ABSTRACT
Over the course of a career spanning more than half a century, J. G. Ballard has been scanning the ambiguities and peculiarities of the contemporary landscape with the keen eye of the flâneur. Moving laterally across form (short story, novel, prose poetry, performance art, collage) and genre (science fiction, cultural journalism, detective fiction, autobiography), he has written with equal insight and intensity on subject matter as varied as nuclear apocalypse, the cult of celebrity, the psychology of consumerism, the meaning of meaningless violence and the erotics of automobile styling. Each response is distinguished by an indefatigable desire to penetrate the myriad surface realities of our disturbed modernity, to tap into its hidden subtexts and to mobilise its unconscious energies. What geometries of meaning exist between Auschwitz and television advertising? What connections can be drawn between Pinochet, Picasso and the geo-political mutations of Europe? It is this line of associative questioning which has earned Ballard the reputation of being ‘one of the few genuine surrealists this country has produced’.3 Indeed, ‘surreal’ and ‘surrealist’ have become standard terms for reviewers and critics when describing Ballard’s work, yet, remarkably, no sustained analysis of the extent and order of Ballard’s Surrealism exists. My book addresses this
critical lacuna, arguing that Ballard’s fictional and non-fictional writings constitute a radical Surrealist experiment in the rewriting of post-war history and culture.
