The Atrocity Exhibition

October 15, 2001

I’ll reveal a vested interest. Some thirty years ago, my magazine New Worlds enthusiastically commissioned much of The Atrocity Exhibition affiliate link. I’m still inclined to think it’s the book that best reflects our times.

You could argue that William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch affiliate link (1959) or Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics affiliate link (1970) had more influence on the century and while I’ll admit to the greatness of, say, Ulysses affiliate link or Remembrance of Things Past affiliate link, they’re really late 19^th century books — a sort of culmination.

Ballard showed an intense, creative interest in the second half of the 20^th century. I admire many of his later novels, including Empire of the Sun affiliate link, but it seems to me that most of them, from Crash affiliate link to Cocaine Nights affiliate link, have been extended riffs on the themes he encapsulated so successfully in The Atrocity Exhibition.

In 1969 Ballard ran into American prurience when the whole first edition was pulped on the orders of publisher Nelson Doubleday, largely because of two short pieces that are not especially typical, “Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan” and “The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered As a Downhill Motor Race.”

Together with such stories as “You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe,” “The Assassination Weapon” and “Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy,” the book contains the original three-page version of Crash. It’s largely free of the dodgy, sentimentalized sadism permeating Cronenberg’s Crash. Ballard’s wonderful elegaic tone, vaguely reminiscent of nouvelle vague voice-overs, saves this litany of destroyed celebrity and annihilated emotion from the coldness of its technique — pseudo-clinical, non-linear, fragmented, apparently plot-less. Ballard shared the engagement of many of his best sf contemporaries with issues only now in the public mind, but whereas writers like Dick were content to frame their parables in conventional narratives, Ballard felt that the narrative itself distorted what he was trying to examine. His technique has been much imitated since. Without his intentions and concerns, his profoundly original imagination, it rarely succeeds.

While Burroughs demonstrated how to use modern language and metaphor, it was Ballard who focussed on those mythic images of the 20^th century, fusing personalities and events, the public with the personal, fashioning the bombing of Hiroshima, the tragic legend of Princess Margaret, the assassination of Kennedy, the sexualized automobile, into enduring symbols of the human dilemma.