Travis Elborough talks to J. G. Ballard
The Drowned World is concerned with social regression, and de-evolution, issues that you have explored in several of your subsequent novels. Do you think your preoccupation with these themes stems from your own experiences in an internment camp in Shanghai when you saw, first hand, how easily the veneer of civilization could slip away?
Yes, I think it does; although anyone who has experienced a war first hand knows that it completely overturns every conventional idea of what makes up day-to-day reality. You never feel quite the same again. It’s like walking away from a plane crash; the world changes for you forever. The experience of spending nearly three years in a camp, especially as an early teenage boy, taking a keen interest in the behaviour of adults around him, including his own parents, and seeing them stripped of all the garments of authority that protect adults generally in their dealings with children, to see them stripped of any kind of defence, often losing heart a bit, being humiliated and frightened – and we all felt the war was going to go on forever and heaven knows what might happen in the final stages – all of that was a remarkable education. It was unique, and it gave me a tremendous insight into what makes up human behaviour.
You’ve written that the landscape of The Drowned World was also shaped by your memories of Shanghai. How conscious were you of that echo while you were actually writing the novel?
I don’t think I was conscious of it at all at the time. It’s true, though, that in Shanghai every spring, when the winter snows on the Himalayas began to melt and sweep down the Yangtse, there were these huge floods and much of Shanghai was a couple of feet under water, which was fun for a small boy. The area around was completely flat and given over to rice cultivation, and water lay as far as the eye could see. I remember looking from our camp, Lunghua, eight miles out, towards the French concession which occupied the south half of the city; I would see the apartment houses rising from these great sheets of water. But I think I only really realized this may have been an influence on The Drowned World some time later. Like every novelist, I think, I have this stock of memories I draw on, usually without realizing quite where they come from.
You were an editor of a science journal at the time you were writing The Drowned World and it was first published in 1962, the same year, incidentally, as Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking study of the ecological effects of pesticides. Was the state of the environment of growing concern to you back then?
I think I’ve always been interested in the ecological aspects of life on this planet. Coming from a very dramatic part of the world, a place with war, floods and all the rest of it, I’ve always felt that people living in the cosy suburbia of Western Europe and America never appreciated just how vulnerable we were to climatic disasters. I also felt very strongly at the time I wrote The Drowned World that all of us carry, coded into our nervous systems, these archaic memories of the world that our ancestors grew up in thousands of years ago, a time when the climate was so much more dramatic. So I think I was interested in the notion of a flooded city as a sort of time machine – the way that climatic change, of a dramatic kind, whether flooding or the creation of a desert, tapped long-buried memories of our earlier ancestry and perhaps a very different kind of psychology. When I was writing The Drowned World I think I was interested in the whole notion of going back to the primeval swamp, and also the idea of individual identity, something we prize enormously today but in fact it’s very much a late artefact and you know there are more primitive forms of life.
Do you think there is a moral purpose to your fiction?
I am not sure about that. I see myself more as a kind of investigator, a scout who is sent on ahead to see if the water is drinkable or not.
As a scout or investigator you’ve been uncannily prescient, famously predicting Reagan’s presidency in The Atrocity Exhibition, and I noticed that one commentator made reference to The Drowned World in the aftermath of the New Orleans disaster. Have you ever worried that you might be too prescient?
An investigator and a sort of early warning system, let’s put it like that. I suppose one of the things I took from my wartime experiences was that reality was a stage set. The realities that you took for granted – the comfortable day-to-day life, school, the home where one lives, the familiar street and all the rest of it, the trips to the swimming pool and the cinema – were just a stage set. They could be dismantled overnight, which they literally were when the Japanese occupied Shanghai and turned our lives upside down. I think that experience left me with a very sceptical eye, which I’ve turned onto something even as settled as English suburbia where I now live. Nothing is as secure as we like to think it is. One doesn’t just have to think of Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans – this applies to everything. A large part of my fiction tries to analyse what is going on around us, and whether we are very different people from the civilized human beings we imagine ourselves to be. I think it’s true of all my fiction. I think that investigative spirit forms all my novels really.
You studied medicine and have stated that you believe that the contemporary novelist should be like a scientist. Do you ever regret not qualifying as a doctor?
I was very interested in medicine. The experience of dissecting cadavers for two years was a very important one for me, for all sorts of reasons. I do think that novelists should be like scientists, dissecting the cadaver…I would like to have become a doctor, but the pressure to write was too great. I knew from friends of mine who were a year or two ahead of me that once you actually joined a London hospital or became a junior doctor the pressures of work were too great. I’d never have any time to write, and the urge to write was just too strong.
Of your many books, which is your personal favourite?
That’s hard. I do have a lot of sentimental feelings for The Drowned World. It’s my first novel and I think it was where I found my particular imaginative bent.
You started your career as a short-story writer, but would it be fair to say that it was a little while before you made the transition to novels?
It took me a long time. I published my first short story in 1956. I didn’t write The Drowned World until 1962, which is quite a long time, partly because I had a family of young children and a full-time job, and in all the rush and hurly-burly of family life I hadn’t time to mentally map out a novel, which might then take six months or more to write.
I am very grateful that I did start my career as a writer writing short stories because you really learn your craft. You can also explore yourself; if you write a huge number of short stories it doesn’t take you long to realize you have certain strengths and weaknesses and that your imagination leans towards one corner of the compass. I think young writers today are tempted into writing novels far too early. I think part of the reason I did take such a long time to write my first novel was that, of course, there was this huge market for short stories, which doesn’t exist today. People read short fiction then, which they don’t do now. I think, as I’ve written elsewhere, people have lost the knack of reading short stories, which is a great shame. Evening newspapers in London ran short stories. The Evening News had a short story every day, unthinkable today. Most magazines of any kind had a short story.
Are there any contemporary writers whose work you do admire?
I don’t read as much fiction as I used to, but I am a great admirer of Iain Sinclair. I love his writing that hovers between fiction and nonfiction. He’s a unique talent. I enjoy Will Self, and various others.