Memory and the Jungian Unconscious in J. G. Ballard’s Autobiographical Narratives

ABSTRACT

This paper offers a comparative analysis of J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, The Kindness of Women, and Miracles of Life in their engagements with the psychological theory of Carl Jung. The first half of the paper explores Jung’s suggestions that psychology is to some extent ethnically determined and Eastern and Western consciousness in many ways antonymous. Challenging this view, Empire resists essentialist notions of psychology which argue that the individual psyche is in part separate from the social environment in which it forms. In Empire individual psychology changes with changing power relations and is unable to escape imperialist systems of thought. In this manner, the novel resists national and ethnic categories for the understanding of human psychology, and instead turns its focus to the effect of political structures on mental activity and self-conception. Turning from Empire to Kindness and Miracles, the second part of the paper reads Ballard’s broader fictional and nonfictional autobiographies for their representation of memory as a radically constructive function of mind. In this manner, Ballard’s autobiographical projects foreground the slippage between fact and fiction in the process of remembering, and challenge the conception of mind as an inelastic or deterministic structure.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See Jeannette Baxter’s “Uncanny Forms: Reading Ballard’s Non-Fiction” for a fuller examination of Ballard’s reflections in his nonfiction on the imperialist cultures of his childhood.

2. In Ballard’s words: “When they [the Japanese] seized the international settlement and became the occupying power we became one with the Chinese proletariat” (Bigsby, 72).

3. For example, Volodymyr Walter Odajnyk argues that for Jung “the fundamental cultural movements of history are frequently determined more by psychological than by economic or political forces” (122).

4. As Susan Rowland observes, “the value of Jungian discourse lies in its capacity for self-consciousness. Jungian theory is historically constituted, in this sense including a complicity with colonialism. Yet, its affinity with deconstruction means that it can be deployed to critique colonialism from within, an argument not pretending to be outside and transcendent of politics” (198).

5. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. The first digits refer to the volume number, the second to the paragraph number. Thus CW11.845 refers to Collected Works, Volume 11, Paragraph 845.

6. As the novel repeatedly says, for Jim England is “strange, inconceivable” (13), a “country far stranger than China” (45–46), a “world at once familiar yet totally removed from his own experiences” (244), a “small, strange country on the other side of the world that he had never visited, but that was nominally ‘home’” (279). This is in part why Jim cannot decide “which side” of the war he is on – “a problem” that he “never really resolve[s]” (228).

7. See also: pages 116, 138, 231, 233. Here, Jim is also likened to a “coolie” for the English. His identity questioned (“are you British, boy?”), he is later cast out among the Chinese.

8. For Jung irrationalism is associated with introspection, since to look inward is to come into contact with the irrational unconscious. The “irrational” attitude of the East is thus one of introspection, spirituality, peace, and calm – another set of stereotypes which has long been used to describe the East, but perhaps less jarring than the description of “childish.”

9. In Clarke’s words, there is a danger that for Jungian theory “the East becomes an ideal, unreal object controlled and manipulated for our own purposes, a vision which is effectively blind to the real East, deaf to its real voice” (165).

10. “By fear, repentance, promises, submission, self-abasement, good deeds, and praise he [the Christian] propitiates the great power,” and “if you shift the formula a bit and substitute for God some other power, for instance the world or money, you get a complete picture of Western man” (Jung, CW11.772).

11. For Jim, whose parents are irreligious, the practices of Christianity are akin to “exotic foreign ritual[s]” (162).

12. In the manuscript of Empire Jim thinks the “ascendancy of the European” “natural.” Significantly, in the published version of the novel Ballard cuts the essentializing modifier, suggesting that Jim is aware that political power has naught to do with any supposedly innate qualities in those who hold it. See “Manuscript of Empire.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kevin Hart

Kevin Hart is a lecturer at Mahidol University International College. His research centres on literary modernism and the contemporary novel and on the intersection of literary studies with the social sciences. His selected recent articles have appeared in Victorian Popular Fictions, James Joyce Quarterly, and Irish Studies Review.