The Unlimited Dream Company de James Graham Ballard : un espace surréaliste pour dénoncer la catastrophe du contemporain

• Main Author: Smeralda Cappello
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2014-11-01
• Series: Études Britanniques Contemporaines
• Subjects: James Graham Ballard; space; imagination; surrealism; simulacrum; catastrophe
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/1786

Space, in The Unlimited Dream Company, is treated by a surrealist approach: modern-life’s empty and desolated places, the same that Ballard experimented in Shepperton—paradigm of nowhere—,are filled with a fabulous world. In the land of dehumanized urban spaces suddenly appear lush forests, where Blake, the protagonist, acts, crossing dream and reality, life and death, lucidity and hallucination. Imagination is a creative and destructive force that is central in the novel. It lets Blake—who is almost a superhuman entity—transform reality, by leaving the familiar and reassuring world of experience to join the exotic universe of dream and desire. Now, according to Ballard, dreams, desires, visionary states actually are the only way through which a transcendental absolute, unknown to mankind, expresses itself. Humankind is imprisoned in a temporal and material universe, killing imagination and making life a nightmare: the only way to survive is by taking part in the schizophrenic insanity of the contemporary world. The space that we experiment every day is a closed one. Wishing to free man from his oppressions, Ballard discredits the conventional world. Like surrealist theories, supposed to let the masks of reality fall down, this novel denounces the illusion of the material world and asserts that physical space is a simulacrum, behind which some surreality is hidden and needs to be interpreted. It is through imagination that the reality hidden behind the icons of society can be revealed. Space is so configured like an open and unlimited area, capable to adjust itself to the imaginative thinking of all people.