Svetozar Poštić

Ballardian City as Digital Incarceration

Even though J. G. Ballard’s fiction largely belongs to the period preceding the sweeping digital revolution of the late 20th–early 21st century, the prominent British prose writer prophetically announces it in his early short stories. In “Concentration City’’ (1957), for example, a long train ride by the main protagonist, who intends to flee the confinement of the limitless city, ends up at the station from which he departed. In “Chronopolis’’ (1960), the teenage hero ventures from an isolated suburb to the abandoned megalopolis to discover the mystery of the personal time-keeping outlawed several decades earlier. Finally, in “Billenium’’ (1962), the oppressive claustrophobia caused by invasive overpopulation becomes totally unbearable. In subsequent postmodern prose, infinite urban structures are frequently portrayed as the peak of progress, the heart of technological and social evolutionary advancement. Many famous fictional utopias envision a fully urbanized future, while their dystopian counterparts represent vast urban spaces as seductive and sinful, overcrowded yet lonely, oppressive and menacing captivity. Most notably, the densely populated areas are gradually but decisively transformed into a simultaneously enchanting and repulsive symbol of cyberaddiction, further propounding the inescapability of the Ballardian digital loop. This paper presents the city as an entrapment in the matrix of virtual pleasure, depicting it as a never-ending joyride that leads to anxiety, confusion and spiritual emptiness.