station and asked if they could have their watches and clocks back again’.24 Even in this early Ballard short story, a certain scorn for suburban nostalgia is evident. For Ballard, this nostalgia for clock time is symptomatic of a wider retrograde sentiment in the suburbs that hinders its unlimited potential. This is not to suggest that Ballard is not playfully inconsistent in his views on the suburbs, but it is safe to suggest that the author’s infatuation with them stems from his belief that timelessness and tedium are a necessary prelude to unprecedented forms of experience and affect.
ii.
In 1992, President George H.W. Bush assured Republican voters fearful of the decline of traditional family values that his administration would ‘keep trying to strengthen the American family; to make them more like The Waltons and less like The
Simpsons'. While the former have faded into a well-deserved obscurity, the latter
continue to exert a formidable cultural influence. However, this notion of an idealised North American nuclear family, as propounded by The Waltons (1972-1981), Little
House on the Prairie (1974-1983) and Happy Days (1974-1984) among others, has
continued to influence American (and thus global) demotic opinion regarding the ideal family structure well into the 21st century. The nuclear family is strictly defined by David Popenhoe as ‘based on “a sharp division of labor [sic]... with the female as
24 Ibid.
25 Euan Ferguson, ‘300 Reasons Why We Love The Sim psons’, Guardian Unlimited (April 20, 2003), <http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6 9 0 3 ,9 3 9 7 5 l,00.htm l> [accessed 25 October 2007] (paragraph 1 o f 300).
full-time housewife and the male as primary provider and ultimate authority’” .26 In Ballard and Coupland’s fictions, the cant of the suburban nuclear family is tested to destruction through murder and examples of curiously deferred incest. This chapter explores the possibility that these atrocities serve to reinforce and reconfigure the nostalgic nuclear family rather than undermine it in the writings of both authors. For an idea of what an ‘ideal’ Ballardian suburban family might be like, we may look to Ballard’s novel The Unlimited Dream Company (1979). Like Concrete Island (1973) before it, it is a surreal desert island tale set in the London suburb of Shepperton. The protagonist, Blake, steals a light aircraft, crashes, lands in the Thames and, after surviving his own watery ‘death’ becomes a Dionysian messiah to the formerly-listless suburbanites. As the quiet residents of suburbia become his sexually pliant acolytes and inexplicably turn into birds, Blake tries to leave Shepperton only to be repelled with every attempt by ever-retreating barriers psychological and physical.
Blake is initially appalled to be convalescing in the suburbs, noting the ‘...sterile lives in this suffocating town’ (UDC, 35). As the town’s vegetation begins to grow at a vastly accelerated rate and the inhabitants of the town begin to look to him as a fertility god in service to a higher morality, a family dynamic of sorts asserts itself, which serves to radically destabilise the traditional suburban family unit. Initially, his benefactor’s family cautiously take to him as one of their own, a surrogate son or brother. ‘What made me uneasy,’ he remarks, ‘was that they had both been expecting
26 Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the N ostalgia Trap (N ew York: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 7.
me, as if I had lived in this house for years as one of the family and had just returned from a boating accident’ ( UDC, 61). Blake’s incorporation into the family unit, while total and unconditional, is nonetheless not bound to a particular role. ‘Mrs St Cloud’ notes Blake, ‘embraced me with warm arms, holding my head with a firm hand against her shoulder as if comforting her small son’ ( UDC, 55).
The initial relationship between the elderly Mrs. St Cloud and Blake is one of mother and son, but this rapidly metamorphoses into something far more ambiguous. Blake sleeps with Mrs St Cloud during his recovery, and while the act is violent, she appears to offer little resistance, slipping into her newly assigned role without protest or deviation from the carnal script. Later, Blake describes Mrs St Cloud as ‘this mother who had given birth to a violent and barbarous infant, wrestling me from her body’
{UDC, 65). In this act of coupling, therefore, Blake is simultaneously Mrs St Cloud’s
son, her lover and his own child. Nor does it end there. After calmly turning over his responsibility as the suburb’s spiritual guide to Blake, local cleric Father Wingate enlists his help in dismantling his church so as not to impede the town’s conversion to paganism. During his meetings with Blake, Father Wingate’s honorific becomes literal: ‘[h]e looked up at me with the sudden affection of a man who has wrestled with a stranger he discovers to be his own son’ {UDC, 77). In this instant, Blake finds a father figure at the very moment Wingate cedes any claim on the town to him. Blake once again finds himself simultaneously parent and child, and later casually enters into a sexual relationship with his ‘father’ as he has already with his ‘mother,’ Mrs St Cloud: ‘I felt his [Father Wingate’s] mouth against my bruised lips, tasted his teeth and the stale tobacco of his spit’ {UDC, 112). Blake’s changing roles in the suburb belie the ossified positions of the traditional suburban family, using incest in particular
to demonstrate the protean nature of all familial relations when uncoupled from categories maintained by tradition. Michael Delville recognises this as a recurring tendency in Ballard’s fictions, suggesting that ‘the complex Freudian family romance that underlies Ballard’s narrative’ is another modulation of the Ballardian survival strategy:
As is often the case in Ballard’s fiction, it is only through the redistribution and permutation of traditional family roles within the same individual that the modem self can hope to achieve freedom from the life-denying pressures of society.27
These extreme examples serve to open up a reading of suburbia as a launchpad for new ways of life. However, the narrative offers an essentialist reading of human identity. Through Blake, Ballard writes ‘I had opened the doors of my face, swung back the transoms of my heart to admit these suburban people to the real world
beyond’ (UDC, 177). Ballard’s suburban focus, however reframed and reinterpreted, is the traditional suburban family, which has survived any number of Ballardian
selective-breeding experiments intact. This may appear counterintuitive given the grotesque couplings with which the novel teems, and yet Ballard chooses to describe every one of the sexual acts in the novel in familial terms. As much as these violations of the incest taboo may shock and repulse, they grant a deviant legitimacy to the traditional family structure, of which suburbia is widely held to be the standard-bearer. Whatever and with whomever the congress, there is always a parent/child or
brother/sister roleplay being enacted. As such, those roles are accepted
unquestioningly. The traditional suburban family’s existence is corroborated by even symbolic incest narratives, which serve to illustrate that there is a norm from which to deviate.28
iii.
The dissolution of the nuclear family model as a source of irony would have been inconceivable to Americans in the 1950s, and yet this is precisely what Coupland attempts in All Families Are Psychotic (2001), a novel in which a floridly
dysfunctional family courier a purloined letter written by Prince William to Diana, Princess of Wales to a collector-tycoon named Florian in the Bahamas. Stephanie Coontz has investigated the doctrinaire position on familial relations, claiming that ‘[w]hen respondents to a 1955 marriage study “were asked what they thought they had sacrificed by marrying and raising a family, an overwhelming majority of them
replied, ‘Nothing.’ ” Less than 10 per cent of Americans believed that an unmarried
? Q
person could be happy.’ For better or worse, this position has now changed in light of thwarted ‘attempts to “recapture” family traditions that either never existed or existed in a totally different context.’30 For Ballard and Coupland, the nuclear family is a contingent effect of capitalism; a gated community of sorts that implodes due to the impossibility of its realisation. ‘Like most visions of a “golden age,” writes Coontz, ‘the “traditional family” [...] evaporates on closer examination. It is an
28 It is curious that the nuclear family as a model unit was only recognised after Freud had questioned