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