Arrows of surrealist desire: 

re-reading J. G. Ballard’s Unlimited Dream Company

 GAVIN PARKINSON 

Abstract

 J. G. Ballard’s novel The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) has not received as much critical attention as the books by Ballard that preceded or came after it, perhaps because it is even less easy than his other fiction to categorize, entering a world of the fantastic and erotic as opposed to the more familiar science fiction, dystopic, and urban terrains mapped by the author. In the scholarship on the novel the central protagonist ‘Blake’ has been connected with some justification to the figure of William Blake, yet this article shows how that identification can only be fully understood by recognizing the role played by pre-Surrealist writing and Surrealist art as the means towards forging Blake’s character and behaviour. Using both Surrealist theoretical texts and those by and on the Comte de Lautréamont, it is argued that The Unlimited Dream Company creates a mythic figure and a world that are motivated by desire as the Surrealists understood that term. This article enhances and elaborates that reading by demonstrating that in order to give the freest possible rein to the idea of a world given over to desire, Ballard harnessed the art of Hans Bellmer and Max Ernst and, in doing so, achieved the aim of Surrealism to create a new myth.