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The Wounded Romanticism of Jg Ballard LYRICAL BALLARDS: THE WOUNDED ROMANTICISM OF J. G. BALLARD THOMAS KNOWLES A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of Nottingham Trent University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy October 2015 2 Copyright Statement This work is the intellectual property of the author. You may copy up to 5% of this work for private study, or personal, non-commercial research. Any re-use of the information contained within this document should be fully referenced, quoting the author, title, university, degree level and pagination. Queries or requests for any other use, or if a more substantial copy is required, should be directed to the owner of the Intellectual Property Rights. Contents Copyright Statement .................................................................................................... 2 Abstract ........................................................................................................................ 5 Abbreviations ............................................................................................................... 7 Introduction: Romanticisms Past and Present .............................................................. 9 Romanticisms Past ................................................................................................. 22 Apocalyptic Literature and Romantic Bardism.................................................. 26 Modern Romanticisms ........................................................................................... 43 Ballard on Romanticism and its (Decadent) Descendants ..................................... 67 Chapter Outlines................................................................................................. 77 Chapter 1. Mind-forged Landscapes in Ballard’s Early Short Stories ....................... 90 Incipient Bards and Personal Apocalypses ............................................................ 93 Atomic Revelations .............................................................................................. 120 Chapter 2. Apocalypse Now: The Romantic Prophet and Union with Nature in The Drowned World ........................................................................................................ 134 Anti-Enlightenment .............................................................................................. 138 Marrying Heaven and Hell ................................................................................... 149 Chapter 3. Romantic Wounds in The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash ...................... 168 The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash ....................................................................... 171 Decadence ............................................................................................................ 186 The Double ........................................................................................................... 200 4 Iconoclasm ........................................................................................................... 205 Chapter 4. Dreams of Mediation in The Unlimited Dream Company and The Day of Creation ................................................................................................................... 212 Imposing Visions ................................................................................................. 222 Televisual Nightmare ........................................................................................... 236 Chapter 5: Detecting the Future of Apocalypse in Millennium People and Kingdom Come ........................................................................................................................ 251 The Messiahs of Modernity ................................................................................. 262 The Life of Affect ................................................................................................ 275 Revolution and Reaction ...................................................................................... 278 Afterword: Notes towards a Ballardian Romantic Legacy ...................................... 286 Bibliography ............................................................................................................. 289 5 Abstract This thesis aims to provide a new account of the post-war British author J. G. Ballard (1930-2009) and his work, and in particular of his complex engagement with and critique of Romanticism. As such it represents an original contribution to knowledge in the areas of both J. G. Ballard criticism and in the study of Romantic legacies. Ballard’s ambivalent response to the legacies of Romanticism is seen to form a part of his overall ambivalence and ambiguity as a writer. In addition to the traditional ‘high Romantic’ aesthetic and ideology of Romanticism, Ballard is seen to draw upon Gothic, decadent and symbolist strands of Romanticism. After introducing the key Romantic echoes which I observe in Ballard, and the critical and cultural legacies of Romanticism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which he is responding to, I trace these elements through selected works covering the breadth of his oeuvre. Rather than offering a survey of the entirety of his work, of which there are several in print, the thesis considers a selection of key texts at different stages of Ballard’s career in order to bring out the evolving Romantic resonances of his work. In chapter 1 I examine the apocalyptic bard figures in a number of Ballard’s short stories published between 1956 and 1964; in chapter 2 I focus upon the marriage between mind and world in The Drowned World (1962); chapter 3 considers The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) and Crash (1973) as the urban and suburban sites of the wounding of a Romantic sensibility; chapter 4 concentrates upon The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) and The Day of Creation (1987) as meditations upon the role of the imagination in a multiply-mediated modernity; and chapter 5 investigates 6 Millennium People (2003) and Kingdom Come (2006) as postmodern detective stories that draw upon the tradition of the visionary urban and suburban wanderer. 7 Abbreviations Ballard, J. G. The Wind from Nowhere (London: Penguin, 1974 [1962]). WFN Ballard, J. G. The Drowned World (London: Fourth Estate, 2014 [1962]). DW Ballard, J. G. The Drought (London: Fourth Estate, 2014 [1964]). D Ballard, J. G. The Crystal World (London: Fourth Estate, 2014 [1966]). CW Ballard, J. G. The Atrocity Exhibition (London: Fourth Estate, 2014 [1970]). AE Ballard, J. G. Crash (London: Fourth Estate, 2014 [1973]). C Ballard, J. G. Concrete Island (London: Fourth Estate, 2014 [1974]). CI Ballard, J. G. High-Rise (London: Fourth Estate, 2014 [1975]). HR Ballard, J. G. The Unlimited Dream Company (London: Fourth Estate, 2014 [1979]). UDC Ballard, J. G. Hello America (London: Fourth Estate, 2014 [1981]). HA Ballard, J. G. J. G. Ballard eds. V. Vale and Andrea Juno (San Francisco: Re/Search Publications, 1984). R/S JGB Ballard, J. G. The Day of Creation (London: Fourth Estate, 2014 [1987]). DC Ballard, J. G. Rushing to Paradise (London: Fourth Estate, 2014 [1994]). RP Ballard, J. G. A User’s Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews (London: Flamingo, 1997 [1996]). UGM Ballard, J. G. Cocaine Nights (London: Fourth Estate, 2014 [1996]). CN Ballard, J. G. Super-Cannes (London: Fourth Estate, 2014 [2000]). SC Ballard, J. G. The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1 (London: Fourth Estate, 2014 [2001]). CSS1 8 Ballard, J. G. The Complete Short Stories: Volume 2 (London: Fourth Estate, 2014 [2001]). CSS2 Ballard, J. G. Millennium People (London: Fourth Estate, 2014 [2004]). MP Ballard, J. G. Kingdom Come (London: Fourth Estate, 2014 [2006]). KC Ballard, J. G. Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with J. G. Ballard, 1967-2008, eds. Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara (London: Fourth Estate, 2012). EM 9 Introduction: Romanticisms Past and Present The work of the post-war British author J. G. Ballard (1930-2009) has fascinated and frustrated its readers and critics in equal measure over the years. His writing career began in the 1950s, producing short stories for science fiction magazines like Science Fantasy and New Worlds, and continued until his death in 2009. Ballard was the author of some eighteen novels, over one hundred short stories, an autobiography, and numerous reviews, essays, manifestoes and pieces of journalism. He also wrote a novella (Running Wild (1988)) and was a prolific interviewee. A prominent member of the British science fiction ‘New Wave’ of the 1960s and 70s,1 he achieved a wider popularity and critical recognition after the publication of his semi-autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun (1984), which was adapted for the big screen by Stephen Spielberg in 1987.2 His novels The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) and Crash (1973) attracted prosecutions and censorship in both the United States and Britain for obscenity, and David Cronenberg’s 1996 film adaptation of Crash was banned in the city of Westminster. The Collins English Dictionary defines the second sense of the adjective ‘Ballardian’ as follows: 1 Descriptions of the British ‘New Wave’ tend to cluster around the three authors who worked together on New Worlds during the 1960s and 70s – Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock. This was a science fiction that sought to investigate the present and the near future in psychological and sociological terms, and which was more interested in the media landscape and the artistic avant-garde than in space travel and the distant futures of ‘hard’ science
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