The Day of Creation. J. G. Ballard

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СКАЧАТЬ and shoves his camera and mic in the doctor’s face, but only after he registers the river with the National Geographic Society in Washington, DC, naming it the Mallory. Noon, whether out of penance for her execution attempt, or in gratitude for the H₂0, assists Mallory in commandeering a car-ferry, the Salammbo, and the two depart toward the river’s source, their objective changing like a stream of consciousness, or becoming a stream of consciousness: One moment Mallory wants to dam the Mallory, the next he wants to destroy it.

      All of the above happens in a hundred or so pages. The nearly two hundred pages remaining are pure journey: Kagwa’s pursuit (to reclaim the car-ferry, which contains the Mercedes he bought with the river funds); Harare’s skirmishing; Sanger and Pal coming aboard to collect their leagues of unscripted footage, and the overtaking of the Diana: a ‘brothel-ship’, formerly patronized by oil-riggers, and now under the commission of Mrs Warrender, another Brit, another white, who’d superintended the animal breeding station with her Rhodesian husband, until he was slaughtered …

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      Think back, now, to the way movies used to be – not on computers, but in halls – not digital, but analogue, a succession of frames flowing off a reel like water until all that was left was a flume of hot white light projecting its pristination at a screen. Think back to the size of the screens and so to the size of the people on them – people firmamental, stars – skygods enacting myths in perpetual sequel.

      What I mean is: Apocalypse Now. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola in 1976 but released only in 1979. Apocalypse Now features title cards and is narrated by Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), who is dispatched upriver – the fictional Nung River – to terminate Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who has ‘gone native’, and formed a private militia to fight his private wars. The film’s production was notoriously plagued: principal photography in the Philippines was interrupted by typhoon season; Harvey Keitel was fired (for reasons never publicized), and replaced by Sheen, who promptly had a heart attack; Brando showed up unprepared, obese, and with his head shaved; Dennis Hopper, who plays a traumatized photojournalist, was method acting his way through a coke-binge. At least ‘the extras’ were reliable – scores of Vietnamese who’d fled one violent insurrection for another. President Marcos regularly demanded the return of the army helicopters the production were renting, which he scrambled to surveil and even strafe the New People’s Army of the illegal CPP, the Communist Party of the Philippines. This drama behind the drama made its way into a documentary assembled by Eleanor Coppola, in which her director-husband can’t stop himself from airing the resemblance between the psychologies of artistic creation and military-industrial destruction: ‘We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.’^[1]

      Hearts of Darkness is the title of that making-of documentary, and it’s obvious to everyone sweating in it – except Brando, who refused to do any reading – that Apocalypse Now is based on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In that novella, Marlow, the original of Willard, steamboats up the Congo River scouring the rainforest for the rogue ivory-trader, and slaver, Kurtz. In Conrad’s telling neither Marlow nor Kurtz are elite soldiers, but are or were employees of ‘the Company’, and the setting is the Central African Congo Free State, which was, in fact, a corporation wholly owned and operated by Belgium. Another liberty Coppola took: his Kurtz is assassinated by Willard, while the page-bound Kurtz dies slowly, and Marlow falls ill, from ‘an impalpable greyness’, ‘a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism’. Heart of Darkness was serialized in 1899, and republished in 1902 as the middle novella of a trilogy that bridged the stages of terraqueous life: preceding it is Youth, in which the foreign is exotic, yet nurturing; following it is The End of the Tether, in which the foreign has become indistinguishable from home and the only Empire left is a watery grave. Between the two fictions – between birth and death – is dream: ‘It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream – ’ Marlow says, ‘making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams … ’

      Heart of Darkness, of course, has its own ur-versions, its own unconscious – in the legends that European and Anglo-American writers translated from, and were inspired to invent by, the African and Asian cultures they nonetheless regarded as ‘primitive’, or ‘inferior’. Stay close, because we’re approaching the Inmost Station.

      We have stories about treasure hunters who leave their lands and wander the globe, only to be recalled by a dream of a willow in their house’s yard, under which a hoard of gems is buried; we have tales of hunters slaying wild boars whose carcasses metamorphose into the corpses of fathers. Then there’s ‘My First Day in the Orient’, an essay of around 1890 by the half-Greek, half-Irish Lafcadio Hearn, who spent two decades as a reporter and English tutor in Japan:

      Then I reach the altar, gropingly, unable yet to distinguish forms clearly. But the priest, sliding back screen after screen, pours in light upon the gilded brasses and the inscriptions; and I look for the image of the Deity or presiding Spirit between the altar-groups of convoluted candelabra. And I see – only a mirror, a round, pale disk of polished metal, and my own face therein …

      An adventurer seeks the divine, and finds himself instead. Tug aside the curtain, and the man is the Maker, and the Maker is the man – ‘The horror! The horror!’

      Imagine if Apocalypse Now was filmed again with state-of-the-art CGI, so that Willard survives his river cruise only to discover that he is Kurtz. (Which would’ve been preferable, if Sheen had played both the roles? Or Brando?)

      Imagine Heart of Darkness rewritten so that Marlow makes the same discovery – and now he is foundered, crazed, suicidal.

      All this brings us, by a commodius vicus of recirculation, back to The Day of Creation, in which Mallory (which is ‘Marlow’ mixed with ‘Ballard’) sets out toward the source of his river, which might not be Lake Chad or the mountains of the Massif, but his own deluged deluded brain: malnourished, fevered. The River Mallory is the doctor’s crosscurrent double, an inconstant, alternately reflecting/reflected ‘black mirror’. ‘I tried to stand back from my own obsession,’ Mallory says, ‘but I could no longer separate myself from my dream of the Mallory.’

      In the first book of the first of the books, the Bible, ‘The Day of Creation’ occurred a full week before Paradise even existed: ‘And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep,’ and everything would’ve been perfectly peaceful, if God hadn’t said, ‘Let there be light’ – and there was light. Ballard’s novel reminds us that we’ve suffered ever since for our projections.

      Brooklyn, March 2014

      1. Around 1969, George Lucas tried to make a version of the John Milius script, but his proposal to shoot it in 16mm as a pseudo-documentary on location in South Vietnam, with the war still in progress, found no support at the studios. Coppola channeled this conceit through a brief cameo in his own movie as a telejournalist yelling at Air-Cav soldiers who’ve just razed a village: ‘Don’t look at the camera! Just go by like you’re fighting!’ In 1971, Dennis Hopper released The Last Movie, which he directed and starred in as ‘Kansas’, a stuntman on a Western being filmed in Peru. Kansas stays on after the production has wrapped, and makes an attempt at a calmer if romanticized life with a native prostitute. Their idyll is threatened, however, once an indigenous tribe, misunderstanding the Hollywood fakery, fashions equipment out of bamboo and starts ‘filming’ a Western in which the violence isn’t staged, but fatal.

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