Future Ruins: Michelle Lord © 2007. Used with permission.

NOTE: This feature was published in two installments: Parts I & II last week, Part III this week.

William Viney, © 2007.

III. Ultimate Waste: Crash and Empire of the Sun

Crash presents a barrage of images that expresses collapse, dereliction, and waste; a seemingly endless carnival of sex and destruction; intoxicating, perverting, and desensitizing the reader. Towards the beginning of the novel, Ballard records James’ thoughts on the sexual possibilities of the everyday [1]. James imagines plane-crash victims whose minds have become a ‘brothel of images’ [2]. This phrase neatly draws together the union of sex and destruction that is the novel’s obsession: not only does it suggest the perversions that lurk in the hidden transcript of daily life, but also an attendant destructiveness built into the etymological roots of ‘brothel’. The word originates from the Middle English; broðen, ‘ruined, degenerate’ the past participle of breoðan; ‘to go to ruin ‘ [3]. This intense and paradoxical portrayal of generative destruction is arguably the novel’s central preoccupation, as Ballard himself has noted, the car crash is where the ‘twentieth century reaches its purest expression [...] Here we see, all too clearly, the speed and violence of our age, its strange love affair with the machine and, conceivably, with its own death and destruction’ [4]. The crash is inconceivable without laying waste to both man and machine.

With its brutal collision of violence, technology, and desire, Crash represents a distillation of imaginative obsessions, characterised by some as uniquely Ballardian [5]. Nowhere else in Ballard’s oeuvre is the human body treated with such sustained, clinical, and graphic representation. The raw violence of the car crash allows the secret or forbidden aspects of the body to become visible. The corporeality of Crash might seem unrelated to ideas of rubbish and refuse, but, as I hope will become clear, Ballard’s bodies are defined by their waste; made flesh by their vulnerable viscosity.

The definition of the human body through its constituent fluids has a long history. Since Galen (A.D. 130-200?), people have believed our physiological complexion to be the product of four fluid humours: blood, phlegm, choler (yellow bile), and melancholy (black bile). The letting of one or more of these fluids can directly affect an individual’s health. In this ancient conception, the body is borderless, neither bounded nor defined, a state of continual flux predicated upon the extraction and renewal of fluids. For Dalia Judovitz, Descartes reversed this process, making the body rigid; a machine inhabited by the ghost of consciousness [6]. Ballard’s Crash finds itself at the very juncture of Galen’s and Descartes’ theories of the body. The novel catalogues the body’s oozing fluids with meticulous detail, they are, in fact, often the only physical attributes of what are, in the general, rather hollow characters. On the other hand, Ballard’s bodies incessantly threaten to become machines, blending into the cars with which they collide. The wastes of body and car are frequently commingling, confusing the relations between human and machine, natural and synthetic.

Vomiting proves a regular reaction to a car crash. James vomits across his steering wheel after his crash with Dr. Helen Remington and her husband (C, 14), whilst Catherine and Vaughn both vomit after separate collisions (C, 3, 8). It is well known that one of the body’s instinctive reactions to shock, trauma, or disgust, is to vomit; a seemingly involuntary act that can appear to envelop ones entire being. For Kristeva, the importance of bodily fluids relates to the threatened individual, a safeguard against both a loss of self and a loss of affect. Rather than signifying loss, the excretion of bodily fluids can register a means to ‘compensate for the collapse of the border between inside and outside [...] Urine, blood, sperm, excrement then show up in order to reassure a subject that is lacking its ‘own and proper self’ [7]. From a more anatomical perspective, vomiting is a sign of the sympathetic nerve at work: the aspect of the nervous system that autonomically regulates the body’s organs. The sympathetic system is closely associated with a primitive ‘fight or flight’ response to bodily trauma [8]. From either the psychoanalytic or the anatomical standpoint, vomiting is a clear signal of bodily threat; to excrete is a powerful statement of corporal vulnerability.

James vomits again when in hospital, the beginnings of a series of illuminating passages that deal with the body’s propensity to excrete various solid and viscous waste materials. This propensity, luridly and voyeuristically imagined by James, becomes an obsession: ‘did small grains of faecal matter still cling to [the nurses'] anuses as they proscribed some antibiotic for a streptococcal throat, did the odour of illicit sex acts infest their underwear [...] traces of smegma and vaginal mucus on their hands [...]?’(C. 19). James becomes transfixed by the lurking filth beneath the sterile exterior of the hospital staff. In the same way, he realises that the nurses are also constantly preoccupied with the ‘unclean’ aspects of his body: ‘all these women only seem to attend to my most infantile zones [...] commissaries guarding my orifices’ (C .22). James’ subjection to the maternalistic waste management of his nurses finds direct parallel in the creation of the body’s boundaries during infancy. Kristeva has argued that the mother has a primal role in mapping the body, using her maternal authority to order the child’s body into ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’, ‘waste’ and ‘want’: ‘[t]hrough frustrations and prohibitions, this authority shapes the body into a territory having areas, orifices, points and lines, surfaces and hollows, where the archaic power of mastery and neglect, of the differentiation of proper-clean and improper-dirty, possible and impossible, is impressed and exerted’ [9]. James has this process rehearsed in the hospital, his orifices, points, lines, surfaces, and hollows are again placed under the ‘commissar’ of female prohibition, giving him a sharpened view of his own body, and a fresh perspective on its waste. Sensitised to the processes of self-creation that the body’s waste inspires, James describes how he ’saw my own reflection, a mirror of blood, semen and vomit.’.. (C, 9). With an ironic allusion to Narcissus, James realises that the body’s waste can hold up a mirror to the self.

Vaughn’s car is always described as dirty. Its first appearance in the novel is anonymously described as: a ‘dusty American car’, as Vaughn watches James and Catherine through his ‘mud-spattered windshield’ (C, 43). Elsewhere, it seems Vaughn’s car cannot appear in the text without the presence of accompanying filth: ‘dusty Lincoln’, ‘unwashed windshield’ (C, 68, 86). The dirt that constantly attaches itself to Vaughn’s Lincoln comes to mark the dangerous and unpredictable character of his obsessions. However, it is the bodily residues that most indelibly mark Vaughn’s car: ‘with mucus from every orifice of the human body’ (C, 111). Vaughn’s brutal obsession with the car crash and the eroticisation of wounds is intimately bound to the residues left on the crashed car: ‘the perverse logic of blood soaked instrument panels, seat-belts smeared with excrement, sun-visors lined with brain tissue’ (C, 5). Later in the novel, James discovers a ‘black gelatinous material’ that covers ‘the muddied disc of the whitewall tyre’ (C, 129). These ‘gummy residues’, perhaps evidence that Vaughn’s has been actively hitting pedestrians or animals, remark upon the often ambiguous circumstances by which waste material attaches itself to another surface, and by doing so, competes for fresh meaning and significance. To avoid suspicion from the police, Vaughn suggests they clean the car, an act that provokes one of the most ruthlessly powerful scenes of the novel. The episode becomes a ritual in cleansing and defilement, a sardonic automobile-baptism.

James sits passively whilst his wife and Vaughn copulate on the rear seat, giving way to a series of dramatic yet playfully ambiguous juxtapositions: ‘the white soap sluiced across the roof and doors like liquid lace. Behind me, Vaughn’s semen glistened on my wife’s breasts and abdomen. The rollers drummed and battered at the car; the streams of water and soap solution jetted over its now immaculate body’ (C, 134). Elsewhere, Catherine is also described as having ‘immaculate cleanliness’, ‘as if she had reamed out every square centimetre of her elegant body, separately ventilated every pore’ (C, 89–90). She appears so clean to James, so untainted, that he wonders whether ‘her whole identity was a charade’, leading him to deliberately inspect ‘every orifice’, to find some trace of dirt or filth that will verify her existence (C, 90). The central question is this: is Vaughn’s semen analogous to, or at odds with, the soap that jets across the body of the car? Who, or what, is being cleaned? Semen, here and elsewhere in the novel, is entirely divorced from its generative potential. In a similar episode James and Catherine have sex that is ‘empty and sterile, a jerking away of waste tissue’ (C, 97). Ballard prevents any association in Crash between semen and its common life-giving properties. New associative arrangements are therefore fostered. With the car-wash context in mind, we might question William Miller’s argument that semen is ‘the most polluting of male substances’, its contaminating power rising from its sticky fecundity, misogynist threat of instant feminisation, and a complex process of defilement linked to post-coital shame [10]. Miller’s overtly heterosexual reading of the body’s fluids emphasises the possessive or polluting aspects of the body. In contrast, Crash is decidedly neutral in its response to both bodily fluids and the sexual acts that provoke them; no clues are given to guide our response. We are left guessing as to whether the cleaning of the car is an ironic metaphor for the ethical degeneration of the central characters, or that, by having sex with Vaughn, Catherine is actually being cleansed of her corporeal unreality. However morally ambiguous these passages are, the corporeal residues nevertheless provide provocative and arresting images, the reader is allowed an uncompromising vision of the body’s waste.

By repeatedly commingling the fluids of humans and cars, Ballard achieves a certain hybridity of waste, a union of the organic and synthetic that perfectly encapsulates ‘the nightmare marriage between sex and technology’ [11]. As James and Helen have sex in his car for the second time, the equivocal use of pronouns exaggerates the possibility of this marriage:

The nail of her forefinger scratched at this fretline, which rose diagonally from the window-sill at the same angle as the concrete ledge of the irrigation ditch ten feet from the car. In my eyes this parallax fused with the image if an abandoned car lying in the rust-stained grass on the lower slopes of the reservoir embankment. The brief avalanche of dissolving talc that fell across her eyes as I moved my lips across their lids contained all the melancholy of thisderelict vehicle, its leaking engine oil and radiator coolant (C, 61)

The key aspect of this passage is the structural position of ‘this derelict vehicle’, the obscure reference to talc, and the fragmented interaction between ‘her’ and ‘my’ that blurs the object of dereliction. Because engine oil and radiator coolant so easily correlate with fluids of the human body (blood and sweat), the themes of sex, technology, and destruction are precisely rendered in a single ambiguous sentence. The commingling of human and technological wastes, becomes the principal image that draws together the novel’s ambitious thematics: ‘[t]he passenger compartment enclosed us like a machine generating from our sexual act an homunculus of blood, semen, and engine coolant’ (C, 63). In the mixing of fluids, death, sex, the body and the machine become inextricably linked.

Future Ruins: Michelle Lord © 2007. Used with permission.

When blood, semen, and vomit are mixed, the novelty of the image dulls our familiar reflexes. The blurring of the organic and inorganic undoes our ability to clearly see the abject material, obscuring the relationship between the wastes of the body and the violent event that produces them. Some have tried to argue that the ‘death of affect’ Ballard’s characters experience is due to a media-drenched Baudrillardian hyper-reality [12]. Although this might explain their apparent affectlessness, it does not fully explain our states and levels of abjection; our responses to a book that is often uncomfortable to read. And yet, several things numb the senses when reading Crash, the most obvious being stylistic. Crash lacks Kristeva’s ‘crying-out theme‘, what she goes on to define as ‘the theme of suffering-horror [that] is the ultimate evidence of such states of abjection within a narrative representation’ [13]. The repetitiveness of Ballard’s narrative tone, with its endless brothel of images, never reaches this state of hysteria; Crash has, as Luckhurst has noted, a ‘remorseless monologism’ [14]. It is because Ballard’s prose style is so clinical, so obsessively repetitious, and so immersed in the idiom of the scientific, that it fails to conform to Kristeva’s theory of the abject. Moreover, Ballard’s refusal to employ a lurid vernacular idiom places a clinical filter between image and revulsion. It is through this clipped and distant narrative tone that Ballard can allows the body’s waste to be so wholeheartedly examined, as if dissected in an urban operating theatre. Ballard has described his studies in medicine as ‘minutely paring away the skin and muscles and nerves, carrying out this extremely detailed study of what was once a human being’ [15]. In a similar way, he pares down the descriptive flesh of conventional narrative, leaving a disparate littering of waste material. Crash sees Ballard at his most ambiguously provocative. The obsessive descriptions of organic of inorganic waste serve as both a voyeuristic invitation to share in these gruesome fantasies and a warning against the psychologically deranging combination of technology and late capitalist individualism. The novel was always intended as a ‘cautionary tale’ [16], but a cautionary tale to be voyeuristically enjoyed. The moral ambivalence of the narrative, and the explicit commingling of fluids, prevents our full and unreserved revulsion. Crash allows us to view the body’s waste without the distraction of disgust or the perversity of hedonistic acceptance.

Empire of the Sun is a novel of indeterminate ends and beginnings. It inaugurates Ballard’s partially autobiographical account of war-torn Shanghai (continued in The Kindness of Women). As such, it creates the opportunity to map the abandonment, dereliction, and half-empty swimming pools that recur throughout his fiction, marking the psycho-literary genesis of the Ballardian idiom, an enlightened vantage point from which to reread his entire oeuvre. Furthermore, the novel can be seen as the terminus of Ballard’s treatment of waste, the epitome of all that has gone before. Although Ballard’s other works deal with the subject of death and the disposal of corpses, Empire of the Sun attempts to cope with this disposal on a mass-scale, or rather, during both war and peace, it explores the complex transition between the valued human being and lifeless, disposable cadaver.

Jim’s confrontation with death is irrevocably intensified by the war. Corpses begin to appear to him as litter, just another object made derelict by bombing: ‘[t]he verges were littered with the debris from the air attacks. Burnt-out trucks and supply wagons lay in ditches, surrounded by the bodies of dead puppet soldiers, the carcasses of horses and water buffalo’ (ES, 291). As the occupation begins, Jim observes: ‘[b]odies of Chinese lay everywhere, hands tied behind their backs in the centre of the road, dumped behind the sandbag emplacements, half-severed heads resting on each other’s shoulders’ (ES, 76). Ballard’s matter-of-fact tone, so reminiscent of Crash, remarks upon the self-evident nature of death: through the eyes of a young boy, death is without mystery or terror.

Jim’s proximity to death has always been a close one; corpses are a regular sight even in peacetime. At the beginning of chapter three, Jim plays on a burial tumulus, peering and poking at the sun-warmed skeletons inside: ‘Jim felt his cheeks and jaw, trying to imagine his own skeleton in the sun, lying there in this peaceful field within sight of the aerodrome’ (ES, 29). Jim’s intimacy with the deceased allows his imagination to erode the barrier between the dead and the living; he positions himself within rather than beyond the grave. With ‘the rotting coffins project[ing] from the loose earth like a chest of drawers’ (ES, 29), these re-emerging corpses have an implicitly symmetrical relationship with the novel’s numerous others:

Every night in Shanghai those Chinese too poor to pay for the burial of their relatives would launch the bodies from the funeral piers at Nantao, decking the coffins with paper flowers.Carried away on one tide, they came back on the next, returning to the waterfront ofShanghai with all the other debris abandoned by the city (ES, 41).

Here is a theme that will literally haunt the reader throughout the novel: the uncanny return of the dead. In fact, the novel ends with a vision of inevitable return:

The flowers formed a wavering garland around the coffin as it began its long journey to the estuary of the Yangtze, only to be swept back by the incoming tide among the quays and mud- flats, driven once again to the shores of this terrible city (ES, 351).

It is as if the dead, like memory itself, have an unpredictable capacity to powerfully revisit the living. In the camp graveyard Jim observes: ‘[h]ere and there an arm or a foot protruded from the graves, the limbs of restless sleepers struggling beneath their brown quilts’ (ES, 205–206). Burial is a deeply contingent form of waste disposal; a change of weather conditions is all that needed for the discarded to reannounce their presence. Just as a change of wind can bring an unpleasant smell, so heavy rain can exhume the dead. As long as they refuse to be out of sight, the dead continue to ruthlessly occupy our minds.

The ritual of mourning often involves an intricate process of objectification, once the body has been made object it can be made absent, discarded, making death’s absence complete. This is not done purely for emotional reasons. Just as food waste can become hazardous to one’s health if it is not discarded, so the rotting corpse presents a threat. So when Jim drinks from the river, with the corpse of a Chinese woman only fifty yards away, he ‘[c]autiously, [...] decanted a little water from one palm to the other, then drank quickly so that the germs would have no time to infect him’ (ES, 90). Nevertheless, the corpse also poses a threat to the psychological health of the living. For Julia Kristeva, the corpse is the absolute essence of the polluting abject, the ‘decaying body, lifeless, completely turned into dejection, blurred between the inanimate and the inorganic, a transitional swarming, inseparable lining of a human nature whose life is indistinguishable from the symbolic-the corpse represents the fundamental pollution’ [17]. In a similar vein, Françoise Dastur has argued that ‘the corpse occupies a disconcerting intermediate position between persons and things and, on account of its corruptibility, is regarded as a source of pollution’ [18]. If the cadaver is the ‘fundamental’ object of abjection and pollution, then it follows that it must represent a form of fundamental or ‘ultimate’ waste, an act of disposal that maintains both the physical and psychological health of the living.

Flies swarm and buzz about them about the corpses that fill the final chapters of Empire of the Sun, greedily profiting from the lack of organised burial or disposal. As both prophets of and fanfares for the physical presence of death, flies enjoy a structurally integral position in the novel’s unique taxonomy of waste. When Jim first meets the wandering Kamikaze pilot he observes: ‘[t]he flies hovered around the pilot’s mouth, tapping his lips like impatient guests at a banquet [...] the Japanese made no move to brush them away. No doubt he knew that his own life was over .’.. (ES, 280–281). When he meets the pilot for the second time, dead on the riverbank, Jim must see him through a ’swarm of flies’, one of whom ‘drank from [the pilot's] pupil’ (ES, 339). Counterbalancing this sense of enormous waste, Ballard’s flies are ferocious feeders. The corpses encourage ‘a plague of a thousand glutted flies’, flies who devour the very air (ES, 309, 336). In a scene that undeniably contains echoes of the 10th floor swimming pool in High-Rise, Jim returns to Lunghua camp to discover that ‘a cloud of flies enveloped him [...] Brushing the flies from his mouth, Jim walked into the men’s ward. The decaying air streamed down the plywood walls, bathing the flies that fed on the bodies piled across the bunks [...] like sides of meat in a condemned slaughterhouse’ (ES, 302). Flies profit from the decay of humans. As detrivores they are dependent upon on our discards: one creatures waste is another’s want, and disturbingly, flies will not let us ‘go to waste’. Our carefully constructed divisions between clean and unclean, waste and want, become sullied under the promiscuous attention of the fly. More than simply disrupting categories of value, flies wield the power to locate waste and, most unsettling of all, the capacity to identify humans as waste. As Steven Connor has written: ‘[f]lies and humans are asymmetrically deterritorializing [...] Flies and humans are each other’s parasite or interference. Each gives the other its unbeing’ [19]. If the human corpse announces a form of ultimate or essential waste in Empire of Sun, then flies, the very species that profit from this waste, constitute a means of conceptualising a form of ‘impossible’ waste. The fly is one of the few species that remains entirely intractable to human mastery or design: ‘for humans, there is no disposing of or dispensing with flies’ [20]. The fly ridden corpse provides a consummate image of human powerlessness, expressing the essential transience of human life; the waste we all become in the Christian burial service: ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’.

IV. Conclusion

As Jim lies in the stadium with Mr Maxted’s corpse, he makes an implicit judgement about exactly when Maxted’s body becomes waste: ‘[l]ong after Mr Maxted had grown cold, Jim had continued to massage his cheeks, keeping away the flies until he was sure that his soul had left him’ (ES, 272). We have already been told that Jim is an amateur soul-spotter, ‘[h]e often watched the eyes of the patients as they died, trying to detect a flash of light when the soul left’ (ES, 207). When Maxted’s body becomes vacant, the flies are permitted to feed. In a profound way, the ‘flash of light’ that announces the moment when Maxted’s body becomes waste resonates with the consequences of the atomic age. The phrase is tellingly repeated when Jim sees the atomic flash from the Nagasaki bomb: ‘a flash of light filled the stadium’ (ES, 276). If a ‘flash of light’ is all that prevents Maxted from becoming waste, then Ballard emphasises how the whole human race teeters dangerously on the brink of absolute destruction, in one flash of light civilisation can be laid waste.

In this way, Empire of the Sun marks the beginning of the atomic era, inaugurating the possibility that the human race can come to a sudden and violent end. With their shared interest in abrupt and unexpected renegotiations of value, High Rise, Concrete Island and Crash all share this revelation of potential apocalypse. The minute and the enormous, the antique and the everyday, the built environment and the natural, the organic and the inorganic; Ballard allows every aspect of modernity to be transferred into waste. Ballardian waste is so ubiquitous that what we ordinarily view as secret and hidden becomes the abundantly normal, a permanent feature of our lived environment. Far from being a useless nuisance that we would prefer to discard as our past, the figure and the figuring of waste provides the central metaphor for our present. Ballard’s work stands in the indelible afterglow of the flash, the flash of waste creation that is the very hallmark of our age.

NOTE: This feature was published in two installments: Parts I & II last week, Part III this week.

Endnotes

[1] To avoid confusion between J. G. Ballard the author and James Ballard the central character of Crash, I will refer to the character as ‘James’.

[2] J. G. Ballard, Crash (1975; London: Vintage, 1995), 19. Hereafter, cited in the text as C.

[3] Interestingly, there is an additional sense of abandonment and worthlessness, see ‘Brothel’, The Compact Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Ed, 2002).

[4] J.G. Ballard, A User’s Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews, (London: Flamingo, 1997), 262.

[5] See Roger Luckhurst, ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard, 119–50, for an account of Crash’s place in the long thematic and narratalogical development of Ballard’s fiction.

[6] Dalia Judovitz, The Culture of the Body: Genealogies of Modernity (2001; Michigan: U of Michigan P, 2004), 67-82.

[7] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 53.

[8] See Henry Gray, Anatomy: Descriptive and Surgical (1858; Bristol: Paragon, 1998), 546-56.

[9] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 72.

[10] William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, 103, 103-104.

[11] J. G. Ballard, ‘Introduction’, Crash, n.p.

[12 For two excellent overviews on the relationship between Ballard and Baudrillard, see: Emma Whiting, ''Abject Literature': Disaffection and abjection in The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash, ' unpublished essay, 2007; Roger Luckhurst, 'The Angle Between Two Walls': The Fiction of J. G. Ballard.

[13] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 141.

[14] Roger Luckhurst, ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard, 123

[15 J. G. Ballard, interview with Melvyn Bragg, The South Bank Show, ITV1. 17 Sept. 2006.

[16] J. G. Ballard, interview with Melvyn Bragg, The South Bank Show, ITV1. 17 Sept. 2006.

[17] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 109.

[18] Françoise Dastur, Death: An Essay on Finitude, trans. John Llewelyn (1994; London: Althone, 1996), 8.

[19] Steven Connor, Fly, (London: Reaktion, 2006), 182, 183.

[20] Steven Connor, Fly, 183.

Bibliography

Primary

Ballard, J. G. Concrete Island. 1973. London: Vintage, 1994.
—. Crash. 1975. London: Vintage, 1995.
—. Empire of the Sun. 1984. London: Panther, 1985
—. High Rise. 1975. London: Flamingo, 2000.
—. Interview with Melvyn Bragg. The South Bank Show. ITV1. 17 Sept. 2006.
—. ‘The Ultimate City’. The Complete Short Stories. London: Flamingo, 2001.
—. A User’s Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews. London: Flamingo, 1997.

Secondary

Appadurai, Arjun. ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in a Cultural Perspective. Ed. Arjun Appaduri. 1986. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 3-63.

Brigg, Peter. J. G. Ballard. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1985.

Connor, Steven. Fly. London: Reaktion, 2006.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gaytatari Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1976.

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo. 1966. London: Routledge, 2002.

Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. 1969. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock, 1972

Gasiorek, Andrzej. J. G. Ballard. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005.

Hawkins, Gay, and Stephen Muecke. ‘Introduction: Cultural Economies of Waste’. Culture and Waste: The Creation and Destruction of Value. Ed. Gay Hawkins and Stephen Muecke. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. ix-xxvi.

Jencks, Charles. The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. 1977. London: Academy, 1989.

Joedike, Jürgen. Architecture Since 1945: Sources and Directions. Trans. J. C. Plames. London: Pall Mall Press, 1969.

Judovitz, Dalia. The Culture of the Body: Genealogies of Modernity. 2001. Michigan: U of Michigan P, 2004.

Kolnai, Aurel. ‘Disgust’. On Disgust. 1929. Ed. and Trans. Barry Smith and Carolyn Korsmeyer. Chicago: Open Court, 2004. 29-92.

Kopytoff, Igor. ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process’ The Social Life of Things: Commodities in a Cultural Perspective. Ed. Arjun Appaduri. 1986. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 64-91.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection. 1980. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia UP, 1982.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Ed. Fredrick Engels. Vol.1 .1954; London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1977.

Miller, William Ian. The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997.

Luckhurst, Roger. ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1997.

Rathje, William, and Cullen Murphy. Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage. 1992. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2001.

Rubin, William S. Dada and Surrealist Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1980.

Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. ‘Narrativizing Visual Culture: Towards a Polycentric Aesthetics’. The Visual Culture Reader. Ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff. 1998. Abington: Routledge, 2006. 37-57.

Short, Robert. Dada and Surrealism. London: Octopus, 1980.

Scanlan, John. Garbage. London: Reaktion, 2005.

Thompson, Michael. Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979.

Trigg, Dylan. The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the Absence of Reason. New Studies in Aesthetics 37. New York: Peter Lang, 2006.

Whiting, Emma. ”Abject Literature’: Disaffection and Abjection in The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash‘. Unpublished essay, 2007.

Future Ruins: Michelle Lord © 2007. Used with permission.

NOTE: This feature was published in two installments: Parts I & II here, Part III there.

William Viney, © 2007.

I. Waste and Value.

Waste undeniably concerns notions of value and meaning: what is retained and preserved is valued; what is discarded, banished, and abjected is devalued [1]. Waste therefore marks implicit boundaries, articulates dynamic categories, and stratifies objects into orders of value. Yet these orders of meaning and significance are by no means static. Rubbish, refuse and litter are expressions of complex systems in perpetual motion: representing different things, to different people, at different times. This semantic contingency is the product of an aesthetic, economic, biological, and socio-political “discursive constellation” [2] that is forever in flux. The subject of waste requires therefore an interdisciplinary approach. We must adopt a critical apparatus flexible enough to trace the intricately intersecting discursive nodes that generate and maintain value.

Though cultural order and taste might at first appear to be rigid and long established, it in fact requires endless renewal and recreation, re-enacted through individual and collective forces. From a structural anthropologist’s point of view, rubbish is a dynamic social force. For Mary Douglas, it is the clean and orderly that represents the static and immobile, whilst dirt, rubbish, and refuse contain a covert revolutionary potential, harbouring a power to contest the static stability upon which order depends. As Douglas has noted, “[d]irt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative moment, but a positive effort to organise the environment” [3]. Waste or rubbish (synonyms of dirt for Douglas) maintain order, through the binary logic of the devalued Other. Simultaneously, waste contests that order, as it threatens to become a valued object. As this brief theoretical excursion illustrates, the value of waste is far from absolute. The changing values given to objects lend them tumultuous life, making possible a “cultural biography of things” [4]. If we begin to think about J. G. Ballard’s cultural biography of objects, we are immediately struck by his unerring focus on the final chapters, the closing pages that mark the transition into, and out of, the category of ‘waste.’ Even more peculiar, Ballard’s ‘biography’ of things never fully ends, his waste frequently returns as want, merging end and beginning, creation and destruction.

Michael Thompson, one of the earliest theorists of waste, has divided objects into two categories: ‘transient’ objects (e.g. a car) with a finite life span which decrease in value as time progresses; whilst ‘durable’ objects (e.g. antique furniture) have prolonged life spans, and their value increases as time progresses. Our attitude towards an object greatly depends on our ability to place it into one of these categories; our financial energies will be thrown into the conservation (through insurance, maintenance, presentation etc.) of the durable object, whilst we will happily destroy or discard the transient object. Thompson goes on to argue that there is a shadowy and covert third term: ‘rubbish.’ Although a transient object may fall into the ‘rubbish’ (or waste) category it may, by good fortune, fortitude, or human intervention, re-emerge with durable credentials. Waste as a social category of value is therefore intimately bound to fluid transfers of value, a category of flexibility and mutability [5]. Most notable in Ballard’s fiction is the absence of Thompsonian durability, to borrow another phrase from Thompson; Ballard’s world is a “world of transience.” For Ballard, waste registers a process, a cycle, a movement, and system in transition: durability and permanence have no place in a fictional world that revels in the power of waste to negotiate and renegotiate value.

II. Architectures of Waste: High-Rise, Concrete Island, and “The Ultimate City”

The changing character of the city, and the casual effects these changes have upon the individual and collective psyches of its populace, are powerfully rendered in High-Rise, Concrete Island, and “The Ultimate City”. All three contain familiar visual landscapes: the high-rise apartment building, the roadside waste ground, the empty Central Business District. However, each of these recognisable aspects of urban experience is rendered unfamiliar through the pervasive renegotiation of waste categories. Unexpected reversals propel each narrative on unknown trajectories: the brand new high-rise becomes derelict, the waste ground becomes habitable, the abandoned city centre thrives once more. In each case, values and priorities transform themselves, giving way to new orders of social organisation and new systems of commerce. What is considered rubbish finds itself similarly reconfigured, as radical new ecologies of consumption and rejection are tried and tested. Waste hovers at the fringes in a ubiquitous and deeply ambivalent manner, at all times it threatens to upset traditional categories of value. As waste becomes accepted, even loved, Ballard shows how our environment conditions notions of waste, want, and value.

In High-Rise, Ballard questions the bold ambition of high modernist architecture. These building projects implicitly communicate concepts of cleanliness and waste management, furthering a techno-modernist form of social engineering [6]. At the core of post-war redevelopment were notions of reclamation and redevelopment. Progressive ultramodern housing rose from the derelict slums and industrial wastelands. This is a context with which Ballard’s fiction patently interacts:

Together [the apartment blocks] were set in a mile-square area of abandoned dockland and warehousing along the north bank of the river [...] The massive scale of the glass and concrete architecture, and its striking situation in the bend of the river, sharply separated the development project from the rundown areas around it, decaying nineteenth-century terraced houses and empty factories already zoned for reclamation [7].

Dominating the architectural scene of 1960s and 1970s Britain, the Brutalist school confronted inner city decline, bombed-out post-war dereliction, and industrial decline, with a clinical rationalism. As Jürgen Joedike has made clear, the Smithsonian-Brutalist movement privileged ethical and social architectural principles over the aesthetic. Precise geometry, ‘honest’ (i.e. visible) use of materials, and a dedication to the striking ‘image,’ were seen to create buildings both progressive and pure, in function and form [8]. The ultra-rationalist/behaviourist ideals that the Brutalists inherited from architects such as Le Corbusier and Mies Van Der Rohe meant that the high-rise was intended as a means to cleanse post-war Britain of its social ills, literally cleaning up the neighbourhood through a minimalist economy of space. A utopian relationship with technology fostered a correspondingly technocratic architecture:

for the machine supported present-day cities, only a live, cool, highly controlled, rather impersonal architectural language can deepen that base-connection, make it resonate with culture as a whole [9].

Peter Smithson’s Futurist aesthetic becomes playfully inverted in Ballard’s high-rise. Whilst the building begins as “a huge machine designed to serve [...] a never-failing supply of care and attention” (HR, 10), the ‘machine’ comes to a shuddering collapse, taking with it the moral stability of its residents. The absolute failure of the high-rise permits the exploration of previously repressed psychological phenomenon: tribal violence, sexual promiscuity, and open vandalism.

The high-rise’s aggressive environment encourages a competitive decadence that allows valuable objects to become transformed into waste – shows of wealth, irresponsibility, and indifference gather around acts of disposal. Drinking “a brand of expensive imitation champagne” in the morning, and throwing a full bottle, “still with its wired cork and foil in place,” off the balcony, powerfully demonstrates the violent waste-making of the affluent classes (HR, 11, 12). It is this self-conscious creation of waste that is endlessly paraded throughout the novel. Laing’s mild annoyance towards his inconsiderate neighbours is far less interesting than his decision to dispose of the remnants of the champagne bottle in an identical manner as the revellers above, by throwing it over his balcony’s balustrade. Individual waste becomes socialised, the category of waste is contagious.

Fittingly, Laing’s first altercation with a fellow resident is over a blocked rubbish-disposal chute. He and Steele soon unite however, as they unblock the chute and discuss the peculiar waste disposal habits of the upper floor residents. At this early stage in the novel, the presence of waste is already expressing the transient relations people hold with their refuse:

Steele stood back as the column of garbage sank below in a greasy avalanche. He held Laing’s arm, steering him around a beer can lying on the corridor floor. ‘Still no doubt we’re all equally guilty — I hear that the lower floors people are leaving small parcels of garbage outside their apartment door’ (HR, 39).

The telling manipulation of language here suggests a deliberate, perhaps ritualistic, negotiation and renegotiation of waste values, and this merely marks the beginning of what becomes an obsession. Ballard’s incessant cataloguing of rubbish becomes a towering feature of his narrative. A careful balance is struck between waste avoidance (clearing the chute and steering round the beer can) and waste acceptance (parcels of rubbish left in communal spaces), a balance that will steadily break down through the course of the novel. Any quaint delicacy that “small parcels” might suggest becomes obliterated as the rubbish heaps up, inside and outside the building. Anthony Royal, the building’s architect, observes from his top-floor apartment a “sea of rubbish that spread[s] around the building like an enlarging stain” (HR, 76). This spreading sea, for Royal and the reader, is a “visible index of the block’s decline,” a physical measure of “the extent to which its tenants accepted this process of erosion” (HR, 76). At first tolerated, then accepted without acknowledgment, and finally embraced as a truer state of being, the residents’ changing relations with rubbish is an important barometer of social change; a mirror that reflects the collective mental health of the high-rise.

The steady accumulation of rubbish is symptomatic of an eroded boundary between ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’ The high-rise retains an inexplicable hold upon the psyches of the residents, they reject the outside world entirely. For example, despite growing hardships, Royal observes: “they would not be leaving either the following morning or any other” (HR, 78). He dreams of an architecture with “no possibility of escape” (HR, 81). In their rejection of the outside world, Royal and his fellow residents testify to the success of self-containment. The waste and dirt of the high-rise insulate the residents against an outside that has become increasingly unattractive, detached, unreal. After attempting to go to work and getting only as far as the car park before turning back, Laing realises he will never again try to leave (HR, 104). Coupled with the bizarre psychological control the high-rise holds over its residents, the physical properties of the high-rise means that waste cannot escape either. An architecture that prioritises the vertical over the horizontal means that spatial boundaries are reordered. The high-rise has no discernable centre, or rather, the whole building is a giant centre. Similarly, each apartment has no discernable periphery, the front door simply leads further into the main building. The “small parcels of garbage” left outside the apartment door speak of the contested nature of private space in a high-rise apartment block. With this space contested, the sense of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ become similarly obscured. With a clearly identifiable ‘outside’ lost, the boundary between ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ is blurred, complicating the spatial distinctions implicit in ‘throwing things out.’ Even though the residents might try to throw their rubbish off their balconies, Royal still observes waste that appears as a “sea” and a “stain.” Both words express the impossibility of disconnecting the building from its waste: “[a] greasy spray hung across the face of the building, the residue of the cascade of debris now heaved over the side without a care whether the wind would carry it into the apartments below” (HR, 97). Laing tries to clean his flat only to discover that “all he was doing was rearranging the dirt” (HR, 100). With its complication of spatial divides, the high-rise renders waste uncanny – in perpetual circulation, forever threatening to return to sender.

Future Ruins: Michelle Lord © 2007. Used with permission.

If waste defines space (and vice versa) through the generation of physical and conceptual boundaries then the sense that refuse has lost its ‘correct’ place registers the renegotiation of these boundaries, and perhaps the renegotiation of waste categories in general. The most intimate and domestic spaces, such as the kitchen and bed, become unexpected rubbish tips. In fact, Laing finds himself in his kitchen bedding down on bags of rubbish:

[H]e realised how derelict it had become. The floor was strewn with debris, scraps of food and empty cans. To his surprise, Laing counted six garbage-sacks — for some reason he had assumed there was only one [...] Reclining against this soft bed of his own waste he felt like going to sleep (HR, 100).

Laing’s indifference to these heaps of rubbish are neither the signs of laziness or the failure of the buildings’ technology, but rather, proof that his values are at a considerable remove from those that prompted him to throw the broken wine bottle off his balcony. His dramatic change in attitude towards waste is “to be welcomed [it] helped to expose a more real vision of himself” (HR, 100). Similarly, Royal observes the unwillingness of his residents to dispose of their sacks of rubbish:

Presumably they held this rubbish to themselves less from fear of attracting the attentions of the outside world than from the need to cling to their own, surround themselves with the mucilage of unfinished meals, bloody bandage scraps, broken bottles that once held the wine that made them drunk, all faintly visible through the semi-opaque plastic (HR, 137).

It is difficult to say when exactly our waste ceases to belong to us. The residents believe that by throwing their rubbish over the rails they lose an aspect of themselves. In this sense, when we discard an object we in fact give birth to, or create something, that we can cherish, creatively expressing an aspect of ourselves. Put simply: a truer connection with one’s waste offers a truer sense of the self, a reversal of the unreal disposable society that dominates the metropolis beyond the buildings’ limits. The logical conclusion of this attitude is a richer relationship with one’s own bodily wastes: “the stench gave him confidence, the feeling that he had dominated the terrain with the products of his own body” (HR, 107). As will become clear in Concrete Island, Crash, and Empire of the Sun, Ballard uses the body as a site and object of ‘ultimate’ waste — the Alpha and Omega of the discarded. High-Rise has its own peculiar twist on this theme, a twist only fully appreciated if, bizarrely, we go via the swimming pool.

Perhaps the most Ballardian of images, the declining status of the swimming pool is a dependable measure of narrative progress: it provides a flexible and mobile metaphor that leaps from narrative to narrative. Almost all of Ballard’s novels contain a swimming pool in one form or another. In Cocaine Nights the crowded swimming pool is symbol of violent regeneration. The empty pools of Hello America powerfully represent the shortage of water that has left the twentieth century empty and derelict, making Western civilisation seem laughably futile. In Empire of the Sun Jim’s crystal clear pool empties itself at the same rate that the expatriate community are evacuated: ” [t]he water was covered with leaves and dead insects, and the level had fallen by almost three feet, draping a scummy curtain on the sides. Cigarettes ends lay crushed on the white tiles, and a Chinese packet lay under the diving board” [10]. In a subtle way, the refuse that the Chinese soldiers have left suggests a form of colonisation, a politicised reclamation of space through rubbish.

In a more startling correspondence, the changing fortunes of the high-rise and the relative cleanliness of the building’s swimming pools are directly correlated. Apart from the waste disposal-chute incident analysed above, the swimming pool is the original place of conflict in the high-rise, where the separate levels begin to divide themselves into a series of primitive castes. The first incident involves an argument between a cost-accountant from the 17th floor and Mrs Wilder. The cost-accountant accuses Mrs Wilder’s children of repeatedly urinating in the pool. Aside from the comic images this evokes, it sets in motion a spiralling series of additional incidents, culminating in the death of the jeweller. As the children are banished from the sullied swimming pool the lower-levels retaliate by drowning an Afghan hound owned by an upper floor resident. What Ballard terms the “contamina[tion]” and “profanation” of the pool again announces a more specific objective correlative for the psychological health of the high-rise. The pool, like the building as a whole, is already progressing from a space of decadent leisure to one of violent contamination and waste.

The decline of the swimming pool is gradual yet entropic; “a half-empty pit of yellowing water and floating debris” (HR, 75) soon becomes “yellowing water [...] filled with debris, the floor of the shallow end emerging like a beach in a garbage lagoon. A mattress floated among the bottles, surrounded by a swill of cardboard cartons and newspapers” (HR, 88). After this, the 35th floor pool has a lengthy absence until it reappears: “[t]wo bodies, he noted, floated in the pool, barely distinguishable from the other debris, the kitchen garbage and pieces of furniture” (HR, 159). Both pools have become established unofficial dumps, places where both kitchen waste and human bodies can be discarded with equal ease. This disturbing image acts as a mere prelude to the climactic description of the 10th floor swimming pool:

In the yellow light reflected off the greasy tiles, the long tank of the bone-pit stretched in front of them. The water had long since drained away, but the sloping floor was covered with the skulls, bones and dismembered limbs of dozens of corpses. Tangled together where they had been flung, they lay about like tenants of a crowded beach visited by a sudden holocaust (HR, 170).

This is perhaps the ‘ultimate waste’ generated by the high-rise’s harsh environment. With the Jewish Holocaust as a historical intertext, we are reminded how easily humans can discard one another on an unthinkable scale. True to the earlier observation that, “for all their descent into barbarism, the residents remained faithful to their origins and continued to generate a vast amount of refuse” (HR, 134), the numerous bodies that fill the pool are the systemic waste products of a building, a community, and the individual, in a state of absolute collapse. In a more sinister way, the body pit presents an extension of the unshakeable late-capitalist tendency towards disposability. Ballard’s dystopian vision of architectural modernity suggests a salient and unrelenting feature that transcends seismic social change: the generation of waste.

With the precise details of an autobiography, Concrete Island situates itself very specifically within time (at exactly 3 o’clock April 22nd 1973) and place (six hundred yards from the junction of the Westway and the M4). Richard Maitland’s car tyres explode and send him careering into a forgotten wasteland, setting forth a narrative imbued with the indisputable force of possibility. This piece of derelict land has been created and disremembered, hidden and neglected. Its true origins are made deliberately ambiguous, an ambiguity provoked by Ballard’s enigmatic and exacting style: “a small traffic island, some two hundred yards long and triangular in shape, that lay in the waste ground between three converging motorway routes” [11]. Whilst the familiar term “traffic island” suggests the immediate designs of motorway planners and municipal bureaucrats, “waste ground” creates a contrary and implicit opposition, a sense of chance and contingency: an incidental systemic by-product of humanity’s need for transportation. This concrete island is not only “sealed off from the world around it by the high embankments on two sides and the wire-mesh fence on its third” (CI, 13), but is also “a forgotten island of rubble and weeds” (CI, 5). With “the world around it,” the waste ground is a non-space, deliberately sealed and excluded from the social and economic norms of the everyday. Yet Ballard’s insistence on the term “island” presents a powerful force of naturalisation, with all the associated notions of colonisation and empire, primitivism and pioneer living. As these brief extracts already suggest, Concrete Island is a novel obsessed with the junctures between the created and the artificial, natural and unnatural, the familiar and unfamiliar, the valued and the discarded.

Compounding an endless flux between binaries is the lingering remnants of the island’s archaeology, which has been described by Andrzej Gasiorek as a “physical palimpsest” [12]. Maitland traces the outline of what was once a Victorian terraced street, discovering the ruins of an abandoned church, graveyard, and print shop, with the littered type of an old letterpress still scattered on the ground (CI, 41, 65). We glimpse traces of the island’s hidden history, a history made archaeology by post-war demolition squads and an emerging desire for high-speed travel. All this Victorian certainty has become waste, both by design and neglect. The durable old world has been replaced by a transient new world. The shifting fortunes of what was once a habitable and thriving environment, stable enough to support a church, print shop, and cinema, gives emphasis to the ephemeral nature of land use and value. An uncertain duality between the created and the forgotten is tirelessly reinstated, Maitland’s environment becomes loaded with both a benevolent domestic potential and a desolate wasted malevolence, and it is between these binaries our traditional valuations of wastelands are wilfully disrupted.

What is so remarkable about the island on which Maitland finds himself is its resistance to straightforward categorisation. By successfully existing as island, waste ground, Victorian ruin, “unofficial municipal dump” (CI, 13), and the home of Jane and Proctor, this space retains a robust semantic multiplicity. If we choose to agree with Ballard’s speculative observation that “this triangular patch of waste ground had survived by exercise of guile and persistence, and would continue to survive, unknown and disregarded, long after the motorways had collapsed into dust” (CI, 69), then we must also acknowledge its semantic undecidability as an important contributing factor to this persistence [13]. Maitland’s grim assessment of his island as an “abandoned ground,” no more than “meaningless soil” (CI, 32), does not merely express his frustration with being marooned, rather, it communicates his thwarted desire to give his environment meaning; to give this space a proper language, and a proper name.

If Maitland’s island represents a sort of non-space, without unequivocal value, then we should be unsurprised by the catalogues of seemingly formless refuse piled at the island’s boundaries. With these, Ballard gives his 1970s wasteland a sense of impossible borderlands, populated by the miscellaneous and discarded. The following passages are typical:

[a] wire-mesh fence sealed off the triangle of waste ground from the area beyond, which had become an unofficial municipal dump. In the shadows below the concrete span were several derelict furniture vans, a stack of stripped-down billboards, mounds of tyres and untreated metal refuse. (CI, 12-13).

No grass grew under the overpass. The damp earth was dark with waste oil leaking from the piles of refuse and broken metal drums on the far side of the fence. The hundred-yard-long wire wall held back mounds of truck tyres and empty cans, broken office furniture, sacks of hardened cement. Builder’s forms, bales of rusty wire and scrapped engine parts were heaped so high that Maitland doubted whether he would be able to penetrate this jungle of refuse even if he could cut through the fence (CI, 39).

Future Ruins: Michelle Lord © 2007. Used with permission.

Although both extracts technically describe an area beyond the small triangle ground that Maitland inhabits, this is no less instructive. As the eastern end of the triangle is the only side not lined with a solid, insurmountable motorway embankment, it presents the only viable means to escape, yet Maitland observes a “jungle of refuse” that forms a third embankment, a wall of waste that effectively completes his isolation. Paradoxically, the waste ground is given boundaries through heaps of refuse, but the inherent chaos of these heaps serves only to obscure the islands’ beginning and end. The wire fence can only form a tenuous and explicitly porous screen between the ‘wanted’ and the ‘wasted’; the leaking oil signifies their fragile, if not impossible, division.

Just as discarded objects pile up in Concrete Island, so too does socially discarded people. Richard Maitland, a successful architect, is thrown into a wasteland, perhaps never to escape. Proctor, after injuring himself in the circus, has been made mercilessly unemployed: ” ‘They just threw him out’ ” (CI, 98), whilst Jane, once wealthy, married, and pregnant, has become a drug-using prostitute [14]. It is through the island’s three inhabitants that we are made aware of the fluid movement between success and failure, the harsh downside to a socially mobile population. Ballard describes them as “[t]hree derelicts” (CI, 109), and “outcasts” (CI, 114). Their social identities become fused with the status of the island:

Identifying the island with himself, he gazed at the cars in the breaker’s yard, at the wire-mesh fence, and the concrete caisson behind him. These places of pain and ordeal were now confused with pieces of his body. He gestured towards them, trying to make a circuit of the island so that he could leave these sections of himself where they belonged (CI, 70).

The island harnesses a powerful ability to fragment, making Maitland wish he could discard the aspects of himself that have become useless: in a similar passage, frustrated with his damaged leg Maitland wishes “he could disconnect” and “throw it away” (CI, 127). In Ballard’s deeply critical manner, Maitland has become fully absorbed into disposable culture; a culture that has made and populated the island, a culture that is predicated on throwing away anything that is inconvenient or uncomfortable. Along with the haunting reminders of Jane’s aborted child, Ballard strikes deep into a society that complacently accepts the human body as a form of waste, as something to be discarded along with the cigarette packets and empty bottles.

Although the pervasive culture of the disposable may shape and populate the island, this should not detract from the fluctuating categories of value that prevents rubbish from becoming an entirely static order of meaning. Instances of scavenging and recycling galvanise Concrete Island’s Crusoe-like ’survival-narrative,’ connecting the novel to a long history of travel fiction. But unlike the great majority of canonical shipwrecked heroes, Maitland must rely on an artificial and redundant landscape for sustenance. His need to recycle gives great testimony to the dynamic aspects of Thompsonian rubbish theory, a subtle implosion of categories that suggests a continuous renegotiation of value.

The novel’s first instance of recycling occurs where he wrenches off a piece of exhaust piping from his wrecked car to fashion a crude six-foot long crutch. In a peculiar way, his car continues to give him mobility, or rather, it is recycled waste that makes his hobbling exploration of the island possible (CI, 32). No less remarkable are Maitland’s desperate attempts to catch the attention of passing drivers, firstly by setting the car alight to make a beacon, and secondly by using the car’s blackened wiring as writing material (CI, 51, 61). Although he fails to attract anyone’s attention his recycling is nonetheless successful, transforming the wreck into a crutch, a torch, and a pen.

As Maitland establishes himself on the island, the opportunities to utilise its rich resources multiply. Proctor shows him the island’s main food-source, the fly-tipped kitchen waste of a local restaurant:

[A]n amorphous mass of gleaming mucilage which lay in a three-feet-high heap across a stack of tyres. The nearest edge of this sludge-pile was already oozing through the mesh [...] Proctor picked at the slices of wet bread, lumps of fatty meat and vegetable scraps embedded in the greasy avalanche (CI, 128).

This complex (and comparatively rare) use of consonance and assonance indicates a clear intention to shock. Phrases such as “gleaming mucilage,” “sludge-pile,” and “greasy avalanche,” emphasises the decaying viscosity of this “illicit garbage dump” (CI, 128). Yet this fetid feast leaves Maitland profoundly unaffected: “he felt no sense of revulsion” (CI, 128). The episode is remarkable for a number of reasons. Firstly, it allows the island a habitable benevolence, with a moderately reliable source of food Maitland’s colonisation becomes possible. Secondly, it illustrates an important revolution in value. The fatty lumps and sodden dregs register the excesses of Western consumerism, at first considered waste, once again finds value in the mess tins of Maitland and Proctor. Finally, it provides a significant example of how powerful emotions of disgust can act as organising principles behind categories of value. William Miller has argued that disgust is an emotion that “ranks people and things in a kind of cosmic ordering” [15]. Therefore, Maitland’s loss of disgust announces a cosmic, or rather, a holistic reordering of value. His rotten heap of food scraps corresponds to what the German phenomenologist Aurel Kolnai has called the “prototype of all disgusting objects”; the sight, smell, or taste of putrification; “the tactile impression of flabbiness, sliminess, pastiness, and indeed anything soft…” [16]. Similarly, Julia Kristeva argues that food loathing is “the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection” [17]. But, if we accept that the abjection of objects in part constitutes the Lacanian “I”, where the expelled object affirms and consolidates the formation of the self-becoming subject, then Maitland’s acceptance of waste suggests the reversal of this process, signifying both an unravelling and restructuring of the self. Via the consumption of waste, an emerging identity is therefore articulated. Through the assimilation of previously abject(ed) material Maitland becomes waste, and waste becomes him.

The novel’s powerful depiction of ‘wasted living’ — the domestication of and through waste — finds climactic resolution when Proctor creates Maitland a “pavilion of rust” (CI, 162); a crude house made of the discarded sections of cars. In a deeply ambivalent way, Jane observes: “I can see that you’re a real architect” (CI, 163). Has Maitland achieved a truer sense of ‘reality’? Does a recycled eco-architecture present a viable antidote to the unreal high-rises that dominate the urban skyline? Are Jane’s words a sarcastic commentary on Maitland’s dramatic fall from grace? The presence of waste makes these questions both possible and irresolvable. The fluid transactions between categories of value obscure a critical overview. Critics have often preferred to stress the dystopian aspects of the novel. Gasiorek writes that the island is a “symbol of the waste and destruction modernity leaves in its wake,” Peter Brigg calls the work a “disaster novel,” and Roger Luckhurst writes of the “uncanny wasted margins or ruins of a forgotten twentieth century history” [18]. Ballard’s Concrete Island typically engenders thematically negative readings; nowhere is the novel’s latent utopian content, seen in the regenerative treatment of waste, given an opportunity to redress this imbalance. The tragi-comic ambiguity of Maitland’s fate depends on our acceptance of the island as a viable space in which to live. Should we accept this, as Maitland certainly does, then we must radically reappraise our hierarchies of value and acknowledge the hidden potential to be found in the discarded.

If High-Rise and Concrete Island generate and explore myths of the present, “The Ultimate City” tells a myth of the near future, an exploration of how the future will look upon our present. Raised in the post-industrial ‘Garden City,’ Halloway becomes captivated by the world his parents left behind. Using the flying competition as a thinly veiled excuse, he builds a sailplane and reaches the other side of the sound to explore the metropolis: “an abandoned dream ready to be re-occupied” [19]. He discovers systems of waste built upon an aggressive use of power and materials, an economic unsustainability predicated upon massive overproduction and consumption, only to be abandoned on an equivalent scale. Not only does Halloway reoccupy a wasteland and a derelict high-rise, but an entire metropolis. He re-inhabits a discarded twentieth-century.

The defining contrast of the novella opposes the docile pastoralism of the Garden City on the one hand, and the aggressive petroleum-driven industrialism of the abandoned metropolis on the other. The Garden City’s manufacturers are so exact that “everything [is] so well made that it last[s] for ever” (CSS, 879), what refuse is produced is efficiently recycled. The metropolis is an enormous monument to the culture of the discard, a wasteland strewn with abandoned cars, televisions, washing machines, and other commodities. Through Halloway’s regeneration of the long abandoned city, the narrative asks crucial questions about the material legacies of technologically advanced societies, the transient nature of material culture, and the futile ambitions of Western industrialism. His ability to playfully master the systems of a distant twentieth-century tie into processes of reconciliation and self-exploration, allowing him to come to terms with his insatiable desire for power and waste.

The aptly named Buckmaster, the ageing industrialist Halloway meets in the metropolis, represents the industrial glut of Fordist production. With an emphasis upon disproportionate material accumulation, surplus and excess, Buckmaster describes his golden age:

During the war I built thirty thousand fighters for the government, we were turning them out so fast the Air Force kept the war going just to get rid of them… [and] … enough spare parts to give every man on this planet his own robot-assembly kit (CSS, 896).

Ballard gives us a clear sense of the motive and morals of the old world, constantly reflected in the enormous volume of discarded goods: “[i]n the open fields a local manufacturer had dumped what appeared to be a lifetime’s output of washing machines” (CSS, 879); “[t]housands of cars lined the streets, their flamboyant bodywork covered with moss” (CSS, 882). The size of production and consequent abandonment is enigmatically captured in Miranda and Buckmaster’s waste sculptures:

As he stepped down from the pedestrian exit, he noticed that a nearby parking lot had been used as a municipal dump. Old tyres, industrial waste and abandoned appliances lay about in a rusty moraine. Rising from its centre was a pyramid of television sets some sixty feet high, constructed with considerable care and an advanced geometry (CSS, 883-884).

With their direct association with the monuments of ancient civilisations, these heaps of consumer durables hold an arresting power [20]. Although they represent objects drained of use and exchange values and made useless through abandonment, they demonstrate a nostalgically aestheticised form of memorialisation. This is most powerfully demonstrated in Buckmaster’s “cathedral of cars” (CSS, 897), a four hundred foot monument made entirely of cars, and the largest of the city’s pyramids of waste. Halloway observes that this pyramid “resembled a gothic cathedral” (CSS, 895). These physical epitaphs to Western civilisation hold an implicit relationship with Dada, and to Marcel Duchamp’s ‘readymades.’ Like Dada, these towering monuments of rust express a clear rejection of rationalist humanist principles, elevating mundane objects as works of art and debasing works of art to the level of mundane objects [21]. Duchamp argued that his readymades were created to inspire “a reaction of visual indifference [...] a total absence of good or bad taste, in fact, a complete anesthesia” [22]. Of course, the last thing Duchamp’s shock-tactics inspire is critical affectlessness, his Bicycle Wheel (1913) and Fountain (1917) still attract debate. More accurately, Duchamp’s readymades challenge our traditional tools of analysis, obscuring the distinctions between art and the everyday, the aesthetised and the ordinary [23]. Buckmaster’s ‘cathedral’ represents an extension of Duchamp’s Dadaist ideals, generating something far more elaborate than an ‘architecture of waste.’ The pyramid allows a complex network of competing uses and meanings to collide, a nuanced mixture of object d’art, monument, memorial, and deification of waste. Rubbish, rather than the simple by-product of a forgotten economic system, is figured as the very symbolic locus of that system. All this is achieved through the very materials that the monument seeks to celebrate, waste is used to glorify waste. A very specific brand of mise en abime is created, collapsing important interpretative binaries such as the relationship between part and whole, end and beginning, subject and object: the physical and semantic centre of the edifice is therefore rendered disturbingly ambivalent.

The pyramids trigger in Halloway an appreciation for waste that goes far beyond nostalgic mourning, he begins to see the aesthetic desirability of waste. The following extract is arguably one of the novella’s most powerful:

Far from disfiguring the landscape, these discarded products of Twentieth-Century industry had a fierce and wayward beauty. Halloway was fascinated by the glimmering sheen of the metal-scummed canals, by the strange submarine melancholy of drowned cars looming up at him from the abandoned lakes, by the brilliant colours of the garbage hills, by the glitter of a million cans embedded in a matrix of detergent packs and tinfoil, a kaleidoscope of everything they could wear, eat and drink. He was fascinated by the cobalt clouds that drifted below the surface of the water, free at last of all the plants and fish, the soft chemical billows interacting as they seeped into the sodden soil. He explored the whorls of steel shavings, foliage culled from a metallic Christmas tree, rusting wire whose dense copper hues formed a burnished forest in the sunlight. He gazed raptly at the chalky whiteness of old china-clay tips, vivid as powdered ice, abandoned railyards with their moss-covered locomotives, the undimmed beauty of industrial wastes produced by skills and imaginations far richer than nature’s, more splendid than any Arcadian meadow. Unlike nature, here was no death. (CSS, 915)

Ballard steers us towards a peculiar version of the Kantian sublime: the common flower can no longer hold Halloway’s attention, only a “fierce and wayward” bricolage of waste can provoke his ‘fascination’ and ‘rapture’ [24]. Whereas in High-Rise and Concrete Island rubbish was embraced for typically utilitarian ends (for food, shelter, domination), Halloway’s appreciation of waste operates on primarily aesthetic terms, abstracted beyond a crass division between ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’ It might be tempting to dismiss the final line of this extract as mere Ballardian hyperbole. To do so would be to miss the source of wastes unique aesthetic properties. If a bomb were dropped on La Gioconda it would become worthless, if a bomb were dropped on a rubbish tip its visual nature would be altered, but its value would remain unchanged. The visual attractiveness of industrial waste is one that can never be tarnished — its steady decline is the very source of its arresting beauty.

NOTE: This feature was published in two installments: Parts I & II here, Part III there.

ENDNOTES

[1] I believe Ballard’s treatment of waste runs contrary to John Scanlan’s between garbage and the complete absence of meaning and value; see John Scanlan, Garbage, (London: Reaktion, 2005), 97-98, 112. For Ballard, waste lies on a flexible spectrum of value, ever fluid, mutable, and capricious.

[2] Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (1969; London: Tavistock, 1972), 66.

[3] Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo, (1966; London: Routledge, 2002), 2

[4] Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” The Social Life of Things: Commodities in a Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appaduri (1986; Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 64-91.

[5] Michael Thompson, Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979), 9-10.

[6] Ballard’s High-Rise is set in 1970s London Docklands, at the very cusp of gentrification which only gathers its full pace in the 1980s. It is commonly believed that the West End grew to be a desirable and exclusive district because it lay up wind of the slums in the east, the colonisation of the East End by the affluent professional classes in High-Rise supposes a solution to this problem; a solution the novel wilfully destroys.

[7] J. G. Ballard, High-Rise, (1975; London: Flamingo, 2000), 8. Hereafter, cited in the text as HR.

[8] Jürgen Joedike, Architecture Since 1945: Sources and Directions, trans. J. C. Plames, (London: Pall Mall Press, 1969), 110-23.

[9] Peter Smithson, quoted in Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, (1977; London: Academy, 1989), 23.

[10] J. G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun, (1984; London: Panther, 1985), 62. Hereafter, cited in the text as ES.

[11] J. G. Ballard, “Introduction,” Concrete Island, (1973; London: Vintage, 1994), 11. Hereafter, cited in the text as CI.

[12] Andrzej Gasiorek, J. G. Ballard, (Manchester; Manchester UP, 2005), 113.

[13] Scanlan argues that symbolic and linguistic undecideability is an inevitable characteristic of waste. See On Garbage, 11-53.

[14] The fallen fortunes of the islanders are reflected in Ballard’s appropriation of establishment names. ‘Maitland’ may well be a reference to jurist and historian Frederic William Maitland (1850 – 1906), whilst ‘Proctor’ might refer to astronomer and philosopher Richard Anthony Proctor (1837 – 1888). If this is so, then Ballard takes two eminent Victorians, who worked to uphold legal and natural law, and places them at the mercy of the twentieth century.

[15] William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997), 2.

[16] Aurel Kolnai, “Disgust,” On Disgust, ed. and trans. Barry Smith, Carolyn Korsmeyer (1929; Chicago; Open Court, 2004), 51, 52.

[17] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, (1980; New York; Columbia UP, 1982), 2.

[18] Andrzej Gasiorek, J. G. Ballard, 108, Peter Brigg, J. G. Ballard, (Mercer Island, WA; Starmont House, 1985), 68, Roger Luckhurst. ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard, (Liverpool; Liverpool UP, 1997), 132.

[19] J. G. Ballard, “The Ultimate City,” The Complete Short Stories, (London: Flamingo, 2001), 876. Hereafter, cited in the text as CSS.

[20] New York’s ‘Fresh Kill’ landfill site towers at 505ft tall and 2.8 by 3.8 miles diameter; twenty-five times the size of the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza. Ballard’s pyramids of waste are therefore closer to reality than they at first appear. For more on Fresh Kill see William Rathje and Cullen Murphy, Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage (1992; Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2001), 3-9.

[21] For an overview of the many different varieties of Dadaism, see Robert Short, Dada and Surrealism (London: Octopus, 1980), 7-52.

[22] Marcel Duchamp, quoted in William S. Rubin, Dada and Surrealist Art(New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1980), 37.

[23] See Scanlan, On Garbage, 89-115. Although Scanlan ignores the excess of meaning Duchamp’s aesthetics of waste inspires, he nevertheless is right in noting that the use of rubbish by Duchamp is fundamental to an art that “has no objective meaning” 96.

[24] Dylan Trigg has written that an encounter with decaying modern buildings prompts an experience of the “post-industrial sublime,” proving “reason to be fictitious.” See The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the Absence of Reason, New Studies in Aesthetics 37 (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 141-153.