Above all, The Atrocity Exhibition is a melancholy book, fixated on something terrible that it can’t let go. Its landscape is both dead and accelerating, a windblown desert strewn with the wreckage of modernity that is at the same time a place of unbearable speed and intensity. In 1964 Ballard’s wife Mary died suddenly of pneumonia, leaving him to bring up their three children alone. In 2007, when he was already terminally ill, I interviewed him. ‘I was terribly wounded by my wife’s death,’ he told me. ‘Leaving me with these very young children, I felt that a crime had been committed by nature against this young woman – and her children – and I was searching desperately for an explanation … To some extent The Atrocity Exhibition is an attempt to explain all the terrible violence that I saw around me in the early sixties. It wasn’t just the Kennedy assassination … I think I was trying to look for a kind of new logic that would explain all these events.’
New York, January 2014
My sources for this essay are personal communications with Michael Moorcock and Marc Haefele, my interview with JGB (collected in Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with J. G. Ballard 1967–2008, edited by Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara) and essays by Mike Bonsall, Mike Holliday and Rick McGrath, all to be found on Ballardian.com. Raymond Roussel’s own explanation of ‘Parmi les noirs’ can be found in How I Wrote Certain of My Books, translated by Trevor Winkfield.
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