A 'Clock Less Urgent': Work, Leisure and Time in J. G. Ballard's The Drowned World and Vermilion Sands
A 'Clock Less Urgent': Work, Leisure and Time in J. G. Ballard's The Drowned World and Vermilion Sands

Summary/Abstract: This article proposes that the deliberate complication of time in J. G. Ballard’s early fiction—specifically Vermilion Sands and The Drowned World—responds to a certain shift in midtwentieth-century evaluations of work and leisure. It suggests that the characters who populate Ballard’s early fictions can be read as displaced and disorientated late-capitalist subjects, whose experience of time is transformed by the ‘weird’ temporality of the landscapes in which they find themselves. Written at a time when many were concerned about a post-industrial future and the resulting “sudden onrush of leisure,” Ballard’s fictions go beyond a simple critique of what an all-permissive leisure society might look like. Instead, they prod and unsettle the notion of linear time and, by doing so, force us to confront linear time and, by doing so, force us to confront the essential weirdness of what we consider to be a ‘normal’.

• Details
• Contents