The Sun Within: New Solar Myth in Early Novels of Wilson Harris and J.G. Ballard

Abstract

Even in our disenchanted age, the Sun remains a potent symbol in mythopoeic literature, and, in very different ways, Wilson Harris and J. G. Ballard each use internalised images of the Sun to construct and narrate their modern mythical landscapes. In Harris’s Palace of the Peacock (1960), the Sun fills the pages with a nebulous and ineffable blinding power. In Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962), the dual image of the physical and the psychological Sun inspires an atavistic pilgrimage. This chapter studies the role of the Sun in each novel, where it serves to inspire a quest for a form of individuation. I argue that Ballard’s Sun is a transcendental engine that drives individual psychic integration, while Harris’s is a gateway into a metaphysical realm of spiritual unity. In each case, the Sun is the focus of a modern mythological method.