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Romanticism and Vermilion Sands

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Romanticism and Vermilion Sands chapter 2 Aeolian Harps in the Desert: Romanticism and Vermilion Sands Thomas Knowles Abstract This chapter explores the legacy of Romanticism in J.G. Ballard’s Vermilion Sands, and the presence of that collection in The Atrocity Exhibition’s “The Summer Cannibals.” Drawing upon the aesthetic theory of Wordsworth’s “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, as well as the literary criticism of M.H. Abrams, it reads the sonic sculptures and singing statues of Vermilion Sands as warped reincarnations of the Romantic Aeolian harp, played upon by the wind and by the lamia-like muses that figure in each story. Keywords J.G. Ballard – Vermilion Sands – Romanticism – Aesthetics – Sublime – the death of affect – imagination J.G. Ballard describes Vermilion Sands (1971) variously as “an exotic suburb of [his] mind”; “between Arizona and Ipanema Beach”; and as part of the “3,000 mile-long linear city that stretches from Gibraltar to Glyfada Beach” (vs 7). The resorts of Vermilion Sands, Red Beach and Lagoon West are at once otherworldly and familiar, evoking Mediterranean sun-drenched vil- las and apartment complexes as well as the dreamscapes of Surrealism and, I would suggest, the Romanticism of English poetry. Supernatural elements of the landscape take the form of jewelled insects, sand rays, singing statues and sonic sculptures, as well as sentient architecture and clothing, and lamia-like faded screen actresses and heiresses. Surrounded by sand seas, multi-coloured sand reefs and fused lakes, the natural world is as exhausted as its beach- fatigued human residents. The denizens and visitors of Vermilion Sands are affectless, bored, capricious and always on the lookout for new ways to stimulate their decadent imaginations. Yet in his descriptions of this future- past world Ballard evokes a lyrical, sometimes decadent, poetry. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi �0.��63/97890043�3866_005 <UN> 24 Knowles The Vermilion Sands collection bookends Ballard’s career just as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) stands at its centre. Published individually between 1956 and 1970, these short stories include Ballard’s first professionally published fiction, “Prima Belladonna” (1956), whilst “Say Goodbye to the Wind” (1970) takes us up to the publication of The Atrocity Exhibition. Their resonance can be clearly detected in the “Summer Cannibals” chapter of The Atrocity Exhibition and also extend into the final quartet of Ballard’s novels, becoming infused in the speci- fied nowheres of Cocaine Nights (1996) and Super-Cannes (2000). Ballard, in an interview with Will Self, suggested that authors do not necessarily write their works in the correct order, and that Vermilion Sands ought to have been his last book, I have often thought that writers don’t necessarily write their books in their real order. Empire of the Sun may well be my first novel, which I just happened to write when I was fifty-four. It may well be that Vermilion Sands is my last book. em 314 Vermilion Sands, then, is a presence before, after and throughout the universe of Ballard’s writing, a location suggestive of the aesthetic of the sublime, which this chapter will trace through the perpetuation and disavowal of Romanti- cism in both Vermilion Sands and The Atrocity Exhibition. The nine short stories that make up Vermilion Sands have been read in Jung- ian terms as an externalization of the warring elements of the psyche in the self’s quest for individuation.1 References to Surrealist art works, painters and textual effects abound too.2 However, the texts also support a reading which sees them as experiments in the calibration of the imaginative faculty which mediates between mind and world, and therefore as epistemological tales that both perpetuate and critique the Romantic drive to synthesize the dichoto- mous relationship between subject and object. This is an explicitly Romantic concern, and the oscillations in Ballard between the dejection of the “death of affect” (or “beach fatigue” as it is referred to in these stories) and the engorged imagination that would remake the world in an aesthetic revolution, hinge 1 See for example William M. Schuyler, ‘The Portrait of the Artist as a Jung Man: Love, Death and Art in J.G. Ballard’s Vermilion Sands’ (1993), in New York Review of Science Fiction no. 57 (May 1993): 8–11, and no. 58 (June 1993): 14–19. 2 See Jeannette Baxter’s J.G. Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination: Spectacular Authorship. London: Ashgate, 2010. Although Vermilion Sands itself is not covered in detail, many of Baxter’s in- sightful readings are equally applicable to these stories. <UN>.
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