Identity and Imagination in Climate Fiction
By: Joshwa Walton
Tags: Literature, Fiction, Climate Change

In Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962), set one hundred and eighty-three years after its publication date, London is virtually unrecognizable — a breeding ground of heavily evolved species of plant and animal life resembling a flooded lagoon. It is important to note that, through this small cast of characters, Ballard is easily capable of touching on their adaptability to this new climate. Strangely enough, Ballard’s writing does not deal with the popular notion of coming to terms with this new world. Instead, the novel begins with his characters being fairly adjusted to their environment. The novel rather quickly insinuates their reluctance to actually leave the place, despite its worsening conditions (43). From here, the only path Ballard has carved out for himself is one of further alteration — by this I mean: a tightening of the characters’ grasps on the environment surrounding them. In a way, this intentional adaption to the changing world is what needs to be mobilized in the readers of climate fiction. However, Ballard does not stop there. Thematically, Ballard’s work is far more complex, delving into the world of the collective unconscious, uniting his cast of characters through dreams resulting from a biological/neurological change catalyzed by the changing environment. Ballard writes:

Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs… Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory. (56)

The linking of an internal consciousness to an external, unfamiliar space is a literary device that ultimately unites the cast of characters by redefining human nature, but Ballard chooses to only focus on Dr. Kerans throughout the novel, exploring his change in identity as an effect of an eventuality that could possibly transform the entire human race in time. Ballard elaborates:

The further down the Central Nervous System you move, from the hindbrain through the medulla into the spinal cord, you descend back into the neuronic past. For example, the junction between the thoracic and lumbar vertebrae, between T-12 and L-1, is the great zone of transit between the gill-breathing fish and the air-breathing amphibians with their respiratory rib-cages, the very junction where we stand now on the shores of this lagoon, between the Paleozoic and the Triassic Eras. (56)

This regression of human evolution in a sense provides quite a different look at how climate consciousness can alter someone, while still warranting an appropriate outcome that romanticizes a stronger awareness of the Earth. It is this journey’s destination that could be viewed as a loss of identity, instead of a persistence in maintaining one’s former identity. However, Ballard chooses to depict this in a positive light, implying that the remaking of Kerans’ identity is the fate the human race must come to terms with. In this sense, The Drowned World (1962) becomes a commentary on the collective humankind, despite its focus on a singular character. Ballard’s focus on Kerans opens the door to even paralleling Biblical mythology, such as Genesis — the end of the novel being a retelling of the infamous origins of human life acting as a new beginning in a very different world. We specifically see all of this in the novel’s conclusion, once Dr. Kerans reunites with a former, escaped associate, Hardman, which results in Kerans committing to living the rest of his days as the “second Adam searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn Sun” (198). However, the most poignant message here is the unique relationship with the earth, humbly depicting our species as inevitably returning to the earth it originated from, and instead of exhibiting reluctance, we should embrace it with open arms.

Embedded in this narrative, there are strands that speak of society, particularly reflective of 1962, however, they remain relevant in some sense today. In Dr. Robert Kerans’ relationship with one of his associates, Beatrice Dahl, we see Ballard’s problematic perspective on sexuality and women projected into a future in which a climate disaster does not relatively affect prejudice or objectification. This masculinist objectification and sexualization is certainly evident in Beatrice’s introduction:

Beatrice Dahl lay back on one of the deck-chairs, her long oiled body gleaming in the shadows like a sleeping python… The Colonel paused at the rail, looking down at the beautiful supple body with ungrudging approval… ‘All right, you two, get on with it. I’m not a strip show…’ ‘My dear Miss Dahl, you should be flattered that I keep coming to see you,’ Riggs told her… ‘Besides, as the military governor of this area’ — here he winked playfully at Kerans — ‘ I have certain responsibilities towards you. And vice versa..’ (37)

There is also a problematic discourse on race exhibited through Strangman’s character and his henchman. It is unclear whether or not this is a method in which Ballard is insinuating that social norms and interactions are also descending into further chaos, also resembling a cyclical or reversed structure in which the social collective is plunged through the violent prejudices of humanity’s past, or if Ballard was merely commenting on the social ailments of his time. This can be seen in the following passage:

As his Negro lieutenants re-started their engines and drifted off towards the bank, he surveyed the surrounding building with a critical eye… The alligators congregated like hounds around their master, the wheeling cries of the dense cloud of sentinel birds overhead, Nile plover and stone curlew, piercing the morning air. (103)

Regardless, it is important to note that Ballard would go to such lengths to flesh out a story in which the social collective is not necessarily remade or suffering from a loss of identity, but is somehow more corrupt in the wake of environmental catastrophe. Strangman’s purpose seems to, for the most part, represent the time before the world was remade over, clashing with Kerans and his associates’ adaptation to the haunting lagoon. This is especially evident when Strangman drains the city of water, revealing our world — their old world — underneath:

Half an hour later Beatrice, Kerans and Dr. Bodkin were able to walk out into the streets. Huge pools of water still lay about everywhere, leaking from the ground floors of the buildings, but they were a little more than two or three feet deep. There were clear stretches of pavement over a hundred yards long, and many of the further streets were completely drained. Dying fish and marine plants expired in the centre of the roadways, and huge banks of black sludge were silted up into the gutters and over the sidewalks… (144)

Therefore, I think at the heart of this novel is society’s reluctance to surrender their identities to the changing planet, but the individuals’ (Bodkin, Beatrice, Hardman, and, especially, Kerans) acceptance of it and the result of that remade identity.