SOURCE: “J. G. Ballard's Empire of the Senses: Perversion and the Failure of Authority,” in Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, Vol. 108, No. 3, May, 1993, pp. 519–32.

In the following essay, Foster, an associate professor of English at Southern Methodist University, contends that Ballard's presentation of extreme perversity and violence—particularly as found in Running Wild, The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, and Empire of the Sun—represents a stark critique of modern consumer and technological society which illustrates the objectification of the human body as an instrument of sexual pleasure and destruction.

When Charles Manson invited America's youth to kill their parents, he was less interested in resisting authority than in removing the figures of an authority that was already dead. The fathers had died, but they did not know it, as one of Freud's patients dreamed.¹ In The Dead Father, by Donald Barthelme, the Dead Father continues to...