By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
I’m often surprised by how little serious critical attention some of the work of J. G. Ballard (1930-2009) has received. ‘Having a Wonderful Time’ is a good example.
Like many of the short stories from the 1982 collection Myths of the Near Future, this short tale – which is told as a series of postcards sent to England from the Canary Islands – anticipated a number of features of twenty-first-century life long before the twentieth century had run its course.
Summary
Written in 1978, ‘Having a Wonderful Time’ is set in the ‘near future’ of 1985 (one year after Orwell’s dystopian year of choice, we might note in passing). The plot of the story is easy enough to summarise. A woman, Diana, sends a series of postcards home to a female friend in England from the holiday resort in which she is staying with her husband, Richard, in Las Palmas, on the island of Gran Canaria.
The postcards start out as lightly humorous accounts of the couple’s flight out to Gran Canaria, and their fortnight’s holiday on the island. But when their two weeks are up, there’s a surprise development: they are told that there is a problem with the computer controlling their flight to Gatwick, and they will have to remain on the island for another day while it’s resolved.
The next day, the problem hasn’t been fixed, and they remain out there, and the same happens again, and again. They find themselves on indefinite holiday. Flights continue to arrive to the island, but they are told that their flight home to Gatwick continues to be delayed. Diana occupies her time by joining an amateur dramatics society and taking part in a production of ‘The Importance of Being Ernest’ (sic).
Richard, meanwhile, hires a pedalo and goes exploring along the coast, reporting that he estimates there are perhaps a million holidaymakers on the island and the entire island is being turned into a series of holiday complexes or ‘human reserves’.
After more than four months on the island, Richard tells Diana a theory he has heard that Western European governments are in collusion with the Spanish authorities and are turning the whole of the Canaries into a permanent holiday camp for their ‘employables’: the management class as well as factory workers. He tells her that these governments cannot allow them to return home lest they start revolutions in their home nations. Diana dismisses this as a ‘preposterous’ story.
Richard goes off to found a resistance group and, having stolen an ‘unseaworthy’ motorboat and set off for the African coast, washes up dead on a French beach. Diana, meanwhile, continues to act in local productions: this time, Electra (the title of Greek tragedies by both Sophocles and Euripides).
The final postcard in the story is dated 3 July: the one-year anniversary of Diana and Richard’s arrival on the island for the start of their holiday. Diana continues to be in good spirits and is still taking part in theatre productions, keeping her mind occupied so she hardly thinks about Richard.
Towards the end of her final missive, she has the dawning realisation that the friend she is writing to is probably also somewhere on the island by now, and that none of her postcards have probably ever been delivered, and instead lie in the sorting office behind the hotel.
Analysis
How should we analyse this story? It’s perhaps worth bearing in mind some of the points J. G. Ballard made repeatedly in interviews he gave throughout his career. These have been collected and scrupulously edited in a highly readable, fat collection, Extreme Metaphors, which is required reading for any Ballard fan.
In interviews, Ballard often refers to future totalitarianism as being a ‘benign’ form of dictatorship, carried out in the manner of a smiling waiter rather than Big Brother or Adolf Hitler.
Another strand in these interviews – and something which later novels like Super-Cannes (2000) explore on a much larger canvas – is the idea of the leisure classes living in gated communities and perennial holiday camps. In ‘Having a Wonderful Time’, this reality is forced upon Diana and Richard, but only Richard sees it for the totalitarianism it is.
Diana positively embraces it, while simultaneously denying that it exists as such. She may take part in amateur productions of Greek tragedies and Victorian comedies, but her own life resembles nothing more than that twentieth-century masterpiece, Waiting for Godot. She is always hopeful that Godot, or Gatwick, will materialise tomorrow, and despite each day bringing disappointment, the reality never dawns on her.
The title of Ballard’s story, ‘Having a Wonderful Time’, obviously alludes to the phrase commonly used in holiday postcards sent to friends and family at home. As with another such expression, ‘wish you were here’ (which the poet Tony Harrison memorably gave a poignant new lease of life in one of his sonnets recalling his childhood holidays with his parents), the phrase ‘having a wonderful time’ quickly evolves from a bland cliché into a title carrying grim irony.
Diana may still be telling herself she’s having a lovely time, but the truth is that her holiday camp has become, to all intents and purposes, a concentration camp.
Of course, Ballard’s vision of the future is not to be taken as entirely serious. He is using exaggeration and humour to explore some important aspects of late twentieth-century society. Chief among these is one that science fiction is all-too-familiar with: what do we do as a society when most of the jobs that people have traditionally done for centuries are fully automated, or no longer needed?
In this regard, the factory workers are less of a surprise than the management class to which Richard belongs. Western Europe is largely post-industrial, with many centres of industry transferred to China and India, among other developing nations. White-collar jobs far outnumber blue-collar ones.
But Ballard’s story does appear to have anticipated what the late David Graeber famously dubbed ‘bullshit jobs’: administrative jobs (usually with nebulous titles ending in ‘manager’, whose precise purpose one cannot fathom from the job title alone) which don’t appear to serve any real function in an organisation.
In this regard, Ballard’s solution to this problem of mass unemployment (and ‘unemployables’) may be comically extreme (and deliberately so), but he appears to have foreseen the rise of such jobs in an increasingly automated, post-industrial world.
Which is to say, ‘Having a Wonderful Time’ does something similar to what this glorious Armstrong and Miller sketch did in more recent times: it uses comedy to address the problems of what is effectively a post-work society.
In 2020-22, too, lockdowns around much of the world brought home a similar idea: people on furlough or ‘working’ from home, believing that this extended holiday could somehow become a permanent way of life. Some people were like Diana and embraced a life without real purpose and meaning, a world of bread and circuses to d