Imagining Humanity’s Retreat in J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World
April 16, 2025
Reading J. G. Ballard’s 1962 novel The Drowned World was like immersing myself in the eco-dystopian equivalent of a film noir version of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Infused with Ballard’s own interpretations and embellishments on Freudian and Jungian psychology, The Drowned World explores what happens to the human psyche when faced with environmental collapse. The novel seems to suggest that an environmental return to a prehistoric environment would result in a psychic retreat from community and a surrender to the death drive. A classic of post-apocalyptic life on Earth and a foundational novel of the climate-fiction genre, The Drowned World is a fascinating and entertaining read.
In the novel’s imagined future, Earth’s climate is destroyed due to solar radiation storms that occur in the middle of the 22nd century (the 2100s), rendering most of the planet unfit for human habitation and returning the planet to a state comparable to that of the Triassic period. Humans are forced to retreat to the two poles, which are now subtropical zones averaging 85 degrees. Although much of humanity has either migrated or died off because of this climate apocalypse, some stubborn stragglers remain in the world’s former population centers, and the government sends out military-scientific expeditions to track the environmental changes occurring. The novel is set in the year 2145 in the area formerly known as London. The plot revolves around a set of six characters: biologists Robert Kerans and Alan Bodkin, wealthy socialite Beatrice Dahl, soldiers Colonel Riggs and Lieutenant Hardman, and a pirate crew led by the mysterious Strangman. The scientists and the soldiers are on an expedition in the former London, where Dahl lives in a moldering luxury condominium, and where they eventually are terrorized by Strangman.
The characters succumb to feelings of “lethargy and ennui” related less to the heat and more to the psychological impact of the climate’s changes. Just as the plant’s climate appears to be returning to an ancient past, so too does the flora and fauna. Vegetation reaches two-hundred feet high. Reptiles are resurgent. And mammalian (including human) fertility has fallen off the charts, prompting Kerans to postulate that “the genealogical tree of mankind was systematically pruning itself, apparently moving backwards in time” (55). The novel repeatedly emphasizes the scale of change as being on the order of millions or billions of years—what is known as deep time. This shift in time scale affects the human characters, as Kerans describes the feeling as “abandoning the conventional estimates of time in relation to his own physical needs and entering the world of total, neuronic time, where the massive internals of the geological time-scale calibrated his existence” (62).
The novel eventually turns into a cross between film noir and the Gothic. The novel’s film noir qualities really seem strongest once Strangman arrives, taking on the role of gangster, and the mood turns even more oneiric and cruel. The novel’s Gothic qualities come through its setting of ruined, decaying buildings draped in vines, the emphasis on the characters’ psychological states, and the ambiguity of whether something supernatural is occurring. The other aspects of the novel that often appear in gothic fiction are the return of the repressed and the uncanny. For the characters, this seems to manifest through the slippage between dreams and waking life, and by the way in which the characters “really remember these swamps and lagoons” because they are a reawakened “ancient organic memory millions of years old” (89).
The uncanny is not the only Freudian psychological concept that seems to feature in the novel. I am also reminded of Freud’s concept of the death drive as an attempt to evade the reality principle:
The clinical pathological manifestations, which Freud wanted to better understand by conceptualizing the “death drive,” like narcissism, addictions, homicidality, or suicidality, are attempts at achieving satiation by “short circuit”:
…that is, they are attempts to satisfy the demands made upon the mind for work without actually doing the work. In other words, they are attempts to evade the reality principle, which is indeed a dangerous (and potentially fatal) thing to do. These are failures of ego functioning. (Solms, 2021, p. 1054)
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9554588/
Here I’m thinking about how Kerans and Beatrice reject Riggs’s entreaties for them to return with him to civilization, and instead commit to staying in London, despite knowing they would be able to survive there for only a few more months. The death drive also appears to explain Lieutenant Hardman going AWOL and Kerans following him into the jungle, “a second Adam searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn sun” (198).
I suppose we could say that The Drowned World is about human adaptation or evolution that feels regressive in the sense of a return to an ancient state of being but that might also lead to a kind of higher plane of existence. By having its main characters reject civilization, the novel appears to question the efficacy of clinging to the industrial world in the face of rapid and seemingly irreversible climate change. But the embrace of the changed world by Hardman, Kerans, and Beatrice seems more like suicide than an attempt to prolong human existence through adaptation. Ultimately, the novel was a really interesting read due to its speculative approach to how dramatic climate change might affect the human psyche and for the terrific noirish mood it develops, especially if you can visualize it in black and white.
Further Explorations
Ballard, J. G. The Drowned World. Liveright / W. W. Norton & Company, 1962.
Be Smart. “The Impossible Hugeness of Deep Time.” [Video] YouTube. Feb 12, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dI7SbZx_Qiw&t=70s.
“Death-drive.” Oxford Reference. Retrieved 17 April 2025, from https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095704767.
“Deep time.” Wikipedia. Retrieved 17April 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_time.
“Film noir.” Wikipedia. Retrieved 17 April 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_noir.
“Gothic fiction.” Wikipedia. Retrieved 17 April 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_fiction.
Heringman, Noah. Deep Time: A Literary History. Princeton University Press, 2023. https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691235790/deep-time.
Kirsch, Michael et al. “‘Death drive’ scientifically reconsidered: Not a drive but a collection of trauma-induced auto-addictive diseases.” Frontiers in Psychology, Vol. 13, No. 941328. 28 Sep. 2022. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.941328.
“Uncanny.” Wikipedia. Retrieved 17 April 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny.