COPYRIGHT
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
This edition published by Fourth Estate in 2014
A revised, expanded, annotated, illustrated edition was first published in the USA by Re/Search Publications in 1990
Copyright © J. G. Ballard 1990
The original edition was first published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape in 1970, and first published in paperback by Panther Books in 1972
Copyright © J. G. Ballard 1969
Introduction © Hari Kunzru 2014
Interview © Travis Elborough 2006
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Source ISBN: 9780007116867
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER ISBN: 9780007322190
Version: 2016-01-20
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Author’s Note
Preface by William S Burroughs
Introduction by Hari Kunzru
1 The Atrocity Exhibition
2 The University of Death
3 The Assassination Weapon
4 You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe
5 Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown
6 The Great American Nude
7 The Summer Cannibals
8 Tolerances of the Human Face
9 You and Me and the Continuum
10 Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy
11 Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A.
12 Crash!
13 The Generations of America
14 Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan
15 The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race
APPENDIX:
Princess Margaret’s Face Lift
Mae West’s Reduction Mammoplasty
J. G. Ballard with Travis Elborough
About the Author
Praise
Also by the Author
About the Publisher
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Most of the film stars and political figures who appear in The Atrocity Exhibition are still with us, in memory if not in person – John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. Together they helped to form the culture of celebrity that played such a large role in the 1960s, when I wrote The Atrocity Exhibition.
Other figures, though crucially important to the decades that followed, have begun to sink below the horizon. How many of us remember Abraham Zapruder, who filmed the Kennedy assassination in Dallas? Or Sirhan Sirhan, who murdered Robert Kennedy? At the end of each chapter I have provided a few notes that identify these lesser characters and set out the general background to the book.
Readers who find themselves daunted by the unfamiliar narrative structure of The Atrocity Exhibition – far simpler than it seems at first glance – might try a different approach. Rather than start at the beginning of each chapter, as in a conventional novel, simply turn the pages until a paragraph catches your eye. If the ideas or images seem interesting, scan the nearby paragraphs for anything that resonates in an intriguing way. Fairly soon, I hope, the fog will clear, and the underlying narrative will reveal itself. In effect, you will be reading the book in the way it was written.
J. G. Ballard, 2001
PREFACE BY WILLIAM BURROUGHS
The Atrocity Exhibition is a profound and disquieting book. The nonsexual roots of sexuality are explored with a surgeon’s precision. An auto-crash can be more sexually stimulating than a pornographic picture. (Surveys indicate that wet dreams in many cases have no overt sexual content, whereas dreams with an overt sexual content in many cases do not result in orgasm.) The book opens: ‘A disquieting feature of this annual exhibition … was the marked preoccupation of the paintings with the theme of world cataclysm, as if these long-incarcerated patients had sensed some seismic upheaval within the minds of their doctors and nurses.’
The line between inner and outer landscapes is breaking down. Earthquakes can result from seismic upheavals within the human mind. The whole random universe of the industrial age is breaking down into cryptic fragments: ‘In a waste lot of wrecked cars he found the burnt body of the white Pontiac, the nasal prepuce of LBJ, crashed helicopters, Eichmann in drag, a dead child …’ The human body becomes landscape: ‘A hundred-foot-long panel that seemed to represent a section of sand dune … Looking at it more closely Doctor Nathan realized that it was an immensely magnified portion of the skin over the iliac crest …’ This magnification of image to the point where it becomes unrecognizable is a keynote of The Atrocity Exhibition. This is what Bob Rauschenberg is doing in art – literally blowing up the image. Since people are made of image, this is literally an explosive book. The human image explodes into rocks and stones and trees: ‘The porous rock towers of Tenerife exposed the first spinal landscape … clinker-like rock towers suspended above the silent swamp. In the mirror of this swamp there are no reflections. Time makes no concessions.’
Sexual arousal results from the repetition and impact of image: ‘Each afternoon in the deserted cinema: the latent sexual content of automobile crashes … James Dean, Jayne Mansfield, Albert Camus … Many volunteers became convinced that the fatalities were still living and later used one or the other of the crash victims as a private focus of arousal during intercourse with the domestic partner.’
James Dean kept a hangman’s noose dangling in his living room and put it around his neck to pose for news pictures. A painter named Milton, who painted a sexy picture entitled ‘The Death of James Dean’, subsequently committed suicide. This book stirs sexual depths untouched by the hardest-core illustrated porn. ‘What will follow is the psychopathology of sex relationships so lunar and abstract that people will become mere extensions of the geometries of situations. This will allow the exploration without any trace of guilt of every aspect of sexual psychopathology.’
Immensely magnified portion of James Dean subsequently committed suicide. Conception content relates to sexual depths of the hardest minds. Eichmann in drag in a waste lot of wrecked porous rock.
INTRODUCTION BY HARI KUNZRU
In 1966 New Worlds, a British science fiction magazine edited by the writer Michael Moorcock, published a ‘condensed novel’ by J. G. Ballard titled ‘The Assassination Weapon’. Moorcock was, he remembers, ‘delighted’ to receive Ballard’s copy. ‘It was exactly what I’d been looking for and I demanded more. He complained I was making his eyes bleed, turning them out. For me it was exemplary, a flag to wave for authors and readers … I’d been nagging Jimmy to develop stories he’d mapped out on his walls in Letraset and type cut out of copies of Chemistry and Industry (they were all over his living room) and ‘The Assassination Weapon’ delivered far more than I’d hoped for.’ Later that same year New Worlds published ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, which in 1970 would become the title story of Ballard’s most notorious book.
Under Moorcock, New Worlds was at the forefront of science fiction’s so-called ‘new wave’. In the golden age of the thirties and forties, SF had been a genre of ray guns and robots, focused on the frontiers opened up by science and technology. It was muscular, optimistic, often aggressive, its heroes exploring space and colonizing planets with an almost nineteenth-century vigour. Moorcock’s polemic editorials repositioned the genre as a speculative avant-garde, a venue for a more anxious and subversive style of imagination. Ballard’s experimental fictions share a set of preoccupations – the media, sex, war, altered states of consciousness, the troubling nature of political and religious authority – with other new wave writers like Samuel Delaney, Thomas M. Disch, Norman Spinrad and Philip K. Dick, all of whom were published in the magazine.
Ballard’s other main supporter in this period was Ambit, the tiny but influential literary journal run by London paediatrician Martin Bax. Also in 1966 Bax published ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’ and ‘The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’. The following year Ballard became Ambit’s prose editor, bringing in the artist Eduardo Paolozzi (as Moorcock did at New Worlds) to produce a series of collages and visual essays that echoed Ballard’s own obsessions. Looking at the contributor lists for these very different magazines we see on the one hand Ballard alongside major SF writers like Brian Aldiss and M. John Harrison and on the other, literary modernists like Ann Quin, Peter Porter and B. S. Johnson. The fact that Ballard was present in both these milieux was a sign that certain rigorously policed borders in British culture were beginning to crumble. However, neither New Worlds nor Ambit was in any sense the ‘mainstream’. Ironically, there is a publisher’s advertisement on the back of Ambit 29 (cover: pop art Kennedy in racing goggles) promoting Anthony Powell, Paul Scott, J. B. Priestley and Noël Coward, alongside a biography of Winston Churchill. Against this pale background, Ballard’s provocations were profoundly shocking.
