I thought I’d read this before, many years ago, and perhaps I did – the handful of dog-eared pages in my paperback copy suggest someone read it, though perhaps I acquired it second-hand. Or perhaps I buried my memories of reading it, whether deliberately or unintentionally? That would certainly be a Ballardian response to a Ballardian text. But usually when I reread a book I first read long before, chunks of it will produce a sense of deja vu-esque familiarity, and I got none of that from The Drowned World – which is surprising given how often I’ve read critical or theoretical work which references it. Selah.
The story is less about Kerans and his self-thwarted urges to head south than it is about the attempts by Riggs (representing Continuity Civilisation’s last attempt to shore up its militaristic and hierarchical order in its Arctic redoubt and somehow BAU itself into a future which has now been foreclosed upon) to keep control of any viable space and/or knowledge left free of the encroaching waters, and the attempts by Strangman to roll back the clock just far enough to reclaim the ruins as a playground in which to re-enact the barbarisms that Continuity Civilisation had long suppressed. I’m by no means a scholar of Freud, but I wonder if one might see Riggs as the superego and Strangman as the id, leaving Kerans to stand for the ego retreating into a state of redundancy and collapse… eh, probably not. Indeed, trying to map any particular theory onto this book is probably a mistake, as it’s as much a map of Ballard’s own theory (and his own unconscious) as anything else, by the author’s own admission.
But then again, that may be too easy an escape route – for how unconscious was it really? Ballard’s obsession with the themes of the reversion to barbarism, solitude, and solipsism amid the collapse of a previously rigid hierarchy is perhaps too consistent and well-established (not to mention clearly signposted time and time again outwith the texts in question by the author himself) to be as unconscious as he claimed them to be. That’s not to negate the power of their insight, to be clear; rather, it serves to highlight the fascination and loathing that the spectacle and experience of social collapse held for Ballard, manifest as a longing to escape into a solitary and self-sufficient annihilation while the world wound itself down around him… a longing perhaps less held in abeyance by the act of writing than it was manifested through it.
It’s a feeling I recognise quite clearly – not just the supposed (and, realistically, false) liberation of running away into the lawless and abandoned ruins, but the longing for the contextual excuses for doing so, for the moment at which one can give up on the perpetual struggle between order and chaos that is human affairs and eke out your last days in the punctuated quietude of the interstices, knowing yourself to have been fooled or seduced by neither side in the struggle, dependent on no one but yourself. Of course, I may very well just be projecting myself into an equally fictional authorial-intention-space, here, over-identifying with the author because I’m too cynical and trained at over-reading to identify with the text itself… but then again, maybe not? Ballard’s endless and relentless return to those formative images and experiences may preclude his own claims of their unconscious origins, but it in now way precludes their being the engine of his art. And while my own experiences were never so drastic or violent as his, I have in common with Ballard the experience of an “expatriate” childhood, the gradual dethroning of parental authority, competence and power, and an exposure to the arbitrary and contradictory whims of hierarchical authority. We both saw just how thin the veneer of civilisation really is, and the hypocrisies which prop it up; perhaps then it’s no surprise that we share the urge to leave it all behind, to enact a refusal of both stasis and entropy, despite the knowledge that our knowing is a function of the privileges afforded us by the very system that so revolts and fascinates us.
(And perhaps that urge to walk away is more widespread than we would like to admit, too, even if the moderating awareness of privilege is not. As has been remarked many times before now, there’s something deeply Ballardian about Brexit in general, and in particular the almost rabid fixation on the no-deal exit option that currently reigns among its most fervent disciples… perhaps to them the EU is Riggs and the Arctic settlements struggling to manage their own decline, and Strangman the depredations of a more nimble and rapacious form of capitalism that doesn’t square with the old (“noble”, imperial/paternal) form? Perhaps then walking southward into the floodlands beneath the blazing sun, cognizant and fully accepting of one’s inevitable doom, is the only dignified way to refuse either option… there’s something very Captain Oates about it, and indeed about this whole sorry shit-show of imperial nostalgia. As such it worries me that I identify with that solipsist-annihilation urge in Ballard’s characters, because they are more often than not distillations of anxieties that, while not particular to the British middle classes, are nonetheless endemic to them; I was raised in Brexitland, and despite all my conscious efforts, that deep architecture may never be fully expunged.)
The Drowned World doesn’t so much reach a climax as it finally permits the possibility of the ending that’s signposted clearly from the very start, and then repeatedly deferred. (Another Brexit parallel, amirite?) The obstacles that prevent Kerans from following through on the urge to head south into the sun are not external so much as they’re his internalisations of the external: he’s clinging to a vestigial sense of the appropriate, and perhaps to the last shreds of fear that prevent him from embracing a fate that is finally made concrete when he discovers the necrotic Hardman on his journey southward. The implication is that he will continue southward, in the hope (if not the expectation) that other may follow, as indicated by his scratching out a message with his pistol-butt. This is traditionally read as being a pessimistic and dystopian conclusion, but does it have to be? Perhaps we can imagine the inevitable Hollywood coda wherein Kerans limps into some enclave of sun-baked refuseniks eking out an existence on berries and iguana meat, reproducing just fast enough to beat the mortality rates and allow the inevitable mutations to ensure that some of the next generation make it through to repopulate the new, hot, wet world… but that’s not just scientifically unfeasible, it’s also a betrayal of Ballard’s entire literary project, I think. His refusenik characters are proxies for himself, to some extent, but they’re also necessities of narrative mechanics: the irrationalities of both “civilisation” and “barbarism” can only be exposed as such from the alienated perspective of the outsider, the character given the privilege of choosing either side who nonetheless chooses neither.
It bears noting at this point that Ballard’s portrayals of Strangman’s piratical crew are seriously racist, using hackneyed stereotypes of blackness and mixedness as a shorthand for a form of barbarism characterised by the ease with which it might be directed by a more “civilised” captain. (While it provides no excuse whatsoever, it’s interesting to note that Strangman is portrayed as an avatar of extreme whiteness not merely in contrast to his crew, but also to Riggs, Kerans and the others, albeit to a lesser degree.) This aside, the consistent othering of blackness all through the book makes it very hard to like or praise, even as I can recognise its historical importance and influence… indeed, its largely unquestioned position as a foundational element in the proto-canon of “cli-fi” probably needs a sustained and critical examination on that basis alone. Many have made comparisons between The Drowned World and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but that comparison cuts two ways: much like Conrad’s novel, this one is badly tainted by the institutionalised viewpoints of its author.
