Core Text

Ballard, J.G. The Crystal World. Jonathan Cape, 1966

Summary

The Crystal World was J.G. Ballard’s fourth novel in what has come to known among his devotees as the “disaster series.” Written in 1966 before “global warming” and “climate change” became common parlance and a genre dedicated to such phenomena was born, the ensuing years and ominous climatic discoveries have elevated Ballard as the godfather of “cli-fi.” The book begins with Dr. Sanders on the bow of a steamer that has delayed disembarkation for unknown reasons at Port Mattare, and, already, Ballard alerts the reader to pay attention to the environment: “…surface of the water was still gray and sluggish, leaching away the somber tinctures of the collapsing vegetation along the banks”; “…the dark green arbors towering into the dull air like immense cypresses, somber and motionless, touched only by faint gleams of light.” The location of the port is somewhere in the Republic of Cameroon, which “was still recovering from an abortive coup ten years earlier, when a handful of rebels had seized the emerald and diamond mines at Mont Royal…” Along with ecological details that signal unease, signifiers crowd the first few paragraphs: Sanders, a doctor who treats leprosy; Father Balthus, a priest in dark soutane; Ventress, a Belgian architect dressed in a white suit who tells Sanders, “This is a landscape without time.”; and the letter from Suzanne, the wife of Sanders’ colleague and his lover, which ends with at once luminous and ominous line, “The light touches everything with diamonds and sapphires.” 

Suzanne is the reason for Sanders’ journey. She and her husband had disappeared into the forest in Mont Royal to found a leprosy clinic. Balthus, Ventress, Suzanne, along with Thorensen, the director of the diamond mine, are all characters Sanders would encounter again as he ventures deeper into the jungle and realizes the “faint gleams of light” are in fact emanating from the mysterious crystallization of the forest and its living creatures, and each of them functions as a moral catalyst for Sanders. The scientific reasoning behind the efflorescence of crystal Ballarad gives is lacking but useful: an infinite atomic duplication of itself, capable of filling the entire universe and whose behavior is closest to cancer. As crystallization spreads and consumes every organism in its path, Sanders’ interior journey reverses course and the objective becomes running away from the forest in order to escape the fate of turning into a crystalline form. Along the way, Sanders finds out that crystallization is not an isolated phenomenon but is occurring in Florida and Russia also. In Ballard’s fossilized world, the crystal is a stand-in for time: Crystallization process requires “leaking time” and fossilization evinces time frozen. It’s also human’s race against time in the face of nature’s transgression – to run from being fossilized within the crystal or to embrace it. Sanders and company, in the end, come to a revelation that running is futile, so they remain or return to the forest to live in timelessness, to exist between death and life, which for them is some kind of utopia. 

Teaching Resources

• Heller, Jason. “These Cli-Fi Classics Are Cautionary Tales For Today.” NPR, July 26, 2019. Heller starts this “beach reads” recommendation by injecting an ominous climate anecdote – “As yet another record-breaking summer heats up…” – and goes on to offer summaries of five cli-fi titles. He praises The Crystal World as a work that surpasses Ballard’s previous books – The Burning World, The Drowned World and The Wind from Nowhere – in his “disaster series.” Heller also draws a parallel with Heart of Darkness, an influence Ballard dismissed based on the fact that he hadn’t read it at the time of writing The Crystal World. Still, it is unmistakable that in both fictions, post-colonial malaise is manifested as geological transgressions which in turn engenders extreme human reaction to them.   

• O’Connell, Mark, “Why We Are Living in JG Ballard’s World.” New Statesman, April 1 2020. With the pandemic very much in the foreground, this essay makes a convincing case that our current mysophobic existence owes more to Ballard’s dystopian vision than to any realms prognosticated by other postmodern authors. Indeed, Ballardian world is the one we occupy now – uneasy and distanced: “The rapid transition, under the new viral order, into further extremes of technological alienation has only made it more so.” Ballard’s short stories like “Having a Wonderful Time” (1982) and “The Intensive Care Unit” (1977) speak more directly to quarantine, human-weariness, and invisible captor. His “World” series encapsulates another set of mental stressors, anxiety and psychological displacement induced by environmental entropy. O’Connell is well aware of Ballard’s complicated early life – a White British settler family in Shanghai forced into internment camp under Japanese occupation during WWII – and draws a connection between Ballard’s experience with imperialism with upended-ness that often undergirds his characters’ psyche and the environment that occupies them. 

• Clark, Jim, “Reading Climate Change in J.G. Ballard.” Critical Survey, Vol. 25, No. 2, Berghahn Books, 2013, pp. 7-21. Clark, in his prismatic analysis, does a great job linking climate change post hoc to The Drowned World (1962) and The Crystal World (1966), and critiquing the post-cli-fi hermeneutics of climate dystopias in these texts. Clark’s thesis is most persuasive when drawing out the inner world, the psyche, of Ballard’s characters when faced with environmental upheaval, as the locus of transformation: “The outer environment is subordinated to inner space, and what action or response it requires is primarily internal and transformative.” Time is another essential thematic component. Clark asserts that “Ballard conflates environment and time” and equates climatic disruption to temporal disruption. Timelessness of the crystal is a metaphor for the end of time, or surrender to time, which then is rendered as the end of environment. Expounding on the ways in which Ballardian climatic transgressions have been prescient of the environmental malaise to come, Clark also draws an analogy between the efflorescence of crystal and a viral infection prefiguring a pandemic narrative that became familiar in later cli-fi genre and eerily apropos of the current viral pandemic. 

Discussion Questions

1. In planting a white doctor who presumably treats African leper patients amidst diamond and emerald mines then setting him off into a forest that turns him into the very element of seduction and exploitation, does Ballard’s post-colonial duality subvert the “resource curse”?
2. Ballard has said that his central characters in his “climate” novels see the “system of imaginative possibilities represented by the disaster,” which Clark infers as follow, that “if Ballard conflates climate with time, he also conflates it with psyche.” Both insinuate that by confronting the disaster on an existential level, one can then harness the inner capacity for transcendence. This seems like a bit of channeling an utopian outcome in a dystopian situation, which is essentially what many of the climate accords are. In reality, when so many seem to have gone back to life as “normal” even after facing an existential threat of climate catastrophe, can individual psychical transformation be a real catalyst for “profound personal change” as Clark argues?
3. In climate discourse and science, human anxiety is intrinsically tied to time, which acts as a simultaneously passive and aggressive omnipresent element. The race to keep the rise of global temperature below 1.5°C  to avoid the irreversible chain of events is itself a race against time’s irreversibility. Ballard seems to suggest that surrendering to time, therefore reaching a form of utopian timelessness, is a noble, even a moral thing to do. How does this square with the psyche being the catalyst for profound change?