ABSTRACT

This paper offers a comparative analysis of J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, The Kindness of Women, and Miracles of Life in their engagements with the psychological theory of Carl Jung. The first half of the paper explores Jung’s suggestions that psychology is to some extent ethnically determined and Eastern and Western consciousness in many ways antonymous. Challenging this view, Empire resists essentialist notions of psychology which argue that the individual psyche is in part separate from the social environment in which it forms. In Empire individual psychology changes with changing power relations and is unable to escape imperialist systems of thought. In this manner, the novel resists national and ethnic categories for the understanding of human psychology, and instead turns its focus to the effect of political structures on mental activity and self-conception. Turning from Empire to Kindness and Miracles, the second part of the paper reads Ballard’s broader fictional and nonfictional autobiographies for their representation of memory as a radically constructive function of mind. In this manner, Ballard’s autobiographical projects foreground the slippage between fact and fiction in the process of remembering, and challenge the conception of mind as an inelastic or deterministic structure.

摘要

本文对巴拉德的《太阳帝国》、《女人的善良》和《生命的奇迹》与卡尔·荣格的心理学理论进行了比较分析。本文的前半部分探讨了荣格的建议，即心理学在某种程度上是由种族决定的，而东方和西方意识在许多方面是反义的。《帝国》挑战了这种观点，反对心理学的本质主义概念，这些概念认为个体心理在一定程度上与其形成的社会环境是分离的。在帝国个人心理随着权力关系的变化而变化，无法摆脱帝国主义思想体系。这样，小说就抵制了对人类心理理解的民族和族裔范畴，而将焦点转向了政治结构对心理活动和自我概念的影响。本文的第二部分从《帝国》转向《仁慈与奇迹》 ，阅读了巴拉德更广泛的虚构和非虚构自传，因为它们将记忆描述为一种根本上具有建设性的心灵功能。通过这种方式，巴拉德的自传体项目突出了记忆过程中事实与虚构之间的滑移，并挑战了思维作为非弹性或决定论结构的概念。