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Partial Answers 8/1: 185–208 © 2010 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Everyday Apocalypse: J. G. Ballard and the Ethics and Aesthetics of the End of Time

Elana GomelTel Aviv University

“Don’t wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.”

Albert Camus

Delirium and Destination

What happens after the end of time?The question seems absurd: if time comes to an end, the idea of any-

thing “happening” is meaningless. A narrative of events can only unfold in time, just as time is humanly apprehended only through narrative. In Paul Ricoeur’s classic formulation, temporality is the “structure of exis-tence that reaches language in narrativity” (35). The end of time would annihilate the narrative imagination predicated on the flux of social and biological change. And yet, paradoxically, this imagination seems to flourish on the edge of its own destruction. The notions of the end of time, the apocalypse, the millennium, have been central to the Western historical imagination, infecting it by what Derrida called “the disorder or delirium of destination” (24) — a phrase that captures the combination of unshakeable determinism and giddy exaltation of apocalyptic beliefs. The end is nigh, but true believers have to work hard to make it happen. Their work is violence.

Like any other conceptualization of temporality, apocalypse attempts to create a humanly meaningful narrative of historical change. But it is peculiarly self-destructive because it denies what it sets out to explain: time, history, and mortality. Apocalypse is time’s bomb; a conspiracy against history; an attempt to defeat death by violence. Perhaps the best representation of the apocalyptic mindset is the terrorist group in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent who plot to murder time by blowing up the Greenwich Observatory.

The “delirium” of the approaching cataclysm has motivated some of the most destructive religious and political events in history, from the

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Crusades and the expulsion of Jews from Spain to Nazism and Stalinism, not to mention innumerable schisms, sects, and cults. And apocalypse has remained a central (if not the central) temporal form of postmoder-nity, promising, just as it did in ancient times, “the key to human history” (Weber 5).

Despite its many guises, the narrative of the end of time is surprising-ly uniform across the immense range of apocalyptic literature, both reli-gious and secular. No matter how the end is visualized, whether brought about by divine wrath, the inexorable law of history, the hidden workings of nature, or any combination thereof, it proceeds along the same well-trodden path. This path, the apocalyptic plot, has been summarized by cultural scholars, literary critics, and students of religion in very similar terms. It consists of two stages, destruction and renewal. In her analysis of the end-of-century millenarian fever, Lee Quinby describes it as the transition from “world destruction” to “a new, transformed earth” (4). Looking at nineteenth-century American literature, David Ketterer finds a tight “correlation between the destruction of the world and the estab-lishment of the New Jerusalem” (7). And Robert Jay Lifton, who studied the political praxis of apocalypse in the Japanese sect Aum Shinrikyo that had released poison gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995, uncovers “a loosely connected, still-developing subculture of apocalyptic violence — of violence conceived in sweeping terms as a purification and renewal of humankind through the total or near-total destruction of the planet” (4). Emotionally speaking, apocalypse links fear and hope, since “tribulation and horror will usher in public and private bliss, free of pain or evil” (Weber 31).

The origin of the apocalyptic plot (at least in its Western incarnation) lies in the Book of Revelation of St. John the Divine, the last book of the Christian Bible. This esoteric text, a combination of the Jewish prophetic tradition with the nascent Christian eschatology, has had a cultural and political influence quite incommensurable with its shaky position within Catholic and mainstream Protestant theologies. The book barely achieved inclusion in the canon (due to the mistaken belief that its author was the apostle John). Its burning immediacy that appealed to many early Chris-tians was defused by St. Augustine who insisted that it should be read al-legorically, with the millennium referring to the reign of Christ within his Church, while the Tribulations represented the struggle of good and evil in the hearts of believers. In 431 AD, the Council of Ephesus officially adopted this doctrine, declaring that the date of the Second Coming was unknowable and that the apocalyptic promises of salvation referred to in-

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dividual souls after death, not to humanity in the material world. Needless to say, countless gurus, sectarians, and heresiarchs, from twelfth-century Joachim of Fiore to twentieth-century David Koresh, disagreed. For the contemporary evangelical movement in the United States the “final book of the New Testament, rejected by many Catholics as inauthentic proph-ecy, became the centerpiece of theology” (Shorris 119). The Revelation has shaped “a way of life” imposing structure and meaning upon the evangelicals’ perception of both public and private time; it is not just a narrative but the narrative, since it subsumes all other representations of the past and future history (Quinby 2).

But in (post)modernity, the apocalyptic plot has spread beyond the religious right. It can be found in diverse secular ideologies, from Na-zism and Communism to “deep” ecology; in blockbuster movies (such as the Terminator and Matrix series); and in countless science-fictional disaster novels. This narrative uniformity across a wide cultural spectrum indicates a deeper “content of the form” (Jameson 1981: 1), whose politi-cal, psychological, and ethical meanings are relatively independent of the overt ideology and/or theology of the text.

It is this formal/ideological structure of the apocalyptic plot that is the focus of my essay. Beyond critique of specific apocalyptic ideologies, conducted by such scholars as Quinby, Lifton, Tina Pippin, and Cath-erine Keller, to name only a few, I will consider the narrative chronotope of the end of time as the locus of political and ethical dangers.1 I shall analyze J. G. Ballard’s fictions of apocalypse as a narrative fighting its own narrativity, a rebellion of utopian/millenarian space pitted against historical time.

Narrative can be viewed a “socially symbolic act” whose “content of the form” reflects sedimentation of historical experience (Jameson 1981: 3). At the same time, narrative is an “emplotment” of history, a structure of meaning imposed upon the flux of historical events (White 192). The narrative chronotope is the nexus of “the time of human life” and of “historical time,” which enables “the representability of events” (Bakhtin 22). In this reciprocal relationship with history lies narrative’s power to shape societies and individuals. Narrative provides templates for indi-vidual self-representation, while situating identity within the context of (narrativized) history. Narrative is also a locus of social solidarity and ac-tion, since it mediates between the private time structured by intensities of experience and the public time structured by collective memory.

1 Chronotope is defined by Mikhail Bakhtin as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships” in a narrative text (15).

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This ability of narrative to order and organize perception of individual and collective time has been the target of some postmodern criticism concerned “with deconstructing the linear concept of time, of mean-ing, of narrative and of narrative history” (Currie 79). Temporality as the main axis of narrative has acquired a bad name in postmodernism, which tends to be “dominated by categories of space rather than by cat-egories of time” (Jameson 2003: 319).2 While for Jameson this is a mixed blessing, other critics celebrate “the spatial turn” as the release from the tyranny of chrono-logic, opening up the possibility of “the play of desire in space” (Friedman 217). Though Friedman herself stresses that spati-ality does not exclude temporality, the postmodern chronotope tends to inscribe the ascendancy of space as the defeat of time. In this sense, it is inherently apocalyptic.

The apocalyptic plot separates time and space by linking the former to the horror of the Tribulations and the latter to the perfection and quietude of the millennium. Any narrative chronotope, as Bakhtin points out, rep-resents the “indissoluble unity” of time and space (15). The apocalyptic chronotope is an exception; it breaks this unity and sets time and space against each other. The stage of destruction is dynamic and temporal, consisting of a series of cataclysmic events with constantly increasing levels of violence. But the millennium is static and timeless. Its repre-sentations are always couched in spatial terms, as avatars of the New Jerusalem, the eternal City of God: “And the city lieth foursquare, and the length is as large as the breadth: and he measured the city with the reed, twelve thousand furlongs. The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal. . . . Having the glory of God: and her light was like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal” (Revela-tion 21:17; 19). The most striking aspect of this image is, as Catherine Keller points out, its “gemology” (81). There is no change in the City of God; no time, and no life either.

The apocalyptic plot allows space to devour time, “rendering spatial what is essentially temporal”: history (Kermode 124). The overall time-shape of the apocalypse reveals “a timeless, permanent, transcendental reality . . . [in which] each element . . . is necessitated to be what it is by its relations to the other elements and to the whole” (Berlin 107). Apoca-lyptic time is the distance between history’s beginning and ending, laid

2 The postmodern chronotope “registers a shift in sensibilities from a predominantly temporal and historiographic imagination to one much more concerned with the spatial and the geographic” (Smethurst 15).


out in advance by either a supernatural designer or a natural design. And it is this spatiality of apocalypse that makes it so attractive to a certain strand in postmodernism whose history fatigue finds an expression in the “rush to imagine the end” (Pippin 4).

This essay is a defense of temporality, along the lines of Gary Saul Morson’s defense of “tempics,” the narrative poetics that recognizes and celebrates “the messiness, historicity, and timeliness (not timelessness) of things” (292). My critical focus is on the enemy of “tempics” — the narrative desire for the end of narrative; the history of the denial of his-toricity; the perverse dynamics of temporal self-negation whose political double is violent self-destruction.

This narratological/ideological approach to apocalypse has deter-mined my choice of the main textual corpus: the four apocalyptic novels of the British writer J. G. Ballard (1930—2009), collectively known as the Four Elements Quartet. Ballard’s novels are on the opposite end of the political spectrum from the impatient eschatology of the evangelical Christian fiction or celebratory violence of Hollywood disaster flicks. But his exquisite mastery of the apocalyptic plot in all its permutations makes the Quartet a perfect example of the narrative poetics of apoca-lypse. And it is Ballard’s deconstruction of this poetics that makes his novels politically and ethically relevant. By probing the narrative “time/shape” of the apocalyptic plot, Ballard forces his readers to consider not what might happen after the end of time but rather their own desire for time to end.

The Pleasures of Being Left Behind

• Politicalcrisis• Economiccrisis• Worldwideepidemics• Environmentalcatastrophe• Massdisappearances• MilitaryapocalypseAnd that’s just the beginning . . . of the end of the world. It’s happening now.3

This is how the official site of the Left Behind media empire greets a surfer, helpfully offering a YouTube explanatory video in preparation for an apocalyptic shopping spree that includes several book series (includ-

3 http://www.leftbehind.com/ (November 11, 2008).

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ing one for children), audios, videos, computer wallpaper, and the End of Time calculator.

Left Behind, which started as a series of 16 bestselling books authored by the evangelical preacher Tim LaHaye and journalist Jerry Jenkins and has developed into a cultural juggernaut, is a useful primer of apocalyptic narrativity. Despite the temporal and ideological gap between Ballard’s secular apocalypse and LaHaye’s religious one, both draw upon and em-bellish the basic narrative sequence of The Book of Revelation. The Left Behind series, then, may be seen as revealing the political unconscious of the apocalyptic plot Ballard attempts to deconstruct.

The Left Behind series is just one instance of the widespread popular-ity of the so-called dispensational premillennialism, also known as the pre-Tribulation Rapture theology, in contemporary America. According to Amy Frykholm, “evangelicalism is an increasingly significant part of American popular culture. Scholars identify 10 to 15 million Americans who are ‘doctrinal’ believers in dispensational premillennialism and an-other 10 to 15 million who are what Susan Harding calls ‘narrative be-lievers’” (25).

Dispensational premillennialism is the theology elaborated by John Nelson Darby (1800–1882), an Anglican priest who left the Church of England to join the Plymouth Brothers and predicted the Second Coming in 1882 (as with all such prophecies, its failure seemed only to have con-vinced the believers of its veracity).4 Darby introduced the key element of contemporary American evangelicalism: the Rapture, during which the believers will be bodily lifted into the air to meet Christ before the beginning of the Tribulations. After that, the future history will tick off as briskly as a clock: the two witnesses; Antichrist; Tribulations; Armaged-don; millennium; Satan’s comeback and his final defeat; resurrection; the Last Judgment. Bolstered by the continuing success of C. I. Schofield’s First Reference Bible (1909) that linked Old and New Testament proph-ecy into a seamless timeline, the Rapture has firmly captured the imagi-

4 Darby believed that history is divided into successive ages or “dispensations” and that salvation will not be achieved in the current age. This is in stark opposition to postmillennial-ism that was the dominant Protestant theology of the nineteenth century and that profoundly influenced various meliorative social movements, including liberalism, abolitionism, and trade unionism. Postmillennialism believes that the Second Coming will only occur after humanity has achieved a millennium by its own efforts. Emblematic of the transition from post- to premillennialism is the career of the feminist pioneer Christabel Parkhurst who even-tually turned to Adventism and became a fervent believer in the imminent Second Coming (Weber 188).


nation of the American evangelical movement. While some lip-service is paid “to post- and mid-trib” positions (with additional mind-boggling classifications such as pre- and mid-Wrath), the majority of the evangeli-cals support the Left Behind Rapture theology, which is briskly summed up on another “prophecy” site, Rapture Ready:

The rapture is an event that will take place sometime in the near future. Jesus will come in the air, catch up the Church from the earth, and then return to Heaven with the Church. In 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18, we are given a clear description of the rapture: “the dead in Christ will rise, then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord.” The main thrust of this website is to prove that the rapture will occur prior to the beginning of the tribulation. This has been well researched and documented throughout the site.5

Besides the obvious Schadenfreude of watching from above the tribu-lations of assorted infidels, the Rapture offers a less blatant narrative pleasure. A narrative with a clear and predetermined ending has to have a no-less-clear beginning. The Rapture “starts the end time clock tick-ing” (Weber 182). The Left Behind series opens with a book also called Left Behind, in which the primary characters, pilot Rayford Steele and journalist Cameron “Buck” Williams, are confronted with the Rapture on a commercial airplane. This takes place on the book’s first page. Elid-ing the minute exegesis of other evangelical compositions, Left Behind plunges straight into action. The first chapters read like a workmanlike thriller (it is not even immediately clear that the event is the Rapture rather than, say, a more mundane alien abduction). This clean structure is in all probability responsible for the unparalleled success of the series, with more than 60 million copies sold, far more than any other Christian fiction.

As one plows through the interminable length of the Left Behind se-ries, with its wooden atrocities and underwhelming miracles, suspense is supplanted by its opposite, foreknowledge. After all, once the theological parameters of the initial disaster become clear, nobody in the intended audience can have any doubt about the future developments. And yet, instead of inducing boredom, this foreknowledge becomes the source of an even more potent readerly pleasure. Left Behind flouts Shklovsky’s view that art defamiliarizes reality; its goal is precisely to familiarize

5 http://www.raptureready.com/faq/faq149.html (March 24, 2009).

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teleology by repetition. By renouncing suspense and allowing the reader the freedom to wander the familiar byways of Biblical allusion, Left Be-hind lays bare the phenomenon of intertextuality — any text being “the absorption and transformation of another” (Kristeva 66). Both Kristeva and Friedman (following Roland Barthes’ earlier distinction between “readerly” and “writerly” texts) regard intertextuality as a spatial aspect of narrativity, in which the reader’s language of desire meets the desire in/of language. Left Behind is highly intertextual; and its responsiveness to its readers’ desires generates an exemplary postmodern dynamics of narrative time being gradually overtaken by narrative space.

This transformation of time into space is enacted in the series through the slowing-down of narrative time. This is not immediately obvious since every volume of the series is packed with action. However, when one considers that the end is known in advance, that the end is, in fact, what causes the entire sequence in a rigid teleology characteristic of what Kermode calls “endism” (120), one has to ask what the point of this feverish activity is. And here the inordinate length of the Left Be-hind series becomes particularly important. The Book of Revelation, like most prophetic writings, is very brief, allowing the reader to flesh out its basic sequence of events in a variety of possible scenarios. But Left Behind, with its full-length 16 volumes, strives for narrative. When its protagonists finally reach the millennium, the authors launch several new series — the Kids series, the Underground Zealot series, the Military series and so on, each as capable as the original one to stretch out almost infinitely the rigidly predetermined sequence of apocalyptic events. The stark chronology of the endgame is bogged down in the slow-motion violence of the Tribulations.

In the classic narratology of Gérard Genette and Seymour Chatman, narrative temporality has two aspects: chronology and duration, “the first concerned with the relationships between the temporal order of the events that are being told and the pseudo-temporal order of the narrative; the second concerned with the relationships between the duration of the events and the duration of the narrative” (Genette 25). While tradition-ally these two aspects are relatively independent of each other, they are tightly correlated in the apocalyptic plot, which takes place in what Ker-mode calls “the third order of duration” between the fixed and unalter-able beginning and ending (70). Apocalypse translates chronology into duration. Since the end is known in advance, the narrative possibilities of the apocalyptic plot are reduced to the elaboration of its basic stages. Spatial resolution takes the place of temporal suspense.


The aesthetics of the disaster movie provides another example of this phenomenon, as plot and character are subordinated to the visual pleasures of special effects. The lightless sky and the skull-crashing ma-chines of the Terminator trilogy; the fractal mechanical cities of Matrix; the beheaded Statue of Liberty of Cloverfield; and the empty London of 28 Days Later dominate these films’ chronotopes and stretch the predict-able chronology of their plots. It might seem paradoxical to talk of action slowdown in action movies but in fact the accumulation of disasters does not constitute a true narrative sequence, in which events are linked by causality. Instead, there is a reiteration of the basic event of the catastro-phe with a progressively ratcheted-up intensity of violence.

The slowed-down duration of apocalypse is what Lawrence Langer calls “traumatic time,” frozen in the perpetual “now” (6). Duration is linked by trauma theorists to the aesthetics of the catastrophic sublime, the “intensities” of postmodernism (Jameson 2003: 317). But Langer’s ethical defense of durational, as opposed to chronological, temporality rings hollow when confronted with the cynical industry of the sublime that the apocalyptic pop-culture has become. Left Behind manufactures trauma and uses it as a ploy of “millennial seduction.” Since the trauma is not in the past but in the future, the text generates a sort of installment-plan sublimity whose purchase is indefinitely postponed by the writing-off of temporal debts.

Left Behind is an exemplary postmodern text also in the way it erases the boundary between fictional and non-fictional representations of his-tory. Hayden White’s critique of the veridical claims made by traditional historiography is well-known. It is based on his notion of the “emplot-ment” of a mere chronicle of events into “verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences” (192). Without digressing into the prolonged de-bate over this claim, one can point out that Christian apocalyptic fiction neatly sidesteps the horns of the historian’s dilemma. Left Behind is ob-viously fictional in the sense that all its characters are people who have never existed. Nor do the authors make any claim, for example, that the true Antichrist, when he appears, will be a Romanian named Nicolae Carpathia rather than the current Pope or the US President.6 However,

6 Both have been suggested as possibilities by the evangelical blogosphere, the point being that until he is revealed as the Beast, the Antichrist will seem to be merely an extraor-dinary human being.

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at the same time the series narrates what its audience regards as the true story of both the past and the future. Instead of emplotting the contingent material of actual events into “verbal fictions,” the series dresses up the would-be true plot of history in a fictional narrative.

Uniting the past and the future, fiction and truth, history and proph-ecy, the apocalypse culminates in the millennium where all such dualities cease to exist because time, responsible for the painful instability of the human condition, ceases to exist as well. Time dies into utopia, which E. M. Cioran describes as “a kind of stationary duration, an immobilized Possible, a counterfeit of eternal present” (104). Narrative representa-tion of this “eternal present” is, of course, not an easy matter because it militates against the very nature of narrativity, its temporality. Even in The Divine Comedy, the Paradise is far less memorable than the Inferno. With considerably less talent at its authors’ disposal, the Left Behind vi-sion of Kingdom Come in the last book of each series is rather bathetic, though not more so than its secular counterparts, glimpses of utopian spaces that end the adrenaline-pumped action of disaster movies, such as a pseudo-pioneer village at the end of the last cinematic version of I Am Legend or the closing credits of The Happening floating over the vision of a happy suburban home. No matter how disappointing or scaled-down, the utopian space is necessary to signify not just the end of this particular narrative but the end of all narratives, the end of time.

The apocalyptic plot is a prime example of the approach to tempo-rality which Jean-Francois Lyotard calls “myth” and which he opposes to “contingency.” Myth is a narrative design, which “allows a sequence of events to be placed in a constant framework in which the beginning and the end of a story form a sort of rhythm or rhyme” (67). Modernity reconstructs religious myths into “great narratives,” in which “the gen-eral course of history is conceivable” within the framework of some im-mutable principle (68). The apocalyptic plot belongs to the modality of “myth” in two senses: it imposes “a constant framework” upon history and it makes history intelligible according to an immutable principle, whether this principle is the will of God, the Hegelian laws of develop-ment, or the Gaia hypothesis.

While postmodernism celebrates the death of mythical “grand nar-ratives,” they get reborn on sites ranging from apocalyptic blockbusters to Ground Zero. This resurgence is made easier by the “spatial turn” of postmodern culture that encourages sublime intensities in place of ana-lytical historicity. Narrative history has been criticized for its selectivity: Hayden White argues that the emplotment of history by “selection, sup-


pression, or subordination” of historical events results in the falsifica-tion of individual experience (White 194). But the danger of apocalyptic myths rests precisely on their capacity to absorb and blend heteroge-neous elements. Since it claims that its narrative shape IS the shape of history, apocalypse needs no emplotment. Potentially any event can be seamlessly incorporated into the apocalyptic plot. Commenting upon the epistemological omnivorousness of apocalyptic groups who are unfazed by any critical argument or unfulfilled prophecy, journalist Alex Heard writes: “Start reading and studying, and you quickly realize that any-thing can be a sign of the End” (89). If for ordinary historical narratives “what is not there in a discourse” is “constitutive of what is” (Currie 80), the apocalyptic narrative is structured not by exclusion but by inclusion. Anything that “is not there” may be easily transformed into “what is” by the ever-expanding apocalyptic hermeneutics.

The pleasure that the Left Behind series offers its readers is the plea-sure of transforming the troubling contingency of history into the re-assuring stasis of myth. Frykholm, who interviewed Rapture believers, points out that instead of being consumed by anxiety, most of them are smugly self-confident. Their faith in the imminent end of time allows them to reduce the alien perturbations of history into familiar signposts:

Political events, diplomatic missions, wars, earthquakes, floods, and other natural disasters are not random, but woven into a complex narrative about the world’s approaching end. This method of interpretation highly struc-tures readers’ understanding of the world they live in. It offers coherence to what might otherwise appear random and secures for them a very spe-cific and special place in world history. (106)

The apocalyptic chronotope is a configuration of two spaces: the space of the Tribulations and of the millennium. But it would be a mis-take to argue that the apocalyptic plot consists in the transition from the one to the other. Such a transition would introduce the possibility of a dif-ferent outcome, contaminating myth with contingency. Rather, the two spaces, outwardly opposite, are in fact the same, linked together by the overarching design of history, in which the past and the future coexist in the timelessness of prophecy. The Tribulations and the millennium are superimposed upon each other, constituting the unified textual/ideologi-cal terrain, in which the end of time is ritually re-enacted as a murder of history. In this sense, apocalypse is not the opposite of utopia; apoca-lypse is utopia.

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The Four Elements

Ideologically, J. G. Ballard is situated at the opposite end of the spectrum from the Rapture believers. One of the best-known and most controversial contemporary British writers, the author of the scandalous Atrocity Ex-hibition and Crash (made into the much-debated film by David Cronen-berg), Ballard has been accused of nihilism and pornography of violence. There is even an adjective “Ballardian,” indicating a peculiar mixture of dystopia, lyricism, and violence that characterize his writings.

Nevertheless, many of his writings explore the apocalyptic plot, none more so than the four novels, collectively known as the Four Elements Quartet. The Quartet comprises The Wind from Nowhere (1961), which was Ballard’s first published novel, The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1964), and The Crystal World (1966). Each novel presents a version of the apocalypse linked to one of the four traditional elements: air, water, fire, and earth. Ballard started his career as a science-fiction writer, and the conventions of the genre have remained a potent influence on his imagination.

The Quartet belongs to the so-called New Wave in the science fiction of the 1960s that attempted to push the stylistic and thematic boundar-ies of the genre. Much of the New Wave writing was cast in the apoca-lyptic mode, especially in Britain, where the millenarian mood of the decade was reinforced by the local tradition of catastrophic science fic-tion. Going back to H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and The War of the Worlds (1896), this tradition has been profoundly influenced by Olaf Stapledon’s magisterial works of future history, The First and Last Men (1931) and Star Maker (1937). More philosophically engaged and artistically sophisticated than the American pulp-originated science fic-tion, British science fiction in the 1950s and 60s became so preoccupied with apocalypse that Brian Aldiss, himself an SF writer, christened it tongue-in-cheek “the British catastrophe” (338). In the works of such popular purveyors of cozy Armageddon as the appropriately named John Wyndham, John Christopher, and John Lymington, the world in general and Britain in particular are destroyed by perambulating plants, undersea monsters, the death of grass, giant beasts, assorted plagues, and all man-ners of alien invasions. J. G. Ballard’s early science fiction belongs in this tradition, which continued to be a profound influence on his mature writing as well.

Many critics regard Ballard’s early science fiction as inscribing a quasi- religious longing for the millennium. Andrzej Gasiorek, for example,


writes: “The post-apocalyptic worlds [that the Quartet novels] envision, in which so-called civilized life is stripped bare by drought, deluged by floodwater, or frozen in time by the crystallization of living matter, are all in limbo, awaiting rebirth to a radically new dispensation” (11). Even if such millennial longings are limited to individual characters’ “inner changes and self-discovery” rather than on the communal salvation in the mold of the Left Behind series, they are seen as the only way to coun-teract the “allegations of pessimism and nihilism” that have dogged Bal-lard’s work (Delville 9).

I shall argue the opposite. It is not the intimations of the millennium but precisely its radical rejection that constitutes the ethical and political thrust of Ballard’s work. Just as narratively the Quartet deconstructs the apocalyptic chronotope by laying bare its formal devices, so ideologi-cally it undermines the salvationist scheme of universal destruction by taking it to the extreme. Roger Luckhurst points out the importance of the “enigma of the interval,” the catastrophic duration of Ballard’s texts, and it is precisely in this in-between narrative space that the poetics and politics of the apocalypse are questioned (72). From the first to the last novel, the Quartet develops into a deconstruction of its own formal prem-ises. It is not just a series of apocalyptic texts but also a text about the apocalypse.

Gone with the Wind

It is almost irresistible to see the four novels as a pleasingly symmetrical whole, imbued with a mythical significance (the four elements; the four Horsemen of the Book of Revelation; the Four Zoas of William Blake and so on7). But the novels were not originally conceived as a series at all. The Wind from Nowhere was a potboiler that Ballard wrote to break into print. Far less accomplished than the rest, his first novel was in-tensely disliked by its author and often excluded from his bibliographies. Nor did he ever state that the Quartet is based on the four elements or on any other four-fold mystical scheme, but this has not prevented endless speculations by his critics and fans on the subject. Yet precisely because the Quartet is a hodgepodge of influences, allusions, and inspirations, unified post factum into a seamless mystical whole, it provides a perfect

7 Characteristically, David Pringle regards the symbolism of the Bible as the foundation of the “fourfold symbolism” of Ballard’s early science fiction (49).

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example not only of apocalyptic writing but also of apocalyptic reading, which substitutes synchronic signification for diachronic contingency.

The Wind from Nowhere is sometimes dubbed Ballard’s “idiot off-spring,” though a review charitably points out that it already has the “un-definable atmosphere that marks Ballard’s best work.”8 This atmosphere is rather too definable. The novel is a holocaust by numbers, featuring a monstrous gale that reduces the Earth’s surface to rubble. It is a textbook incarnation of the disaster scenario, which merits attention precisely be-cause of its formulaic nature, offering a model example of the apocalyp-tic chronotope.

The apocalypse is seemingly natural; it is vaguely explained by solar flares and meteorological conditions. But it is structured by the tradition-al stages of the eschatological progression. The first chapters detail the signs and portents of the coming Tribulations: the freakish weather and the pervasive dust as the wind begins to strip off the soil. The main char-acters are mere ciphers, Everymen and Everywomen, meant to represent the spectrum of the collective response to the catastrophe. The difference between the damned and the Elect is not theological but moral: selfless-ness and fortitude are rewarded by survival.

The “sedimentation” of eschatology is clear in the scene, in which a Meteorological Office scientist, failing to explain the wind’s origin, grimly jokes that “maybe it’s the deliberate act of an outraged Provi-dence, determined to sweep man and his pestilence from the surface of this once green earth” (55). Even while ostensibly abjuring a religious justification, a secular apocalypse smuggles it in through allusions and stock imagery.

The novel also references another Biblical story, that of the Tower of Babel. In a sub-plot, the demented millionaire Hardoon builds a gi-ant tower, which he believes will be able to withstand a 500-mile-per hour wind. Hardoon describes his project as an attempt “to challenge the wind, asserting Man’s courage and determination to master Nature” (165). This hubris does not go unpunished: the tower is uprooted and then the wind miraculously dies down.9 The eschatological re-inscription of the natural disaster is complete when it is personified as a supernatural force that scourges man’s vanity and ambition.

8 http://www.ballardian.com/biblio-the-wind-from-nowhere (November 25, 2008).9 For an interesting discussion of the Tower of Babel and its connection to apocalyptic

violence see Batnaniv HaKarmi’s “Hubris, Language, and Oppression: Recreating Babel in Primo Levi’s If This is a Man and Midrash.”


But alongside its reliance on the Christian myth, the novel also em-ploys actual history: World War II and the Blitz of London. The belea-guered governmental headquarters “reminded Marshall of the last hours in Hitler’s fuhrer bunker” (sic; 117), while the scenes of the packed Lon-don Tube with people patiently waiting out the deadly attack from the air are modeled on similar scenes during the Blitz. These war allusions create a sub-plot of contingency, subtly undermining the formulaic un-folding of the meteorological apocalypse.

This doubleness of the plot is reflected in the doubleness of the set-ting. Like any apocalyptic text, The Wind from Nowhere embellishes its predictable chronology of destruction with voluptuously rendered scenes of ruined cities, drying seas, and people flying through the air like rag dolls. But this “Ballardian” landscape of the apocalyptic wasteland is offset by the drab scenes of people patiently waiting underground for the wind to die down and for ordinary life to resume. Unusual for an apocalyptic novel, its space is structured vertically, by the opposition of the exposed surface that is “being stripped to its seams” (117) and the un-derground. The unattractive “sub-world of dark labyrinthine tunnels and shafts crowded with countless thousands of almost motionless human beings, huddled together on the unlit platforms with their drab bundles of possessions” (142) becomes a space of human endurance and solidarity, a space of history. It is the underground City of Darkness, rather than the millenarian City of Light, that offers a possibility of survival.

A swerve away from the apocalyptic plot becomes evident at the end of the novel. The Wind from Nowhere offers no glimpse of a millennium, even on a purely personal level. The main characters survive, though in a field of rubble. The last sentence of the novel mocks millenarian hopes: “Like a cosmic carousel nearing the end of its run, the storm wind was slowly losing speed” (186). The homely image of the carousel with its circular motion undermines the relentless drive toward the end of time. The denial of the millennium is explicitly spelled out in the episode where one of the characters contemplates the child of his friend born in an underground shelter:

Maitland considered the baby’s small wizened face. He would have liked to think it symbolized hope and courage, the new world being reborn un-known to them in the cataclysmic midst of the old, but in fact he felt grim-ly depressed. Dora’s courage, her pathetic little cubicle with its makeshift shelves and clutter of damp clothes, make him realize just how helpless they were, how near the center of the whirlwind. (145)

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The figures of the whirlwind and the carousel are premonitions of the baroque literal shapes into which the setting is distorted in the next nov-els of the Quartet, as space and time fuse to create the nightmare terrain of the millennium.

The Terminal Lagoon

The Drowned World (1962) is a far more self-conscious exploration of the apocalyptic space/time. The novel departs from the pop-disaster for-mula and develops a rich tapestry of lush metaphors, literary allusions, and dream-like landscapes characteristic of Ballard’s mature writing.

The novel’s apocalypse is brought about by water: solar flares cause global warming, the melting of the ice caps, and a planet-wide deluge. The drowned cities of Europe and America are hidden under tropical la-goons and humid jungles. Ballard explores the symbolic connotations of water as the medium of death and rebirth by creating a chronotope where the boundary between the psychic and the physical is erased. This is the terrain of “archeopsychic time,” in which “the terrestrial and psychic landscapes were now indistinguishable, as they had been at Hiroshima and Auschwitz, Golgotha and Gomorrah” (43; 72). His lost characters do not band into a group of survivors, the secular Elect, as in The Wind from Nowhere. Just the opposite: social ties and obligations fall apart as each of them, in his or her solitary way, explores “the buried phantoms” of the personal and the biological past, “uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs” (43). The protagonist Ker-ans eventually embarks on a doomed trek south, into the primeval Eden of the wet Triassic jungles populated by giant iguanas. Attempts by the deranged leader Strangman, a caricature of Kurtz from Heart of Dark-ness, to “revive” civilization by draining the flooded London are treated by others with mockery and revulsion. Instead, the individual quests of Kerans, Beatrice, Bodkin, and other characters are for “the entire ransom of the Unconscious” hidden in the depth of liquid time (100).

The time arrow of the watery apocalypse points backward; the catas-trophe is experienced not as a prelude to the millennium but as a journey back in time. Bodkin the psychologist explains:

“as we move back through geophysical time so we re-enter the amniotic corridor and move back through spinal and archaeopsychic time, recol-lecting in our unconscious minds the landscapes of each epoch, each with a distinct geological terrain, its own unique flora and fauna, as recogniz-able to anyone else as they would to be to a traveler in a Wellsian time machine.” (43)


But even this reverse flow turns out to be only a prelude to a complete cessation of temporality. The chronotope of The Drowned World is truly static because time has fused with space, creating a dream-like simu-lacrum of a “total present,” in which all epochs coexist. The terrain of languid lagoons and steamy jungle that covers up the ruins of London is a liquid chaos, in which “the nominal realities of time and space ceased to exist” (82). Like the characters of Joseph Conrad for whom journey up the river is travel in time, Kerans and others explore the past by div-ing into the water of the “temporal lagoon.” Strangman wryly jokes that Kerans and his lover Beatrice suffer from “a touch of time-sickness . . . the chronoclasmic bends” (91).

The Drowned World takes the durational aspect of the apocalyptic plot to its (il)logical extreme. There is no more chronology, only inten-sity. The Tribulations have come but not gone and never will. They are not a step toward the millennium but a permanent state of being, the dream-time of the perpetual “now” (70).

The simultaneity of the apocalyptic chronotope is emphasized in The Drowned World by the elaborate system of literary and artistic allusions, including but not limited to, Heart of Darkness, H. G. Wells, fin-de-siècle decadent poetry, and the surrealistic paintings of Salvadore Dali, Max Ernst, and Paul Delvaux: Ballard’s novel substantiates Kristeva’s and Friedman’s point that intertextuality is a spatial dimension of the text. In the watery simultaneity of the “archeopsychic past,” literature and real-ity, dream and waking, past and future blend together into an undiffer-entiated flood of impressions and experiences that washes away the old chronological order of history.

But as time drains away, so does life. All the characters in the novel perish, either physically or psychologically, having lost not only the will to survive but even the capacity to distinguish between life and death. The doomed Kerans becomes “a second Adam searching for the forgot-ten paradises of the reborn sun” (171). The apocalypse is figured as a col-lective return to the womb, the gradual disintegration of the self through immersion in the waters of time. By the time death comes, the characters are no longer conscious of having lived. The novel’s New Jerusalem is Lethe, the river of forgetfulness.

Like most Ballard’s novels, The Drowned World, with its combination of sublimity and violence, or sublimity-as-violence, has often been seen as purely nihilistic or as uncritically reflecting the postmodern quest for intensity. But in an on-record interview Ballard himself emphasized the ideological aspect of the novel, relating it to the Katrina disaster: “There are many kinds of war and terror, but the worst thing is that violence

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holds a subliminal attraction for us. If we want to combat it successfully, we have to admit that humanity is not completely civilizable. Regrettable, but true.”10 In another conversation, Ballard clarifies his point by coura-geously describing political and religious terrorism as “elective (that is, voluntary) psychopathy . . . willingly embracing psychopathic behavior because of its energizing potential” that may affect not individuals but entire nations (Vale 100). Unless we combat the voluntary psychosis of violent millennialism with the awareness of its roots and consequences, we are likely to be rendered impotent by the false belief in the essential rationality of humanity or the essential goodness of religion.11 Thus, The Drowned World becomes a political critique of the apocalypse by reject-ing the false consolation of the millennium, or rather, by showing that the millennium and the Tribulations are one and the same.

Sea of Bones

What The Drowned World did for the durational aspect of the apocalyp-tic plot, the next, 1965, novel in the series, The Drought (also published as The Burning World), does for its chronological aspect. The Drowned World eliminated chronology, experimenting with pure duration. The Drought eliminates duration, reducing chronology to a series of unre-lated events. This structural symmetry is enhanced by the fact that the supposed “element” of The Drought, fire, is in fact the absence of water, as the world is parched after the chemical wastes dumped into the oceans have generated a mono-molecular film that prevents evaporation. But this almost too-neat correlation hides a more serious shift, from dreamy sym-bolism to a ruthless exploration of apocalyptic violence.

As in The Drowned World, the protagonist of The Drought lives in a world where the inner and the outer landscapes have merged. But the result is horrifying rather than sublime. Deprived of both memory and hope, Ransom experiences temporality as a dry accumulation of disas-ters. Drained of duration, time disintegrates into a jumble of moments stranded on the wasteland of history. When Ransom stumbles across the desert of salt and fish-bones that used to be a lake, he feels that he is “ad-vancing across an inner landscape where the elements of the future stood around him like the objects in a still life, formless and without associa-

10 http://www.ballardian.com/violence-without-end (November 25, 2008).11 This is in an interview recorded on November 23, 2004 and dealing with Islamic ter-

rorism and the Iraq war. In Vale, 99–101.


tion” (139). This sense of meaningless time falling apart is conveyed by disconnected images of aimless cruelty, random violence, and bizarre mutilations. The Drought is undoubtedly the bleakest novel in the series, not so much because of its apocalyptic scenes of car-choked highways and people killing each other for a sip of water, but rather because, as opposed to the traditional apocalyptic plot, these scenes do not lead up to any millennial consummation.

The geography of Ransom’s wanderings undermines the linearity of many secular apocalypses, in which the protagonists cross the hostile terrain to reach a City of Light. With a handful of accidental companions Ransom escapes the drying lake community and manages to reach the sea-coast, only to find it transformed into a salt-marsh whose bitter waters mock the millenarian promise of rebirth. Stranded there for a decade with an unloved ex-wife, Ransom inexplicably decides to go back to the lake. His companions are just as accidental and unconnected as before; their shared privations failing to create any sense of emotional bond. The lake is now a basin filled with fish-bones and presided over by the monstrous Caliban-like Quilter, a fat Miranda, and their idiot children. Neither the lake nor the sea provides any real destination; and Ransom’s meandering across the mean landscape of the desiccated land is not even an inverted quest into a heart of darkness but merely a senseless nightmare.

The Drought features a millenarian cult of a fire-and-brimstone preacher and his fishermen disciples who become literal, not metaphori-cal, fishers of men. Religious fanatics burn the city, hoping that “God’s grace would come to them only through this final purging fire” (37). But even this violence ultimately dissolves in the sterility of the novel’s land-scape. On the salt beach “time [is] not absent but immobilized” (113). And so both violence and compassion are equally meaningless because neither can generate change. The novel vividly demonstrates how hu-man identity is constructed by a narrative, in which each action or event acquires meaning from the temporal sequence in which it is embedded. Once this sequence is gone, identity becomes illegible and accidental, a broken reflection of “a world of volitional time where the images of the past were reflected free from the demands of memory and nostalgia, free even from the pressures of thirst and hunger” (165).

If Kerans in The Drowned World embraced the apocalypse in pur-suit of self-extinction, Ransom is intermittently beguiled and revolted by it. Eventually abandoning both communities, he strikes out on his own, searching for “absolution in time,” as opposed to the disconnected “quantum of existence” that his life has become (34; 36). His search for

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water figures the desire for time in the desert of eternity. In a strange and hallucinatory ending, having lost all human ties and connections, Ransom is suddenly blessed by the fall of rain; an oblique hope for the recovery of history and escape from “a zone without time, suspended in an endless interval” (113).

But this hope is offered only faintly and ironically: Ballard’s apoca-lypse denies us easy solutions and allegorical interpretations. The novel’s use of intertextuality again incarnates the spatiality of its chronotope, but its literary allusions are piled up haphazardly, like the accidental objects littering the dry river-bed of Ransom’s wanderings. If in The Drowned World, the allusions were thematically unified by the fin-de-siècle trope of regression, in The Drought they seem to be random, selected for their momentary impact rather than for some overarching thematic sig-nificance. Shakespeare’s Tempest, Wagner, and the Bible are no more than accidental objects in the textual wasteland. The millenarian space drained of both duration and chronology is “no longer a place for the sane” (64).

Lepers in the City of Light

The Crystal World returns to the dreamlike beauty of The Drowned World but with a twist that unifies all the four novels into a coherent whole. The last novel in the series looks back on the political, psychological, and metaphysical concerns of the first three and restates them in a way that makes clear the connection between the apocalyptic desire and the apocalyptic chronotope; between “millennial seduction” and millennial narrativity.

Its premise is that a mysterious process causes “crystallization” of all things, including human beings and animals, encasing them in sheaths of beautiful jewels. The crystallization is generated by “anti-time” (by anal-ogy with anti-matter), which annihilates ordinary temporality, “subtract-ing from the universe another quantum from its total store of time” (85). Time itself dies into a millennium of eternal perfection. In this version of the apocalypse, history comes to an end without the ugly Tribulations. Rather, the entire planet becomes an analogue of the New Jerusalem of the Book of Revelation, the city whose walls are of jasper; and which is “pure gold, like unto clear glass” with foundations of the wall “garnished with all manner of precious stones” (Revelation 21:19). In Ballard’s crys-tal millennium, even the profane Babylon that used to be called Miami is transformed into “a city of a thousand cathedral spires, a vision material-ized from St. John the Divine” (168).


But there is no human life in the city of jewels. Like Snow White in her glass coffin, the crystallized humans are neither dead nor alive. Sus-pended in timeless animation, they have become not angels but objects, beautiful and lifeless things.

And yet, there are people who deliberately walk into the jeweled for-ests seeking to become part of the inorganic “New Jerusalem” (138). They are suffering from leprosy, which becomes endemic at the same time as the process of crystallization begins. The lepers would rather be imprisoned in the sublimely beautiful coffins of crystals than in their rotting flesh. But leprosy is a disease that kills slowly, gradually, and in-exorably — just like old age; like life itself. We are all lepers.

The juxtaposition of time and eternity in The Crystal World is figured as the juxtaposition of leprosy and crystallization. Sanders, the protago-nist who eventually retreats into the forest, writes: “I know that all mo-tion leads inevitably to death, and that time is its servant” (83). Without time, there is no decay but also no growth; and without death, there is no life. Thought itself only exists in time and thus can be regarded as a sort of sickness, contingent on the inevitable decay of its vehicle. As Cioran points out, “freedoms prosper only in a sick body politic” (13). If time is leprosy, its cure is non-being.

The Crystal World simultaneously critiques the psychic and ideologi-cal underpinnings of the millennium and reveals its powerful seduction. The bejeweled forests are an ultimate incarnation of the apocalyptic chro-notope in which successive moments are embalmed in lifeless simultane-ity. And yet this cemetery of time is beguilingly beautiful. As opposed to the stark wasteland of The Drought, the sparkling forests of The Crystal World are the true millennium: pure, eternal, and deadly.

The Ethics of Mutability

Mikhail Bakhtin related the messy, unpredictable, multiform chronotope of the novel to the open-endedness of history, in which “a place for the future must be found” (37). In his impassionate defense of the poetics of contingency, Morson quotes Bakhtin to make his own point that narrative temporality is the main axis for the self-creation of subjects and societ-ies; we narrate our selves in the full knowledge that “the past is fixed and the future is not,” and it is only along this arrow of time that freedom and authenticity can be found (284). Morson’s critique of what he calls the “synchronic” world-view and what, following Lyotard, I have called myth, obliquely refers to the violence implicit in the idea that the immu-table laws of history exist and we can know them and, therefore, know

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the future (302). But the apocalyptic plot makes this violence overt, col-lapsing the distinction between murder and salvation. In the apocalyptic plot “the place for the future” must be not found but revealed by clear-ing away the detritus of accidental history. And this detritus consists of human bodies that by necessity function as soft clocks ticking away the irreplaceable moments of time. The only way to create a purely spatial chronotope is to freeze all organic processes and to stop all human and perhaps even non-human actions. The ultimate narrative of the end of time is the end of narrative.

Ballard’s novels both incarnate the death of narrative and question its ethical premises and consequences. In its combination of violence and beauty, of narrative slowdown and temporal distortion, the Quartet embodies the postmodern poetics of the sublime. But in its denial of utopian redemption, in its mockery of the millennium, the Quartet under-mines the political appropriation of the sublime in the service of religion and ideology. By taking to the extreme the spatiality of the postmodern chronotope, Ballard’s novels show that if time is dead, it is because it has been murdered by the violent excesses of the would-be builders of New Jerusalem. Myth is only a reification and obfuscation of history.

Ballard’s anti-apocalyptic apocalypse opposes millennialism by fo-cusing on corporeal experience and psychic endurance. His Four Horse-men are not the exceptional disasters of the Book of Revelation, War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death, but the abused foundations of life — Air, Water, Earth, and Fire. Against the deadly delusion of a divine emplot-ment of history Ballard pits the everyday realities of survival in time.

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———. 1974b [1962]. The Drowned World. London: Penguin Books.———. 1974c [1964]. The Drought. London: Penguin Books.———. 2000 [1966]. The Crystal World. London: Flamingo.Berlin, Isaiah. 2002. Liberty. Ed. Henry Hardy. Oxford: Oxford University

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