The most obvious thing about Ballard’s novels and short stories is that, although they have a hallucinatory intensity and routinely describe extreme mental states and characters who descend into psychosis and insanity, the outward form of them is for the most part extremely conservative.

Ballard’s prose style occasionally uses unexpected phraseology but is, at its heart, pukka – an eminently correct, professional, middle-class English voice. In other words, the searing weirdness of many of Ballard’s stories is conveyed in a disconcertingly respectable prose style.

It is, therefore, something of a surprise to learn that Ballard had a long-running interest in quite radical literary experimentation, and it’s useful to be aware of his efforts in this field because they inform your reading of the earlier and mid-period stories and novels.

This blog post is a brief overview of the most notable of Ballard’s literary experiments. (What follows is heavily indebted to a number of online articles which are referenced at the bottom.)

Project for a new novel (1958)

In the late 1950s Ballard was working on the journal of the Chemical Society in London and was much taken with the juxtaposition of snazzy layout and scientific content in related American magazines, such as Chemical and Engineering News.

He had the idea of cutting up headlines and text from it and other scientific magazines like it, in order to create collages packed with scientific words and phrases arranged in surreal combinations:

Letters, words and sentence fragments are pasted onto backing sheets with glue. Their design visually references everyday media, with headlines, body text and double-page spreads suggesting a magazine layout. Originally Ballard planned to display the work on billboards, as if it was a public advertisement.

In the end Ballard created four collage works, which became famous among his friends and close colleagues, and which are now in the possession of the British Library who curate Ballard’s collected notes and manuscripts.

One of the four collages Ballard made for his Project for New Novel. Note the phrase Mr F is Mr F, which became the title of a short story, and the names Coma, Kline and Xero, given to characters who turn up in the novel The Atrocity Exhibition

Ballard himself described the Project as:

Sample pages of a new kind of novel, entirely consisting of magazine-style headlines and layouts, with a deliberately meaningless text, the idea being that the imaginative content could be carried by the headlines and overall design, so making obsolete the need for a traditional text except for virtually decorative purposes.

I liked the stylish typography. I also like the scientific content, and used stories to provide the text of my novel. Curiously enough, far from being meaningless, the science news stories somehow become fictionalised by the headings around them.

It was a collage of things clipped from journals like Chemical Engineering News, the American Chemical Society’s journal – I used them a lot because I liked the typeface. I wanted to publish a novel that looked like that, you see – hundreds of pages of that sort of thing. Get away from text altogether – just headlines!

Many of the names, phrases and concerns which first appeared in the Project have resurfaced over the years, particularly the characters Coma, Kline and Xero who appear in The Atrocity Exhibition, Coma also cropping up in the classic short story The Voices of Time, and phrases such as ‘the terminal beach’ and ‘Mr F is Mr F’, both of which became the titles of short stories.

The four collages can also be seen in the background of a photograph of Ballard taken in 1960 in his garden at Shepperton, which has become a talisman for true Ballardians. The full text of Project for a New Novel was finally published 20 years after it was created, in New Worlds magazine No. 213, in 1978.

J.G. Ballard in front of his abandoned billboard novel, 1960. Photo: Mary Ballard

Advertisers Announcements (1967-71)

Between 1967 and 1971 Ballard produced five Advertisers Announcements. As he explained in an interview:

Back in the late 60s I produced a series of advertisements which I placed in various publications (Ambit, New Worlds, Ark and various continental alternative magazines), doing the art work myself and arranging for the blockmaking, and then delivering the block to the particular journal just as would a commercial advertiser.

Of course I was advertising my own conceptual ideas, but I wanted to do so within the formal circumstances of classic commercial advertising – I wanted ads that would look in place in Vogue, Paris Match, Newsweek, etc.

To maintain the integrity of the project I paid the commercial rate for the page, even in the case of Ambit, of which I was and still am Prose Editor. I would liked to have branched out into Vogue and Newsweek, but cost alone stopped me…

The five ads are:

1. Homage to Claire Churchill

Homage to Claire Churchill (1967)

Claire was his girlfriend and this a pretty straightforward happy photo of her. There’s no strapline or product logo as you’d expect in a real advert. Instead there’s a dense paragraph of text at the bottom, quoting a typical paragraph from his experimental novel, The Atrocity Exhibition, indeed the ad was published in Ambit in July 1967 and it borrows copy directly from ‘The Death Module’, simultaneously published in New Worlds and later re-named ‘Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown’ in The Atrocity Exhibition.

2. Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?

The Angle Between two Walls (1967)

This is a still from the art film Alone by American filmmaker Steve Dwoskin, which records a woman masturbating, shot from floor level and pointing up between her legs to show her hand as she touches herself.

What has this got to do with the angle between walls? Well, the correlation of sex and the angles of walls and buildings is explained in The Atrocity Exhibition by the book’s psychiatrist Dr Nathan. He explains that the book’s central protagonists has moved so far beyond conventional sex that he has excavated down to the fundamental paradigm of the junction – an obsession with how entities meet and combine of which human sex is just a small sub-set.

Hence the character’s obsession with the walls of the apartments and bedrooms he finds himself in, and with modern architecture like the (then new) Hilton Hotel, and the curving ramps and inclined planes of the new concrete multi-story car parks. These are all aspects of the modern world’s obsession with junctions and angles and the meeting points of lines and planes. As such they are visual correlatives of the strange angles and postures adopted by the human animal when it has sex.

3. A Neural Interval

A Neural Interval (1968)

This is a photo from a 1960s bondage magazine. It’s not particularly sexy, is it? Because of the sea in the background I initially thought the subject was a swimmer or diver with cumbersome kit photo-collaged on top of her. But no, this really is a supposedly sexy photo of bondage gear circa 1968.

The adjective ‘neural’ crops up a lot in late-60s Ballard, and the phrase ‘neural interval’ suggests a stoppage in time, or at least a stoppage of stimuli to the senses. It’s not immediately clear how this is related to a woman wearing bondage gear in a boat, although possibly the very disjunction between the words and the image are precisely its point.

4. Placental Insufficiency

A Placental Insufficiency (1970)

Ballard appropriates a striking photo by American photographer Les Krims. I thought that some or all of it must have been collaged, but apparently this woman looked like that and was happy to pose with a hunting rifle. Those Yanks, eh.

By this stage, after four ads, I think two or three things are obvious.

1. Women The photos are all of women, sexy or naked women in 3 out of 4. If Ballard is seeking to deconstruct the glib imagery of advertising, featuring naked women is a funny way of going about it. Still, it was 1967 or 68, I suppose when plenty of women’s liberationists thought that burning their bras and stripping naked would abolish shame, embarrassment and the male gaze.

2. America For someone supposedly engaged in critiquing the modern world, deconstructing consumer capitalism, revealing the perverse fetishism which underlies the commercial packaging of homogenised sexuality etc etc, Ballard, like so many rebels and revolutionaries of his era, was strongly attracted to the epicentre of world capitalism, America, and inclined to bow the knee to every type of American consumer product, including Hollywood film actresses and the long, cool, flash American cars which feature in so much of his mid-period fiction (like the heavy American Lincoln Continental driven by Dr Robert Vaughan, the demented exponent of car crash fetishism in Crash).

3. Texts But the really obvious thing about them is that, although the images are striking, the real force of the thing comes from the texts. Ballard not only doesn’t have the courage to leave the images to stand alone, or to give them brief and clever or satirical straplines: each one has to have quite lengthy and demanding avant-garde text stapled onto them.

5. Venus Smiles

Venus Smiles (1970)

Ballard himself took this photo of his partner Claire Churchill as she was contorting herself to get into a pair of jeans after a visit to the beach, hence the flecks of seaweed and sand sticking to her white skin.

This is the most interesting of the photos because of the way it’s been turned on its side, because of the big black bush between her legs, and the way the detritus clings to her skin like flies or enlarged bacilli. And the superimposed text, which starts off with characteristic Ballard obsessions with depersonalisation, ends up being unexpectedly sweet.

Conclusion

These pictures of five women, four of them naked, tend to confirm the suspicion that the super-imposed text might be clever but this arty contrivance – like so many attempts at avant-garde art – pales into insignificance next to the immense primal urge of male voyeurism.

Condensed novels and The Atrocity Exhibition

Knowing about the cut-and-paste novel idea, and having seen the Alternative Ads, it’s a lot easier to understand why Ballard originally wanted to have The Atrocity Exhibition done as a book of collage illustrations.

I originally wanted a large-format book, printed by photo-offset, in which I would produce the artwork – a lot of collages, material taken from medical documents and medical photographs, crashing cars and all that sort of iconography.

Alas, the practicalities of publishing intervened, and Ballard amended the idea to something related but different.

The final version of The Atrocity Exhibition is his most accessible piece of experimentalism because it was published as a mass market paperback. Superficially the book is divided into fifteen short ‘chapters’ but as soon as you start reading them you realise that none of them make sense in themselves, and they certainly don’t add up to a consistent narrative in the usual way of a novel.

Instead, each chapter is what Ballard described as a ‘condensed’ novel – clips and excerpts, moments of time, brief gestures and fragments of dialogue cut and pasted together. The reader has to sort out what is going on and how the fragments are connected, in his or her own mind.

Not only that, but each ‘chapter’ or ‘condensed novel’ references the same fragments, actions and images, repeated but in distorted form. At the most obvious level, the same ‘characters’ recur in consecutive sections – Dr Nathan, Catherine Austen, Karen Novotny – but there is also a stray meeting between two characters at some kind of formal conference or symposium which is re-enacted in each chapter, there is the repeated enactment of car crashes or of a helicopter crash which is its cognate; the male characters each display obsessive behaviour, such as Talbot assembling some kind of modernist sculpture on the roof or outlining furniture in an apartment with chalk; and each chapter contains a numbered list, although the items on the list change from chapter to chapter and so does the ostensible list creator. And so on.

The point is that The Atrocity Exhibition makes a lot more sense if you don’t come to it cold, as an unexpected freak show, but see it as a logical development and extension of Ballard’s long-running interest in fragments, collage and non-narrative.

Crashed Cars exhibition (1970)

In April 1970 Ballard staged an exhibition titled Crashed Cars at the New Arts Laboratory in London.

1. In the post-war period cars became a symbol of consumer empowerment and glamour. Cars were promoted in films and adverts and car ownership rocketed. However, so did the incidence of car crashes, with a number featuring high-profile fatalities – James Dean (1955), Albert Camus (1960), Jayne Mansfield (1967) (which, obviously, continued after the exhibition and down to our day – Marc Bolan (1977), Grace Kelly (1982), Princess Diana (1997)).

2. And after all, a car crash is the centrepiece of the closing song on the decade’s keystone album, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, when John Lennon sings:

I read the news today, oh boy
About a lucky man who made the grade
And though the news was rather sad
Well, I just had to laugh
I saw the photograph

He blew his mind out in a car
He didn’t notice that the lights had changed
A crowd of people stood and stared
They’d seen his face before
Nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Lords

3. A quick search of the internet reveals that, as it happens, the highest figure for road traffic-related deaths during peacetime was 7,985 in 1966, the year before the Beatles album (by comparison, 1,782 people were killed in road accidents in 2018.)

So Ballard wasn’t being all that eccentric to envision a) the car as a key symbol of the twentieth century, and b) the mystique about car crashes – the way they had killed a number of A-list celebrities, the way people were gruesomely fascinated by them (‘Well, I just had to laugh, I saw the photograph’) – as telling us something profound and unsettling about our car-mad culture.

And so he staged an exhibition of crashed cars. Actually, there were only three car wrecks in the exhibition and – disappointingly – no photos of the event appear to have survived. Some of the visitors to the gallery vandalised the wrecks with wine, paint and urine, confirming Ballard’s belief that the growing ‘technological landscape’ was influencing human behaviour and social relationships and not in a good way.

Alternatively, they might just have been getting into the spirit of anarchic 1960s ‘happenings’.

To me Ballard’s Crash exhibition hardly seems experimental at all. It is well known that people stop to stare at car crashes and that traffic slows right down on motorways as people slowly pass the scenes of smashes. I’ve done it myself.

This is because there really is something deeply fascinating about the pathology of car crashes and something weirdly compelling about the way that objects which are promoted as smooth and curved and aerodynamically perfect are transformed into angular nests of smashed windscreens and random spikes of metal jutting out. For the last few days I’ve walked past a car parked near my work, the right half of whose bonnet and wings are buckled up and outwards like the carapaces of an enormous beetle.

Since 1970 we’ve had precisely 50 years during which all kinds of objects from the real world have been situated in galleries for our entertainment and mystification. A few years ago I came across a display at Tate Modern of a set of engine blocks from cars which had been blown up by suicide bombers in the Middle East, considered as works of art. No-one bats an eyelid at things like that any more.

So considering the exhibition as an investigation of just what it is that fascinates us about car crashes, and the suggestion that they have a strange and eerie beauty of their own, doesn’t strike me as at all weird. In fact it’s surprising that it took someone so long to come up with it.

Traditionally, the significance of the exhibition is that Ballard went on to explore the mystique and pathology of car crashes in the ‘controversial’ novel Crash (1973), although the weirdness of our obsessive car culture is also the subject of the less well-known novel Concrete Island which immediately followed it (1974). But I’m making the point that the Crash exhibition was part of a continuum of literary and artistic experiments which Ballard undertook in the first half of his career.

Practical conclusion

In the 1950s and 60s Ballard created more collages, now lost. I imagine these, like the New Project and the Advertisers Announcements were fun to make and show friends, and maybe persuade a gallery to display for a while… But in the end your agent, your wife and your publisher want standardised texts which they can publish, market and sell. Which is what, after the mid-1970s, Ballard produced in abundance.

References

• J.G. Ballard’s Experimental Text Collages: His 1958 Foray into Avant-Garde Literature
• Text collages by J.G. Ballard (at the British Library)
• J.G. Ballard’s Graphic Experiments
• ‘What exactly is he trying to sell?’: J.G. Ballard’s Adventures in Advertising, part 1 in the Ballardian
• Invitation card to J.G. Ballard’s ‘Crashed Cars’ exhibition, 3 April 1970 (at the British Library)

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