J. G. Ballard’ın “The Ultimate City” Eserinde Ekotopya ve Petrokültür

Yıl 2021, , 340 - 354, 30.10.2021

Cenk Tan , İsmail Serdar Altaç

https://doi.org/10.53048/johass.988383

Öz

James Graham Ballard, iklim kurgudan sınır aşımına kadar geniş bir yelpazede kurgusal eserler kaleme alan çağdaş bir İngiliz romancıdır. Ballard’ın “The Ultimate City” (1976) öyküsü, ütopik kentsel deneyin felakete dönüştüğü distopik bir portre çizen öykülerinden biridir. Hikâye, ana karakter Halloway ve yardımcılarının, petrolün tükenmesinden dolayı yıllar önce terk edilmiş bir kenti yeniden canlandırma çabalarını konu almaktadır. Halloway şehirde kalan kısıtlı miktarda petrol ile kenti yeniden yaşama döndürmeyi amaçlamaktadır ki bu amaç beraberinde sadece kaos ve karmaşa getirecektir. Makale, Ekotopya ve petrokültür kavramlarından yola çıkarak Ballard’ın eserinde petrolün modern toplumları nasıl şekillendirdiğini ve yok ettiğini inceleyecektir. Bu bağlamda, söz konusu kavramların teorik tartışmasının akabininde makale, öyküde bahsedilen ekolojik toplumun ekotopik özelliklerini irdelemekte ve bunları metropolisin tüketim kültürü ile karşılaştırmaktadır. Buna müteakip olarak, modern kentsel yaşamın vazgeçilmez bir unsuru olan petrol meselesi ele alınmaktadır. Çalışmanın bu kısmı petrole duyulan bağımlılık düzeyini ve bununla bağlantılı olarak petrolün dönüştürücü gücünü öyküden verilen örneklerle açığa çıkarmaktadır. Makale, “The Ultimate City”nin okura, gerekli önlemler alınmadığı takdirde güncel enerji politikalarının muazzam bir felakete yol açabileceğine dair öngörülü uyarısını aktardığını öne sürmektedir.

Anahtar Kelimeler

J. G. Ballard, “The Ultimate City”, ekotopya, petrokültür, distopik kurgu

Ecotopia and Petroculture in J.G. Ballard’s “The Ultimate City”

Öz

James Graham Ballard was a contemporary British novelist who published a wide variety of works ranging from climate fiction to transgressive fiction. “The Ultimate City” (1976) is one of Ballard’s short stories that portrays a dystopian vision where a utopian urban experiment transforms into a catastrophe. The story tells the attempt of the protagonist, Halloway and his company to reanimate a city that was abandoned years ago due to oil depletion. Halloway aims to bring the city back to life through the limited amount of oil left in the city, only to confront chaos and disorder. Using the concepts of Ecotopia and petroculture, this article aims to explore the ways in which oil shapes and destroys modern societies and possible alternatives to this predicament in Ballard’s work. To this end, after a theoretical discussion of these concepts, the article examines the ecotopian features in the ecological community in the text and compares it to the consumerist culture of the metropolis; and later addresses the problem of oil that is an essential component of modern urban life. This part of the article reveals the degree of dependence on oil and the transformative power associated with it through examples from the story. The article argues that “The Ultimate City” is a premonition to the reader concerning the current energy politics that may culminate in a total disaster unless necessary steps are taken.

Anahtar Kelimeler

J.G. Ballard, “The Ultimate City”, ecotopia, petroculture, dystopian fiction

Kaynakça

• Ballard, J. G. (2009). The Complete Short Stories. New York: W.W. Norton.
• Bergthaller, H. (2017). Fossil Freedoms: The Politics of Emancipation and the End of Oil. In U. K. Heise, J. Christensen and Michelle Niemann (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities. Oxon: Routlege.
• Berry, E., and Proctor, J. D. (2011). Guest editors' introduction: Imagining Ecotopia. Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 5(2), 121-125. Doi:10.1558/jsrnc.v5i2.121.
• Callenbach, E. (1975). Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston. Berkeley: Heyday Books.
• Canavan, G. (2012). Petrofutures and Retrofutures: Oil, Scarcity and Limit. In R. Barrett and D. Worden (Eds.), Oil Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Chang, H. C. (2005). Ecological Utopia: A study of three literary utopias in the 1970s. Airiti Library, (11), 251-269. Doi:10.6258/BCLA.2005.63.09.
• Conway, K. (2020). Chronotopes of Petromodernity: Oil and Mobile Privatization in the 1950s. Nordia Geographical Publications, 48(6), 47-61. Retrieved from: https://nordia.journal.fi/article/view/90709.
• De Geus, M. (2002). Ecotopia, sustainability, and vision. Organization & Environment, 15(2), 187-201.
• De Haan, O. (2019). How Crucial is Callenbach’s Deep Ecological Utopia for the 21st Century Environmental Crisis? An Ecocritical Reading of Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975) (Master's thesis, Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain, Belgium). Retrieved from: https://dial.uclouvain.be/memoire/ucl/en/object/thesis%3A18154.
• Durning, A. (1992). How Much is Enough? The Consumer Society and the Future of the Earth. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
• Evans, C. (2012). The Space Age Is Over. In S. Sellars & D. O'Hara (Eds.), Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with J. G. Ballard 1967-2008. London: Fourth Estate.
• Firsching, L. J. (1985). J.G. Ballard's Ambiguous Apocalypse. Science Fiction Studies, 12(3), 297-310. Retrieved from: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4239704.
• Frick, T. (2012). The Art of Fiction. In S. Sellars & D. O'Hara (Eds.), Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with J. G. Ballard 1967-2008. London: Fourth Estate.
• Gasiorek, A. (2005). JG Ballard. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
• Gilman, R. (1991). The Eco-village Challenge. Retrieved from: https://www.context.org/iclib/ic29/gilman1/
• Gorelick, S. M. (2010). Oil Panic and the Global Crisis. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Heidegger, M. (1993). Basic Writings. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.
• Jamieson, D. (2011). Energy, Ethics and the Transformation of Nature. In D. G. Arnold (Ed.), The Ethics of Global Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• LeMenager, S. (2014). Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Lipschutz, R. D. (2018). Eco-utopia or eco-catastrophe? Re-imagining California as an ecological utopia. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene, 6(65), 1-16. Doi:10.1525/elementa.320.
• McNeill, J. R. and Engelke P. (2014). The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
• Oramus, D. (2015). Grave New World: The Decline of the West in the Fiction of JG Ballard. Toronto: Terminal Press.
• Orr, C. (2012). How to Face Doomsday without Really Trying. In S. Sellars & D. O'Hara (Eds.), Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with J. G. Ballard 1967-2008. London: Fourth Estate.
• Sedighi, M., and Albader, B. (2019). Framing a new discourse on petromodernity: The global petroleumscape and petroleum modernism. Planning Perspectives, 34(2), 345-353. Doi:10.1080/02665433.2018.1561323.
• Sellars, S. (2012). ‘Rattling other people’s cages’. In S. Sellars & D. O'Hara (Eds.), Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with J. G. Ballard 1967-2008. London: Fourth Estate.
• Schneider-Mayerson, M. (2015). Peak Oil: Apocalyptic Environmentalism and Libertarian Political Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Sullivan. I. S. (2017). Material Ecocriticism and Petro-Text. In U. K. Heise, J. Christensen and Michelle Niemann (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities. Oxon: Routlege.
• Szeman, I. (2017). Conjectures on world energy literature: Or, what is petroculture? Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 53(3), 277-288. Doi:10.1080/17449855.2017.1337672.
• Tschachler, H. (1984). Despotic reason in Arcadia? Ernest Callenbach’s ecological utopias. Science Fiction Studies, 11(3), 304-317.
• Wilson, S., Carlson, A., and Szeman, I. (2017). Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture. Montréal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP.