Mapping The Drowned World (original) (raw)

2017, Cartographic Perspectives

Mapping The Drowned World Climate-change is the new Cold War. Like the omnipresent threat of nuclear annihilation, climate-change looms in the background, a constant insidious threat: imminent and inexorable, yet ill defined. Written in 1962, during the perpetual slowburning crisis of the Cold War, J.G. Ballard's novel The Drowned World reads like an uncanny premonition of the key crisis of our current age: climate-change. As a bridge between the postwar apocalyptic fears of the recent past and current eschatological anxieties, this allegorical work of fiction is a rich source of information. Mapping The Drowned World is driven by the research question: what can we learn about our world by re-reading, rewriting and re-interpreting The Drowned World through the lens of art? This three-pronged methodology has generated three suites of artworks: a series of maps, and two major installations in the form of ruined scalemodel cities. In addition, a group exhibition which featured some of these works, alongside works made by five other Australian artists, was staged and documented in a catalogue, also titled Mapping The Drowned World. The written content of this research includes several new analyses of The Drowned World, critiques of the artworks made as part of this project and works made by other artists, and an original interstitial chapter for the novel which recuperates the only female character in The Drowned World. Together, both the creative and written components of this research contribute new knowledge to three fields: scholarship on J.G. Ballard, including contemporary artworks made in direct response to his stories; the field of critical cartography, both textual and visual; and works which respond to eschatological anxiety. 10 visions of the future; The Atrocity Exhibition, 1970, and other efforts in radical short fiction; Crash, 1973, an experiment in technophilic porn; his meditations on the dystopian present such as High Rise, 1975, and Kingdom Come, 2006; and his most conventional novel, Empire of the Sun, 1984, which even gained widespread mainstream readership and won major literary prizes. 12 Ballard has been described, among other things, as "the seer of Shepperton", 13 a "poet of death" 14 and "the most reluctant of messiahs". 15 Ballard's own obsessiveness 16 is echoed in the obsessive devotion of his wide range of fans, a diverse group which includes sci-fi geeks, self-styled Ballard experts and university sanctioned academic scholars. Which is not to say that Ballard doesn't have his detractors. Critics who admire Ballard spend a great deal of time defending him against those who don't. An example that gets quoted (and refuted) frequently is English critic Duncan Fallowell's particularly vitriolic 1977 review of Ballard's collection of short stories, Low-Flying Aircraft. Fallowell berated Ballard for being a "prophet of doom" who himself profits from his visions of catastrophe and encourages others to wallow in fantasies of disaster. 17 Fallowell also accused Ballard of creating poorly sketched, one-dimensional, sexist characters utilising prose that is conventional at best. American author H. Bruce