“How the World Declared War on America”
Deciphering the angled cursive, written in biro, can take some concentration, so details emerge like drone strikes in the mind, detonating after a slight delay. “A backstory would describe the US imperial reach & attacks on other countries – its threats, use of force etc. The events that have brought a sense of despair to its lost former allies, & the decision to attack the US before it is too late.” In the notebook designated A, with an incongruously sparkly pink cover, the backstory is further fleshed out. “US has allies,” Ballard wrote, “an alliance of gangster dictators, corrupt royal houses, and the lumpen proles of filling station personnel etc.” Ballard imagined that economic aggression towards allies would feed into conflict: “The US insists on preferential empire-style trade agreements forcing its goods onto the rest of the world.”
It is an unnerving experience to encounter the notes for JG Ballard’s An Immodest Proposal, or How the World Declared War on America. They are handwritten in a series of spiral-bound, reporter’s notebooks, kept in the Ballard archives in the British Library. Dating from around 2005, the notes sketch out a book that remained unwritten at the time of Ballard’s death in 2009, a spectral ur-novel that would have been the final foray into fiction from one of the 20th century’s greatest speculative imaginations. It feels as if, 20 years on, its time has come.
By page 20 of this first notebook, the different ideas for plot points are drawn together into a coherent background narrative. “The US controls the entire Middle East, having put down a Saudi revolution and installed puppet regimes in Iran, Gulf States, Turkey and Egypt. US also has sympathetic regimes in Europe (UK Germany) despite rising unemployment and economic stagnation.” Reading these sentences, I felt exhilarated, and not a little freaked out. It’s not that it’s a perfect fit with the present – indeed, what the notes imagine is a story of psychological retaliation against an aggressive US government, something that has not happened. But small details kept leaping off the page. “US rule extends around 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 formed by war and its human effects: along with his family, Ballard was captured by the Japanese when they occupied Shanghai during the Second World War, and spent years of his childhood in an internment camp. So human aggression and desire very much were his purview – and particularly those moments when the fragile carapace of technological civilisation cracks to reveal the primal instincts lurking beneath, exactly as has happened across America and the Middle East in the last month.
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It was WL Webb, the literary editor of the Guardian for almost three decades, who dubbed JG Ballard the “seer of Shepperton”. Webb, who visited the author at his home in the London suburbs to interview him in 1984, wanted readers to know that Ballard was the author of “magic fictions, the games against time and death which are the ground of all art and love”. And this “seer” soubriquet crystallised the notion of Ballard as an oracle. Indeed, it has become a truism that we are living in the world Ballard imagined into being, and Ballard himself was prone to revel in it. As he told Robert Louit in 1988: “I have the impression that a truly prophetic system was set out very early in my life – from the Japanese occupation of China, from my years in the concentration camp – and that it’s realised itself in all the fiction I’ve written.”
In retrospect, that seems like canny self-mythologising from a writer unusually attuned to his own public image. His focus, he liked to say, was on the next five minutes, and to write about that he was highly alert to the cultural milieu of the present – especially when it emerged from America. When the Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan landed his first big job in politics, as Republican governor of California in 1966, Ballard was fascinated, precisely because Reagan had been a film star. “Watching his right-wing speeches, in which he castigated in sneering tones, the profligate, welfare-spending, bureaucrat-infested state government, I saw a more crude and ambitious figure, far closer to the brutal crime boss he played in the 1964 movie, The Killers, his last Hollywood role.”
In one of the pieces collected in The Atrocity Exhibition, 1967’s “Why I want to Fuck Ronald Reagan”, Ballard surfaced the kinds of obscene, psychosexual fantasies he saw coded into such a populist figure. One of its more vanilla lines contained the seed of a prediction: “The profound anality of the Presidential contender may be expected to dominate the United States in the coming years.” Reagan would not make a run for the presidential candidacy until 1975. Angela Carter later wrote: “back in the sixties, Ballard was the only sane person in the entire Western world who predicted the ex-movie actor would one day rise to the dizzying heights of the presidency”.
By 1977, his reputation as a visionary prompted British Vogue to invite him to prognosticate on “The Future of The Future” in a piece focused on technology. Ten years ago, Ballard’s daughter Bea, a television producer, pointed out how his description of the domestic media environment of the future had anticipated YouTube. Ballard had identified home video and computers as significant developments: “Together these will achieve what I take to be the apotheosis of all the fantasies of late twentieth-century man – the transformation of reality into a TV studio, in which we can simultaneously play out the roles of audience, producer and star.” He suggested that computers will “take over other functions, acting as major domo, keeper of finances, confidant and marriage counsellor. ‘Can you afford the Bahamas this year, dear? Yes… if you divorce your husband.’” (I have little doubt that Chat GPT has recommended divorces.)
In the 21st century, his reputation for foresight has been enhanced – continuing to anticipate the next five minutes as they unfold before us. The rise of populist nationalism in the suburbs of the UK? Head straight to his final published novel, Kingdom Come, itself inspired by the spread of flags around Kingston during 2006. The writer Toby Litt admitted to me that “when I first read Kingdom Come, I thought it was a little slack in the prophecy department. I couldn’t see how anyone would ever get exercised about the display of Crosses of St George. I didn’t see the British falling for a charismatic screen-ready fascist charlatan. Consumerism as church was already a tired trope. But, as he’d so often been before, Ballard was embarrassingly, terrifyingly on the money. He never disdained the obvious and so always discerned the imminent.”
What directed Ballard’s attention towards the US for his final proposal? He had been enamoured of the idea of the United States since a child, when he fell for the American cars that 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. “‘U.S.A.’ might well be the title of a 24 hours a day virtual reality channel, broadcast into the streets and shopping malls and, perhaps, the White House itself,” he wrote in an introduction to his novel Hello America, in which he imagined a president called Charles Manson “playing nuclear roulette in Las Vegas”.
He mentioned Donald Trump only once in his published works. In a piece for this magazine, Ballard described a trip to Shanghai during which Chinese customs officials asked if he was carrying any “salacious materials”, a category which, he suggested, might include a Donald Trump autobiography. But he was explicit about the prospects of a cultish American president. In 1998 he said he thought “the human race extremely vulnerable to any master-manipulator. I’ve remarked elsewhere that messiahs usually emerge from deserts, and I expect the next Adolf Hitler or Mao to emerge from the wilderness of the vast North American and European shopping malls. The first credit card Buddha, at its best, or, at its worst, the first credit card Stalin.”
Bea Ballard offers the tantalising possibility that the seer may not quite be 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 about the next century. We decided we would do the series as drama-documentary in the form of a series of news reports from the Year 2030. My father was happy to take on the role of reporter, and we would use news and library footage to illustrate the reports. I sat with him over a series of afternoon sessions where he outlined his predictions – recording each one with my tape recorder. I still have those tapes in my personal archive – a trove of treasure.”
Should we be alarmed by Ballard’s lost novel? Are we inside some kind of dark academia plot-line, in which the BL notebooks are vatic texts? Best, perhaps, to think of them as an obsidian mirror. Ballard’s fiction is most frequently straight-faced and monological, treating an extreme metaphor as deadly serious. It seems that he had the same plan for An Immodest Proposal, as the nod to Swift in the title suggested: “Best to deal it seriously – as if the enemy was as dangerous as Nazi Germany or the Stalinist S.U. Not an ironic or ambiguous ending.”
The extreme metaphor has become all too real. The Trumpian White House expresses the Ballardian view of America with a crystalline clarity. Here are humanity’s basest instincts celebrated via the most advanced weaponry we can build. The secret to Ballard’s analytical and literary success was that he was a Freudian, convinced that mankind’s destructive urges expressed themselves through technologies such as the media, computers, or the car. Freud’s Civilisation and its Discontents was his touchstone, and the death drive his muse. As the White House defies the civilised constraints of ethics, empathy and international law, and glories in barrages of ballistic missiles like an infant clapping gleefully at the faeces hurled from its cot, we are forced once more into Ballard’s world.
[Further reading: JG Ballard’s apocalyptic art]
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