The Position of Spoons, page 2
—J. G. BALLARD, KINGDOM COME (2006)
J. G. Ballard, England’s greatest literary futurist, changed the coordinates of reality in British fiction and took his faithful readers on a wild, intellectual ride. He never restored moral order to the proceedings in his fiction because he did not believe we really wanted it. Whatever it was that Ballard next imagined for us, however unfamiliar, we knew we were in safe hands because he understood ‘the need to construct a dramatically coherent narrative space’.
When I was a young writer in the 1980s, Ballard first came to my attention after I read his luminous, erotic story collection, The Day of Forever. It was so formally inventive that I would not have guessed it had been published in 1967. Nor did I know that the baffled conservative literary establishment of his generation had tried to see off his early work as science fiction. Ballard always insisted he was more interested in inner space than outer space.
When it came to anything by Ballard, genre really did not matter to me; his fiction could have been filed under ‘Tales of Alien Abduction’ or ‘Marsh Plants’ and I would have hunted it down. Despite our difference in generation, gender and literary purpose, it was clear to me that he and I were both working with some of the same aesthetic influences: film, surrealist art and poetry, Freud’s avant-garde theories of the unconscious. I was just starting to write but Ballard made me feel less lonely. Perhaps more significantly we shared the dislocation of not being born in Britain. Home was the imagination. I too was attracted to the paintings of de Chirico and Delvaux, with their dreamplaces – empty, melancholy cities, abandoned temples, broken statues, shadows, exaggerated perspectives. Ballard was going to make worlds we had not seen before in British fiction. When asked, after the success of Empire of the Sun, why it took him so long to write in a less disguised way about his childhood experience at the internment camp in Lunghua, his beautiful answer was that it took him ‘twenty years to forget and twenty years to remember’. Of course, images from Shanghai and the war were laid for ever inside him. I have always thought that his books, with the exception of Crash, which seems to me an abstract attempt to grieve for his dead wife, were already written in that one room he shared with his parents between 1943 and 1945. The reach of his imagination was never going to fit with the realist literary mainstream but I was always encouraged by his insistence that he was an imaginative writer.
I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.
Good on you, Jim. There is a great deal of rather strained legend-making when it comes to Ballard, but it is the witty, deadpan, open-minded American journalist and pianist V. Vale, founder of the tremendous RE/Search Publications and champion of Ballard since 1973, who in my view tracked his thought drifts most sensitively in various interviews. I have never regarded Ballard as a kind of psychogeographer of postmodernity; his most enjoyable fiction is more Dada than Debord.
I believe in the impossibility of existence, in the humour of mountains, in the absurdity of electromagnetism, in the farce of geometry, in the cruelty of arithmetic, in the murderous intent of logic.
His highly imagined landscapes and abandoned aircraft and stopped clocks and desert sand were located in his head – and anyway he preferred driving fast cars to walking. He once sent me a photograph of the Heathrow Hilton and told me it was his spiritual home. What was it that Ballard offered to me as a young female writer? It is more to do with what he did not offer. He preferred social theory to social realism. I was not going to run to Ballard’s books to learn how to write a ‘well-rounded’ character, for God’s sake. His characters are more like tannoys to broadcast his arguments and ideas. But I did love his gloomy, unbelievable male psychiatrists, cinematically lit, groomed, suave and perverse, sipping a stiff gin and tonic while they observe (and possibly medicate) everyone else freaking out around them. The well-mannered narrators in the later novels (Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes, Millennium People, Kingdom Come) are mostly mild, middle-class, manly men. Their destiny is to become inflamed Nietzschean men, excited to finally understand that they too would like to punch their fists through the boredom of the empty, greedy, good life with its fragile veneer of civilization.
Yet I have always regarded Ballard as quite a paternal writer, steering us through the ruins of his dystopias via the mindset of his apparently rational avatars – always endearingly baffled to discover their own suppressed urges. I enjoyed his noirish female characters, too (many of them doctors), enigmatic instead of domestic, emotionally unavailable, sexually experimental, sometimes tanned and thuggish, as in Cocaine Nights, or vulnerable but corruptible as in Kingdom Come – but the great thing is that they do not want the male lead to marry them and are never about to roast a chicken.
I believe in the beauty of all women, in the treachery of their imaginations, so close to my heart.
All these years later, I still marvel at the eerie poetry of Ballard’s prose. It lingers like a strange perfume over his concise, matter-of-fact sentences, more heightened in the earlier novels and short stories, but the bottom notes (petrol, anguish, desire, nightmares) are still present in the first three lines of his final and most didactic novel, Kingdom Come:
The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world …
Kingdom Come is an exuberant, crazed, maverick, twenty-first-century restaging of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. We have our usual Ballardian narrator, a decent chap, former advertising executive Richard Pearson, who, while driving down the slow lane of the M25, is surprised to find the indicator ticking as if it has a mind of its own. Pearson obeys his car’s invitation to turn down a slip road, which ‘I had somehow known was waiting for me.’ Ballard believed our unconscious plans a number of assignments for us. The slip road leads to the small motorway town of Brookfields, near Heathrow. Pearson’s father, a retired air pilot, has been killed by a deranged mental patient who opened fire, apparently at random, on the crowds shopping at the Metro-Centre, a massive mall in the centre of this town. Pearson suspects there is more to find out about his father’s death and begins his investigations – with the oedipal help of the attractive female doctor who attended to his dying father, and who for some reason has sex with his son.
There are no spaceships hovering above the Metro-Centre, with its ‘humid, microwave air’, but the minds of the citizens who shop there have definitely been abducted by hyper-consumerism.
At the sales counter, the human race’s greatest confrontation with existence, there were no yesterdays, no history to be relived, only an intense transactional present.
The former advertising executive starts to uncover the drives of the savage consumers of Middle England who lug home refrigerators, toasters, televisions, beat up Asian shopkeepers and lavish affection on the three giant teddy bears sitting in the atrium of the Metro-Centre. Naturally, these Disneyesque toys are pierced with bullet holes.
Kingdom Come is a brutal fairy tale in which ‘a more primitive world’ is ‘biding its time’. The blades of knives on display in the mall’s hardware store menacingly form ‘a silver forest in the darkness’. Ballard explores the pre-rational nationalism that replaces politics, the mass spectacle of St George’s flags waved at the endless parades and sports matches. ‘No Sieg Heils, but football anthems instead. The same hatreds, the same hunger for violence, but filtered through the chat-show studio and the hospitality suite.’
It seems that for Ballard, the labyrinthine Metro-Centre is as enthralling as de Chirico’s brooding Italian archways and piazzas.
Once again he will chase his obsessions and try to convince us that the modern personality most likely to survive late capitalism will be the elective psychopath.
If Freudian theory is waving to us through the St George’s flags, Ballard makes sure its fingernails are bitten raw. As he has often stated, his literary aim was to find the hidden wiring in the fuse box of modernity. In the case of Kingdom Come, consumerism slips into ‘soft’ fascism. As a former advertising executive, Richard Pearson knows that ‘all he is good at is warming the slippers of late capitalism’ and the future is ‘a cable TV programme going on for ever’, a barcode, CCTV camera and a parking space. And what about dreams?
The Metro-Centre is dreaming you. It’s dreaming all of us.
Kingdom Come does nothing less than perform keyhole surgery on late capitalism’s heart of darkness.
TELEGRAM TO A PYLON TRANSMITTING ELECTRICITY OVER DISTANCES
It is in my mind to tell you that you stand like a dancer, like an ogre, like a shaman, like a child in a rage. You are certain of your gravity. You are holding your breath. Stars lay their dust on you. Foxes play by your feet. Light passes through you. What holds you together might come unstuck as things that hold us together sometimes do.
It is in my mind to tell you that my daughter is watching High School Musical on the TV in North London. Right now she is arranging her facial muscles and body posture and vowels and consonants to become someone who can sing her way out of conflicts with bullies in the school playground. It is in my mind to tell you that my daughter’s eyes look like oil wells lit at night. This is the earth we share and talk about in strange ways.
I transmit these thoughts to you from the marshes and silent canals of Hackney, East London, to the curved bay of Cádiz, Spain, and on and under and it is in my mind to tell you that all thoughts can be bent like a spoon.
A MOUTHFUL OF GREY
To stand in the centre of Russell Square Gardens, London, WC1, in the November rain is to summon all your losses in life. It will remind you of every time you have been abandoned, felt desolate, been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
A civic garden square gentles the pace of the city that surrounds it, holding a thought before it scrambles. Its punctuation is a pause in the life of the city. A place where the beginnings of a latent nervous breakdown can express itself and God can be glimpsed inside the body of a London pigeon. As you stare at the block of rat-grey sky above the naked winter trees and listen to the roar of traffic that circles the square (for this is a square in a circle), you will experience the vertigo of standing still while passers-by are on the move. Here in the square, wooden benches have been positioned under the trees. In the November rain those benches appear forlorn, damp, stuck with dying autumn leaves. At the far end of the square is the Gardens Café, its white plastic chairs stacked in a puddle of rain. One remaining plastic table and a broken umbrella have not yet been put away, reminding the public of the true purpose of the gardens: a place to convivially eat and drink al fresco in a square of old trees, to flirt, to rest, to think, to enjoy the general ambience of History and Scholarship via the universities and British Museum nearby.
Inside the café, which is open despite the weather, the walls are painted a deep Mediterranean blue. There is something about this garden square that resembles a deserted beach resort in winter. Fellini’s film La Strada comes to mind. The roar of the traffic can sound like the ocean and the café has all the melancholy of a seaside tea room selling sun hats out of season.
Fellini called his film ‘a kind of Chernobyl of the psyche’, and while it would be an over-dramatic comparison with Russell Square Gardens on a grey day of ceaseless rain, lone London seagulls scream in the sky. It is possible to listen to the cadence of the traffic as if it were waves and imagine you are about to deliver a heartbreaking revelation to the person you most love.
If you stroll out of the gardens, be sure to cross the road and at least see the interior of what used to be called the Russell Hotel (it will change its name many times) opposite the gardens, on the corner of Southampton Row. Founded in 1898 and once sold as ‘nineteenth-century charm with twentieth-century facilities’, the spine of the hotel is a grand circular staircase built from a ripple of burnt orange marble. Enjoy the way your twenty-first-century shoes will sink into the twentieth-century carpet as you stroll past the wooden panelling and crystal chandeliers towards the Brasserie, which at one point in its history was named after Virginia Woolf.
Virginia (1882–1941), long neck, hair up, smoked roll-ups, often mocked for living in her mind. If you are thinking of staying in certain hotels nearby, living in your mind is probably the best place to be. Virginia Woolf killed herself by placing stones in the pockets of her raincoat and jumping into a river. What would she think about being remembered as a hamburger served with coleslaw and fries?
It is possible the burger made from mad English cows will sing, ‘My heart is like a singing bird’ as you bring this mouthful of heritage Bloomsbury to your lips.
THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY CAFÉ LIFE IN FREUD’S VIENNA
Is there a single silver teaspoon that has not stirred up the memory of seduction and rage? Is there a Fräulein in the house without vague, disabling despair? Ah, the fresh and full aroma of hysteria under a constellation of coffee cups!
May the waiter (calm, contemptuous, organized) please bring to the table the shivering Sachertorte with its dark, oily cacao.
Observe Herr K. in his great coat lined with fur, gazing at Frau K.’s petticoats, white as frothing alpine milk. Is he still in love with his mother? Does he wish to murder his father, who regularly engaged in bestial coitus with the governess?
Today Frau K. likes her coffee the Turkish way. As she lifts the small cup to her lips, her right arm freezes in mid-air. Oh no! Is this the same arm that pulled a handsome Herr closer to her breast when they embraced on the big wheel at the fair in the park?
Near-death trance, vertigo and strudel under the new clean light of electricity!
Observe Frau O., who, revived by the libido of yeast in the Kaiser bread rolls, is in flirtation with the family doctor. This kindly gentleman administers vitamin injections to her sister on the last Tuesday of every month. Watch how he gallantly presses Frau O.’s fingers to his lips and then rises to play billiards in the next room. Tomorrow at noon, these white-haired industrialists will send their clever, unhappy daughters (parental conflicts, the laws of society, lecherous uncles) to the curer of souls at Berggasse 19. There, they will learn that desire must not always win the day, but it always does.
There will for ever be a snake in the cake box.
THEM AND US
We owe a great deal to the grandly expressive female hysterics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their apparently inexplicable symptoms (loss of voice, paralysis of limbs, anorexia, bulimia, chronic fatigue, fainting fits, indifference to life) were asking subversive questions about femininity: What does it mean to be a woman? What should a woman be? Who is her body supposed to please and what is it for? If she is required to cancel her own desires, what is she supposed to do with them? Hysteria is the language of the protesting body.
At the start of Freud’s career in patriarchal Vienna, he was under the impression there was one sexuality and that it was male. Fortunately, he changed his mind, but he humbly confessed that after thirty years of professional practice, he still did not know what women wanted. Yet Freud was witness to the most modern of female questions and conflicts. Unlike his mentor, the pioneering French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, nicknamed the Napoleon of Neuroses (his pet monkey roamed the wards at the Salpêtrière Hospital), Freud encouraged his patients to speak freely and without censorship. This was no small matter considering how callously women had been silenced by the societal restrictions of their day and not least by their families, many of whom were sexual predators. We must thank these women for telling their stories to Freud in his consulting room in Berggasse 19.
Anna O., Emmy von N., Dora and Jane Avril (a dancer at the Moulin Rouge who was painted by Toulouse-Lautrec) all struggled with myths about female character and destiny. In their attempts to find words for disabling despair, Freud tuned in to their most awkward and shaming memories or reminiscences. Psychoanalysis was born when he discovered that it was possible to interpret rather than medicate symptoms that had no biological or neurological cause. As Freud describes in his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, the task of a psychoanalytic treatment ‘is to make conscious everything that is pathogenically unconscious’. He never promised that the Talking Cure would make us happy, but he believed it might make us less miserable. If words are so powerful that they can make us pregnant (as Anna O. believed), it is not surprising that psychoanalysis has always paid the closest attention to the structure of language. Freud wanted to find the truths that had been dodged.
The diagnosis of hysteria, which began with Hippocrates in the fifth century BC, has now been erased from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Yet we all know that trauma (from the Greek for ‘wound’) has not gone away, and neither have the girls and women who self-harm.
If the birth of psychoanalysis offered methods to investigate the unconscious mind, there is no doubt that personal and political conflicts, and above all rage and hopelessness, continue to speak through the body in our own century.
Hysteria is not about them, it is about all of us.
Hysteria is dead! Long live hysteria!
ANN QUIN
I recognize some of my own influences in Quin’s writing. Her literary taste and aesthetic enthusiasms were European – Duras, Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute – and I’m guessing she must have read some of Freud and R. D. Laing.
I know how lonely she must have felt in Britain at the time she was writing. No wonder she scarpered as soon as her debut novel, Berg (1964), had earned her a ticket to travel to Europe and America. I know she understood she was on to something new and that she took herself seriously, in the right way; she had a serious sense of her literary purpose.
