Chapter Five, Part I:


Experiments and simulations:
The Atrocity Exhibition

This book stirs sexual depths unstirred by the hardest core illustrated porn. William S. Burroughs (1990). Preface to The Atrocity Exhibition[1]

Part I. Introduction: ‘deviant logic’

In his lecture ‘Air War and Literature’ (1997, rev. 1999), W. G. Sebald argues that the recollections of German victims of area and fire bombing by the allies in World War II are unreliable. His argument, that an artificial account may, paradoxically be more authentic, suggests an approach to Ballard’s writing. Sebald comments that eye-witness accounts sound discontinuous and inauthentic, and that they frequently resort to clichés:

The apparently unimpaired ability — shown in most of the eye witness reports — of everyday language to go on functioning as usual raises doubts of the authenticity of the experiences they record. The death by fire within a few hours of an entire city, with all its buildings and its trees, its inhabitants, its domestic pets, its fixtures and fittings of every kind, must inevitably have led to overload, to paralysis of the capacity to think and feel in those who succeeded in escaping. The accounts of individual eyewitnesses, therefore, are of only qualified value, and need to be supplemented by what a synoptic and artificial view reveals.[2]

These bombings were the logical outcome of the technological developments of the time. They took place in the real and metaphorical space of the ground zero of technology, the point where technology and barbarism reveal their connection. Ballard, through his insistence on a ruthless autopsy of the relationship of technology to human experience, found a language to do this. The Atrocity Exhibition and other works provide the ‘artificial and synoptic view’ — the authentic view, because it is dislocated from the ideological context of events — of the effects of technology.

Ballard uses extreme images and ‘deviant logic’[3] to ‘out-imagine everyone else’. Like a ‘scientist or engineer’, he experimentally juxtaposes images of death, cruelty and suffering to technological artifacts and to images of everyday life to document the ‘uneasy pleasures’ of the times. The Atrocity Exhibition is a set of ‘condensed novels’. These are novels compacted and packaged like objects of the media landscape, pure fiction according to Ballard’s redefinition of fiction as something made from the technological conditions of the time. They are collected with other works dating from 1965 to 1969. They were originally assembled under the title Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A.[4] In the assemblage, Ballard re-invokes the violence that orders and controls the technological landscape. The power relations of the technological ecology and the competing fictions which contest its representation are textualized in the ‘flight and pursuit’ narrative of this ‘novel’, one that creatively illuminates Ballard’s contention that ‘social relationships are no longer as important as the individual’s relationship with the technological landscape of the 20th century’ (1971).[5]

To ‘mimetize’ sex and violence, and to textualize the terror and dismemberment of our times is to expose the ways that sex and violence are part of technology’s fetishising system. In The Atrocity Exhibition Ballard uses the Surrealist model of the conceptual scientific investigation. The Immaculate Conception (1930) written by André Breton and others, is a set of simulations of mental disorders, aphorisms and ‘judgements’. Breton anticipates that that ‘“essays of simulation” of maladies virtual in each one of us could replace most advantageously the ballad, the sonnet, the epic, the poem without head or tail, and other decrepit modes’.[6] Like the Surrealists Ballard is interested in investigating the latent content of ‘reality’. This is achieved by treating waking life as a dream, enabling the insights that are normally constrained by the rules and conventions of waking life. Following Freud,[7] Breton writes that in a dream:

the mind of the dreaming man is fully satisfied with whatever happens to it. The agonizing question of possibility does not arise. Kill, plunder more quickly, love as much as you wish. And if you die, are you not sure of being roused from the dead? Let yourself be led. Events will not tolerate deferment. You have no name. Everything is inestimably easy. [8]

Ballard imaginatively exploits the unremitting daily experience of the violence of technology by revealing its most extreme tendencies. In The Atrocity Exhibition he treats the outer world like a dream, or like fiction, transforming it into a set of mental landscapes, which become recognizable as quotidian reality, and which expose the violence between the geometries of the body and of technology, paradoxically allowing ‘living proof’ of atrocities to be made visible. Ballard accordingly uses the textuality of fiction to show a process of movement between inside (the psyche, the ‘invisible’) and outside (‘reality’, the visible’, that subject to the senses) a process which is analogous to the ‘folding’ in the production of subjectivity described by Deleuze. Death and life, interior and exterior, the body and technology are simultaneously present and absent in this process of folding and refolding. The stories are narratives of formation, the diegesis of the formation of the modern subject which emulates or is the same as the formation of the embryo in its cloacal folds. The process is either violent or produced by violence, or enabled by technology, and atrocity images are thus central to this. Ballard makes this particularly clear in The Atrocity Exhibition where the identity of the protagonist shifts as he wanders about in derelict landscapes and architectures and moves between the interstices of technological artifacts.

The conceit of an atrocity exhibition of ‘mimetized’ deaths, wandering astronauts, photographs, slide shows, newsreels, psychiatric experiments and crash dummies runs through The Atrocity Exhibition. Parodies of scientific and sociological investigations such as the Kinsey Report appear in titles such as ‘Indicators of Sexual Arousal’, and in the desire to ‘quantify and eroticize’ everything, which is reiterated throughout the text.


Part II. ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ (1966)

Much of Ballard’s achievement in The Atrocity Exhibition is exemplified in its first chapter. Also entitled ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, it is an exhibition of clusters of signs and images, a dispersed anatomy of science, technology, violence and the media. Like most of the ‘condensed novels’ in this collection, it describes a set of shifting characters wandering among the exhibits, encountering evidence of each other, the past and the future. Characters attempt to make connections between these signs and images. Dr Catherine Austin, for example, is reminded of ‘slides of the exposed spinal levels’ by images in the paintings of mental patients, couplings of ‘Luna Park and Eniwetok, Freud and Elizabeth Taylor’.[9]

haracters and readers are confronted in ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ with images and lists produced by ‘free association’[10] revealing Ballard’s preoccupations with military technologies, flight, and psycho-palaeontology. They are lists of ‘the terminal documents’ that present the characters as a set of codes about contemporary experience:

(1) Spectro-heliogram of the sun; (2) Front elevation of balcony units, Hilton Hotel London; (3) Transverse section through a pre-Cambrian trilobite; (4) ‘Chronograms,’ by E.J. Marey; (5) Photograph taken at noon, August 7th, 1945, of the sand-sea, Qattara Depression, Egypt; (6) Reproduction of Max Ernst’s ‘Garden Airplane Traps’; (7) Fusing sequences for ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Boy’, Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-Bombs’. [11]

For the readers, characters are another layer of evidence, another set of signs from which to make meaning. The figure of the aviator, his features bruised and fractured through scattered magazine photographs and newsreels, appears to the protagonist Travis. This aviator is a version of the figure that first appears in ‘You and Me and the Continuum’ (1965). According to his preface to Anywhen, (1970) James Blish writes of how in 1965 he and five others including J. G. Ballard were invited to contribute work to the magazine Impulse, on ‘the theme of a man who sacrifices his life for a cause — or who doesn’t’. Ballard’s contribution was published in March 1966 with following introduction:

The author writes — ‘The theme of sacrifice led me to think of the Messiah or, more exactly, the idea of the second coming and how this might take place in the twentieth century. In my version, which I would describe as a botched second coming, the Messiah never quite managing to come to terms with the twentieth century, I have used a fragmentary and non-sequential technique... and have tried to invoke some of the images that a twentieth century Messiah might see. You’ll notice that the entries are alphabetised.’[12]

In The Atrocity Exhibition, the aviator appears ‘in a succession of roles, ranging across a spectrum of possibilities available to each of us in our interior lives.’[13] He is Ballard’s strategy for entering and moving between spaces, used to textualize and thus provide a psychic map of encounters with the architectonics of external reality, observing, and observed by, Travis in ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’. This dislocated ghost also figures as an unresolved image requiring the parallax, a viewpoint from elsewhere that will give him meaning. The ‘planes of his face failed to intersect, as if their true resolution took place in some as yet invisible dimension’.[14] Travis travels with ‘the bomber pilot… and the beautiful young woman with the radiation burns’ to ‘the suburbs of hell’. They are surrounded by billboards, signposts and screens in the media landscape. All are points of entry into the technological world of the time, ‘replicas of napalm bombings in Vietnam, the serial deaths of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe terraced in the landscapes of Dien Bien Phu and the Mekong Delta’.[15] Travis has ‘moved deeper into his own psychosis’ and journeys ‘into a familiar land, zones of twilight’.

Ballard’s hypnotic style and imagery produces a dream effect. The reiteration of words, names, phrases, places, and events such as ‘Nagasaki’, ‘the Mekong Delta’, ‘Claude Eatherly’, ‘serial deaths’, ‘radiation burns’, ‘pools of ash’ for example, drawn from the dictions and iconography of the Cold War, resonate like its own celestial music to produce the ‘zones of twilight’, through which Travis (in his various forms) wanders. The effect presents these horrors as delusions to be analyzed and understood. The character of Travis is a cipher for the signs of his Cold War times; he is used to reopen the elisions that totalize contemporary experience. The Cold War landscape is presented as a dream to be interpreted, rather than a political territory to be fought over. At one point Travis listens to secret transmissions which link landscapes, geology and the outer forms of human figures to the dissecting vision of anatomy. In these, Ballard uses memories of his childhood[16] inlaid with the material of technological memory:

Pirate Radio. There were a number of secret transmissions to which Travis listened: (1) medullary: images of dunes and craters, pools of ash that contained the terraced faces of Freud, Eatherly, and Garbo; (2) thoracic: the rusting shells of U-boats beached in the cove at Tsingtao, near the ruined German forts where the Chinese guides smeared bloody handprints on the caisson walls; (3) sacral: VJ Day, the bodies of Japanese troops in the paddy fields at night. The next day, as he walked back to Shanghai, the peasants were planting rice among the swaying legs. Memories of other than himself, together these messages moved to some kind of focus. The dead face of the bomber pilot hovered by the door, projection of World War III’s unknown soldier. His presence exhausted Travis.[17]

Ballard interposes the figure of Dr Nathan to complicate the perspective. (In ‘The University of Death’ the oppositional relationship between experimenter and subject is broken down, as Ballard changes the protagonist Travis to Talbot, but also sends the enigmatic Koester into the experiment.) There is a journey of flight and pursuit, a common motif in Ballard’s fiction. Through the shifting viewpoints that it allows, this motif has the effect of opening ‘slits in time’ in the gaps between one character and another’s perspective. Nathan reports and explains Travis’s attempt to ‘return to a symmetrical world, one that will recapture the perfect symmetry of the blastosphere’,[18] a fantasy of lost embryonic perfection. In so doing Nathan comments on the deformity of the human body in its vertical asymmetry, and Travis’s realization that the ‘human organism is an atrocity exhibition’.[19] It reveals in its wounds and ruptures, its asymmetries, the signs of technology’s power and violence.

The ‘right-angle spiral of a stairwell’ according to Nathan, may remind Travis of ‘similar biases within the chemistry of the animal kingdom’, and the ‘jutting balconies of the Hilton Hotel have become identified with the lost gill-slits of the dying film actress, Elizabeth Taylor’. Through Travis’s obsessions Ballard invites us to see the body as completely fetishized by its encounters with technology, and that the technological environment is a map of this fetishization.

Travis’s journey is overseen by the analytical Dr Nathan and the menacing Captain Webster, technocrats — but in Nathan’s case also a surrogate for Ballard — who seek to resist what Nathan calls Travis’s ‘revolt against the present continuum of time and space’. The ensuing battle takes place among the bunkers of a weapons testing range, and results in the ‘false deaths’ of Nathan, Webster and Austin. Ballard textualizes real sites — the weapons testing range, and other familiar landscapes which include the zoo, Shanghai and the World War I German bunkers of Tsingtao to make them into the mental landscapes of his experiments. Predominant among these in this story is the displacement of bodies into landscape and architecture, or their projection onto billboards. These displacements are also mimetized events, re-enactments of the scenes that are ‘screened’ for us and from us by image making systems. The repetition and reconfiguration in Ballard’s writing is part of this process. Mimetization occurs in repetition and return, an endless re-enactment that is obsession.

In ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, Ballard investigates how we deal with imaginative violence; that is to say, he examines instinctive psychic responses to violence, those comparable to the flight or fight mechanisms triggered by actual violence.[20] Patterns of myth, evolution and memory inform the chapter in such a way as to produce a hypnotic, or hallucinatory effect, but the violence of Ballard’s imagery and the precision of the medical or other scientific language produces a new myth. He refigures violence to make its presence obvious in the everyday experience, the experience of World War III, in which, ‘The blitzkriegs will be fought out on the spinal battlefields, in terms of the postures we assume, of our traumas mimetized in the angle of a wall or balcony’.[21] He achieves this by using characters as proxy agents in the mise en abŷme.[22] By this telescoping, as each investigates the other and fictionally measures the landscape, he ‘quantifies and eroticizes’ the human experience of the technological landscape.

Ballard uses the imaging technology of the movie still to reveal its own effects. He sometimes emphasizes the importance of stills or sequences of stills in film in contrast to the tracking shot, or the use of the zoom lens. He is interested in the way in which a film can show a sequence or series of images in montage. This emphasis on the still, in the context of cine-film, further suggests an opening up or exposure of what is otherwise elided. It provides another means by which a ‘mythology of the psyche’[23] may be constructed. Stills also enable the proliferation of images, captured pseudo-moments in time that may be dispersed for consumption. Ballard also refers to aspects of the star system and its allure for groups and individuals. He deploys the images of movie stars, such as Elizabeth Taylor, and other celebrities, as movable signs, collages showing the way their images have entered people’s lives, modeling consumerism, social modes and languages.

Similarly to this collaging of images, Travis uses a kind of pataphysics to explore the meanings of photographs. Nathan comments that Travis has inverted the chronogram by treating ‘photographs of most commonplace objects… as if they already were chronograms and extracted the element of time…. The results were extraordinary. A very different world was revealed.’[24] This points to one of Ballard’s methods in The Atrocity Exhibition. Jules Etienne Marey (1830-1904) was a ‘chronophotographer’ whose Chronograms locate the bodies of living things in time, another example of the ‘logic of the visible at the service of the invisible’.[25] They are Marey’s attempt to find ‘under what conditions the maximum of speed, force, or labour which the living being can furnish, may be obtained’.[26] Time is visible in Marey’s diagrammatic form. Chronograms recur as a motif in Ballard’s work; because of their ability to image the relationship between technology and the body they are frequently included in lists or are objects kept by characters, but they also suggest another method by which Ballard takes a surrealist scientific approach a step further, developing its logic. The use of randomly grouped or sequenced ‘out-takes’ is ‘an attempt to get beyond Time into a different Realm’.[27] Travis’s chronograms and Talbot’s lab slides are Ballard’s time machines, like Xero’s ‘trap of mirrors’, or Traven’s bicycle wheel. In other texts these take the form of pavilions made of car doors, as in The Drought and Concrete Island (1973), or Sheppard’s collection of polaroids and chronograms, and the drained swimming pool in ‘Myths of the Near Future (1982). The form of these objects is identical with the patterns of time marked by evolutionary history, as it is recalled in the human body, or figured in collections of objects.

Ballard both uses the actions of Travis, (analyzing, measuring, driving among billboards, attempting to find a way out of time) and produces lists generated by ‘free association’, and images taken from different ‘levels’ of experience to show this:

On one level, the world of public events. Cape Kennedy and Viet Nam mimetized on billboards. On another level, the immediate personal environment, the volumes of space enclosed by opposed hands, the rooms we occupy, the postures we assume, the motion-space of highways, staircases, the angles between these walls. On a third level, the inner world of the psyche. Where these worlds intersect, images are born. [28]



Part III. ‘The University of Death’ (1968)

In The Atrocity Exhibition, images of atrocities as ‘conceptualizations, as ‘false’ memories, are set up for reconsideration. Ballard collages images of death, ghostly filmic images, newsreels, the Zapruder film of the assassination of Kennedy, (which figures as one of the key events of the post-war period in his work) to give them a mythic dimension.

Ballard’s reiterative prose and these strings of images replicate dream effects, the effects of timelessness, in an attempt to ‘rediscover the present’. The prose and imagery is hallucinatory and erotic. The latent is made manifest in his writing and this opposition is dissolved as the reader encounters one or another ‘set of emergency scenarios’, and discovers ‘a secondary narrative with very different meanings’ in the ‘birth of images.’[29] Ballard recasts events textualizing them for the insights they may render. The assassination of JFK is one of these events, recast here as ‘The University of Death’.

In this story, a kind of thriller of menace and experiment, Ballard reports on the shifting subjectivity that occurs in experiments on human behaviour, and reworks the Kennedy assassination, which for Ballard is a kind of car crash, or more ambiguously, an ‘auto disaster’.[30] Ballard merges technology with the human body so that a menacing sexuality informs all things here. He makes the relationship between human identity and the media, and the consumerist imagery that surrounds it explicit, as the female body becomes its own replica, and the machines of war disturb the borders of the psyche:

‘Shall I lie down with you?’ Ignoring her question, Talbot studied her broad hips, with their now empty contours of touch and feeling. Already she had the texture of a rubber mannequin fitted with explicit vents, an obscene masturbatory appliance. As she stood up he saw the diaphragm in her handbag, useless cache-sex. He listened to the helicopters. They seemed to alight on an invisible landing zone in the margins of his mind. [31]

Talbot also, as the writer’s proxy, constructs antennae from laboratory slides of ‘diseased spinal levels’ to pick up signals from outer space, experiment with time and link evolutionary memory to the future. Ballard’s characters seem to be awaiting instructions as from a new DNA. The character of the aviator reappears in ‘The University of Death’, this time as the ‘shabby voyeur’ watching Talbot’s telescopes. He is ‘some fugitive from time and space, clearly moving now into his own landscape.’[32] He keeps atrocity images in his room, ‘grotesque magazine photographs; the obsessive geometry of overpasses, like fragments of [Novotny’s] own body; X-rays of unborn children; a series of genital deformations; a hundred close-ups of hands.’[33] The aviator is a kind of Claude Eatherly figure. The name of the reconnaissance pilot for the Hiroshima bombing occurs in ‘The Terminal Beach’, and later in The Atrocity Exhibition, with a note to the revised edition suggesting his role as one who ‘would ease [the public’s] sense of unease, and deflect their even greater fears of the H-bomb’.[34] The aviator also appears in ‘The Assassination Weapon’. He is an apt figure to examine the images of this kind. He has an archangelic function, enabling movement from one level of perception or fiction-making to another. The strange aviator in ‘The University of Death’ marks the production of the subject born with the atomic bomb, and fittingly appears at the return to Dealey Plaza, the site of the event which for Ballard represented ‘a tectonic shift in the communications landscape, sending fissures deep into the popular psyche that have not yet closed.’ Unsettled ghost, the bearer of a key to the condition of the modern psyche, he is a figure of annunciation, as he is in ‘The Assassination Weapon’, before the strange merging of the human and the technological in the body of Karen Novotny:

She stepped from the car, the coil hanging in her womb like a steel fetus, a stillborn star. She smoothed her white linen skirt as Talbot ran back from the fence, ripping the cassette from his camera. Between them had sprung up a relationship of intense sexuality. [35]

Ballard does not psychologise his characters in his psychoanalytic experiments in The Atrocity Exhibition. The interiority of the nineteenth-century deracinated subject of realist fiction is not only absent but irrelevant here. Such a psychology is also absent from dreams; while the dreamer may have a sense of the self as an ‘I’, the disruption of the usual relations of the self with objects and people about him/her denies the ‘I’ its usual stability. Similarly, the subject is unfixed in Ballard’s assemblage of experiments. The actions of characters are mimetic, reenactments, ‘false’ deaths and performances, or actions driven by libidinal desires. Multiplications and variations are generated by these actions; patterns of wounding, dismemberment, deformity and sexuality, such as from the passage sub-headed, ‘The Optimum Wound Profile’, Koester’s ‘scenario of Talbot’s death’, that Nathan reads: ‘He would need to be mounted in the crash vehicle in an obscene position as if taking part in some grotesque intercourse — Christ crucified on the sodomized body of his own mother’. Talbot follows Karen Novotny, chalking outlines of objects and then of her body in its different postures and actions. He, like other characters, investigates objects in space, in relation to other objects and architectures. The characters, for example Koester,[36] the student in the ‘black military overcoat, later described as ‘the sallow-faced young man in the fascist overcoat’,[37] conduct experiments on each other, or they observe each other and document each other’s actions as though ‘in the field’ of human and object behaviour. Ballard is ‘on safari or in his laboratory, faced with an unknown terrain or subject’.[38] Meaning is sought not as an explanation for existence or as a medium of social cohesion, but as significance, a ‘conceptual equation’, as Nathan tells Webster:

In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one’s legs will have more significance than all the pages in War and Peace. In twentieth-century terms the crucifixion, for example, would be re-enacted as an auto disaster.[39]

Ballard agrees. He analyses the signs and symptoms of modern life as though it were a complex mathematical formula expressed in objects and human flesh.



Part IV. ‘The Assassination Weapon’ (1966)

Collage is self-consciously part of Ballard’s method in The Atrocity Exhibition and it generated ideas for the characters long before he wrote it. In ‘The Assassination Weapon’ (1966)[40] the characters of Coma, Kline and Xero re-appear, having first appeared in a series of Ballard’s collages in the late 1950s, as he records in a note to the story:

These three figures, who are shadows projected from Traven’s unconscious, had been in my mind since the end of the 1950s… They materialized in The Atrocity Exhibition, but then exited and never returned. I wait patiently for them to reappear.[41]

These collages, Ballard’s ‘Project for a New Novel’, are a forerunner to The Atrocity Exhibition in that they consist of fragments of technical and technological language framed by headings. These combinations of ‘magazine style’ headings and text gleaned from his work on the magazine Chemistry & Industry generate significance in a new symbolic order structured by post-war science and technology, as for example, in the following extract from the second of four pieces:

. . .  Coma slid out of the solar rig

Zolin and Green of Du Pont begin a two-part study of epoxy resins
as engineering construction materials, with 13 case histories of successful
Pressure packaging may spawn new family of food products … Re-
search—Cottrell’s plastic models help in study of precipitator design…
First trip to outer space may be to Mars’ moons… Minerals found by
chemical prospecting … Pulp mills are still the biggest source of stream
To pilot plant or not to pilot plant?  No matter how you decide this ques-
tion, it could be expensive for your company.  Cover shows make believe
process which a panel of experts discussed.  Top to bottom: Donald D.
Jordan, Shelby A. Miller, John B. Tepe, Edward G. Scheibel, Donald Q.
Kern.  Their answers to this question are on page 578

Ballard comments on the stylishness of the typography,[42] which is taken from Chemistry & Industry. He does not seek to ironise the material in the manner of some Pop Art, but reveals patterns or traces of technology’s attachment to language and image in the collage method. In this case the chemistry magazine is an instrument of the dissemination of information about post-war developments in chemistry, and of its commercial uses. Ballard uses non sequiturs and the incomplete sentences of the cut-up to rearrange content, so that its latent meanings may be analyzed. From this he invents a new narrative form — taken from specialist magazines, the technological master texts of his times — to reveal the facts of human experience in a period that is completely subject to technology’s power. That is to say, if the identity of the nineteenth century bourgeois individualist subject is suggested by the linear psychological development to be found in the realist novel, then the post war, post-Hiroshima subject is structured by a completely new architectonics, one of atomic power and mass communications.

Ballard made these collages early in his career, a few years before the Kennedy assassination. In them he established his method for dealing with the explosion of mass communications in the 1960s, especially of images, of which the assassination was a significant aggregation for Ballard. Ballard privileges the visual and he reproduces key phrases to look like messages, headlines, or advertising slogans. He shows these as coded instructions for living in the second half of the twentieth century. They become the constantly refigured formulae that link the psyche to outer reality.

Coma, Kline, and Xero are coded permutations of the psychic and material world. They follow or accompany Traven. Xero and the aviator, the archangel of Hiroshima, merge in ‘The Assassination Weapon’: Xero is the ‘strangest’ of the three:

a figure of galvanic energy and uncertainty. As he moved across the abandoned landscape near the overpass, the very perspectives of air seemed to invert behind him. At times, when Xero approached the forlorn group sitting on the embankment, his shadows formed bizarre patterns on the concrete, transcripts of cryptic formulae and insoluble dreams. These ideograms, like the hieroglyphs of a race of blind seers, remained on the grey concrete after Xero had gone, the detritus of this terrifying psychic totem. [43]

Traven gathers found objects of American scientific and commercial imperialism. He finds a typewriter, ‘with half the keys missing (he picks out fragmentary sentences, sometimes they seem to mean something)’, that Coma also uses to write poems. He and Coma are thus experimenters also; the broken typewriter is a permutation instrument, an encoding device of the signs around them. The section ‘Beach Fatigue’ with its reference to ‘Guam 1947’ specifically identifies Traven [44] as a return to the character of the same name in ‘The Terminal Beach’, which is set in the abandoned Eniwetok, the site of H-bomb testing. Both characters walk among the refuse of modernity — the skeletal remains of the future; Traven tries to solve the problems of time. Ballard connects medical science, at its most menacing and violent, and consumer culture, in the objects that Traven collects: leucotomes (used in psychiatric surgery to sever the frontal lobes of mental patients) and a Coke bottle.[45] Ballard transfers the potential of one instrument to the other. It is the Coke bottle, and not the leucotomes that Traven cuts himself on. Both Travens gather and collage materials in an attempt to re-enter and make sense of the places and events they encounter, and Ballard textualizes these for the reader’s orientation to the mental landscapes of the near future.

These mental landscapes are Ballard’s settings, and their structures are visible through the dissolution of distinctions between past, present and future in a place such as Eniwetok. He experimentally formulates the material and psychic relations of humans to each other and their settings and the implications of these for the present and future. The architectonics of our subjectivity is visible in the leucotomes and the ‘Coke bottle’. A leucotome is an instrument of authoritarian menace, manipulation and dismemberment, the Coke bottle is the cliché, the consumerist sign par excellence, both signifier and signified of the twentieth century enthrallment of the masses. Ballard uses these properties to build the textured fictive space that presents to the reader as the mental landscape of his or her time and place. Thus Dr Nathan summarizes the condition of Xero/the aviator/Traven:

‘The author,’ Dr Nathan wrote, ‘has found that the patient forms a distinctive type of object relation based on perpetual and irresistible desire to merge with the object in an undifferentiated mass. Although psychoanalysis cannot reach the primary archaic mechanism of “rapprochement” it can deal with the neurotic superstructure, guiding the patient towards the choice of stable and worthwhile objects…. A spoon, for example offends him by the mere fact of its existence in time and space. More than this, one could say that the precise, if largely random, configuration of atoms in the universe at any given moment, one never again to be repeated, seems to him to be preposterous by virtue of its unique identity…’[46]

Ballard’s fiction is an attempt to replicate this ‘given moment’ while retaining the texture of its instability. Nathan explains the condition in terms of Traven’s (Xero/the aviator’s) ‘previous career as a military pilot’ and ‘the unconscious role of thermonuclear weapons in bringing about the total fusion and non-differentiation of all matter’. Traven (in his various guises) is confused by the presence of objects in the face of the ‘phenomenology of the universe’, which are at odds with his experience of dissolution.

The question of the effects of Hiroshima or Nagasaki on individuals and on the collective psyche is a popular one in discussions of the history of the twentieth century. Ballard, however, is interested in a more audacious field trip into this event. For example, he goes beyond Marguerite Duras’ recognition of the difficulty of Hiroshima, ‘All one can do is to speak of the impossibility of speaking of Hiroshima.’[47] He deals with the psychic effects she identifies when she writes, ‘The knowledge of Hiroshima is something that must be set down, a priori, as being an exemplary delusion of the mind.’ In her account of Duras, Kristeva argues that:

Because of what took place in history there can be no artifice involving Hiroshima. Neither tragical nor pacifist artifice facing the atomic explosion, nor rhetorical artifice facing the mutilation of feelings.[48]

Kristeva discusses films as ‘the supreme art of the apocalypse’, because, she writes, with reference to Augustine, ‘the image has such an ability to have us “walk into fear”’. Here she is discussing the problem of representation of, or response to, the atom bomb and the Nazi death camps:

What those monstrous and painful sights do damage to are our systems of perception and representation. As if overtaxed or destroyed by too powerful a breaker, our symbolic means find themselves hollowed out, nearly wiped out, paralyzed. On the edge of silence the word ‘nothing’ emerges, a discreet defense in the face of so much disorder, both internal and external, incommensurable. Never has a cataclysm been more apocalyptically outrageous, never has its representation been assumed by so few symbolic means….

A new rhetoric of apocalypse (etymologically, apocalypso means de-monstration, dis-covering through sight, and contrasts with aletheia, the philosophical disclosure of truth) seemed necessary for a vision of this nevertheless monstrous nothing to emerge — a monstrosity that blinds and compels one to be silent. Such a new apocalyptic rhetoric was carried out in two seemingly opposite, extreme fashions that complement each other: a wealth of images and a holding back of words.[49]

Ballard does not, however, ‘hold back words’, but uses and re-uses his analytical lexicon to textualize these events. Neither does he reproduce a nostalgia of death. By insisting on the image’s ability to disclose truth, under the conditions that he produces, he over-rides the tendency of literature to become introvertedly melancholic, and insists on the reality of atrocity. In this he resists a tendency to recast atrocity in metaphysical terms. In his discussion of the Holocaust, Slavoj Žižek describes this tendency as:

the elevation of the Holocaust into metaphysical diabolical Evil, irrational, apolitical, incomprehensible, approachable only through respectful silence. The Holocaust is presented as the ultimate traumatic point where objectifying historical knowledge breaks down, where it has to acknowledge its worthlessness before a single witness, and, simultaneously, the point at which the witnesses themselves have to concede that words fail them, that what they can share is ultimately only their silence as such. So the Holocaust is referred to as a mystery, the heart of darkness of our civilization, its enigma negates all (explanatory) answers in advance, defying knowledge and description, noncommunicable, lying outside historicization — it cannot be explained, visualized, represented, transmitted, since it marks the Void, the black hole, the end, the implosion, of the (narrative) universe.[50]

Ballard does visualize this implosion, ‘the real danger’  that takes place, as Virilio points out ‘in our minds’.[51] He dissolves the ‘image/words dichotomy’, that Kristeva refers to when she suggests that the two alternatives for representing horror are ‘the “Mass communication arts” on the one hand, and the experience of the nouveau roman on the other’[52]. He achieves this through his fictional appropriation of the former in a Pop-Surrealist textual immersion in ‘the most destructive element’. He constantly inter-cuts connected and unconnected images, and transposes settings such as Eniwetok onto Shepperton, or Dealey Plaza. He assembles documents, the ‘assassination weapon’ for the ‘false death’ of JFK, to displace the corpse undergoing post mortem. He displaces the Texas Book Depository with towers of radio telescopes. A Japanese woman, Madame Butterfly/Nurse Nagamatzu in a wig, is assassinated as Jackie Kennedy:

Venus Smiles. The dead face of the President’s widow looked up at him from the track. Confused by the Japanese cast of her features, with all their reminders of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, he stared at the bowl of the telescope.[53]

Ballard recovers images from their usual context to make new textual combinations. The method is explained, again, in Nathan’s account of Traven:

‘However, you must understand that for Traven, science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate events from their context in time and space.’[54]

‘The Assassination Weapon’ concludes with the departure of the ‘trinity’ of Kline, Coma and Xero, and Traven is left on the sand with a parodic mandala — a rusting bicycle wheel — and the remnants of the psychological tests. This diminuendo begins a collapse of the architectonics normally structuring the symbolic order, to refigure events ‘in different terms’.[55] The ‘constant sky’, ‘warm air’, the ‘shreds of test papers’,[56] and sand and rust provide the stage set for the aftermath of an explosive event. The billboards showing Jackie Kennedy, Oswald and Malcolm X that had been assembled by Xero begin to collapse, to give way to desert conditions necessary to timelessness. ‘Nothing happened.’

Go to: Part II of Chapter Five

Table of Contents:
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Conclusion
Bibliography
Acknowledgements



Footnotes:

[1] The Atrocity Exhibition, (London: Jonathon Cape, 1970; revised edition San Francisco: RE/Search, 1990).

[2] ‘Air War and Literature: Zürich Lectures’, On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell, (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003), 3-105, 26.

[3] Introduction to the French edition of Crash, (1974), in original English in Foundation, No. 9, November, 1975, repr. in V. Vale and A. Juno, J. G. Ballard, 96-98, 98.

[4] The stories are written in a different order to that of the collection. See bibliography for details.

[5] ‘Fictions of Every Kind’, in Books and Bookmen, February, 1971, repr. in V. Vale and A. Juno, 98-100, 99.

[6] André Breton, ‘Introduction to the Possessions’, from The Immaculate Conception, in What is Surrealism? Selected Writings, edited and introduced by Franklin Rosemount, (London: Pluto Press, 1978), 51.

[7] Sigmund Freud, On the Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey, (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1953; Harmondsworth: Penguin repr. 1982), 596 ff. Freud’s observation on the absence of affect in dreams is further discussed in Chapter Eight. The dreamer is not a psychological entity in the sense that his/her actions and responses are identifiable with a unified and consistent psychology.

[8] André Breton, ‘The First Surrealist Manifesto’, Waldberg, Surrealism, 68.

[9] The Atrocity Exhibition, 9.

[10] Ballard’s note to revised edition in ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, The Atrocity Exhibition, 9.

[11] Ibid. 9.

[12] David Pringle quoting from James Blish’s Anywhen, email to JGB mailing list, post # 5416, September 13, 2004.

[13] Note to ‘You and Me and the Continuum’, The Atrocity Exhibition, 81.

[14] The Atrocity Exhibition, 10.

[15] ‘Terraced’, a term used throughout the text, implies a violence done to the body, with its associations of layering and geology, as well as the military associations of the word. This layering enables the distancing of the viewer from the body, an effect that Ballard produces in much of his writing.

[16] He recalls visiting the concrete tunnels at Tsingtao as a seven year old child in a note to the revised edition in The Atrocity Exhibition, 12.

[17] ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, The Atrocity Exhibition, 11-12.

[18] Ibid. 14.

[19] Ibid.

[20] ‘We have absolutely no biological training to deal with violence in imaginative terms. And our whole inherited expertise for dealing with violence, our central nervous systems, our musculature, our senses, our ability to run fast or to reach quickly, our reflexes, all that inherited experience, is never used. We sit passively in cinemas watching movies like The Wild Bunch, where violence is just a style.’ J. G. Ballard in conversation with Eduardo Paolozzi and Frank Whitford, Studio International, October 1971, Volume 182, no. 937, 136–143

[21] ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, The Atrocity Exhibition, 12.

[22] In addition to this Ballard’s notes to the revised edition form another outer layer, surrounded by Ballard’s further reflections on his writing, and the critical or analytical interventions by other writers.

[23] ‘The Coming of the Unconscious’, New Worlds, 1966, repr. in A User’s Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews, (London: HarperCollins, 1996), 84-88, 85.

[24] The Atrocity Exhibition, 12.

[25] Odilon Redon quoted by Ballard in ‘The Coming of the Unconscious’, A User’s Guide to the Millennium, 84.

[26] Jules Etienne Marey, Animal Mechanism: A Treatise on Terrestrial and Aerial Locomotion, Fifth Edition, trans. unknown, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co, Ltd., 1906, 2-3.

[27] J. G. Ballard, interview by Catherine Bresson, Métaphores, 1983, quoted in ‘Quotations by Ballard’, V. Vale and A. Juno, J. G. Ballard, 154-164, 163.

[28] In Judith Merrill, England Swings SF, 1968, quoted in ‘Quotations by Ballard’, V. Vale and A. Juno, 154-160, 159.

[29] Ballard’s note to revised edition in ‘Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy’, in The Atrocity Exhibition, 89.

[30] Ballard’s note to revised edition in ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’ (originally titled ‘The Death Module’), in The Atrocity Exhibition, 45.

[31] ‘University of Death’, The Atrocity Exhibition, 19.

[32] Ibid. 21.

[33] Ibid. 20.

[34] Ballard’s note to revised edition in ‘You and Me and the Continuum’, from The Atrocity Exhibition, 86.

[35] ‘The University of Death’, The Atrocity Exhibition, 20-21.

[36] Possibly named for Arthur Koestler.

[37] ‘The University of Death’, The Atrocity Exhibition, 20 and 24.

[38] Introduction to 1995 edition of Crash, (London: Vintage, 1995), 5-6.

[39] ‘The University of Death’, The Atrocity Exhibition, 27.

[40] Ballard presented a ‘happening’ with this title in 1968-9, at the ICA.

[41] See note to ‘The Assassination Weapon’, The Atrocity Exhibition [1970], (revised edition, San Francisco: RE/Search Publications, 1990), 32, and the collages themselves in J. G. Ballard (San Francisco: RE/Search Publications, 1984), 38-40 ‘Mr f.’, the protagonist of the 1961 short story ‘Mr F is Mr F.’, is named in these collages.

[42] I have attempted to reproduce this here.

[43] ‘The Assassination Weapon’, The Atrocity Exhibition, 32.

[44] The name is borrowed from the writer B. Traven. See Chapter 9.

[45] An empty Coke bottle attached to the loop of a blind taps out coded messages in Stanley Kramer’s movie On the Beach (1959). It is mistaken for a sign of life in the aftermath of devastating nuclear war.

[46]‘The Assassination Weapon’, The Atrocity Exhibition, 34.

[47] Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima mon amour, synopsis, (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 10; quoted in Julia Kristeva, Dark Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 231.

[48] Kristeva, 231.

[49] Ibid. 223-4.

[50] Slavoj Žižek, ‘Hitler as Ironist?’, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion, (London: Verso, 2001), 66-7.

[51] Virilio, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotex(e), 1986), 150. See above, Chapter Four, n. 10.

[52] Kristeva, Dark Sun, 224-5.

[53] ‘The Assassination Weapon’, 35-6.

[54] Ibid 36.

[55] Note to ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’, The Atrocity Exhibition, 41.

[56] This image is strangely suggestive of an event at the Trinity atomic test. Enrico Fermi, co-inventor of the nuclear reactor, tested the power of the explosion by tearing up strips of paper and dropping them during the blast to observe their displacement. Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, (New York: Touchstone, 1986), 674.