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Three: In the Artificial Gardens of Eden-Olympia
- Fordham University Press
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t h r e e In the Artificial Gardens of Eden-Olympia All this alienation . . . I could get easily used to it. — j a n e i n j . g . b a l l a r d , Super-Cannes J. G. Ballard’s business park for the technocratic elite, Eden-Olympia, has its own grinning Cheshire cat, a psychiatrist by the name of Dr. Wilder Penrose, whose ‘‘grimace of pleasure seemed to migrate around his face, colonizing new areas of amiability’’ (171). Penrose oversees the general well-being of the talented and highly paid workaholics who comprise the population of this ‘‘virtual city conjured into the pine-scented air like a sonet -lumière vision of a new Versailles’’ (8)—a ‘‘humane version of Corbusier’s radiant city’’ (5). As such, Penrose takes it upon himself to engineer a suitable set of living arrangements for this highly concentrated form of postmodern community, whose citizens are ‘‘an order of computer-literate nuns, committed to the sanctity of the workstation and the pieties of the spreadsheet’’ (8), as well as willing participants in ‘‘a huge experiment in how to hothouse the future’’ (15). The corporate wonderland of Eden-Olympia also has its own Alice, in this case a middle-aged Englishman by the name of Paul Sinclair. Paul nar70 In the Artificial Gardens of Eden-Olympia 71 rates his attempts to respond to the riddles behind a massacre perpetrated by the distinguished Dr. David Greenwood, who had inexplicably jolted the tranquil complex only a month earlier. Moving from one enigmatic encounter to the next, Paul tries to put the pieces of the puzzle together, wondering what it is about this sterile environment that would lead a man noted for being a humanitarian activist to go on such a murderous rampage. As Paul notes, ‘‘It surprised me that he had seen enough of his colleagues to dislike them, let alone set about killing them’’ (39). Paul’s young wife, Jane—more explicitly flagged by the book as an Alice figure—has the unenviable job of replacing the murderer: living in his house and using his office1 —or rather, following the logic of Eden-Olympia, living in his office and using his house, since, in this place, the human body is ‘‘an obedient coolie, to be fed and hosed down, and given just enough sexual freedom to sedate itself’’ (17). Dr. Greenwood’s massacre is ultimately understood to be one of the negative effects of living in one of Marc Augé’s ‘‘non-places,’’ a spatial symptom of what this theorist calls supermodernity.2 For in Eden-Olympia, ‘‘the vanguard of a new world-aristocracy’’ (115) begin to simply ‘‘float free of themselves’’ (116). Since the inhabitants spend most of their time hunched over gene-splicing equipment or stock market figures, there are no energies to spare for anger, jealousy, racial prejudice and the more mature reflections that follow. There are none of the social tensions that force us to recognize other people’s strengths and weaknesses, our obligations to them or feelings of dependence. At Eden-Olympia there’s no interplay of any kind, none of the emotional trade-offs that give us our sense of who we are. (255) This asocial automatism has its seductive side, and Paul’s wife soon joins her colleagues by ‘‘keying in the emotions she would feel that day, the memories to be cued . . . the whole programme laced with sardonic asides’’ (89). Paul becomes increasingly concerned about the effect the business complex is having on Jane and attempts to resist the sinister effects of this particular ‘‘community of those who have no community.’’ He watches himself watching a nurse attending to his injured knee, acknowledging ‘‘that I had the strong sense that we were friends who had known each other for years. Yet I had forgotten her face within seconds of leaving her’’ (39). Similarly, the ‘‘inept femme fatale’’ Frances Baring confesses, ‘‘That’s the trouble with Eden-Olympia—you can’t remember if you once had sex with someone’’ (114). Living in glass houses does not breed the paranoia that we might [34.205.246.61] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:12 GMT) 72 Love and Other Technologies expect, but a sense of anonymity, even invisibility. So, when Paul complains to one of the security men, ‘‘There’s no civic sense here,’’ he is gently contradicted , with a gesture toward a nearby surveillance camera. ‘‘Think of it as a new kind...