Abstract
This article is a discussion of J. G. Ballard’s (semi-)autobiographical war narratives, with a focus on the different textual strategies and processes of signification Ballard employs from his avant-garde novel The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) to the feverish fictional account of his time in World War II China in “The Dead Time” (1977) and Empire of the Sun (1984) to his more reflective autobiographical texts The Kindness of Women (1990) and Miracles of Life (2008). Ballard’s obsessive repetition of many of the same images and attest to a problematics of representation of the traumatic event, and ultimately they represent a complex and rich work of fabulation that escape categorizations of fiction and autobiography.
Highlights
This article is a discussion of J
Ballard and the Jamie/Jim figure in the texts. ...What the initial reviewers believed they had found in these texts—the key to unlock the opacity of the fictions—already founders over the indeterminate zone between fiction and autobiography that Empire and Kindness occupy. (162)
In 2008, Ballard published his de facto autobiography, Miracles of Life, and that it reads largely like a Ballard novel should be further indication that Ballard constantly blurs the line between reality and fiction
Summary
Pedro Groppo, Death games and the persistence of memory: J. Ballard (1930-2009) has always been about the aftermath of World War II in some way or another In his monograph on David Cronenberg’s film adaptation of Crash (2001), the English writer Iain Sinclair (2003, 34) suggests that that avant-garde novel is far more autobiographical than the nominal, fictionalized account of Ballard’s childhood in wartime Shanghai, Empire of the Sun (1984). Crash (2001), on the other hand, is a scandalous work of imaginative fiction that prompted a reviewer for Jonathan Cape to pronounce the author “beyond psychiatric help” (46) The protagonists of both novels have slightly fictionalized versions of J. This describes Ballard’s project, especially in Kindness, in which the memories of World War II comprise only the first part of the novel, which covers much of the protagonist’s life, with further chapters having significant parallels to his fiction. I do not attempt, to posit any claims that the texts are autobiographical, only that if they are read in context with Ballard’s fictional and non-fictional oeuvre, they may form a rich and complex picture, albeit inconsistent—and for that very reason all the more interesting
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
