Modernity's side effects: Boredom and psychopathology in J. G. Ballard's cocaine nights

Abstract

James Graham Ballard stands out as a speculative author, sometimes also classified as a science fiction author, who distorts the quotidian scenes from his own and the reader’s environment and uses them as raw material for his dystopic scenarios. The settings he chooses for his works are usually theme parks, luxury residences, highways, shopping malls and holiday resorts which are spaces that popped out and proliferated in number especially after the Second World War. Written in 1966, Cocaine Nights sustains the Ballardian tradition in which the spaces of the new middle class are dystopified. Converging with the detective fiction tradition, Cocaine Nights presents a distorted image of the holiday resorts to the reader.

The novel deals with a holiday resort rife with lawlessness and psychopathological behaviour in the south of Spain. Charles Prentice, who arrives in the region after learning that his brother has been arrested for arson and murder, aims to solve the mystery, only to find that there is a logic of lawlessness governing the life in the holiday resort. The kind of community in question is quite “Ballardian” in that it consists of an affluent milieu of society who casts aside the issues of survival and has nothing to do. This paper aims to examine the effects of financial affluence and boredom on the lawlessness presented in Cocaine Nights.