J. G. Ballard: Visions and Revisions Also by Jeannette Baxter J. G. BALLARD: Contemporary Critical Perspectives J. G. BALLARD’S SURREALIST IMAGINATION Also by Rowland Wymer (∗published by Palgrave Macmillan) DEREK JARMAN SUICIDE AND DESPAIR IN THE JACOBEAN DRAMA WEBSTER AND FORD∗ THE ACCESSION OF JAMES I: Historical and Cultural Consequences (edited with Glenn Burgess and Jason Lawrence)∗ THE ICONOGRAPHY OF POWER: Ideas and Images of Rulership on the English Renaissance Stage (edited with György E. Szönyi) NEO-HISTORICISM: Studies in Renaissance Literature, History and Politics (edited with Robin Headlam Wells and Glenn Burgess) SHAKESPEARE AND HISTORY (edited with Holger Klein) J. G. Ballard: Visions and Revisions Edited by Jeannette Baxter and Rowland Wymer Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Jeannette Baxter and Rowland Wymer 2012 Chapters © individual contributors 2012 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-27812-7 All rights reserved. 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A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10987654321 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 Contents Acknowledgements vii Notes on Contributors viii Introduction 1 Jeannette Baxter and Rowland Wymer Part I ‘Fictions of Every Kind’: Form and Narrative 1 Ballard’s Story of O: ‘The Voices of Time’ and the Quest for (Non)Identity 19 Rowland Wymer 2 Ballard/Atrocity/Conner/Exhibition/Assemblage 35 Roger Luckhurst 3 Uncanny Forms: Reading Ballard’s ‘Non-Fiction’ 50 Jeannette Baxter Part II ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: Sex, Geometry and the Body 4 Pornographic Geometries: The Spectacle as Pathology and as Therapy in The Atrocity Exhibition 71 JenHuiBonHoa 5 Disaffection and Abjection in J. G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash 88 Emma Whiting 6 Reading Posture and Gesture in Ballard’s Novels 105 Dan O’Hara Part III ‘Babylon Revisited’: Ballard’s Londons 7 The Texture of Modernity in J. G. Ballard’s Crash, Concrete Island and High-Rise 123 Sebastian Groes v vi Contents 8 J. G. Ballard and William Blake: Historicizing the Reprobate Imagination 142 Alistair Cormack 9 Late Ballard 160 David James Part IV ‘The Personal is Political’: Psychology and Sociopathology 10 Empires of the Mind: Autobiography and Anti-imperialism in the Work of J. G. Ballard 179 David Ian Paddy 11 ‘Going mad is their only way of staying sane’: Norbert Elias and the Civilized Violence of J. G. Ballard 198 J. Carter Wood 12 The Madness of Crowds: Ballard’s Experimental Communities 215 Jake Huntley 13 ‘Zones of Transition’: Micronationalism in the Work of J. G. Ballard 230 Simon Sellars Index 249 Acknowledgements Our biggest debt of gratitude is to the contributors to this volume; we thank them for their commitment, patience and tireless enthusiasm. We also gratefully acknowledge the support of Anglia Ruskin University for granting periods of study leave and the stimulation from colleagues and students with whom we have discussed some of our ideas. Jeannette would especially like to thank Kate and Wallace for the many delightful distractions and Rowland is similarly grateful to Pauline, Elliott, and Imogen. Working with Palgrave Macmillan has been a pleasure; many thanks especially to Paula Kennedy and Benjamin Doyle for their contin- ued support and invaluable help and advice with editorial queries. We also gratefully acknowledge the Ballard Estate for their interest in and assistance with this collection. vii Notes on Contributors Jeannette Baxter is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. She is the author of J. G. Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination: Spectacular Authorship (2009); editor of J. G. Ballard: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (2008); co-editor of A Literature of Resti- tution: Critical Essays on W. G. Sebald (2012), and author of numerous essays in the areas of literary modernism, postmodernism, and con- temporary British fiction. She is co-editing a special issue of Women: A Cultural Review on the work of Jean Rhys. Alistair Cormack is Head of English at Gresham’s in Holt, Norfolk. He is the author of Yeats and Joyce: Theories of History and the Reprobate Tradition (2008) and of essays on Monica Ali and Ian McEwan. He is currently involved in research for a biography of the Irish translator and journalist Stephen MacKenna. Sebastian Groes is Lecturer in English Literature at Roehampton Univer- sity. He specializes in modern and contemporary culture and literature, and representations of cities. He is the author of The Making of London (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), and editor of Ian McEwan (2009) and co-editor of Kazuo Ishiguro (2009) and Julian Barnes (2011). Jen Hui Bon Hoa is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at Harvard University. She is currently completing her dissertation, ‘Secret Lives of the City: Reimagining Public Space in Twentieth-Century Lit- erature and Theory from Walter Benjamin to François Bon’. Her essay in this volume is part of her next research project, ‘The Compulsive Body’, which explores the notion of bodily intelligence in contemporary theories of aesthetic experience, affect, and subject formation. Jacob Huntley is a Tutor in Literature and Creative Writing at the Uni- versity of East Anglia. His critical work principally explores non-mimetic or genre fiction from a Deleuzian perspective and he has also written on aspects of the Gothic, horror fiction, William Hope Hodgson, John Wyndham and the Saw films. viii Notes on Contributors ix David James is Lecturer in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Lit- erature at the University of Nottingham. He is author of Contem- porary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space (2008) and co-editor of New Versions of Pastoral: Post-Romantic, Modern, and Contemporary Responses to the Tradition (2009). He is currently completing a mono- graph on how modernist aesthetics have been reanimated by twenty- first-century novelists, while guest editing with Andrzej Gasiorek a special issue of Contemporary Literature on ‘Post-Millennial Commit- ments’ for winter 2012. His latest book, for which he is sole editor, is The Legacies of Modernism: Historicizing Postwar and Contemporary Fiction (forthcoming). Roger Luckhurst is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. His publications include ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard (1997), The Inven- tion of Telepathy (2002), Science Fiction (2005), and The Trauma Question (2008), as well as a number of co-edited collections of essays, including Literature and the Contemporary (1999), The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cul- tural History c.1880–1900 (2000) and Transactions and Encounters: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century (2002). His current projects include a study of the curse of the British Museum Mummy. Dan O’Hara is Lecturer in English and American Literature at the Uni- versity of Cologne. He was educated at Warwick, and Oxford, where he took his D.Phil., ‘Machinic Fictions: A Genealogy of Machines in Twentieth-Century Prose and Art’ (2005). His publications include Thomas Pynchon: Schizophrenia & Social Control (1994), the ongoing Concordance to the Works of Deleuze and Guattari (2009– ), and the forth- coming Extreme Possibilities: Selected Interviews with J. G. Ballard, 1967– 2006, co-edited with Simon Sellars. He has written often for Ballardian, and has also published on Pynchon, Beckett, Deleuze, Bourdieu, and Shelley. David Ian Paddy is Professor of English Language and Literature at Whittier College, a liberal arts college near Los Angeles. He teaches courses in modern and contemporary British literature, drama, cre- ative writing, science fiction and Celtic literature. His current research area is contemporary Welsh fiction. He is the author of articles on Angela Carter, Niall Griffiths, Jackie Kay, Jeff Noon, Samuel Beckett and R. S. Thomas, and the forthcoming book, The Empires of J. G. Ballard (2012). x Notes on Contributors Simon Sellars is a researcher in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. He is the publisher and editor of the widely read website ballardian.com, author of Applied Ballardianism: the Philosophy of J. G. Ballard (forthcoming), and co-editor with Dan O’Hara of Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews with J. G. Ballard, 1967–2008 (forthcoming). Emma Whiting received a Ph.D. from the University of East Anglia in 2010.