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.