In Memoriam: J.G. Ballard

Jonathan has always been completely frank,” James Graham Ballard wrote of his doctor in the 2008 autobiography Miracles of Life, “leaving me with no illusions about the eventual end.” That end came on April 19, 2009, when he died of prostate cancer, but Ballard, to his great credit, never had many illusions about anything. This fervent insistence that we ought not to lie to ourselves, however distressing the truth may be, is likely was made him the Anglophone world’s greatest if most consistently underrated novelist.

To most readers, Ballard is best known for his bestselling Empire of the Sun, a fictionalized retelling of his own childhood in a Japanese prison camp near Shanghai, later adapted into a fairly mediocre film by Steven Spielberg. To others, not all of them charitably inclined, he was creator of the notoriously transgressive novel Crash, which was made into a great but highly controversial film by David Cronenberg. Neither of these momentary eruptions into the mainstream, however, can really convey the depth of one of the most consistently fascinating literary legacies of the late 20th century. Love it or hate it, it cannot be denied that Ballard’s oeuvre retains a place in contemporary fiction that is genuinely unique. In describing it, one is almost forced to fall into quintessentially Ballardian formulations: he was a forensic scientist performing an autopsy on the psychoneuroses of post-war civilization, a psychogeographic culture jammer posing as an unassuming suburban gentleman, a compulsive cartographer of the psychotic topography of the near future, an impish prophet of the erotic catastrophes to come…. One can go on forever with such formulations, but it is perhaps best to recount what he considered the most complimentary review of his life: the reader’s note to the manuscript for Crash, which simply read, “This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish.”

To some, this might suggest the kind of hell-bent, psychopathic literary showman typified by Hunter S. Thompson and resurrected as farce by the likes of James Frey. In fact, Ballard was, in life at least, almost preternaturally sane. He lived a quiet life in Shepperton, a suburb of London famous for its movie studios, and raised several children largely on his own. In speech and dress he was almost aggressively conventional, and at times seemed to delight in the incongruence between the hallucinogenic, apocalyptic world of his novels and the stolid, suburban lifestyle he maintained. This incongruence was illusion, however, because Ballard’s greatest talent was to diagnose the psychoses inherent in what is generally regarded as everyday life, and to explore the extraordinary new possibilities they offered for pleasure, beauty, and even love.

Read the rest at The New Ledger.

The Awful Anti-Semitism of The Washington Post’s Pat Oliphant

I’ve been living in Israel and writing about it for so long that very little people say or think about it shocks me anymore. Since the second intifada began in 2000, I’ve been both witness to and target of a veritable rainbow of invective from across the political and ideological spectrum. As a result, I’d become convinced that my jaded sensibilities were unlikely to be shaken anytime soon, something that, I must admit, made me vaguely uncomfortable. So, I must thank Pat Oliphant and the Washington Post for reminding me that I am, thankfully, not nearly as desensitized as I imagined.

When I sat down to write about the cartoon reproduced above, I felt the necessity of restraining my first instincts. As Pierre Vidal-Naquet said about writing his response to Noam Chomsky’s defense of Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, “epithets came to my pen.” So I will simply explain, and hope the reader finds for himself the anger aroused by the imagery and its origins.

There is, unfortunately, nothing particularly original about the cartoon above. It is, in fact, one with a long tradition of antisemitic iconography, stretching back at least to the 1930s. The sword-wielding crusader; the shark-toothed Star of David; the hapless victim of Jewish cannibalism; none of this is new. It is, in fact, a series of reproductions, a collage of tropes drawn from various archetypes first employed by Nazi propaganda. This, in and of itself, is not shocking. The visual language of antisemitism has existed for a long time, and it will continue to do so for a long time to come. What is shocking about this cartoon is the fact that it was drawn by an acclaimed American political cartoonist—perhaps America’s most acclaimed political cartoonist—and published in one of the largest and most influential newspapers in the United States. While one should not labor under illusions about the prevalence of antisemitism in such circles, it is usually expressed esoterically enough to indicate a certain amount of doubt and discomfort on the part of those who engage in it. This cartoon, however, is without doubt or discomfort. Its violence is explicit, its hatred manifest, and its origins beyond doubt.

Read the rest at The New Ledger.

The Lost World of the Watchmen

Watching Zack Snyder’s new adaptation of the happily uncredited Alan Moore and the very-much credited Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen is somewhat like watching the CliffsNotes to Moby Dick. Regarding any other product of the comics medium, such a statement would be ludicrously pretentious. In the case of Watchmen, however, we are dealing with something very much like a great work, and films of great works are rarely successful. Made under conditions of extreme aesthetic intimidation, they are always caught between the desire to capture the success of the original by osmosis, i.e. imitation, and the knowledge that cinematic adaptations are almost always at their best when they are least faithful. Snyder’s Watchmen, unfortunately, tends to have the worst of both worlds. Its faithfulness undermines its power, and the moments when it is unfaithful are rarely an improvement.

Snyder has what many other filmmakers in his position have lacked, however, namely a good excuse. Watchmen has long been acknowledged—by director Terry Gilliam and Moore himself, amongst others—to be essentially unfilmable. Its plot can be described fairly simply: a group of retired superheroes, most of whom have no super powers, try to solve the murder of a former colleague in an alternative 1985, in which the world is poised on the brink of nuclear annihilation. This brief if accurate description fails to convey, however, anything of the intensity with which Watchmen assaults the reader. Dense, non-linear, and kaleidoscopic in structure, Watchmen is a book which defies and defines its genre while simultaneously deconstructing it. The comparison to Moby Dick is apt in that Watchmen’s power derives from the fact that it remains a genre piece even while it is subjected to an overwhelming concentration of forces which lead, ultimately, to the sublime destruction of itself and its own medium. Much as Melville set out to write a simple, above-average tale of adventure on the high seas, and ended up anticipating literary modernism by over half a century, Moore and Gibbons set out to create an interesting twist on the superhero genre, and ended up producing a tour de force of post-modernism. Watchmen is a book that got away from its authors and inadvertently became more than the sum of its many, many parts.

Snyder’s film, unfortunately, is nothing but parts. One senses while watching it that the filmmakers cherry-picked the book for its most impressive setpieces, which they then quite faithfully, and quite spectacularly, committed to film, sometimes almost frame-for-frame. Certainly, this leads to some extraordinary moments, but they remain only moments. In Moore’s book, by contrast, they lead inexorably, but completely without the reader’s awareness, to a stunning final reveal in which all the loose threads, all the bizarre twists and turns of his seemingly inscrutable narrative come together in a single, apocalyptic moment involving a vagina dentata straight out of a Freudian nightmare. This horror has, notoriously, been erased from Snyder’s film, along with most of the other small details which could not have been contained in a movie of any manageable length, but which are essential to Moore’s steady escalation toward something like the end of the world. Without its great magician’s reveal, and everything that leads up to it, Watchmen on film feels somehow partial, unfinished, and lost in its own web of homages to the formidable original.

Read the rest at The New Ledger.

Anti-Semitism and Israel’s Critics

The claim that criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic has become something of a shibboleth. Indeed, the efficacy of the argument would seem to be borne out by the degree to which it is now essentially a cliché. At the same time, however, almost everyone tacitly acknowledges that there is at least some question about the matter, or the principle would not have to be so constantly invoked in the first place.

The argument over criticism of Israel, such as it is, seems to boil down to two irreconcilable propositions. The first claims that Israel is a country like any other which enacts certain policies. These policies are therefore open to criticism just like those of any other country. There is nothing, in fact, can be nothing anti-Semitic about criticizing specific policies, and the accusation of anti-Semitism is therefore little more than an attempt to muzzle those who point out unpleasant truths about Israel’s conduct.

This claim is fairly straightforward, but it has several serious problems. The first is that it is, self-evidently, untrue. Israel, like it or not, is a Jewish state, in fact the only Jewish state. It is therefore, by definition, not a state like any other. The idea that Israel’s identity as a Jewish state can be somehow – I hesitate to use the word “magically” – separated from how it is perceived and judged is a reassuring but nonetheless dubious fantasy.

Read the rest at The New Ledger.

The Israeli Elections: A Primer

To outsiders, especially Americans, the results of yesterday’s elections must appear to be a rather bizarre phenomenon. Barring any last minute surprises, it appears that Tzipi Livni and the Kadima party have received more votes than Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, but the right-wing parties in general have received more votes than the left-wing parties. As a result, Netanyahu, even from second place, may be called upon to form the next Israeli government. This is not necessarily unusual in Israel, where elections rarely mean what they’re supposed to mean, and the winner is never quite a winner. The reason for this is that Israeli democracy is of a decidedly unique variety, and almost the polar opposite of America’s stentorian, carefully constructed republic.

Read the rest at The New Ledger.

Tintin, Herge, and the Shadow of Innocence

The news that Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson will soon be producing a series of films based on the Belgian comics character Tintin has given more than a few of us — and in the Anglophone world, we are indeed few – some pause. We are those who, from our childhoods, have enjoyed considering ourselves the members of a rarified group lucky enough to enjoy the exploits of this enigmatic piece of European pop culture. Tintin has never taken off in America, and probably never will, despite the best efforts of Mr. Spielberg, who is, if he is nothing else, a master popularizer.

The truth is that Tintin has always been the Gallic hero par excellence. There is nothing remotely American about him. And what those of us who love the character and revere his creator — the melancholic and childlike Herge — have always responded to has been precisely that. For us, Tintin was our earliest window into another world. A world far older, more compromised, more frightening, and more pessimistic than the wide-open dreamscape of American pop culture. A world infused with the ever-presence of the political and that particularly European sense of crisis. Tintin’s world is a fantastic landscape that is always in danger of collapse before real-world forces and real-world violence. There could be nothing that is further from the phantasmagoria of the American superhero comics, with their ubermenschen laying waste to the forces of evil, always rendered, even in the supposedly “grim and gritty” genre, as incredulous grosteques, their evil made manifest by their physical deformity and the derangement of their actions.

This was Herge’s genius. His world of adventure is an inversion of the original. The traditional children’s tale brings the adult world into that of the child, so that it is forced to play by a child’s rules: the manic bursts of energy, the corrosive violence of an unfettered and unapologetic Id, authority and evil as mere caricatures of themselves. Herge brought the child’s world into that of the adult. In the person of Tintin, he creates a character who is neither child nor adult, but an interloper, an androgynous, sexless blank, a neutral center around which the mad, frightening spectacle of the adult world revolves.

Read the rest at The New Ledger.

Strange Goings-On at the Spine

I think I'm a relatively intelligent person, but I find it difficult to understand exactly what Marty Peretz is trying to say in this particular blog post. First he says

Barack Obama's position on the future of Jerusalem is crystal clear.

Meaning

On Wednesday, Obama told the AIPAC conference in Washington that "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided."

Then, in the next sentence, he says

On Thursday, he told CNN that, of course, Jerusalem will be part of whatever negotiations take place in the context of a peace effort.

Finally asking

Does the second statement contradict the other, as Obama's critics have mobilized themselves into charging?

Well, yes. If Jerusalem is up for negotiation, that means its division is up for negotiation, as the Palestinians have wanted for decades. So, this isn't really that complicated.

Except it is, apparently.

So let's examine what Obama believes. One that Jerusalem is and will continue to be the capital of the Jewish state. There are no ifs or buts about that...

Obama also asserted that the city will remain undivided. This is his guarantee of American backing for a city map that will not cut off the Mount of Olives from the rest of Jerusalem and that Pisgat Ze'ev and Neve Ya'akov which, east of Arab neighborhoods, were added and annexed to Jerusalem after 1967 and will remain in Jerusalem.

But keep in mind that these intricate matters must be hashed out and ratified at the negotiating table.

My personal opinion is that if something is not up for negotiation, then you don't negotiate it. That is, if Obama believes what Peretz says he believes, then Jerusalem should not be an issue for future negotiations. The problem is that Jerusalem will be an issue for future negotiation, everybody knows it, and the presidential candidates are--yes--pandering to the Jewish vote when they say otherwise.

The fact that Obama is not alone in lying his head off when it comes to Jerusalem shouldn't come as any surprise to people who follow Jewish or Israeli politics. Every year the presidential candidates make this or that pledge regarding Jerusalem and never follow through on them. Its become one of those bizarre rituals of American identity politics in which everyone knows they're lying or being lied to and no one particularly cares, because what is important is not the actual policy in question but the due deference being paid to the concerns of the particular group involved.

Peretz's strange take on Obama's blatantly--but not surprisingly--contradictory statements on Jerusalem really says more about Obama and his supporters than it does about American policy toward Jerusalem or Israel in general. For whatever reason, those who have bought into the Obama phenomenon simply cannot seem to wrap their heads around the fact that he is, in fact, a politician, and is perfectly willing to say things he doesn't mean or believe in order to drum up more votes. Especially, its worth noting, among a community of voters who regard him with a fair degree of skepticism. There is nothing overly unusual about this, but Peretz's rather muddled attempt to pretend it isn't happening is a bit disappointing. If there is one thing above all which the Jewish people should have learned from our history, it is that, pace Orwell, messiahs, political or otherwise, should always be judged guilty until proved innocent.