The Mirage
INTRODUCTION BY M. JOHN HARRISON
Disaster fiction has as long a history as the anxieties it represents. For the British at the end of World War Two it was retrospectively concerned with loss of empire, loss of status, and, after five years of war, the sense of how quickly a comfortable life could be lost; but it also articulated a fear of further change. The pre-war middle classes were forced to confront new science, new technologies and a new world order. In a dozen or so years their landscape had changed irreversibly.
1951: a not very successful writer called John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris shortened his name, gave up trying to supply the American market with soft-boiled science fiction, and offered an entire generation a way of representing their new condition: after them, he promised, would come the deluge. This turned out to be a popular and curiously comforting narrative. The Day of the Triffids, an account of the defeat of humanity by implacable half-sentient vegetables, allowed a soft approach to the national sense of confusion and grief by expressing it metaphorically. The real decline was mourned in the fictional one, which simultaneously repressed and expressed it. Not everyone, however, saw change as a catastrophe.
In 1943, James Graham Ballard, adolescent son of an English textile chemist employed in the Shanghai International Settlement, had been interned by the Japanese. The Ballard family exchanged a life of comfort and stability – picnics, film premieres and fancy-dress parties – for the half-ruined buildings and barbed wire of the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Centre. Ballard observes in his autobiography Miracles of Life that his parents and their peers seemed to miss only the enormous amounts of alcohol they were used to consuming. In its absence they performed the plays of Noël Coward and ate the maggots in the daily rice. His sister was treated for dysentery. Towards the end of his stay malnutrition left ‘Shanghai Jim’ with skin infections and a prolapsed rectum. Yet he remembers the camp as ‘my last real childhood home, where I would spend the next two and a half largely happy years’. A few acres of rubble, smelling of sewage and ‘shared with a million mosquitoes’, became his site of instruction, its uncertainties in themselves enough of a promise. Years later, a writer in search of a centralising metaphor, he came to view post-war Britain as a similar zone of anxiety and freedom.
Trading on nostalgia and an appeal to male competence, The Day of the Triffids had quickly established a thriving subgenre of essentially political fiction, in which the appropriate response to the catastrophe was to begin re-establishing the past, often by starting an allotment. By contrast, J. G. Ballard dreamt forward. His stories became sites of metaphysical play and a kind of Swiftian satirical reversal later mimicked in the work of his admirers Martin Amis and Will Self. Nevertheless The Drought begins with all the assumptions of the traditional disaster: Earth’s oceans, coated with an accidentally generated polymer, have ceased to evaporate. Rainfall has failed, perhaps for the time being, perhaps forever. Civilisation, as you might predict, has fallen apart.
In a landscape closely resembling the shores of the Salton Sea, some remnants of humanity – viewed through the flattened affect of Dr Charles Ransom, the story’s central character, as if they were always in the distance – scuttle about trying to understand what a change like this might mean in terms of the built environment they relied upon not so long ago for psychic as well as physical support. Architect Richard Foster Lomax and his sister Miranda, expending the last of the city’s water via the lawn sprinklers and fountains in the grounds of their ‘glass and concrete folly’; Quilter, Lomax’s dwarf henchman, with his deformed skull and ‘instinct for failure’; Philip Jordan, the adolescent ‘starveling of the river ways, creating his own world out of the scraps and refuse of the twentieth century’; cool and reserved Catherine Austen, Early Ballardian Woman obsessed with the white lions in the failing zoo; the Reverend Howard Johnstone, head of the local militia and last normative figure in the community, nevertheless tempted to ‘accept the challenge and set off north, right into the centre of the drought’: the psychic projects, collective and individual, of these self-obsessed survivors proliferate and flower as garishly as the mutated sea-anemone in that other early masterwork of Ballard’s, ‘The Voices of Time’.
Meanwhile, Dr Ransom, born under ‘the sign of the crab … the sign of deserts’, his own desires shifting and uncertain in the harsh authorial light, favours any plan or structure, however contrary or ambiguous, that seems to ‘trap time’ in movement and colour, fixing it even as it dissipates. At points of maximum stress, the novel itself seems to become one of these Surrealist contraptions, relieving its internal tensions not through plot but via sudden gorgeous displays of imagery. Lions hunt fishermen through a deserted city; fishermen, slipping along the streets with their nets at the ready, fish for men; dead fish ‘like putrid jewels’ hang in the brackish water of a ‘drowned’ aquarium. The night fills with meaningless fireworks, the world is in flames. A black swan launches itself into the air, ‘burning cinders falling around it’. These symbols are not so much the record of a disaster as of the liberated contents of the unconscious.
It would be easy to interpret this novel as Ballard’s pataphysical reworking of The Tempest. Richard Lomax makes a satisfyingly neo-liberal Prospero. By page twenty-one, Philip Jordan has already been described as ‘the river’s last presiding Ariel’. Miranda, of course, is Miranda – though in this incarnation she’s clearly been unable to resist Quilter’s Caliban semiotics. But other appropriations abound: false Noahs, failed Crucifixions, flickering reiterations of Ulysses and Madame Sosostris and Tiresias the blind prophet. The river’s tent is broken. The waste land is in itself a shifting signifier, as much a mirage as a site of mirages. Both Quilter and Philip Jordan take a turn as the Ancient Mariner, and there are many, many albatrosses. In their endless recombination these symbols lose their significance; and as meaning itself thins out, so geography begins to lose its meaning too. As a boy, Ballard tells us in Empire of the Sun (one of his less official autobiographies), he was intrigued by the bidding conventions of the game of bridge, ‘a code within a code’. This paranoid-critical sense of one algorithm packed into another haunts his fiction. Everything – the shape of a salt dune, the arrangement of some elongated shadow at the photographer’s magic hour, the turn of a woman’s head, the intersection of two walls – seems to be decodable. Yet every image is so saturated with significance that, paradoxically, nothing can be made of it.
The drought at the heart of The Drought is cultural. Culture is withering. In the guise of rainfall, old social and political meanings run down to the sea and are decreasingly renewed. Where the land seemed fertile, its inhabitants can now admit that it is exhausted. ‘It seems’, Ransom says at one point, ‘that we have a knack of turning everything we touch into sand and dust. We’ve even sown the