Written from 1967-1969, The Atrocity Exhibition is Ballard’s most concentrated book—a prophetic masterpiece. Not since James Joyce and William S. Burroughs has the novel’s form—a radical departure from traditional linear narratives—been so illuminative of the shifting inner landscapes of its characters; it resembles a flickering video-collage in written form. We enter the schizophrenic psyche of the main character whose name changes (Travis, Travers, Traven, Talbot) mirror the increasing fragmentation of his external environment—a backdrop of splintered mass-cultural icons. As Ballard commented, “Its landscape is compounded of an enormous number of fictions, the fragments of the dream machine that produces our lifestyle right now. I mean fictions like TV, radio, politics, the press, and advertising. Life is an enormous novel. Today, when the fictional elements have overwhelmed reality, the main task of the arts seems to be more and more to isolate the real elements in this goulash of fictions from the unreal ones.”

 

In this edition, the deconstruction of the narrative form is taken one step further by the inclusion of recently-written annotations. This amplification of text by the author himself, twenty years later, provides valuable (and poignant) clarification of important figures, events, places and other references which may have faded into undeserved oblivion. The interplay between the “real” author’s first-person annotations and the text provides a curious displacement of subject/object, reality and fiction.

 

Yet another level of “reality” is challenged by Phoebe Gloeckner’s precisely-drawn illustrations. Their realism dismantles “pornography” like Ballard’s text: as a series of fragmentary, alienated, passionless responses to a set of stimuli. A penis inside a mouth takes on the detached distancing of a medical lecture, its eroticism excised—just as an atrocity on the news is neutralized by the commercial that follows, resulting in deadened emotional response. Implied here is a critique of science as ultimate pornography, capable of reducing the ineffable—unique personal relationships, the source of our greatest delight—to objectified, purely functional commodifications.

 

As Ballard observes, “I think we’re all perhaps innately perverse, capable of enormous cruelty, yet paradoxically our talent for the perverse, the violent, and the obscene may be a good thing. We may have to go through this phase to reach something on the other side. It’s a mistake to hold back and refuse to accept one’s nature. In The Atrocity Exhibition, the fantasies of our epoch and of its technology lie ruthlessly exposed to light, evoking all the lyrical disenchantment of their failed promise.—V. Vale