‘Going mad is their only way of staying sane’: Norbert Elias and the Civilized Violence of J. G. Ballard

Abstract

How should we evaluate J. G. Ballard’s fiction as social commentary? There have been a range of answers to this question. Many analyses of Ballard’s writing — inspired not least by the author’s emphasis on exploring the psychological terrain of ‘inner space’¹ — have focused on the unconscious and symbolic or emphasized the transcendence of materiality rather than engagement with social life itself.² Others have stressed Ballard’s attention to the media-constructed simulacra of reality: ‘a concern with the material conditions of production and consumption of mass-media artefacts’, Michel Delville claims, is ‘conspicuously absent’ from Ballard’s work.³ But Ballard commented on numerous political and aesthetic topics, and developed a reputation for perceptive, even prophetic, analysis of social change, a view perhaps more reflected in recent criticism. Andrzej Gasiorek has referred to Ballard as both ‘a historian of the post-war era, who is interested in the unfolding of social developments over time’ and ‘a cartographer of the contemporary period’.⁴ Dominika Oramus sees in Ballard’s later work a chronicle of the ‘twilight of the West’.⁵ Iain Sinclair even suggests that sociology has triumphed over literature in Ballard’s recent work, remarking that the novel Kingdom Come (2006) ‘could have been stripped down to be a series of savage essays or presentations about the motorway corridor with dramatised events happening in the middle’.⁶