‘The scientist on safari’: J.G. Ballard and the naturalist gaze

Abstract

This article explores J.G. Ballard's contention that the contemporary author ought to approach his subject matter like ‘the scientist on safari'. In questioning what it means to adopt the gaze of the scientist, I draw a parallel between Ballard's practice and that of the Naturalists, who, following Émile Zola's diktat in ‘Le Roman Expérimental', believed the author's role to be that of an experimenter, watching over his characters with the detachment of the scientist. Taking as my starting point Ballard's inclusion of a passage from the journal of the Goncourt brothers – key initiators in the Naturalism movement – in the notes to The Atrocity Exhibition, I explore Ballard's interaction with the Naturalist genre through the ways in which characters and the narrative voice gaze at their surrounding landscapes. I interrogate the ways in which the Naturalist gaze (masquerading as that of the scientist) betrays a conviction that the visible world is not only knowable, but explicable too, because it can be looked at and hence described.