The reception of J. G. Ballard's work has always bewilderingly bifurcated between pronouncements that Ballard is “our best novelist” (Kimberley 52) and dismissal of his clumsy, embarrassing, and possibly insane works. This divergence of evaluation can more than probably be attributed to Ballard's association with science fiction and the need for critics to distance themselves from the stereotypical portrait of the average “fan” as dysfunctional male adolescent. Curiously, however, if “mainstream” criticism associates him with the genre, the institutions of science fiction have always treated Ballard's membership with suspicion. In a strange effect, Ballard is situated within the SF/mainstream binary only as he is projected onto the other side of the bar: when science fiction critics do praise him, it is for transcending the genre (becoming mainstream); mainstream criticism celebrates his transformative reworkings of science fiction tropes as long as they remain within the genre.¹ This process effectuates a constant double displacement, and the difficulty of siting Ballard's work, of finding adequate contexts in which to read it, results from this uncertain nonsite between science fiction and the mainstream.

If displacement, for Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, “permits the objectivation, localisation and containment of anxiety” (123), the strategy here is delocalization, decontainment; Ballard is always projected outside whatever frame is being invoked. The difficulty of placing (and thus of reading) Ballard is insistent from his earliest works. The quartet of catastrophe novels, written between 1962 and 1966, operated by “inverting” the logic of the genre; no longer narratives of heroic survival in the midst of global disaster, the protagonists of The Drowned World and The Crystal World “accept” catastrophe and willingly seek ecstatic dissolution in death. Perversity intensifies in Ballard's notorious experimental fictions The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash, both of which are dispassionate “scientific” investigations of the highly compacted conjunction of media obscenity, pornography, and the erotic potential of new technologies. The latter, famously, presents the car crash as the apotheosis of orgasm.

One way of dealing with such extremity is simply to refuse it, to render it external to either science fiction or the mainstream. Exclusion resulted, until recently, in a resounding critical silence, but an attendant effect was Ballard's occupation of that strange space of the “cult writer.” The cult can cut a swath through institutional framings of the high/low, serious/popular binaries (onto which the mainstream/SF divide is often mapped [see Luckhurst]) to appeal to an unforeseeably admixed sodality of readers. As Umberto Eco notes, “cult” texts are read transgressively: the “low” can be elevated to the “high” or vice versa. However, cults coagulate around secrets, arcana, are performed through private languages and rituals. The “initiated” depend for their survival on an uncomprehending exteriority, whose disapprobation merely intensifies the lure of the cult. One way of “saving” Ballard becomes only another form of marginality.

This secrecy has nevertheless been breached on two occasions. In a way that apparently ejected him from the double marginalization of “science fiction” or the “cult author,” Ballard was received and understood, with massive critical and commercial success, in his two “autobiographical” novels, Empire of the Sun (1984) and The Kindness of Women (1991). The sudden visibility of Ballard and Ballard's work in 1984 (Booker Prize nominee, Guardian Fiction Prize) is no less astonishing for his equally sudden disappearance and then repeated “discovery” in 1991 (the week of publication saw major interviews on Radio 3 and Radio 4, a documentary on BBC 2, and serialization in the Independent; later Ballard received that most English of accolades, an appearance on Desert Island Discs).

The reason for this sudden “acceptability”—a conjunction of mass audience with critical elevation to “serious” novelist—can be incontrovertibly traced to a perceived generic shift: SF to “autobiography.” More than this, Empire could be rendered generically safe in another sense: it was a Second World War novel. The terms of that acceptance are problematic, however. The logic of the argument proceeds thus: Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women can be detached from the oeuvre in their generic shift; both can be read as new additions to an honorable “confessional” mode, thus escaping the derogatory appellation of “science fiction.” At the same time these texts can then be re-attached to the oeuvre as “straight” texts which finally decode the bizarre and perverse aberrations that had gone before, rendering the fiction autobiographically comprehensible. This reading of the “autobiographies” as petition—a kind of apologia or entreaty—suppresses both the fictionality of the texts, which holds them much closer to the science fiction than is admitted, and the inevitable dependence on the prior work that a structure of detachment/reattachment necessitates. The petition for separability becomes mired in the complex repetitions that fold the texts back into the oeuvre.

The dominant media reception of these works clearly deployed them as autobiographical decoding machines (while I cite from newspaper and journal reviews, these have been crucial sites for the construction of “Ballard” outside science fiction circles). Of Empire it was said that it was “the key to the rest of an extraordinary oeuvre and central to his project” (Webb), “the first stage in a comprehensive decoding” (Murray); of Kindness, that it “provides a framework for comprehending much that is disturbing in his writing” (Blow), that it “loops together all the strands of a story that, in the course of fictionally processing his life, reveals how and where Ballard acquired his distinct gallery of images for his literature” (Kemp). It now became “tempting to see all his earlier fiction as a kind of displacement activity” (Barber).

The logic of this repeated argument is a retrospective rereading of the prior science fiction as encrypted autobiographical performance. Inverting the order of the series, Empire and Kindness become the paradigms that decrypt and displace the science fiction from simple self-identity; a nongeneric “secret” can now be implanted to explain Ballard's perverse attachment to such a juvenile genre. A similar rereading is effected around Kurt Vonnegut's “autobiographical” Slaughterhouse-Five, as Peter Brigg notes (106).

However, this move cannot be limited to an attempt to petition for “seriousness” for writers associated with science fiction; it often informs the theory of autobiography in general, especially as represented in the writing of James Olney, Georges Gusdorf, and other “metaphysicians” of the autobiography. The autobiography is “the symptomatic key to all else that he [sic] did” (Olney 4); the “autobiographical key” (Gusdorf 46) unlocks the work; it is “[the] magnifying lens, focusing and intensifying that same peculiar creative vitality that informs all the volumes of his [sic] collected works” (Olney 3–4).

What is of interest in these theories of autobiography is not the content of their claims—Georges Gusdorf's transcendentalism, evident in his view that autobiography represents the “theodicy of the individual being” (39), is frequently matched by James Olney's religiosity—so much as the fact that such descriptions can only be stated by the formal institution of a framing device. Autobiography can never, in the final instance, be evidentially grounded in the text but must appeal to the edges of the text, the contextual determination which establishes autobiography as autobiography. As Joseph Loesberg says, the “qualities by which we demarcate genres tend in autobiography to involve less the formal shape of a text than extra-textual and even extra-literary concepts of intention, authorial sincerity and truthfulness” (169). Since the fictive has a disconcerting ability to mimic the textual appearance of autobiography, Albert Stone argues that “our expectations depend heavily upon all sorts of obvious clues to authorial intention such as a preface, photographs, even cover blurbs or library classifications” (6). Philippe Lejeune's theorization of the pragmatics of the “autobiographical pact” may try to determine the genre through retrospection, the identity of author, narrator, and central character, but ultimately Lejeune concludes that “[the] fringe of the printed text … controls the entire reading (author's name, title, subtitle, name of the collection, name of the publisher, even including the ambiguous game of prefaces)” (29).

John Sutherland, in discussing how cover apparatuses determine responses to texts, takes as his opening example the hardback edition of Empire of the Sun. It is plain here how the very packaging of the book attempts to detach the work from the science fictional oeuvre. It is not just the cover design, the “orientalized” typography of title and author name in red on a white background (thus echoing the colors of the Japanese “Rising Sun” flag) and the delicate, impressionistic watercolor silhouettes of Japanese soldiers that figure on the lower edge of the front cover—although the point here is that both of these elements distinctly mark the text off from the garish yellow and functional typography that gives generic identity to Gollancz's usual science fiction publications. Rather, Sutherland concentrates on the cover blurb. This is his commentary on its effects:

what will most condition the reader's experience of the novel are three points, all stressed as being important in the jacket material: (1) Empire of the Sun draws on autobiographical experience and therefore carries a more complex ethical cargo than most fiction; (2) it is a “departure” from Ballard's normal (science fiction) work; (3) it is the crowing achievement of his work in fiction—the point to which all his previous novels tend. It seems clear to me that someone entering Empire of the Sun via the jacket apparatus must have a different set from the reader (particularly the reader new to Ballard) with a bald library copy.

(4)

Framing devices direct and constitute readings. That both this jacket material and the reviews cited earlier are crucial enframing devices is helpfully theorized by Gerard Genette in the concept of the paratext. For Genette, the paratext is that set of framing apparatuses which includes the framing on and around the text (peritext: titles, prefaces, blurbs) and those at more distance (epitext: reviews, interviews, conversations). Since a text cannot appear in a naked state, unadorned, this edge determines a reading, however “auxiliary” (261) it may appear.

One might expect that this welcome attentiveness to the textual edge would assist in an analysis of the insertion of a generic frame which strategically aims to distance Ballard's “autobiographies” from his science fiction. Genette, however, and in spite of arguing that the paratext is “fundamentally heteronomous” (261), suggests that this frame is “always the bearer of an authorial commentary either more or less legitimated by the author,” that it must always return as the “responsibility of the author” (262). In proposing that the multiple discourses of the paratext are fully traceable to a singular author-ity, Genette's foregrounding of the paratext is yet an apotropaic frame: it is marked only to be immediately effaced. In this, it performs according to Jacques Derrida's analysis of the parergon (the frame of the art-“work”): “the parergon is a form which has as its traditional determination not that it stands out but that it disappears … melts away at the moment it deploys its greatest energy” (Truth in Painting 61). It is as if the work generates its own frame, completely and exhaustively determines its own contextual enframing. It is significant in this respect that Genette cites Lejeune on autobiography to assert that the responsibility of the paratext always reverts to the author. For Lejeune it has to if the pact is to be at all functional, if the boundary between fictional oeuvre and autobiographical text is to remain in place. This is exactly the same for Gusdorf, Olney, and others, like Barrett Mandel, who asserts that autobiographies “ultimately emanate from the deeper reality of being” (50). Loesberg again: “the problems theorists attribute to writers of autobiography, the problems involved in accurately inscribing consciousness within a text, are actually problems faced by a reader of autobiography unwilling to accept textual indeterminateness as inherent in an autobiographical text” (169).

In Ballard's case, it is evident that the enframing is not purely self-generated. It is the product in part of a mechanism to detach the “autobiographies” in order to give them the textual sanction to operate as decoding machines for the oeuvre. And yet Empire and Kindness slip the fixity of the division that would render transparent the fictional code because they are, of course, autobiographical novels. This is not solely to say that the texts “fictionalize” the life and rewrite significant details (jettisoning the parents), although they do both these things. Autobiographical theory has long abandoned the measure of truth/correspondence claims. Nor is it to simply announce that Lejeune's insistence on the absolute identity of the proper name of the author and that of the central character is wrecked by the persistently undecidable difference between “J. G. Ballard” and the character Jamie/Jim. This is to miss the point. It is, rather, that Ballard's elaborately teasing play between the fictive and autobiographical exposes the operativity of the frame instated to divide science fiction and “mainstream,” popular and serious, high and low. Far from this “wavering between fact and fiction” being “trivializing” [Towers 38], this breaching foregrounds the parergonal effect that is at once so evidently in force and yet so consistently effaced. The way in which Ballard's texts transgress the textual edge that would guarantee the logic of detachment/reattachment directs attention to the “whole problematic of judicial framing and of the jurisdiction of frames” (Derrida, “Living On” 88).²

What is required is a close analysis of how the attempt to distinguish the “autobiographies” from the fictional oeuvre runs into difficulties. Detached from the science fiction, Empire and Kindness must nevertheless obliquely repeat it in order to render it autobiographically readable. The injunction is to read Ballard's oeuvre backwards: the tropicalized London landscapes of The Drowned World find their generation in the Shanghai skyline reflected on the paddy fields beyond the Lunghua camp, the detention center where Ballard, in his boyhood, was interned by the Japanese from 1942 to 1945; the obsession with dreams of flight in much of Ballard's work reverts back to childhood obsession and the “liberation” of Shanghai by the American air force, staged in Empire as an almost theatrical performance just beyond the limits of the camp. Kindness accelerates this process of identification: Ballard's brief career as an air force pilot in Canada in the 1950s ties in to Traven's obsession with nuclear war in Ballard's famous experimental short story “The Terminal Beach”; his endlessly rehearsed anecdote about his one disastrous experience with LSD equates with the bizarre visions of The Crystal World no less than the transmogrification of Shepperton (Ballard's hometown) in The Unlimited Dream Company.

The separation on which this decoding depends is problematic for reasons which center on repetition. No simple “departure” comes with Empire; “The Dead Time,” a story published in the Myths of the Near Future collection, is woven out of the ambivalent space between the official “end” of the war and the beginning of “peace” (or re-beginning of war) in the zone around Shanghai. Given the peritextual blurbs on each of Ballard's books, which always contain reference to his internment in China, this story can already be read as generated out of “autobiographical” elements. Secondly, there is the curious paragraph in The Atrocity Exhibition, the longest of the book, which is a narrative told by the disintegrating central character about his early life in Shanghai. It begins: “Two weeks after the end of World War II my parents and I left Lunghua internment camp and returned to our house in Shanghai” (72). This entry is startling not least because it is closer to the facts than the subsequent “autobiographies” (the parents are there, whereas Empire and Kindness virtually erase them). The same paragraph details an attempt to travel to Japan on the invitation of a Captain Tulloch, and the oblique sense that the Japanese prisoners in the hold of the ship are victims of an impending American atrocity. This scene is repeated in Kindness (60–61), but witnessed from the ship on which Jim leaves for England. Tulloch appears in Empire, but as one of the roving bandits who is shot attempting to raid the Olympic stadium (see chapter 39). A Tulloch is also a river steamer captain in The Drought. There is a sense here of a constant permutation of details, weaving between fiction and supposed autobiography.

This oscillation is further emphasized by the relation of Empire to the first part of Kindness, which returns to the Shanghai childhood. Although there is repetition (the same bizarre anecdote of the English driving out to survey battlefields, where, in Empire, “the rotting coffins projected from the loose earth like a chest of drawers” with “dead soldiers … as if they had fallen asleep together in a deep dream of war” [29, 32] and, in Kindness, “open coffins protruded like drawers in a ransacked wardrobe” with “dead infantrymen … as if asleep in a derelict dormitory” [25]), Kindness is far from a reprise. Of the three opening chapters, the first predates Empire, the second would need to be inserted between parts 1 and 2 of Empire (which jumps to the end of internment rather than detailing any time between arrival and the weeks before release), and the third at points openly rewrites Empire. There is, for example, a casual reference to the bombs at Nagasaki and Hiroshima: “Some of the prisoners even claimed to have seen the bomb-flash” (42); those prisoners, in Empire, include Jim himself, and this gesture seems to defuse the vital image-chains of apocalyptic light in Empire. Also, the Jim of Kindness only learns from reports of war crimes that “the Japanese had planned to close Lunghua and march us up-country” (55); this statement effectively negates fifty or sixty pages of the forced march in Empire, some of its most powerful sequences, among them the eventual escape from the march by lying amongst the dead, imitating them (272), a scene also in “The Dead Time.”

One should also consider the completely different emphasis of Kindness, the centrality of Jamie's relation to Peggy Gardner in the camp, entirely absent from Empire, and the key event which resonates through Kindness: the casual murder of the Chinese prisoner, tortured and asphyxiated on the derelict station platform (chapter 3). This traumatic scene seems to replace the intensity of the identification with and guilt over the youthful kamikaze pilot in Empire (which itself resonates with the fictive dialogue between Traven and the Japanese figure at the end of “The Terminal Beach”).

These interleavings and rewritings, between fiction and perceived, “autobiography,” between Empire and Kindness themselves, undermine the enframings that would separate putative decoder from code. The border of demarcation necessary to allow this model to operate is repeatedly transgressed. And in a complex effect of invagination, Ballard's work draws these “external,” parergonal questions into the very “inside” of his texts. One cannot comment on the problematic siting of Ballard without noting that the strange spatiality of border effects constitutes an abiding thematic of his work, a peculiar form of metacommentary that is an involution of his disconcerting mobility and displacement cross the key SF/mainstream border. So, for example, Blake, the pilot-messiah of Shepperton in The Unlimited Dream Company, attempts to cross the town boundary, only to find spatial distortions preventing exit: the more he reaches toward the edge, the further it recedes. He is left in a nonsite, an expansive but impossible space between: “the motorway remained as far away as ever. … At the same time, Shepperton receded behind me, and I found myself standing in an immense field” (38). Similar effects operate in “The Enormous Space,” where the narrator impulsively declares his exile to the prison of his suburban home. As food rations diminish, the spaces of the house exponentially expand, and he is reduced to lying in the kitchen to avoid losing himself in the infinite space of the hall. Contained space as infinitely expansive structures both “Report on an Unidentified Space Station” and Concrete Island.

Empire is equally obsessed with the marking of boundaries and the logical inversions and displacements that attend them. Strictly speaking, it is a mistake to view Empire as a novel about World War II; the time of the war takes place in the blank space between parts 1 and 2. Rather it is about the impossibility of determining a clear boundary between beginnings and ends, ends and re-beginnings. Early in the book, his father's joke “You might even start the war” (24) haunts Jim after his torch signals appear to produce the first barrage from the Japanese warships (43). The latter half is full of obsessional conversations attempting to find an end, a closure. As the Japanese guards leave the camp, Jim proclaims “the war has ended!”, to which the weary response comes: “Ended again, Jim? I don't think we can stand it” (231), and a few pages later: “Sure enough, the war's end proved to be short-lived” (234). On the forced march, the ending seems more pressing: “The war must end.” “It will.” “It must end soon.” “It has almost ended. Think about your mother and father, Jim. The war has ended” (edited, 255–56). If this seems definitive, Jim's immediate question opens a further border: “But … when will the next one begin …?” (256). Official endings are meaningless: “The whole of Shanghai and the surrounding countryside was locked into a zone where there was neither war nor peace, a vacuum …” (305). If Jim leaves Shanghai, certain that “the Second World War had ended,” but wondering “had World War III begun?” (332), then it is unsurprising that only the final part of Kindness, after the 1960s, can be entitled “After the War.”

Between these blurred beginnings and endings, Empire moves from one bounded zone to another. “Walls of strangeness separated everything” (50), strange not least because of the inversions that attend these zones. The charmed life of the expatriates continues until 1941 because the International Settlement is a peculiar pocket within the colonial landscape (an invaginated space that echoes the drained lagoon in The Drowned World?). Once overrun, the zone retracts to the “sealed worlds” (86) of the abandoned houses on Amherst Avenue. Jim is constantly on the wrong side of the border: initially misplaced to a Navy hospital (and within that, to a misplaced ward), he misses the roundup of European and American civilians and finds it impossible to surrender (“Jim had pondered deeply on the question of surrender, which took courage and even a certain amount of guile. How did entire armies manage it?” [110]). “Safe” as a prisoner, there is the farcical attempt to find a prison camp that will accept him: the British prisoners constantly refuse him entry, fearing disease. In Lunghua much of the time is spent strengthening the camp defenses in order to keep the Chinese out (the fence, for Jim, is dangerously permeable—he is sent out by Basie to determine the terrain beyond the edge). With peace as the threat of starvation, liberation as death, the dead providing life (Jim's mimicry), perhaps the most persistent inversion is praise for the Japanese over the dour and apathetic English, that “the Japanese, officially his enemies, offered his only protection” (60).

Borders stretch and contract, values are inverted, there are zones within zones (Jim's battle for space with the Vincents over the movable walls of their shared room [172]): this effect can be read as an oblique metathematic of the problematization of that textual edge which would divide fiction and autobiography.

If Empire directs attention to the frame, Kindness introduces difficulties into that which the frame is said to engender: the “autobiography” as decoding machine. It is directed (not least by Ballard's epitextual work) that The Kindness of Women is to be read as a retracing of the writer's life. It is strange, given Ballard's assertion that “Each of my novels [is] reflected in a section of the book” (to Pickering), that no explicit link is ever made to the fiction. These linkages are there, but they are encrypted. Reviewers have insisted on a rigorous division of the “autobiographies” from prior texts; the “bullshit apocalyptics” (Strawson) have been left behind. In terms of image, style, and the pattern of verbal repetitions between the “fiction” and the “autobiographies,” this seems an astonishing claim to make. Although the fiction itself is never mentioned, there is a kind of game of reference spotting of titles and phrases grafted from prior texts. A drunken publishing agent touring Soho for prostitutes has his action described thus: “The atrocity exhibition was more stirring than the atrocity” (146). The next page contains an embedded reference to a “drowned world” (147). Phrasal echoes continually appear: in Spain, “the peculiar geometry of these overlit apartments” where “stylized” sex acts are performed (121) immediately keys into the language of The Atrocity Exhibition, whose thesis on “the death of affect” is repeated here (158). Lykiard's likely view of Armageddon as “merely … the ultimate happening, the audience-storming last act in the theatre of cruelty” (151) echoes Nathan's view that “For us, perhaps, World War III is now little more than a sinister pop art display” (Atrocity Exhibition 12). In the car crash sequences, the obsessional phrase “the just and rake of the steering wheel” is repeated from Crash (182). Relationships are repeated too: Richard Sutherland tussles for Miriam's affections by taking her flying (just as, in an internal repetition, David Hunter later takes Sally up in the air [221]), recalling any number of erotic triangles in the fiction where the narrator competes with a rogue pilot (“Low-Flying Aircraft,” “Myths of the Near Future,” even “The Dead Astronaut”).

The chapter on LSD takes repetitive phrases from The Crystal World (“carapace,” “coronation armour” [161]). In the epitextual interviews on the publication of Kindness, Ballard both asserts that “The LSD experiences are The Crystal World” (to Pickering) and that “I took LSD long after the publication of that book. Crystal was the product of a completely unaided visionary imagination” (to Thomson). The latter has long been Ballard's position in interviews; Kindness demonstrates a process of rejigging elements into “mythology,” and possibly (yet who could determine intention from these flatly contradictory statements in supposedly “extrafictive” utterances?) Ballard's quiet derailment of the attempt to bind text to life.

There is no interdiction on reading these repetitions “backwards”: these repetitions, cited in “autobiography,” decode the prior fictional texts. Equally, however, there is no interdiction on reading them “forwards,” as further fictions produced out of the obsessive elements that are repeatedly combined and recombined in the oeuvre. And yet it is clear that the decrypting reading cannot do without the encrypting reading. The detachment of the “autobiography” cannot be too radical; there must be repetitive elements to reattach, even as that reattachment threatens their separation. This problem is discussed by Ann Jefferson in her article on the disruptive “autobiographies” of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes. Roland Barthes, by Barthes, toys with the role of autobiography as “metatextual commentary” on prior works but then sets about destroying the authority of the meta-: “my texts are disjointed, no one of them caps any other; the latter is just a further text, the last of the series, not the ultimate in meaning: text upon text, which never illuminates anything” (120).

Does Kindness occupy the same deliberately enigmatic space as Barthes's teasing (non)autobiography? Is there no authority to the gestures of decryption offered by the text? I emphasize “decryption” because Kindness repeatedly deploys the image of the crypt. Internment becomes interment; in the constant inversions encountered here, the prison camp becomes a safe and secret crypt from the anarchy on the other side of the fence: “Far from wanting to escape from the camp, I had been trying to burrow ever more deeply into its heart” (41). This image begins a chain of tombs and wombs: a dissected medical school cadaver's womb is revelatory, “displayed like a miniature stage set” (81); Jim's decision to leave Canada, to pursue a different mythology, is dictated by the unborn child in a prostitute's womb, which had “given me my new compass” (99). What follows is a chapter devoted to the inaccessible mysteries of childbirth, Miriam's withdrawal and return, encryption and decryption (111–14). In a “secret logic” (146), Miriam's burial is overcoded with the mourning of Jacqueline Kennedy, the atrocities of the 1960s, and the Chinese dead. The book's final movement contains the unearthing of a World War II fighter pilot in the Cambridge fens and a pacifying reburial—a scene echoed by the rescue of a child entombed in a car as it slips into a river.

This set of images could offer a tempting narrative of Kindness as a coming to terms with the melancholic compulsions that have driven the fiction, the “autobiography” as accepting loss and enacting the work of mourning. Indeed, it could be seen as a working through of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's theorization of the “cryptophoric subject.” In what Nicholas Rand terms a “general theory of psychic concealment” or a “poetics of hiding” (57), the melancholic erects a crypt in the ego in which the dead are incorporated, kept alive, in secret: “Grief that cannot be expressed builds a secret vault within the subject. In this crypt reposes … the objective counterpart of the loss” (Abraham and Torok, “Introjection” 8). What the crypt seals is an absolutely unutterable secret, and yet the living dead within the crypt may find ways of breaking the seal: “the phantom of the crypt may come to haunt the keeper of the graveyard, making strange and incomprehensible signs” (8); this phantom “works like a ventriloquist, like a stranger within the subject's own mental topography” (Abraham, “Notes” 290). That the title of the final section of Kindness, “After the War,” ambivalently references the 1960s, its televisual violence, Miriam's death, as well as the haunting remainders of World War II, might invoke a form of melancholic ventriloquizing whose “secret logic” is pacified in the closing movements of literal decrypting.

It may seem that in invoking this psychoanalytic theorization of the crypt, I am suggesting that Kindness offers a revelation of the “secret,” the encrypted “primal scene” that motors the Ballardian oeuvre. This would be the interpretive dream of ascribing to the text the role of decrypting autobiography. But given the complex, even obsessional, repetitions that mark Ballard's fiction, including the repetitions within the “autobiographies,” his work displays rather a textual anatomy of melancholic compulsion. This is to say nothing of any putative psychopathology of Ballard; what is meant is that while a reading of this thematic of decryption may gesture toward an autobiographical decoding, the patterns of textual repetitions maintain the encryption, spinning out the code rather than working to decipher it.

Both “autobiographies” mythologize, which is to say that they take elements of the same compulsively repetitive landscapes, scenarios, and images and recombine them in fictions which yet teasingly and forever undecidably play within the frame of the “autobiographical.” There is no authenticity here, no revelatory disclosure of (in Gusdorf's insistent phrase) “deeper being.” Indeed, perversely, there is a positive valorization of “inauthenticity” and mediation, such that what is most intensely felt is the most mediated, always already a restaging, a repetition. Throughout both Empire and Kindness is a sense of doubling, of an uncanny restaging that accompanies every significant event. Theatrical and cinematic analogies pervade both texts. The opening page of Empire establishes this immediately:

Jim had begun to dream of wars. At night the same silent films seemed to flicker against the wall of his bedroom in Amherst Avenue, and transformed his sleeping mind into a deserted newsreel theatre. During the winter of 1941 everyone in Shanghai was showing war films. Fragments of his dreams followed Jim around the city …

(11)

This passage has a confusing circularity. No priority can be established between the dream of war (as both passive residua and active fantasy projection: later Jim is “dreaming of the war and yet dreamed of by the war” [260]), its filmic representation, and the reality of the streets. To Jim, “the landscape now exposed in many ways resembled a panorama displayed on a cinema screen” (186), and the prisoners were “like a party of film extras under the studio spotlights” (254) (as the British visiting the battlefields are “like a group of investors visiting the stage-set of an uncompleted war film” in Kindness [25]). Shanghai had always dissolved the boundaries of the cinema: the two hundred hunchbacks hired for the opening of The Hunchback of Notre Dame ensured that “the spectacle outside the theatre far exceeded anything shown on its screen” (37). In war this effect is intensified:

He rested in the padlocked entrance to the Nanking Theatre, where Gone with the Wind had been playing for the past year in a pirated Chinese version. The partly dismantled faces of Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh rose on their scaffolding above an almost life-size replica of burning Atlanta. Chinese carpenters were cutting down the panels of painted smoke that rose high into the Shanghai sky, barely distinguishable from the fires still lifting above the tenements of the Old City.

Again the interpenetration of the real and representation is profoundly disruptive. It becomes impossible to limit this figure, since it structures both texts.

Kindness ends in a mass of doubling and further multiplication—the filming of Empire of the Sun by Steven Spielberg. This is vertiginous, because it lends a sense of preprogramming to this figural chain. Everything is doubled and redoubled: filmed in Shepperton, Jim's hometown, the sense of a restaged suburbia, surrounded as it is by the sound stages of the film studios, becomes re-restaged; Jim's neighbors are recruited as the extras they had always been. Discovering a virtual simulacra of his childhood home just outside Shepperton and reflecting that the film team was “working to construct a more convincing reality than the original I had known as a child” (274), Jim responds that this is “uncanny.” But the irruptive doubling that the uncanny tries to name and contain cannot be stopped here: this response is itself being filmed, within the film, by a documentary crew. Later Ballard arrives in a Los Angeles with his own name emblazoned on billboards, television, and cinema marquees (the apotheosis of one central obsession of The Atrocity Exhibition). The text ends with the launch of Thor Heyerdahl's papyrus ship on the Pacific, not a replica ship, but a fiberglass replica of the original replica, which had sunk in the Atlantic. The repetitions multiply in a nauseous Baudrillardian spiral, where the effect is to lose grip of the division of original and copy. In closing Kindness by enfolding a version of Empire within it, Ballard may create a sense of completion, but this is not Gusdorf's understanding of autobiography as a “second reading of experience … truer than the first” (35); closure comes from this textual incorporation of Empire into Kindness and the literalization of this figural chain of always already restaging. And in relation to the oeuvre as a whole, the complex webs of repetition confound assertions of original (autobiography) and copy (fiction) to propose a structure “controlled by no centre, origin or end outside the chain of recurrent elements”; as J. Hillis Miller concludes: “Such a sequence is without a source outside the series” (142).

Entertaining the notion that Empire and Kindness finally unearth the crypt's secret, the primal scenes that have engendered the corpus, is thus severely problematized. Where Abraham and Torok's theory is of use, however, is in their concern with how the crypt makes itself known through the enigmatically illegible, the presence of unreadably cryptic utterances. The methodology they employ is “cryptonymy,” analysis of “words that hide.” The secret can only appear in utterances which decompose and destroy the terrifying possibility of revelation by displacement through chains of allosemic, metonymic, and synonymic diversions. I do not propose to follow the profoundly disintegrative analyses that Abraham and Torok perform—on the dream texts of the Wolf Man, for example—but rather note how the cryptic pervades the surfaces of Ballard's fiction, teasing with the ghostly traces of a potential disclosive deep strata.³

Chapter 3 of Kindness begins:

Everyone was shouting that war had ended. … Vapour trails left by the American reconnaissance planes dissolved over my head, the debris perhaps of gigantic letters spelling out an apocalyptic message.

“What do they say, Jamie?” Peggy called out to me.

(43)

It is ambiguous whether Peggy's question relates to the shouting voices or the disintegrating “text” Jamie fails to read in the sky. Debris, the shattered signs of disappearing meaning, constitute a pervasive image-chain in Ballard, his textual landscapes peppered with “gnomic and meaningless graffiti” (Drowned World 40), “cryptic anagrams” (Concrete Island 112), “covered with strange ciphers” (“Terminal Beach” 134), marked by “empty signatures in the sand” (Vermilion Sands 134), and the skies above, as in Kindness, full of “collapsing ciphers,” “calligraphic signals” (Drought 75, 25), and “the symbols of a cryptic alphabet” (“Terminal Beach” 134). Where the cryptic stands for the locus of an unreadability that precisely begins the process of reading for Abraham and Torok, where the cipher is for Karl Jaspers the fragile disclosive pointer to the Transcendent in his existential metaphysics, these signs in Ballard's work cover his landscapes with suggestibility of meaning never achieved. Yasuda, the Japanese figure in “The Terminal Beach,” ultimately suggests that Traven's search on Eniwetok, so overloaded with coded signs, is in fact for “the white leviathan, zero” (153). Cipher, indeed, is returned from its meaning as “a secret or disguised manner of writing” (OED) to its etymological root: zero, naught. And equally the cryptic gestures toward the secret contents of a crypt that remains sealed.

Once again, as in the involution of border effects and parergonality seen operating “inside” Empire, the question of decipherment, of decoding or decryption, is already encountered within the “autobiographies” first in its explicit thematization, and then in the repetition of images which, in precisely concerning unreadability, preempt the “autobiographies” as rendering transparent the cryptic code of the fiction.

Summarily, this problematization of the reading that would divide the signature between fictional and autobiographical pacts could be related to a term that Derrida introduces in his discussion of the artwork of Gerard Titus-Carmel: the cartouche. Titus-Carmel made 127 drawings of a model coffin; in a written statement, an appended cartouche, Titus-Carmel asserts that the drawings follow the model. The model “paradigm” inspires the series but is also outside it. But what, in the series, gives authority to a cartouche that is, after all, externally appended? And what prevents a reversal of this reading, seeing the model as a result of the sketches, or inserted somewhere in the series? The repetitions between Ballard's fiction and “autobiographies” ask the same questions if the latter are presented as decoding the former: such an assertion, it might be said, depends on a cartouche. Derrida's teasing out of the logic of the cartouche looks like this:

If I place the cartouche outside the work, as the metalinguistic or metaoperational truth of the work, its untouchable truth falls to ruins: it becomes external and I can, considering the inside of the work, displace or reverse the order of the series, calmly reinsert the paradigm at any point. …

If, conversely, I make room for the cartouche on the inside, or on the inside edge of a frame, it is no longer any more than a piece of the general performance, it no longer has a value of truth overbearing. … The result is the same, the narrative is reinscribed, along with the paradigm, in the series.

(Truth in Painting 220)

Hence, far from the wished-for moment of decipherment, Empire and Kindness as a kind of cartouche which would decode the series, the “autobiographies” continue the enigmatic crypticness of Ballard's work. We are left with what Derrida elsewhere calls “seriality without paradigm” (“Living On” 130), since the textual edge as guarantor of reading is repeatedly transgressed, forever undermining the authority of any appended cartouche.

In problematizing the petition for “seriousness” through attendance to repetition, I have gained my edge, my angle, from the recognition that this demand for separation derives from the insistence of hierarchical binaries between science fiction/mainstream, high/low, serious/popular. The a-topic mobility of J. G. Ballard's work across these divides does not erase them but exposes their modes of deployment. That has been the impetus behind reading Empire and Kindness as narratives precisely about their own positionality and transgressiveness. Ballard's work is not simply to be adjudicated within institutional (canonical) frameworks; rather, it inscribes the frame within the texts and proceeds to read, to render visible, their effaced mechanisms of judgment. An important “allegory of reading” is thus being offered: not the “impossibility of reading” per se (de Man 77) but the impossibility of reading without attendance to all those paratexts, cartouches, passe-partouts that would determine texts for us, if we do not first read the legends etched into the frame.

Notes

1. For example: “In sf Ballard had a tight framework for his unnerving ideas; out on the lunatic fringe, he can only flail and shout” (Martin Amis, review of Crash, qtd. in Pringle 99).

2. Derrida's full statement reads: “I am seeking merely to establish the necessity of this whole problematic of judicial framing and the jurisdiction of frames. This problematic, I feel, has not been explored, at least not adequately, by the institution of literary studies in the university. And there are essential reasons for that: this is an institution built on the very system of that framing.”

3. The secret is so firmly embedded that only the most violent disintegration can recover its contours: this may desecrate the “family crypt,” but as Derrida says, the burial was never legal (see “‘Fors’” xxxiv). Analysis of a patient is obviously of a different order than literary analysis: there are a number of difficulties with this extremely disruptive method when transformed into an approach to literature. Although Esther Rashkin's essay on Henry James is quite brilliant, the violence it inflicts on textual surfaces does need to be addressed. See Rashkin.

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