J.G. Ballard and the Drowned World of Shanghai

chapter 1 J.G. Ballard and the Drowned World of Shanghai

Graham Matthews

Abstract

J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) presents a panorama of department stores and skyscrapers emerging out of swamplands that evokes the landscape of Shanghai where Ballard lived until he was sixteen. Drawing on historical representations of China in the 1930s and 1940s this chapter reveals the ways in which Ballard incorporated elements of his childhood experience of China into the fictional landscape of The Drowned World. Writings about China by Elizabeth Enders, Carl Crow, C.F. Gordon Cumming, Liu Eh, Ruth Hsu and others are compared to Ballard’s novel. By investigating the influence of the Shanghai landscape on Ballard’s portrait of the submerged London in The Drowned World, this chapter indicates the ways in which space and memory influence the fashioning of imaginative truth.

Keywords

J.G. Ballard – The Drowned World – Shanghai – China – London – uk – memory – imagination – truth – history – natural disaster – landscape

Ostensibly set in London, The Drowned World (1962) presents a panorama of department stores and apartments emerging out of swamplands that evokes the landscape of Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s where Ballard lived until he was sixteen. Ballard recalls post-war Shanghai as a place filled with abandoned buildings, empty swimming pools and collapsed irrigation systems. This is re- flected in the novel by descriptions of the Ritz that are reminiscent of the Peace Hotel on the Bund and by repeated references to bamboo groves, lush vegetation, huge rivers, canals, and flooded paddy fields. Just as various characters in the novel steadily devolve into primordial forms, The Drowned World reaches back in time to Ballard’s own “archaeopsychic” past and to the formation of his creative imagination. Due in part to the commercial success of his semi- autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun (1984) critical attention has typically focused on Ballard’s internment in Lunghua Camp, which is often presented as informing his fiction’s recurring theme of barely suppressed psychopathy and

10 Matthews violence lurking under the surface of civilization. However this is to neglect the vast array of overlapping and competing texts, discourses, ideologies and images that surrounded the nascent author as he grew up in a city that juxta- poses East and West, land and sea, commerce and artistry, wealth and poverty, technology and tradition. As contemporary author Will Self notes, “the Bal- lardian sensibility surely has its crucible just as much in the pre-War Shanghai through which the child Ballard was either ferried in a chauffeur-driven car, or else travelled alone on reckless cycle rides” (“Crash: Homage to J.G. Ballard”). In this essay I explore the ways in which space and memory informed Ballard’s writing by developing links between the landscape of The Drowned World and the advertisements, newspaper articles, stories, rhymes, travelogues, essays, and memoirs that surrounded Ballard as he grew up in Shanghai in the 1930s. My argument does not simply trace the sources for Ballard’s works but seeks instead to show how the novel challenges conventional understanding of the text as a unified object, presenting it as a temporary convergence of mul- tiple, overlapping, and competing texts and citations. By stepping beyond the limits of the novel and into the social text of Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s, memory and by extension the self, I show it to be simultaneously individual and collective, internal and external, subjective and societal. In a 1975 interview with James Goddard and David Pringle, Ballard discuss- es the impact that the landscape of Shanghai had on his formative years and the sharp contrast between the vibrancy of the Far East and dour post-war England: “It was a very interesting zone psychologically, and it obviously had a big influence – as did the semi-tropical nature of the place: lush vegetation, a totally waterlogged world, huge rivers, canals, paddies, great sheets of water ev- erywhere” (82). By contrast, the English landscape in 1946 is described as pro- vincial, timeworn, and dull: “England was a place that was totally exhausted. The war had drained everything. It seemed very small, and rather narrow men- tally, and the physical landscape of England was so old” (Goddard and Pringle 86). Not only does The Drowned World superimpose the semi-tropical landscape of Ballard’s past on to the post-war devastation of his present, the text explicitly comments on the relationship between memory, space, and society. In 1984, Ballard rejected on moral grounds the notion of a reflexive, self- conscious fiction that explicitly acknowledges the inseparability of author and text: “I regard that whole postmodernist notion as a tiresome cul-de-sac [and] accept that an imaginative writer, like a figurative painter, takes for granted perspective, illusionist space, the unlimited depth of the picture plane” (“Interviews: The Art of Fiction”). Pointing instead to the power of dreams, myths, and legends, Ballard argues that the work of fiction is always already a work of illusion which, in the hands of a skillful writer or storyteller, is able to elicit suspension of disbelief. Ballard maintains that the power of the invented