“It took me 20 years to forget, and 20 years to remember.” JG Ballard’s comment on his life in wartime Shanghai is the key to the novel he wrote on the subject, and to all the visionary writer’s work. First published 40 years ago, Empire of the Sun is many things: a montage of surreal landscapes from a collapsed world; a novelistic rendering of the fragility of any kind of order in human life; a historical snapshot of the close of Western dominance in one of its eastern outposts; a lightly fictionalised autobiography of the author’s formative years; an adventure story, even, with a teenage boy at its centre. But more than anything else the book is a meditation on time and memory, on how the shocks we encounter become traumas we cannot escape, and how these traces of unbearable pain, retrieved and transformed, can become life-affirming and renewing.
Human memory is a constant reprocessing of our lives. As the world keeps on unmaking us, we remake ourselves or our lives are spent in forgetting. Freedom is found not in bourgeois autonomy, a stately progress through successive phases of life, but in situations that shatter our idea of linear time and force us to relinquish our beliefs about the future and the past. If Ballard’s work has a message, it is that rather than banishing from our minds the chaos that regularly engulfs us, we are better off accepting and learning to find meaning in it.
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