains deliberately enigmatic; in place of intellectual understanding, the work demands an empathetic response and wishes the viewer to experience its mysterious profundity in the manner of an inner vision.”

All this meant Symbolism acquired more than a touch of the occult, and many was the Symbolist artist who attempted to start his own Hermetic brotherhood. (And it would have been a brotherhood. Not many Symbolist sisters, sadly.) And this was just one more thing that made it ripe for a fall. Freud seemed to undermine the sense that dreams and visions pointed to a higher reality, by saying they were all about sex, really; and even before the two World Wars, there was, Edward Lucie-Smith says:

“…a growing impatience with what was considered to be Symbolist preciosity and over-refinement. Artists began to long for a harsh Primitivism, just as some of their contemporaries longed for war itself.”

Symbolist artists saw themselves as delicate “souls”, as apolitical as they were unworldly, and there was no room for them in a world about to be torn apart by several million tons of shrapnel. After the war, alienation went hand in hand with cynicism, not a belief in the marvellous and mysterious, and even Symbolism’s occult strain had to give way to the desperation of postwar Spiritualism.

Symbolism did, though, leave its mark. Its artists didn’t all die out as the century turned; some pursued similar ideals to greater extremes and came up with abstraction (Gibson: “Indeed, the major pioneers of abstraction, Kandinsky, Malevich, Kupka and Mondrian all began their careers as Symbolist painters”), and, of course, Surrealism.

Symbolism came back, along with its stylistic offshoot Art Nouveau, in the psychedelic sixties, and flourished in the fantasy-loving seventies, with its Ballantine Adult Fantasy paperbacks and lusciously immersive, otherworldly prog-rock albums. (And the kind of marriage of art, music and spectacle found in Yes’s collaborations with Roger Dean or a Hawkwind light-show harks back to Symbolism’s love of the “total artwork” of Wagner, or Scriabin’s experimentation with a colour organ as part of his decidedly Symbolist/occultist musical works such as “Prometheus” or “The Poem of Ecstasy”.) And I can’t help but see Jean Delville’s “Parsifal” in Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” video — particularly Roger Taylor:

Later, meanwhile, Frantisek Kupka’s brooding monument “The Black Idol” seems to have found a home in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula:

“The revenge of imagination over reality” is how Rodolphe Rapetti sums up the aims of Symbolist art (Symbolism, 2004), while Guillermo del Toro, a definite fan, says “To them… mystery was the supreme goal of art.”

Not all Symbolist art can be described as fantasy art, but it has certainly turned up some new favourites for fantasy-art-loving me, while at the same time being perhaps the last mainstream art movement to so unapologetically embrace (often quite overly-luscious) beauty — another thing two World Wars put an end to. I’ve peppered some of my favourite examples of Symbolist art throughout this article, but I’ll leave you with a few more: