Dissertation

‘SOON IT WOULD BE TOO HOT’: THE PRESCIENCE OF JOHN
CHRISTOPHER’S THE DEATH OF GRASS AND J.G. BALLARD’S THE
DROWNED WORLD.
Aberystwyth University
B.A. Honours dissertation
April, 2015
Student no.: 120063259
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements p. 3
List of illustrations p. 4
Introduction p. 5
Chapter 1 The 1950s, historical and literary context of The Death of Grass p. 8
Chapter 2 The end of the ‘50s and the beginning of the ‘60s; where does p. 16
The Drowned World take the genre?
Chapter 3 Here and now: What makes The Death of Grass and The p. 24
Drowned World seem prescient to a contemporary reader?
Conclusion p. 33
Bibliography p. 35
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Peter Barry, my undergraduate dissertation supervisor, for his
thoughtful support and guidance, as well as the module co-ordinator, Beth Rodgers, for
making the task seem a little less daunting.
Secondly, I want to thank John Christopher (Sam Youd) and J.G. Ballard for
writing such fascinating novels, and to my parents for introducing me to them! It has
been a pleasure to study The Death of Grass and The Drowned World, it really has.
Most of all, however, I want to thank my girlfriend, Alice, for her continued
interest in my work, and her emotional and intellectual support. This dissertation is
dedicated to her.
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 1.
The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dali (1931)
<http://uploads5.wikiart.org/images/salvador-dali/the-persistence-of-memory-1931.jpg>
[retrieved 16th of March, 2015]
Figure 2.
The Eye of Silence, Max Ernst, (1944) on the cover of the Panther Books paperback
edition of J.G. Ballard’s The Crystal World (1966)
<http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/wp-
content/uploads/2009/04/crystal_world.jpg> [retrieved 15th of April, 2015]
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Introduction
We live in an age of uncertainty. Extreme weather reports dominate our news;
footage of unseasonal blizzards are soon replaced by graphics describing record-
breaking heat-waves. Earth’s climate is warming faster than ever before, largely thanks
to anthropogenic activities, such as land use changes, deforestation and greenhouse gas
emissions, to name a few. All the while, the world population continues to increase, and
so do its demands; fewer and fewer farmers produce more and more food as intensive
farming continues to grow. The strain on resources is palpable. Yet more than fifty years
ago two authors, John Christopher and J.G. Ballard, prophesied two major 21st century
dilemmas: food security and global warming. Christopher’s 1956 novel, The Death of
Grass, and Ballard’s 1964 novel, The Drowned World are united by their prescience,
and are as relevant today as they ever have been. In a recent article, Dan Bloom writes
that ‘this year, 2015, is shaping up to be “The Year of Cli-Fi” in academia, and not just
in North America, but in Britain and Australia as well.’1
The academic zeitgeist in
English literature, it seems, currently centres on global warming, or, more broadly,
climate change, and my dissertation on two eerily prophetic novels seeks to capture
something of it.
Firstly, I will situate The Death of Grass and The Drowned World within
their literary context in an effort to elucidate their classification as ‘disaster’ novels.
Whilst it proves useful to shelve them alongside similar works, categorising the novels
within the disaster genre limits their conceptual parameters. It would be a mistake to
call The Death of Grass a ‘sci-fi’, for example, because of its hard-hitting realism; the
1 Dan Bloom, ‘“Cli-Fi” Reaches into Literature Classrooms Worldwide’, ed. by Kitty Stapp on Inter
Press Service New Agency (2015).
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narrative is straightforward and unpretentious. Furthermore, I will prove that a pathogen
such as the one Christopher imagines really does exist, and is just as menacing.
Consequently, it becomes necessary to consider more precise definitions of the two
novels. The Drowned World, in contrast, could be described as a pioneering work of
‘Cli-Fi’, (climate fiction) paving the way for contemporary authors to vocalise their
apprehensions about rising global temperatures. Though initially thought of as genre
fiction, specifically science, or ‘disaster’ fiction, both novels can be more clearly read as
eco-catastrophe narratives that prefigure late 20th century anxieties about industrial
monoculture and global warming.
Later, I will go on to explore how Christopher and Ballard grapple with
their respective environmental issues within the historical contexts in which they were
written, especially with regard to their post-war, or even postmodern, status. The fact
that both Christopher and Ballard are British, and set their novels in a fictionalised
Britain, is of utmost importance, since it reveals much about the British mindset through
how they portray Britain, or Britishness, in their novels. Written in 1956, The Death of
Grass condemns post-war British complacency, justifiably showing it to be hollow and
unwarranted. Although not with the same vigour, Ballard criticises British
exceptionalism (a term explained in the relevant section in Chapter 1) in The Drowned
World six years later, by personifying the notion in one of his characters, an amiable, yet
frustratingly bureaucratic colonel. Lofty ideas of British superiority will be shown to be
groundless in the two novels; if worldwide eco-catastrophe struck, Britain would be as
susceptible as any other nation.
Finally, I will frame The Death of Grass and The Drowned World within
contemporary ecocriticism in an effort to reevaluate them as ecocritical, or at least
‘proto-ecocritical’, texts. I will compare Christopher’s fictional Chung-Li pathogen with
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a real life stem rust fungus, Ug99, and demonstrate that The Death of Grass is closer to
home than many of us might like to admit. Christopher blames industrial farming
techniques, criticising a lack of polyculture in 1950s Britain. Unfortunately, almost sixty
years later, the problem still has no clear solution. I will go on to argue that Christopher
had a sophisticated grasp of the nature-culture dichotomy; ‘Nature’ is not a feminised
abstract entity in The Death of Grass. In fact, the absence of nature, or its anthropogenic
degradation, is what Christopher shows us we ought to fear most. Christopher astutely
shows that humanity is part of the global ecosystem, not above or beyond it. Ballard, on
the other hand, decentralises humanity as Earth’s dominant species, speculating that if
the climate were to revert to a Triassic-like conditions, reptiles would once again thrive.
He hypothesises how the human unconscious would disintegrate under such
circumstances, retrogressing to a primeval state of mind. In doing so Ballard makes
ample use of the motif of time to investigate the relative insignificance of humanity on
the geological scale. Via literary analysis and contextual framing I endeavour to contend
that The Death of Grass and The Drowned World should be thought of as pioneering
ecocritical texts, foreshadowing environmental catastrophes decades ahead of their time.
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Chapter 1. The 1950s, historical and literary context of The Death of Grass
In 1972, Darko Suvin wrote that ‘science fiction’ is a ‘literary genre whose necessary
and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition,
and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's
empirical environment.’2
While it lacks an historical dimension, failing to recognise
how an author’s empirical environment shifts with the passing of time, Suvin’s succinct
definition demonstrates how the genre is uniquely able to encourage new modes of
thought via his concept of cognitive estrangement. Nevertheless, ‘speculative fiction’ is
a far more apt term to describe The Drowned World and The Death of Grass. Margaret
Atwood defines the expression as ‘things that really could happen but just hadn’t
completely happened when the authors wrote the books.’3
To that end I find that
‘speculative fiction’ distinguishes the two novels from the vast majority of science
fiction, since they presuppose circumstances that are, to a certain extent, possible. The
Death of Grass, in particular, stood out from the crowd, because, unlike the implausible
pulp science fiction that was rife during the early ‘50s, it was a novel that responded to
the ecological problems of its time in a more down-to-earth fashion.
The Death of Grass ‘ostensibly continues the Wyndhamesque sub-genre of
anxious British disaster fiction’, Christopher Daley argues, replicating ‘the themes of
[John] Wyndham’s earlier catastrophes in that it narrates an ecological terror which
causes structural meltdown and subsequently leaves a group of archetypal English
suburbanites facing a post-apocalyptic battle for survival.’4
The premise of
2 Darko Suvin, ‘On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre’, College English, Vol. 34, No. 3 (December,
1972), p. 375.
3 Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, 2nd edn. (London: Virago Press,
2012), p. 6.
4 Christopher Daley, British science fiction and the Cold War, 1945-1969 (2013), p. 86. Subsequent
references to this book are given in the text as ‘Daley’, followed by the page number.
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Christopher’s novel, therefore, is quite well defined by the literary tradition from which
he draws inspiration. Indeed, the main protagonist of The Death of Grass, John
Custance, who fills the heroic mould quite nicely, is a civil engineer living in the
suburbs of London with his wife and two children. Part of what differentiates the novel,
however, from others like it is its fiercely pragmatic realism. For his stylistic reworking
of the British disaster novel Brian Aldiss acknowledged Christopher as ‘master of the
semi-cosy’, praising The Death of Grass for its ability to terrify.5
‘The essence of the
cosy catastrophe’, in contrast, ‘is that the hero should have a pretty good time (a girl,
free suites at the Savoy, automobiles for the taking) while everyone else is dying off’
(Aldiss, p. 316, my italicisation). The master of the ‘cosy’, Aldiss argued, was
Christopher’s spiritual predecessor, John Wyndham. However, even the term ‘semi-
cosy’ seems to imply an element of quaintness, or even softness, presumably due to the
novel’s mostly bourgeois cast and rural setting. Though Aldiss recognises Christopher’s
stylistic subversion of Wyndham’s disaster fiction, I would argue that The Death of
Grass is far too realistic, and explicit, to be identified as ‘semi-cosy’.
In a genuinely disturbing scene about half way through the narrative, Custance,
his friend, Roger, and right his hand man, Pirrie, raid a small farmhouse in search of
supplies. The farmhouse, we later learn, belongs to a family of three, and when the
father tells the men to clear off from the front doorway, Custance jumps aside, gives a
quick signal, and Pirrie snipes the man from afar, killing him instantly. Once inside the
house, Custance comes face to face with the mother, who’s brandishing a loaded gun:
Her hand moved along the side of the gun, but as it did so, John’s own
hand moved. The clap of the sound was even more deafening in the
5 Brian Aldiss, Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (London: Grafton Paladin, 1988), p.
317.
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confinement of the room. She stayed upright for a moment and then,
clutching at the banister to her left, crumpled up. She began to scream as she
reached the ground, and went on screaming in a high strangled voice.
Roger said: ‘Oh, my God!’
John said: ‘Don’t stand there. Get a move on. Get that other gun and let’s
have this house searched. We’ve been lucky twice, but we don’t have to be a
third time.’
(Christopher, p. 109)
Unperturbed, Custance begins searching the house, leaving a shocked Roger downstairs
with the dying woman he just shotgunned in the face. After the house is cleared,
Custance calls the rest of the group over to the house. Custance’s young son, Davey,
asks him what the shooting was about, to which he replies, “‘we have to fight for things
now... We have to fight to live. It’s something you’ll have to learn”’ (Christopher, p.
111). This is not ‘semi-cosy’, let alone ‘cosy’, fiction. The previously unassuming, mild-
mannered Custance is now the neo-feudal leader of his group, and will indiscriminately
murder to protect and serve it.
Nevertheless, Christopher shows his readers the stark realities of a post-
apocalyptic Britain for a reason. The horrors of The Death of Grass are in the narrative
to serve a purpose. By shocking its readers, and asking them what would happen in a
world without grass, Christopher introduces them to the current domestic and foreign
issues that he perceived as perilous to humanity. His primary concern is with post-war
excess and food security. The ecological terror that causes the complete collapse of
modern civilisation, that Custance, and his family, must face, is the Chung-Li virus,
which putrefies all grasses, including the most vital of cereal crops: maize, wheat and
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rice. Unlike Wyndham’s fantastical triffids in The Day of the Triffids, the Chung-Li
virus is certainly more realistic, and is, in some measure, Christopher insists, the fault of
humanity. This realism establishes The Death of Grass as a ‘speculative fiction’, instead
of a romping disaster thriller.
Christopher heavy-handedly makes it plain that humanity is to blame for the
virus, when Custance’s brother, David, writes to him that ‘“for years now, we’ve treated
the land as though it were a piggy-bank, to be raided. And the land, after all, is life
itself’” (Christopher, p. 41). Earlier on in the novel David explains that monoculture
dominates post-war British agriculture: ‘“There’s no sense in doing anything but wheat
and potatoes these days. That’s what the Government wants, so that’s what I give ‘em”’
(Christopher, p. 9). It is from this real world context that the fictional Chung-Li virus
appears. After the privations of WWII, arable agriculture stabilised in Britain during the
late ‘40s and early ‘50s, due to the increased use of herbicides, pesticides and fertiliser,
as well as advances in mechanisation. Greater food security was, of course, essential in
the effort to rebuild Britain, but widespread monoculture became ubiquitous. Though
monoculture is, by its very nature, advantageous from an economic point of view, a
single strain of an aggressive virus can blight entire crop yields. Christopher was keen
to tackle the issue in The Death of Grass, and show its inherent pitfalls. Consequently,
the novel takes on the air of an allegorical fable, bluntly showing us what might happen
if arable monoculture destabilised. The result of such a destabilisation is, in The Death
of Grass, total desolation. The veneer of civilisation is quickly stripped away, and the
road ahead for Christopher’s characters following the ravages of the virus is a more
pragmatic one than Wyndham’s characters faced in The Day of the Triffids, and is all
the more brutal as a consequence.
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In the introduction to the recent Penguin edition, Robert Macfarlane writes that
The Death of Grass owes much of its initial popularity to how it ‘caught the imagination
of a country for whom the threat of German invasion was not long distant.’6
He goes on
to argue that The Death of Grass bears greatest comparison with William Golding’s
Lord of the Flies, ‘not a sci-fi at all’, because of Christopher’s superior handling of
moral memory and British exceptionalism (Macfarlane, p. xiii). The notion of British
exceptionalism may have proved practically useful during WWII, keeping morale high
amongst soldiers and civilians alike, but after VE Day, and well into the ‘50s, the
rhetoric seemed stale, lingering, like a bad aftertaste, from the imperial nineteenth-
century. The mere idea that the British are intuitively morally superior to other nations
and cultures was utter nonsense to post-war authors. In an interview with Jack Biles,
William Golding said that Lord of the Flies ‘was simply what it seemed sensible for me
to write after the war, when everyone was thanking God they weren’t Nazis. I’d seen
enough to realise that every single one of us could be Nazis’ (Macfarlane, p. xiii-ix).
Similarly, Christopher was keen to illustrate to his readers that British post-war
complacency was wholeheartedly delusional, presenting his readers with a reflection of
post-war Britain, albeit somewhat distorted, that laid bare its ideological inadequacies.
British exceptionalism is utterly rejected in The Death of Grass, and morality too
swiftly withers away, like the titular grasses.
Roger, Custance’s close friend, personifies this complacent British
exceptionalism, and earlier on in the narrative displays an archetypal ‘air of school-
boyish high spirits’ (Christopher, p. 17). Near the novel’s beginning, Custance, his wife,
Ann, Roger and Roger’s wife, Olivia, are playing cards, when they hear on the radio
that ‘“the lowest possible figure for deaths in the China famine must be set at two
6 Robert Macfarlane, ‘Introduction’ to John Christopher’s The Death of Grass, 8th edn. (London: Penguin
Books, 2009), p. viii. Subsequent references to this introduction are given in the text as ‘Macfarlane’,
followed by the page number.
12

hundred million people’” - almost four times the population of Britain at the time - to
which Roger replies, ‘“what’s two hundred million... There’s an awful lot of Chinks in
China. They’ll breed ‘em back in a couple of generations’” (Christopher, p. 18). Though
Roger expresses an almost inhuman lack of sympathy for the Chinese, and emits a racist
slur to boot, his reaction does not come from entrenched racism or indifference, but
from a deep-seated jingoistic belief in British exceptionalism. ‘“The belt tightens, notch
by notch””, he says later on, ‘“and no one complains”’; the proverbial stiff upper lip
will not be trembled by a little rationing (Christopher, p. 43). With a childlike naïvety,
Roger believes that, while other nations might fall to the pathogen, Britain will stand
alone as a pillar of collective restraint and patience. Although Roger’s boisterous
nationalism epitomises British complacency in The Death of Grass, other characters
chime in, as well as the government and press. It becomes clearer and clearer that
Christopher constructs this imagined fortress of collective self-belief so that he can
emphatically tear it down, revealing British exceptionalism for what it really is:
nonsensical and unfounded.
In response to his brother’s concerns, Custance says to him, ‘“That was the East,
though, wasn’t it? Even if things were to get short - this country’s more disciplined”;
Custance too believes in a superior British mindset (Christopher, p. 33). Furthermore,
‘there was news that in some other countries similarly situated, food riots had taken
place, notably in the countries bordering the Mediterranean. London reacted smugly to
this, contrasting that indiscipline with its own patient and orderly queues for goods in
short supply’ (Christopher, p. 44, my italicisation). The fact that the ‘London’ reacted
‘smugly’ to the social unrest in other countries exemplifies the superciliousness of the
British government, and its peoples. ‘“Yet again,” a correspondent wrote to the Daily
Telegraph, “it falls to the British peoples to set an example to the world in the staunch
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and steadfast bearing of their misfortunes. Things may grow darker yet, but patience
and fortitude is something we know will not fail”’ (Christopher, p. 44). Things do
indeed grow darker for the British, and, eventually, patience and fortitude fail. Much to
Christopher’s relish, all hell breaks loose.
David, in truth, is the only character who rejects the national optimism, and is
willing to take a ‘“chance on looking a fool”’ to secure piece of mind (Christopher, p.
35). He says, ‘“I’ve got an uneasiness in my bones and I’m concerned with quietening
it. Being a laughing-stock doesn’t count beside that”’ (Christopher, p. 35). David goes
against the grain, voicing his scepticism about propagandist optimism, and even longs
for the virus to ‘win’: ‘“In a way, I think I feel it would be more right for the virus to
win, anyway”’. In the end, his wish comes true: the virus does win. David’s uneasiness
is vindicated by the ensuing social meltdown following the crop failures, but being
made a martyr by his brother’s marauding party is his only reward. Had Custance
followed his brother’s advice earlier on in the novel he would have saved himself, and
his family, a bitterly traumatic journey. Regardless, British society is brought to its
knees, and any sense of exceptionalism has been lost amongst the rubble. There is no
happy ending for Custance; only the grim allusion to Cain and Abel after the perceived
fratricide of his brother. All Custance can hope for is that his son will ‘“do more than
farm it”’, he postulates, ‘“He will own it. It’s a nice bit of land. Not as much as Cain left
to Enoch, though”’ (Christopher, p. 194). That said, there is a little hope for humanity,
and the British peoples. In a biblical-like cleansing of the Earth a few have survived, but
it is more thanks more to their quick-wittedness and ruthlessness than any sense of
moral righteousness.
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Chapter 2. The end of the ‘50s and beginning of the ‘60s; where does The Drowned
World take the genre?
The Drowned World, which constitutes the second entry into Ballard’s quartet of
‘disaster’ novels, succeeding The Wind from Nowhere - a novel Ballard later disowned
- and preceding The Burning World and The Crystal World, is a notable departure from
the literary tradition from whence it emerges. Whilst only six years separates The Death
of Grass and The Drowned World, Ballard helps to initiate the New Wave of science
fiction in Britain with his second novel, steering the genre into uncharted waters.
Although he conforms to some of the core narrative principles laid down before him,
instead of showing us what the world would be like if apocalyptic disaster struck, and
what our immediate reactions would be, Ballard shows us what the world would be like
many decades after the disaster, and how it will have changed the psychology of the
survivors. Ballard’s aesthetic focus is inward, rather than outward; surreal, rather than
real. As such, Michael Moorcock, editor of New Worlds magazine from 1964 to 1970,
said of Ballard, and other writers who contributed to the magazine, that ‘we were doing
post-modernism before the name was invented.’7
Moorcock’s claim is a bold one, but
one that appreciates Ballard’s literary innovations within English literature, and,
specifically, science fiction. Moreover, it would be an injustice to Ballard’s oeuvre to
draw lines between his early science fiction, his avant-garde forays and his semi-
autobiographical writings; motifs and themes expressed in The Drowned World and
Crash, for example, reappear to haunt the narratives of Empire of the Sun and The
Kindness of Women. The Drowned World, therefore, exhibits some of the thematic
7 Ken Mondschein, ‘Michael Moorcock on Politics, Punk, Tolkien, and Everything Else’, The Corporate
Mofo (2002).
15

obsessions that would pervade Ballard’s later work, and is, in many ways, ahead of its
time.
Though The Drowned World superficially follows in the footsteps of Wyndham
and Christopher, Michel Delville points out that the novel is ‘entirely devoid of the
scenes of private and collective panic we usually associate with the genre’, and that it
‘also mark[s] a decided departure from the most basic ideological assumptions of the
disaster tale, whose main emphasis had until then been on a small group of survivors
and their heroic attempts to overcome the crisis and restore a new sense of social and
political normalcy.’8
Instead, Ballard presents us with an antihero, Dr. Robert Kerans, a
scientist whose work consists of documenting the biological effects of the rapid climate
change that Earth has experienced since ‘a series of violent and prolonged solar storms’
struck ‘some sixty or seventy years earlier’ (Ballard, p. 21). Kerans’ work is slow, and
the introverted scientist is in no hurry to complete it, stating that ‘the biological
mapping had become a pointless game’, since he was ‘sure that no one at Camp Byrd in
Northern Greenland bothered to file his reports, let alone read them’ (Ballard, p. 8-9).
This aimlessness is exacerbated by Kerans’ ‘growing isolation and self-containment,
[which is also] exhibited by the other members of the unit and from which only the
buoyant Riggs seemed immune’ (Ballard, p. 14). In contrast to the purposeful John
Custance in The Death of Grass, Kerans is indifferent to his predicament, eventually
falling into an ‘archaeopsychic’ malaise from which he never truly returns.
In a deliberate subversion of the traditional disaster novel, the pace of The
Drowned World is glacial - ironic, considering the fictional climate. Whereas The Death
of Grass is a novel of savage immediacy, Ballard’s is contemplative, asking what human
experience really counts for on the grand scale of geological time. As Earth’s newest
8 Michel Delville, Writers and their Work: J.G. Ballard, 1st edn (Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers,
1998), p. 7. Subsequent references to this book are given in the text as ‘Delville’, followed by the page
number.
16

epoch - a subdivision of the geological timescale that is longer than an age, but shorter
than a period - begins, Kerans tells Colonel Riggs, his commanding officer, that ‘we
know all the news for the next three million years’, illustrating a growing belief in their
insignificance as a species (Ballard, p. 15). Beside the lagoon, which ‘used to be called
London’, Kerans and the supporting cast of characters are in an interstitial setting, both
spatially and temporally; they are unable to come to terms with their present, and unable
to move on into any meaningful future (Ballard, p. 75). As such, the motif of time
comes sharply into focus during the course of the novel. In a later section of The
Drowned World, when Kerans, Riggs and a search party are looking for the missing
Lieutenant Hardman, Kerans notices a clock tower, whose timepiece appears to have
frozen:
One of the clock faces was without its hands; the other, by coincidence, had
stopped at almost exactly the right time - 11:35. Kerans wondered whether
the clock was not in fact working, tended by some mad recluse clinging to a
last meaningless register of sanity, though if the mechanism were still
operable Riggs might well perform that role. Several times, before they had
abandoned one of the drowned cities, he had wound the two-ton mechanism
of some rusty cathedral clock and they had sailed off to a last carillon of
chimes across the water. For nights afterwards, in his dreams Kerans had
seen Riggs dressed as William Tell, striding about in a huge Dalinian
landscape, planting immense dripping sundials like daggers in the fused
sand.
(Ballard, p. 63)
17

Firstly, the passage reveals that Riggs, though initially cast in Kerans’ mind as a mad
recluse, is the only character who has retained some semblance of sanity; he is desirous
to hold on to former understandings of time, when, frankly, such order is irrelevant
given their circumstances. Riggs makes it his mission not to let himself descend into the
‘archaeopsychic’ sickness that the others appear to have, even at the cost of looking a
little eccentric. Arguably, Riggs only seems insane to Kerans, and the others, because,
paradoxically, he is sane. Kerans goes on to relay a dream in which Riggs is dressed as
William Tell, the Swiss folk hero who appears variously in Salvador Dali’s works,
‘striding about’ a landscape that recalls the artist’s best-known work, The Persistence of
Memory. ‘Fusing the iconography of Dali’s time-saturated meditations with his own
Surrealist signatures (clocks without hands, archaeopsychic time)’, Jeanette Baxter
argues, ‘Ballard forges a haunting inner landscape in which memory is equally as
tenacious.’9
What Baxter is correctly asserting is that Ballard’s use of time as a motif,
and subsequently memory, is more clearly reminiscent of the Surrealist art movement
than of science fiction literature.
Like The Death of Grass, The Drowned World is best understood as a novel
beyond the realms of science fiction. Thanks to this sense of aimlessness, as well as its
steaming jungle landscapes, and overt colonial references, Ballard’s novel invites a
comparison with Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad’s novella that describes Charles
Marlow’s journey along the Congo River to the centre of the African continent. Like
Kerans’, Marlow’s physical journey becomes a psychological one; an exploration of the
latent content of his unconscious mind. It is in this sense that I would argue that The
Drowned World can be read as a post-modernist reworking of Heart of Darkness,
because Ballard’s novel ends with Kerans heading South, assuring his self-destruction;
9 Jeanette Baxter, J.G. Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination: Spectacular Authorship, 1st edn. (Cornwall:
Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2009), p. 24.
18

‘“there isn’t any other direction’”, he claims, pursuing his latent urge for self-
destruction, and assimilation with the drowned world. Of course, Ballard owes much to
authors that paved the way before him, and he is not shy about referencing them in The
Drowned World, but the novel’s atmosphere is a ‘time-saturated’ one that most
resembles Surrealist visual art than any literature. This perceptible sense of
deliriousness allows him to explore the Freudian notion of the ‘death drive’, the
inherent urge towards death, or self-destruction. Earlier in the novel, Ballard makes
reference to two other Surrealist painters, Paul Delvaux and Max Ernst. Ernst’s visual
aesthetic, in particular, resurfaces throughout The Drowned World and Ballard’s other
disaster novels; ‘[his] self-devouring phantasmagoric jungles screamed silently to itself,
like the slump of some insane unconscious’ (Ballard, p. 29). The empirical world around
the main characters clearly has some resemblance to Ernst’s imagined landscapes, and
Ballard is not reticent about his influences. In fact, a detail from Ernst’s painting, The
19
Figure 1. The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dali, 1931.

Eye of Silence, was used as the cover on several editions of Ballard’s 1966 novel, The
Crystal World. Along with Dali, Ballard draws inspiration from Ernst’s paintings to
create an outer landscape that reflects a chaotic inner.
Although the main protagonists of The Death of Grass and The Drowned World
are largely incomparable,
Custance’s friend, Roger, and
Riggs, whom Kerans dreams of
as William Tell, share a lack of
adaptability that can be
attributed to their adherence to
a pre-disaster mode of
thinking. Like Christopher,
Ballard is eager to stress the
hollowness of British
exceptionalism following the
Second World War.
Consequently, Riggs’ buoyant
attitude earns him nothing but
derision from the other
characters. Riggs ‘was still
obeying reason and logic,’
Kerans explains, ‘buzzing around his diminished, unimportant world with his little
parcels of instructions like a worker bee about to return to the home nest’ (Ballard, p.
75). The scathing simile illustrates to the reader that the ‘worker bee’ is thoughtless in
his actions, and is missing the ability to critically examine himself, his predicament or
20
Figure 2. The Eye of Silence, Max Ernst, 1944 on the cover of
J.G. Ballard’s The Crystal World, 1966.

the future of humanity. Thanks to this outdated middle-class stoicism, Kerans’ is unable
to take him seriously, and ‘after a few minutes he ignored the colonel completely and
listened to the deep subliminal drumming in his ears’, (Ballard, p. 75). Additionally, the
novel’s sole female character, Beatrice Dahl, says to Kerans, “but, darling, he was
insufferable. All that stiff upper lip stuff and dressing for dinner in the jungle – a total
lack of adaptability” (Ballard p. 80). Paradoxically, Kerans and Beatrice successfully
‘adapt’ to their post-apocalyptic circumstances by accepting the inevitability of their
individual annihilation.
As well as having the proverbial ‘stiff upper lip’, Riggs personifies British
imperialism. His introduction to The Drowned World is one with obvious colonial
overtones: he is described by Kerans as ‘surveying the winding creeks and hanging
jungles like an old-time African explorer’, (Ballard, p. 12). The colonial allusion is
given credence by the fact that British history between 1956 and 1962 - the publication
dates of The Death of Grass and The Drowned World, respectively - was marked by the
accelerated demise of the British Empire in the wake of the Suez Crisis. Britain no
longer held the influence it once had on the world stage, and, following the Suez Crisis,
the process of decolonisation gained further momentum. In just six years independence
was attained by Sudan; Ghana; British Somaliland; Cyprus; Nigeria; Sierra Leone;
Tanganyika; (part of modern day Tanzania) British Cameroons; Jamaica; Trinidad and
Tobago; Uganda and Samoa. Taking an historicist approach to the way that Riggs is
introduced to the narrative illuminates our understanding of his character, and the
antiquated English rhetoric he represents. After all, Britain no longer exists in any
meaningful sense in The Drowned World: ‘the British Isles was linked again with
northern France... [and] Europe became a system of giant lagoons’ (Ballard, p. 22).
Modern civilisation has drowned, and ‘the genealogical tree of mankind was
21

systematically pruning itself’ to reach a point ‘where a second Adam and Eve [may
find] themselves alone in a new Eden’.
Biblical allusions surface throughout The Drowned World, and it is not hard to
see why; the mere fact that the world has ‘drowned’ alludes to Noah and the Flood
Myth. The allusions, however, should not be read as Ballard’s half-hearted attempt to
make bold religious, or atheistic, statements. The thematic effect of his frequent
allusions to the Bible, particularly the book of Genesis, is one of cleansing; the Earth is
being cleansed of its human and mammalian population, returning to a primeval state.
Ballard’s imagined Earth is experiencing an extinction event, and the human population
is dwindling. Kerans understands this only too well, and is more than happy to resign
himself to the totality of individual annihilation, though it is with delusional biblical
implications that he does so. In the final chapter of The Drowned World, titled ‘The
Paradises of the Sun’, Kerans embarks on his trek to the equator, and is described in the
novel’s last sentence as ‘a second Adam searching for the forgotten paradises of the
reborn sun’ (Ballard, p. 175). Humanity is decentralised as the warming Earth’s
dominant species, leaving the individual to pursue the latent content of their
unconscious.
22

Chapter 3. Here and now: What makes The Death of Grass and The Drowned World
seem prescient to a contemporary reader?
To a contemporary reader, The Death of Grass and The Drowned World seem
remarkably prescient; both novels voice concerns about problems that have, since their
conception, intensified. Whilst Christopher is troubled by the fragility of food security,
and, specifically, the relative lack of diversity within industrialised agriculture, Ballard
dissects global warming, and the effects it may have on the human mind, regardless of
its cause. The world population grew exponentially during the 20th century, so intensive
farming has been crucial in the effort to keep up with demand; more food is produced
by fewer farmers than ever before, and Christopher was cognisant of this trend as early
as 1956. More impressive, however, is how he foreshadowed the complex pathogens
that threaten contemporary cereal farming. Ballard, on the other hand, may not have
described global warming as a manmade catastrophe, but simply by imagining a
warming Earth, and how the individual may respond to it, he foreshadowed
contemporary fears about climate change. Analysing the texts through an ecocritical
lens proves incredibly useful in shedding light on how the novels are relevant to us now,
and what they can tell us about the predicaments humanity currently faces, or soon will.
The task of the ecocritic, Kate Rigby argues, is to consider how literature ‘might assist
us to confront catastrophe’.10
I would, therefore, argue that The Death of Grass and The
Drowned World give a considered insight into the potential consequences of two very
different ecological disasters, and that they can be reclaimed, in some measure, as
ecocritical texts.
10 Kate Rigby, ‘Confronting Catastrophe: Ecocriticism in a Warming World’, The Cambridge
Companion to Literature and the Environment, 1st edn., ed. by Louise Westling, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2014) p. 213.
23

The Death of Grass can be read as a proto-ecocritical text in very plain terms:
Christopher describes an ecosystem completely destroyed by a pathogen that has
proliferated thanks to intensive monoculture. Macfarlane wrote that ‘Christopher’s
worries at the impact of human activity on the environment were a decade ahead of their
time, and his account of the pandemic panic was prescient by half a century or so’
(Macfarlane, p. xi). He goes on to suggest that Ug99, a potentially pandemic strain of
stem rust fungus, is just the sort of pathogen Christopher had predicted. First
characterised in Uganda in 1999, almost fifty years after The Death of Grass was
published, Ug99 is eerily similar to the fictional Chung-Li pathogen that wreaks havoc
in Christopher’s novel. Wheat, one of the three most-produced cereals - along with rice
and maize - accounts for ‘“twenty percent of [humans’] calories and about the same
[percent of] protein”’, Ravi Singh tells Kerry Grens in a recent article in The Scientist,
yet ‘ninety percent of wheat varieties could succumb’ to Ug99; almost total crop
failure.11
‘Should the pathogen establish a global presence’, experts agree that ‘the
annual global harvest of some 700 million tons of wheat would be decimated’ (Grens).
Science’s best solution to the pathogen are genetically modified (GM) crops, but Grens
complains that ‘transgenic approaches are taboo, as public opposition, regulatory
expenses, and genetic complexity have kept wheat transgenics off the market’ (Grens).
Ug99, and the threat it poses, reveals, in retrospect, how prophetic The Death of Grass
really is.
Erroneously, Macfarlane writes that The Death of Grass ‘is a vision of nature’s
revenge for its sustained mistreatment - a return of the repressed’ (Macfarlane, p. vi). In
fact, Christopher, as well as Ballard, demonstrates quite a sophisticated understanding
of the notion of ecocritical dualism - the anthropocentric separation of humans from
11 Kerry Grens, ‘Putting Up Resistance’, The Scientist (2014). Subsequent references to this article are
given in the text as ‘Grens’.
24

‘nature’. As previously mentioned, Christopher makes it clear that modern agricultural
techniques are to blame for the Chung-Li pathogen, yet he does not go so far as to claim
that ‘nature’, as an abstract entity, has somehow fought back against human abuse.
Christopher is neither sentimental nor romantic about his narrative; if cereal crops were
to fail, society would collapse. Macfarlane asserts that The Death of Grass ‘belongs to
‘a mid-century sci-fi tradition of what might be called “floral apocalypse” which began
in 1947 when an American writer, Ward Moore, published Greener Than You Think’
(Macfarlane, p. vii). In Moore’s novel a chemically treated species of Bermuda grass
grows many hundreds of times its ordinary height and spreads uncontrollably,
eventually threatening to choke out all other plants. However, unlike Moore’s Bermuda
grasses, or Wyndham’s titular triffids, the Chung-Li pathogen is far less extraordinary,
and all the more chilling as a consequence:
Ann said: ‘Our minds can’t grasp it properly, can they? The news bulletins,
the military checkpoints - they’re one kind of thing. This is another. A
summer evening in the country - the same country that’s always been here.’
‘A bit bare’, John said. He pointed to the grassless hedgerows.
‘It doesn’t seem enough’, Ann said, ‘to account for famine, flight, murder,
atom bombs . . .’ she hesitated; he glanced at her, ‘. . . or refusing to take a
boy with us to safety.’
John said: ‘Motives are naked now. We shall have to learn to live with
them.’
(Christopher, pp. 79-80).
25

Ann cannot believe that the bare, grassless hedgerows account for the complete
collapse of modern civilisation. Frankly, it does not seem enough, yet it is, and would be
in reality if Ug99 became pandemic. Custance later expresses the same disbelief,
thinking to himself, ‘they had lived in a world of morality whose lineage could be
traced back nearly four thousand years. In a day, it had been swept from under them’
(Christopher, p. 105). This is no spectacular ‘floral apocalypse’. Christopher’s Britain is
simply brown and bare; it is not ‘nature’s revenge’ that causes catastrophe in The Death
of Grass, but, instead, its absence. This thematic difference distinguishes Christopher’s
novel from previous disaster narratives by rejecting nature-culture dualism, showing
that humanity is simply another link in the ecological chain, and not outside of it.
Though the term had not yet been coined, Christopher and Ballard appear to
engage with the notion of the ‘Anthropocene’, a proposed geological epoch popularised
by atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen. As a result of anthropogenic ‘land use changes,
deforestation and fossil fuel burning’, Crutzen explains that human activities have
‘grown to become significant geological forces’.12
These forces have become so great
that Crutzen insists that ‘it is justified to assign the term “anthropocene” to the current
geological epoch’ (Crutzen, p. 13). However it is viewed, the fact that humans have
made a geological impact on the Earth is astounding. Of course, an anthropogenic epoch
is fraught with potential ecological disasters, and The Death of Grass and The Drowned
World make brazen statements about two of its most perilous possibilities: agricultural
collapse and global warming. ‘It is extremely easy to think of scenarios that avoid the
disasters of the Anthropocene’, Timothy Clark writes in his essay, ‘Nature, Post Nature’,
‘the obstacle, for want of a better phrase, is not nature, or even conceptions of nature,
but human nature. Too often treated as a separate issue, it is arguably various notions or
12 Paul J. Crutzen, ‘The “Anthropocene”’, Earth System Science in the Anthropocene, ed. By Eckhart
Ehlers and Thomas Krafft (Berlin: Springer, 2006) p. 13. Subsequent references to this essay are given in
the text as ‘Crutzen’, followed by the page number.
26

norms of human nature that have utterly determined conceptions of nature.’13
Clark
overturns traditional conceptions of the culture-nature dichotomy by arguing that it is
human nature that causes what many perceive to be ‘natural disasters’.
Congruently, neither The Death of Grass nor The Drowned World attempt to
elucidate anything about ‘nature’; they both tackle human nature. Christopher’s novel
shows us that without a few species of grass humanity would tear at the seams. He
describes how chaos would ensue, how we would all fight for our individual - or at least
familial - survival, and, consequentially, how civilisation would crumble without a
collective conscience. Ballard’s novel describes how the individual would respond to
extreme global warming, how the psychology of the individual would be unfathomably
changed by their drastically altered surroundings. Suppressed biological memories
resurface, and, in binary opposition with the survivalism that Custance adopts in The
Death of Grass, the urge for self-destruction, or the Freudian death-drive, inflicts
Kerans, and Hardman. Clarks later asks, ‘is the Anthropocene to be no more than a time
in which humanity en masse must confront its own inadequacy, even its self-destructive
pettiness?’ (Clark, p. 85). Indeed, it seems that both of the novels centre on self-
destruction - be it personal or collective - as a part of human nature, and our perceptions
of our inadequacies are, in turn, an intrinsic part of how we view our environment.
The ‘Sci-fi Seer’, as Lynn Barber called him, or the ‘Seer of Shepperton’, are
monikers that Ballard has earned thanks to the acute accuracy of his visions of the near
future.14
It is not hard to see why Ballard was described as a ‘seer’, because, amongst
other things, he accurately predicted the rise of social media in his 1977 essay, ‘The
13 Timothy Clark, ‘Nature, Post Nature’, The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment,
1st edn., ed. by Louise Westling, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) p. 84. Subsequent
references to this essay are given in the text as ‘Clark’, followed by the page number.
14 Lynn Barber, ‘Sci-fi Seer’, Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews with J.G. Ballard, 1967-2008, 1st
edn., ed. by Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara, (London: Fourth Estate, 2012) pp. 22-35.
27

Future of the Future’, in Vogue magazine.15
The Drowned World, however, is not a
vision of the near future, nor of the far future, but somewhere in between; the characters
of Ballard’s novel exist an interstitial time zone, a period of psychological retrogression
- ‘retrogression’, rather than ‘regression’, since the characters are entering a worsened
psychological state, not just a more primitive one. The cause of the retrogression is
global warming due to solar flares - logically possible, though unlikely for the
foreseeable future. Although it is not due to anthropogenic activities, like greenhouse
gas emissions and deforestation, global warming in The Drowned World is relevant
from an ecocritical point of view in and of itself. Irrespective of its source, Ballard
correctly predicted some sort of global warming before the fidelity of computer models
had sufficiently improved to corroborate with the prevailing hypotheses. The rapidly
increasing heat is frequently referred to as a return to the Earth’s Triassic, or prehistoric,
past, during which time mammals were in their infancy. From the outset, Ballard
decentralises humans as the supreme species in his imagined London. In a sardonic
comment aimed at the giant iguanas lurking in the surrounding office buildings, Kerans
says, ‘as their seats in the one-time boardrooms indicated, the reptiles had taken over the
city. Once again they were the dominant form of life’ (Ballard, p. 18). With a dry sense
of humour, Ballard subverts the traditionally anthropocentric notion that humanity is
intrinsically superior other species. As such, Ballard imagines how the human
consciousness, and, especially, human unconsciousness, would respond to such a drastic
usurpation.
In the opening pages of the novel, Ballard makes it plain that Kerans has begun
to isolate himself from the rest of the party, and that Riggs ‘recognised Kerans’
unconscious attempt to sever his links with the base’ (Ballard, p. 8). The reason why, the
15 J. G. Ballard, ‘The Future of the Future’, A User’s Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews, 2nd
edn., (London: Flamingo, 1997) pp. 224-27.
28

reader slowly comes to terms with, is that, by and large, human consciousness appears
to be retrogressing to formerly primitive states. It is Riggs alone who seems to have
resisted the downward spiral his colleagues are falling into, largely thanks to his
buoyant, if a little vacuous, personality. We later learn that several of the novel’s
characters, including Dr. Bodkin, - the only member of the team who can remember a
pre-drowned world - Beatrice and Hardman, are having dreams that appear to hark back
to an earlier state of being on the evolutionary tree of life. Of course, physiological
retrogression is impossible, and Ballard is aware of this; Kerans even jokes about it,
sarcastically telling Bodkin that his theory resembles ‘“Lamarckism in reverse”’
(Ballard, p. 42). Besides, Bodkin - and Ballard, therefore - is more fascinated by
psychological retrogression. Bodkin speaks of ‘“biological memories”’, and questions
why we have a ‘“universal but completely groundless loathing of the spider... [and a]
hatred of snakes and reptiles”’ (Ballard, p. 43). His answer is that ‘“we all carry within
us a submerged memory of the time when the giant spiders were lethal, and when the
reptiles were the planet’s dominant life form”’ (Ballard, p. 43). In other words,
humanity has been dethroned, and appears to be withdrawing from the fray, physically
and psychologically. Bodkin explains to Kerans:
‘These are the oldest memories on Earth, the time-codes carried in every
chromosome and gene. Every step we’ve taken in our evolution is a
milestone inscribed with organic memories... Just as psychoanalysis
reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed
material, so we are now being plunged back in to the archaeopsychic past,
uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs.
The brief span of an individual life is misleading. Each one of us is as old as
29

the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the
great sea of its total memory. The uterine odyssey of the growing foetus
recapitulates the entire evolutionary past, and its central nervous system is a
coded time scale, each nexus of neurones and each spinal level marking a
symbolic station, a unit of neuronic time.’
(Ballard, p. 43-44).
Although his theory of organic memories in a literal sense is mere pseudo-science,
Bodkin’s point about the lifespan of an individual being misleading proves to be an
insightful ecocritical platform from which the reader can examine themselves, their
species, and the effects that global warming might eventually have on us, and not
simply on the surrounding environment. This, I would argue, is what Ballard is really
trying to communicate to his reader; our insignificance is not as an individual, but as a
species. Clark declares that the context by which we frame human existence has
changed: ‘There is a blatant mismatch between the scale of our most basic self-
conceptions, the horizons of our own personhood, the arena of our meaningful
engagements, and the centuries-wide planetary context in which they must now operate’
(Clark, p. 86). The contextual frame of human existence is extended to incorporate
biological and geological time in The Drowned World. The fourth dimension becomes
the playing field for Ballard to explore humanity’s significance, and impact, on the
Earth. The timescale of an individual’s life is no longer relevant: ‘Each one of us is as
old as the entire biological kingdom’ (Ballard, p. 44). We are not the first supreme
species on Earth, and nor will we likely be the last.
30

Conclusion
In his 1962 essay that appeared in New Worlds magazine, Ballard perceptively wrote
that ‘the biggest developments of the immediate future will take place, not on the Moon
or Mars, but on Earth, and it is inner space, not outer, that needs to be explored. The
only truly alien planet is Earth.’16
The Death of Grass and The Drowned World maintain
their focus solely on Earth, and in our current literary, and meteorological, climate, they
demand to be read as ecocritical texts. With the real-world threat of Ug99 just barely
being contained, Christopher’s uncanny novel supplies a spine-chilling narrative about
what might happen if the pathogen were to become pandemic. The Death of Grass
subverts the traditional disaster narrative, keeping its proverbial feet on the ground
thanks to its pragmatic realism and, in the process, absence becomes a principle motif,
as the most vital cereal crops wither away leaving nothing but bare brown earth. Like
being plunged into perpetual nighttime, the brownness proves to be too unnatural a state
for the main characters to properly comprehend. Equally unnatural is the drowned world
that Ballard’s characters find themselves in. In a world so altered by global warming the
human unconscious appears to be retrogressing irrevocably. Ballard asks us whether this
sort of world, which seems better suited to Mesozoic reptiles, is one that humanity
could still survive in, let alone thrive. The answer, it slowly becomes clear, is in the
negative. In reality, as in The Drowned World, our species finds itself in warming
world, and Ballard’s hallucinatory exploration of internalised psychological landscapes
proves too feverish and bewildering for the human mind.
16 J.G. Ballard, ‘Which Way to Inner Space?’, A User’s Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews,
2nd edn., (London: Flamingo, 1997) p. 197.
31

Until long-term solutions are discovered, and implemented, if at all, anxiety
about both food security and global warming will dominate modern literature and
academia. The ‘Cli-Fi’, or eco-catastrophe, sub-genre is burgeoning, and looks set to
invade the mainstream. Recent novels that might be thought of as Cli-Fi novels include
Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, (2003) - and its follow-up novels, The Year of the
Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013) - Marcel Theroux’s Far North (2009) and Ian
McEwan’s Solar (2010). Well-respected, prize-winning authors are turning to our
current ecological predicaments as subjects to engage with. Consequentially, The Death
of Grass and The Drowned World can, and should, be viewed as trailblazers of the
genre; the novels are too prophetic to be left dormant in the literary canon. They must
be read for what they are: eco-catastrophe nightmares that may very well come true.
The environment (in its broadest sense) will be the defining topic of 21st century
literature, and both Christopher and Ballard had the foresight to anticipate this trend
decades in advance.
32

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