Ballard adapts persistence-of-vision optics to describe fragmented crisis experience

Evidence

The title phrase here surely must be read against that (apparently pseudoscientific) doctrine of the “persistence of vision” that has played so great and emblematic a role in film theory, where the illusion of continuity is generated by the overlap of static afterimages on the retina. Ballard now projects this overlap into our experience of the world itself and its multiple realities, whose discontinuities reappear at the moment of individual and collective crisis and breakdown — separating into the layered bands of beach and sea. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 412

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the reader’s noise/silence material — persistence of vision as the sense-perception analogue of how sound seams persist across discrete perceptions. — connects to: Burnt Shadows builds connections across crises through unstated temporal resonance for readers to detect; Trauma’s fragmented memory demanded a nonlinear narrative form — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America…, 374
• DEFINE: Clarifies ‘persistence of vision’ from film theory as the model for Ballard’s layered, banded perception of world discontinuities.
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Burnt Shadows builds connections across crises through unstated temporal resonance for readers to detect; Trauma’s fragmented memory demanded a nonlinear narrative form — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America…, 374