The present [essay] has grown out of my conviction that there are areas of modern or postmodern art that have been inspired by a vision or ethos similar to that which animates certain science fiction works. Robert Smithson, a minimal sculptor who was engaged from the late 1960s and until his death in 1973 in the creation of earthworks, reveals in his art and writing a profound affinity with the kind of vision which informs the writing of J.G. Ballard a writer associated with the New Wave science fiction of the 1960s. Yet—it must be said—my primary aim is not simply to compare the art works of the one with the fiction of the other. I am more concerned with the confluence of minds and visions; consequently, Smithson's writings figure more prominently in this essay than the physical art works. However, I will also trace the evolution of their aesthetic systems as corollaries to their vision. In this respect, Smithson's sculptures (and, for that matter, the forms of Ballard's fiction) constitute an indispensable element, as we shall see, in a dialectic which subsumes both vision and aesthetic.

What follows does not constitute an argument for a “science fiction art” in the making. As a literary genre science fiction has had its share of pictorial representation in all those bug-eyed aliens, spaceships and cities of the future found on magazine and paperback covers. My concern, though, is with an aesthetic which would transcend the illustrative framework of the genre and establish complementary relations with it. A case for such an aesthetic is implicitly suggested in the first paragraph of Robert Smithson's first major published article, “Entropy and the New Monuments” (1966). Smithson argues that “many architectural concepts found in science-fiction have nothing to do with science or fiction, instead they suggest a new kind of monumentality which has much in common with the aims of some of today's artists.”¹ The statement follows a quotation out of a practically unreadable science fiction novel of the 1930s, The Time Stream by John Taine (Eric Temple Bell),² describing a view of thousands of “broad, low pillars” stretched in long parallel avenues over a vast desert. These “monuments” are appropriated by Smithson for the purpose of suggesting the aims of minimal artists such as Robert Morris or Donald Judd. These aims have little to do with the original sense affixed to the monuments in the novel. Here as well as in most other borrowings from science fiction, Smithson does not look so much for a “story”—or, to use his words, for the “‘values’ of the naturalistic ‘literary’ novel”—but for concepts and images that would trigger ideas related to his aesthetic conception.

Yet Smithson's contention that architectural conceptions such as those embodied in the quoted passage have “nothing to do with science or fiction” should not be taken wholly at face value; at least not in terms of his own conception of the “new monuments” expounded in this article. It is not that his essay is so much about science fiction (although it abounds in science fiction references, including a long passage devoted to science fiction movies); but it does explore ideas that appear to underlie much of science fiction in their insistent references to time and entropy. A key concept in Smithson's thought and aesthetic, entropy is a measure of the amount of energy lost (or rendered unavailable) when energy is transformed from one state to another. According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, in the universe this unavailable energy always tends towards a maximum. The implication is that everything in the universe is running down as energy is dispersed in a more random manner. Smithson views the minimal art made by the artists discussed in his essay as a way of meeting entropy head-on by obliterating any sense of “time as decay” and thus of entropy (elsewhere Smithson appears to concur with the view that “entropy is the cause of time in man”³). If the future carries the inevitable stamp of decay, then those works would “cause us to forget the future.”

Instead of being made of natural materials, such as marble, granite, or other kinds of rock, the new monuments are made of artificial materials, plastic, chrome and electric light. They are built not for the ages but against the ages. They are involved in a systematic reduction of time down to fractions of seconds, rather than in representing the long spaces of centuries. Both past and future are placed in an objective present … A million years is contained in a second …⁴

In this largely symbolic fight “against entropy,” Smithson upholds the instant—“inorganic time”—as against human time (history and evolution). Such a temporal orientation is attained by an art of “monumental inaction” whose forms, exhibiting “flat surfaces, the banal and empty, the cool, blank after blank,”⁵ embody a minimal energy condition or what Smithson refers to as “nullification.”

The frame of reference Smithson applies to minimal art in this essay hardly fits the ideal of formal clarity free of content and context to which some of its adherents have subscribed. Indeed, Smithson's own early minimal pieces of the mid 1960's—sculptures such as Alogon # 1 (1966) or Gyrostasis (1968)—already exhibit some deviations from the canon of minimal art. Theirs are not the cool, balanced and pure, content-free forms of minimal art, but intricate mirror plays or tapering progressions of geometric shapes implying a sense of openness and irreducibility or, in Lawrence Alloway's words, a “sense of collapsing systems.”⁶ Such a sense also underlies the preoccupation with time and entropy found in “Entropy and the New Monuments.” Smithson's contention that minimal artists are motivated by the awareness of an “ultimate collapse of both mechanical and electrical technology” foreshadows his future concern with architectural or environmental sculpture as an element in a new landscape embodying these concepts. Yet, I should add, in this essay Smithson already looks outside the gallery to perceive around him an “architecture of entropy” evoked by the “cold glass boxes” of modern commercial buildings or, better, by the “infinite number of housing developments.” This architecture may inspire, Smithson contends, the art of immobility and emptiness of an artist such as Robert Morris. But more significantly in terms of his future thought, this urban sprawl comes to represent for him an entropic condition of sameness and agglomeration leading to chaos and dilapidation. The denial of entropy Smithson perceives in minimal art is only the observe of Smithson's own overwhelming sense of decay which, already at this point, is perceived by him on a cosmic scale. Thus the concept of entropy tends to signify for him—and this is the vision haunting him rather than the abstract scientific equation—an “ultimate future (when) the whole universe will burn out and be transformed into an all-encompassing sameness”⁷ (what is often referred to as the “heat death of the universe”). Similarly, the conception of time as an interval rather than a duration leads to the perception of a “hidden infinity” which later becomes identified in his mind with geological or cosmic time.

While the thought or vision informing Smithson's essay may not, perhaps, be the exclusive domain of science fiction, it does appear to be uniquely attuned to the cultural and scientific orientation underlying science fiction as a relatively novel form of fictional representation. Exploring science fiction from this perspective, Robert Scholes discerns in it the reflection of a revolution in man's conception of himself, brought about by a variety of scientific advances such as the theories of evolution, relativity, gestalt psychology and cybernetics. This revolution has broadened man's sense of time, enabling him to perceive historical time as a fragment of the grander frame of reference of human time, “which is again a tiny fragment of geologic time, which is itself only a bit of cosmic time.”⁸ The novel as a literary form exemplifying an age conscious of history as a shaping force has thus been superseded, according to Scholes, by a form of speculative fiction (Scholes names it “structural fabulation”). Such a fiction embodies an “awareness of the universe as a system of systems, a structure of structures,” and views human existence as a “random happening in a world which is orderly in its laws but without plan or purpose.”⁹ Generalized and all-inclusive though this programme for the “fiction of the future” might be, it is helpful in setting up J.G. Ballard as an apt subject for comparison with Robert Smithson. Other science fiction writers may also fit the mark; but it is Ballard who, during the period under consideration (roughly the 1960s), provides a sustained pursuance of this vision in terms of both the content and form of his fiction.

Ballard's underlying concern, like Smithson's, is with entropy and time. He has been called a “poet of death.”¹⁰ I would see him rather as a poet of decay. Entropy, though not explicitly referred to as in Smithson's writings, is embodied in a compelling vision of stagnation, decline and dilapidation. A running thread thoughout his fiction is the sense of failure and ultimate collapse of technological society and the betrayal of humanity by the idea of scientific progress. In the late 1950s and early 1960s this vision attains its most haunting expression in the evocation of megalithic cities on the decline. In “Chronopolis” (1960) the city forms an enormous ring of decaying suburban sprawl around a vast dead centre. “Build Up” (differently entitled “The Concentration City,” 1957) is a somewhat Borgesian conceit concerning a city-universe infinitely extending in all directions, where “free space” is an unknown concept. Dilapidation in this vast system is expressed by dispersed local disturbances such as huge cave-ins or “black areas” (“a million cubic miles have gone back to jungle”). “Billenium” (1961),¹¹ the quintessential overpopulation story, presents an ironic view of a world on a downward slope and heading towards total chaos. In later stories Ballard unfolds visions of accumulating junk and consumer waste around suburban areas: “The areas on either side of the expressway were wasteland, continuous junkyard filled with cars and trucks, washing machines and refrigerators, all perfectly workable but jettisoned by the economic pressure of the succeeding waves of discarded models …” (“The Subliminal Man,” 1963).

The “entropic” consciousness at work in all those stories is typified by an unchecked accumulation of things—objects, houses, people—leading to mounting chaos and randomness within the system and finally resulting in an “all-encompassing sameness,” to use Smithson's phrase. Smithson indeed offers a similar vision of discount centres near the super highways surrounding the city, inside which there are “maze-like counters with piles of neatly stacked merchandise; rank on rank it goes into a consumer oblivion.”¹² Similarly, the houses of suburbia “fall back into sprawling babels of limbos … An immense negative entity of formlessness displaces the centre which is the city and swamps the country.”¹³ Such qualities of formlessness, fragmentation and swallowed up boundaries also govern Ballard's disaster novels and stories. These are apocalyptic visions of disturbances in the eco-system resulting in a leveling down of civilization and its trappings into a boundless wasteland. It may be a “wind from nowhere,” in a novel bearing such title (1962), which literally levels all human habitation, burying the world beneath a layer of rubble and topsoil. In The Drowned World (1962), freak solar storms turn the earth into a vast tropical zone in which large areas, including all centres of civilization, are submerged under water and have become wastelands of stagnant swamps and lagoons, enveloped by tangles of plant forms, while areas that formerly were seas are now deserts of silt and salt flats. The disappearance of boundaries between land and water makes for one of the dominant images of the 1964 novel The Burning World (British title: The Drought). A long drought has turned all land areas into dry wastelands of parched earth and sand (sand is another prominent leveller in Ballard's fiction). The seashore now forms a “dune limbo,” miles of salt-dunes and pools of brine: “Nowhere was there a defined margin between the shore and sea, and the endless shallows formed the only dividing zone, land and water both submerged in this gray liquid limbo.”¹⁴

The desert or wasteland is the reigning paradigm for the entropic condition. Desert consciousness ranges in Smithson's thought between the “concrete deserts” of cities and suburban sprawl to the deserts of the Southwest in which he and other artists such as Michael Heizer and Walter DeMaria have actually worked. For Smithson—as for Ballard—the desert or wasteland is a zone of fragmentation, lack of differentiation and boundlessness. Perhaps the most intense evocation of what the desert comes to represent for Smithson is to be found in one of his “travelogue” essays, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” (1967), describing a day trip taken around construction sites—bridge, pumping derrick, parking lot, etc.—along the Passaic River. One of those sites or “monuments” is referred to as “a sand box or a model desert.”

Under the dead light of the Passaic afternoon the desert became a map of infinite disintegration and forgetfulness. This monument of minute particles … suggested the sullen dissolution of entire continents, the drying up of oceans … all that existed were millions of grains of sand, a vast deposit of bones and stones pulverized into dust.¹⁵

But Smithson's desert consciousness is not merely a reflection of his awareness of the fundamental properties of the world surrounding him (although such an awareness is certainly part of his intellectual make-up and harks back to his childhood interest in natural history). It also signifies an aesthetic which has been consistently pursued by him since his early minimal work. Minimal aesthetics call for an art devoid of any personal expression denoting the presence of the artist in his work. Smithson, on the contrary, asserts himself as a distinct voice both in his sculpture and, more persuasively, as a writer. Writing about other minimalists (“Entropy and the New Monuments”), he evinces from their work a broad frame of reference encompassing, as seen before, ideas of time and entropy and an overwhelming sense of the emptiness at the heart of existence. In the same manner, he charges with specific personal meaning his perceptions of science fiction movies, suburban architecture or industrial “monuments.” Thus art comes to mean for him not only art-making but also an act of perception (“A great artist can make art by simply casting a glance”¹⁶). Placing art in the gallery as an “art object” means separating it from its conceptual frame of reference, severing it from a temporal process governed by the artist's perception. The only way, Smithson feels, an artist can resist this “convenient fiction” of art as an isolated object with a beginning and an end (a fiction depriving him of a continuous presence in his own art) is by a willed introduction of time and process into the art work. Only then will the artist (the perceiving mind) and the art work be placed within a perspective that distends or, rather, breaks up the time and space boundaries imposed by the gallery. It is only fitting that for Smithson, with his predilection for natural history, time and process are consistent with his perception of the earth as a “map undergoing disruption” whose layers and “levels of sedimentation” make one aware of the “millions and millions of years of ‘geologic time’.”¹⁷ As we shall find out, such a vision underlies his manipulation of the “raw matter of the earth” in his Non-Sites and earthworks.

It is in terms of this programme that Smithson's desert consciousness attains its full significance. As a physical locale the desert epitomizes the condition under which the fragmentation or “pulverization” of matter is seen in all its “primal grandeur.” But further than that, the “desert is less “nature” than a concept, a place that swallows up boundaries.”¹⁸ In “A Sedimentation of the Mind; Earth Projects” (1968) Smithson expounds a dialectic fundamental to his art, elsewhere referred to as a “bipolar rhythm between mind and matter.”¹⁹

One's mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing, and conceptual crystallizations break apart into deposits of gritty reason.²⁰

In the light of this dialectic, the desert as concept implies boundless fragmentation infinitely extending in space and time and in the artist's mind. The engulfment of the artist by this “desert” endows the dialectic of mind and matter with the attributes of the primary process. Smithson appropriates Anton Ehrenzweig's term “dedifferentiation” to describe this suspension of boundaries between the “self and the non self,”²¹ relating it to Freud's notion of the “oceanic” state (in Freud's words, the “limitless extension and oneness with the universe”²²). Art in this sense does not involve the dreaded Kantian things-in-themselves; it is rather a system of relationships between undifferentiated materials, containers and sets of references. This is the idea behind Smithson's Non-Sites. On his excursions to certain outdoor sites—quarries, mines, derelict man-made structures—Smithson collected stones, slate, bits of found objects. Those were placed in the gallery in heaps or containers (their shapes often reflecting some quality of the original site), accompanied by documentary photographs and maps of the site. The Non-Site is a way of physically containing the disruption of the site, says Smithson. “The container is in a sense a fragment itself, something that could be called a three-dimensional map … it actually exists as a fragment of a greater fragmentation. It is a three-dimensional perspective that has broken away from the whole, while containing the lack of its own containment.”²³ The fragment contained in the bin is not placed apart from the site from which it was taken (it would be then an art object); it forms, rather, a dialectic with it—a “Site/Non-Site dialectic” as Smithson refers to it later in his writings.²⁴ Similarly, the artist's manipulation of the “dedifferentiated” matter of the earth does not imply a total immersion in the primary process but a relationship with it as one of many variables in a constantly changing equation.

The Site/Non-Site dialectic is the context in which Smithson's vision of entropy attains its broadest artistic definition. The continuous entropic disruption of matter is not limited to the sites or their non-site fragments. Nothing escapes it, not the bins or containers which will eventually turn to dust, nor the tools of human intervention in geologic processes (tools of strip mining, excavation, construction) which “become part of the earth's geology as they sink back into their original state. Machines like dinosaurs must return to dust or rust.” (A few years after writing this Smithson introduced ideas of this nature in his Spiral Jetty film, juxtaposing a bulldozer engaged in the construction of the jetty with the image of a stegosaurus.) This dialectic also defines for Smithson the essence of the cosmic or the eternal. He does not like Blake perceive eternity in a grain of sand (“there are no mysteries in these vestiges, no traces of an end or a beginning”²⁶), yet it does exist for him as a quality of the ever-extending series of fragmentations. Smithson entertained such notions in the proposals he made in the capacity of artist-consultant for the Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Airport. Proposing that earthworks be built around the airport which would be seen only from the air, he suggests that “this art is remote from the eye of the viewer the way a galaxy is remote from the earth.” Thus the airport may be viewed conceptually as an “artificial universe” which, within such a series of fragmentations, consists of a “dot in the vast infinity of universes, an imperceptible point in a cosmic immensity.”²⁷ A perception such as this of a relationship between the microcosmic and the macrocosmic underlies Smithson's earthwork The Spiral Jetty (1970).

The Spiral Jetty, however, introduces another dimension in the development of Smithson's aesthetic—an aesthetic of fragmentation, as we may rightly call it—the implication of which will become clearer after we have considered Ballard's “parallel” aesthetic. Similarly to Smithson, Ballard too conceives the external landscape as a “mental map” of a psychic reality. The mechanism involved is not that of projection but the perception of a quality of the landscape that appears connected with a certain innate quality of his character's mind. Such a connection, in his earlier fiction in particular, may be literally accounted for on the basis of some “scientific” theory. The jungles and swamps covering the earth in The Drowned World are the scene of a biological regression of plants and reptiles to the Triassic age, when these conditions—high solar radiation, high temperatures and humidity—were the norm. Man, it is assumed, while not going on such a backward journey, has retained biological memories of this age which are now being released by the changing landscape as dream images. “Every step we've taken in our evolution is a milestone inscribed with organic memories … Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our blood-streams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory.”²⁸ Patrick Parrinder may be correct in pointing out that much of the “science” in Ballard's fiction is provided by Jungian psychology.²⁹ Jungian thought is indeed apparent in the idea of inherited collective thought patterns in the human mind as well as in the speculation concerning the existence of primordial images which are residues of functions from man's animal ancestry. This is true not only of The Drowned World but of quite a few short stories in Ballard's canon. Yet it appears to me that Parrinder somewhat overstates Jung's importance in this connection. The “collective unconscious” to which indeed certain features of external reality are progressively subjugated, as Parrinder maintains, is a vehicle for a vision which is clearly related to Freudian thought. The “entropic,” fragmented and undifferentiated external landscape serves as a physical correlative for the psyche's “inner space” with its sense of oceanic engulfment and the loss of individual identity in the womb. The Drowned World abounds in imagery evoking the lure of the quiescence of the womb. Silt banks surrounding lagoons and swamps seem “like the lost forever beckoning and unattainable shores of the amnionic paradise”³⁰; a planetarium now under water surrounds Kerans, Ballard's character, with the blackness of a “uterine night,” water and silt carrying him “gently like an immense placenta.”³¹ But there is a further descent, beyond the womb, defined by Freud's Nirvana principle and the perception of the instinct's goal as being directed towards a restoration of the primal state of things in unbound or primary processes (and the additional reflection that “inanimate things existed before living ones”).³² Such a wish for “oneness with the universe” is experienced by Kerans in a dream in which he steps into a lake “whose waters now seemed an extension of his own blood stream … he felt the barriers which divided his own blood cells from the surrounding medium dissolving, and he swam forwards, spreading outwards across the black thudding water.”³³ Irresistibly drawn to follow the sun southwards to a zone of jungles and unbearable temperatures, Kerans appears to be “searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn sun”³⁴ where such a dream might become a reality.

The Freudian and Jungian perspective in Ballard's fiction forms a setting for his characters' confrontation with questions of being and oblivion and their search for a form of immortality. Often they have practically no past life or we see them attempting to eradicate whatever they carry with them from their past. The “entropic” landscape surrounding them—boundless and fragmented—offers them an escape from time and memory. “When the artist goes to the desert he enriches his absence,” says Smithson in reference to the denial and renunciation of minimalism as well as to his own perception of the void at the centre of existence, the “vacancy of Thanatos.”³⁵ Ballard's characters likewise attempt to enrich their own absence. The bleached deserts of The Burning World serve as a cleansing agent providing a “rest from the persistence of memory”.³⁶ Objects and people alike appear to resemble the “smooth pebble-like objects, drained of all associations, suspended on a washed tidal floor,” in Tanguy's painting Jours de lenteur, a reproduction of which hangs in Ransom's room. The journey which Ransom, the novel's central character, undertakes in a desert landscape existing simultaneously in the external world and in his “inner space” is one intended to bring about an “absolution in time,” its end point the virtual timelessness of the inanimate. Kerans (The Drowned World) abandons himself to the landscape of the primary process for a similar reason: “… he would then be abandoning the conventional estimates of time in relation to his own physical needs and entering the world of total, neuronic time, where the massive intervals of the geological time-scale calibrated his existence.”³⁷ Immortality is often associated by Ballard with the very slow, indeed almost timeless, “majestic progression of cosmic time.” “The Waiting Grounds” (1959) presents a vision of a super-civilization whose members progressively slow down their physiological time (thereby accelerating “stellar time”) in order to attain the furthest reaches of the universe; finally, their time slowed down to zero, they achieve an ultimate union with the cosmos. The time-driven hero of another short story, “The Voices of Time” (1960), spontaneously builds a “cosmic clock,” a low structure made of concrete in the shape of a mandala (a term adopted by Jung to denote a symbol of harmony of self and the cosmos in the form of a circle with a cross radiating from its centre). Lying at the center of his mandala, he gains a cosmic vision of the River of Time, “… a vast course of time that spread outwards to fill the sky and the universe, enveloping everything within them … Powers knew that its source was the source of the cosmos itself … he felt his body gradually dissolving, its physical dimensions melting into the vast continuum of the current …”³⁸ Ballard appears to concur with Smithson's conviction that space and matter are “the remains, or corpse of time.”³⁹ Thus immortality may be gained either by submerging oneself in the Time leaking out of the ancient matter of the universe (“The Voices of Time”) or, as in The Crystal World (1966), by adopting the “frozen” time of the crystal (an involuntary adoption, it would seem, due to a strange disease causing a process of crystallization in plant life and people). For Smithson too, I should add, the crystal represents encapsulated time, being the seat of greater disorder or higher entropy. His thought steeped in crystallography, Smithson saw the crystal as the essence of inanimate matter which seemed to him largely preferable to organic nature.

A discernible shift in the temporal perspectives of this search for immortality in Ballard's fiction may serve as a clue to the evolution of his aesthetic. While the early stories (“The Voices of Time”; “The Waiting Grounds”) revel in visions of “deserts of vast eternity,” to use Andrew Marvell's evocative phrase, the disaster novels usually generate a perspective circumscribed by geology or palaeontology. When we come to “The Terminal Beach” (1964) and the “condensed novels” of the years 1966-1969 the perspective seems severely limited to human history, even to contemporary history. We should keep in mind, though, a common thread running through much of Ballard's fiction—his characters' ontological pursuit of the “white leviathan, zero” (“The Terminal Beach”) or, in other words, the search after the “envelopment” of the primary process with its accompanying sense of timelessness and virtual immortality. The timeless (which is tantamount to the eternal) is gained by the synchronic conception of time as a continuum in which past and future exist simultaneously in a certain dialectic. Timelessness is thus relatively conceived and may be generated even by a reduced temporal perspective. Such a temporal dialectic is often exhibited by certain features in the external landscape. The locale of “The Terminal Beach” is a desert island formerly used as a nuclear test site. A vast system of derelict concrete roads, target basins and concrete shelters, the island is literally a “minimal concrete city.” The “nontime” generated by the island's architecture (“as ancient in its projection into, and from, time future … as any of Assyria and Babylon” is reduced to a temporal perspective embracing Hiroshima and Third World War as the two elements of the dialectic. Traven, a guiltridden air force pilot, finds in the island an “immense synthesis of the historical and psychic zero,” the minimal landscape thus reducing the question of being to its bare essence.

This gradual reduction of temporal perspective is paralleled by a change in formal conception. The traditional narrative form of the early stories can hardly accommodate the vision of “deep time” and union with the cosmos. The vision is communicated in “The Waiting Grounds” by the disembodied voice of an unearthly interlocutor. One senses also some incongruity between the relatively mundane narrative framework of “The Voices of Time” and the ecstatic experience of abandonment to the endless “river of time” and its personified “thin archaic voices reaching … across the millenia.” Even the more limited visionary scale of The Drowned World and The Burning World entails problems related to the critical distinction between showing and telling. Ballard's own voice is constantly heard commenting on the significance of his characters' actions in terms of the demands of “inner space” (“… for Ransom the long journey up the river had been an expedition into his own future, into a world of volitional time …”⁴⁰). He camouflages his voice at times, relocating his philosophical discourses on time and the cosmos in his character's mind. In fact, in much of Ballard's fiction one senses, somewhat uneasily, the essayist grafted on to a story teller. Sensitive to the demands of his craft, Ballard thus attempted to develop a fictional form that would accommodate his vision. His solution lay in what may be termed an aesthetic of fragmentation (to follow the terminology earlier assigned to Smithson). It is already manifested in “The Terminal Beach,” where the island's “fragmentary landscape” prompts in Traven a sense of dissociation, a “fragmentary image of himself.” The fragmentation is also reflected in the formal structure of the story which consists of a collage of short sections under various headings (The Blocks; The PreThird; The Lakes and the Spectres; Total Noon: Eniwetok, etc.) presenting a fragmented “centre of consciousness” and employing several, almost indistinct points of view (author; Traven; The Young Woman; The Dead Japanese Doctor). The “condensed novels,” displaying a more extreme form of this aesthetic, dispense with plot and character altogether and present a collage of violent images, observed and commented upon by Ballard's dissociated personages. These are images of assassinations, atrocities, or car crashes, embedded in the realities of our age and often associated with public figures such as John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, with memories of Hiroshima and Auschwitz, or with fears of a thermonuclear holocaust.

One of the earliest “condensed novels,” “You and Me and the Continuum” (1966) may serve to illustrate Ballard's intentions. Divided into short “chapters” having suggestive titles (Helicopter; Jackie Kennedy, I See You in My Dreams; Minkowski Space-Time, etc.), the story presents a fragmented narrative concerning the elusive figure of an Air Force pilot whose “mortal remains” (literally or in the sense of memory traces) crop up at different times and in a number of unexpected places. This vague story line only serves Ballard's purpose of creating a timeless, fragmented world which subsumes the many levels of experience informing today's schizophrenic existence. Such a program is explicitly stated in another of those “novels”:

Planes intersect: on one level, the tragedies of Cape Kennedy and Vietnam serialized on billboards, random deaths mimetized in the experimental auto-disasters of Nader and his co-workers … On another level, the immediate personal environment, the volumes of space enclosed by your opposed hands, the geometry of your postures, the time values contained in this office, the angles between the walls. On a third level, the inner world of the psyche. Where these planes intersect, images are born, some kind of valid reality begins to clarify itself.⁴¹

The title “You and Me and the Continuum” provides another point of view concerning the ambience of the story and the rationale for its structure. Those random fragments—bits and pieces of “undifferentiated mass,” where “you” and “me” have lost all distinction—are debris, so to speak, of the space and time continuum. Indeed, to utilize Smithson's terminology, if the boundless continuum is perceived as a “site,” then those fragmented “condensed novels” can be viewed as Ballard's “Non-Sites.”

Some of the “condensed novels” were brought together in 1970 as The Atrocity Exhibition (American title: Love and Napalm: Export USA, 1972). The publisher, in the hope of making the selection more palatable to the general public, attempted to present it as a novel whose central character is a doctor suffering from a nervous breakdown, who seeks his sanity by casting himself in a number of roles: H-Bomber pilot, presidential assassin, crash victim, psychopath. The stories, true enough, exhibit some continuity in terms of their subsidiary characters, Dr. Nathan, Catherine Austin, Karen Novotny (all associated in some way or another with a mental institution). The central character in each story goes by a different name, but all names begin with the letter “T.” The narrative form of each follows roughly the same pattern. Yet to suggest a traditional plot continuity, it seems to me, is to oversimplify (I assume Ballard himself never meant it thus to be perceived; also, the stories were written over a period of a few years and not quite in the order of their compilation.) Had such a continuity been Ballard's overriding concern, he would have managed better than that. In such an event, fragmentation would have been a plot device rather than the all-embracing vision that it is. It would appear rather that to publish the stories together is to extent the implication of fragmentation to encompass the multiple perspectives offered by their cyclical or repeated pattern. In terms of Ballard's own image of the “continuum,” such a conception might perhaps be associated with a model of space-time based on an ascending spiral which repeats the same cyclical form while progressing along a lateral axis.

Yet to take the aesthetic of fragmentation to such an extreme is to tempt the limits of fiction. There is danger that the literary form will buckle under the weight of intentions; repetition might end up in tedium and fatigue. However, my intention has not been to evaluate Ballard's fiction in terms of its ultimate success or failure but to trace the evolution of its vision and aesthetic. And it is apparent that only a persistent pursuit of his vision, along such lines as the preceding discussion indicates, would have inexorably led Ballard to such a reductive formal conception. Smithson followed his vision as persistently, but with the crucial difference that his Site/Non-Site dialectic as applied to the large earthworks expands the art system and pushes further back its limits. The Spiral Jetty (1970) exists as a physical structure on the north shore of the Great Salt Lake, Utah (“Coil, 1500′ long and approximately 15′ wide. Black rock, salt crystals, earth, red water (algae).”⁴² It also exists as a Non-Site (“Is the Site a reflection of the Nonsite (mirror), or is it the other way around?”) in Smithson's essay (1972) and film (1970), and in the mind. Earlier, in 1967, Smithson has defined “eternal time” in terms of “cycles of non duration”—“a paradigmatic or primordial infrastructure, that repeats itself in an infinite number of ways.”⁴³ The “primordial infrastructure” Smithson employs here—a concept and an image reverberating “up and down space and time”—is the spiral. In terms of its form, “the dizzying spiral yearns for the assurance of geometry”; it is a finite form potentially extending to an infinitely remote point at each “end.”⁴⁴ These points of indeterminacy or boundlessness suggest to Smithson an “undifferentiated state of matter” associated by him, as we have seen, with the primary process. Physically this state is evoked by the experience of looking at the spiral (“the spiral curled into vaporization”) and the experience of the site itself. Smithson refers to the region's “shattered appearance,” to its man-made “trapped fragments of junk and waste.” Matter itself exists in an “indeterminate state” where “hills took on the appearance of melting solids” and “solid and liquid lost themselves in each other.” But the spiral also suggests an emergence from this state by functioning, in Donald Kuspit's words, “as a sliding scale, a continuum which at any point can be read as either a microcosm or a macrocosm.”⁴⁵ Thus within the Spiral Jetty system the spiral appears as a series of ever-expanding spirals; “Each cubic salt crystal,” to begin with, “echoes the Spiral Jetty in terms of the crystal's molecular lattice.” The spiral itself echoes the appearance of the site, where lake and shoreline “suggest an immobile cyclone … spinning sensation without movement.” The film introduces other references as well: Smithson reads over the sound track a legend about a whirlpool found somewhere in the Great Salt Lake.⁴⁶ The large macrocosmic perspective is introduced by shots of spiraling solar explosions and by the reading on the sound track of a passage from John Taine's The Time Stream describing a “vast spiral nebula of innumerable suns.” Somewhere along the scale exists man (biologically, for the mind is everywhere): “Chemically speaking, our blood is analogous in composition to the primordial seas. Following the spiral steps we return to our origin, back to some pulpy protoplasm.” Blood is associated with the red colour given to the water surface of the salt lake by certain microbacteria. Red is also the colour one sees when closing the eyes and letting the “sun burn crimson through the lids,” a point which serves to launch Smithson (in his essay) on a rhapsody of vision as the mediator between the “orbs of blood” in the eyes and the orb of the sun. This mediation is also located on the spiral itself. A sequence in the film is shot from a helicopter spiraling upwards (Smithson points out in the essay that “helicopter” derives from the Greek helix or spiral) which manoeuvres the sun's reflection into the centre of the Spiral Jetty, the nucleus in which Smithson locates his “unicellular beginning,” in a convergence of macrocosm and microcosm.

A carrier of verbal signs in a larger sign system, the “Spiral Jetty” essay itself continues this reverberation of spirals. In “A Sedimentation of the Mind” and other 1968 essays Smithson applied the geologic metaphor not only to the mind (as we have seen) but also to language: “Words and rocks contain a language that follows a syntax of splits and ruptures. Look at any word long enough and you will see it open up into a series of faults, into a terrain of particles each containing its own void.”⁴⁷ This “language of fragmentation” is largely Smithson's own in “The Spiral Jetty,” exhibiting at the same time the dedifferentiation of the primary process and a tentative emergence from it (“Perception was heaving, the stomach turning. I was on a geologic fault that groaned within me … I had the red heaves, while the sun vomited its corpuscular radiations”). Smithson attempts at some point to order his language in the form of an equation (based on the spiral as an infrastructure) between images and concepts relating to the centre (“scale of centers”) and those embodying the edges. But here again the dialectic between the indefinite centre and the limitless edges of the spiral reigns supreme and does not allow any linguistic certainty: “The equation of my language remains unstable, a shifting set of coordinates, an arrangement of variables spilling into surds. My equation is as clear as mud—a muddy spiral.” The film also began, writes Smithson, as a “set of disconnections, a bramble of stabilized fragments taken from things obscure and fluid, ingredients trapped in a succession of frames …” Here too the spiral serves as an underlying formative principle. Physically, the film reel forms a spiral (as attested to in the film by a juxtaposition of spiral reels of film and a photograph of the jetty). And then, “the movieola becomes a “time machine” that transforms trucks into dinosaurs” (the film abounds in such montages of different geologic eras). A model of time often referred to in science fiction is that of a spiral; time travel in terms of such a model is a movement between two adjacent points, not along the loop but by cutting across it. Perhaps Smithson had such a notion in mind; he was, no doubt, aware of such a model of time since it is found in one of the preparatory sketches for the Dinosaur Hall sequence of the film.⁴⁸

Ballard and Smithson have had similar visions: their art and writings are suffused with the awareness of temporality as a measure of a universal dissipation brought about by destructive entropic processes in the cosmos and on the earth's surface. This descent towards the “desert” of fragmentation and undifferentiation—the all-encompassing sameness or void of the entropic end point—finds its correlative in the mind's craving for the primal state of primary process and, beyond that, the quiescence of the “unicellular beginning” and of inanimate matter. Yet their art and writing move along different aesthetic trajectories. Smithson ultimately forges for art a “continuum” where “remote futures meet remote pasts,”⁴⁹ where a microcosm is interchangeable with a macrocosm. Ballard moves towards a conception of fiction which is reductive in form and in the implication of its vision. His aesthetic of fragmentation captures existence as pieces of flotsam and jetsam swept along a continuum largely circumscribed by the here and now, images that are “fragments in a terminal moraine left behind by your passage through consciousness.”⁵⁰ For Ballard and Smithson both, ours is ultimately an indifferent universe in which meaning can be gotten at only through a collusion in its indifferent design. But Ballard is a literary artist, and his art involves a mimetic representation of Thanatos as a universal promise within a fictional framework. Smithson's Spiral Jetty mediates between art and nature. As a physical site it exists in nature, thereby extending and verifying the meaning of the “fictions” which are his writings. Thus by embracing the infinite implications of the universe's indifferent design, Smithson's art, paradoxically, upholds life against death.

Notes

1. The Writings of Robert Smithson: Essays with Illustrations, ed. by Nancy Holt, with an introduction by Philip Leider (New York: NYU Press, 1979), p.9. Hereafter referred to as Smithson.

2. The Time Stream, The Greatest Adventure, The Purple Sapphire: Three Science Fiction Novels by John Taine (Eric Temple Bell) (New York: Dover Publications, 1964).

3. “Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space” (1966), Smithson, p.34.

4. “Entropy and the New Monuments” (1966), Smithson, p.10.

5. Ibid., p.11.

6. Lawrence Alloway, “Robert Smithson's Development”, Artforum, vol XI, no. 3 (Nov. 1972), p.54.

7. “Entropy and the New Monuments,” Smithson, p.9.

8. Robert Scholes, “The Roots of Science Fiction,” in Mark Rose, ed., Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976), p.51. This essay forms a chapter in Robert Scholes, Structural Fabulations: An Essay on Fiction of the Future (Notre Dame, Indiana, 1975).

9. Ibid., p.55.

10. Bruce Franklin, “Foreword to J.G. Ballard's ‘The Subliminal Man,” in Thomas D. Clareson, ed., SF: The Other Side of Realism (Bowling Green, Ohio, 1971), p.200.

11. The three stories mentioned above have all been compiled in Billenium (New York, 1962).

12. “Entropy and the New Monuments,” Smithson, p.12.

13. “A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art” (1968), Smithson, p.76.

14. The Burning World (New York, 1964), p.93.

15. “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” (1967), Smithson, p.56. These grains of sand, themselves formed in an entropic process of pulverization, also suggest to Smithson an experiment for “proving entropy”: running clockwise in a sand box divided in half with sand of two colors on each side is an irreversible process; the mixed sand cannot be separated again by running in it in a counterclockwise direction.

16. “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects” (1968), Smithson, p.90.

17. Ibid., p.86.

18. Ibid., p.89.

19. “Earth (Symposium at White Museum, Cornell University, 1970)”, Smithson, p.166.

20. “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,” Smithson, p.82.

21. Ibid., p.84. Smithson appears to have relied quite heavily on Ehrenzweig's ideas as expounded in his book The Hidden Order of Art which came out in 1967. Fragmentation, oceanic envelopment, containment are all key concepts in Ehrenzweig's thought.

22. Civilization and Its Discontents (London, 1949), p.14.

23. “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,” Smithson, p.90.

24. Smithson provides lists for the two terms of the dialectic in his essay “The Spiral Jetty” (1972), Smithson, p.115.

25. “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,” Smithson, p.85.

26. Ibid., p.90.

27. “Aerial Art” (1969), Smithson, p.92.

28. The Drowned World (New York, 1962), pp.38-41.

29. “Science Fiction and the Scientific World View,” Science Fiction: A Critical Guide, ed. Patrick Parrinder (London, 1979), p.83.

30. The Drowned World, p.64.

31. Ibid., p.99.

32. Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol XVIII (London, 1955), p.38.

33. The Drowned World, pp.64-65.

34. Ibid., p.158.

35. “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,” Smithson, p.89.

36. The Burning World, p.32.

37. The Drowned World, p.44.

38. The Voices of Time and Other Stories (New York, 1960), p.35.

39. “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan” (1968), Smithson, p.96.

40. The Burning World, p.149.

41. “Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown,” The Atrocity Exhibition (London, 1970), p.59.

42. When not indicated otherwise, quotations referring to the Spiral Jetty are to Smithson's essay “The Spiral Jetty,” Smithson, pp.109-116.

43. “Ultramoderne” (1967), Smithson, p.49.

44. For a very detailed discussion of the philosophical implications of the spiral in Smithson's art, see Donald B. Kuspit, “The Pascalian Spiral: Robert Smithson's Drunken Boat,” Arts Magazine, vol 56, no. 2 (Oct 1981), pp.82-88.

45. Kuspit, p.82.

46. For an analysis of the film's sources, see Elizabeth C. Childs, “Robert Smithson and Film: The Spiral Jetty Reconsidered,” Arts Magazine, vol. 56, No. 2 (Oct 1981), pp.68-81.

47. “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,” Smithson, p.87.

48. Childs, p.77.

49. “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,” Smithson, p.91.

50. The Atrocity Exhibition, p.59.