J. G. Ballard and William Blake: Historicizing the Reprobate Imagination

Abstract

This chapter will seek to investigate the points at which an imagination that struggles against the limits of material reality can usefully be historicized and to suggest the points at which that imagination might be argued to have genuinely broken free. The focus will be J. G. Ballard’s The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) and, in particular, the many interesting intersections the novel has with the works of William Blake. The chapter will begin by acknowledging the novel’s unique position in Ballard’s oeuvre and, given this eccentricity, looking at ways it might be approached. It will also investigate two central questions. First, what are the implications of a writer such as Ballard — generally understood as, amongst other things, a high postmodernist — returning to a figure central to our understanding of Romanticism? Secondly, what are the implications for criticism of the replaying of tropes at different historical junctures, especially of tropes involving revolution, transcendence and transformation? Finally, by looking closely at Ballard’s debt to Blake, it will make an argument about the nature of the revolution The Unlimited Dream Company envisages.