Page 46 - Studio International - October 1970

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are expected to find something new to say, my
fellow writers and myself are expected to find
something old, and to go on saying it. And
nothing alerts, will strike terror into the heart
of a publisher so much as the word
`experimental'. And the next most alarming
word is 'new'. You see, the novel, despite what
appear to be the technical advances of Joyce
or William Burroughs, the novel is basically an
early 19th-century structure. The writer still
sees himself in the role of an Academy painter
producing historical paintings. The sort of
revolution achieved by the Impressionists,
limited simply to its effect on the choice of
subject-matter, has not yet been achieved in
literature. I mean no-one is yet writing like
Corot painted, if you see the connection. Most
writers see themselves in the same role as
Homer. They're telling the story of how it
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happened.
PAOLOZZI: I think Ballard's subject-matter and
mine touch at certain points. We're both
involved with the encounter with machines, and
we're both involved with forcing people to look
and with preventing them from escaping from
certain facts. I don't want to make prints that
will help people to escape from the terrible
world. I want to remind them.
WHITFORD : The imaginations of you both are
obviously stimulated, excited to an unusual
degree by all aspects of technology, and yet, it
seems to me, the vast majority of us haven't the
imagination to cope with the enormous riches
which technology has conferred on us. For
example, when a satellite was first used to beam
TV from one continent to another for the general
public someone somewhere had a brainwave.
Let's use this previously undreamed-of facility
to create a truly wonderful programme. But was
their imagination up to it ? Not at all. In the face
of all that awe-inspiring technology, the
switches, batteries, angles, circuits all working
like magic, all they could think up was to show
16a
the first tram leaving Sydney depot at 4.3o in
the morning, a baseball match from San
Francisco and the Beatles in the studio in
London singing a song they'd composed
16b specially for the occasion. It was all live, of
course, but it might just as well have been on
film. They could have saved themselves all the
trouble. Here is a classic example of how the
imagination has failed to keep pace with the
possibilities afforded by technology of all kinds.
PAOLOZZI : This is quite true. I'm prepared to
spend the rest of my life on that premise. A lot
of people who are actually manipulating the
mass media are curiously under-educated. And
the media are such tremendously well-made
machines, like warfare, which also has a
tremendous amount of money spent on it, and
the machinery protects the inefficient, the
amateurish because there are so many
compensatory devices. So that the bad
photographer will be rescued by the art editor,
the incompetent interviewer rescued by the
man on the cutting-room floor.
BALLARD : Another example : I believe the space
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