Deciphering angled cursive written in biro can take a concentration, so details appear like drone shots in the mind, bursting after a slight delay. “A backstory would describe the US’s imperial reach and attacks on other countries – its threats, use of force, etc. Events that have brought a sense of desperation to its lost former allies and the decision to attack the US before it’s too late.” In designated notebook A, with an incongruously bright pink cover, the rear view is further mirrored. “The United States has allies,” Ballard wrote, “an alliance of gangster dictators, corrupt royal houses, and the lumpen prole of gas station attendants, etc.” Ballard imagined that economic aggression against allies would feed into the conflict: “The US insists on imperial-style preferential trade agreements that force its goods on the rest of the world.”
It is an unsettling experience to come across the notes on JG Ballard’s An Immodest Proposal, or How the World Declared War on America. They are handwritten in a series of spiral-bound reporters’ notebooks preserved in the Ballard archives at the British Library. Dating from around 2005, the notes outline a book that remained unwritten at the time of Ballard’s death in 2009, a spectral novel that would have been the last attempt at fiction by one of the great speculative imaginations of the 20th century. It feels like, 20 years later, the time has come.
On page 20 of this first notebook, the various ideas for plot points are pulled together into a coherent backstory. “The US controls the entire Middle East, having suppressed a Saudi revolution and installed puppet regimes in Iran, the Gulf states, Turkey and Egypt. The US also has sympathetic regimes in Europe (UK Germany) despite rising unemployment and economic stagnation.” Reading these sentences, I felt excited and not a little scared. Not that it’s a perfect fit with the present—indeed, what the notes depict is a story of psychological revenge against an aggressive American government, something that didn’t happen. But the little details kept popping off the page. “US rule extends across the globe, using a similar mix of threats, economic pressure, oil bribes – Venezuela, Nigeria, Russia (all oil producers the US needs).
Geopolitics was not normally Ballard’s game. But his imagination was shaped by war and its human effects: along with his family, Ballard was captured by the Japanese when they occupied Shanghai during World War II and spent his childhood years in an internment camp. So human aggression and desire was very much his forte – and especially those moments when the fragile carapace of technological civilization cracks to reveal the primal instincts that lie beneath, just as it has been all over America and the Middle East in the last month.
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It was WL Webb, the literary editor of Guardian for nearly three decades, who called JG Ballard “the seer of Shepperton”. Webb, who visited the author at his home in suburban London to interview him in 1984, wanted readers to know that Ballard was the author of “magical fictions, games against time and death, which are the basis of all art and love”. And this “seer” soubriquet crystallized the notion of Ballard as an oracle. Indeed, it has become true that we are living in the world that Ballard imagined into existence, and Ballard himself was inclined to revel in it. As he told Robert Lowe in 1988: “I have the impression that a truly prophetic system was created very early in my life—from the Japanese occupation of China, from my years in the concentration camp—and that it has been realized in all the fiction I’ve written.”
In retrospect, this seems like clever self-mythologizing by a writer extremely attuned to his public image. His focus, he liked to say, was on the next five minutes, and to write about it he was very alert to the cultural environment of the present – especially when he left America. When Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan got his first big job in politics, as Republican governor of California in 1966, Ballard was fascinated, precisely because Reagan had been a movie star. “Watching his right-wing speeches, in which he mocked the debauched, welfare-spending, bureaucrat-infested state government, I saw a more gruff and ambitious figure, much closer to the brutal crime boss he played in the 1964 film, assassinshis last role in Hollywood”.
In one of the pieces collected in Exhibition of atrocitiesIn 1967’s “Why I Want to Shoot Ronald Reagan,” Ballard displayed the kinds of obscene psychosexual fantasies he saw encoded in such a populist figure. One of her more vanilla lines contained the seed of a prediction: “The deep analytics of the presidential contender can be expected to dominate the United States in the coming years.” Reagan would not run for president until 1975. Angela Carter later wrote, “In the sixties, Ballard was the only sane person in the entire Western world who predicted that the former movie actor would one day rise to the dizzying heights of the presidency.”
In 1977, his reputation as a visionary took off British Vogue to invite him to forecast “The Future of the Future” in a piece focused on technology. Ten years ago, Ballard’s daughter Bea, a television producer, noted how his description of the local media environment of the future foresaw YouTube. Ballard had identified home video and computers as important developments: “Together these will achieve what I consider the apotheosis of all late-twentieth-century human fantasies—the transformation of reality into a television studio in which we can simultaneously play the roles of audience, producer, and star.” He suggested that computers “will take over other functions, acting as main domo, financial keeper, confidant and marriage counselor. “Can you afford the Bahamas this year, honey? Yes… if you divorce your spouse.” (I have little doubt that Chat GPT recommended divorce.)
In the 21st century, his reputation for foresight has grown – continuing to predict the next five minutes as they unfold before us. The rise of populist nationalism in the UK suburbs? Head over to his latest published novel, Kingdom Come, himself inspired by the proliferation of flags around Kingston in 2006. Writer Toby Litt admitted to me that “when I first read Kingdom ComeI thought it was a little slack in the prophecy department. I could not see how anyone would practice for the display of St. George’s Crosses. I didn’t see the British falling for a charismatic, screen-ready fascist charlatan. Consumerism as a church was already a tired rope. But, as he had so often been before, Ballard was embarrassingly, terribly short on money. He never scorned the obvious and thus always discerned the relative.”
What drew Ballard’s attention to the US for his final proposal? He had been in love with the idea of the United States since childhood, when he fell for the American cars he saw in Shanghai and read copies of time magazine. He visited the country several times, trips which confirmed his interest, not in the real America, but in its image. “‘USA’ could be the title of a 24-hour-a-day virtual reality channel, broadcast on streets and shopping malls and, perhaps, in the White House itself,” he wrote in an introduction to his novel. Hello Americain which he imagined a president named Charles Manson “playing nuclear roulette in Las Vegas.”
He mentioned Donald Trump only once in his published works. In an article for this magazine, Ballard described a trip to Shanghai during which Chinese customs officials asked him if he was carrying any “good material,” a category which, he suggested, might include an autobiography of Donald Trump. But he was clear about the prospects of a cultural American president. In 1998 he said he thought “the human race is extremely susceptible to any master manipulator. I have noted elsewhere that messiahs usually emerge from deserts, and I expect the next Adolf Hitler or Mao to emerge from the deserts of the great shopping centers of North America and Europe. The first credit card, at best credit card, Buddha, at best Status.”
Bea Ballard offers the tantalizing possibility that the viewer may not be quite finished. “In May 1992, when I was working as a producer at the BBC, I was thinking about the next millennium and I thought it would be fascinating to do a project with my father in which he would give his predictions for the next century. We decided to make the series as a documentary-drama in the form of a series of news reports from 2030, my father’s role was the happy use of the library. filming for him illustrated reports I sat with him during a series of afternoon sessions where he outlined his predictions – recording each one on my tape recorder, I still have those tapes in my personal archive.
Should we be alarmed by Ballard’s lost novel? Are we in some kind of dark academic lineage in which BL notebooks are vatic texts? Better, perhaps, to think of them as an obsidian mirror. Ballard’s fiction is more often straight-faced and monologue, treating an extreme metaphor as deadly serious. It seems he had the same plan An immodest proposalas Swift’s nod to the title suggested: “Better to take it seriously – as if the enemy were as dangerous as Nazi Germany or the Stalinist SU, Not an ironic or ambiguous ending.”
The extreme metaphor has become very real. The Trumpian White House expresses the Ballardian view of America with crystal clarity. Here are humanity’s baser instincts celebrated through the most advanced weapons we can build. The secret of Ballard’s analytical and literary success was that he was a Freudian, convinced that humanity’s destructive desires were expressed through technologies such as the media, the computer, or the machine. of Freud Civilization and its discontents it was his touchstone, and death guides his muse. As the White House defies the civilized constraints of ethics, sensibility, and international law, and glories in ballistic missile barrages like a baby gleefully clapping its hands over the feces thrown from its bed, we are once again forced into Ballard’s world.
(Further reading: The apocalyptic art of JG Ballard)
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