The Atrocity Exhibition

COPYRIGHT

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This edition published by Fourth Estate in 2014

A revised, expanded, annotated, illustrated edition was first published in the USA by Re/Search Publications in 1990

Copyright © J. G. Ballard 1990

The original edition was first published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape in 1970, and first published in paperback by Panther Books in 1972

Copyright © J. G. Ballard 1969

Introduction © Hari Kunzru 2014

Interview © Travis Elborough 2006

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007116867

Ebook Edition © OCTOBER ISBN: 9780007322190

Version: 2016-01-20

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Author’s Note

Preface by William S Burroughs

Introduction by Hari Kunzru

1 The Atrocity Exhibition

2 The University of Death

3 The Assassination Weapon

4 You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe

5 Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown

6 The Great American Nude

7 The Summer Cannibals

8 Tolerances of the Human Face

9 You and Me and the Continuum

10 Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy

11 Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A.

12 Crash!

13 The Generations of America

14 Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan

15 The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race

APPENDIX:

Princess Margaret’s Face Lift

Mae West’s Reduction Mammoplasty

J. G. Ballard with Travis Elborough

About the Author

Praise

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Most of the film stars and political figures who appear in The Atrocity Exhibition are still with us, in memory if not in person – John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. Together they helped to form the culture of celebrity that played such a large role in the 1960s, when I wrote The Atrocity Exhibition.

Other figures, though crucially important to the decades that followed, have begun to sink below the horizon. How many of us remember Abraham Zapruder, who filmed the Kennedy assassination in Dallas? Or Sirhan Sirhan, who murdered Robert Kennedy? At the end of each chapter I have provided a few notes that identify these lesser characters and set out the general background to the book.

Readers who find themselves daunted by the unfamiliar narrative structure of The Atrocity Exhibition – far simpler than it seems at first glance – might try a different approach. Rather than start at the beginning of each chapter, as in a conventional novel, simply turn the pages until a paragraph catches your eye. If the ideas or images seem interesting, scan the nearby paragraphs for anything that resonates in an intriguing way. Fairly soon, I hope, the fog will clear, and the underlying narrative will reveal itself. In effect, you will be reading the book in the way it was written.

J. G. Ballard, 2001

PREFACE BY WILLIAM BURROUGHS

The Atrocity Exhibition is a profound and disquieting book. The nonsexual roots of sexuality are explored with a surgeon’s precision. An auto-crash can be more sexually stimulating than a pornographic picture. (Surveys indicate that wet dreams in many cases have no overt sexual content, whereas dreams with an overt sexual content in many cases do not result in orgasm.) The book opens: ‘A disquieting feature of this annual exhibition … was the marked preoccupation of the paintings with the theme of world cataclysm, as if these long-incarcerated patients had sensed some seismic upheaval within the minds of their doctors and nurses.’

The line between inner and outer landscapes is breaking down. Earthquakes can result from seismic upheavals within the human mind. The whole random universe of the industrial age is breaking down into cryptic fragments: ‘In a waste lot of wrecked cars he found the burnt body of the white Pontiac, the nasal prepuce of LBJ, crashed helicopters, Eichmann in drag, a dead child …’ The human body becomes landscape: ‘A hundred-foot-long panel that seemed to represent a section of sand dune … Looking at it more closely Doctor Nathan realized that it was an immensely magnified portion of the skin over the iliac crest …’ This magnification of image to the point where it becomes unrecognizable is a keynote of The Atrocity Exhibition. This is what Bob Rauschenberg is doing in art – literally blowing up the image. Since people are made of image, this is literally an explosive book. The human image explodes into rocks and stones and trees: ‘The porous rock towers of Tenerife exposed the first spinal landscape … clinker-like rock towers suspended above the silent swamp. In the mirror of this swamp there are no reflections. Time makes no concessions.’

Sexual arousal results from the repetition and impact of image: ‘Each afternoon in the deserted cinema: the latent sexual content of automobile crashes … James Dean, Jayne Mansfield, Albert Camus … Many volunteers became convinced that the fatalities were still living and later used one or the other of the crash victims as a private focus of arousal during intercourse with the domestic partner.’

James Dean kept a hangman’s noose dangling in his living room and put it around his neck to pose for news pictures. A painter named Milton, who painted a sexy picture entitled ‘The Death of James Dean’, subsequently committed suicide. This book stirs sexual depths untouched by the hardest-core illustrated porn. ‘What will follow is the psychopathology of sex relationships so lunar and abstract that people will become mere extensions of the geometries of situations. This will allow the exploration without any trace of guilt of every aspect of sexual psychopathology.’

Immensely magnified portion of James Dean subsequently committed suicide. Conception content relates to sexual depths of the hardest minds. Eichmann in drag in a waste lot of wrecked porous rock.

INTRODUCTION BY HARI KUNZRU

In 1966 New Worlds, a British science fiction magazine edited by the writer Michael Moorcock, published a ‘condensed novel’ by J. G. Ballard titled ‘The Assassination Weapon’. Moorcock was, he remembers, ‘delighted’ to receive Ballard’s copy. ‘It was exactly what I’d been looking for and I demanded more. He complained I was making his eyes bleed, turning them out. For me it was exemplary, a flag to wave for authors and readers … I’d been nagging Jimmy to develop stories he’d mapped out on his walls in Letraset and type cut out of copies of Chemistry and Industry (they were all over his living room) and ‘The Assassination Weapon’ delivered far more than I’d hoped for.’ Later that same year New Worlds published ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, which in 1970 would become the title story of Ballard’s most notorious book.

Under Moorcock, New Worlds was at the forefront of science fiction’s so-called ‘new wave’. In the golden age of the thirties and forties, SF had been a genre of ray guns and robots, focused on the frontiers opened up by science and technology. It was muscular, optimistic, often aggressive, its heroes exploring space and colonizing planets with an almost nineteenth-century vigour. Moorcock’s polemic editorials repositioned the genre as a speculative avant-garde, a venue for a more anxious and subversive style of imagination. Ballard’s experimental fictions share a set of preoccupations – the media, sex, war, altered states of consciousness, the troubling nature of political and religious authority – with other new wave writers like Samuel Delaney, Thomas M. Disch, Norman Spinrad and Philip K. Dick, all of whom were published in the magazine.

Ballard’s other main supporter in this period was Ambit, the tiny but influential literary journal run by London paediatrician Martin Bax. Also in 1966 Bax published ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’ and ‘The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’. The following year Ballard became Ambit’s prose editor, bringing in the artist Eduardo Paolozzi (as Moorcock did at New Worlds) to produce a series of collages and visual essays that echoed Ballard’s own obsessions. Looking at the contributor lists for these very different magazines we see on the one hand Ballard alongside major SF writers like Brian Aldiss and M. John Harrison and on the other, literary modernists like Ann Quin, Peter Porter and B. S. Johnson. The fact that Ballard was present in both these milieux was a sign that certain rigorously policed borders in British culture were beginning to crumble. However, neither New Worlds nor Ambit was in any sense the ‘mainstream’. Ironically, there is a publisher’s advertisement on the back of Ambit 29 (cover: pop art Kennedy in racing goggles) promoting Anthony Powell, Paul Scott, J. B. Priestley and Noël Coward, alongside a biography of Winston Churchill. Against this pale background, Ballard’s provocations were profoundly shocking.

A friend of the Kennedy family, Randolph Churchill (whose biography of his father Heinemann were promoting on that Ambit back cover) was outraged to discover that some SF hack had been taking satirical liberties with the memory of the President, assassinated less than three years previously. Churchill attempted to have Ambit’s Arts Council grant cut off, but that was as far as his influence went. Things got more serious in 1968 when Brighton’s Unicorn Bookshop decided to print a pamphlet edition of ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’. There was a police raid and Unicorn’s proprietor, Bill Butler, found himself in court on obscenity charges. When interviewed as a possible defense witness, Ballard reportedly disqualified himself by explaining that he too considered his story obscene, that it was in fact intended to be obscene. Butler’s barrister called poet and radio producer George MacBeth instead, who gamely claimed to be prepared to broadcast an audio version on the BBC. Besides Ballard’s tale, the other offending articles seized in the raid were mostly American – a play by Tuli Kupferberg titled ‘FuckNam’, copies of Oz and The Evergreen Review and work by Burroughs, Ginsberg, Jean Giorno and Herbert Huncke. Butler, who’d previously run Better Books, Britain’s main conduit for American Beat writing, had a lot of support, but still he was convicted, fined £400 and ordered to pay costs. Despite this legal trouble, in 1970 the American publisher Doubleday agreed to print an edition of Ballard’s ‘condensed novels’ under the title The Atrocity Exhibition. Marc Haefele, a young Doubleday editor at the time, remembers that a few weeks before publication, John Sargent, the company president and another friend of Jackie Kennedy, was touring a company warehouse in Virginia when the book was drawn to his attention. On the spot, he gave the order to pulp the entire print run. A British edition went ahead, but it wasn’t until 1972 that an American edition was published, under the title Love and Napalm: Export USA.

Whatever the guardians of public morality found so hard to stomach about The Atrocity Exhibition, it was surely more than dirty words and lèse-majesté. The novel presents fragments or avatars of a traumatized man, variously named Travis, Travers, Traven, Talbot or Talbert, who is conducting some kind of spun-out scientific experiment, which also takes the form of a lecture or media spectacle. Traven is both a researcher and an experimental subject or patient in an institution where white-coated medical science has become contaminated by other things: pornography, celebrity, the imminence of violent disaster. He is observed by one Dr Nathan and has a highly-fetishized sexual relationship with Karen Novotny or Catherine Austin or Coma, names for a blank, damaged woman who often seems to be constructed from fragments of female celebrities – Jackie Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe. The Atrocity Exhibition visits terrible violence on these female celebrity bodies, in the form of plane and car crashes, nuclear fallout, disasters of all kinds. Ronald Reagan and the car safety campaigner Ralph Nader get the same treatment. The book’s obscenity, the reason it still has the potential to shock, is a function of its objectivity. It is clinical when, for decency’s sake, it ought to feign emotion. It looks on our sacred treasures, our culture’s real sacred treasures – the imaginary bodies of famous people – and responds with all the violence and lust and revulsion that the healthy well-adjusted citizen suppresses. Decency is what separates rational economic actors, dutifully maximizing their personal benefit, from the racaille, from scum. It is the source of order. Ballard’s fictional refusal of it was – and remains – a threat.

Each section of The Atrocity Exhibition is a flight over the same apocalyptic landscape, a landscape which is also the human body, observed with a clinician’s eye as it undergoes trauma, as it is anatomized, penetrated, cut and crushed and humiliated, scorched and fucked. This body-landscape is also an image of itself, a mass-media projection made up of Hollywood movies and pornography and news footage of the Vietnam War. Living in the shadow of disaster, Travers is an exemplary modern subject. The only difference between him and the average suburbanite is that he doesn’t disguise his abjection. He is a burnt-out case, a celebrity stalker, a kind of psychological crash-test dummy with a detached professional interest in the brick wall that’s about to make contact with his skull. He may, of course, also be insane.

As Moorcock’s memory of Ballard’s living-room cut-ups suggests, the origins of The Atrocity Exhibition don’t lie in traditional techniques of prose composition. In 1958 Ballard had taken a job as an editor at Chemistry and Industry magazine, which he held until 1964. Almost as soon as he got there, he began to use materials in the office to make photocopied collages which he later described as ‘sample pages of a new kind of novel, entirely consisting of magazine-style headlines and layouts, with a deliberately meaningless text, the idea being that the imaginative content could be carried by the headlines and overall design, so making obsolete the need for a traditional text except for virtually decorative purposes.’ Many words and phrases from this Project for a New Novel turn up in The Atrocity Exhibition, notably the sequence ‘Kline – Coma – Xero’ which become something more than proper names, something slightly less (or more diffuse) than characters.

Ballard’s most frequently acknowledged aesthetic debt is to Surrealism. In The Atrocity Exhibition, his references are usually visual – to Ernst and Dalí, Yves Tanguy. Indeed, as he told an interviewer, ‘I originally wanted a large-format book, printed by photo-offset, in which I would produce the artwork – a lot of collages, material taken from medical documents and medical photographs, crashing cars and all that sort of iconography.’ Though Ballard also namechecks contemporary American artists (Ed Kienholz, Tom Wesselmann) one of the few writers he references is Raymond Roussel, inventor of what are probably best thought of as textual algorithms, game-machines for producing narrative. Using a tool-kit based on puns, homonyms and various kinds of combination and shuffling, Roussel would, for example, create an opening and an ending for a passage or story, often generating them by changing as little as a single letter. For example, in ‘Parmi les noirs’, Roussel changes ‘Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard’ (the white letters on the cushions of the old billiard table) to ‘les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard’ (the letters of a white man about the hordes of the old plunderer) and journeys from the first image to the second.

Admired by the Surrealists, lovers of automatism in all its forms, Roussel’s writing machines seem to open a road towards a poetry of the unconscious. Ballard’s various automatisms are directed towards a similar end, though for him, access to the unconscious is not straightforwardly liberating. Apart from the collages and cut-ups, Ballard also used found text, such as surgical instructions and scientific papers, into which he inserted the names of celebrities to produce pieces like ‘Princess Margaret’s Facelift’ and ‘Mae West’s Reduction Mammoplasty’. Automatism is liberating, yes, but also sinister. The Atrocity Exhibition is a cousin of A Clockwork Orange and The Manchurian Candidate, books that display a deep anxiety about behaviorism, conditioning and free will. By the sixties, ideas about computing were beginning to percolate out into the wider culture, particularly through the newly fashionable discourse of cybernetics. Suddenly, it was apparent that information and control systems were embedded in the biology of the human organism, as well as into various forms of technology (notably missile guidance), a fact which made cybernetics key to the conduct of the Cold War. It was now open to conceptualize the media in an analogous way as a technology of control, a sort of guidance system which could be used to direct consumers towards desired goals. During the period he was working on The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash, Ballard (who had briefly worked at an ad agency) published a series of ‘Advertisers Announcements’ in Ambit. He conceived of these spreads in a conceptually rigorous way, to the extent of paying the magazine’s ad rate for the pages. ‘Fiction,’ reads the text of one, ‘is a branch of neurology.’

‘Does the Angle Between Two Walls Have a Happy Ending?’ asks the headline to the same 1967 piece, over a black-and-white image of a female body, actually a still from Alone, the American filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin’s 1964 film about a masturbating woman. The ‘happy ending’ is of course a joke about commercial narratives and commercial sex. The phrase ‘the angle between two walls’ turns up several times in The Atrocity Exhibition, along with imagery of intersecting planes and the mathematical modulus. Always Ballard is interested in the junction between incommensurable systems, a point of identity where they link or double up. Limestone formations in Spain connect the human spine, the primitive evolution of consciousness and the geology of the external world. The celebrity car crash is a complex fetishistic modulus in which the media, technology and the suffering human body wrap round each other; the subject, conditioned by repeated exposure to these stimuli and their association with sexual pleasure and pain, learns to respond with arousal and fear. Ballard’s fiction isn’t a weightless postmodern system of equivalences, a skating rink on which signs slip over signs. Rather it’s a system of identities that trigger passage from one order of experience to another, a physical business of blood and nerve endings that can seamlessly shift to flickering images on a screen.

Above all, The Atrocity Exhibition is a melancholy book, fixated on something terrible that it can’t let go. Its landscape is both dead and accelerating, a windblown desert strewn with the wreckage of modernity that is at the same time a place of unbearable speed and intensity. In 1964 Ballard’s wife Mary died suddenly of pneumonia, leaving him to bring up their three children alone. In 2007, when he was already terminally ill, I interviewed him. ‘I was terribly wounded by my wife’s death,’ he told me. ‘Leaving me with these very young children, I felt that a crime had been committed by nature against this young woman – and her children – and I was searching desperately for an explanation … To some extent The Atrocity Exhibition is an attempt to explain all the terrible violence that I saw around me in the early sixties. It wasn’t just the Kennedy assassination … I think I was trying to look for a kind of new logic that would explain all these events.’

New York, January 2014

My sources for this essay are personal communications with Michael Moorcock and Marc Haefele, my interview with JGB (collected in Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with J. G. Ballard 1967–2008, edited by Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara) and essays by Mike Bonsall, Mike Holliday and Rick McGrath, all to be found on Ballardian.com. Raymond Roussel’s own explanation of ‘Parmi les noirs’ can be found in How I Wrote Certain of My Books, translated by Trevor Winkfield.

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