J. G. Ballard by Wilson D. Harlan;

Author:Wilson, D. Harlan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2017-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

EMPIRES OF THE SELF

Autobiographical Novels

OVERVIEW

So far, I have discussed Ballard’s novels in chronological order of publication. This is because of their tidy thematic progression and grouping (a starter novel, a trilogy, an experimental novel, and another trilogy). After High-Rise, Ballard becomes less systematized until we arrive at the final quartet of “crime” novels. Between 1979 and 1994, he published six novels and one novella. Three of them form another trilogy that fictionalizes Ballard’s life and are the subject of this chapter: The Unlimited Dream Company, Empire of the Sun, and The Kindness of Women. The latter two follow Ballard’s life from childhood to adulthood in his fifties. They are among his most realistic novels. Unlimited is his most oneiric, fantastical novel, yet it is set in Shepperton and extremely personal, shedding light on his place of residence and narrative fixations; Jordi Costa calls it “a sort of perverse gospel, which describes the passion, death and resurrection—not necessarily in that order—of an apostle of the febrile imagination who seeks to be deciphered as an extreme metaphor of Ballard himself” (170).

Critics don’t usually consider Unlimited to be a work of Ballardian autobi-ographika, and it doesn’t pretend to do the same things as Empire and Kindness. But they are all intimate expressions of Ballard’s life. Unlimited is particularly interesting if we think of it as an expression of his own inner space—an adventure through the unconscious suburb of the “real” man.

In Grave New World, Dominika Oramus proposes that Ballard’s entire canon can be viewed as an effort in self-fashioning and the creation of his own image. His “quasi-autobiographies, numerous articles and memories … present a persona or rather a number of personas that he constructed in different moments of his life” (13), as do the becoming-Adams of the natural-disaster trilogy, the protean T of The Atrocity Exhibition, the “Ballard” of Crash, the fish-out-of-water “detectives” of his later novels, and so on. Together these extrapolations form a certain idea about the “real” Ballard. Oramus warns that the idea is just that—not the real, and not an ideal, but the imagined—and it shouldn’t be mistaken as historical or personal truth.

Ballard enjoyed playing with readers’ assumptions about himself as well as the role of the author, but he was relatively adamant about how his various “Ballards” were fictions conjured from his internal and external experiences. Still, some readers and critics have “accused” the “Ballards” of being Ballard, perhaps because he wrote them so well, perhaps because, deep down, people wanted them to be real, embracing their own psychopathies in a kind of vicarious projection. It just wasn’t the case, and in daily life, Ballard was thoroughly un-“Ballard.”

His autobiographical novels adhere to the postmodern rule of thumb that, because we are products of the media environment, our names should be enclosed in quotes. Modern capitalist technologies render identity a terminal fiction—this thesis has its roots in The Atrocity Exhibition and thereafter continues to grow and mature, culminating in his final novel, Kingdom Come. Subjected to aggressive mediascapes, Ballard’s characters jeopardize the concept of a fixed identity on multiple levels.

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