mystifying of Otherness as a transcendent force, but the reciprocating dependence on narrative which that mysterious stress on the mysterious entails.’64 According to Steiner, psychoanalysis and particularly Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) are stained with ineradicable nostalgic traces because, with their heavy emphasis on Thanatos as the perpetual victor over Eros, Dionysus over Apollo, Cain over Abel, the final victory of the death drive is the consummation of an innate imperative to ‘return’ to an Edenic state of pre-selfhood:
What the species strives for, finally, is not survival and perpetuation, but repose, perfect inertness. In Freud’s visionary programme, the explosion of organic life, which has led to human evolution, was a kind of tragic anomaly, almost a fatal exuberance. It has brought with it untold pain and ecological waste. But this detour of life and consciousness will sooner or later end. An internal entropy is at work. A great quietness will return to creation as life reverts to the natural condition of the inorganic. The consummation of the libido lies in death.65
The white (de-facing) makeup of the pierrot then also figures here as a death mask, one to be welcomed as well as derided. Perhaps Ballard’s mystifying adoption of nostalgic colonial codes is an exercise in pursuing colonial logic to the point of collapse; romancing it into the grave. With its alleged teleological insistence on homogenous civilising projects, Ballard’s reading of empire may be that it is in fact
64 Taussig, p. 159.
suicidal, in the sense that any totalising ideology gleefully sets the conditions of its own demise. As Bewell writes, ‘a mistaken superimposition of a “native” landscape onto a foreign one’ invites ‘a confusion of the two,’ whose consequence is ‘death’.66 Ballard would like to hasten that speculative suicide, even if (or perhaps because o f
which) he is pulled into terrible gravity of its disappearance. That wished-for suicide,
so the Ballardian logic goes, will in turn open the door to an uncovering of its engine of ideological propulsion, and the one thing it aggressively denies; that its true telos is the de-civilising of the natives at the omphalos, or imperial centre. Ballard even goes so far as to acknowledge that ‘I think I was just trying to recreate the landscape of Shanghai in Western Europe and the U.S.’67 While it is infinitely more reassuring to believe this is only true of his fictions, Ballard’s project is, as unwittingly as Freud’s, transformative rather than diagnostic. Steiner confirms this in Freud’s case, at least on the individual level:
Many of Freud’s conjectures have been self-fulfilling in that private and social mores have altered so as to meet psychoanalytic expectations. It is not just a nasty joke to say that so many neuroses arose after Freud had taught us to expect them.
At its most cynical, the task of the anthropologist is to traverse space in order to identify cultures that can absorb their own culture’s discourses of deep memory and
66 Bew ell, p. 61.
67 Quotes, p. 354.
ossified structure. In this way, our present is granted intelligibility and anterior
context, allowing for an ‘empirical’ verification of nostalgic narratives which can then be enthroned as fact rather than nostalgia. The anthropologist creates a space for nostalgia. The anthropologist, in this case Ballard, uses extant depth models created in the colonial centres to manufacture an authentic, retrievable past that just so happens to resemble ‘the Proustian excitement of scenes witnessed in childhood’ to which Sinclair refers. Ballard is an inverted colonialist in the sense that he is attempting to author the centre from the colony, which is what his parents’ generation had been doing, albeit in a far less brutal fashion. Wagner writes:
[T]he whole range of conventional controls, our “knowledge,” our literatures of scientific and artistic achievement, our arsenal of productive technique, is a set of devices for the invention of a natural and phenomenal world. By
assuming that we merely measure, predict, or harness this world of situations, individuals, and forces, we mask the fact that we create it.69
It is perhaps to conquer once and for all perspectives such as Wagner’s and Taussig’s that Ballard so aggressively insists on totalising models of human behaviour.
Seemingly resistant to both refutations and refinements of core Freudian and Jungian beliefs, Ballard, like Lomax, has dug in his heels and stranded himself on an
epistemological terminal beach. His antipathy towards any discourse he suspects to be ‘postmodern’ may well be occasioned by a sense that they might revoke some of his anthropologist’s/missionary privileges. They may even expose the nostalgic traces in
his own work. A savage critic of colonial nostalgia who does not engage with discourses arising from the death of, among others, colonial grand narratives, must also depend on discourses produced coevally with, and therefore not ulterior to, colonial practices. Ballard is nostalgic for the modem. Jameson writes:
Indeed, it seems just possible that the pathos of entropy in Ballard may be just that: the affect released by the minute, and not unenthusiastic, exploration of this whole new world of spatiality, and the sharp pang of the death of the modem that accompanies it. At any rate, from this nostalgic and regressive perspective - that of the older modern and its temporalities - what is mourned is the memory of deep memory; what is enacted is nostalgia for nostalgia, for the grand older extinct questions of origin and telos, of deep time and the Freudian Unconscious.. .70
The compulsion to ‘uncover’ or perhaps implant pathogenic deep memory structures by Ballard is itself evidence of a nostalgia for a stable, indivisible prenostalgic whole immune to further fragmentation. Like Strangman, Ballard is a colonial without an empire. His ‘orphaning’ in Empire o f the Sun not only quite advantageously elides the question of sanction and prohibition, but also allows for an illusion of ^nostalgia. This is not psychological realism so much as wish fulfilment. The repetition of the never- perpetrated murder of the detested colonial set in the early novels fails each time to remove what Roger Luckhurst has termed the ‘recalcitrant traces’ occasioned by the
70 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic o f Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), p. 156.
‘very attempt at active forgetting’, which also hold the purity of his other fictions
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hostage. Empire o f the Sun, then, is not an attempt to provide an ‘autobiographical decoding machine’ for the preceding novels in a specious bid for acceptance into a literary elite for whom Ballard has nothing but contempt; it is an attempt to provide an autobiographical encryption machine for himself.72 That the author is, forty years hence, as ‘guilty’ of nostalgia as any of his Shanghai peers is obfuscated by a Byzantine operation of ideological deflection and diversion in Empire o f the Sun. In
Memory, History, Forgetting (2004), Paul Ricoeur writes:
The ideological process is opaque in two ways. First, it remains hidden; unlike utopia, it is unacknowledged; it masks itself by inverting itself, denouncing its adversaries in the field of competition between ideologies, for it is always the
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other who stoops to ideology.
By ‘othering’ his English peers in the camp and Shanghai at large, Ballard manages to arrogate nostalgia to them and gainsay his own. This also accounts for the author’s problematic identification with the Japanese in the novel. Jim’s war is with his own and with himself. Ballard is nostalgic for the mutant England found in Lunghua; that much is true because, in the Surrealist frame to which he has pinned his colours, it is the only place from which he felt exiled at the end of the war. Boym writes: