Time, Memory and Inner Space

By JG Ballard

The Woman Journalist Magazine

1963

How far do the landscapes of one's childhood, as much as its emotional experiences, provide an
inescapable background to all one's imaginative writing? Certainly my own earliest memories are of
Shanghai during the annual long summer of floods, when the streets of the city were two or three
feet deep in a brown silt-laden water, and where the surrounding countryside, in the center of the
flood-table of the Yangtze, was an almost continuous mirror of drowned paddy fields and irrigation
canals stirring sluggishly in the hot sunlight. On reflection it seems to me that the image of an
immense half-submerged city overgrown by tropical vegetation, which forms the centerpiece of The
Drowned World, is in some way a fusion of my childhood memories of Shanghai and those of my
last 10 years in London.

One of the subjects of the novel is the journey of return made by the principal characters from the
20th century back into the paradisal sun-filled world of a second Triassic age, and their gradually
mounting awareness of the ambivalent motives propelling them into the emerging past. They realize
that the uterine sea around them, the dark womb of the ocean mother, is as much the graveyard of
their own individuality as it is the source of their lives, and perhaps their fears reflect my own
uneasiness in reenacting the experiences of childhood and attempting to explore such dangerous
ground.

Among the characteristic fauna of the Triassic age were the crocodiles and alligators, amphibian
creatures at home in both the aquatic and terrestrial worlds, who symbolize for the hero of the novel
the submerged dangers of his quest. Even now I can vividly remember the enormous ancient
alligator housed in a narrow concrete pit, half-filled with cigarette packets and ice-cream cartons in
the reptile house at the Shanghai Zoo, who seemed to have been jerked forward reluctantly, so many
tens of millions of years into the 20th century.

In many respects this fusion of past and present experiences, and of such disparate elements as the
modern office buildings of central London and an alligator in a Chinese zoo, resembles the
mechanisms by which dreams are constructed, and perhaps the great value of fantasy as a literary
form is its ability to bring together apparently unconnected and dissimilar ideas. To a large extent all
fantasy serves this purpose, but I believe that speculative fantasy, as I prefer to call the more serious
fringe of science fiction, is an especially potent method of using one's imagination to construct a
paradoxical universe where dream and reality become fused together, each retaining its own
distinctive quality and yet in some way assuming the role of its opposite, and where by an
undeniable logic black simultaneously becomes white.

Without in any way suggesting that the act of writing is a form of creative self-analysis, I feel that
the writer of fantasy has a marked tendency to select images and ideas which directly reflect the
internal landscapes of his mind, and the reader of fantasy must interpret them on this level,
distinguishing between the manifest content, which may seem obscure, meaningless or nightmarish,
and the latent content, the private vocabulary of symbols drawn by the narrative from the writer's
mind. The dream worlds, synthetic landscapes and plasticity of visual forms invented by the writer
of fantasy are external equivalents of the inner world of the psyche, and because these symbols take
their impetus from the most formative and confused periods of our lives they are often time-
sculptures of terrifying ambiguity.

This zone I think of as "inner space", the internal landscape of tomorrow that is a transmuted image
of the past, and one of the most fruitful areas for the imaginative writer. It is particularly rich in
visual symbols, and I feel that this type of speculative fantasy plays a role very similar to that of
surrealism in the graphic arts. The painters de Chirico, Dali and Max Ernst, among others, are in a
sense the iconographers of inner space, all during their most creative periods concerned with the
discovery of images in which internal and external reality meet and fuse. Dali, regrettably, is now in
total critical eclipse, but his paintings, with their soft watches and minatory luminous beaches, are
of almost magical potency, suffused by that curious ambivalence that one can see elsewhere only on
the serpentine faces in the paintings of Leonardo.

It is a curious thing that the landscapes of these painters, and of Dali in particular, are often referred
to as dream-like, when in fact they must bear no resemblance to the vast majority of dreams, which
in general take place within confined indoor settings, a cross between Kafka and Mrs Dale's Diary,
and where fantastic images, such as singing flowers or sonic sculpture, appear as infrequently as
they do in reality. This false identification, and the awareness that the landscapes and themes are
reflections of some interior reality within our minds, is a pointer to the importance of speculative
fantasy in the century of Hiroshima and Cape Canaveral.

I define Inner Space as an imaginary realm in which on the one hand the outer world of reality, and
on the other the inner world of the mind meet and merge. Now, in the landscapes of the surrealist
painters, for example, one sees the regions of Inner Space; and increasingly I believe that we will
encounter in film and literature scenes which are neither solely realistic nor fantastic. In a sense, it
will be a movement in the interzone between both spheres. (1968)

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has
sprung the intact reality of the 20th century. What the writers of modern science fiction invent
today, you and I will do tomorrow -- or, more exactly, in about 10 years' time, though the gap is
narrowing. Science fiction is the most important fiction that has been written for the last 100 years.
The compassion, imagination, lucidity and vision of H.G. Wells and his successors, and above all
their grasp of the real identity of the 20th century, dwarf the alienated and introverted fantasies of
James Joyce, Eliot and the writers of the so-called Modern Movement, a 19th century offshoot of
bourgeois rejection. Given its subject matter, its eager acceptance of naiveté, optimism and
possibility, the role and importance of science fiction can only increase. I believe that the reading of
science fiction should be compulsory. Fortunately, compulsion will not be necessary, as more and
more people are reading it voluntarily. Even the worst science fiction is better -- using as the
yardstick of merit the mere survival of its readers and their imaginations -- than the best
conventional fiction. The future is a better key to the present than the past.

It is now some 15 years since the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, a powerful and original writer in his
own right, remarked that the science fiction magazines produced in the suburbs of Los Angeles
contained far more imagination and meaning than anything he could find in the literary periodicals
of the day. Subsequent events have proved Paolozzi's sharp judgment correct in every respect.
(1971)
The kind of imagination that now manifests itself in science fiction is not something new. Homer,
Shakespeare and Milton all invented new worlds to comment on this one. The split of science
fiction into a separate and somewhat disreputable genre is a recent development. It is connected to
the near disappearance of dramatic and philosophical poetry and the slow shrinking of the
traditional novel as it concerns more and more exclusively with the nuances of human relationships.
Among those areas neglected by the traditional novel are, above all, the dynamics of human
societies [the traditional novel tends to depict society as static], and man's place in the universe.
However crudely or naively, science fiction at least attempts to place a philosophical and
metaphysical frame around the most important events within our lives and consciousness. If I make
this general defense of science fiction it is, obviously, because my own career as a writer has been
involved with it for almost 20 years. From the very start, when I first turned to science fiction, I was
convinced that the future was a better key to the present than the past. At the time, however, I was
dissatisfied with science fiction's obsession with its two principal themes - outer space and the far
future. As much for emblematic purposes as any theoretical or programmatic ones, I christened the
new terrain I wished to explore inner space, that psychological domain [manifest, for example, in
surrealist painting] where the inner world of the mind and the outer world of reality meet and fuse.
(1974)

I regard myself as a very emotional person in my ordinary life. And I regard myself as a very
emotional writer. I write out of what I feel to be a sense of great urgency and commitment. I'm
certainly not a political writer, but I feel a great sense of urgency... When people say to me, ‘You're
very cold and clinical,’ I always find that strange; they may be confused. I use the language of an
anatomist. It's rather like doing a post-mortem on a child who's been raped. The anatomist's post-
mortem is no less exact, he itemizes things no less clearly, for the rage and outrage he feels. (1975)

Sometimes he wondered what zone of transit he himself was entering, sure that his own withdrawl
was symptomatic not of a dormant schizophrenia, but of a careful preparation for a radically new
environment, with its own internal landscape and logic, where old categories of thought would
merely be an encumberance.
p. 14

Over the mantelpiece was a huge painting by the early 20th-century Surrealist, Delvaux, in which
ashen-faced women danced naked to the waist with dandified skeletons in tuxedos against a spectral
bone-like landscape. On another wall one of Max Ernst’s self-devouring phantasmagoric jungles
screamed silently to itself, like the sump of some insane unconscious.
p. 29

Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed
material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient
taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs… Each one of us is as old as the entire
biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory.
The Drowned World, J.G. Ballard, Millennium 1999, p. 41.