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Heterotopic Space in Selected Works of J. G. Ballard

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Heterotopic Space in Selected Works of J. G. Ballard View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by White Rose E-theses Online 1 Heterotopic Space in Selected Works of J. G. Ballard Christopher James Duffy Submitted in accordance with the requirements for a degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of English November 2015 2 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. © 2015 The University of Leeds and Christopher James Duffy The right of Christopher James Duffy to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. 3 Acknowledgments Many thanks to Richard Brown for his invaluable advice and guidance, and to everyone who has supported me during the writing of this thesis. Dedicated to Miriam for her patience and understanding, and to Miles for making my life blessed. 4 Abstract J. G. Ballard’s writing confronts the potentiality of space within the contemporary landscape, articulating complex relationships between the external environment and the individual. In 1983, Ballard stated: ‘[…] the sort of architectural spaces we inhabit are enormously important -- they are powerful. If every member of the human race were to vanish, our successors from another planet could reconstitute the psychology of the people on this planet from its architecture.’1 Ballard’s texts are at all times bounded by a materiality which the reader is obliged to pay close attention to. This thesis takes a distinct approach to the spatial in the work of Ballard by concentrating on the external, physical environment and its psychological effects. It uses Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia as a theoretical underpinning to describe certain of Ballard’s spaces, a term richly generative for a number of reasons. Heterotopias are other spaces, off-centre with respect to the normal and everyday. They modify space in some way, drawing out latent possibilities. Ballard’s representations of space operate in a similar manner, from early short stories that contrast the quotidian with the fantastic, to investigations of postcivil society reconfiguring criminality in his final novels. This study approaches Ballard’s work in a chronological way, in order to reflect the way in which his heterotopic spaces map changing social conditions. This also enables consideration of Ballard’s developing textual spaces, and, following Foucault’s definition of disturbing literary heterotopias that destroy in advance syntax holding words and things together, Ballard’s unsettling of genre and traditional narrative structures will be examined along with the resistance of Ballard’s texts to easy categorisation and critical assimilation. Ultimately, in this thesis I argue that the spatial is a vital critical category for understanding Ballard’s work, conceiving him as an explorer of complex heterotopic space and writer of disruptive heterotopic literature. 1 V. Vale and Andrea Juno, eds., J. G. Ballard (San Francisco: RE/Search Publications, 1984), p. 44. 5 Table of Contents Abbreviations 6 Introduction 7 1 Two Heterotopic Spaces in ‘Prima Belladonna’ and ‘Escapement’ 31 2 Heterotopia and Post-Catastrophic Space in The Drowned World, The Drought, and The Crystal World 54 3 Heterotopia and Désoeuvrement in ‘The Terminal Beach’ and The Atrocity Exhibition 86 4 Heterotopia and ‘The Conquest of Space’ in Memories of the Space Age 116 5 Hidden Heterotopias in Crash and Concrete Island 138 6 Autobiography and Heterotopia: Reading Empire of the Sun with The Kindness of Women and Miracles of Life 168 7 Crime Fiction and Heterotopia in Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes 198 Conclusion 226 Bibliography 232 6 Abbreviations WFN -- The Wind From Nowhere DW -- The Drowned World D -- The Drought CW -- The Crystal World AE -- The Atrocity Exhibition C -- Crash CI -- Concrete Island VS -- Vermilion Sands ES -- Empire of the Sun MSA -- Memories of the Space Age KW -- The Kindness of Women UGM -- A Users Guide to the Millennium CN -- Cocaine Nights SC -- Super-Cannes CSS1 -- The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1 CSS2 -- The Complete Short Stories: Volume 2 ML -- Miracles of Life: An Autobiography 7 Introduction The work of J. G. Ballard confronts the spatial as a horizon of possibility within the contemporary environment, perceiving that space is not a neutral quantity and attempting to understand the processes that actively constitute different spaces inscribing certain kinds of reality. In Ballard’s fiction, structuring logics that encode behaviours and social relations regulate spatial possibilities. A central dynamic is the individual struggling to assert coherent alternative arrangements of things (physical and psychological), giving credence to the idea that characters shape their environment through imaginative investments that actively question the idea of reality encoded deep within the spatial. Ballard engages in a project of excavation and recovery in which alternative meanings of space are hidden in palimpsest environments making apparent the contingency of present circumstances and limits to totalising authoritative meaning, often forcing characters to pass through gaps and exclusions within the material landscape. This study reads space in Ballard as heterotopic, concentrating on his descriptions of physical environments and considering the way in which this aspect of Ballard’s work develops over the course of his career. In his lecture ‘Of Other Spaces’2 (‘Des Espaces Autres’) given to the Circle of Architectural Studies (Cercle d’ètudes architecturales) on 14 March 1967, Michel Foucault calls the present an ‘epoch of space’ defined in the following way: ‘We are in the epoch of simultaneity; we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.’3 Anticipating a spatial turn within the humanities, Foucault no longer sees space as a fixed, taken-for-granted ontological category. Foucault’s epoch 2 Foucault’s lecture was first published by the French journal Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité in October 1984. It has been translated into English as both ‘Of Other Spaces’ (in the journal Diacritics in Spring 1986 translated by Jay Miskowiec) and ‘Different Spaces’ (in the collection Aesthetics: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Volume 2 translated by Robert Hurley). It appears as ‘Of Other Spaces’ in the recent 2008 translation by Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter in the collection Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society, which is the version referred to in this study. 3 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces (1967)’, trans. by Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter, in Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society, ed. by Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 13-30 (p. 14). 8 is one in which different types of space, or ‘emplacements’ to use his particular term,4 can be juxtaposed next to each other, existing within the same continuum as separate but related to each other. In ‘Of Other Spaces’, Foucault also defines heterotopia, an extremely rich term that has continued to generate a number of different meanings since 1967. Heterotopias are alternative orderings, heterogeneous to the rest of normalised space all around them. Foucault makes an important distinction: unlike utopias that do not exist anywhere, heterotopias exist in the real world.5 Peter Johnson notes the concept of heterotopia problematises the utopic nowhere so that ‘heterotopia refers to varied spatial and temporal disruptions that imaginatively interrogate and undermine certain formulations of utopia’.6 Although heterotopias may spatially encode certain impulses towards a better life, this is always carried out in negotiation within the parameters of material existence, however messy and complex. Heterotopias are therefore defined by their relationship with the real spaces of the world. The concept helps stress physical materiality in Ballard’s work continually reasserting itself against the possibilities of utopic transcendence. Etymologically, heterotopia combines ‘hetero’ (another or different) and ‘topos’ (place). Originally, heterotopia is a medical term referring to a displaced but otherwise harmless tissue developing in an unusual or abnormal place. According to Heidi Sohn: ‘From the 1920s onwards, heterotopia increasingly appears in medical literature to describe phenomenon occurring in an unusual place, or to indicate “a spatial displacement of normal tissue”, but which does not influence the overall functioning and development of the organism.’7 Although Foucault does not refer to 4 ‘Emplacement’ means different things in French and English. As Dehaene and De Cauter note: ‘In Foucault’s text, emplacement should be considered a technical term, that is space or rather place in the era of the network as opposed to extension. The space of emplacement only exists as “discrete space”, an instance of one of the possible positions that exist within a set of positions […] On occasion, he uses the term in a non-technical sense to refer more generally to sites and places, but it is clear that he deliberately avoids the common words “place”, “lieu”, or “endroit” and thereby produces an effect of both emphasis and estrangement.’ (Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, pp. 23-24) 5 Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, p. 17. 6 Peter Johnson, ‘Unravelling Foucault’s “Different Spaces”’, History of the Human Sciences, 19:4 (2006), 75-90 (p. 75). 7 Heidi Sohn, ‘Heterotopia: Anamnesis of a Medical Term’, in Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society, ed. by Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 41-50 (p. 41). 9 the genesis of heterotopia in medical terminology, the idea of a benign spatial displacement within the body is evocative for his use of the term in a social and cultural context.
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