Authors: J. G. Ballard
In the Upper VIth I passed the King’s College entrance
examination and met the admissions tutor. I had applied to
read psychology, but at the time psychology was not an
independent faculty at Cambridge, and he told me that I
would have to read philosophy, which contained a small
element of psychology within it. ‘What do you want to do
when you graduate?’ he asked me. When I said that I was
really interested in psychiatry, he told me that I would need
a medical degree. I was interested in medicine, which seemed
to abut abnormal psychology and surrealism, so I agreed
there and then, perhaps not the wisest decision in the long
term. My parents, naturally, were delighted. In October 1949
I moved half a mile down Trumpington Street to King’s, and
began my study of anatomy, physiology and pathology.
As I left The Leys for the last time, entering the world as
an adult, I felt more confident about the future than I had
at any time since arriving in England. In the last two years at
school I had read a great deal, endlessly experimented with
my short stories, which were becoming steadily more
unreadable, and through my study of biology had even
found a strain of scientific mysticism in my imagination. I
was happy with the prospect of becoming a psychiatrist, and
knew that I already had my first patient – myself. I was well aware that my reasons for studying medicine were strongly
influenced by my memories of wartime Shanghai, and by the
horrors of the European war exposed at the Nuremberg
trials. The dead Chinese I had seen as a boy still lay in their
ditches within my mind, an ugly mystery that needed to be
solved.
The faith in reason and rationality that dominated postwar
thinking struck me as hopelessly idealistic, like the belief
that the German people had been led astray by Hitler and
the Nazis. I was sure that the countless atrocities in eastern
Europe had taken place because the Germans involved had
enjoyed the act of mass murder, just as the Japanese had
enjoyed tormenting the Chinese. Reason and rationality
failed to explain human behaviour. Human beings were
often irrational and dangerous, and the business of psychiatry
was as much with the sane as the insane.
My last act at The Leys, in the week before I left, took place
in the basement kitchen in North B house, when I skinned
and then boiled a rabbit. I was determined to expose the
skeleton, wire it together and use it as a combined mascot
and table ornament. I filled the entire building with steam
and a disagreeably potent stench. The housemaster came
down to stop me, but backed off when he saw that I was on
an intense mission of my own. Why the rabbit skeleton was
so important I can’t remember.
* * *
Shanghai was still very close to me, and the American
airbases that surrounded Cambridge were a constant
reminder, as were the American airmen who visited the pubs
and cinemas with their English girlfriends. I was strongly
drawn to flight, and could still see the B-29s sailing slowly
over Lunghua, releasing their coloured parachutes like toys
thrown to desperate children. I once climbed through the
fence around a British airfield and crept into one of the
parking bays protected by an earth embankment. Security
was lax, and none of the service crews was around. There was
a four-engined bomber with a tricycle landing gear – probably
a Liberator – and I swung myself through the open
ventral hatchway, and sat surrounded by the clutter of equipment
inside the cockpit.
Today I would have been arrested, held in a child remand
centre, examined by psychologists, sent to a juvenile court,
and generally made to feel like a dysfunctional and even
dangerous member of society. In fact, I had touched nothing
and damaged nothing, and merely gazed through a small
window into a dream. I might think that England was deeply
repressed and ready to be laid on the analyst’s couch, but I
was well aware of my own flaws. I liked to think I was rootless,
but I was probably as English as anyone could be, and
being rootless was anyway a huge handicap. I was drawing a
curtain over my past life, accepting that I would never go
back to Shanghai and would have to make a new life in
England, with all that this entailed.
Unlike most undergraduates – never ‘students’, one of countless
minor anachronisms – I knew Cambridge well when I
first went up to King’s. I knew the coffee shops and bookshops,
I had punted on the Cam, I knew several of the
colleges well, especially Trinity, I had been to the tea dances
at the Dorothy, the Arts Cinema and the film society, where
I had seen all the pre-war classics such as
The Seashell and the
Clergyman
, and Dalí’s
Un Chien Andalou and L’Âge d’Or.
This had advantages and drawbacks. There was never any
chance that I would be ‘smitten’ by the visual impact of the
colleges, the Gothic presence of King’s chapel, the beauty of
the Backs. I went on having my hair cut at the same barbers,
I bought my shoes at the same shoe shops. Had I seen
Cambridge for the first time in 1949, I might have taken
more from it. In a sense I was ready to leave as soon as I
arrived, not the best arrangement.
On the other hand, I could concentrate on the important
aspects of Cambridge – the medical and science faculties – and ignore anything connected with ‘heritage’ Cambridge,
which has mesmerised generations of parents, who have
sacrificed so much energy and ambition into getting their
children between those sacred Gothic walls. This has long
been one of the most wasteful forms of English snobbery. I
firmly believe that Oxford and Cambridge should be
graduate universities only, at one stroke killing off this
absurd status race, and at the same time benefiting all other
universities.
In reality there are two Cambridges, the faculties on the
one hand – history, physics, archaeology and so on – where
research, lectures and laboratory work take place, and the
colleges, which are residential clubs that provide poor food,
a small amount of often poor teaching and the bulk of the
myths about the Cambridge lifestyle. I was very happy with
the first, and bored stiff by the latter.
I spent my two years studying anatomy, physiology and
pathology. The tuition I received was superb, the lectures
lucid and intelligent, and the anatomy demonstrators who
regularly tested us were all qualified physicians specialising
in surgery. Anatomy involved the extended dissection of
the five parts into which the human body was divided.
Physiology and pathology largely consisted of examining
slides through the microscope, but anatomy was a process
entirely initiated by the student, and demanded hours of
patient application. The dissecting room was the gravitational
centre of all medical study. If nothing else was going on we would go to the DR, put on our white coats, take our
particular body part – the leg, arm or head-and-neck we
were dissecting, and start work alongside our Cunningham
dissection manuals (never Gray’s), whose pages would soon
be stained with human fat.
Before our first visit to the DR we were welcomed by
Professor Harris, the head of the anatomy school. He was an
inspirational lecturer, the child of a modest Welsh family
too poor to send their children to university. Harris and
his brother were both determined to become doctors, so the
younger brother worked for six years to support the older
and pay his medical school fees until he qualified. He in turn
supported his younger brother for a further six years until
both had gained their degrees. In his wide-ranging lectures
Harris made clear his belief in the noble calling of medicine,
with anatomy at its heart, and I never for a moment doubted
him.
At the end of his opening lecture Harris warned that a
small number of us would be unable to cope with the sight
of the cadavers waiting for dissection on the glass-topped
tables. Walking into that strange, low-ceilinged chamber,
halfway between a nightclub and an abattoir, was an
unnerving experience. The cadavers, greenish-yellow with
formaldehyde, lay naked on their backs, their skins covered
with scars and contusions, and seemed barely human, as
if they had just been taken down from a Grünewald
Crucifixion
. Several students in my group dropped out, unable to cope with the sight of their first dead bodies, but
in many ways the experience of dissection was just as overwhelming
for me.
Nearly sixty years later, I still think that my two years of
anatomy were among the most important of my life, and
helped to frame a large part of my imagination. Both before
and during the war in Shanghai I had seen a great many
corpses, some at very close quarters, and like everyone else I
had neutralised my emotional response by telling myself:
‘This is grim, but sadly part of life.’ I assume that police,
firemen, paramedics, doctors and nurses react in the same
way. But they, at least, are absolved from any sense of guilt or
responsibility. Even as a child in Shanghai I knew that something
was wrong. Most of the corpses I saw, even (indirectly)
the famine and disease victims, had been killed by someone
else, and childishly I felt that I was partly responsible.
Now, in 1949, only a few years later, I was dissecting dead
human beings, paring back the layers of skin and fat to reach
the muscles below, then separating these to reveal the nerves
and blood vessels. In a way I was conducting my own
autopsy on all those dead Chinese I had seen lying by the
roadside as I set off for school. I was carrying out a kind of
emotional and even moral investigation into my own past
while discovering the vast and mysterious world of the
human body.
Each term we would begin work on a new cadaver, five
teams of two students dissecting a body part. A team would separate its part from the cadaver, and continue the term’s
dissection on its own. When the DR was closed we would
leave our parts in one of the large wooden cabinets – one
cabinet filled with heads, another with legs, and so on.
Looking at the heaped faces with their exposed teeth, it was
difficult not to think of the newsreels of Belsen and Dachau
that were still being shown in cinemas when fresh accounts
of Nazi atrocities came to light.
In 1949 most of the cadavers in the DR were those of
doctors who had willed their bodies for dissection to the
next generation of medical students. This selfless act was a
remarkable tribute to the spirit of these dead doctors, who
knew that they would be reduced at the end of the term to a
clutch of bones and gristle tagged for the incinerator. Once,
searching for the senior laboratory assistant, I strayed into
the preparation room beyond the DR on the last day of
term, and found a large table set with a dozen metal platters,
each bearing its tagged remains of the doctors who had
bequeathed their bodies, a mysterious banquet in which I
had taken part. I felt, and still feel, that in a sense they had
transcended death, if only briefly, living on as the last breath
of their identities emerged between the fingers of the students
dissecting them.
Although they were identified only by number, each of the
cadavers seemed to have a distinct personality – the girth
and general physique, the profile bones of the face coming
through the skin and reasserting themselves, the scars and blemishes, odd anomalies such as extra nipples and toes,
residues of operations, tattoos, inexplicable blemishes, the
story of a lifetime written into the skin, especially of the
hands and face. Dissecting the face, revealing the layers of
muscles and nerves that generated expressions and
emotions, was a way of entering the private lives of these
dead physicians and almost of bringing them back to life.
There was one female cadaver, a strong-jawed woman of
late middle age, whose bald head shone brightly under the
lights. Most of the male medical students gave her a wide
berth. None of us had seen a naked woman of our mothers’
age, alive or dead, and there was a certain authority in her
face, perhaps that of a senior gynaecologist or GP. I was
drawn to her, though not for the obvious sexual reasons;
her breasts had subsided into the fatty tissue on her chest,
and many of the students assumed she was male. But I was
intrigued by the small scars on her arms, the calluses on her
hands she had probably carried from childhood, and tried to
reconstruct the life she had led, the long years as a medical
student, her first affairs, marriage and children. One day I
found her dissected head in the locker among the other
heads. The exposed layers of muscles in her face were like the
pages of an ancient book, or a pack of cards waiting to be
reshuffled into another life.
And all the while, in a wooden box under my bed at
King’s, slept the bones of a small Asian farmer who had once
planted rice, smoked his pipe in the evenings and watched his grandchildren grow. After his death his body had been
boiled down to the white sticks that were sold on to an
English medical student who had once boiled a rabbit to its
bones. His skeleton, in the same pine box, has probably
guided generations of Cambridge students, who have sat at
their desks and explored his ribs and pelvis, feeling the bony
points of his skull as if assembling the armature of a soul.
Patiently, he has lived on.
My years in the dissection room were important because
they taught me that though death was the end, the human
imagination and the human spirit could triumph over our
own dissolution. In many ways my entire fiction is the dissection
of a deep pathology that I had witnessed in Shanghai
and later in the post-war world, from the threat of nuclear
war to the assassination of President Kennedy, from the
death of my wife to the violence that underpinned the
entertainment culture of the last decades of the century. Or
it may be that my two years in the dissecting room were an
unconscious way of keeping Shanghai alive by other means.