Reading the Body as Narrative Cue in J. G. Ballard’s Concrete Island

Abstract

This essay is concerned with the representation of bodies in J. G. Ballard’s Concrete Island (1974), a rewriting of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). Specifically, it posits that the body in Ballard’s novel is first and foremost a narrative cue in a constructivist sense: readers are trained to recognise that whenever the text makes appeals to the body, they are to understand this as a counter-narrative to what the characters may be thinking or stating in verbal utterances. As a consequence, while we may initially recognise the protagonist Robert Maitland as a Robinson figure who will conquer the concrete island he is stranded on, the text’s strong focus on corporeality will dispel this notion quickly, revealing Maitland as on a trajectory towards becoming a heteronomous Friday figure or merging with the more obvious candidate for Concrete Island’s Friday, the tramp Proctor. Stylistically, the text privileges this reading through a variety of means, such as ascribing agency to extensions of the body like Maitland’s car and persistently foregrounding parallels between Proctor and Friday.