Abstract
In 2003, J. G. Ballard was offered one of the highest honours a citizen of his nation can receive, the Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). It was an honour he refused. Long-time readers of Ballard’s work were surely more surprised by the offer than the refusal. That Britain’s answer to William S. Burroughs and Jean Genet was now deemed significant and respectable enough to be given a royal award was a strange turn of events; it was as if one of the most notorious criminals were being given the keys to the city. Ballard’s anti-conventional disposition meant that he would reject the award, and his reasons were clear: ‘as a republican, I can’t accept an honour awarded by the monarch. There’s all that bowing and scraping and mummery at the palace. It’s the whole climate of deference to the monarch and everything else it represents’.1 By refusing the CBE, Ballard reaffirmed his status as a writer who bucks convention and as a public persona who wryly dismisses accepted wisdom.
Let us go forward in malice to none and good will to all. Such plans offer far better prizes than taking away other people’s provinces or land or grinding them down in exploitation. The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.
Winston S. Churchill, ‘Anglo-American Unity’, 6 September 1943
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Notes
J. G. Ballard in conversation with Tania Branigan, ‘It’s a pantomime where tinsel takes the place of substance’, Guardian, 22 December 2003, http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,1111871,00.html, accessed August 2010.
Roger Luckhurst, ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997).
Jeannette Baxter, J. G. Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination: Spectacular Authorship (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009); ‘Visions of Europe in Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes’, in Jeannette Baxter, ed., J. G. Ballard: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (London: Continuum, 2008), pp. 94–106.
Dennis A. Foster, ‘J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Senses: Perversion and the Failure of Authority’, PMLA 108.3 (May 1993), 519–32;
Liam McNamara, ‘The Ruse of the Social: Human Waste and the Gated Community’, Reconstruction: A Cultural Studies eJournal 2 (Summer 2000). http://www.reconstruction.ws/023/mcnamara.htm;
Andrzej Gasiorek, J. G. Ballard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).
Fredric Jameson, ‘World Reduction in Le Guin’ [1975], in Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), p. 269.
Edward W. Said, ‘Two Visions of Heart of Darkness’, in Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), pp. 19–31.
Mark Pauline, in J. G. Ballard: Conversations (San Francisco: Re/Search, 2005), pp. 127–58 (p. 138).
Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 1988);
Jago Morrison, Contemporary Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 2003).
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis [1973], trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1981), p. 41.
Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2006), p. 57.
Marianne Brace, ‘J. G. Ballard: The comforts of madness’, The Independent, 15 September 2006, http://www.fpmrecords.com/miscdoc/jgballard_interview.html, accessed 9 August 2010.
Ballard, Super-Cannes (London: Flamingo, 2000), p. 258.
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 3.
Slavoj Žižek, Violence (New York: Picador, 2008), p. 2.
Freud, Sigmund, Civilization and its Discontents [1930], trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1989), p. 69.
Jacques Lacan, ‘Kant with Sade’ [1963], in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2006), pp. 645–68 (p. 645).
Slavoj Žižek, ‘Kant with (or against) Sade’, in The Žižek Reader, ed. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 283–301 (p. 288).
Winston Churchill, ‘Anglo-American Unity’ (Speech at Harvard University, Boston, 6.9.1943), in Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897–1963, ed. Robert Rhodes James, vol. 7: 1943–1949 (New York and London: Chelsea House Publishers, 1974), pp. 6823–7 (p. 6826).
Angela Carter, ‘Notes from the front line’ [1983], in Shaking A Leg: Collected Writings, ed. Jenny Uglow (London: Penguin Books, 1997), pp. 36–43 (p. 38).
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© 2012 David Ian Paddy
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Paddy, D.I. (2012). Empires of the Mind: Autobiography and Anti-imperialism in the Work of J. G. Ballard. In: Baxter, J., Wymer, R. (eds) J. G. Ballard: Visions and Revisions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230346482_11
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