Shakespearean reincarnations: an intertextual reading of J. G. Ballard's "The Ultimate City"

J. G. Ballard's iconoclastic opinions on English literature notwithstanding, one of his most interesting works, the 1976 novelette "The Ultimate City," is quite evidently a science-fictional rewriting of Shakespeare's The Tempest. This essay aims at understanding why Ballard felt...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of the fantastic in the arts 2008-09, Vol.19 (3), p.363
Main Author: Rossi, Umberto
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Dramatists
Playwrights
Urban renewal
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:J. G. Ballard's iconoclastic opinions on English literature notwithstanding, one of his most interesting works, the 1976 novelette "The Ultimate City," is quite evidently a science-fictional rewriting of Shakespeare's The Tempest. This essay aims at understanding why Ballard felt he had to tackle the Shakespearean tragicomedy; its basic interpretive hypothesis is that the British author exploited the metatextual frame of the play (which is an anamorphic image of theatre itself, with Prospero as a self-portrait of the author as a dramatist and stage director) to stage his own narrative act. "The Ultimate City" shows us Ballard building and managing his favorite "street theatre" of stylized violence and metropolitan life through a fictional alter ego, Halloway, trapped in an ironic project of urban renewal. Such a project, taking place in a small part of a decaying metropolis, is a synecdoche of both twentieth-century technologized civilization and Ballard's own fictional world--just as The Tempest has been read as a distillation of Shakespeare's dramaturgy.
ISSN:0897-0521