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Post-Temporal Subjectivity in the Fiction of J. G. Ballard

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Post-Temporal Subjectivity in the Fiction of J. G. Ballard Post-temporal Subjectivity in the Fiction of J. G. Ballard by Pedro Henrique dos Santos Groppo Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree “Doutor em Estudos Literários: Teoria da Literatura/Literatura Comparada” Belo Horizonte Faculdade de Letras Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais 2014 Table of Contents Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 1 A World without Time ............................................................................................................... 2 A Space of Memory ................................................................................................................... 4 Chapter 1: Space, Time, and the Uncanny .......................................................................... 10 Ballardian Perspective ............................................................................................................. 11 The Uncanny ............................................................................ Error! Bookmark not defined. The Home ................................................................................................................................. 15 Space/Power/Knowledge ......................................................................................................... 18 The Death of Affect ................................................................................................................. 25 Postwar Subjectivity and the Technological Sublime ............................................................. 27 The Media Landscape .............................................................................................................. 33 Hauntology ............................................................................................................................... 37 Chapter 2: J. G. Ballard and the Technological Uncanny ................................................. 41 From Outer to Inner Space: The New Wave ........................................................................... 41 Ballardian Space ...................................................................................................................... 44 The Influence of Surrealism ..................................................................................................... 49 Ballard and Postmodernism ..................................................................................................... 53 From the Sublime to the Grotesque ......................................................................................... 57 Technological Uncanny ........................................................................................................... 60 Chapter 3: Journeys to an Interior: Ballard and World War II ....................................... 64 Montage Landscapes of War: The Atrocity Exhibition ............................................................ 68 Death Games: “The Dead Time” ............................................................................................. 74 The Open-Air Cinema: Empire of the Sun ............................................................................... 77 The Persistence of Memory: The Kindness of Women and Miracles of Life ........................... 84 Chapter 4: Machine Embodiment: Crash and Death ......................................................... 91 To Become a Machine ............................................................................................................. 93 Conceptualized Psychopathology: The “Crashed Cars” Exhibition ........................................ 98 Cinecity: Crash! ..................................................................................................................... 101 Autogeddon ............................................................................................................................ 104 Hyperreality ........................................................................................................................... 108 “If Christ came again, he would be killed in a car crash” ...................................................... 110 Posthumous Fantasies: The Unlimited Dream Company ....................................................... 113 The Living and the Dead ........................................................................................................ 120 Conclusion: Exhausted Futures .......................................................................................... 127 Works Cited .......................................................................................................................... 132 Abstract This dissertation is an analysis of a selection of texts by J. G. Ballard (1930-2009) concerned with the collusion of personal and cultural trauma. Semi-autobiographical texts such as Empire of the Sun and other more imaginative works such as Crash and The Unlimited Dream Company are examined as illustrating the psychological and fictional processes of trauma, a wound that destabilizes time and space and the workings of memory and the imagination. Ballard’s themes of the death of affect, the mediatized subject, and the intractability of death are posited as consequences of a post-temporal subjectivity effected by the traumas of the Second World War and the emergence of the overloaded communications landscape of the 1960s. This dissertation adds to the existent literature in that it attempts to explore a poetics of a certain disconnect in the relation between subject and object, a relation that is skewed by the workings of trauma and repression, and that manifests itself in attempts to direct and order the real. Keywords: trauma, World War II, postmodernism, spatiality Resumo Esta tese é uma análise de uma seleção de textos de J. G. Ballard (1930-2009) que tratam da confluência do trauma pessoal e cultural. Textos semiautobiográficos como o Império do sol e obras como Crash e The unlimited dream company são examinadas como ilustrações dos processos psicológicos e ficcionais do trauma, uma ferida que desestabiliza tempo, espaço e os funcionamentos da memória e da imaginação. Ballard trata a morte do afeto (death of affect), o sujeito mediatizado, e a intratabilidade da morte como consequências de uma subjetividade pós-temporal em virtude da Segunda Guerra Mundial e da emergência da sobrecarregada paisagem midiática dos anos 60. Esta tese contribui para a literatura existente ao explorar uma poética do desencontro na relação entre sujeito e objeto, por sua vez distorcida pelos efeitos de trauma e repressão e que se manifesta em tentativas de ordenar o real. Palavras-chave: trauma, pós-modernismo, Segunda Guerra Mundial, espaço Acknowledgments I would like to thank my advisor, Professor Julio Jeha, for his patience and support. Thanks also to CNPq for the financial support and to CAPES/Fulbright for the opportunity of conducting part of the research for this dissertation at the University of California, Riverside under the supervision of Professor Rob Latham. Groppo 1 Introduction While J. G. Ballard (1930-2009) was still alive, there was a certain difficulty in Britain in acknowledging his stature as a writer. The appreciation of his work has been steadily growing in the five years after his death, exemplified by the advent of numerous critical books, academic conferences, and film adaptations in the works. Outside of Britain, Ballard is still less known, but the publication of a volume of his complete short stories was met with great enthusiasm in the United States in 2010. In the assertion of writers such as Will Self, Jonathan Lethem, and John Gray, he is probably the preeminent English writer of the postwar period. Still, Ballard sits uneasily as an “English” or “British” writer, for in many ways he never left Shanghai, where he was born and which remained his spiritual home. Postwar England was a shock to Ballard: having grown up in the prosperous International Settlement in Shanghai, the England of the Age of Austerity was a country that engaged in a deep cultural repression. England had not lost the war, but it certainly looked like it had. In Shanghai, became aware of the brutal reality of the world, the flimsy structure of social convention and the vulnerability of human life. The catastrophic breakdown of life in China that occurred after Pearl Harbor left him with an indelible impression. In his autobiography, Miracles of Life, Ballard recounts visiting the ruins of a formerly lush casino with his father before the war in Shanghai, a building that held “a deeper meaning” for him, “the sense that reality itself was a stage set that could be dismantled at any moment, and no matter how magnificent anything appeared, it could be swept aside into the debris of the past” (58). He then counters this gloomy impression with characteristic ambivalence: I also felt that the ruined casino, like the city and the world beyond it, was more real and more meaningful than it had been when it was thronged with gamblers and dancers. Abandoned houses and office buildings held a special Groppo 2 magic and on my way home from school I often paused outside an empty apartment block. Seeing everything displaced and rearranged in a haphazard way gave me my first taste of the surrealism of everyday life, though Shanghai was already surrealist enough. (59) Ballard calls “surrealism of everyday life” an ability to look at the world at an angle,
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