Ruins of the Future: Decaying Urban Landscapes in Richard Jefferies, J.G. Ballard and Angela Carter’s Speculative Fiction (After London, The Drowned World and The Passion of New Eve)

Abstract

‘Tous les hommes ont un attrait secret pour les ruines’ (Chateaubriand 360) : Chateaubriand’s declaration conforms to his contemporaries’ fascination for the rediscovered ruins of Antiquity, but proves to be still relevant in contemporary speculative fiction. The scopic drive motivating the contemplation of fallen civilizations is centred around the image of decaying city landscapes. If Volney,1 Chateaubriand or Mary Shelley2 are notable example of this phenomenon spanning early to late Romanticism and provide a precedent of the ‘nostalgia for ruins’ (Huyssens, 6), the merging of this type of portrayal with speculative fiction has proved a fertile soil for socio-political and literary explorations of the ‘city’ in its political sense, as the readers get to contemplate the ruins of their present. The posterity of this tradition has acquired new meaning as the decay of the city mirrored contemporary anxieties—nuclear war being a central one after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which inspired numerous science-fiction tropes in both popular and critically acclaimed fiction. As Burton Pike phrases it, the twentieth century literary city came to ‘express the fragmentation of the very concept of community’ (viii). Indeed, the traditional division between the refined, civilised city and the vulgar, violent margins is reversed in contemporary speculative fiction: a ‘relapse into barbarism’3 in the city, pastoral wilderness in the countryside. Those innovative takes on the image of the city lay themselves open to ecocritical, dystopian and ontological readings. To do so, I will provide an analysis of Richard Jefferies’s After London (1911), which delves both into the pastoral description of new wild England and the effect of the traumatic ‘apocalypse’ turning Londoners into barbarians’ tribes; J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World is an example of what he calls ‘inner space’,4 the speculative nature of his story linking the ruins and toxicity of London with the disrupted individual and communal psyche of the survivors. Finally, Carter’s take on another iconic city, New York, offers another perspective on the ruins as symptom and mirror of a decaying humanity, as the apocalyptic metropolis becomes the locus of consumerist and sexual greed, a reversed mirror of John’s New Jerusalem.