Super-Can't

Henry posted a paean to J.G. Ballard the other day over at Crooked Timber, and it got me thinking about why it is that I find Ballard so unsatisfactory. (Warning: contains generalized, possibly misleading Super-Cannes spoilers.) Because he really doesn't do it for me, at all. (I'm all fired up for the blogosphere-wide slow-down when Neal Stephenson's latest comes out, though.) I read Super-Cannes about a year ago, even though I thought I might not like it. I have a close friend who's truly, deeply, crazy about Ballard and I thought I should give it another shot. So what goes wrong, from my perspective?

Well, for one thing, he strikes me as something of a misogynist. Not a terrible one, but it's something I have a peculiarly low tolerance for in modern authors. I can already see a fairly good case being made that he is such a thorough-going misanthrope that the misogyny is, so to speak, tautological. Nonetheless, it rubs me the wrong way.

Secondly, and more importantly, his nihilism seems sort of juvenile to me. It's as though he's seen through society's bullshit and discovered we're all a bunch of phonies. This insight palls quickly. Now, I recognize that his personal history makes him a qualified nihilist, but that recognition doesn't change my experience of the novels.

Relatedly, the evil that the protagonist in Super-Cannes uncovers at the hollow core of society strikes me as in many ways just the same thing that the hard-boiled yet moral detective discovers in a bad contemporary thriller: rich, politically influential people always turn out to be making child snuff porn or running some crypto-fascist organization or whatever. It's practically required. It's true that sometimes this seems to be true, as in the Belgian scandals of a few years back, or that child-molesting mayor in Connecticut. So perhaps this can qualify as cold insight into the true nature of things, but to me it always seems to come out as would-be titillating.

Now, I'll say this for Ballard, he mostly removes the frame that in the average thriller allows people to both read about excitingly-described crimes and disapprove of them along with the investigating hero. But not completely, because of course the hero does disapprove, does want to be the lone wolf who takes these people down. So I find myself both turned off by the flat, blasé tone (neither the hero nor the author seems to be very upset about the pedophilia ring, not viscerally upset in the way an ordinary person would be if he found out about something like that) and bored with the elements that are conventional (the thriller aspect, the supercilious detailing of the critical premise: society is full of phonies).

Right, so what I'm saying is, I don't like J.G. Ballard. I much prefer, a thousand times prefer, William Burroughs, who is, pace Henry, much funnier than Ballard. I don't think I cracked a smile reading Super-Cannes, while I find Burroughs just hilarious, and truly underrated as a serious novelist due to the druggy, boys-from-outer-space-in-radioactive-chaps atmosphere.*

*I can just see you saying, "doesn't like misogyny in modern novels, and she loves Mr. "Send all the women to Venus and let men reproduce by cloning""?! I don't find that Burroughs commits the irritating sin of having well-rounded, plausible male characters and then embarassing cartoons instead of female ones. He just doesn't give a shit about women at all. I find this infinitely preferable to having to learn about someone's sexual hangups and fear of women, and watch as their irritating male characters have all their bad behavior and bad attitudes justified by implausible behavior coming from the female cartoons (see my non-existent monograph: Why I Stopped Reading the Novel JR by Gaddis Part-way Through).

Comments

[Walt Pohl]

What if Ballard is right, and everyone is a phony? What, as a writer of fiction, should you do then? Create pretty illusions?

[Dell Adams]

What would stop you?

[Adam Rice]

I've had the same reaction to him and to Aldiss. And some others I can't name. Something about British New-Wave SF authors that seems kind of...rootless.

[Belle Waring]

I've been meaning to respond to Walt Pohl's comment for days now and I keep flaking out. Maybe life is just a meaningless antechamber to death and everyone who doesn't write just like Beckett is a sucker. But probably not, or at least, it's a legitimate aesthetico-pholisophical stance to deny this bleak outlook. So go on with the illusions, I say.