Shanghaied by J.G. Ballard (The Kindness of Women)
There are many reasons for going to Shanghai to see the Bund. It was on our bucket list, having been seduced by literature and movies that feature Shanghai, like of course The Empire of the Sun (Ballard and Spielberg) and Once we were Orphans by Ishiguro plus various documentaries about the Japanese occupation of Shanghai. The great opportunity arose a few weeks ago when we visited family in Suzhou. A taxi took us to the Yangtse hotel on Hankou Rd., just opposite the People’s Park. The next day we walked down to the Bund. Being German I had always assumed -wrongly - that the name derives from the German ‘Bund’ given that the Germans also had a concession here. OK, it derives from English via Hindustani. In retrospect it makes sense as the English play the main role in this Shakespearian tragedy of sorts. Of course we were blown away by the views across the river, the incredible skyline of skyscrapers, and when turning back across the road to see many of the classical buildings of the Bund. At the Shanghai History Museum, we learned that Mao Zedong had ordered the troops not to use high explosives when entering the Bund so as to preserve the historic buildings. Good on him! Shame on re-developing the Bund as a raised promenade that is now thronged by millions of tourists. Luckily when we were there it was not too bad. Walking back via Nanjing Road, the most famous pedestrian shopping road in China if not in the world, we were transported into a future of great contradictions: capitalism and socialism living side by side, carefully controlled lest any capitalist decadence rears its ugly head, like sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. Mind you from our hotel we saw a sign advertising a massage parlour, and we were wondering if the medicinal massage treatments on offer were a disguise for more decadent treatments one finds in massage parlours in many a Western city. We also came across D-Mall, an underground shopping heaven for all things Manga, what with teenagers dressed up in Manga garb but curiously careful not to show too much skin. One could assume that local authorities tolerated such outlandish behaviour as a safety valve for rebellious youth as long as it was confined to fashion and nothing else.
From these contemporary perspectives it is quite difficult to imagine the Shanghai and the Bund that was the stage for the likes of Ballard. The decadence of the 1930s is certainly not documented in the Shanghai History Museum. For the young Ballard the sight of prostitutes and brothels around every street corner might have been recorded for cities like London, Paris, Berlin and New York, as much as vintage pornographic clips grace the porn sites of today (although probably mostly AI generated). As every literary sleuth knows, J.G. Ballard’s formative years were first dominated by the Western concessions of the Bund and then the destruction of it, including the interment by the Japanese. Equally, as very psychanalytic sleuth knows, this brew of sex and violence can shape a character for the rest of his life, none more so than Ballard’s. Of course, the cliché of sex as violence has a much longer history, portraying penetration as an act of rape. I think it would be wrong to paint Ballard into this unsavoury corner. Ballard’s obsession with sex is not of this sort even though he flirts with violence for violence or art’s sake. His attitude to sex is clearly reflected in his title of his novel The Kindness of Women, i.e. all the women in his fictional life in this novel – no doubt in part based on his experiences – kindly offer themselves to an ever-obliging Jim (Ballard) playing to that quaint English idiom of ‘making love’. It’s a nice idea – and as far as I know only available in the English language, e.g. compare this to the unfortunate French (nation of lovers) metaphor (hopefully not a simile) of ‘la petite mort’. That sex equals death is unfortunately also invoked by Ballard, especially in his notorious ‘crash’ chapter (and made into a movie), albeit as a deviant interlude which sends his old (fictional) friend from way back in Shanghai to a term in the lunatic asylum. His very questionable redemption equals that of another fictional main actor, namely Sally who after Jim’s wife’s death assumes the role of the 60s drug-addled American beauty with whom Jim engages in anal sex, described in anatomical detail. Various critics have noted Ballard’s cold and ‘clinical’ descriptions of sex, presumably based on his time as a medical student (in the novel given space in a long chapter on dissecting a female cadaver). So much for making love as a poetic imagination. That Sally, when not engaged in anal sex and class A drugs, looks after Jim’s three children as a wonderful playmate is then a bit far-fetched. Indeed, much of the novel can be subjected to the critique of Chomsky’s saying that ‘nothing is impossible, but many things are unlikely’. As such I prefer novels that resemble real life, as we (or at least I) know it, i.e. having consumed various drugs myself (LSD included as does Jim) I can confidently say that I, like Sally, would have made a terrible if not dangerous babysitter. That Sally eventually redeems herself, extricating herself from the dreadful 60s, and towards the end of the novel becomes a mother herself, sounds a bit like a sob story. Ballard in his monumental effort to run down the 60s and the aftermath as crazed media (mainly TV) events, the proverbial sex, drugs and rock’n’roll excesses, not to speak of all the pornography that goes with it. While Jim claims to not ever having watched a pornographic movie, he does go down to the nitty-gritty in Rio catching a glimpse of bestiality being filmed. As such it becomes an odd obsession that is never defined, embedded only in the media (the chapter on the ‘lens’) that turns post-war Europe and the Americas into a dystopian hotbed of deviant sex, war, violence, advertising and celebrities. While much of this scenario is a fact of life as we (or at least I) know it, there are always glimpses of hope for a better world, some of which were indeed moments of ‘peace and love’ in the 60s that were extinguished by a reactionary elite that rules the waves still today. That Ballard had to further exemplify his dystopian take on things via his character Dick, the Cambridge psychologist turned BBC celebrity, is also an odd undertaking, i.e. that Dick had to record his own death (of cancer) for a documentary for the BBC. The same Dick also provides a whole chapter for recording an LSD trip with Jim. Ballard thus covers all corners of the field but mainly to score own goals. The grim succession of chapter after chapter occasionally leads to unexpected black humour, like the last one where he attends the premiere of The Empire of the Sun movie (in which he has a brief blurry appearance) in LA and (unexpectedly) meets up with his former Shanghai young governess Olga, now in her 60s and well-to-do, only to offer her still presentable body to Jim for a bit of a romp to make up for the missed opportunities in Shanghai. Even the also fictional Peggy, Jim’s fellow prisoner in the internment camp in Lunghua, who later becomes a paediatrician in London and always resists Jim’s advances on the grounds that they were innocent children in the camp, eventually gives in and they have satisfactory sex, something to do with a vulva and a penis. As the novel ends on Venice beach in LA (where I too sat in the sand) with the odd scenario of someone launching a replica Heyerdahl papyrus boat with ‘its bows set towards the China shore’, one wonders what it all means when the final sentence reads ‘Cleo, think where that might lead …’.
Reading this novel – it is a novel, not an autobiography – in 2026 that was first published in 1991, one is aware that it is as controversial now as it was then. Not that the dystopian vision has diminished over time – in fact it might have become worse – and as such one has to be grateful to Ballard (RIP) for having alerted us to the corrosive media fault lines (nowadays so bad that social media is to be banned for under 16-year olds, along with alcohol, vapes, drugs, sex, pornography and whatever) that seem to rule all of our lives – at least in the capitalist West.
Having just been in socialist/communist Shanghai – Ballard’s nostalgic place of departure from yesteryear – I am confused about this socialist utopia with its gleaming (phallic?) corporate high rises (also a dystopian Ballard topic, and made into a movie) and endless shopping malls, what with CCP’s condemnation of Western decadence, all the while promoting temple tourism in the face of Marx’ ‘religion is the opium of the people’, and Reich’s socialist ideas about freedom from sexual repression, and what a possible future for Shanghai as much as Shepperton might look like. Ballard’s novel title The Kindness of Women actually sounds quite upbeat and might serve as a headline recipe for the future, if it were not for many of the unpalatable ingredients of the story line itself. He could have concentrated more on solutions to the dystopian dilemma, like the 60s Beatles ‘All you need is love’ and add generous dollops of love making (as in a way, Ballard does), however much such sentiments are soaked in clichés (on which some of us old geezers survive, more or less, to this very day, but still condemned to sit on the couch and watch the wildfire documentaries on BBC).
