The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard 9781472542854, 9781441161956

Citation preview

Acknowledgements

My thanks to the staff and students of the School of English, University of Leeds, for providing the culture within which this project was conceived; particular thanks to Dr Richard Brown for continued advice and encouragement and to Dr Nick Ray for invaluable conversations and generous sharing of resources. Thanks also to the staff of the University of Leeds Library, and, for last-minute help in the proofing stages, to Dr Catherine Bates, Martyn Colebrook, Dr Alexandra Emmanuel, Dr Alberto Fernández Carbajal, Reshma Jagernath, Dr Kaley Kramer, Dr Emma Smith, and Dr Dominic Williams. Thanks to Mat Fenge for neighbourly patience and to Anise Paul for fantastic support; again, however, this one is dedicated to George Ian and Mavis Francis, for pretty much everything.

Introduction

About to embark on a perverse journey through the motorway night with his mentor, the twisted former TV scientist Vaughan, ‘James Ballard’, protagonist of J. G. Ballard’s infamous novel Crash , apprehends the call of a ‘benevolent psychopathology’ which ‘beckoned towards us, enshrined in the tens of thousands of vehicles moving down the highways, in the giant jetliners lifting over our heads, in the most humble machined structures and commercial laminates’ (C , 138). The phrase reappears in David Cronenberg’s 1996 film based on Ballard’s novel as a key sound-bite in a dialogue between Elias Koteas and James Spader’s characters carefully signalled as containing the narrative’s conceptual essence. Risking synecdoche for a moment, one might consider ‘benevolent psychopathology’ as a route marker at the beginning of this book’s career through the strange mindscapes of Ballard’s fiction, a symptomatic signal around which the alert reader might, on the model of the psychoanalyst, construct a narrative to explain the dynamics of Ballard’s haunting, disorienting writings. How can one have a ‘benevolent psychopathology’? In what real sense is it possible to envisage a well- meaning sickness of soul ? Such is the connotation of the phrase, conjuring in its calculated unlikelihood the strange reversals of meaning and unwelcome psychological contradictions which were the stock-in-trade of Sigmund Freud’s writings. Ballard’s works are in some sense engaged in arguing the beneficial nature, the necessity, of madness or psychopathology for contemporary people, not only in Crash – a reader’s report on which condemning him as ‘beyond psychiatric help’ Ballard famously greeted as confirming its ‘complete artistic success’ (Times, 20 April 2009) – but right through into his last novels, which envisage the people of twenty-first- century England engaged in meaningless rebellion against themselves and all the trappings of modern life. ‘Each of these imaginary wounds was the model for the sexual union of Vaughan’s skin and my own. The deviant technology of the car- crash provided the sanction for any perverse act’ (Crash , 138); with its espousal of the language of sexual deviation and perversion, Ballard’s writing is deeply imbued with the discursive textures of psychoanalysis, yet it is also distinctly

2

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

post- Freudian as well as being psychological in a far broader sense, translating and re-inscribing Freud’s psychodynamic theories into the concrete and plastic languages of the contemporary motorway landscape, flirting with the psychotic possibilities of the imagination as it searches for new modes of individual liberation and excitement. Moving to occupy a zone hitherto inexplicably uncolonized, or at best only dealt with among other critical concerns, this book attempts to address head- on the psychological aspect of Ballard’s fictions, their distinctive concern with matters of the human mind and psychology as well as their creative dialogue with a wide range of psychoanalytic, psychological and psychiatric discourses. It is my hope not to provide an exhaustive or definitive account of the inherent and profound psychological preoccupations of Ballard’s fiction but rather to complement the range of useful and provoking studies of the last fifteen years in opening up new possibilities for reading Ballard psychologically within the context of twentieth- and twenty-first- century culture. Among the conundrums which will propel my enquiry are questions over the relationship between Ballard’s fiction and the array of theories, practices, institutions, histories, etc, which make up ‘psychology’; over the operation of Ballard’s fiction in dramatizing, fictionalizing, adapting, modifying, mutating, or subverting psychological discourses; over the cultural implications and value of Ballard’s creative use of psychological theories to find new perspectives or ways of thinking, including, potentially, the limitations and dangers of his avant- gardist speculations; and, last but not least, what it is about the psychological aspect of Ballard’s fictions which makes them so compelling, invigorating, and important for this individual reader as well as for contemporary culture at large.

Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry According to Thomas Hardy Leahey, a historian of the discipline, ‘Psychology means psyche-logos, literally, the study of the soul, though the term was not coined until the seventeenth century and was not widely used until the nineteenth century’ (Leahey, 4). The Oxford English Dictionary defines psychology in these terms: The scientific study of the nature, functioning, and development of the human mind, including the faculties of reason, emotion, perception, communication, etc.; the branch of science that deals with the (human or animal) mind as an entity and in its relationship to the body and to

Introduction

3

the environmental or social context, based on observation of the behaviour of individuals or groups of individuals in particular (ordinary or experimentally controlled) circumstances. (OED Online) Histories of psychology by writers such as Leahey and B. R. Hergenhahn have tended to begin with the theories of Greek philosophers regarding mind and knowledge and follow the development of the topic through the history of Western thought (with an emphasis particularly on science and philosophy), although John G. Benjafield has usefully flagged up the need to ‘guard against our own cultural biases while examining the development of psychological thought in the English- speaking world’, and has made a point of including Eastern texts such as the I Ching and Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching in his account of psychological history (Benjafield, 1, 11–14). The OED gives both ‘of or relating to the soul or spirit’, and ‘of or relating to the mind or psyche’ as connotations of the word-fragment ‘psycho-’ and ‘The mind, soul, or spirit, as distinguished from the body’ as a gloss for the word ‘psyche’, so that it appears there is, etymologically at least, some confusion over whether psychology is the study of soul or of mind. Our own secular age, and the rationalistic discipline of modern psychology, perhaps prefers to speak of the mind rather than of the soul, and I will therefore follow the OED’s emphasis on ‘mind’ in my discussions of psychology, although one might in this connection note in passing Ballard’s own Romantic fondness for speaking of ‘spirit’ (‘Interview by A. Juno and Vale’, 31). The key concerns of this book are the ways in which Ballard’s fiction is concerned with the human mind, particularly as it has been made the subject of scientific or analytical study, ways in which his fiction has been influenced by psychological disciplines and the modes of thinking derived from them, and ways in which it has sought to emulate, contribute to or interact with both the heterogeneous institutionally created disciplines identified by the moniker ‘psychology’ and their reflection and dissemination in the discourse of wider society. While I refer to a range of other psychological thinkers and phenomena, I am principally concerned to locate Ballard in terms of particular areas of psychological thought and discourse with which he was himself deeply engaged, most significantly the psychoanalytic psychology of Sigmund Freud, the analytic psychology of Freud’s disciple and rival Carl Gustav Jung, and the work of the psychiatrist R. D. Laing, a key thinker in what has become identified as the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s. A brief word may be useful here on the distinction between ‘psychology’, ‘psychoanalysis’, and ‘psychiatry’. Jean Laplanche and Jean- Bertrand Pontalis, perhaps the foremost exegetes of Freudian theory, define

4

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

psychoanalysis, a ‘Discipline founded by Freud’, in terms of ‘a method of investigation which consists essentially in bringing out the unconscious meaning of the words, the actions and the products of the imagination [. . .] of a particular subject’, ‘a psychotherapeutic method based on this type of investigation’, and ‘a group of psychological and psychopathological theories which are the systematic expression of the data provided by the psycho-analytic method of investigation and treatment’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 367). Psychoanalysis can be located as a significant strand within the wider history of psychology – Leahey, Hergenhahn, and Benjafield all include chapters on Freud and psychoanalysis in their histories of the discipline. A related term to psychology, and one which will be of particular relevance when discussing the influence of R.D. Laing on Ballard, is ‘psychiatry’. According to Richard P. Bentall, ‘It was a German, Johann Christian Reil, who first coined the term “psychiatry” from the Greek “psyche” (soul) and “iatros” (doctor)’ (Bentall, 9). Bentall follows historian Edward Shorter in seeing German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, rather than Freud, as ‘the central figure in the history of psychiatry’ (Bentall, 9); he offers a useful definition of the psychiatrist as ‘A medical doctor who specializes in the treatment of psychiatric problems’ whose medical training is followed by ‘supervised clinical work’; ‘Psychiatrists often use psychiatric drugs as their main line of treatment, but many also acquire training in psychological techniques’ (Bentall, 522). As such, therefore, a medical training and qualification and a specifically medical specialization in mind-related medicine is what identifies a psychiatrist from a psychologist; Bentall’s glossary defines the psychoanalyst in rather disparaging terms which make clear the association of this ‘old-fashioned and ineffective’ discipline with Freudian theory (Bentall, 523). For the purposes of what follows I shall consider Ballard’s engagements with psychoanalysis and psychiatry as aspects of the broader ‘psychological’ nature of his fictions. After a brief summary of psychology’s precursors in Greek, Chinese, and mediaeval European philosophy, John G. Benjafield traces the discipline’s debt to Cartesian philosophy, Newtonian physics, the tradition of British empiricism associated with Locke, Berkeley, Hume and the Mills, and the work of Wollstonecraft, Kant, and Darwin. He identifies a transformation of psychology in the nineteenth century driven by the perceptual research of Herbart, Fechner, and Helmholtz and the Darwinian theories of Francis Galton and Herbert Spencer; following this he sees Wundt’s introspective experimentalism and the consciousness psychology of William James as significant developments in the period leading up to the era of the dominance of Freudian psychoanalysis and its offshoots. Benjafield goes on to

Introduction

5

detail a variety of psychological schools emerging contemporaneously with or after psychoanalysis including structuralist and functionalist psychologies, behaviourism, Gestalt psychology, learning theory, developmental psychology, humanistic psychology, and cognitive psychology. Thomas Hardy Leahey’s survey, more historicizing in its approach, locates Wundt and his experimental peers as part of a psychology of consciousness succeeded by the Freudian psychology of the unconscious mind, and traces the rise of behaviourism from a post-Darwinian psychology of adaptation through to an era of behaviourist dominance circa 1913 to 1950. Stressing the impetus from war and social pressures in the development of US psychology in this period, Leahey narrates the erosion of behaviourist dominance in favour of cognitive- scientific psychology, a paradigm currently dominant but still beset by theoretical difficulties (Leahey, 430). It will be seen that psychology is a vastly diffuse intellectual field which a project of this scale cannot hope adequately to encompass. My discussion of Ballard’s engagement with psychology will therefore be selective and partial, yet I hope to provide the beginnings of a sense of some ways in which his fiction engages with the broad field of psychology as well as with psychoanalysis. In terms of psychoanalysis’ relation to the broader field of psychology, Benjafield’s survey usefully stresses Freud’s departure from physiology, his thinking on religion and culture, and issues raised with his work relating to his intellectual proprietorialism, overemphasis on sexuality, attitude to women, and deterministic negativity (Benjafield, 98–108); Leahey meanwhile paints a vivid picture of Freud’s combative rejection of consciousness psychology and sense of psychoanalysis as a new Copernican revolution (Leahey, 264–5), and is particularly interesting in both stressing politically and socio- culturally critical elements in Freud’s project (Leahey, 269–70) and, following F. J. Sulloway, in attempting to see through ways in which Freud may be said to have mythologized the development of his theory (Leahey, 280). Suspicious of Freud, Leahey’s account stresses academic psychology’s rejection of psychoanalysis and Freud’s own disregard for empirical scientific method (Leahey, 290–3). In his A History of Psychiatry (1997), Edward Shorter narrates the eighteenth- century origins of psychiatry in the rise of the therapeutic asylum, of the concept of nervous illness and the beginnings of biological psychiatry, and of Romantic psychiatry. Shorter dubs the 1800s ‘The Asylum Era’ (Shorter, 33) and traces the rise during this period of the ‘fi rst biological psychiatry’ (Shorter, 69) and of the dominance of nervous illness as a psychiatric paradigm. Freud appears in Shorter’s narrative as the perpetrator of a psychoanalytic ‘hiatus’ (Shorter, 145), with its

6

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

high- water- mark in the 1960s, characterized by an attempt by psychoanalysts to ‘take over psychiatry’, a ‘discipline previously oriented to biology and not to psychology’ (Shorter, 154). For Shorter, getting underway in the 1930s, ‘psychoanalysis infi ltrated American psychiatry far more deeply than elsewhere, causing scientific stagnation’ (Shorter, 160); the ‘most baleful aspect of the takeover of psychiatry by psychoanalysis was the analyst’s ambition to extend their theories to the diagnosis and treatment of psychotic illness’ (Shorter, 175). Contemporary with this period, Shorter details the arrival of a variety of therapies which ‘broke the therapeutic nihilism that had dominated psychiatry in previous generations’ (Shorter, 194); these included drugs such as scopolamine, chloral hydrate, bromides, and barbiturates, shock therapies involving the use of drugs such as Metrazol as well as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), coma therapies including insulin coma, and lobotomy, as well as English innovations in group psychotherapy, many of which can be seen to form a backdrop to certain of Ballard’s early short fictions. These early twentieth-century alternatives were ‘almost all wiped from the slate by the advent of the second biological psychiatry’ in the 1970s (Shorter, 238), a development unhappily delayed, for Shorter, by the climate of distrust towards scientistic authority accompanying the anti- psychiatry movement of the early 1960s. Genetics, psychopharmacology, neuroscience and a resuscitation of ECT combined in this new biological paradigm, whose early promise, for Shorter, has remained unfulfi lled as ‘a result of psychiatry’s enmeshment in popular values, in corporate culture, and in a boggy swamp of diagnostic scientism’ (Shorter, 288). Progressive revisions of the U.S. Diagnostic Statistical Manual and the rise of commercialized drugs such as Prozac are two significant landmarks in this period of psychiatric history. In Healing the Mind , also published in 1997, Michael H. Stone, after surveying developments from 100 b.c. to the Nineteenth Century, narrates an expansion in psychiatry between 1900 and 1929 followed by a mass emigration of psychiatrists from Europe during the period 1930–1949 and the resultant dominance of developments in U.S. psychiatry during the 1950s. He characterizes the 1960s in terms of a renaissance of biological psychiatry and the diversification of psychotherapy, and of developments in biological psychiatry, neuroscience, and genetics; he surveys the 1970s under the headings of a flourishing of objectifiable science, of a well- developed general and hospital psychiatry and genetic and biological psychiatry, of child psychiatry and of neo- Darwinian ethology. Areas of note for Stone in the period 1980– 1996 include biometrics, taxonomy, and epidemiology, the continuing

Introduction

7

development of psychoanalysis, the globalization of psychiatry, and the emergence of fields including the study of personality disorders and forensic psychiatry.

Culture and Criticism When dealing with J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) one comes to expect paradox, and to contemplate his position within culture creates no exception. Ballard attained the status of major author in his own lifetime, bequeathing his archive to the British Library in lieu of tax on the fruits of his commercial success (Guardian , 11 June 2010). Major feature-films were based on two of his novels, Empire of the Sun (Dir. Steven Spielberg. Warner Bros. 1987.) and Crash (Dir. David Cronenberg. New Line Productions. 1996.), the latter the subject of a year-long censorship controversy before being passed for showing in the UK; his 1984 novel Empire of the Sun won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was Booker shortlisted.1 From a position of cult popularity as a member of the British New Wave of science fiction, Ballard, uniquely, made the transition to mainstream acceptance. Praised by critics, writers, and thinkers including Susan Sontag, Martin Amis, Angela Carter, Will Self, and John Gray, and taught on university courses in Europe and the U.S.A., his work’s popular cultural influence extends to Bruce Sterling’s cyberpunk movement in science fiction and the industrial and New Wave musical stylings of SPK, Joy Division and others; Ballard was also the subject of a 2003 film season on BBC4 featuring the BBC profile ‘Shanghai Jim’.2 Despite this apparent cultural canonization, there remains another aspect to popular recognition of Ballard’s achievement. This is his recognition as a literary maverick, an imaginative radical, a transgressive, subversive writer unafraid to violate taboos and to voice unspoken truths about the state of modern humanity.3 That Ballard valued this rebellious edge was exemplified by his 2003 refusal of a CBE for services to literature.4 Arguably, like William Burroughs, who he greatly admired and to whom he is often compared, Ballard achieved literary success without sacrificing his radical credentials, as his adoption by the counter- cultural RE/Search Publications of San Francisco testified.5 Although by no means as theatrically flamboyant in his personal life as one of his major creative inspirations, Salvador Dalí, he embraced controversy; long before the debacle surrounding the Crash film his work encountered outraged rejection by the major American publisher Doubleday as well as a British obscenity

8

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

prosecution, while an exhibition of crashed cars he mounted provoked unexpectedly violent responses.6 One significant reason for Ballard’s success was undoubtedly his ability to compose fictions closely relevant to some of the inherent problems and contradictions of contemporary Western culture. Seen by some of his more sympathetic critics as an ironically amoral moralist, he was valued for his ‘uniquely skewed’ yet clinically astute readings of contemporary life.7 In demand as a cultural critic as well as a writer, he continued into his late seventies to publish essays and opinion-pieces in the British press. The incisiveness of his psycho- cultural critiques encouraged many commentators to bestow on him labels such as ‘prophet’, ‘visionary’, ‘seer’, or ‘clairvoyant’.8 The critic ought to be very cautious around such labels; however, Ballard’s capacity for anatomizing incipient cultural truths or logics does at times seem remarkable. Salman Rushdie noted in a New Yorker article of September 1997 how the death of Princess Diana during her flight from camera-wielding paparazzi might be seen to exemplify the pornographic logics critiqued in Crash; other examples of such insight on Ballard’s part included the current decline of the American space project, and even, arguably, global warming (as depicted in Ballard’s 1962 novel, The Drowned World ). In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008 even the violent revolution of the English middle- class depicted in Ballard’s Millennium People (2003) seems an increasingly topical dystopian speculation, while the pseudo-fascist sports clubs of Kingdom Come (2006) shadow the recent sinister visibility of organizations such as the English Defence League, formed in 2009.9 Ballard’s critical reputation is growing. Roger Luckhurst’s and Andrzej Gasiorek’s surveys have recently been joined by Dominika Oramus’ 2007 study Grave New World: The Decline of the West in the Fiction of J. G. Ballard , and two books by Jeannette Baxter; J. G. Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination: Spectacular Authorship (2009) and her edited collection J. G. Ballard: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (2008), based on papers from the first international academic conference on Ballard’s work. Despite this, some sense still remains of Ballard’s marginalization in critical accounts of post-war British literature. Surveys by Rod Mengham (1999) and Brian W. Shaffer (2005) mention Ballard only in passing; Dominic Head’s 2002 Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000 offers a brief treatment of Crash , a Ballard text which, as Roger Luckhurst has noted, comes in recent critical discourse to ‘govern over the whole oeuvre’ (Angle , 123). Despite Crash’s persistence in Head’s later The State of the Novel (2008) as foremost among a list of texts demonstrating freshness and engagement in the British fiction of the

Introduction

9

1970s, conventionally seen as a ‘“literature of exhaustion”’ (Head, State of the Novel , 11), Ballard, frequently cited as influential upon other, more central figures in contemporary writing, never attains foregrounding in such accounts, meaning that the relevance of Roger Luckhurst’s characterization of him as a writer of the margins persists (Angle , xi–xii). Ballard fits ambivalently into attempts by critics of contemporary or postwar British fiction to characterize the field. Andrzej Gasiorek has argued that ‘the dichotomy between realism and experimentalism is misleading in the post-war context’ because ‘numerous novelists have sought to transcend it in their writing. Their work is marked by the tension between a wish to represent various aspects of post-war reality and a recognition of the artistic difficulties thereby entailed’ (Post-War British Fiction , 17). Ballard’s work resonates with Gasiorek’s sense of the complex intermingling of realist and experimentalist impulses in post-war fiction. On the other hand, Dominic Head’s riposte to Gasiorek, emphasising a ‘concentration on those works that treat of contemporary history and society’ and de- emphasising ‘fantasy and magic realism’ (Head, Modern British Fiction, 2–3) can also claim some relevance to Ballard’s work, since Ballard’s late novels in particular have of late been repeatedly examined for their social relevance by critics including Gasiorek and Philip Tew. In terms of Brian Shaffer’s useful shorthand characterization of twentieth- century British literary history, Ballard stands as an heir to ‘the elitist orientation of literary modernism’ and as a witness to ‘the Cold War; the decline and demise of the British Empire’; he is recognized during the rise of the ‘literary prize phenomenon’. While Ballard’s own attitude towards ‘the post-1968 explosion in critical theory and the rise of postmodernism’ was habitually distrustful, Hal Foster has made explicit some of the connections between Ballard and postmodernism as theorized by Fredric Jameson (Foster, ‘Death in America’), and there are numerous points of intersection between postmodernist theory and Ballard’s oeuvre. He is far less in touch, however, with important contemporary areas of interest such as ‘the effect on “British” and “English” literature by Irish and Scottish national identities; and the challenge posed to male- dominated and ethnically British literary traditions by feminist and black-British authors, among others’ (Shaffer, xviii). This has not prevented Nick Bentley identifying Ballard as one of a number of writers exploring the ‘social and cultural Zeitgeist’ of the 1990s; aspects of Bentley’s characterization of the culture of this period relevant to Ballard include ‘the relationship between fiction and reality’, ‘the politics and aesthetics of the body’, and ‘the imaginative construction of contemporary spaces’ (Bentley, 3).

10

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

Rod Mengham very appositely connects Ballard with the appearance in fiction since the 1960s of ‘a powerful tradition of alienation that has taken the forms of insanity, psychedelia, drug cultures and related addiction phenomena’. R. D. Laing’s and David Cooper’s invention of ‘non-psychiatry’ as part of a campaign to diffuse so- called madness throughout society ‘as a subversive source of creativity, spontaneity, not “disease”’, states Mengham, ‘might be counterpointed with drug-based experiments in “consciousness raising” promoted by Timothy Leary but satirized by Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ (Mengham, 9). These contexts, and particularly the thinking of R. D. Laing, will be particularly relevant to my arguments. Lane, Mengham, and Tew write that ‘The use of psychological models to account for the pattern and significance of historical events is particularly well- suited to the structure of the post-nineteenth- century novel’, and my later chapters in particular will address how Ballard’s fictions enact in their linguistic structure conceptions of historicity implied in psychoanalysis (Lane, Tew, and Mengham, 4). A further dimension of the psychological character of Ballard’s writing may be opened up by considering him as a precursor or fellow-traveller to the post- Situationist ‘psychogeographies’ undertaken by writers including Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair and Will Self. Roger Luckhurst’s important study The Angle Between Two Walls (1997) rereads Ballard’s nonsense- question ‘Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?’ in terms of the Derridean concept of the hinge or la brisure , ‘the point in any structural system that makes the working of the system at once possible and impossible’ (Angle , xiii), applying this concept to the Ballardian oeuvre as a whole as a means of suggesting that the work tends to occupy an enigmatic ‘space between’, that it consistently ‘escapes analysis’ and will not surrender its ‘irreducible core’ for enumeration in the terms of any single critical discourse (Angle , xix). This is a highly productive and provoking approach which usefully sets out to ‘fracture the homogenization’ of various ‘overdetermined frames’ of reference which Luckhurst sees as characteristic of ‘the dominant critical approach to Ballard’ (Angle , 48), opening up a ‘meta - critical’ approach (Angle , xiv) which avoids being seduced into a reductive reading of Ballard through any of the numerous theoretical frameworks, psychoanalysis among them, which, as Luckhurst points out, the texts actually ‘embed’ within themselves (Angle, xv). Any project such as this which seeks to consider Ballard’s work in relation to the psychological discourses with which it is in dialogue must acknowledge the usefulness of Luckhurst’s intellectually rigorous problematization of psychological theory’s role within older readings of

Introduction

11

Ballard. I shall attempt to do so as this study progresses, and shall attempt in particular to contextualize, interrogate and problematize the Freudian and other psychological concepts which Ballard’s fictions may variously cannibalize, transmute, rehearse, or even in some cases take as uninterrogated givens. While Luckhurst’s privileged frame of reference in his approach to Ballard is poststructuralist, he is insistent that in Ballard’s oeuvre an ‘obsessively repetitive text enchains an obsessively repetitive reading’ (Angle, 180), implying late Freudian repetition compulsion as a key structural dynamic in Ballard’s work; as such his own reading does not fully escape the psychoanalytic context it so vocally interrogates. Where Luckhurst’s book is largely oriented towards poststructuralist theory and issues of literary genre, Andrzej Gasiorek’s J. G. Ballard develops from the direction of Gasiorek’s previous concerns with realism and experiment in post-war British fiction a more culturally historicizing account stressing Ballard’s representational debts to both Surrealism and Pop Art. Gasiorek makes productive, if occasional, use of Freudian ideas, beginning with a location of Ballard’s confrontational critique of British society as an ‘oedipal revolt’ against the ‘paternal country of origin’ ( J. G. Ballard , 1); his highlighting of Ballard’s rejection of ‘a socially rooted fiction based on psychological realism, the development of character, and the close observation of cultural codes’ ( J. G. Ballard , 3) raises the useful question of the psychological realism or otherwise of Ballard’s fictions. Gasiorek is insightful on the psychological significances of Ballard’s engagement with Surrealism, highlighting ‘the Surrealists’ insistence that the prosaic world concealed realities that were inaccessible to the fettered rational mind’ ( J. G. Ballard , 8) and how Surrealism combined psychologically analytical and synthetic tendencies and ‘laid bare the unconscious processes that informed key aspects of external public life’ as well as seeking to ‘overcome divisions – between self and world, the rational and the irrational, the conscious and the unconscious – sublating them in a liberatory synthesis’ ( J. G. Ballard , 9). Innovatively positioning Pop Art as an equally significant influence, with Surrealism, on Ballard, Gasiorek suggests that ‘Ballard’s writing [. . .] has also been motivated by a strong analytic tendency, a drive to uncover and to understand the hidden logics that inform everyday social life’ ( J. G. Ballard , 13), and that Surrealism was for Ballard thus of limited use in part because ‘the reversal of the fictionreality dyad meant that the external world had become the phantasmatic realm previously associated with the hidden depths of the unconscious, and partly because its desire to overcome division [. . .] threatened a premature resolution of contradictions’ ( J. G. Ballard , 14). I attempt in what

12

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

follows to provide a more thoroughgoing, textually detailed application of psychoanalysis to Ballard which complements and extends Gasiorek’s useful discussions of his fiction as analytically oriented towards a contemporary social unconscious. In J. G. Ballard ’s Surrealist Imagination: Spectacular Authorship (2009), Jeannette Baxter enacts a timely location of Ballard’s writing within the Surrealist visual tradition which interprets Ballard’s writings as ‘a radical Surrealist experiment in the rewriting of post-war history and culture’ (Imagination , 2). Baxter acknowledges ‘the Surrealists’ interest in Freudian psychoanalysis’ (Imagination , 2), and her description of her own project is in fact permeated with psychoanalytically derived terminology, a tendency upon which my own account will develop by interrogating more closely and more critically the psychoanalytic framework on which the Surrealist project drew. Baxter rightly acknowledges that ‘Surrealism’s enquiry into the unconscious [. . .] played a particularly significant role in Ballard’s transformation of post- war science fiction’ (Imagination , 5), and that ‘Ballard reinstalled the transformative power of the imagination at the heart of his seditious vision’ (Imagination , 6), although I would contend that her discussion of ‘Ballard’s idiosyncratic enquiry into, and remapping of, the contemporary, post-war psyche through the topography of “inner space”’ defined as ‘explicitly Surrealist in origin’ (Imagination , 6) tends to write out of the picture Ballard’s explicit reference to psychoanalysis in his definition of inner space. Baxter’s sense of Surrealist art as ‘a way into the historical unconscious for Ballard; a way of reassessing and rupturing the flat, homogenous and ideologically contrived surface of official narratives of post-war history and culture’ and her mobilization of ‘Adorno’s stress on the active liberation of latent historicity contained within the work of art’ (Imagination , 7) can both be of use to my project; in particular I will be concerned in Chapter Four to engage with Ballard’s treatment of what Baxter has called ‘historical atrocity and its legacies of trauma, guilt and amnesia’ (Imagination , 7). While Baxter’s rebuttal of accusations of nihilism and ahistoricality aimed at Ballard is apposite, her suggestion that Ballard’s writing be understood as ‘an exercise in historical representation that insists on subjectivity and agency, and which views history and its vicissitudes without fetishism in order to confront its neuroses, anxieties and psychopathologies’ (Imagination , 8) implies an excessively partisan approach which disregards the applicability of a Freudian sense of fetishism to certain of Ballard’s representations and ways in which psychoanalytic concepts including fetishism can be mobilized in order to problematize Ballard’s representations of topics including sexuality

Introduction

13

and race. I shall emulate to some degree the ‘limited form of intentionalism’ which Baxter employs in her appeal to paratextual materials such as Ballard’s non-fiction and interviews (Imagination , 12); while I am sympathetic to her conception of the enduring significance of Surrealism as a central context for Ballard’s work, I will naturally be making the case for psychological contexts as comparable in their importance for Ballard, as a considerable amount of evidence across his fictional and non- fictional writings testifies.

Theory A single-author study originating from the direction of English Literature and attempting to assess Ballard’s fiction in its psychological dimension enters a field of considerable complexity. A project of this kind must necessarily be aware of its situation in relation to the long history of dialogue between literature and psychology – psychology’s relationship to the literary at its disciplinary origins and use of literary resources in the construction of its theories, the long history of literary critics’ use of psychological concepts to elucidate texts, and the mobilization by creative writers themselves of psychological theories as an imaginative and intellectual resource. It must also be self- conscious about its engagement with psychology’s (and particularly psychoanalysis’) diffusion within culture more generally, with the ways, for example, in which Freud’s work has become absorbed into the texture of critical theory and of deconstruction, but also with the ways in which concepts such as the unconscious have become part of common cultural assumptions in the contemporary. Psychology’s significance as a paradigm for the interpretation of literature was reflected in the existence of the journal Literature and Psychology, published in Providence, New Jersey, which ran from 1951 until 2004. Of all aspects or strands of psychology, psychoanalysis has occupied the centre stage in the history of literary criticism, and near the end of this period a number of significant critical interventions made forceful cases for the continued relevance of psychoanalysis; these included Linda Ruth Williams’ Critical Desire: Psychoanalysis and the Literary Subject (1995), Sue Vice’s Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reader (1996), and Elizabeth Wright’s useful survey Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reappraisal (1998). Psychoanalysis remains an important theoretical corpus in the field of literary and cultural studies, for reasons which are perhaps due partly to the incredible success with which it became disseminated in twentieth century culture, and partly to its

14

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

strongly interpretative and textual emphasis as a discipline, which makes it highly sympathetic to the practice of criticism. More recently, new critical trends have begun to explore relationships between narrativity and consciousness and to apply the discoveries of cognitive psychology to literary study, signalling the enduringly fruitful intersection of literature’s and psychology’s shared concerns with the human mind and human experience. If this study does not engage with these most recent trends, it is because the overt and complex relevance to Ballard’s fiction of other psychologically related areas, most particularly psychoanalysis and anti-psychiatry, has not yet received the concentrated examination it deserves. To address Ballard exclusively in terms of his engagement with psychoanalysis could occupy the space of several books; however, to do so would also be to close down the sense in which his fictions, although dialoguing complexly with psychoanalysis, are psychological in a far broader sense. As such this project speaks to a variety of psychologically related disciplines or bodies of theoretical and clinical knowledge, chiefly psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and disciplinary academic psychology; as an attempt to discuss Ballard’s work within the history of these disciplines it is also naturally concerned with the history of science and history of psychology. Attention to the literature on psychoanalysis and criticism makes possible a clearer picture of the complexities of their relationship. Sue Vice begins from a clear identification of the unconscious as the concept most significant in ‘making psychoanalysis central in both culture and criticism’ (Vice, 2), For Vice, Freud’s conception of a layer of the mind in which uncivilized and prohibited desires persist was ‘revolutionary and empowering’ (Vice, 3), opening new dimensions in cultural understanding: ‘The unconscious works by its own logic and even language, and it is the task of analysis to tap into this logic (as it is one of the tasks of psychoanalytic criticism to tap into the text’s unconscious logic)’ (Vice, 3). Meredith Anne Skura, however, in The Literary Use of the Psychoanalytic Process (1981), questions the usefulness of conceiving of psychoanalysis in the ‘formulaic’ terms of Freudian theory, stressing instead its dynamic nature as a practice (Skura, 13). Following Freud, Skura reminds us that ‘psychoanalysis is simultaneously a therapy, a theory of the mind, and a method of investigation’ (Skura, 13–14). She stresses the many different Freuds generated by twentieth- century culture, and insists that his concepts are mobile and contingent in meaning, that ‘His statements have to be understood in the context of his evolving definitions which, for example, transform “wish” into its opposite, even within the boundaries of a single essay’ (Skura, 17). Moreover, the confusions attending Freud’s work ‘are only symptoms of the real tension inherent in psychoanalysis itself, even when taken as a whole.

Introduction

15

Freud was simply not consistent’ (Skura, 17). Skura quotes Freud’s insistence that to understand psychoanalysis properly one must trace its origins and development (Skura, 18). Although this project is necessarily limited to a textual, non-practical conception of psychoanalysis, Skura’s are worthwhile considerations; attempts to take account of the diffuse, contradictory nature of Freudian theory are made vastly easier by Jean Laplanche’s and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis’ indispensable 1967 conceptual dictionary, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, which traces the development of specific terminologies across the corpus of Freud’s writing. A cogent interrogation of Ballard’s relationship to psychoanalytic psychology requires a cogent conceptualization of psychoanalysis’ relationship to literature. In Critical Desire: Psychoanalysis and the Literary Subject (1995), Linda Ruth Williams argues the two as intimately connected. Stressing that ‘Psychoanalytic criticism pre- dates the establishment of English literature as a discrete subject’ (Williams, 2), Williams questions the assumption that ‘psychoanalytic models in use are themselves somehow pre- or essentially non-literary’, and sets out to discover how the subject comes ‘into being through language, images, and models, which are best understood through a form of analysis which is itself at root essentially “literary”’ (Williams, 2). In her argument psychoanalysis itself constituted from the beginning exactly a mode of reading: ‘The patient [. . .] does not offer up to the analyst an open “text” thick with overt significance, but rather a linguistic and symbolic puzzle or jumble, which requires the training of a peculiarly “literary” eye to read it powerfully’; ‘Forever sceptical about how subjects construct their narratives consciously [. . .], Freud strives to read the analysand’s discourse deviously, against the grain’ (Williams, 7). Williams further claims that Freud’s developing focus on the individual’s fantasy-life means psychoanalysis envisions the human subject as ‘itself made up of tales and images which are already “literary” – imagistic and narrative fabrications woven from scraps of libidinally charged “truth”’ (Williams, 15). The self is built out of its unconscious fantasies, a tissue of interconnected narratives of desire and perception: It is not, then, that the analysand makes up the stories of her early life, but that the stories have made up her. [. . .] The self comes into being in terms of [. . .] the network of relationships which she later tells back to herself [. . .] as primal scenes, Oedipal crises, the narrative of early psychic history. (Williams, 17) Williams’ is an appealing argument which opens a sense of the possible synergies between psychoanalysis and literature, although one might hope

16

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

to avoid allowing its vivid sense of the literary nature of psychoanalysis to efface a critical sense of the differences between literary writing, psychoanalytic modes of writing, the speech acts entailed in the analytic process, and the fantasy life of the individual. Psychoanalysis’ relationship to literature is an aspect of its relation to language, a relation which receives considerable attention in the criticism, largely due to the dominance in literary and cultural criticism from the 1970s onwards of Jacques Lacan’s ‘rereading of Freud attentive to his semiotic imagination, to the role of language as the medium of psychoanalysis and the structuring agent of the psyche’ (Brooks, 24). Vice is among those who emphasize the linguistic basis of psychoanalysis, viewing it as ‘an interpretative strategy, concentrating particularly on the language which tries to render the body’s experiences, the role of sexuality in defining the self, and the construction of subjectivity and gender’ (Vice, 1); for Vice, post- structuralist, Lacanian psychoanalysis ‘makes clearer the link between psychoanalysis as a therapy and as a critical practice: both are concerned with the workings of language and how the unconscious is expressed in it’ (Vice, 1). If a Lacanian post-structuralist approach is largely absent from the discussion of Ballard’s fiction which follows, this is due not to a dismissal of the critical potential of such an approach but to a wish to prioritize attention to Ballard’s interaction with Freud, a writer far more obviously significant to him at the level of influence. One might note too at this stage the inherently problematic nature, particularly for the non-analyst, of claims to access what Vice has called the ‘unconscious logic’ of the text and its embodiment in textual language; my account will neither claim to psychoanalyze J. G. Ballard the man nor to assert its own knowledge of a textual unconscious. As such there is a very real sense in which what follows is not psychoanalytic criticism. Vice’s comments about ‘the language which tries to render the body’s experiences, the role of sexuality in defining the self, and the construction of subjectivity and gender’ delineate some prominent aspects of more recent critical uses of psychoanalysis, and these are developed by Elizabeth Wright in Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reappraisal (1998). Wright stresses psychoanalysis as exploring ‘what happens when primordial impulse is directed into social goals, when bodily needs become subject to the demands of culture’; for her, ‘What is of peculiar interest to psychoanalysis [. . .] is that aspect of being which is ignored or prohibited by the laws of language’ (Wright, 1). ‘In the unconscious’, contends Wright, ‘the body does not take the social mould, and yet the conscious mind thinks it has’: the joint re- creation on the part of the patient and analyst of the patient’s life- development graphically reveals that no phase is ever totally

Introduction

17

outlived, no early satisfaction wholly surrendered. The distress and suffering which bring human beings to the consulting room symptomatically speak of the mismatch between bodily desire and sexual- cum- social role. (Wright, 2) Wright stresses as the core uniting different developments in psychoanalysis its focus on ‘the role of sexuality in the constitution of the subject and, crucially, how this sexuality is to be defined’ (Wright, 3); in her view ‘To concentrate on mechanisms without taking account of the energies with which they are charged is to ignore Freud’s most radical discoveries: it is precisely shifts of energies brought about by unconscious desire that allow new meanings to emerge’ (Wright, 3–4). Wright’s stress is on the negotiation of sexual and bodily desires within language, on how psychoanalysis ‘brings out the unconscious aspect of language through its concentration on the relationship between sexuality and social role’ and hence how ‘The literary text, the art- object, the works of popular culture are forms of persuasion whereby bodies are speaking to bodies, not merely minds to minds’ (Wright, 4): This emphasis upon the bodily aspect of art poses a problem for psychoanalytic criticism because the public and the social are thereby neglected. Psychoanalytic aesthetics intermittently battles with this problem on two fronts: first, how the work of artistic merit is to be distinguished from the ‘work’ involved in the construction of dreams or fantasy; second, how the work as text is to be regarded, now it is no longer the property of a single author but produced in a network of social relations. [. . .] The language of desire has both a private and a public aspect and that is why the literary and artistic work is a ‘text’, the proper reading of which is no simple matter. (Wright, 4) Wright’s reminder of the centrality of sexuality in Freudian theory and of Lacan’s emphasis on the conflicts of sexuality with the social domain of language is extremely suggestive when encountering Ballard’s verbal art, which, as I shall show, engages Freud’s psychosexual explorations most directly during the fertile period which produced such masterworks as The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash . As Wright’s work also makes clear, the twentieth century saw the development and fragmentation of psychoanalysis into different sub- disciplines; Wright evokes subdivisions disparately stressing: ‘the energies of the drive in its pursuit of its aim (instinct or id-psychology)’; ‘that part of the self capable of social integration (ego-psychology and its off- shoot, object-

18

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

relations theory)’; ‘the division of the subject in language (structural psychoanalysis)’; anti-psychiatric opposition to ‘social institutions’; revelations ‘about collective fantasies and their historical determinants’, and the potential for ‘a theory of the subject’ offering liberation from ‘the constriction of patriarchal representations’ (Wright, 3). My own approach approximates most closely to instinct-psychology, understood as reflecting most closely the emphasis of Freud’s writing on the instincts; I shall hope also in particular to touch upon ways in which Ballard’s Freudianism relates to his encounter with anti-psychiatry and, especially, his suggestive engagements with collective fantasy in history. Like Wright, Sue Vice emphasizes developments in feminist psychoanalytic theory, contending that ‘Gender, its construction and social deployment, is one of the central areas of psychoanalytic investigation, and a feminist contribution to this endeavour can politicise psychoanalysis, raising to the surface – and into consciousness – its patriarchal assumptions’ (Vice, 12); for Vice, ‘the broadening of the critical ménage à trois to include a materialist analysis of history along with feminism, psychoanalysis and literature seems to indicate the way psychoanalytic criticism will go in the future’ (Vice, 13). I shall not engage in detail with psychoanalysis’ absorption into recent feminist theory, but this remains an area which might interact productively with Ballard’s writing, whose fictional treatments of sexuality and gender have received less critical attention than they warrant. When dealing with the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis in a critical context, the issue of the truth value or explanatory value of psychoanalysis raises its head. Elizabeth Wright is enough of a partisan of psychoanalysis to defend it against attacks on its scientific status, asserting that while ‘If science is given a positivist definition, psychoanalysis cannot count as one of the physical sciences’ (Wright, 2), ‘Science itself is a highly interpretative activity, and it is as a science of interpretation – that is, in part as a science of science – that psychoanalysis is to be regarded’ (Wright, 3). Wright echoes a familiar psychoanalytic defence in claiming to apply ‘the insights of psychoanalysis itself’ to an understanding of ‘shifts in ideology’ relating to public credence towards psychoanalysis (Wright, 1). A less defensive and more nuanced suggestion that psychoanalysis’ interpretive validity inheres in its very stress on the process of interpretation is offered by Skura’s earlier work. Skura points to Freud’s discarding of the conscious/ unconscious dichotomy in support of a sense that ‘there is no single neatly definable meaning of which we are directly and all- encompassingly conscious in all it [sic] manifestations, nor is there any such thing as a meaning of which we are totally unconscious’ (Skura, 3). Rather than looking

Introduction

19

‘only for unconscious or conscious meaning, the analyst describes a whole range of what has been called “modes of consciousness,” or modes of representation’, and ‘Rather than simply discovering the unconscious, Freud discovered the variety of ways in which we become aware of ourselves and our world and the means by which we represent both’ (Skura, 3). Skura stresses psychoanalysis as ‘a method rather than as a body of knowledge, as a way of interpreting rather than as a specific product or interpretation’ (Skura, 5); for her, ‘if anything is clear from the spirit of Freud’s writing, it is that there are no such definitional necessities governing all behavior’ (Skura, 17): Freud could discover truths in certain cases precisely because all behavior works according to its own logic [. . .]. Freud’s statements are examples of the sort of probing we need to do, not of the absolute truths we will find in all cases. (Skura, 17) For Skura there is a ‘tension between two different ways of seeing the logical status of psychoanalytic statements’ (Skura, 19), a ‘double vision’ (Skura, 19) generated by the conflict between Freud’s scientific aims and the affinity of his works to the humanities, the tension between ‘description and explanation’ (Skura, 24). ‘All aspects of the patient’s discourse – or a literary text’, claims Skura, ‘are viewed differently if we are no longer trying to see them as determined solely by their function in the psychic economy but are willing to look for other, less predictable relations among them’; her analysis, Skura claims, delineates ‘how the “unpredictable relations” in elements of content, psychic functions, mode of representation, and rhetorical function’ are ‘vital to different kinds of interpretation – and how their interaction is necessary in order for us to feel that we have discovered something about what the text means’ (Skura, 28). A similarly sophisticated approach to psychoanalysis as a method of creative meaning-making is offered by Peter Brooks in ‘The Idea of a Psychoanalytic Criticism’. Brooks critiques psychoanalytic literary criticism’s ‘inability to rid itself of the underlying conviction that is that it is inherently explanatory’; the insertion of the conjunction ‘and’ between literature and psychoanalysis, as critiqued by Shoshana Felman, ‘has almost always masked a relation of privilege of one term to another, a use of psychoanalysis as a conceptual system in terms of which to analyze and explain literature, rather than an encounter and confrontation of the two’ (Brooks, 22). Psychoanalysis ‘has traditionally been used to close rather than open the argument’ (Brooks, 22), a fact linked to the discipline’s exaggerated interpretive claims, Freud’s

20

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

imperialistic tendency to claim ‘the final hermeneutic power’ (Brooks, 23); post- structuralist psychoanalytic criticism has attempted to break away from this in staging ‘an encounter of psychoanalysis and literature that doesn’t privilege either term, but rather set in a dialogue that both exemplifies and questions how we read’ (Brooks, 23). This attitude resonates with Sue Vice’s suggestion that ‘It is now often agreed among writers on psychoanalytic literary practice that the relation between criticism and text should be not masterful but mutual’, and that ‘It is not a question of a superior critical knowledge being used to unlock the secrets of the literary text, with the latter as passive object and psychoanalytic criticism as metalanguage, but a polymorphous “mutual entanglement”’ (Vice, 6). Brooks’ own persisting sense of psychoanalysis’ place in criticism derives ‘from our conviction that the materials on which they exercise their powers of analysis are in some basic sense the same: that the structure of literature is in some sense the structure of mind’ (Brooks, 24); such a conviction ‘of course depends on a more general belief, or intuition, that the psychoanalytic version of the human psyche is somehow “true,” that it corresponds to one’s own experiences and insights’ (Brooks, 25). Unable to discount psychoanalysis’ ability to produce truth- effects, yet mindful of recent critiques of its validity as a psychological science, I am drawn to aspects of Skura’s and Brooks’ arguments stressing psychoanalysis as an unterminated, flexible process of meaning production and to conceptions which stress the productive encounter of literary and psychoanalytic texts over an imperialistic and reductive imposition of meaning. The relationship between psychoanalytic and literary texts is suggestively addressed in Skura’s discussion of representative samples of psychoanalytic criticism as deriving from different aspects of the psychoanalytic process, and in particular from five specific stages in the development of Freud’s technique: ‘the case history; the fantasy; the dream; the rhetorical exchange between an analyst and patient; and the entire psychoanalytic process’ (Skura, 6). Skura’s identification of each of her models in terms of its associated text is intended to ‘establish the model as a model for the literary text itself, and not for the act of interpretation’ (Skura, 12). ‘The complex ways in which literary texts elaborate and call attention to the play of consciousness’, Skura claims, ‘have no parallel in simpler phenomena like fantasies and dreams which turn up in the course of an analysis’ (Skura, 11–12), ‘But they do have a parallel in the way that these phenomena are handled in analysis – in the moments of integration and insight about them which characterise the psychoanalytic process’ (Skura, 11–12).

Introduction

21

Inherent in Skura’s and Brooks’ interventions is the drawing of an analogy between the psychoanalytic encounter and the process of reading. Skura criticizes the reductionism of ‘too heavy a dependence on psychoanalytic theory rather than practice’ (Skura, 13), an attitude which would tend to disqualify non- psychoanalysts as psychoanalytic critics of literature. Indebted to Skura, Brooks, seeking a productive psychoanalytic model for future literary study, turns to the Freudian concept of transference, which he says offers ‘the most useful elaboration of the phantasy model of the text’ (Brooks, 36): in the transference, the analysand constitutes himself as a subject by way of the dialogic and dialectic presence of the analyst, in a dynamic of erotic interaction. Furthermore, the whole relationship is metaphoric, in that it is based on the analyst’s role as surrogate for past figures of authority, and the revival of infantile scenarios of satisfaction that are reproduced and replayed as if they were of the present. (Brooks, 42) Brooks use ‘as model what is already a metaphor, or perhaps an allegory of metaphor’ may suggest, he says, that the relationship he is trying to establish between psychoanalysis and literature ‘is itself a transactive and transferential one, based on a “transaction between contexts”’ and hence potentially that ‘the best – and perhaps the only – model for the use of the psychoanalytic model in literary study is the model of metaphor’ (Brooks, 42–3). Brooks’ adoption of transference as a model for reading is part of his broader argument that ‘psychoanalytical criticism can and should be textual and rhetorical’ (Brooks, 22). Subscribing to a sense that psychoanalytic criticism may go beyond formalism to ‘that desired place where literature and life converge’ (Brooks, 26), Brooks suggests that in this case ‘paradoxically we can go beyond formalism only by becoming more formalistic’ (Brooks, 26); critiquing rhetorical and deconstructive psychoanalytic criticism for failing to make the ‘crossover between rhetoric and reference’, he expresses the hope for ‘a psychoanalytically informed literary criticism’ which will ‘enhance an understanding of human subjects as situated at the intersection of several fictions created by and for them’ (Brooks, 26). Brooks’ vision of a more rigorously formalist psychoanalytic criticism is based around a reading of Freud’s 1908 essay ‘Creative Writers and Daydreaming’, particularly its emphasis on the temporality of fantasy and concept of ‘forepleasure’, and also mobilizes the Freudian concepts of fetishism, exhibitionism, and voyeurism. ‘A neo- formalist psychoanalytic

22

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

criticism’, says Brooks, could do worse than ‘attach itself to studying the various forms of the “fore” in forepleasure, developing a tropology of perversities through which we turn back, turn around, the simple consumption of texts, making their reading a worthy subject of analysis’ (Brooks, 34). For Brooks psychoanalysis cannot be a metalanguage offering explanations of literature; when critics have taken it as such ‘they have always been talking beside the point – the point being the structure and rhetoric of texts’ (Brooks, 43); this does not, however mean that the psychoanalytic model as metaphor cannot ‘be “suggestive” in its “systematic deployment,” that is, can function as a tool for both comprehension and discovery’ (Brooks, 43): One can, then, resist the notion that psychoanalysis ‘explains’ literature and yet insist that the kind of intertextual relation it holds to literature is quite different from the intertextuality that obtains between two poems or novels [. . .]. For the psychoanalytic intertext obliges the critic to make a transit through a systematic discourse elaborated to describe the dynamics of psychic process. The similarities and differences, in object and intention, of this discourse from literary analysis creates a tension which is productive of perspective, of stereoptical effect. Psychoanalysis is not an arbitrarily chosen intertext for literary analysis, but rather a particularly insistent and demanding intertext, in that mapping across the boundaries from one territory to the other both confirms and complicates our understanding of how mind reformulates the real, how it constructs the necessary fictions by which we dream, desire, interpret, indeed by which we constitute ourselves as human subjects. The detour through psychoanalysis forces the critic to respond to the erotics of form – that is, to an engagement with the psychic investments of rhetoric, the dramas of desire played out in tropes. Psychoanalysis matters to us as literary critics because it stands as a constant reminder that the attention to form, properly conceived, is not a sterile formalism, but rather one more attempt to draw the symbolic and fictional map of our place in existence. (Brooks, 43–4) Brooks’ influential argument is taken up by both Vice and Wright. Vice counterposes Brooks against Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek’s earlier discussion of psychoanalytic criticism, preferring the former for his implication that ‘the object of analysis is thus reading, not the author, reader or fictional character’, that ‘like the analysand on the couch, the reader experiences dramas of power and desire through interpreting and constructing the

Introduction

23

text’, and that psychoanalysis enables ‘a better understanding of our own fictive and textual constructions as subjects’ (Vice, 10). Wright, meanwhile, referring to an ‘overlap in the “reader theory” of psychoanalysis and literature’, offers this implicit gloss of Brooks’ transference model that: the assumptions of classical criticism, that the text is the patient and the reader the analyst, no longer hold: the case is rather that the text is the analyst. The reader- cum- critic’s position is then far more complicated for she is subject to the effects the text produces in her as reader and at the same time is committed to the analysis of the same effects as critic. Such transference phenomena have much to contribute to the problem of ‘aesthetic distance’, for this is also what the analyst and analysand have to achieve in order to bring the analysis to a successful conclusion. (Wright, 193–4) Offering the joke, contra Brooks, as ‘the best psychoanalytic model of the aesthetic interaction’, Wright closes with the assertion that ‘Psychoanalytic criticism explores texts for the (ambiguous) ‘free’ associations that tell of the struggle between a body and the society on which it depends’, helpfully suggesting both the readerly freedoms which psychoanalytic criticism may entail as well as its serious implications for understanding representations of bodily and social experience (Wright, 194). Brooks’ use of the transference encounter as a metaphoric model for reading complements the post-Lacanian stress on polymorphously-productive textual encounters, opening considerable possibilities for a psychoanalytically informed literary criticism alive to the ‘complex ways in which literary texts elaborate and call attention to the play of consciousness’, to recall Skura’s words. The following essays will draw on these sophisticated reconsiderations of psychoanalytic criticism’s possibilities, but their ultimate recourse will be primarily to the textuality of Freud’s theoretical work and its intertextual relations with Ballard’s writing, a prioritization of the textual which has the advantage of permitting the maintenance of a certain critical distance from Freudian theory, the option of a noncommittal stance towards its truth or validity. Like Catherine Belsey’s ambitious synthesis of the reading practices of Barthes, Lacan, Macherey and others in Critical Practice, models like Brooks’ presuppose intimate familiarity with a broad range of complex material as the prerequisite for the critical activities they envision; nonetheless, consciousness of them will allow the following arguments to attain a higher level of sophistication than would otherwise be possible. Reading- as-transference permits a metaphorical

24

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

conception of the repetitive readings and re-readings entailed in literary criticism as a working-through of the critic’s personal and intellectual relationship to the body of fictions by which his own assumptions and presuppositions are submitted to analysis. A work of criticism hoping to place Ballard in the context of psychology, and particularly of psychoanalysis, must also acknowledge the complex and problematic place of psychoanalysis within culture at large; to the extent that Ballard’s work is deeply involved in a dialogue with psychoanalysis, there is a sense that the value of his work is tied up with the value of that much- contested discipline. An erudite account of the place of psychoanalysis in culture is given in John Forrester’s Dispatches from the Freud Wars. Citing Mark Edmundson’s suggestion that we live now in the ‘Age of Freud’ (Forrester, 1) and surveying the different possible cultural genealogies of ‘“Eminent Freudians”’ (Forrester, 2), Forrester suggests that ‘There is something irreversible about what Freud has done to twentieth- century culture’ (Forrester, 2). Himself a Freud loyalist, he identifies as the two major areas within which Freud’s thought has been questioned the feminist critique of Freud developing in the 1970s and the older critique concerning ‘its status as a source of scientific authority and therapeutic promise’ (Forrester, 2–3). For Forrester Freud’s influence transcends such critiques, impacting on ‘ethics, mores’, ‘politics, the social sciences, literature itself – not just literary criticism – and the arts in general’ (Forrester, 4–5); he reframes the customary interrogation of psychoanalysis’ uncertain disciplinary status by asking ‘what changes in our general categories are required by recognising that psychoanalysis is both an art and a science?’ (Forrester, 5) and identifies among the gifts of psychoanalysis to culture both the analyst as ‘a cultural figure whose work is aesthetic as much as it is investigative’ and the opportunity for the patient or analysand to ‘render his or her life a work of art, a narrative of chance and destiny as well as a thriller, whether psychological or otherwise’ (Forrester, 5). Academic psychologist Stephen Frosh offers a more cautious balancing of psychoanalysis’ ‘authoritarian training and institutional structures’, procedural lack of rigour, ‘ethnocentricity and tendency towards normative moralising’ against its ‘engagement with subjectivity and emotion, concern with agency and intentionality’, its ‘widening of the scope of rationality, critical awareness of the limits of consciousness’ and ‘fluid and complex interpersonal focus, appreciation of fantasy and therapeutic integrity’ (Frosh, 231). Summarising his career in Miracles of Life , Ballard states his own persisting commitment to psychoanalysis plainly: ‘I felt strongly, and still do, that psychoanalysis and surrealism were a key

Introduction

25

to the truth about existence and the human personality, and also a key to myself’ (Miracles, 133); he is clear about the significance for his world-view of Freud’s foregrounding of irrational elements in human life as well as the broader psychiatric concerns of his project: The faith in reason and rationality that dominated post-war thinking struck me as hopelessly idealistic, like the belief that the German people had been led astray by Hitler and the Nazis. [. . .] Reason and rationality failed to explain human behaviour. Human beings were often irrational and dangerous, and the business of psychiatry was as much with the sane as the insane. (Miracles, 137)

Approaches For Peter Widdowson and Peter Brooker ‘all literary- critical activity is always underpinned by theory’, and theory necessarily ‘represents an ideological – if not expressly political – position’; their contention is that ‘it is more effective, if not more honest, to have a praxis which is explicitly theorized than to operate with naturalised and unexamined assumptions; that such a praxis may be tactical and strategic rather than seemingly philosophically absolute’, and that theory ‘is to be put to use and critiqued rather than studied in the abstract and for its own sake’ (Selden, Widdowson, and Brooker, 9). Such considerations, and the insistence of these writers on a ‘self- questioning and critical’ use of theory (Selden, Widdowson, and Brooker, 9) and the importance of the ability to ‘theorize one’s own practice’ (Selden, Widdowson, and Brooker, 10), cannot fail to be salutary for a project based largely around readings of psychoanalytic theory, itself a thriving sub- set within Widdowson and Brooker’s ‘diverse tribe’ of contemporary critical praxes (Selden, Widdowson, and Brooker, 7). The foregoing discussion of psychoanalytic literary criticism attempts to establish a critical positioning of this project in relation to its major theoretical compasspoints; as well as taking a critical approach to the range of theoretical, academic, diagnostic, and clinical material with which it deals, this book, attempting to avoid theory’s potential for abstraction, emphasizes a historicizing approach to psychoanalytic, psychological, and psychiatric discourses, reflective of Ballard’s engagement with them within the historical continuum of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Concerned with tracing both how Ballard’s fictions rewrite specific psychological discourses and how they dialogue with them, this project

26

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

maintains some degree of openness both to traditional discussions of literary influence and to more modern conceptions of intertextuality. For Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein, ‘influence should refer to relations built on dyads of transmission from one unity (author, work, tradition) to another’ (Clayton and Rothstein, 3), while intertextuality may be seen either as ‘the enlargement of a familiar idea’, a general term ‘working out from the broad definition of influence to encompass unconscious, socially prompted types of text formation [. . .]; modes of conception [. . .]; styles [. . .]; and other prior constraints and opportunities for the writer’, or as an entirely new concept which ‘might be used to oust and replace the kinds of issues that influence addresses, and in particular its central concern with the author and more or less conscious authorial intentions and skills’ (Clayton and Rothstein, 3). Influence, for Clayton and Rothstein, ‘has to do with agency, whereas intertextuality has to do with a much more impersonal field of crossing texts’ (Clayton and Rothstein, 4). They usefully pick up on art historian Michael Baxandall’s case for ‘the greater analytic capability one gains by turning the theory of influence on its head and talking about the agency of the author being influenced’ (Clayton and Rothstein, 6), his implication that an author ‘becomes a “precursor” only when someone uses his or her work, so that at best the line of intentionality runs from the later to the earlier author, or else does not run at all’ (Clayton and Rothstein, 7). This certainly applies to the way Ballard can be seen, throughout his oeuvre, to make use of particular psychological texts as conceptual raw material for his narrative fictions. To ‘encourage a stress on the receiving author as agent’ argue Clayton and Rothstein, ‘psychologizes lineage’, and I would wish as far as possible to privilege reference to Ballard’s texts over any claim to understand Ballard’s personal psychology (Clayton and Rothstein, 7). The psychologization of lineage, as well as an ‘insistence on the subject’, a resolute nonreferentiality, and the construction of a ‘severely limited canon’ (Clayton and Rothstein, 9), are criticisms Clayton and Rothstein level at Harold Bloom, for them, with Walter Jackson Bate, creator of one of ‘the two most important postwar theories of influence’ (Clayton and Rothstein, 7). Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, with its psychoanalytic use of ‘Freud’s investigations of the mechanisms of defence and their ambivalent functionings’ as ‘the clearest analogues I have found for the revisionary ratios that govern intrapoetic relations’ (Bloom, 8), is significant for this account less in offering Oedipal resistance as a model for the relationship of Ballard the author to Freud and other psychological writers influential on him than simply for having asserted literary influence as a worthy topic of study; I must profess

Introduction

27

here an enduring fascination with the topic of creative influence and with the way Ballard has drawn on the resources of twentieth- century psychology to create such innovative and resonant fictions. There is then a sense in which, despite the fascinations of influence, a more apposite conceptualization of textual interrelation for use in this project is offered by intertextuality, a term coined, as Clayton and Rothstein note, by Julia Kristeva. In Desire in Language , Kristeva sees the text as ‘a trans-linguistic apparatus that redistributes the order of language by relating communicative speech’; conceived as a ‘productivity’, ‘its relationship to the language in which it is situated is redistributive (destructiveconstructive)’; the text ‘is a permutation of texts, an intertextuality: in the space of a given text, several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neutralise one another’ (Desire, 36). Intertextuality relates to Kristeva’s concept of the ideologeme, ‘the intersection of a given textual arrangement (a semiotic practice) with the utterances (sequences) that it either assimilates into its own space or to which it refers in the space of exterior texts (semiotic practices)’ (Desire, 36). Conceiving of the text as ideologeme has political implications, determining ‘the very procedure of the semiotics that, by studying the text as intertextuality, considers it as such within (the text of) society and history’ (Desire, 37). In Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva moves away from the concept of intertextuality; defining it as a ‘transposition of one (or several) sign system(s) into another’ (Revolution , 59–60), she complains about the common understanding of this term ‘in the banal sense of ‘“study of sources”’, preferring instead a new term, transposition , which ‘specifies that the passage from one signifying system to another demands a new articulation of the thetic – of enunciative and denotative positionality’ (Revolution , 60). Granted that ‘every signifying practice is a field of transpositions of various signifying systems (an inter-textuality)’, says Kristeva, ‘one then understands that its “place” of enunciation and its denoted “object” are never single, complete, and identical to themselves’; rather, they are ‘always plural, shattered, capable of being tabulated. In this way polysemy can also be seen as the result of a semiotic polyvalence – an adherence to different sign systems’ (Revolution , 60). Kristeva’s conceptualization of the text as a locus of productivity within which multiple utterances drawn from other sources intersect and neutralize each other places a welcome emphasis on the specific details of textuality itself and the fragmentary and multidimensional relationship between different instances of textual language; the concept of the ideologeme, meanwhile, is suggestive in identifying the written text as part of a larger cultural meta-text to which it has not only a linguistic

28

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

but also a historical and ideological relationship. Apologies for an instinct towards the banal study of sources aside, Kristeva’s discussion of transposition creates a sophisticated sense of the plurality, multiplicity, and contingency of linguistic meaning which can usefully inform our approach to Ballard and his psychological con-texts in the discussions which follow. Ballard’s early short fictions withstand an unprecedented degree of close reading in terms of Freudian theory. My first chapter opens by discussing Ballard’s effective declaration of allegiance to depth psychology in early stories such as ‘Manhole 69’ and ‘Zone of Terror’ which speculatively mobilize psychoanalytic ideas within the context of narratives concerned with the relationship between psychological professional and patient. I discuss the beginnings of Ballard’s engagement with social psychology in his mobilizations of Freud’s super-ego theory and his detailed dramatization of psychoanalytic process in stories such as ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’ and ‘The Screen Game’. The work of Carl Gustav Jung was also a significant influence on the earliest period of Ballard’s fiction, and the middle section of my first chapter discusses the relevance of Jungian concepts such as the collective unconscious, the mandala, regression, and the mana-personality to particular stories. Finally, I examine Ballard’s preoccupation with the psychology of contemporary modernity, discussing his figuration of the contemporary self as regressive and death- driven, his psychoanalytic critiques of the space race, and his fictional engagements with contemporary anti-psychiatry. Beginning with a situation of the much- discussed Ballardian concept of ‘inner space’ in terms of the psychological dimension of his fictions, my second chapter discusses Ballard’s catastrophe novels of the early 1960s. Unprecedentedly detailed readings of The Drowned World in relation to Jungian theory are situated innovatively within unexplored theoretical and historical contexts and, in the wake of Luckhurst’s useful existentialist reading, the psychoanalytic and analytic-psychological contexts for The Drought are given a fresh appraisal. A powerfully Jungian fiction, as Luckhurst makes clear, The Crystal World is re-read in its Freudian dimension as embodying an uncanny hysterical surreal as theorized by Hal Foster, and Frantz Fanon’s postcolonial critique of depth psychology is mobilized to re-problematize representations of race in the catastrophe novels. Ballard’s fictions of the late 1960s and 1970s encourage reading in terms of a far broader range of psychological theory. In my third chapter I discuss The Atrocity Exhibition’s simulations of schizophrenia and psychosis in relation to Freudian and other contemporary diagnostic materials,

Introduction

29

emphasizing the collection’s implication of the contemporary media explosion as precipitating mental crisis. The paranoiac and quasi-psychoanalytic interpretative strategies of Atrocity are discussed with particular reference to the book’s satirical mobilization of Freudian theorizations of sexuality. Contra Jean Baudrillard’s anti-psychological reading of Crash , I demonstrate ways in which that novel interacts extensively not only with Freudian psycho- sexuality but with Freud’s complex theorization of the drives as laid out in his late metapsychology as well as his discussions of fantasy. Ballard’s debt to the work of R. D. Laing at this period is acknowledged through a reading of Concrete Island in relation to his theories of the schizoid and the schizophrenic journey. Freud’s work was a keystone in the emergence of late twentieth- century trauma theory, and my fourth chapter examines the possibilities for reading Ballard’s quasi- autobiographical fictions, Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women, entailed not only by Freud’s theorizations of trauma, mechanisms of psychological defence, and the psychology of war but also by significant works of trauma theory by writers including Cathy Caruth and Dori Laub. Caruth’s work on trauma in history is mobilized alongside Michel de Certeau’s discussions of psychoanalysis’ relations to the historical to examine Ballard’s fictional autobiographies as instances of psychoanalytic historiography, before, drawing on de Certeau, Laura Marcus, Jacques Derrida, and other writers, I discuss the autobiographical and literary dimensions of these texts in terms of their relations to psychoanalysis. The final phase of Ballard’s fiction, from the late 1980s onwards, increasingly engaged with the psychology of the social. In my fi fth and final chapter, I delineate the debt of these fictions to Freud’s social-psychological writings. The violent transgressions of Cocaine Nights extrapolate from the vision of human nature and human society promulgated in Freud’s ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, while its sister-text, Super- Cannes, dramatizes the self- subversive tendency of civilizational repression and the deathdriven repetitions of social domination theorized in Herbert Marcuse’s post- Freudian philosophical essay Eros and Civilization. Millennium People is read as reasserting the spirit of the 1960s in its Laingian critique of social repression in post-millennial Britain, while the challenging post-Freudian espousal of inherent human aggressivity pervading the late fiction is placed in the context of Kingdom Come ’s relationship to the history of dialogue between psychology and fascism.

Chapter 1

A Host of Furious Fancies

In its earliest phase Ballard’s short fiction drew heavily on the conceptual resources of Freud’s theoretical writing. Early stories such as ‘Manhole 69’ (1957) and ‘Zone of Terror’ (1960) treat Freudian conceptions centrally within the context of relationships between psychiatrist and patient. ‘Manhole 69’ (1957), Ballard’s fi fth published story, frames a declaration of allegiance to psychoanalytic theory within a setting evoking contemporary experimental psychology. Three experimental subjects, Lang, Gorrell and Avery, ‘narcotomized’ – neurosurgically deprived of the ability to sleep – by egotistical Dr Neill and his assistant Morley, undergo a process of hallucinatory breakdown which manifests to others as catatonic withdrawal but to them subjectively as the room around them progressively shrinking to the size of a manhole. Dr Neill’s claim that ‘For the first time Man will be living a full twenty-four hour day, not spending a third of it as an invalid, snoring his way through an eight-hour peepshow of infantile erotica’ (Stories, 51) belittles at a stroke three foundational tenets in Freudian psychoanalysis: the significance of dreams as the ‘royal road to the unconscious’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 475), the fundamental significance of unconscious activity as manifested in dreams for mental life, and the central role in unconscious life Freud allots to infantile sexuality. Neill’s physiological conception of human psychology contrasts with Morley’s speculatively open approach: Neill let out a light snort. ‘I suppose you’re trying to say that sleep is some sort of communal activity and that these three men are now isolated, exiled from the group unconscious, the dark oceanic dream. Is that it?’ ‘Maybe.’ ‘Nonsense, John. The further we hold back the unconscious the better. We’re reclaiming some of the marshland. Physiologically sleep is nothing more than an inconvenient symptom of cerebral anoxaemia. It’s not that you’re afraid of missing, it’s the dream. You want to hold on to your front-row seat at the peepshow.’

A Host of Furious Fancies

31

‘No,’ Morley said mildly. [. . .] ‘What I really mean is that for better or worse Lang, Gorrell and Avery are now stuck with themselves. [. . .] How much of yourself can you stand? Maybe you need eight hours off a day just to get over the shock of being yourself.’ (Stories, 52) Neill’s topographical image of the unconscious as ‘marshland’ gainsays Freud’s placing of the unconscious at the centre of mental life; his dismissal of a ‘group unconscious’ rejects C. G. Jung’s collective unconscious, a ‘psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals’ (Archetypes, 43). Morley’s reply implies a defence of psychoanalysis’ sense of the vital importance of dreams in mental life, the denouement bearing out his hunch, as, deprived of sleep, the experimental subjects hallucinate the walls of their world closing in. Ballard is here typically content to evoke distinctively Freudian (infantile sexuality) and Jungian (collective unconscious) conceptions alongside each other in popularized, jargonized form without acknowledging them as significant sites of difference between Freud’s and Jung’s theoretical beliefs. Despite his dismissal of Morley’s concern for the ‘Unconscious’ (Stories, 56) Neill states that ‘The transference is getting much too positive’ and orders the subjects be told he will ‘be asleep for forty- eight hours’ (Stories, 57). In Freud’s conception of transference feelings towards parental or other figures originating at an infantile stage are revived and projected on to the analyst; in Laplanche and Pontalis’ words ‘infantile prototypes re- emerge’, ‘the patient transfers unconscious ideas on to the person of his physician’, and ‘the subject’s relationship to parental figures [. . .] is once again lived out’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 455, 457, 458). ‘Manhole 69’ implies exactly this identification of the physician with the image of the father, for Freud the most significant of the imagos connected to transference (Laplanche and Pontalis, 458). Deprived of the presence of the psychiatrist with whom they identify the experiment, Lang, Gorrell and Avery become catatonic, and the end of the story implies their complete childlike dependence on him as parent-figure, Neill’s return enabling Lang’s reawakening: ‘“Yes, Bobby,” he said gently. His voice was feathersoft, caressing. “I’m here, Bobby. You can come out now”’ (Stories, 67). Through the catatonic breakdown of Lang, Gorrell and Avery, ‘Manhole 69’ rebuffs Neill’s willingness to use psychoanalytic theory without acknowledging the central importance of the unconscious, perhaps aligning him with ego-psychology, a contemporary American extension of psychoanalysis emphasizing ego- development. The story’s speculative content freely combines key psychoanalytic ideas with literary models and quasi-neurological

32

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

jargon; Morley’s interpretation of the events is ‘tentative and uncertain’, trying out different frameworks, moving from a psychoanalytic explanation in terms of ‘Reactivation of the infantile imago? A regression into the great, slumbering womb? Or to put it more simply still – just a fit of pique’ to a neurologically oriented statement that ‘The central nervous system can’t stand narcotomy’ (Stories, 65). Morley and Neill’s final hypothesis combines elements of Freudian terminology – in Neill’s hypothesis that for the subjects the gym may have ‘become an external projection of their own egos’ (Stories, 66) – with reference to Chekhov’s short story ‘The Bet’. Implicitly arguing for a Freudian emphasis on the dream-life, ‘Manhole 69’ is not reductively doctrinaire in its Freudianism but uses Freudian concepts as part of an imaginative speculation on human psychological dynamics which also admits literary and neurological models, echoing Freud’s own hybridizations of case- analysis, quasi-biological speculation and literary allusion. Like ‘Manhole 69’, ‘Zone of Terror’ (1960) employs psychoanalytic concepts centrally within a fictive frame informed by a wider knowledge of contemporary psychology. Burned- out corporate scientist Larsen undertakes rest- cure supervised by company psychologist Bayliss, and under the influence of a cocktail of drugs repeatedly encounters a double of himself. Provoked to crisis by an especially strong stimulant, he begins to see a proliferation of these doubles, and is eventually, apparently at the direction of one of the doubles, shot dead by Bayliss. ‘Zone of Terror’ dramatizes the power struggle between psychological professional and patient in terms compellingly suggestive of contemporary anti-psychiatric trends; Larsen is counter-medicating himself with amphetamines against the barbiturates administered by Bayliss (Stories, 137), and is critical of Bayliss’ cryptic, minimalist approach and his ‘inaccurate diagnoses’ (Stories, 139). Bayliss’ drug regime reflects contemporary developments in drug therapy, and contemporary developments in cybernetics relevant to psychology are evoked by the simulated central nervous system in whose development Larsen is involved. Bayliss’ implied explanation of Larsen’s breakdown in terms of a fictional work by Kretschmer called An Analysis of Psychotic Time (Stories, 137) makes reference of uncertain relevance to Ernst Kretschmer (1888–1964), an influential German psychiatrist who lived through the Nazi period and published books on topics including the relationship of mental disorders to physiological typology (Stewart, 184). Roger Luckhurst has noted the relevance of Freud’s essay ‘The “Uncanny”’ to ‘Zone of Terror’ (Angle , xv), and notwithstanding Bayliss’ speculative interpretation of Larsen’s condition – less ‘physiological’ in Luckhurst’s

A Host of Furious Fancies

33

term (Angle, xvi), than based around an interesting and carefully vague analogy between visual memory and the cinematic film reel (Stories, 143–4) – the Freudian uncanny must be recognized as a key context for the story’s doubling process. Freud explains the uncanny as a specific feeling of dread or fear which is caused by ‘something repressed which recurs’ (XVII, 219, 241). One of the associated symptoms of this feeling- effect is ‘a doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self’ (XVII, 234), which Freud explains as the recurrence in the mind of the post-infantile individual of the ‘unbounded self-love’ or ‘primary narcissism’ which ‘dominates the mind of the child and of primitive man’ (XVII, 235). Because ‘every affect belonging to an emotional impulse, whatever its kind, is transformed, if it is repressed, into anxiety’ (XVII, 241), when primary narcissism recurs at the later stage of the individual’s development it does so in a reversed form, so that the double is experienced as an ‘uncanny harbinger of death’ (XVII, 235). Larsen’s doubles can be read precisely as uncanny harbingers of his own death, their proliferation leading to his shooting by Bayliss at the instruction of one of the temporal doubles (Stories, 149). ‘Zone of Terror’ deliberately decentres Freudian readings; Bayliss explicitly dismisses Freudian interpretations of the double, claiming he ‘isn’t the shining hero of the super- ego, or the haggard grey-beard of the deathwish’; rather, ‘He is simply a photographic double. Displace one eyeball with your finger and you’ll see a double of me. Your double is no more unusual, with the exception that the displacement is not in space but in time’ (Stories, 143). This pre- empting of psychoanalytic interpretations through technological analogy spells out and makes available to the uninformed reader these possible interpretations while simultaneously forestalling a reductive ‘solving’ of the riddle of the narrative by the reader familiar with psychoanalysis; potential Freudian readings are created as possibilities in the reader’s mind only as options within a more ambiguous range of possible significances relating to psychosis and to the mind’s perception of time conceived on the model of technological representation. In line with Luckhurst’s useful evocation of this Freudian term, an effect of interpretative overdetermination is deliberately created, admitting multiple possible models for mental function. Despite the story’s disavowal, through Bayliss, of a Freudian reading of the doubles, the two Freudian associations for them it offers and then dismisses can both be seen to derive from the text of ‘The “Uncanny”’; as well as associating it with intimations of death, Freud’s essay discusses the uncanny double as associated with the critical agency he would later develop into the super- ego (XVII, 235). Freudian theory in fact permits a

34

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

partial identification between death-wish and super- ego, since Freud claims that the super- ego is a representative of the id and is energized precisely by a turning against the self of aggressivity derived from the death instinct (XIX, 36, 170). Viewed in this light Larsen’s doubles, as well as being neither death instinct nor super-ego, could also be both. A reading of the story in terms of death at the hands of a critical agency charged with the energies of the death drive is encouraged by its representation of the supervising, analytical figure of the psychiatrist, the critical agency par excellence, as actually shooting Larsen at the story’s end. ‘Zone of Terror’’s uncanny doubling may be even more overdetermined in Freudian terms if one interprets Larsen’s vision of an ‘enormous ratlike creature’ whose face, ‘insane and terrified’ is ‘another replica of his own’ (Stories, 148) as an allusion to Freud’s famous case history of the ‘Rat Man’, an apparently successful analysis in which Freud came to see the obsessional thoughts of his patient Ernst Lanzer as symptoms of an obsessional neurosis with its roots in his Oedipal relationship with his father (Quinodoz, 88–91). Allusion to the ‘Rat Man’ compounds the sense of Oedipal conflict between patient and psychiatric professional which pervades ‘Manhole 69’ and ‘Zone of Terror’. ‘The Watch-Towers’ (1962) initiates in Ballard’s oeuvre a dialogue with Freud’s theory of the super-ego. For Freud the super-ego is an intra-psychic agency which arises from the surmounting of the Oedipus complex: alongside the demolition of a boy’s Oedipus complex his ‘object- cathexis of his mother must be given up. Its place may be filled with one of two things: either an identification with his mother or an intensification of his identification with his father’ (XIX, 32). In fact what takes place to be more precise, says Freud, is an ambivalent mixture of both identifications (XIX, 33). The super- ego is a structural agency in the psyche constituted from this transformation of and reaction against the first infantile relations to parental figures: ‘The super- ego is, however, not simply a residue of the earliest object- choices of the id; it also represents an energetic reactionformation against those choices’; for Freud this ‘double aspect of the ego ideal derives from the fact that the ego ideal had the task of repressing the Oedipus complex; indeed, it is to that revolutionary event that it owes its existence’ (XIX, 34). By identifying with the father as a means of compensating for its own abdication of its desire for the mother the subject internalizes the father as a representative of authority and of socially instituted prohibitions; in effect the individual now carries around within itself an agency representative of the parental influence which is responsible for the impulses towards self- control and social responsibility, and therefore also of conscience and guilt:

A Host of Furious Fancies

35

The super- ego retains the character of the father, while the more powerful the Oedipus complex was and the more rapidly it succumbed to repression (under the influence of authority, religious teaching, schooling and reading), the stricter will be the domination of the super- ego over the ego later on – in the form of conscience or perhaps of an unconscious sense of guilt. (XIX, 34–5) The development of the super- ego is not only a vital stage in the emergence of the structuring of the individual’s psyche, it is also the basis of the individual’s sense of morality; for Freud psychoanalysis has ‘from the very beginning attributed the function of instigating repression to the moral and aesthetic trends in the ego’, that is the super- ego, so that this agency plays a vital role in the repression that gives rise to the unconscious; the super- ego is an internalization of the morality taught to the infant by its parents: Very true, we can say, and here we have that higher nature, in this egoideal or super- ego, the representative of our relation to our parents. When we were little children we knew these higher natures, we admired them and feared them; and later we took them into ourselves. (XIX, 36) The individual’s expectations of good behaviour in himself are all attributable to the super- ego, and this includes his religiously derived moral feelings: ‘It is easy to show that the ego ideal answers to everything that is expected of the higher nature of man. As a substitute for a longing for the father, it contains the germ from which all religions have evolved’ (XIX, 37). In ‘The Watch-Towers’, Renthall’s impatience with his fellow townsfolk’s fear of the towers, his scoffing declaration that ‘People are hiding away in their back bedrooms like a lot of frightened ghosts’ (Stories, 377), positions him as defiant towards the towers as science-fictional symbols for the super- ego. Despite the fact that the towers cause him ‘more anxiety than he was prepared to admit’ (Stories, 373) and his occasional haunting by ‘some invisible shadow of guilt’ (Stories, 378), recalling Freud’s association between guilt and the super- ego, he is determined in his challenge to the authority of the council and the watch-towers, implying, in psychoanalytic terms, a refusal of the law of the father. His friend Hanson’s query, gesturing to the watch-towers, over whether Renthall would be wise to take his married mistress Julia Osmond out more often (Stories, 376), supports a reading of the towers in terms of the super- ego as internalization of the moralistic judgements of parental and societal figures.

36

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

The text’s unspoken dialogue with Freud’s theory of the super- ego constitutes an early rehearsal of the long- standing argument Ballard conducted throughout his oeuvre against the limiting and stifling effects of self-imposed morality and social convention. Hanson’s mention of disapproval on the council of Renthall and Julia’s ‘idiosyncratic’ ‘menage a deux’ encourages a reading of the story in terms of the psychology of the individual’s relation to the majority (Stories, 376); Renthall, with his angry disregard of the council, is the figure of the defiant individualist. Aloof, free-thinking, he has the isolation characteristic of many Ballardian heroes: No one else visited the café, and he was glad to be able to pursue his thoughts alone, in this miniature urban vacuum, with nothing to intervene between himself and the lines of watch-towers stretching into the haze beyond the roof-tops. (Stories, 377) Renthall’s determinedly unashamed affair with Mrs Osmond recapitulates the tendency Freud observes in patients with Oedipally related complexes to be attracted to ‘only one to whom another man can claim right of possession’ (in other words to women whose attached status makes them identifiable with the unattainable mother of the Oedipal stage), accentuating the sense of his as an Oedipal challenge to the father as lawgiver (XI, 166). Renthall’s scepticism about the association between the council and the watch-towers, which hang numinous and inaccessible over the town, and about the likelihood that the watch-towers will take any interdictory action, might be read as an attitude of refusal vis à vis the super-ego arising from a sense of that agency as only existing within the mind, as a subjective rather than objective phenomenon. The invisible watchers might allegorize the numinous interdictory presence of God, conceived in Freud as a deification of the super-ego, in contrast to the more mundane authority of the Council. Renthall’s parodic suggestion to Julia of a magic ritual to overcome her unease implies the fear of surveillance inspired by the influence of the super-ego to be a thing of the mind (Stories, 380); controlling his own instinctive anxiety, Renthall satirizes his peers’ belief in communication between the Council and the towers (Stories, 385), implying this belief as a projection rather than an actuality. However, the story’s ironic conclusion adds a twist to its vision of Renthall’s bold defiance of internalized convention by implying the inescapability of the super-ego as an inherently psychic phenomenon. Renthall’s increasing obsession with the towers, to a point where eventually only he can still see them, plays out Freud’s sense that the super- ego is a vital structural element

A Host of Furious Fancies

37

in the psyche. For Freud, paradoxically, the moralizing super- ego is said to be a representative not of reality but of the subject’s internal desires: By setting up this ego ideal, the ego has mastered the Oedipus Complex and at the same time placed itself in subjection to the id. Whereas the ego is essentially the representative of the external world, of reality, the super- ego stands in contrast to it as the representative of the internal world, of the id. Conflicts between the ego and the ideal will, as we are now prepared to find, ultimately reflect the contrast between what is real and what is psychical, between the external world and the internal world. (XIX, 36) This idea is extremely suggestive in terms of the story’s conclusion, which throws into question precisely the contrast between real and psychical, external and internal by destabilizing the reader’s sense of whether or not Renthall’s perceptions are real. Renthall is surprised when his coinhabitants begin to built outdoor patios, and appear oblivious to the towers – the implication is surely that they have unconsciously reacted to Renthall’s disproval of the authority of the towers, and have ceased to believe in them. Renthall becomes the only person capable of seeing the towers, but is convinced they will soon spring into action (Stories, 390); he hypothesizes hypnosis as an explanation for the townspeople’s attitude, and Clifton begins to treat him like a delusional patient. His apprehensions seem increasingly paranoid, and his feeling that ‘I seem to be the only one who’s still compos mentis’ (Stories, 392) recall Laing on the schizophrenic’s personal logic. The ‘unprecedented clarity’ of his final revelation of the watch-towers and their occupants (Stories, 394) is described in terms that suggest hallucination, but the question of their reality or otherwise is left open; the ultimate implication is perhaps that Renthall’s public victory over the super-egoic apparition of the towers has been won at a heavy cost, that of the subordination of his sanity to his preoccupation with them, and that his impossible attempt to extirpate the super-ego from the landscape of his psyche has only reinforced its domination of his psychic reality. Where ‘Manhole 69’ and ‘Zone of Terror’ evoke Freudian doxa within a psychiatrist-patient relationship and ‘The Watch-Towers’ expands Ballard’s engagement with Freud’s theory of the super-ego, the stories later anthologized in the Vermilion Sands collection (1971) enact psychodramas suggestive of the Freudian psychoanalytic encounter within the decadent, bohemian setting of a fictional leisure resort. Roger Luckhurst has read these stories interestingly in terms of Freudian compulsion-repetition and transference;

38

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

I hope to build here on Luckhurst’s work in suggesting how these stories will withstand an even closer Freudian reading than he has supplied. It is in ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’ and ‘The Screen Game’ that Ballard’s fiction comes closest to basing its narrative around the psychoanalytic therapeutic encounter as described by Freud. ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’ does so through the conceit of psychotropic houses capable of retaining their residents’ emotions. Howard Talbot and his wife Fay move into 99 Stellavista despite Fay’s reservations about the house retaining the recorded memories of Gloria Tremayne, the star accused of having murdered her husband ten years previously. When Howard’s involvement with Tremayne’s haunting presence becomes too intense and Fay leaves him, his anger triggers a recapitulation of a cataclysmic trauma buried in the house’s synthetic memory. Freud’s mature conception of the psychoanalytic treatment developed out of Breuer’s cathartic model, described by Freud as ‘bringing directly into focus the moment at which the symptom was formed, and [. . .] persistently endeavouring to reproduce the mental processes involved in that situation, in order to direct the discharge along the path of conscious activity’; cathartic cure was attained by a process of ‘Remembering and abreacting, with the help of the hypnotic state’ (XII, 147). Laplanche and Pontalis define abreaction as an ‘Emotional discharge whereby the subject liberates himself from the affect attached to the memory of a traumatic event in such a way that this affect is not able to become (or to remain) pathogenic’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1); catharsis, meanwhile, is a method ‘in which the therapeutic effect sought is “purgative”: an adequate discharge of pathogenic affects’, allowing the patient ‘to evoke and even to relive the traumatic events to which these affects are bound, and to abreact them' (Laplanche and Pontalis, 60). In Freud’s account of the development of his method, abreactive catharsis was replaced by a technique ‘in which the analyst gives up the attempt to bring a particular moment or problem into focus’ and ‘employs the art of interpretation mainly for the purpose of recognizing the resistances which appear there, and making them conscious to the patient’ so as to encourage the patient to relate the ‘forgotten situations and connections’ (XII, 147); as with Breuer’s cathartic hypnotic method, the aim is ‘to fill in gaps in memory; dynamically speaking, it is to overcome resistances due to repression’ (XII, 148). Under Freud’s new technique certain cases behaved differently to those under the hypnotic technique: rather than remembering what he has forgotten and repressed, the patient ‘acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is

A Host of Furious Fancies

39

repeating it’; for instance, the patient ‘does not say that he remembers that he used to be defiant and critical towards his parents’ authority; instead, he behaves in that way to the doctor’ (XII, 150). As long as the patient is in the treatment ‘he cannot escape from this compulsion to repeat, and in the end that we understand that this is his way of remembering’ (XII, 150). These repetitions are identified by the term transference: We soon perceive that the transference is itself only a piece of repetition, and that the repetition is a transference of the forgotten past not only on to the doctor but also on to all the other aspects of the current situation. We must be prepared to find, therefore, that the patient yields to the compulsion to repeat, which now replaces the impulsion to remember, not only in his personal attitude to his doctor but also in every activity and relationship which may occupy his life at the time [. . .]. (XII, 151) The Freudian analysand ‘repeats instead of remembering, and repeats under the conditions of resistance’; ‘he repeats everything that has already made its way from the sources of the repressed into his manifest personality – his inhibitions and unserviceable attitudes and his pathological character-traits’; he also ‘repeats all his symptoms in the course of the treatment’ (XII, 151). The transference is the ‘main instrument [. . .] for curbing the patient’s compulsion to repeat and for turning it into a motive for remembering’, a ‘playground’ in which the compulsion ‘is allowed to expand in almost complete freedom and in which it is expected to display to us everything in the way of pathogenic instincts that is hidden in the patient’s mind’ (XII, 154). Provided the patient cooperates in the analysis, Freud says, the analyst will ‘succeed in giving all the symptoms of the illness a new transference meaning and in replacing his ordinary neurosis by a “transference-neurosis” of which he can be cured by the therapeutic work’ (XII, 154). The success of the analysis necessitates that the patient be given time to ‘become more conversant’ with his resistances as articulated to him by the analyst, to ‘work through’ them, a ‘part of the work which effects the greatest changes in the patient’ (XII, 155) and which correlates to ‘the “abreacting” of the quotas of affect strangulated by repression – an abreaction without which hypnotic treatment remained ineffective’ (XII, 156). In ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’ a fictional variant of the transference transpires in which Howard Talbot and his wife self- consciously act out a repetition not of their own infantile complexes but of the baleful emotional relationship between Miles Vanden Starr and Gloria Tremayne encoded in the house’s memory: ‘Later I knew that I was treating Fay in exactly the way

40

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

that Vanden Starr had treated Gloria Tremayne, recapitulating the steps of their tragedy with consequences that were equally disastrous’ (Stories, 314). Talbot’s rage at his eventual abandonment by Fay provokes the house into a ‘psychotropic grand mal ’ recapitulating Vanden Starr’s shooting by Tremayne (Stories, 318). Talbot interprets his own role in this seizure as ‘to reconstruct the original traumatic situation and release the repressed material’ (Stories, 319), a gloss of Freudian therapeutic procedure which recurs in Ballard’s The Drowned World and which suggests the abruptness of the early model of cathartic abreaction more than Freud’s later conception of a therapy based on transference and working through resistances. The house qua patient is suggested to have relived the trauma of Vanden Starr’s murder, thereby therapeutically discharging the pathogenic affects associated with it and leading to the disappearance of Vanden Starr’s malevolent personality from its memory (Stories, 320). A transferential repetition also takes place, however, in Talbot, who has himself been engaged in reliving a past complex, that of his infatuation with Gloria Tremayne. Freud warns that the repetitions of the psychoanalytic process can be perilous, that ‘dangers arise from the fact that in the course of the treatment new and deeper-lying instinctual impulses, which had not hitherto made themselves felt, may come to be “repeated”’ (XII, 153–4). 99 Stellavista’s ‘grand mal ’, almost taking Talbot’s life, evokes, albeit in comic vein, this potential of the psychoanalytic experience to unleash instinctual destructiveness; Talbot’s statement that he knows he will reactivate the house ‘whatever the outcome’ despite the fact that it ‘might well be madness to me’ (Stories, 320) hints at a self- destructive compulsion aroused in him through his quasi-psychoanalytic confrontation with the house’s personality. Like that of ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’, the narrative of ‘The Screen Game’ (1962) is concerned with a violent abreaction of repressed trauma. Hired by enigmatic millionaire Charles Van Stratten to paint backdrops for an avant- garde film, Paul Golding meets the alluring Emerelda Garland, becoming aware that Van Stratten’s funding of the film has the ulterior motive of attempting psychodramatic therapy of his troubled mistress. When Emerelda’s progress through the expanding labyrinth of screens Golding paints for her reaches a certain stage, Van Stratten attempts to penetrate the core of her painted refuge and is killed by the jewelled insects which gather around her in the darkness; this killing, we learn, recapitulates Emerelda’s own traumatic implication in the death of Van Stratten’s unsympathetic mother. The concept of trauma evolves throughout the course of Freud’s work; one of his definitions describes it as ‘an experience which within a short period of time presents the mind with an increase of stimulus too powerful

A Host of Furious Fancies

41

to be dealt with or worked off in the normal way’, resulting in ‘permanent disturbances of the way in which the energy operates’ (XVI, 275). Laplanche and Pontalis describe a traditional account of the concept, de- emphasized by the late 1960s, in which ‘the aetiology of neurosis is related to past traumatic experiences whose occurrence is assigned to a constantly receding date according as the analytic investigation penetrates more deeply’ and in which ‘effective cure is sought by means of an abreaction and a psychical working out of the traumatic experiences’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 466). Freud’s and Breuer’s Studies in Hysteria , central to this early account, stresses trauma’s economic definition: ‘the outcome of the trauma is always the incapacity of the psychical apparatus to eliminate the excitations in accordance with the principle of constancy’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 467). Texts of the early period presuppose ‘a well- defined thesis tending to explain how the traumatic event triggers the setting up by the ego of a ‘pathological defence’ [. . .] operating in accordance with the primary process, instead of the normal defences generally used against an unpleasurable event’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 467): The trauma’s action is broken down into several elements, while it now presupposes at least two events. In a first scene – the so- called scene of seduction – the child is the object of sexual advances from the adult which fail to arouse any sexual excitement in him. A second scene, occurring after puberty, often of a seemingly innocent nature, evokes the first one through some association. It is the memory of the first scene that occasions an influx of sexual stimuli which overwhelm the ego’s defences. Although Freud calls the first scene traumatic, it is plain that, from the strict economic point of view, this quality is only ascribed to it after the fact (nachtraglich); or to put it another way: it is only as a memory that the first scene becomes pathogenic by deferred action, insofar as it sparks off an influx of internal excitation. (Laplanche and Pontalis, 467) In later years ‘the aetiological significance of traumas tends to give way in Freud’s work to that of phantasy-life and fixations at the various libidinal stages’; trauma is a ‘complemental series’ and refers in the ‘Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis’ to ‘an event occurring during the second period, not the childhood experience that is found at the origin of a fixation’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 468). In ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ Freud ‘readopts the economic definition of the trauma as a breach’, leading him to hypothesize that ‘an excessive influx of excitation immediately halts the

42

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

operation of the pleasure principle, obliging the psychical apparatus to carry out a more urgent task “beyond the pleasure principle”’, consisting in ‘binding the excitations in such a way as to allow for their subsequent discharge’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 468). Repetition of ‘dreams in which the subject relives the accident intensely, placing himself once more in the traumatic situation as if attempting to dominate it, is attributed to a repetition compulsion’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 468). In ‘Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety’, ‘the notion of the trauma assumes renewed significance aside from any reference to traumatic neurosis proper’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 469). Rather than any childhood scene of seduction, in ‘The Screen Game’ Emerelda’s involvement in Mrs Van Stratten’s death is the original overwhelming event which cannot be assimilated. The charge of affect associated with this event is abreacted violently through Emerelda’s killing of Charles through the medium of her cloud of jewelled insects, their escape from the cluster of screens symbolic of the discharge of repressed emotion. Charles’ killing forms part of a complemental series with that of his mother, a compulsive repetition of the original scene; it is provoked by a transference in which, standing on the terrace, the scene of the murder, at night, Emerelda projects the figure of Mrs Van Stratten on to the analyst-like figure of her doctor, Gruber. Albeit that it comes at the climax rather than the origin of the traumatic process, Charles’ fatal attempt to break through the screens surrounding Emerelda symbolically recalls the breaching of a protective layer which in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ instantiates trauma. Golding’s supplying of Emerelda with the moveable screens, through which she moves in an abstract game, evokes the analytic process of materializing the resistances in order that they may be worked through by the patient – the screen becomes an image for the pathological resistances of the traumatized patient, literally defending Emerelda as it does from the analytic gazes of Golding and Van Stratten. The title ‘The Screen Game’ suggests the relevance of Freud’s concept of the screen memory to the symbolic action of the narrative. For Freud a ‘screen memory’ is ‘a childhood memory characterized both by its unusual sharpness and by the apparent insignificance of its content’, whose analysis ‘leads back to indelible childhood experiences and to unconscious fantasies’; like the symptom, ‘the screen memory is a formation produced by a compromise between repressed elements and defence’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 410–11). Screen memories ‘are compromise-formations like parapraxes or slips and, more generally, symptoms’; they are formed predominantly through the mechanism of displacement (Laplanche and Pontalis, 411). Freud distinguishes between different kinds:

A Host of Furious Fancies

43

first, between positive and negative ones, according to whether or not their content is contrary to the repressed content; and secondly, between ‘retrogressive’ screen memories and those which have ‘pushed forward’, according to whether or not the manifest scene which they evoke precedes or follows those elements with which it is connected. Where it follows, the screen memory’s role is obviously restricted to supporting retroactively projected fantasies, and its ‘value lies in the fact that it represents in the memory impressions of thoughts of a later date whose content is connected with its own by symbolic or similar links’ [. . .]. (Laplanche and Pontalis, 411) Condensing real and fantasy childhood elements, screen memories are of great importance for Freud: Not only some but all of what is essential from childhood has been retained in these memories. It is simply a question of knowing how to extract it out of them by analysis. They represent the forgotten years of childhood as adequately as the manifest content of the dream represents the dreamthoughts’. (Laplanche and Pontalis, 411) Rather than Freud’s focus on screen memories as fantasy-products of childhood, it is his sense of them as defensive compromise-formations which is particularly relevant to ‘The Screen Game’. Van Stratten speaks of the ‘whole question of the illusions which exist in any relationship to make it workable, and of the barriers we willingly accept to hide ourselves from each other’, asking ‘How much reality can we stand?’ (Stories, 546). Lurking within the screens, Emerelda is precisely hiding herself – and in particular her repressed guilt – from the gaze of others. The screens symbolically assume a defensive role like that of the Freudian compromise-formation of the screen memory. As in Freudian psychology, the self in ‘The Screen Game’ is a thing of depth and opacity, the reality of whose nature may often best be hidden from human view; life itself may be conceived as a screen game, a shifting play of defensive illusions.

Jungian Fictions While Freud’s influence pervades Ballard’s writing, there is a significant strain within his early fiction which utilizes ideas from the work of Carl Gustav Jung. The key concept in Jung’s psychology is that of the collective

44

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

unconscious, ‘a part of the psyche which can be negatively distinguished from a personal unconscious by the fact that it does not, like the latter, owe its existence to personal experience’ consisting essentially of ‘pre- existent forms, the archetypes’ which are ‘the unconscious images of the instincts themselves’ (Archetypes, 42–4). The collective unconscious, a ‘second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals’, ‘does not develop individually but is inherited’ (Archetypes, 43). Ballard’s Jungian-influenced stories frequently concern a reorientation of the self towards the collective unconscious, particularly as symbolized by water or the sea, a symbolism relating to Jung’s statement in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious that ‘Water is the commonest symbol for the unconscious’, ‘a living symbol of the dark psyche’ (Archetypes, 18, 17). ‘Now Wakes the Sea’ (1963) is one of a number of such stories, alongside ‘Deep End’, ‘Prisoner of the Coral Deep’ and ‘The Reptile Enclosure’. Richard Mason sees the sea rolling in over the suburbs where he lives night after night, a real- seeming and vivid experience about which he assures his unsettled wife ‘I wasn’t dreaming’, even though ‘the nearest sea is a thousand miles away’ (Stories, 472). His wife Miriam’s feeling that she has also heard the sea and that ‘it sounded very old and blind, like something waking again after millions of years’ (Stories, 476), alongside the palaeontological context evoked by the fossil and by the excavation taking place on a nearby headland (Stories, 477), suggest Mason’s dreams as deriving from a phylogenetic past associable with the Jungian collective unconscious; similarly his reverie over a fossil mollusc, with its ‘endless associations of ancient seas and drowned strands’, a ‘bottomless cornucopia of image and reverie’ (Stories, 473), recalls Jung’s sense of the inexhaustible symbolism of archetypes, ‘primordial types’ (Archetypes, 5) or ‘universal images that have existed since the remotest times’ which constitute the ‘contents of the collective unconscious’ (Archetypes, 5, 4). As I discuss in Chapter Two, Mason’s intuition regarding his dream that ‘perhaps it was a sort of memory’ (Stories, 478), suggesting he has come into contact with inherited memories from the history of the human species, relies on a loose interpretation of Jung, since Jung discusses the heritability not of specific memories but of archetypes, ‘pre- existent forms [. . .] which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents’, ‘unconscious images of the instincts themselves, in other words, [. . .] patterns of instinctual behaviour ’ (Archetypes, 43, 44). As so often in Ballard, ‘Now Wakes the Sea’ exemplifies the conceptual impurity of his fiction, the story’s denouement evoking notions of abreaction and death instinct associated not with Jung but with Freud.

A Host of Furious Fancies

45

Besides the sea, the other major Jungian symbol of which Ballard makes use is the mandala. The 1962 story ‘The Voices of Time’ evokes a variety of psychological contexts, but the ‘crude Jungian mandala’ (Stories , 172) constructed by the dead biologist Whitby and later reproduced involuntarily by the neurologist Powers is its key image. For Jung this Eastern religious symbol was an archetype occurring naturally in modern mental experience having a specific, significant psychological meaning: The Sanskrit word mandala means ‘circle’ in the ordinary sense of the word. In the sphere of religious practices and psychology it denotes circular images, which are drawn, painted, modelled, or danced. [. . .] As psychological phenomena they appear spontaneously in dreams, in certain states of conflict, and in cases of schizophrenia. [. . .] In Tibetan Buddhism the figure has the significance of a ritual instrument (yantra), whose purpose is to assist meditation and concentration. [. . .] Its spontaneous occurrence in modern individuals enables psychological research to make a closer investigation into its functional meaning. As a rule a mandala occurs in conditions of psychic dissociation or disorientation, for instance in the case of children between the ages of eight and eleven whose parents are about to be divorced, or in adults who, as a result of a neurosis and its treatment, are confronted with the problem of opposites in human nature and are consequently disoriented; or again in schizophrenics whose view of the world has become confused, owing to the invasion of incomprehensible contents from the unconscious. In such cases it is easy to see how the severe pattern imposed by a circular image of this kind compensates the disorder and confusion of the psychic state – namely, through the construction of a central point to which everything is relate, or by a concentric arrangement of the disordered multiplicity and of contradictory and irreconcilable elements. This is evidently an attempt at self-healing on the part of Nature, which does not spring from conscious reflection but from instinctive impulse. (Archetypes, 387–8) The mandala stands in Jung for the wholeness of the self; it ‘could even be called the archetype of wholeness’; mandalas endeavour to express ‘either the totality of the individual in his inner or outer experience of the world, or its essential point of reference’; their object ‘is the self in contradistinction to the ego, which is the only point of reference for consciousness, whereas the self comprises the totality of the psyche altogether, i.e., conscious and unconscious’ (Archetypes, 388–9). The ‘energy’ of the central point of the mandala ‘is manifested in the

46

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

almost irresistible compulsion to become what one is, just as every organism is driven to assume the form that is characteristic of its nature’; this centre ‘is not felt or thought of as the ego but, [. . .] as the self ’ (Archetypes, 357): Although the centre is represented by an innermost point, it is surrounded by a periphery containing everything that belongs to the self – the paired opposites that make up the total personality. This totality comprises consciousness first of all, then the personal unconscious and finally an indefinitely large segment of the collective unconscious whose archetypes are common to all mankind. (Archetypes, 357): Ballard’s story utilizes Jung’s image of self and wholeness in the construction of a tale about the reconciliation of the individual self with its cosmological context. The climax of the story sees Powers, almost completely overwhelmed by his ever-increasing tendency to narcolepsy, drawn to the centre of the concrete mandala he has constructed, as the voices of time, transmissions from the stars counting down to the ultimate entropic death of the cosmos, come to dominate his consciousness (Stories, 192–3). The mandala becomes the symbol of his loss of self-identity and his unity with the cosmic continuum: Quietly it carried him away, and he rotated slowly, facing the direction of the tide. Around him the outline of the hills and the lake had faded, but the image of the mandala, like a cosmic clock, remained fixed before his eyes, illuminating the broad surface of the stream. Watching it constantly, he felt his body gradually dissolving, its physical dimensions melting into the vast continuum of the current, which bore him out into the centre of the great channel, sweeping him onward, beyond hope but at last at rest, down the broadening reaches of the river of eternity. (Stories, 193) As this passage demonstrates, the mandala’s specific religious significances of timelessness and ego-loss, upon which Jung draws in his definition, are relevant to ‘The Voices of Time’. The mandala, Jung says, is associated with Shiva, ‘the One Existent, the Timeless in its perfect state’ and through contemplation of it the Kundalini yogi ‘recognizes himself as God again, and thus returns from the illusion of individual existence into the universal totality of the divine state’ (Archetypes, 356, 357). Contemplation of the mandala aims at ‘a psychic change in the adept’: The ego is the expression of individual existence. The yogin exchanges his ego for Shiva or Buddha; in this way he induces a shifting of the

A Host of Furious Fancies

47

psychological centre of personality to the impersonal non- ego, which is now experienced as the real ‘Ground’ of the personality. (Archetypes, 358) Like the user of the yogic mandala, Powers in ‘The Voices of Time’ moves towards an identification with the eternal and from a state of individuality to a state of continuity with universal totality. ‘Beyond hope but at last at rest’ (Stories, 193), Powers renounces his identity as a differentiated ego, as symbolized by his sensation of bodily dissolution. Ballard recasts the totality with which the yogi’s self becomes integrated for Jung (consciousness, personal unconscious, archetypal collective unconscious) in terms of an ‘endless river’ of time or a ‘river of eternity’ (Stories, 193), an image evoking the insights of twentieth- century physics into the unity or interdependence of space and time. Like the yogi in Jung’s account, experiencing the true ground of his personality, Powers awakens to his previously unconscious knowledge of his continuity with the entire ‘cosmos itself’ (Stories, 193). This use of the Jungian mandala as a symbol of integrated selfhood presiding over an episode of psychic crisis recurs in ‘The Delta at Sunset’ (1964). In his delirium archaeologist Charles Gifford sees ‘the looming figures of his wife and assistant still surrounded by the rotating mandalas he saw in his dreams’ (Stories, 631); his consciousness is dominated by ‘ceaseless dreams, sinking from one plane of reverie to the next, the great mandalas guiding him downwards, enthroning him upon their luminous dials’ (Stories, 634). Gifford’s is exactly the state of ‘psychic dissociation or disorientation’ Jung associates with spontaneous modern manifestations of the mandala; suffering a fever caused by a wound to his foot, he is entering a state of ‘profound psychological malaise’ (Stories, 634) characterized by near total withdrawal from interaction with those around him (Stories, 634) and a total focus upon ‘the interior landscape emerging from the beaches of the delta’ (Stories, 637). The evocation of mandalas guiding Gifford downwards implies his orientation towards the collective unconscious, conceived spatially by Jung as a substrate underlying the personal unconscious (Archetypes, 4). As in Jung, Gifford is concerned with a rejection of ego- consciousness (‘It’s not this, Mechippe, that ties us to mortality, but our confounded egos’ (Stories, 629)) and with the timeless, entering ‘a zone of complete timelessness, where at last he sensed the simultaneity of all time, the coexistence of all events in his past life’ (Stories, 634); where ‘The Voices of Time’ implies an extra-temporal reintegration with the unconscious past on the broadest cosmic level, the orientation of ‘The Delta at Sunset’ is archaeological (ruined Toltec civilization) and evolutionary (the snakes Gifford hallucinates as symbolic of an earlier position in the evolutionary line leading to man).

48

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

Jung asserts that ‘The snake, as a chthonic and at the same time spiritual being, symbolizes the unconscious’ (Archetypes, 363); he also ascribes it a variety of other complex symbolic associations (Archetypes, 446, Symbols, 548), his identification of it as an archetype leading some commentators to accuse him of inconsistency in his theory of the non-perceptual nature of archetypes (Samuels, 33). ‘The Delta at Sunset’ attempts to push beyond its acknowledgment of this reading (Stories, 631), Gifford claiming that ‘in fact I disagree with Jung’: For me the snake is a symbol of transformation. Every evening at sunset the great lagoons of the Palaeocene are re- created here, not only for the snakes but for you and I too, if we care to look. Not for nothing is the snake a symbol of wisdom. (Stories, 631) Gifford’s qualification, alluding to Jung’s book Symbols of Transformation , suggests an attempt to push beyond obvious Jungian meanings, opening up a more complexly and multiply determined symbolism also connoting transformation and wisdom, although Gifford’s assertion that the snake means wisdom is perhaps not such a radical departure from Jung’s definition in terms of the unconscious, since for him adaptation to the inner psychic life is essential to the individual’s successful progression. As frequently in Ballard, part of the innovation in his mobilization of the Jungian collective unconscious here is in bringing out its relationship to a post-Darwinian sense of the individual’s phylogenetic history. The process of transformation upon which Gifford insists is in fact suggestive of what Jung calls regression, a psychological process whereby, ‘Progression’, ‘the daily advance of the process of psychological adaptation’ characterized by ‘continual satisfaction of the demands of environmental conditions’ is arrested by ‘a damming up of libido’ (Structure , 32), resulting in the activation of an ‘unconscious factor’ by which regression ‘confronts consciousness with the problem of the psyche as opposed to the problem of outward adaptation’ (Structure , 36). Regression, says Jung, ‘leads to the necessity of adapting to the inner world of the psyche’, following which adaptation ‘progression can begin again’ (Structure , 36). Similarly, Gifford withdraws from any attempt to adapt himself to the external world around him, enacting the ‘retreat from the outside world’ in terms of which Jung describes the introverted response to regression (Structure , 40–1). His vindictive encouragement of his wife’s involvement with his assistant Lowry and his contemplation of his own deep- seated self-loathing (Stories, 632), are instances of the ‘altogether incompatible contents and tendencies,

A Host of Furious Fancies

49

partly immoral, partly unaesthetic, partly again of an irrational, imaginary nature’ which constitute the unconscious ‘psychic elements’ reactivated during Jungian regression (Structure , 34). However, as so often in Ballard’s fiction, the freshness of his appropriation of Jungian theory here inheres in the freedoms he is willing to take with it. Where for Jung regression, ‘as an adaptation to the conditions of the inner world, springs from the vital need to satisfy the demands of individuation’ (Structure, 39), ‘The Delta at Sunset’ is carefully ambiguous about the outcome of Lowry’s morbid obsession with his reptilian visions; his refusal to leave the camp and insistence that he will only need one month’s supplies might conceivably mean that he will return to Taxcol after that time, but the more dramatic potential implication is that he does not anticipate surviving beyond then (Stories, 639). The identification of the Jungian individuative process with the Freudian death- drive is a persistent note in Ballard’s early work, signalling a disturbance simultaneously moral and theoretical. ‘The Venus Hunters’ (1963) mobilizes Jung’s theory, articulated in his 1959 book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, of flying saucers as mandala-images heralding a moment of communal psychological transformation. Dr Andrew Ward, a young astronomer appointed to the Hubble Memorial Institute at Mount Vernon Observatory, is introduced to café manager and former psychology lecturer Charles Kandinski, who has published a book about his claimed encounter with a Venusian spaceman. Initially highly sceptical, Ward is increasingly impressed by Kandinski’s sincerity, finally abandoning his presentation at an astronomical conference to run to Kandinski’s aid during an apparent further sighting. Shaken by his own witnessing of the spaceship Kandinski has seen, Ward, although remaining sympathetic to Kandinski’s cause, abandons his post at the observatory in order to re-immerse himself in courses on the elementary principles of rationalist science. In Flying Saucers Jung sees UFOs as psychic manifestations associated with an incipient transformation of the collective psyche; they herald ‘changes in the constellation of psychic dominants, of the archetypes, or “gods” as they used to be called, which bring about, or accompany, long-lasting transformations of the collective psyche’ (Saucers, xii). These symbolic manifestations arise from ‘an emotional tension having its cause in a situation of collective distress or danger, or in a vital psychic need’, in this case the Cold War (Saucers, 8). Projections of unconscious contents from which the rationalistic contemporary mind is alienated, arising from ‘a psychic dissociation’ between conscious and unconscious attitudes (Saucers, 9), they are ‘symbols representing, in visual form, some thought that was not thought consciously,

50

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

but is merely potentially present in the unconscious’ (Saucers, 18). Specifically, Jung interprets flying saucer sightings as instances of the mandala archetype, reading the ‘round bodies’ of UFOs in terms of ‘the symbol of totality well-known to all students of depth psychology, namely the mandala’, ‘symbol of “order” ’ (Saucers, 18), ‘individuation’ (Saucers, 19) and the ‘self ’ (Saucers, 20), ‘deliverance, salvation and wholeness’ (Saucers, 22–3). ‘The Venus Hunters’ explicitly takes Jung’s Flying Saucers as its starting point, with Ward’s colleague Cameron stating to him that ‘Jung’s views on flying saucers are very illuminating, Andrew; they’d help you to understand Kandinski’ and glossing an assertion by Jung that ‘throughout history, at all times of uncertainty and discord, cosmic space vehicles have been seen approaching earth’ (Stories, 497). Cameron portrays Kandinski as a prophetic figure in touch with the collective psychic upheavals ignored by rational society; ‘The real significance of his fantasies, like that of the ban-the-bomb movements, is to be found elsewhere than on the conscious plane, as an expression of the immense psychic forces stirring below the surface of rational life, like the isotactic movements of the continental tables which heralded the major geological transformations’ (Stories, 497). The story carefully implies Kandinski’s visions as Jungian projections of unconscious contents. The spaceship seen by both Ward and Kandinski is ‘an enormous metal disc’ (Stories, 499) of which it is said Kandinski, contrary to his earlier confident expectations, is ‘certain it had not come from Venus’, implying its identity with Jung’s circular visionary mandalas. The model of the solar system revealed to Kandinski by the Venusian omits to mention a sixth moon of Uranus discovered after his encounter, implying that the Venusian’s communications with him are hallucinations based on his own outdated astronomical knowledge. The story casts Kandinski as an instance of the Jungian mana-personality, the narratorial voice noting Kandinski’s audience’s ambivalent fascination and resentment of ‘Kandinski’s exposure of their own private fantasies, an expression of the same ambivalence which had propelled so many of the mana-personalities of history towards their inevitable Calvarys’ (Stories, 492), while Cameron responds to Ward’s mention of Kandinski’s comparison of his experience to a revelation like that of St Paul with a warning that ‘The mana-personalities of history have no time for personal loyalties – the founder of the Christian church made that pretty plain’ (Stories, 498). The mana-personality in Jung’s definition is an individual liberated from possession by complexes and possessed of a spiritual charisma. ‘Mana’ is ‘a universal magical power about which everything revolves’, belief in which is common to dynamistic religions (Storr, 69), or a capacity in ‘anyone who has insight into his own actions, and has thus found access to the unconscious’ to

A Host of Furious Fancies

51

produce through the ‘deepening and broadening of his consciousness’ ‘an unintentional influence on the unconscious of others, a sort of unconscious prestige’ (Storr, 401). The term ‘mana- personality’ refers to such an individual, to one who has become free of possession by complexes, so that in him nothing more will happen ‘that is not sanctioned by the ego, and when the ego wants something, nothing should be capable of interfering. The ego would thus be assured of an impregnable position, the steadfastness of the superman or sublimity of a perfect sage’ (Storr, 123). The mana-personality is possessed of an archetypal power; corresponding to ‘a dominant of the collective unconscious, to an archetype which has taken shape in the human psyche through untold ages of just that kind of experience’; historically it evolves ‘into the hero and the godlike being, whose earthly form is the priest’ (Storr, 123). Jung sees this power as dangerous, decrying people’s urge ‘to find a tangible hero somewhere, or superior wise man, a leader and father, some undisputed authority’, but he does not believe ‘the sovereign power of the primordial images’ can be escaped: ‘One can only alter one’s attitude and thus save oneself from naïvely falling into an archetype and being forced to act the part of expense of one’s humanity’ (Storr, 124): Possession by an archetype turns a man into a flat collective figure, a mask behind which he can no longer develop as a human being, but becomes increasingly stunted. [. . .] The danger lies not only in oneself becoming a father-mask, but in being overpowered by this mask when worn by another. (Storr, 124) The use of Jung’s ideas in ‘The Venus Hunters’ is part of the story’s discussion of the psychological role of science-fiction. The story acknowledges contemporary mainstream tendencies to interpret science-fiction as a form tapping the unconscious mind. In response to Ward’s pronouncement that ‘I’m afraid I have a closed mind when it comes to interplanetary bogey-men’, Cameron responds ‘I find them fascinating. Straight out of the unconscious’ (Stories, 484); he evokes the story ‘Leiningen vs the Ants’ as a ‘classic example of the forces of the Id rebelling against the Super-Ego’ (Stories, 485). The contemporary topicality of this interpretation is exemplified by J.B. Priestley’s 1953 article ‘They Come from Inner Space’, which sees science fiction as a form in which ‘the old wild dreams of the Unconscious break through’, a form presenting ‘the myths and characteristic dreams of our age’ (Priestley, 712). However, ‘The Venus Hunters’ also pushes beyond this simplistic reading. Cameron’s interpretation of interplanetary bogeyman as ‘Straight out of the unconscious’ is given a riddling twist when he adds, referring

52

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

to the resident of an exotic aquarium, ‘The fish too’ (Stories, 484). The ‘pulpy nightmare’ on the cover of a science-fiction magazine Ward picks up implies the familiar sense of the genre as a low-culture form emphasizing libidinal id-forces, yet Kandinski points out the similarity of this representation to both modern mainstream cinema and Renaissance high art (Stories, 486); he dismisses Ward’s unease about science-fiction on the grounds that ‘Most of the themes in these stories come straight out of the more unpleasant reaches of the unconscious’ by saying that ‘That sounds rather dubious and, if I may say so second-hand. Take the best of these stories for what they are: imaginative exercises on the theme of tomorrow’ (Stories, 487). The story’s own position on science fiction is implied by Kandinski’s assertion to Ward that his problem with science-fiction comes from taking it ‘too seriously’ (Stories, 486). This apparently relates to Kandinski’s sense of the stories as ‘imaginative exercises’, but it takes on new meaning once Cameron’s reading of Kandinski as a mana-personality is introduced. Science fiction, the story implies, is not to be taken too seriously in the sense that its manifest content, as exemplified by the parody of alien SF which constitutes Kandinski’s account of his encounter with the Venusian and which Ward finds ‘puerile and crudely written but, most disappointing of all, completely devoid of imagination’ (Stories, 485), is not to be taken too literally. Rather, the story implies, espousing its own Jungian frame of reference, it is the unconscious content to which such fantasies point which is the true source of their interest; the true source of disturbance and mystery in ‘The Venus Hunters’ is not Kandinski’s hackneyed images of aliens but the mysterious psychic upheavals of which they are feeble attempts at manifest rationalization. The narrative thus makes a case for science-fiction as psychological art which entertains with appropriately comic brio and precision ideas from one of Jung’s wilder interventions in the field of popular psychology.

Psychology, Modernity Ballard’s mobilization of depth psychological theory in his short fiction contributes to its broader speculative concern with the psychology of post-war modernity. ‘The Overloaded Man’ (1961), for instance, evokes a subject alienated by his hyper-modern circumstances who finds escape through a dissociative process suggesting Freud’s definition of regression. Work- shy ex-business-lecturer Faulkner spends his days in the garden of his self- contained ‘psycho-modular’ housing unit (Stories, 245), cultivating the ability to erase mental associations attached to the houses opposite

A Host of Furious Fancies

53

so that all he perceives is ‘a world of pure psychic sensation’ (Stories, 249) through which he finds ‘an escape route’ (Stories, 247) from his intolerable circumstances. The story concludes with Faulkner, in his dissociated state, murdering his wife, immersing himself in the garden pond and waiting for ‘the world to dissolve and set him free’, implicitly a suicide by drowning (Stories, 254). Freud describes regression as a reversal (in dreams and hallucinations) of the normal direction of psychical excitation so it flows not towards the end of the psychic system concerned with motor activity but towards the perceptual and sensory end, which is conceived as external to the system encoding the memory associations which constitute identity. Freud hypothesizes a reversal, during dreaming, of the normal direction of flow of psychical excitation. Psychical processes, Freud states ‘advance in general from the perceptual end to the motor end’ of the mental system, conceived ‘as resembling a compound microscope or a photographic apparatus’ (V, 537, 536). In dreams, however, the ‘impetus to the construction of dreams’, located in the unconscious, ‘moves in a backward direction. Instead of being transmitted towards the motor end of the apparatus it moves towards the sensory end and finally reaches the perceptual system’ (V, 541, 542). All dreams thus have ‘a “regressive” character’, being characterized by a momentary reversal of the ‘direction taken by psychical processes arising from the unconscious’ (V, 542). This ‘retrogressive movement in the psychical apparatus from a complex ideational act back to the raw material of the memory-traces underlying it’, this movement from the unconscious back towards the perceptual system and its attendant memoryforming structures, means that ‘in a dream an idea is turned back into the sensory image from which it was originally derived’ – hence the sensoryperceptual nature of dreams (V, 543). Freud explains ‘hallucinations in hysteria and paranoia and [. . .] visions in mentally normal subjects’ similarly as regressions, or ‘thoughts transformed into images’ (V, 544). Faulkner’s experience in ‘The Overloaded Man’ corresponds closely to this Freudian formulation, his regressive experience allowing him to perform a sociopathic dissolution of the oppressive constraints of his identity. Entering a quasi-hallucinatory state, he leaves the world of coherent cognition behind, wallowing in ‘an endless panorama of brilliantly coloured images’ (Stories, 247), ‘a world of pure psychic sensation’ (Stories, 249) comparable to the raw ‘sensory image’ arising for Freud during dreamregression (V, 543). For Freud, sensory perception occurs in part of the psychic apparatus (Pcpt.) prior to the system of traces encoding memory (Mnem .) which is responsible for the facility of thought-association:

54

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

Our perceptions are linked with one another in our memory – first and foremost according to simultaneity of occurrence. We speak of this fact as ‘association’. It is clear, then, that, if the Pcpt. system has no memory whatever, it cannot retain any associative traces [. . .]. We must therefore assume the basis of association lies in the mnemic systems. Association would thus consist in the fact that, as a result of a diminution in resistances and of the laying down of facilitating paths, an excitation is transmitted from a given Mnem. element more readily to one Mnem. element than to another. (V, 539) Faulkner’s movement in Ballard’s story towards ‘a world of pure psychic sensation’ is also a movement towards a state prior to the accretion of memory and its attendant associative links. Faulkner speculates that in the new mode of consciousness he is cultivating, ‘eliminating the vector of time from the de-identified object frees it from all its everyday cognitive associations’, or alternatively that he may have ‘stumbled upon a means of repressing the photo-associative centres that normally identify visual objects’ (Stories, 247). Identity and association are shrugged off simultaneously here; regression towards a purely sensory-perceptual or ideational state of existence allows an escape from the automated routines of modern existence depicted in the story’s opening scenes, albeit an escape sociopathic and suicidal in its implications. An espousal of dream-regression as liberation arguably remains a dominating principle within Ballard’s fiction right through into his last novels. As Faulkner’s deliberately self- destructive actions at the story’s end imply, the other significant Freudian context for ‘The Overloaded Man’ is the death-instinct. In ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, Freud sets out a dualistic conception of human nature in which an instinct is defined as ‘an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things [. . .] or, to put it another way, an expression of the inertia inherent in organic life’ (XVIII, 36), and two opposing sets of instincts are hypothesized, one being the ‘death instincts’ (XVIII, 44) which seek to return organic life to an inorganic and inanimate state, and one the sexual instincts seen as ‘the true life instincts’ (XVIII, 40) or as ‘Eros, the preserver of all things’ (XVIII, 52), which seek to restore a hypothetical earlier state of unity. From the perspective of the death instincts, ‘‘‘the aim of all life is death’’’ (XVIII, 38), and this Freudian idea is a far stronger influence on Ballard’s fiction than Freud’s conception of Eros. The short fictions proliferate with instances of the death instinct being taken seriously as a fictional hypothesis; in ‘Manhole 69’ Lang talks about ‘how completely death- orientated the psyche is’ (Stories, 58); the hypnotically induced suicide of ‘The Man on the

A Host of Furious Fancies

55

99th Floor’, the mystical abdication of the self in ‘The Voices of Time’ and the seaward automatism of characters in ‘The Reptile Enclosure’ all speak to a sense of the individual’s inherent wish for death, albeit with varying degrees of acceptance. Ballard’s deliberate, thoroughgoing embrace of the death drive, his willingness to work it through in all these different manifestations, is a significant aspect of the provocative, disturbing and arresting nature of his fiction; in ‘The Overloaded Man’, Faulkner’s succumbing to the drive is accelerated by the frustrations of technological modernity. ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964) develops this engagement with Freud’s concept of the death instinct in the context of a contemplation of the impact of the Cold War on human psychology. In this deliberately fragmented narrative, a man named Traven arrives at an island notionally identified as Eniwetok, site of America’s initial 1952 hydrogen bomb test. Haunted by dreams of his dead wife and son, he wanders the island’s abstract landscape of fused sand and concrete observation bunkers, experiencing it as a physical embodiment of a mental state associated with the psychic implications of the post-hydrogen-bomb era, and reaching an uneasy state of acceptance following a hallucinated conversation with a dead Japanese doctor. In the story the irradiated synthetic landscape becomes emblematic of mid-twentieth- century mankind’s ability to impose the destructive impulses of his psyche – specifically the death drive – on his external environment; ‘if primitive man felt the need to assimilate events in the external world to his own psyche’, Traven reasons, ‘20th century man had reversed this process’ (Stories, 590). The story acknowledges through direct quotation its own debt to prominent British psychoanalyst Edward Glover’s War, Sadism and Pacifism (1946), a collection of essays which attempts a psychoanalytic explanation of war and ends with an angry piece lambasting the dishonesty and concealed aggression of the victorious Allied nations and describing the atomic bomb as ‘a triumph for the Death Instinct’ (War, Sadism, and Pacifism, 275). Glover’s assertion, immediately following his statements and quoted in Ballard’s story, that ‘The capacity so painfully acquired by normal men to distinguish between sleep, delusion, hallucination and the objective reality of waking life has for the first time in history been seriously weakened ’ speaks directly to the story’s characterization of post-war modernity in terms of a fractured, delusional psychotic dreamscape mingling reality and fantasy (War, Sadism, and Pacifism, 274). Ballard’s story, however, goes beyond Glover’s moralistically inflected Freudian reading of the Bomb to offer a far more extreme and shocking implication; that of the actual desirability of the annihilation the Bomb offers. The dead doctor, Yasuda, says to Traven that ‘It seems to me that you are hunting for the white leviathan, zero’ (Stories, 603). In Ballard’s story the circular island, whose

56

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

central target-area is described as the ‘ultimate circle, below ground zero’ (Stories, 592), symbolizes the sought after psychic null-point evoked by Freud explicitly in terms of the destructive detonation of the hydrogen bomb; yet with its ‘endlessly revolving circus wheel’ (Stories, 601), it might also evoke the mandala which in Jungian psychology is a ‘symbolical representation of the self ’ in its totality (Saucers, 20). As Luckhurst has implied, the story’s ‘synthesis of the historical and psychic zero’ (Stories, 591) is ambiguous, suggestive both of nothingness and of completion (Angle, 70). As well as the landscape of consumerism and the destructive power of the hydrogen bomb, Ballard’s short fiction engages with the psychological dimensions of modernity in offering a psychoanalytic re-reading of the space race. ‘The Cage of Sand’ is a prominent example. The story’s dramatic landscape, in which red Martian sands abut the abandoned white hotels of a future Cocoa beach, Florida, near the NASA launching-grounds at Cape Canaveral, recalls, as well as the illogical landscapes of Surrealist art, the process of ‘condensation’ Freud claims takes place as part of the construction of dreams; combining Martian rocket-fragments with terrestrial ruins, Ballard’s landscape is the analogy in spatial terms of one of the ‘collective and composite figures’ which for Freud arise from this process (IV, 279–304, 293). The image in ‘The Cage of Sand’ of seven dead astronauts orbiting the earth in their satellite capsules, returning nightly in quasi-zodiacal configurations, presents the reader with a technologized symbol of the ‘“compulsion to repeat”’ discussed in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (XVIII, 19), keying the story in to the conceptual domain of Freud’s late theory with its sense of humanity as instinctually drawn towards death. The image is also precisely uncanny in a Freudian sense, since Freud claims ‘the repetition of the same thing’ as a ‘source of uncanny feeling’ (XVII, 236), declaring that ‘whatever reminds us of this inner “compulsion to repeat” is perceived as uncanny’ (XVII, 238). The story’s mobilization of uncanny tropes of repetition encourages a reading of it in terms of the return of repressed material, for Freud the defining factor in the creation of uncanny feeling; on one level the reader is being encouraged to contemplate the repressed of the space programme, the story enacting the vision of dereliction, failure and exhaustion elided from the triumphalist broadcasts of NASA’s achievements during the 1960s. The compulsion to repeat is associated with Freud’s formulation of trauma in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, and trauma is a vital context in ‘The Cage of Sand’. Louise Woodward spends all her time staring skywards following the death of her husband in an orbital accident (Stories, 359); Travis haunts Cocoa Beach in an attempt to expiate his devastating failure as an astronaut (Stories, 359), and Bridgman himself feels obscurely compelled to remain there

A Host of Furious Fancies

57

following his failure to win the contract to design the first city on Mars (Stories, 360); all have suffered overwhelming events which have left them fundamentally damaged and altered in terms of their personalities, recalling Freud’s definition of trauma as experience resulting in ‘permanent disturbances of the manner in which the energy operates’ (XVI, 75). More specifically, the story dramatizes melancholic reactions to trauma as theorized by Freud: Ostensibly, Louise Woodward was watching her husband’s satellite in order to keep alive his memory, but Bridgman guessed that the memories she unconsciously wished to perpetuate were those of herself twenty years earlier, when her husband had been a celebrity and she herself courted by magazine columnists and TV reporters. (Stories, 359) The depiction here of the ultimately narcissistic basis of Louise Woodward’s grieving for her husband recalls Freud’s definition in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ of melancholia as a pathological variant of the normal mourning process in which, instead of displacing libido freed by the loss of a loved object onto a new object, the subject identifies its own ego with the lost object and invests the freed libido therein in a process which enacts a regression to the primary narcissism of the infantile stage: There is no difficulty in reconstructing this process. An object- choice, an attachment of the libido to a particular person, had at one time existed; then, owing to a real slight or disappointment coming from this loved person, the object-relationship was shattered. The object- cathexis [. . .] was brought to an end. But the free libido was not displaced on to another object; it was withdrawn into the ego. There, however, it was not employed in any unspecified way, but served to establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object. [. . .] In this way an object-loss was transformed into an ego-loss and the conflict between the ego and the loved person into a cleavage between the critical activity of the ego and the ego as altered by identification. (XIV, 248–9) The narcissistic identification with the object then becomes a substitute for the erotic cathexis, the result of which is that in spite of the conflict with the loved person the love-relation need not be given up. [. . .] It represents, of course, a regression from one type of object- choice to original narcissism. (XIV, 249) Louise Woodward’s wish to perpetuate memories of herself at the time of her husband’s greatest fame can be closely compared to Freud’s sense

58

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

that the melancholic invests libido in their own ego which has become identified with the lost love- object; she invests in her memories of herself which are irrevocably linked to the memory of her husband’s fame, a direct fictional instantiation of the Freudian narcissistic melancholic. Bridgman’s own obsessive retouching of his deselected design for a ‘fantastic Martian city’ (Stories, 358) precisely enacts a similar narcissistic focus on a lost object which is identified with the self, as might Travis’ continued rehearsal of the routines surrounding his abortive space-flight (Stories, 360). ‘The Cage of Sand’ is an exercise in melancholia in the specifically Freudian pathological sense, the implied association between the space race and pathological narcissism suggesting, if not a political critique, then at least a disillusion with expansionist dreams of outer space exploration. Recalling Ballard’s pronouncements about the necessity for science fiction to explore ‘inner space’, ‘The Cage of Sand’ represents space exploration in a way evoking Freud’s emphasis on the significance of phantasy life for the individual. For Freud, ‘phantasies possess psychical as contrasted with material reality, and we gradually learn to understand that in the world of the neuroses it is psychical reality which is the decisive kind ’ (XVI, 368). Laplanche and Pontalis expand on this Freudian sense of phantasy as having a determining effect on individual life: As the investigation progresses, even aspects of behaviour that are far removed from imaginative activity, and which appear at first glance to be governed solely by the demands of reality, emerge as emanations, as ‘derivatives’ of unconscious phantasy. In the light of this evidence, it is the subject’s life as a whole which is seen to be shaped and ordered by what might be called, in order to stress this structuring action, ‘a phantasmatic’ (une fantasmatique). (Laplanche and Pontalis, 317) Accordingly, Ballard’s post-Freudian fictions insist on the significance of the phantasy-lives of their protagonists; in the case of ‘The Cage of Sand’ this includes the ‘personal myth’ Travis is said to have created (Stories, 360) as well as the ‘private reveries’ in which Bridgman spends most of his time (Stories, 358). The sense of resolution Bridgman reaches at the conclusion depends not on an exterior reality but on the symbolic implications of the fall and re- entry of one of the satellites for his phantasy-life. The planet Mars is said to have served as ‘a symbol of unattained ambition’ for both Bridgman and the fallen astronaut, Merril; for Bridgman Merril’s comet-like descent onto the red Martian sands off Cocoa Beach enacts on a symbolic level Merril’s own (and through identification with him, Bridgman’s) final arrival at Mars,

A Host of Furious Fancies

59

prompting Bridgman to exclaim exultantly ‘Damn it! [. . .] We made it!’ (Stories, 372). This moment combines a parodic pathos over Bridgman’s delusional identification of himself with a fallen relic of the doomed space project with a sense of triumph that on a psychological level a genuine breakthrough has been achieved. If Bridgman’s life is shaped and ordered by the ongoing development of his (unconscious) phantasy-life, then his phantasied conviction that he has ‘made it’ to Mars signals not merely pathetic delusion but a significant therapeutic attainment. Bridgman’s exultant ‘sudden access of refound confidence’ (Stories, 372) suggests the ‘mania’ which for Freud characterizes the surmounting of a melancholic state, while his indifference to being forced to return to the outside world also implies the surmounting of his narcissistic state of melancholic arrest (XIV, 253–5). Ballard here cements his reorientation of science fiction towards ‘inner space’, hijacking contemporary symbols of ‘outer space’ exploration into the service of a narrative of psychological healing. Merril’s Icarus-like fall from orbit suggests a return of the repressed, the return to Earth of ‘something which is familiar’ ‘which has become alienated [. . .] through the process of repression’ (XVII, 241), encouraging an understanding of the stories conclusion in terms of the ‘reconciliation with the repressed material’ which Freud sees as essential for the psychotherapeutic process (XII, 152). Glimpsing an uncanny illusion in which he identifies the dead gantries of Canaveral with memories of his illusory Martian city, Bridgman is freed from his former state of uncertainty with regard to his motives (Stories, 360) by a sudden sense of self-understanding: ‘The wind stirred softly through the sand, cooling this replica of the planet which lay passively around him and at last he understood why he had come to the beach and been unable to leave it’ (Stories, 372). Speaking about the aim of psychoanalytic technique, Freud states that ‘Descriptively speaking, it is to fill in gaps in memory; dynamically speaking, it is to overcome resistances due to repression’ (XII, 148); exactly this happens to Bridgman, not through analysis but through the course of events which befall him, which allow him to remember and re-assimilate his repressed symbolic complex surrounding his feelings of failure. As in psychoanalysis, self-understanding equals triumph; in terms of trauma, Bridgman has been through a process of ‘working out’ in which the fall of the satellite played a pivotal role (Laplanche and Pontalis, 466). ‘A Question of Re-Entry’ (1963) offers a different take on the psychological significance of the space-race. Sent to locate the remains of a lunar spacecraft piloted by Colonel Francis Spender which has crashed into the Amazon jungle, UN agent Connolly comes to realize that Ryker, the Kurtz of this Conradian yarn, has been using a table of traverse calculations for

60

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

the Echo III satellite to control the local native tribe by predicting the satellite’s celestial appearances, and has allowed the tribe to eat the downed astronaut as part of a fertility ritual in order to perpetuate his control. ‘A Question of Re-Entry’ hypothesizes space exploration as a symptom of Western collective psychopathology. Connolly sees Spender’s moon mission as ‘the culmination of an age- old ambition with profound psychological implications for mankind’ (Stories, 436): the failure to find the astronaut after his return might induce unassuageable feelings of guilt and inadequacy. (If the sea was a symbol of the unconscious, was space perhaps an image of unfettered time, and the inability to penetrate it a tragic exile to one of the limbos of eternity, a symbolic death in life?). (Stories, 436–7) Ballard here extrapolates his familiar Jungian use of sea imagery into a speculative interpretation of the potential symbolic significance of space in the contemporary collective mind. Ryker’s gibe to Connolly about the ‘real reasons’ for the moon shot (Stories, 446) anticipates Connolly’s own contemplation of the possibility that ‘the entire space programme was the symptom of some inner unconscious malaise afflicting mankind, and in particular the western technocracies, and that the space- craft and satellites had been launched because their flights satisfied certain buried compulsions and desires’ (Stories, 453). A specific contrast is drawn between the putative psychopathology of Western civilization and the more well- adjusted psychology of the Amazonas Indians. Captain Pereira constructs the Indians as living ‘a certain form of untamed, natural existence’ (Stories, 438), suggesting to Connolly that he should not despise them since However diseased and dirty they may be, at least they are in equilibrium with their environment. And with themselves. You’ll find no Christopher Columbuses or Colonel Spenders here, but no Belsens either. Perhaps one is as much a symptom of unease as the other? (Stories, 442) Later, Connolly reflects that in contrast to the situation in Western civilizations, ‘in the jungle, where the unconscious was manifest and exposed, there was no need for these insane projections’ and that ‘the likelihood of the Amazonas playing any part in the success or failure of the space flight became, by a sort of psychological parallax, increasingly blurred and distant, the missing capsule itself a fragment of a huge disintegrating fantasy’

A Host of Furious Fancies

61

(Stories, 453). Further, he realizes, where the Indians are ‘at equilibrium with their environment, accepting its constraints and never seeking to dominate the towering arbours of the forest, in a sense an externalization of their own unconscious psyches’, Ryker has upset that equilibrium, and by using the Echo satellite [. . .] brought the 20th century and its psychopathic projections into the heart of the Amazonian deep, transforming the Indians into a community of superstitious and materialistic sightseers, their whole culture oriented around the mythical god of the puppet star. (Stories, 458) This reading of the space race and of its relationship to different terrestrial human societies relates interestingly to Freud’s discussions of the nature of civilization. The representation of the Indians as in equilibrium with the unconscious recalls Freud’s conception in ‘Civilization and its Discontents’ of civilization as based upon instinctual renunciation. For Freud ‘it is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non- satisfaction (by suppression, repression or some other means?) of powerful instincts’, and ‘This “cultural frustration” dominates the large field of social relationships between human beings’ (XXI, 97). The existence of cultural frustration leads Freud to suggest that ‘primitive man was better off in knowing no restrictions of instinct’ and that civilized man ‘has exchanged a portion of his possibilities of happiness for a portion of security’ (XXI, 115). The representation in ‘A Question of Re-Entry’ of the space race as impelled by ‘certain buried compulsions and desires’ resonates powerfully with this Freudian sense of civilization as inherently repressing instinctual life into the domain of the unconscious and as compensating for this economically through sublimatory activities including scientific endeavour (XXI, 97). The story’s evocation of Western collective guilt and psychological malaise recalls Freud’s speculation whether ‘under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization – possibly the whole of mankind – have become “neurotic?”’ (XXI, 144). In particular, it recalls Freud’s application of the theory of the super- ego to questions of civilization; Freud sees the establishment of the super-ego as the origin of the sense of guilt, which he sees as ‘the most important problem in the development of civilization’, and claims that ‘the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt’ (XXI, 134), a sense which ‘remains to a large extent unconscious, or appears as sort of malaise, and dissatisfaction, for which people seek

62

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

other motivations’ (XXI, 135). The exact language of ‘Civilization and its Discontents’ can then be read in the perspective taken on Western civilization in ‘A Question of Re-Entry’. Despite its apparent overturning of Connolly’s prejudices about the ‘crudity and violence’ of the Amazon tribes, the story inherits from Freud as well as this language a particular highly questionable set of assumptions about non-Western cultures as less repressed but also less highly developed and mature than Western ones. ‘The Insane Ones’ (1962) is the most direct response in Ballard’s short fiction to the anti-psychiatry movement, with whose beginning it is almost exactly contemporary. For Edward Shorter, the ‘basic argument’ of the antipsychiatry movement was that psychiatric illness was ‘not medical in nature but social, political and legal’, that it was in fact a socially constructed myth (Shorter, 274); Shorter associates the inception of the movement with the publication at the beginning of the 1960s of a number of influential books including Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (1961), Thomas Szasz’s The Myth of Mental Illness (1960), Erving Goffman’s Asylums (1961), R.D. Laing’s The Divided Self and Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest , published in 1962, the same year as ‘The Insane Ones’ (Shorter, 274–6). The hyperbolic scenario in ‘The Insane Ones’ of a world government which exaggerates the anti-psychiatric trend to a near-fascist extreme implies a position pro-‘the psychological sciences’, and thus in part a rebuff to anti-psychiatry. Charles Gregory is a fugitive psychiatrist on the run in North Africa following the ultra- conservative United World government’s Mental Freedom legislation: The Mental Freedom legislation enacted ten years earlier by the ultraconservative UW government had banned the profession outright and enshrined the individual’s freedom to be insane if he wanted to, provided he paid the full civil consequences for any infringements of the law. That was the catch, the hidden object of the MF laws. What had begun as a popular reaction against ‘subliminal living’ and the uncontrolled extension of techniques of mass manipulation for political and economic ends had quickly developed into a systematic attack on the psychological sciences. Over-permissive courts of law with their condoning of delinquency, pseudo- enlightened penal reformers, ‘Victims of society’, the psychologist and his patient all came under fierce attack. Discharging their self-hate and anxiety onto a convenient scapegoat, the new rulers and the great majority electing them, outlawed all forms of psychic control, from the innocent market survey to lobotomy. The mentally ill were on their own, spared pity and consideration, made to pay to the hilt for their failings.

A Host of Furious Fancies

63

The sacred cow of the community was the psychotic, free to wander where he wanted, drooling on the doorsteps, sleeping on sidewalks, and woe betide anyone who tried to help him. (Stories, 291) This is a passionate and emphatic rebuff to contemporary attacks on psychiatric science; amplified to an absolutist level, the outlawing of psychiatry leaves the mentally aberrant individual at the mercy of draconian legal penalties. Gregory makes the mistake of analyzing the daughter of President- General Bortman; the psychiatric treatments sensationally stressed in his subsequent show-trial, (‘electric shock apparatus, movies of insulin coma’ (Stories, 291)) reflect typical complaints by anti-psychiatric campaigners about the techniques of institutional psychiatry (Shorter, 282). The danger and disgrace of his jail term dissuades Gregory from helping Carole Sturgeon, an attractive runaway he picks up who subsequently commits suicide (Stories, 292). While in favour of psychiatry, the story aligns itself with anti-psychiatry in its attack on repressive attitudes to mental health. Blame is unambiguously allocated to the ‘insane penalties’ and ‘lunatic legislation’ installed by the world president, ‘cold dead-faced Bortman’ with his ‘bureaucratic puritanism masking two real obsessions: dirt and death’ (Stories, 293); ‘Any sane society would have locked Bortman up forever, or given him a complete brain-lift’ (Stories, 293). Gregory’s friend Kalundborg relates how ‘In New York alone they’re jumping from the roofs at the rate of ten a day. The world’s turning into a madhouse, one half of society gloating righteously over the torments of the other’, suggesting that ‘Most people don’t realize which side of the bars they are’ (Stories, 293); Kalundborg interrogates the authoritarianism of Bortmann’s beliefs that ‘the father-figure is always benevolent’ and that ‘Psychiatry is ultimately self-indulgent, an encouragement to weakness and lack of will’ (Stories, 294). The narrative draws on anti-psychiatry’s problematization of definitions of sanity in its assault on the inhumane treatment of mental patients. The story’s title contains an embedded problematization of definitions of sanity, encouraging the reader to consider whether the insane ones are the mentally ill, or those who treat them inhumanely, a question resonating strongly with anti-psychiatric attacks on social definitions of madness such as, for example, R.D. Laing’s and David Cooper’s interrogations of the validity of schizophrenia as a diagnostic category (Politics, 100; Cooper, 1–2). Kalundborg diagnoses Bortmann himself as an ‘obsessional neurotic’ (Stories, 294). The story’s problematization of definitions of sanity is given a further ironic twist when Gregory becomes involved with Christian, a young patient of Kalundborg’s, who claims ‘My father killed himself five years ago

64

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

when Bortman had him thrown out of the Bar Association [. . .] I need the barbiturates to stop myself trying to toss a bomb at Bortman’ (Stories, 295). Following his mocking attempt to incriminate Gregory by simulating suicide and forcing Gregory to restrain him, Christian makes a request of Gregory: ‘Help me, Doctor. I want to kill Bortman, it’s all I think about. If I’m not careful I’ll really try. Show me how to forget him. [. . .] Damn, I hated my father. I was glad when Bortman threw him out.’ (Stories, 295) Gregory agrees to a truncated analysis, concluding with the summary that ‘It was the stroke your mother suffered after your father’s death that made you realize the guilt you felt subconsciously for hating him, but you conveniently shifted the blame onto Bortman, and by eliminating him thought you could free yourself’, and warning Christian that ‘The temptation may occur again’ (Stories, 296). However, the therapeutic effect of Christian’s analysis is other than Gregory anticipates: ‘You cured me, doctor, and give or take the usual margins I’m completely sane, more than I probably ever will be again. Damn few people in this world are now, so that makes the obligation on me to act rationally even greater. Well, every ounce of logic tells me that someone’s got to make the effort to get rid of the grim menagerie running things now, and Bortman looks like a pretty good start. I intend to drive up to Lake Success and take a shot at him.’ (Stories, 296) In an insane world led by an obsessional authoritarian, true sanity may entail violent rebellion, an implication offered with a brilliantly ironic flourish in Gregory’s last cry of ‘Christian, you’re insane!’ (Stories, 297); Gregory feels that he himself is ‘the real assassin, an exiled doctor with a three-year- grudge’ (Stories, 296). ‘Minus One’ (1963), with its evocation of the depersonalization exercised on the mentally ill by social institutions established for their control, is another contemporary story continuing Ballard’s reaction to the anti-psychiatric trend; I shall return to the relevance of anti-psychiatry to Ballard’s novels from the late 1960s onwards after exploring next in detail the continuing reaction to depth psychology embodied in his early 1960s novels of catastrophe.

Chapter 2

Unconscious Catastrophes

Ballard’s catastrophe novels of the early 1960s emerge contemporaneously with his 1962 declaration of his intention to write a fiction exploring ‘inner space’. Roger Luckhurst has very usefully attempted to fracture the hegemony of ‘inner space’ over critical interpretations of Ballard, suggesting how the term ‘cannot finally be determined under a single definition, and be extended across the work: its peculiar inflections and revisions have to be attended to according to the dominant ‘thetic’ frame which the specific text deploys’ (Angle, 51). While this is a productive critical strategy, ‘inner space’ remains an important Ballardian trope of central importance to the psychological dimension of Ballard’s fiction; in a 1973 interview Ballard was clear that by ‘inner space’ he meant a specifically ‘psychological space’ (Linnett, 5). Ballard’s 1962 manifesto ‘Which Way to Inner Space?’ claims that ‘The biggest developments of the immediate future will take place, not on the Moon or Mars, but on Earth, and it is inner space, not outer, that needs to be explored’ (User’s Guide, 197). ‘Inner space’, then, signifies on one level the terrestrial contemporary as opposed to the far-flung topoi of conventional science fiction; another definition, however, in the 1963 essay ‘Time, Memory and Inner Space’, glossing ‘inner space’ as the ‘internal landscape of today’ (User’s Guide, 200), equates it more specifically with the terrestrial contemporary as it exists on an imaginative or subjective level. Ballard’s engagement across his oeuvre with the mass iconography of the twentieth century and with the dynamics of social violence suggests that his ‘inner space’ connotes not a purely subjectivist ‘internal landscape’ but the interaction of and permeability between private and public contemporary imaginaries. Ballard’s ‘inner space’ is rightly associated with the dreamlike images of Surrealist painting; however, just as Bretonian Surrealism itself was in theoretical dialogue with psychoanalysis, Ballard’s encounter with Surrealism is informed by his reading of Freudian and Jungian depth psychology. Ballard testifies to this connection by his reference in ‘Which Way to Inner Space?’ to Dalí’s theatrical 1936 attempt to dive ‘To the Unconscious!’ as

66

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

an attempt to build an ‘inner space- suit’ (User ’s Guide, 198) and by titling his major essay on Surrealist art ‘The Coming of the Unconscious’. The essay’s reading of the art of de Chirico, Ernst, Magritte and Dalí is expressed in precisely psychoanalytic terms: This calculated submission of the impulses and fantasies of our inner lives to the rigours of time and space, to the formal inquisition of the sciences, psychoanalysis pre- eminent among them, produces a heightened or alternate reality beyond that familiar to our sight or senses. What uniquely characterizes this fusion of the outer world of reality and the inner world of the psyche (which I have termed ‘inner space’) is its redemptive and therapeutic power. To move through these landscapes is a journey of return to one’s innermost being. (User ’s Guide, 84) Problematically asserting the scientific status of psychoanalysis, Ballard is concerned here with impulse and fantasy, key phenomena for Freud in his exploration of ‘psychical reality’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 363–4). Art here is the locus of a specifically therapeutic imaginative and representative activity, recalling the curative goals of depth psychology, particularly Jung’s stress on drawing and painting as a means of therapeutically exposing unconscious material. Closely informed by depth psychology, Ballard’s ‘inner space’ also bears a strong relation to fantasy and dreams as conceived in psychoanalysis. In ‘Time, Memory and Inner Space’, Ballard is explicit about the relationship of ‘inner space’ to his writing: Without in any way suggesting that the act of writing is a form of creative self-analysis, I feel that the writer of fantasy has a marked tendency to select images and ideas which directly reflect the internal landscapes of his mind, and the reader of fantasy must interpret them on this level, distinguishing between the manifest content, which may seem obscure, meaningless or nightmarish, and the latent content, the private vocabulary of symbols drawn from the writer’s mind. The dream worlds invented by the writer of fantasy are the external equivalents of the inner world of the psyche, and because they take their impetus from the most formative and confused periods of our lives they are often time- sculptures of terrifying ambiguity. (User ’s Guide , 200) Ballard would later qualify his disavowal of his creativity as a process of selfanalysis, seeing it as ‘a journey towards myself’ (Linnett, 6). ‘Inner space’

Unconscious Catastrophes

67

here is the ‘internal landscape’ or ‘inner world’ of the writer, and the function of ‘speculative fantasy’ (User ’s Guide, 200) is to hold a mirror up to this inner life, to give it external form. Ballard’s distinction between the ‘manifest’ and ‘latent’ contents of his fiction derives from Sigmund Freud’s distinction in The Interpretation of Dreams between the manifest and latent contents of the dream. Freud argues that in interpreting dreams, a distinction must be made between dreams’ ‘manifest content as it is presented in our memory’ and ‘their latent content, or (as we say) the ‘dream-thoughts’, arrived at by means of our procedure’. For him, ‘The dream- content [. . .] is expressed as it were in a pictographic script, the characters of which have to be transposed individually into the language of the dream-thoughts’, from which its meaning can be disentangled (IV, 277); the manifest content is like the ostensibly nonsensical visible form of a rebus or picture-puzzle, and the latent content may be reached by translating the manifest content much as the rebus is translated by replacing each of its components with a word to arrive at the phrase or saying encoded within it. Ballard is thus problematically claiming for his ‘inner space’ fiction a quality of latent psychological meaning akin to that claimed by Freud for the dream. Are we to take seriously Ballard’s injunction to read his fiction in a fashion analogous to the psychoanalyst’s interpretation of dreams, and how can this be possible in the absence of psychoanalytic expertise and outside the access to free associations from the dream content available to the analyst in the psychoanalytic encounter? Although Ballard emphasizes the therapeutic aspect of his ‘heightened or alternate reality’, it also has a profoundly disturbing dimension. Asked about inner space in a 2005 interview, he stated that ‘I meant the invented space that you see in dreams and surrealist paintings in particular, but also in highly dislocated realities such as war zones, sites of plane crashes, earthquake aftermaths, derelict buildings, where the observer imposes his own dreams, fears, phobias’ (Francis 2006). The definition in terms of plane crashes and earthquake aftermaths recasts ‘inner space’ as specifically a space of trauma, a space in which overwhelming shock has destabilized the capacity of the organism to distinguish the perceived from the unconsciously projected. The anxious effect whereby the distinction between reality and imagination becomes ambivalent is associated by Freud with the ‘uncanny’ (XVII, 244), and the relevance to Ballardian ‘inner space’ of this conception should be acknowledged – it is worth noting in this connection, in light of Ballard’s self-identification as a writer of fantasy, the use of the Freudian uncanny made by theorists of fantasy literature such as Rosemary Jackson (Jackson, 62–72). Close attention to Ballard’s

68

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

discussions of ‘inner space’ opens up for a psychological reading of his fiction questions concerning the claim of his texts to be psychologically symbolic and to be interpretable in a fashion analogous to the psychoanalyst’s interpretation of dreams; the connection to Surrealism raises problematic issues in terms of the claim to represent a ‘fusion’ between the subjective and objective and of whether Ballardian ‘inner space’ can embody simultaneously a therapeutic fusion and a dislocatory, traumatized reality pervaded with fear and anxiety. It is in the context of these questions that I now turn to a discussion of Ballard’s catastrophe novels.

The Drowned World The importance of Jung’s psychological theories for Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) has been well- established in criticism, in particular by Roger Luckhurst, who has delineated and questioned the novel’s ‘thesis of devolution beyond individual pre/history, ordered and directed by the Collective Unconscious’ (Angle , 55). Something closely akin to the ‘collective, universal, and impersonal’ inherited psychic system of Jung’s collective unconscious (Archetypes, 43) begins to manifest itself in the consciousness of Dr Kerans, Dr Bodkin, and Beatrice Dahl in The Drowned World in response to the cataclysmic climatic transformation of their environment; the ominous dreams they experience reflect ‘biological memories’, ‘the oldest memories on Earth, the time- codes carried in every chromosome and gene’, ‘organic memories’ (DW, 43). Bodkin’s assertion that ‘Each of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory’ (DW, 44) recalls Jung’s sense of the collective unconscious as universal to humanity, his association of it with the fluid imagery of water, and his sense that ‘Our consciousness has developed cumulatively, as well as individually, from the darkness and the twilight of the primordial unconscious’ (Integration , 12). Ballard’s use of the conceit of inherited ‘biological memories’ in The Drowned World and elsewhere derives from a non-rigorous fictional interpretation of Jung’s theorization of the collective unconscious. Bodkin specifies that Keran’s repeated dream ‘wasn’t a true dream [. . .] but an ancient organic memory millions of years old’: The innate releasing mechanisms laid down in your cytoplasm millions of years ago have been awakened, the expanding sun and rising temperature are driving you back down the spinal levels into the drowned seas

Unconscious Catastrophes

69

submerged beneath the lowest layers of your unconscious, into the entirely new zone of the neuronic psyche. This is the lumbar transfer, total biopsychic recall. We really remember these swamps and lagoons. (DW, 74) The evocation of ‘drowned seas submerged beneath the lowest layers of your unconscious’ associates Bodkin’s ‘neuronic psyche’ with the collective unconscious, conceived by Jung as a ‘psychic substrate’, a ‘deeper layer’ underlying the personal unconscious (Archetypes, 4, 3). However, the notion of direct ‘biopsychic recall’ is alien to Jungian theory, which stipulates that each of the archetypes constituting the contents of the collective unconscious ‘is altered by becoming conscious and by being perceived, and it takes its colour from the individual consciousness in which it happens to appear’ (Archetypes, 5). Andrew Samuels explains the distinction between inherited memory images and the Jungian archetype by stating that a conception of ‘primordial imagery’ as ‘transmitted over time’, a suggestion that ‘fantasies are memories of specific, prehistoric experiences and that their content is inherited from previous generations’, falls into ‘the Lamarckian fallacy’ (Samuels, 25). ‘In the same way that biologists cannot accept that acquired characteristics are inherited, it is impossible for psychologists to hold that mental imagery or other contents can be passed on in that way’; it is, however, perfectly reasonable to assert that ‘while content is not inherited, form and pattern are; the concept of archetype meets this criterion. The archetype is seen as a purely formal, skeletal concept, which is then fleshed out with imagery, ideas, motifs, and so on’ (Samuels, 25). Unlike Bodkin’s direct ‘biopsychic’ memories, the Jungian archetype is manifested rather than perceived; it is an ‘essentially “irrepresentable” basic form’ (Structure , 213), not a specific perceptual content deriving from ancestral experience as in Ballard’s science-fictional refiguring of Jung. Jung himself was inconsistent over his conception of the archetype as without inherent content, as R. Hobson has pointed out with reference to Jung’s discussion of formulations such as the ‘archetype of the snake’ (Samuels, 33). Amplifying Jung’s own occasional use of organic imagery, The Drowned World cross-fertilizes Jung’s ideas with neurophysiological terminology recalling Ballard’s medical anatomical training and with concepts from biology. Dr Bodkin’s explanation of Hardman’s dreams as triggered by something akin to ‘innate releasing mechanisms’ observable in nature (DW, 43) borrows this term from the pioneering work of Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen in the field of ethology, the biological study of behaviour (Burkhardt, 204, 5). Andrew Samuels states that ‘Jung himself

70

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

drew parallels between archetypes and animal behaviour’, and discusses ‘numerous attempts to link Jung’s archetypal theory to ethology’ (Samuels, 36); these include a paper by Frieda Fordham published in 1957 in which ‘Fordham considered that Tinbergen’s demonstration of innate release mechanisms (IRMs) in animals may be applicable to humans’ (Samuels, 36) and Jolande Jacobi’s mention of ‘Lorenz and his “innate schemata” in connection with archetypes’ in her 1959 book Complex/Archetype/Symbol (Samuels, 37). Ballard’s 1962 novel is in dialogue with these contemporary biopsychological speculations. Lorenz and Tinbergen have been located by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, leading theorists of one school of recent evolutionary psychology, as among evolutionary psychology’s intellectual precursors in their application of Darwinian insights to behaviour (Tooby and Cosmides, 7); for Tooby and Cosmides the foundations of this important current psychological discipline were laid exactly at the period of The Drowned World ’s writing, in ‘the strain of theoretical evolutionary biology that started in the late 1950s and early 1960s’ (Tooby and Cosmides, 6). As I shall discuss, some of the disturbing implications of an evolutionary psychological vision of humanity resurface in Ballard’s final fictions. As Luckhurst notes (Angle, 55), The Drowned World mobilizes Jung’s theory of archetypes, which Jung defines as the ‘contents of the collective unconscious’ (Archetypes, 4), ‘primordial type’s, ‘universal images that have existed since the remotest times’, expressed in ‘myth and fairytale’, ‘dreams and visions’ (Archetypes, 5). Kerans’ unconscious is ‘becoming a well- stocked pantheon of tutelary phobias and obsessions, homing on to his already overburdened psyche like lost telepaths. Sooner or later the archetypes themselves would become restive and start fighting each other, anima against persona, ego against id. . . .’ (DW, 71–2). The novel’s depth-psychological auto-interpretation here is notable for its impressionistic superimposition of terminologies – anima and persona, ego and id originate from quite distinct Jungian-archetypal and Freudian-topographical conceptions of the psyche, but are juxtaposed here so as to convey a generalized sense of psychic complexity and conflict effacing what Luckhurst convincingly claims is the primarily Jungian conceptual framework of the narrative. At other points the novel’s use of Jungian archetypes is strikingly detailed. Beatrice Dahl, the alluring heiress with whom Kerans is involved, embodies Jung’s archetype of the anima, a ‘magical feminine being’ associated with a variety of female mythological figures who appears at a certain stage in male psychological development (Archetypes, 25). The anima represents the man’s unconscious feminine side: ‘What is not-I, not masculine, is most probably feminine, and because the not-I is felt as not belonging to me and

Unconscious Catastrophes

71

therefore as outside me, the anima image is usually projected upon women’ (Archetypes, 27). For Jung, ‘An alluring nixie from the dim bygone is today called an “erotic fantasy,” and she may complicate our psychic life in the most painful way’ (Archetypes, 25). The Drowned World represents Beatrice precisely in terms of erotic fantasy, the text evoking ‘her long oiled body gleaming in the shadows like a sleeping python’ (DW, 25); the description of her as ‘if she was deliberately trying to confuse him, Pandora with her killing mouth and witch’s box of desires and frustrations’ (DW, 31) resonates, more than with Luckhurst’s interpretation in terms of the death drive (Angle, 57), with Jung’s characterization of the anima in terms of ‘unbearable independence’, a mischievous, unsettling being who ‘causes states of fascination that rival the best bewitchment, or unleashes terrors in us not to be outdone’ (Archetypes, 25, 26). As Mark Jones suggests (Jones, 133–4), Dr Bodkin evokes ‘the wise old man, the superior master and teacher, the archetype of the spirit, who symbolizes the pre- existent meaning hidden in the chaos of life’ (Archetypes, 35), which Jung also calls the ‘archetype of meaning ’ (Archetypes, 32); appropriately in terms of this interpretation, it is Bodkin who articulates the ‘metabiological fantasy’ (DW, 44) Luckhurst has identified as the novel’s ‘thetic’ content (Angle, 55). The other significant archetypal figure in The Drowned World is Strangman, who sweeps into Keran’s lagoon on a hydroplane with a salvage crew of heavily stereotyped Negroes. Luckhurst identifies the ‘complexly overdetermined’ figure of Strangman as a ‘Jungian Shadow to Kerans’ (Angle, 57), and closer attention to Jung’s characterization of this archetype elucidates how closely Strangman instantiates it. For Jung the shadow is ‘the face we never show to the world’; associated with the ‘personal unconscious’, it is ‘a living part of the personality’ which ‘cannot be argued out of existence or rationalized into harmlessness’ (Archetypes, 20), ‘a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well’ of the unconscious (Archetypes, 21). Jung associates the shadow with what he calls the ‘inferior function’, which is ‘practically identical with the dark side of the human personality’ (Archetypes, 123). It is linked to ‘the trickster motif’, which ‘appears [. . .] naïvely and authentically in the unsuspecting modern man’, ‘represented by counter tendencies in the unconscious, and in certain cases by a sort of second personality, of a puerile and inferior character’ (Archetypes, 262). With his flashy showmanship, malevolence, and fascination with the recently submerged twentieth- century past, Strangman is exactly the dark or inverse side of the passive Keran’s hypnosis by the vistas of ‘archaeopsychic time’ (DW, 44). His ‘further neuronic role’ as a ‘warning mirror’ for Kerans (DW,

72

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

115) is consistent with role of the shadow as an unflatteringly honest mirror image in the individual’s ‘confrontation with the self’ (Archetypes, 20). His swarm of albino crocodiles even recalls Jung’s description of the shadow as ‘A minatory and ridiculous figure’ who ‘stands at the very beginning of the way of individuation, posing the deceptively easy riddle of the Sphinx, or grimly demanding answer to a “quaestio crocodilina”’ (Archetypes, 271). For Jung ‘there is no development unless the shadow is accepted’ (Archetypes, 340), and it is possible to read in Keran’s intimation that Strangman ‘had passed his peak, and was beginning to disintegrate’ (DW, 161) and Riggs’ pronouncement that ‘he’s doing a valuable job reclaiming works of art that were perforce abandoned’ (DW, 158) an example of Jung’s sense that ‘instead of acting in a brutal, savage, stupid, and senseless fashion, the trickster’s behaviour towards the end of the cycle becomes quite useful and sensible’ once ‘the conscious mind is [. . .] able to free itself from the fascination of evil and is no longer obliged to live it compulsively’ (Archetypes, 266). In this reading Keran’s relationship to Strangman becomes a fictional instantiation of the surmounting of the shadow archetype through the process of individuation. As this implies, while Roger Luckhurst suggests that ‘If The Drowned World concentrated on phylogenetic elements, The Crystal World follows that more intensely personal journey of individuation towards a repossession of the self’ (Angle, 58), it is possible to see Mark Jones as correct in describing The Drowned World as a ‘Jungian fiction on the process of individuation’ (Jones, 134). In Jung, individuation is specifically ‘the psychological process that makes of a human being an “individual” – a unique, indivisible unit or “whole man”’ (Integration, 3); elsewhere Jung defines it as ‘a developmental process which is peculiar to the psyche and consists in integrating the unconscious contents into consciousness’ with the result that ‘the psychic human being becomes a whole’ (Structure , 223). Such absorption of unconscious material into synthesis with the conscious mind is recast in ‘biopsychic’ terms in Bodkin’s depiction of Keran’s progressive rediscovery and acceptance of ‘archaeopsychic’ material encoded in his own body. Close attention to Jung can also develop Luckhurst’s sense of The Drowned World as enacting a process of ‘devolution and regression’ (Angle , 57). Keran’s introverted response to catastrophe in The Drowned World can be read in terms of regression, to the extent that he invests his psychic energy or libido in a focus on his ‘inner world’, becoming completely oriented towards this and eventually completely adapted to it. In Ballard’s novel, however, the progressive adaptation to the external world which is the ultimate goal of regression takes the surprising form of Keran’s apparently suicidal journey

Unconscious Catastrophes

73

south into the sun; the individuation process as envisaged by Jung is recast in terms of the late- Freudian theory of the death instinct. Much of the power and appeal of The Drowned World lies in its rich and multivalent symbolism, which can be read in the context of Jung’s extensive address to symbolism in Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Symbols of Transformation and Man and His Symbols. Jung sees symbolic imagery as an inherent part of mankind’s existence: Mankind has never lacked powerful images to lend magical aid against all the uncanny things that live in the depths of the psyche. Always the figures of the unconscious were expressed in protecting and healing images and in this way were expelled from the psyche into cosmic space. (Archetypes, 12; see also 6–9) Jung is convinced that the ‘growing impoverishment of symbols’ in modernity reflects the ‘spiritual poverty’ of contemporary Europe (Archetypes, 14, 15). Alongside the personal archetypes – shadow, anima, old wise man – he discusses what he calls the ‘archetypes of transformation’ which ‘are not personalities, but are typical situations, places, ways and means, that symbolize the kind of transformation in question’ (Archetypes, 38). These, like the personalities, ‘are true and genuine symbols that cannot be exhaustively interpreted, either as signs or as allegories. They are genuine symbols precisely because they are ambiguous, full of half- glimpsed meanings, and in the last resort inexhaustible’; they are distinguished by ‘their manifold meaning, their almost limitless wealth of reference, which makes any unilateral formulation impossible’, and are ‘in principle paradoxical’ (Archetypes, 38). For Jung, the ‘symbolic process is an experience in images and of images’ comparable to the images found in alchemy, yoga, and Tarot; and is associated with the ‘synthetic process’ of individuation (Archetypes, 38, 40). Archetypal symbols must be made ‘as fully conscious as possible’ and synthesized with consciousness ‘through the act of recognition’; this is ‘a dialectical procedure’ which ‘expresses itself in, or is accompanied by, dream symbols’ that are related to the “representations collectives”’ (Archetypes, 40-1). In Complex/Archetype/Symbol , Jolande Jacobi further elucidates the relationship between archetype and symbol in Jung’s thought: When the archetype manifests itself in the here and now of space and time, it can be perceived in some form by the conscious mind. Then we speak of a symbol . This means that every symbol is at the same time an archetype, that it is determined by a nonperceptible ‘archetype per se’. (Jacobi, 74)

74

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

In Jacobi’s account ‘symbols present an objective, visible meaning behind which an invisible, profounder meaning is hidden’ (Jacobi, 77), and the symbolic, which ‘interprets the symbolic expression as the best possible formulation of a relatively unknown thing’, is distinguished as a mode of signification from the semiotic, which ‘interprets the symbolic expression as an analogue or an abbreviated designation for a known thing’, and the allegoric, which ‘interprets the symbolic expression as an intentional paraphrase or transmogrification of a known thing’ (Jacobi, 77, 80). Jacobi quotes Jung’s statement that a symbol ‘is an expression for something that cannot be characterized in any other or better way’: The symbol is alive only so long as it is pregnant with meaning. But once its meaning has been born out of it, once that expression is found which formulates the thing sought, expected, or divined better than the hitherto accepted symbol, then the symbol is dead . . . and it becomes a conventional sign [. . .]. (Jacobi, 85) The symbol’s meaning, as long as it remains a symbol, is for Jung always ‘invisible’, existing in potentia , never articulated or revealed. A conception of symbols as inherently inexhaustible and indefinable in meaning is highly problematic for the literary critic seeking to elucidate textual meaning; Jacobi implicitly devalues criticism in her disparagement of ‘intellectuals’ as ‘no longer capable of grasping anything more than the outward façade, the semiotic aspect of a symbol’ (Jacobi, 87–8). To read The Drowned World as a Jungian symbolic text in Jacobi’s sense would entail disregarding a purely intellectual approach and espousing the Jungian symbol’s stimulation of ‘a man’s whole being to a total reaction’ in which ‘his thought and feeling, his senses and his intuition’ all participate (Jacobi, 88). Such an approach offends all the rationalist and intellectualist assumptions of contemporary criticism; what an understanding of it allows the critic to do, however, is to point the way in which The Drowned World , Ballard’s most Jungian text, attempts to simulate a rigorously Jungian sense of symbolism. The novel’s different characters with their complex associations and symbolically freighted episodes such as Keran’s dive into the planetarium and Strangman’s draining of the lagoon each accrete to themselves a wide range of associations which play against and cross-fertilize each other to maximize potential meaning. Alongside references recalling Jung’s preoccupation with oriental religions, the novel annexes to itself a variety of mythological contexts, recalling Jung’s association of mythic representations with unconscious archetypes; examples include the comparison of

Unconscious Catastrophes

75

Beatrice to Pandora, the painting which represents the story of Ester and Xerxes, and Keran’s comparison to Neptune, allusions which enrich and complicate the novel’s symbolic texture. In the light of Jung’s assertion of the inexhaustibility of the symbol, Strangman, with his derisive approach to the obvious reading of Keran’s dive as a return to the unconscious, so fascinating to Luckhurst, might be read as a mouthpiece for a Jungian sense of the symbolic as never exhaustibly defined through semiotic interpretation. Having identified ‘the Jungian frame for The Drowned World ’ (Angle , 53), Luckhurst closes his chapter on Ballard’s catastrophe novels by offering Freud’s ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ as a ‘final frame’ for them (Angle , 69). As this gesture concedes, significant aspects of The Drowned World ’s meaning depend upon its relationship to Freudian theory. Even Bodkin’s ‘metabiological fantasy’, which I have discussed as a biologized version of Jung’s collective unconscious, incorporates Freudian ideas; his assertion that ‘Just as psycho- analysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs’ (DW, 43–4) evokes the same sense of abreactive catharsis evoked in short fictions such as ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stella Vista’ and ‘Now Wakes the Sea’, and conceives the characters’ reconciliation with unconscious memories in the specifically Freudian terms of taboo and drive. Ballard here plays free and easy with Jungian and Freudian theoretical constructs, hybridizing them in a theoretical bricolage tailored to his science-fictional scenario. The Drowned World ’s evocation of the Freudian death instinct is overt, Kerans reflecting on ‘the image of his own death each of them carried with him in the secret places of his heart’, and seeing life as an ‘incurable disease’ (DW, 72). His dreams of ‘soft beaches’ which ‘glow invitingly with a glossy carmine sheen, the sky warm and limpid, the emptiness of the long stretches of sand total and absolute, filling him with an exquisite and tender anguish’ (DW, 83) recall Freud’s sense of ‘the inertia inherent in organic life’ (XVIII, 36), and his idea that ‘The pleasure principle seems actually to serve the death instincts’ (XVIII, 63). The title of the novel’s ninth chapter, ‘The Pool of Thanatos’ (DW, 96), evokes the Greek mythological name for death used in psychoanalytic theory to denote the instinct (Laplanche and Pontalis, 447). Keran’s experiences during his dive into the planetarium during this chapter hybridize this implicit acceptance of the death instinct, in ways not explicit in Freud’s writing, with the ‘certain lasciviousness’ (XVII, 244) Freud associates with intra-uterine or womb-return phantasy. This concept is most fully treated by Freud in ‘An Infantile Neurosis’,

76

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

where it is asserted of his patient that his fantasy of a veil between him and the world ‘was in reality a wishful phantasy: it exhibited him as once more back in the womb, and was, in fact, a wishful phantasy of flight from the world’ (XVII, 100). Preferring Jung’s phylogenetic emphasis to Freud’s ontogenetic preoccupation with infantile sexuality, the novel disregards Freud’s psychosexual interpretation of the womb-phantasy as derived from homosexual attachment to the father and expressive of ‘a wish to be inside the mother’s womb in order to replace her during intercourse – in order to take her place in regard to the father’ (XVII, 101). Keran’s and his companions’ encounter with their unconscious biological memories is not a straightforwardly Jungian case of reintegrative synthesis. Rather, it is an anxious confrontation suggestive of the Freudian uncanny, the return of ‘something which is familiar and old- established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression’ (XVII, 241). The novel evokes a return of the repressed both biological, the compulsive repetition of the trauma of archaic ‘physico- chemical’ crises (DW, 43), and historical: the scene following Strangman’s draining of the lagoon, when the ruins of London, so poetically evoked an their aquatic ethereality during Kerans dive, appear repulsive and deathly when uncovered, suggests the estranging transformation which takes place for Freud when material is repressed and then returns, so that ‘every affect belonging to an emotional impulse, whatever its kind, is transformed, it is repressed, into anxiety’ (XVII, 241). Keran’s impression that ‘Just as the distinction between the latent and manifest contents of the dream had ceased to be valid, so had any division between the real and the super-real in the external world’ (DW, 73–4), and the suggestion that ‘Phantoms slid imperceptibly from nightmare to reality and back again, the terrestrial and psychic landscapes were now indistinguishable, as they had been at Hiroshima and Auschwitz, Golgotha and Gomorrah’ (DW, 74), speak to Freud’s sense that ‘an uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced’, as when ‘something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes, and so on’ (XVII, 244). Within the representational space of the novel, conceived by Ballard as operating analogously to the fusion of subjective and objective realities he sees in Surrealist painting, Keran’s experience itself becomes the locus of an uncanny ‘inner space’ indeterminately fusing subjective and objective and suggesting a threatening leakage of repressed unconscious contents into his conscious mind; biological, biblical, and historical traumata are compounded in this evocation of abreactive crisis. The ambivalence Freud associates with the uncanny is emphasized insistently in The Drowned World . After Keran’s accident during his dive to the

Unconscious Catastrophes

77

planetarium, Strangman’s ironic comment that ‘he wanted to become part of the drowned world’ (DW, 111) and Keran’s question ‘“Did I or did I not try to kill myself?” ’ (DW, 112) provokes Kerans to a recognition that ‘he had been impelled by a curious urge to place himself at Strangman’s mercy, almost as if he were staging his own murder’ (DW, 112–13): ‘Was the drowned world itself, and the mysterious quest for the south which possessed Hardman, no more than an impulse to suicide, an unconscious acceptance of his own devolutionary descent, the ultimate neuronic synthesis of the archaeopsychic zero?’ (DW, 113). Freud adapted the term ambivalence from Bleuler’s usage to mean a ‘simultaneous existence of contradictory tendencies, attitudes or feelings in a relationship to a single object’, stressing an ‘opposition of the yes/no type, wherein affirmation and negation are simultaneous and inseparable’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 26–7); his late theory, with its opposition between life and death instincts, ‘tends to root ambivalence [. . .] in an instinctual dualism’, leading Laplanche and Pontalis to associate it with Freud’s incompletely developed discussion of the ‘fusion’ and ‘defusion’ of life and death instincts in his late writings (Laplanche and Pontalis, 28, 180–3). Rather than originating in Jung, Kerans’ ambivalence intensifies the novel’s Freudian sense of human existence as inherently riven by instinctual conflict; his puzzling over the ‘conundrum’ of the drowned world (DW, 113) problematizes a simple reading of his experience in terms of ‘an impulse to suicide’, opening the novel to a more complex sense of motivation recalling the late elaborations of Freud’s dualistic drive theory. Ambivalence persists to the novel’s conclusion, with Kerans aware that ‘his own life might not survive the massive unbroken jungles to the south’ (DW, 174) but no certain signal given as to the fact of his death. Freely appropriating from both Jung’s and Freud’s theories, The Drowned World superimposes onto a Jungian notion of an inherited collective unconscious – biologized with reference to contemporary ethological thought – a Freudian process of therapeutic abreaction normally applied to the individual rather than the collective psyche; its essentially Jungian narrative of individuative regression is inscribed with a marked late-Freudian sense of the psyche as dominated by the existence of drives both erotic and disposed towards the dissolution of the individual.

The Drought In comparison to The Drowned World and its later companion The Crystal World , Ballard’s The Drought tends to some extent to frustrate schematization in depth-psychological terms; Freudian and Jungian elements coexist

78

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

within the text with a wide range of other allusive contexts, including Surrealist paintings, the biblical story of Jonah, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest . Notwithstanding this, attention to the resonances of The Drought with psychological theory potentiates a suggestive reading of the text. Citing an interview statement by Ballard, David Pringle has suggested that the sandy landscape of The Drought is symbolic of an imagined future (Pringle, 18, 22). Entertaining this emphasis on the novel as imaginatively concerned with the future, it becomes possible to read elements of the text as implying a concern with the role of the unconscious in the future of the human mind or the future of humanity’s relation to the unconscious. The Drought ’s conjuring of a world reduced to dust and shrunken, saline oceans inverts the cataclysmic flooding of Earth envisaged in The Drowned World . Simultaneously with this reversal of environmental scenario occurs a reversal of metaphoric significance; the novel turns its back on the psychological past symbolized in the archaeopsychic returns of The Drowned World , envisaging instead through its sand-blown landscape a psychological future. The Drought ’s opening image of a dying river reads as a desiccation of the symbolic fertility associated with the Jungian phylogenetic past: Throughout the long summer Ransom had watched the river shrinking, its countless associations fading as it narrowed into a shallow creek. Above all, Ransom was aware that the role of the river in time had changed. Once it had played the part of an immense fluid clock, the objects immersed in it taking up their positions like the stations of the sun and planets. The continued lateral movements of the river, its rise and fall and the varying pressures on the hull, were like the activity within a vast system of evolution, whose cumulative forward flow was as irrelevant and without meaning as the apparently linear motion of time itself. The real movements were those random and discontinuous relationships between the objects within it, those of himself and Mrs Quilter, her son and the dead birds and fish. With the death of the river, so would vanish any contact between those stranded on the drained floor. [. . .] None the less, Ransom was certain that the absence of this great moderator, which cast its bridges between all animate and inanimate objects alike, would prove of crucial importance. Each of them would soon literally be an island in an archipelago drained of time. (D, 13–14) The fading of the river’s ‘countless associations’ enacts a move away from the boundless interpretative fecundity of the Jungian symbol which was

Unconscious Catastrophes

79

the model in The Drowned World , evoking the death of the collective unconscious with its inexhaustible meanings. The evolutionary and phylogenetic continuum, associated with the collective unconscious, with which Ballard’s first novel is concerned here shrinks and sputters out, depriving individuals of the universal connection they previously enjoyed by virtue of their shared past. This implication of a future exhaustion of the riches of the Jungian collective unconscious is reinforced by the representation of Richard Lomax and his sister Miranda, both of whom can be read as Jungian symbolic figures. Miranda Lomax, like The Drowned World ’s Beatrice, exhibits characteristics of the capricious Jungian anima; she is ‘like a wise, evil child’, provoking ‘a sharp sense of unease’, ‘like a witch waiting for the casual chance’ (D, 48), and is specifically associated with the embodiment of the anima to which Ballard repeatedly returns in his fictions, the lamia: These latent elements in Lomax and Miranda were already appearing. [. . .] Her white hair and utter lack of pity reminded him of the spectre that appeared at all times of extreme exhaustion – the yellow-locked, leprous- skinned lamia who had pursued the Ancient Mariner. Perhaps this phantom embodied ancient memories of a time, whether past or future, when fear and pain were the most valuable emotions, and their exploitation into the most perverse forms the sole imperative. [. . .] It was this sense of remorseless caprice, with its world of infinite possibilities unrestrained by any moral considerations, which had its expression in the figure of the white-haired witch. (D, 52–3) As throughout Ballard’s fiction, the lamia here is Coleridgean as well as evoking the anima of The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. The idea that Miranda might embody ‘ancient memories of a time, whether past or future, when fear and pain were the most valuable emotions’, suggests a reading of her as an instinctual archetype from the a-temporal collective unconscious. Miranda’s brother Richard Lomax, with his architectural follies and firework displays, his aspects of Puck (D, 43) and Mephistopheles (D, 47), also suggests the symbolic richness of a Jungian archetype. Central to his identity is his androgyny, signalled from the outset by his ‘Fabergé style’ (D, 43) and ’ambiguous physical make-up’ (D, 44), and developing in time into his reversion ‘to a primitive level where the differentiation into male and female no longer occurred’ (D, 179). This detail suggests a more specific Jungian archetypal reading. In The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious Jung associates the anima concept with ‘the syzygy

80

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

motif’, stating that ‘We encounter the anima historically above all in the divine syzygies, the male-female pairs of deities. [. . .] We can safely assert that these syzygies are as universal as the existence of man and woman’ (Archetypes, 56, 59). Anima- like Miranda and her hermaphroditic brother, with their close physical resemblance, suggest just such a male- female archetypal pair. Lomax’s association with the syzygy, and his role in husbanding the last residues of water in Mount Royal (D, 175–6) implies his association with the collective unconscious, of which water is a symbol in The Drowned World; the description of him as ‘the serpent in this dusty Eden [. . .] trying to grasp back his apple, and preserve intact, if only for a few weeks, the world before the drought’ (D, 176) implies as futile his orientation towards the collective unconscious as communal psychological past, a futility underlined by Quilter’s peremptory murder of him (D, 185–6). Likewise a limit to Miranda’s archetypal power as a representative of the psychological past is implied by a question Ransom ponders: If the future, and his whole sense of time, were haunted by images of his own death, by the absence of identity beyond both birth and grave, why did these chimeras not coincide more closely with the terrifying vision of Miranda Lomax? (D, 53) Eschewing the immersion in the deep past characteristic of The Drowned World , The Drought orients itself towards the future, and the priority for its protagonist Dr Ransom becomes an escape from rather than an embrace of the past. Unlike Kerans, who embraces phylogenetic memories, The Drought ’s Ransom is haunted, like the traumatized Freudian subject, by the need to exorcize personal ones. For Ransom ‘the only final rest from the persistence of memory would come from his absolution in time’ (D, 37); ‘his own stratified personality reflected his preoccupation with the vacuums and drained years of his memory’ (D, 44); the desertification of the landscape is said to have provoked in him ‘hopes of isolating himself among the wastes of the new desert, putting an end to time and its erosions’ (D, 81). Memory is both Ransom’s oppressor and his obsession, and the passing of time offers both a destructive erosion and the hope of a final escape from time’s attrition. The houseboat in which Ransom is staying at the narrative’s beginning becomes an image for his attempts to insulate himself against time’s effects: Ransom picked up the frame and looked at the photograph of himself. Although he recognized the small, square- jawed face of the child on the lawn, there now seemed an absolute break of continuity between

Unconscious Catastrophes

81

the two of them. The past had slipped away, leaving behind it, like the debris of a vanished glacier, a moraine of unrelated mementoes, the blunted nodes of the memories that now surrounded him in the houseboat. The craft was as much a capsule protecting him against the pressures and vacuums of time as the steel shell of an astronaut’s vehicle guarded the pilot from the vagaries of space. Here his halfconscious memories of the past had been isolated and quantified, like the fragments of archaic minerals sealed behind glass cases in museums of geology. (D, 15–16) Ransom’s apparent need to isolate and quantify his ‘half- conscious memories of the past’, to exorcize the memory of his childhood (D, 15), suggests the Freudian model of trauma as rooted in problematic memories which must be mastered through an effort in the present; the comparison of Ransom’s mementoes to fragments ‘sealed behind glass’ suggestively evokes both a repression of memories into the unconscious and an attempt to order psychic contents through analytic activity, a separation of individual elements. Freud’s conceptualization of memory in terms of associative links between perceptual traces, discussed in Chapter One, is relevant here. For Freud, ‘Our perceptions are linked with one another in our memory’ through association (V, 539), and personality is built up from the interconnective matrix of these traces: ‘What we describe as our ‘character’ is based on the memory-traces of our impressions’ (V, 539–40); with his attempt to isolate his memories from one another, Ransom seems to wish for escape from the very connections and linkages which for Freud are the basis of personality itself. The psychological future into which Ransom is moving is precisely one characterized by the breakdown of connections, by individual isolation and the failure of relationships. The novel insistently thematizes psychological withdrawal and the individual as psychologically isolated. ‘I already have pulled out’, Ransom remarks in response to Grady’s recommendation that he leave town (D, 33); he looks back on his later killing of Grady as an experiment with regard to his own detachment from others (D, 122). Ransom and his wife Judith’s house at Mount Royal is ‘as anonymous and free of associations’ as a motel, suggesting the deliberate impersonality of modern life, and their failing marriage, which has no ‘personal component’ is a ‘vacuum’ (D, 36). Ransom’s ‘first hopes of isolating himself among the wastes of the new desert’ (D, 81) are perpetuated in his hallucination of a ‘solitary traveller’ whose isolation seems ‘a compass of all the unstated motives that Ransom had been forced to repress during the previous days’ (D, 93). This failure of

82

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

relationship is perpetuated during Ransom’s exile on the salt beaches; life there is described in terms of ‘an endless string of little communities’ (D, 122) and a ‘general withdrawal of the settlement from the world outside’ (D, 125). Here distance from the psychologically collective, from the collective unconscious, creates a future in which individual relations are arid, sterile; of Ransom’s marriage to Judith, to which he clings despite possibilities of involvements with Catherine Austen and Vanessa Johnstone, it is said that ‘he felt few bonds between them’; the success of their present union ‘had been decided by wholly impersonal considerations’ (D, 120). The novel’s vision of a world without relationship is underlined by its abdication of investment in the Freudian Oedipal father. Philip Jordan gravitates to Ransom as if to a surrogate father-figure, when the time comes to leave Hamilton rejecting his real father, Jonas, but insisting on bringing his ailing foster father, Mr Jordan, whose blindness is suggestive of the Oedipus myth (D, 83–5). The hellfire preacher Johnstone, whose sermons suggest God as an incarnation of the sadistic super-ego, is reduced to a blind, Lear-like geriatric on the salt beaches. In ‘The Future of an Illusion’ Freud says that in creating gods mankind makes ‘the forces of nature not simply into persons with whom he can associate as with his equals [. . .] but he gives them the character of a father’ (XXI, 17); for him, religion is ‘the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity; like the obsessional neurosis of children, it arose out of the Oedipus complex, out of the relation to the father’ (XXI, 43). The representation of religion in The Drought echoes this Freudian reading of religion as obsessional neurosis. Johnstone is said to be ‘imposing his own fantasies on the changing landscape’ (D, 30); his sermon, ‘comparing Jonah’s wish for the destruction of Nineveh with mankind’s unconscious hopes for the end of their present world’ (D, 40–1) and welcoming a grace ‘that would come to them only through this final purging fire’ (D, 41) evokes a pathological obsessiveness; the faces of the local fishermen are compared to ‘the obsessed faces of the primitive fishermen who left their nets by the Lake of Galilee’ (D, 60). The preacher Jonas’ belief that he will find a ‘new river’ (D, 65), one which Johnstone later appears to share (D, 75), suggests their religious beliefs as, in Freud’s words, ‘a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality’ (D, 43). Mankind’s future, in The Drought, is one in which the psychological bonds which have previously made life meaningful fail, while the religious narratives which project these relationships on to the wider universe are revealed as illusory, insubstantial. The Drought ’s emphasis on the breakdown of association and relationship is powerfully symbolized in the image of the ‘dune limbo’ in which

Unconscious Catastrophes

83

Ransom and the other characters subsist following their migration to the coast. Life here is characterized by an entropic erosion of personality: It was not this that held them together, but their awareness that only with each other could they keep alive some faint shadow of their former personalities, whatever their defects, and arrest the gradual numbing of sense and identity that was the unseen gradient of the dune limbo. Like all purgatories, the beach was a waiting- ground, the endless stretches of wet sand sucking away from them all but the hardest core of themselves. These tiny nodes of identity glimmered in the light of the limbo, the sign of nothingness that waited for them to dissolve and deliquesce as the crystals dried by the sun. (D, 119) The future of the self is here not the progressive fulfilment of Jungian individuation but a gradual attrition of identity which strongly suggests Freud’s entropic sense in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ of the ‘tendency of mental life, and perhaps of nervous life in general, [. . .] to reduce, to keep constant or to remove internal tension due to stimuli’, which he says is ‘one of our strongest reasons for believing in the death instincts’ (XVIII, 55–6). Ransom ultimately embraces a Freudian entropic conception of the future of his own existence, coming to see it as the source of a sought-for escape from the memories and drives which oppress him: As he pondered on the real reasons for their journey, he had begun to sense its true compass. At first Ransom had assumed that he himself, like Philip Jordan and Mrs Quilter, was returning to the past, to pick up the frayed ends of his previous life, but he now felt that the white deck of the river was carrying them all in the opposite direction forward into zones of time future where the unresolved residues of the past would appear smoothed and rounded, muffled by the detritus of time, like images in a clouded mirror. (D, 152) For Ransom, by contrast, the long journey up the river had been an expedition into his own future, into a world of the volitional time where the images of the past were reflected free from the demands of memory and nostalgia, free even from the pressure of thirst and hunger. (D, 176) Despite The Drought ’s orientation towards a future remote from the unconscious past, the narrative also enacts an uncanny return of the repressed which implies the persistence of memory, the impossibility of complete

84

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

escape from the past. The bodies of people killed in conflict over the resources of the coast are returned by the sea to the beaches where they died in an uncanny haunting: thousands of bodies tipped into the sea ‘after the final bloody battles on the beaches had come back to them, their drowned eyes and blanched faces staring from the shallow pools. The washed wounds, cleansed of all blood and hate, haunted them in their dreams’; ‘Recently Ransom’s memories of the corpses, repressed for so many years, had come back to him with added force’ (D, 121). Ransom and his companions’ return up the dried river to Mount Royal might symbolize a return to the unconscious past. The landscape through which they journey is characterized by strong concentration of uncanny symbols and experiences; the skulls of dead cattle and the milled bones of fish invoke death, for Freud a key association of the uncanny (D, 149, 159–60); Ransom is haunted by visions of an enigmatic double (D, 155); the mannequins they encounter suggest the automata discussed as uncanny in Freud’s essay (D, 154). Quilter, himself a figure from the characters’ past in Mount Royal, recurs like an uncanny symptom throughout this journey of return; Mrs Quilter is reminded of him by gesture of Ransom’s (D, 149) and is convinced she will find him in the town (D, 159); Ransom hallucinates his face in the dented skulls of cattle (D, 149) and the window full of mannequins (D, 154). In line with the uncanny return of the repressed intimated at this stage of the novel, some kind of reconciliation with the unconscious past may be intimated in the novel’s conclusion, as the isolations and withdrawals of the journey to the coast are reversed: Philip Jordan is reconciled with his father (D, 187) and Ransom experiences a resurgent sense of relationship to the individuals around him: ‘The resolution of everything during his journey from the coast carried with it the equation of all emotions and relationships. Simultaneously he would become the children’s father and Quilter’s brother, Mrs Quilter’s son and Miranda’s husband’ (D, 183); yet this is a deathly reconciliation; the ending remains uncanny in evoking an indistinction between the real and imagined (D, 188). Quilter plays a complex and ambiguous symbolic role within the context of The Drought ’s psychologically suggestive narrative. The text associates him with figures as different as Caliban and Buddha; on one level, as his perversity and irrationality suggest (D, 9–10), he may function as a Jungian shadow to Ransom; he is first seen looking down into the water in an echo of the language Jung uses when discussing the encounter with the unconscious. In particular however he seems to represent an evolutionary step which allows some vital psychological element – whether the collective unconscious or the dream-life of humanity – to perpetuate itself

Unconscious Catastrophes

85

into the future. Quilter’s children by Miranda ‘resembled the children of the congenitally insane’, yet ‘their pupils were full of dreams’ and Ransom remarks of one of them ‘He looks like a genius’ (D, 170); one of them apparently has the miraculous ability to restore life to a dead bird. Roger Luckhurst has perceptively linked Quilter’s hydrocephalism and his use of the phrase ‘water on the brain’, to suggest that the hydrocephalic Quilter is the character best adapted to survive in The Drought ’s desert landscape (Angle, 63). In light of this, and of Ballard’s habitual symbolic association between water and the unconscious, Quilter’s hydrocephalic children can be read as embodying an evolutionary mutative adaptation which allows the vital unconscious element of the human mind to be carried within the head rather than relying on its external embodiment in the ocean. In counterpoint to the defunct androgyne Lomax, associated with the syzygy archetype, Quilter represents a more successful human attempt to persist into the future, yet his success is not depicted as an unalloyed positive; his legacy is the hybridization of his own perverse, dream-filled personality with that of the lamia-like Miranda, herself a figure of a strain of ‘remorseless caprice [. . .] unrestrained by any moral considerations’ (D, 52) inherent in humanity’s collective mind. With his bestial associations and irrational violence, which align him thoroughly with Freud’s view of humanity in ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’ – Miranda interprets his crushing of a seagull as ‘a sign he loves the bird’ (D, 183) – the idiot- savant Quilter stands for post- Freudian humanity’s animalistic and perverse dimensions as evolutionary assets.

The Crystal World For Roger Luckhurst, ‘If The Drowned World concentrated on phylogenetic elements, The Crystal World follows that more intensely personal journey of individuation towards a repossession of the self’; for him in this novel ‘the catastrophe, rather than residing in the distant past in The Drowned World , is entered at the beginning, marking in landscape the psychological entry to the process of individuation’, explaining ‘the ruling opposition of dark/light and the choice of crystal, a key Jungian symbol of the completed Self, holding as much importance in Jung’s iconography as the mandala’ (Angle , 58). This is a succinct and apposite summary of many of the key Jungian elements of The Crystal World . The novel is indeed overt in depicting individuation, Jung’s ‘developmental process which [. . .] consists in integrating the

86

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

unconscious contents into consciousness’ with the result that ‘the psychic human being becomes a whole’ (Structure , 223). Captain Radek says to Dr Sanders ‘Outside this forest everything seems polarized, does it not, divided into black and white? Wait until you reach the trees, Doctor – there, perhaps, these things will be reconciled for you’ (CW, 71); later, Sanders says to Louise Peret that ‘Of course there’s a dark side of the psyche, and I suppose all we can do is find the other face and try to reconcile the two – it’s happening out there in the forest’ (CW, 136). Besides Jung’s sense of the crystal as a symbol of self, there is, however, another Jungian conceptual correlate for The Crystal World ’s crystallizing forest. This is the pleroma, a concept from Gnostic theology which Jung evoked in his ‘Septem Sermones ad Mortuos’, written during a period of mental crisis during WWI: A thing that is infinite and eternal hath no qualities, since it hath all qualities. This nothingness or fullness we name the PLEROMA. Therein both thinking and being cease, since the eternal and infinite possess no qualities. In it no being is, for he then would be distinct from the pleroma, and would possess qualities which would distinguish him as something distinct from the pleroma. In the pleroma there is nothing and everything. It is quite fruitless to think about the pleroma, for this would mean self- dissolution. [. . .] In the pleromatic or (as the Tibetans call it) Bardo state, there is a perfect interplay of cosmic forces, but with the Creation – that is, with the division of the world into distinct processes in space and time – events begin to rub and jostle one another. (Storr, 342) The pleroma in Jung’s definition is an ‘infinite and eternal’ ‘nothingness or fullness’ in which all qualities or forces are mutually cancelled and which is mutually exclusive with being as we know it. In The Crystal World Sanders writes to Paul Derain of his belief that ‘this illuminated forest in some way reflects an earlier period of our lives, perhaps an archaic memory we are born with of some ancestral paradise where the unity of time and space is the signature of every leaf and flower’ (CW, 83); Father Balthus, meanwhile, sees the crystalline forest as a Eucharistic ‘last marriage of space and time’ (CW, 162). Both imply the crystallization as effacing the ‘division of the world into distinct processes in space and time’ Jung discusses. Sanders’ claim that ‘There, in that place of rainbows, nothing is distinguished from anything else’ (CW, 136) echoes Jung’s idea of the pleroma as an absence of distinctions; his sense that in the forest ‘the gift of immortality’ is ‘a direct

Unconscious Catastrophes

87

consequence of the surrender by each of us of our own physical and temporal identities’ (CW, 169) recalls the pleroma’s eternal associations. Ballard’s crystal forest can, in fact, be read as a science-fictional instantiation of Jung’s conceptualization of the pleroma, the novel here opening itself speculatively to the spiritual and religious dimensions of Jung’s thought. Despite the validity of these Jungian readings, The Crystal World is, like The Drowned World and The Drought , conceptually impure, drawing upon Freudian ideas within the framework of its Jungian narrative. The novel’s preoccupation with its characters’ ambiguous latent motivations reflects Freud’s view, expounded in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life , that human behaviour is to a considerable degree the expression of unconscious intentions. For Freud the everyday forgetting of names is ‘not left to arbitrary psychical choice but follows paths which can be predicted and which conform to laws’ (VI, 2); it is driven by ‘the influence of a motive ’ (VI, 4). Objects may be displaced with unconscious dexterity suggesting ‘hidden but powerful motives’ (VI, 142); the frequent ‘“chance” actions’ of neurotics can be interpreted as ‘symptomatic acts’ (VI, 191) expressive of something their actor ‘does not want to say straight out and which for the most part he is unaware of’ (VI, 195). The upshot of these assertions is that ‘Certain shortcomings in our psychical functioning [. . .] and certain seemingly unintentional performances prove [. . .] to have valid motives and to be determined by motives unknown to consciousness’ (VI, 239); this results in a deterministic view of human mental life which Freud embraces (VI, 240). In fact, argues Freud, the determination of ‘parapraxes and chance actions’ by unconscious influences is closely analogous to ‘the mechanism of dream-formation’ (VI, 277); psychoneurotic symptoms, ‘and especially the psychical formations of hysteria and obsessional neurosis, repeat in their mechanism all the essential features of this mode of working’ (VI, 278). In all cases of seemingly unintentional behaviour, ‘the phenomena can be traced back to incompletely suppressed psychical material, which, although pushed away by consciousness, has nevertheless been robbed of all capacity for expressing itself ’ (VI, 279). In a fashion suggestive of these ideas, The Crystal World foregrounds Sanders’ ‘ambiguous motives for coming to Port Matarre’ (CW, 13). Despite feeling he now understands the motives of his ‘younger self, and the real reasons that had sent him to Fort Isabelle’ (CW, 17), he engages in an intense process of self-analysis, speculating that perhaps part of the Matarre forests’ appeal to him is that ‘here at last he might be free from the questions of motive and identity that were bound up with his sense of time and the past’ (CW, 17–18). His affair with Suzanne Clair is ‘an attempt to come to terms with himself and his own ambiguous motives’ (CW, 19). Sanders’ incomplete apprehension

88

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

of his own motives bears a close relation to Freud’s sense of unconscious motivations as habitually forcing their way to indirect expression through behavioural symptoms; like so many characters in Ballard’s writing, like the hysteric and the obsessional neurotic in Freud’s conception, Sanders and the other traumatized characters of the novel are driven by ‘hidden but powerful motives’ originating in the unconscious; a passive acceptance of the dictates of the unconscious, not an active agency, is their lot. The characters’ impulsion by unconscious forces means that the novel is driven by a Freudian return of the repressed, and accordingly The Crystal World is characterized, perhaps even more than its two predecessors, by a preponderance of powerfully uncanny effects. From the opening the tone is one of ‘uncertainty’ (CW, 11) and ‘unease’ (CW, 12), recalling the anxiety signalling the return of the Freudian repressed, and the text evokes an unstable sense of reality recalling the uncanny effacement of ‘the distinction between imagination and reality’ (XVII, 244); ‘For the first time he felt completely convinced of the reality of Port Matarre’ (CW, 40); ‘this feeling of flatness and unreality [. . .] filled Sanders with a sense of failure and disappointment’ (CW, 120). The ambivalent, deathly figure of Ventress is the focus for the text’s dramatization of uncanny effects: ‘Again Sanders felt the sense of confusion which the strange light in Port Matarre had generated, a confusion in some way symbolized by Ventress and his skulllike face’ (CW, 70). Ventress’ description of the viruses as immune to time and as ‘neither animate nor inanimate’, ‘Neither living nor dead!’ (CW, 89) reads them in terms of Freud’s adoption of Jentsch’s characterization of the uncanny in terms of ‘“doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate”’ (XVII, 226). This emphasis is perpetuated in the description of Serena Ventress’s ‘half- animate immolation within the crystal vaults’ (CW, 113), and Sanders’s closing sense that ‘I don’t think the simple distinction between life and death has much meaning now’ (CW, 173). A ‘repetition of the same thing’ (XVII, 236) structures the narrative, Sanders’s relationship with Louise Peret recapitulating his affair with Suzanne Clair ‘as if familiar intimacies were already beginning to repeat themselves’ (CW, 37), his projective confusion of Louise with Suzanne (CW, 56) the symptom of the return of his repressed fixation on the older woman. The predominance of uncanny effects in The Crystal World may productively be read alongside Hal Foster’s discussion of Surrealism in terms of the Freudian uncanny. Seeing Surrealism as a ‘theoretical object productive of its own critical concepts’ (Foster, xviii), Foster rejects automatism and dream as keys to the Surrealist unconscious, offering instead Freud’s

Unconscious Catastrophes

89

uncanny (Foster, xvi–xvii); for him, ‘the surrealists not only are drawn to the return of the repressed but also seek to redirect this return to critical ends’, and ‘the uncanny is crucial to particular surrealist oeuvres as well as to general surrealist notions (e.g. the marvelous, convulsive beauty, and objective chance)’ (Foster, xvi–xviii). For Foster, the ‘unconscious based on originary unity’ hypothesized by Surrealist founder André Breton (Foster, 3) was haunted in Surrealist practice by intimations more ‘in line with the late Freudian theory of a primal struggle between life and death drives’ (Foster, 4), suggesting ‘an unconscious not unitary or liberatory at all but primally conflicted, instinctually repetitive’ (Foster, 5). Foster suggests that, contrary to canonical Surrealism’s own rhetoric, it is precisely at ‘points of greatest difficulty – where pleasure and death principles appear to serve one another, where sexual and destructive drives appear identical – that surrealism is at once achieved and undone’; ‘ just as surrealist automatism suggests not liberation but compulsion, so surrealism in general may celebrate desire only, in the register of the uncanny, to proclaim death’ (Foster, 11). Foster goes on to argue that the concept of the marvellous, which succeeded automatism as the basis of Breton’s theorization of the surreal, points equally towards ‘an unconscious less liberatory than compulsive’ (Foster, 19). For Foster the Surrealist ‘marvelous is the uncanny – but projected, at least in part, away from the unconscious and repressed material toward the world and future revelation’ (Foster, 20). In Breton’s conception there are two main categories of the Surrealist marvellous; ‘convulsive beauty’ and ‘objective chance’ (Foster, 19); Breton also divides convulsive beauty into three further categories; the ‘veiled- erotic’, the ‘fixed- explosive’ and the ‘magic- circumstantial’ (Foster, 23). In Foster’s argument all of these can be defined in terms of the Freudian uncanny; the veiled- erotic ‘is uncanny primarily in its in/animation, for this suggests the priority of death, the primordial condition to which life is recalled’, the fixedexplosive ‘is uncanny primarily in its im/mobility, for this suggests the authority of death, the dominant conservatism of the drives’ (Foster, 25), and the magic- circumstantial, identified with objective chance, is also based around ‘repetition keyed not only to primordial death but also to personal trauma’ (Foster, 28). The transformation of the forest which takes place in The Crystal World can be read precisely as an instance of Foster’s uncanny Surrealist marvellous; where Foster characterizes this marvellous in terms of an uncanny confusion over whether the event in question ‘is an external or internal event, of otherworldly, secular, or psychic agency’ (Foster, 19) and of

90

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

a ‘negation’ of the ‘philosophical equation’ of the real and the rational (Foster, 20), exactly these effects can be seen in the forest’s transformation: Sanders becomes convinced that its origins are ‘more than physical’ (CW, 168), and questions the necessity of a rational, scientific explanation for it: ‘For some reason he felt less concerned to find a so- called scientific explanation for the phenomenon he had just seen’ (CW, 69). Where Foster stresses Freud’s emphasis on ‘a usurpation of the referent by the sign or of physical reality by psychic reality’ as symptomatic of the uncanny (Foster, 7), such a usurpation is evident in the iconic or symbolic charge Ballard’s crystallizing process bestows upon objects – a crocodile becomes a ‘fabulous armorial beast’ (CW, 79) – as well as Sanders’ increasing tendency to see the other characters as psychological symbols, his suggestion that Suzanne represents ‘the dark side of the equinox’ (CW, 136). The ‘in/animation’ and ‘im/mobility’ of crystallized organisms in The Crystal World recalls Breton’s first two categories of convulsive beauty, sharing what Foster has seen as their uncanny nature, their blurring of the line between life and death, their suggestion of the ultimate inevitability of a return to an inorganic state. In particular, they recall the fixed- explosive, which is characterized by the ‘violent arrest of the vital’, the ‘sudden suspension of the animate’, as in Breton’s example, a Man Ray photograph of a tango dancer frozen in mid- swirl (Foster, 27). Sanders’ midnight liaison with the leprosy-afflicted Suzanne Clair (CW, 140) might be compared to the ‘encounter’ for Foster characteristic of Bretonian ‘objective chance’, with which Foster identifies the magic- circumstantial (Foster, 29). Foster suggests crystal itself as an uncanny symbol: This uncanny indistinction also has a phylogenetic register, for such substances as limestone, coral, and crystal all exist in subterranean or submarine realms that are evocative of primal states, both ontogenetic (i.e., in the womb) and evolutionary (i.e., in the sea). (Foster, 25) For Foster, ‘the marvelous, convulsive beauty, and objective chance are founded on traumas that involve the origin of desire in loss and its end in death, and Surrealist art can be seen as different attempts to repeat and/ or work through such events’ (Foster, 48). As well as shock he identifies the Surrealists’ use of the earlier psychoanalytic diagnostic of hysteria as a model for artistic expression, claiming that ‘convulsive beauty is patterned on hysterical beauty as an experience of the world convulsed, like the body of the hysteric, into “a forest of symbols”’ (Foster, 49). Although concepts of hysterical beauty are open to feminist critique, Foster claims that in Surrealism

Unconscious Catastrophes

91

‘the female body is not the sublimated image of the beautiful but the de sublimated site of the sublime – i.e., the hysterical body inscribed with signs of sexuality and marks of death’ (Foster, 53). Of the Surrealists he asserts ‘In a simple sense they wanted to be hysterics, to be by turns passive and convulsive, disponible and ecstatic’ (Foster, 53). ‘In a more difficult sense’, he claims, ‘they were hysterics, marked by traumatic fantasy, confused about sexual identity. Out of this condition some surrealists were able to develop a subversive association between sexual trauma and artistic representation – an association only suggested in Freud’ (Foster, 53–4). The Crystal World narrates a comparable movement towards the mortal end of desire; the crystallization of the African landscape creates a ‘forest of symbols’, in Foster’s Baudelairean phrase, a reality convulsed into the realm of the aesthetic by deathly libidinal forces; Suzanne’s body, marked by the leonine mask of leprosy, corporealizes a surreal sublime in touch with the late Freud’s acknowledgement of death. The powerfully uncanny aspect of The Crystal World signals its specific debt to Freud’s late theory, and its operation, like its predecessors, under the aegis of Freud’s ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’. Leprous, sombrely beautiful Suzanne Clair, with her enigmatic hold over Sanders and identification with the ‘dark side of the psyche’, embodies the death instinct and its problematic relationship to Eros, the life instincts. Ventress’ smuggling of a pistol into Port Matarre in Sanders’ suitcase is said to symbolize ‘in sexual terms as well, all Sanders’ hidden motives for coming to Port Matarre in quest of Suzanne Clair’ (CW, 25); the careful qualification of the pistol’s implications of a murderous or aggressive instinct with a stress on its phallic symbolism reflects the mutual imbrication of erotic and deathly drives in Freud’s late theory, which I discuss in detail in the next chapter. The implication that Sanders’ feelings towards Suzanne are specifically sadistic, suggestive of a projection outwards of the death instinct, is amplified by the later intimation that he has deliberately infected her with leprosy (CW, 126). Suzanne’s double Louise Peret, repeatedly associated with the imagery of light, is implicitly allied to the Freudian Eros or life instincts through Sanders’ speculation that ‘the response to light is a response to all the possibilities of life itself’ (CW, 135). While Sanders’ clinch with Louise, ‘at a pivotal point below the dark and white shadows of the equinox’ (CW, 38), frees him momentarily from the dark image of Suzanne, he ultimately remains compelled by ‘his real motives for wanting to sail up-river, his quest for an end to all Suzanne Clair stood for in his mind’ (CW, 52). Sanders’ subsequent surmise of Suzanne that ‘obviously she stands in some way for the leproserie and whatever that means – the dark side of the equinox’ (CW, 136) implies his quest for reconciliation with ‘the dark side of the psyche’

92

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

as a quest for death, an interpretation urged obliquely again in Suzanne’s question ‘do you know who you . . . made love to?’ (CW, 142). The youthful Louise’s prefiguring of Sanders’ deadly return to the arms of Suzanne suggests the priority of the death instinct over the erotic life which, as I shall discuss in Chapter Three, Jean Laplanche has read in the late Freud. Jeannette Baxter has seen The Crystal World as resonating with the work of Aimé Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, and Kwame Nkrumah in articulating ‘a postwar contribution to the Surrealist legacy of anti- colonial poetics’ (Baxter, 39). In fact, close attention to Frantz Fanon’s postcolonial critique of psychoanalysis opens up the problematic nature of Ballard’s representation of black subjects. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon proffers ‘a psychoanalytical interpretation of the black problem’ (Fanon, 4) which insists that European psychoanalysis does not and cannot conceptualize the workings of the Black psyche: ‘Whenever I have read a psychoanalytic work [. . .] I have been struck by the disparity between the corresponding schemas and the reality that the Negro presents’ (Fanon, 116); ‘Freud and Adler and even the cosmic Jung did not think of the Negro in all their investigations’ (Fanon, 117); ‘Like it or not, the Oedipus complex is far from coming into being among Negroes’ (Fanon, 117). Fanon’s suggestion in ‘The Negro and Psychopathology’, drawing on Jungian terminology, is that only a ‘collective unconscious’ containing repressed Erlebnisse (Fanon, 112) can explain the fact that ‘A normal Negro child, having grown up within a normal family, will become abnormal on the slightest contact with the white world’ (Fanon, 111); he emphasizes the ‘traumatism’ associated with the schooling and socialization of the Black colonial subject (Fanon, 115), claiming that ‘every affective erethism in an Antillean is the product of his cultural situation’ (Fanon, 118). Nigel C. Gibson has usefully interpreted Black Skin, White Masks as ‘not simply about making sense of European representations of Blackness. Its thesis is to aid the disalienation of the Black, who has internalised the racial gaze of the White Other, which is expressed most commonly as “an inferiority complex”’ (Gibson, 42). Dealing with ‘The Negro and Psychopathology’, Gibson stresses Fanon’s insistence that when ‘the question of race is introduced one has to move from the individual to the social and from the unconscious to the conscious’ (Gibson, 43), and quotes Fanon’s assertion that if the black man has an inferiority complex it arises largely from economic factors (Gibson, 43). For Gibson, Fanon’s critique of psychoanalysis is experiential and social: Neither neurosis nor the Oedipus complex are basic elements of human reality, but Fanon’s departure from Freud and Lacan is not only based on

Unconscious Catastrophes

93

cultural relativism. His phenomenological view of culture, as it reflects lived experience, underwrites his critique of the Oedipus complex. [. . .] Fanon’s critique of the Oedipus complex derives from “his determination to explain human psychology within its essential socio-historical coordinates,” and thus ahistorical psychological perspectives have no place in the Fanonian conception of culture and personality. (Gibson, 45) Gibson also offers a useful discussion of Fanon’s use of Jung. ‘Critical of the importance of the unconscious in a study of the Antillean,’ says Gibson, ‘Fanon was nevertheless willing to embrace Jung’s conception of the “collective unconscious,” which for the Antillean was European’ (Gibson, 47). In Gibson’s reading, ‘Embracing the Other’s Manichaean standpoint, the Antillean partakes in the same collective unconscious as the European. The Antillean does not simply mimic the European’s collective unconscious, but embraces it as their own’; as a consequence ‘The shameful desires projected onto the black, which lie dormant in the remotest depths of the European unconscious, have to be doubly repressed’ (Gibson, 47). As Gibson reads Fanon’s sense of it, ‘Rather than a set of genes, the collective unconscious is “simply the prejudices, myths, collective attitudes of a given group”’ (Gibson, 49). The collective unconscious is, therefore, ‘cultural, and thus anyone – whatever color – who has breathed the racism of Europe and “assimilated the collective unconscious of that Europe, will be able, if he stands outside himself, to express only his hatred of the black”’ (Gibson, 49). Gibson’s useful exegesis of Fanon’s critique of psychoanalysis in light of colonial Black experience opens up questions about the representation of Africa and Africans in The Crystal World . Gibson’s reading of Fanon as implying the Black colonial subject’s participation in a European collective unconscious containing prejudicial attitudes towards the Black underlines the extent to which The Crystal World almost entirely disregards Black subjectivity. Kagwa, the ‘educated African’ with whom Sanders briefly interacts (CW, 112), first appears as ‘one darker twin’ among Sanders’ reflections in a crystallized mirror, implying the African subject as perilous Jungian shadow, no more than a facet of the white psyche (CW, 93). Although Kagwa’s humanity is later acknowledged in his brief conversation with Sanders (CW, 111–12) the majority of roles and representations accorded to Africans in The Crystal World are shadow-roles, as when two ‘natives’ (CW, 119) are seen as ‘shadowy replicas of themselves, replicas of illuminated originals in some distant land at the source of the petrified river’ (CW, 120) – either this is a symptom of Sanders’ dissociation or

94

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

African blacks are reduced here to ancillary spear- carriers in the drama, insubstantial simulacra of some absent Platonic ideal. Where Baxter has argued for the reference of The Crystal World to contemporary African political events, I stress the limited attention paid to the social and economic realities of the novel’s West African setting. With its focus on the re- assimilation by a European subjectivity (Sanders) of unconscious material projected onto the African landscape, The Crystal World can be seen precisely as offering what Gibson calls an ‘ahistorical psychological’ perspective at odds with the ‘sociodiagnostic’ emphasis of Fanon’s work. In fact, the novel can be read as projecting on to a fictional landscape only nominally denoted as African a specifically European collective unconscious containing particular ‘prejudices, myths, collective attitudes’ regarding Africa, not least of which is the identification of Africa as a space of the unconscious lisible in texts such as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Although it is perhaps in the figures of ‘Big Caesar’ and ‘Jomo’ in The Drowned World that Ballard’s fiction most troublingly approaches the racism of the Tarzan comics Fanon evokes in which ‘the Bad Man, the savage are always symbolized by Negroes’, The Crystal World ’s bestial representations of Thorensen’s mulatto henchman (CW, 101–2) also resonate with Fanon’s discussion of the negro as ‘phobogenic object, a stimulus to anxiety’ (Fanon, 117). Hence, while in its token acknowledgement of the African subject’s experience through the figure of Kagwa The Crystal World perhaps attempts to redress the worst stereotyping of The Drowned World ’s representations, the novel, with its heavy thematic reliance on Manichean divisions between black and white, dark and light, does not entirely break free of what Fanon sees as the racism of the European collective imaginary.

Chapter 3

Insane Modernities

The Atrocity Exhibition The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) represents the psychology of the late 1960s in terms of madness or mental breakdown. While it still mobilizes Freudian theory, this collection of short experimental pieces, first published throughout the late 1960s, does so as part of a far wider range of psychological and psychiatric reference. The slogan ‘Dissociation: Who laughed at Nagasaki?’ (AE , 3) recodes the clinical term to imply a disjunctive psychological reaction engendered by traumatic historical events, while the alternate selves of Ballard’s protean protagonist (hereafter referred to as Traven except where reference is to the alternate name used in a particular story), recall the most prominent of the dissociative group of disorders, Dissociative Identity Disorder, of which the core phenomenology is ‘the existence of distinct personality states that take turns being in executive control of the body and are separated by varying degrees of amnesia’ (Ross, 14). Still more significant for Atrocity than dissociation is a group of conditions with which it is often confused – schizophrenia. The term (meaning ‘split mind’) was coined by Eugen Bleuler as a response to Emil Kraepelin’s earlier diagnostic category of dementia praecox (Frith and Johnstone, 30); both terms occur in Atrocity (AE 103, 129), and Ballard’s text is notable for the comparability of its representations of the Traven character’s experience to contemporary clinical accounts of schizophrenia, for example F.J. Fish’s 1962 description, which draws extensively on Bleuler. Fish defines the main symptoms of the condition in terms of ‘disorders of thought, perception, emotion, and motor behaviour’, all of which Traven can be seen to exhibit in Atrocity (Fish, 18); Fish’s summary of Bleuler stresses as central to schizophrenia a ‘disorder of association’ leading to ‘a changeableness and lack of clarity in the concepts which are falsely constructed by condensation, displacement and symbolism’ (Fish, 19), a symptomatology strongly associable with the compacted and irrationally symbolic fantasy images Traven entertains. Private fantasy and an overinclusiveness of thinking are also stressed in Fish’s summary of schizophrenia

96

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

and characterize Traven’s behaviour (Fish, 19–20); paranoia, the presumable basis of Traven’s bizarre imaginary systems, is additionally associated with the schizophrenic group of disorders (Fish, 77–91). Besides conventional contemporary accounts of schizophrenia, Atrocity seems to resonate with R.D. Laing’s fashionable and controversial approach to schizophrenic experience during the 1960s. Laing’s post-Freudian, existential emphasis on the normal alienation of most contemporary human beings from their own experience chimes with Atrocity’s arguments about the death of affect or feeling and the need for the true significance of the contemporary landscape to be deciphered in pseudo-Freudian terms (Politics, 22). His polemical conception of modernity as mad and of consensual reality as a ‘collusive madness’ is reminiscent of the text’s image of the participation of Western media audiences in the Vietnam War as the expression of a shared sexual psychopathology. Traven’s schizophrenic thinking intensifies in each of Atrocity’s narratives to the point of frank psychosis. Morgan, McKenzie and Fearon cite Wing’s definition of a psychotic state as ‘one characterised by delusions or hallucinations, in which the individual is unable to differentiate his grossly abnormal thought processes from external reality and remains unaware of this deficiency’; psychotic symptoms, they state, ‘can occur in a range of disorders [. . .] including schizophrenia spectrum disorders, affective disorders, a range of brief psychotic disorders and grief reactions’ (Morgan, McKenzie and Fearon, 1). Atrocity simulates multiple such hallucinatory delusions on the part of its central character, for example in Travis’ perception of an interlocutor that ‘For some reason the planes of his face failed to intersect’ (AE , 2) or the unexplained appearance of totemic individuals (AE , 43). Traven’s experiences also resonate with the psychotic symptoms of ‘heightened awareness, intensification of sensory experience, alteration in the sense of self, externalization of conflict, and invasion of perceptual and cognitive modalities’ to whose delineation by Bowers Peter Buckley refers (Buckley, xiii). Attention to modern clinically oriented introductions to schizophrenia and psychosis encourages contemplation of the ethics of Atrocity’s simulations of mental illness. In contrast to the therapeutic concerns of clinical writers, Atrocity has little interest in Traven as a holistically conceived human individual whose psychosis has a personal aetiology; his trauma are historical, the disorienting effect of mass-mediated images of Vietnam and the public distress following JFK’s assassination – his is individual psychosis as psycho-historico- social symptom rather than personal experience, his madness a metaphor for the overload imposed on the contemporary subject by the technological landscape rather than the investigation of a specific human character.

Insane Modernities

97

The specifically contemporary psychosis which Atrocity evokes is intimately connected to the text’s preoccupation with the psychological impacts of the 1960s electronic media explosion. These impacts did not go unexplored by contemporary institutional psychology, and Atrocity’s bizarre experiments regarding ‘Sexual stimulation by newsreel atrocity films’ (AE , 147) can be historicized as a hyperbolic satire on the contemporary ‘media- effects’ tradition in psychology as described by media psychologist David Giles (Giles, 19); the text’s surreal claim of the relation between Elizabeth Taylor and her audiences that ‘The planes of their lives interlocked at oblique angles, fragments of personal myths fusing with the commercial cosmologies’ (AE , 13) and the notion that ‘The presiding deity of their lives the film actress provided a set of operating formulae for their passage through consciousness’ (AE , 13) anticipate discussions of the ‘parasocial interaction’ of viewers with media figures (Giles 188–9) and of ‘parallels between fan behaviour and religious devotion’ (Giles 198–9). There is also a link here to the work of a foundational figure in media psychology, pop- sociologist Marshall McLuhan, whose Understanding Media (1964) saw electronic media as an extension of the human nervous system causing a virtual contraction or ‘implosion’ of the world, initiating an ‘Age of Anxiety’ in which the subject felt compelled to participate personally in wider global events (McLuhan, 4–5). For McLuhan, electronic media create a situation where humans have effectively ‘extended our central nervous system in a global embrace’, an extension unavoidably affecting ‘the whole psychic and social complex’ (McLuhan, 11); subjects in the age of electronic media ‘actually live mythically and integrally, as it were, but we continue to think in the old, fragmented space and time patterns of the pre- electric age’ (McLuhan, 12). Now that ‘our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us’ we ‘necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner’ (McLuhan, 12). Traven’s frenetic activities in Atrocity can be seen precisely as responses to intense anxiety provoked by the implosion of traumatic public events into his consciousness, manic attempts to expiate or process traumas – the deaths of Kennedy and Monroe, the Apollo disaster – experienced by the media consumer as events of mythic force and direct personal significance. Where Roger Luckhurst astutely reads Atrocity’s imagistic repetitions as evoking ‘media as the embodiment of the death drive, the compulsion to repeat’ (Angle, 95), I stress here an alternative Freudian reading reinforcing

98

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

my sense of Atrocity as implicating media in the psychosis of Traven as exemplary modern subject. Ballard’s 1990 para-textual annotations to Atrocity offer a fascinating quasi- Freudian question regarding the psychological impact of television viewing: ‘What actually happens on the level of our unconscious minds when, within minutes on the same TV screen, a prime minister is assassinated, an actress makes love, an injured child is carried from a car crash?’ (AE , 145). Media content is here figured in terms suggestive of Freudian dream- condensation; channel- surfing generates an experience analogous to Freudian primary process, that process ‘characteristic of the unconscious system’ in which ‘psychical energy flows freely, passing unhindered, by means of the mechanisms of condensation and displacement, from one idea to another’ and which tend to ‘completely recathect the ideas attached to those satisfying experiences which are at the root of unconscious wishes’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 339). If electronic media, in Ballard’s suggestive evocation, can themselves simulate the condensed, irrational thought-processes characteristic of the unconscious, what is the implication for the actual personal unconscious of the viewer who consumes these primal images of aggression and desire as a staple of their mundane experience? Atrocity’s implicit answer is that there will be a psychotic reaction. As Laplanche and Pontalis describe it, Freud’s mature conception of psychosis offers a model based around Freud’s second theory of the psychical apparatus in which ‘a rupture between ego and reality occurs straight away, leaving the ego under the sway of the id; then, at a second stage – that of the onset of delusions – the ego is supposed to reconstruct a new reality in accordance with the desires of the id’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 372). This model – rupture between ego and reality leading to fabrication of artificial reality fulfilling id- desires – speaks to Traven’s hallucinatory or psychotic experiences, as when he seemingly hallucinates Elizabeth Taylor’s image in the camouflage patterning of a military complex (AE , 3). The similarly disturbing surrealist obscenity of Travis’ identification of the ‘balconies of the Hilton Hotel’ with the ‘lost gill- slits of the dying film actress, Elizabeth Taylor’ (AE , 9) recalls the domination of primary process by the mechanisms of ‘displacement, [. . .] whereby an often apparently insignificant idea comes to be invested with all the psychical value, depth of meaning and intensity originally attributed to another one’ and ‘condensation, a process which enables all the meanings in several chains of association to converge on a single idea standing at their point of intersection’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 339). What is at stake in these hallucinatory identifications is precisely the ‘overdetermination of the symptom’ typical of primary process

Insane Modernities

99

(Laplanche and Pontalis, 339); Atrocity simulates psychotic manifestations provoked by a disorienting overload of mediated images in ways profoundly related to Freud’s clinical descriptions of pathological mental function. The psychotic regressions triggered in Traven and his alter- egos by the sensory overload of contemporary life enact new permutations of the regressive subversion of the self suggested in many of Ballard’s previous fictions: In conclusion, it seems that Travis’ extreme sensitivity to the volumes and geometry of the world around him, and their immediate translation into psychological terms, may reflect a belated attempt to return to a symmetrical world, one that will recapture the perfect symmetry of the blastosphere, and the acceptance of the ‘Mythology of the Amniotic Return’. In his mind World War III represents the final self- destruction and imbalance of an asymmetric world. (AE , 9) ‘The author,’ Dr Nathan wrote, ‘has found that the patient forms a distinctive type of object relation based on a perpetual and irresistible desire to merge with the object in an undifferentiated mass. Although psychoanalysis cannot reach the primary archaic mechanism of “rapprochement” it can deal with the neurotic superstructure, guiding the patient towards the choice of stable and worthwhile objects. In the case under consideration the previous career of the patient as a military pilot should be noted, and the unconscious role of thermonuclear weapons in bringing about the total fusion and non- differentiation of all matter. [. . .]’ (AE , 45–6) Ballard’s thematic of Freudian uterine return here finds new manifestations through a Surrealist-style redeployment of contemporary scientific and technological terms. Travis’ wish for a return to perfect symmetry and his implied impulsion towards self- destructive escape from a state of imbalance suggests the impulsion towards a removal of tensions Freud associates with the death instinct, the perfect roundness of the blastosphere suggesting the ‘psychic zero’ which recurs in Ballard’s work. Travis’ ‘attempt to return to a symmetrical world’ and ‘desire to merge with the object in an undifferentiated mass’ also bears comparison to Jacques Lacan’s reconceptualization of the Freudian death drive so as to posit human existence as permeated by a ‘malaise ’ structurally inherent to it (Ragland, 92). For Lacan, existence within language ‘implicitly imposes a “no” (a limit, or “kind” of law) on the immediacy of satisfaction’, so that language ‘serves as a structure of alienation from jouissance ’ and ‘introduces a certain division

100

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

in the subject’, meaning ‘humans are forever after “thrown” by the experience of trying to recuperate forbidden jouissance ’ (Ragland, 86) – jouissance being Lacan’s version of Freudian libido or ‘the essence or quality that gives one’s life its value’ (Ragland, 87). In Ragland’s account Lacan argued that ‘being is painful because it depends on meaning derived from the effects of loss, organized as they are in an imaginary nexus of images and fantasies of plenitude’; the ‘permanent flaw or malaise ’ of the human being ‘begins with the loss of the primary object’, that is, of ‘the illusion of a primordial oneness between child and mother’ (Ragland, 93, 103, 89). The examples from ‘The Lost Symmetry of the Blastosphere’ and ‘PreUterine Claims’ above present examples of a comparable sense of lack resulting from loss of a ‘primordial oneness’, whether the symmetry of the zygotic blastosphere or the undifferentiated mass into which Travis is said to want to merge. Fundamentally alienated by his existence not within language but within space and time itself, Travis anticipates apocalypse as the healing of a cut or split in himself, asserting the dominance over reality of jouissance, ‘whose goal is to maintain consistency in an effort to screen out encounters with loss and lack’ (Ragland, 88), precisely through psychosis, ‘the true death state where jouissance prevails over the law’ (Ragland, 104). Atrocity’s representations of Travis’ insanity translate Freud’s theorization of psychosis as regression into the contemporary scientific lexes of biology and thermonuclear war in a manner suggesting sympathies with the complex extension of Freudian theory by Lacan.

Interpretation Atrocity’s is a peculiarly interpretative madness. The text thematizes the acts of irrational interpretation characteristic of paranoia, as recent critics have been swift to identify, Luckhurst suggestively evoking Lacan’s work on the subject and Baxter exploring the relevance of Salvador Dalí’s paranoiaccritical method to Traven’s irrational interpretations. Ballard’s authorial note of 2001, with its injunction to a non-linear associational approach on the part of the reader, underlines how this maddening text encourages precisely a paranoiac mode of reading at the level of its unconventional structure. I am concerned here however specifically with how attention to Freudian theorizations of paranoia can open productive readings of the collection. Laplanche and Pontalis define Freudian paranoia as ‘Chronic psychosis characterized by more or less systematised delusion, with a predominance of ideas of reference but with no weakening of the intellect and,

Insane Modernities

101

generally speaking, no tendency towards deterioration’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 296); they stress that ‘paranoia is defined in psychoanalysis, whatever the variations in its delusional modes, as a defence against homosexuality’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 297). While elements of Atrocity allude to homoerotic relations, the text sidelines this strict Freudian sense of paranoiac aetiology to stress systematic delusion as an attempt to make sense of the traumatizing realities of the 1960s communications landscape. In ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ Travis will ‘attempt to relate his wife’s body, with its familiar geometry, to that of the film actress, quantifying their identities to the point where they became fused with the elements of time and landscape’ (AE , 13); he will assume ‘the postures of the film actress, assuaging his past dreams and anxieties in the dune-like fragments of her body’ (AE , 14). In ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’ Trabert constructs ‘a mobilepsycho- drama which recapitulates the Apollo disaster in terms of both Dealey Plaza and the experimental car crashes examined so obsessively by Nader’ in order ‘presumably through a cathartic collision’ to ‘reintegrate space and so liberate the three men in the capsule’ (AE , 73), while in ‘The Assassination Weapon’ Webster comments that Traven is ‘trying to build bridges between things [. . .] to kill Kennedy again, but in a way that makes sense’ (AE , 50). These violent, psychotic attempts at sense-making activity can be understood in terms of Freud’s claim in ‘Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia’, based on an account by Judge Daniel Schreber, that ‘The delusional formation, which we take to be the pathological product, is in reality an attempt at recovery, a process of reconstruction’ which is never wholly successful (XII, 71). The insane activities of Ballard’s protagonists are doomed, pathological attempts to make sense of a disorienting, traumatizing contemporary; as such, they also resonate with Buckley’s discussion of the psychotic’s ‘sudden “understanding” of the “meaning” of the experience’, a sense of ‘noesis’ ‘often accompanied by a state of exultation and a feeling of being in direct communication with God’ (Buckley, xxvi): ‘For Travis, the ascension of his wife’s body above the target area, exploding madonna of the weapons range, was a celebration of the intervals through which he perceived the surrounding continuum of time and space’ (AE , 13). The text’s simulation of psychotic noesis finds further resonance in R.D. Laing’s sense of the existential meaningfulness of schizophrenic delusion, his suggestion of schizophrenia as ‘a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation’ (Politics, 95). For Freud the ‘most striking characteristic of symptom-formation in paranoia’ is projection, in which an ‘internal perception is suppressed, and, instead, its content, after undergoing a certain kind of distortion, enters

102

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

consciousness in the form of an external perception’ (XII, 66). Paranoiac fantasies of catastrophe are instances of projection, in which the ‘patient has withdrawn from the people in his environment and from the external world generally the libidinal cathexis which he has hitherto directed on to them’; the patient’s apocalyptic intimation ‘is the projection of this internal catastrophe; his subjective world has come to an end since his withdrawal of his love from it’ (XII, 70). Traven’s symbolic interpretation of World War III as ‘the final self- destruction and imbalance of an asymmetric world’ (AE , 9) might potentially be read with reference to this formulation. However, Atrocity pushes beyond the quasi- clinical portrayal of paranoia into a simulation of the condition where the boundary between factuality and delusion dissolves. Mental patients in ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ are suspected of intuiting ‘some seismic upheaval in the minds of their doctors and nurses’ (AE , 1), a formulation which reads their artistic representations of apocalypse not merely as reflective of their own internal catastrophes but as sensitized predictions of a wider social psychosis. The text zeroes in on the catastrophic dimension in modernity, car crashes, genocidal wars, space disasters, assassinations, in such a way as to destabilize the distinction between subjective and objective catastrophe. Inner and outer catastrophe seem simultaneous: which came first – is the assassination of JFK the projective symptom of some modern mass psychopathology or just an external cue to which the mass psyche offers a psychotic response? Amid its simulation of a paranoiac overproduction of meaning, of what Baudrillard might call a ‘vertigo of interpretation’ (Simulacra , 175), Atrocity also gestures, with appropriately indeterminate half- seriousness, towards a conception of psychoanalysis as enabling innovative and revealing new readings of contemporary culture. Ballard frequently quoted in his nonfiction Dalí’s assertion that ‘after Freud’s explorations within the psyche it is now the outer world which will have to be eroticized and quantified’ (User’s Guide , 88). In line with this trope, Atrocity purports to mobilize psychoanalysis as a tool for interpreting the landscape of modernity, reading latent or unconscious logics into manifest technologized surroundings: Apart from its manifest function, redefining the elements of space and time in terms of our most potent consumer durable, the car crash may be perceived unconsciously as a fertilizing rather than a destructive event – a liberation of sexual energy – mediating the sexuality of those who have died with an intensity impossible in any other form [. . .]. (AE , 26–7) ‘Planes intersect: on one level, the tragedies of Cape Kennedy and Vietnam serialized on billboards, random deaths mimetized in the

Insane Modernities

103

experimental auto- disasters of Nader and his co-workers. Their precise role in the unconscious merits further scrutiny, by the way; they may in fact play very different parts from the ones we assign them. On another level, the immediate personal environment [. . .]. On a third level, the inner world of the psyche. Where these planes intersect, images are born, some kind of valid reality begins to assert itself.’ (AE , 72) In a strikingly free adaptation of Freud’s technique for deciphering the latent meaning of the dream from its manifest content, Atrocity’s Dr Nathan claims to apply it to the physical world of modernity, arriving at a reading of the car crash as sexual discharge; his second pronouncement here, meanwhile, applies the interpretative move from manifest to latent meaning specifically to the simulacral world of media imagery. The ‘Planes intersect’ passage instantiates the ‘Marriage of Freud and Euclid’ posited elsewhere in the text (AE , 118), a notional fusion of sciences dealing respectively with the subjective and objective dimensions of human life. The concept of a psychoanalysis of space such as Atrocity here envisages is interrogated by Henri Lefebvre, who points out the inevitably partial and incomplete nature of psychoanalysis as a system for understanding space and suggests that the ‘pathology of space’ which such a concept may be taken to imply leads logically to a nihilistic sense of ‘society as a whole and ‘man’ as a social being’ as ‘sicknesses of nature’ – a nihilism of which Ballard’s text, with its contemplation of ‘the human organism’ as ‘an atrocity exhibition’ (AE , 9) could certainly at least be accused (Lefebvre, 242, 99). Nathan’s attempts to psychoanalyze his environment offer a provoking new strategy for the critique of modernity in the tradition of Surrealist aesthetics while simultaneously pushing the very interpretative claims of psychoanalysis itself to absurd, near satirical extremes.

Sexuality Atrocity may problematize interpretation through its depiction of the deranging overproliferation of knowledges characteristic of the postmodern moment, yet its satirical power derives to a considerable extent from its ironic emulation of the hermeneutic techniques of psychoanalysis. In particular, the collection mobilizes Freud’s discussions of polymorphously perverse sexuality to generate avant-garde reinterpretations of the roles of public events and personalities in contemporary mass psychology. ‘Love and Napalm: Export USA’ envisages experiments and surveys in which exposure to media coverage of the Vietnam conflict is found to have benefits for the psychosexual health

104

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

of a variety of subjects: exposure to ‘TV newsreel films depicting the torture of Viet Cong’, for example, leads to ‘a marked increase in the intensity of sexual activity [. . .] with particular emphasis on perverse oral and ano-genital modes’ (AE , 147). As in Nathan’s application of Freud’s distinction between latent and manifest contents of the dream to contemporary reality, ‘atrocity films’ (AE , 147) are found to have an impact on sexual behaviour reflecting the ‘latent sexual character of the war’ (AE , 149). The starting point for ‘Love and Napalm’’s satirical indictment of the media viewer’s libidinal complicity with the violence of Vietnam is Freud’s assumption in his ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’ that ‘a disposition to the perversions is an original and universal disposition of the human sexual instinct’ (VII, 231); Ballard’s experimental subjects’ fantasies, with their emphasis on ‘perverse oral and ano-genital modes’, imply war footage as enabling their perverse ‘regression to an earlier fixation of libido’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 307), specifically those of the oral and anal- sadistic stages which for Freud are normal stages in infantile sexual development (VII, 198). Freud defines perversions as ‘sexual activities which either (a) extend, in an anatomical sense, beyond the regions of the body that are designed for sexual union, or (b) linger over the intermediate relations to the sexual object’ normally ‘traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim’ (VII, 150). While ‘No healthy person [. . .] can fail to make some addition that might be called perverse to the normal sexual aim’ and it is ‘inappropriate [. . .] to use the word perversion as a term of reproach’ (VII, 160), for Freud a perversion characterized by exclusiveness and fi xation can normally be regarded as ‘a pathological symptom’ (VII, 161). Perversions denote a failure of the integration of component instincts which takes place at puberty in normal development; they are ‘on the one hand inhibitions, and on the other hand dissociations, of normal development’ (VII, 231); as Laplanche and Pontalis discuss, Freud’s insistence on the genital organization as the ultimate goal in individual sexual development means that his definition of perversion ultimately hinges on problematically normative assumptions (Laplanche and Pontalis, 308–9). ‘Love and Napalm’ twists the Freudian acceptance of a degree of perversity as normal for a ‘healthy’ subject satirically into a deadpan pseudo- scientific routine making the deliberately provocative suggestion that voyeuristic sexual responses to Vietnam atrocity footage should be accepted as characteristic of healthy human psychological function: Vietnam and sexual polymorphism of individualized relationships of a physical character. The need for more polymorphic roles has been

Insane Modernities

105

demonstrated by television and news media. [. . .] The Vietnam war has offered a focus for a wide range of polymorphic sexual impulses, and also a means by which the United States has re- established a positive psychosexual relationship with the external world. (AE , 148) For Freud all human beings are polymorphously perverse; a ‘disposition to perversions of every kind is a general and fundamental human characteristic’, although in his patriarchal conception this disposition is most fully expressed in certain ‘uncultivated’ subjects such as children and ‘women who are prostitutes’ (VII, 191). ‘Love and Napalm’’s vision of mediated images of the Vietnam War as foci for polymorphously perverse fantasy extrapolates the post-Freudian logic of 1960s sexual liberation, with its embrace of the polyperverse, into satirically hyperbolic obscenity: The latent sexual character of the war. All political and military explanations fail to provide a rationale for the war’s extended duration. In its manifest phase the war can be seen as a limited military confrontation with strong audience participation via TV and news media, satisfying low-threshold fantasies of violence and aggression. Tests confirm that the war has also served a latent role of strongly polymorphic character. Endless-loop combat and atrocity newsreels were intercut with material of genital, axillary, buccal and anal character. The expressed faecal matter of execution sequences was found to have a particular fascination for middle-income housewives. Prolonged exposure to these films may exercise a beneficial effect on the toilet training and psychosexual development of the present infant generation. (AE , 149) Again here Ballard interprets public events as capable of decoding by analogy with the process of dream interpretation, and once again war is seen as latently appealing to the inherent polyperversity of the mass audience. References to ‘the toilet training and psychosexual development of the present infant generation’ evoke the ‘Three Essays’ focus on infantile sexuality and the complex processes of child sexual development, particularly the anal stage (VII, 186, 198); the bizarre suggestion that combat and atrocity newsreels can contribute to the successful completion of these processes adds a peculiar humour and psychosexual pathos to Ballard’s aggressively offensive satirical gambit. Controversial in its own time, Freud’s theory of infantile sexuality is here the raw material for an extreme ironic assault on the broader moral perversity of contemporary humanity and the sadisticvoyeuristic dangers of media war coverage. ‘Love and Napalm’’s assertion

106

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

that ‘it is only in terms of a psychosexual module such as provided by the Vietnam war that the United States can enter into a relationship with the world generally characterized by the term “love”’ (AE , 151), that a nation’s military aggression might unconsciously constitute its means of loving relation to the world, recalls the complex imbrication of erotic and aggressive drives and loving and hating feelings discussed in Freud’s ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’ with which Ballard continued his dialogue in Crash (1973). Freudian conceptions of psychosexual development are also a vital context for the controversial ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’. Here, ‘Powerful erotic fantasies of an anal- sadistic character surrounded the image of the Presidential contender’ (AE , 165); ‘The preferred mode of entry overwhelmingly proved to be the rectal’ (AE , 166); ‘The profound anality of the Presidential contender may be expected to dominate the United States in the coming years. By contrast the late J.F. Kennedy remained the prototype of the oral object, usually conceived in pre-pubertal terms’ (AE , 168). The anal- sadistic stage is one of Freud’s infantile pre- genital stages (VII, 198); ‘Freud’s second stage of libidinal development, occurring approximately between the ages of two and four’, the stage ‘is characterised by an organisation of the libido under the primacy of the anal erotogenic zone’; the object-relationship at this period ‘is invested with meanings having to do with the function of defecation (expulsion/retention) and with the symbolic value of faeces. The anal- sadistic stage sees the strengthening of sado-masochism in correlation with the development of muscular control’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 35). In ‘Character and Anal Erotism’ Freud ‘linked character-traits surviving in the adult – the triad constituted by orderliness, parsimony and obstinacy – with anal erotism in the child’; in later versions of the ‘Three Essays’ ‘the anal stage appears as one of the pre- genital organisations lying between the oral organisation and the phallic one’, being ‘the first stage in which there is a polarity between activity and passivity: Freud has activity coincide with sadism and passivity with anal erotism, assigning distinct sources to each of the corresponding component instincts’; these are ‘the musculature (for the instinct to master) and the anal mucous membrane ’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 35). The suggestion regarding the relationship between sadism and anality is that ‘sadism, being essentially bipolar (since its self- contradictory aim is to destroy the object but also, by mastering it, to preserve it) corresponds par excellence to the biphasic functioning of the anal sphincter (evacuation/retention) and its control’; at the anal stage, ‘the symbolic meanings of giving and withholding are ascribed to the activity of defecation; in this connection, Freud

Insane Modernities

107

brings out the symbolic equation: faeces = gift = money’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 35–6). ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ conceives U.S. political figures in terms of Freudian jargon as figures in the unconscious fantasy of the viewing public; the ‘oral object’ mentioned in connection with Kennedy would presumably be the sexual object on which the subject is fi xated during the oral phase, during which the sexual aim ‘consists in the incorporation of the object’ (VII, 198). The notion of Reagan as invoking in the viewing subject perverse fantasies harking back to the anal- sadistic stage constitutes a satirical attack on the right-wing movie- actor-turned-politician, with attention to detailed Freudian definitions of the anal- sadistic stage elucidating satiric implications in terms of inflexible control, sadistic and masochistic impulses and questions of materialistic giving and withholding. If, for Tim Dean and Christopher Lane, despite psychoanalysis’ traditional pathologization of homosexuality, Freud’s vision of the inherent perversity of the human sex drive ‘effectively “queers” all sexuality’ (Dean and Lane, 5), then despite the definite potential for reading it as a homophobic slur the suggestion that ‘Motion-picture studies of Ronald Reagan reveal characteristic patterns of facial tonus and musculature associated with homo- erotic behaviour’ (AE , 166) might also be read as drawing on psychoanalysis to subvert and undermine Reagan’s image as reactionary apologist for American family values.

Crash Jean Baudrillard’s provocative anti-psychological reading of Ballard’s Crash in Simulacra and Simulations wilfully disregards the profound conceptual and textural influence of Freud’s writings on Ballard’s novel. For Baudrillard, Crash embodies no psychology, no sexuality, no depth of any kind; rather, it is an instance of his theory of hyperreality, where photography, technology and the body are all ‘simultaneous in a universe where the anticipation of the event coincides with its reproduction, indeed with its “real” production’ (Simulacra , 117). Ballard himself was evasive about Baudrillard’s reading, claiming he had ‘not really wanted to understand’ it (‘Response’, 329), and more than one critic has subsequently taken issue with Baudrillard. Nicholas Ruddick suggests Ballard’s attack is really directed at Baudrillard himself; retrieving the psychological reading Baudrillard rejects, Ruddick claims that far from exemplifying a state of ‘hyperreality’, Crash is concerned with ‘the liberation of a “deep” real’ associated with

108

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

the unconscious (Ruddick, 356, 357). For Ruddick this means that the text is ‘ultimately moral’; Ballard’s evasiveness regarding Baudrillard’s reading arises from the fascination Ballard shares with Baudrillard with the glittering surfaces of ‘the contemporary scene’ even as he seeks, unlike Baudrillard, to penetrate beyond them to the real (Ruddick, 359). Aidan Day, in a related equation of psychology and moral content in the novel, takes its ‘point’ to be an illustration of ‘the psychopathology, the mental and conceptual disease of the modern world’ (Day, 293, 292). Baudrillard’s anti-psychological reading of the novel is stimulating and productive, but, as Day has contended, it is not fully borne out by close attention to the text. For Baudrillard there is ‘No affect’ behind the characters’ actions, ‘no intimacy’ and ‘no [. . .] sensual value’ in the book’s sexual acts, which he claims are ‘nothing but signatures’ (Simulacra , 112, 116). While its prose style is bloodless, the events narrated with a clinical detachment, and the narratorial style dispassionate, however, Crash’s preoccupation with psychology is manifest; even Vaughan, the textual epitome of ‘detachment from any emotion or concern’ (C , 102), is seen as experiencing a ‘burst of anger’ (C , 219) shortly before his death, while a kind of sensibility operates in James’ romantic responsiveness to the ‘pathos’ of the technological environment (C , 68). Vaughan’s performativity of character might evoke a superseding of psychological depth-models in the context of a surfaceoriented postmodernity, yet even he manifests a ‘psychology’, even if of a completely new kind; James describes him as ‘a strange mixture of personal hauntedness, complete confinement in his own panicky universe, and yet at the same time open to all kinds of experiences from the outer world’ (C , 123). ‘Will modern technology provide us with hitherto undreamedof means for tapping our own psychopathologies?’, queries Ballard’s 1995 introduction to the novel; ‘Is there some deviant logic unfolding more powerful than that provided by reason?’ (C , 6). Crash is precisely concerned with the new psychological possibilities of the machine landscape, and in particular its irrational possibilities, the spectre of a ‘benevolent psychopathology’ (C , 138) which might enable human beings to reconnect with the alienating surfaces of their high-tech environment. Gasiorek convincingly offers the description of spectators at Vaughan’s death as ‘like a crowd drawn to an injured cripple whose deformed postures reveal the secret formulas of their minds and lives’ (C , 17) in support of his assertion that Vaughan’s behaviour is symptomatic of a ‘social unconscious’ ( J.G. Ballard , 88). Ballard’s simile translates Freud’s claim in the ‘Three Essays’ that ‘what the “pervert” compulsively does and the neurotic falls ill defending against, every human child both wishes and (within its infantile capacities) does’

Insane Modernities

109

(Davis, 37); Vaughan as pervert embodies the pathological enactment of unconscious desires hypothesized within the novel’s fiction as shared by the populace at large, a communal psychology investing automotive technology with all its most destructive and libidinal drives. Polyperversion and fetishism As in Atrocity, in Crash Ballard develops his bizarre fictional conceit from Freud’s theorizations of sexuality. The sexual activities the characters undertake in the novel are hyperbolic exaggerations of Freud’s definition of perversions as activities extending sexual pleasure beyond the genital regions or the act of coitus itself (VII, 150), pushing beyond the dedicated erotogenic zones of adult genitality to embrace the machine as an extension of sexual anatomy and deriving sexual excitement from a wide and imaginative range of ‘intermediate relations’ (VII, 150) pushed to the furthest degree of abstraction (the mechanical ballet of Vaughan and Catherine’s sex, for example). In the ‘Three Essays’ Freud discusses the ‘originally bisexual physical disposition’ of humankind (VII, 141), claiming that ‘without taking bisexuality into account I think it would scarcely be possible to arrive at an understanding of the sexual manifestations that are actually to be observed in men and women’ (VII, 220). As noted previously, the tendency to a ‘polymorphously perverse disposition’, a ‘disposition to perversions of every kind’, is, claims Freud, ‘a general and fundamental human characteristic’ (VII, 191). In Crash essential bisexuality is a given, stressed through the permutations of erotic relationships; Catherine’s relationships with James, Vaughan, Karen; James’ with Catherine, Helen, Gabrielle, Vaughan. Polymorphous perversity pervades the narrative, with every type of sexual intercourse Freud discusses represented – vaginal, oral, anal, fetishistic, even unsavoury hints at paedophilia. Post- Freudian uber-polyperversity here extends beyond the Sadean permutations of human sexuality to embrace relations between humans and machines and also imaginary as well as real relations, recalling Freud’s comments in the ‘Three Essays’ about the mental factor in the perversions, which resonate with both the exaggerated cerebralism of Crash’s sex and its intimations of a transcendental abjection: It is perhaps in connection precisely with the most repulsive perversions that the mental factor must be regarded as playing its largest part in the transformation of the mental instinct. It is impossible to deny that in their case a piece of mental work has been performed which [. . .] is the

110

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

equivalent of an idealization of the instinct. [. . .] The highest and the lowest are always closest to each other in the sphere of sexuality. (VII, 161–2) Parodying the post-Freudian 1960s ideal of a healthy, guilt-free polyperversity, Crash figures the alienated, affectless sexual freedoms of its characters as symptoms of modern cultural psychopathology. The emphasis is not, as often in Freud, on the aetiological explanation of ‘perversions’ as an aspect of personality, but on sexuality as the medium of psychological response to a machine landscape in which ‘the human inhabitants [. . .] no longer provided its sharpest pointers, its keys to the borderzones of identity’ (C , 48–9). Sexual fetishism is an obvious context for the imagined perversions represented in Crash . Freud’s hypothesis in ‘Fetishism’ is that the fetishist’s fetish- object ‘is a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and – for reasons familiar to us – does not want to give up’ (XXI, 152–3); the infantile male conviction of the penis as a universal human trait persists in the fetishist’s mind, and the fear of castration resulting from the sight of the female genital is defended against by a disavowal of the woman’s lack of a phallus and the substitution for it of the fetish- object (XXI, 154). Crash enacts a strange mutation of Freud’s theory in James’ relationship to Gabrielle’s body, his disappointment that her breast is not ‘a detachable latex structure’ (C , 177) and his discovery of her wounds as new substitutes for the genital zones. Where for Freud fetishism ‘saves the fetishist from becoming a homosexual’ (XXI, 154), James’ developing sexual interest in the car crash is coterminous with his developing fetishistic interest in the scars imprinted in Vaughan’s body (C , 150). The glossy surfaces of automotive technology become in Crash sites for the investment of a sexuality displaced from genitality; in contrast to Freud, however, apart from one passing comment about protagonist ‘James Ballard’’s relation to his mother (C , 180) the novel is remarkably uninterested in tracing the origins of James’ psychopathology to his infantile history; Ballard’s psychological focus here is not on tracing the psychosexual influence of the personal past but on speculatively exploring the psychosexual possibilities of the immediate future.

Drives Critics have repeatedly associated Crash with the theory of the death drive or death instinct elaborated in Freud’s late theory. Roger Luckhurst writes

Insane Modernities

111

of the novel as enacting a ‘literalization of the death drive, the fatal cathexis of the car crash as ambivalent symbol of the extent of alienation in the technological landscape’ (Angle , 124), while Andrzej Gasiorek argues the text ‘suggests that contemporary social existence is powered by the death- drive’ ( J. G. Ballard , 82) and speaks of its remorseless insistence on ‘the colonisation of the sex instinct by the death instinct’ ( J.G. Ballard , 97). Surprisingly in light of these critical identifications of late Freudian theory’s relevance to Crash , no critic has examined in detail its dialogue with the novel. Attention to Freud’s late developments of his theory of the instincts, with reference to their discussion by Jean Laplanche in Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, opens up some productive readings of Ballard’s narrative. Crash’s vision of the sudden extinction of crash- death as the ultimate sexual kick recalls Freud’s intimation in the final chapter of ‘Beyond’ that ‘The pleasure principle seems actually to serve the death instincts’ (XVIII, 63). Laplanche, in his chapter on the death drive, attempts further to unpick the nature of the relationship between pleasure principle and death instincts, arriving at the suggestion that ‘the pleasure principle, insofar as, throughout the text, it is posited as being of a piece with “its modification” as the reality principle, is henceforth situated on the side of constancy’, whereas ‘It is “its most radical form” or its “beyond ” which, as the Nirvana principle, reasserts the priority of the tendency towards absolute zero or the “death drive”’ (Life and Death , 117). The identification of the pleasure principle in its adaptive guise of the reality principle with a tendency towards constancy and of the death instinct with a ‘Nirvana principle’, a tendency towards ‘absolute zero’, derived from Laplanche’s tracing of the partly mathematical bases of Freud’s conceptual language, allows Laplanche to assert in closing that ‘the death drive is the very soul, the constitutive principle, of libidinal circulation’ (Life and Death , 124). The impulsion towards a reduction of tension to zero drives both Freud’s ‘greatest pleasure attainable by us’, sexual discharge (XVIII, 62), and, in its purest expression, the extinction of the organism itself. This would align the death-lust of the characters in Crash with the most radical implications of Freud’s essay as read by Laplanche, not merely Gasiorek’s ‘colonisation of the sexual instinct by the death instinct’ ( J.G. Ballard , 97) but the actual identity of the two, problematically collapsing Freud’s insistent theoretical dualism. Crash’s debt to ‘Beyond’ relates as much to the conception of trauma it expounds as to the death instinct. Freud developed this theory of trauma partly on the evidence of the ‘“traumatic neurosis”’ which ‘occurs after severe mechanical concussions, railway disasters and other accidents

112

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

involving a risk to life’, including the shell- shock prevalent in the aftermath of WWI (XVIII, 12). Ballard’s choice of the car crash as an image for twentieth- century violence keys in to this Freudian identification of a specifically mechanical violence as part of the evidential basis for his late theorization of trauma, while the novel’s obsessive fi xation with epidermal wounds, whether the blood-blister on the hand of Helen Remington’s dead husband (C , 20) or the gradually changing pattern of bruises on James Ballard’s chest after his crash (C , 28), inscribes on the physicality of its characters Freud’s image of trauma as a breach in the organism’s epidermal shield (XVIII, 31). James Ballard’s repeated returns to the site of his first car crash and his replacement of his wrecked car with another of the same exact model instantiate Freud’s ‘compulsion to repeat’ (XVIII, 23); reading James as a Freudian traumatic neurotic suggests his compulsive journeys as an attempt to ‘master the stimulus retrospectively’ (XVIII, 32) through the ‘psychical binding of traumatic impressions’ (XVIII, 33). Ballard’s novel is in fact traumatic in its very narrative organization, unfolding from an original collision-point (‘Vaughan died yesterday in his last car- crash’, C , 7) towards which it then inexorably, compulsively returns just as James’ attempts to bind the excitation of his traumatic crash initiate a morbidly compulsive repetition of the ecstatic moment of impact. The conventional interpretation of Crash with reference to ‘Beyond’’s theory of the death instinct expands further with attention to less frequently cited essays from Freud’s late period. Freud’s elaboration of the theory of instincts in ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’, for example, has many suggestive resonances for the novel. Vaughan, with his ‘discharging sexuality’ (C , 173), driven to a compulsive carnality which can only temporarily void ‘his sense of crisis’ (C , 165), embodies Freud’s sense of the nervous system as ‘an apparatus which has the function of getting rid of the stimuli that reach it, or of reducing them to the lowest possible level’ (XIV, 120). Freud’s sense of ‘instinct’ as ‘a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, as the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind’ as ‘a measure of the demand upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body’ (XIV, 121–2) has a vital resonance for Crash’s discussion of the imbrication of the imaginary in the corporeal. Freud’s claim that the sexual instincts ‘are numerous, emanate from a great variety of organic sources, act in the first instance independently of one another and only achieve a more or less complete synthesis at a late stage’ (XIV, 125) speaks powerfully to the decentring, ego- destructive, body- disintegrating sexuality of Ballard’s novel; Gabrielle’s collision with the crushed body of her

Insane Modernities

113

sports car transforms her into ‘a creature of free and perverse sexuality’ alive to ‘all the deviant possibilities of her sex’ (C , 99), reversing Freud’s process of genital integration to liberate the polymorphous possibilities of independent organic drives. Crash dramatizes Freud’s complex discussion in ‘Vicissitudes’ of sadismmasochism as a layering of successive modifications of the same instinct. For Freud sadism-masochism exemplifies the vicissitude he defines as reversal of instinctual aim, which he characterizes by a ‘turning round of an instinct upon the subject’s own self’ and a ‘transformation from activity to passivity’ (XIV, 127). He breaks this process down into three stages; that of sadism, which ‘consists in the exercise of violence or power upon some other person as object’, of the turning round upon the self, in which the ‘object is given up and replaced by the subject’s self’, and of masochism, in which an ‘extraneous person is once more sought as object’ but has to ‘take over the role of the subject’ due to the second stage’s transition ‘from an active to a passive instinctual aim’ (XIV, 127). However, rather than this being a simple polar transformation, it ‘never in fact involves the whole quota of the instinctual impulse’; the ‘earlier active direction of the instinct persists to some degree side by side with its later passive direction’ (XIV, 130). Freud uses the image of a ‘series of separate successive waves’ comparable to successive eruptions of lava to visualize the coexistence of different modifications of the instinct: We can then perhaps picture the first, original eruption of the instinct as proceeding in an unchanged form and undergoing no development at all. The next wave would be modified from the outset – being turned, for instance, from active to passive – and would then, with this new characteristic, be added to the earlier wave, and so on. (XIV, 131) Freud identifies this layering of instinctual modifications with the phenomenon of instinctual ambivalence (XIV, 131). Ballard’s novel evokes this anguished ambiguity, this compounding of a violent impulse with a turning round of violence upon the self, in images such as its description of Helen Remington repelling a sexual advance from James ‘as if about to tear her exposed breasts on this trap of glass and metal knives’ (C , 120). The novel also mobilizes Freud’s discussion of the inter-layered transformations of the scopophilic- exhibitionist instinct. This again is envisaged in terms of three stages; looking ‘as an activity directed towards an extraneous object’, a giving up of the object and ‘turning of the scopophilic instinct towards a part of the subject’s own body’, and the introduction of a

114

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

new subject ‘to whom one displays oneself in order to be looked at by him’ (XIV, 129). James Ballard’s intense scrutiny of his own body in the hospital (C , 28) and subsequent need to be observed by Vaughan in the act of sex (C , 120) recall these second and third stages in particular. Vaughan can in fact be said to assume towards James the role of the ‘extraneous person’ who takes over the role of the subject in both the masochistic and the exhibitionist stages; James’ relationship to Vaughan is predominantly one of cowed masochistic passivity in which Vaughan takes over the agency of the subject as both aggressor and watcher, although there are ways in which this relation is also reversed; Vaughan’s liaison with Catherine in the car wash depicts a complex interplay of scopophilic- exhibitionist and sadisticmasochistic tendencies, James looking on voyeuristically as Vaughan stakes a violent erotic claim on his wife (C , 160–4). Freud emphasizes of the ambivalent pairings of sadism-masochism and scopophilia- exhibitionism that ‘their activities are auto- erotic ; that is to say, the object is negligible in comparison with the organ which is their source, and as a rule coincides with that organ’ (XIV, 132). Facile puns aside, one might note the specifically auto- erotic nature of the instinctual permutations dramatized in Crash; the sexuality which is being envisioned is one primarily directed not outwards onto another individual as in Freud’s conception of normal adult sexuality but back into the separate organic origins of the particularized instinctual impulses, an involution of sexuality into the body itself, as with Gabrielle’s awakening to the possibilities of her body through her crash, ‘a fierce marriage pivoting on the fleshy points of her knees and pubis’ (C , 99). Crash might be said in fact to dramatize a regression towards the narcissistic auto- erotism discussed in ‘Vicissitudes’. In the discussion of the transformation of love into hate with which he closes the essay, Freud hypothesizes mental life as governed by ‘three polarities’, those of subject (ego) – object (external world), pleasure – unpleasure, and active – passive (XIV, 133). There is, says Freud, ‘a primal psychical situation in which two of them coincide’: originally, at the very beginning of mental life, the ego is cathected with instincts and is to some extent capable of satisfying them on itself. We call this condition ‘narcissism’ and this way of obtaining satisfaction ‘autoerotic’. At this time the external world is not cathected with interest [. . .] and is indifferent for purposes of satisfaction. During this period, therefore, the ego- subject coincides with what is pleasurable and the external world with what is indifferent. (XIV, 134- 5)

Insane Modernities

115

In Crash , Vaughan is clearly identified as a narcissistic figure, his compulsive masturbation implying a very literal sense of auto- erotism; however, all the characters can be seen to some degree as engaged in narcissistic, auto- erotic self- satisfaction; in the case of James and Vaughan particularly, the characters to whose inner lives the reader has the most access, this selfsatisfaction takes place through the medium of fantasy. Vaughan seems at times to embody Freud’s descriptions of later stages, such as the sadisticanal ‘urge for mastery, to which injury or annihilation of the object is a matter of indifference’ (XIV, 139), but his relationship to Elizabeth Taylor strongly recalls Freud’s discussion of the narcissistic ego’s introjection of pleasurable objects, while what James sees as his ultimate withdrawal ‘into his own skull’ (C , 16) suggests the resultant emergence of a ‘pleasure- ego’ for which ‘the external world is divided into a part is pleasurable, which it is incorporated into itself, and a remainder that is extraneous to it’, so that ‘the ego- subject coincides with pleasure, and the external world with unpleasure’ (XIV, 136). Consummating his narcissism in a suicidal motorway smash into a coachload of hapless tourists, Vaughan regresses to the level of the ‘primordial repudiation of the external world’ which is the narcissistic ego’s original relation to it (XIV, 139). Freud’s later revision of his theory of drives in ‘The Economic Problem in Masochism’ is also suggestive for Crash . In ‘The Economic Problem’, Freud recalls his hypothesis in the ‘Three Essays’ that the attainment of a certain level of intensity by non- sexual psychic processes may trigger sexual excitation ‘as a concomitant effect’; this process is dubbed ‘libidinal sympathetic excitation’ and hypothesized as providing the ‘physiological foundation’ for erotogenic masochism (XIX, 163). This idea could be seen to underlie Crash’s representations of the mechanical excitations to which the characters subject themselves and the capacity of ‘pain and unpleasure’ (XIX, 163) to arouse and revitalize them; for Vaughan, it is asserted, ‘each crashed car set off a tremor of excitement’ (C , 12). Freud divides masochism into three types: erotogenic, feminine, and moral; erotogenic masochism is seen as underlying the other two forms (XIX, 161). Starting from his late sense of the conflicts between libido and death instincts, Freud claims that the ‘libido has the task of making the destroying instinct innocuous, and it fulfils the task by diverting that instinct to a great extent outwards’, giving rise to destructive, dominating and sadistic impulses (XIX, 163). However, another portion of the death instinct ‘remains inside the organism and, with the help of the accompanying sexual excitation [. . .], becomes libidinally bound there. It is in this portion that we have to recognise the original, erotogenic masochism’ (XIX, 163–4). As such

116

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

‘the death instinct which is operative in the organism – primal sadism – is identical with masochism’, and after ‘the main portion of it has been transposed outwards onto objects’, there ‘remains inside, as a residuum of it, the erotogenic masochism proper, which on the one hand has become a component of the libido and, on the other, still has the self as its object’ (XIX, 164). Freud here redefines the sadism which is the first stage in sadismmasochism in ‘Instincts’ as primary masochism, whose projection outward initiates the three stages of the sadistic-masochistic transformation detailed in that essay. Primary masochism maps easily onto many of Crash’s representations; the assumption of human beings as inherently aroused by pain in consequence of the self- destructive drive at the basis of their existence contextualizes Vaughan’s ‘obsessions with the mysterious eroticism of wounds’ (C , 12) and the striking depiction of him deliberately slamming himself into the dashboard of James’ car (C , 192). Jean Laplanche’s reading of ‘Instincts’ and ‘The Economic Problem’ in his chapter ‘Aggressiveness and Sadomasochism’ offers further fascinating possibilities in terms of Crash’s dialogue with these essays. Laplanche’s identification as ‘the essential dimension of the affirmation of a death drive’ ‘the idea that the aggressiveness is first of all directed against the human subject and, as it were, stagnant within him, before being deflected toward the outside’, in other words Freud’s ‘thesis of “primary masochism”’ (Life and Death , 86) compounds our sense of ‘The Economic Problem’ as in key with Crash’s representations. Laplanche claims to show a continuity between the theses of primary masochism and the death drive which he claims entails a ‘double armature’ constituted by ‘the use of the notion of “propping” or anaclisis in the theory of sadomasochism’ and ‘the priority of the masochistic moment in the genesis of the sadomasochistic drive insofar as the latter is a sexual drive (and consequently a drive in the true sense of the Freudian Trieb)’ (Life and Death , 86). His argument that ‘the Freudian theory of “propping” should be used as the guiding scheme in understanding the problem of sadomasochism’ emphasises ‘the marginal genesis of sexuality and the genesis of sexuality in a moment of turning around upon the self’ (Life and Death , 87): Sexuality appears as a drive that can be isolated and observed only at the moment at which the nonsexual activity, the vital function, becomes detached from its natural object or loses it. For sexuality, it is the reflexive (selbst or auto-) moment that is constitutive: the moment of a turning back towards self, an ‘autoerotism’ in which the object has been replaced by a fantasy, by an object reflected within the subject. (Life and Death , 88)

Insane Modernities

117

This insistence on the turning round on the self as constitutive of sexuality is powerfully resonant with Crash , in which fantasy, sexuality, and auto- erotism are so intimately connected. Laplanche’s combination of his diagrammatizations of these three vicissitudes into ‘a three- dimensional model intended to bring into relief the existence of two different surfaces – self-preservation and sexuality – and to bring into play the process of propping as the line at which the two surfaces intersect’ (Life and Death , 95) is also suggestive, as it clearly sets out the way in which sexuality and self- annihilation can be identified with one another in Freudian theory, as in Ballard’s novel. Laplanche picks up on Freud’s emphasis on the transformation of selfaggression into reflexive masochism, ‘the genesis of reflexive masochism’ as ‘a turning round upon the self’ (Life and Death, 96), seeing this turning round either in terms of ‘domination or conquest of oneself’ (Life and Death, 97) or of ‘an internalization of the whole of the action on the psychical level [. . .] a fantasmatization’ (Life and Death, 97). Analysis of Freud’s essay ‘A Child is Being Beaten’ as an example of this leads him to conclude that ‘the fantasy, the unconscious, and sexuality in the form of masochistic excitation together emerge in a single movement’ (Life and Death, 100). The process of turning round ‘is not to be thought of only at the level of the content of the fantasy, but in the very movement of fantasmatization’ (Life and Death , 102): To shift to the reflexive is not only or even necessarily to give a reflexive content to the ‘sentence’ of the fantasy; it is also and above all to reflect the action, internalize it, make it enter into oneself as fantasy. To fantasize aggression is to turn it round upon oneself, to aggress oneself: such is the moment of autoerotism, in which the indissoluble bond between fantasy as such, sexuality, and the unconscious is confirmed. (Life and Death, 102) Laplanche’s emphasis is thus powerfully on fantasy as inherent to sexuality from the very moment of its constitution, and on sexuality as involving a masochistic turning round of aggression on the self. His reading of Freud is significantly meaningful for Crash , a novel above all concerned with fantasies of aggression; does the compulsive appeal of this most subversive and controversial of Ballard’s fictions arise, at least in part, from its offering the reader an intimation above all of auto- erotic self-aggression, the opportunity fantasmatically to turn aggression round upon him or herself? Whether or not this could be said to be true, Laplanche’s reading underlines the significance of fantasy as a key zone of conceptual exchange between the works of Ballard and Freud, and it is to a consideration of this that I now turn.

118

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

Fantasy Crash is a novel about fantasy. The Sadeian sexual fantasy-lives of its characters are a pre- eminent preoccupation of its narrative, and attention to the ways in which Freud conceptualized fantasy (or ‘phantasy’, which I use here to indicate a specifically Freudian sense of the word) provides significant perspectives on this important dimension of the text. In ‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’, Freud recapitulates his conception of the unconscious primary mental processes characterizing infantile life as dominated by the pleasure principle, tending to ‘strive towards gaining pleasure’ and draw back ‘from any event which might arouse unpleasure’ (XII, 219). Satisfaction in the primary processes is obtained ‘by means of hallucination’ (XII, 219). In time, however, the non- satisfaction of the infant’s internal needs leads to the surmounting of this hallucinatory satisfaction by a ‘new principle of mental functioning’ presenting ‘no longer what was agreeable but what was real’; the ‘reality principle ’ (XII, 219). Phantasy, for Freud, occupies a special position in relation to these two principles: With the introduction of the reality principle one species of thoughtactivity was split off; it was kept free from reality-testing and remained subordinated to the pleasure principle alone. This activity is phantasying, which begins already in children’s play, and later, continued as daydreaming, abandons dependence on real objects. (XII, 222) Where Freud’s sense is thus of phantasy as an activity perpetuating the hallucinatory satisfactions of primary process following the setting up of the reality principle, in Crash Vaughan’s and James’ endless sexual fantasies of automotive collision suggest an analogous satisfaction, one which, rather than drawing back from unpleasurable events, is expressive of the agonizing pleasures of primary masochism and its sadistic vicissitudinal elaborations (C , 13–16). The novel also develops from Freud’s sense of the sexual instinct’s special relationship to phantasy. In ‘Formulations’, due to the developmental stages of auto- erotism and the latency period, ‘the sexual instinct is held up in its psychical development and remains far longer under the dominance of the pleasure principle’, so that ‘a closer connection arises, on the one hand, between the sexual instinct and phantasy and, on the other hand, between the ego-instincts and the activities of consciousness’ (XII, 222). This intimate connection of phantasy and sexuality is reflected in the encyclopaedic libidinal permutations of the characters’ sexual reveries in Crash. The sexual drive is for Freud a weak spot in the constitution of the reality-adapted ego, an area in which the individual is slow to adapt itself

Insane Modernities

119

to the demands of the external world, and in Ballard’s novel sexual fantasy becomes the site of the characters’ indulgence of the pleasure principle through deeply aberrant freedoms liberating them from the constrictions of their technologized environment. From procreative object love they regress to a literal auto- erotism in which the ability of the individual to fulfil its erotic demands on an internalized basis expands outward to embrace the glass and metal surfaces of the motorway landscape. Crash can also be read in light of the intimate relation, for Freud, of phantasies to unconscious processes. Freud claims that the strangest characteristic of ‘unconscious (repressed) processes’ ‘is due to their entire disregard of reality-testing; they equate reality of thought with external actuality, and wishes with their fulfilment – with the event – just as happens automatically under the dominance of the ancient pleasure principle’; this results in ‘the difficulty of distinguishing unconscious phantasies from memories which have become unconscious’ (XII, 225). Laplanche and Pontalis detail a sense related to this identification in which ‘the Freudian problematic of phantasy, far from justifying a distinction in kind between unconscious and conscious phantasies, is much more concerned with bringing forward the analogies between them’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 317). This opens up for the critic without psychoanalytic training the difficult issue of the relationship of the unconscious to the prolific fantasies envisaged in Crash; what unconscious realities do James’ and Vaughan’s fantasies reflect, particularly in light of Ballard’s uninterest, avowed in his introduction to Crash , in the roots of personality? Is there an unconscious of Crash? My suggestion would be, in light of my earlier discussion of the novel’s mobilizations of Freud’s theories of the drives, that Crash’s concern, not at all with ‘the sources of character and personality sunk deep in the past’ (C , 5), is rather with the unconscious in the sense of the libidinal and bodily drives and their infantile polymorphousness, destructively and ecstatically released in characters repressed by technological civilization. Freud stresses phantasies as possessing a ‘psychical as contrasted with material reality’, a reality which in the world of the neuroses ‘is the decisive kind’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 363); he claims that ‘one must never allow oneself to be misled into applying the standards of reality to repressed psychical structures, and on that account, perhaps, into undervaluing the importance of phantasies in the formation of symptoms on the ground that they are not actualities’ (XII, 225). In Crash James and Vaughan accelerate the Freudian emphasis on the reality of fantasy life to a hyperbolic extreme where it comes to occlude reference to material reality, as in Vaughan’s interpretation of Seagrave’s death as an actualization of his own planned death collision with

120

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

Elizabeth Taylor (C , 187). This delusion instantiates the ‘hallucinatory wishful psychosis’ Freud associates with dreams and with the ‘acute hallucinatory confusion’ of amentia (XIV, 229–30), which ‘not only brings hidden or repressed wishes into consciousness; it also represents them, with the subject’s entire belief, as fulfilled’ (XIV, 230). In Vaughan’s insanity what Freud called ‘reality-testing’ is entirely suspended and, in the economic terms of ‘A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams’, ‘the (unrepressed, completely conscious) wishful phantasies are able to press forward into the system, and they are there regarded as a better reality’ (XIV, 233). As Laplanche and Pontalis comment in their dissatisfaction with Freud’s conceptualization of reality-testing, ‘once a hallucinatory state or a dream-state holds sway there is no ‘test’ that can counter it’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 384) and Crash consciously simulates a similarly unhinged indeterminacy of the real and the imagined on the part of Vaughan and James. Freud’s identification of reality-testing as ‘among the major institutions of the ego, alongside the censorships which we have come to recognize between the psychical systems’ (XIV, 233) and his suggestion that in schizophrenia ‘psychosis cannot be among the initial symptoms’, becoming possible ‘only when the patient’s ego is so far disintegrated that reality-testing no longer stands in the way of hallucination’ (XIV, 234) suggest an identification of Vaughan’s madness with the two distinct ‘temporal regressions’ Freud identifies with psychoneurotic states, a regression of the ego to ‘primitive narcissism’ and of the libido to ‘the stage of hallucinatory satisfaction of wishes’ (XIV, 223). In its thematizations of Freudian phantasy Crash enacts a decentring of the ego in keeping with the insistently subversive traditions of the European avant-garde.

Concrete Island While Atrocity and Crash interact in diverse and complex ways with a wide range of Freud’s writings, another very significant context for Ballard’s fictions during the late 1960s and 1970s is the work of the controversial psychiatrist R.D. Laing. The alienated responses of the protagonists of Atrocity, Crash , and later works to their technologized modern environments are closely related to Laing’s vision of alienation as the normal condition of modern man (Politics, 12); however, particularly significant for certain of these fictions is Laing’s description of the alienation of the schizoid individual. For Laing the schizoid occupies an unusual existential position; he or she is ‘an individual the totality of whose experience is split in two main ways: in the first place, there is a rent in his relation with his world and,

Insane Modernities

121

in the second, there is a disruption of his relation with himself’ (Divided Self, 17). Unable to feel connected to other human beings, he ‘does not experience himself as a complete person but rather as “split” in various ways, perhaps as a mind more or less tenuously linked to a body, as two or more selves, and so on’ (Divided Self, 17). Plagued by ‘ontological insecurity’ concerning the validity of his or her own existence (Divided Self, 40), the schizoid eschews relationships to avoid a perceived threat to the autonomy of the precariously sustained sense of self (Divided Self, 46). The schizoid position is thus one of extreme psychological isolation: The ‘self’ in such a schizoid organisation is usually more or less unembodied. It is experienced as a mental entity. It enters the condition called by Kierkegaard ‘shut-upness’. [. . .] The individual is developing a microcosmos within himself; but of course, this autistic, private, intra-individual ‘world’ is not a feasible substitute for the only world there really is, the shared world. [. . .] Such a schizoid individual [. . .] would appear to be, in an unreal, impossible way, all persons and things to himself. The imagined advantages are safety for the true self, isolation and hence freedom from others, self- sufficiency, and control. [. . .] If the whole of the individual’s being cannot be defended, the individual retracts his lines of defence until he withdraws within a central citadel. He is prepared to write off everything he is, except his ‘self’. But the tragic paradox is that the more the self is defended in this way, the more it is destroyed. (Divided Self, 76–81) In Concrete Island , architect Roger Maitland’s accidental marooning on a West London traffic island is portrayed progressively more insistently as an unconsciously deliberate withdrawal into a citadel-like microcosmos akin to that constructed by Laing’s schizoid. Immediately after the crash Maitland suspects that ‘he had almost wilfully devised the crash, perhaps as some bizarre kind of rationalization’ (CI, 9); prostitute and drop- out Jane Sheppard, referring to his non- committal relationships with his wife and mistress, asserts to him that ‘you were on an island long before you crashed here’ (CI, 100). The parallel with the Laingian schizoid’s deliberate self-isolation is reinforced by Maitland’s delirious self-identification with the island; he feels that ‘More and more, the island was becoming an exact model of his head’ (CI, 51), and after identifying sections of his injured body with parts of the island experiences an epiphanic moment in which he asserts aloud to himself ‘I am the island’ (CI, 52). Maitland’s desire for solitude is traced back to a childhood memory which he has endlessly re-fantasized until it has become central to his personality:

122

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

Most of the happier moments of his life had been spent alone – student vacations touring Italy and Greece, a three-month drive around the United States after he qualified. For years now he had remythologized his own childhood. The image in his mind of a small boy playing endlessly by himself in a long suburban garden surrounded by a high fence seemed strangely comforting. It was not entirely vanity that the framed photograph of a seven-year- old boy in a drawer of his desk at the office was not of his son, but of himself. Perhaps even his marriage to Catherine, a failure by anyone else’s standards, had succeeded precisely because it recreated for him this imaginary empty garden. (CI, 22) Maitland’s deep- seated schizoid fantasy of solitude, expressed in an image of an ‘imaginary empty garden’ recalling the partially fantastical nature of the Freudian screen memory (Laplanche and Pontalis, 411), is realised by proxy by his marooning within the ‘stony garden’ (CI, 47) of the island, like his childhood garden an enclosed and empty space surrounded by impassable barriers. Maitland is unsure of his own ontological validity, calling his name aloud to ‘identify himself’ (CI, 47), and shares the schizoid’s dissociation from his own physicality, at one point attempting imaginatively to ‘shuck off portions of his own flesh’ (CI, 111). He also exhibits the schizoid’s fear of relationship and of the impingement of the other (Divided Self, 46), his solipsistic tendency mentally to depersonalize others, to nullify ‘the specific human individuality of the other’ in order to neutralize them as threats to his own individuality (Divided Self, 55); after his deliberate cultivation of his independence from both his wife and mistress (CI, 28–9), his fantasy of freedom from the external world and the ‘affections and demands’ (CI, 101) of his family and friends is realized as the surrounding traffic and even his wife, son and mistress become remote and unreal to him: After two days of isolation [. . .] a thin but distinct mental screen divided him from the traffic moving past. [. . .] With a deliberate effort he thought of his wife, his son and Helen Fairfax, framing their faces in his mind. But they had become more and more remote, receding like the distant clouds over White City. (CI, 145) Maitland’s schizoid withdrawal is implied as reflecting a deep-rooted aspect of his personality; however, it is also a direct response to the alienating nature of the rationalized technological landscape in which he lives. At the end of the 1970s sociologist Marshall Berman suggested that

Insane Modernities

123

the eclipse of the problem of modernity in that decade had meant ‘the destruction of a vital form of public space’ and hastened ‘the disintegration of our world into an aggregation of private material and spiritual interest- groups, living in windowless monads, far more isolated than we need to be’ (Berman, 34). Maitland, who mentally negates the entire world outside his own enclosure, is on one level the individual as Berman’s ‘windowless monad’, an embodiment of a terminal stage of modern social entropy. The technological landscape facilitates this tendency in him. Driving on the motorway, Maitland is a dehumanized puppet (CI, 7); like the freeway drivers in Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles, his freedom to travel long- distance is bought at the price of an ‘almost total surrender of personal freedom’, ‘a complete surrender of will to the instructions’ on the motorway signs (Banham, 217, 219). Once he crashes off the motorway system, however, its rationalist inflexibility conspires to keep him in a state of alienation. Assuming rescue is a simple matter of flagging down a car, he climbs the massive embankment, only to find the rush hour drivers, ‘forced [. . .] on relentlessly’ by the traffic (CI, 15), unable to stop for him. Once he is hit by a car and his leg is injured he is unable to ascend the slope again, and hope of rescue recedes: ‘The drivers had lowered their sun-vizors, shielding their eyes from the morning sunlight. None of them would notice the haggard figure standing among the abandoned cars’ (CI, 24). Maitland is here rendered insignificant in the eyes of passing drivers by the scale and speed of the mechanized landscape, blotted from their view by the opacity of a purposeful technology. In Concrete Island the cityscape repeatedly interposes inhuman distances and hard, opaque barriers in the way of human contact, as when Maitland envisions his secretary typing an agenda somewhere ‘behind the glass curtain-walling’ in a distant office block, ‘never thinking for a moment that her boss was squatting on this motorway embankment with a bloody mouth’ (CI, 13). Ballard’s Westway interchange is part of an ‘alienating city’ (CI, 130) in which a rationalizing societal machine keeps the individual in monad- like isolation from its fellow human beings and pushes Maitland, along with undesirables such as Jane and Proctor, into an excluding segregation in the neutral spaces at its margins. For Laing the schizoid’s withdrawal from relationship is enormously damaging to the individual: isolated as is the self as a defence against the dangers from without which are felt as a threat to its identity, it loses what precarious identity it already has. Moreover, the withdrawal from reality results in the ‘self’s’

124

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

own impoverishment. Its omnipotence is based on impotence. Its freedom operates in a vacuum. [. . .] The self becomes dessicated and dead. (Divided Self , 152) Recalling this omnipotent impotence, the ‘dominion’ (CI, 126) Maitland feels he has achieved over the island at the novel’s end comes precisely with the final departure of anybody he might be able to call his subject; dead to the society of the outer world, Maitland is undisputed ruler of the vacuous ‘empty city of his own mind’ (CI, 101). However, alongside a sense that Maitland has entirely withdrawn from the continuum of social life, Concrete Island conveys an intimation that his crash of the motorway may have facilitated a regenerative crisis akin to that discussed by Laing in The Politics of Experience . In Laing’s terminology, the schizoid position is a sane mode of alienation whose acceleration into psychosis he identifies as schizophrenia (Divided Self, 16). However, in Politics he advances the view that the strange behaviours characteristic of the schizophrenic experience, viewed in traditional psychiatric terms as signs of a diagnosable pathology, may in fact in some cases be ‘behavioural expressions of an experiential drama’ (Politics, 102), of a ‘natural healing process’ (Politics, 105) devalued by contemporary culture. This process entails an immersion of the subject, whose alienation means his experience is normally split into inner and outer worlds, in ‘more or less total inner space and time’ (Politics, 103); he or she undergoes a ‘voyage from outer to inner’, ‘from being outside (post-birth) back into the womb of all things (prebirth)’, and subsequently a return from ‘inner to outer’, ‘from a cosmic foetalization to an existential rebirth’ (Politics, 106). There are parallels here, although Laing does not spell them out, with regression as Jung conceives it, an arrestive orientation towards the unconscious psyche which permits subsequent resumption of personal development. Maitland’s sense that the island is becoming ‘an exact model of his head’ and that his ‘movement across this forgotten terrain was a journey not merely through the island’s past but through his own’ (CI, 51) suggests precisely a reorientation toward the ‘inner space’ of his own subjective experience; his fall down a pit next to one of the abandoned air-raid shelters into a space of ‘pelagic quiet’ and soothing organicism (CI, 54) and his subsequent mothering by Jane in a windowless underground room or womb (CI, 64) implies a process of rebirth. Concrete Island ’s conclusion is carefully ambiguous, with Maitland both feeling ‘no real need to leave the island’ and looking forward to planning ‘his escape from the island’ (CI, 126), but the signs of recovery Maitland shows at this point in the narrative leave open the

Insane Modernities

125

possibility that his experience has been a regenerative psychic crisis, akin to Laing’s schizophrenic journey, which will permit a new reorientation towards social life, a dynamic repeated still more emphatically in HighRise as Dr Robert Laing reorients his gaze from the regressively incestuous Oedipal privacy he has contrived back out towards the neighbouring tower blocks (HR , 170–3).

Chapter 4

Trauma, Psychoanalysis, Autobiography

Ballard’s novels between 1979 and the early 1990s can be divided into two principal strains. The first is a strain verging upon the generic territories of fantasy and apocalyptic science fiction which seeks either to transfigure a known landscape – in the case of The Unlimited Dream Company’s visionary transformation of Ballard’s home town of Shepperton – or to fantasize, with extensive reference to mediated representations, an imaginative version of another continent less familiar to the author, whether America, in Hello America (1981), or Africa, in The Day of Creation (1987). The second strain is that fruitful sally into fictionalized autobiography which cemented Ballard’s acceptance as a literary writer and produced Empire of the Sun (1984) and its companion-piece or sequel The Kindness of Women (1991). Both strains perpetuate and develop Ballard’s dialogue with psychological discourses and are texturally and imaginatively indebted to them. As part of this, both also embody a quasi- autobiographical concern with the issue of writerly process, with particular reference to the imagination. In ‘Creative Writers and Day- Dreaming’, Freud offers a model of writerly creativity based around his sense of the phantasy in adult life as ‘the fulfilment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality’ (IX, 146). In the creative writer, ‘A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work’ (IX, 151); his writing is a modified form of his phantasies and its appeal is in offering an aesthetic pleasure Freud dubs ‘ fore- pleasure ’ which makes possible for the reader ‘the release of still greater pleasure arising from deeper psychical sources’ (IX, 153). It is noticeable that Freud takes as his examples not high literature but ‘the less pretentious authors of novels, romances and short stories’ (IX, 149) and the ‘psychological novel’ (IX, 150) – very much, in fact, the generic terrain from which Ballard’s writing originates. Texts such as The Unlimited Dream Company and The Day of Creation can be understood in terms of Freud’s conception of the relationship between phantasy and literature; even if one wishes to remain

Trauma, Psychoanalysis, Autobiography

127

distanced from the claims of psychoanalysis, one may recognize Ballard’s overt use of personal fantasies as the raw material for these highly imaginative non-realist fictions, his implicit sympathy for Freud’s emphasis on the psychological origins of literature in phantasy. Ballard’s 1979 fantasy The Unlimited Dream Company interacts richly with the writings of Freud, Jung, and Laing, instantiating in its encyclopaedia of unreal marvels Freud’s insistence on the dream as ‘the fulfilment of a wish’ (IV, 121). Through the ‘reproduction of Leonardo’s cartoon of the Virgin seated on the lap of St Anne’ Blake sees in Miriam St Cloud’s office (UDC , 135), the novel identifies as a key allusive context Freud’s 1910 essay ‘Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood’, in a footnote to which Freud mentions the cartoon. In the essay Da Vinci’s childhood impression of an encounter with a vulture is symbolically connected to his unusually powerful Oedipal attachment to his mother (XI, 91–2) and dreams of flight are said to express ‘nothing else than a longing to be capable of sexual performance’ (XI, 126); The Unlimited Dream Company draws on Freud’s speculative analysis of the roots of Leonardo’s remarkable creativity in the sublimation of his libidinal impulses to enrich its own allegorical meditation on the transformative powers of the visionary artist. The Day of Creation (1987), meanwhile, seemingly enacts a return to the symbolism of Ballard’s earliest novels, protagonist Mallory’s ‘obsession with underground water’ (DOC , 13) implying a reconnection to the mythic resources of the Jungian collective unconscious; however, this time the explicit identification of Mallory’s miraculous river with his self and his imagination introduces the insistent implication of an allegory for the process of writerly creation itself. The novel anticipates potential criticisms of its representations of Africa by the child- soldier Noon’s attempts to parrot educational tapes containing ‘ jargonized dialogue with a Marxist slant’; ‘tourism and bourgeois hegemony. . .the natural park as neo- colonialist folk-lore . . . African wild-life and the exploitation of racist stereotypes’ (DOC , 118); however, the fetishistic language in which Mallory anticipates the consummation of his relationship with Noon (DOC , 185) suggests Homi K. Bhabha’s FreudianLacanian discussion of the colonial stereotype as entailing a fetishistic ambivalence between metaphoric/narcissistic and metonymic/aggressive positions. Bhabha’s discussion of the role in colonial identifications of a ‘myth of historical origination’, the ‘archaic affirmation of wholeness/similarity’, the primal fantasy of a pure origin (Bhabha, 76) are fascinating in relation to Ballard’s narrative of regressive return to the source of an African river; perhaps not all readings of the novel’s representations of Africa would share Bhabha’s non-moralistic insistence that ‘To judge the stereotyped image on the basis of a prior political normativity is to dismiss

128

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

it, not to displace it’ and that ‘In order to understand the productivity of colonial power it is crucial to construct its regime of truth, not to subject its representations to a normalizing judgement’ (Bhabha, 67).

Empire of the Sun Perhaps the most obvious psychological context for Ballard’s quasiautobiographical fictions, Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women, is Freud’s work on trauma, discussed by Roger Luckhurst in The Trauma Question as ‘the unavoidable foundation for theories of trauma’, particularly within cultural studies (Trauma, 8). Noting how the arrival in 1980 of the psychiatric category of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was ‘incompatible with psychoanalysis’ and has tended to marginalize Freud (Trauma, 1, 8) within what he describes as ‘contemporary trauma culture’ (Trauma, 2), Luckhurst places Freud’s writing at the originating nexus of the various cultural- critical elaborations of traumatic theory by writers including Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman (Trauma, 8). While interpretations of Freud by Caruth and Felman can, as I shall discuss, be provoking contexts in relation to which to read Ballard’s quasi-autobiographical narratives, their most explicit relationship is to Freud’s own conception of trauma, particularly as expounded in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’; his hypothesis, on the evidence of specific behavioural compulsions to repeat, of traumatic neurosis as the result of an ‘extensive breach’ in his biologically figurative ‘protective shield against stimuli’ (XVIII, 31), leading to compulsively repetitive dreams or other behaviours understood as ‘endeavouring to master the stimulus retrospectively’ (XVIII, 32). As the symptomatic indicator of ‘something repressed which recurs’ (XVII, 241), Freud identifies uncanny experience with the traumatic compulsion to repeat (XVII, 238), and the aesthetic effect of the uncanny is overtly inscribed in the narrative textures of Empire . The novel opens and closes with the image of coffins cast on the Yangtze being driven back by the tide onto the Shanghai shore, a compulsive repetition evoking a return of the long-buried traumata of the writer’s youth. Child of violent times, the youthful protagonist, Jim, experiences the circumstances of the beginning of WWII in China as uncanny repetitions of earlier traumatic scenes from the country’s violent history. At Hungjao Aerodrome, his memory of a tour of the 1937 battlefields and of dead Chinese soldiers who looked ‘as if they had fallen asleep together in a deep dream of war’ (EOS , 20) ushers in a sudden encounter with Japanese soldiers waiting in a subterranean

Trauma, Psychoanalysis, Autobiography

129

trench: ‘An entire company of Japanese infantry was resting in this old battlefield, as if re- equipping itself from the dead of an earlier war, ghosts of their former comrades risen from the grave and issued with fresh uniforms and rations’ (EOS , 20). Present invaders uncannily recapitulate a former conflict. Violence is seemingly part of an unending chain of repetitions woven into the very origins of Jim’s fantasy life, the imagery of war for him always harking back to a previously existing experience, suggesting the ‘constantly receding’ origin of Freudian trauma (Laplanche and Pontalis, 466); finding his parents’ swimming pool drained, Jim thinks of ‘concrete bunkers in Tsingtao, and the bloody handprints of the maddened German gunners on the caisson walls’ (EOS , 47). The deferral or ‘Nachträglichkeit ’ of trauma in Freud’s conception (Laplanche and Pontalis, 111), what Caruth refers to as ‘belatedness’ (Caruth, 91), is exemplified by Empire ’s appalling image of a yellow silk glove held by Jim’s father which Jim then recognizes as the skin of a petty officer’s hand scalded off the flesh during the sinking of the HMS Petrel (EOS , 32). The image also instantiates the sense of traumatic derealization which haunts Jim throughout the novel more broadly: Jim found it difficult to believe that the war had at last begun. Walls of strangeness separated everything, every face that looked at him was odd. [. . .] But the bombardment of the Petrel , the tank that had crushed the Packard, the huge guns of the Idzumo all belonged to a make-believe realm. He almost expected Yang to saunter into the ward and tell him that they were part of a technicolour epic being staged at the Shanghai film studios. [. . .] What was real, without any doubt, was the mud-flat to which his father had helped to drag the wounded sailors, and where they had sat for six hours beside the dead petty officer. (EOS , 34–5) The defamiliarization Jim experiences here implies an uncanny indistinction between the real and the imagined triggered by the traumatic nature of his experiences, a problematic of differentiation which persists throughout the narrative of Jim’s experience. It is notable in Jim’s response to the Petrel incident here that, true to the belatedness of trauma, it is the shocking events themselves Jim experiences as unreal and the duration of their painful aftermath of whose reality he is certain. His experience of trauma is also profoundly mediated by his exposure to film; in the novel’s opening lines images of war have already achieved an uncanny familiarity as his exposure to newsreels causes him to begin to ‘dream of wars’ (EOS , 3), while his obsession at the novel’s conclusion with watching war films

130

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

such as ‘Bataan and The Fighting Lady’ (EOS , 274), making Yang wonder why he should want to ‘see these films so many times’ (EOS , 274), suggests his traumatized repetition of the violence of his experiences through the consumption of cinematic representations. The novel implies violence itself as perpetuated specifically through a mechanism of traumatic repetition in its representation of the figure of Lieutenant Price: Jim knew that Lieutenant Price would have liked to get him alone and then beat him to death, not because he was cruel, but because only the sight of Jim’s pain would clear away all the agony that he himself had endured. (EOS , 234) Empire ’s representation of trauma is an aspect of a searching exploration of the psychology of war, dialoguing with Freud’s own discussions of the topic. In particular, the capacity of war to destroy human illusions is explored with clinical honesty. Jim’s naïve pre-war speculations about the pretensions of adults such as Mr Maxted (EOS , 16) develop into a pointed delineation of the limits to much-vaunted British ideals of decency: None of the British internees would raise a finger, even if every coolie in China was beaten to death in front of them. [. . .] Dr Ransome would probably have tried to stop the Japanese. But the physician was careful never to go near the parade ground. (EOS , 177) In ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’, written during the First World War, Freud discusses the disillusionment arising from war, arising from a ‘low morality shown externally by states which in their internal relations pose as the guardians of moral standards, and the brutality shown by individuals who, as participants in the highest human civilization, one would not have thought capable of such behaviour’ (XIV, 280). Such disillusion, he claims, is the result of civilization’s unrealistic disavowal of the morally neutral or amoral instinctual basis of human existence, and should in one sense be welcomed in the name of an honest acknowledgement of the realities of existence. Empire ’s representation of the psychology of individuals living in a war zone comes from the direction of a similar unflinching honesty about human violence and cruelty, a preoccupation with the puncturing of unrealistic illusions about human nature which is pervasive in Ballard’s oeuvre. But war cannot be abolished; so long as the conditions of existence among nations are so different and their mutual repulsion so violent,

Trauma, Psychoanalysis, Autobiography

131

there are bound to be wars. The question then arises: Is it not we who should give in, who should adapt ourselves to war? (XIV, 299) Freud’s question in ‘Thoughts for the Times’, above, is answered in the affirmative by Jim’s experience in Empire, as he comes to welcome both the excitements of violence, the challenges of survival, and the security of imprisonment, exemplified when, observing the eagerness of the prisoners to return to the camp, Jim feels himself to have been privy all along to the paradoxical ‘simple truth [. . .] that inside Lunghua they were free’ (EOS , 243). Jim’s experience is precisely one of psychological adaptation to war, enabled by a realism which is profoundly disturbing to the idealistic Dr Ransome: ‘Clearly he was annoyed with Jim, as if he blamed him for the raiding Mustangs. Was it because he had learned to enjoy the war? (EOS , 153); ‘He resented Jim for revealing an obvious truth about the war, that people were only too able to adapt to it’ (EOS , 161). Yet their end reminded Jim of his own, about which he had thought in a clandestine way ever since his arrival at Lunghua. He welcomed the air raids, the noise of the Mustangs as they swept over the camp, the smell of oil and cordite, the deaths of the pilots, and even the likelihood of his own death. Despite everything, he knew he was worth nothing. He twisted his Latin primer, trembling with a secret hunger that the war would so eagerly satisfy. (EOS , 150) A central aspect of Jim’s psychological adaptation to war is Empire ’s dramatization of his complex attitudes to death. Jim’s attitude to the deaths of American pilots in an air raid on the neighbouring airbase perpetuates Ballard’s preoccupation with the Freudian death instinct; the description of the burning pilot as ‘a fragment of the sun’ (EOS , 149) keys this moment of transcendental violence in to Jim’s later imaginative response to witnessing the flash from the Nagasaki A-bomb, in which light is both a transfiguring and destructive force uniting living and the dead: Had the fields been seared by the flash of the atomic bomb which the Eurasian had described? Jim remembered the burning body of the Mustang pilot, and the soundless light that had filled the stadium and seemed to dress the dead and the living in their shrouds. (EOS , 217) Jim’s death-lust is only one aspect of the complex psychology of his relation to death, which also suggests the unconsciously ambivalent attitude to mortality discussed by Freud in ‘Thoughts for the Times’; in particular,

132

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

where for Freud even the death of a loved one can be experienced in part as a triumph over the ‘something of the stranger’ which the loved other in part also represented (XIV, 293), Jim too is represented as capable of rejoicing in deaths not his own, relishing ‘the curious pleasure the corpses in the hospital cemetery gave him, the guilty excitement of being alive at all’ (EOS , 164). Where Freud sees modern civilized man as disavowing death, Jim is familiar with death even before the outbreak of war, playing around the skeletons of dead Chinese (EOS , 17); death is real, normal, for Jim, and war, violence, and cruelty are exciting, invigorating; ‘Wars always invigorated Shanghai, quickened the pulse of its congested streets’ (EOS , 39); ‘The Chinese enjoyed the spectacle of death, Jim had decided, as a way of reminding themselves how precariously they were alive. They liked to be cruel for the same reason’ (EOS , 40). Freud’s discussion of the primitive belief in the soul as arising from a refusal to accord death ‘the significance of annihilation’ (XIV, 294) undergoes a macabre transposition into Jim’s pathos-inducing speculations about the souls of the internees he buries in Lunghua’s cemetery (EOS , 160). A novel about psychological survival, Empire dramatizes the strategies Jim mobilizes in order to survive, strategies fictionalizing variations on psychoanalytic theorizations of mourning and of mechanisms of defence. British psychoanalyst Caroline Garland identifies how ‘the processes of mourning, and its pathological counterpart, melancholia, have particular significance for the final outcome of trauma for the individual’ (Garland, 19). In ‘Mourning and Melancholia, Freud distinguishes between the healthy process of mourning, in which the ego is freed from attachment to the lost love object through an attentional reprocessing of associated memories and expectations (XIV, 245), and the related pathological one of melancholia, discussed in Chapter One. Characterized as a ‘survivor’ (EOS , 169), Jim’s response to separation from his parents is predominantly a healthy and pragmatic one, mourning rather than melancholia; in a gesture intriguingly reminiscent of Dori Laub’s anecdote concerning a particular Holocaust orphan (Felman and Laub, 87), he keeps the ‘blurred images of a man and a woman’ on the wall of his cubicle in order to ‘keep alive the lost memory of his parents’ (EOS , 135), yet is also swift to find alternative love- objects to replace his parents in Dr Ransome and Mrs Vincent. Identifications are another crucial part of Jim’s survival strategy. Psychoanalysis uses the term identification chiefly in the sense of ‘identification of oneself with’ another (Laplanche and Pontalis, 205), a mechanism understood as constitutive of the human subject (Laplanche and Pontalis, 206). Jim’s identification of himself with the kamikaze pilots who take off

Trauma, Psychoanalysis, Autobiography

133

from the neighbouring airfield (EOS , 146) is exactly self- constitutive, a necessary delusion enabling him to keep hope alive: For so long he had invested all his hopes in this young pilot, in that futile dream that they would fly away together, leaving Lunghua, Shanghai and the war forever behind them. He had needed to pilot to help him survive the war, this imaginary twin he had invented, a replica of himself whom he watched through the barbed wire. (EOS , 266) Jim’s identification with the pilots and with Private Kimura and the ‘commitment to the Japanese Air Force’ originating from his ‘fearful knowledge that he had nearly given his life to build the runway’ (EOS , 146) are instances of the defence of identification with the aggressor, conceptualized by Freud’s daughter Anna in her 1936 book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (Mechanisms, 117–31); a related psychological phenomenon is Stockholm Syndrome, mentioned by Ballard in his 2005 interview with me in connection to the ‘quasi-mystical’ treatment of death in Empire and other texts (Francis, 286). Jim’s delusional fantasies during his ordeal towards the end of the war are paranoiac projections, one of the three main types of defence theorized by Freud in ‘Further Remarks on the Neuro-Psychoses of Defence’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 109). Discussing denial defence, Caroline Garland quotes Freud’s idea that ‘a fair number of analyses have taught us that delusion is found applied like a patch over the place where originally a rent had appeared in the ego’s relation to the external world’ (Garland, 10), and Empire conveys a strong sense of the individual attempting to mend a fractured sense of reality through means of the imagination, to impose coherent interpretation on circumstances which have confounded previous assumptions. Jim experiences a paranoiac conviction of the agency of the dead: ‘Yet the dead had protected Jim, and saved him from the night march. Lying with their bodies through the dark hours, he had felt closer to them than he felt to the living’ (EOS , 214); he becomes confused as to his own animate or inanimate status: ‘He knew that he was alive, but at the same time he felt as dead as Mr Maxted. Perhaps his soul, instead of leaving his body, had died inside his head?’ (EOS , 215). During his delirium in the march to the stadium at Nantao he entertains a variety of superstitious beliefs about death, including his messianic reaction to discovering that the wounded kamikaze pilot is alive, his belief that he has ‘made a small space in his death and allowed his soul to return’ and can raise himself and ‘millions of Chinese’ (EOS , 268). Jim’s fantasy makes the boundaries of death

134

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

permeable: ‘Had they dug themselves free of their own graves? (EOS , 269). For Paul Crosthwaite such passages enact a process of ‘ameliorative revision’ of traumatic experience (Crosthwaite, 108) and also ‘draw attention to their own fictional status and suggest a determination to hold the traumatic real in abeyance, even as a version of it is rendered in narrative’ (Crosthwaite, 109). Preferring psychological to Crosthwaite’s literary language, I read such representations as fictional instantiations of paranoiac defence which suggest strongly the role of Freudian theoretical concepts in helping impart shape to Ballard’s narrativization of his wartime experiences. Empire interacts problematically with trauma theory’s discussions of the relationship between trauma, language, and history. In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Cathy Caruth rereads Freud’s use of the romance of Tancred and Clorinda in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ as implying trauma as more than pathology. Trauma is for Caruth ‘always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available’; this truth, ‘in its delayed appearance and its belated address, cannot be linked only to what is known, but also to what remains unknown in our very actions and our language’ (Caruth, 4). An interrogation of the traumatic must, Caruth argues, ‘be spoken in a language that is always somehow literary: a language that defies, even as it claims, our understanding’ (Caruth, 5). Although the figurative conception of a ‘wound that cries out’ entails for the critic the risk of being led out of the contemplation of the text into discussion of its relationship to the author’s life, while the privileging of a mysterious ‘reality or truth that is not otherwise available’ and of that which defies readerly understanding tends to suggest a conception of the inaccessible unconscious which would tend to mystify textual meaning, these perspectives are suggestive for a reading of Empire, both the novel in which Ballard most directly addresses the formative traumas of his wartime experience and that in which Ballard’s reputation as a ‘literary’ writer was cemented, with its winning of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Accepting Caruth’s perspectives, one might formulate a reading of Empire in which the novel’s literary language enables the articulation of an otherwise inexpressible ‘truth’ about Ballard’s wartime experience, a reading which would fly in the face of poststructuralist cautions about the possibility of fixed textual meaning. Alternatively, one might attempt to read ‘a wound that cries out’ in the novel’s descriptions of Jim’s half- comprehension of his own reactions to his situation, for example in the fascinating symbolism of the cubicle he fashions into an imaginative refuge and which is paralleled with the protective shell of the turtle he envies for its ‘private fortress against the world’ (EOS , 135).

Trauma, Psychoanalysis, Autobiography

135

In fact Caruth’s discussion of trauma as the linguistic effort to make accessible the reality of a wounding not only difficult to express but even partially unknown resonates with Ballard’s own expressed sense of the operation of Empire as literary text. Caruth suggests that in the contemporary encounter with trauma ‘we can begin to recognize the possibility of a history that is no longer straightforwardly referential (that is, no longer based on simple models of experience and reference)’ and that ‘a rethinking of reference is aimed not at eliminating history but at resituating it in our understanding, that is, at precisely permitting history to arise where immediate understanding may not’ (Caruth, 11). In interview with Christopher Bigsby, Ballard stated his belief that ‘in fiction you can reach the psychological truth or the imaginative truth of a set of events in a way that you can’t in an autobiography’ (Bigsby, 84); for him it was ‘the element of psychological truth that is important’, and his decision to write Empire in fictional rather than autobiographical form and to separate Jim, unlike his wartime self, from his parents enabled a representation ‘psychologically truer to my own experiences in real life’ (Bigsby, 84). Ballard’s sense of literary artifice as enabling the expression of a ‘psychological truth’ is suggestive of Caruth’s conception of a non-referential mode of history-telling associated with trauma. Reading Freud’s Moses and Monotheism , Caruth suggests that ‘By replacing factual history with the curious dynamics of trauma, Freud would seem to have doubly denied the possibility of historical reference’: first, by himself actually replacing historical fact with his own speculations, and second, by suggesting that historical memory, or Jewish historical memory at least, is always a matter of distortion, a filtering of the event through the fictions of traumatic repression, which makes the event available at best indirectly. (Caruth, 15–16) Empire could be read as in sympathy with this sense of Freud as conceiving historical memory as traumatic distortion or filtering, the event consciously fictionalized and skewed in an attempt to reflect the reality of the experience, historical reference displaced or sidelined by a more pressing exigency relating to the affective and cognitive rupture entailed by its impact on the subject. There is a further connection here to Dori Laub’s anecdote in his and Shoshana Felman’s Testimony of a Holocaust survivor whose memory of exploding chimneys during an act of insurrection by the inmates at Auschwitz turned out to be fallible in its historical detail; Laub reads the woman’s version of events as testimony ‘not to the number of chimneys blown up, but to something more radical, more crucial: the

136

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

reality of an unimaginable occurrence’ (Felman and Laub, 60), ‘not simply to empirical historical facts, but to the very secret of survival and of resistance to extermination’ (Felman and Laub, 62). Knowledge in testimony is here conceived as ‘not simply a factual given that is reproduced and replicated by the testifier, but a genuine advent, an event in its own right’ (Felman and Laub, 62), fundamental truths of experience conceived, paradoxically, precisely through their fictionalization or distortion. Roger Luckhurst has drawn attention to Ruth Leys’ incisive, detailed, and near- devastating critique of Caruth’s work. Luckhurst maintains a sense of Caruth’s as ‘still the work where the lines feeding notions of cultural trauma converge: the problem of aesthetics “after Auschwitz”; the aporia of representation in poststructuralism; the diverse models of trauma developed by, and in the wake of, Freud’; however, he is powerfully convinced by Leys’ sense of Caruth’s ‘mimetic’ conception of trauma as undermined by an ‘antimimetic’ conception in which ‘trauma theory is always representational, available to memory, and therefore open to constant revision’ (Luckhurst, Trauma, 13). Leys rigorously demonstrates how Caruth’s arguments depend on a reconfiguration of Freud’s thinking, arguing that ‘In short, Caruth calls for a radical reconfiguration of psychoanalysis in which the traumatic nightmare is defined as an “unclaimed experience” – as a literal, nonsymbolic, and nonrepresentational memory of the traumatic event’ (Leys, 272). For Leys there are reasons to doubt Caruth’s reading of Freud as ‘adhering to the view that the traumatic nightmare is a literal memory of the traumatic event’ (Leys, 274); a more rigorous account such as her own, she implies, ‘underscores the fictive-fantasmatic- suggestive dimension of the traumatico-mimetic repetition’ (Leys, 275). Leys sees Freud and his contemporaries as having oscillated between two competing notions of representation: one defined in terms of a “representative theatricality” that underscores notions of specular self- distantiation and conscious recollection in trauma; the other defined in terms of an originary and affective “mimesis” or identification that emphasizes notions of nonspecular absorption in a traumatic scenario that is immemorial not because of the constitutive breakdown of all representation but because that scenario is unavailable for a certain kind of representation – theatrical self-representation – and hence for conscious memory. (Leys, 275) Leys’ problematization of Caruth’s reading of Freud as conceiving of the traumatic nightmare as a literal memory of the traumatic event throws into question Ballard’s corresponding sense of ‘psychological truth’ in

Trauma, Psychoanalysis, Autobiography

137

fictional representation; it opens the possibility that Empire , a text which models itself so overtly on the traumatic repetitions of Freudian trauma, may be operating under an overly simplistic conception of Freud’s theorizations of traumatic memory. An adherence to Leys’ stress on the ‘fictivefantasmatic- suggestive dimension of the traumatico-mimetic repetition’ would emphasize Empire as precisely a fictionalized, fantasized evocation of Ballard’s wartime experience, stressing any attempt to represent traumatic experience as a work of imagination and of linguistic artifice – although such an approach might presumably also assert the same about Ballard’s descriptions of the war in Miracles of Life (2008), his autobiography proper, raising interesting issues with regard to how to distinguish between the acts of memory performed in autobiographies and in autobiographical fictions. In terms of Leys’ sophisticated distinction between a ‘“representative theatricality”’ and ‘an originary and affective “mimesis”’, Ballard’s own comments about ‘psychological truth’ surely align his sense of the novel with the latter, stressing as they do a sense of experiential verity and loyalty to a sense of presentness in the remembered scenario; Empire is notable for its lack of the specular distancing which would arise from the use of a present- day narrator looking back at Jim’s experience from the present. In light of Leys’ deconstructionist emphasis on the ‘fictive-fantasmaticsuggestive’ in traumatic representation and her conception of Freud as oscillating between mimetic and non-mimetic conceptions of such representation, Ballard’s sense that his fictions are able to access ‘psychological truth’ appears naïve – a term, incidentally, with which Ballard actively associated his writing in analogy with ‘psychotic’ outsider art (Revell, 45); wary of the ‘dismal jargon’ of postmodern theory (‘A Response’, 329), Ballard is anything but deconstructionist in his literary approach.

The Kindness of Women A Freudian conception of the traumatic equally structures Ballard’s The Kindness of Women, a narrative organized around the deathly repetition and ultimate therapeutic mastering of repressed trauma. Paul Crosthwaite has seen the novel as tracing ‘its protagonist’s movement from childhood traumatization, through adolescent repetition, to partial recovery, and then from a second period of overwhelming experience, which reawakens the first, for a prolonged process of “working through”, to eventual psychic restoration’ (Crosthwaite, 112). I would largely concur with this reading, but am more sympathetic than Crosthwaite to Luckhurst’s sense that recovery

138

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

emerges only ultimately in this text dominated by melancholic repetitions (Crosthwaite, 112). That this is a narrative of psychic recovery is unequivocally proclaimed, as Crosthwaite observes, by the protagonist’s sense near the novel’s end that he has undergone ‘a profound catharsis that had taken decades to draw to a close’ (KOW, 284). The text’s self- construction as a narrative of therapeutic self- analysis by Ballard’s eponymous protagonist Jim is announced through his encounter in a Cambridge dissecting-room with the dead physician Dr Grant; the novel signals clearly that in terms of the personal system of metaphors or imaginative foci in Jim’s mind, Dr Grant is connected to the atrocities he has witnessed in Asia, and that his dissection of Dr Grant enables a parallel process of self-analysis: ‘Exposing herself to these young men with knives in their hands, she set a kind of order on my memories of the dead Chinese and Japanese I had seen during the war’ (KOW, 70); ‘By dissecting her, exploring her body from within, I felt that I was drawing closer to some warped truth which I had never been able to discuss with anyone since sailing from Shanghai on the Arrawa’ (KOW, 78). Jim’s traumatic memories of war begin to emerge into his consciousness through their association with the embalmed corpses of his medical training: ‘More and more, the cadavers in the dissecting room reminded me of the severed limbs I had seen in the avenue Edward VII’ (KOW, 79). The encounter with his repressed memories which the process of dissection permits is therapeutic: Jim feels that this woman doctor has ‘set me free’ (KOW, 81); ‘This dead physician had not only offered her body for dissection, but had reduced herself to a heap of fatty sticks as if deliberately dissolving whatever power she held over me’ (KOW, 82). Exemplifying the power of the human spirit over death, Dr Grant sets Jim on the path to an abreaction of his violent memories. Throughout Kindness Jim’s obsession with violence and death figures as a compulsively repetitive reaction to his traumatic experiences in China. Jim is frank about the lasting impact of the war on his inner life: But war, which had widowed and maimed so many of them, had never touched their imaginations. In Shanghai, from 1937 to the dropping of the atom bomb, we had been neither combatants nor victims, but spectators roped in to watch an execution. Those who had drawn too close had been touched by the blood on the guns. (KOW, 79) His dangerous attempt to swim across the bay at Santa Margarita and his peril in the path of the Estartit ferry (KOW, 115–16) evoke the deathly mythic context of the Styx and its ferryman Charon and anticipate his

Trauma, Psychoanalysis, Autobiography

139

fascination with the violence of the bullfight (KOW, 126–8). Jim’s friend David Hunter’s comments cement this sense of the traumatic recapitulation of violence as almost akin to an addiction when he states that ‘I used to wonder why you didn’t come back to Shanghai with me. You didn’t need to – they started the Viet Nam war for you instead’ (KOW, 216); David articulates the text’s implication of Jim’s transgressive, provocative artistic practice as a recapitulation of wartime violence, art as a more benign form of repetition compulsion: ‘Remember, Jim – all I did on the flyover was what you did in your exhibition . . .’ (KOW, 217). Emphasis on Jim’s traumatized repetition of his experiences is perpetuated by Peggy Gardner’s retrospective interpretation of his behaviour: You were desperate for violence! It made sense of everything, but you needed television to fill the air with it, play all that horror and pain over and over again. [. . .] All those car crashes and pornographic movies, Kennedy’s death, they’re your way of turning it into a film, something violent and glamorous. You want to Americanize death. (KOW, 222–3) Jim’s happy family life in Shepperton is represented as haunted by his repressed memories of China. Jim feels that ‘the past had slipped away, taking with it my memories of Cambridge and Canada’ (KOW, 105), and that ‘For the first time I was living in an endless present that owed nothing to the past’ (KOW, 106), but there is an overtone of insubstantiality to this ‘present as depthless and cheerful as a child’s colouring book’ in which ‘Soon the whole planet would be on vacation’ (KOW, 106). Jim claims that ‘The children Miriam had borne and the others who played by the stream had taken the place of the dead Chinese lying in the Lunghua creeks and canals’ (KOW, 106), but David Hunter suspects him of having ‘repressed a large part of my true nature’ (KOW, 107) in turning his back on Shanghai and refusing David’s offer of a trip there. Textual hints such as Jim’s pronouncement with reference to China that ‘sometimes I think he’s still playing there by himself’ (KOW, 109), or the description of his resentment over Miriam’s death (KOW, 180), imply David as a more destructive alter ego or double for Jim; he figures as a less fortunate fellow sufferer of Jim’s damage, his fatal road crash explicitly traumatic in aetiology: ‘No penance could atone for this historical crime; a logic triggered in that cruel city had led inevitably to the death of the woman cellist on the Hammersmith flyover’ (KOW, 241). Mary Ballard’s death from pneumonia is recoded in Miriam’s death from an accidental fall, the accident in Caruth’s reading of Freud being ‘the exemplary scene of trauma par excellence ’ in speaking ‘not

140

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

only the reality of the violent event but also the reality of the way that its violence has not yet been fully known’ (Caruth, 6). Kindness figures the violence of the 1960s as the vehicle for a therapeutic working-through of the atrocities Jim witnessed in his youth: A unique alchemy of the imagination was taking place. In many ways the media landscape of the 1960s was a laboratory designed specifically to cure me of all my obsessions. Violence and pornography provided a kit of desperate measures that might give some meaning both to Miriam’s death and the unnumbered victims of the war in China. (KOW, 158) The parallel here is with the paranoiac survival- strategies of Atrocity; the suggestion is that trauma may be processed on the level of fantasy, through the abstract freedoms of the imagination: ‘Images of pain and anger floated free, like the billboards advertising the endless deaths of the murdered president, messages of violence and desire that alone could assuage the bereaved’ (KOW, 163). It is specifically art which allows this processing of trauma, the dangerous and quasi-insane artistic strategy of Jim’s car crash exhibition holding out the hope of an irrational sense of redemption: Miriam would be alive again, Kennedy would drive triumphantly thorough Dealey Plaza, the casualties of the Second World War would rest in their graves and a Chinese youth at a rural railway station would at last have conveyed his desperate message to me. (KOW, 190) A very Freudian sense of the inaccessibility, unreliability, and illegibility of Jim’s traumatic motivations is suggested in his speculations over his own car crash: ‘Was my accident, in which I was lucky not to be killed, an attempt to die in an erotic death-pact with Sally?’ (KOW, 193). In his traumatized state Jim has lost the ability to divine the correct relationship between his own experience and mediated public imaginary: ‘Had the events in Dealey Plaza been no more than the most elaborate of a series of staged accidents prefigured on that Shanghai race- course of my childhood?’ (KOW, 193). Jim’s encounter with his past through his artistic experiments in the 1960s ultimately contributes to ‘a profound catharsis’ (KOW, 284), a working through and laying to rest of trauma. Visiting Sally Mumford, casualty of 1960s utopianism, Jim experiences the highly cathected events of that decade as now annulled of their emotional charge: ‘the thought of returning to an intact piece of the sixties was as daunting as trying to re-enter the previous weekend’s hangover’ (KOW, 231). As Luckhurst and Crosthwaite rightly

Trauma, Psychoanalysis, Autobiography

141

discuss, the crashed Spitfire which Sally’s husband and his friends excavate, its engine block ‘a fossil of pain’ (KOW, 241) becomes ‘symbolic of a process of disinterring and “pacifying” troubling memories of the war’ (Crosthwaite, 112); Crosthwaite’s sense of this scene as implying a sense of ‘recovery and acceptance of the past’ is corroborated by the annealing of trauma implied as Flying Officer Pierce is laid to rest (KOW, 243) and David makes a show of friendship towards a Korean airline pilot (KOW, 245). Further to this redemptive mobilization of the archaeological symbolism favoured by Freud, the compulsive repetition of scenes in which Jim courts danger are balanced by a recurring motif of reference to the Eurydice myth, a context implied by the chapter title ‘Queen of the Night’. Miriam’s accident on the beach at Estartit is followed by Jim’s rescuing of Sally from the sea (KOW, 156) and the miraculous rescue of a young girl from the river during his boat trip with Cleo (KOW, 267–71), a symbolic chain of scenes whose complex implications include a sense of redemptive encounter with the dangerous element of the unconscious and a transition from loss to redemption. Kindness’ debt to psychoanalytic conceptions of trauma has implications for its representations of history. In Heterologies Michel de Certeau discusses psychoanalysis and historiography as two distinct registers of writing. Identifying the return of the repressed as definitive of psychoanalysis, he argues that ‘This “mechanism” is linked to a certain conception of time and memory, according to which consciousness is both is the deceptive mask and the operative trace of events that organise the present’ (de Certeau, 3). Furthermore, ‘If the past (that which took place during, and took the form of, the decisive moment in the course of the crisis) is repressed , it returns in the present from which it was excluded, but does so surreptitiously’ (de Certeau, 3). Psychoanalysis, for de Certeau, implies a particular conception of the past: There is an ‘uncanniness’ about this past the present occupant has expelled (or thinks it has) in an effort to take its place. The dead haunt the living. The past: it ‘re-bites’ [. . .] (It is a secret and repeated biting). History is ‘cannibalistic,’ and memory becomes the closed arena of conflict between two contradictory operations: forgetting, which is not something passive, a loss, but an action directed against the past; and the mnemic trace, the return of what was forgotten, in other words, an action by a past that is now forced to disguise itself. More generally speaking, any autonomous order is founded upon what it eliminates; it produces a ‘residue’ condemned to be forgotten. But what was excluded re-infiltrates the place of its origin – now the present’s ‘clean’ [. . .] place. (de Certeau, 3–4)

142

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

The frightening resurgence of the dead of China into Jim’s consciousness during the chapter ‘The Queen of the Night’ locates the novel in a psychoanalytic register; their presence as a point of contrast during the happy period of ‘Magic World’ (KOW, 106) suggests their surreptitious re-infiltration of the present. Unlike psychoanalysis, says de Certeau, historiography ‘is based on a clean break between the past and the present’; it is produced by ‘relations of knowledge and power linking two supposedly distinct domains’: ‘the present (scientific, professional, social) place of work, the technical and conceptual apparatus of inquiry and interpretation, and the operation of describing and/or explaining’ and, on the other hand, ‘places (museums, archives, libraries) where the materials forming the object of this research are kept and, [. . .] set off in time, [. . .] there are the past systems or events to which these materials give analysis access’ (de Certeau, 4). Although historiography ‘postulates a continuity (a genealogy), a solidarity (an affiliation), and a complicity (a sympathy) between its agents and its objects, it nevertheless distinguishes a difference between them [. . .]. The space it organises is divided and hierarchical’ (de Certeau, 4). In fact, for de Certeau, psychoanalysis and historiography ‘have two different ways of distributing the space of memory’ (de Certeau, 4): They conceive of the relation between the past and present differently. Psychoanalysis recognises the past in the present; historiography places them one beside the other. Psychoanalysis treats the relation as one of imbrication (one in the place of the other), of repetition (one reproduces the other in another form), of the equivocal and of the quiproquo [. . .]. Historiography conceives the relation as one of succession (one after the other), correlation (greater or lesser proximities), cause and effect (one follows from the other), and disjunction (either one or the other, but not both at the same time). (de Certeau, 4) It is the possibility of such a clean break between past and present in which is such a challenge to Jim in Kindness ; habitué of the scientific domains of the dissecting- room and the psychology department, alienated by the historical pageantry of Cambridge (KOW, 68), he is obsessed by the American bombers stationed around town, images for him of his wartime experience (KOW, 71); precisely the imbrication of past and present de Certeau evokes, a failure to impose a hierarchy on the order of events. The later evocation of the Kennedy monument at Runnymede, overlaid by a palimpsest of ‘Ancient graffiti’ (KOW, 267), and Jim’s uncanny confusion over Spielberg’s simulation of his Shanghai house in

Trauma, Psychoanalysis, Autobiography

143

a 1930s mansion near his home in Shepperton (KOW, 273) perpetuate this sense. Jim is driven by what de Certeau sees as the shared aim of psychoanalytic and historiographical strategies of time: to ‘elaborate [. . .] different ways of thinking, and by so doing overcome violence (the confl icts and contingencies of history), including the violence of thought itself’ (de Certeau, 5). De Certeau’s discussions of the relationship of specific works by Freud to historiography open up provoking potential readings of Kindness’ psychoanalytically informed depictions of the historical. De Certeau suggests that Freud’s claim in ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’ that the individual’s relations to others which form the main subject of psychoanalytic research might be considered ‘social phenomena’ (de Certeau, 7) make Freud feel ‘authorized to take his analytical apparatus across the lines dividing the established disciplines, which apportion psychic phenomena among themselves according to a distinction (between “individual” and “collective”) that Freud challenges and wishes to transform’ (de Certeau, 7). He then identifies how Freud consciously, beginning within his own physiological and psychiatric specialism, extended his work to encompass literary texts, ethnology, and history, notwithstanding his own lack of expertise: though constructed and verifiable within the bounds of a particular field, his theory was not meant to be anchored there; it was, rather, destined to renew other fields, in relation to which Freud himself nonetheless lacked the necessary elements for first-hand information and technical control. (de Certeau, 7) This gambit, de Certeau suggests, is an ideological gesture; ‘When a theoretical point of view is extended beyond the field within which it was elaborated, [. . .] does it not [. . .] cross the line between scientific “theories” and scientific “ideologies”?’ (de Certeau, 7). De Certeau reads Freud’s own uncertainty about his ‘socio-historical research’ (de Certeau, 7) as signalling Freud’s creative destabilization of historiography: In history, Freud was a pioneer, but not a practitioner [. . .]. In addition to a coherent corpus of verifiable, theoretical hypotheses, he injected into historiography the suspense of a detective story [. . .] and the uncanniness of a fantasy novel [. . .]. He reintroduced mythic conflicts into a scientific system. He brought back the sorcery in knowledge, the taking it even to the offices of the historians, who seem to assume that the past is already neatly ordered, piecemeal, sitting on the archive shelves. (de Certeau, 8)

144

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

Liberated from the disciplinary purity of historiography, Freudian psychoanalysis, for de Certeau, potentiates an unofficial history disconnected from disciplinary situations: A half century after Michelet, Freud observes that the dead are in fact ‘beginning to speak.’ But they are not speaking through the ‘medium’ of the historian-wizard, as Michelet believed: it is speaking [. . .] in the work and in the silences of the historian, but without his knowledge. These voices – whose disappearance every historian posits, which he replaces with his writing – ‘re-bite’ [. . .] the space from which they were excluded; they continue to speak in the text/tomb that erudition erects in their place. (de Certeau, 8) Kindness is an instance of the literary as one of the ‘other fields’ de Certeau sees Freud’s theory as destined to renew, and of the migration of Freudian ideology into other domains; one can see Ballard’s entire oeuvre, in fact, as pervaded with more or less modified elements of Freudian ideology. Like Freud daringly dismissing the distinction between individual and collective psychology in de Certeau’s reading, Ballard presumes to equate Jim’s individual psychology with larger collective psychological phenomena, as in his personal identification with Jackie Kennedy’s bereavement (KOW, 145); arguably, too, he dares creatively to mingle genres – in this case, fiction, autobiography, and historical novel – in such a way as to destabilize official discourses of history so as to produce new meanings and new perspectives. In his declaration that ‘it is speaking ’ de Certeau seems to point to the existence of an historical uncanny haunting official history in the wake of Freud, and if one accepts this then Empire and Kindness might surely be aligned with it. His sense of Freud as introducing ‘mythic conflict into a scientific system’ and bringing back ‘the sorcery in knowledge’ so as to confound the reductive narratives of conventional historiography certainly resonates with Kindness’ opening of uncanny and magical imaginative spaces within the story of a twentieth- century life; one thinks of Jim’s fantasy of Shepperton in terms of Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies (KOW, 103). In particular, the novel’s mythic shaping recalls de Certeau’s argument for psychoanalysis as creating an irrational history of nature: In taking the individual back to the something other (or unconscious) which determines it without its knowledge, psychoanalysis returned to the symbolic configurations articulated by social practices in traditional civilizations. The dream, fable, myth – these discourses, excluded by

Trauma, Psychoanalysis, Autobiography

145

enlightened reason, became the site where the critique of bourgeois and technological society developed. (de Certeau, 15) Freudian critique [. . .] may now seem like an anthropology. But, in fact, it initiated something that could be called a new history of ‘nature’ which introduced into historicity: a) The persistence and lingering action of the irrational , the violence at work inside scientificity and theory itself. b) A dynamics of nature (drives, affects, the libido) conjoined with language – in opposition to the ideologies of history which privilege relations among people and reduce nature to a passive terrain permanently open to social or scientific conquest. c) The relevance of pleasure (orgasmic, festive, etc.), which was repressed by the incredibly ascetic ethic of progress. (de Certeau, 15–16) Kindness, with its insistence on desire, sexuality, familial love, asserts exactly the unofficial ‘natural’ dimensions of life reasserted for de Certeau in Freudian historiography; the astonishing description of the birth of Miriam’s daughter, with its mythic assertion of the pharaonic biological dignity of the newborn child (KOW, 112), offers a powerful counter-narrative to the technological violence of official history which obsesses Jim. As a quasi- autobiographical fiction informed by psychoanalysis, Kindness demands scrutiny in terms of the relationship between psychoanalysis and autobiography. In Auto/biographical Discourses Laura Marcus notes ‘a sense in which psychoanalysis is founded on the work of autobiography’ (Marcus, 82). Freud used his own biographical experience as the basis for his theories, including in The Interpretation of Dreams, in some ways a far more autobiographical work than his ‘An Autobiographical Study’; he wrote about autobiographical texts by Schreber and Goethe (Marcus, 82), and formulated ‘a theory of psychoanalytic biography or “pathography” ’ (Marcus, 83). Marcus touches upon numerous parallels between autobiography and psychoanalysis including a shared concern with narrative, with image and memory, and with ‘the making of an individual’, but for her these affinities are ‘not enough to create a symmetry between the two practices, and from the early twentieth century onwards there has been a sense of missed opportunities and failed relationships’ (Marcus, 214). Psychoanalysis’ relationship to issues of autobiographical representation is in fact problematic in ways which apply interestingly to Kindness. Marcus discusses psychoanalysis’ sympathy with a ‘literary appropriation of autobiography’ by twentieth- century critics entailing ‘a blurring of the boundaries between non-fictional and fictional writings and an escape from the fruitless endeavour to draw hard and fast distinctions between

146

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

fact and fiction in self-writings’ (Marcus, 201). For Marcus such critical tendencies resonate with the ‘complexity of autobiographical “truth” in psychoanalysis’: Freud’s discovery (or assumption) that patients ‘lie’ is turned to advantage. The fictions which patients manufacture are perceived as enabling the truth of the therapeutic effect and the operation of the unconscious is only seen in the fictions which we invent in order to represent the unconscious. (Marcus, 201) Psychoanalysis is seen here as having a peculiarly sophisticated relationship to issues of truth, one oriented less toward facticity and more toward a truth effect operating at a latent level beyond the consciously artificial surface fabric of language. A fiction of the self is produced in which the truth is assumed to inhere in some way to which its text can only point. A counter to this type of assumption is offered by Bruce Mazlish, who discusses a sense in which being post-psychoanalytic might actually tend to make autobiographies less rather than more revealing of ‘truth’ pertaining to the author himself. Mazlish discusses the lack of true self-analysis in Freud’s ‘An Autobiographical Study’, suggesting that ‘In effect, Freud’s Autobiography could as well have been written by a non-analyst’ (Mazlish, 34), and argues that The Interpretation of Dreams can be seen as Freud’s true autobiography, in which ‘Freud bared and analysed the deepest springs of his psyche: his experience of the Oedipus complex, his feelings about the sibling rivals who anticipated the Breuers and Jungs of his later years, his aggressive impulses, his worldly ambitions [. . .]’ (Mazlish, 34). ‘Should these revelations’, asks Mazlish, ‘have also appeared in his Autobiography?’: ‘And, if not in the particular piece he wrote to satisfy an official professional request, in some master work summing up his life? Or is the psychoanalytic “case” material intrinsically unsuitable to the autobiographical genre?’ (Mazlish, 34). Mazlish goes on to discuss Ernest Jones’s autobiography, suggesting that here ‘most of what he says is a screen, in fact, a defence, against our penetrating into his unconscious life’ (Mazlish, 35) and that ‘Jones’ autobiography, along with Freud’s suggests that psycho-analytic autobiography at the best of hands may not be possible at all. Or if it is, it is so only as a case history’ (Mazlish, 36). For Mazlish ‘autobiography, even after Freud, is what it has always been; primarily a consciously shaped literary production’: As such, it cannot simply offer free associations, or analyses of dreams, or any other part of a standard case history, in lieu of a highly stylised and

Trauma, Psychoanalysis, Autobiography

147

structured account of an individual’s development of self, as perceived from a specific present viewpoint other than neurosis. (Mazlish, 36) Ballard’s sense of Empire as attaining ‘psychological truth’ specifically through fictionalization, discussed above in relation to Caruth’s and Laub’s senses of traumatic historical truth, might also agree with Marcus’ sense of the complexity of autobiographical truth in psychoanalysis. However, Mazlish’s critique of psychoanalytic autobiography also raises some relevant considerations for Ballard’s quasi- autobiographical fictions. In so far as the reader can tell there are elements of considerable honesty in Kindness, implicit acknowledgements of Ballard’s fictionalized alter- ego Jim’s instability and his utilization of acquaintances in his dangerous artistic experiments, but this novel, with its mythic structuring, is precisely ‘a consciously shaped literary production’, ‘a highly stylised and structured account’, or what Philippe Lejeune, discussing psychoanalysis’ failure to transform autobiography, called ‘not an act of analysis but a lived activity of synthesis’ (Marcus, 214). Ballard, like Freud picking and choosing which of his dreams and motives to analyze in Interpretation, retains the expert control of the psychoanalytically informed writer over the material he chooses to release to his reader. Where Marcus discusses the frequent centrality of the Freudian ‘“family romance”’ to autobiography (Marcus, 214), the Oedipal mother is glaringly absent from Ballard’s narrative named for female tenderness, suggesting not so much the kind of anti-autobiographical defence Mazlish evokes in the case of Jones as a pointedly implicit autobiographical reproach by Ballard toward his mother, in key with certain comments he would later make in Miracles of Life (MOL , 84). Kindness is an ambiguous instance of what Marcus sees as the conflict in twentieth- century autobiography theory between the ‘“realist ego”’ and the ‘“narcissistic ego”’ as discussed by Elizabeth Grosz (Marcus, 217). Marcus delineates a hostility between a predominantly American ‘ego psychology’ animating the psychobiographical work of Mazlish and Erik Erikson and ‘Lacanian theorists also writing in the 1970s, for whom ego psychology was a voluntaristic dilution of Freud’s most important theories which neglected the unconscious in favour of an autonomous ego in contact with objective reality’ (Marcus, 215). These two positions are aligned respectively with Grosz’s realist ego, which, ‘innate, pre- given and identified with the self, adapts instinctual drives to the demands of external reality, affecting a rational compromise between the two’, and narcissistic ego, ‘an amorphous entity, enmeshed in drives, fantasies and intersubjective relations’ associated with Lacan’s specularizing conceptual extension from Freud’s ‘On

148

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

Narcissism’ (Marcus, 217). Both models, for Marcus, have been brought to bear on autobiography: ‘Either the autobiography serves to create the illusion of a unified self out of the fragments of identity, or the text reveals, in its fissures, its doublings and its incompleteness, the fragmentations of the subject and its lack of self- coincidence’ (Marcus, 218). With her emphasis on ‘the prevalent imagery of fragmented bodies and the anxiety about the borders and boundaries of self in auto/biographical discourses’, Marcus’s inclination is towards the narcissistic ego, identified with deconstructionist approaches to autobiography (Marcus, 218). Kindness might be said to instantiate the Lacanian narcissistic ego’s ambivalent oscillation between ‘affirmative self-recognition and the paranoic knowledge of a split subject’ (Marcus, 218). Jim’s odyssey from the Shanghai Bund to the Los Angeles beachfront, and the strong tone of self- justification sounded at points by the text, is definitely suggestive of ‘affirmative self-recognition’ or of ego psychology’s sense of the ego as ‘psychic hero’ (Marcus, 215); Jim’s story is exactly one of a gradual adaptation to reality, the therapeutic fictive fashioning of an ‘illusion of the unified self’ out of a subjectivity fractured by the traumas of war. However, taking David Hunter as an uncanny double for Jim, there is indeed a marked lack of ‘self- coincidence’ in his representation, as also in the humorous scene of the child actor in the film of Empire introducing himself with the words ‘I’m you . . . ’ (KOW, 275) or the disparate Jims who populate the narrative’s chronologically fragmented sections. Marcus suggests that ‘Psychoanalysis (Freudian and post- Freudian) and autobiography share a double rhetoric of narrative/verbal and visual representations, the text and the mirror, the interpretative or hermeneutic and the specular’; she associates this tendency with Lacan’s theory of the mirror- stage, the developmental moment of ‘the child’s recognition/misrecognition of a mirrored self-image, a fragmented body and identity reflected back as whole and entire’ (Marcus, 217). Fascinatingly, the written texts created by ‘Jim’ the writer are largely absent from the narrative of Kindness, present in the main only in the sense that there are allusions to the textures of Ballard’s own fictions woven into the different chapters; there is, however, a powerful thematization of specularity, including in reference to Jim’s involvement with electronic media. In line with a reading emphasizing reintegrative adaptation of the self, one might trace across Empire and Kindness a trajectory from Jim’s mother’s shattered dressing- table mirror, emblem of a fracturing of the illusory wholeness of the self, through to Cleo’s deliberate refusal of the mirror during her fi rst act of sex with Jim; however, it is notable that although Jim sees Cleo as ‘right to seal

Trauma, Psychoanalysis, Autobiography

149

away those silver screens’, he is unable entirely to relinquish the allure of the specular: ‘One day we would find the key to the mirror, and enter it together’ (KOW, 265). Kindness’ ambiguity in terms of the ego means that it cannot be read straightforwardly in sympathy with de Certeau’s Lacanian-influenced account of psychoanalysis as making use of biography in order to critique the western ideology of the individual subject. De Certeau’s claim is that ‘the innovation of Freudianism consists in its use of biography as a means of destroying the individualism posited by modern and contemporary psychology’ (de Certeau, 24). This is an explicitly political reading of psychoanalysis: ‘Elaborated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries individualism served as a social base and as the epistemological foundation of a capitalist economy and democratic politic’; individualism is ‘the historical trope for occidental modernity’ which is dismantled and destroyed in its truth- seemingness by Freudianism (de Certeau, 24). De Certeau’s evidence is what he sees as Freud’s reversal of each of the rights and obligations of the individual as enumerated by Kant: in Freud’s analysis, ‘the “adult” appears to be defined by his “minority”; knowledge, by desire mechanisms; liberty, by the law of the unconscious; progress, by originary events’ (de Certeau, 24). This sense of psychoanalysis is at odds with the powerful strain of (bourgeois?) individualism in Ballard’s writing, his emphasis on nonconformity and on the privileging of the internal impulsions of the instincts over social pressures as a means to fulfilment, expressed in Kindness in the depiction of Jim’s waywardness and dogged adherence to his family life. The novel closes with the image of a free and reintegrated self, yet still the constitutive importance of desire mechanisms and originary events pervades the text, narrating professional and personal identity as a desperate activity of response to the overwhelming historical pressures of formative experience. Beyond its dimensions as historical and quasi-autobiographical writing, Kindness’ relation to the psychological discourse of psychoanalysis can be considered at the level of the literary itself. In de Certeau’s reading, psychoanalysis entails a ‘Displacement toward the poetic or novelistic genre’, a ‘conversion to literature’; in support of this de Certeau quotes Freud’s sense in ‘Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva’ that ‘“the novelist has always preceded the scientist”’ (de Certeau, 19). For de Certeau Freudian discourse ‘is the fiction which comes back to the realm of scientificity, not only insofar as it is the object of the analysis, but insofar as it is the form. The novelistic mode becomes theoretic writing’ (de Certeau, 20). De Certeau reads in Freud a very specific sense of the operation of the case history conceived by Freud as novel:

150

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

For Freud, the ‘novel’ is defined as the conjunction in a single text of, on the one hand, ‘the symptoms of the illness’ [. . .], in other words, a semiology based on the identification of pathological structures and, on the other hand, ‘the history of the suffering’ [. . .], in other words, a series of related events which intervene and alter the structural model. [. . .] In Freud’s writing, the pathological structure becomes the framework where events are produced but not integrated – events nonetheless decisive from the point of view of the illness’s development. [. . .] The text which appears to lack ‘scientific authenticity’ is rather the effect of the serious treatment of the dialogic function integral to the cure. In short, no historicity without novel. (de Certeau, 20) The Freudian case history as novel arises from the disjunction between the ‘theoretic framework’ by which Freud describes a pathology (de Certeau, 20) and the ‘differences which the suffering of the other introduces into this framework’ (de Certeau, 20–1). The ‘disturbances that the “suffering” of the other introduces into the system of “illness” also attain something that is beyond the analyst’s knowledge’; the affective responses engendered in the analyst ‘mark a divergence between his historic place (an unconscious) and his scientific position (a knowledge)’ (de Certeau, 21). By implicating something in the analyst beyond his objective scientific knowledge, a new mode of knowing is engendered beyond the scientific: In removing thus a part of its “sérieux ” from the scientific model, the Freudian narrative inscribes there a hidden historicity of the analyst and a reciprocal mutation of the interlocutors. It is a sculpture of events, previously unknown, in the structural framework of knowledge. (de Certeau, 20–1) For de Certeau, this new Freudian conception of the novel ‘instructs as to the reading of other documents’, allowing us ‘to consider any narrative as a relationship between a structure and some events, that is to say between a system [. . .] and its alteration by an otherness’ (de Certeau, 21). Here the literary work ‘is not reducible to the “serieux ” of a structural model imposed by a conception of scientificity’, appearing rather as ‘a setting of historical alterations within a formal framework’ (de Certeau, 21). De Certeau sees all Freud’s analytic activities as essentially literary; ‘there is a continuity between Freud’s manner of listening to a patient, his manner of interpreting a document (literary or other), and his manner of writing. There can be no essential break between these three operations’; ‘The “novel” in this

Trauma, Psychoanalysis, Autobiography

151

sense can characterize at once the utterances of a patient, a literary work, and the psychoanalytic discourse itself’ (de Certeau, 21). This conception by de Certeau of the birth of psychoanalysis as a conversion to literature is usefully questioned by Laura Marcus. ‘The “conversion”’, she claims, ‘is neither simple nor absolute. In his case history “Dora”, Freud insists that he is writing science and not literature, constructing some curious oppositions between the “man of letters” and the “medical man”’ (Marcus, 84). Laura Marcus also in this connection critiques Stephen Marcus’ argument for Freudian case histories as ‘a new form of literature [. . .] creative narratives that include their own analysis and interpretation’ (Marcus, 84), pointing to how ‘The “literary” or poetic, [. . .] can represent both the undoing of any claims to scientific or historical status, or it can stand for unimpeachable cultural value, making, and substantiating, its own claims to historicity and truth’ (Marcus, 85); rather than constituting literature per se, Freud’s writings for her entail ‘the mixing and crossing of the forms and truth- claims of myth, literature, fiction, science and history’, initiating ‘a new logic of these forms of knowledge and belief’ (Marcus, 85). Ballard expressed in interview his interest in the case history as a form (Revell, 43), but in light of my foregoing discussions of the highly crafted nature of Ballard’s quasi-autobiographical fictions it would seem very difficult to read them convincingly on this Freudian model; the case history relies on the evidence of the patient’s dreams and free-associations recorded in a more or less unedited form by the analyst. Where de Certeau posits an identity between patient’s utterances, literary work, and psychoanalytic discourse, Ballard’s novel presents a narrative of a traumatized individual in a literary format, drawing on Freudian theory as a structural and thematic resource; there remain irreducible differences between this work of fiction and the linguistic content of psychoanalytic therapy and theory. In de Certeau the case history as novel produces meaning by creating the conditions for a creative disjunction between theoretical pathology and the experience of the analysand, but Kindness manufactures a degree of coherence in the fictionalized narrative of a life through the highly stylized imposition of a structure of repetition compulsion upon specifically selected and dramatized memories; these might be thought two diametrically opposed methods of meaning-production. Notwithstanding this, de Certeau’s model of the narrative as ‘a relationship between a structure and some events, that is to say between a system [. . .] and its alteration by an otherness’, or as ‘a setting of historical alterations within a formal framework’ is a suggestive context for the traumatic structuring of Empire and Kindness, which narrate Jim’s persistent struggle to find new paradigms to make sense of

152

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

experiences which repeatedly destabilize his sense of reality; ‘At a single word from Tulloch, the apparently secure world he had begun to rebuild himself out of one small room and a few tins of Spam had collapsed at his feet’ (EOS , 246). Structured by trauma, Empire and Kindness stake their claim to ‘historicity and truth’, to the ‘unimpeachable cultural value’ of the literary, in Laura Marcus’ words, on a refashioning of biographical experience in terms of the uncertainly scientific systems of Freudian metapsychology. Jacques Derrida’s prolific readings of Freud promise a great deal in terms of reading Ballard’s relationship to psychoanalysis; however, his essay ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ is particularly promising. Tracing Freud’s mobilization of writing as a metaphor for the operations of the psyche from the ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ (1895) through ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ to the ‘Note on the Mystic Writing-Pad’ (1925), the essay is a suggestive context within which to contemplate Kindness as a fictive quasiautobiography indebted to Freud’s psychoanalytic writings. Discussing Freud’s early conception of the memory-trace, Derrida asserts that because ‘Trace as memory is not a pure breaching that might be reappropriated at any time as simple presence; it is rather the ungraspable and invisible difference between breaches’, psychic life must be conceived as ‘neither the transparency of meaning nor the opacity of force but the difference within the exertion of forces’ (Derrida, 253). Because of this definition in terms of an interval separating two distinct breaches, Derrida suggests that ‘in the first time of the contact between two forces, repetition has begun. Life is already threatened by the origin of the memory which constitutes it’ (Derrida, 254) – the two or more breaches implied by the existence of a memory trace instantiate a repetition suggestive of death drive; Derrida thus reads the trace or inscription which is the mechanism of memory in Freud’s early theory precisely in terms of a deathly repetition- compulsion. Life as threatened by its own originating memory and writing or inscription as inherently bound up with a deathly compulsion chime resoundingly with Jim’s narrative in Kindness, his helpless repetitions of the violence he has witnessed embodied in the violent literary fantasies he reads to affectless Warholian youth at a rock festival (KOW, 152). Derrida’s sense of Freud’s attempt throughout the Project for a Scientific Psychology ‘to account for the psyche in terms of spacing, a topography of traces, a map of breaches’ (Derrida, 258) suggests tantalizingly the question of whether Ballard’s concept of psychological ‘inner space’ will relate in detail to this aspect of Freud; Jim’s own ‘topography of traces’ is suggested by David’s implication that his encounter with the Japanese at the railway station is marked ‘inside your head’ (KOW, 216) and by other iconic geographical sites of memory

Trauma, Psychoanalysis, Autobiography

153

which map out the coordinates of his life; the runways of American bases in Cambridgeshire, the splash meadow where he plays with his children, the Kennedy Memorial recalling his investment in JFK’s televised death. Derrida’s definition of ‘the fundamental property of writing, in a difficult sense of the word, as spacing ’ leads him to suggest with reference to Interpretation that the ‘border between the non-phonetic space of writing (even “phonetic” writing) and the space of the stage (scène) of dreams is uncertain’; as such, we should not be surprised if Freud, ‘in order to suggest the strangeness of the logico-temporal relations in dreams, constantly adduces writing, and the spatial synopses of pictograms, rebuses, hieroglyphics and nonphonetic writing in general’ (Derrida, 273). Dreams are a matter of ‘Synopsis and not stasis: scene and not tableau’; ‘The laconic, lapidary quality of dreams is not the impassive presence of petrified signs’ (Derrida, 273). Dream and writing in Freud, for Derrida, share a spatiality and a dynamic incompletion in time which might be reflected in Kindness’ structuring around sparsely denoted, vivid scenarios such as the closing scene in which Jim and Cleo watch a replica of Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki set sail from a Los Angeles beach, with its sense of mythic departure and spontaneous openness to the potentialities of the present moment: ‘Cleo, think where that might lead . . .’ (KOW, 286). Derrida’s treatment of the ‘Note on the Mystic Writing-Pad’ is still more suggestive than his reading of Interpretation. He reads in the ‘temporality of the wax slab’ the three Kantian modes of time, ‘permanence, succession, simultaneity’ (Derrida, 283); Freud’s use of the writing-pad, a novelty writing-machine, as an image for the operation of the memory-trace implies for Derrida a peculiar relationship between writing and the work of the psyche: Temporality as spacing will be not only the horizontal discontinuity of a chain of signs, but also will be writing as the interruption and restoration of contact between the various depths of psychical levels: the remarkably heterogeneous temporal fabric of psychical work itself. (Derrida, 283) ‘Time’, says Derrida, ‘is the economy of a system of writing’ (Derrida, 284). In light of his reading of the mystic writing-pad here Kindness begins to look even more Freudian. Ballard’s preoccupation with simultaneous perception, most fully explored in Atrocity, resurfaces in Kindness in the paralleling of Jim’s wartime experiences with the trauma of his present (KOW, 190); the temporality of this memory-haunted, segmented narrative of a life unified under the sign of a cluster of intensely cathected obsessions can interestingly be thought in terms of the different levels of simultaneity, succession, and permanence. The ‘interruption and restoration of contact between the

154

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

various depths of psychical levels’, the ‘heterogeneous temporal fabric of psychical work itself’, are evident in the way the textual present of Jim’s narrative persistently slips back to make contact with submerged moments from the past. For Derrida too ‘Writing is unthinkable without repression. The condition for writing is that there be neither a permanent contact nor an absolute break between strata’ (Derrida, 285); Jim the writer oscillates between horrified encounters with the dangers of his past and the changing contentments of his present. Derrida decentres the self in his account of Freud’s metaphor of writing in a way which complements the ambivalent treatment of the self in Kindness previously discussed; for him ‘We must be several in order to write, and even to “perceive.” The simple structure of maintenance and manuscription, like every intuition of origin, is a myth, a “fiction” as “theoretical” as the idea of the primary process’ (Derrida, 284–5); ‘The “subject” of writing does not exist if we mean by that some sovereign solitude of the author. The subject of writing is a system of relations between strata: the Mystic Pad, the psyche, society, the world’ (Derrida, 285). In the light of these considerations I persist in seeing in the different narrative sections in Kindness a perpetuation of the fragmentation of a unitary subject implied in Atrocity, and in its narration of a modern consciousness a perpetuation of Atrocity’s analysis of the ‘system of relations’ between layered external, somatic, and psychic realities; Jim’s infatuation with media imagery, his sex life, his memories of the war. Derrida’s essay ultimately pursues Freud’s engagement with the metaphor of writing beyond the scope of this essay. In its aspect as a technical activity connecting ‘the psychical apparatus and the nonpsychical apparatus’, he claims, ‘writing is the stage of history and the play of the world’; ‘It cannot be exhausted by psychology alone[.] That which, in Freud’s discourse, opens itself to the theme of writing results in psychoanalysis being not simply psychology – nor simply psychoanalysis’ (Derrida, 287). One should perhaps recognize here a limit to the sense in which Ballard’s fictions themselves can be said to be psychological. Writing is a material and cultural phenomenon irreducible to psychology, and Ballard’s fiction’s dialogue with Freud goes beyond that fiction’s aspect as psychological representation and into the complex dimension of textuality emphasized in Derrida’s work. Nonetheless, as in the example briefly explored here, Derrida’s reading of Freud potentiates intriguing possibilities for the consideration of Ballard’s fiction as a response to or extrapolation from Freud’s ambivalently psychological and literary project.

Chapter 5

Contemporary Psychopathies

The final phase of Ballard’s fiction, from the late 1980s through to 2007, increasingly engages with the psychology of the social. Running Wild (1988) deals with the socialization of children, offering an account of murderous Oedipal revolt focusing less on attachment to the mother than on the potential of over-attentive modern parenting to alienate and repress children. Where Laing and Esterson’s Sanity, Madness, and the Family (1964) suggested schizophrenia as induced by familial context, in Running Wild an over- attentive, over- sensible upbringing denies the children of Pangbourne Village the spontaneity and emotional experience they need. The depiction of the children as ‘willing themselves into madness as a way of finding freedom’ (RW, 72) recalls Laing’s suggestion that ‘Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potentially liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death’ (Politics, 10); the ‘mutilated copy of Piaget’s classic text on the rearing of children’ Greville finds at the Maxteds’ (RW, 47) – presumably Science of Education and the Psychology of the Child (1969) – hammers home the novella’s rejection of an over-rationalistic approach to child-rearing. Running Wild ’s conception of societal repression, derived from strains of thought popular during the 1960s, should be compared carefully to Freud’s sense of repression as a constitutive dynamic in the formation of the individual; Ballard’s work participates in a wider cultural tendency to conflate psychoanalytic and political senses of ‘repression’ critiqued by Deleuze and Guattari in AntiOedipus (Anti- Oedipus, 113). Where Running Wild addresses the socialization of the individual in the heart of a hypermodern Europe, Rushing to Paradise (1994) mobilizes the utopian trope of the desert island to present a vision of psychopathy as the last preserve of human freedom from civilizational repression. The novel narrates the South Pacific adventures of a group of obsessed characters drawn into the orbit of the unstable Dr Barbara Rafferty, a monstrous female Manson whose title and Christian name yoke together reason and barbarity and whose attempts to found a

156

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

utopian environmentalist commune on the fictional island of Saint-Esprit culminate in mass murder. An avatar of what psychoanalytic critic Barbara Creed has discussed as the ‘monstrous-feminine’, Dr Barbara’s behaviour resonates with psychiatric definitions of the psychopath, and the novel’s morally ambiguous treatment of this individual whom some might straightforwardly condemn as criminally insane instantiates the provocative argument pervading Ballard’s late fictions for psychopathy as the last remaining locus of freedom in a completely sane society – Ballard’s problematic representations of psychopathy will briefly be discussed below with particular reference to Millennium People. Rushing to Paradise ’s evocation of the albatross, that Baudelairean and Coleridgean symbol of poetry and of man’s doomed destructiveness, associates its courting of madness with the Romantic imagination, instrument of human liberty and fulfilment; the name of the island, Saint-Esprit, places Barbara’s insanity in the context of an implicit concern to preserve, not the wildlife of natural ecosystems, but the inner nature of the human spirit or psyche.

Cocaine Nights Crossing frontiers is my profession. Those strips of no-man’s land between the checkpoints always seem such zones of promise, rich with the possibilities of new lives, new scents and affections. At the same time they set off a reflex of unease that I have never been able to repress. As the customs officials rummage through my suitcases I sense them trying to unpack my mind and reveal a contraband of forbidden dreams and memories. (CN, 9) Cocaine Nights begins with an image evoking the concern of Ballard’s late fiction with the relation between individual and society. Gibraltar’s border with Spain is here a psychological interzone where the postmodern, post- Freudian self with its hidden cargo of strange and proscribed impulsions is subject to the anxiety which accompanies the internalization of social prohibitions. The novel’s ostensible structuring around the detective thriller form and concern with Charles Prentice’s quest to understand the motivations of his brother Frank makes this interpretatively driven narrative part of the wider cultural conversation between psychoanalysis and detective fiction whose theoretical extreme is represented by Lacan’s seminar on Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’. The two brothers, uncanny stand-ins for one another, are deftly sketched in terms suggestive of psychoanalytic

Contemporary Psychopathies

157

case-history; displaced schooling in Saudi Arabia, mother’s traumatic suicide, Frank’s presumably resultant ‘childhood tic’ of ‘compulsive stealing’ (CN, 17), Charles’ paternal-fraternal relation to the imaginative Frank and his own sense of rootlessness: ‘Already we were assuming our familiar roles first set out in childhood. He was the imaginative and wayward spirit, and I was the stolid older brother who had yet to get the joke’ (CN, 23); ‘sometimes I think I’ve made jet-lag into a new philosophy. It’s the nearest we can get to penitence’ (CN, 25). This is Freudian character- analysis hard-boiled into glib Greeneian shorthand. The conundrum driving the detective-novel dimension of Cocaine Nights, the enigma of Frank’s guilt or otherwise in the case of the fire at the Hollinger mansion, continues the novel’s evocation of the individual’s internalization of social prohibitions in the form of the super- ego, utilized to such effect in Ballard’s earlier story ‘The Watch-Towers’. The issue of Frank’s guilt, posed at the end of the first chapter by Danvila’s pronouncement that ‘he has pleaded guilty to five charges of murder’ (CN, 21), is carefully sustained in its ambivalence: ‘I could well imagine Frank, in his quizzical way, forgetting to slip the padded manila envelope into the right hands, curious to see what might result [. . .]’ (CN, 15); ‘But Frank was too fastidious, too amused by his own weaknesses, to commit himself to any serious misdemeanour’ (CN, 17). Frank’s calm avowal of his own guilt leads Charles to speculate that ‘His plea of guilty was a charade, part of some bizarre game he was playing against himself, in which even the police were reluctant to join’ (CN, 29), or that ‘he must be under some secret pressure’ (CN, 30); his refusal to plead insanity (CN, 78) and Charles’ feeling of ‘curious complicity in the crime I was trying to solve’ (CN, 79) evoke the ‘moral masochism’ imposed by the super-ego as embodiment of the death drive (XIX, 170), and the eventual revelation of Frank’s involvement in the lethal fire (CN, 320) compounds the novel’s complex Freudian sense of self- destructive impulses as capable of actuating themselves through the individual’s sense of its own relation to the community, a psychoanalytic subtlety missed by the detective Cabrera, ‘a hundred seminars on the psychology of crime still fresh in his mind’ (CN, 29), a Ballardian figure for the inability of rationalist forensic psychology to explain the operations of the human psyche. Prentice’s increasing reluctance to visit Frank (CN, 158) signals the imbrication of Cocaine Nights’ ostensible detective plot within a broader narrative about the psychology of the social, underlined as Prentice’s attempts to unravel his brother’s alleged crime are increasingly sidelined by his fascination with the strange psychological climate of Ballard’s Costa Del Sol. The

158

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

Costa, with its ‘retirement havens’ and ‘residential compounds’ like a ‘series of psychological pens that soothed and domesticated these émigré populations’ (CN, 34), forms a ‘special kind of willed limbo’ characterized by an ‘enforced leisure that fossilized the nervous system’ (CN, 34), an ‘affectless realm’ suggestive of a ‘leisure- dominated future’ (CN, 35). The only lacuna amid this geography of decortication is Ballard’s fictional utopia of Estrella de Mar, a seaside town with a ‘thriving arts community’, ‘alert and confident’ residents (CN, 36), and a sense of energy and ‘real community’ (CN, 43) suggestive of ‘Chelsea or Greenwich village in the 1960s’ (CN, 43). Representing the flowering of a fascination with the leisure landscapes of southern Europe evident in Ballard’s work as early as The Atrocity Exhibition , the novel’s richly detailed contrast between Estrella and the rest of the Costa is nonetheless in dialogue with Freud’s writings on social psychology, particularly the stark instinctual reductivism of ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, with its vision of contemporary civilization as based on instinctual repression. In ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’ Freud proclaims the instincts as the source of human satisfaction: convinced that ‘what decides the purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle’ (XXI, 76), he sees ‘the satisfaction of a wild instinctual impulse untamed by the ego’ as the most intense of attainable pleasures (XXI, 79). Contemplating ‘the social source of suffering’ (XXI, 86), Freud speculates that behind the failure to eradicate human suffering through social regulation may lie ‘a piece of unconquerable nature’, ‘a piece of our own psychical constitution’, that ‘what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions’ (XXI, 86). For him, the essence of civilization ‘lies in the fact that the members of the community restrict themselves in their possibilities of satisfaction, whereas the individual knew no such restrictions’ (XXI, 95); as such, individual liberty is at odds with civilization, and ‘A good part of the struggles of mankind centre round the single task of finding an expedient accommodation [. . .] between the claims of the individual and the cultural claims of the group’ (XXI, 96). The emergence of culture is synchronous with the increasing sublimation of instinctual aims, with the ‘renunciation of instinct’ and ‘cultural frustration’ upon which I touched in Chapter One (XXI, 97). Freud warns darkly of ‘serious disorders’ ensuing from failure to compensate economically for this civilizational tendency to deprive the instincts of satisfaction (XXI, 97), and Cocaine Nights, like other novels of Ballard’s late period, on one level instantiates this warning: in their embrace of the libidinal gratifications of violence and sexuality,

Contemporary Psychopathies

159

the denizens of Estrella de Mar reassert their individual liberties against a postmodern leisure society oriented around the subdual and constriction of human instinctual energies. The novel improvises around Freud’s theme of civilization as repressive of human sexuality, his contentions that ‘On the one hand love comes into opposition to the interests of civilization; on the other, civilization threatens love with substantial restrictions’ (XXI, 103) and that civilization ‘behaves towards sexuality as a people or a stratum of its population does which has subjected another one to its exploitation’ (XXI, 104). Cocaine Nights enacts a morally ambiguous development of this view. The evocation of sexually liberated Club Nautico members happy debriefing of each other on ‘the silky misdemeanours of the night’ (CN, 42) and of ‘another Estrella de Mar, a world of imported bed-boys and other genial pleasures’ (CN, 135), the latter suggestive of Freud’s complaint that the ‘requirement [. . .] that there shall be a single kind of sexual life for everyone, [. . .] becomes the source of serious injustice’ (XXI, 104), are tempered by scenes of the communal sanctioning of an attempted rape taking place in the car park (CN, 57- 8) and of another, planned rape perpetrated during the filming of an amateur pornographic film (CN, 126), both carefully described in terms suggesting a quasi-parental concern for the victim. The novel speculatively narrates a rebellion by the people of Estrella de Mar against Freudian civilizational repression in language implying a careful moral assessment of the gains and losses of untrammelled instinctual behaviour. The violence of Cocaine Nights is similarly an extrapolation of arguments advanced in ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’. In Freud’s conception the reason for the civilizational impulsion towards social binding lies in the commonly disavowed truth that human beings are ‘creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness’ (XXI, 111); when the ‘mental counter-forces’ to this aggression are out of action, it ‘manifests itself spontaneously and reveals man as a savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien’ (XXI, 112). The identifications, aim-inhibited relationships, sexual restrictions and moral injunctions by which civilization controls the human instincts are reaction-formations against man’s aggressive instincts, which threatened to precipitate social disintegration (XXI, 112). For Freud, not only was aggression inherent to humanity long before the development of capitalist civilization but also, in fact, ‘It is clearly not easy for men to give up the satisfaction of this inclination to aggression. They do not feel comfortable without it’ (XXI, 114). Developing directly from Freud’s sense of humans as inherently aggressive, Cocaine Nights proffers the specific hypothesis of

160

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

violent aggression as an invigorating response to the excessively leisured and controlled environment of the Costa Del Sol. Charles’ comparison of Estrella to Rio, the proximity of whose violent favelas allowed him to sleep his ‘deepest sleep’ (CN, 81), implies the life-affirming power of death and danger; later, his near- strangulation by an unknown assailant engenders in him an erotic-thanatic excitement at ‘the perfume of my own strangulation’ (CN, 100). His interpretation of Bobby Crawford’s theatrical theft and gratuitous burning of a speedboat and of Charles’ own car as attempts less ‘to force me to leave Estrella de Mar than to integrate me into its inner life’ (CN, 160) signals the relationship of violence to the most profound internal realities of human life. As the psychiatrist Sanger explains to Prentice, ‘Crime, and transgressive behaviour – by which I mean all activities that aren’t necessarily illegal, but provoke us and tap our need of strong emotion, quicken the nervous system and jump the synapses deadened by leisure and inaction’ (CN, 180); ‘Here transgressive behaviour is for the public good. All feelings of guilt, however old and deep-rooted, are assuaged’ (CN, 181). Sanger puts a neurological gloss on the novel’s sense of the human need for instinctual excitation, gesturing to the Freudian stress on the inherent conflict in the human psyche between gratification and the individual’s profound formative introjection of social prohibitions. Bobby Crawford is an appropriately ambiguous figurehead for Ballard’s fictional social experiment in instinctual liberation. Likeable and dangerous, Crawford is first seen playing aggressively against the Club Nautico’s tennis machine, an image of the reassertion of human passion against an inhuman technological landscape; a figure of liberation, his wistful eulogy for his dead girlfriend Bibi is a Laingian vision of freedom, a demonstration of his allegiance to the pleasure principle: ‘Bibi needed to soar over our heads, dreaming her amphetamine dreams [. . .] leading everyone into the cocaine night’ (CN, 208). With his ‘evangelical zeal and his selfless commitment to the people of the Residencia’, Crawford is the impetus behind its ‘civic renewal’ (CN, 254) – Hennessy says of him ‘Forty years ago he’d have been running the Festival of Britain’ (CN, 46) – yet his revivification of the somnolent residents of the Costa is predicated around violent transgression: basing his rule on the ‘three pillars’ of ‘drugs, gambling, and illicit sex’ (CN, 257) and a conviction that ‘civic pride and the arts’ go hand in hand with ‘extensive crime’ (CN, 261). Crawford’s pyromania allies him with the violence of the id: ‘A spectacular fire touches something deep inside us’ (CN, 204); his hope that by starting his pornographic film club he can help the residents surmount the ‘amnesia of self’ into which they have fallen (CN, 262) makes him a figure of desublimation and of reconnection to desire, the emotions, and the id seen as the

Contemporary Psychopathies

161

core of the self, the ground of authentic being. His sense that ‘people are like children, they need constant stimulation. [. . .] Only crime, or something close to crime, seems to stir them’ (CN, 260) evokes the Freudian belief in the infantile urge towards gratification as never entirely surmounted. Like a Jungian mana-personality, Crawford acts as the naïve focus of certain inarticulate socially shared psychological needs of the residents, their unconscious requirement for transgressive behaviour as a means of achieving a sense of community and agency: ‘He has certain dangerous qualities, of which he isn’t really aware. He excites people, and stirs them in ways they don’t understand’ (CN, 176). Ultimately in the novel’s moral schema his id- driven energy compels Crawford too far along the slippery slope: Crime would always be rife, but Crawford had put vice and prostitution and drug- dealing to positive social ends. Estrella de Mar had rediscovered itself, but the escalator of provocation had carried him upwards to the Hollinger house and the engulfing flames. (CN, 324–5) The narrative denouement of Cocaine Nights is intimately inflected, once more, by overtones of the theorization of human social life propounded in ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’. Frank Prentice’s manipulation by a syndicate of conspirators into perpetrating the fire at the Hollinger mansion (CN, 315–21) relates to Freud’s sense of social cohesion as based around guilt at the killing of the primal father. As Paula Hamilton explains to Charles, ‘A great crime was needed, something terrible and spectacular that would bind everyone together, seal them into a sense of guilt that would keep Estrella de Mar going for ever’; the people of Estrella ‘had to commit a major crime themselves, something violent and dramatic, up on a hill where everyone could see it, so we’d all feel guilty forever’ (CN, 317). In this psychosocial ritual ‘The important thing is to sacrifice someone and seal the tribe into itself’ (CN, 324). In Freud’s social theory, the legacy of the killing of the primal father means that the human community, structured around the form of the family, cannot fail to experience guilt derived from the ambivalence of the struggle between Eros and death (XXI, 132): So long as the community assumes no other form than that of the family, the conflict is bound to express itself in the Oedipus complex, to establish the conscience and to create the first sense of guilt. [. . .] Since civilization obeys an internal erotic impulsion which causes human beings to unite in a closely knit group, it can only achieve this aim through an ever-increasing reinforcement of the sense of guilt. What began in relation to the father is completed in relation to the group. (XXI, 132–3)

162

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

For Freud the sense of guilt is ‘the most important problem in the development of civilization’, and ‘the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt’ (XXI, 134). The way in which the consortium at Estrella de Mar attempts to bind itself together through the commission of a communal murder of its aristocratic head echoes this Freudian sense of the transmission of social cohesion through compulsive repetition of the super- egoic self- aggression of Oedipally derived guilt. Likewise, Paula Hamilton’s revelation to Prentice arises from her remorse over the ‘conspiracy to kill the psychiatrist’ (CN, 316) and resulting wish to prevent the syndicate’s plan ‘to do the same thing for the Residencia Costasol, with poor old Sanger as the sacrifice’ (CN, 318). Prentice’s willing embrace of his framing for Crawford’s murder, sustaining the dream of the ‘syndicates of guilt’ (CN, 329) in order to perpetuate Crawford’s liberatory mission, implies his enchainment within the psychosocial structure of guilt-reinforcement holding Ballard’s dystopian micro- society together. The dead Crawford, liberatory bearer of ‘an elixir that would wake the world’ (CN, 327), stands for that free instinctual energy which escapes binding by this morbid dynamic and is hence, paradoxically, ultimately excluded from social reality.

Super- Cannes Ballard’s Super- Cannes enacts a speculative interrogation of the psychology of postmodern corporatism, depicting Eden- Olympia, a fictionalized version of the Côte d’Azur business park of Sofia-Antipolis, as a utopianist control landscape which produces isolated and asocial subjects. The novel’s critique of this corporate technoscape, initially introduced as ‘a humane version of Corbusier’s radiant city’ (SC , 5), has an ideological relationship to R.D. Laing’s complaints about the alienation entailed by modern civilization, as the opening encounter of protagonist Paul Sinclair with corporate psychiatrist Wilder Penrose implies (Politics, 12). His name evoking both the British Surrealist painter Roland Penrose and the Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, Penrose is the business park’s apologist and champion, a threatening figure of the domineering and irresponsible psychiatrist in the anti-psychiatric tradition, a ‘psychopomp’ Sinclair identifies with the ‘waiting madness’ haunting the business park (SC , 3). His aggressive persona implies psychiatry’s potential complicity in matters of social power (SC , 14, 16), and Paul’s ambivalent admiration for him is later countered by Frances Baring’s hostile expressions of anti-technocratic, anti-psychiatric

Contemporary Psychopathies

163

feeling: ‘Eden- Olympia is a brainstorm [. . .] Wilder Penrose is storming the brains. . .’ (SC , 113); ‘let’s kill all the psychiatrists’ (SC , 115). The mass shooting of a number of the business park’s top executives by Dr David Greenwood problematically rewrites Michael Ryan’s Hungerford rampage in terms of R.D. Laing’s sense of madness as potential ‘break-through’ on the part of the alienated individual (Politics, 110); Greenwood’s enthusiasm for Lewis Carroll, precursor of the Surrealists (SC , 78), aligns him with the fantastic as a necessary subversive counter to Eden- Olympia’s affectless rationality. Perhaps even more than with anti-psychiatry, Super- Cannes’ interrogation of the corporatized landscape resonates powerfully with Herbert Marcuse’s extrapolation of the social ramifications of Freudian metapsychology in Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Enquiry into Freud (1956). In this text Marcuse interrogates Freud’s equation of civilization and repression, arguing from the detail of Freud’s theory as applied to contemporary circumstances for ‘a non-repressive civilization’ as a real historical possibility (Marcuse, 5). Marcuse reads in Freud a hidden trend whereby the transformation of the pleasure principle into the reality principle by which civilization subordinates the instincts is subverted by a persistent return of the repressed (Marcuse, 16); in delineating the workings of repression, Freud effectively upholds ‘the tabooed aspirations of humanity: the claim for a state where freedom and necessity coincide’ (Marcuse, 18). The unconscious drive towards gratification haunting the repressed mind of the socialized individual, Marcuse implies, may provide the basis for future political liberation (Marcuse, 18-19). As I shall show, Super- Cannes is pervaded with a related psycho-politics in which a desublimatory rejection of civilizational repression is seen to arise from the very functioning of civilization itself. Ballard’s novel dramatizes something closely akin to what Marcuse describes as the contemporary alienation of labour. Marcuse details how the ‘Performance principle ’, the specific version of Freud’s reality principle he sees as dominant under contemporary late capitalism (Marcuse, 35), entails an advanced stage of rationalized domination and control of social labour in which work is an activity alienated from the satisfactions demanded by the Freudian pleasure principle (Marcuse, 45). Despite this alienation the social benefits deriving from the individual’s work cause his libidinal restraint to appear rational and encourage him to conform socially (Marcuse, 45–6). As a consequence, the regular individual ‘lives his repression “freely” as his own life: he desires what he is supposed to desire; his gratifications are profitable to him and to others: he is reasonably and often even exuberantly

164

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

happy’; repression ‘disappears in the grand objective order of things which rewards more or less eloquently the complying individuals and, in doing so, reproduces more or less adequately society as a whole’ (Marcuse, 45). Alienation becomes normalized to the extent that any knowledge of it is purely unconscious; alienation and regimentation expand outwards from the working day to colonize leisure time (Marcuse, 47). The work culture of Eden- Olympia depicted in Super- Cannes operates along comparable lines. Jane Sinclair is rapidly drawn into Eden- Olympia’s ‘regime of fulfilment through work’ (SC , 39), her long working hours implying a normalized alienation, leading Paul to reflect that ‘After another six months she would be as institutionalized as any long-term convict’ (SC , 81). Wilder Penrose boasts that ‘At Eden- Olympia work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work’; his suggestion of the senior workers at EdenOlympia that ‘Work is where they find their real fulfilment – running an investment bank, designing an airport, bringing on stream a new family of antibiotics’ (SC , 94) suggests a development beyond Marcuse’s sense of alienated labour as ‘absence of gratification, negation of the pleasure principle’ (Marcuse, 45) to a perverse stage of technocratic organisation where work itself, rather than leisure, is identified with gratification. For Marcuse a society governed by the performance principle must train the individual ‘for its alienation at its very roots – the pleasure ego. It must learn to forget the claim for timeless and useless gratification, for the “eternity of pleasure”’ (Marcuse, 47). Under this system the individual ‘is not to be left alone’: For left to itself, and supported by free intelligence aware of the potentialities of liberation from the reality of repression, the libidinal energy generated by the id would thrust against its ever more extraneous limitations and strive to engulf an ever larger field of existential relations, thereby exploding the reality ego and its repressive performances. (Marcuse, 47–8) Where Jane exemplifies a free conformity to the performance principle, Paul Sinclair himself, loafing alone by his swimming pool, is a lone pleasure- ego still susceptible to timeless and useless gratification, and thus both the object of suspicion in the context of the park’s ‘grudging puritanism’ (SC , 46) and capable of an unwelcome critical perspective on the park’s repressive work culture (SC , 59). Like that of late industrial society in Marcuse’s conception, the social structure of Ballard’s Eden- Olympia is a depersonalized one. For Marcuse, in modernity the events and experiences which trigger an Oedipal response to authority are encountered not in the personal context of the family but in ‘the institutions and ideologies which the individual faces daily and

Contemporary Psychopathies

165

which reproduce, in their very structure, both domination and the impulse to overthrow it’ (Marcuse, 74). Consequently, at the contemporary level of civilization, ‘the father can be overcome without exploding the instinctual and social order [. . .]. Domination has outgrown the sphere of personal relationships and created the institutions for the orderly satisfaction of human needs on an expanding scale’ (Marcuse, 77). Institutionalization has replaced the embodiment of authority in the personalized image of the Oedipal father so that ‘all domination assumes the form of administration’ and the individual’s life is organized not by a patriarchal superior but by ‘the “system,” the sum total of the institutions that determine, satisfy, and control his needs’ (Marcuse, 98). Super- Cannes depicts a society in which social cohesion has similarly become disconnected from familial and interpersonal bonds and come to hinge instead on conformity to the structures of impersonal institutional procedure. As Penrose says to Paul, the intention is to ‘make the office feel like a home – if anything, the real home’ (SC , 17); intimacy and neighbourly relations are minimized in this hypermodern environment where ‘An invisible infrastructure took the place of traditional civic virtues’ (SC , 38). The park’s head of security, Pascal Zander, is an ineffectual authority figure, ‘more public relations man than security chief’, who refuses to believe in the existence of criminality within EdenOlympia (SC , 83). Where Marcuse discusses the contemporary ‘“automatization” of the superego’ (Marcuse, 94), the absorption of social taboos at the level of physiological reflex (Marcuse, 32-33), Super- Cannes projects this concept outward in its depiction of the automated landscape of EdenOlympia as obviating the need for autonomous action: Civility and polity were designed into Eden- Olympia, in the same way that mathematics, aesthetics and an entire geo-political worldview were designed into the Parthenon and the Boeing 747. (SC , 38) Given the absence of an explicit moral order, where decisions about right and wrong were engineered into the social fabric along with fire drills and parking regulations, Zander’s job became impossible. Crime could flourish at Eden- Olympia without the residents ever being aware that they were its perpetrators or leaving any clues to their motives. (SC , 89) As for Marcuse, at Eden- Olympia the depersonalization and institutionalization of society isolates and impoverishes the individual. Marcuse claims the social value of the individual is now ‘measured primarily in terms of standardised skills and qualities of adjustment rather than autonomous judgement and personal responsibility’ (Marcuse, 96); with the ‘decline of the social function of the family’ (Marcuse, 96) ‘the formation

166

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

of the mature superego seems to skip the stage of individualization: the generic atom becomes directly a social atom’ (Marcuse, 97). The human being ‘is kept in a state of impoverishment, both cultural and physical’ (Marcuse, 99); his or her high standard of living ‘is restrictive in a concrete sociological sense: the goods and services that the individuals buy control their needs and petrify their faculties’; ‘better living is offset by the allpervasive control over living’ (Marcuse, 100). Such assertions illuminate Super- Cannes as post- Freudian psycho- social critique. Paul banters cheerfully with the young Frenchwoman who X-rays his knee, but has ‘forgotten her face within seconds of leaving her’ (SC , 39); theirs is a standardized and anonymous encounter. Individuals in the complex are atomized, Paul’s neighbour Simone Delage sunbathing naked on her balcony ‘as if the anonymity of Eden Olympia made her invisible to her neighbours’ (SC , 40). Completely consumed by her work schedule, Jane has slotted efficiently into the standardized space of her predecessor’s house and medical office, processing patients through a series of uniform procedures (SC , 67); she embodies the complete alienation of labour in Marcuse’s sense, the reduction of work relations to ‘relations between persons as exchangeable objects of scientific management and efficiency experts’ (Marcuse, 102). Her lesbian affair with Simone Delage, corralled into the space of weekend leisure (SC , 277), exemplifies Marcuse’s ‘relaxed sexual morality within the firmly entrenched system of monopolistic controls’ (Marcuse, 95). SuperCannes envisages a corporate environment maintaining its residents in a state of normalized repression akin to that in Marcuse’s anti- technocratic re-reading of Freud. Eros and Civilization’s application of Freud to modernity goes beyond an analysis of the repressive nature of late industrial civilization to contend that social progress has the paradoxical effect of undermining civilization’s own basis in instinctual repression. While the death drive may contribute to civilization through technological progress and the formation of the super-ego (Marcuse, 52), the tendency of the ego to liberate super- egoic aggression means that ‘Freud’s metapsychology comes face-to-face with the fatal dialectic of civilization: the very progress of civilization leads to the release of increasingly destructive forces’ (Marcuse, 54). This tendency is exacerbated by the basis of civilization in the sublimation of Eros, the repression of sexuality: Culture demands continuous sublimation; it thereby weakens Eros, the builder of culture. And desexualization, by weakening Eros, unbinds the destructive impulses. Civilization is thus threatened by an instinctual

Contemporary Psychopathies

167

de-fusion, in which the death instinct strives to gain ascendancy over the life instincts. (Marcuse, 83) While the destructive instincts themselves are in part sublimated and modified through civilized work activities (Marcuse, 85- 6), ‘such satisfaction cannot stabilize their energy in the service of Eros. Their destructive force must drive them beyond this servitude and sublimation, for their aim is, not matter, not nature, not any object, but life itself’ (Marcuse, 86). Marcuse takes twentieth- century history as evidence for civilization’s unbinding of the death drive (Marcuse, 87); in particular he evokes a regression to the ‘sado- masochistic phase’, whose impulses ‘are reactivated in a new, “civilised” manner: practically without sublimation, they become socially “useful” activities in concentration and labour camps, colonial and civil wars, in punitive expeditions, and so on’ (Marcuse, 101). The therapeutic ratissages undertaken by Penrose and his ‘bowling clubs’ of Eden- Olympia executives, punitive excursions to the streets of Cannes and La Bocca, liberate the aggressivity of these high- level corporate achievers with ‘no time for adulterous affairs or coveting their neighbours’ wives’ (SC , 255); beginning as a psychosocial tonic with positive health benefits for the participants (SC , 260), they accelerate into the killing of Pascal Zander and Penrose’s messianic plans for Eden II (SC , 352, 363). The narrative suggests a Marcusian framework richly elaborated with reference to the incidental detail of corporate life and to Ballard’s complex and provocative thesis of psychopathy as freedom (SC , 263). Beyond its instantiation of a post-Marcusian view of civilization as liberating destructiveness, Super- Cannes resonates with Marcuse’s sense of human history as a compulsive repetition of aggressive domination: The primal father, as the archetype of domination, initiates the chain reaction of enslavement, rebellion, and reinforced domination which marks the history of civilization. But ever since the first, prehistoric restoration of domination following the first rebellion, repression from without has been supported by repression from within: the unfree individual introjects his masters and their commands into his own mental apparatus. (Marcuse, 16) The usurpation of the father by the brother clan as hypothesized in Totem and Taboo entails, for Marcuse, a repetition of social domination; the sons ‘want the same thing as the father: they want lasting satisfaction of their needs. They can attain this objective only by repeating, in a new form, the

168

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

order of domination which had controlled pleasure and thereby preserved the group’ (Marcuse, 64). However, this repetition of domination entails an ambivalent guilt both over the parricide and the failure to liberate society from domination: The revolt has, for a short span of time, broken the chain of domination; then the new freedom is again suppressed – this time by their own authority and action. Must not their sense of guilt include guilt about the betrayal and denial of their deed? Are they not guilty of restoring the repressive father, guilty of self- imposed perpetuation of domination? [. . .] As the reality principle takes root, even in its most primitive and most brutally enforced form, the pleasure principle becomes something frightful and terrifying; the impulses for free gratification meet with anxiety, and this anxiety calls for protection against them. The individuals have to defend themselves against the spectre of their integral liberation from wanton pain, against integral gratification. (Marcuse, 67) Civilizational development is therefore, for Marcuse, propelled by a dialectical interaction between the liberatory impulse and the reinforcement of domination which succeeds and betrays it: the son’s overthrow of the regal father ‘is a crime, but so is his restoration – and both are necessary for the progress of civilization’ (Marcuse, 68). The inheritors of authority are trapped in a double-bind between their offences against the reality principle and the pleasure principle; their feeling of guilt ‘is sustained in spite of repeated and intensified redemption: anxiety persists because the crime against the pleasure principle is not redeemed. There is guilt over the deed that has not been accomplished: liberation’ (Marcuse, 68). Super- Cannes closes with Paul Sinclair planning the assassination of Simone and Alain Delage, Penrose and their associates, the violent clique that dominates Eden- Olympia (SC , 391); ‘ready to finish the task that David Greenwood had begun’ (SC , 392). His act will be a repetition of Greenwood’s guiltridden killing of the Eden- Olympia residents who led him to indulge his attraction to underage girls (SC , 347- 9), a rebellion against the monopoly on violence of the charismatic Penrose (SC , 306) which attempts to expiate Sinclair’s own implication in the violent activities at the business park. As such, then, the narrative of Ballard’s major late novel is structured by something approximating to the dialectic between instinctual liberation and the reimposition of domination, between revolt and remorse, which for Marcuse propels human history. Sinclair’s decision at the novels’ end

Contemporary Psychopathies

169

suggests human social life, after Marcuse, as compulsively enchained in the repetition of violent acts.

Millennium People Millennium People ’s hypothesis of a middle- class revolution perpetuates Ballard’s post- Freudian reading of contemporary culture as inherently repressive. In a subversive rewriting of traditional Marxian views of the bourgeoisie, Ballard’s Chelsea revolution casts the British middle- class as itself exploited by the contemporary order, beguiled by the cultural theme park of 20th- century life (MP, 61), a ‘new proletariat, like factory workers a hundred years ago’ (MP, 64). Modern grievances are listed in evidence: ‘This flat cost me more than my father earned in his lifetime’ (MP, 78); ‘Kay pays to park outside her own house’ (MP, 79); ‘We’re all locked into huge mortgages. People have sky-high school fees, and the banks breathing down their necks’ (MP, 79). The novel’s protagonist, industrial psychologist David Markham, is professionally complicit in this exploitation of the middle- class as an employee of ‘the Adler Institute, which specialized in industrial relations and the psychology of the workplace’ (MP, 8); the reference to Freud’s disciple Alfred Adler, best-known for his coinage of the concept of the inferiority complex, reinforces the novel’s critique of professional life as a domain of psychological insecurity and conflict (Bottome, 156). More than a political revolution is at stake. Markham speaks of the revolt’s leader, psychiatrist Richard Gould, as having ‘moved on to a far more radical revolution, which he knew was closer to my heart’ (MP, 3- 4). The novel’s dismantling of a ‘middle- class world’ (MP, 6) and rejection by an ‘entire professional caste’ of ‘everything it had worked so hard to secure’ (MP, 6) has an affiliation to the anti-bourgeois liberatory politics of Surrealism and its 1960s offshoot, Situationism: ‘these likeable and over- educated revolutionaries were rebelling against themselves’ (MP, 3); ‘They rejected all offers of help, refusing to air their real grievances or to say whether any grievances existed at all’ (MP, 6). Markham’s lover Kay Churchill’s ‘sensible and utterly mad’ suggestion that the middle classes are ‘the victims of a centuries- old conspiracy, at last throwing off the chains of duty and civic responsibility’ (MP, 8- 9) reasserts a human desire for irrational infantile freedom from the bonds of repressive civilization. In keeping with this paean to the desublimatory rhetoric of the late 1960s, Markham’s developing involvement with the revolt suggests the

170

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

reassertion of subjective truth against conventionalized reality associated with the writing of R.D. Laing, a figure woven into the novel’s representational texture as a supposed associate of Markham’s bohemian mother (MP, 110). In The Politics of Experience, Laing argues figuratively for schizophrenia as a socially defined category: The plane that is out of formation may be abnormal, bad or ‘mad’ from the point of view of the formation. The formation itself may be bad or mad from the point of view of the ideal observer. The plane that is out of formation may be also more or less off course than the formation itself is. (Politics, 98) Markham’s involvement with Kay Churchill encourages a related rejection of institutional psychological discourse and social convention: I watched her with unfeigned admiration, aware that nothing at the Adler had prepared me for her. Psychiatry was at its best when dealing with failure, but had never coped with success. Kay was driven by the true fanatic’s zeal, a belief system that was satisfied with only one convert, herself. In many ways she was right. The social conventions that tied people to their cautious and sensible lives had to be cleared away. (MP, 95) The intense individualism of Kay’s deliberate arousal of her own resentments is labelled ‘mad’ by Markham’s wife Sally (MP, 109), but in Millennium People as in earlier novels madness, in the words of Laing’s Politics, ‘is potentially liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death’ (MP, 110). Sally, with her ‘little fantasy that she was handicapped’ (MP, 14) and her unconventional sexual life, instantiates a related sense of perverse behaviour as a liberating mode of dealing with personal trauma: ‘Like Frida Kahlo, the tram accident entitled her to indulge her whims [. . .] I knew that the affairs would go on until she found a convincing explanation for the accident that had nearly killed her’ (MP, 144). Her specially modified car, recalling Gabrielle’s in Crash, becomes a symbol of the way in which Markham’s desires have become compromised by his adaptation to social roles, just as the dangerous excitements of the Chelsea revolution become for Markham symbolic of liberation from negative aspects of personal psychology and the baggage of professional relationships into a more authentic and less repressed existence: In many ways, my life was as deformed as this car, rigged with remote controls, fitted with overriders and emergency brakes within easy reach. I had warped myself into the narrow cockpit of professional work at the Adler, with its inane rivalries and strained emotional needs. (MP, 145)

Contemporary Psychopathies

171

The attack on the NFT had unlocked the door of my cell. I felt free again, for the first time since I joined the Adler and was inducted into the freemasonry of the professional class. Its suffocating regalia still hung in a wardrobe of my mind, the guilt and resentments and self- doubt [. . .]. But the regalia were heading for the dustbin. I no longer resented my mother for her offhand selfishness, or my colleagues at the institute for the bone-breaking boredom they inflicted on the world. (MP, 146-7) The psychiatrist Dr Richard Gould is on one level a fictionalization of R.D. Laing, an embodiment of Laing’s argument for insanity as potential liberation. His cohabitation with his patients in an abandoned asylum recalls Laing’s experimental institution at Kingsley Hall during the late 1960s, and the description of Bedfont Hospital as ‘The last of the great Victorian asylums’ (MP, 131), with ‘moral judgements enshrined in every forbidding corbel’ (MP, 127) recalls Erving Goffmann’s sociological discussion, drawn on by Laing in Politics (Politics, 91-3), of mental hospitals as ‘total institutions’ comparable to jails, concentration camps, boarding schools and barracks (Goffman, 4- 5). Gould embodies a Laingian opposition to repressive social conventions, claiming that the middle- class revolutionaries of Chelsea Marina have ‘been repressed for years’ (MP, 130), railing against the uniformity of the housing estates threatening to supersede Bedfont (MP, 133) and against ‘the middle- class’s herd mentality’ (MP, 205). Markham describes Gould’s madness in terms recalling R.D. Laing’s discussion of ‘the transcendental experiences that sometimes break through in psychosis’ (Politics, 108): I recognized Gould when I was thirty feet from him. He stood with his back to me, head craning at the swaying branches, hands clutching at the air like a devout seminary student gazing at a rose window in a great cathedral. [. . .] His expression was numbed but almost ecstatic, and his eyes followed the swirling branches in a childlike way, apparently in the throes of a warning aura before an epileptic fit. (MP, 208) Despite his instability, Gould is identified with the compassionate empathy with ‘the experience of the patient’ Laing emphasized in his dealings with the insane (Politics, 90), ‘a patient and kindly teacher’ offering the Down’s children ‘a colourful pathway into their own minds’ via the medium of art (MP, 127). Despite its ultimate repudiation of Gould’s violence, the novel retains a sense of investment in the value of his madness as a Laingian attempt to resist the alienation inherent to contemporary culture and to human existence

172

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

itself. Blinded by his admiration for Gould, Markham finally accepts the deranged psychiatrist’s responsibility for the worst atrocities of the Chelsea revolt (MP, 291–2), yet an enduring investment in Gould’s agenda is insistently signalled through Markham’s insistence that ‘In his despairing and psychopathic way, Richard Gould’s motives were honourable’ and that ‘He was trying to find meaning in the most meaningless times, the first of a new kind of desperate man who refuses to bow before the arrogance of existence and the tyranny of space-time’ (MP, 292); in the Laingian tradition of sympathy for the confused logics of the insane, Gould’s crimes are seen as existential acts of protest, pseudo-religious attempts to construct a unified meaning out of an ‘inexplicable world’ (MP, 287), and the final note of the novel holds him up as an embodiment of an impossible fantastic liberty from restrictions and regulations (MP, 293–4). Millennium People ’s annexation to its liberatory Laingian rhetoric of contemporary terrorism conceived as a psychopathic attempt to create meaning is highly problematic. In an oblique gesture towards 9/11, the traumatic ‘crash’ driving Markham’s story is a bomb which explodes at Heathrow’s Terminal 2, with which Markham becomes personally and psychologically involved, recognising his ex-wife on TV as one of the victims. From the outset terrorism is read as a psychopathological symptom of social malaise: ‘Some people are mad. Sally, we’re all right.’ ‘No one is all right’ (MP, 17). The hypothesis is of a ‘motiveless violence’ engendered by a psychosocial climate of boredom and alienation: ‘No one was safe from the motiveless psychopath who roamed the car parks and baggage carousels of our everyday lives. A vicious boredom ruled the world, for the first time in human history, interrupted by meaningless acts of violence’ (MP, 28). This sense of violence as driven by boredom resonates with frustration- aggression explanations of violence offered by social psychology (Hogg and Vaughan, 451); more specifically, however, Gould’s paradoxical suggestion that ‘people who find the world meaningless find meaning in pointless violence’ (MP, 81) and Markham’s sense of the terrorist bomb set off in the Tate Gallery as ‘the only meaningful event in the entire landscape’ (MP, 180), expressing ‘a fierce authenticity that no reasoned behaviour could match’ (MP, 182), suggest terrorism as a Surrealist gesture recalling Ballard’s citation of Breton’s dictum that ‘a sort of ultimate surrealist act was to go out into the street and fire a revolver at random into the crowd’ (Revell, 46). Andzej Gasiorek has rightly read the violence of Millennium People as a redoubled assault by the Freudian id against technocratic domination ( J.G. Ballard , 211), and part of the novel’s implication is that violence allows the alienated contemporary subject a sense of meaning in permitting a

Contemporary Psychopathies

173

stimulating rejuvenation of contact with the instinctual life, expressing the mutual imbrication of sexuality and thanatos on which Ballard’s fiction is so insistent. Kay says to Markham that ‘Last night in bed – you were so wrapped up in the violence of it, the horror of those deaths. You had the best sex in your life’; she insists on the thanatic basis of Markham’s arousal, claiming ‘You wanted to bugger me, and beat me. For God’s sake, I know when a man’s balls are alight. [. . .] You were thinking of that bomb, suddenly going off and tearing everything apart. The meaningless violence – it excited you’ (MP, 161). Kay’s reading of Markham’s response to the Heathrow bomb recodes the impulsion of the subject towards ‘psychic zero’ so insistently figured in Ballard’s earlier fictions; the death drive is true in Ballard’s fictional worlds, and socially instituted limitations on the self are needed to prevent its self- destruction: There wasn’t anything to see, but there was this huge white space. It meant everything and nothing. It gripped you, David. You’re like someone who’s outstared the sun. Now you want to turn everything into Heathrow. [. . .] You’re looking for real violence, and sooner or later you’ll find it. [. . .] You need those double yellow lines, those parking regulations and committee meetings to calm you down. (MP, 164– 5) Millennium People ’s evocation of the ‘motiveless psychopath’ and its identification of Gould in psychopathic terms is part of Ballard’s wider mobilization in his late work of the concept of psychopathy, a mobilization problematic insofar as the term ‘psychopath’ ceased to be used in mainstream psychiatry from the American Psychiatric Association’s 1994 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-IV onward (Blair, Mitchell, and Blair, 6). Furthermore, clinical descriptions of the psychopathic personality type, what is now called ‘Antisocial personality disorder ’ (Blair, Mitchell, and Blair, 6), contrast strongly with Millennium People ’s representations of Richard Gould as a Laingian innocent capable of a selfless empathy. Making a case for the continued usefulness of psychopathy as a clinical term, Blair, Mitchell, and Blair describe the category as denoting ‘a disorder that consists of multiple components ranging on the emotional, interpersonal, and behavioural spectrum’ (Blair, Mitchell, and Blair, 7) and as implying ‘a callous/unemotional dimension [. . .] a narcissism dimension [. . .] and an impulsivity dimension’ (Blair, Mitchell, and Blair, 8); psychopathy is an emotional disorder, which, if it develops into its full form, puts the individual at risk of repeated displays of extreme antisocial behaviour.

174

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

This antisocial behaviour can involve reactive aggression but it is important to note that psychopathy is unique in that it is a disorder that is also associated with elevated levels of instrumental aggression. (Blair, Mitchell, and Blair, 17) The definition of psychopathy in terms of callousness, manipulative instrumental aggression, and ‘lack of empathy’ (Meloy, 32) might problematize Ballard’s representation of Gould as psychopathic; it would certainly also problematize Millennium People ’s hypothesis of meaningless violence, since the psychopath’s violence is characterized above all by its instrumental goal. The novel problematically hybridizes in the fictional figure of Dr Gould the regressive, ego- decentred personality of the Laingian schizophrenic and the ‘grandiose self- structure’ of the psychopath in J. Reid Meloy’s psychoanalytic account (Meloy, 48) to produce a more aggressive and disturbing vision of madness as liberation than that formulated in Laing’s writing; Ballard’s late fiction offends both the diagnostic conventions of contemporary mainstream psychiatry and the humanist idealism of anti-psychiatric thinking in the pursuit of its post-Freudian insistence on human violence. Like its mobilization of the concept of psychopathy, Millennium People ’s trope of meaningless violence is, as the novel itself ultimately acknowledges, highly problematic. Where earlier fictions such as The Atrocity Exhibition simulated in detail irrational thought- systems leading to acts of violence, Millennium People ’s hypothesis of a motiveless violence tends to de- contextualize, de-historicize, and de-politicize such acts and to move away from the empathic approach to the experience of the mentally ill suggested by Laing in chapters such as ‘Persons and Experience’ (Politics , 15- 38); the suggestion that ‘No one was safe from the motiveless psychopath’ offers a very generalized sense of the psychopath as public threat which disregards the actualities of the lives of mentally ill people responsible for incidents, such as the murder of Jill Dando, to which its narrative implicitly alludes. Further, attention to discussions of terrorism within mainstream psychology since 2001 problematizes the novel’s vision of the terrorist as a psychopath with incomprehensible motivations. Reviewing 30 years of empirical research into terrorism, Clark McCauley concedes that ‘A loner like Theodore Kaczynski [. . .] may suffer from psychopathology’ (McCauley, 15), but his major emphasis is on a challenging of assumed associations between terrorism and psychopathy. McCauley suggests that ‘terrorism and terrorists may be more normal than we usually recognise’ (McCauley, 19); ‘In too- simple terms, terrorists kill for the

Contemporary Psychopathies

175

same reasons that groups have killed other groups for centuries. They kill for cause and comrades, that is, with a combination of ideology and intense small- group dynamics’ (McCauley, 19). Even conceding Gould as a rare case of the lone psychopathic terrorist like Kaczynski, Ballard’s vision of terrorism as the potential expression of a liberatory madness sidelines the social and political motivations factoring in the psychology of the majority of terrorists according to empirical research. The emphasis on irrational libidinal aggression universalizes violence, refusing an engagement with the complexities of motivation – one notes the relatively limited direct representation given of the detail of Gould’s subjectivity, something he shares with other Ballardian psychopaths in earlier novels of the period. Acknowledging the way in which it risks mystifying the motivations behind violence, the novel eventually distances itself from the conception of meaningless violence promulgated early in the narrative. State-trained sociopath Vera Blackburn, ‘self-immersed and emotionally dead, a vicious and lethal child’, is depicted as unsettled by the consequences of her bombing of the Tate Gallery: ‘She was more unsettled than she realized, and a tic jumped across her upper lip. For once the real world had made a bigger bang’ (MP, 186); Markham says of Gould that ‘He had been shocked by Joan Chang’s death, dismayed by the real violence that had taken place after his relaxed talk of meaningless acts. Violence, I wanted to tell him, was never meaningless’ (MP, 202). Violence may be meaningless in the sense that it expresses irrational urges whose nature has not been linguistically defined and articulated, but this does not necessarily preclude subsequent attempts at rational analysis of its motivation and, as Markham’s comment implies, it does not annul its meaning in terms of its damaging impact upon its victims. In a sense Millennium People ’s hypothesis of the boredom and alienation engendering its violence defuses from the start its thesis of violence as without meaning. However, the main action of the narrative is driven by a polemical commitment to human irrationality, typical of Ballard’s late writing, which might trouble even Freud.

Kingdom Come Where Millennium People addresses psycho- cultural repression in the privileged professional enclaves of central London, Kingdom Come turns its attention to the collective psychology of a fictionalized M25 corridor characterized as alienated by the forces of contemporary consumerism. A post-Freudian

176

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

sense of the people of this terrain as subject to civilizational repression is signalled from the opening sentence: ‘The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world. . .’ (KC , 3). Having addressed leisure and corporate psychology in Cocaine Nights and Super- Cannes, Ballard here turns his attention to the psychology of advertising and consumerism. The novel reads the psychogeography or socio-psychology of the London hinterland through the lens of marketing man Richard Pearson’s cynical embrace of terminal capitalism: I was moving through a terrain of inter-urban sprawl, a geography of sensory deprivation [. . .]. Nothing now made sense except in terms of a transient airport culture. [. . .] There were no cinemas, churches or civic centres, and the endless billboards advertising a glossy consumerism sustained the only cultural life. (KC , 6) This is a control landscape, a ‘defensive landscape [. . .] waiting for a crime to be committed’ (KC , 7), stripped of spirituality and moral signifi cance by its materialist and rationalist organisation: This was a place where it was impossible to borrow a book, attend a concert, say a prayer, consult a parish record or give to charity. In short, the town was in an end state of consumerism. I liked it, and felt a certain pride that I had helped to set its values. (KC , 8) Kingdom Come ’s thesis of the emergence amid the ‘gigantic boredom’ of this alienated society (KC , 64) of a pseudo-fascist movement oriented around sport, violence, and consumerism continues Ballard’s creative development of the implications of Freud’s social-psychological thought. Freud is explicitly disavowed by one of the leaders of the new social movement, local headteacher William Sangster; responding to Pearson’s sense that ‘Most of the people here are going mad, without realising it’ (KC , 84), Sangster asserts ‘That’s the Hampstead perspective, the view from the Tavistock Clinic. The shadow of Freud’s statue lies across the land, the Agent Orange of the soul. Believe me, things are different here’ (KC , 85). Sangster reads Freud the intellectualizing analyst as toxic defoliant to the natural wilderness of the unconscious psyche, figure of an alienating Modernism which ‘taught us to distrust and dislike ourselves’ (KC , 85). The Tavistock, where Laing trained as a psychoanalyst, cannot offer an appropriate means of reading the new culture for Sangster because his is a philosophy, in a sense profoundly postFreudian, emphasising humanity as irrationally motivated, impelled by the pleasure- ego’s drive towards instinctual gratification, an irrationalism to

Contemporary Psychopathies

177

which intellectual analysis is anathema. Sangster argues in favour of the new social developments, endorsing an embrace of consumerism as a ‘collective enterprise’ with shopping as a ‘collective ritual of affirmation’ in a culture ‘driven by emotion’ (KC , 85): Like it or not, only consumerism can hold a modern society together. It presses the right emotional buttons. [. . .] People don’t want to be appealed to by reason any more. [. . .] Liberalism and humanism are a huge brake on society. They trade on guilt and fear. Societies are happier when people spend, not save. What we need now is a kind of delirious consumerism, the sort you see at motor shows. (KC , 86) Sangster’s sense of society at large as driven by emotion reinscribes Freud’s sense in ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’ of group psychology as essentially irrational and primitive. In ‘Group Psychology’ Freud, drawing on Gustave Le Bon’s The Psychology of Crowds (1897), argues that ‘in a group the individual is brought under conditions which allow him to throw off the repressions of his unconscious instinctual impulses’ (XVIII, 74). Led ‘almost exclusively by the unconscious’ (XVIII, 77), characteristics of the group’s behaviour, including ‘weakness of intellectual ability, [. . .] lack of emotional restraint, incapacity for moderation and delay, [. . .] inclination to exceed every limit in the expression of emotion and to work it off completely in the form of action’, lead Freud to characterize group psychology, particularly of non- organized groups, in terms of ‘a regression of mental activity to an earlier stage such as we are not surprised to find among savages or children’ (XVIII, 117). Sangster’s claim of the modern consumer that ‘We believe in the triumph of feelings over reason. [. . .] We need drama, we need our emotions manipulated, we want to be conned and cajoled’ (KC , 168) figures the British consuming public in terms strongly reminiscent of Freud’s conception of the infantile nature of group mentality. The failure of Kingdom Come’s incipient fascist movement also perpetuates the novel’s dialogue with ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’. The novel develops an interesting sense of group dynamics as driven less by leadership than by the emotional mood of the population as a collective. Psychiatrist Tony Maxted interprets the history of Nazi Germany as motivated not by the agenda of a party clique but by the irrational aggression of the populace: People still think the Nazi leaders led the German people into the horrors of race war. Not true. [. . .] Going mad would set them free, and they chose Hitler to lead the hunting party. [. . .] They needed a psychopathic god to worship, so they recruited a nobody and stood him on the high altar. (KC , 104)

178

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

Echoing Pearson’s own flirtation with a sinister Blairite ‘New politics’ (KC, 146) in which the politician panders to the popular mood, Sangster suggests that ‘Consumer fascism provides its own ideology, no one needs to sit down and dictate Mein Kampf. Evil and psychopathy have been reconfigured into lifestyle statements’ (KC , 168). Notwithstanding this, Sangster’s suggestion that ‘People long for authority, and only consumerism can provide it’ (KC , 86) resonates with Freud’s sense that the group ‘wants to be ruled and oppressed and to fear its masters’ (XVIII, 78–9). Freud argues in ‘Group Psychology’ that the basic form of a group with a leader is that of ‘a number of individuals who have put one and the same object in place of their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego’ (XVIII, 116). Any group capable of subsisting, he claims will consist of ‘Many equals, who can identify themselves with one another, and a single person superior to them all’; man is ‘a horde animal, an individual creature in a horde led by a chief’ (XVIII, 121), and group psychology is a recapitulation of the archaic subordination of the primitive horde to the primal father (XVIII, 122- 3). Rather than from the triumph of socializing forces over human aggressivity, the ultimate failure of Richard Pearson’s popular movement results only from its inability to locate a suitably dominant figure to fulfil this role: ‘The crowd outside the town hall had wanted David Cruise to lead them, but the cable presenter was too unsure of himself’ (KC , 127). The irrationalist emotionalism of Kingdom Come ’s failed fascist movement also bears relation to Wilhelm Reich’s post- Freudian, Marxistinformed discussion of the libidinal nature of fascism. In Reich’s argument, fascism may be defi ned as ‘the basic emotional attitude of the suppressed man of our authoritarian machine civilisation and its mechanisticmystical conception of life ’ (Reich, xiii). In Reich’s theory of ‘sex- economic sociology’, consciously differentiated from Freud’s theory of civilization (Reich, 28), civilizational ‘suppression of one’s sexual needs’ ‘strengthens political reaction and makes the individual in the masses passive and nonpolitical; it creates a secondary force in man’s structure – an artifi cial interest, which actively supports the authoritarian order’ (Reich, 31). Reich’s assumption regarding fascist leadership is that ‘a führer, or the champion of idea, can be successful [. . .] only if his personal point of view, his ideology, or his program bears a resemblance to the average structure of a broad category of individuals’ (Reich, 35). Reich sees religious mysticism as ‘the most important psychological precondition for the assimilation of fascist ideology by the masses’ (Reich, 116); for him the ‘basic religious idea of all patriarchal religions is the negation of sexual need’

Contemporary Psychopathies

179

(Reich, 146); religion ‘draws its power from the suppression of genital sexuality’ (Reich, 163). Reich sees fascism as essentially based on this negation of sexuality, the suppression of ‘orgastic desire’ and ‘natural genital gratification’ (Reich, 169); a natural state of sexual satisfaction is opposed to fascist mysticism’s defensive attitude to sexuality (Reich, 169), and the sadism associated with fascism originates from ‘ungratified orgiastic yearnings’ (Reich, 192). Kingdom Come is in sympathy with Reich’s ideas in its sense of a population’s lack of instinctual fulfi lment as leading to aggressive and violent social trends, the need for concordance between the attitudes of leader and mass, and the dangers of uninvested libidinal energy, but Reich’s emphasis on the sexual genesis of fascism is absent from the novel, which emphasizes instead a human male propensity toward the excitements of violence (KC , 98), a tribalist attraction to violence itself (KC , 258). More directly relevant for Kingdom Come than Reich are evolutionarypsychological arguments for human beings as inherently violent, of Ballard’s engagement with which the novel is the clearest formulation. An early and influential version of this type of argument is advanced in Konrad Lorenz’s ethological work On Aggression (1963). Still valued as a foundational thinker within evolutionary psychology for his work on the tendency of animals to ‘imprint’ on a parental object (Buss, 12), Lorenz enjoyed a successful academic career under the Nazi Third Reich (Burkhardt, 277). Drawing parallels to human behaviour throughout his discussion of aggression in non-human vertebrates, he begins the penultimate, Nietzschean- titled chapter of On Aggression , ‘Ecce Homo!’ with a comparison of human social behaviour to the tribalism of rats (Lorenz, 204); he argues that due to the human’s ‘basically harmless, omnivorous’ constitution ‘No selection pressure arose in the history of mankind to breed inhibitory mechanisms preventing the killing of conspecifics until, all of a sudden, the invention of artificial weapons upset the equilibrium of killing potential and social inhibitions’ (Lorenz, 207). This innovation, suggests Lorenz, ‘has brought about a most undesirable predominance of intra- specific selection within mankind’ (Lorenz, 209); ambivalent about the Freudian death wish, he suggests that evolutionary pressures from tribal competition ‘bred into man a measure of aggression drive for which in the social order of today he finds no adequate outlet’ (Lorenz, 209). A conception of aggression as an evolutionarily adaptive behavioural trait in humanity was also propounded by another foundational figure in evolutionary psychology, E.O. Wilson, in his discipline- forming

180

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

Sociobiology: The New Synthesis , published in 1975 (Sociobiology, 254; Buss, 18); Wilson carefully qualified his espousal of this viewpoint by emphasizing aggressive behaviour patterns as ‘evoked only under certain conditions of stress’ (Sociobiology, 254–55) and reducible by careful design of ‘population densities and social systems’ (Sociobiology, 255). In his anti-humanist polemic Straw Dogs , published bearing a cover blurb by Ballard and drawing in its arguments on Cocaine Nights and SuperCannes , John Gray cites Wilson’s speculation in On Human Nature that ‘if hamdryas baboons had nuclear weapons, they would destroy the world in a week’ (Gray, 92; On Human Nature , 104) in support of his contention that ‘Genocide is as human as art or prayer’ (Gray, 91). Gray fails to acknowledge Wilson’s statement within his chapter on aggression that humans ‘are far from being the most violent animal’ (On Human Nature , 103) and his dismissal of contentions by Freud and Lorenz as well as by post- Freudian writer Erich Fromm in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1974) of the existence of an aggressive drive in humans (On Human Nature , 101); Wilson prefers a more recent scientific explanation of violence based on ‘genetic potential and learning’ (On Human Nature , 105). Ballard’s Kingdom Come takes a similarly extreme polemical line to Gray’s on the issue of human aggression. Kingdom Come ’s image of ‘soccer as society’s last hope of violence’ (KC , 36) resonates with Lorenz’s sense that in modern society there is ‘no legitimate outlet for aggressive behaviour’ (Lorenz, 217) and his suggestion of sport as such a potential outlet (Lorenz, 241–3). The novel articulates parallels between the political behaviour of humans and animal behaviour in Pearson’s comparison of the British public to ‘a herd of wildebeest on the African plain’ (KC , 146); its argument for human beings as animals with an inherited instinct for violence is most clearly voiced in Tony Maxted’s suggestion to Pearson that aggression performs a vital role in human psychology: That’s when you rally yourself, even when someone’s beating the blood out of your brains. [. . .] After three rounds you’re alive again. [. . .] That’s the trouble with the video conference. Primal aggression tamped down, no straight lefts, no uppercuts to the chin. We’re a primate species with an unbelievable need for violence. (KC , 99) Historicizing his theory with reference to ‘Witch-hunts, auto- da-fés, heretic burnings, the hot poker shoved up the enemy’s rear, gibbets along the skyline’ (KC , 104), Maxted gives a specific example of this ‘willed insanity, the

Contemporary Psychopathies

181

sort that we higher primates thrive on’ (KC , 103) strongly reminiscent of Gray’s example from Wilson: Watch a troupe of chimpanzees. They’re bored with chewing twigs and picking fleas out of each other’s armpits. [. . .] They work themselves into a frenzy, then set off in a hunting party. They come across a tribe of colobus monkeys and tear them limb from limb. Very nasty, but voluntary madness brought them a tasty supper. They sleep it off, and go back to chewing twigs and picking fleas. (KC , 103–4). The primate ‘elective psychopathy’ of Maxted’s chimpanzees (KC , 103) strongly suggests Lorenz’s discussion of the existence of ‘militant enthusiasm’ in young human males as a ‘specialized form of communal aggression, clearly distinct from and yet functionally related to the more primitive forms of petty individual aggression’ (Lorenz, 231); Maxted’s sense that the people of Brooklands ‘wanted to hero-worship a leader’ (KC , 258) resonates with Lorenz’s discussion of ‘object-fixation’ in connection with this militancy (Lorenz, 230). Deliberately provocative, Kingdom Come takes a position on human violence consonant not only with the most problematic parts of Freud but also with the work of one of the most controversial figures in the development of evolutionary psychology; where Lorenz closes On Aggression with an avowedly optimistic sense of the potential of reason to prevail over aggression (Lorenz, 258), Ballard’s novel sounds a more dystopian, less certain note of appeal to rationality in its final warning that ‘unless the sane woke and rallied themselves, an even fiercer republic would open the doors and spin the turnstiles of its beckoning paradise’ (KC , 280). Kingdom Come ’s provocative dystopian hypothesis of consumerist alienation triggering an outbreak of animal violence in the Thames corridor can usefully be interrogated with reference to Michael Billig’s Fascists: A Social Psychological View of the National Front (1978). Billig notes the history of sympathy between psychology and fascism, including Jung’s headship of the German Psychoanalytic Association during the Nazi period (Billig, 13), the amenability of Lorenz’s ethological discussions of aggression to fascist ideology (Billig, 14-15), and the role of professional psychologists in the totalitarian state, but most specifically, he points up Mannheim’s (1960) hints at ‘a deeper relationship between fascist ideology and psychology’ and the possibility that ‘the exploitation of scientific psychology itself can be traced to ideological features in fascism rather than being solely attributed to the exercise of power’ (Billig, 16). Evidence for these ideas comes from Hitler’s insistence that ‘the new necessities are not economic or even

182

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

rational in the strict sense. They are psychological, being based upon willpower, consciousness, determination and personality’ and Mussolini’s insistence on ‘faith in the powers of the human spirit’ over materialistic positivism (Billig, 17); ‘In other words, fascism, by its faith in the ability to transcend historical, economic and rational laws, was based on what Stern (1975) has called the Ideology of the Will’; Stern summarizes this ideology in the assertion that ‘“Criticism, reasonableness itself, is decadent. Living experience – Erlebnis – is all, and all is Erlebnis”’ (Billig, 17). This definition of fascist ideology’s stress on psychological experience, desire, and spirituality is very close to the emotionalist, anti-rational position proposed by Sangster in Ballard’s novel. Billig discusses the direct textual relationship of Freud’s discussion of group psychology to the intellectual history of fascism, noting that Le Bon’s Psychologie des Foules, with its arguments that ‘the crowd was governed by unconscious and instinctual forces’ (Billig, 21) both drew upon such ‘forerunners of nazi ideology’ as Gobineau and H.S. Chamberlain, expressed views similar to those found in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and was a direct influence on Mussolini (Billig, 21–23). Kingdom Come ’s depictions of mass psychology are thus related, via Freud’s ‘Group Psychology’, to psychological arguments closely involved in the genesis of European fascist ideology. Billig also critiques Reich as proposing ‘a doctrine of sexual Erlebnis’, claiming that ‘His theory, while contrasting with the psychology of the fascist Erlebnis, does not wholly contradict it’ (Billig, 27). Billig warns against the general agreement that ‘behind the outward political forms of fascism, hidden psychological forces are dangerously lurking’, suggesting that this assumption concedes the argument to the fascist, who ‘proposes that the success or failure of fascism depends upon the battle for the unconscious spirit’ (Billig, 27) – a related critique might potentially be made of Ballard’s provocative argument that a consumerist fascism might actually reflect the unspoken desires of contemporary populations. ‘When fascism revives its own psychology’, says Billig, ‘it is necessary to adopt a methodological perspective which does not accept uncritically the erroneous suppositions of a fascist psychology’ (Billig, 28). ‘Contemporary fascist propaganda, in common with classic fascist propaganda, attempts to claim psychological validity for itself’ (Billig, 28); ‘Links are established when the National Front recommends the work of Lorenz’ (Billig, 28). Referring to the perpetuation in 1970s fascism of ‘the traditions of Psychologie des Foules’, Billig suggests that Now that the fascist myth has been fractured psychologists cannot, even by implication, accord fascism the mystique it craves. Here is a case where

Contemporary Psychopathies

183

political developments have dated a theoretical perspective. The contemporary fascist revival should not panic the psychologist into any grand theory of fascism, which overlooks the obvious and mundane factors contributing to the perpetuation of the fascist mentality. (Billig, 30) Billig’s 1978 interrogation of the co- opting of psychological modes of thought in justification of fascist attitudes speaks provokingly to Ballard’s 2006 novel; characters within Ballard’s text put forward psychological arguments for the embrace of a pseudo-fascist group mentality which rely on assumptions closely comparable to those discussed in Billig’s account, particularly a sense that human mass-psychology is inherently irrational and emotion- driven and a sense, related to the work of Lorenz, that ethology may justify a belief in humans as inherently aggressive. It is the subversive and provocative project of Ballard’s novel to perpetuate these disquieting ideas; deriving partly from Freud’s own ‘grand theory’ of human nature, they fly in the face of Billig’s rationalist assault on psychological attempts to naturalize extremism.

Conclusion

Ballard’s early short fiction develops a variety of narratives around concepts drawn from the theoretical writings of Freud and Jung, and intervenes in contemporary debates relating to the anti-psychiatry movement. The focus on ‘inner space’ announced in his 1962 manifesto reaches its most literal realization in the 1960s catastrophe novels, which, simulating the indeterminacy between fantasy and the real evoked in Surrealist art, are structured around a version of the Jungian concepts of collective unconscious and individuation contaminated with a late- Freudian uncanny compulsivity. The Atrocity Exhibition mobilizes a diversity of psychoanalytic and psychiatric concepts in interpreting the perverse latencies of the contemporary landscape, while Crash distils Freudian thinking on sexuality, trauma, instinctual conflict and phantasy into a violent figuration of the contemporary; the influence of Laing on Ballard’s thought also pervades his novels of this period, particularly Concrete Island . Ballard’s quasi-autobiographical novels, Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women , rework his life experience into complex literary artefacts engaging intriguingly with psychoanalytic and post-psychoanalytic theoretical explorations of trauma, history, death, and autobiography, while the late novels, from Cocaine Nights to Kingdom Come , resonate with Freud’s social psychology and the post- Freudian philosophy of Herbert Marcuse as well as anti-psychiatry and evolutionary psychology in offering provocative visions of the dangers of contemporary cultural repression in light of human nature’s instinctuallibidinal essence. My intention in writing this book was not to reassert a stultified orthodoxy in critical approaches to Ballard; I remain appreciative of Roger Luckhurst’s articulate decentring of what he saw as the dominant model within Ballard criticism, which certainly contained strong elements of reference to psychology. My critique of earlier scholarly treatments of Ballard, however, emphasizes the relative paucity of detailed engagement with psychological and psychoanalytic theory which characterized their acknowledgements of the psychological aspects of Ballard. I hope that this intervention has gone some way towards demonstrating what a thoroughly

Conclusion

185

psychological writer Ballard was, notwithstanding his relative lack of interest in particularized human character and the nuances of personal development. In particular, I hope to have shown how deeply Freudian a writer Ballard was, and how detailed, too, were his creative uses of or dialogues with controversial writers such as Jung and Laing. I hope this account may complement the emergent emphases on aesthetic, political and historical significances of his writing suggested by recent writers such as Gasiorek, Baxter, and Oramus; all of these versions of Ballard are worthwhile, but Ballard the psychological and psychoanalytical writer has at least as much claim on our understanding as any, not least because of the significant debt his creative processes can be shown to owe these disciplines. Exploration of the psychoanalytic dimensions of Ballard’s work has brought to light how deeply imbued with other elements of twentiethcentury thought is his writing. In particular, his reaction to existentialism, usefully pointed up in Luckhurst’s reading of The Drought in terms of existential philosophy, persists in demanding attention, as do his dialogues with such philosophers as Nietzsche and Bergson. I am conscious that my attempt to reflect Ballard’s relationships to psychoanalysis and anti- psychiatry in the course of this project has distracted me from that aspect of Ballard’s writing which engages directly with lived perceptual experience, and am highly curious about the readings of Ballard that phenomenological thinking may facilitate, while Ballard’s obsession with time is a further psychology-related aspect of his work which could profitably be contemplated from a direction drawing both on philosophy and on psychological theory. The sexuality and corporeality of Ballard’s writing demand further attention than I have given them here, notwithstanding Freud’s own thoroughgoing emphasis on the sexual as the root of human energy; although an emphatically male writer, Ballard writes fascinatingly about gender, and discussion of his work drawing on feminist critical theory could be productive, especially given the shared psychoanalytic context. Ballard is a writer of the post modern period and a writer about media, and my brief treatment of The Atrocity Exhibition has demonstrated how innovatively Ballard thought about the psychology of media reception, opening rich possibilities for discussing him in connection to fi lm, television, advertising, multimedia and more. Finally, Ballard is a writer of the imagination, and deserves to be seen in the context of developing conceptions of that faculty from the Romantic period onwards, and indeed in some senses as quixotically reasserting the Romantic heritage of the Surrealist imagination in the context of the postmodern world

186

The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard

of simulation; Ballard was in many ways, as he himself acknowledged, a writer of fantasy as much as he was a writer of science fiction. Ballard’s is a fiction deeply imbued with the traumatic, particularly understood in its late- Freudian sense; his writing brings a highly Freudianized understanding of psychic damage to bear on his own personal experience of the catastrophic upheavals of twentieth- century history, of technologized warfare, personal bereavement and the reality-inversions of consumer living and the communications explosion. From the beginning he has a strong sense of the psychological paradoxes of interpersonal communication and social interaction, which develops out of the superego-fantasies, anti-psychiatric distrust and social- control paranoia of ‘The Watch-Towers’, ‘Zone of Terror’ and ‘The Insane Ones’ into the explorations of recreational violence and mob irrationality of Super- Cannes and Kingdom Come . Against this preoccupation with social insanity and consensus reality is counterposed a powerful preoccupation with the individual self as a bastion of imaginative freedom from the vicissitudes of the external world. Ballard’s embrace of Freud’s hypothesis of the death instinct and its imbrication with Eros is thoroughgoing, even oppressive, pervading his oeuvre from the early short fictions right through to the social aggressivity and willed insanity of the final novels. This is one of the most challenging and disturbing aspects of his fiction, notwithstanding his sense that it is necessary (on what level? Artistic? Personal? Civilizational?) for us to immerse ourselves in the ‘destructive element’ of psychopathology and ‘swim through [. . .] to the other end of the pool’ (Lewis, 33); such thinking, provocative and polemical on an artistic level, risks legitimating some seriously unhealthy behaviour if not taken in context as a Surrealist aesthetic gesture. Ballard remains unrepentant, optimistic, pursuing the ‘philosophy of acceptance’ (Stories, 603) with which he arms himself against the most gruesome and soul- destroying realities of twentieth- and twentyfirst- century existence; for him the unconscious, irrational bases of human existence will out and must be faced unflinchingly, even clinically: that is the role he apportions his art. In this context, incidentally, the mystical aspect of his writing, about which he himself has spoken at various times, should not be disregarded. Ballard courts madness in the tradition of the modernist avant- garde, and is insistent to the last on the perennial nature of humanity’s arousal to destructive insanity, sounding a warning tocsin, projecting an artistic transference-repetition of the harsh lessons of his childhood that cuts through the humanist mythology of progress. Ballard is thus a highly significant voice for the Twenty-first Century, offering ways of understanding contemporary life which have significant

Conclusion

187

philosophical and critical potential. I hope to have conveyed some sense of how his detailed and enthusiastic engagement with the sphere of psychological thinking and theorizing was fundamental to the original perspective he was able to develop on the unique historical period through which he lived. If, as Steven C. Ward argues, ‘For most people living in the West today, psychological knowledge seems to capture basic, inherent aspects of what it means to be human’ (Ward, 228), Ballard is a valuable and provoking voice in encouraging us to engage with what he sees as some of the unwelcome truths of our psychological human nature – including, to return to the phrase with which I began this account, our psychopathology, benevolent or otherwise. Symptomatic of the psychological ontology which permeates modern Western culture in Ward’s account, Ballard’s writing also offers a creative response to psychological thinking and discourse which is at points able implicitly to critique it and to lay bare its limitations. Finally, and not least importantly for present and future readers of his fiction, the weirdly cerebral dislocation of the perspectives Ballard brought to bear on the contemporary landscape, his explorations of simultaneous perception and the synaesthetic functioning of human imagination, and the avid corporeality of his evocations of the precariousness of being alive, mean that the psychological dimensions of his fiction are a source of great and affecting beauty.

Notes

Introduction 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Michael Brooke. ‘The Crash Controversy’. Screen Online . Hp. 2003–2004 [copyright]. Online. British Film Institute. Available: www.screenonline.org.uk/film/ id/591961/. 13 July 2005; Michel Delville, J. G. Ballard (Plymouth: Northcote House in association with the British Council, 1998), viii. Jeremy Adam Smith. ‘Evolution of a Moralist: J. G. Ballard in the Twenty-first Century’. Strange Horizons 19 July 2004: 20 pars. Online. Available: www.strangehorizons.com/2004/20040719/ballard.shtml. 9 June 2005; Will Self, ‘My Hero J. G. Ballard’, The Guardian , 14 November 2009; John Gray, ‘Appreciation: J. G. Ballard’, New Statesman, 23 April 2009; Bruce Sterling, ‘Preface’, in Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (New York: Ace, 1988), x; ‘Close to the Heart: Graeme of SPK on J. G. Ballard’, Sounds, 24 December 1983; Joy Division, Closer (Factory Records, 1980); Caroline Frost. ‘J. G. Ballard: Shanghai Jim’. BBC Four. Hp. 2005 [copyright]. Online. British Broadcasting Corporation. Available: www.bbc. co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/profi le/ballard.shtml. 9 June 2005. Azim Rizki. ‘Reflections on J. G. Ballard’. Word Riot 2005: 11 pars. Online. Available: www.wordriot.org/template.php?ID=281. 9 June 2005; TW Books. Hp. 11 July 2005 [last update]. Online. Tangled Web UK. Available: www.twbooks. co.uk/authors/jgballard.html. 13 July 2005; Richard Scheib. ‘Crash’. The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review. Hp. Unknown [last update]. Online. Richard Scheib. Available: www.moria.co.nz/sf/crash.htm. 9 June 2005. Tania Branigan, ‘It’s a Pantomime where Tinsel Takes the Place of Substance’, The Guardian , 22 December 2003. Jeanette Baxter. ‘Ballard, J. G.’. The Literary Encyclopedia . Online. The Literary Dictionary Company. Available: www.litencyc.com/php/speople. php?rec=true&UID=235. 9 June 2005; V. Vale and Andrea Juno, eds, Re/Search 8/9: J. G. Ballard (San Francisco: V/Search, 1984). Jeremy Lewis, ‘An Interview with J. G. Ballard’, Mississippi Review, 20 (1991), 27–40 (28); J. G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (San Francisco: V/Search, 1990; orig. publ. without authorial annotations London: Cape, 1970) 105–6; Thomas Frick, ‘The Art of Fiction LXXV: J. G. Ballard’, Paris Review, 94 (1984), 132–60 (141–2). Jeremy Adam Smith. ‘Evolution of a Moralist’; John Kenny. ‘A User’s Guide to the Millennium’ [review]. Albedo. Hp. 2005 [copyright]. Online. Aeon Press Ltd. Available: http://homepage.eircom.net/~albedo1/html/j_g__ballard.html. 9 June 2005.

Notes 8

9

189

RE/Search Publications. Hp. 1999–2005 [copyright]. Online. RE/Search Publications. Available: http://researchpubs.com/latest/jgbqu.html. 9 June 2005; Fantastic Fiction . Hp. 1 January 2006 [last update]. Online. D.C. Wands. Available: www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/authors/J_G_Ballard.htm. 9 June 2005; Jeanette Baxter. ‘Age of Unreason’ [interview with J. G. Ballard]. The Guardian 22 June 2004: 38 pars. Online. Guardian Newspapers Limited. Guardian Unlimited . Available: http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/sciencefiction/story/0,6000,1245664,00.html. 9 June 2005; Susan Tranter. ‘“Millennium People” by J.G. Ballard’ [review]. enCompass. Hp. Copyright date unknown. Online. British Council Film and Literature Department. Available: www. encompassculture.com/readerinresidence/botm/september04/. 9 June 2005. Matthew Taylor. ‘English Defence League March in Leicester Banned’. The Guardian 4 October 2010: 15 pars. Online. Guardian Newspapers Limited. Guardian Unlimited . Available: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/oct/04/ english- defence-league-march-banned. 25 November 2010.

Bibliography

Fiction and Non-Fiction by J. G. Ballard Ballard, J. G., The Atrocity Exhibition (London: Cape, 1970; repr. with authorial annotations San Francisco: V/Search, 1990; repr. London: Flamingo, 2001). Ballard, J. G., Cocaine Nights (London: Flamingo, 1996; repr. 1997). Ballard, J. G., The Complete Short Stories (London: Flamingo, 2001; repr. 2002). Ballard, J. G., Concrete Island (London: Cape, 1974; repr. London: Triad/Panther, 1985). Ballard, J. G., Crash (London: Cape, 1973; repr. London: Vintage, 1995). Ballard, J. G., The Crystal World (London: Cape, 1966; repr. London: Flamingo, 1993). Ballard, J. G., The Day of Creation (London: Gollancz, 1987; repr. London: Flamingo, 1993). Ballard, J. G., The Drought (London: Cape, 1965; repr. London: Flamingo: 1993). Ballard, J. G., The Drowned World (New York, Berkley: 1962; repr. London: Millennium, 1999). Ballard, J. G., Empire of the Sun (London: Gollancz, 1984; repr. London: Guild, 1985). Ballard, J. G., Hello America (London: Cape, 1981; repr. London: Flamingo: 1993). Ballard, J. G., High- Rise (London: Cape, 1975; repr. London: Flamingo: 1993). Ballard, J. G., The Kindness of Women (London: Harper Collins, 1991). Ballard, J. G., Kingdom Come (London: Fourth Estate, 2006). Ballard, J. G., Millennium People (London: Flamingo, 2003). Ballard, J. G., Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton: An Autobiography (London: Fourth Estate, 2008). Ballard, J. G., ‘A Response to the Invitation to Respond’, in Hayles, N. Katherine, and David Porush, Brooks Landon, Vivian Sobchack, J. G. Ballard, ‘In Response to Jean Baudrillard’, Science Fiction Studies, 18 (1991), 321–9. Ballard, J. G., Running Wild (London: Hutchinson, 1988; repr. London: Flamingo, 2002). Ballard, J. G., Rushing to Paradise (London: Flamingo, 1994). Ballard, J. G., Super- Cannes (London: Flamingo, 2000; repr. 2001). Ballard, J. G., The Unlimited Dream Company (London: Cape, 1979; repr. London: Triad/Panther, 1985). Ballard, J. G., A User’s Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews (London: Flamingo, 1997).

Bibliography

191

J. G. Ballard Interviews and Articles Bigsby, Christopher, ‘In Conversation with J. G. Ballard’, in Writers in Conversation , 2 vols (Norwich: EAS Publishing, 2000), i, 71–86. Branigan, Tania, ‘It’s a Pantomime where Tinsel Takes the Place of Substance’, The Guardian , 22 December 2003. Frick, Thomas, ‘The Art of Fiction LXXV: J. G. Ballard’, Paris Review, 94 (1984), 132–60. Lewis, Jeremy, ‘An Interview with J. G. Ballard’, Mississippi Review, 20 (1991), 27–40. Linnett, Peter, ‘J. G. Ballard Interview’, Corridor: New Writings Quarterly, 5 (1974), 4–7. Revell, Graeme, ‘Interview by Graeme Revell’, in Vale and Juno, 42–52. Vale, V., and Andrea Juno, ‘Interview with A. Juno and Vale’, in Vale and Juno, 6–35.

Criticism and Commentary on J. G. Ballard Baxter, Jeannette, ed., J. G. Ballard: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (London: Continuum, 2008). Baxter, Jeannette, J. G. Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination: Spectacular Authorship (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). Crosthwaite, Paul, Trauma, Postmodernism, and the Aftermath of World War II (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Day, Aidan, ‘Ballard and Baudrillard: Close Reading Crash’, English , 193 (Spring 2000), 277–93. Delville, Michel, J. G. Ballard (Plymouth: Northcote House in association with the British Council, 1998). Foster, Hal, ‘Death in America’, in Andy Warhol: A Special Issue , ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 69–88. Francis, Samuel William, ‘A Critical Reading of “Inner Space” in Selected Works of J. G. Ballard’ (Unpublished doctoral thesis: University of Leeds, 2006). Gasiorek, Andrzej, J. G. Ballard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). Gray, John, ‘Appreciation: J.G. Ballard’, New Statesman , 23 April 2009. Jones, Mark, ‘J. G. Ballard: Neurographer’, in Fiction, Alternativity, Extrapolation , ed. Derek Littlewood and Peter Stockwell, introd. Peter Stockwell (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 127–45. Luckhurst, Roger, ‘The Angle between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997). Pringle, David, Earth is the Alien Planet: J. G. Ballard’s Four- Dimensional Nightmare (San Bernardino: Borgo Press, 1979). Revell, Graeme, ‘Close to the Heart: Graeme of SPK on J. G. Ballard’, Sounds, 24 December 1983. Ruddick, Nicholas, ‘Ballard/Crash/Baudrillard’, Science Fiction Studies, 19 (1992), 354–60.

Bibliography

192

Rushdie, Salman, ‘Crash: The Death of Princess Diana’, in Step Across this Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992–2002 (New York: Random, 2002), 118–21. Self, Will, ‘My Hero J. G. Ballard’, The Guardian , 14 November 2009. Sterling, Bruce, ‘Preface’, in Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (New York: Ace, 1988). Vale, V., and Andrea Juno, eds, Re/Search 8/9: J.G. Ballard (San Francisco: V/Search, 1984).

Film and Other Media Cronenberg, David, dir, Crash . New Line Productions. 1996. Joy Division, Closer (Factory Records, 1980). Spielberg, Steven dir, Empire of the Sun . Warner Bros. 1987.

Other Secondary Sources Anderson, Linda, Autobiography (London: Routledge, 2001). Ash, Mitchell G., and William R. Woodward, eds, Psychology in Twentieth- Century Thought and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Banham, Reyner, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (London: Penguin, 1971). Baudrillard, Jean, Simulacra and Simulation , trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). Belsey, Catherine, Critical Practice (London: Routledge, 1988). Benjafield, John G., A History of Psychology, 2nd edn (Don Mills, Ont. and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Bentall, Richard P., Madness Explained: Psychosis and Human Nature (London: Allen Lane, 2003). Bentley, Nick, ed., British Fiction of the 1990s (London: Routledge, 2005). Berman, Marshall, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983). Bhabha, Homi K., The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Billig, Michael, Fascists: A Social Psychological View of the National Front (London: Academic Press for the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology, 1978). Blair, James, Derek Mitchell, and Karina Blair, The Psychopath: Emotion and the Brain (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). Bloom, Harold, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London: Oxford University Press, 1973; repr. 1975). Bottome, Phyllis, Alfred Adler, Apostle of Freedom (London: Faber, 1938; repr. 1957). Brooks, Peter, Psychoanalysis and Storytelling (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). Buckley, Peter, ed., Essential Papers on Psychosis (New York: New York University Press, 1988). Burkhardt, Richard W., Jr., Patterns of Behavior: Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the Founding of Ethology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Bibliography

193

Buss, David M., Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind , 2nd edn (Boston: Pearson, 1999; repr. 2004). Caruth, Cathy, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Clayton, Jay, and Eric Rothstein, Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). Creed, Barbara, Monstrous- Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993). Davis, Douglas A., ‘Freud, Jung, and Psychoanalysis’, in The Cambridge Companion to Jung, ed. Polly Eisendrath and Terence Dawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 35–9. Dean, Tim, and Christopher Lane, eds, Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). De Certeau, Michel, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi, fwd. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986; repr. 2006). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, Anti- Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , pref. Michel Foucault (London: Athlone, 1984). Derrida, Jacques, Writing and Difference , trans., introd. and notes Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2001; repr. 2010). Eisendrath, Polly, and Terence Dawson, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Jung (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto, 2008). Felman, Shoshana, Writing and Madness: Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis , trans. Martha Noel Evans, Shoshana Felman with the assistance of Brian Massumi (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985). Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (London: Routledge, 1992). Fish, F. J., Schizophrenia (Bristol: Wright, 1962). Flick, Uwe, The Psychology of the Social (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Forrester, John, Dispatches from the Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). Foster, Hal, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). Foucault, Michel, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (London: Routledge, 1971; repr. 1993). Freud, Anna, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence , trans. Cecil Baines (London: Hogarth, 1948). Freud, Sigmund, ‘A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , xiv (1957), 217–35. — ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , xviii (1955; repr. 1973), 1–64. — ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , xxi (1961), 57–145. — ‘Creative Writers and Day- Dreaming’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , ix (1959), 141–53.

194

Bibliography

— ‘The Dissection of the Psychical Personality’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , xxii (1964; repr. 1973), 57–80. — ‘The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , xix (1961), 171–9. — ‘The Dynamics of Transference’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , xii (1958), 97–108. — ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , xix (1961), 155–70. — ‘The Ego and the Id’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , xix (1961), 1–66. — ‘Fetishism’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , xxi (1961; repr. 1973), 147–57. — ‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , xii (1958), 213–26. — ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , xvii (1955; repr. 1973), 1–123. — ‘The Future of an Illusion’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , xxi (1961), 1–56. — ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , xviii (1955), 65–143. — ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , iv (1953; repr. 1973), 1–338. — ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , v (1953; repr. 1973), 339–686. — ‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , xiv (1957), 109–40. — ‘Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , xi (1957; repr. 1973), 63–137. — ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , xiv (1957), 237–60. — ‘A Note upon the Mystic Writing- Pad’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , xix (1961), 225–32. — ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , xiv (1957), 73–102. — ‘An Outline of Psychoanalysis’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , xxiii (1964; repr. 1973), 141–208. — ‘Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , xii (1958), 1–82. — ‘The Psychopathology of Everyday Life’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , vi (1960), 1–279. — ‘Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , xii (1958), 145–56. — ‘Repression’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , xiv (1957), 141–58.

Bibliography

195

— The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , trans. and ed. James Strachey and others, 24 vols (London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953–74). — ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , xiv (1957), 273–301. — ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , vii (1953; repr. 1973), 123–245. — ‘The “Uncanny”’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , xvii (repr. 1973), 217–56. — ‘The Unconscious’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , xiv (1957), 159–215. Frith, Christopher D., and Eve C. Johnstone, Schizophrenia: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Frosh, Stephen, For and Against Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1997). Garland, Caroline, ed., Understanding Trauma: A Psychoanalytical Approach (London: Karnac, 2002). Gasiorek, Andrzej, Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After (London: Arnold, 1995). Geen, Russell G., Human Aggression , 2nd edn (Buckingham: Open University, 2001). Gibson, Nigel C., Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination (Cambridge: Polity in association with Blackwell, 2003). Giles, David, Media Psychology (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2003). Glover, Edward, Freud or Jung (London: Allen and Unwin, 1950). — War, Sadism and Pacifism: Further Essays on Group Psychology and War (London: Allen and Unwin, 1933). Goffman, Erving, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1961). Gray, John, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (London: Granta, 2002). Haugtvedt, Curtis P., Paul M. Herr and Frank R. Kardes, eds, Handbook of Consumer Psychology (New York: Psychology Press, 2008). Head, Dominic, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction 1950–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). — The State of The Novel: Britain and Beyond (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell,2008). Hergenhahn, B. R., An Introduction to the History of Psychology, 4th edn (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2001). Hewstone, Miles, Wolfgang Stroebe and Geoffrey M. Stephenson, Introduction to Social Psychology: A European Perspective , 2nd edn (London: Blackwell, 1996). Hogg, Michael A., and Graham M. Vaughan, Social Psychology, 5th edn (Harlow: Prentice Hall, 2008). Jackson, Rosemary, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Routledge, 1988). Jacobi, Jolande, Complex, Archetype, Symbol in the Psychology of C. G. Jung, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New York: Pantheon, 1959). Jarzombek, Mark, The Psychologising of Modernity: Art, Architecture and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

196

Bibliography

Jung, Carl Gustav, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies , trans. R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959). — The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, ed. Herbert Read and others, 20 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953–71). — The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, v, Symbols of Transformation: An Analysis of the Prelude to a Case of Schizophrenia , trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Pantheon, 1956). — The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, ix Part One, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Pantheon, 1959). — The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, viii, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Pantheon, 1960). Jung, Carl Gustav, and others, eds, Man and His Symbols (New York: Doubleday, 1964). — The Integration of the Personality, trans. Stanley Dell (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Trubner, 1940; repr. 1944). Kandel Englander, Elizabeth, Understanding Violence (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1997). Kearney, Richard, The Wake of Imagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Kotowicz, Zbigniew, Laing and the Paths of Anti-Psychiatry (London: Routledge, 1997). Kristeva, Julia, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art , ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980). — Revolution in Poetic Language , trans. Margaret Waller, introd. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). Lacan, Jacques, Ecrits: A Selection , trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977). Laing, Ronald David, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (London: Tavistock, 1960; repr. 1969). — The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (London: Penguin, 1967; repr. 1971). Laing, Ronald David, and Aaron Esterson, Sanity, Madness and the Family: Families of Schizophrenics (London: Tavistock, 1964). Lane, Richard, Rod Mengham, and Philip Tew, eds, Contemporary British Fiction (Cambridge: Polity, 2003). Laplanche, Jean, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. and introd. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976; repr. 1985). Laplanche, Jean, and Jean- Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson- Smith, introd. Daniel Lagache (London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1973; repr. London: Karnac, 2006). Leahey, Thomas Hardy, A History of Psychology: Main Currents in Psychological Thought , 6th edn (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2004). Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space , trans. Donald Nicholson- Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). Leys, Ruth, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Lorenz, Konrad, On Aggression , trans. Marjorie Latzke, introd. Eric Salzen (London: Routledge, 1996). Luckhurst, Roger, The Trauma Question (London: Routledge, 2008).

Bibliography

197

Mandler, George, A History of Modern Experimental Psychology: From James and Wundt to Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). Marcus, Laura, Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994). Marcuse, Herbert, Eros and Civilisation: A Philosophical Enquiry into Freud , pref. Douglas Kellner (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956; repr. London: Routledge, 1998). Mazlish, Bruce, ‘Autobiography and Psychoanalysis: Between Truth and SelfDeception’, Encounter, 35 (1970), 28–37. McCauley, Clark, ‘Psychological Issues in Understanding Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism’, in Psychology of Terrorism , ed. Bruce Bongar and others (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 13–29. McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964; repr. 1968). Meisel, Perry, The Literary Freud (New York: Routledge, 2007). Meloy, J. Reid, The Psychopathic Mind: Origins, Dynamics and Treatment (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002). Mengham, Rod, ed., An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction: International Writing in English since 1970 (Cambridge: Polity, 1999). Michelson, Larry K., and William J. Ray, eds, Handbook of Dissociation: Theoretical, Empirical, and Clinical Perspectives (New York: Plenum, 1996). Morgan, Craig, Kwame McKenzie, and Paul Fearon, eds, Society and Psychosis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Muller, John P., and William J. Richardson, eds, The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida and Psychoanalytic Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). Phillips, Adam, Going Sane (London: Hamilton, 2005). Piaget, Jean, Science of Education and the Psychology of the Child , trans. Derek Coltman (Harlow: Longman, 1971). Porter, Roy, and Mark S. Micale, eds, Discovering the History of Psychiatry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Priestley, J. B., ‘Thoughts in the Wilderness: They Come from Inner Space’, New Statesman and Nation , 5 December 1953, 712–14. Quinodoz, Jean-Michel, Reading Freud: A Chronological Exploration of Freud’s Writings , trans. David Alcorn (Hove: Routledge, 2005). Ragland, Ellie, Essays on the Pleasures of Death: From Freud to Lacan (New York: Routledge, 1995). Reich, Wilhelm, The Mass Psychology of Fascism , ed. Mary Higgins and Chester M. Raphael (London: Souvenir, 1972; repr. 1997). Ricoeur, Paul, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation , trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970). Rose, Jacqueline, Why War?: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Return to Melanie Klein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). Ross, Colin A., ‘History, Phenomenology, and Epidemiology of Dissociation’, in The Handbook of Dissociation: Theoretical, Empirical, and Clinical Perspectives, ed. Larry K. Michelson and William J. Ray (New York: Plenum, 1996), 3–20. Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985; repr. London: Routledge, 1997).

198

Bibliography

Schultz, Duane P., and Sydney Ellen Schultz, A History of Modern Psychology, 6th edn (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1996). Selden, Raman, Peter Widdowson, and Peter Brooker, A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, 4th edn (London: Prentice Hall, 1997). Shaffer, Brian W., ed., A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945–2000 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). Shorter, Edward, A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (New York: Wiley, 1997). Skura, Meredith Anne, The Literary Use of the Psychoanalytic Process (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). Stewart, William, A Biographical Dictionary of Psychologists, Psychiatrists and Psychotherapists, fwd. Stan Gilmore (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008). Stone, Michael H., Healing the Mind: A History of Psychiatry from Antiquity to the Present (London: Pimlico, 1998). Storr, Anthony, ed. and introd., The Essential Jung (London: Fontana, 1983; repr. 1998). Tooby, John, and Leda Cosmides, ‘Conceptual Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology’, in The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, ed. David M. Buss (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2005), 5–67. Vice, Sue, ed., Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reader (Oxford: Polity, 1996). Ward, Steven C., Modernizing the Mind: Psychological Knowledge and the Remaking of Society (Westport, CT: Praeger 2002). Williams, Linda Ruth, Critical Desire: Psychoanalysis and the Literary Subject (London: Arnold, 1995). Wilson, Edward O., On Human Nature (London: Penguin, 1995). — Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975). Wright, Elizabeth, Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reappraisal (Cambridge: Polity, 1998).

Online Resources Anon. ‘J. G. Ballard: The Times Obituary’. Times 20 April 2009: 15 pars. Online. Times Newspapers Limited. Available: www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/ obituaries/article6129021.ece. 23 June 2011. Baxter, Jeanette. ‘Ballard, J. G.’. The Literary Encyclopedia . Online. The Literary Dictionary Company. Available: www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true &UID=235. 9 June 2005. — ‘Age of Unreason’ [interview with J. G. Ballard]. The Guardian 22 June 2004: 38 pars. Online. Guardian Newspapers Limited. Guardian Unlimited . Available: http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/sciencefiction/story/ 0,6000,1245664,00.html. 9 June 2005. Brooke, Michael. ‘The Crash Controversy’. Screen Online . Hp. 2003–4 [copyright]. Online. British Film Institute. Available: www.screenonline.org.uk/film/ id/591961/. 13 July 2005. Fantastic Fiction. Hp. 1 January 2006 [last update]. Online. D.C. Wands. Available: www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/authors/J_G_Ballard.htm. 9 June 2005.

Bibliography

199

Frost, Caroline. ‘J. G. Ballard: Shanghai Jim’. BBC Four. Hp. 2005 [copyright]. Online. British Broadcasting Corporation. Available: www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/ documentaries/profile/ballard.shtml. 9 June 2005. Kenny, John. ‘A User’s Guide to the Millennium’ [review]. Albedo. Hp. 2005 [copyright]. Online. Aeon Press Ltd. Available: http://homepage.eircom. net/~albedo1/html/j_g__ballard.html. 9 June 2005. OED Online. Hp. 2005 [copyright]. Online. Oxford English Dictionary. Available: www.oed.com/. 23 June 2011. RE/Search Publications. Hp. 1999–2005 [copyright]. Online. RE/Search Publications. Available: http://researchpubs.com/latest/jgbqu.html. 9 June 2005. Rizki, Azim. ‘Reflections on J. G. Ballard’. Word Riot 2005: 11 pars. Online. Available: www.wordriot.org/template.php?ID=281. 9 June 2005. Scheib, Richard. ‘Crash’. The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review. Hp. Unknown [last update]. Online. Richard Scheib. Available: www.moria.co.nz/ sf/crash.htm. 9 June 2005. Smith, Jeremy Adam. ‘Evolution of a Moralist: J. G. Ballard in the 21st Century’. Strange Horizons 19 July 2004: 20 pars. Online. Available: www.strangehorizons. com/2004/20040719/ballard.shtml. 9 June 2005. Taylor, Matthew. ‘English Defence League March in Leicester Banned’. The Guardian 4 October 2010: 15 pars. Online. Guardian Newspapers Limited. Guardian Unlimited . Available: www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/oct/04/englishdefence-league-march-banned. 25 November 2010. Tranter, Susan. ‘“Millennium People” by J. G. Ballard’ [review]. enCompass. Hp. Copyright date unknown. Online. British Council Film and Literature Department. Available: www.encompassculture.com/readerinresidence/botm/ september04/. 9 June 2005. TW Books. Hp. 11 July 2005 [last update]. Online. Tangled Web UK. Available: www. twbooks.co.uk/authors/jgballard.html. 13 July 2005.

Index

‘anti-psychiatry’ 10, 18, 28, 62–4, 162–3, 184, 185 The Atrocity Exhibition 17, 28, 95–107, 109, 120, 140, 153–4, 158, 184–5 ‘The Cage of Sand’ 56–9 Caruth, Cathy 29, 134–6, 139, 147 Cocaine Nights 29, 156–62, 176, 180, 184 Concrete Island 29, 120–5, 184 Crash 1–2, 7, 8, 17, 29, 106, 107–20 The Crystal World 28, 85–94 The Day of Creation 126–7 De Certeau, Michel 29, 141–5, 149–51 ‘The Delta at Sunset’ 47–8 Derrida, Jacques 29, 128, 152–4 dissociation 45, 47, 49, 52–3, 93, 95, 97, 104, 122 The Drought 77–85 The Drowned World 8, 28, 40, 68–77, 85, 87

instinctual ambivalence 76–7, 88, 113–14, 127, 131, 161, 168 instinctual vicissitudes 106, 112–14, 117 latent and manifest 66–7, 76, 102–5, 145 masochism 106, 113–17, 118, 157, 167 memory 38–9, 41–3, 53–4, 57–9, 81, 121–2, 126–7, 135–7, 141–2, 152–3 Oedipus complex 11, 15, 26, 34–6, 82, 92–3, 125, 127, 146–7, 155, 161–2, 165 phantasy 21, 41, 58, 75–6, 118–20, 126–7, 184 polymorphous perversity 103–10, 113, 119 super-ego 28, 33–7, 51, 61, 70, 82, 157, 162, 165–6, 186 symptomatic acts 87–8 uncanny 28, 32–4, 56, 67–8, 76, 83–4, 88–90, 128–30, 141–4, 148, 156

Empire of the Sun 7, 29, 126, 128–37, 144, 147, 148, 151, 184 evolutionary psychology 69–70, 179–81, 184

influence and intertextuality 26–7 ‘inner space’ 12, 28, 51, 58–9, 65–8, 76, 124, 152, 184 ‘The Insane Ones’ 62–4, 186

Fanon, Frantz 28, 92–4 Freud, Sigmund anal-sadistic stage 106–7 ‘Civilization and its Discontents’ 29, 61–2, 85, 158–62 death instinct 34, 44, 54–5, 73, 75, 77, 83, 91–2, 99, 110–2, 115, 131, 167, 173, 186 fetishism 12, 21, 109–10 group psychology 143, 177–8, 182 hysteria 41, 53, 87, 90–1

Jung, Carl Gustav 3, 28, 43–52, 58–75, 77–85, 93, 127, 161, 181, 184–5 archetypes 44, 48–9, 55, 69–72, 73–5, 79–80, 84 collective unconscious 31, 43–4, 68–9, 78–9 Flying Saucers 49–50 individuation 49, 72–3, 85–6 mana-personality 50–1 mandala 45–7 pleroma 86–7

202

Index

regression 48, 72, 77, 124 self 45–7, 50, 85–6 The Kindness of Women 29, 126, 128, 137–54, 184 Kingdom Come 8, 29, 175–83, 184, 186 Lacan, Jacques 16–17, 23, 92, 99–100, 127, 147–8, 156 Laing, Ronald David 3, 4, 10, 29, 37, 62–3, 96, 101, 120–5, 127, 155, 162–3, 170–4, 176, 184–5 Laplanche, Jean 3–4, 15, 92, 111, 116–17 Lorenz, Konrad 69–70, 179–81, 183 ‘Manhole 69’ 28, 30–2, 34, 37, 54 Marcuse, Herbert 29, 163–9, 184 media psychology 97–9 Millennium People 8, 29, 156, 169–75 ‘Now Wakes the Sea’ 44, 75 ‘The Overloaded Man’ 52–5 paranoia 29, 37, 53, 96, 100–2, 133, 140, 148 psychiatry 3–4, 5–7, 25, 162, 170, 173–4 psychoanalysis 1, 3–7 and autobiography 137, 145–9 and criticism 13–25 and historiography 141–5 and literature 149–54

psychopathy 155–6, 167, 172–5, 177–8 psychosis 96–7, 98–9 ‘A Question of Re-Entry’ 59–62 Reich, Wilhelm 178–9, 182 Running Wild 155 Rushing to Paradise 155–6 schizophrenia 28–9, 37, 45, 63, 95–6, 120, 124–5, 155, 170, 174 ‘The Screen Game’ 28, 40–3 Super-Cannes 29, 162–9, 176, 180, 186 Surrealism 11–13, 24, 28, 56, 65–8, 76, 78, 88–92, 98, 103, 162–3, 169, 172, 184–6 ‘The Terminal Beach’ 55 ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’ 28, 38–40, 75 trauma 12 , 29, 38–42 , 56–9, 67–8, 75–6, 80–1, 88–92 , 94–7, 111–2 , 128–30, 134–41, 151, 172 , 184, 186 The Unlimited Dream Company 126–7 ‘The Venus Hunters’ 49–52 ‘The Voices of Time’ 45–6, 55 ‘The Watch-Towers’ 34–7, 157, 186 ‘Zone of Terror’ 28, 30, 32–4, 37, 186