Interrogating The Drowned World through
Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjectivity
Dr. P S Subrahmanya Bhat,
Professor
of English,
Karnatak
Arts College Dharwad,
Karnataka, India.
&
Apoorva Chikmath,
PhD Reaserch Scholar,
Karnatak University Dharwad,
Karnataka, India.
Abstract: Although J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World was published in
1962, decades before Anthropocentricism and Timothy Morton’s Theory of
Hyperobjectivity came into existence, it perfectly anticipates the challenges
posed by climate change in the 21st century. The novel serves as a
literary articulation of the theory postulated by Timothy Morton in his work Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after
the End of the World. In Ballard’s The Drowned World, climate change acts as a dominant force that
shapes human perception, the ecosystem and non-human agencies. This article
argues that the flooded world in The
Drowned World complies with the properties of hyperobjects as defined by
Timothy Morton- viscosity, nonlocality, temporal undulation, phasing and interobjectivity;
demonstrating that Ballard’s novel anticipates the challenges posed by climate
change decades before they are named.
Keywords: J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World,
Hyperobjectivity, Climate Change, Timothy Morton
Climate change
is often considered a distinctly contemporary problem, rooted in late 20th
century scientific discourse and political urgency. However, certain literary
works anticipated the consequences of climate change on the ecosystem and human
perception. J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, published in 1962, is one
such example. Ballard has portrayed what a future climate change-ravaged world
would look like and the consequences it would have on human and non-human
agencies by picturing a flooded earth, drowned cities, and the emergence of new
and mutated species. The novel imagines the future Earth transformed by rising
temperatures, melting ice caps and global flooding. Ballard’s focus is not
merely on catastrophe but also on the transformation of human perception,
memory and desire under planetary conditions that exceed human
comprehension.
Timothy Morton’s
concept of hyperobjects, as postulated in Hyperobjects: Philosophy and
Ecology after the End of the World, offers a compelling framework for
understanding why The Drowned World stands strikingly relevant in the
age of climate crisis. Hyperobjects are entities that are massively distributed
in time and space and are beyond human perception. Climate change is Morton’s
central example of such an entity. This article argues that The Drowned
World fits precisely into Morton’s theory of Hyperobjectivity.
The Drowned World
has been interpreted through
various critical lenses, most prominent among which are reading the novel
through the lens of ecological and environmental themes, psychological
perspective, gender dynamics, etc. Cenk Tan, in his PhD thesis titled “An
Ecocritical Study of J G Ballard’s Climate Fiction Novels, studies The
Drowned World through an ecofeminist perspective. The author puts the
character of Beatrice in the spotlight, highlighting how Beatrice is the only
female character in the novel and draws similarities between the situation of
Beatrice and the natural world in the novel. According to the author, both
Beatrice and the natural world are subject to male domination and patriarchy.
He writes how capitalism impacts the life of Beatrice and the natural world
around. Cenk Tan says, “There exists a parallel condition between Beatrice, the
only woman left in London and Earth. From an ecofeminist point of view, both have
been discriminated, exploited and abused by the patriarchal, capitalist world
order” (Tan,87). Jim Clarke, in his article “Reading Climate Change in
Ballard”, takes a climatological approach to interpret the novel. He notes how
the civilisation is dominated and defined by the environment and how the
characters in the novel traverse through psychological states affected by it.
The narrative of Ballard’s climate dystopias is post-apocalyptic, meaning the
disaster has already occurred and is not preventable (Clarke, 9). Clarke points
out that Ballard’s antipathy towards the scientific community and science as a
whole is depicted in the novel. It can be seen through the existential
pointlessness of the monitoring work conducted at the lagoon station (10). He
writes, “Ballard depicts a world where, though climate change has already
occurred and is accelerating, the scientific method is ironically still trapped
in a superseded paradigm of hypothesising before reacting” (11). He is of the
view that Ballard’s novels are distant from contemporary climate fiction
because the visions of climate change are diachronically displaced from the
issues and debates that arose out of climatic global warming concerns, and they
contain no discussion of blame or responsibility, and no attempt at mitigation
(Clarke, 19). Ecopsychology is another interesting lens through which The
Drowned World can be studied. In an article titled “The Psychological
Landscape of Ecological Disaster in J.G. Ballard’s Fiction”, Miss Sheetal and
Dr Narendra Kumar have explored Ecopsychology as an interdisciplinary field
that explores the relationship between human psychology and the earth’s
environmental systems. The article discusses about the scope of Ecopsychology
in examining how characters’ interactions with their environments reflect
broader psychological and ecological themes. The study highlights how the
literature can portray the psychological impacts of environmental issues,
offering insights into how individuals and societies perceive and react to
ecological disorders. In another article
titled “A Clock Less Urgent- Work, Leisure and Time in J.G. Ballard’s The
Drowned World and Vermilion Sands”, the author Christopher Webb draws an
interesting argument on the deliberate complication of time in Ballard’s The
Drowned World and its response to a certain shift in mid-twentieth century
evaluations of work and leisure. Webb calls the characters in Ballard’s novel
displaced and disoriented late capitalist subjects whose experience of time is
transformed by the weird temporality of the landscapes in which they find
themselves (1). He draws his argument based on the idea given by Simon Sellars
that the recurring theme in Ballard’s writing throughout the 1960s is the idea
of escaping or cheating time, precipitated by a period of psychic turmoil (4).
He argues that The Drowned World imagines a world that has slipped back
into a pre-human past in which the very idea of leisure seems absurdly
irrelevant and distinguishes two types of time concepts that compete with each
other in this altered world. One is the clock time, the one that most of the
characters use to control and sense a new environment, and the other is deep
time, which is an inner psychological time that has begun to take over the
characters in their growing isolation and steers them away from the human
environment towards a radically new environment (14). He argues that the
absence of standardised clock time leads directly to the dissolution of the
human subject. While these perspectives provide a wide range of interpretations
of the novel, Timothy Morton’s concept of Hyperobjectivity offers a distinctly
new critical lens for reading J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World,
especially when compared to earlier psychoanalytic, modernist, or
environmental-humanist interpretations. What Morton enables is a shift away
from human-centered meaning toward an ontology in which climate itself becomes
an active, overwhelming presence that exceeds narrative, psychology, and
ethics.
Although written
decades earlier, the novel anticipates the theoretical ideas discussed by
Timothy Morton in his Hyperobjectivity. Timothy Morton, in his book
“Hyperobjectivity: Philosophy and ecology after the End of the World”,
describes Hyperobjects as “things that are massively distributed in time and
space” (Morton, 1). Hyperobjects may be directly manufactured by humans or may
occur naturally. Hyperobjects have a crucial impact on human beings, and they
are directly responsible for the end of the world (Morton, 2). Hyperobjects
exceed conventional human understanding. They infiltrate bodies, environments,
and psychological states. Hyperobjects are not some imaginary objects, but they
exist in reality. They are real whether humans believe in them or not. Reading
climate as a hyperobject and not just as a setting in the novel provides a
completely new perspective for studying Ballard’s The Drowned World.
Reading Ballard
through the lens of Morton’s Hyperobjectivity enables a deeper understanding of
the ecocritical property of the novel. Climate change and ecological disaster
don’t play a background role in Ballard. Rather, Ballard frames the entire
narrative around Climate change and its uncontrollable force that drives
throughout the novel. Environmental disaster manifests itself as a hyperobject
in Ballard’s novel. Morton argues that every time one tries to pull free from
hyperobjects, the more hopelessly stuck one is to them (Morton, 29). This
stickiness or entanglement is seen throughout Ballard’s novel. The paper
analyses the novel Drowned World through the properties of hyperobjects,
including viscosity, Nonlocality, Temporal Undulation, Phasing, and
Interobjectivity.
Timothy Morton,
in his book “Hyperobjectivity: Philosophy and ecology after the End of the
World”, describes Hyperobjects as “things that are massively distributed in
time and space” (Morton, 1). He coined the term hyperobjects in his work “The
Ecological Thought”. A hyperobject could be anything that is widely distributed
or spread across in huge quantities. It could be the Lago Agrio oil field in
Ecuador, or the Florida Everglades, or the biosphere, or the Solar System, or
the total of all nuclear materials on the Earth or simply climate change, or
global warming itself (Morton, 1). According to Morton, “Hyperobjects are not
just collections, systems, or assemblages of other objects. They are objects in
their own right” (2). Hyperobjects cannot be fully seen, touched, or
comprehended. Humans perceive only localised manifestations or symptoms of
Hyperobjects. Global warming, for example, cannot be observed in its totality;
it appears through heat waves, storms, droughts, polar melting, and ocean level
rise. Hyperobjects are not merely external phenomena; they infiltrate thought,
bodies, and infrastructures. Morton identifies several defining properties of
Hyperobjects, namely Viscocity, Non Locality, Temporal Undulation, Phasing and
Interobjectivity.
One of Morton’s
key claims is that Hyperobjects are viscous, meaning they are always stuck to
us. One can't get away with them. This very closeness of hyperobjects is a
menace. Morton is of the view that we are not the sole actors on a stage called
"Earth." Rather, we are caught in a sticky, interdependent
relationship with nonhuman entities that are far larger and more lasting than
we are. Climate change, in this sense, is not an external problem to be solved
but a condition that permeates everyday existence. In The Drowned World, climate
change is profoundly viscous. “By noon, less than four hours away, the
water would seem to burn” (Ballard, 7). The characters in the novel The
Drowned World cannot escape from the effects of climate change. They are
always entangled with them throughout the novel. This defines the
characteristic of stickiness or viscosity in the novel. The climate clings to
their skin, their minds, and their psychological states. The heat described in
the novel illustrates viscosity literally. Early in the novel, Kerans
experiences the climate as an unavoidable force:
“Temperature at
the equator are up to one hundred and eighty degree now, going up steadily, and
the rain belts are continuous as high as the 20th parallel. There’s more slit
too—” (Ballard, 15).
This mirrors
Morton’s notion that hyperobjects adhere to bodies. Global warming becomes
intimate and tactile. Even standing still, the characters sweat, hallucinate,
and grow fatigued. The climate crisis is not an external threat but something
absorbed through pores and lungs.
As the environment shifts toward a
Triassic ecology, characters undergo psychological regression. Beatrice feels
“one or two strange and peculiar nightmares” (28). Morton argues that
hyperobjects disrupt human identity by forcing us into relations we cannot
escape. Ballard literalizes this; the climate gets inside the subconscious. The
dreams are not metaphors; they are viscosity made psychological. The
terrestrial and psychic landscapes clung to the characters and appeared real. Ballard
writes, “Just as the distinction between the latent and manifest contents of
the dream had ceased to be valid, so had any division between the real and the
superreal in the external world. Phantoms slid imperceptibly from nightmare to
reality and back again, the terrestrial and psychic landscapes were now
indistinguishable” (74).
Even attempts to leave the drowned
world fail. When Riggs orders the evacuation north, many characters feel unable
or unwilling to abandon the environment. Hyperobjects trap humans not through
physical imprisonment but through entanglement with systems like geological,
biological, psychological. Ballard shows climate as something one can neither
escape nor confront directly. Humans merely inhabit symptoms of a much larger phenomenon.
Morton defines
hyperobjects as nonlocal, meaning they cannot be fully experienced in any one
place or moment. Non-Locality of hyperobjects signifies that the effects of
hyperobjects are distributed globally. They transcend human boundaries. The hyperobject
as a whole cannot be seen or felt from a single place. Morton takes the help of
an example of the invisibility of nuclear radiation to explain non-locality. He
says that though nuclear accidents occur thousands of miles away in places like
Chernobyl and Fukushima, the unseen radioactive particles float in the air and
years later, some humans die of radiation sickness (Morton, 38). This proves
that Hyperobjects cannot be experienced in full; only scattered manifestations
are perceptible. Ballard’s drowned London exemplifies this property. London is
merely one node in a vast web of climate transformation. The military base
receives reports of submerged European cities, shifting equatorial lines, and
global migrations. These distant events appear only in fragments, reinforcing
nonlocality. Morton signifies that hyperobjects inhabit a Humean causal system
(a philosophy in which it is perceived that one event causes another, but only
the constant conjunction of events is experienced) in which association,
correlation and probability are the only things that go on (Morton, 19). In
chapter two, Ballard writes, “New sea completely altered the shape and contours
of the continents. The Mediterranean contracted into a system of inland lakes,
and the British Isles were linked again with northern France. The Caribbean Sea
was transformed into a desert of silt and salt flats. Europe became a system of
giant lagoons” (22). The characters
never see these places. The reader only imagines them through partial reports.
The altered world cannot be grasped in totality. London’s lagoon is not the
hyperobject but a symptom of global warming. Morton insists that hyperobjects
appear only through localised effects. Ballard’s lagoon functions as one such
effect. The novel’s refusal to show the entire world dramatises nonlocality.
The catastrophic reversion of the climate is planet-scaled, yet the narrative
remains confined to a few square miles. The characters and by extension, the
reader, must confront the limits of human perception. The setting is almost set
in the submerged city of London, and the information about the other regions
across the globe is portrayed through reports received in stations.
According to
Morton, Hyperobjects exist within deep time, a scale so vast that it is beyond
human experience. This is a temporal undulation of hyperobjects. Morton brings
in the concept of the light cone from relativity to illustrate that beyond its
boundaries, our distinctions between “now,” “here,” and “past” collapse. Events
outside of that light cone cannot be assigned to any distinct point in time or
space, so the future can seep into the present. This leads to what he calls
downward causation, where hyperobjects influence shorter-lived entities like
us. Hyperobjects operate across vast temporal scales, and Ballard’s novel
foregrounds time as a destabilised, nonhuman phenomenon. In The Drowned
World, the climate’s transformation is not merely futuristic; it is
prehistoric. The world reverts to conditions resembling the Triassic or
Palaeozoic eras: giant ferns, reptilian fauna, and tropical lagoons. Time
collapses into a cyclical structure. Ballard writes, “Impenetrable Mato Grossos
sometimes three hundred feet high, they were a nightmare world of competing
organic forms returning rapidly to their Paleozoic past” (19). Human attempts
to maintain civilisation- military hierarchy, scientific routines, and
scheduling appear trivial. Planetary time overwhelms human time. Riggs’s
schedules feel absurd against the backdrop of Earth’s geological cycles.
Ballard thus dramatises the insignificance of anthropocentric temporality.
Hyperobjects
like climate change, global warming, or radioactive waste are so massively
distributed in time and space that humans can’t experience them all at once.
Instead, we encounter them only in fragments, moments, or phases, much like how
you only see one slice of the moon at a time. This is the phasing of
hyperobjects. According to Morton, “Hyperobjects are phased: they occupy a
high-dimensional phase space that makes them impossible to see as a whole on a
regular three-dimensional human scale basis. We can only see pieces of
hyperobjects at a time (Morton, 70). In The Drowned World, the effects
of climate change are not seen as a whole; instead, through various moments
like burning sun, storms that erode the surface of water, and occasional
appearances of mutated species and through the occasional dreams of the
characters.
Hyperobjects do
not exist independently but through relationships among countless entities. Hyperobjects like climate change,
radioactive waste, or global warming are massively distributed in time and
space. We can’t encounter them in their totality; instead, we detect them
through other objects. For example, climate change becomes visible via rising
sea levels, melting ice, or species migration. These clues exist in an
interobjective space, a network of signals and effects linking many objects
together. This property of interobjectivity of hyperobjects exists through
relationships between radiation, atmosphere, organisms, water, sediment, and
human bodies. Ballard’s novel is filled with networks. The novel’s ecosystem is
not merely hotter; it is transformed. Tropical vegetation proliferates at
extraordinary rates; reptiles mutate; microbial life booms. The environment’s
biological response is intertwined with solar radiation and climate. Morton
calls this “the mesh”—a dense network of interdependent processes. Kerans and
the others are not observers but participants in this mesh. Their bodies adapt-
sleeplessness, disorientation, lethargy, dream states. The scientists’
instruments corrode, boats rot, buildings decompose. The hyperobject connects
everything. Buildings become artificial reefs; lagoons reclaim streets.
Interobjectivity reveals itself through the dissolution of boundaries.
Although written
in 1962, The Drowned World fits precisely into Timothy Morton’s theory
of Hyperobjectivity. Morton’s hyperobjectivity allows The Drowned
World to be read not as a metaphor for human decline or ecological warning
but as an early fictional articulation of Anthropocene, in which climate
emerges as a dominant, nonhuman agent. This is what fundamentally distinguishes
a hyperobject-oriented reading from other criticism, i.e. it does not interpret
the drowned world, it inhabits it. Morton provides a transformative framework
for reading J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, one that moves beyond
symbolic, psychological, and humanist interpretations toward a posthuman
understanding of climate and agency. Hyperobjectivity allows the drowned
landscape to be understood as the manifestation of a massively distributed,
nonhuman force that exceeds human perception, control, and narrative
comprehension. By foregrounding the properties of hyperobjects like
nonlocality, viscosity, temporal vastness, and phased appearance, Morton’s
theory illuminates Ballard’s depiction of a world in which human subjectivity
is increasingly destabilised. Hyperobjectivity reframes The Drowned World
as a narrative of slow catastrophe rather than apocalyptic rupture. The absence
of dramatic climactic events, heroic resistance, or restorative closure aligns
with Morton’s claim that ecological crisis unfolds as an ongoing condition
rather than a singular endpoint.
Though Morton
theorized hyperobjects fifty years after Ballard, The Drowned World
anticipates all five properties. The novel understands climate as a
distributed, massive, entangled force that exceeds comprehension. Ballard does
not present ecological catastrophe as a human-centered narrative. Instead, he
writes the planet as the protagonist. Hyperobjects produce the uncanny:
familiar environments become strange. The drowned city is both recognisable and
alien. Ballard’s The Drowned World provides a remarkably prescient
literary model for understanding hyperobjects. By presenting global warming not
as a solvable problem but as a planetary force that infiltrates bodies, dreams,
ecosystems, and consciousness, Ballard constructs a narrative about humanity’s
entanglement with nonhuman forces. The novel challenges anthropocentrism by
revealing the limits of human agency and perception. Ballard refuses to offer
solutions or redemption; instead, he exposes the terrifying beauty of a world
where planetary processes exceed human control. In this sense, The Drowned
World stands as an early ecological novel that anticipates contemporary
theories of the Anthropocene and hyperobjects, making it a crucial text for
understanding the philosophical implications of living within vast,
interconnected, and incomprehensible systems.
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