“It took me 20 years to forget, and 20 years to remember.” JG Ballard’s comment on his life in wartime Shanghai is the key to the novel he wrote on the subject, and to all the visionary writer’s work. First published 40 years ago, Empire of the Sun is many things: a montage of surreal landscapes from a collapsed world; a novelistic rendering of the fragility of any kind of order in human life; a historical snapshot of the close of Western dominance in one of its eastern outposts; a lightly fictionalised autobiography of the author’s formative years; an adventure story, even, with a teenage boy at its centre. But more than anything else the book is a meditation on time and memory, on how the shocks we encounter become traumas we cannot escape, and how these traces of unbearable pain, retrieved and transformed, can become life-affirming and renewing.
Human memory is a constant reprocessing of our lives. As the world keeps on unmaking us, we remake ourselves or our lives are spent in forgetting. Freedom is found not in bourgeois autonomy, a stately progress through successive phases of life, but in situations that shatter our idea of linear time and force us to relinquish our beliefs about the future and the past. If Ballard’s work has a message, it is that rather than banishing from our minds the chaos that regularly engulfs us, we are better off accepting and learning to find meaning in it.
Born in Shanghai in 1930, Ballard lived in the city until 1946, when he left with his mother for Britain. For him, the old country into which he arrived was not a haven of safety; it looked pokey and cramped, almost a place of confinement. He told me he relished the struggle for survival in the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Centre in which he was interned in early 1943, along with around 2,000 other Europeans and Americans, though his parents were crushed by the indignities inflicted on them.
His most disturbing recollections, recalled in Miracles of Life – published in 2008, the year before he died – were of scenes of torture and rapine outside the camp following its evacuation in August 1945 by the defeated Japanese. There he encountered the human animal at its worst, revelling in savage revenge and sadistic cruelty.
Yet in Empire of the Sun, as in the rest of his novels and short stories, Ballard tells a positive tale. With all their horrors, the extreme situations into which human beings are thrown when order breaks down are not simply catastrophes. Unburdened of our socially constructed personalities, we can discover new life in disaster zones.
For many of his readers, Empire of the Sun seemed like a departure from Ballard’s earlier work. His first successful novel, The Drowned World (1962), set in a London turned into a tropical lagoon by global warming that has rendered much of the planet humanly uninhabitable, is recognised as a pioneering work of post-apocalyptic fiction. It was not the first in the genre. In After London (1885), the Victorian nature mystic Richard Jefferies pictured a similar future for the city. But whereas Jefferies posited a reversion to medieval society, Ballard places his characters in an environment that allows no return to the past. Each must cope with a rupture in history – their own and that of the planet – which is irreversible.
The central protagonist in The Drowned World, a scientist despatched from the Arctic to catalogue the flora and fauna of London as the city submerges into Paleozoic swamp, decides to remain in the jungle. At the end of the book, he pushes forward into the encroaching forest, “a second Adam searching for the forgotten paradise of the reborn sun”.
Ballard pursued the same theme in The Crystal World (1966), in which a physician travelling to a leprosarium in the central-African jungle discovers plants and animals petrified into crystals. Rather than fearing he might suffer a similar transmutation, he seems to embrace petrifaction as an escape from time. In Memories of the Space Age (1982), a canonical text containing all the essential themes of his work, a former Nasa physician travels to Cape Canaveral, derelict since interstellar travel was given up. Living in an unoccupied hotel, he and his wife undergo the last stages of “space sickness”, succumbing to ever-deeper fugues in which time seems to come to a halt. Again, the physician welcomes the death of his time-bound self as a liberation.
Empire of the Sun is a realist novel set in a definite historical milieu, but it explores the same experience of world-ending change. A modern apocalypse can come in two forms: the sudden destruction of an entire way of life, and the continuous effacement of the past in the perpetual flux of turbo-charged capitalism. In Shanghai, Ballard experienced both.
In an interview, he described the city as “a huge, non-stop circus” of parades, street carnivals and advertising stunts staged against a background of mass deprivation and random death. With the Japanese invasion, the performance was shut down. The show was revived under the aegis of China’s new, state-led capitalism. Ballard’s boyhood home, which he visited in 1991 for a television documentary and found dilapidated but still standing, was later remodelled as a research library, then upscale restaurants, since shuttered. After further renovations, the building is now unrecognisable.
Ballard has often been described as an unnervingly prescient writer, and so he was. In his experimental novel The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), he anticipated a Hollywood actor, Ronald Reagan, being elected American president in 1981. Crash (1973) prefigured the fusion of celebrity and media-managed mass voyeurism in Princess Diana’s death in 1997. In Concrete Island (1974) and High-Rise (1975), cities are places where violence and predation are pervasive and normalised. Cocaine Nights (1996) and Super-Cannes (2000) describe elite gated communities, whose stability is maintained by drug use, experimental sex and a controlled hinterland of crime. His final novels, Millennium People (2003) and Kingdom Come (2006), foreshadow the urban terrorism, middle-class protest movements and inchoate riots that punctuate our lives today.
In an interview in the Guardian in 2004 he described a “soft totalitarianism”, in which “nothing is allowed to disturb and unsettle us”, “the politics of the playgroup rules us all”, and “the chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age”. Coolly observed from his unassuming suburban house in Shepperton, our condition was clear to him 20 years ago.
Interpreting Ballard as a moralising culture critic, however, is to misunderstand him completely. He loved Shanghai for the excitement and freedom it offered and preferred its wild capitalism to the domestication of the welfare state. When I once asked him what was the future he most feared, he replied: “Something like Germany – a bourgeois utopia” (this was in the late Nineties). His attitude to social breakdown was always ambiguous. He never glamourised anarchy or violence, but – always a faithful disciple of the surrealists – dreaded far more the death of the imagination in a sedated tranquillity.
When the non-stop circus stopped, the eponymous “Jamie Graham” in Empire of the Sun was pitched into a more-than-Hobbesian state of nature. His struggle was not just for survival but also for fulfilment beyond bare existence. The relationships he forged with two American expatriate grifters, the British camp doctor and a teenage Japanese trainee airman, served a need for human solace as much as self-interest.
The depth of these attachments is captured in Steven Spielberg’s 1987 film, which Ballard praised especially for Christian Bale’s performance as Jamie. In The Kindness of Women (1991), a sequel to Empire of the Sun, Ballard writes movingly of how after settling in England he found succour in family life with his wife – who died tragically of pneumonia in 1964 – and bringing up his beloved children.
Ballard came to terms with his memories by making them into myths. For the boy, the deserted hotels, casinos and apartments through which he wandered were uncanny epiphanies of the emptiness lying not far beneath the flimsy surfaces of quotidian life. For the writer, memories of them became refuges, seemingly out of time, from transience and loss.
Forty years on, the Shanghai of Ballard’s novel is an unsettling augury of the present. Whatever they may say, no one has any idea what the future holds. For most, daily life is composed of purposeless drift, constant friction and events that have become illegible. Some react with the urban terrorism, protest movements and inchoate riots anatomised in Millennium People and Kingdom Come. Others seek consolation in traditional faiths. Ballard’s mythology did not rely on any hypothetical future or transcendental realm.
In Jamie Graham, the writer recreated an earlier self that endured some of the worst horrors of the last century. The man I knew over relaxed lunches in London may not have fully healed himself. I suspect the scenes he witnessed after the evacuation of the camp never ceased to trouble him. Yet through his work he released his traumas from darkness and turned vistas of desolation and abandonment into luminous images, which helped him live on and find happiness.
[See also: Slavoj Žižek’s war with the left]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 11 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The Iron Chancellor’s gamble