Laura Colombino
Laura Colombino
Title: Dazzling Mineral Traumas: Competing Aesthetics in J.G. Ballard’s The Crystal World
Abstract: Reacting to a talk by Sir Martin Rees, professor of cosmology and astrophysics at Cambridge University, on the incommensurability between the life of the sun and the evolution of the human species, Christopher Hitchens asked himself, ‘Where is the narrative to match this startling reality?’ He soon realised that the answer lay in J. G. Ballard. Ballard’s characters are often attracted to landscapes where they can renegotiate their relationship with time on a larger
scale — evolutionary, geological or cosmic — as the concept of the Anthropocene compels us to do. Ballard published The Crystal World in 1966, long before the nonhuman turn took hold in cultural theory. Yet the astronomical, geological and climatological timeframes of the novel presage today’s concept of the hyperobject and accord with our new materialist sensibility, which decentres the human. The narrative of colonial exploitation — of precious stones avidly ransacked in the jungle — is reversed and it is the mineral world that, like a contagious disease, ends up colonising the human one. The paper explores resonances between Ballard’s conception of crystals and that of contemporary artists. In particular, Massimiliano Pelletti’s classical crystal busts show the intersection of different temporal scales and aesthetic worlds associated with art/archaeology, geology and the body. These planes act upon each other, producing an effect which is both dazzling and destabilising: the crystal wounds that cut across his Platonic figures do not bleed but crystallise in the permanence of geological deep time, while they still retain the viscerality of the physical wounds. Similarly, the paper shows how Ballard compels us to experience the incommensurability between the human and the geological scale, leaving us to wonder whether we should mourn and resist the traumatic possibility of our demise or succumb to the allure of a planet where we are no more, at least in our present form. Is the embrace of change deadening or reviving? I am drafting this abstract on the day the EU has narrowly passed the Nature Restoration Law. In Ecology without Nature, Timothy Morton argues that while we (vainly?) fight to make the environment cleaner and less toxic, from a philosophical point of view our path should be the opposite: faced with a process that now seems irreversible, we should learn to accept and live with an environment that has surpassed the traditionally conceived condition of “naturalness”. The paper argues that by pitting different aesthetics against each other, The Crystal World helps us reflect on the complexities of our responses to environmental change and opens the doors of imagination to alternative ways of being on the earth.
Works Cited
Ballard, J.G. 2004. The Crystal World. London: Fourth Estate.
Hitchens, C. 2010. ‘The Catastrophist’. The Atlantic. January/February 2010 Issue.
Morton, T. 2009. Ecology without Nature. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: Harvard U.P.
Bio: Laura Colombino MAE is Professor of English Literature at the University of Genova, Italy. She has a longstanding focus on transdisciplinary studies such as the relationship between writing and the visual arts; architectural spaces and their embodiment; the interplay of trauma, cultural memory and the city. She is the author of the Ford Madox Ford: Vision, Visuality and Writing (Peter Lang, 2008) and Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature: Writing Architecture and the Body (Routledge, 2013). She has edited and coedited books on Ford Madox Ford (Rodopi 2009, 2013; Routledge, 2019) and sits on the editorial board of the Ford Madox Ford: Complete Works (Oxford University Press). She has published essays and articles on several Victorian, modernist, and contemporary writers and contributed to the catalogue of the art exhibition Lee Bul: Crashing (London: Hayward Gallery, 30 May–19 Aug 2018). Most recently, she has co-edited with Peter Childs the special issue of Textual Practice ‘Narrating the (non)human: ecologies, consciousness and myth’ (2022) and written chapters for A Companion to Charles Dickens, Second Edition (Wiley/Blackwell, forthcoming) and The Cambridge Companion to Kazuo Ishiguro (2023). She is currently working on a monograph on Ishiguro and ethics for Routledge.
