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  • 标题:Shakespearean reincarnations: an intertextual reading of J. G. Ballard's "The Ultimate City".
  • 作者:Rossi, Umberto
  • 期刊名称:Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
  • 印刷版ISSN:0897-0521
  • 出版年度:2008
  • 期号:September
  • 出版社:The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

Shakespearean reincarnations: an intertextual reading of J. G. Ballard's "The Ultimate City".


Rossi, Umberto


So, of his gentleness Knowing I love my books, he furnished me From mine own library with volumes which I prize above my dukedom

--Prospero, Duke of Milan

THERE ARE SEVERAL SIGNS TELLING US THAT J. G. BALLARD'S CANONIZATION process is well underway and that he has secured an important position in contemporary British fiction: five academic monographs devoted to his fiction in about ten years, (1) an international conference held at the East Anglia University in Norwich in 2007, (2) and an entry for the adjective "Ballardian" in the Collins English Dictionary, meaning "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard's novels and stories, esp. dystopian modernism, bleak man-made landscapes, and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments."

Scholarly acknowledgments of Ballard's literary merits may sound a bit paradoxical since the writer's attitude to literature and literary institutions was mostly iconoclastic. He declared in an interview that "[a] ton of Proust isn't worth an ounce of Ray Bradbury" ("Sci-Fi Seer" 26); in an article he maintained that "James Joyce's Ulysses had an immense influence on me--almost entirely for the bad. [...] [I]t's excessively interiorized, is curiously lacking in imagination and fails to engage the reader's emotions, defects that of course recommend it to academia" ("Memories of James Joyce" 145). Not that Finnegans Wake fares much better: "Joyce's incomprehensible novel, which has provided a living for generations of English Literature professors, represents a lamentable tendency in 20th-century fiction: the quest for total obscurity" (Quotes 91). Other important figures of modernism (and nineteenth-century fiction) were victims of Ballard's irony: "I think that the serious novel in future will be serious in the sense that Hitchcock's films are serious, and not in the way that Mrs Dalloway or Middlemarch are serious" ("Pure Imagination" 20).

But postmodernist novelists were not treated much better: Ballard said in 1991 he had not bothered to read Thomas Pynchon's Vineland as he thought that Pynchon's works are "over-written in that American idiomatic way," and thought both William Gaddis and Umberto Eco were unreadable--the former because his fiction is "Post-modernism trapped inside an Escher staircase," the latter as his novels are "a marketing triumph, not intelligent and original enough" ("Ballard's Anatomy" 71-72). Besides, "American novels who have a high literary reputation--let's say, that school of writers like Roth and Vonnegut ... are middle-brow writers who don't stretch their readers' imagination any way whatever" (Quotes 88).

However, Ballard's provocative remarks were not only aimed at individual authors, regardless of their canonical status; he often attacked the novel tout court because it "is basically an early 19th century structure. The writer still sees himself in the role of an Academy painter producing historical paintings" ("Speculative Illustrations" 142). The novel, being a nineteenth-century form, "has completely excluded [...] any consideration of the impact of science and technology on human beings from the main body of its works" (Quotes 87). But all British fiction is obsolete: "the main underpinning of English culture for the last couple of centuries has been English literature. [...] Now this underpinning has completely gone, it's no longer part of the furniture of anyone's mind--anyone under the age of forty" (Burns and Sugnet 16). Moreover, British fiction is hampered by its parochialism: "the English novel seems to me to be a branch of provincial fiction, relevant to nothing but itself" ("Memories of Greeneland" 137); also the Angry Young Men who contested the English literary establishment "were a totally parochial phenomenon, they didn't shake the literary establishment in any serious way whatever. They were all soon annexed into it" (Quotes 87). Many other provocative statements might be quoted, but none of them is as representative of Ballard's approach to literary issues as this: "Winnie-the-Pooh may well be one of the most successful characters that English fiction has created in this century, taking his place beside Peter Pan and James Bond" ("The Bear" 119); here Ballard is giving Leopold Bloom and Mrs. Dalloway their marching orders, replacing them with British pop icons. (3)

Yet Ballard never gave literature per se its marching orders. His dislike of modernist and postmodernist monstres sacres was not incompatible with his appreciation of other writers, most of them belonging to other national literatures, e.g., William Burroughs, Joseph Heller, Luis-Ferdinand Celine, Jean Genet, Philip K. Dick, and the Marquis de Sade. But his favorite sources of inspiration were non-fiction writers like Sigmund Freud and Carl G. Jung or visual artists like Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, or Giorgio De Chirico, painters whose works somewhat embed narrative elements and belong to Surrealism or were appreciated by Surrealists (it should be noticed that these artists are mostly enfants terribles who often add a deliberately Dadaist or kitschy dimension to their paintings). Ballard's late modernity could also be measured by the importance of other media in the creation of his imagery: surely he drew more inspiration from the reading of Life and Newsweek, or the viewing of US thriller movies, than from Milton or the Bible. Moreover, he was a voracious reader of "invisible literature," that is,

market research reports, pharmaceutical company house magazines, the promotional copy for a new high-energy breakfast food, journals such as Psychological Abstracts and the Italian automobile magazine Style Auto, the internal memoranda of TV company planning departments, sex manuals, U.S. governmental reports, medical textbooks as the extraordinary Crash Injuries. (Quotes 108)

But there is at least one of the respectable classics that Ballard paid homage to--the most established, canonized, and institutionalized writer of English literature, William Shakespeare. He included Shakespeare among the top ten writers of the millennium, and in the "Greatest Writers of the Last 100 Years" survey published on the BBC Web site in 1999, he went so far as to add that Shakespeare was "[t]he universal writer and poet" (Quotes 90).

Ballard also paid homage to the Bard in a more substantial fashion, by rewriting one of his most famous plays, The Tempest, as a science fiction novelette, "The Ultimate City" (1976). Though it is not as famous a work as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), Crash (1973), or Empire of the Sun (1984), its being a literary remake based on such a well-known source encourages an intertextual reading that may tell us something more about Ballard the fiction writer and his textual strategies. This should also help us understand what Ballard's real relation with the tradition of English literature might actually be. (4)

Shakespeare enters the list of Ballard's likes, as we shall see, because he is another author of "imaginative fiction" (like Kafka, Swift, Calvino, Borges) as opposed to that naturalistic fiction which, according to Ballard, "could vanish into oblivion and not be missed" (Quotes 96). It is quite easy to see that The Tempest, with its central magical elements and the role played by such a non-human creature as Ariel, is a definitely non-realistic play. Moreover, in 1987 Ballard praised Fred M. Wilcox's 1956 sf film Forbidden Planet thus: "this remarkably stylish color film is a quantum leap forward in visual confidence and in the richness of its theme--an update of Shakespeare's The Tempest" (Quotes 133). Forbidden Planet proved that the plot of Shakespeare's last masterpiece lent itself to a science-fictional rewriting and that the theme of the play could be updated, replacing sorcery with future science and technologies.

There is, however, something else that Ballard draws on in The Tempest, and that is its metatheatrical dimension. Shakespeare's tragicomedy presents us with a character, Prospero, who has almost total control on the play's plot, a sort of director-within-the-play, who manipulates the other characters and the key events of the plot thanks to his magic books and a magically empowered creature like Ariel (who is also subject to Prospero's arts). Prospero has been seen as the ultimate self-portrait of Shakespeare as both playwright and director; The Tempest might thus be read as a play on theatre, an interpretation underpinning one of the most remarkable modern productions of the Shakespearean text, Giorgio Strehler's La tempesta (Bevington xxxv). (5) This metatextual component may be a key to read "The Ultimate City" as an anamorphic representation of Ballard's literary practice, a self-portrait of the writer--possibly mirrored by different characters--as a postmodern visionary and a mass media bricoleur.

I have already discussed the plot of "The Ultimate City" in detail in a previous academic essay ("Una riscrittura" 396-404). Suffice it to say that the novelette tells the story of a twenty-first-century orphan, Halloway, in a time when metropolises have been abandoned and humanity has moved to small, sun-powered towns. Halloway was born in one of these, Garden Town, an environmentally friendly place, which is too boring for the eighteen-year-old protagonist. To escape his hometown, he builds a glider designed by his father--a genial engineer working on renewable energies who died in a failed experiment (874)--which allows Halloway to fly over the Sound separating Garden City from the nameless metropolis on the opposite shore (876); there Halloway accidentally smashes against the facade of a skyscraper.

Halloway then meets a black mechanic called Olds, who can resurrect any machine he likes but can only speak by means of a display because of a car accident (hence his nickname, short for Oldsmobile); Buckmaster, (6) an old architect, once rich and famous and now living like a hermit in the deserted metropolis, busy building "monument[s] [...] to Twentieth-Century technology" (897), i.e., gigantic piles of car wrecks, domestic appliances, etc.; Stillman, "a classic specimen of metropolitan man" (896), Buckmaster's violent and deranged henchman; and Miranda, Buckmaster's daughter, a sort of fashion nymph who spends her time planting flowers everywhere and changing her appearance every day. Halloway offers to help Buckmaster and in a short time devises a more ambitious plan than the old architect's funeral monuments to the forsaken technologies of the twentieth century: the young man decides to bring back to life a part of the old metropolis with the help of Olds and Stillman (905)--evidently an act of oedipal rebellion against the ecocompatible, non-polluting technologies of Garden City.

The resurrected part of the old metropolis suffers from all the ills that afflicted the major twentieth-century conurbations, but Halloway is glad of this, as "pollution was part of the city, a measure of its health" (911). In fact, scores of teenagers begin to move to the revived part of the metropolis and enthusiastically join Halloway's project of urban renewal (910). But the resurrected metropolitan troubles prevail in the end: Stillman, who helps Halloway at first, ultimately becomes the boss of a criminal gang and defies Halloway's leadership. Urban life in the reclaimed area degenerates to a series of random acts of senseless violence--including the death of a girl in a car accident (917)--until Halloway's technophiliac dream collapses.

In a climactic showdown at the airport, Olds flies away on Halloway's repaired glider, Stillman dies in the fire of the airport car-park, and Halloway is left in the middle of his shattered project. Buckmaster and his daughter have already fled from the metropolis, also abandoned by all its teenage inhabitants. Everything returns to its original condition of ruin and dereliction, and Halloway starts to build "the first of a series of huge metal pyramids in his mind, as high perhaps as these skyscrapers, built of airliners, freight trains, walking draglines and missile launchers, higher than anything of which Buckmaster and the Twentieth Century had ever dreamed" (924).

The following table may help to understand the correspondences between the characters of the two texts: The Tempest "The Ultimate City" Alonso, King of Naples Halloway Sr Prospero, the Right Duke of Milan Buckmaster Ferdinand, son to the King of Naples Halloway Jr Miranda, daughter to Prospero Miranda Ariel, an airy spirit Olds(mobile) Caliban, a savage and deformed slave Stillman Antonio, brother to Prospero, usurping Duke of Milan Sebastian, brother to Alonso Invasion party/Rescue expedition Stephano, a drunken butler Trinculo, a jester

Since the references to The Tempest have been already noticed by other scholars and my previous essay, I will focus on some points where Ballard meaningfully alters important elements of the Shakespearean play.

Obviously Buckmaster is not a sorcerer, but with his technological expertise and his past achievements (repeatedly mentioned by the old architect), he is the warden of the hi-tech metropolis just as Prospero is the master of his magic island. Olds accompanies Halloway to Buckmaster, like Ariel, who lures Ferdinand with his songs (1.2.392-411) and leads him toward Prospero and Miranda. But Olds's music is remarkably different from Elizabethan and Jacobean songs: "There was a jangle of coarse sound, a rapid beat of drums and guitars, and a rock-and-roll singer's voice bellowed across the empty street" (893). Olds, being dumb, cannot sing, but he can reactivate a juke-box in an abandoned bar. While in Shakespeare's play it is Prospero's magic, embodied in his books, (7) that moves everybody and everything, even the tempest itself in Ballard's metropolis magic is replaced by technology, seen as a Faustian force bound to make possible the impossible itself (and that is what Buckmaster has tried to accomplish in his career that he summarizes as a list of science-fictional techno-wonders [896]).

While Ariel flies throughout The Tempest, Olds only manages to fly at the end of the novelette. Yet he is similar to Ariel because his remarkable mechanical and electrical skills serve the urban renewal plan devised by Halloway but approved by Buckmaster; moreover, his skills are similar to Buckmaster's (though more practical). On the other hand, Stillman, the sociopath who corresponds to Caliban, being as savage and mentally deformed ("a savage and deformed Slave" is Caliban's description in the Dramatis Personae list of the play), is also tied to technology, as Ballard introduces him driving an enormous bulldozer (895). Ariel and Caliban somewhat partake in Prospero's magic; Olds and Stillman evidently partake in Buckmaster's technological powers.

Prospero has been literally dethroned, but Buckmaster has been less violently ousted by a technological leap: the passage from the heavy technology of fossil fuel (inextricably tied to the consumer society) to the lighter technologies of renewable energy sources and eco-compatible economy (embodied in the neo-Arcadian society of Garden City).

Ballard's Miranda seems to be more aware of the complexities of the world than her Shakespearean counterpart, a "silly lovesick little goose" in W. H. Auden's opinion (133). Ballard's maiden "had done a great deal of thinking about the subject [of sex] and for all her shyness was well prepared to deal with [Halloway] on her own terms" (898). The twenty-first-century Miranda also seems to have read her Shakespeare, as she says, "sometimes I feel like the daughter of some great magician--wherever I touch, a flower springs up" (899). Such ironic intertextual references, as we have seen, can also be found in the rest of the novelette: Ballard seems to have taken all precautions to make the readers aware that they are reading a remake of The Tempest.

In "The Ultimate City" Ballard has left on the stage only the main characters, getting rid of the several courtier figures in Shakespeare's play (we have no individual equivalent of Alonso, Sebastian, Antonio, etc.); however, he moves some actions/situations from one character to another. We know that Prospero repeatedly procrastinates Ariel's liberation throughout The Tempest; even the last act closes with Prospero still giving Ariel orders and promising once again that he will set him free ("Then to the elements / Be free, and fare thou well" [5.1.318-319; emphasis added]). But in "The Ultimate City" this action is moved to Halloway/Ferdinand: it is the visionary teenager from Garden City who repeatedly promises Olds/Ariel that one day he will teach the dumb technician to fly. In other works by Ballard, flight usually represents a psychic redemption, a liberation from suffering, or a utopian opportunity (Rossi, "Images" 91-93); here too, by promising flight lessons that are never delivered, Halloway also promises to set Olds free from his condition of psychological suffering (probably triggered by the car accident). In actuality, Halloway soon loses interest in flight and the glider, maybe because they are part of the paternal light technologies of Garden City, hence much less interesting than the powerful, noisy, and violent machines to be reactivated in the metropolis. The flight lessons are just bait Halloway uses to make Olds cooperate in the urban renewal effort.

This means that Halloway, Ballard's avatar of Ferdinand, has "stolen" one of Prospero's characteristic actions. If we examine Halloway's role throughout the novelette, we have to admit that he quickly turns from Buckmaster's aide into the ruler of the island, if by "island" we mean the "self-sufficient neighbourhood" where the urban renewal takes place: an enclave which "contained the whole city in miniature" (905). The funeral pyramids designed by Buckmaster are abandoned, and all the available resources are devoted to Halloway's plan to resurrect at least a part of the dead metropolis. The young technophile, having appointed himself city commissioner (in opposition to Stillman's role as underworld boss), is obviously acting as the ruler of the reborn city (914); this means, of course, that he has usurped the role Buckmaster played in the first part of the novelette. While Ferdinand is a basically positive character in The Tempest, his avatar in "The Ultimate City" is undoubtedly more ambiguous from a moral point of view.

We could also read Halloway's ousting of Buckmaster as another act of rebellion against a patriarchal figure. Halloway rebels against his father by emigrating from Garden City and its soft technologies to the metropolis with its ghosts of sheer power and unlimited growth; but there he meets Buckmaster, who is another paternal figure after all. Though Buckmaster and Halloway Sr. stand for different technologies (and societies), they are both technocrats (the former is an architect, the latter an engineer), as in The Tempest Prospero and Alonso (Ferdinand's father) are both aristocrats. Ballard here departs from the Shakespearean model because there is no resurrection of Halloway Sr. (while Alonso, thought dead by Ferdinand, reunites with his son in 5.1.172-83). While Ferdinand respects the paternal authority of both Prospero and Alonso in the play, Halloway disobeys both his father and Buckmaster in the novelette, notwithstanding the latter's warnings about the dire consequence of the technologies that the teenager has resurrected with Olds and Stillman (914-15).

The outcome of the urban renewal project sets "The Ultimate City" apart from The Tempest. Prospero, with the help of Ariel and his books, manages to solve all the crises which occur on the island and balance the books in the end: he can return to Milan as Duke, having defeated or neutralized all the villains in the play (Caliban included) and secured the future with his daughter's marriage to the next King of Naples. But Halloway, once he has usurped the role of Prospero/Buckmaster, fails to control a mechanism that he does not fully understand and sees his technological island ravaged by the same destructive dynamics which brought the twentieth-century civilization based on fossil fuels and consumerism to its end. There is no happy end with a resolutive and auspicious wedding: Miranda leaves the metropolis with her father (one more exile for the old Duke), after having tried to eliminate the young usurper (919).

The coup staged by Stillman and his militia signals the ultimate failure of Halloway as governor of the technological island (918). A comparison of the relationship of the protagonist to the two opposite creatures of the island in The Tempest and "The Ultimate Island" is revealing. While in Shakespeare's play Prospero manages to control both Caliban and Ariel, Halloway fails to do so because Stillman rebels against him and tries to kill Olds. It is the black technician who defeats Stillman, burning him with the gasoline taken from cars' tanks (923), and then deserts Halloway, having learned how to fly, actually becoming airy like his Shakespearean predecessor.

Ballard, unlike Shakespeare, is not interested in such court conspiracies as the one hatched in The Tempest by Antonio and Sebastian, and the only real plot--i.e., Stillman's coup--is not supported by groups or individuals from outside the island (while Caliban, that we have posited as Stillman's equivalent in the play, asks for the help of Stephano and Trinculo, ineffectual as it may prove to be). There is a moment when Halloway's (then still) vicarious power on the technological island is threatened by external forces, and that is the episode of the invasion party, actually a rescue expedition from Garden City which reaches the center of the metropolis looking for Halloway. It is not a real menace, as the cycling rescue squad is easily routed with a display of stylized twentieth-century urban violence, a technological show which involves "cataract[s] of neon," "a babel of sound," and a "mock car chase" with Stillman and Halloway pursuing each other in a white limousine and a police car respectively (909-10). All the conspiracies in The Tempest are thus condensed in a single, comedic episode of the novelette.

Having defined what are the correspondences (and differences) between the two texts, we should now try to answer the fundamental question about "The Ultimate City": why did Ballard, who always expressed iconoclastic opinions about the tradition of English literature and literariness itself, rewrite one of the most canonical literary works in that tradition, that is, The Tempest, a distillation of Shakespeare's whole theatrical experience (Melchiori 620)?

I have read "The Ultimate City" as a rewriting of The Tempest in my 1994 article "Images from the Disaster Area," where I showed how the novelette was later recycled by Ballard in his 1981 novel Hello America. (8) The presence of Shakespeare in Ballard was acknowledged in 1998 by Michel Delville's monograph, one of the first academic book-length essays on the British writer (94-95). Curiously, Delville does not explicitly mention "The Ultimate City," maybe because he has developed an intuition contained in Gregory Stephenson's 1991 monograph Out of the Night and into the Dream, which had already applied The Tempest's characters scheme to three works by Ballard, (9) including the novelette we are reading.

Both Delville and Stephenson, however, draw from the earliest critical monograph on Ballard, David Pringle's Earth Is the Alien Planet (1979), where Stillman was already identified with Caliban and Olds with Ariel (45-46), and both were read as "figments from the depths of the protagonist's imagination" (46). Stephenson follows Pringle's interpretive approach, as he maintains that "Halloway's journey from his home to the old metropolis represents a journey into his own unconscious" (107). All these readings are archetypal, as they interpret Ballard's characters as psychological types, which may be superimposed over the Shakespearean characters because they also are representations or embodiments of those archetypal figures (this chimes in with Pringle's attempt to define those figures in the third chapter of his monograph, "The Lamia, the Jester and the King: Ballard's Characters"); both Pringle (49) and Stephenson (4-5) have been inspired by Jung. (10) Delville follows this interpretive line when he says that events and characters in Ballard's novels (especially in The Drowned World and The Drought) signify "a second order of correlated meanings whose universal resonance is reinforced by a number of biblical references and literary allusions," including those to The Tempest, so that in Ballard's fiction what is important are the "correspondences between the phenomenal world and the inner landscapes of the unconscious and subconscious mind" (10).

Delville also suggests another possible reading of the intertextual relation between Ballardian novels and Shakespearean plays (though, as we have already said, he does not mention "The Ultimate City"). He says that what we have in Concrete Island (and The Drought) is "a perverted treatment of motifs" (95), thus hinting at a parodic attitude in Ballard. Maybe his staging The Tempest in a forsaken metropolis is a way to mock at the Classic, another act of literary iconoclasm, consistent with the statements that we have quoted at the beginning of this essay. But these two readings are not compatible. If Ballard were just poking fun at Shakespeare--seen as the most established writer in English(-language) literature--could he at the same time acknowledge that the characters in The Tempest embody a-historical or transhistorical archetypes, whose permanent meaning he accepts? (11) Can a writer at the same time imply that Prospero the magician is an obsolete figure, superseded by Buckmaster the architect-engineer and Halloway the technological bricoleur, and that those 400-year-old characters nonetheless manifest eternal components of the human mind, so that we cannot get rid of them? (12)

However, Shakespeare and his Tempest are part of the novelette in such a way that we cannot ignore it: Ballard, as we have seen, has inserted textual elements that make the reference to the play unavoidable. We may read "The Ultimate City" as an apologue on the destiny of our consumerist civilization or as a meditation on the psychical impact of technology, but Ballard seems to be telling us that we cannot read it without taking The Tempest into account. We should then ask ourselves what aspect(s) of the play attracted Ballard, what the seventeenth-century text could offer the twentieth-century visionary.

I have already suggested that Ballard was interested in The Tempest as it was born in the same years of modernity itself ("Una riscrittura" 413). We know that the play was almost certainly staged for the first time in 1611. The year before, Galileo Galilei had published his essay Sidereus Nuncius, the first scientific publication based on observations made with a telescope. In 1609 Johannes Kepler had published Astronomia Nova, which presented the first two laws of planetary motion, which would be completed in 1619 by Harmonices Mundi, also introducing the third law. Francis Bacon's Novum Organum was published the next year. William Harvey announced the discovery of blood circulation in 1616, and Rene Descartes published Discourse on the Method in 1637, a text which revolutionized both philosophy and mathematics, as it introduced the coordinate system and paved the way for analytic geometry. These, and other discoveries which took place in those years, are the milestones of a cultural revolution which gave the West its technological and scientific superiority over other civilizations (especially in those fields that supported European colonial enterprises overseas, namely naval engineering, navigation, and military technologies) and fueled both the industrial revolutions and the European imperialism to come.

In my earlier comparison of Prospero with another warden of a quite different island, that is, Robinson Crusoe, who manages to control Friday (whose remarkable swiftness is Ariel-like ["Una riscrittura" 409]) and keep the Calibanesque cannibals at bay ("Una riscrittura" 411) thanks to his firearms and technological skills, I have highlighted the shift from magic to technology that takes place between Shakespeare and Defoe. It may then seem that Prospero the magician is not a modern figure, compared with the businesslike and pragmatic Puritan hero; Prospero may still have much in common with the occultists and esoterics of the Renaissance, from Pico della Mirandola to John Dee, and their literary avatar Faust. But Ian Watt persuasively shows us that the figure and story of Faust, Prospero's unfortunate colleague, can be read as a myth of modern individualism (ch. 1), and individualism is surely one of the main cultural and intellectual propulsive forces of modernity.

By using The Tempest as an overt subtext, Ballard shows us what has happened to the dream of unlimited growth and mastery over nature which was born in the very years of Shakespeare's life. The alpha and the omega of Western civilization as we know it today are thus conflated in a cautionary tale which shows us technology and its discontents: the novelette can then be read as strongly influenced by the rise of environmentalist concerns in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and its fictional future world has surely been shaped by the 1973 oil crisis (Rossi, "Una riscrittura" 413).

But this historical reading only explains a part of the implications of Ballard's choice to rewrite The Tempest. That interpretation must be complemented by a careful analysis of theatre and theatricality in the novelette; by coupling the exhibition of technology (and Halloway's techno-voyeurism) with the theatrical and metatheatrical dimension, we may understand not only what relevant "contents" are present in the novelette, but how those contents are articulated, or better ingrained, in the text. Saying that "The Ultimate City" talks about environment, especially the artificial environment of the metropolis, the forces which shaped it, and the mindset that generated it and was in turn generated by it, is simply not enough; literary criticism should explain, or try to explain, what textual devices enabled a writer to deliver his or her sermon (so to speak) in such an effective way. Critics may thus also interrogate just how much that "sermon" is conditioned by the devices (or tropes) that the writer has used and what ambiguities those devices may have generated. It was necessary to discuss The Tempest as a milestone in the making of the modern mind, and to summarize that analysis in this contribution (my earlier essay in Italian may not be accessible to many scholars due to the language barrier); but now we must turn our attention to the most important textual device in the novelette, which also comes from Shakespeare--even it if suffered a sea-change of sorts--that is, street theatre.

It is the text itself that suggests how we should read it: when the writer describes Stillman and the gang of teenage hoodlums he is gathering about him, which will ultimately turn into his private militia, he uses a tell-tale metaphor. "Clearly Stillman relished lording it over this entourage of wide-eyed teenagers and farm-bred youths, fitting them up with their gangster suits and weapons like a corrupt stage-director playing ironic games with a chorus of young actors. At times Halloway felt that he too was part of this sardonic man's devious entertainment" (911-12; emphasis added).

One cannot escape the feeling that this theatrical metaphor somewhat enfolds the whole novelette; also Halloway is part of it, because what he has been doing is, all in all, staging a piece of street theatre. Halloway has not really resurrected the whole old metropolis. The text clearly says that "he knew that the task of literally bringing back to life the whole of this huge metropolis was beyond the skills of even a hundred men like Olds," so he settles for a small-scale resurrection: "Adjoining the square was a cluster of side-streets that formed a self sufficient neighbourhood cut off from the fifty-storey buildings surrounding it [...] the working population of this city-in-miniature would have been more than 2000 in its heyday. [...] [A] hundred people like himself would be able to get most of the activities going again" (905).

So Halloway operates a strange kind of urban planning, based on an architectural synecdoche: the city-in-miniature will stand for the great metropolis, pars pro toto, (13) as a grandiose stage where the exciting and glamorous script of metropolitan life will be acted by Halloway's willing actors, the teenagers who will--like him--run away from the "quiet, civilized and anaemic people" of Garden City and the other eco-compatible towns (909). Like Stillman, Halloway is a corrupt stage-director: corrupt because he wants his peers to get rid of the environmentalist virtues fostered in Garden City. Like Stillman, he is playing ironic games with a chorus of young actors. The irony in his play is that his urban renewal project (or better, show) is doomed to destruction like the twentieth-century civilization--or stage--it is meant to represent. Devious entertainment indeed.

The display of metropolitan life which scares away the rescue expedition from Garden City (909-10) is a show-within-the-show, a scene in the gigantic play Halloway organizes in his city-in-miniature, that we can see as an island within the island where the abandoned metropolis stands. Halloway's "self sufficient neighborhood" is a concrete island, to quote the title of another work by Ballard, and it has the same metonymic relation of Prospero's magic island to the rest of the world: like Shakespeare's "wooden O" it is also a metaphor for the theatre as a place of representation. And Shakespeare scholars mostly agree that The Tempest is, possibly more than Hamlet, a metatheatrical text, a play on the theatre, where Prospero is a gifted stage-director (14) who can "manipulate and manage the world of human feelings" (Melchiori 622; translation mine).

This is why Ballard "needed" The Tempest as his subtext, even though he completely disrupts the optimistic plot of Shakespeare's play by editing out the redemptive marriage between Miranda and Ferdinand. Ballard was interested in the play-within-the-play, in the many theatrical simulations Prospero may stage with the help of Ariel and his magic, in the masque of act 4. Halloway's project of urban renewal can be seen as a techno-masque where cars, neon signs, supermarkets, and designer clothes play the role that the Greek goddesses Juno, Ceres, Iris, and "certain nymphs" played in Shakespeare's allegorical show. Obviously the masque within The Tempest celebrates life, fertility, and reproduction, while Halloway's techno-masque is based on stylized violence, consumerism, and psychopathology, but we have already said that Halloway, like Stillman, is "playing ironic games" on his urban stage.

Surely the technological means available to the King's Men in Jacobite London were quite different from the technological mirabilia that Olds revives in the novelette, from electric appliances to car engines, to all the devices used by Halloway to scare the rescue expedition: generators, arc-lights, neon signs, loudspeakers, and the electric grid itself. But this is the brave new world of the twentieth century, recreated to rout the meek dwellers of the eco-compatible towns and lure their bored children. Halloway's theatre is postmodernist: he and Stillman do not recite a lofty, lyrical monologue in resounding iambic pentameters like Hamlet, Macbeth, or Prospero, but stage a "mock car chase," something out of those American road movies that Ballard loved so much (910). (15) This technological performance is an act of mass-media bricolage, where media-derived materials are recycled and reassembled in complex, multidimensional textual collages.

This form of street theatre is not only the artistic choice of a writer who wishes to exploit the rich textual resonances of a structure based on the mise-en-abyme. Ballard suggests that street theatre is part of what we call reality today. Commenting on Marcus Sarjeant's mock attempt on Queen Elizabeth II in 1981, the writer says,

There was the Queen in a fantasy/fancy dress uniform followed by all these real soldiers dressed up in costume to look like 17th century soldiers, being fired on by a man with a replica pistol! Wonderful piece of street theater. [...] How could you possibly have arrested a young man for doing that? [...] If you held up a sign with the word "Pistol" on it, would that constitute an offense? [...] Or a sign saying "Assassination"? Does the sign itself constitute an offense? ("Interview" 7)

Such an interference between real life and replica objects, that is, simulations, things that "are in appearance identical to the real thing" ("Interview" 7; emphasis in original), is one of those ontological short-circuits which have been discussed by Baudrillard and many other theorists of postmodern or late-modern society. In fact Halloway's urban renewal is nothing less and nothing more than the production (or reproduction) of an urban simulacrum, a hyperreal environment whose ultra-fast growth and decay deliberately mirrors the fast life of so many modern cities, from the mushroom towns of the second Industrial Revolution to Shenzhen.

Among these modern metropolises, we should also include Shanghai, Ballard's birthplace, "one of the largest cities in the world [...], 90 per cent Chinese and 100 per cent Americanised" as it is described in Ballard's compact autobiography Miracles of Life, published in 2008 (4). Halloway's street theatre resembles the Shanghai that the British writer also depicts in Empire of the Sun and his 1991 autofiction The Kindness of Women: "[w]ith its newspapers in every language and scores of radio stations, Shanghai was a media city before its time, celebrated as the Paris of the Orient and the 'wickedest city in the world'" (Miracles 4-5). A media city just like the city-in-miniature staged by Halloway, whose chaotic, savagely vital character chimes in with this description of Shanghai's street life:

Everywhere I turned, a cruel and lurid world surged around me. Shanghai lived above all on the street, the beggars showing their wounds, the gangsters and pickpockets, the dying rattling their Craven A tins, the Chinese dragon ladies in ankle-length mink coats who terrified me with their stares, the hawkers wok-frying delicious treats [...], starving peasant families and thousands of con-men and crooks. (Miracles 29)

To summarize all of this urban environment, Ballard finds no better phrase than "street spectacle" (Miracles 25). The wickedest city in the world of his childhood, repeatedly recreated in his fiction and non-fiction, is also a media city which thrives on the mass-media representation of itself, and on a vortex of mass-media materials: radio programs, films, newsreels, newspapers and magazines, American comics and cartoons, British children's adventure and fantasy books, the stylized violence of American hell drivers, and the real violence of terrorist bombings--superimposed on the endless street spectacle--play a strategic role in Ballard's imaginative education as it is told in the first part of Miracles of Life.

Thus, Halloway recreating the morbid thrill and glamor of metropolitan life is also Ballard recreating the overexcited atmosphere of Shanghai in the 1930s. This takes us once more to Shakespeare and his Tempest, as many interpret Prospero to be the Bard himself and that the final speech of the old sorcerer is the epilogue of both the play and Shakespeare's theatrical career (or as such has been understood by generations of readers and spectators, though scholars remind us that The Tempest was almost surely followed by The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII).

This metatextual dimension, once we understand its workings, can be also found in earlier Ballardian works. For example, it is quite important in The Atrocity Exhibition, where most of the hallucinatory presentation of media materials is usually in the form of lists of heterogeneous images and texts offering surrealistic juxtapositions. The "terminal documents" collected by Travis in the first page of the book, the paragraph called "Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown" (9), are devised by an enigmatic character whose name changes in every story of the collection (e.g., Travis, Talbot, and Traven). A patient in an asylum, or a psychiatrist who works there, the T-Cell (Luckhurst 86) or T-Man is another media bricoleur like Halloway. His ability to envision the innermost drives of his tormented psyche in the images circulated by the media or to read World War III as "the final self-destruction and imbalance of an asymmetric world, the last suicidal spasm of the dextro-rotatory helix, DNA" (Atrocity 14), is similar to the young man's ability to resurrect the deceased world of high-tech and consumerism through the staging of its urban myths, icons, and neuroses. An exhibition, one should remember, is an act of showing--a show, just like the street theatre managed by Halloway.

A comparison of "The Ultimate City" and The Atrocity Exhibition may also tell us something about the morbid relation between Ferdinand/Halloway and Caliban/Stillman. In the earlier text (more a collection of interrelated stories than a traditional novel), there is a similar relation between Dr. Nathan, the dispassionate psychiatrist who studies the case of the T-cell and observes his deviant practices, and the T-cell itself, which seems to be the prey of his obsessions and drives. The T-cell can then be read as an alter-ego of Nathan, who fictionally embodies the author of the text, Ballard himself; Ballard may thus experience the deviant acts and often self-destructive acts of his character, the T-cell, in a vicarious fashion. Such a dynamics of experience by proxy was surely not invented by Ballard, but his version of the relation between author and character is interesting inasmuch as it is exhibited, or better staged, by placing Dr. Nathan, a representation of the author as a detached observer (and also deeply involved voyeur), near the T-cell, the embodiment of all the repressed drives of the writer.

The distance between author and character is shortened in Ballard's next work, Crash, and the metatexual game is made more overt, we might even say exhibitionistic; the street theatre of car accidents as a form of metropolitan sexual perversion, actually staged by Vaughan (also in Cronenberg's 1996 film version), also includes James Ballard, who is a character of the novel and its narrator. The sexual intercourse between Ballard the character and Vaughan, the street performer of technophiliac events, marks a moment of tell-tale intimacy between author and character. Through the disturbing sex scene of chapter 21--which is not a homosexual coitus but an act of narcissistic interpenetration--Ballard tells us how deeply he is involved in the perverse techno-sexual imagination displayed in the novel; he tells us that the spectacle of technologized death we are offered by car crashes is not one that may simply be observed with rational detachment.

Such a detachment, needless to say, is totally absent in "The Ultimate City." Halloway does not pretend to be a mere observer or a witness, but takes part in the street theatre, as its director and one of its actors. On the other hand, Stillman is at the same time Halloway's antagonist and his most reliable accomplice, as he helps Halloway to stage his dream of lurid power and violence, and he provides this synecdoche of the twentieth century with its darker side--a side that Halloway can only get rid of after the utter failure of his surrealistic project of urban renewal. In terms of the Shakespearean subtext, Ferdinand has not only usurped Prospero; he also befriends Caliban and alienates Ariel.

All this tells us that the theatrical metaphor in "The Ultimate City" is another chapter of the evolution of the figure or trope of the screen in Ballard, a key metaphor that has been proposed by the Italian critic Andrea Cortellessa (123-29). Ballardian fictions work like screens, screening unpleasant and problematic memories to protect the scarred mind of the writer, but at the same time screening disturbingly fascinating images of violence and destruction, just like the disappeared cinema screens that mesmerized an English boy in the late 1930s with their visions of a war to come--an image we find at the beginning of Empire of the Sun. The couple of characters we have found in the two works of the 1970s, that is, Dr. Nathan/T-cell and Ballard/Vaughan, can both be said to perform such a protective/exhibitionistic screening function. The same may be said for Halloway's theatrical project of urban renewal: Ballard's alter ego stages the twentieth-century metropolis, a psychogeographic location which is at the same time disturbing and fascinating. It is through this fictional street theatre that Ballard could safely access it, with all its glamor, contradictions, and ineliminable threats.

If what precedes the 1976 novelette may help us to understand what may have led Ballard to access Shakespeare's most metatheatrical play, what follows that date may show us instead a fundamental difference between The Tempest and "The Ultimate City." Even though the play was not Shakespeare's last work, it is generally read as his swansong; there is no doubt that it is his last major theatrical and literary achievement. On the other hand, Ballard's career does not stop after his novelette, because it is followed by ten novels, another novelette, an autobiography, and scores of short stories and essays. Among these we find some of his most important works: Hello America, Empire of the Sun, The Kindness of Women, Super-Cannes (2000), Kingdom Come (2006), and Miracles of Life.

If "The Ultimate City" was not Ballard's terminus, it was however a more important turning point than has been acknowledged so far. Interestingly, it is followed by works with a stronger autobiographical component. The surrealistic novel The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) is a vision (in a Blakean sense) (16) of Ballard's own life in Shepperton (the London suburb where the writer lived from 1960 to his death and where this surrealistic novel is set). Hello America, whose second part (the one set in Las Vegas) is evidently a rewriting of "The Ultimate City," is at the same time a science-fictional travel across a future, abandoned America and an exploration of the myths, symbols, and icons that the United States has been exporting since its birth--among which there is the idea/obsession of unlimited growth and consumer society which haunts "The Ultimate City"--so that Wayne, the protagonist, can be seen as another self-portrait of the author, exploring (and retelling) the core of the American Dream/Nightmare. Then we have Empire of the Sun, a strongly autobiographical novel set in Shanghai, and presenting its readers with war-torn China in the 1940s. (17)Thus, "The Ultimate City" that we have read as a portrait of the artist as a young visionary paves the way for Ballard's autobiographical experiments, which include some of his most important book-length works. It is then interesting to notice that in these works Ballard does not need a strong deuteragonist (who may also appear as an antagonist), like the T-cell in Atrocity, Vaughan in Crash, or Stillman in the novelette we have analyzed. The repeated staging of his dreams and nightmares seems to have brought with itself a renewed awareness of what lay on the other side of the screen, thus triggering that process of narrative appropriation of personal experience (Rossi, "Mind") whose stages are Empire of the Sun, The Kindness of Women, and Miracles of Life.

In conclusion, that Ballard needed an immersion in Shakespeare's The Tempest to find charms, spirits, and art to weave his subsequent narrative webs is proof of the simple fact that no writer is an island. Literature is a network of texts, or a hypertext, something that T. S. Eliot had suggested well before the invention of the World Wide Web; (18) though Shakespeare's and Ballard's texts are set on an island, these literary spaces are far from isolated. The island in both works may well be an image of the country both writers belong to (though Ballard's birthplace was Shanghai), because we all should be aware, thanks to Carlo Ginzburg, that whenever islands are conjured up in British fiction, it is the mother island of Great Britain that is evoked--like all islands, including Prospero's and Halloway's, a synecdoche of the whole, not so vast world we live in.

Works Cited

Auden, W. H. "The Sea and the Mirror." 1944. Selected Poems. Ed. Edward

Mendelson. London: Faber, 1984. 127-75. Print. Ballard, J. G. The Atrocity Exhibition: With Author's Annotations. San Francisco:

RE/Search, 1990. Print.

--. "Ballard's Anatomy: An Interview by Paul Di Filippo." Science Fiction Eye 8

(Winter 1991): 64-75. Print.

--. "The Bear of Little Brain." A User's Guide 119-20.

--. Crash. 1973. London: Paladin, 1990. Print.

--. "Interview by A. Juno & Vale." J. G. Ballard. Ed. V. Vale and Andrea Juno. San Francisco: RE/Search, 1984. 42-35. Print.

--. "J. G. Ballard." Search & Destroy: Rebel Youth Culture 10 (1978): 20-21. Print.

--. J. G. Ballard's Quotes. Ed. V. Vale and Mike Ryan. San Francisco: RE/Search, 2004. Print.

--. "Memories of Greeneland." 1978. A User's Guide 137-39.

--. "Memories of James Joyce." 1990. A User's Guide 145.

--. Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton. London: Fourth Estate, 2008. Print.

--. "'Pure Imagination, the Most Potent Hallucinogen of All': JG Ballard Talks with Sebastian Shakespeare." The Literary Review (Nov. 2001): 18-22. Print.

--. "A Response to the Invitation to Respond." Science-Fiction Studies 18.3 (1991): 329. Print.

--. "Sci-Fi Seer: Interviewed by Lynn Barber." Penthouse: The Magazine for Men May 1970: 26-30. Print.

--. "Speculative Illustrations: Eduardo Paolozzi in Conversation with J. G. Ballard and Frank Whitford." Studio International 182.937 (Oct. 1971): 136-43. Print.

--. "The Ultimate City." 1976. The Complete Short Stories. London: Flamingo, 2001. 873-924. Print.

--. A User's Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews. New York: Picador, 1996. Print.

Baxter, Jeannette. J. G. Ballard: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. London: Continuum, 2008. Print.

--. J. G. Ballard's Surrealist Imagination: Spectacular Authorship. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Print.

Bevington, David. "The Tempest in Performance." The Tempest. Shakespeare. New York: Bantam, 1988. xxv-xxxv. Print.

Burns, Alan, and Charles Sugnet. The Imagination on Trial: British and American Writers Discuss Their Working Methods. London/New York: Allison and Busby, 1981. Print.

Cortellessa, Andrea. "Sugli Schermi: Burri, Ballard, Cronenberg (parte II)." Ipso Facto 1.3 (1999): 107-29. Print.

Delville, Michel. J. G. Ballard. Plymouth: Northcote, 1998. Print.

Eliot, T. S. "Tradition and the Individual Talent." 1919. Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. London: Faber, 1975. 37-44. Print.

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

Ginzburg, Carlo. No Island Is an Island: Four Glances at English Literature in a World Perspective. Trans. John Tedeschi. New York: Columbia UP, 2000. Print.

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

Melchiori, Giorgio. Shakespeare: Genesi e struttura delle opere. Bari: Laterza, 2000. Print.

Oramus, Dominika. Grave New World. Warsaw: U of Warsaw, 2007. Print.

Pringle, David. Earth Is the Alien Planet: J. G. Ballard's Four-Dimensional Nightmare. San Bernardino: Borgo, 1979. Print.

Rossi, Umberto. "Images from the Disaster Area: An Apocalyptic Reading of Urban Landscapes in Ballard's The Drowned World and Hello America." Science-Fiction Studies 21.1 (1994): 81-97. Print.

--. "A Little Something about Dead Astronauts." Science Fiction Studies 36.1 (2009): 101-20. Print.

--. "Mind Is the Battlefield: Reading Ballard's 'Life Trilogy' as War Literature." Baxter, J. G. Ballard: Contemporary 66-77.

--. "Una riscrittura Shakespeariana di James G. Ballard." Shakespeare e il Novecento. Ed. Agostino Lombardo. Roma: Bulzoni, 2002. 393-416. Print.

Stephenson, Gregory. Out of the Night and into the Dream: A Thematic Study of the Fiction of J. G. Ballard. New York: Greenwood, 1991. Print.

Watt, Ian. Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Print.

Yates, Frances Amelia. The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age. London: Routledge, 1979. Print.

Notes

This article could not have been written without the help of the JGB mailing list at Yahoo! Groups and the cooperation of David Pringle, Mike Holliday, and Rick McGrath (whose Web site <http://www.jgballard.ca/> contains the texts of several Ballard interviews).

(1.) These include Luckhurst's The Angle Between Two Walls, Delville's J. G. Ballard, Gasiorek's J. G. Ballard, Oramus's Grave New World, and Baxter's J. G. Ballard's Surrealist Imagination: Spectacular Authorship.

(2.) Some of the papers presented there were included in the collection of essays J. G. Ballard: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Jeannette Baxter.

(3.) We might add to this collection of memorable statements Ballard's ironic and amusing "A Response to the Invitation to Respond," in which--asked to answer Baudrillard's essays on his oeuvre and some American critics' remarks--he ended with the warning, "I fear you are trapped inside your dismal jargon" (329).

(4.) Because Ballard did have a relation to that tradition, there were writers he respected and praised. However, most of them were closely related to sf, the genre that the Shepperton visionary practiced in the first phase of his literary career, roughly 1956-81, and two of them stand out: George Orwell and Aldous Huxley (Quotes 87). To those two authors we should add another novelist who played an important role in Ballard's apprentice years (1956-62)--Graham Greene--surely not, in those years, a canonized writer for English academia.

(5.) The text used by Strehler was Agostino Lombardo's Italian translation of the play; since Lombardo was one of the leading Italian Shakespeare academic scholars at that time, it is likely that Strehler's metatheatrical interpretation owes to Lombardo's scholarship.

(6.) The surname of the character obviously hints at a historical figure (as it often happens in Ballard's fiction), American architect and inventor Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), famous for his geodesic spheres.

(7.) For the issue of magic in The Tempest and its historical background, see Yates's The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age. Though magic is often unleashed by Ariel, we must not forget that the airy spirit is always at Prospero's orders, e.g., when he conjures the storm (1.2.175-85). Prospero's power over Ariel is based on the old magician's powers (which allow him, for example, to subjugate Ferdinand without any help from Ariel; 1.2.469-96).

(8.) This article was an enhanced version of a previous essay published in Italy in 1992; at that time I was not aware that the issue had already been discussed, as we shall see, by non-academic critics.

(9.) These include The Drought (Stephenson 54) and Concrete Island (Stephenson 79-80).

(10.) Stephenson also refers to Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell, and Northrop Frye as guiding lights of his critical effort (3-6), three scholars who, like Jung, focused on myth and mythology--a field where archetypes are well at home.

(11.) Though Ballard has usually acknowledged Freud as a powerful influence on his narratives, Jung is also present, for example in the recurring images of mandalas, the Buddhist and Hinduist concentric diagram playing an important role in Jung's psychoanalytical theories.

(12.) Gasiorek's reading of "The Ultimate City," so far the most detailed analysis available in English, privileges the psychical dimension though it offers just a brief acknowledgement of the Shakespearean subtext (129), being more interested in the relation of Ballard to "early modernist technophiles" (i.e., the Italian Futurists, mentioned earlier in Gasiorek's monograph [22]) and Freud's Civilization and its Discontents (131). Oramus also reads "The Ultimate City" focusing more on its metropolitan setting than its Shakespearean echoes. Following Delville, she posits The Tempest as Ballard's "favorite intertext" (147). Oramus's use of the term intertext in this context may be puzzling, but here "intertext" should probably be read as "subtext." All in all, these interpretations are animated more by contemporary concerns--such as the destructive drives in the metropolitan mindset and the contrast between environmental consciousness (and conscience) and technophiliac hubris (or recklessness)--than by Shakespeare, born in a still agrarian England, and his oeuvre.

(13.) The abandoned metropolis is itself a synecdoche for the extinct civilization it belonged to.

(14.) Or playwright, if we accept Melchiori's suggestion that Ariel is an image of the stage-director (620).

(15.) Ballard mentions some of these films in the 1990 annotated edition of The Atrocity Exhibition: "Some of the best American thrillers have been set in the desert: The Getaway, The Hitcher, Charley Varrick, Blood Simple" (82). In all these films (as well as in Sarafian's Vanishing Point, mentioned by Ballard in a 1978 interview ["J. G. Ballard" 20]) there are remarkable car chase scenes, perfectly tuned in to the car fetishism in Crash.

(16.) No wonder then that the protagonist's name is Blake. Characters' names in Ballard often have a symbolic value (Rossi, "A Little" 103n5, 109n13).

(17.) Other elements tie "The Ultimate City" with Empire in particular. In the novel, Ballard offers a heavily fictionalized narrative of his detention in the Lunghua concentration camp, where his parents are totally absent; it is then interesting to notice that Halloway is an orphan. He has thus an important feature in common with Shanghai Jim, Ballard's alter ego in Empire. Moreover, Empire of the Sun is also an "empire of the son," as it is a protracted projection of Jim's imagination on the war's dire realities. That is another act of postmodernist, media-fed imagination, like Halloway's urban renewal (Delville 67, 73). Needless to say, what can be literal and somewhat objectified in an sf novelette must be presented as reverie in a realistic novel like Empire.

(18.) In his celebrated essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," tradition, the "ideal order" among existing literary monuments, "is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them," so that tradition is transformed by Eliot into an open-ended system, quite different from any authoritarian and exclusive canon (38).
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