‘The Enormous Space’ by J. G. Ballard
A NOTE ON the local geography. Frequent visitors to the French Riviera will be familiar with Marina Baie des Anges, the vast apartment complex that lies like a second Colosseum under the Nice Airport flight path. The Pierre Cardin Foundation, at Miramar to the west of Cannes, is difficult to find but well worth a visit, and must be one of the strangest buildings in Europe. Port-la-Galère, nearby, is another architectural oddity, with its honeycomb facades worthy of Gaudi.
Antibes-les-Pins, at Golfe-Juan, is part of the high-tech Côte d’Azur that is rapidly replacing the old. An even better example, and the inspiration for Eden-Olympia, is the landscaped business park of Sophia-Antipolis, a few miles to the north of Antibes.
Super-Cannes is a luxury enclave on the heights above the Croisette, but the term might well refer to that whole terrain of science parks and autoroutes on the high ground above the Var plain. Together they make up Europe’s silicon valley, a world away from the casinos and belle époque hotels that define the Riviera of old.
Nostalgic Aviation, a cheerful museum of aircraft memorabilia, stands at the entrance to Cannes-Mandelieu Airport, and is a haven for flying buffs. On the new Riviera, even aviation is now consigned to a fondly remembered past.
J.G. Ballard
BY ALI SMITH
‘There’s something about the novel that resists innovation,’ J. G. Ballard said. He said it more than once; it was something he was fond of saying even as he himself innovated, working away beneath and pulling up the floorboards of literary tradition, one eye on the contemporanea his novels happened to inhabit and the other on a very different clock, one ‘whose movements are virtually imperceptible but which cover giant periods of time as the human race evolved.’ Super-Cannes, which he published on the cusp not just of a new century but a new thousand years, makes inquiry into both – the time we inhabit and our place in evolutionary terms. It parallels the ancient mysteries of Eros and Thanatos alongside what’s called human progress. It rewrites (it seems literally to do this as it unfolds) the speed and expectations of English narrative while examining our warmth towards, our desire for, and the naivety and comfort in our nostalgia about, the novel form.
It’s as if he’s questioning the form’s uses to us, now, the postmodern, evolved, post-Nietzschean so-civilised human beings of the beginning of the next millennium, as he put it in an interview with John Gray:
We inhabit a house in which there are rooms that have never been unlocked, down in the basement. Now and then we’ve had a glimpse in these rooms and there are strange old cabinets and odd musical instruments. What sort of tunes do they play, one wonders, lying in the dust? … There is a darker corner of the human psyche which intrigues us, and which we feel might benefit us if we started to explore it. It’s almost a kind of murder mystery investigation. A crime happened, perhaps, or some strange event in the human past, and we are drawn to try and understand what happened.
What will happen when we go down to play in the dark of the self? What will happen when Nietzsche collides with the expectations of the super-rich exclusive-set beach-read? This: a brilliant hybrid, a glistening, riotous and deadpan piece of visionary slipstream – a brand-new kind of crime novel. Super-Cannes is the keystone of Ballard’s trilogy about gated communities, along with Cocaine Nights (1996) and Millennium People (2003), all three of which examine, via this gated microcosm, time, crime and psychopathology. It takes as its subject the liberal (seeming) nature of the giant corporations up against the truth about human instinct and human nature.
An exemplary good sort called David Greenwood has run amok, killing several work colleagues in Eden-Olympia, a science/business park plus paradisal residential complex nestling among the swimming pools in the hills above Cannes in the well-heeled south of France. Paul, an aviator who has badly damaged his knee (in a crash in a plane before it even left the ground), and his new and much younger wife, Jane – the middle-aged Paul is having what might be called a late romance – arrive in Super-Cannes from MaidaVale in their old classic Jaguar. It’s as if they’ve arrived in the future in a gorgeous clunky time-machine, ‘still locked into the past’, a past that’s ‘a huge phantom limb that aches and throbs’, so shockingly suddenly gone it’s like it’s been amputated.
Jane is taking Greenwood’s job. They inherit the mystery. Why would a good man living in a ‘suburb of paradise’ go mad, they wonder, looking down at how the ‘hundreds of blue ovals trembled like damaged retinas in the Provencal sun.’
The very first paragraph announces a collision between notions of heaven and territories of mental state. It declares a ‘waiting madness’, a ‘state of undeclared war’. It veers, in a few lines, from heaven via psychiatry all the way to murder, asking the question along the way about what shape an ‘intelligent city’ might take and tossing in – quite casually – a collision of ancient and modern cultural and aesthetic references from the mythical god of communication and the dead via the surrealists to The Tempest, the last of Shakespeare’s own late romances. This novel is full of resonances from and references to novels and texts (as well as all the film narrative riffs which might be expected in any suburb of Cannes); it’s actually a very bookish novel; a library literally litters it: Defoe, Saint-Exupéry, Connolly, Fitzgerald, Greene, Spark, Hardy, Stevenson, Proust, Conrad and Carroll – above all, Carroll: since this is a novel which deals simultaneously with the form’s real and seeming innocences, its nostalgias, its fetishised and subterranean urges, with its own very specific ‘Alice library’ at its core.
‘The French see the Alice books as a realistic picture of English life,’ Wilder Penrose says. He’s the park psychiatrist, the mindman, the Prospero, or puppetmaster, or God, of Super-Cannes (and a clinical, rational, reassuringly white-coated version of Angela Carter’s foul and clever dream-inventor in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman).Names of characters in Ballard’s work