On Jean Baudrillard

Social Reality Made through Simulacra: The Hidden Logic of the

American Dream in the Landscapes of Ballards Hello America
Usually, we think of the landscape as outside of us; it is also inside us, forming our
character, as J.G. Ballard shows in Hello America, a science fiction novel about the
country in 2130, one hundred years after it was abandoned due to the lack of fuel and
energy. Americans left for Europe where conservationist and socialist regimes with
long experiences of strong centralised government were able to maintain a low-level
industrial life (46). In response a world government formed, dammed the shallow
waters of the Bering straits between Siberia and Alaska, improved the climate of
northern Europe and Siberia while making most of America into a desert (47), except
for Las Vegas and the west Coast, which became flooded, a new tropical climate (48).
As unlikely as this scenario may seem, it is not at all unlikely that there will be energy
or environmental crises of catastrophic proportions, as Ballard suggests in the title of
Hello America, waking its readers up to avoid an undesirable future. Ballards
critique, however, is not only about the mismanagement of resources or the
unwillingness of Americans to curb their self-interest, which he sites as contributing
to the downfall in more than one passage.
In his Introduction he claims he is creating an alternative America: a
simulacrum which might well reveal something of the secret agenda that lies
beneath the enticing surface of the American dream (Introduction 5). In The Angle
Between Two Walls: The Fiction of J.G. Ballard Roger Luckhurst points out the
importance of the idea of the simulacrum for any reading of Hello America,
interpreting this idea in the context of Uberto Ecos Travels in Hyperreality: Faith in
Fakes. Although I agree in general with this approach of Luckhurst, the idea is much
central to the social philosophy of Jean Baudrillard than of Eco, and it is this meaning
that Ballard uses when he exaggerates and extrapolates present tendencies of the
American society, as we shall see in the following interpretation of the novels
landscapesthe abandoned, powerless cities; the areas outside them where gigantic
images appear in the sky; and finally a science fiction version of Las Vegas.
The very first lines of the novel begin with the cityscape of an alternative future
America: Manhattan in 2130 is a golden coast where an exploratory European
expedition lands for a purpose that only becomes apparent much later. The chief
engineer of the ocean ship SS Apollo, McNair, exclaims, Theres gold, Wayne, gold
dust everywhere! Wake up! The streets of America are paved with gold! (7).
Ballards emphasis on the word are in the very first line reveals how he is
presenting a stereotype that has become fully, literally true. The streets are filled with
gold, so bright it is blinding, yet it is only sand. In the process of being fully realized
the American dream of wealth turns into its opposite. The real landscape of New York
is therebut the monuments to ambition have been transformed by this dream of
gold (9) into abandoned empty facades in a desert. A suspension bridge, which he
had seen in old magazines and which he had imagined to be much greater than it was,
now stood unused, ruined by time, with rusty sides and broken cables. Originally, the
dream of gold created those monuments to prosperity, or to capitalism and ambition.
Ballard shows the reader how the dream may eventually change the reality into a
wasteland. In either case, the successful New York of today or the ruined New York of
the future, is made from dreams; the dreams are not made from it.

In Chapter 3, the SS Apollo hits A Drowned Mermaid, the submerged but visible
Statue of Liberty. Ballard is intimating that in a failure of the American dream, the
lady of democracy would share the same fate as the monuments of gold.
Moving westward. toward the second main landscape, each member has a different
private reason for wanting to be there. Most significant is the protagonists dream of
America; Wayne, a stowaway, wants to find out what happened to his father on a
previous expedition and what the glory of America really was (22).
Wayne resolved to keep a diary of the extraordinary visions he would see
in the following months, led by this image of his dead mother asleep below
the waves. In all good time he would present his record to Dr. Fleming, the
once and future father whom he would find somewhere in America, waiting
for him in the golden paradises of the west. (22)
This symbolism of the Statue of Liberty as Waynes mother, and perhaps the
abandoned, ruined glory of America as his lost father shows the construction of reality
according to cultural images on a personal level, just as the sky line of New York is
the construction of reality according to the dream of wealth. Ballards original
landscapes are designed in accordance with main contemporary social theories very
related to Baudrillards idea of the simulacrum. Waynes attempt to find his future
father is a paradox, for how could ones origin be in the future? This is a literary
example of Jean-Francois Lyotards definition of the postmodern nature of
contemporary culture seeking its future anterior.; in other words, it is seeking to
know what it is becoming. In terms of ordinary physical causation and chronological
order, the idea makes no sense. In terms of psychological or spiritual development,
however, there are final causes directing some human behavior, as when a musician
wants to become a composer, to be not just part of the production of music he or she
has learned so well but to be its source. If this interpretation is correct, then Wayne
and the readers who identify with the main character want to know what in the nature
of America led it to its fate..
The sociologist Baudrillard uses the metaphor of the desert to explain features of
America today. The cities made of rock, cement, metal, and glass have obliterated
plants and other life forms while making human life there limited in possibility by the
restrictions, the difficulties, and the demands of work to keep the cities alive. Ballard,
too, believes the landscape of Americans helps to make their inner selves when he
writes we are at one with the dust. (89). The dust, more and more, has been the
artificial world, the pool showing Narcissus himself before he realizes it.
Moving westward toward the second main fictional landscape, one outside the
cities, the expedition seems to be repeating the original settling of America so as to
revise the outcome. It is a trend in some literature and criticism, for example in the
feminist movement, to present old myths in a new way. The members encounter
Indians who are camel-nomads dressed in bizarre combinations of animal hides over
executive suits (63). They are the real Americans who did not abandon it after the
energy crisis and climactic catastrophe. Their numbers had dwindled drastically
because of the quakes and the concomitant skyvisions (64). They would get sick and
die if they went near the cities which had the quakes.
The survivors are simulacra of the native American Indians virtually
eliminated by the white settlers, although there is a crucial difference: the members of
the expedition have the chance to stop the source of their destruction, thus righting
any previous wrong in American history.

The nomads might represent a critique of mass culture, since they were
illiterate except for brand names on neon signs and gave themselves the names Big
Mac, U-Drive, Texaco, and 7-Up, among others. Though it may be such a critique,
Ballards view offers even more. The survivors of America have become so defined
by its previous creations that the situation is a hyperreal presentation of an aspect of
the American dream. It is usually thought that people make their dreams and
consequent creations; Ballard is showing through fiction that it is at least equally true
that the dreams and creations in turn change the nature of the people. This
interpretation is suported by the fact that Wayne is being defined by somthing he does
not totally know yethis fathers fate and the lost glory of America.
The cultural and media products of Americans make them the way they are not
only because they get their names from them but also because the skyvisions have
been determining the fate of the Indians: before flashes of light and quakes they see
giants in the sky.
One giant was an American cowboy, John Wayne.
High above him, almost filling the cloudless, cobalt sky, was the enormous
figure of a cowboy. Two huge spurred boots, each the height of a ten-storey
building, rested on the hills above the town, while the immense legs, clad in
worn leather chaps and as tall as skyscrapers, reached up to the gunbelt a
thousand feet in the air. The silver-tipped bullets pointed down at Wayne like
a row of aircraft fuselages. Beyond them rose the cliff wall of the cowboys
check shirt, and then the towering shoulders that seemed to carry the sky.
(97)
Notice that as Wayne prepared to shoot the Captain, the giant one-mile tall John
Wayne pointed a gun at Wayne, who then appears to be acting according to the
manner of the larger cowboy. Advertising has the goal of reproducing the life style
presented in its images, as occurs in the film Blade Runner when a large skyscraper
has on its gigantic faade the face of a woman, the image of desire, who becomes a
model of the way others should desire.
If the first main landscape in Hello America is the golden and democratic city made
into a desert, then constituting the second main landscape are the cultural images
originally leading to the making of America. They are literally written in the sky like
divine messages. They replace the grand narratives, political, religious, or cultural
myths giving daily life its meaning, thought by Lyotard to be fragmented in modern
life. It is a mythical media landscape showing the extent to which Americans live
purely in their own creations and are created by them. For example, popular culture
represents this in Tron, a film in which people are trapped in a video game. Perhaps
the novels hero, Waynehimself an echo of John Wayne in more than his name, did
not see them, the reader may doubt because all the characters started to change their
identities becoming more in appearance like the Indians, becoming savage and
fighting with each other as they travelled westward toward the reason for the
expedition: to find the source of the skyvisions and to stop them.
The third main landscape is the simulacrum of Las Vegas in 2130. Chapter 18,
introducing Las Vegas where the expedition and the novel will end, is appropriately
called The Electrographic Dream, an alternative form of the American dream or
perhaps its hidden logic. It is quite a surprise for the expedition members in energyless America to see the neon signs of Caesars Palace and Desert Inn working, for
them as much of a surprise as the skyvisions, perhaps even more so because they can

now come into contact with the visions and understand their source. The energy
producing the skyvisions is the same as that lighting Las Vegas once again, and the
leader who projects the images does so from that city. The logic behind the American
dream and nightmare is there as well; Las Vegas is called a miniature United States
(132).
No longer a desert, Las Vegas inverts contemporary American reality by being part
of a tropical jungle, this fact alerting the reader to a new, special significance for that
city and the ideal of the West. It is a mirror reflecting failure and humiliation (48). It
combines the lost golden splendour of New York made into garish neon illusions with
the hyperreal representation of media and cultural images made into gigantic images
with the power of bringing life or death. In the Las Vegas of Hello America many of
the sky images become tangible such as a robot of Frank Sinatra and neon signs of
celebrities.
Like Conrads Heart of Darkness the expedition members reach the source of the
nuclear explosions and the dark side of the American character leading partially to its
previous failure with the energy crisis. In charge in Las Vegas is a demented president
named Charles Manson, created out of Ballards fear that a murderer might get into
office as the real Manson had fantasized doing while in prison. Manson shows the
extreme to which the militaristic tendencies of the U.S. might someday reach. In the
back of his mind is former President Ronald Reagan whose fantasies of Star Wars
weapons programs partially comes from remaining film images in the former actors
mind (Introduction). Instead of playing with gold, a major presidential preoccupation,
Manson plays with or insanely fantasizes about cruise missiles.
When Wayne recounts a conversation with one of Mansons men, Paco, some of the
reasons for Americas downfall become explicit.
I [Wayne] tried to explain to him my own dreams of a renascent USA, but
he clearly thinks Im crazily impractical, hung upon brand names and a lot
of infantile delusions about unlimited growth. In his eyes it was an excess of
fantasy that killed the old United States, the whole Mickey Mouse and
Marilyn thing, the most brilliant technologies devoted to trivia like instant
cameras and space spectaculars that should have stayed in the pages of
science fiction. As he put it, some of the last Presidents of the USA seemed
to have been recruited straight out of Disneyland. (140)
If the novel had ended with Manson, the fate of America would have been dark. To
redeem the American character and present the bright side is Dr Fleming, a man with
the yankee virtue of invention, who also happens to be Waynes father. He created
Sunlight fliers, airplanes made of glass and powered by the sun, the description of
which uses quite lovely language and shows their positive nature t the readers.
Also, he created a number of robots like the former Presidents of the U.S. Like the
calvary saving the white settlers at the last minute, the inventors two creations help to
stop Manson and rescue Wayne and other members of the expedition.
For a time, Wayne is not sure whether to give his loyalty to Manson the demented
power monger or to Fleming, the eccentric inventor. This demonstrates the choice
America has once again: to follow a Manson with an excess of fantasy and a desire
for power through unlimited growth, or to follow a Dr. Fleming with limited, applied
fantasy and a concern for the environment.

I believe the significance of Ballards novel goes beyond these warnings about
Americas excesses or even encouragement of its inventiveness. Repeatedly, Ballard
presents a reality that is modeled on images. As he writes in his Introduction,
Whenever I visit the United States I often feel that the real America lies
not in the streets of Manhattan and Chicago, or the farm towns of the midwest, but in the imaginary America created by Hollywood and the media
landscape. Far from being real, the sidewalks and filling stations and office
blocks seem to imitate the images of themselves in countless movies and TV
commercials. (4)
This idea of a simulacrum is a key term in the social philosophy of Baudrillard,
who has also written extensively about America. In Simulations he formulates a
theory of society based on the simulation of any part or aspect by at least one other
and often a number of others. Through this simulation the laws of society are passed
on to each of its parts. Without attempting to explain the theory fully, I would like to
point out that it has great explanatory power because social phenomena can be
ordered as a system: any part is related to some others according to laws of
connection applying to all.
In fact, this principle is something like the Internet: there is no single center but at
some specific time any computer may be the center for some others so as to link them.
The internet is a good example to explain the idea of a simulacrum because it
demonstrates how in modern society the laws of connection are necessarily
reproduced in what is connected. Similarly, cultural images reproduce some of the
social form which produced them. One result is that American people act like people
in films, in varying degrees, or they learn about other places and experiences and form
emotions. Another result is that people in foreign countries, by using American
products and consuming the culture, are themselves being influenced by the social
form. The cultural images are not just objects but are forming the people who become
aware of them. This is the Coca-colonization of the world discussed by Ballard: the
use of the product and awareness through advertisements and the media imparts to the
consumer a kind of American cheerfulness, enjoyment of empty entertainment, and
desire to have energy. The images are as addictive as the cocaine first used in cocacola.
In conclusion, the main aesthetic virtue of Hello America is the wonderful
interconnection of the very original images into an alternative America. In this way
the literary form is reproduced in the content it presents: Ballard writes about
simulation and his novel itself is a simulacrum, since he cannot avoid the influence of
the cultural images of America.