2024-04-10 13:04:27
Climate fiction is a booming genre of contemporary literature. While science fiction set the tone for popular culture in the 20th century with its departure to distant worlds and the hope for scientific revolutions, climate fiction – or cli-fi for short – now sets the tone with its natural disasters and the end of the world. Last year, “Blue Skies” by TC Boyle and “°C – Celsius” by Marc Elsberg were big bestsellers. And the trend continues: Looking at this year’s publishing programs, the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” even announces a “spring of dystopia” in the book world.
In keeping with the literary zeitgeist, two new translations of JG Ballard’s early work have been published: “The Drought” and “The Flood”. Ballard, who was born in Shanghai in 1930 and died in Great Britain in 2009 – whose first name was James Graham, abbreviated to JG – is one of the important figures in dystopian science fiction. With “Love & Napalm. “Export USA” (1970), he delves deeply into the collective dream worlds of an unsettled world power. And his description of the perverse death drive in automobile society, “Crash” (1973), has been part of the pop culture canon since the film adaptation by David Cronenberg. Since 2016, the Zurich publisher Diaphanes has been republishing German translations of Ballard.
With The Drought and The Flood, published in 1962 as The Drowned World and in 1964 as The Burning World, Ballard seems to have prophetically anticipated the climate fiction hype. Conversely, one could say that the literary desire for apocalyptic catastrophes is as old as the great stories of humanity itself, see, among others, the biblical plagues or Noah’s Ark. In any case, Ballard, who, inspired by surrealism and psychoanalysis, has always been interested in the “inner space” of human experience, shows that he is a master at describing catastrophes.
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The extraordinary thing about Ballard’s disaster fiction is that it does not evoke heroism. There is no “last generation” clinging to the rudder that they intend to turn around – on the contrary. There are only lost characters who are no less helpless and powerless in the face of a flood or drought than they are in the face of the “normal” natural process. The fact that in “The Drought” a fine layer of plastic made from industrial waste clogs the oceans and prevents evaporation only shows the hubris that still clings to all ideas of controlling nature to this day. This is followed by “oceanic retaliation, as simple as it is just.”
The scenario of the novels is very simple. In one case the world is under water, in the other case the water disappears. Ballard describes a sunken London and withered ghost towns. They are ruins of a civilization. The people who wander through Ballard’s floods or deserts live in a crumbling frame of reference. They follow social rules that have obviously lost their meaning; there is no new orientation yet. Scientists lose their minds, socialites languish in front of paintings by Max Ernst. Adventurers and cult leaders are the ones who are best able to adapt.
What Ballard is playing through is evolution in fast motion. His interest remains in the inner worlds of people whose own society is slipping like sand between their hands. The mental landscape is also changing. Unknown or long-forgotten life forms begin to sprout under the extreme circumstances. “Much more important than mapping the harbors and lagoons of the outer landscape was mapping the ghostly deltas and glowing beaches of the sunken neural continents,” says The Flood. The catastrophe brings something threateningly archaic to light.
Looked stuffy, but didn’t write like that: Ballard
Quelle: picture alliance / Photoshot
You can ignore the plot, Ballard is more about atmospheres and images. This is strictly literary and has no educational purpose whatsoever. The catastrophe is not described here in order to encourage an insight or reversal that ultimately comes from the Old World. The prime example of this pedagogicalization of the apocalypse is the children’s book “The Best Ends of the World” (2021) by Andrea Paluch, Robert Habeck’s wife. The end of the world, including a flood and a drought, merely serves as an infantile foil for green revival fantasies (“beautiful, frightening, inspiring”).
Paluch sinks into harmlessness (hated algae salad and kayak tours at high tide) and brutality (armed men shield the water during drought), only to praise an upscale kitsch idyll under the title “Back to Nature” (solar flat screens and electric cars), which represents both the end of the world and… also turns utopia into an instrumental caricature. Ballard, on the other hand, does not want to educate (or return to nature), but rather to communicate literary experience. That’s why he writes the more beautiful endings of the world. “The fiction is already there. The writer’s job is to invent reality,” Ballard once said.
In “The Flood” and “The Drought,” Ballard describes how the change in natural systems is accompanied by the collapse of social and psychological systems. In his later work he focuses even more on the implosion of social worlds. In “High-Rise” (1988), an archaic battle of all against all takes place in the perfectly planned idyll of a high-rise building. Why? The residents are wealthy, educated, with happy childhoods. Maybe, a psychiatrist says in one scene, it’s “our not-at-all-innocent post-Freudian selves” because the perfect people never had the chance to be perverted.
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In “Millennium People” (2003) and “The Empire Is Coming” (2006), Ballard explores the middle-class suburbs where a diffuse revolt is spreading. The people don’t seem to be missing anything, yet they start a civil war. They are desperate attempts to escape the narrowness of the rational world and the boredom of consumerism – a rebellion against the exhausted liberalism in the heart of the West. “The future will be a battle between vast systems of competing psychopathies,” says “The Empire Is Coming.” The more orderly society appears, the crazier it becomes in itself.
Ballard is not a warning and admonisher, but a creator of surrealistic scenarios in which the powerful underlying currents of everyday life come to light. He works through the myths of modernity. This is how his Robinson Crusoe in “The Concrete Island” (1975) ends up under a motorway intersection with no escape. Ballard is as fascinated by postmodern “non-places,” as Marc Augé called them, as he is by natural disasters. No one casts such an eerie look at the world as JG Ballard. If the 20th century was Kafkaesque, the 21st century might prove to be Ballardesque.
JG Ballard: The Drought. Diaphanes, 256 pages, 18 euros.
JG Ballard: The Flood. Diaphanes, 224 pages, 18 euros.
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