Customer Reviews

Atrocity Exhibition (Flamingo Modern Classics)

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

I could easily title this review The Patients are Running the Asylum (and Isn't It Wonderful), but you'll have to read The Atrocity Exhibition to find out why....

This strangely elegant work seems to be the nexus of Ballard's 'Concrete Trilogy' (formed by Crash, Concrete Island, and High Rise) . These other works are crisper with straight ahead, if fantastic, plots and a tight focus on their subject matter. Atrocity Exhibition is where Ballard fuses everything from this period of his writing. Sex and Speed collide with Isolation and Arhitecture to create a narrative seemingly out of control, but with its own dream logic.

Small, usually paragraph-sized, snap shots follow hard on one another in this artfully crafted non-linear tale. It's also decidely fast paced. Imagine someone resurrecting Max Ernest to direct a Hong Kong-style thriller. The reader zips along in divine confusion as characters that we think we understand seem to drift from there moorings into an increasingly abstract landscape. And its hard to tell if we are looking at decay or evolution.

For that matter opposites are played against one another throughout. We are left to balance discourses on Freud and Jung with chapter titles like 'Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan' and 'The Assassination of John F. Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Road Race'. In true Dadaist style Ballard pushes our preconceptions of high and low art with this kind of play.

The greatest delight of Atrocity Exhibition is how hard the reader has to work to keep up. Just when you think you've figured out what this tale is about, you realize that you've only reached the foothills of another steep learning curve. But don't worry, the wonder, the strangeness, and the perversity will keep you coming for more. The mind's natural desire to create narrative is thwarted again and again to be rewarded with something deeper and more profound, but almost indescribable.

Full of strange intertextual references and images this book is still years ahead of its time. It's also not without it's own deadpan humor. At one point we see a full scale replicable of Keinholz's sculpture 'Dodge '57' (which consists of the back end of a '57 and the legs of a couple making out) zooming down the highway. Ballard also weaves in his obsession with the Space Program. Even though the manned interstellar missions are over for now, we've only begun to explore the space these travels have opened up in our minds. Atrocity Exhibition, written in the late '60s, places Ballard firmly in the vanguard of those exploring the fertile space between machine and mythology.

This work is by a master of the surrealistic at the height of his powers. The next time you hear someone carping about the impossiblity of interactivity in art, just smack 'em in the side of the head with a copy of The Atrocity Exhibition.

Interest in Ballard's work is sure to be stirred by the controversial film of his novel, "Crash." "The Atrocity Exhibition" shares many of the same characters and themes. In fact, of the two works, "Atrocity Exhibition" is the better: it pushes the artistic conventions of fiction to the limits to explore the degenerating mental landscape of the protagonist. Against a nightmarish postmodern background of unethical psychological experiments gone awry and obsession with media icons, even questions of simple identity become impossible to unravel. Travis/Travers/Traven/Talbot is pushed to madness and perhaps even murder - one character seems to die in four seperate scenes! - by his co-workers, fellow psychiatrists at a teaching hospital. Modern architecture becomes confused with perverted sexuality as the protagonist projects his fantasies of Elizabeth Taylor onto high rise apartment buildings. This edition is a gem. It contains four additional Ballard stories, a preface by William S. Burroughs, and deranged illustrations by Phoebe Gloeckner who juxtaposes her world- renowned medical illustrations with images of disturbing eroticism and mechanization. Provocative, exhilarating and terrifying, Ballard sucks the reader into the psychosis of his characters. This work is Ballard's literary masterpiece. After reading it, the world seems a much scarier place.

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.

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.

Again Ballard is perverting our perceptions of life. You can either see that as a good thing or a bad thing. It's not an easy book to read. In fact at some times you may end up feeling frustrated with the book but if you persevere with it it'll be alright...once you have his notes explaining the book to you but even then he still leaves you to think about the nature of what it is all about

What I think the book is about is the whole cult of celebrity fame and the ever narrowing medical definition of it's conditions. What we see is that today's world is leading us to be dehumanized neurotic people with dangerous and repressed fetishes. Again the contents of Crash appear hear but in prequel form. He was only starting out his ideas of Vaughan's crazed nature and so on. There is also the reinactment of many of the car crashes such as JFK and Elizabeth Taylor and so on.

They say the book is experimental in it's approach. I'm not much of a book hound so I don't know what the hell they mean but it certainly one which is different in it's topical approach. Perhaps it could be said that it is experimental because it kinda reads as a magazine - a sort of doctor's journal where even the doctors are as insane as you are. You can read any part of it that you like and go over it again and again to suit your fancy. But it still holds out an enigma that will not make itself clear

Frustrating and not altogether enjoyable but it's a book that gets you thinking and makes you wonder - How messed up are we?

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.

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!!!

I innocently happened upon this book from my enjoyment of the Re/Search publications, and found myself very much changed by this treasure of literature. For me,"The Atrocity Exhibition" started off as just a story to pass the time at first, full of interesting, mysterious characters, wrapped in a murky sea of polluted thoughts and perversion. But as my urge to alleviate bordem developed into an overwhelming curiosity, I found myself seeing something of a pattern to the prose, the characters, and myself. Suddenly I found myself seeing a wonderfull tragic flow, that was not a falling of a crippled society, but an almost invisible shifting of consciousness that has been going on, and continues to change the way our thought patterns, sexuality, and our organic structures, manipulate and coarse through existence. It is like my mind was and has always been growing a genitalia which use is without bounds. So in other words, I thought the book was really neat, full of subtle, respectfull commentary on our ever changing world.

"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 generally appreciate ReSearch, their guide to J.G. Ballard
is a fine volume, and JGB himself participated in the
ReSearch version, but as a longtime Ballard reader I must
say that those who really want to get at
"The Atrocity Exhibition" should definitely find another
version. What ReSearch has produced is a coffeetable book for
the doom generation, full of tritely "ballardian" visual
imagery. Furthermore, the editorial introduction brags that
Ballard's commentary "deconstructs" the novel. If there ever
were a novel NOT in need of "deconstructing" it is The Atrocity
Exhibition.

Ballard is always very generous about the many
lame co-optations of his work, whether it be Spielberg's movie
or Cronenberg's movie or this mess, all of which have his
praise and support (which after years of public incomprehension
and hostility is understandable), but that doesn't mean you
are getting the real thing when you visit these collaborative

calamities. Read the man himself, in plain text.