Before his sig­na­ture works like The Atroc­i­ty Exhi­bi­tion, Crash, and High-Rise, J. G. Bal­lard pub­lished three apoc­a­lyp­tic nov­els, The Drowned World, The Burn­ing World, and The Crys­tal World. Each of those books offers a dif­fer­ent vision of large-scale envi­ron­men­tal dis­as­ter, and the last even pro­vides a clue as to its inspi­ra­tion. Or rather, its orig­i­nal cov­er does, by using a sec­tion of Max Ern­st’s paint­ing The Eye of Silence. “This spinal land­scape, with its fren­zied rocks tow­er­ing into the air above the silent swamp, has attained an organ­ic life more real than that of the soli­tary nymph sit­ting in the fore­ground,” Bal­lard writes in “The Com­ing of the Uncon­scious,” an arti­cle on sur­re­al­ism writ­ten short­ly after The Crys­tal World appeared in 1966.

First pub­lished in an issue of the mag­a­zine New Worlds (which also con­tains Bal­lard’s take on Chris Mark­er’s La Jetée), the piece is osten­si­bly a review of Patrick Wald­berg’s Sur­re­al­ism and Mar­cel Jean’s The His­to­ry of Sur­re­al­ist Paint­ing, but it ends up deliv­er­ing Bal­lard’s short analy­ses of a series of paint­ings by var­i­ous sur­re­al­ist mas­ters.

The Eye of Silence shows the land­scapes of our world “for what they are — the palaces of flesh and bone that are the liv­ing facades enclos­ing our own sub­lim­i­nal con­scious­ness.” The “ter­ri­fy­ing struc­ture” at the cen­ter of René Magritte’s The Annun­ci­a­tion is “a neu­ron­ic totem, its round­ed and con­nect­ed forms are a frag­ment of our own ner­vous sys­tems, per­haps an insol­u­ble code that con­tains the oper­at­ing for­mu­lae for our own pas­sage through time and space.”

In Gior­gio de Chiri­co’s The Dis­qui­et­ing Mus­es, “an unde­fined anx­i­ety has begun to spread across the desert­ed square. The sym­me­try and reg­u­lar­i­ty of the arcades con­ceals an intense inner vio­lence; this is the face of cata­ton­ic with­draw­al”; its fig­ures are “human beings from whom all tran­si­tion­al time has been erod­ed.” Anoth­er work depicts an emp­ty beach as “a sym­bol of utter psy­chic alien­ation, of a final sta­sis of the soul”; its dis­place­ment of beach and sea through time “and their mar­riage with our own four-dimen­sion­al con­tin­u­um, has warped them into the rigid and unyield­ing struc­tures of our own con­scious­ness.” There Bal­lard writes of no less famil­iar a can­vas than The Per­sis­tence of Mem­o­ry by Sal­vador Dalí, whom he called “the great­est painter of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry” more than 40 years after “The Com­ing of the Uncon­scious” in the Guardian.

A decade there­after, that same pub­li­ca­tion’s Declan Lloyd the­o­rizes that the exper­i­men­tal bill­boards designed by Bal­lard in the fifties (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture) had been tex­tu­al rein­ter­pre­ta­tions of Dalí’s imagery. Until the late six­ties, Bal­lard says in a 1995 World Art inter­view, “the Sur­re­al­ists were very much looked down upon. This was part of their attrac­tion to me, because I cer­tain­ly did­n’t trust Eng­lish crit­ics, and any­thing they did­n’t like seemed to me prob­a­bly on the right track. I’m glad to say that my judg­ment has been seen to be right — and theirs wrong.” He under­stood the long-term val­ue of Sur­re­al­ist visions, which had seem­ing­ly been obso­lesced by World War II before, “all too soon, a new set of night­mares emerged.” We can only hope he won’t be proven as pre­scient about the long-term hab­it­abil­i­ty of the plan­et.

via Flash­bak

Relat­ed con­tent:

Sci-Fi Author J.G. Bal­lard Pre­dicts the Rise of Social Media (1977)

What Makes Sal­vador Dalí’s Icon­ic Sur­re­al­ist Paint­ing “The Per­sis­tence of Mem­o­ry” a Great Work of Art

An Intro­duc­tion to René Magritte, and How the Bel­gian Artist Used an Ordi­nary Style to Cre­ate Extra­or­di­nar­i­ly Sur­re­al Paint­ings

When Our World Became a de Chiri­co Paint­ing: How the Avant-Garde Painter Fore­saw the Emp­ty City Streets of 2020

J. G. Ballard’s Exper­i­men­tal Text Col­lages: His 1958 For­ay into Avant-Garde Lit­er­a­ture

An Intro­duc­tion to Sur­re­al­ism: The Big Aes­thet­ic Ideas Pre­sent­ed in Three Videos

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.