Mark Blacklock's Reading List

"Honestly, I would just drop in wherever you want, because he did emerge almost fully formed as a writer of short stories. ‘The Voices of Time,’ as I say, would be early- 1960s: maybe actually 1960. It has so many of those key ideas: alienated figures trying to work something out—the mysteries of the universe—deep time—receiving signals from space—running around a deserted base going mad… It’s incredible. Then you come forward into the late 1970s and early 1980s, and you get things like ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown,’ where every single word is footnoted. And the very playful, paratextual, formally experimental work that he does in the short story form. Then there are the Vermillion Sands pieces collected together as a sequence of stories set in an imaginary resort—a sort of Mediterranean beach resort of the future. People are just living lives of leisure, they have no work, and are playing around sculpting clouds in the sky and making singing statues… again, exemplary of a certain part of his vision. He said: the future is boring! People will have nothing to do! So they will entertain themselves by doing the weirdest things. So, yes. You can dip in and dip out. He started off as a short story writer and he is an expert in the form."

"Yes. There are a number of different motifs and instants that recur. There’s a character that comes back in different forms—Talbert, Traven, Travis, Talbot—and Roger Luckhurst, who wrote the first monograph on Ballard, called him ‘the T-cell’; it’s like the character has been transposed from one condensed fiction into another. They are responding to a kind of sensory environment in which different planes of experience are presented on the same level of reality. The experiences of the senses, the experience of the media environment, the experiences of the everyday normal—they are all treated exactly the same. It’s an astonishing achievement. “Most bookish people will have an idea of what it is to be Ballardian” He preferred to call them condensed fictions or condensed novels to experimental short stories. They consist of lexia – paragraph-length prose poems using incredibly technical vocabulary literally borrowing from, sampling from, textbooks and found documents. There are free-associated lists of ideas and objects encountered by the characters. There are magnified images of body-parts of billboards. Incidents of violence – predominantly the Kennedy assassination, but also we know he was reading books about the aftermath of Nagasaki and Hiroshima – these spectacularised, massive, species-scale violent acts haunt the entire collection. And underpinning it is an extremely abstracted surrealist logic whereby geometry is asked to produce emotional or erotic responses. Absolutely. I mean, quite literally. Crash emerges from this period, where he’s putting metaphors on the same plane as empirical events… It’s absolutely a surrealist approach, you know? Putting things on the same canvas that don’t belong together—a melting clock, the face of a goddess, you know? Ballard is doing that with technological elements, and anatomy taken to its most pornographic extreme in Crash . He plays around with these ideas in pieces like ‘Tolerances of the Human Face’; a short piece titled ‘Crash,’ which is part of The Atrocity Exhibition collection and predates the novel; and ‘The Summer Cannibals’… They were appearing in either New Worlds or Ambit , alongside collages, photographs, found images of crash test dummies and crashed cars. At that same point in time he exhibited crashed cars at the New Arts Lab in Camden. He was proposing a one-act play based on the car crash to the ICA, and Eduardo Paolozzi, his great friend , was going to make crash test dummies for that. This period of intense research into the idea of the car crash as extreme metaphor—as a sort of fertilising image – produces one of the great masterpieces of twentieth century literature. And he’s onto something! It’s a weird thing that we quite happily accept: this technology that is advertised as an instrument of desire probably kills more of us on a day-to-day basis than almost anything else. So it makes complete sense to extrapolate from that to make it a tool of characters – cyphers, really – who would use it to explore their drives towards death and eros. He often said that he would have been a painter if he could be, but he didn’t have the talent. He was a really astute commentator on visual art. And visual art was a profound influence—the Surrealists, first and foremost. He wrote a couple of really, really detailed, almost scholarly, essays on the Surrealists and Salvador Dali, separately. He commissioned remakes of two paintings by Paul Delvaux that had been lost during the war. Some of the best writing in my collection is his writing on visual art. This is the book that I really needed. There was an earlier collection published in the early 1990s, but it doesn’t cover the whole of his career, and other pieces have emerged since it was published. It wasn’t brilliantly organised. So as a researcher and writer on Ballard—and an enthusiast—I wanted to see more of his brilliant nonfiction writing, and to have it collected in a way that was really well organised. Some of the best pieces are the pieces that were really hard to find—like catalogue essays about artists, stuff that was spread all over the place. So I’ve gathered those together and paid one of the best indexers in the business to do a really good index. That’s a thing of joy in itself."

"It’s absolutely amazing. It operates purely by dream logic. A guy called Blake has stolen a Cessna and crashed it into the Thames, near Shepperton. When he emerges from the plane, there’s a scene of characters that are like Jungian archetypes: a Jesuit priest, who’s a sort of father figure; a doctor, who is sort of like a mother… Anyway, he moves through Shepperton, which is where Ballard lived, and it’s never clear whether he is dead or alive. There’s a body in the Cessna: is it Blake? We don’t know. There’s no explanation for anything. Images succeed one another, it’s really rich and also erotic in the sense that it’s steeped in it, the way that dreams can be sexual on a weird level that you can’t put your finger on. Sometimes it’s literal: Blake wants to mate with everybody in Shepperton. It’s astonishing. He sustains it for a whole book. It’s visually stunning. Shepperton is transformed into a jungle. He is transformed into a whale at one point, into birds… It’s metamorphic, fluid, properly surrealist. It’s not always mentioned. Empire of the Sun and Crash are the big noises. And High Rise —the ones that have been adapted into films. I think it gets slightly sidelined. But there are people who go for it."

"Yes, so, as I say, I really love his late period: Cocaine Nights , Super-Cannes , Millennium People , Kingdom Come , which are all basically the same novel again and again. I mean, the plot is pretty much always Heart of Darkness . This is pretty broad brush. But there’s someone who goes up river, and they lose themselves in that world, become part of the logic of that world. That’s what happens again and again in these last four. They are all centred on the idea of middle-class communities that have become bored with contemporary life and are entertaining themselves by playing around with violence, drugs, sex. Kingdom Come fertilises that with his observations about British society at that specific point in time. He gets slightly shaken by seeing so many St George’s flags proliferating around Shepperton—that’s probably around 2004, when a big football tournament is happening, but he was reading about Fascism at the time, doing research as he always did. He was interested in how Nazism was also a capitalist movement, and he thought that consumer culture was a slip towards a sort of soft Fascism, because the only moral code is money. So he uses all of those elements. There’s a substratum of Surrealism. It’s slightly abstracted and has that feeling of a warning. Honestly, I think that Ballard was an analyst of the present. This whole idea of him being a prophet, that he was predicting the future, sort of cheapens his achievements, really. What he was great at doing was observing the circumstances around him and extrapolating from that: you could end up here. That’s exactly what he’s doing in Kingdom Come."