rival floors. The violence frees everyone's most deriant and degenerate impulses, “as if encouraged by the secret logic of the high-rise.”

Never does a hero emerge in these books to restore order. Instead, the characters find their new lives thrilling, full of possibility. These are perverse novels of self-discovery, illustrating what Ballard calls “the most terrifying casualty of the century: the death of affect.” The characters run in emotional neutral, connecting with each other only through technology, through abstraction.

Even sex is a conceptual act for the disembodied. Characters in a Ballard fiction often seem dissociated from their bodies, spectators of their own actions, unaware of what motivates them. They can be startled by their own image in a mirror. The narrator in Crash, a “Mr. Ballard,” speaks of “the unreality of my own skin and bones.”

More real in this artificial world are images. Vaughan pursues them obsessively in Crash, with his trunk full of film and photo equipment. He documents crash casualties, the grimaces of nurses, the “mysterious eroticism of wounds.” This makes the spectacle of wounding and death hyperreal—manipulable, fragmentable, replayable. In his apartment, decorated with the photos of crash victims, he and “Ballard” watch slow-motion footage of test collisions. It is his dream to die in a collision—with the film star Elizabeth Taylor. Specifically, to die at the moment of her orgasm. With a telephoto lens, Vaughan stalks the film actress, creating larger-than-life images of her body parts. Photos of eyebrow and cleavage join him on the front seat, as he rehearses their deaths. Perhaps the image of Elizabeth Taylor is another system whose “logic” he can understand.

THE LANDSCAPE OF THE BODY

Ballard's characters are personalities in retreat who peer through their own eyes as through a protective screen. They are the by-products of the latent and blatant violence that surrounds the new technologies. “Geometry” is often a metaphor these characters apply to another's body or face, as though a gridlike afterimage had burned the retina while they watched TVs, their cubed rooms, or the ugly vista beyond the windshield.

This point of view penetrates Ballard's urban nightmare “trilogy”: Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1973), and High-Rise (1975), as well as the hard-to-find collection of “condensed novels,” The Atrocity Exhibition (1970). In Concrete Island, architect Robert Maitland crashes his Jaguar down into the desolate triangle created by looping highway interchanges. He realizes that he might have devised this accident, as though—unknown to him—his body had taken the wheel. He is marooned—unable to signal drivers, unable to climb the embankments after injuring a leg—but keeps making choices that limit his chances for rescue. “Losing interest in his own body,” he feels after several days that he is the island. No wonder he can't leave. He'll have to find a way back inside himself first.

We shuddered through some crisis of the body in the '70s, when these books were written. But perhaps it was a crisis of the real, the authentic, as modernism died and the postmodern vocabulary of appropriation, simulation, and “the loss of the real” hadn't yet taken shape. Many artists retreated to their bodies in extremist actions that allowed them to feel what the artist/writer Mary Kelly has called “the authenticating imprint of pain.”

They were like the Ballard hero, whose bizarre and antisocial behavior allows him to enlarge his consciousness. Probably the most notorious (while not the most extreme) body artist was Chris Burden, who, for example, had someone shoot him in the arm with a rifle in 1971—as a performance. Others (sometimes literally) wallowed in taboos that frightened and disgusted their audiences. Performances by California artist Paul McCarthy included such acts as vomiting onstage, walking barefoot through broken glass, and fucking a pile of raw meat. “It is my belief that our culture has lost a true perception of existence. It is veiled,” McCarthy said in 1979. “We are only fumbling in what we perceive to be reality. For the most part, we do not know we are alive.”

BODY DOUBLE

Ballard explores the eerie inner space of the psyche because he believes in “the death of outer space.” The real challenge of the Final Frontier is either to understand its “logic” or to endure its mystery.

In a beautiful and relatively recent short story, “Myths of the Near Future,” dense vegetation has grown up around the rusted gantries at an abandoned Cape Kennedy. The Ballard hero—here called Sheppard (for Alan Shepard?)—suffers the first symptoms of “space sickness,” an illness spreading exponentially through the population. During the terminal stages, victims begin to believe they are former astronauts. Sheppard is in Florida to find his wife, already dead from the disease, and bring her back to life by “constructing a metaphor.”

He has realized that the key is time travel, not space travel. “Could it be,” he wonders, “that traveling into outer space, even thinking about and watching it on television, was a forced evolutionary step with unforeseen consequences, the eating of a very special kind of forbidden fruit? Perhaps, for the central nervous system, space was not a linear structure at all, but a model for an advanced condition of time, a metaphor for eternity which they were wrong to try to grasp. …”

Ballard surrounds Sheppard with the strangely romantic images of a deserted present—like abandoned supermarkets and drained swimming pools littered with cracked sunglasses. Sheppard is trying to build his conceptual time machine from pornographic photos, reproductions of surrealist paintings, and the geometry of the drained pools. Perhaps he thinks that if he identifies enough with his unconscious mind, he will be able to slip out of his body into another dimension.

O FLAT NEW WORLD

Only imagination floats us free of the deadly grid that becomes our life. The future will be boring, Ballard tells his interviewers in an issue of Re/Search devoted to his work. This oversized journal is an excellent introduction, with interviews, selections from his most provocative fiction, and hard-to-get material like the “new novels”—type collages of meaningless text. The complex Ballard we glimpse in Re/Search organized an exhibition of crashed cars in 1970 (“each of these sculptures is a memorial to a unique collision between man and his technology”); shows visitors his two “Bibles,” the Warren Commission Report and a medical textbook on crash injuries; and admits that he worried about his children crossing the street all through the writing of Crash. He had his own traffic accident after that novel was completed, and Re/Search includes photos of the dented car.

Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930 to British parents. In that culture no one could ignore the lurid surrealism of everyday life or the insistent fact of death. Eleven-year-old Jim, in the fictional Empire of the Sun, is familiar with public executions and the “regatta of corpses” always afloat on the Yangtze River. He, like the young Ballard, ends up in a Japanese detention camp. But Jim—unlike Ballard—endures the war separated from his parents. For a while, Jim lives in the abandoned houses of those Europeans already in Japanese hands, foraging for cocktail biscuits, gazing at the drained swimming pools. It's clear where some of Ballard's concerns originate. Young Jim sees the flash of the atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki. He feels that his soul has died while his body survives “and his sense of being apart from himself remained.”

Since 1960, Ballard has lived in Shepperton, a London suburb, a “psychic battleground,” he assures the interviewers from Re/Search. The future will be “a vast conforming suburb of the soul.” This is the curious flattening effect of mass culture, true both literally and metaphorically. While suburbs expand ever farther into the countryside, gentrification suburbanizes the urban. On the TVs in every home, every image is of equal weight: Johnny Carson, Afghanistan, Chevrolet. A relentless and terrible equality is at work. Stars equal wars in the new collective unconscious.

Ballard predicted in 1967 that ex-actor Ronald Reagan would win the role of President, fulfilling the “logic” of a media society. “Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan” (included in The Atrocity Exhibition) reads like a lab report, which suggests, I suppose, that some mass psychosis would elect this man. The narrator, apparently a doctor, measures the psychosexual response to Reagan among psychiatric patients. He discovers, for example, “the masturbatory nature of the Presidential contender's posture” and “the marked fascination exercised by … [his] hair style.” Reagan is pure image.

Most astonishing are the obscene references to the President's colon written almost two decades before this section of his anatomy made news. Ballard explains with clinical dispassion, “The profound anality of the Presidential contender may be expected to dominate the United States in the coming years.”

“I WILL NEVER WASH THIS HAND AGAIN”

We wish to consume stars, those images made of light. They astonish us with their physical bodies, less real to us than their images. We can hardly believe they are alive. We grow hysterical in the physical presence of such mythological beings, whose touch makes any mere object an absurd relic. From the March 20, 1986, Daily News: “Whoever stole the toilet seat from the Riverwest Theater lounge—because they believed Elizabeth Taylor sat on it the other night—made off with a piece of celebrity memorabilia that some collectors will actually pay for.” Whoever stole it does not believe a real person used it.

Again and again in both Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition, the “real people” so tentatively attached to their own bodies gaze with fascinated reverence at the images of favored celebrities. No longer human, these images have special power as icons to enter the subconscious mind. Once inside, they capture the imagination.

The death of an icon like John F. Kennedy becomes excruciating to resolve. His image—and he was, like Ronald Reagan, just an image—lives on in the unconscious mind, while consciously we know he is gone. Ballard's Kennedy fixation—and ours—confirms this. Ballard thinks the assassination was the cathartic moment that made the rest of the '60s possible. The central character in The Atrocity Exhibition is a doctor who has had a nervous breakdown after witnessing (on TV) the mindless atrocities of Vietnam, the Congo, and Dealey Plaza. This character, Ballard says perversely (in Re/Search), would assassinate Kennedy again, but in a way that makes sense.

In homage to Kennedy, Vaughan drives an aging Lincoln Continental, same model as the one in which the president died. Vaughan believes that Elizabeth Taylor too “could die in a unique vehicle collision, one that would transform all our dreams and fantasies,” as did the Kennedy assassination. These are desperate characters who inhabit the dying culture of white men.

THE CELEBRITY AS TIME TRAVELER

Technology allows the world to watch—in endless replay—the spectacular last moments of the shuttle astronauts. This explosion transformed them from space travelers to time travelers.

Technology allows the characters in Crash to simulate the traffic deaths of the famous. Indefinitely. Those who exist as images live in that universe Sheppard describes in “Myths of the Near Future”: “Everything that's ever happened, all the events that will ever happen, are taking place together. We can die, and yet still live, at the same time. Our sense of our own identity, the stream of things going on around us, are a kind of optical illusion.” The film star Elizabeth Taylor now exists simultaneously as a 20-, 30-, 40-year-old, depending on what film we see. To those of us who will never meet her, she is no more real or unreal onscreen at any age than in the tabloid reports of her latest romance.

We can no longer distinguish the real from the image. In The Unlimited Dream Company (1979), there is no need to. Blake crashes a light aircraft into the Thames at Shepperton. As he is drowning, he sees a vision. He swims ashore. Through much of the book, he remains uncertain about whether he is dead or alive. He is both. With the tremendous power he suddenly has over the residents of Shepperton, he decides he will save them from their conventional lives. Their bodies will merge with his. He consumes them as Vaughan hoped to consume the film actress.

As the transformation begins, exotic birds and flowers appear in the suburban landscape of shopping malls and multistory parking lots. “Already I was convinced that there was no evil, and that even the most plainly evil impulses were merely crude attempts to accept the demands of a higher realm that existed within each of us. By accepting these perversions and obsessions I was opening the gates into the real world, where we would all fly together, transform ourselves at will into the fish and the birds, the flowers and the dust, unite ourselves once more within the great commonwealth of nature.” In this fiction at last, people slip from their bodies. Here the animate will merge with the inanimate, the real with the image, the living with the dead.

They will move through time among their many selves.

“NASA Divers Sight Astronaut Cabin; Dead Are Aboard.”

—New York Times headline March 10, 1986