THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION – J.G. Ballard (1970)

This review is more or less a random collage of fragments that appealed to me: fragments of reviews found on Goodreads, of the book’s preface by William Burroughs, of Hari Kunzru’s introduction, of a 2019 text by Rob Doyle in The Irish Times, and quotes from Ballard & the book itself.

Part of this review also went through an additional process, as I asked an AI to attempt to integrate & summarize some of these fragments into a coherent whole – but I don’t think it did very well on that front.

My editing is fairly minimal, not zero. I also wrote a few sentences or parts of sentence of my own.

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In 1964 J.G. Ballard’s wife died suddenly of pneumonia, leaving him to bring up their three children alone. In 2007, when he was already terminally ill, Hari Kunzru interviewed him. “I was terribly wounded by my wife’s death. 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.”

The Atrocity Exhibition is a challenging read that takes the reader on a journey into the abstract and hallucinatory realm of Ballard’s writing. It crosses over from his more familiar territory of cold and sterile science fiction and delves into a world reminiscent of Burroughs. The central narrative is elusive, making the reading process difficult, but for some it might be worthwhile if you are up for the challenge.

The book can be seen as a long poem. However, Ballard works against himself when his imitations & appropriations of the mind-numbing jargon of medical and sociological studies become mind-numbing themselves. Still, there are interesting phrases & scenes to be found throughout. The author notes that accompany later editions are at times more interesting than the text itself.

The Ballard book that should grace every home is not Crash, nor even The Atrocity Exhibition, but Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with JG Ballard 1967-2008. In those interviews, ideas teem with intoxicating abundance, whereas the novels that serve as vehicles for those ideas tend to be clunky and long-winded, their plots and cut-out characters the paraphernalia of an entertainment form unsuited to the agitated 21st-century brain that Ballard anticipated. He was such a superb commentator on his own fiction, one wonders whether the fiction was needed at all. Might he not have simply pretended it existed, then given us books of pure ideation?

The Atrocity Exhibition is a novel about sex, death, media manipulation, car crashes, and celebrity foreshadowing various themes found in his later works. Fame and the treatment of the famous by the media are explored, as well as linking car crashes and the like with erotic impact, a theme he explores more famously in Crash. I did appreciate his point that media sanitation of violence and sex means that the public can easily dismiss or ignore these ‘atrocities’, but his vehicle for explaining this is abstract, hindering easy engagement by the reader. Except in the final chapters, Ballard’s self-proclaimed “free association” method of writing quickly becomes tedious and monotonous.

This book proves once again – as if I needed any further proof this far into our tiresomely exhibitionist century – that other people’s sexual fetishes make for dull reading, even when they are gussied up with artful prose and oodles of past celebrity names.

But here we come to the crux of this review. While Ballard’s execution is nearly perfect, the actual work he has executed is trite, irritating, often pedantic, shallow and lacks either the earnestness or irony that might salvage it, even if Ballard tries to project an image of being detached from regular society too: “The Atrocity Exhibition‘s original dedication should have been ‘To the Insane’. I owe them everything.”

Some elements are weirdly prescient, whether in a societal sense (the “banalization of celebrity… an instant, ready-to-mix fame as nutritious as packet soup”, and the Vietnam war becoming a rich vein for cinema), or in his own life and works: this was written in ’67 and in ’70 Ballard did actually put on an exhibition of crashed cars in London, and in ’73 he published Crash. The real exhibition provoked strong, violent and sometimes strange reactions in ways that the same vehicles on the street outside would not. Most bizarrely, a model hired to interview visitors whilst she was naked, said, after seeing the exhibits, that she would only do it topless.

On Crash Ballard has written the following: “Throughout Crash I have used the car not only as a sexual image, but as a total metaphor for man’s life in today’s society. As such the novel has a political role quite apart from its sexual content, but I would still like to think that Crash is the first pornographic novel based on technology. In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other in the most urgent and ruthless way. Needless to say, the ultimate role of Crash is cautionary, a warning against that brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape.” It’s easy to see the same applies to this earlier novel. It’s also of note that Ballard would later regret dubbing Crash a cautionary tale, asserting that it is in fact “a psychopathic hymn. But it is a psychopathic hymn which has a point”. The question again is: was Ballard enough of an earnest psychopath himself? Would psychopaths even want to communicate something of a point to the world?

Either way, time has been an enemy of the book’s controversial nature. Who still cares about what Ballard wrote in the notes: that “Pornography is a powerful catalyst for social change, and its periods of greatest availability have frequently coincided with times of greatest economic and scientific advance”?

He sat on the edge of the water-filled basin, staring into the lucid depths of that exposed placenta.

The profound anality of the Presidential contender may be expected to dominate the United States in the coming years.

The fine sand poured into the hollows, a transfer of geometry as delicate as a series of whispers.

The author’s traumatic loss of his wife and the subsequent utterly rearranged life and lifestyle explains at least some of this early-onset logorrhea. Variations on a theme. Kaleidoscopic meditation on the sexuality and non-sexuality of the body, the barrage of cultural imagery, yada yada… you know the drill.

The attempt at abstraction isn’t always engaging, and the prose style – in terms of descriptive ability – is repetitive… every landscape looking like a Max Ernst, a surgical tool, or a rib cage. The characters operate in it as repeat motifs, cropping up in different scenarios and locations as different people.

There are stories here, for those who want to take the time to find them, but the book is held together more by its themes than by its narratives.

This is Ballard’s most outlandish book, a bizarre and eccentrically profane work whose first edition was ordered pulped by publisher Nelson Doubleday when he came across such chapters as “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” and “The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race.” I had been looking forward to reading this for a while. Now that I have finally finished it–it is not that long, but it is muddled in its own weird way–I have to say it was something of a disappointment.

The action takes place in a typical Ballardian setting: a hostile future world, barren and desolate, technologically advanced but emotionally primitive. The “narrative” is frequently interrupted by strange lists of scientific factoids and artistic observations, and descriptions of bizarre experiments concerning insanity, Vietnam, and car crashes, among other things. Media heroes from the 1960s appear regularly on billboards, or in the sky, or in other ways, emphasizing the rapid growth of the media’s impact on the consciousnesses of average people, and the totemic nature of those earlier media stars in comparison with today’s less impressive luminaries. Ballard intermingles their images with obsessive fantasies. In his mind World War III represents the final self-destruction and imbalance of an asymmetric world. The human organism is an atrocity exhibition at which he is an unwilling spectator.

Behind their display frames the images of Nader and JFK, napalm and air crash victims revealed the considerable ingenuity of the film makers. Yet the results were disappointing; whatever Talbot had hoped for had clearly not materialized. The violence was little more than a sophisticated entertainment.

Ballard obsesses over the ways violent mass media spectacles – Vietnam, the assassination of JKF, the suicide of Marilyn Monroe – send shockwaves across the global unconscious. But for me, Bormgans, the real question is if such an unconsciousness actually exists.

The Atrocity Exhibtion looks on 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 might have been a threat once, but I think it was and is hardly effective given the current state of the world. As such, a miserable, failed attempt.

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