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

“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 anything “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 existence 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 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 postmodernity, 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 surprisingly uniform across the immense range of apocalyptic literature, both religious 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 establishment 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 Christians was defused by St. Augustine who insisted that it should be read allegorically, with the millennium referring to the reign of Christ within his Church, while the Tribulations represented the struggle...