J. Ballard – Extreme Metaphors (страница 9)

BARBER: If you think the moon the only important thing likely to happen in your lifetime you presumably have no great expectations of 2001?

BALLARD: We’re ahead of the clock, that’s the whole point. It’s like Buckminster Fuller, you know, saying that World War III is already over and we lost. People aren’t interested in the future any more. The greatest casualty of World War II, I think, was that the past ceased to have moral authority for people, the authority of precedent, tradition, one’s father, social background, everything. That ended with World War II, and thank God. But what has happened in the twenty-five years since then is that the future has become a casualty too. One could say that the moon landing was the death knell of the future as a moral authority. No one thinks that the future is going to be a better place – most people think it’s going to be a worse place. The moral authority of science was colossal in the 1930s. I can remember myself that children’s encyclopedias were loaded with scientific marvels – the greatest bridge in the world, the longest tunnel, the biggest ship, Professor Picard in his stratosphere balloon. But the idea that science was building a bigger and better world ended with Hiroshima and Eniwetok. Now people feel that science may not bring a better world, but a nightmare. Dr Barnard may really be Dr Moreau. Now people are frightened of science and they’re frightened of the future. They no longer feel that because something’s going to happen tomorrow it’s going to be better than today.

So the idea of America is dead, I think, because America was built on the assumption that tomorrow was a better day. The American Dream is the American Nightmare now. I think that’s why American sci-fi of the forties and fifties has come to a full stop. Nobody is writing it any more, no new writers have come into the field, because people don’t accept the authority of the future any more. God knows, the present is infinitely more varied and bizarre and fantastic. People have annexed the future into the present, just as they’ve annexed the past into the present. Now we have the future and the past all rolled into the present – one day you’re wearing Edwardian clothes, the next you’re dressed like an eighteenth-century samurai. One can visualise by, say, the end of the century calendars no longer existing. They won’t be necessary, there’ll be no dates, there won’t be a year 2000, because no one will be interested. And if the proverbial visitor from outer space lands here in the year 2000 (by his calendar, because we won’t have them) he might find himself in anything from Elizabethan England to ancient Rome to Nazi Germany to a Barbarella fantasy of the year 1,000,000 ad.

BARBER: Now you’re making a prediction about the future yourself.

BALLARD: Yes, because we’re still in the dying twilight of tomorrow, we can still see the idea of the future. But my children, or today’s teenagers, they’re not interested in the future. All the possibilities of their lives are contained within a different set of perspectives, an inner life. If you look back over the past ten years you can see a continuous retreat inwards. I coined the expression ‘inner space’ about ten years ago and usually sci-fi writers’ predictions are proven wrong with 100 per cent consistency, but in this one instance I was certainly right: that what you see is the death of outer space, the failure of the moon landing to excite anyone’s imagination on a real level, and the discovery of inner space in terms of sex, drugs, meditation, mysticism. Just look at the career of the Beatles and you see this retreat from the exterior by steady stages, through drugs, then meditation, to a more or less complete involvement with their own bodies. Lennon and Yoko seem to be rediscovering the tactile existence, the organic reality of their own embraces, and it’s very beautiful, I think.

BARBER: If what you say is true, why is there so much science journalism around? Why so many articles on the future of genetic engineering, or heart transplants, or the population explosion?

BALLARD: Most science journalism is really fiction masquerading as fact. Almost anything you care to name nowadays is really fiction, serving someone’s imaginative end, whether it’s a politician’s, or a TV executive’s, or a scientist’s. So-called hard science is now the new show business. Take someone like Desmond Morris, a so-called scientist who is really one of the leading pop entertainers. He’s as much a showbiz performer as John Lennon.

BARBER: What about Barnard?

BALLARD: I think he became show business afterwards. That was where science created its first superstar, the moment Washkansky had his new heart, the first one, that was something unique. I’m sure that most scientific developments in the future are going to be made in the Barnard way. There’ll be no more of the absent-minded professor in his laboratory stumbling on penicillin and taking five years to develop it. No, he’ll be a pushy, ambitious, publicity-oriented scientist who will launch himself not just into the new discovery, but into show business at the same time.

BARBER: Do you also dismiss the sort of science journalism that deals with serious extrapolations of the future, the population explosion, pollution, demographic factors?

BALLARD: This is the Herman Kahn school of distant extrapolation, which I find absolutely meaningless. They say something about the present and they say something about the mind of Herman Kahn, but they don’t say anything about the world fifty years from now, because one simply can’t anticipate. The world rate [sic] changes so fast you don’t need to be much of a mathematician to work out that things will be so different even in ten years’ time that one won’t be able to say anything about them now. It’s like women’s fashion – one can’t even guess what it’ll be like this time next year.

BARBER: Most of your novels and stories seem to be set in the future, and give the impression of a future after the holocaust, after some terrible catastrophe has changed the world.

BALLARD: Well, the facts of time and space are a tremendous catastrophe, aren’t they? Each day millions of cells die in our bodies, others are born. Every time we open a door, every time we look out across a landscape – I’m deliberately trying to exaggerate this – millions of minute displacements of time and space are occurring. One’s living in a continuous cataclysm anyway – our whole existence takes place in the eye of a hurricane.

BARBER: But those changes aren’t a sudden worldwide disaster which would change the character of life on this planet.

BALLARD: Well, look at the events of the last thirty years, the slaughter of human life alone, anything from thirty to fifty million people dead in World War II. World War III, still a possibility, would multiply that figure by ten presumably. That’s one cataclysm that’s already occurred and another that’s possible, of the order of anything invented by science fiction.

BARBER: Are you a pessimist?

BALLARD: I don’t know. Perhaps I’m just being honest. What I’m trying to do is to look at the present and to get away from the notion of yesterday, today, tomorrow.

BARBER: Your latest book, The Atrocity Exhibition, seems to use more personal or autobiographical material than before.

BALLARD: A little more, yes. I mean when I say I want to write fiction for the present, I’m clearly not trying to pretend that I’m not influenced by the past, because we all are to a tremendous degree. Besides, enough time has now elapsed for me to be able to look back. In fact, the setting of The Drowned World, the apartment blocks rising out of the swamp, is like the landscape of immediate post-war China where I was brought up. I was interned during the war in a camp a few miles from Shanghai and I used to look out through the barbed wire across these deserted paddy fields where one saw big abandoned apartment houses of the French Concession surrounded by unbroken areas of water in the sun, especially in the flooding periods. There was a big Japanese airfield adjacent to the camp and it was under attack by the Americans throughout the last year of the war. I’m sure now that was the landscape I used in The Drowned World, though I thought I’d invented it when I was writing the book.

BARBER: As doctors and hospitals figure prominently in your recent stories, perhaps this is a reflection of your early medical training?

BALLARD: Maybe it is. Doing anatomy was an eye-opener: one had built one’s whole life on an illusion about the integrity of one’s body, this ‘solid flesh’. One mythologises one’s own familiar bits of flesh and tendon. Then to see a cadaver on a dissecting table and begin to dissect it myself and to find at the end of term that there was nothing left except a sort of heap of gristle and a clutch of bones with a label bearing some dead doctor’s name – that was a tremendous experience of the lack of integrity of the flesh, and of the integrity of this dead doctor’s spirit. Most cadavers, you know, are donated by doctors; and the doctors can visualise what’s going to happen to their bodies after death, because they’ve done dissection themselves.