J. G. Ballard's Days of Creation


The late J. G. Ballard’s childhood experiences in a Japanese internment camp in Shanghai have been widely understood to be central to his development as a writer. Imagery from that experience suffused his fiction, even though the internment did not appear explicitly. Ballard himself acknowledged the connection—he had, he said in his autobiography Miracles of Life, spent twenty years forgetting the experiences and then another twenty remembering them. At the end of those forty years he evidently found himself ready to deal with the internment directly, and wrote two largely autobiographical novels—Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women.

In fact, I suggest, he wrote three. Immediately following Empire, and before Kindness, comes The Day of Creation, which has many of the hallmarks of a recapitulation. As Paul Di Filippo has argued, Day contains pronounced echoes of Ballard’s first real novel, The Drowned World. In both we move among steamy jungles and flooded landscapes and the remains of civilisation. Collapsing dams release dangerous bodies of water; a helicopter machine-guns the jungle. The imagery invokes extinct reptiles and giant insects and vast stretches of lost time. Mallory, the protagonist of Day, like his predecessor, Kerans, is a doctor of questionable commitment and success, beset by dangerous black men and military officers of ambiguous sympathy, who sets out on an obsessive quest.

The slow rolling eloquence of Ballard's prose, with long sentences that invoke the imagery of gods and myths, gives a dreamlike remoteness to the narrative and suggests that what Day is about is, as in much of Ballard, something below the surface of the mind.

But most suggestive is Day's theme and its place in Ballard’s career: immediately after writing a novel that finally explored his creative roots, he wrote about a man tracking a mysterious river to its source. Once this connection occurred to me I found myself irresistibly interpreting The Day of Creation as Ballard's account of the creative process.

The river rises unexpectedly and the first impulse of Mallory, its "creator", is to stifle it. But it will not be denied and it grows in size and importance.

A more serious attempt to block the flow with explosives almost kills Mallory. He finds himself obsessively identifying with the new waterway—he gives it his own name, tries to buy it for himself and resents having its waters "stolen"—until it carries him off on his long journey towards its source. Sometimes like a writer's inspiration, "it divided . . . and then seemed to wander in long curves, as if aware that my own imagination had flagged" [p. 104]. But more often on this journey the river is seductive or dangerous, a source of strength, sometimes dangerously overpowering, always full of possibility.

"Above all," Mallory says [p. 71], "it was the river, which had once tried to take my life, that now revived me." And he is urged [p. 78] to "let the river run free," to  "make it wider and deeper, so wide that it overruns its banks"—a very suggestive line from a writer who started out in the sf of the 1960s.


When it is taken over by political forces upstream and dammed up, the river becomes stagnant and poisonous. But once again through violence it is released. Its creator passes above the ruined dams towards the ultimate source, which lies among desert mountains. Throughout he has been encouraged and led by the enigmatic child-figure Noon, who seems wiser than Mallory himself. Now he is accompanied by Sanger, the disreputable television naturalist. The landscape appears ancient and primaeval and the journey becomes an ordeal that is made endurable by Sanger's constant recounting of it as a narrative.

In these elements I think one can one can glimpse doubts about the commercialisation of fiction, and at the same time a recognition that story, for all its mysterious childlike origins, is important in a struggle towards an understanding of something primal.

But when Mallory finally locates the source, the river dries up in his arms. At the end he returns to his starting point, longing to find Noon again, his former guide, probably his lover, on another level perhaps his muse.

For the purposes of this allegorical reading it would be convenient to able to report that, having gone though this psychological return, Ballard had found his own inspiration dried up. Of course that’s not true—though Simon Reynolds for one considers that "Ballard's post-Empire fiction . . . seemed to lose its spark, as though confronting his childhood experiences had defused some crucial mechanism of creativity"—and it would be both dangerous and presumptuous to assume that Day is nothing but a piece of psychological autobiography. Nevertheless Ballard’s fiction written after Day does emphasise his urban, psychosocial-catastrophe mode, where the surrealism is limited to human motivation.

Only Ballard could have said how much of The Day of Creation really depicted his own inner experiences; his autobiography provides no clear evidence. But it is very tempting to read at least one line from the novel as an indication of how Ballard understood what had achieved.

"You still call it a stream?" Sanger says to Mallory at one point [p. 52]. "This is a river. You have created a river."

Works cited:


J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965.


— The Day of Creation, New York : Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1987.


— Empire of the Sun, New York : Simon and Schuster, 1984.

—The Kindness of Women, New York : Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1991.


— Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, an Autobiography,  London : Fourth Estate, 2008.


Paul Di Filippo  "Twenty-Five Years Of Drowning: Mapping J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World onto The Day of Creation"  <http://www.jgballard.ca/criticism/difilipo_quantum.html> [2009 April 25].


Simon Reynolds "The unlimited dreams of J.G. Ballard"
<http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2009/04/23/ballard/> [2009 April 27]