Abstract
’The Voices of Time’ (1960) is the finest of Ballard’s early stories, an enigmatic but indisputable masterpiece which marks the first appearance of a number of favourite Ballard images (a drained swimming-pool, a mandala, a collection of ‘terminal documents’) and prefigures the ’disaster’ novels in its depiction of a compulsively driven male protagonist searching for identity (or oblivion) within a disturbingly changed environment. Its importance to Ballard himself was confirmed by its appearance in the title of his first collection of short fiction, The Voices of Time and Other Stories (1962), and by the introduction to it he wrote for a 1977 selection of his best short stories:
If I were asked to pick one piece of fiction to represent my entire output of 7 novels and 92 short stories it would be ‘The Voices of Time’, not because it is the best (I leave that for the reader to judge), but because it contains almost all the themes of my writing — the sense of isolation within the infinite time and space of the universe, the biological fantasies and the attempt to read the complex codes represented by drained swimming pools and abandoned airfields, and above all the determination to break out of a deepening psychological entropy and make some kind of private peace with the unseen powers of the universe.1
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Notes
Charles Nicol, ‘J. G. Ballard and the Limits of Mainstream SF’, Science Fiction Studies, 9 (July 1976) http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/9/nicol9art.htm, p. 8.
Andy Sawyer, ‘Foundation’s Favourites: The Voices of Time by J. G. Ballard’, Vector: The Critical Journal of the British Science Fiction Association, 261 (Autumn 2009), 50–1 (p. 51).
‘The Voices of Time’ in J. G. Ballard, The Voices of Time (London: J. M. Dent, 1984 [1974]), p. 24. Subsequent page references are given in the main text. This volume is a reprint of Ballard’s first British collection, The Four-Dimensional Nightmare (London: Gollancz, 1963), with two stories changed, rather than of The Voices of Time and Other Stories, which had been published the year before in America.
John Donne, Poetical Works, ed. Herbert J. C. Grierson (London: Oxford University Press, 1971 [1929]), p. 206.
Edmund Spenser, ‘Two Cantos of Mutabilitie’, VI.6, in Poetical Works, ed. E. De Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1969 [1912]). Psalm 102 says both the earth and the heavens ‘shall wax old like a garment’ (Authorized Version, verse 26).
Roger Luckhurst, Science Fiction (London: Polity Press, 2005), p. 158.
See also Colin Greenland, The Entropy Exhibition: Michael Moorcock and the British ’New Wave’ in Science Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), ch. 11 ‘No more, with feeling: entropy and contemporary fiction’, pp. 191–206.
Pamela Zoline, ‘The Heat Death of the Universe’ (1967), in Busy About the Tree of Life (London: The Women’s Press, 1988), pp. 50–65 (pp. 64–5). The unreferenced scientific statements are in fact taken from The Penguin Dictionary of Science.
Kingsley Amis, ed., The Golden Age of Science Fiction (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983 [1981]), p. 32. The rather precisely chosen dates 1949–1962 correspond to the founding of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (seen as a positive development by Amis) and Ballard’s guest editorial for New Worlds, ‘Which Way to Inner Space?’. The cover of the Penguin edition features a rock-jawed spaceman wielding a ray gun, a reassuring image for many readers of genre SF but unlikely to attract ‘the general reader’ (to whom Amis says he was trying to reach out).
Kingsley Amis had earlier included ‘The Voices of Time’ in the third volume of the influential Spectrum anthologies of SF which he edited with Robert Conquest (London: Gollancz, 1963). Ballard himself reviewed The Golden Age of Science Fiction for the Guardian and wrote that ‘Amis’s contempt for post-1960 science fiction seems bound up with his growing hatred of almost everything that has happened in the world since then’. See J. G. Ballard, ‘New Means Worse’, A User’s Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews (London: Flamingo, 1997 [1996]), pp. 189–91 (p. 190).
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey, The Pelican Freud Library vol. 11 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 311.
See, for example, Martin Raff, ‘Cell Suicide for Beginners’, Nature, 396:6707 (12.11.1998), 119–22.
Sigmund Freud, Lecture 31 ‘The Dissection of the Psychical Personality’, in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey, The Pelican Freud Library vol. 2 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 112.
Brian W. Aldiss, ‘Danger: Religion!’, in Mervyn Peake, J. G. Ballard, Brian W. Aldiss, The Inner Landscape (London: Corgi, 1970 [1969]), pp. 127–90 (p. 128). The third story is Mervyn Peake’s ‘Boy in Darkness’, which is developed out of the world of the Gormenghast novels.
J. G. Ballard, Miracles of Life (London: Harper Perennial, 2008), pp. 26–7.
Patrick Parrinder, ‘Science Fiction and the Scientific World-View’, in Patrick Parrinder, ed., Science Fiction: A Critical Guide (1979), pp. 82–3.
Gregory Stephenson, Out of the Night and into the Dream: A Thematic Study of the Fiction of J. G. Ballard (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), p. 148.
Roger Luckhurst, ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997), Ch. 2 ‘J. G. Ballard and the Genre of Catastrophe’, p. 48.
Derek Jarman, Kicking the Pricks (London: Vintage, 1996), p. 108. This autobiographical work was first published under the title The Last of England in the same year (1987) as his film of that name.
C. G. Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus, ed. and intro. Sonu Shamdasani, Philemon Series (New York: Norton, 2009), p. 221.
C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and ed. Aniela Jaffé, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (London: Flamingo, 1985 [1963]), pp. 221–2.
T. S. Eliot, ‘Journey of the Magi’, in Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber, 1974 [1963]), p. 110.
It has been argued (by Bruno Bettelheim among others) that the close relationship between the two ideas can be traced back to a more recent source, some speculations by Sabina Spielrein, who was a patient and lover of Jung’s before becoming a Freudian analyst. In a 1912 paper she argued ‘that the sexual instinct contains both an instinct of destruction and an instinct of transformation’, giving us the origin of ‘both Freud’s dual-instinct theory and Jung’s theory of individuation!’ (Elio J. Frattaroli, ‘Me and my anima: through the dark glass of the Jungian/Freudian interface’, in Polly Eisendrath and Terence Dawson, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Jung (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 182).
See also Aldo Carotenuto, A Secret Symmetry: Sabina Spielrein between Jung and Freud, trans. Arno Pomerans, John Shepley and Krishna Winston (London: Routledge, 1984);
Rowland Wymer, ‘Freud, Jung, and the “Myth” of Psychoanalysis in The White Hotel’, Mosaic 22:1 (Winter 1989), 55–69;
John Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994).
C. G. Jung, ‘Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype’, trans. R. F. C. Hull, in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, vol.9 part 1 of The Collected Works (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959), par.155.
J. G. Ballard, ‘Zone of Terror’ (1960), in The Complete Short Stories, 2 vols, (London: Harper Perennial, 2006 [2001]), vol. 1, pp 184–201 (p. 185).
J. G. Ballard. ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964), in The Complete Short Stories, vol. 2, p. 49.
Pauline Réage, Story of O (London: Corgi, 1976 [1954]). Ballard is quoted on the back cover as saying: ‘Here all kinds of terrors await us, but like a baby taking its mother’s milk all pains are assuaged. Touched by the magic of love, everything is transformed. STORY OF O is a deeply moral homily.’ When Anne Desclos/Dominique Aury confirmed in 1994 that she was the real author, she also explained that she wrote the book for her lover Jean Paulhan as a way of ensuring his continued sexual interest in her. See Joan Smith, ‘Love letter’, Guardian, 8 August, 1994.
J. G. Ballard, ‘Track 12’ (1958), in The Complete Short Stories, vol. 1, p. 95.
Maurice Charney, Sexual Fiction (London: Methuen, 1981), p. 69.
Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen, 1981), pp. 76–7. The Lacan quotation is from The Language of the Self
J. G. Ballard, The Crystal World (London: Triad/Panther, 1978 [1966]), p. 85.
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Wymer, R. (2012). Ballard’s Story of O: ‘The Voices of Time’ and the Quest for (Non)Identity. In: Baxter, J., Wymer, R. (eds) J. G. Ballard: Visions and Revisions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230346482_2
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