![]() ![]() On the opening page of the novel, for example, we are told: ![]() A less extreme, but nonetheless comparable, permeability of selfhood is evident in Ballard’s characterization of Jim in Empire of the Sun. ![]() Accordingly, the extent of the man’s temporal horizon is that of the war itself: as the end of the war approaches - ‘as the pinchers east and west continue their slow reflex contraction’ - he speaks of ‘darkness invading his mind, of an attrition of self …’. In this context, war appears not merely as a phenomenon constituted by invasions, but as an invasive force in its own right - one that breaches the psychological ‘border’ that separates the subject from its external environment, evacuates and occupies, and eventually dissolves the border completely. In Gravity’s Rainbow, this conception is taken to its logical extreme in the description of a patient at the ‘White Visitation’ mental hospital, a ‘long-time schiz who believes that he is World War II’.1 The man resists the intrusion of the public realm via the media - he ‘gets no newspapers, refuses to listen to the wireless’ - but, for him, World War II is uniquely all-encompassing and all-pervasive: ‘still, the day of the Normandy invasion somehow his temperature shot up to 104°’. A notable facet of Pynchon’s and Ballard’s fictional reconstructions of World War II is a sense that the conflict is peculiarly threatening to the division between public and private realms of experience and temporality. ![]()
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