Atrocity Exhibition [Paperback]

The book opens in a converted gymnasium at an exhibition of paintings produced by schizophrenics, an event to which the patients themselves are not invited. If Ballard's irony rings true, then the reader of *TAE* is the real, underlying patient, a "doublethinking" innocent in the scan-lines of the psychiatric machine, a test subject weighted-down by the collective anguish of the 20th century. (In essence, Ballard compels us to expand our awareness to a hundred things, so that our pain will be only a hundredth of our awareness.) From the weapons ranges of New Mexico to the space-age bunkers of the Nazi Atlantic Wall, to the mysterious and potent relics of a post-despair media landscape, to the cubicle purgatory of the knowledge-worker's carpal tunnel syndrome, to the cosmetic wounds of vehicular manslaughter and the death of love, Ballard traverses the nodal points, the seeing places, the cult sanctuaries of global neurosis. His original dedication: "To the Insane."

*The Atrocity Exhibition* is a bitter pill, at times grindingly dull. But patient readers can't escape the feeling that they are taking part in some painful and reprehensible conspiracy, a psychological voyage through the air-conditioned nightmare of zero time. While some argue that Ballard never really understood the true currents behind technology's prosthetic will-to-power, instead substituting an introverted array of cryptic tableaux, wistful post-Bomb residuals, and obsessive-compulsive urban simulacra, no one can deny his iconic repertoire of moods and lunatic juxtapositions, a world of dark-adapted souls wandering the derelict edge-communities of Cape Canaveral and Los Alamos, a grounded astronaut in the corridors of sleep, a mythic film-actress floating in formaldehyde, a mental patient unhinged by spinal landscapes of history's time warp. Ballard is merciless in his nonsense correspondences and pretentious techno-rhetoric, but every few paragraphs he gets it just right, sees truly into the wilted heart of an aerial creature navigating the dusky precincts of what we can peremptorily call the Postapocalyptic, beyond origins and ends, energies and passions crystalled by a cutting-edge (in 1968 anyway) literary sensibility.

The book encapsulates everything that's "good" and everything that's "bad" about that appalling shibboleth, Postmodern [Aesth]et(h)ics. As such, it has achieved textbook-status amongst those who wish to write *real* science-fiction this late in history, or ambitious readers who want to formulate their own private aesthetic of what "speculative fiction" can and should be.

The five-star rating is pure hubris on my part. I wouldn't recommend this novel to 99% of a literary public weaned on Toni Morrison or the watered-down aesthetics of someone like Helen Vendler. Yet for those slogging in and around the edge-culture of spiritual ennui and postmodern stupefaction, trying to squeeze that last bit of irony out of our blasted, disaffected industrial landscapes, *The Atrocity Exhibition* may be the soul-bomb for you. Only by marching straight into the purgatories of media pathology and urban disaffection can a program of mental health be formulated, only by understanding the historical underpinnings of postmodern malaise can the culture-shocked reader begin trawling for alternatives.

Returning to the Mutter museum, the uber-FAQ amongst visitors to the facility seems to be "Is it real?" -- or, more profoundly, "Is that ME?" While readers of *The Atrocity Exhibition* and *Crash* tend to the more vulgar "What is this garbage?" and "Are you friggen kidding me?" One can be forgiven for asking either set of questions, I suppose. Ballard's work still dominates our compulsive desire for self-discovery when the Self has been displaced into spinal levels of media bandwidth, where "highways, office blocks, faces and street signs are perceived as...elements in a malfunctioning central nervous system"(44). To the Insane.

Vulgar? Perhaps. Trite? In a sense. Obscurantist? At times. Essential reading? Absolutely.

Special features of the Re/Search revised edition includes an introduction by William S. Burroughs, new notes and comments from Ballard, and four additional short stories. Notes and commentary from Ballard himself run in the margins alongside the text to which they are related. The collection of medical illustrations by Phoebe Gloeckner is impressive. Often overlooked are the excellent black and white urban images, photographed by Ana Barrado. Her pictures are purposefully "Ballardesque," showing abandoned parking lots, beaches and launch sites.

The almost static nature of large parts of the book (intensified by sterile settings such as hotel rooms, institutional buildings, multilane highways - in short transitional places with no value other than their ability to lead elsewhere) are due to the main character having lost any awareness of the passage of time.

He has been hollowed out by his mental crash and has filled that emptiness with a timeless and undiscriminating apprehension of everything around him - and this is where the danger of the book comes from. Where, Ballard asks, would someone who saw the world as a series of discrete and unconnected things (and this, perhaps, is where those obsessive lists that intersperse the book come from) start to assign priorities among those things, to start re-building some coherent picture of this chaos of images.

The answer is that Travis (or Traven or Tallis or whoever it is behind the masks the "hero" manufactures) takes the most powerful images he finds as the basis of his new world - and according to Ballard those would be of sex, violence and celebrity.

And so T**** wanders through a empty world watched over by the vast, indifferent and no longer even vaguely human images of fame, finding as much to be aroused by in the gentle but swift rippling of the bodies of two colliding cars as in the complexly intersecting forms of two human bodies.

And yet this flattened affective landscape acquires a topography as T**** learns to, firstly, simply accept this world and then to rejoice in the strange freedom it gives him.

Ballard is often accused of being amoral, and this is perhaps not unfair, but he might retort that he is actually more moral than his critics. He sees a world which has been altered by human perception of it so profoundly that our choice is to either accept those chances, or be swept under piles of a sand that, on microscopic examination, is made up of countless millions of identical pictures of Marilyn Monroe.