Inner Ecology

Through the interaction with nature, Maitland begins to examine the environment and to reflect on himself. Supported and led by the grass, Maitland ascends to the roof of some shelter where he can have a bird’s-eye view of the island.

In doing so, he has a new experience and obtains a different perspective of the island.

After he explores the island, it becomes easier for him to understand the island; it turns out to be “an exact model of his head” (Ballard, CI 69). Gaining a fuller picture of the island, he attunes himself to the milieu. He further “[identifies] the island with himself” and declares, “I am the island” (70, 71). “The island,” as Peter Linnett observes, “becomes a symbol of his own mind” (71). Maitland’s claim indicates that his crash on the island is not only the beginning of his adventure but also the start of his inner journey. Maitland’s “island soon acquires a psychological dimension”

(Gallardo-Torrano 22); it “becomes an extension of Maitland’s psyche” (Gasiorek 114).

Maitland’s exploration of the island is also that of his inner journey; in a sense, Maitland is not so much marooned on the concrete island as mentally stranded there.

Maitland’s car crash is caused by driving too fast. On the crash day, he leaves his office earlier than usual to avoid rush-hour traffic. Although Maitland has ample time to drive home, he still drives very fast because he wants to see his family. Ostensibly, this reason sounds sensible, yet it is not the entire fact. As the story goes, the reason becomes less and less convincing. At the beginning of the novel, we readers are given a hint. As the novel puts it:

Once inside a car some rogue gene, a strain of rashness, overran the rest of his usually cautious and clear-minded character. Today, speeding along the motorway when he was already tired after a three-day conference, preoccupied by the slight duplicity involved in seeing his wife so soon after a week spent with Helen Fairfax, he had almost wilfully devised the

crash, perhaps as some bizarre kind of rationalization. (Ballard, CI 9;

emphasis added)

This passage suggests that although driving incautiously is not in Maitland’s character, he still speeds up to see his wife soon. However, his intention to see his wife appears

rather insincere because it is tinged with “slight duplicity.” Perhaps he “wilfully”

arranges the crash, and this point becomes more and more apparent. Later, while reflecting on the moment when he shouts his wife’s name at the passing cars on the motorway, he thinks that he should thank his wife for “marooning him” on the traffic island, for if he was not driving home to see his wife, he would not have had a car crash (27).

On the surface, Maitland intends to leave the concrete island and go home soon, but there is a gap between his intention and his action. For example, although he tries several times to attract attention from the passing drivers on the road, his action seems somewhat passive. As described in the novel: “The road was clear except for a

two-decker car-transporter. The driver signalled to Maitland, as if prepared to offer him a lift. Maitland ignored him, waiting impatiently as the long stern section of the transporter lumbered by” (Ballard, CI 21-22). His ignorance of the car transporter driver reveals his unwillingness to be rescued. Moreover, on the fourth day of his marooning on the island, he starts to “forget his wife and son, Helen Fairfax and his partners” because his mind is occupied by how to survive on the island (92).

Maitland has an ambivalent attitude about returning home. He considers how to be saved and leave the island; however, he, consciously or unconsciously, delays his rescue. He postpones his homecoming partly because he is too confident that he will be rescued soon, partly because he does not want to return to his previous life and face reality.

He initially refuses to admit that he is inclined to linger on the island. Yet, it is Jane who can see through his attempt to procrastinate. Having grave doubts about the cause of Maitland’s car crash, she pointedly asks him, “Do you think you crashed on to this traffic island deliberately?” (Ballard, CI 96). Then, she says that

“self-destruction is something I know all about” (96). Later, Jane says more explicitly

to Maitland, “Let’s face it, you’re not really unhappy with your wife. You like that cool scene” (101). She also asserts that Maitland does not want to leave the island because if he really tried, he could have already left the island. Jane’s assertion makes Maitland reconsider whether he “deliberately marooned himself on the island”;

however, he rejects her speculation and deflects the topic by saying, “Jane, you owe it to yourself to leave here—by staying on the island you’re just punishing yourself”

(117). Although Maitland claims that he wants to leave the island, both Jane and Proctor think that he might have been to the traffic island before. As Jane says to Maitland, “Your wife, this woman doctor—you were on an island long before you crashed here” (141). The island that Jane mentions here does not refer to the concrete island but rather to the mentally stranded island. That is, Maitland has already been on an island before he comes to the traffic island; he is already a lonely man living on his own island.

With the passing of time, Maitland gets used to life on the island. He needs to make efforts to think of the faces of his wife, son, and mistress because they are dimmer and dimmer in his mind, “receding like the distant clouds over White City”

(Ballard, CI 145). When he first came to the island, he cared about time and counted how many days he had been marooned. Yet, later, he gradually forgets about dates and time, unlike Defoe’s Crusoe, who keeps records on how long he has lived on the island. Maitland cannot help but admit, “It may sound strange, but for once I’m not all that keen to get away from here [the island]” (140). Towards the end of the novel, Maitland does not disguise his intention of staying on the island but manifestly

declares it. One time, when Jane proposes that Maitland should be put on the road and discovered by the police, Maitland opposes her proposal, saying, “No—I want to stay here. For the time being” (161). Maitland keeps rejecting Jane’s offer to help leave the island. When Jane suggests that she call Maitland’s wife to pick him up, Maitland

dismisses her suggestion because he does not want anyone to know he is on the island.

Even after Proctor’s death, Maitland still insists on staying on the island. He not only again rejects Jane’s proposal to leave the island together but also asks her not to tell anyone about his stay on the island.

If Crusoe is an involuntary castaway, accidentally shipwrecked on an island, then Maitland is a voluntary castaway, intentionally marooned on a concrete island. At the end of the novel, he decides to linger alone on the island “[f]or the time being” as he says (Ballard, CI 161). His car crash becomes his excuse to escape from the reality of everyday life. He seems to exile himself in the attempt, and only in exile can he feel comfort and find himself.

It is worth noting that the concrete island is not only an urban wilderness but also a “forgotten world” in Maitland’s words (Ballard, CI 127). This world presents a marginalized space where the minorities dwell. Although Ballard in this work does not manifestly criticize the urban wilderness that is utilized as a space to degrade the minorities as urban ecocritics do, the novel suggests that the minorities are expelled from the city, thereby living in the urban wilderness. The urban wilderness embodies the image of an excluded space, a “forgotten world.” When Jane, buying things from a supermarket nearby, prepares food for Maitland, she converses with Maitland:

Maitland sat up. “What day is it?”

“Sunday—the Indian places around here are open every day. They exploit themselves and their staffs more than the white owners do. But that’s something you know all about.”

“What’s that?”

“Exploitation. You’re a rich businessman, aren’t you? That’s what you claimed to be last night.” (Ballard, CI 96)

From Jane’s reply, we know that Indian people live in the neighborhood near the

concrete island, and they are exploited. What the concrete island embodies is not so much a spatialization of race as that of class. The lower-class people, like Indian workers, survive hard in the city. Maitland’s ignorance of the fact that the workers are exploited highlights the gap between people of different classes. Because he belongs to the higher middle-class, he is not aware of the lower-class people’s life conditions.

Proctor serves as an example explaining the spatialization of class. He represents the marginalized group in exile, dwelling in the urban wilderness. When Proctor was a teenager, he was an acrobat working in a circus. Later, he failed in an acrobatic exercise and thus damaged his brain. Because he became mentally disabled, he was thrown out of the circus. When talking about Proctor to Maitland, Jane

mentions that Proctor dislikes the police because he has “unhappy memories of the police,” including being kicked around by the police and urinated on by a sergeant (Ballard, CI 97). As Jane notes, “He’s [Proctor’s] terrified of the police, he’ll do anything to avoid bringing them here. It’s not that he’s ever done anything, but this place is all he’s got. When they built the motorway they sealed him in—he never leaves here, you know. It’s pretty remarkable how he’s survived” (98). Because of his mental disability, Proctor is banished from society. When asked by Maitland when he is going to leave the island, Proctor replies, “There’s nowhere for Proctor to go” (130).

Proctor is the epitome of an outcast, having no place to go but lives in the urban wilderness, i.e., the concrete island.

The concrete island serves as the place where people escape from cruel and heart-broken reality. Maitland escapes from his previous life; Jane, from being

morally judged by other people; Proctor, from being bullied by policemen. If Crusoe’s island is a promised land, then Maitland’s island is not a happy paradise but a

“forgotten” land where outcasts are excluded from the world.

III. The Symbiotic Relationship on the Concrete Island

In Concrete Island, Jane and Proctor represent lower-class and peripheral social figures living in the marginalized zone of the city, whereas Maitland represents the bourgeois class. When Maitland intrudes into their zone, they are at first hospitable to him. In a sense, Maitland is an outsider. His intrusion elicits a significant issue in the novel—that is, the question of how to deal with a stranger. This question involves how to coexist with strangers as well as how to develop the host-guest relationship.

Derrida’s and Cowart’s discussion of host and guest, I think, are helpful in exploring the mutual relationship between characters in the novel.

Inspired by Derrida’s discussion of the host-guest relationship, I propose that Maitland is a guest, whereas Jane and Proctor play the roles of host and hostess on the concrete island. Although the guest under Derrida’s discussion is the other, usually referring to a foreigner, in Concrete Island Maitland is not a foreigner. However, in a sense, Maitland is also a stranger, an outsider, for he does not live on the concrete island, and thus appears foreign. Maitland is such a guest who has not been invited but accidentally intrudes on the island. Maitland, after entering Proctor’s den, is knocked down because he is regarded as an intruder occupying Proctor’s place.

However, later, they receive him as a guest into their habitation. When Maitland has a fever, Jane takes care of him until he recovers.

While Derrida’s theory of hospitality analyzes the relationship between host and guest from a philosophical and ethical perspective, David Cowart discusses it from a literary viewpoint. I propose that the host-guest relationship can also be considered a kind of symbiosis. In his Literary Symbiosis, David Cowart borrows the concept of symbiosis from the field of biology to examine the intertextual relationships between literary works. Cowart calls an original text a “host text” and its adaptation a “guest text” (4-5). He further points out that symbiosis includes three kinds of relations:

commensalism, mutualism, and parasitism (4). As he explains, “In a commensalist relationship, only the guest organism benefits, but the host suffers no harm. In a mutualistic relationship, both host and guest benefit. In a parasitic relationship, the guest benefits at the expense of the host” (4). Cowart draws an analogy between these concepts of biological symbiosis to literary studies and terms it “literary symbiosis.”

In this regard, while Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is a host text, Ballard’s Concrete Island is a guest text. In the following, I will also use these three biological terms to help examine the novel. However, my use of these terms and their related issues is more concerned with the relationship between characters in the novel than with the intertextual relationship between Robinson Crusoe and Concrete Island. That is, reading Concrete Island as an ecosystem, I use the related concepts concerning

hospitality as points of departure to examine the relationships between Maitland, Jane, and Proctor. Their relationships, I contend, can be roughly divided into three

phases—commensalist, mutualistic, and parasitic, yet they are not necessarily consecutive nor are they mutually exclusive.