The Crystal World, J. G. Ballard's fourth novel, which established his reputation as a writer of extraordinary talent and imaginative powers, tells the story of a physician specializing in the treatment of leprosy who is invited to a small outpost in the interior of Africa. Finding the roadways blocked, he takes to the river, and embarks on a frightening journey through a strange petrified forest whose area expands daily, affecting not only the physical environment but also its inhabitants.
Release date:
September 1, 1988
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Print pages:
216
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In his second novel J. G. Ballard drowned the Earth, in his third he burned it, and in his fourth he turned it to crystal. Between 1962 and 1966 he ruined the world three times—though he later made it clear that these works were not to be understood as “disaster stories,” but as “transformation stories.” “The geophysical changes that take place [in them],” he said in 1975, “are all positive and good.”
Ballard is not always to be trusted as his own best interpreter, nor do any of his extraordinary novels succumb to single readings, but it is true that one ends The Crystal World exhilarated by what has been witnessed. It is in two senses a dazzling work, which leaves the mind’s eye scorched into strangeness. Deep in the central African jungle, time itself has begun to leak away, and the consequence of this temporal depletion is a super-saturation of space. Anything present within the “zone” of leakage begins to crystalize: to re-iterate itself as pure structure. Orchids and ferns encase themselves in intricately outgrowing replicas. Water hardens into a white and glowing ice. Crocodiles acquire new skins of glassy silver scales.
Downstream of the zone, a man called Sanders arrives at a remote town called Port Matarre just before the equinox. He believes himself to be searching for his former lover, Suzanne, who is working at a leper clinic fifty miles further into the jungle. Self-analyzing but also self-deluding, strongly driven but curiously aimless, Sanders is an early version of a character-type that will recur throughout Ballard’s fiction. In Matarre an odd gaggle of other visitors gathers: Ventress, white-suited and hyperactive; Balthus, a black-frocked Jesuit priest, and Louise, a French journalist looking for a lost colleague and a scoop. All are drawn, for opaque reasons, deeper into the jungle and closer to the zone. What follows is a kind of Baroquealypse Now, a river journey into the heart of lightness. All of the main characters eventually reach the ornate crystalline dream-forest of the “focal area,” where gem-eyed pythons slither past, and the bodies of men lie embalmed in diamond armor.
It is the central paradox of catastrophe fiction that to destroy the world you must first summon it into being. The Crystal World is surely Ballard’s most gorgeous calamity: apocalypse not as abolition but as transfiguration. The prose of the jungle scenes glitters with a dark and elaborate beauty, which feels far from the chrome-sleek sentences of Crash, published seven years later. This is a Byzantine Ballard, relishing the prismatic intricacies of the “jeweled twilight world” he has conjured. The crossing of the glacial river back to Mont Royal, the hunts through the radiant perils of the forest, the siege scene at Thorensen’s mansion, the fate of Radek: to me these are among the most brilliant episodes of all Ballard’s fiction. They lustre on in the memory.
The jacket-image of The Crystal World’s first edition was a detail from Max Ernst’s vast surrealist painting, The Eye of Silence, completed in early 1944 after Ernst had twice escaped internment in France. It depicts what appear to be the remnants of a city, over whose ruins—and inhabitants—vegetation has tanglingly grown. The result is a mossy ossuary, in which humanoid figures are undergoing metamorphoses into hybrid bird-men and tree-beings. We know Ballard to have been an admirer of Ernst, whom he described in 1963 as an “iconographer of inner space.” Indeed, one of Ernst’s paintings appears in The Drowned World (1962): on the wall of an abandoned apartment, the canvas of “one of Max Ernst’s self-devouring phantasmagoric jungles screamed silently to itself.” Ernst influenced Ballard—and Ballard in turn would influence the work of Japanese anime directors, especially Hayao Miyazaki and his followers at Studio Ghibli, whose films are often set in futures in which forests (sometimes toxic, sometimes benign) have re-colonized humanity’s ruins.
The trope at the heart of the Baroque is repetition; repetition is also the trope at the heart of Ballard. It occurs across his oeuvre, and one of the first challenges of reading him is to understand that this repetition is strategic rather than careless. It operates as what he once called a “second language,” existing upon the “surface of the narrative” as a kind of code, or as “signposts” (his metaphor) that give access to depths. In The Crystal World, repetition—also the first principle of crystallography—juts out in the form of image, and is internalised as the novel’s grammar. The first crystalized object that Sanders sees is an orchid whose mineral metamorphosis has resulted in “a dozen [refracted] images … one upon the other, as if seen through a maze of prisms.” Things repeat themselves—and then things repeat each other. In the zone, all objects are self-similar because all are vitrified. It is, reflects Sanders, “a place of rainbows [where] nothing is distinguished from anything else.”
Ballard’s language performs its own version of this indistinction by means of simile, which proliferates from the opening page. A profusion of “as ifs” and “likes” function as the crystalization does, bringing all things into mutual resemblance. This surplus of sameness also expresses itself in the characters who begin, weirdly, to repeat activities and phrases, and to pair off in twinned versions of each other. And at the novel’s end (though I must not reveal too much) an act of perfect repetition on Sanders’s part returns us to a much earlier point in the book—thus leaving The Crystal World encased in its own “maze of prisms.”
In a 1961 essay Iris Murdoch separated twentieth-century novels into two types: the “journalistic” and the “crystalline.” The journalistic was sprawling, inclusive, and documentary, a “degenerate descendant of the 19th-century novel.” The crystalline novel, by contrast, was “a small quasi-allegorical object” that did not “contain characters in the 19th-century sense.” Certainly, The Crystal World is crystalline in Murdoch’s definition of the term. But what is the nature of its “quasi-allegory”? What do the crystals mean?
They mean many things, of course. At one point in the novel, Sanders considers the physics of gem-stone cutting, whereby faceting and polishing serves to gather and ricochet light, such that jewels appear to “occupy more than their own volume of space.” Ballard’s novel possesses similar properties: it is radiant and repetitive with meanings. It is possible, for instance, to read the crystals as a manifestation of capital: a fiscal rather than a physical precipitation, whereby all things are rendered fungible. The “time-leak” starts close to a “French-run diamond mine,” where the earth is being plundered for profit. The military investigation into the phenomenon is triggered not because of the danger to local people, but because it has destabilized the global diamond markets. Or perhaps the crystalization represents mediation, the endless image-making of modernity, and the consequent “retreat of the real” and “death of affect” that so inspired mid-period Ballard. A hint is dropped in support of this reading when Sanders seeks a comparison for the zone’s luminosity, and thinks that it is “as if the whole scene were being reproduced by some over-active Technicolor process.” And—risky as biographical interpretations always are—it is hard not to connect the novel with the sudden death from pneumonia in 1964 of Ballard’s wife, Mary, two years before the publication of The Crystal World. Thus, perhaps, the presence of Serena, who lies in the jungle, fatally stricken with tuberculosis yet sustained by her progressive crystalization, as two grieving men circle obsessively about her.
Unmistakably, the novel also expresses Ballard’s career-long fascination with the annihilation of time. Again and again, he wrote in opposition to meliorist narratives of progress and development, preferring to represent human experience as a succession of instants and episodes: shards and planes, rather than smooth-flowing rivers. As such, he was drawn to devise situations in which the dimension of time contracted, and that of space dilated. Thus the archaeo-psychic “deep time” of The Drowned World (1962), which can be dived down into; or the memory erasures that occur on the arid plains of The Drought (1964); or Sanders’s rapturous conversion into an “apostle of the prismatic sun,” surrendered of his identity and occupying the pure space of the zone, in which environment he can—as Walter Pater put it in praise of momentariness in 1873—“burn with a hard and gem-like flame.”
The Crystal World has never been filmed. It has been optioned more than once, but never shot. It is easy to imagine the allure of the novel to directors—and the problems it would pose. This is a novel so intensely visual that it would overwhelm the medium of film. The closest realization of Ballard’s vision occurred in 2008, when the British artist Roger Hiorns created a work called Seizure. Hiorns arranged for 75,000 liters of copper sulfate solution to be pumped into an abandoned and stripped-out council flat in a low-rise housing development in London’s Elephant and Castle. As the solution cooled, precipitation occurred, until every surface of the flat was jagged with blue crystals. The result was a spiky modernist super-mold, a freeze-frame of decay, and a space to set the scalp prickling. Like Ballard’s novel, Hiorns’s sculpture allowed no easy reading and no soft voyeurism. The “seizure” of the work’s title invokes a physical spasm, but also seizure in the sense of foreclosure and repossession (the work appeared within months of the 2007 financial crisis, such that it seemed as if debt itself were the cause of the crystals). I wish I had been able to get down to London in time to enter the room of Seizure. Stepping into it would have been some version of entering Ballard’s bedizened jungle; the experience of both is sharply terrifying, conceptually prickly, and utterly bewitching.
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