The Tumorous Concrete Island: Sensing the Beginning of the End Through J.G. Ballard's Concrete Island

It has pleased Nature so to make us that we attain happiness only by way of pain.

—The Marquis De Sade (2014)

The sensations inflicted by sadists are similar to jolts of shock, some painful and some pleasurable. Intense pain foretells the body's destruction alongside its radical transformation, such that the body in pain is itself an object of novelty, one to be inspected with pleasure.

Months before the publication of Concrete Island in 1974, J.G. Ballard had a near-death experience in the form of a car crash in Chiswick, near the re-developed area of Westway, London. He later included versions of the accident in his novels as everyday urban disasters that no amount of careful urban planning could prevent. To put matters into perspective, the project to modernize London began during the Second World War, although the first Docklands redevelopment plans were not introduced to the public until 1972. These plans sped up considerably between "the end of the old labour project in 1945 and the beginning of the Thatcher era in 1979" (Gasiorek 2005, 118). By 1981, the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) exerted considerable control over the city's river line, which extended eastward to Canary Wharf. When Ballard was at his most prolific, the London landscape had already become chameleonic in appearance, so much so that writing modern London was akin to tracing the untraceable. By virtue of its ephemeral spatiality, London was stimulating to literary "sensation-seekers" intrigued less by the city's outward prosperity, but more so by palpable signs of its impending ruin. Ballard was contemplating London's apocalyptic prospects as early as in the 1960s when he published The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1964), and The Crystal World (1966), and he persisted in the endeavor well into the 1970s. Concrete Island was published in 1974, Crash in 1973, and High Rise in 1975: the three volumes are collectively known as Ballard's urban disaster trilogy, wherein disasters are refreshing distractions from the concrete "texture of modernity[,]" built "not for man, but for man's absence" (Groes 2011, 124).

Modernity is represented in Ballard's writings as a vertical spatial structure. According to Groes,

High-Rise takes us up into the life of a tower block for the well-off middle classes, a vertical city 'abandoned in the sky' (7); indeed, the original title proposed by Ballard for the novel was Up!. Concrete Island, meanwhile, takes us down in an equally vertiginous cognitive experience. The trilogy thus loosely but consciously re-enacts the classic Dantean structure of The Divine Comedy's three canticles: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso (1314; 1315; 1321). Crash is a novel that discovers a new celestial city in the peripheral zones of the metropolis, where the protagonist observes how the minutiae of suburban life falter…. One way in which Ballard's trilogy can be read is as an attempt to translate postmodern spatiality into classical, human structures by inducing specific sensory reading experiences.

(Groes 2011, 124)

In Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, time is at once rooted in the external reality and enmeshed in private selves, in their memories and impressions. However, the literary spatial turn has demonstrated that spatiality is no less adept than temporality at eliding the external and the internal, the public and the private, for there exists between the mind and the world a newfound rapport—in Ballard's late-twentieth-century urban fiction a sensuous state of being (or what I will call "a worldliness"), one especially attuned to the titillating aspects of our material surroundings. Concrete Island specifically attests to an irrevocable surrender to the apocalyptic chronotope, such that the hitherto "indissoluble unity" (Bakhtin qtd. in Gomel 2010, 188) between time and space wanes, and spatiality becomes the more viable medium for imagining post-apocalyptic disasters. Apocalyptic time unleashes "the horror of the Tribulations[,]" (Gomel 2010, 188), endangering one's ability to reason by exposing one to a milieu of violent shock. But this impairment at the individual level will also necessitate...