Customer Reviews

Atrocity Exhibition

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I've always thought of *The Atrocity Exhibition* as a sort of studio transcript to the notorious Mutter Facility at the College of Physicians in Philadelphia (a grand guignol medical museum ensconced with wax models and formaldehyde exhibits, a physiognomical gallery of God's practical jokes), proving once and for all that when Beauty and its opposite coalesce into body-horror deformity, socially conditioned thinking is shattered. But Ballard goes even further, taking the Atomic and Space Age to task for its traumas, its reverberations, its scorched optics -- applying his scalpel-sharp poetic to the pathogenic aftershock of Nagasaki and an era of technological upheaval. (It is almost impossible to summarize *TAE* without tailspinning into postmodern cliches.) As Julia Kristeva once wrote, "SHOW ME what I permanently thrust aside in order to live." Ballard's book argues that no kinaesthetic language has yet been conceived to map the schizoid traceries of sexuality and the media landscape. Hence, *The Atrocity Exhibition* may be the authentic prolegomenon for all you postmodern yahoos out there trying to one-up the academic nosebleed-theory of Deleuze-Guatarri and their rabble of exegetes.(!)

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.

The Atrocity Exhibition is a novel, or a series of short but connected stories, depending on how you decide to come at it. Traven/Travis/Tallis/etc. appears as one man, moving through different evolutionary experiments, physical and psychological. He is experimenting with his psyche, as Ballard experiments with storytelling and writing. Chapter headings like "The University of Death," "Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown" and "You and Me and the Continuum" give an idea towards the scope of the characters' inner and outer explorations. The experimental sexual interactions, recurring alternate deaths and celebrity obsessions are from lists produced by Ballard using free assocation. Glimpses of themes of many of his later works can be found in this text.

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 short stories (or "condensed novels" as Ballard refers to them) that comprise this astonishing novel can be taken as a series of snapshots of a man in the still centre of a catastrophic psychological breakdown.

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.

"The Atrocity Exhibition" is an unsettling collection of post-linear vignettes devoted to the technolization of lust, the role of perversity in the late 20th century information landscape, and the shifty barrier between the organic and the architectural. Annotated by Ballard, the expanded edition of "The Atrocity Exhibition" includes three "stories" detailing cosmetic surgery on celebrities and a witty science-fiction yarn about Ronald Reagan's third Presidential term. Ballard's prose is disquietingly precise.

Other recommended Ballard: "The Wind from Nowhere" (his harrowing first novel), "The Unlimited Dream Company," "Memories of the Space Age," "Chronopolis," "The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard"

I will not repeat what others have written as all the praise is indeed justified for this classic.

I would like to add that the illustrated edition by ReSearch is the edition to have (I am not sure if this is the one that is currently available from Amazon). Phoebe Gloeckner's work and the B&W photographic collages really add tremendously to the already powerful words of J.G. Ballard.

This is perhaps the trippiest and most important book that I have ever read. I'm not going to pretend that I read tons and tons of avant-guarde literature: this was recommended to me by a philosopher studying postmodern ethics. What you have in this book is something that is neither necessarily real nor unreal, a story nor not a story. This is the Madhyamaka novel-- neither this nor that.

I'm not even fully sure that I 'got' it when I read it. it works much more subconsciously than other books-- without cohernat plot or story line-- suffering through lack of detail, etc. But it hits you, and you understand. It is represenatational of things-- of reality.... I'm not going to be able to put down a lot more than this because I want to avoid pretense, but read this book!!!

You're in for a bumpy ride...

The Atrocity Exhibition is an perversely original, deeply disturbing tale of the 'New Reality', and the disintegration of Society. It is bursting at the seams with a ferocious wit, sexuality and, always a key Ballard theme, much railing against the irrational, all-pervading violence of the modern world. He writes with a spare, exact prose that almost makes his subject matter inviting, drawing us along irresistibly. His is the dark poetry of reason, rationalising the truly irrational. Beautiful words evoking hideous imagery. Sex and violence have never been so intrinsically linked. He wishes to arouse our dormant sensibilities, to shock us, perhaps test our tolerance threshold.

Much in common with Ballard's later Crash, this hauntingly powerful novel employs Burroughsesque non-linear techniques to convey his controversial ideas. The text is broken up into composite bands of sub-heading and paragraph, giving the reading a very fragmentary feel, and like The Naked Lunch it can be dipped into at any stage of its development with satisfying results. The prose exists in isolation, the essence of good writing. The barely-plotted, minimalist storyline reflects the central character's inner mindscape haunted by dreams of JFK and Monroe, dead astronauts and motor-crash victims, as he traverses the terrible wastes of nervous breakdown. Seeking his sanity, he casts himself in a number of roles: H-bomber pilot, presidential assassin, psychopath. Finally, through the black, perverse magic of violence he transcends his psychotic turmoil to find the key to a bizarre new sexuality.

The Atrocity Exhibition is cleverly controlled tour de force of inventive writing. Every page filled with death, depravity, delusion, genocide, or some other unspeakable vice.

We are disgusted at our own enjoyment.

Ballard has a knack for making his insane ideas and conceptsmake perfect sense. This is a perfect example of that. This book isfilled with breathstealing bizarre concepts. You can really get to thinking about them. Many ideas in this angered some. Liz Taylor, Jackie O, and especially Ronald Reagan are all hit hard by Ballard's vicious insight (I don't think Ballard trying to be insulting. He was just being... weird). It's hard to tell exactly what this book is. Is it about the Atrocity Exhibition or is it the Atrocity Exhibition? The letters found at the bottom of random pages point to the latter. Ballard throws away everything anything ever taught about writing, including plot and continuity so don't try to find any, and sets out to create pure art out of words. Does he succeed? Yes.

i bought the book because of the rave reviews, because i fancy myself to be progressive and able to think on many levels. however, i was not able to grasp this book - or collection of short essays, or vignettes, or whatever - even with the foreward by burroughs and the extended commentary by ballard. confusion made reading a chore, and not an enjoyable one (where after a mighty struggle i manage to decipher an idea enough to get my mental teeth into it so that i can digest it later).

what i mean to say is NOT that this is a bad book, but rather that it is not for those who aren't familiar with ballard's philosophies/notions of automobiles and sex. i wish i could have understood these concepts more because the writing itself was excellent and the structure of the book interestingly different from everything i am used to.

in a word: beware.

I was really looking forward to reading this book because it was highly recommended and rated...what can I say? I couldn't believe what kind of nonesense it was when I started with it...someone mentioned here that this is a cult book that wouldn't be recommended to 99 percent of readers, well I guess I am one of this 99 percentile. The only time I could slightly enjoy reading it was when I was stoned and I could get some sense out of it...but since I am mostly sober all the time then this book is definitely not for me!