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The Atrocity Exhibition
First published in 1970 and widely regarded as a prophetic masterpiece, this is a groundbreaking experimental novel by the acclaimed author of ‘Crash’ and ‘Super-Cannes’.
The irrational, all-pervading violence of the modern world is the subject of this extraordinary tour de force.
The central character’s dreams are haunted by images of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, dead astronauts and car-crash victims as he traverses the screaming wastes of nervous breakdown. Seeking his sanity, he casts himself in a number of roles: H-bomber pilot, presidential assassin, crash victim, psychopath. Finally, through the black, perverse magic of violence he transcends his psychic turmoil to find the key to a bizarre new sexuality.
In this revised edition, Ballard has added extensive annotation that help to unlock many of the mysteries of one of the most prophetic, enigmatic and original works of the late twentieth century.
The irrational, all-pervading violence of the modern world is the subject of this extraordinary tour de force.
The central character’s dreams are haunted by images of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, dead astronauts and car-crash victims as he traverses the screaming wastes of nervous breakdown. Seeking his sanity, he casts himself in a number of roles: H-bomber pilot, presidential assassin, crash victim, psychopath. Finally, through the black, perverse magic of violence he transcends his psychic turmoil to find the key to a bizarre new sexuality.
In this revised edition, Ballard has added extensive annotation that help to unlock many of the mysteries of one of the most prophetic, enigmatic and original works of the late twentieth century.
210 pages, ebook
First published January 1, 1969
349 people are currently reading
19067 people want to read
About the author
J.G. Ballard
469 books4,089 followersJames Graham "J. G." Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) was an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Ballard came to be associated with the New Wave of science fiction early in his career with apocalyptic (or post-apocalyptic) novels such as The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1964), and The Crystal World (1966). In the late 1960s and early 1970s Ballard focused on an eclectic variety of short stories (or "condensed novels") such as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which drew closer comparison with the work of postmodernist writers such as William S. Burroughs. In 1973 the highly controversial novel Crash was published, a story about symphorophilia and car crash fetishism; the protagonist becomes sexually aroused by staging and participating in real car crashes. The story was later adapted into a film of the same name by Canadian director David Cronenberg.
While many of Ballard's stories are thematically and narratively unusual, he is perhaps best known for his relatively conventional war novel, Empire of the Sun (1984), a semi-autobiographical account of a young boy's experiences in Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War as it came to be occupied by the Japanese Imperial Army. Described as "The best British novel about the Second World War" by The Guardian, the story was adapted into a 1987 film by Steven Spielberg.
The literary distinctiveness of Ballard's work has given rise to the adjective "Ballardian", defined by the Collins English Dictionary as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments." The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry describes Ballard's work as being occupied with "eros, thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies".
While many of Ballard's stories are thematically and narratively unusual, he is perhaps best known for his relatively conventional war novel, Empire of the Sun (1984), a semi-autobiographical account of a young boy's experiences in Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War as it came to be occupied by the Japanese Imperial Army. Described as "The best British novel about the Second World War" by The Guardian, the story was adapted into a 1987 film by Steven Spielberg.
The literary distinctiveness of Ballard's work has given rise to the adjective "Ballardian", defined by the Collins English Dictionary as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments." The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry describes Ballard's work as being occupied with "eros, thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies".
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 601 reviews
May 30, 2022
“In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one's legs will have more significance than all the pages in War and Peace.”
JG Ballard's : The Atrocity Exhibition is, to put it mildly, an interesting reading experience. Ballard's early and repeated section 'Notes Toward a Mental Breakdown' offers something of a roadmap for the internal landscape presented in this book (novel?). A barrage of images and twisted versions of reality are thrown at the reader along with casual references to WW3, apocalypse and the erotic.
Don't look for a narrative thread here. Instead, think about : The Atrocity Exhibition as both an assault and fetishization of American icons. Ballard returns again and again to JFK and his assassination as well as figures such as Marilyn Monroe and Ronald Reagan; the book attempts both to simulate events around these figures and tear them down. You'll see the genesis of other Ballard works here, most notably : Crash. Going back to the same icons got a little old, though. Also Ballard's use of the word geometry (as in the geometry of aggression, murder, the human body, specific situations...the list goes on) lost a bit of impact because of overuse. Still, The Atrocity Exhibition was both bizarre and sometimes funny, and, despite a lack of narrative, inventive and usually engaging. 3.75 stars.
“All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or Ancient Egypt, is re-assimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonize past and future. The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality, in attractive and instantly appealing forms.”
JG Ballard's : The Atrocity Exhibition is, to put it mildly, an interesting reading experience. Ballard's early and repeated section 'Notes Toward a Mental Breakdown' offers something of a roadmap for the internal landscape presented in this book (novel?). A barrage of images and twisted versions of reality are thrown at the reader along with casual references to WW3, apocalypse and the erotic.
Don't look for a narrative thread here. Instead, think about : The Atrocity Exhibition as both an assault and fetishization of American icons. Ballard returns again and again to JFK and his assassination as well as figures such as Marilyn Monroe and Ronald Reagan; the book attempts both to simulate events around these figures and tear them down. You'll see the genesis of other Ballard works here, most notably : Crash. Going back to the same icons got a little old, though. Also Ballard's use of the word geometry (as in the geometry of aggression, murder, the human body, specific situations...the list goes on) lost a bit of impact because of overuse. Still, The Atrocity Exhibition was both bizarre and sometimes funny, and, despite a lack of narrative, inventive and usually engaging. 3.75 stars.
“All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or Ancient Egypt, is re-assimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonize past and future. The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality, in attractive and instantly appealing forms.”
March 19, 2023
Impossible to rate or even classify this weird and disturbing book from the late '60s: it's not a novel, it's not a collection of mini-novels, it's not even a psychological treatise, though it has aspects of all three.
It explores the links between death/danger and sexuality (his own wife had died suddenly a few years earlier). Parts of it will be thought obscene by many. It reflects Ballard's interests in psychoanalysis and surrealism: the very structure of the book is surreal. All of this makes more sense after reading his far more accessible autobiography, Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, which I reviewed HERE.
Write your own
It is a non-linear narrative, divided into "chapters", of which each paragraph is a self-contained nugget, with its own title. In an introduction written more than 30 years after first publication, Ballard suggests readers scan a chapter for headings that catch their eye, and if they find them interesting, to move on to nearby ones, so maybe one approach is to list a selection of paragraph titles, out of sequence? It's a bit like a game of consequences, which the Surrealists did in picture form, called Exquisite Corpse.
My edition includes Ballard's extensive notes, without which it would be almost impenetrable (and not just the pop culture references). But perhaps it would be less disturbing without them.
There's little point trying to describe the "story" or characters, but it does involve one who monitors how subjects react to scenes of car crashes as a proxy for (well, in addition to) his own life and experiences: "the eucharist of the simulated auto-disaster". Many other characters explore predilections on the boundaries.
There are many mentions of celebrities and events that were significant at the time (Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, assassination of JFK, the space race), surrealist and pop-art artists (especially Dali), Freud, and overall it shows that although Ballard decided not to pursue a career as a psychiatrist, he was still very interested in the field.
The real atrocity exhibition
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 that the Vietnam war becoming a rich vein for cinema), or in his own life and works.
This was written in '67, published in '69, and in '70, Ballard did actually put on an exhibition of crashed cars in London, and in '73, he published Crash, which is a more conventional novel, exploring the same themes. 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.
Too far
Much of this is challenging and controversial. For example, saying 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", but fearing a new puritanism in the 1990s. Personally, I think it's more complicated: our society is simultaneously very sexualised (sexy underwear for pre-schoolers) and also paranoid about child abuse to the point that the damaging effects of that exaggerated fear may outweigh the risks.
In the end, Ballard sometimes goes too far for me and I stopped reading just over half way through. Sexual tastes that I don't share are one thing, but rape is referred to several times, often with an apologist slant, "Her strong stride... carried within its rhythm a calculated invitation to her own sexuality" and although I know there are valid debates about the nature of paedophilia and whether there are grey areas, it's not something I choose to explore in any detail.
See also
For an even more gruesome look at sexuality and death, there's Yukio Mishima's short story, Patriotism, which I reviewed HERE. It's the most unpleasant fiction I’ve ever read - although it did make me laugh in places.
It explores the links between death/danger and sexuality (his own wife had died suddenly a few years earlier). Parts of it will be thought obscene by many. It reflects Ballard's interests in psychoanalysis and surrealism: the very structure of the book is surreal. All of this makes more sense after reading his far more accessible autobiography, Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, which I reviewed HERE.
Write your own
It is a non-linear narrative, divided into "chapters", of which each paragraph is a self-contained nugget, with its own title. In an introduction written more than 30 years after first publication, Ballard suggests readers scan a chapter for headings that catch their eye, and if they find them interesting, to move on to nearby ones, so maybe one approach is to list a selection of paragraph titles, out of sequence? It's a bit like a game of consequences, which the Surrealists did in picture form, called Exquisite Corpse.
departure
journeys to an interior
some bloody accident
the realization of dreams
contours of desire
an existential yes
the conceptual death
questions, always questions
hung among the corridors of sleep
soft geometry
the impossible room
the geometry of her face
transliterated pudenda
imaginary perversions
interlocked bodies
fractured smile
the lost symmetry of the blastosphere
My edition includes Ballard's extensive notes, without which it would be almost impenetrable (and not just the pop culture references). But perhaps it would be less disturbing without them.
There's little point trying to describe the "story" or characters, but it does involve one who monitors how subjects react to scenes of car crashes as a proxy for (well, in addition to) his own life and experiences: "the eucharist of the simulated auto-disaster". Many other characters explore predilections on the boundaries.
There are many mentions of celebrities and events that were significant at the time (Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, assassination of JFK, the space race), surrealist and pop-art artists (especially Dali), Freud, and overall it shows that although Ballard decided not to pursue a career as a psychiatrist, he was still very interested in the field.
The real atrocity exhibition
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 that the Vietnam war becoming a rich vein for cinema), or in his own life and works.
This was written in '67, published in '69, and in '70, Ballard did actually put on an exhibition of crashed cars in London, and in '73, he published Crash, which is a more conventional novel, exploring the same themes. 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.
Too far
Much of this is challenging and controversial. For example, saying 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", but fearing a new puritanism in the 1990s. Personally, I think it's more complicated: our society is simultaneously very sexualised (sexy underwear for pre-schoolers) and also paranoid about child abuse to the point that the damaging effects of that exaggerated fear may outweigh the risks.
In the end, Ballard sometimes goes too far for me and I stopped reading just over half way through. Sexual tastes that I don't share are one thing, but rape is referred to several times, often with an apologist slant, "Her strong stride... carried within its rhythm a calculated invitation to her own sexuality" and although I know there are valid debates about the nature of paedophilia and whether there are grey areas, it's not something I choose to explore in any detail.
See also
For an even more gruesome look at sexuality and death, there's Yukio Mishima's short story, Patriotism, which I reviewed HERE. It's the most unpleasant fiction I’ve ever read - although it did make me laugh in places.
May 30, 2017
The Atrocity Exhibition is something like a shock therapy – it is painstakingly unpleasant but it makes one react.
“Now that sex is becoming more and more a conceptual act, an intellectualization divorced from affect and physiology alike, one has to bear in mind the positive merits of the sexual perversions.”
The Atrocity Exhibition is a series of dreamscapes or, to be more precise, madscapes born in the sick mind of the protagonist – the psychiatrist with the split and fragmented identity. His visions are fatalistic and gloomily surreal and they are modeled on the paintings by Max Ernst and other surrealists and on Locus Solus, the surrealistic novel by Raymond Roussel.
“Entering the exhibition, Travis sees the atrocities of Vietnam and the Congo mimetized in the ‘alternate’ death of Elizabeth Taylor; he tends the dying film star, eroticizing her punctured bronchus in the over-ventilated verandas of the London Hilton; he dreams of Max Ernst, superior of the birds; ‘Europe after the Rain’; the human race – Caliban asleep across a mirror smeared with vomit.”
Sex, violence, death and mass culture become protagonist’s obsessions. He dreams of the World War III and envisions an atomic bomb explosion as the ultimate ejaculation.
“Has a festival of atrocity films ever been held? Every year at the Oscars ceremony, some might say.”
Violence, sex and kitsch are the stuff our madness is made of.
“Now that sex is becoming more and more a conceptual act, an intellectualization divorced from affect and physiology alike, one has to bear in mind the positive merits of the sexual perversions.”
The Atrocity Exhibition is a series of dreamscapes or, to be more precise, madscapes born in the sick mind of the protagonist – the psychiatrist with the split and fragmented identity. His visions are fatalistic and gloomily surreal and they are modeled on the paintings by Max Ernst and other surrealists and on Locus Solus, the surrealistic novel by Raymond Roussel.
“Entering the exhibition, Travis sees the atrocities of Vietnam and the Congo mimetized in the ‘alternate’ death of Elizabeth Taylor; he tends the dying film star, eroticizing her punctured bronchus in the over-ventilated verandas of the London Hilton; he dreams of Max Ernst, superior of the birds; ‘Europe after the Rain’; the human race – Caliban asleep across a mirror smeared with vomit.”
Sex, violence, death and mass culture become protagonist’s obsessions. He dreams of the World War III and envisions an atomic bomb explosion as the ultimate ejaculation.
“Has a festival of atrocity films ever been held? Every year at the Oscars ceremony, some might say.”
Violence, sex and kitsch are the stuff our madness is made of.
February 18, 2019
Disjointed? Yes.
Psychotic? Yes.
Titillating? Occasionally.
Interesting? Of far less interest than could have been expected.
A lot of ramblings about car crashes, sex, Kennedy, all kinds of trauma...
Psychotic? Yes.
Titillating? Occasionally.
Interesting? Of far less interest than could have been expected.
A lot of ramblings about car crashes, sex, Kennedy, all kinds of trauma...
January 7, 2014
I have mixed feelings about this book, as I do about all of Ballard's fictions. Ballard is brilliant, no doubt about that: he possesses one of the clearest prose styles of any writer, a style not just clear but unexpectedly ecstatic in a glacial sort of way. Some of his short stories are among the finest ever written. His collection *Vermilion Sands* in particular is absolutely one of the highest points of the form. As for his novels, they can be astoundingly original but also too obsessive.
*The Atrocity Exhibition* is an experimental novel, but it reads more like a collection of very strange and bewildering (though certainly powerful and affecting) linked stories -- except that the stories aren't really linked in a normal sense: they are more like echoes, amplified feedback, psychotic recursions of each other. This book certainly improves near the end. The last quarter is the best: the satire becomes more easy to comprehend, despite its excessive savagery.
The main problem I have with *The Atrocity Exhibition* is that I simply don't agree with many of Ballard's beliefs that inform the book. Or rather he makes some truly excellent and pertinent points but often overstates them. I just don't accept the 'death of affect' for instance, nor that science has become the ultimate pornography, nor that pornography is necessarily a powerful catalyst for social change, etc. And Ballard's obsessions can become too intrusive in a way that isn't good. Ballard claims to be an early warning system for the breakdown of 'normality' but he often acts more like its salesman.
Having said that, he's a genius, one of the best living writers in the world, and I'm delighted that I've finally read his 'difficult' cult book, the one that inspired so many of his best later works including the novel *Crash!*
*The Atrocity Exhibition* is an experimental novel, but it reads more like a collection of very strange and bewildering (though certainly powerful and affecting) linked stories -- except that the stories aren't really linked in a normal sense: they are more like echoes, amplified feedback, psychotic recursions of each other. This book certainly improves near the end. The last quarter is the best: the satire becomes more easy to comprehend, despite its excessive savagery.
The main problem I have with *The Atrocity Exhibition* is that I simply don't agree with many of Ballard's beliefs that inform the book. Or rather he makes some truly excellent and pertinent points but often overstates them. I just don't accept the 'death of affect' for instance, nor that science has become the ultimate pornography, nor that pornography is necessarily a powerful catalyst for social change, etc. And Ballard's obsessions can become too intrusive in a way that isn't good. Ballard claims to be an early warning system for the breakdown of 'normality' but he often acts more like its salesman.
Having said that, he's a genius, one of the best living writers in the world, and I'm delighted that I've finally read his 'difficult' cult book, the one that inspired so many of his best later works including the novel *Crash!*
February 7, 2021
The 60s according to Ballard: a world of mayhem and violence in all their possible shapes and manifestations, from deranged science to the pornographic use of catastrophes by tabloids and TV, in a surreal atmosphere of stillness and extreme acceleration at the same time.
This is not a novel: it's a scrapbook made of pictures from weekly magazines and anatomy manuals, mathematic equations and visual art cryptic references. The text is a series of short paragraphs with apparently (?) unrelated titles, snapshots that can also be read at random (like Burroughs' cut-ups); no plot nor chronological order, since it's up to the reader to decide whether to read it normally or just leaf through the pages.
This literary anomaly is far from being a wanton, meaningless collection of vignettes though. "The Atrocity Exhibition" is a profound book in which a man's fragmented self explores the post-modern era of Hollywood stars, art icons, Pop celebs and Congo massacres, WW3 (yes) bomber pilots, pornography (the ultimate form of scientific exploration of the human body).
The main character's several identities set off in search of a meaning - a journey through the chaotic orgy of madness and violence taking place all around him (and us) at any given moment. All we vaguely know is that our man is a doctor, possibly a psychiatrist or a neurologist. Then his psyche, haunted by the daily 'atrocity exhibition' of our era and struggling to make sense of it all, degenerates into a shapeshifting conundrum of identities: he becomes a crashed bomber pilot, a psychopath, a sex maniac, an insane scientist roaming the streets of post-atomic landscapes scattered with wrecked vehicles, deserted shooting ranges, ambiguous medical labs, suburban crash-test areas; not to mention the obsessive, literally hovering images of celebrities: Marilyn Monroe (disfigured by radioactivity bruises), Albert Camus, Harvey Lee Oswald, Brigitte Bardot, Jacqueline Kennedy, Ralph Nadar are all actors in the same atrocity newsreel - atrocious exhibits in the frightening museum of our time.
Ballard's world is a geography of rusty crashed cars, half-burned helicopters, beaches lost in space and time like a no man's land of hominous silence and stillness. The great icons of Surrealism provide the writer with a huge amount of visual inspiration: in fact he explicitly refers to the art of Dalí, Dominguez, Tanguy, Erst, Matta all throughout the book.
This is indeed a very graphic but also extremely cryptic work, to say the least. One is often required to stop reading and check out some of the numberless references to art, science or current political affairs (Ballard started to write this in the late 60s); but it's definitely worth the effort.
"The Atrocity Exhibition" is an enigma to be deciphered. A medieval mystery of the atomic era.
Although being one of his first books, this unclassifiable anti-novel is nonetheless the fulfilment of Ballard's recurrent themes. The physical/mental connection between traumatic experiences and eroticism, the inhuman attitude of the Modern Scientist, the perverse fascination with violent death (war newsreels are compared to porn movies by Ballard's psychiatrists): such controversial issues will be further analysed in a long series of novels to come, e.g. "Crash", "High Rise", "Rushing to Paradise".
I therefore recommend those readers who are still unaquainted with Ballard to start with this absolute masterpiece, without being afraid of its reputation. It is neither incomprehensible nor meaningless: just let yourself go and delve into it.
Believe me, you'll feel at home.
This is not a novel: it's a scrapbook made of pictures from weekly magazines and anatomy manuals, mathematic equations and visual art cryptic references. The text is a series of short paragraphs with apparently (?) unrelated titles, snapshots that can also be read at random (like Burroughs' cut-ups); no plot nor chronological order, since it's up to the reader to decide whether to read it normally or just leaf through the pages.
This literary anomaly is far from being a wanton, meaningless collection of vignettes though. "The Atrocity Exhibition" is a profound book in which a man's fragmented self explores the post-modern era of Hollywood stars, art icons, Pop celebs and Congo massacres, WW3 (yes) bomber pilots, pornography (the ultimate form of scientific exploration of the human body).
The main character's several identities set off in search of a meaning - a journey through the chaotic orgy of madness and violence taking place all around him (and us) at any given moment. All we vaguely know is that our man is a doctor, possibly a psychiatrist or a neurologist. Then his psyche, haunted by the daily 'atrocity exhibition' of our era and struggling to make sense of it all, degenerates into a shapeshifting conundrum of identities: he becomes a crashed bomber pilot, a psychopath, a sex maniac, an insane scientist roaming the streets of post-atomic landscapes scattered with wrecked vehicles, deserted shooting ranges, ambiguous medical labs, suburban crash-test areas; not to mention the obsessive, literally hovering images of celebrities: Marilyn Monroe (disfigured by radioactivity bruises), Albert Camus, Harvey Lee Oswald, Brigitte Bardot, Jacqueline Kennedy, Ralph Nadar are all actors in the same atrocity newsreel - atrocious exhibits in the frightening museum of our time.
Ballard's world is a geography of rusty crashed cars, half-burned helicopters, beaches lost in space and time like a no man's land of hominous silence and stillness. The great icons of Surrealism provide the writer with a huge amount of visual inspiration: in fact he explicitly refers to the art of Dalí, Dominguez, Tanguy, Erst, Matta all throughout the book.
This is indeed a very graphic but also extremely cryptic work, to say the least. One is often required to stop reading and check out some of the numberless references to art, science or current political affairs (Ballard started to write this in the late 60s); but it's definitely worth the effort.
"The Atrocity Exhibition" is an enigma to be deciphered. A medieval mystery of the atomic era.
Although being one of his first books, this unclassifiable anti-novel is nonetheless the fulfilment of Ballard's recurrent themes. The physical/mental connection between traumatic experiences and eroticism, the inhuman attitude of the Modern Scientist, the perverse fascination with violent death (war newsreels are compared to porn movies by Ballard's psychiatrists): such controversial issues will be further analysed in a long series of novels to come, e.g. "Crash", "High Rise", "Rushing to Paradise".
I therefore recommend those readers who are still unaquainted with Ballard to start with this absolute masterpiece, without being afraid of its reputation. It is neither incomprehensible nor meaningless: just let yourself go and delve into it.
Believe me, you'll feel at home.
January 1, 2013
The Atrocity Exhibition is a really a long poem, like The Waste Land or Four Quartets. This is why it's very easy to reconfigure the text as poetry.
The lost gills of the dying film actress
The pilot watches him from the roof of a lion house
The familiar geometry of the transfigured pudenda
On the way to a terminal zone
A fading harmonic fractured smile spread across the windscreen
The wig amongst the beer bottles
And you, coma : marilyn Monroe
You: coma : Marilyn Monroe
O technique of decalcomania, O subvocal rosary,
The persistence of the beach, the assumption of the sand-dune
Arabesques, planes of yantra
"Do you lip-read?" she asked, in the yes or no of the borderzone
"The act of intercourse is always a model for something else –
Don't you think?"
"I am the Five Hundred Foot Christ of Salvador Dali"
In the darkness the halffilled reservoirs reflect the starlight.
In the night air, concrete towers, blockhouses, half buried in rubble of disasters, giant conduits, filled with tyres
Helicopters like air spiders
January 11, 2020
A dark satiric blur of short prose bursts melding societal obsessions with sex, war, death, celebrity, and the almighty automobile into one phantasmagorical conglomeration. To read it is to experience a relentless series of oft-repeated images seared across one's brain: sprawling art installations; constant circling helicopters; clinical acts of sexual deviancy; automobiles eroticized and destroyed; celebrities and politicians (often as one and the same, also eroticized and destroyed); urban wastelands composed of concrete overpasses and disused car parks; acts of war in general, and in Vietnam specifically. The frenetic pace slows toward the end, as the text transitions to the high absurdism of scientific findings on the health benefits of car crashes, combat films, and atrocity porn; and a chapter on the reactions of research subjects to various deconstructed distortions of Ronald Reagan (that was pure comedic gold).
August 25, 2021
Should be read after Crash. Human as landscape, industrial wasteland as superorganism. The mathematical formulae of asexual coitus. Fiction as abstract art. Pale, sapped, inhuman dreamscapes. Traffic jams. Meteor-scored faces, etched in ghostly moonlight. A skeletal William S. Burroughs mannikin was strung up in Ballard's closet, dressed as Marilyn Monroe, strapped with a prosthetic something or other, dangling a clownish Ronald Reagan mask from its vampiric jaws.
April 17, 2013
Not exactly a novel, Ballard may have written more involving narratives than this 1970 present-dystopia of modernity in meltdown, but it's unlikely that he has ever surpassed its severe and unsettling perfection of form and function, diamond-hard, brilliant, and single-mindedly focused. While each unit could function as a story (and they were originally published as such in the late 60s) there's also a total cohesion here that makes it more than a collection, into some kind of shambling and unique hybrid form.
In content, The Atrocity Exhibition is a series of iterative interlocked reconfigurations of certain inescapable elements of the modern experience. Sex and death; celebrity, thermonuclear war, and auto-accidents; architecture, advertising, mass media, traumas physical and psychological. Depersonalized, fragmented and utterly haunting. I've heard it said somewhere on GR that Ballard was a great writer without being a good writer, which may have been true in places, but not here -- the writing is perfectly true to its subject, immaculately shaped into a precision instrument of dissection.
Scientific reports on the psychosexual resonance of then-Governor Reagan's media presence, superpositions of dead celebrities over motorways and vacant airstrips, war footage collaged in abandoned theaters, conceptually enacted murders seeking closure to various national-scale ruptures. And not to mention that the personal can not help but invade these large-scale concerns: it was also Ballard's attempt to work through the untimely death of his first wife.
I've got this in the amazing 1990 RE/Search edition, an unsettling large-format juxtaposition of a newly ballard-annotated text against deftly detourned medical illustration and photographs of modern architecture. Likely the perfect form of an edifice of deconstructed experience of the 20th century.
In content, The Atrocity Exhibition is a series of iterative interlocked reconfigurations of certain inescapable elements of the modern experience. Sex and death; celebrity, thermonuclear war, and auto-accidents; architecture, advertising, mass media, traumas physical and psychological. Depersonalized, fragmented and utterly haunting. I've heard it said somewhere on GR that Ballard was a great writer without being a good writer, which may have been true in places, but not here -- the writing is perfectly true to its subject, immaculately shaped into a precision instrument of dissection.
Scientific reports on the psychosexual resonance of then-Governor Reagan's media presence, superpositions of dead celebrities over motorways and vacant airstrips, war footage collaged in abandoned theaters, conceptually enacted murders seeking closure to various national-scale ruptures. And not to mention that the personal can not help but invade these large-scale concerns: it was also Ballard's attempt to work through the untimely death of his first wife.
I've got this in the amazing 1990 RE/Search edition, an unsettling large-format juxtaposition of a newly ballard-annotated text against deftly detourned medical illustration and photographs of modern architecture. Likely the perfect form of an edifice of deconstructed experience of the 20th century.
April 2, 2019
Here is the amazing true story about my experience reading the #2 novel in my J.G. Ballard Binge, The Atrocity Exhibition.
I picked this one up and opened it to a random page…and I read a sentence that was remarkably strange.
Here is the sentence:
He sat on the edge of the water-filled basin, staring into the lucid depths of that exposed placenta.
So I did it again, opening the book to a random page, and got:
The profound anality of the Presidential contender may be expected to dominate the United States in the coming years.
And because it always feels incomplete unless you do a thing three times, I opened it again, and discovered this sentence:
The fine sand poured into the hollows, a transfer of geometry as delicate as a series of whispers.
After that I was done with my experiment and I went to the beginning, and what do you know, my edition included a foreword from J.G. Ballard, and in it, Ballard suggested that I open this book up and read random sentences, because that was the way he had written it.
Of course now that I had permission from the author himself to read his book chaotically and unpredictably, the thrill turned flat, and I read it from start to finish, but as I read I could not shake the idea that any order of the sentences that make up this novel would be just as startling and unexpected as the order Ballard ordered them in.
That’s kind of incredible. It’s a book that doesn’t make a lot of sense, and yet it fills the senses. This novel is a sense-filled experience to read.
It is also a time capsule kind of book, in that the references are all about dead people, some of whom haven't remained so in/famous with the passing years since the novel was first published.
The Atrocity Exhibition is my second novel in my April 2019 J.G. Ballard binge, following Running Wild, which I liked better. But I liked them both a lot.
If you want to read some Ballard with me come join in the fun right here:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
I picked this one up and opened it to a random page…and I read a sentence that was remarkably strange.
Here is the sentence:
He sat on the edge of the water-filled basin, staring into the lucid depths of that exposed placenta.
So I did it again, opening the book to a random page, and got:
The profound anality of the Presidential contender may be expected to dominate the United States in the coming years.
And because it always feels incomplete unless you do a thing three times, I opened it again, and discovered this sentence:
The fine sand poured into the hollows, a transfer of geometry as delicate as a series of whispers.
After that I was done with my experiment and I went to the beginning, and what do you know, my edition included a foreword from J.G. Ballard, and in it, Ballard suggested that I open this book up and read random sentences, because that was the way he had written it.
Of course now that I had permission from the author himself to read his book chaotically and unpredictably, the thrill turned flat, and I read it from start to finish, but as I read I could not shake the idea that any order of the sentences that make up this novel would be just as startling and unexpected as the order Ballard ordered them in.
That’s kind of incredible. It’s a book that doesn’t make a lot of sense, and yet it fills the senses. This novel is a sense-filled experience to read.
It is also a time capsule kind of book, in that the references are all about dead people, some of whom haven't remained so in/famous with the passing years since the novel was first published.
The Atrocity Exhibition is my second novel in my April 2019 J.G. Ballard binge, following Running Wild, which I liked better. But I liked them both a lot.
If you want to read some Ballard with me come join in the fun right here:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
Read
February 1, 2016Reading this was like being trapped in a doctor's waiting room and repeatedly bashed in the back of the head with a cast iron frying pan. Not plot driven, not character driven, just a series of graphic montages that just get weirder as the book goes on. At no time during this read could I have explained what was going on, and I was bored silly throughout, with a lot of WTF-did-I-just-read moments. I think the author might have been intended the book to be funny. Perhaps you are not supposed to think about plot, but just let the nasty imagery float across your brain. Given that the author was a survivor of the Japanese invasion of Shanghai, and was writing this book at the end of the sixties after its decade of tragic celebrity deaths, political assassinations, collapsing Apollo program, unsavoury sexual revolution and the Vietnam War on the TV every day...then perhaps the cramped, dark nature of this horribly dated book is understandable, if not palatable.
November 28, 2019
Although The Atrocity Exhibition is indeed innovative in its nonlinear, associative structure, and ambitious in its sweeping satire of popular culture, it's difficult for me to interpret the novel as anything other than a prototype for
Crash
, which is surely the more mature and complete realisation of the ideas and themes which Ballard first presents here.
Most notably absent in these impulsive, impressionistic sketches are the cohesiveness of the later novel's vision, it's immediacy, the earnest poetry of its prose, and its relentless focus, all of which serve to underline the patent absurdity of its depictions of violent sexuality, and in turn that of the culture it seeks to ridicule. By contrast, The Atrocity Exhibition's intuitive, scattershot approach hits more broadly, though with far less force. Its obscenity fails to be shocking or powerful: it is merely obscene.
Most notably absent in these impulsive, impressionistic sketches are the cohesiveness of the later novel's vision, it's immediacy, the earnest poetry of its prose, and its relentless focus, all of which serve to underline the patent absurdity of its depictions of violent sexuality, and in turn that of the culture it seeks to ridicule. By contrast, The Atrocity Exhibition's intuitive, scattershot approach hits more broadly, though with far less force. Its obscenity fails to be shocking or powerful: it is merely obscene.
September 26, 2023
Transcendent descriptions of drained pools, empty airfields, astronomical telescopes, abandoned observatories, car parks, 'metallicized light' reflecting on burning white concrete... all the hits.
September 12, 2016
This and Crash are two of my favourite books, precisely because of their weirdness, because they showed the teenage me that something surprising and original could be done with the novel form beyond the staid and traditional forms foisted upon us as A level English students. (My less fortunate peers in the soft South had to make do with Hermann Hesse.)
Both Crash and the Atrocity Exhibition belong very much to their time, of course, but they do encapsulate a sort of postmodern masculine sociopathy as it is mediated through contemporary culture and geography. In addition, the clinical descriptions and the absence of affect in the narrator (partly, I think, the fortuitous result of Ballard's medical training) lend the books an eerie detachment, a reductio ad absurdum of the blasé attitude identified by Georg Simmel as a psychological by-product/coping mechanism of modernity. Ballard demonstrates beautifully how this blasé attitude, when taken to its logical conclusion - as required by postmodernity (or hypermodernity) - ultimately results in nihilism.
Having said all that, as in the case of de Sade, many many readers fail to appreciate just how funny Ballard is. Maybe the dry English sense of humour isn't so readily apparent on paper. Just try to imagine him writing it with a wry smile.
Both Crash and the Atrocity Exhibition belong very much to their time, of course, but they do encapsulate a sort of postmodern masculine sociopathy as it is mediated through contemporary culture and geography. In addition, the clinical descriptions and the absence of affect in the narrator (partly, I think, the fortuitous result of Ballard's medical training) lend the books an eerie detachment, a reductio ad absurdum of the blasé attitude identified by Georg Simmel as a psychological by-product/coping mechanism of modernity. Ballard demonstrates beautifully how this blasé attitude, when taken to its logical conclusion - as required by postmodernity (or hypermodernity) - ultimately results in nihilism.
Having said all that, as in the case of de Sade, many many readers fail to appreciate just how funny Ballard is. Maybe the dry English sense of humour isn't so readily apparent on paper. Just try to imagine him writing it with a wry smile.
June 28, 2021
As brilliant as Crash is, that's how not-brilliant this mess is.
Were I still of acid-dropping age, I'd still be over this kind of brummagem philosophizing.
I expect 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. Maybe he needed to get this out before Crash could come. I am not in a position to say. But I can state, with great confidence, that this will not be remembered as Ballard's finest work.
Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It's no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function. A future Rimbaud, Van Gogh or Adolf Hitler will emerge from their timeless wastes.
Were I still of acid-dropping age, I'd still be over this kind of brummagem philosophizing.
I expect 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. Maybe he needed to get this out before Crash could come. I am not in a position to say. But I can state, with great confidence, that this will not be remembered as Ballard's finest work.
April 13, 2019
Ballard’s iconic experimental novel previewing the death of affect and lending itself to the horrible drum loop that opens Joy Division’s Closer. Includes such fun words as ‘mimetized’ and ‘buccal’ and ‘polyperverse’. Mad and briilliant.
November 24, 2015
For all those people who read "Naked Lunch" and thought, "Gee, I'd like to read more of something like this but with a definite emphasis on the psychosexual aspects of architecture and how it mirrors the collapse of society" then not only have you come to the right place, but there is really nowhere else to go. Or for all those people who believe the world needs at least two books focusing on sexual arousal via the use of car accidents, you are going to be very glad this book exists. But for those of us who don't fall into those two camps, there are other reasons to enjoy this that don't involve admiring the firm chassis of that sexy import with its patent leather seats.
This book's had several different forms over the years, first starting off as a variety of short pieces published roughly all over the place that were eventually condensed and collected under this umbrella, which gave them some thematic scope and the chance to inform each other. Of course, with a title like "The Atrocity Exhibition" (a title so good that Ian Curtis apparently didn't even bother reading the book before stealing it for one of his own songs) and story titles that involve invoking the name of a famous celebrity or politician in a sexual context, its no surprise that American publishers did what American publishers normally do when confronted with something remotely controversial that they aren't able to easily make money from said controversy . . . they freaked out. The book was retitled "Love and Napalm: Export USA", which Ballard wasn't a huge fan of and frankly doesn't work as well. The current editions are all large size paperbacks and are liberally sprinkled with annotations from the author himself, as well as a variety of photographs and illustrations, most of which can be imagined as if "Grey's Anatomy" the TV show treated sex like they were "Gray's Anatomy" the medical textbook. Oddly, they add some atmosphere and texture to the stories, as long as you don't mind clinical cross sections of genitalia and other things that should be sexy reduced to a diagram that is the very opposite of sexy. But welcome to the world of JG Ballard.
As for the "stories" themselves . . . any hope you might have that you're in for anything resembling a linear reading experience will probably dissipate by the second or third story when you realize that the main characters appear to be trapped in some kind of weird psychosexual version of "Krazy Kat", where a man with a similar name goes quietly (or not) crazy, being affected by, among other things, the deaths of JFK and Marilyn Monroe, the impact of the media and news on society, or what appears to be his wife, who dies repeatedly and then gets better in the same way my video game character does when I hit the reset button. Its fascinating in its way, presenting a series of fragmentary scenarios that go out of their way to read like essays on sex from people who learned how to write about sex by reading a book about how to write a book on sex. Without any narrative progression to speak of, you're basically forced to go along with the flow and immerse yourself in Ballard's ideas about the media and society and apparently the immense psychic bomb that was the death of JFK.
As a study in society driving someone crazy, it's great. As a conventional story with a beginning, middle and end, not so much and you have to let go of any ideas along those lines when opening this work. As frustrating as the structure can be at times, there's a weird fascination with how committed to this Ballard is and how he's able to communicate these decently strange ideas in an equally odd format and yet the combination of the two makes it not seem that strange at all. What helps, interestingly enough, are the annotations and while I'm normally not a huge fan of the author hanging out to hold my hand as he explains the premise of his own novel, his notes on his own stories are extremely enlightening and often act as mini-essays in themselves, expanding on his ideas involving how the media shapes the perceptions of people, especially in terms of sexual desires, often far more coherently than the stories themselves do. Some of it comes across as scarily prescient (especially in terms of shaping our reactions to tragic events, in particular those that are blocked from depicting the true look of large body counts) and some of it seems rather dated (while a lot of the stories seem to be an attempt to come to terms with the Kennedy assassination, its ultimate impact seems to be diminished with each further generation that wasn't witness to the event . . . fortunately we've gone and replaced it with other events), but rarely is it a case of Ballard simply tooting his own horn and it can be argued that they're essential to understanding the work fully.
Meanwhile, those who stick it out will be rewarded with what amounts to a dry run for "Crash" and although it's not the focus of this book, it actually comes across as the most understandable aspect of it (you can even suggest that "Crash" had even more impact by taking some of the strange ideas in this book and molding them into something resembling an actual story . . . or you could interpret it as the sell out cousin to this book's no holds barred uncompromising experimentation), though folded into all the other weirdness it doesn't stand out as much as it does when you're merely focusing on sexy car crashes. This edition also adds four extra short stories, three of which are basically "stories" involving lovingly detailed but clinical descriptions of surgeries done on famous people . . . I see the point of the style and I see where he's going with it but I always get the impression that I should be more shocked by it than I am. But maybe its impact is dulled because I'm in the healthcare profession and read my own surgical reports for fun. The last story is probably the most savage, taking the idea of Ronald Reagan as President (he's a pretty common target throughout the book, despite it having been written in the last sixties) for terms past his two to a rather horrifying extreme that in some parts doesn't seem entirely removed from the reality we got (the story's satirical lionizing of him is amusing in light of how some political circles almost canonize him these days).
But for all that, is it worth reading? The easy answer is "No, if you don't want to be challenged" but the truth is there's nothing else Ballard has written that was even remotely like this, vicious and despairing, gleeful and horrified, detached and drowning in blood, perverse and mourning . . . its a lot to decipher in its density and there are plenty of ideas here that will keep you pondering long after you've closed the book on its lovingly rendered cross sections of breasts but on a real level this is undiluted Ballard, for better or for worse, and even if the message isn't always palatable or even communicated in an easy to understand way. It's one man's lament on what he perceives is the collapse of society and his attempts to comprehend it and in doing so, make us comprehend the full import. The fact that we didn't listen and indeed seem to have doubled down on everything the book was warning about doesn't make the attempt any less fearless, or his message that much less urgent.
This book's had several different forms over the years, first starting off as a variety of short pieces published roughly all over the place that were eventually condensed and collected under this umbrella, which gave them some thematic scope and the chance to inform each other. Of course, with a title like "The Atrocity Exhibition" (a title so good that Ian Curtis apparently didn't even bother reading the book before stealing it for one of his own songs) and story titles that involve invoking the name of a famous celebrity or politician in a sexual context, its no surprise that American publishers did what American publishers normally do when confronted with something remotely controversial that they aren't able to easily make money from said controversy . . . they freaked out. The book was retitled "Love and Napalm: Export USA", which Ballard wasn't a huge fan of and frankly doesn't work as well. The current editions are all large size paperbacks and are liberally sprinkled with annotations from the author himself, as well as a variety of photographs and illustrations, most of which can be imagined as if "Grey's Anatomy" the TV show treated sex like they were "Gray's Anatomy" the medical textbook. Oddly, they add some atmosphere and texture to the stories, as long as you don't mind clinical cross sections of genitalia and other things that should be sexy reduced to a diagram that is the very opposite of sexy. But welcome to the world of JG Ballard.
As for the "stories" themselves . . . any hope you might have that you're in for anything resembling a linear reading experience will probably dissipate by the second or third story when you realize that the main characters appear to be trapped in some kind of weird psychosexual version of "Krazy Kat", where a man with a similar name goes quietly (or not) crazy, being affected by, among other things, the deaths of JFK and Marilyn Monroe, the impact of the media and news on society, or what appears to be his wife, who dies repeatedly and then gets better in the same way my video game character does when I hit the reset button. Its fascinating in its way, presenting a series of fragmentary scenarios that go out of their way to read like essays on sex from people who learned how to write about sex by reading a book about how to write a book on sex. Without any narrative progression to speak of, you're basically forced to go along with the flow and immerse yourself in Ballard's ideas about the media and society and apparently the immense psychic bomb that was the death of JFK.
As a study in society driving someone crazy, it's great. As a conventional story with a beginning, middle and end, not so much and you have to let go of any ideas along those lines when opening this work. As frustrating as the structure can be at times, there's a weird fascination with how committed to this Ballard is and how he's able to communicate these decently strange ideas in an equally odd format and yet the combination of the two makes it not seem that strange at all. What helps, interestingly enough, are the annotations and while I'm normally not a huge fan of the author hanging out to hold my hand as he explains the premise of his own novel, his notes on his own stories are extremely enlightening and often act as mini-essays in themselves, expanding on his ideas involving how the media shapes the perceptions of people, especially in terms of sexual desires, often far more coherently than the stories themselves do. Some of it comes across as scarily prescient (especially in terms of shaping our reactions to tragic events, in particular those that are blocked from depicting the true look of large body counts) and some of it seems rather dated (while a lot of the stories seem to be an attempt to come to terms with the Kennedy assassination, its ultimate impact seems to be diminished with each further generation that wasn't witness to the event . . . fortunately we've gone and replaced it with other events), but rarely is it a case of Ballard simply tooting his own horn and it can be argued that they're essential to understanding the work fully.
Meanwhile, those who stick it out will be rewarded with what amounts to a dry run for "Crash" and although it's not the focus of this book, it actually comes across as the most understandable aspect of it (you can even suggest that "Crash" had even more impact by taking some of the strange ideas in this book and molding them into something resembling an actual story . . . or you could interpret it as the sell out cousin to this book's no holds barred uncompromising experimentation), though folded into all the other weirdness it doesn't stand out as much as it does when you're merely focusing on sexy car crashes. This edition also adds four extra short stories, three of which are basically "stories" involving lovingly detailed but clinical descriptions of surgeries done on famous people . . . I see the point of the style and I see where he's going with it but I always get the impression that I should be more shocked by it than I am. But maybe its impact is dulled because I'm in the healthcare profession and read my own surgical reports for fun. The last story is probably the most savage, taking the idea of Ronald Reagan as President (he's a pretty common target throughout the book, despite it having been written in the last sixties) for terms past his two to a rather horrifying extreme that in some parts doesn't seem entirely removed from the reality we got (the story's satirical lionizing of him is amusing in light of how some political circles almost canonize him these days).
But for all that, is it worth reading? The easy answer is "No, if you don't want to be challenged" but the truth is there's nothing else Ballard has written that was even remotely like this, vicious and despairing, gleeful and horrified, detached and drowning in blood, perverse and mourning . . . its a lot to decipher in its density and there are plenty of ideas here that will keep you pondering long after you've closed the book on its lovingly rendered cross sections of breasts but on a real level this is undiluted Ballard, for better or for worse, and even if the message isn't always palatable or even communicated in an easy to understand way. It's one man's lament on what he perceives is the collapse of society and his attempts to comprehend it and in doing so, make us comprehend the full import. The fact that we didn't listen and indeed seem to have doubled down on everything the book was warning about doesn't make the attempt any less fearless, or his message that much less urgent.
December 29, 2009
Revisited this right before Christmas...
Check out this back cover blurb:
When the ATROCITY EXHIBITION was originally printed (1970), Nelson Doubleday saw a copy and was so horrified he ordered the entire press run shredded.
What Nelson Doubleday allegedly saw that made him figuratively soil himself in righteous indignation was one of the stories near the end of this book entitled 'Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan.' Legend has it that a wag distributed copies of this story (minus title and headings) at the 1980 Republican National Convention and it was roundly praised by attendees as a thorough psychological analysis of Reagan's public appeal. Heh heh.
This is easily one of Ballard's most experimental works. Arguments can be made as to whether this is a collection of loosely connected short stories or an actual novel. A sloppy summary of this book would be that the main character, Traven, is sliding towards a mental breakdown and is on a quest in the interim to recreate the deaths of iconic media celebrities such as JFK in a way that "makes sense." References to Ballard's love for the surrealists are also hidden throughout this work, particularly Ernst and Dali.
Traven is fairly typical of most of Ballard's characters in that he is basically an empty jacket walking around. I'm not sure if this is a deficiency on Ballard's part as a writer or if this was his way of allowing the reader to more easily step into the role of the main character. As his mental deterioration continues his name also changes within each section (Travis, Tallis, Talbot, etc.).
His cold, clinical prose style shines brilliantly throughout this book. To wit:
The Geometry of Her Face. In the perspectives of the plaza, the junctions of the underpass and the embankment, Talbot at last recognized a modulus that could be multiplied into the landscape of his consciousness. The descending triangle of the plaza was repeated in the facial geometry of the young woman. The diagram of her bones formed a key to his own postures and musculature, and to the scenario that had preoccupied him at the Institute. He began to prepare for departure. The pilot and the young woman now deferred to him. The fans of the helicopter turned in the dark air, casting elongated ciphers on the dying concrete.
If it is still in print, the Re/Search Publications edition of this book is the one to get. It contains sidebar commentary written by Ballard twenty years later along with the addition of his celebrity cosmetic surgery stories.
Check out this back cover blurb:
When the ATROCITY EXHIBITION was originally printed (1970), Nelson Doubleday saw a copy and was so horrified he ordered the entire press run shredded.
What Nelson Doubleday allegedly saw that made him figuratively soil himself in righteous indignation was one of the stories near the end of this book entitled 'Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan.' Legend has it that a wag distributed copies of this story (minus title and headings) at the 1980 Republican National Convention and it was roundly praised by attendees as a thorough psychological analysis of Reagan's public appeal. Heh heh.
This is easily one of Ballard's most experimental works. Arguments can be made as to whether this is a collection of loosely connected short stories or an actual novel. A sloppy summary of this book would be that the main character, Traven, is sliding towards a mental breakdown and is on a quest in the interim to recreate the deaths of iconic media celebrities such as JFK in a way that "makes sense." References to Ballard's love for the surrealists are also hidden throughout this work, particularly Ernst and Dali.
Traven is fairly typical of most of Ballard's characters in that he is basically an empty jacket walking around. I'm not sure if this is a deficiency on Ballard's part as a writer or if this was his way of allowing the reader to more easily step into the role of the main character. As his mental deterioration continues his name also changes within each section (Travis, Tallis, Talbot, etc.).
His cold, clinical prose style shines brilliantly throughout this book. To wit:
The Geometry of Her Face. In the perspectives of the plaza, the junctions of the underpass and the embankment, Talbot at last recognized a modulus that could be multiplied into the landscape of his consciousness. The descending triangle of the plaza was repeated in the facial geometry of the young woman. The diagram of her bones formed a key to his own postures and musculature, and to the scenario that had preoccupied him at the Institute. He began to prepare for departure. The pilot and the young woman now deferred to him. The fans of the helicopter turned in the dark air, casting elongated ciphers on the dying concrete.
If it is still in print, the Re/Search Publications edition of this book is the one to get. It contains sidebar commentary written by Ballard twenty years later along with the addition of his celebrity cosmetic surgery stories.
August 31, 2013
By and large, I think J.G. Ballard is awesome, with everything of his I'd read to date being a real treat. Sadly, such things can never last...
Mostly flying at least 100 feet above my head at all times, this book mostly made me feel like a complete dumbass. I understood the meaning of individual words, sentences, and even the occasional paragraph, but as a whole? I know it's got something to do with sex and car crashes, but after that, I'm out. Actually, that's not quite true. There's also something to do with space and time, the Kennedy assassination and the cult of celebrity, but quite what that is, erm...
I've since discovered, thanks to the intervention of a sympathetic friend (and the author's note, at the very end of the book - helpful!) that this wasn't intended to be read in a linear fashion but dipped into randomly, as well as having accompanying art work. Clearly, buying this for my Kindle was something of a mistake and the fact that I did read it linearly, with no accompanying imagery (which may have shed some light on certain passages) meant it was a very fractured reading experience, with the occasional flashes of brilliance only making the rest seem even more foggily hallucinatory.
If it hadn't been for the notes at the end of each chapter I'd have been lost entirely, and I clung to these like a life-boat.
I can't believe I'm giving a Ballard book such a shitty rating and it's tempting to pretend that I'm smarter than I am, but while the notes were a constant source of interesting thoughts and observances, and while the seeds of some of Ballard's later work were clearly planted here, I can't honestly say I understood, or enjoyed it.
**Also posted at Randomly Reading and Ranting**
Mostly flying at least 100 feet above my head at all times, this book mostly made me feel like a complete dumbass. I understood the meaning of individual words, sentences, and even the occasional paragraph, but as a whole? I know it's got something to do with sex and car crashes, but after that, I'm out. Actually, that's not quite true. There's also something to do with space and time, the Kennedy assassination and the cult of celebrity, but quite what that is, erm...
I've since discovered, thanks to the intervention of a sympathetic friend (and the author's note, at the very end of the book - helpful!) that this wasn't intended to be read in a linear fashion but dipped into randomly, as well as having accompanying art work. Clearly, buying this for my Kindle was something of a mistake and the fact that I did read it linearly, with no accompanying imagery (which may have shed some light on certain passages) meant it was a very fractured reading experience, with the occasional flashes of brilliance only making the rest seem even more foggily hallucinatory.
If it hadn't been for the notes at the end of each chapter I'd have been lost entirely, and I clung to these like a life-boat.
I can't believe I'm giving a Ballard book such a shitty rating and it's tempting to pretend that I'm smarter than I am, but while the notes were a constant source of interesting thoughts and observances, and while the seeds of some of Ballard's later work were clearly planted here, I can't honestly say I understood, or enjoyed it.
**Also posted at Randomly Reading and Ranting**
May 29, 2016
As a reader of Ballard, I’ve always preferred his early novels (The Drowned World, The Crystal World) and short stories (those collected in The Disaster Area, The Four-Dimensional Nightmare, and The Overload Man). Read Ballard for any length of time and you know he returns to the same obsessive images and landscapes again and again, often to powerful effect. Well, The Atrocity Exhibition is obsessive Ballard taken to the max. It’s the full Ballardian commedia dell’arte, replaying all the variations with his recurring cast of mentally exhausted doctors and passive, white-dressed Giaconda-wives and girlfriends. Through fragmented narratives, via collections of widely disparate images, Ballard attempted to capture the ‘peculiar psychological climate that existed in the middle sixties’ — and, of course, his own peculiar psychological climate, too, dealing as he was with the very recent and sudden death of his young wife. The landscapes of the Atrocity Exhibition stories are haunted by blown-up, Madonna-like images of women which sometimes literally fill the sky, but which fail to enable his male protagonists to relate to the real women they have beside them. But this is a book all about fragmentation, dissociation, the post-traumatic need to somehow create a unity out of a shattered whole, to replay past disasters (the death of Marilyn Monroe, the assassination of Kennedy), but in a way that makes sense. It’s a book about what Ballard called ‘the death of affect’ — dehumanisation, trauma, dislocation.
It’s not an easy read. It’s not always a rewarding read. The initial shock of the form of these ‘condensed novels’ — fragmented narratives presented as paragraph-long chapters with snappy Ballardian titles — is vitalising, but after a while the repetition starts to feel a little stale. What works, for me, in his short stories and novels, didn’t always here. Perhaps I shouldn’t have read them one after the other as I did; perhaps it was more important for Ballard to write these than for me to read them — certainly it revitalised his writing in the following decade. Interesting, then, and certainly ‘important’, this is essence of extreme, obsessive Ballard (which is what we want him to be, isn’t it?). I can’t help feeling, though, that it was very firmly answered by his last book, Miracles of Life, which is an affirmation of all the humanising elements in his life (most notably his children), as much as The Atrocity Exhibition is about the dehumanising elements.
It’s not an easy read. It’s not always a rewarding read. The initial shock of the form of these ‘condensed novels’ — fragmented narratives presented as paragraph-long chapters with snappy Ballardian titles — is vitalising, but after a while the repetition starts to feel a little stale. What works, for me, in his short stories and novels, didn’t always here. Perhaps I shouldn’t have read them one after the other as I did; perhaps it was more important for Ballard to write these than for me to read them — certainly it revitalised his writing in the following decade. Interesting, then, and certainly ‘important’, this is essence of extreme, obsessive Ballard (which is what we want him to be, isn’t it?). I can’t help feeling, though, that it was very firmly answered by his last book, Miracles of Life, which is an affirmation of all the humanising elements in his life (most notably his children), as much as The Atrocity Exhibition is about the dehumanising elements.
July 20, 2012
At first I thought this is going to be good. But the authors self-proclaimed "free association" method of writing quickly becomes tedious. In the version I read, each chapter was followed up with explanations. I found the explanations and their tangential ramblings to be much more interesting than the story itself. I could sum up the book in a few sentences 1) Car crashes are like sex and sex is like car crashes. 2) Ralph Nader, JFK, Marylin Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor.
March 21, 2023
A genius writer at his surrealist best.
November 16, 2008
A book (like Pynchon's V or Burrough's cut-up novels) to experience, not read.
Seriously, you will be immersing your head (if not your heart) into a strangely dis-associative mindspace, made even more disturbing and poignant by its now-fixed place in the past. If THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION was a a marker, a beacon point in time, where are we, mankind, in relation to it now?
Not for everyone, not for the squeamish, not for those looking for a narrative or story, not for the unadventurous, not for the wholesome, and not, I'm sorry to say, for the hopeful. But for the curious who crave a difficult slice of a brilliant, perceptive mind at a moment in time where the future we inhabit now was laid out like the progression of a logical equation (for a writer of the time honest enough to grasp it and commit it to to paper), THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION is a must read.
This can't be anyone's favorite book because it wounds you and changes you.
UNCOMPROMISING!
Seriously, you will be immersing your head (if not your heart) into a strangely dis-associative mindspace, made even more disturbing and poignant by its now-fixed place in the past. If THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION was a a marker, a beacon point in time, where are we, mankind, in relation to it now?
Not for everyone, not for the squeamish, not for those looking for a narrative or story, not for the unadventurous, not for the wholesome, and not, I'm sorry to say, for the hopeful. But for the curious who crave a difficult slice of a brilliant, perceptive mind at a moment in time where the future we inhabit now was laid out like the progression of a logical equation (for a writer of the time honest enough to grasp it and commit it to to paper), THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION is a must read.
This can't be anyone's favorite book because it wounds you and changes you.
UNCOMPROMISING!
January 2, 2009
One of the most visionary books I've read, a startling series of linked stories cataloging mental breakdowns, reenactments of tragic events, sexual obsessions with architectural patterns, the beneficial affects of war atrocity footage, and celebrity sex-death fantasies. Sample chapter titles: "Plan for the Assassination of Jaqueline Kennedy" and "Why I Want to F*** Ronald Reagan." Horrifying, but also tinged with an odd clinical beauty.
January 14, 2024
This is Ballard at his most extreme and experimental, almost a distillation of pure Ballardian extreme metaphors. Heady and challenging stuff.
Although listed in his bibliography as a novel this isn't any such thing. It's a collection of short pieces that can't even be characterised as short stories. Most of the pieces feature recurring characters but they also repeat the same themes of sex, violence and celebrity.
Although listed in his bibliography as a novel this isn't any such thing. It's a collection of short pieces that can't even be characterised as short stories. Most of the pieces feature recurring characters but they also repeat the same themes of sex, violence and celebrity.
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July 26, 2022The Atrocity Exhibition is not a novel. It is also, by all means, a strangely weird collection of electric flashes and hallucinatory dream sequences. It was clear from the get-go that I will re-read it many more times, and I enjoyed the prose and the style (unwelcoming as though it may seem at first) enough to look forward to that.
October 21, 2022
The Atrocity Exhibition: a compilation of linked pieces written between 1966 and 1976, with each chapter’s paragraphs conceived as “condensed novels”.
In this, the WWIII is a war of the mind (or against it). It derives from an aggressive mass media mental invasion, following irreversible descent into a world of psychosis. Psychotic episodes distort reality as a way of attaching personal meaning to it. That said, Ballard masterfully blurs the lines between realities, where no opposition is found, but instead a continuum, in which “inner and outer landscapes seem to merge”. Making sense of existence proves challenging when logic and meaning aren’t consistent with a rapid perversion of morality.
“Sex is now a conceptual act, it's probably only in terms of the perversions that we can make contact with each other at all.”
Faced with the limitations of language, the body is emblematically used as a reactive inner landscape, leading to an almost visual and cinematic reading experience.
“The test of language is how well it can be translated into other tongues, and sex is the most negotiable language of all.”
Rooted in melancholy and abjection (immersed in the wells of grief), Ballard blindly commits to the task of investigating the destructiveness of human desire.
The fragmentary form results in an unexpected cohesiveness, obviously reflective of the psychotic experience on both individual level, as well as on a social macro-spectrum.
Ballard’s writing is certainly idiosyncratic and almost perpetually alliterate in its commitment to internalised fixations. His proneness for splurging on repulsive imagery may initially disguise his influences, but only in the same way a sheer veil covers a face - its features remain recognisable if your gaze is undiverted.
In my personal mental stage, I like to imagine Ballard and Freud rewriting mental discourse with the freedom for outcomes of possibly apocalyptic implications. It would be something along the lines of weirdly wonderful, fictionally real and unapologetically honest. Its title might have been “Epiphanies of violence and desire”.
Highly recommended to David Lynch fans. Can we get an adaptation by him already?
In this, the WWIII is a war of the mind (or against it). It derives from an aggressive mass media mental invasion, following irreversible descent into a world of psychosis. Psychotic episodes distort reality as a way of attaching personal meaning to it. That said, Ballard masterfully blurs the lines between realities, where no opposition is found, but instead a continuum, in which “inner and outer landscapes seem to merge”. Making sense of existence proves challenging when logic and meaning aren’t consistent with a rapid perversion of morality.
“Sex is now a conceptual act, it's probably only in terms of the perversions that we can make contact with each other at all.”
Faced with the limitations of language, the body is emblematically used as a reactive inner landscape, leading to an almost visual and cinematic reading experience.
“The test of language is how well it can be translated into other tongues, and sex is the most negotiable language of all.”
Rooted in melancholy and abjection (immersed in the wells of grief), Ballard blindly commits to the task of investigating the destructiveness of human desire.
The fragmentary form results in an unexpected cohesiveness, obviously reflective of the psychotic experience on both individual level, as well as on a social macro-spectrum.
Ballard’s writing is certainly idiosyncratic and almost perpetually alliterate in its commitment to internalised fixations. His proneness for splurging on repulsive imagery may initially disguise his influences, but only in the same way a sheer veil covers a face - its features remain recognisable if your gaze is undiverted.
In my personal mental stage, I like to imagine Ballard and Freud rewriting mental discourse with the freedom for outcomes of possibly apocalyptic implications. It would be something along the lines of weirdly wonderful, fictionally real and unapologetically honest. Its title might have been “Epiphanies of violence and desire”.
Highly recommended to David Lynch fans. Can we get an adaptation by him already?
January 24, 2024
Essential cult novel from 1970 that, while dated, still has something to tell us as the atrocity exhibition just grows more annexes with every year we progress. Media networks, wars, random violence, medical horrors, and a pervasive sense of a dissolving personality are permanent fixtures of our world, and Ballard told us so. The Re/Search edition I read has plentiful annotations and commentary and extras that come in handy with this, at times, opaque text. I’ll write about this elsewhere at greater length.
July 16, 2024
Es un libro loco y brutal. Pero es tan loco que uno no sabe lo que está leyendo. Algo como lo que pasa cuando uno leer a William Burroughs. De todas formas es disfrutable, y se puede entender como un borrador de Crash. Es muy experimental. La primera parte es inentendible, y el final tiene como más sentido, aunque eso también es bien relativo. Carros que se chocan, niños mutilados, gente que disfruta la guerra de vietnam de forma sexual, primeros planos de heridas bucales y genitales, y estudios para demostrar que mezclar un discurso de Ronald Reagan con impresiones anales produce pensamientos antisemitas, y que mostrarle heridas atroces a niños psicóticos produce "mejoras" y sensación de calma.
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