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J. G. Ballard's Empire of the Senses: Perversion and the Failure of Authority

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Dennis A. Foster
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Abstract

Ballard's novels return repeatedly to some scene of trauma to explore the perverse effects that derive from that moment. This essay focuses on three novels. Crash (1973) is most obsessively concerned with the erotics of violence and injury, while Empire of the Sun (1985) and Running Wild (1989) locate the traumatic events in childhood. What Ballard finds is a failure of the representatives of authority (fathers, kings, capital) to found a reliable world, leading children to cling to the often horrible satisfactions of some early experience. The results in Ballard's world include mixtures of masochism and advertising, middle-class terrorism and the fetishization of presidents, war and ecstasy. And what might once have appeared a wild aberration, a violent exercise of the death drive in the pursuit of enjoyment, becomes a way of life.

Type
Cluster: Readings of Narrative, 1937-87
Information
PMLA , Volume 108 , Issue 3 , May 1993 , pp. 519 - 532
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1993

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