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

Elana GomelTel Aviv University

“Don’t wait or the Last Judgment. It takes place every

day.”

Albert Camus

Delirium and Destination

What happens ater the end o time?

The question seems absurd: i time comes to an end, the idea o any-

thing “happening” is meaningless. A narrative o events can only unold

in time, just as time is humanly apprehended only through narrative. In

Paul Ricoeur’s classic ormulation, temporality is the “structure o exis-

tence that reaches language in narrativity” (35). The end o time wouldannihilate the narrative imagination predicated on the ux o social and

biological change. And yet, paradoxically, this imagination seems to

ourish on the edge o its own destruction. The notions o the end o

time, the apocalypse, the millennium, have been central to the Western

historical imagination, inecting it by what Derrida called “the disorder

or delirium o destination” (24) — a phrase that captures the combination

o unshakeable determinism and giddy exaltation o apocalyptic belies.

The end is nigh, but true believers have to work hard to make it happen.

Their work is violence.

Like any other conceptualization o temporality, apocalypse attempts

to create a humanly meaningul narrative o historical change. But it is

peculiarly sel-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 deeat death by violence. Perhaps the best

representation o 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” o the approaching cataclysm has motivated some o

th t d t ti li i d liti l t i hi t th



186 Elana Gomel

Crusades and the expulsion o Jews rom Spain to Nazism and Stalinism,

not to mention innumerable schisms, sects, and cults. And apocalypse

has remained a central (i not the central) temporal orm o postmoder-

nity, promising, just as it did in ancient times, “the key to human history”

(Weber 5).

Despite its many guises, the narrative o the end o time is surprising-

ly uniorm across the immense range o apocalyptic literature, both reli-

gious and secular. No matter how the end is visualized, whether brought

about by divine wrath, the inexorable law o history, the hidden workings

o nature, or any combination thereo, it proceeds along the same well-

trodden path. This path, the apocalyptic plot, has been summarized by

cultural scholars, literary critics, and students o religion in very similarterms. It consists o two stages, destruction and renewal. In her analysis

o the end-o-century millenarian ever, Lee Quinby describes it as the

transition rom “world destruction” to “a new, transormed earth” (4).

Looking at nineteenth-century American literature, David Ketterer fnds

a tight “correlation between the destruction o the world and the estab-

lishment o the New Jerusalem” (7). And Robert Jay Liton, who studied

the political praxis o 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 o apocalyptic violence —o violence conceived in sweeping terms as a purifcation and renewal o

humankind through the total or near-total destruction o the planet” (4).

Emotionally speaking, apocalypse links ear and hope, since “tribulation

and horror will usher in public and private bliss, ree o pain or evil”

(Weber 31).

The origin o the apocalyptic plot (at least in its Western incarnation)

lies in the Book o Revelation o St. John the Divine, the last book o the

Christian Bible. This esoteric text, a combination o the Jewish prophetic

tradition with the nascent Christian eschatology, has had a cultural and

political inuence quite incommensurable with its shaky position within

Catholic and mainstream Protestant theologies. The book barely achieved

inclusion in the canon (due to the mistaken belie that its author was the

apostle John). Its burning immediacy that appealed to many early Chris-

tians was deused by St. Augustine who insisted that it should be read al-

legorically, with the millennium reerring to the reign o Christ within his

Church, while the Tribulations represented the struggle o good and evil

in the hearts o believers. In 431 AD, the Council o Ephesus ofciallyadopted this doctrine, declaring that the date o the Second Coming was

k bl d th t th l ti i l ti d t i



187J. G. Ballard and the Ethics and Aesthetics of the End of Time

dividual souls ater death, not to humanity in the material world. Needless

to say, countless gurus, sectarians, and heresiarchs, rom twelth-century

Joachim o Fiore to twentieth-century David Koresh, disagreed. For the

contemporary evangelical movement in the United States the “fnal book

o the New Testament, rejected by many Catholics as inauthentic proph-

ecy, became the centerpiece o theology” (Shorris 119). The Revelation

has shaped “a way o lie” imposing structure and meaning upon the

evangelicals’ perception o both public and private time; it is not just a

narrative but the narrative, since it subsumes all other representations o

the past and uture history (Quinby 2).

But in (post)modernity, the apocalyptic plot has spread beyond the

religious right. It can be ound in diverse secular ideologies, rom Na-zism and Communism to “deep” ecology; in blockbuster movies (such

as the Terminator and Matrix series); and in countless science-fctional

disaster novels. This narrative uniormity across a wide cultural spectrum

indicates a deeper “content o the orm” (Jameson 1981: 1), whose politi-

cal, psychological, and ethical meanings are relatively independent o the

overt ideology and/or theology o the text.

It is this ormal/ideological structure o the apocalyptic plot that is the

ocus o my essay. Beyond critique o specifc apocalyptic ideologies,

conducted by such scholars as Quinby, Liton, Tina Pippin, and Cath-erine Keller, to name only a ew, I will consider the narrative chronotope

o the end o time as the locus o political and ethical dangers. 1 I shall

analyze J. G. Ballard’s fctions o apocalypse as a narrative fghting its

own narrativity, a rebellion o utopian/millenarian space pitted against

historical time.

Narrative can be viewed a “socially symbolic act” whose “content o

the orm” reects sedimentation o historical experience (Jameson 1981:

3). At the same time, narrative is an “emplotment” o history, a structure

o meaning imposed upon the ux o historical events (White 192). The

narrative chronotope is the nexus o “the time o human lie” and o

“historical time,” which enables “the representability o events” (Bakhtin

22). In this reciprocal relationship with history lies narrative’s power to

shape societies and individuals. Narrative provides templates or indi-

vidual sel-representation, while situating identity within the context o

(narrativized) history. Narrative is also a locus o social solidarity and ac-

tion, since it mediates between the private time structured by intensities

o experience and the public time structured by collective memory.1 Chronotope is defned by Mikhail Bakhtin as “the intrinsic connectedness o temporal



188 Elana Gomel

This ability o narrative to order and organize perception o individual

and collective time has been the target o some postmodern criticism

concerned “with deconstructing the linear concept o time, o mean-

ing, o narrative and o narrative history” (Currie 79). Temporality as

the main axis o narrative has acquired a bad name in postmodernism,

which tends to be “dominated by categories o space rather than by cat-

egories o time” (Jameson 2003: 319).2 While or Jameson this is a mixed

blessing, other critics celebrate “the spatial turn” as the release rom the

tyranny o chrono-logic, opening up the possibility o “the play o desire

in space” (Friedman 217). Though Friedman hersel stresses that spati-

ality does not exclude temporality, the postmodern chronotope tends to

inscribe the ascendancy o space as the deeat o time. In this sense, it isinherently apocalyptic.

The apocalyptic plot separates time and space by linking the ormer to

the horror o the Tribulations and the latter to the perection and quietude

o the millennium. Any narrative chronotope, as Bakhtin points out, rep-

resents the “indissoluble unity” o time and space (15). The apocalyptic

chronotope is an exception; it breaks this unity and sets time and space

against each other. The stage o destruction is dynamic and temporal,

consisting o a series o cataclysmic events with constantly increasing

levels o violence. But the millennium is static and timeless. Its repre-sentations are always couched in spatial terms, as avatars o the New

Jerusalem, the eternal City o God: “And the city lieth oursquare, and

the length is as large as the breadth: and he measured the city with the

reed, twelve thousand urlongs. The length and the breadth and the height

o it are equal. . . . Having the glory o 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 o this image is, as Catherine

Keller points out, its “gemology” (81). There is no change in the City o

God; no time, and no lie either.

The apocalyptic plot allows space to devour time, “rendering spatial

what is essentially temporal”: history (Kermode 124). The overall time-

shape o 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 shit in sensibilities rom a predominantly

temporal and historiographic imagination to one much more concerned with the spatial and




out in advance by either a supernatural designer or a natural design. And

it is this spatiality o apocalypse that makes it so attractive to a certain

strand in postmodernism whose history atigue fnds an expression in the

“rush to imagine the end” (Pippin 4).

This essay is a deense o temporality, along the lines o Gary Saul

Morson’s deense o “tempics,” the narrative poetics that recognizes and

celebrates “the messiness, historicity, and timeliness (not timelessness)

o things” (292). My critical ocus is on the enemy o “tempics” — the

narrative desire or the end o narrative; the history o the denial o his-

toricity; the perverse dynamics o temporal sel-negation whose political

double is violent sel-destruction.

This narratological/ideological approach to apocalypse has deter-mined my choice o the main textual corpus: the our apocalyptic novels

o the British writer J. G. Ballard (1930—2009), collectively known as

the Four Elements Quartet. Ballard’s novels are on the opposite end o

the political spectrum rom the impatient eschatology o the evangelical

Christian fction or celebratory violence o Hollywood disaster icks.

But his exquisite mastery o the apocalyptic plot in all its permutations

makes the Quartet a perect example o the narrative poetics o apoca-

lypse. And it is Ballard’s deconstruction o this poetics that makes his

novels politically and ethically relevant. By probing the narrative “time/ shape” o the apocalyptic plot, Ballard orces his readers to consider not

what might happen ater the end o time but rather their own desire or

time to end.

The Pleasures of Being Left Behind

• Politicalcrisis

• Economiccrisis

• Worldwideepidemics

• Environmentalcatastrophe

• Massdisappearances

• Militaryapocalypse

And that’s just the beginning . . . o the end o the world. It’s happening

now.3

This is how the ofcial site o the Let Behind media empire greets a

surer, helpully oering a YouTube explanatory video in preparation or

an apocalyptic shopping spree that includes several book series (includ-



190 Elana Gomel

ing one or children), audios, videos, computer wallpaper, and the End

o Time calculator.

Let Behind , which started as a series o 16 bestselling books authored

by the evangelical preacher Tim LaHaye and journalist Jerry Jenkins and

has developed into a cultural juggernaut, is a useul primer o 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 o The Book o Revelation. The Let

Behind series, then, may be seen as revealing the political unconscious o

the apocalyptic plot Ballard attempts to deconstruct.

The Let Behind series is just one instance o the widespread popular-

ity o the so-called dispensational premillennialism, also known as thepre-Tribulation Rapture theology, in contemporary America. According

to Amy Frykholm, “evangelicalism is an increasingly signifcant part o

American popular culture. Scholars identiy 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 let the Church o

England to join the Plymouth Brothers and predicted the Second Comingin 1882 (as with all such prophecies, its ailure seemed only to have con-

vinced the believers o its veracity).4 Darby introduced the key element

o contemporary American evangelicalism: the Rapture, during which

the believers will be bodily lited into the air to meet Christ beore the

beginning o the Tribulations. Ater that, the uture history will tick o as

briskly as a clock: the two witnesses; Antichrist; Tribulations; Armaged-

don; millennium; Satan’s comeback and his fnal deeat; resurrection; the

Last Judgment. Bolstered by the continuing success o C. I. Schofeld’s

First Reerence Bible (1909) that linked Old and New Testament proph-

ecy into a seamless timeline, the Rapture has frmly 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 o the nineteenth century and that prooundly

inuenced various meliorative social movements, including liberalism, abolitionism, and

trade unionism. Postmillennialism believes that the Second Coming will only occur ater

humanity has achieved a millennium by its own eorts. Emblematic o the transition rom

post- to premillennialism is the career o the eminist pioneer Christabel Parkhurst who even-

tually turned to Adventism and became a ervent believer in the imminent Second Coming




nation o the American evangelical movement. While some lip-service

is paid “to post- and mid-trib” positions (with additional mind-boggling

classifcations such as pre- and mid-Wrath), the majority o the evangeli-

cals support the Let 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 uture.

Jesus will come in the air, catch up the Church rom the earth, and then

return to Heaven with the Church. In 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18, we are

given a clear description o 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 o this website is to prove that the rapture will occurprior to the beginning o the tribulation. This has been well researched and

documented throughout the site.5

Besides the obvious Schadenreude o watching rom above the tribu-

lations o assorted infdels, the Rapture oers 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 Let Behind series opens with a book also called

Let Behind , in which the primary characters, pilot Rayord Steele and

journalist Cameron “Buck” Williams, are conronted with the Rapture

on a commercial airplane. This takes place on the book’s frst page. Elid-

ing the minute exegesis o other evangelical compositions, Let Behind

plunges straight into action. The frst 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 or the unparalleled success o the series,

with more than 60 million copies sold, ar more than any other Christian

fction.As one plows through the interminable length o the Let Behind se-

ries, with its wooden atrocities and underwhelming miracles, suspense is

supplanted by its opposite, oreknowledge. Ater all, once the theological

parameters o the initial disaster become clear, nobody in the intended

audience can have any doubt about the uture developments. And yet,

instead o inducing boredom, this oreknowledge becomes the source o

an even more potent readerly pleasure. Let Behind outs Shklovsky’s

view that art deamiliarizes reality; its goal is precisely to amiliarize



192 Elana Gomel

teleology by repetition. By renouncing suspense and allowing the reader

the reedom to wander the amiliar byways o Biblical allusion, Let Be-

hind lays bare the phenomenon o intertextuality — any text being “the

absorption and transormation o another” (Kristeva 66). Both Kristeva

and Friedman (ollowing Roland Barthes’ earlier distinction between

“readerly” and “writerly” texts) regard intertextuality as a spatial aspect

o narrativity, in which the reader’s language o desire meets the desire

in/o language. Let Behind is highly intertextual; and its responsiveness

to its readers’ desires generates an exemplary postmodern dynamics o

narrative time being gradually overtaken by narrative space.

This transormation o time into space is enacted in the series through

the slowing-down o narrative time. This is not immediately obvioussince every volume o the series is packed with action. However, when

one considers that the end is known in advance, that the end is, in act,

what causes the entire sequence in a rigid teleology characteristic o

what Kermode calls “endism” (120), one has to ask what the point o

this everish activity is. And here the inordinate length o the Let Be-

hind series becomes particularly important. The Book o Revelation, like

most prophetic writings, is very brie, allowing the reader to esh out

its basic sequence o events in a variety o possible scenarios. But Let

Behind , with its ull-length 16 volumes, strives or narrative. When itsprotagonists fnally 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

infnitely the rigidly predetermined sequence o apocalyptic events. The

stark chronology o the endgame is bogged down in the slow-motion

violence o the Tribulations.

In the classic narratology o Gérard Genette and Seymour Chatman,

narrative temporality has two aspects: chronology and duration, “the

frst concerned with the relationships between the temporal order o the

events that are being told and the pseudo-temporal order o the narrative;

the second concerned with the relationships between the duration o the

events and the duration o the narrative” (Genette 25). While tradition-

ally these two aspects are relatively independent o each other, they are

tightly correlated in the apocalyptic plot, which takes place in what Ker-

mode calls “the third order o duration” between the fxed and unalter-

able beginning and ending (70). Apocalypse translates chronology into

duration. Since the end is known in advance, the narrative possibilitieso the apocalyptic plot are reduced to the elaboration o its basic stages.

S ti l l ti t k th l t l




The aesthetics o the disaster movie provides another example o

this phenomenon, as plot and character are subordinated to the visual

pleasures o special eects. The lightless sky and the skull-crashing ma-

chines o the Terminator trilogy; the ractal mechanical cities o Matrix;

the beheaded Statue o Liberty o Clovereld ; and the empty London o

28 Days Later dominate these flms’ chronotopes and stretch the predict-

able chronology o their plots. It might seem paradoxical to talk o action

slowdown in action movies but in act the accumulation o disasters does

not constitute a true narrative sequence, in which events are linked by

causality. Instead, there is a reiteration o the basic event o the catastro-

phe with a progressively ratcheted-up intensity o violence.

The slowed-down duration o apocalypse is what Lawrence Langercalls “traumatic time,” rozen in the perpetual “now” (6). Duration is

linked by trauma theorists to the aesthetics o the catastrophic sublime,

the “intensities” o postmodernism (Jameson 2003: 317). But Langer’s

ethical deense o durational, as opposed to chronological, temporality

rings hollow when conronted with the cynical industry o the sublime

that the apocalyptic pop-culture has become. Let Behind manuactures

trauma and uses it as a ploy o “millennial seduction.” Since the trauma

is not in the past but in the uture, the text generates a sort o installment-

plan sublimity whose purchase is indefnitely postponed by the writing-o o temporal debts.

Let Behind is an exemplary postmodern text also in the way it erases

the boundary between fctional and non-fctional representations o his-

tory. Hayden White’s critique o the veridical claims made by traditional

historiography is well-known. It is based on his notion o the “emplot-

ment” o a mere chronicle o events into “verbal fctions, the contents

o which are as much invented as ound and the orms o 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 fction

neatly sidesteps the horns o the historian’s dilemma. Let Behind is ob-

viously fctional in the sense that all its characters are people who have

never existed. Nor do the authors make any claim, or 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-



194 Elana Gomel

at the same time the series narrates what its audience regards as the true

story o both the past and the uture. Instead o emplotting the contingent

material o actual events into “verbal fctions,” the series dresses up the

would-be true plot o history in a fctional narrative.

Uniting the past and the uture, fction and truth, history and proph-

ecy, the apocalypse culminates in the millennium where all such dualities

cease to exist because time, responsible or the painul instability o the

human condition, ceases to exist as well. Time dies into utopia, which E.

M. Cioran describes as “a kind o stationary duration, an immobilized

Possible, a countereit o eternal present” (104). Narrative representa-

tion o this “eternal present” is, o course, not an easy matter because it

militates against the very nature o narrativity, its temporality. Even inThe Divine Comedy, the Paradise is ar less memorable than the Inerno.

With considerably less talent at its authors’ disposal, the Let Behind vi-

sion o Kingdom Come in the last book o each series is rather bathetic,

though not more so than its secular counterparts, glimpses o utopian

spaces that end the adrenaline-pumped action o disaster movies, such as

a pseudo-pioneer village at the end o the last cinematic version o I Am

Legend or the closing credits o The Happening oating over the vision

o a happy suburban home. No matter how disappointing or scaled-down,

the utopian space is necessary to signiy not just the end o this particularnarrative but the end o all narratives, the end o time.

The apocalyptic plot is a prime example o 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

o events to be placed in a constant ramework in which the beginning

and the end o a story orm a sort o rhythm or rhyme” (67). Modernity

reconstructs religious myths into “great narratives,” in which “the gen-

eral course o history is conceivable” within the ramework o some im-

mutable principle (68). The apocalyptic plot belongs to the modality o

“myth” in two senses: it imposes “a constant ramework” upon history

and it makes history intelligible according to an immutable principle,

whether this principle is the will o God, the Hegelian laws o develop-

ment, or the Gaia hypothesis.

While postmodernism celebrates the death o mythical “grand nar-

ratives,” they get reborn on sites ranging rom apocalyptic blockbusters

to Ground Zero. This resurgence is made easier by the “spatial turn” o

postmodern culture that encourages sublime intensities in place o ana-lytical historicity. Narrative history has been criticized or its selectivity:

H d Whit th t th l t t hi t b “ l ti




pression, or subordination” o historical events results in the alsifca-

tion o individual experience (White 194). But the danger o apocalyptic

myths rests precisely on their capacity to absorb and blend heteroge-

neous elements. Since it claims that its narrative shape IS the shape o

history, apocalypse needs no emplotment. Potentially any event can be

seamlessly incorporated into the apocalyptic plot. Commenting upon the

epistemological omnivorousness o apocalyptic groups who are unazed

by any critical argument or unulflled prophecy, journalist Alex Heard

writes: “Start reading and studying, and you quickly realize that any-

thing can be a sign o the End” (89). I or ordinary historical narratives

“what is not there in a discourse” is “constitutive o what is” (Currie 80),

the apocalyptic narrative is structured not by exclusion but by inclusion.Anything that “is not there” may be easily transormed into “what is” by

the ever-expanding apocalyptic hermeneutics.

The pleasure that the Let Behind series oers its readers is the plea-

sure o transorming the troubling contingency o history into the re-

assuring stasis o myth. Frykholm, who interviewed Rapture believers,

points out that instead o being consumed by anxiety, most o them are

smugly sel-confdent. Their aith in the imminent end o time allows

them to reduce the alien perturbations o history into amiliar signposts:

Political events, diplomatic missions, wars, earthquakes, oods, and other

natural disasters are not random, but woven into a complex narrative about

the world’s approaching end. This method o interpretation highly struc-

tures readers’ understanding o the world they live in. It oers coherence

to what might otherwise appear random and secures or them a very spe-

cifc and special place in world history. (106)

The apocalyptic chronotope is a confguration o two spaces: the

space o the Tribulations and o the millennium. But it would be a mis-

take to argue that the apocalyptic plot consists in the transition rom theone to the other. Such a transition would introduce the possibility o a di-

erent outcome, contaminating myth with contingency. Rather, the two

spaces, outwardly opposite, are in act the same, linked together by the

overarching design o history, in which the past and the uture coexist in

the timelessness o prophecy. The Tribulations and the millennium are

superimposed upon each other, constituting the unifed textual/ideologi-

cal terrain, in which the end o time is ritually re-enacted as a murder o

history. In this sense, apocalypse is not the opposite o utopia; apoca-

lypse is utopia.



196 Elana Gomel

The Four Elements

Ideologically, J. G. Ballard is situated at the opposite end o the spectrum

rom the Rapture believers. One o the best-known and most controversialcontemporary British writers, the author o the scandalous Atrocity Ex-

hibition and Crash (made into the much-debated flm by David Cronen-

berg), Ballard has been accused o nihilism and pornography o violence.

There is even an adjective “Ballardian,” indicating a peculiar mixture o

dystopia, lyricism, and violence that characterize his writings.

Nevertheless, many o his writings explore the apocalyptic plot, none

more so than the our novels, collectively known as the Four Elements

Quartet. The Quartet comprises The Wind rom Nowhere (1961), which

was Ballard’s frst published novel, The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1964), and The Crystal World (1966). Each novel presents a

version o the apocalypse linked to one o the our traditional elements:

air, water, fre, and earth. Ballard started his career as a science-fction

writer, and the conventions o the genre have remained a potent inuence

on his imagination.

The Quartet belongs to the so-called New Wave in the science fction

o the 1960s that attempted to push the stylistic and thematic boundar-

ies o the genre. Much o the New Wave writing was cast in the apoca-

lyptic mode, especially in Britain, where the millenarian mood o the

decade was reinorced by the local tradition o catastrophic science fc-

tion. Going back to H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and The War

o the Worlds (1896), this tradition has been prooundly inuenced by

Ola Stapledon’s magisterial works o uture history, The First and Last

Men (1931) and Star Maker (1937). More philosophically engaged and

artistically sophisticated than the American pulp-originated science fc-

tion, British science fction in the 1950s and 60s became so preoccupied

with apocalypse that Brian Aldiss, himsel an SF writer, christened ittongue-in-cheek “the British catastrophe” (338). In the works o such

popular purveyors o 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 o grass, giant beasts, assorted plagues, and all man-

ners o alien invasions. J. G. Ballard’s early science fction belongs in

this tradition, which continued to be a proound inuence on his mature

writing as well.

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




writes: “The post-apocalyptic worlds [that the Quartet novels] envision,

in which so-called civilized lie is stripped bare by drought, deluged by

oodwater, or rozen in time by the crystallization o living matter, are

all in limbo, awaiting rebirth to a radically new dispensation” (11). Even

i such millennial longings are limited to individual characters’ “inner

changes and sel-discovery” rather than on the communal salvation in

the mold o the Let Behind series, they are seen as the only way to coun-

teract the “allegations o pessimism and nihilism” that have dogged Bal-

lard’s work (Delville 9).

I shall argue the opposite. It is not the intimations o the millennium

but precisely its radical rejection that constitutes the ethical and political

thrust o Ballard’s work. Just as narratively the Quartet deconstructs theapocalyptic chronotope by laying bare its ormal devices, so ideologi-

cally it undermines the salvationist scheme o universal destruction by

taking it to the extreme. Roger Luckhurst points out the importance o

the “enigma o the interval,” the catastrophic duration o Ballard’s texts,

and it is precisely in this in-between narrative space that the poetics and

politics o the apocalypse are questioned (72). From the frst to the last

novel, the Quartet develops into a deconstruction o its own ormal prem-

ises. It is not just a series o apocalyptic texts but also a text about the

apocalypse.

Gone with the Wind

It is almost irresistible to see the our novels as a pleasingly symmetrical

whole, imbued with a mythical signifcance (the our elements; the our

Horsemen o the Book o Revelation; the Four Zoas o William Blake

and so on7). But the novels were not originally conceived as a series at

all. The Wind rom Nowhere was a potboiler that Ballard wrote to break into print. Far less accomplished than the rest, his frst novel was in-

tensely disliked by its author and oten excluded rom his bibliographies.

Nor did he ever state that the Quartet is based on the our elements or on

any other our-old mystical scheme, but this has not prevented endless

speculations by his critics and ans on the subject. Yet precisely because

the Quartet is a hodgepodge o inuences, allusions, and inspirations,

unifed post actum into a seamless mystical whole, it provides a perect

7 Characteristically, David Pringle regards the symbolism o the Bible as the oundation



198 Elana Gomel

example not only o apocalyptic writing but also o apocalyptic reading,

which substitutes synchronic signifcation or diachronic contingency.

The Wind rom Nowhere is sometimes dubbed Ballard’s “idiot o-

spring,” though a review charitably points out that it already has the “un-

defnable atmosphere that marks Ballard’s best work.”8 This atmosphere

is rather too defnable. The novel is a holocaust by numbers, eaturing a

monstrous gale that reduces the Earth’s surace to rubble. It is a textbook

incarnation o the disaster scenario, which merits attention precisely be-

cause o its ormulaic nature, oering a model example o the apocalyp-

tic chronotope.

The apocalypse is seemingly natural; it is vaguely explained by solar

ares and meteorological conditions. But it is structured by the tradition-al stages o the eschatological progression. The frst chapters detail the

signs and portents o the coming Tribulations: the reakish weather and

the pervasive dust as the wind begins to strip o the soil. The main char-

acters are mere ciphers, Everymen and Everywomen, meant to represent

the spectrum o the collective response to the catastrophe. The dierence

between the damned and the Elect is not theological but moral: seless-

ness and ortitude are rewarded by survival.

The “sedimentation” o eschatology is clear in the scene, in which

a Meteorological Ofce scientist, ailing to explain the wind’s origin,grimly jokes that “maybe it’s the deliberate act o an outraged Provi-

dence, determined to sweep man and his pestilence rom the surace o

this once green earth” (55). Even while ostensibly abjuring a religious

justifcation, a secular apocalypse smuggles it in through allusions and

stock imagery.

The novel also reerences another Biblical story, that o the Tower

o 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

o the natural disaster is complete when it is personifed as a supernatural

orce that scourges man’s vanity and ambition.

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

violence see Batnaniv HaKarmi’s “Hubris, Language, and Oppression: Recreating Babel in




But alongside its reliance on the Christian myth, the novel also em-

ploys actual history: World War II and the Blitz o London. The belea-

guered governmental headquarters “reminded Marshall o the last hours

in Hitler’s uhrer bunker” (sic; 117), while the scenes o the packed Lon-

don Tube with people patiently waiting out the deadly attack rom the

air are modeled on similar scenes during the Blitz. These war allusions

create a sub-plot o contingency, subtly undermining the ormulaic un-

olding o the meteorological apocalypse.

This doubleness o the plot is reected in the doubleness o the set-

ting. Like any apocalyptic text, The Wind rom Nowhere embellishes its

predictable chronology o destruction with voluptuously rendered scenes

o ruined cities, drying seas, and people ying through the air like ragdolls. But this “Ballardian” landscape o the apocalyptic wasteland is

oset by the drab scenes o people patiently waiting underground or

the wind to die down and or ordinary lie to resume. Unusual or an

apocalyptic novel, its space is structured vertically, by the opposition o

the exposed surace that is “being stripped to its seams” (117) and the un-

derground. The unattractive “sub-world o dark labyrinthine tunnels and

shats crowded with countless thousands o almost motionless human

beings, huddled together on the unlit platorms with their drab bundles o

possessions” (142) becomes a space o human endurance and solidarity,a space o history. It is the underground City o Darkness, rather than the

millenarian City o Light, that oers a possibility o survival.

A swerve away rom the apocalyptic plot becomes evident at the end

o the novel. The Wind rom Nowhere oers no glimpse o a millennium,

even on a purely personal level. The main characters survive, though in a

feld o rubble. The last sentence o the novel mocks millenarian hopes:

“Like a cosmic carousel nearing the end o its run, the storm wind was

slowly losing speed” (186). The homely image o the carousel with its

circular motion undermines the relentless drive toward the end o time.

The denial o the millennium is explicitly spelled out in the episode

where one o the characters contemplates the child o his riend born in

an underground shelter:

Maitland considered the baby’s small wizened ace. He would have liked

to think it symbolized hope and courage, the new world being reborn un-

known to them in the cataclysmic midst o the old, but in act he elt grim-

ly depressed. Dora’s courage, her pathetic little cubicle with its makeshit

shelves and clutter o damp clothes, make him realize just how helplessthey were, how near the center o the whirlwind. (145)



200 Elana Gomel

The fgures o the whirlwind and the carousel are premonitions o the

baroque literal shapes into which the setting is distorted in the next nov-

els o the Quartet, as space and time use to create the nightmare terrain

o the millennium.

The Terminal Lagoon

The Drowned World (1962) is a ar more sel-conscious exploration o

the apocalyptic space/time. The novel departs rom the pop-disaster or-

mula and develops a rich tapestry o lush metaphors, literary allusions,

and dream-like landscapes characteristic o Ballard’s mature writing.

The novel’s apocalypse is brought about by water: solar ares causeglobal warming, the melting o the ice caps, and a planet-wide deluge.

The drowned cities o Europe and America are hidden under tropical la-

goons and humid jungles. Ballard explores the symbolic connotations o

water as the medium o death and rebirth by creating a chronotope where

the boundary between the psychic and the physical is erased. This is

the terrain o “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 o survivors, the secular Elect, as in The Wind rom Nowhere. Just the opposite: social ties and obligations all apart as

each o them, in his or her solitary way, explores “the buried phantoms”

o the personal and the biological past, “uncovering the ancient taboos

and drives that have been dormant or epochs” (43). The protagonist Ker-

ans eventually embarks on a doomed trek south, into the primeval Eden

o the wet Triassic jungles populated by giant iguanas. Attempts by the

deranged leader Strangman, a caricature o Kurtz rom Heart o Dark-

ness, to “revive” civilization by draining the ooded London are treatedby others with mockery and revulsion. Instead, the individual quests o

Kerans, Beatrice, Bodkin, and other characters are or “the entire ransom

o the Unconscious” hidden in the depth o liquid time (100).

The time arrow o 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 o each epoch, each with

a distinct geological terrain, its own unique ora and auna, as recogniz-




But even this reverse ow turns out to be only a prelude to a complete

cessation o temporality. The chronotope o The Drowned World is truly

static because time has used with space, creating a dream-like simu-

lacrum o a “total present,” in which all epochs coexist. The terrain o

languid lagoons and steamy jungle that covers up the ruins o London is

a liquid chaos, in which “the nominal realities o time and space ceased

to exist” (82). Like the characters o Joseph Conrad or whom journey

up the river is travel in time, Kerans and others explore the past by div-

ing into the water o the “temporal lagoon.” Strangman wryly jokes that

Kerans and his lover Beatrice suer rom “a touch o time-sickness . . .

the chronoclasmic bends” (91).

The Drowned World takes the durational aspect o the apocalypticplot 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 o being, the

dream-time o the perpetual “now” (70).

The simultaneity o the apocalyptic chronotope is emphasized in The

Drowned World by the elaborate system o literary and artistic allusions,

including but not limited to, Heart o Darkness, H. G. Wells, fn-de-siècle

decadent poetry, and the surrealistic paintings o Salvadore Dali, Max

Ernst, and Paul Delvaux: Ballard’s novel substantiates Kristeva’s andFriedman’s point that intertextuality is a spatial dimension o the text. In

the watery simultaneity o the “archeopsychic past,” literature and real-

ity, dream and waking, past and uture blend together into an undier-

entiated ood o impressions and experiences that washes away the old

chronological order o history.

But as time drains away, so does lie. 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 lie and death.

The doomed Kerans becomes “a second Adam searching or the orgot-

ten paradises o the reborn sun” (171). The apocalypse is fgured as a col-

lective return to the womb, the gradual disintegration o the sel through

immersion in the waters o time. By the time death comes, the characters

are no longer conscious o having lived. The novel’s New Jerusalem is

Lethe, the river o orgetulness.

Like most Ballard’s novels, The Drowned World , with its combination

o sublimity and violence, or sublimity-as-violence, has oten been seen

as purely nihilistic or as uncritically reecting the postmodern quest orintensity. But in an on-record interview Ballard himsel emphasized the

id l i l t th l l ti it t th K t i di t “Th



202 Elana Gomel

holds a subliminal attraction or us. I we want to combat it successully,

we have to admit that humanity is not completely civilizable. Regrettable,

but true.”10 In another conversation, Ballard clarifes his point by coura-

geously describing political and religious terrorism as “elective (that is,

voluntary) psychopathy . . . willingly embracing psychopathic behavior

because o its energizing potential” that may aect not individuals but

entire nations (Vale 100). Unless we combat the voluntary psychosis o

violent millennialism with the awareness o its roots and consequences,

we are likely to be rendered impotent by the alse belie in the essential

rationality o humanity or the essential goodness o religion.11 Thus, The

Drowned World becomes a political critique o the apocalypse by reject-

ing the alse consolation o the millennium, or rather, by showing that themillennium and the Tribulations are one and the same.

Sea of Bones

What The Drowned World did or the durational aspect o the apocalyp-

tic plot, the next, 1965, novel in the series, The Drought (also published

as The Burning World ), does or its chronological aspect. The Drowned

World eliminated chronology, experimenting with pure duration. The

Drought eliminates duration, reducing chronology to a series o unre-lated events. This structural symmetry is enhanced by the act that the

supposed “element” o The Drought , fre, is in act the absence o water,

as the world is parched ater the chemical wastes dumped into the oceans

have generated a mono-molecular flm that prevents evaporation. But this

almost too-neat correlation hides a more serious shit, rom dreamy sym-

bolism to a ruthless exploration o apocalyptic violence.

As in The Drowned World , the protagonist o The Drought lives in

a world where the inner and the outer landscapes have merged. But theresult is horriying rather than sublime. Deprived o both memory and

hope, Ransom experiences temporality as a dry accumulation o disas-

ters. Drained o duration, time disintegrates into a jumble o moments

stranded on the wasteland o history. When Ransom stumbles across the

desert o salt and fsh-bones that used to be a lake, he eels that he is “ad-

vancing across an inner landscape where the elements o the uture stood

around him like the objects in a still lie, ormless 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-




tion” (139). This sense o meaningless time alling apart is conveyed by

disconnected images o aimless cruelty, random violence, and bizarre

mutilations. The Drought is undoubtedly the bleakest novel in the series,

not so much because o its apocalyptic scenes o car-choked highways

and people killing each other or a sip o water, but rather because, as

opposed to the traditional apocalyptic plot, these scenes do not lead up to

any millennial consummation.

The geography o Ransom’s wanderings undermines the linearity o

many secular apocalypses, in which the protagonists cross the hostile

terrain to reach a City o Light. With a handul o accidental companions

Ransom escapes the drying lake community and manages to reach the

sea-coast, only to fnd it transormed into a salt-marsh whose bitter watersmock the millenarian promise o rebirth. Stranded there or a decade with

an unloved ex-wie, Ransom inexplicably decides to go back to the lake.

His companions are just as accidental and unconnected as beore; their

shared privations ailing to create any sense o emotional bond. The lake

is now a basin flled with fsh-bones and presided over by the monstrous

Caliban-like Quilter, a at Miranda, and their idiot children. Neither the

lake nor the sea provides any real destination; and Ransom’s meandering

across the mean landscape o the desiccated land is not even an inverted

quest into a heart o darkness but merely a senseless nightmare.The Drought eatures a millenarian cult o a fre-and-brimstone

preacher and his fshermen disciples who become literal, not metaphori-

cal, fshers o men. Religious anatics burn the city, hoping that “God’s

grace would come to them only through this fnal purging fre” (37). But

even this violence ultimately dissolves in the sterility o 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 rom the temporal sequence in which it is embedded.

Once this sequence is gone, identity becomes illegible and accidental, a

broken reection o “a world o volitional time where the images o the

past were reected ree rom the demands o memory and nostalgia, ree

even rom the pressures o thirst and hunger” (165).

I Kerans in The Drowned World embraced the apocalypse in pur-

suit o sel-extinction, Ransom is intermittently beguiled and revolted

by it. Eventually abandoning both communities, he strikes out on hisown, searching or “absolution in time,” as opposed to the disconnected

“ t i t ” th t hi li h b (34 36) Hi h



204 Elana Gomel

water fgures the desire or time in the desert o eternity. In a strange

and hallucinatory ending, having lost all human ties and connections,

Ransom is suddenly blessed by the all o rain; an oblique hope or the

recovery o history and escape rom “a zone without time, suspended in

an endless interval” (113).

But this hope is oered only aintly and ironically: Ballard’s apoca-

lypse denies us easy solutions and allegorical interpretations. The novel’s

use o intertextuality again incarnates the spatiality o its chronotope, but

its literary allusions are piled up haphazardly, like the accidental objects

littering the dry river-bed o Ransom’s wanderings. I in The Drowned

World , the allusions were thematically unifed by the fn-de-siècle trope

o regression, in The Drought they seem to be random, selected ortheir momentary impact rather than or some overarching thematic sig-

nifcance. Shakespeare’s Tempest , Wagner, and the Bible are no more

than accidental objects in the textual wasteland. The millenarian space

drained o both duration and chronology is “no longer a place or the

sane” (64).

Lepers in the City of Light

The Crystal World returns to the dreamlike beauty o The Drowned World but with a twist that unifes all the our novels into a coherent whole.

The last novel in the series looks back on the political, psychological,

and metaphysical concerns o the frst 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” o all

things, including human beings and animals, encasing them in sheaths o beautiul jewels. The crystallization is generated by “anti-time” (by anal-

ogy with anti-matter), which annihilates ordinary temporality, “subtract-

ing rom the universe another quantum rom its total store o time” (85).

Time itsel dies into a millennium o eternal perection. In this version

o the apocalypse, history comes to an end without the ugly Tribulations.

Rather, the entire planet becomes an analogue o the New Jerusalem o

the Book o Revelation, the city whose walls are o jasper; and which is

“pure gold, like unto clear glass” with oundations o the wall “garnished

with all manner o precious stones” (Revelation 21:19). In Ballard’s crys-tal millennium, even the proane Babylon that used to be called Miami is




But there is no human lie in the city o jewels. Like Snow White in

her glass cofn, the crystallized humans are neither dead nor alive. Sus-

pended in timeless animation, they have become not angels but objects,

beautiul and lieless things.

And yet, there are people who deliberately walk into the jeweled or-

ests seeking to become part o the inorganic “New Jerusalem” (138).

They are suering rom leprosy, which becomes endemic at the same

time as the process o crystallization begins. The lepers would rather

be imprisoned in the sublimely beautiul cofns o crystals than in their

rotting esh. But leprosy is a disease that kills slowly, gradually, and in-

exorably — just like old age; like lie itsel. We are all lepers.

The juxtaposition o time and eternity in The Crystal World is fguredas the juxtaposition o leprosy and crystallization. Sanders, the protago-

nist who eventually retreats into the orest, 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

lie. Thought itsel only exists in time and thus can be regarded as a sort

o sickness, contingent on the inevitable decay o its vehicle. As Cioran

points out, “reedoms prosper only in a sick body politic” (13). I time is

leprosy, its cure is non-being.

The Crystal World simultaneously critiques the psychic and ideologi-cal underpinnings o the millennium and reveals its powerul seduction.

The bejeweled orests are an ultimate incarnation o the apocalyptic chro-

notope in which successive moments are embalmed in lieless simultane-

ity. And yet this cemetery o time is beguilingly beautiul. As opposed to

the stark wasteland o The Drought , the sparkling orests o The Crystal

World are the true millennium: pure, eternal, and deadly.

The Ethics of MutabilityMikhail Bakhtin related the messy, unpredictable, multiorm chronotope

o the novel to the open-endedness o history, in which “a place or the

uture must be ound” (37). In his impassionate deense o the poetics o

contingency, Morson quotes Bakhtin to make his own point that narrative

temporality is the main axis or the sel-creation o subjects and societ-

ies; we narrate our selves in the ull knowledge that “the past is fxed and

the uture is not,” and it is only along this arrow o time that reedom

and authenticity can be ound (284). Morson’s critique o what he callsthe “synchronic” world-view and what, ollowing Lyotard, I have called



206 Elana Gomel

the uture (302). But the apocalyptic plot makes this violence overt, col-

lapsing the distinction between murder and salvation. In the apocalyptic

plot “the place or the uture” must be not ound but revealed by clear-

ing away the detritus o accidental history. And this detritus consists o

human bodies that by necessity unction as sot clocks ticking away the

irreplaceable moments o time. The only way to create a purely spatial

chronotope is to reeze all organic processes and to stop all human and

perhaps even non-human actions. The ultimate narrative o the end o

time is the end o narrative.

Ballard’s novels both incarnate the death o narrative and question

its ethical premises and consequences. In its combination o violence

and beauty, o narrative slowdown and temporal distortion, the Quartetembodies the postmodern poetics o the sublime. But in its denial o

utopian redemption, in its mockery o the millennium, the Quartet under-

mines the political appropriation o the sublime in the service o religion

and ideology. By taking to the extreme the spatiality o the postmodern

chronotope, Ballard’s novels show that i time is dead, it is because it has

been murdered by the violent excesses o the would-be builders o New

Jerusalem. Myth is only a reifcation and obuscation o history.

Ballard’s anti-apocalyptic apocalypse opposes millennialism by o-

cusing on corporeal experience and psychic endurance. His Four Horse-men are not the exceptional disasters o the Book o Revelation, War,

Famine, Pestilence, and Death, but the abused oundations o lie — Air,

Water, Earth, and Fire. Against the deadly delusion o a divine emplot-

ment o history Ballard pits the everyday realities o survival in time.

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