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J. G. BALLARD’S INNER SPACE: THE JUXTAPOSITION OF TIME, SPACE AND

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Article · December 2009

DOI: 10.17851/1982-0739.15.0.62-75

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 J. G. BALLARD’S INNER SPACE: THE JUXTAPOSITION OF TIME, SPACE
AND BODY

Pedro Groppo
Doutorando em Estudos Literários

ABSTRACT
The fiction of J. G. Ballard is unusually concerned with spaces, both internal and
external. Influenced by Surrealism and Freudian psychoanalysis, Ballard’s texts explore
the thin divide between mind and body. This analysis of the story “The terminal beach”
illustrates well some of the concepts present throughout his fiction.

KEYWORDS
Body, space, the uncanny

The fiction of J. G. Ballard is concerned with psychology, both by way of characters

and their relationships, and an exploration of the real, outer world in terms of the mind. In
reading Ballard, one should be attentive of spaces, how they inform and are informed by the
characters’ psyches – be these spaces imagined or real. In 1962, writing for New Worlds, the
avant-garde science fiction (SF) magazine of the sixties, Ballard advocated a separation
between “inner” and “outer” spaces. He believed that, taking his cues from Sigmund Freud
and the surrealists, “outer space” was no longer that important, and that writers should turn
their attention to “inner space,” meaning mind exploration rather than the space travel often
depicted in the more generic flavor of SF. It was a true manifesto, and many took heed,
turning Ballard into the champion of the “New Wave” of British SF. For him, “outer space”
could only have any kind of interest if it were to mirror “inner space”: “The biggest
developments of the intermediate future will take place, not on the Moon or Mars, but on
Earth, and its inner space, not outer, that needs to be explored. The only truly alien planet is
Earth.” 1 Ballard argued that SF was “the only medium with an adequate vocabulary” for the
ideas and situations of the twentieth century, but that it still was sorely lacking in one aspect,

1
BALLARD. A user’s guide to the millennium, p. 197.
and that was an emphasis on the psychological and the biological. For him, the human body
and mind were the true technological apparatuses that SF should deal with, far more
interesting than spaceships, robots or laser guns. His turn, then, to a speculative and
imaginative fiction more informed of the workings of the mind, memory, fantasy, the body
and its impulses, is completely justified by this need to explore the new thematic ground of
the twentieth century.
To confirm his lineage to the surrealists, Ballard concludes the text with an allusion to
Salvador Dali’s delivering a lecture in London dressed in a diving suit. When asked how deep
Dali proposed to descend, he answered, “To the unconscious”! Ballard feels that we need that
inner space suit, and it is up to SF to build it. The period between 1962 and 1970, the year
Ballard published The atrocity exhibition, his collection of avant-garde “condensed novels”, is
his most prolific, with dozens of SF short stories and four novels (later he kept producing
them, but in a much reduced number). In another essay for New Worlds, “The paranoid as
artist”, Ballard conflated SF and surrealism, reading them as means of departing from
accepted norms and received accounts of reality, 2 which would produce a kind of “cognitive
estrangement”, which, according to SF critics such as Darko Suvin, is an indispensable
feature of SF. With The atrocity exhibition, he devised a new language and abandoned most
of the more superficial devices of the genre – the four novels, for instance, all dealt with
dystopian, post-catastrophe scenarios in a near future – but still maintaining its characteristic
aura of estrangement.

The subject matter of SF is the subject matter of everyday life: the gleam on
refrigerator cabinets, the contours of a wife’s or a husband’s thighs passing
the newsreel images on a color TV set, the conjunction of musculature and
chromium artifact within an automobile interior, the unique postures of
passengers on an airport escalator. 3

It is all about adopting a SF perspective to the real world and defamiliarizing it,
uncovering hidden relations and logics to objects and situations of everyday life. According to
Andrzej Gasiorek, SF offered Ballard a “way of exploring and perhaps coming to terms with
the unprecedented scale of twentieth-century social and technological change, a way of
grasping how and why human life had developed in the ways that it had”, 4 whereas
surrealism “provided a technique for generating insights into the hidden logics that motivated

2
BALLARD. A user’s guide to the millennium, p. 97.
3
BALLARD. Re/search 8/9, p. 99.
4
GASIOREK. J. G. Ballard, p. 9.
these developments; yet in another version of estrangement, it laid bare the unconscious
processes that informed key aspects of external public life”. 5 Ballard’s fiction draws from
both genres, as well as from Pop Art and the Gothic.
One of the key short stories in the Ballard canon, one that exemplifies his synthesis
between techniques of Surrealism and SF, is “The terminal beach” (1964). In his introduction
to The best SF of J. G. Ballard, he wrote that it is “the most important story I have written. It
marks the link between the science fiction of my first ten years, and the next phase of my
writings that led to The atrocity exhibition and Crash”. 6 In the same 1962 manifesto for New
Worlds, Ballard stated, “The first true s-f story, and one I intend to write myself if no one else
will, is about a man with amnesia lying on a beach and looking at a rusty bicycle wheel,
trying to work out the absolute essence of the relationship between them”. 7 “The terminal
beach” comes close to this proposed scenario, and it might be Ballard’s most overt piece in
this new kind of SF.
“The terminal beach”, also published in New Worlds, is set on Eniwetok or a similar
Pacific island that used to serve as testing ground for atomic explosions. A pilot named
Traven is voluntarily stranded on the island, trying to come to terms with the premature death
of his wife and son. The physical description of the island is almost like a text version of
Dali’s “The persistence of memory”, suggesting a conflation of past and present time. The
island is frequently described by the narrator as a “zone of non-time”, and “a synthesis of the
historical and psychic zero”, 8 which provokes in Traven a need to engage in a kind of psychic
erasure and ultimately self-annihilation.
The architecture of strange buildings, camera towers, and test platforms is said to be a
“continuous concrete cap upon the island, a functional, megalithic architecture as grey and
minatory (and apparently as ancient, in its projection into, and from, time future) as any of
Assyria or Babylon”. 9 Ballard suggests that this is a kind of future archeological ground,
removed from our sense of history and reality to appear alien. Still, it is clear that the shadow
of the past of atomic tests has plunged this landscape into a sort of geographical and

5
GASIOREK. J. G. Ballard, p. 9.
6
BALLARD. The best SF of J. G. Ballard, p. 6.
7
BALLARD. A user’s guide to the millennium, p. 198.
8
BALLARD. The complete short stories, p. 32.
9
BALLARD. The complete short stories, p. 32.
chronological abjection, transforming it into a site that erases and effectively denies history
and humanity.
Traven supplies his own ghosts, those of his dead family, and as he goes deeper into a
state of complete deprivation, starving for days, he provokes a sort of fusion between his
mind and the environment. “All sense of time soon vanished, and his life became completely
existential, an absolute break separating one moment from the next like two quantal events”. 10
Ballard provides very little in terms of conventional character psychology to describe Traven.
Instead, he describes the landscape, the architecture of the buildings, and the strange objects
he finds. With “The terminal beach,” Ballard suggests a way of looking at mental processes,
conscious and unconscious, by way of geography and spatiality. By doing so, he draws on the
Gothic tradition of examining structures that project and introject certain anxieties and desires
that can go by unnoticed on everyday life. In a sense, landscapes and buildings can be
metaphors for a number of psychological, moral, and aesthetic issues. In Ballard’s works, as
in Gothic fiction and Surrealism, these external structures are often projections that embody in
one way or another unspoken tensions, contradictions, and thought processes of their
inhabitants and designers.
In the light of Ballard’s manifesto, “Which way to inner space”, we can posit Traven
as the “man with amnesia,” not so much with a loss of memory but with an unusual sense of
memory, one that conflates past, present, and future. The beach is, symbolically, not only a
primordial setting, but one that explicitly alludes to the cyclic nature of time, in constant
renewal, erasure and erosion. The bicycle wheel is an allusion to a piece by artist Eduardo
Paolozzi of the Independent Group’s exhibition of contemporary art “This is tomorrow” in
1956, one that the theorist Scott Bukatman says could be the inspiration for many of Ballard’s
texts, especially Crash, High-rise, and The atrocity exhibition. 11 Here is an excerpt from
Ballard’s autobiography, Miracles of life (2007) about the event:

Another of the teams brought together the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, and
the architects Peter and Alison Smithson, who constructed a basic unit of
human habitation in what would be left of the world after nuclear war. Their
terminal hut, as I thought of it, stood on a patch of sand, on which were laid
out the basic implements that modern man would need to survive: a power
12
tool, a bicycle wheel and a pistol.

10
BALLARD. The complete short stories, p. 35.
11
BUKATMAN. Terminal identity: the virtual subject in post-modern science fiction, p. 43.
12
BALLARD. Miracles of life, p. 188.
 Indeed one can see Traven struggling to find the relationship between the fabricated,
physical elements of the present, and the more essential, almost eternal, elements of nature.
His mind seeks solace in the synthesis between the two, and in a way, this is the locus of
much of Ballard’s concerns in his fiction. Gasiorek summarizes Ballard’s attempt to
“overcome divisions between self and world, the rational and the irrational, the conscious and
the unconscious – sublating them in a liberatory synthesis”. 13 Ballard’s fiction is often located
within this border zone, searching for a synthesis of opposite elements that should lead to
liberation.
Gasiorek sees Ballard’s appropriation of Surrealism as a technique. SF, on the other
hand, provides a rich vocabulary that Ballard finds attuned to the time and that he has claimed
as the true literature of the twentieth century. But his fiction is remarkably uninterested in the
commonplace, and while he does adopt at that point SF as his nominal genre, his concern is
elsewhere. The trope of sublating time and space with internal psychology is not unique to
Surrealism either – it approximates Ballard to the Gothic. David Punter, in The literature of
terror, warns that the Gothic is not a unified and consistent movement, but rather a number of
novels that were later grouped under the same moniker. These were written by authors such as
Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, C. R. Maturin, and Mary Shelley; they
featured haunted houses and castles, extreme sensation and situations of terror. 14
At first sight, there is very little to connect Ballard to the nominal Gothic fiction of
that period, but Punter lists other, more punctual and pervasive features of the Gothic, such as
the restricted access to an “objective” world, being instead narratives immersed in the psyche
of the protagonist, but more importantly, its development into a literature of “landscapes of
the mind, settings which are distorted by the pressure of the principal characters’
psychological obsession”. 15 The use of physical settings to illustrate, influence, and contain
the workings and the states of the mind is a thoroughly Gothic trope, as is the concern with
psychic and social decay, a “tone of desensitized acquiescence in the horror of obsessions and
prevalent insanity”. 16 With the latter, Punter might as well be describing Ballard’s The
atrocity exhibition, which is, in general terms, about the death of affect and about giving voice
to a looming sense of insanity.

13
GASIOREK. J. G. Ballard, p. 9.
14
PUNTER. The literature of terror, p. 8.
15
PUNTER. The literature of terror, p. 12.
16
PUNTER. The literature of terror, p. 13.
 “The terminal beach” even figures a couple of overt conventions of the Gothic, such as
the obsession with architectural ruins and decay, and the haunting visions of Traven’s dead
wife and son, both elements that tie him to the past. In this short excerpt, “The terminal
beach” reads like something out of Edgar Allan Poe:

His wife’s pale features seemed illuminated from within, her lips parted as if
in greeting, one hand raised to take his own. His son’s face, with its
curiously fixed expression, regarded him with the same enigmatic smile of
the child in the photograph. “Judith! David!” Startled, Traven ran forwards
to them. Then, in a sudden movement of light, their clothes turned into
shrouds, and he saw the wounds that disfigured their necks and chests.
17
Appalled, he cried out.

This is a typical Gothic situation: ghosts luring the living and eventually provoking fear and
terror. Their appeal lies in their apparent ability to cheat death, but in uncanny fashion, the
appearance is revealed false by exposing their wounds and shrouds. This makes explicit
Ballard’s debt to the genre, but he updates many of its conventions and concerns through
other, subtler ways. One is the use of the uncanny in relation to spaces, real and imagined.
In “The terminal beach”, there is a striking space consisting of two thousand concrete
blocks, perfect cubes of 15 cubic feet, spaced at 10 yards. One of the sides of these cubes
holds a door, visible only at a certain angle (not unlike the surrealistic trompe l’œil), and the
blocks are described as having the “size and air of a house”. 18 Inside them, Traven finds
solace and the fatigue that took over his body vanishes. “For the first time since his arrival at
the island, the sense of dissociation set off by its derelict landscapes began to recede”. 19 If the
alien, inhospitable landscape of the island is uneasy to Traven, the homelike “concrete
monsters” give him comfort.
Here Freud’s essay “The uncanny” (1919) can be of help. Freud suggests, by
etymologically analyzing the word “unheimlich” (uncanny), that which is (literally) “homely”
or “heimlich” ends up having also its opposite meaning, that is, “unheimlich” (unhomely).
Following Ernst Jentsch’s definition of Unheimlich as that which “ought to have remained
secret and hidden but has come to light”, 20 Freud develops the uncanny as a manifestation of
the unconscious process of repression. What is uncanny is at the same time unfamiliar and
strange but is also homely and familiar, thus articulating hidden and repressed tensions by

17
BALLARD. The complete short stories, p. 45.
18
BALLARD. The complete short stories, p. 46.
19
BALLARD. The complete short stories, p. 38.
20
FREUD. The uncanny, p. 34.
bringing them to light, and is a mark of the return of the repressed. Much of the Gothic, and
for that matter, of all that provokes terror, is triggered by uncanny elements that force us to
come to terms with taboos or uncomfortable, forgotten ideas. It is still homely because it is
instantly recognizable, and pertains to primitive and infantile feelings that morality, ethics,
and values consistently efface and repress. Quoting Freud, “[T]he uncanny is uncanny only
because it is secretly all too familiar, which is why it is repressed”. 21 For now, it suffices to
understand how the blocks in “The terminal beach” have for Traven an uncanny role, one that
allows the elision of past and present, conscious and unconscious, inner and outer space.
These interstitial spaces are numerous in Ballard’s fiction, and it may even be said that much
of his work fulfills the same role on a genre, or category, level. Stories such as “The terminal
beach” use this blurred interstitial zone to comment on the unspoken role of spaces in the
postwar world, working by way of Gothic, SF, and surrealist conventions to explore the
hidden logics of a largely chaotic and irrational world.
“The terminal beach” seems to be the ideal starting point for an inquiry because it is
one of Ballard’s early attempts to put all those elements together, while explicitly locating his
text in history. The island is a former H-bomb test site. Consequently, being that the
landscape becomes a fusion of Traven’s psyche and the actual, physical world, it is possible
to extrapolate Traven’s obsessions and fears onto a larger sphere: his fragmented
consciousness and fixation with past events, both his family’s death and the history of the
landscape, that of the atomic bomb. The story was written at the height of the Cold War, but
there is a sense that the bomb caused a profound change in Western civilization. In a later
text, his semi-autobiographical novel Empire of the sun, Ballard elects the Nagasaki bomb as
the turning point not only of World War 2 and his fictional stand-in’s place in it (at the time a
prisoner of war in China) but also of his emotional and intellectual maturity, signaling a
permanent shift in his imagination.
Dominika Oramus, in her book-length study Grave new world, identifies the gradual
internal degeneration of Western civilization in the second half of the twentieth century as a
major current in Ballard's fiction. Contemporary reality in later Ballard texts is presented as
“post-apocalyptic: though we are not literally living amidst the ruins, the golden age is far
behind us and we are witnessing the twilight of the West”. 22 She suggests that this turning
point is the bomb, its invention and use, because it makes the human propensity for self-

21
FREUD. The uncanny, p. 36.
22
ORAMUS. Grave new world, p. 14.
destruction finally explicit, because it makes total annihilation possible. In a way Ballard’s
fiction, despite the elements of estrangement widely employed, is about the contemporary
world, living in the shadow of irreconcilable and illogical events in history. His texts expose
modern man’s difficulty in contextualizing the world around him and a consequent crisis of
identity.
Self-destruction and catastrophe are manifestations of another Gothic topic, that of
death. If we assume the first SF novel to be Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), as Brian
Aldiss proposes in his Billion year spree: the true history of science fiction, it also means that
the genre sprung out of the Gothic. The technological element in the story is the ability to
create a human being by artificial means, out of dead bodies. Victor Frankenstein transgresses
many boundaries by making his creature, one of which is the finality of death, a thought that
provokes terror and uneasiness. Death itself is put into question, as man can now manipulate
this natural fact. That haunting preoccupation with death and its relation to technology is at
the core of SF, and in early Ballard post-apocalyptic stories such as “The terminal beach”.
In later Ballard texts, subjectivity toward all elements of life, including death, is
increasingly more pervasive and progresses at an enormous rate, as in Crash (1973), in which
death is seen as the logical next step of an extremely abstract approach to sexuality and
technology. Both Concrete island (1974) and The unlimited dream company (1979) seem to
be creative explorations of near or actual death experiences, attempts to represent death in
fiction and its liberating effect on the imagination. Empire of the sun (1984) contains one of
his most complete and provoking approaches to the theme, as the delirious protagonist, Jim,
sees a reversal of the process of death and experiences the dead coming back to life towards
the end of the novel – the looming presence of the Nagasaki bomb determining the outcome
of Jim’s predicament and the war. That scene from Empire of the sun is almost a recreation of
a portion of “The terminal beach”, in which Traven finds the body of a Japanese man in a
crevice. He is not military or science personnel, and, like Traven, has no apparent motive to
be on the island, suggesting that he might be in fact Traven’s double, a projection of his own
self. Hallucinating, he converses with this man, Yasuda, who urges him to exercise a
“philosophy of acceptance”, letting go of his guilt and his ties to the past. Ironically, Yasuda
can only “accept” this because he is already dead, and has fully merged (body and mind) with
the island. As the story ends, Traven drags Yasuda’s body, now referred to as “the dead
archangel”, from the crevice and uses it as a “guardian”, to keep Traven away from the blocks
(which seem to accelerate his process of dissolution). In a sense, he has found a way to
project his own death onto a double, deflecting his own process of decay, but which remains
nonetheless a physical sign of the future.
Freud identified the death drive in Beyond the pleasure principle (1920), describing it
as a force that makes living creatures strive for an inorganic state, which is the deeper,
primordial, and essential state of things. This concept can be useful to understand how,
especially in the kind of fiction we are dealing with, there is an overwhelming concern with
death and destruction. It links death with birth and the compulsion to repeat. The energy of
the death drive is, according to André Green, a “work of the negative”, and seems always to
be related with dissociation, regression, and dissolution. 23 It is only curious that the sounds of
the deathly island, where Traven goes to die and come to terms with the inevitability of death,
remind him of the beach at Dover, where he was born, signaling the relation between death
and birth, the end and the beginning of life. “The landscape seems to be involved with certain
unconscious notions of time, and in particular with those that may be a repressed premonition
of our own deaths”, 24 which constitutes a privileged space in which time is but an illusion.
“The terminal beach” tries to convey a psychic reinvention of space, a physical incarnation of
all these drives and obsessions, history and psychology together encoded in architecture and
spatiality. In a section of the short story titled “The catechism of goodbye”, Traven begins a
pretense of saying “goodbye” to a location that had been used test sites for atom bombs, such
as Eniwetok and Los Alamos. When he does that, one of the blocks disappears: “the corridors
remained intact, but somewhere in his mind appeared a small interval of neutral space”.
Eventually he stops, realizing that if he kept on, he would have to “fix his signature upon
every one of the particles of the universe”. 25 If we follow Freud’s explanation of the death
drive as a principle of stability and his affirmation that the dominating tendency of mental life
is the “effort to reduce, to keep constant or to remove internal tension due to stimuli”, 26
Traven’s saying “goodbye” is his attempt to reduce tension, or his guilt, physically present as
the blocks. The only way to set the mental tension to zero, and deplete the landscape of the
ominous blocks, is death, and is, we assume, Traven’s destiny.
Ballard often isolates characters in settings, as he has done in “The terminal beach”, in
ways that the socio-historical context becomes embedded in the physical landscape, which is

23
GREEN. The work of the negative, p. 85.
24
BALLARD. The complete short stories, p. 40.
25
BALLARD. The complete short stories, p. 46.
26
FREUD. Beyond the pleasure principle, p. 56.
also informed by the psychology of the characters. These closed and almost controlled spaces
become perfect stage sets in which he can enact the key problems of urban alienation and the
death of affect. This kind of isolation disallows appeals to exterior forces, relying primarily on
the external/physical and internal/mental spaces of the characters. A powerful technique, it
yields disturbing and cogent results, asserting the ongoing importance of certain surrealist
tropes in contemporary art and literature, as well as the force of the compressed form. Both
these ideas can be traced back to Freud’s description of the dream-work in 1900, the
conflation of conscious and unconscious stimuli in one narrative, and the workings of
condensation and displacement. Ballard’s metaphors and imagery are often dream-like, but
the narrative form of dreams seems to have influenced him the most. The synthesis of subject
and object, character and setting, internal and external, reality and fiction, are all marked
features his style.
The study of spaces in literature began to receive special attention with the Gothic, and
is now more important than ever. As Ballard has stated, the difference Freud pointed out
between the latent and the manifest content of a dream now has to be applied to reality. 27 It is
as if reality and fiction have traded places, and our experience of reality must be guided by
fictional and dream states. To truly comprehend an actual space, we must look at its subtext,
at its latent content. Michel Foucault suggested that

a whole history remains to be written of spaces – which would at the same

time be the history of powers (both these terms in the plural) – from the
great strategies of geo-politics to the little tactics of the habitat, institutional
architecture from the classroom to the design of hospitals, passing via
28
economic and political installations.

Foucault notes that spaces are not only physical locations but also embodiments of a
subtext of power. Relations of authority and power are encoded in the way hospitals and
schools, for instance, are designed, and the act of looking beyond the manifest content of
reality provides a powerful tool of analysis. Ballard too ascribes the same importance to
spaces, an obsession that takes full form in two of his novels of the 1970s – Concrete island
and High-rise – tales of urban alienation and psychological and physical entrapment. Set in
contemporary locations of everyday life, but isolated in time and space, they are Ballard’s
most developed explorations of the theme of space and modern man’s dislocation in the
world.

27
BALLARD. Re/search 8/9, p. 103.
28
FOUCAULT. Power/knowledge: selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977, p. 149.
 Gasiorek suggests that the two novels occupy opposite ends of the civic spectrum:
“one exposes the hidden byproducts of contemporary life, while the other concentrates on its
dreams of rational design”. 29 In Concrete island, an architect crashes his car in a deject traffic
island among interceding carriageways, and finds himself unable to escape. The traffic island
is inhabited by some of society’s rejects and is a byproduct of late twentieth-century urban
planning, a forgotten space that may or not be a projection of the dying architect’s mind. In
High-rise, written shortly thereafter, a thousand-apartment building set on the outskirts of
London answers the problems of modernity by compartmentalizing and embodying every
living need and comfort possible for its inhabitants, a utopia in the manner of the architect Le
Corbusier. It quickly turns into a dystopia, one without a discernible particular cause, as
people living in the high-rise find the need to liberate their atavistic impulses, descending into
barbarism and full-fledged clan warfare, indulging in every kind of moral transgression,
including rape and murder. Ballard’s characterization is more concerned with the architecture
and the artificial social organization imposed by the spaces themselves than with conventional
character psychology. All the action takes place inside such spaces, without hardly any
mention of other locations, suggesting that the relation of space and individual is more than
just physical. It is as if any of the events of both texts, either actual or psychological, could
never take place if not for the influence of the unusual surroundings, which asks for a reading
that considers Ballard’s treatment of space and architecture, and how it relates to human
psychology.
By tracing the influences of the Gothic in Ballard’s work – particularly those related to
the representation of space and the body – there will be new insights into these complex,
unassimilated and almost uncategorizable texts. Roger Luckhurst, in his book The angle
between two walls, points out the elusive character of Ballard’s texts: “His work at once
constantly activates theoretical models, but it is also awkward, didactic, and overtheorized,
tending to evade or supersede the theories meant to ‘explain’ it”. 30 To be sure, a great number
of postmodern theorists and academics “use” Ballard to illustrate and explain many works of
art made possible by new technology, such as video art and cyberpunk. Ballard is often
invoked to show how SF writers have anticipated a contemporary sensibility; for example, the
fusion of man and machine so explored in cyberpunk, is thought to have sprung out of Crash.
Jean Baudrillard famously takes the novel and uses it to explain his theory of simulacrum, not

29
GASIOREK. J. G. Ballard, p. 120.
30
LUCKHURST. The angle between two walls: the fiction of J. G. Ballard, p. xviii.
the other way around. Still, there are few book-length studies of Ballard’s fiction, although he
is widely known and seen as a paragon of SF New Wave and cyberpunk and a huge influence
in media studies. He is barely read in the United States (his last published novel in the country
is 2000’s Super-Cannes) and it appears that whereas he is superficially known, his fiction
remains unassimilated by readers and theorists.
The ideas expounded in his texts are extremely prescient, both because they have
aged better than a great number of his contemporaries’ in the SF field, and mainly because
they have anticipated psychological and social changes triggered by technology, rather than
just the technological changes themselves. For Ballard, “SF is a response to science and
technology as perceived by the inhabitants of a consumer goods society”, 31 and in a sense it
should accurately portray, project, and anticipate the true paradigm shift, the one inside our
heads. As Ballard took that into account, and described an “external reality ontologically
transformed by the multiplicity of electronic signals in the air,” or as Bukatman terms it, the
“mediascape”, 32 he has seen how the imaginary space of mass media began to take hold of
reality in the 1960s, something that became evident to theorists in the 80s, with the advent of
cyberpunk and cyberspace.

The techniques of surrealism have a particular relevance at this moment

[1966], when the fictional elements in the world around us are multiplying to
the point where it is almost impossible to distinguish between the “real” and
33
the “false” – the terms no longer have any meaning.

Undoubtedly Ballard employs surrealist techniques because he identifies them taking

place in a much larger scale, again stressing his pressing concern with the socio-historical
sphere. Oramus stresses that

irrespectively of the literary conventions Ballard applies in a given text

(science fiction, speculative fiction, detective story, thriller, war novel or any
other), he charts the very same territory and remains throughout primarily
interested in the reaction of the human mind to the post-World War II reality
34
which is the common denominator of his diverse obsessions.

Ballard’s preoccupation with the present and the technological and social
developments since the war is certainly paramount, but we must look into his uses of the

31
BALLARD. Re/search 8/9, p. 99.
32
BUKATMAN. Terminal identity: the virtual subject in post-modern science fiction, p. 42.
33
BALLARD. A user’s guide to the millennium, p. 88.
34
ORAMUS. Grave new word, p. 23.
conventions and the genres he employs to understand how general and wide his insights really
are. The act of comparing and tracing the development of the uses of certain literary tropes
over time is fundamental to contextualize and represent the subject. To better understand
Ballard’s fiction and his representation of the landscapes of the mind and their meaning as
literary creations and social observations, his use of certain techniques and the largely
unexplored affinity with the Gothic and its relation to architecture and the representation of
space must be investigated.

RESUMO
A ficção de J. G. Ballard lida com espaços, tanto internos quanto externos. Influenciado
pelo Surrealismo e psicanálise freudiana, Ballard explora a linha tênue entre mente e
corpo. Esta análise do conto “The terminal beach” ilustra alguns desses conceitos
presentes na sua obra como um todo.

PALAVRAS-CHAVE
Corpo, espaço, o estranho

REFERENCES

BALLARD, J. G. The best SF of J. G. Ballard. London: Futura, 1977.

BALLARD, J. G. Re/search 8/9. San Francisco: ReSearch Pub, 1984.
BALLARD, J. G. A user’s guide to the millennium. New York: Picador, 1996.
BALLARD, J. G. The complete short stories. London: Harper, 2006. v. 2.
BALLARD, J. G. Miracles of life. London: Harper, 2007.
BUKATMAN, Scott. Terminal identity: the virtual subject in post-modern science fiction.
Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.
FOUCAULT, Michel. Power/knowledge: selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977.
Brighton: Harvester, 1980.
FREUD, Sigmund. The uncanny. New York: Penguin, 2001.
FREUD, Sigmund. Beyond the pleasure principle. New York: Penguin, 2003.
GASIOREK, Andrzej. J. G. Ballard. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005.
GREEN, André. The work of the negative. London: Free Association, 1999.
LUCKHURST, Roger. The angle between two walls: the fiction of J. G. Ballard. Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 1997.
 ORAMUS, Dominika. Grave new world. Warsaw: Warsaw University Press, 2007.
PUNTER, David. The literature of terror. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003.

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