The Blowfish Blog

[The Pro Circuit] The Death of James Graham Ballard Considered as a Pornographic Spectacle

Why, in a column about porn, would one address the recent death of science fiction writer J.G. Ballard? Because Ballard was the producer of material that this present author has found, to his intense distress, eminently jackable. Oh, and he’s my sick, twisted spiritual Daddy, which would maybe bewilder him, but who cares?

I’m referring, as will be obvious to those of you familiar with Ballard’s work, to those works that showcase the author’s proclivity for describing with blatant and bizarre language the confluence of sexuality and violence in such things as car crashes and murder.

Ballard himself would probably like that sentence, because in such works as Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition, he spent much of his time writing in the cold, detached tones of a scientific observer, even while naming the protagonist after himself and matching his own identifying details. He seemed to get off on the convoluted language, satirizing science and technology at the same time he lampooned politics. and he sprayed them all with his potent seed, in a way that in his day left most readers wiping their eyes and cursing.

Such elements of his bizarrely explicit psychosexual work The Atrocity Exhibition as “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” are rendered as technical papers, producing such quotes as “Slow-motion film of Reagan’s speeches produced a marked erotic effect in an audience of spastic children” and “Faces were seen as either circumcised (JFK, Khrushchev) or uncircumcised (LBJ, Adenauer)” and “In assembly-kit tests Reagan’s face was uniformly perceived as a penile erection.”

When “Ronald Reagan” was distributed as a prank at the 1980 Republican National Convention by members of the Marxist-Leninist Situationist International, Ballard claimed, it was regarded by the RNC delegates as exactly what it appeared to be: a technical journal article describing a behavioral study of Reagan’s sex appeal — circumcised Kruschev and all.

Other elements of The Atrocity Exhibition include “The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race” and “Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy,” both of which rendered political assassination as psychosexual pursuits.

In particular, Ballard was obsessed with media, and this seemed to inform his deviant ideas of sexuality in a way that would have been marginally abstract in the hands of a theorist or philosopher — but became dangerously visceral in the hands of a writer of science fiction who got going just as the genre began its savage turn from pulpy formulaic entertainment to weird fucked-up decimation of all society’s values. Ballard, for his part, hated the term science fiction, and the science fiction community took something like 10 to 20 years to stop desperately trying to ignore The Atrocity Exhibition. It was the cyberpunks who finally inserted this work into the science fiction lexicon. Ballard preferred the term “apocalyptic” to describe his work. He seems to have seen his more audacious work, for all intents and purposes, as a social-political assault on celebrity culture, media, and consumerism.

Which is all well and good, but his blatant treatment of deviant sexuality, when he went there, was a huge influence on more literary pornographers than I can count. The blatant assault on reason that is “Ronald Reagan” was a revelation to me when I read it in college. I had already been writing porn novels professionally; shortly after I read “Ronald Reagan,” I wrote my first piece of seriously fucked-up psychosexual death-obsessed porn. Does that make me a satirist? No, I’m a pornographer. And Ballard, at least in that work, was my godfather.

But for the record, The Atrocity Exhibition is probably too weird for most people to jack off to. Calling Ballard’s subsequent psychosexual work Crash “less weird” than anything is of questionable provenance, and probably calls my sanity into question. But the casual reader will find Crash, ultimately, a relatively straightforward novel with plot and characters, a narrative thread, and the kind of emotional arc that draws one into a story. Is it made any less traditional by the fact that it’s about a guy, coincidentally (I’m sure) named James Ballard, who gets off on car crashes, particularly celebrity car crashes, and becomes involved with a group of people who feel the same way? Maybe so.

In Crash, Ballard (the character) encounters a doctor whose main fantasy is to die in a head-on car crash with Elizabeth Taylor. This is not typical stuff either for porn or science fiction; it might be slightly more at home in the world of avant-garde literary fiction or the Decadent movement of the late 19th Century, but even there it’s beyond anything Alfred Jarry or the Paris Grand Guignol ever came up with. I think Baudelaire would have read Crash with his jaw on the floor. Oscar Wilde would have howled.

So consider that Violet tells me it’s the first book she ever jacked off to, and that while a young man I became physically aroused while reading it — to my great dismay. I know several other literary pornographers for whom Crash’s “satire,” or “psychosexual deconstruction” or “critical analysis of the 20th-Century Zeitgeist,” or whatever the fuck you wish to call it, translated directly into hard-ons and girljuice.

Is that weird? Um, yeah, kinda. But hey, you start taking things apart, and sometimes you find some surprising stuff once you look under the hood.

David Cronenberg made a supremely sexy film version of Crash, and as a (somewhat reluctant) fan of the novel I found his movie surprisingly successful. If you’re not a big reader, you can get the basic gist of Ballard’s Crash by watching that film. The subtleties of the book are legion and those of the film are relatively few, but it’s still hard to grok it without some mental gymnastics.

It’s a challenging concept, as Ballard was always challenging to his readers. In bringing the literary avant-garde to science fiction, and science fiction to the avant-garde, and in smearing them both with his pungent jizz and other less savory body fluids, J.G. Ballard remade modern sexuality in a way that proved an enduring influence on the people who would build the punk culture of the late ’70s and ’80s, and by extension the renaissance in erotic literature and media that marked the ’90s and continues, in somewhat varied form, in to this day. Blame the internet if you wish, but Ballard was there before any of us.

Thomas Roche blogs about sex, death and science fiction at Thomasroche.com.

Image: Cover scan of a 1977 Panther Books UK reprint of Crash.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, 21 April 2009 at 10:59 am and is filed under Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.