“Ballardian” is probably not anywhere near the top of the list of potential Met Gala themes one could have reasonably expected to see in their lifetime (likely not in the top thousand or so, just behind “Borgesian” and ahead of “Barthelmian” even if we just stick to the literary B’s). Yet here we are…
When Vogue announced that the dress code for its 2024 soiree would be “The Garden of Time,” I initially didn’t clock it as a reference to the J.G. Ballard story, and any random photograph taken from the night does little to reinforce the connection. Any reference to the late, great author of dystopian science fiction with an emphasis on urban surrealism was quickly supplanted by the Gala’s more digestible theme: “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” (though the relationship between the gala’s theme and its dress code is notoriously ambiguous). Fey apparel, floral garments, and even some clock and hourglass symbolism were all apparent on the red carpet—visions of Ballardian horrors of modern life, less so.
The irony of this year’s theme was not lost on those familiar with the story. The Met Gala, for all its charity and celebration of the arts, has become a veritable Olympics of Opulence, a night when unimaginable wealth is flaunted on the museum steps in New York’s thrumming heart. Ballard’s “The Garden of Time” tells the story of a rich count and countess living a charmed life in a walled garden surrounded by magnificent art, baroque architecture, and near-total seclusion. It is an idyllic manse where even “the air seemed brighter, the sun warmer” while the surrounding lands are “always dull and remote.” Count Axel, the keeper of the castle, looks over the ramparts one evening to see an army of torch-wielding commonfolk presumably coming to redistribute his wealth by force. The count then goes into his garden to pluck a crystalized “time flower” that, once picked, bursts apart and turns back time, pushing the mob deeper into the horizon. Axel and the Countess savor their remaining time together as they exhaust their supply of flowers, and the story ends with the mob breaching the walls only to find that the castle is a creaking husk, long abandoned—the rubble ruled by two lonely statues, a monument to our handsome couple.
It is not difficult to spot the friction, here. Both the Met Gala and Ballard’s story are visions of haves and have-nots. It goes without saying that there is extreme poverty in our real world, mere blocks from the Gala, and inequality is the bedrock of our society, so any flourish of wealth where the cost of tickets to attend the event outpaces the total annual income of millions of families is going to become a target of ire. Though it’s never explicitly stated if the Count and Countess are poor custodians of the land or how they amassed their hoard of art—it is obvious the couple cloisters themselves and have monopolized all of life’s beauty and luxury, from access to art, the sun above, and even time itself. That feeling that the rich control the material world is not a new idea, but Ballard’s sense that the affluent can turn the dial on metaphysics itself is an unsettlingly plausible notion.
These images of walled gardens, experiments in seclusion, a grasping hunger for experience, the privatization of beauty, class warfare, and mob mentality are all pervasive throughout Ballard’s oeuvre. Nearly every element we see in “The Garden of Time” has gone under the microscope with greater specificity in one or more of Ballard’s novels. To examine how the rich play if left completely unsupervised, free to let their darkest impulses drive them in the name of art and creativity—Ballard created the overlit beaches of Vermilion Sands, a fixup novel of short stories that follows the psychopathic rich and the boutique managers who keep their paradise running. Animosity between social classes is at the concrete core of perhaps Ballard’s most popular science fiction book High-Rise, in which a modern marvel of architecture—a city sealed in a skyscraper—declares war on itself as the upper and lower floors dissolve into atavistic tribal violence in a commentary on suburbia and hostile urban planning. Even the usually sanctified mob itself is not free of criticism, as evident in Millennium People, a satire about the misplaced, meaningless anger lying dormant in the hearts of London’s middle-class intelligentsia.
Ballard can sometimes be contradictory in his treatment of these same subjects across different books: the celebrities who populate the resort of Vermillion Sands are almost exclusively pathological narcissists who tie their own noose—yet in Millennium People, Ballard engages in a defense of the famous when the mob tries to scapegoat them to justify its bloodlust. But this is less waffling on an opinion and more of a desire to produce variations on a theme and explore the same truth in different environments. Both Ballard’s revolutionary hotbed of Chelsea Marina in Millennium People and the resort town of Estelle Del Mar in Cocaine Nights present profound middle-class ennui as a serious threat—but give rise to wildly different reactions. The residents of Estelle Del Mar are desperate for sensation and danger that wakes up the soul and forces them to live mindfully, while in Millenium People, boredom is turned into aimless rages against dog shows, the tourism industry, and art museums as the wayward neo-proletariat search for a worthwhile boulder to push uphill. The symbols remain the same, but the contexts produce strange mutations.
This is to say that we should resist the easy reading of this story: that the lords in “The Garden of Time” are piggish, wasteful caricatures of what wealth does to people. Ballard lends his couple no small amount of sympathy and does not delight in watching his creations scatter like insects when the mob climbs the hill. Indeed, in Millennium People, the protagonist David Markham laments after the senseless death of a celebrity—killed for no discernible reason, yet framed by the rioters as a revolutionary act—the fact that “[f]ame and celebrity were again on trial, as if being famous was itself an incitement to anger and revenge, playing on the uneasy dreams of a submerged world, a dark iceberg of impotence and hostility.” It is in some ways a radical position to take, in a world desperate to balance the scales of inequality, to insist that celebrities do not deserve the mob’s justice simply for being gluttons for life and leisure and that we should resist substituting a convenient, highly visible scapegoat in place of the real culprits, no matter how satisfying the release or how tone-deaf the target.
Still, we also should not paint the couple in the garden as entirely blameless, and this is where the cries of the affluent come off as tinny. Despite ostensibly wielding time itself, it is painfully obvious that the only thing that Axel and the Countess understand about the crystal flowers is that they are in dwindling supply. They write time itself off as a stubborn gravity beyond mortal control, an incomprehensible force Ballard calls “as simple and mysterious as sundials.” To them, time is archaic and their fate inevitable. Yet this is not necessarily a story about the unstoppable march of time and how no coin or castle can pacify it. While counting his winnowing patch of time flowers, Axel laments that “[d]uring his entire lifetime, he had failed to notice a single evidence of growth among the flowers.” Perhaps this is Ballard suggesting that time is the one thing that we cannot cultivate and stockpile—but if the couple is guilty of crimes other than harpsichord ownership, it might suggest that the mob’s anger is rooted in their lord’s great mistreatment of time and take issue with the suggestion that the exhaustion of the precious time flowers is but one of those simple, thorny facts of life…
At least, on the personal scale, and herein lies our aristocrat’s true sin: Time for the individual may be finite, but it is the responsibility of those in the present to ensure that there will be time for others to spend in the future. There is a proverb sometimes attributed to Chief Seattle of the Duwamish and Suquamish peoples: “We do not inherit our land from our ancestors, but instead borrow it from our children.” This wisdom contradicts Axel’s belief that no decision may have saved them and there was no way to cultivate the time flowers. If they had only shared their resources, the answer to how one grows more time flowers may have been found among the common folk. A more generous approach to life would have left more time available for all, but instead the secrets and the garden itself dies with the couple. No fool draws more anger than the one who makes every mistake possible, achieves nothing, and then claims that there was no other possible outcome. This is why fatalism from those in power, this resignation to the violent ways of the world (or the worsening climate, a metaphor that fits snugly inside “The Garden of Time”)as human nature or the unavoidable cost of doing business tend to fall on deaf ears. The story can be read, then, as a commentary not about the stubborn, fickle properties of time—but instead about those who live thoughtlessly and mistake their inability to leave the world in a better place than they found it as a harsh reality rather than a personal failure.
Inevitability is another common theme in Ballard’s writing. Nearly all of the stories in Vermilion Sands begin with a tattered vignette of dilapidated mansions, ghost ships, and personal effects left ruined on the beach before a flashback takes us to the first events of their tragic origins. Both High-Rise and Millennium People also begin this way, with a vision of a chaotic present before peddling backwards to when things were bright, perhaps inspiring hope for a new, better outcome even if we know the truth beforehand. Though we begin with the regal couple at the start of “The Garden of Time” very much alive, by the end we come to realize that their actions have been buried in the unreachable past, their only punishment dispensed by nature, deepening and calcifying their belief that they did all they could.
Perhaps this is the greatest trick that time pulls on us: Not that it somehow manages to slip through our fingers no matter how tightly we cup our hands, but that even those who understand that time is in short supply are unaware of just how little time there is, how the end can be measured in steps, not years. It’s the false perception that a crisis point, some decision to change our decadent ways and avoid disaster is not approaching rapidly, but in fact was passed long ago and it is too late for our anger to mean anything. The tragedy of “The Garden of Time” is that even though the mob has finally been summoned to restore balance, they know not that they are marching on ruins.
