Abstract: This essay attempts to understand its central image of the giant by analyzing J. G. Ballard’s short story “The Drowned Giant” and the animated film adapted from it under the same title. The analysis suggests that the metaphor of “giants and dwarfs” in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels offers a way of understanding Ballard’s giant. More specifically, Ballard’s depiction of the relationship between the giant and the spectators may be read as a contemporary continuation of the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in Western intellectual history.
Keywords: Ballard; the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns; giants and dwarfs; Swift.
I. Ballard’s Life and Creative Thought
Volume 2, Episode 8 of Love, Death + Robots, “The Drowned Giant,” is adapted from the short story of the same title by the celebrated British science-fiction writer J. G. Ballard. The protagonist Steven’s monologue largely follows the story. Because the plot advances almost entirely through Steven’s narration, the short can at times resemble an audiobook; perhaps to offset this, the screenwriter added a small amount of dialogue between characters. The animation also cuts and adds some details for the screen, but it does not fundamentally alter the conceptual core of Ballard’s text. Reading the original story alongside the adaptation therefore lets us approach the film more deeply and in a way closer to the author’s intentions.
To understand the rich symbols and metaphors in “The Drowned Giant,” we first need some sense of Ballard’s life and intellectual concerns. Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930. As a child he witnessed war and death and experienced the violence of war firsthand. During the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, he and his parents were interned at the Lunghua camp until the end of the Second World War. The experience led him to reflect on human nature and directly shaped his early disaster fiction; The Crystal World, for instance, belongs to this line of influence. The trauma of the war remained a mark throughout his writing. In the original “The Drowned Giant,” people eventually cover the giant with graffiti, including a swastika, a detail that makes the imprint of war on Ballard’s fiction especially visible.
Although Ballard devoted himself to science fiction, he was by no means blindly optimistic about science or the future. On the contrary, his work repeatedly depicts social and technological development as capable of producing a collapse in human values. Ballard believed that the dominant mid-1950s mode associated with Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke had failed to realize the full potential of science fiction because it remained too optimistic about both the future and science. After Hiroshima and Auschwitz, attitudes toward science had changed fundamentally, yet science fiction’s optimism had not changed with them. The malaise of early-1950s science fiction, in his view, lay in allowing scientific imagination to approach magic and thereby lose some of its seriousness and sense of reality. Ballard instead urged science fiction to attend to what he called “inner space”: the zone where the inner world and external reality meet, where the mind impinges upon the world, rather than merely projecting fantasies outward.1 Michael Moorcock’s account of “inner space” makes the same shift of emphasis. Science fiction, on this view, need not be preoccupied with outer space, spaceships, robots, scientists, or explorers. It can instead take an ordinary person in the near future and explore psychological life; it may take the form of experimental prose or dystopia, and it may concern entropy or pessimistic visions of the future.2 Ballard’s persistent pursuit of inner space is one reason his science fiction often carries the weight and seriousness associated with literary fiction, and “The Drowned Giant” is no exception. It can be difficult to decide whether his work belongs to science fiction or serious literature; perhaps it belongs to both. Love, Death + Robots treats the story as science fiction and turns it into animation, yet it often reads more like a graceful allegory crowded with metaphor and philosophical reflection. Ballard himself described “The Drowned Giant” as belonging on the fantasy or allegorical side of his writing rather than as straightforward science fiction.3
Ballard’s attitude toward the Enlightenment is also worth noting. More than once he expressed skepticism toward it. In a 2003 interview with The Age, he called the Enlightenment view of humankind “a complete myth”: it encourages us to imagine that we are sane and rational most of the time, when in fact we are not.4 Whatever conclusion we draw from this remark, Ballard’s experiences, his creative priorities, and his doubts about the Enlightenment all provide clues for thinking about the meaning of “The Drowned Giant.”
II. Literary Parallels to “The Drowned Giant”
Comparing “The Drowned Giant” with better-known classics can help us uncover its implications. The meanings of canonical works have generally been explored more thoroughly and from more angles. When we discover a genuine similarity between two works, we may be able to transfer a conceptual insight from one to the other or at least acquire a useful perspective. Conversely, apparent similarities that conceal decisive differences can help us exclude misleading interpretations.
A. Melville’s Moby-Dick
Ballard repeatedly associates the giant with a whale, so readers can easily think of Melville’s Moby-Dick. The white whale is such a massive symbolic presence that it seems capable of helping us explore the meaning of Ballard’s giant. Ballard may even be deliberately invoking Melville: the narrator describes the drowned leviathan as comparable in mass and dimensions to the largest sperm whale.5 The giant’s body is later turned into fertilizer and animal feed, which may suggest the rendering of whale blubber. In the animation, when the protagonist visits the beach at night, numerous barrels appear in the frame; they seem to contain oil rendered from the giant’s fat, like whale oil. The scene in which butchers discuss cutting up the giant likewise suggests that his flesh eventually reaches butcher shops. Such details can easily be read as pointing toward an environmental theme. Near the end of the story, the giant’s remains seem to merge into the surrounding ecology, which may further encourage an ecological interpretation. By comparison, there certainly are ecological readings of Moby-Dick, but few would claim that ecological protection is what makes the novel great. Ecology is only one relatively immediate way of registering the relation between humanity and nature. The deeper subject is the relation itself, a relation that refracts a culture’s atmosphere, psychic condition, and form of life. The same is true of “The Drowned Giant.” Both story and film contain something that can be read ecologically, but that is not necessarily their deepest or most precise meaning. They may indeed pay tribute to Moby-Dick and make us feel the mounting tension between humanity and nature, but that is only a ladder: it helps us climb toward a discussion of human existence itself.
Rather than collecting evidence that the giant “is” a whale, we should attend to a clue repeated throughout the story: the spectators alter the giant and eventually forget that he ever existed, while Steven, the narrator, does not forget him. The film makes this even more explicit than the story. At the end, Steven says that he has not forgotten the giant and dreams of him returning to life, gathering the scattered pieces of his body, and running back toward the sea. The story thus begins with disbelief that a giant could exist and ends with everyone except the narrator forgetting that he did exist. The giant’s absorption into the environment does not primarily stage a lesson in conservation; it stages his disappearance from memory. We should therefore resist the quick equation of giant and whale and first confront the relationship between the giant and the spectators’ remembering and forgetting.
B. Kafka’s The Metamorphosis
Both “The Drowned Giant” and Kafka’s The Metamorphosis can be read as allegories. Structurally, the former begins with the surreal event of a drowned giant appearing on the coast, while the latter begins with an equally impossible event: Gregor Samsa awakens to find that he has become a monstrous insect. Apart from this impossible premise, the surrounding world remains comparatively realistic. Both stories also end openly. Ballard and Kafka alike have to address a particular problem: how do ordinary people’s attitudes change when they are confronted with a surreal object? At the same time, it matters how the “insect” and the “giant” are imagined as relating to themselves. Kafka gives us Gregor’s thoughts after his transformation; Ballard approaches the giant’s possible inner state indirectly through the narrator’s imagination.
By ordinary logic, someone who discovers that he has turned into a giant insect ought first to worry about himself and about how to become human again. Gregor, however, initially worries about getting to work. He remains preoccupied with the family’s livelihood, his father’s aging, and his sister’s education. It is almost as though becoming an insect is not the worst thing that has happened; worse is the damage that his transformation may do to others. The protagonist’s attitude toward himself and others forms a powerful tension with the attitudes of those around him. His father remains cold and eventually uses violence against him. His mother and sister begin with sympathy but also become indifferent. Gregor’s determination to disappear ultimately exceeds even his sister’s: once he understands that he contributes nothing to the household and has instead become a burden, he chooses death. Return, then, to Ballard. At first the people who see the giant are fascinated and curious. Soon they begin to revel on his body. As the body is dismembered, public excitement cools. Within a few months everyone has forgotten that the giant existed, and when they encounter his enormous remains they remember only a whale. In The Metamorphosis, the family’s changing attitudes help us interpret Gregor as an alienated worker and, at another level, as someone driven to self-erasure under the indifference and pressure of those closest to him. Ballard’s insistence, from beginning to end, on the spectators’ changing attitudes must likewise be a major clue to the identity of the giant.
If the work’s central purpose were simply environmental protection, or even merely to present the relationship between humanity and ecology, the painstaking description—in both story and film—of the crowd’s movement from astonishment to indifference and finally to forgetting would be redundant. In fact, the passages that make “The Drowned Giant” difficult to interpret also provide the key to that difficulty. The Metamorphosis points us in the same direction: the transformation of the spectators’ attitude, and their eventual forgetting of the giant, are central to understanding this allegory.
III. The Metaphor of the Giant
The giant’s identity is a riddle. He appears without warning on the shore after a violent rainstorm, and no one knows where he came from. Ballard’s story makes his arrival seem almost as though he had fallen from the sky.6 The opening therefore leaves an enormous space in which to search for the giant’s identity. Identifying what he is or what he signifies is crucial because the answer determines the direction of interpretation. If the giant is taken as a symbol of a whale, for example, interpretation moves toward environmental protection or a generalized reverence for nature. The preceding discussion suggests that this is insufficient.
A close reading of the story reveals a pattern. While the giant remains intact, Ballard more often describes him as though he were an epic hero. As his body is cut apart, descriptions that assimilate him to a whale become increasingly frequent. One plausible function of this shift is to show that the giant is being forgotten and that the spectators are replacing the memory of a giant with the false memory of a whale. Ballard’s narrative emphasis falls on this failure of memory. The narrator explicitly observes that the crowd eventually forgets the giant altogether and that even the few who retain some recollection misremember him as a whale. The narrator himself, by contrast, never forgets the giant. The film makes the same distinction at the end when Steven says that he repeatedly dreams of the giant coming back to life, collecting the pieces of his body, and running toward the sea.
Following this clue, we can reconsider the metaphor through the problem of forgetting. The forgetting itself is strange. So many people saw the giant with their own eyes: how could his existence be erased so quickly, or overwritten by the memory of a whale? Understanding this is central to understanding the work. We might frame it as a curious algebra problem. Let the giant be the unknown X. The reader’s task is to return to narration and plot and ask what image, substituted for X, best fits the context and logic and most adequately explains the repeated emphasis on memory and forgetting.
The giant is perfect; human beings are copies. Both story and film tell us that what attracts the narrator most is not simply the giant’s enormous scale but the categorical force of his existence. Human beings, by comparison, live in a world of approximations: beside the giant we appear as incomplete, insignificant copies.7 Reverse the proposition and it says something striking. If the giant did not exist, human beings might take themselves to be the absolute and the perfect. This initially recalls anthropocentrism and scientism, though I will postpone that point. The spectators eventually lose interest in the giant and forget him. Their response can therefore be read as a desire to forget greatness and escape the shadow it casts. In Plato, human beings are not perfect gods but mimetic and limited creatures; the forgetting of the giant can thus be compared with the theory of recollection. To lose the memory of the giant is to lose knowledge of greatness and, with it, the Socratic recognition of one’s own ignorance. This brings us toward Plato’s relation between forms and imitation, toward “know thyself,” and toward the knowledge of one’s ignorance. Read alongside Ballard’s doubts about the Enlightenment and his suspicion of scientific optimism, the passage gives us reason to think that he is depicting human beings who have forgotten their limits and become arrogantly ignorant. The giant now begins to look less like a whale than like an image of something close to perfection and wisdom.
The narrator repeatedly likens the giant to an epic hero. These descriptions repeatedly connect outward form with inward character, and they contrast the giant’s bearing with that of the humans who climb over his body. The giant thus resembles an ancient hero, while modern people become dwarfs who trample and dismember him. The opposition between giant and dwarf suggests the opposition between ancients and moderns and, more specifically, between two qualities of soul: the souls of ancient people and the souls of modern people. Once the giant is read as a metaphor for the great soul of the ancients, many of the story’s apparent absurdities begin to make sense. The film suggests that the giant may not be dead but merely asleep, as though he could wake at any moment and crush the copies around him. In the story, he lies gazing at the sky, apparently unaware of those copies. A fisherman standing on the giant’s chest signals to the crowd; as people approach, they erupt into astonished, triumphant noise. But once the narrator and his companions truly draw near, their excited chatter falls silent.8
As time passes, the giant’s physical appearance changes, and the narrator imaginatively infers changes in his state of mind from those transformations. The giant first appears like a Greek hero, then seems to acquire a modest, mature composure, and later, during the dismemberment, appears pained and helpless. Ballard describes the treatment of the giant as depredation, and the sheer scale of the body paradoxically increases its vulnerability.9 If today we can truly approach the nobility of ancient souls only through books, the dwarfs’ dismemberment of the giant can be read as the moderns’ distortion and misreading of the ancients, a process that ultimately dissolves their spiritual nobility. There is no contradiction between the initial emphasis on the giant’s greatness and perfection and the later emphasis on his fragility. The first names the sublimity of the ancients themselves; the second is ironic. Ancient greatness is defenseless against arbitrary dismantling by later generations. The giant suffers not only dismemberment but humiliation through arbitrary alteration. If his virtue survives in ancient books, then what people do to him resembles quoting those books out of context. What follows from such distortion? Ballard offers a possible hint in the graffiti scrawled across the giant’s body. The markings include comic slogans and a swastika. The jokes may signify the modern dissolution of the seriousness of classical texts; the Nazi mark may suggest that such dissolution and distortion can end in catastrophic war. Ballard may be using the scene to reflect on the Second World War and, more obliquely, on its causes. The implication would be that war belongs among the consequences of modernity: modernity inflates confidence in reason while forgetting divine teaching and the humility of the ancients. Significantly, the animated adaptation does not show this key swastika.
As the giant is further dismembered, his head is cut off.10 The removal of the head means that he has finally lost the most immediately human feature. What remains looks more like a mass of flesh, a set of signs without a soul; there is less and less left to inspire awe. The disappearance of the giant’s human features also anticipates the disappearance of the memory that a giant ever existed. Over time, his changing body and the history of its dismemberment begin to resemble, with startling force, the fate of the ancients in the long current of Western history. Ballard explicitly notes that as the body disappears and the remaining faint human features of the dismembered giant vanish, the spectators’ interest vanishes with them.11 The irony is that the giant loses his sublimity because the crowd itself has cut him apart and altered him—and the dwarfs then forget the result of their own actions.
Months later, the narrator encounters the giant again only in fragmentary form. By this point people have forgotten that he ever existed. The story emphasizes that even the fisherman who first claimed to have discovered the giant has forgotten him and now remembers only an enormous sea creature.12 If the giant is understood as the soul of the ancients, this strange amnesia becomes intelligible. It is precisely what the moderns do to the ancients. The dwarfs of the present refuse to believe in ancient greatness, or even that greatness ever existed; they look down on the depth of ancient souls from the height of their own. Both story and film thereby carry a muted reflection on technological reason and scientism.
The preceding analysis gives us a provisional answer to the riddle. The giant symbolizes great figures of the ancient world and the greatness of character embodied by them. These qualities are preserved in the great books of antiquity, books filled with a wisdom that bears a divine dimension. The entire film presents a struggle between ancients and moderns. The dwarfs seem to defeat the giant, yet, as the narrator says at the end of the film, the giant is not dead: he revives, gathers his fragments, and runs back toward the sea. The giant leaves the arrogant dwarfs behind. If the giant signifies the souls of the ancients, the classics, and ancient wisdom, this reading can be further tested through Gulliver’s Travels—and that comparison in turn deepens the meaning of Ballard’s image. “The Drowned Giant,” on this account, becomes an allegory of the intellectual-historical event known as the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns.
IV. Reading “The Drowned Giant” through Gulliver’s Travels
The preceding discussion used Moby-Dick to reject a simple equation between the giant and the whale, while The Metamorphosis taught us to use the spectators’ changing attitudes as a clue. Gulliver’s Travels, however, can guide us more directly toward what Ballard may be expressing. There is also evidence for a connection between Ballard and Swift. Simon Sellars remarks that a reader first introduced to Ballard through “The Drowned Giant” might take him for a master of magical realism working in a Swiftian tradition.13 Once we compare “The Drowned Giant” and Gulliver’s Travels, the spectators’ transformation begins to look like the change in attitude by which modern people encounter the ancients. In that sense, the spectators are the moderns—the dwarfs—while the giant represents the ancients and the classics they wrote.
Plato’s Phaedrus already makes the difference in the quality of souls comparable to the difference in stature between adults and children. Differences in height can therefore function as an analogy for differences in the quality of the soul. Swift turns this analogy directly into fable in Gulliver’s Travels. Read against Swift’s historical context and motives, the book has been described as one of the most penetrating reflections produced by the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. On such a reading, the contrast between Lilliput and Brobdingnag becomes a contrast between modern democracy and ancient monarchy.14 I do not expect a short piece such as “The Drowned Giant,” or its animated adaptation, to sustain a direct allegory of ancient and modern political regimes. That would run a serious risk of overinterpretation. Compared with the density of plots and symbols in Gulliver’s Travels, Ballard’s story is too brief to extend its symbolic structure so far. But even without elevating the comparison to the level of political regimes, “The Drowned Giant” plainly invites a comparison between ancients and moderns, and more specifically between two qualities of soul. According to Plato’s Republic, the quality of souls does determine the form of regimes, so such an extension is not impossible; here, however, it is better to remain close to Ballard’s text and the screenplay.
The narrator goes to the site as a scientist. His monologue tells us that he and his companions initially do not believe that a giant can exist and supplement their disbelief with modern scientific explanation, attributing the sight to an optical effect. Their skepticism is the skepticism of modern science directed toward the very existence of giants. In Swift’s version of the ancient-modern dispute, the moderns appeal to the progress of science in order to dismiss the ancients as foolish. The ancient side’s reply, however, is that even if modern people surpass ancient people in science, this does not mean they surpass them in art or in the quality of the soul. It is even possible that by habitually viewing the ancients through the lens of modern scientific thought, we become incapable of seeing them at all—or begin to doubt that they ever existed. The narrator and the visitors are dwarfs; dwarfs naturally struggle to admit that giants exist or once existed. The sudden appearance of the giant’s corpse breaks this scientific certainty.
At first people watch from a distance and are reluctant to approach. As they slowly come closer, the scale of the contrast between giant and dwarfs produces an overwhelming shock, and the crowd erupts in noise. That noise marks the dwarfs’ changing state of mind. Once they climb onto the giant, they become more and more boisterous, while the giant remains silent and preserves a dignity reminiscent of ancient Greece. Ballard thereby constructs a contrast between giant and dwarfs. The story next describes water gathered in the giant’s palm as though it were the residue of another world, only for the people climbing his arm to destroy it. If we connect these clues from the narrator’s perspective with Swift’s giant/dwarf metaphor, Ballard seems to be setting two qualities against each other: noisy, frivolous modern people and ancient people who preserve their dignity. The moderns do not cherish their link to the classical world, and the destruction of the little pool suggests precisely this. It is the beginning of every later destruction, culminating in the trampling, dismemberment, and eventual forgetting of the giant. In the same passage the narrator hopes to find clues to the giant’s identity, but the swollen body makes this impossible. The suggestion is that our distance from the classical age has become so great that the very clues needed to understand it have vanished. The narrator does not know who the giant is, yet repeatedly hints that his face has a Greek cast: we are forgetting Greek greatness.
The rhetoric used for the giant and the rhetoric used for the spectators carry an evaluative contrast much like Swift’s. The giant’s skin has a pearly luster and a rich, sweet odor, while the people swarm around him like flies; young men crawl into his nostrils and howl like mad dogs. The giant’s prolonged silence and solemnity stand against the crowd’s short-lived uproar.15 The film works similarly. It repeatedly gives the giant Greek features and an epic-heroic bearing; as his body changes, he is associated with discretion, modesty, and the composure of a well-fed maturity. The spectators, by contrast, are called copies and shown as noisy and uncivilized. The rhetoric plainly contrasts two orders of character, assigning nobility to the giant and baseness to the dwarfs. We can compare Swift’s rhetoric in The Battle of the Books. He first satirizes the modern Hobbes through dogs fighting over prey, then tells his fable of the bee and the spider.16 The bee represents the ancients, the spider the moderns. Set beside each other, the two works make it plausible that Ballard too uses rhetoric to contrast the souls of ancient and modern humanity.
After the police abandon the cordon, thousands of people come to the beach, with at least two hundred standing or sitting on the giant. Here again, the dwarfs are described in debasing terms. Later the police return, clear a path, and bring a group of university anatomists and marine biologists. When the police offer to help the experts climb onto the giant’s palm, they refuse. Once the authorities withdraw again, the crowd climbs back onto the body, now compared to a flock of gulls gathering on a huge fish. The police and scholars appear and disappear almost as though they have merely gone through the motions. This may suggest that neither the organs of the state nor scholars possess any real consciousness of the need to protect the giant; the result is to let the crowd pour in and allow the dwarfs to trample and destroy him. The scene seems to say that when the state neglects education and abandons the public to itself, greatness will be forgotten, and our own souls will become impoverished and arrogant.
The dwarfs are extraordinarily noisy as they climb over the dead giant, so it is they, not he, who seem full of life. Yet the narrator says that for him the giant remains alive, indeed more alive than the dwarfs who look at him. This vitality clearly means more than biological life. If giant and dwarf stand for ancient and modern dispositions, the vitality in question must belong to the classics and to enduring value. Later, when the narrator finally climbs onto the giant, he senses that the body has begun to submit to time and will soon decay. It is precisely the ceaseless transformation of the corpse—the vitality visible within death—that gives him the courage to step onto it. Giant and dwarf alike must ultimately surrender to time. At least two implications follow. First, although the tradition of the classics and the noble spirit represented by the giant can endure longer than the moderns, the giant cannot prevent shallow descendants from forgetting him, nor can he ensure that the classics will not be misunderstood or altered. Second, the giant is not a god but a living being with limits. If even the giant is constrained by embodiment, how can the dwarf justify arrogance? The narrator suggests that the humiliations inflicted on the giant make him seem more human and at the same time more vulnerable. That vulnerability releases a pent-up current of malice, inciting the smaller creatures around him to consume the huge body. The passage satirically anticipates the further dismantling and alteration to come. The film shows graffiti on the giant but omits the swastika found in the story. In the original, that mark can be read as Ballard’s indictment of Nazism, and Ballard surely understood much of Nazi evil as an evil of modernity. On this interpretation the swastika suggests that the crimes of the Second World War are connected with the consequences of distorting and forgetting the ancients. Once the giant’s head is cut off, his identity becomes still harder to recognize and public interest disappears. The earlier choices of police and scholars now appear mistaken: scholars should have established the value of the giant, with the police protecting him as part of humanity’s lasting memory.
When the giant appears again, he exists only as fragments. This can stand for quotation out of context and resembles the postmodern deconstruction of classical tradition. More seriously, people have forgotten the giant altogether: even when staring at pieces of his body, they insist that they are parts of a whale. The dwarfs have deconstructed the giant’s inheritance and erased the giant from memory. “God is dead”; their souls no longer have room for sublimity or greatness. Here the film’s revised ending is particularly suggestive. The narrator says that the giant remains alive, gathers the scattered pieces of his body, and returns to the sea. It is as though the giant, disappointed with the dwarfs, takes his thought back from them and leaves.
If the image of “giants and dwarfs” signifies something similar in Ballard and Swift, then Allan Bloom’s words make an equally fitting conclusion to “The Drowned Giant”: “My title [Giants and Dwarfs] emphatically does not refer to the old saw ‘We are dwarfs, but we stand on the shoulders of giants.’ This expresses, in the guise of humility, too much self-satisfaction. Do giants let themselves be climbed so easily? Is it their function to carry dwarfs on their shoulders? Perhaps they were once so gracious but now have set us down on the earth and quietly stolen away, leaving us with an illusion of broader perspectives. The groundless assumption of intimacy with greatness soon gives way for a new generation which denies that there ever were giants and asserts that the whole story is a lie made up by their teachers to empower themselves. The giants are, I presume, looking down on this little comedy and laughing.”17