The Drowned World

“Perhaps the specialists at Camp Byrd were too tired even to laugh.”

Kerans and Bodkin feel as though their work is unappreciated. They have inserted deliberate absurdities into their reports, and no one noticed, proving that no one is reading these reports. Every institution in this rapidly deteriorating society is exhausted and broken, to the point where everyone is too tired even to laugh at the grim joke that society has become.

“Once again they were the dominant form of life.”

Kerans is a scientist, and he knows that many millions of years ago, reptiles were once the dominant form of life on Earth. Now, rising temperatures and the consequent decline of humanity have reasserted reptilian control of the world. In Kerans’s view, this is part of a very long cycle; one day, humans and mammals may be back on top, but Kerans will be long dead by that time. The cycle theory may be true, but it is of no help to Kerans.

“Satisfying one’s emotional needs isn’t enough. There’s got to be a more valid motive.”

Drifting through the lagoon, and drifting through life, the characters feel alienated from any kind of meaningful existence. They can barely satisfy their emotional needs, but even this scant satisfaction may not be enough. They crave a “valid” motivation, a genuine means of Asserting Agency in the Face of Human Extinction.

“Kerans recognized the same symptoms he had seen in himself, an accelerated entry into his own ‘zone of transit,’ and left the Lieutenant alone, asking Bodkin to call in periodically.”

Kerans has sympathy for Hardman because he feels the same bleak melancholy and alienation that have stricken him. Kerans barely knows how to help himself, let alone anyone else, so he leaves Bodkin to his strange experiments with little more than a polite request for palliative care. Kerans may understand Hardman’s pain, but part of this understanding is the recognition that there is little to be done about it.

“As he let himself out of the suite he left the thermostat at its usual eighty-degree setting, despite the fuel the generator would waste, reluctant to make even a nominal concession to the hazards facing him after Riggs’ departure.”

Kerans knows that fuel is scarce, and he knows that leaving the air conditioning on in his apartment is a waste of resources. He is self-aware enough to recognize the ways in which his actions contrast with his thoughts and intentions but finds more intellectual interest in pondering this contrast than actually changing his actions. He is his own experiment, with his own survival as trivial and as irrelevant as the scientific reports he writes.

“Several times, before they abandoned one of the drowned cities, he had wound the two-ton mechanism of some rusty cathedral clock and they had sailed off to a last carillon of chimes across the water.”

Before abandoning the cities to the sea, Riggs winds their cathedral clocks one final time, even though they will soon wind down of their own accord. Riggs knows this but continues to wind the clocks as a ritualistic affirmation of social order. He is empowered by institutions to continue some form of order; by winding the clocks, he is symbolically endorsing the need for social order. The clocks symbolize Civilization as a Social Construct. The gesture itself is more meaningful than the resulting action. The clocks will eventually stop, but Riggs will not stop in his mission to perpetuate society.

“There are no nightmares at the Ritz.”

Kerans lives in an abandoned luxury hotel. Few of the amenities work, and what few commodities are left behind have no meaning in the post-apocalyptic world. The Ritz still signifies luxury, even if Kerans is doing little more than staring out over an iguana-infested lagoon each day. The Ritz has become the nightmare and a symbol of society’s collapse, but Kerans refuses to acknowledge this.

“At my age all you have are the memories of memories.”

Bodkin blames his age for his growing alienation from reality, but his words are true for all of humanity at this point. Kerans and the other characters do not live in a functioning society; they occupy the ruins of a dead world. They live inside these dead spaces, and, in Kerans’s case, they may not even remember the world as it once was. They are living in the memories of memories because this is all they have left.

“Much as he needed Beatrice Dahl, her personality intruded upon the absolute freedom he required for himself.”

Kerans craves the absolute freedom that comes from traveling south. Kerans has little conception of what this absolute freedom is, however, beyond surrendering himself to the brutal world. Freedom, to Kerans, means abandoning any responsibility or pretense that survival is possible and facing his fate head-on.

“All day he sat by the shuttered windows of the suite, listening from the shadows to the shifting movement of the mesh cage, as it expanded and contracted in the heat.”

Following the departure of Riggs, Kerans is able to indulge his vision of freedom. This interpretation of freedom involves sitting beside a cage, trapped indoors because of the searing heat. The post-apocalyptic world that Kerans inhabits drastically limits the scope of his imagination, limiting his conception of freedom in the abstract and literal sense.

“Her hair was always dressed immaculately, the make-up on her mouth and eyes exquisitely applied, but her withdrawn, isolated gaze gave her the waxen, glacé beauty of an inanimate mannequin.”

Though she was not alive during the pre-apocalypse era, Beatrice still clings to the vestiges of society. She presents herself as a glamorous person, dressing elegantly and making up her face even though the only people she will encounter are Kerans and Bodkin. She is not dressing up for them but for herself, as a way to cling to the last remaining traces of a world she never knew. Beatrice’s doomed grace is a tribute to the drowned world.

“Kerans looked up, surprised at the ease with which Strangman had mastered Bodkin’s jargon.”

Strangman is a charming, dangerous man. He insinuates himself into the group in a linguistic sense, repeating Bodkin’s empty jargon without really understanding any of it. Strangman represents the danger of this drowned world, in which the ruins of the old remain behind to be repurposed for the post-apocalyptic world. Strangman uses the jargon as he loots the ruins for his own dangerous amusement.

“Although fully aware of Strangman’s malice and unpredictability, he felt confident that he would not try to kill him by so crude a method as blocking the air supply.”

Kerans takes comfort from Strangman’s unspoken sense of social expectation. To simply cut off Kerans’s air supply would be, in effect, bad manners. Strangman may be evil, but he likes to think of himself as civilized. The irony of Kerans’s assumption is the notion of civility long after civic society has collapsed. The manners remain, long after society itself has crumbled.

“He had begun to fall asleep now at unpredictable moments, sometimes sitting half-upright on the bed while unlacing his shoes.”

The more time Kerans spends near the lagoon and around the freebooters, the more he begins to lose his grip on the routines and structures of his old life. The temperature is hostile, and the people are untrustworthy, leaving Kerans to dwell in his quarters alone. He struggles to survive and cling to the fragments of civilization that he has left. He is half upright, slipping out of a regular sleep cycle, and losing sight of what kept him remotely human.

“Dimly he realized that the lagoon had represented a complex of neuronic needs that were impossible to satisfy by any other means.”

The draining of the lagoon is the exposing of a metaphor, denuding the lagoon of everything that Kerans found compelling. The lagoon, when it was still mysterious, satisfied a “complex of neuronic needs” (148)—a visual embodiment of the coming extinction and of the world’s reversion to its Triassic form. Now that it is drained, however, all Kerans sees are the filthy, ruined streets of a world he never knew. The mystery is gone, replaced by tragedy, and Kerans is even more certain that he must go to the lagoons in the south. Kerans becomes aware of what the lagoon meant to him as a metaphor and that the drained lagoon has changed in a symbolic sense. He travels south in pursuit of this metaphor.

“Egged on by Strangman, half a dozen of the sailors dressed themselves up, bow ties around their bare necks, and pranced through the streets in tremendous glee, tails flaring and knees high-kicking, like a troupe of lunatic waiters at a dervish carnival.”

Amid the ruins of drowned London, the freebooters dress themselves in evening wear and run amok in the empty city. Their actions are a lawless parody of the old elite, a violent echo of a lost world. They may be dressed in the right clothes and using the right words, but the world to which they allude—and to which these clothes and words belong—is lost.

“Kerans, you’re still alive. How do you do it?”

Strangman’s words seem polite, but there is a hint of menace in his tone. Importantly, however, the question is one that Kerans is beginning to ask himself. He remains alive, despite the collapse of society, despite Riggs’s departure, and despite Strangman’s violent attempts on his life. Kerans, like humanity itself, endures for the sake of endurance. He survives for the sake of survival, remaining alive not because of some goal, ambition, or desire but simply for lack of better options. Kerans does not know how he achieves this, nor why, but he plans to stay alive until he can travel south, facing death on his own terms.

“Kerans seized her arm, steered her past the prostrate body into the ante-room, his right hand and forearm numb from the jarring discharge of the Colt.”

Kerans is forced into violent action against Strangman and the freebooters. Earlier in the novel, he notes that he had never really fired his gun in anger. Now, he is forced to do so. Kerans is not a stereotypical action figure: The recoil of the gun hurts him, reminding him that he is a scientist rather than an action hero. His numb arm is a reminder of how out of place he is.

“I know Strangman’s a nasty piece of work—with that white skin and his alligators—but strictly speaking he deserves a medal for pumping out the lagoon.”

In the post-apocalyptic world, morality is a secondary concern. Strangman may be a murderous pirate, but he has succeeded in draining a lagoon and reclaiming a lost city. This is remarkable, Riggs notes, and what is left of society will pragmatically reward such an achievement while ignoring the accompanying immorality. Not only will society ignore Strangman’s crimes, but he may also win a medal for his actions. The medal illustrates the priorities of this society: Morality is secondary to rebuilding and reclaiming the world.

“Colonel, you’ve got to flood it again, laws or no laws. Have you been down in those streets; they’re obscene and hideous!”

Kerans urges Riggs to reflood the city, believing that there is no way that humans can go back to the world as it was before. The empty streets are now “obscene and hideous,” a metaphorical rebuke of society as it now stands. Kerans cannot abide the ruined city, which is why he travels south, venturing deeper into the part of the world that has been reclaimed by nature. Society needs to remain drowned, he believes, and attempts to resuscitate society are profane and terrible.

“Obscured by the events of the past week, the archaic sun in his mind beat again continuously with its immense power, its identity merging now with that of the real sun visible behind the rain-clouds.”

Following Kerans’s recent experiences, there is a flattening of the symbolic and the real. The very real sun burns overhead, while the metaphorical sun burns brighter in his mind. The two have become one, and he chases southward in pursuit of what the sun represents. He faces down the burning metaphor in the sky in search of the “archaic sun in his mind” that represents the unknown yearning that he has felt for so long.

“At last all he could see were the isolated letters of the giant slogan Strangman’s men had painted, looming out of the darkness over the flat water like a concluding epitaph: Time Zone.”

The graffitied words “Time Zone” are an ironic reference to society’s collapse. Without society, the old abstract constructs that humans tried to impose on the world are now meaningless. The words are particularly relevant when scrawled on the old buildings of London, as Greenwich Mean Time was traditionally considered the central point in the calculation of international time zone, a system that no longer means anything, given that most of what is left of humanity is gathered at the poles.

“But the evidence of any man-made structures was increasingly scanty, the towns and cities of the south swallowed by the rising silt and vegetation.”

Kerans journeys south through the jungle and sees the natural world reclaiming the old human structures. These ruins are overwhelmed by the power of nature, being swallowed by silt and vegetation until they are almost unrecognizable. Kerans’s journey is a reminder of the impermanence of society; for all its power, the last traces of humanity are being swallowed within generations.