J. G. Ballard’s Traumatised and Traumatising Englishness

Abstract

This chapter considers how, shaped by trauma and traumatising forces, J. G. Ballard’s fiction reconfigures versions of white, middle-class, masculine Englishness, and how his work charts a generational flux that responds to centripetal illusions of power and nationality. Ballard interrogates England’s capacity to define itself, attracted by centrifugal cultural forces that defy a concept of social and political cohesion, and does so from a very specific class perspective. Much of Ballard’s writing — fiction, cultural and journalistic commentary, and autobiography — concerns itself with English identity in transition, identifying often oblique investigations of national character in a culture facing imperial diminishment, a fundamental crisis of belonging and unbecoming. While briefly considering one early novel, The Drowned World (1963), this chapter mainly draws upon two other key periods in Ballard’s oeuvre: firstly, selected novels from the 1970s, specifically Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974), High Rise (1975), and The Unlimited Dream Company (1979); secondly, his two post-millennial novels, Millennium People (2003) and Kingdom Come (2006). These phases offer differently nuanced reimaginings of the English bourgeois self.