ABSTRACT
The Drowned World is the most painterly novel within Ballard’s collection. It is a collage of twentieth-century Surrealist fictions in which Ernst’s phantasmagoric jungles, Delvaux’s haunting cityscapes and Dali’s time-saturated meditations coincide and overlay one another to form a palimpsest of soft, visual geographies. In his brief yet incisive reading of Ballard’s early science fictions, Colin Greenland outlines the significance of visual Surrealism for Ballard’s literary agenda. The ‘dislocation and ambiguities’ exhibited in Surrealist art, he suggests, radiate an ‘extraordinary power of emotional and imaginative conviction … Violating our expectations of continuity, every painting, every collage is a metaphysical disaster area’.2 Although Greenland is correct to note that Ballard’s recycling of Surrealist imagery functions to perpetuate ‘the Surrealists’ assertion that their art discloses contents of the unconscious mind’,3 his observation that Ballard is ‘more interested’ in penetrating the latent forces of ‘the present than the past’ overlooks the historical dimensions of Ballard’s Surrealism.4 This is a rather restrictive view of the author and his work which I will seek to dilate. By employing a historicist reading of the visual intertexts embedded within The Drowned World, I argue that Ballard incorporates Surrealist paintings into his own artwork in order to access and mobilize the historical unconscious. Ballard’s project of spectacular authorship is a Surrealist experiment in historical recovery, and visual Surrealism functions, in this context, to set up provocative discussions about memory, trauma and the recurrent nightmares of twentieth-century history.
