The Atrocity Exhibition
by J. G. Ballard
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The irrational, all-pervading violence of the modern world is the subject of this novel. The central character's dreams are haunted by images of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, dead astronauts and motorcar crash victims.Tags
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Member Reviews
Other reviewers have talked about it being unratable, and certainly a one to five scale can never capture the ambivalence I feel about this.
In essence, it's Crash, but without the luxury of a coherent plot for the reader to cling on to. Disjointed barely even covers it.
Neither does repetitive. The same themes as those in Crash occur again and again (and again and again): geometry and sexuality, an erotic fixation with automobile accidents, the media, film and images, and celebrity (specifically the Kennedys, Maralyn Monroe and Elisabeth Taylor). You want to take Ballard by the shoulders and scream at him 'shut up about the wounds, shut up about the shapes, shut up about bloody Jackie Kennedy'. You'd look into his eyes and wonder what show more the actual f**k is going on in this obsessive, one-track-mind brain.
But on the other hand, it's precisely that incomprehensible bizarreness that is so compelling, impossible to stop listening to even as your anger and resentment at listening to it mounts. His writing style is just incredible; it takes the babbling of a mad man and lays it out with such clinical, articulated consideration and sophistication - somehow detached and yet visceral - that in the end, like all really good crazy people, he makes you wonder if you're the crazy one after all. show less
In essence, it's Crash, but without the luxury of a coherent plot for the reader to cling on to. Disjointed barely even covers it.
Neither does repetitive. The same themes as those in Crash occur again and again (and again and again): geometry and sexuality, an erotic fixation with automobile accidents, the media, film and images, and celebrity (specifically the Kennedys, Maralyn Monroe and Elisabeth Taylor). You want to take Ballard by the shoulders and scream at him 'shut up about the wounds, shut up about the shapes, shut up about bloody Jackie Kennedy'. You'd look into his eyes and wonder what show more the actual f**k is going on in this obsessive, one-track-mind brain.
But on the other hand, it's precisely that incomprehensible bizarreness that is so compelling, impossible to stop listening to even as your anger and resentment at listening to it mounts. His writing style is just incredible; it takes the babbling of a mad man and lays it out with such clinical, articulated consideration and sophistication - somehow detached and yet visceral - that in the end, like all really good crazy people, he makes you wonder if you're the crazy one after all. show less
Wanting to read more Ballard is hardly a contentious ambition, and I’ve read plenty of Ballard already. The 4th Estate editions also made a nice set with their distinctive cover designs, so it was worth picking up copies. Which is what I did. I’ve always been a bit ambivalent about Ballard, perhaps preferring the idea of his fiction more than I did his actual fiction – which is itself quite a Ballardian attitude. He was never a great prose stylist, and he was often a better commentator on twentieth-century life than he was a novelist – what his books said was often more interesting than the stories he chose to tell. The Atrocity Exhibition (Annotated) is a case in point. Half the time, Ballard zeroes in quite effectively on some show more weird public compulsion, turns it on its head, and the result is a biting comment on the cultural landscape. But just as often, it’s word salad, and he piles the words one upon the other and it reads like an academic work that completely misses the point of its topic. And then, over all this, like giant flashing lights and deafening klaxons, is all the “controversial stuff”, story titles like ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ and ‘Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy’. The problem with sacred cows is that no one will admit they make steaks that taste just like normal steaks. Of course, there’s also the bits and pieces of The Atrocity Exhibition (Annotated) that went on to become and/or inspire Crash, which is much the better work. But still, Ballard: always worth a read. show less
“The Atrocity Exhibition” is an experimental “novel” apparently about the confusing interminglings of sex and violence forced on the psyche that take place in a sociocultural environment marked by (e.g.):
* Repeated exposure to shocking human suffering (war, car crashes, assassination; each proudly televised on cable news)
* The proliferation of celebrities’ bodies into the public consciousness; more and more of their sexualities externalized for consumption
* Whatever you’d call the sexual equivalent of the addict’s mounting need for an even greater fix than the last, happening on a grand scale, reducing the most perverse into outdated kitsch; relatedly the sexual fetishization of anything and everything
* Scientism and show more psychologism reframing man as mere processes, functions of space and time acting out within confined geometric space and good old linear time
* Et cetera.
The “novel” is not really one in a traditional sense. The first ten or so chapters feature the protagonist Travis/Travers/Talbert/Traven/ect. playing out different psychosexual roles, making sense of life through car crashes, geometry, sex, atrocities, films, psychosis, etc. with strategies that are difficult for an outside viewer to make sense of. These chapters are not really connected except by a sort of insanity and randomness running through them. Certain themes and characters appear and reappear: a doctor, a love interest, JFK, geometry, Jackie Kennedy, car crashes, sexual fetishes, helicopters, textbook jargon, the reassignment of sexual value to apparently sexless objects like bridges, mounds of dirt, and empty river basins. These ideas surface and then disappear in little half-page subtitled vignettes; a chapter constitutes about 15 vignettes.
After those are a couple unlinked chapters, with similar themes but even less character and plot. I guess it’s called an “experimental novel” for a reason. One of those chapters is titled “Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan,” incidentally written before his presidency.
My summary feelings about this book are that (1) it was very oblique in structure, casting aside plot, character, and reliable narration in favor of hammering home themes through repetition and reconfiguration, (2) I was surprised to find the protagonist’s psychotic sexuality (by 1960s standards) not too far off from my own, (3) Ballard is one of the few authors I’ve read who is willing to admit to the most abstract perversions: reassembling the bodies of celebrities on ourselves and others, the drug user’s need for a greater sexual hit, the fear that we can only make contact with one another at the intersections of our inner perversions during intercourse, the random moments of the normal surface world suddenly revealing its geometry, the excitation of violence and atrocity. Metaphorically it was a little bit of a scary read because I’m not used to swimming without my floaties, but I never would have learned to swim otherwise. show less
* Repeated exposure to shocking human suffering (war, car crashes, assassination; each proudly televised on cable news)
* The proliferation of celebrities’ bodies into the public consciousness; more and more of their sexualities externalized for consumption
* Whatever you’d call the sexual equivalent of the addict’s mounting need for an even greater fix than the last, happening on a grand scale, reducing the most perverse into outdated kitsch; relatedly the sexual fetishization of anything and everything
* Scientism and show more psychologism reframing man as mere processes, functions of space and time acting out within confined geometric space and good old linear time
* Et cetera.
The “novel” is not really one in a traditional sense. The first ten or so chapters feature the protagonist Travis/Travers/Talbert/Traven/ect. playing out different psychosexual roles, making sense of life through car crashes, geometry, sex, atrocities, films, psychosis, etc. with strategies that are difficult for an outside viewer to make sense of. These chapters are not really connected except by a sort of insanity and randomness running through them. Certain themes and characters appear and reappear: a doctor, a love interest, JFK, geometry, Jackie Kennedy, car crashes, sexual fetishes, helicopters, textbook jargon, the reassignment of sexual value to apparently sexless objects like bridges, mounds of dirt, and empty river basins. These ideas surface and then disappear in little half-page subtitled vignettes; a chapter constitutes about 15 vignettes.
After those are a couple unlinked chapters, with similar themes but even less character and plot. I guess it’s called an “experimental novel” for a reason. One of those chapters is titled “Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan,” incidentally written before his presidency.
My summary feelings about this book are that (1) it was very oblique in structure, casting aside plot, character, and reliable narration in favor of hammering home themes through repetition and reconfiguration, (2) I was surprised to find the protagonist’s psychotic sexuality (by 1960s standards) not too far off from my own, (3) Ballard is one of the few authors I’ve read who is willing to admit to the most abstract perversions: reassembling the bodies of celebrities on ourselves and others, the drug user’s need for a greater sexual hit, the fear that we can only make contact with one another at the intersections of our inner perversions during intercourse, the random moments of the normal surface world suddenly revealing its geometry, the excitation of violence and atrocity. Metaphorically it was a little bit of a scary read because I’m not used to swimming without my floaties, but I never would have learned to swim otherwise. show less
Before reading this book, I thought I was worldly, weary, and wise. I thought I had seen all the perversity and sex that modern novels could deliver. I thought I understood fetish.
I understood nothing.
This is a wild poem in novel format drawing out the most sexual visualizations. I could compare it with Anaïs Nin with her absolute poetry of sex, but to do so would ignore the absolute grotesquerie of Ballard's coupling with mangled machinery.
This is a novel of car crash survivors being unable to get off unless they remembered the "real" moment of utter release. Always chasing that high. Spying on car crashes, haunting crash test dummies, getting off in the seats of cars near the sites of your crash... or other's crashes. Of preparing show more the most lurid fantasies, drawing much more than solace from other victims, of fetishizing and tempting the ONE FINAL RELEASE.
This is death and violence and sex written in a nightmarish orgy of utter fixation... without most of the people actually, you know, taking it in a usual psychopathic thriller mode. This isn't about murdering your victims for that high. This is all about including our cars in on the very act that defines our lives. A third sexual partner.
And you know what? This novel RUINED ME for watching any kind of car-chase movie. If you find yourself wanting to swear off yet another Fast and Furious movie or an endless stream of Dukes of Hazard lookalikes, then look no further. This is your CURE. :) :) show less
I understood nothing.
This is a wild poem in novel format drawing out the most sexual visualizations. I could compare it with Anaïs Nin with her absolute poetry of sex, but to do so would ignore the absolute grotesquerie of Ballard's coupling with mangled machinery.
This is a novel of car crash survivors being unable to get off unless they remembered the "real" moment of utter release. Always chasing that high. Spying on car crashes, haunting crash test dummies, getting off in the seats of cars near the sites of your crash... or other's crashes. Of preparing show more the most lurid fantasies, drawing much more than solace from other victims, of fetishizing and tempting the ONE FINAL RELEASE.
This is death and violence and sex written in a nightmarish orgy of utter fixation... without most of the people actually, you know, taking it in a usual psychopathic thriller mode. This isn't about murdering your victims for that high. This is all about including our cars in on the very act that defines our lives. A third sexual partner.
And you know what? This novel RUINED ME for watching any kind of car-chase movie. If you find yourself wanting to swear off yet another Fast and Furious movie or an endless stream of Dukes of Hazard lookalikes, then look no further. This is your CURE. :) :) show less
This made my kneecaps uncomfortable! Crash
is one of the most disturbing, yet also one of the most unique books I’ve read. Having previously read other J.G. Ballard novels that I thought were slightly boring, I was shocked at how graphic this one actually was (both sex and gore-wise).
Yeah, I know it’s literally a book about sex and car crashes, but I was still surprised. Sue me.
Even though it made me queasy at times and downright cringe at others, I was still somewhat invested in this book, and dare I say…enjoyed it?
This book was creepy, disgusting, obscene, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone I personally know, but I had no qualms about finishing it. I just wish the usage of the word “penis” was cut by about 50%, among show more others. show less
is one of the most disturbing, yet also one of the most unique books I’ve read. Having previously read other J.G. Ballard novels that I thought were slightly boring, I was shocked at how graphic this one actually was (both sex and gore-wise).
Yeah, I know it’s literally a book about sex and car crashes, but I was still surprised. Sue me.
Even though it made me queasy at times and downright cringe at others, I was still somewhat invested in this book, and dare I say…enjoyed it?
This book was creepy, disgusting, obscene, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone I personally know, but I had no qualms about finishing it. I just wish the usage of the word “penis” was cut by about 50%, among show more others. show less
The issue with filling a book with references for its time is that those references become more obscure over time and detract from the associations the author intends to create. Because of that, I would say a little over half of this book retains the power it may have had when it was first published.
Its sustained success is, in part, the fractured structure that mirrors its protagonist and his multiple personas, which is still disorienting and challenging. But the best content comes once those sections are over and we get the postscript essays. The essays reflect more accurately and succinctly the author's fixations on celebrity and disasters and how their bleeding into the mundane irreparably scar its consumers and participants in ways show more that we don't fully comprehend.
That said, the book must still answer for its remaining content, which is not so much shocking as it is misogynistic, repetitive, and indulgent. So it goes with "provocative male authors".
Overall, I would encourage you to seek out the essay "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" and consider the rest extra credit. show less
Its sustained success is, in part, the fractured structure that mirrors its protagonist and his multiple personas, which is still disorienting and challenging. But the best content comes once those sections are over and we get the postscript essays. The essays reflect more accurately and succinctly the author's fixations on celebrity and disasters and how their bleeding into the mundane irreparably scar its consumers and participants in ways show more that we don't fully comprehend.
That said, the book must still answer for its remaining content, which is not so much shocking as it is misogynistic, repetitive, and indulgent. So it goes with "provocative male authors".
Overall, I would encourage you to seek out the essay "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" and consider the rest extra credit. show less
Impossible to rate or even classify this weird and disturbing book from the late '60s: it's not a novel, it's not a collection of mini-novels, it's not even a psychological treatise, though it has aspects of all three.
It explores the links between death/danger and sexuality (his own wife had died suddenly a few years earlier). Parts of it will be thought obscene by many. It reflects Ballard's interests in psychoanalysis and surrealism: the very structure of the book is surreal. All of this makes more sense after reading his far more accessible autobiography, Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, which I reviewed HERE.
Write your own
It is a non-linear narrative, divided into "chapters", of which each paragraph is a self-contained show more nugget, with its own title. In an introduction written more than 30 years after first publication, Ballard suggests readers scan a chapter for headings that catch their eye, and if they find them interesting, to move on to nearby ones, so maybe one approach is to list a selection of paragraph titles, out of sequence? It's a bit like a game of consequences, which the Surrealists did in picture form, called Exquisite Corpse.
My edition includes Ballard's extensive notes, without which it would be almost impenetrable (and not just the pop culture references). But perhaps it would be less disturbing without them.
There's little point trying to describe the "story" or characters, but it does involve one who monitors how subjects react to scenes of car crashes as a proxy for (well, in addition to) his own life and experiences: "the eucharist of the simulated auto-disaster". Many other characters explore predilections on the boundaries.
There are many mentions of celebrities and events that were significant at the time (Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, assassination of JFK, the space race), surrealist and pop-art artists (especially Dali), Freud, and overall it shows that although Ballard decided not to pursue a career as a psychiatrist, he was still very interested in the field.
The real atrocity exhibition
Some elements are weirdly prescient, whether in a societal sense (the "banalization of celebrity... an instant, ready-to-mix fame as nutritious as packet soup", and that the Vietnam war becoming a rich vein for cinema), or in his own life and works.
This was written in '67, published in '69, and in '70, Ballard did actually put on an exhibition of crashed cars in London, and in '73, he published Crash, which is a more conventional novel, exploring the same themes. The real exhibition provoked strong, violent and sometimes strange reactions in ways that the same vehicles on the street outside would not. Most bizarrely, a model hired to interview visitors whilst she was naked, said, after seeing the exhibits, that she would only do it topless.
Too far
Much of this is challenging and controversial. For example, saying in the notes that "Pornography is a powerful catalyst for social change, and its periods of greatest availability have frequently coincided with times of greatest economic and scientific advance", but fearing a new puritanism in the 1990s. Personally, I think it's more complicated: our society is simultaneously very sexualised (sexy underwear for pre-schoolers) and also paranoid about child abuse to the point that the damaging effects of that exaggerated fear may outweigh the risks.
In the end, Ballard sometimes goes too far for me and I stopped reading just over half way through. Sexual tastes that I don't share are one thing, but rape is referred to several times, often with an apologist slant, "Her strong stride... carried within its rhythm a calculated invitation to her own sexuality" and although I know there are valid debates about the nature of paedophilia and whether there are grey areas, it's not something I choose to explore in any detail.
See also
For an even more gruesome look at sexuality and death, there's Yukio Mishima's short story, Patriotism, which I reviewed HERE. It's the most unpleasant fiction I’ve ever read - although it did make me laugh in places. show less
It explores the links between death/danger and sexuality (his own wife had died suddenly a few years earlier). Parts of it will be thought obscene by many. It reflects Ballard's interests in psychoanalysis and surrealism: the very structure of the book is surreal. All of this makes more sense after reading his far more accessible autobiography, Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, which I reviewed HERE.
Write your own
It is a non-linear narrative, divided into "chapters", of which each paragraph is a self-contained show more nugget, with its own title. In an introduction written more than 30 years after first publication, Ballard suggests readers scan a chapter for headings that catch their eye, and if they find them interesting, to move on to nearby ones, so maybe one approach is to list a selection of paragraph titles, out of sequence? It's a bit like a game of consequences, which the Surrealists did in picture form, called Exquisite Corpse.
departure
journeys to an interior
some bloody accident
the realization of dreams
contours of desire
an existential yes
the conceptual death
questions, always questions
hung among the corridors of sleep
soft geometry
the impossible room
the geometry of her face
transliterated pudenda
imaginary perversions
interlocked bodies
fractured smile
the lost symmetry of the blastosphere
My edition includes Ballard's extensive notes, without which it would be almost impenetrable (and not just the pop culture references). But perhaps it would be less disturbing without them.
There's little point trying to describe the "story" or characters, but it does involve one who monitors how subjects react to scenes of car crashes as a proxy for (well, in addition to) his own life and experiences: "the eucharist of the simulated auto-disaster". Many other characters explore predilections on the boundaries.
There are many mentions of celebrities and events that were significant at the time (Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, assassination of JFK, the space race), surrealist and pop-art artists (especially Dali), Freud, and overall it shows that although Ballard decided not to pursue a career as a psychiatrist, he was still very interested in the field.
The real atrocity exhibition
Some elements are weirdly prescient, whether in a societal sense (the "banalization of celebrity... an instant, ready-to-mix fame as nutritious as packet soup", and that the Vietnam war becoming a rich vein for cinema), or in his own life and works.
This was written in '67, published in '69, and in '70, Ballard did actually put on an exhibition of crashed cars in London, and in '73, he published Crash, which is a more conventional novel, exploring the same themes. The real exhibition provoked strong, violent and sometimes strange reactions in ways that the same vehicles on the street outside would not. Most bizarrely, a model hired to interview visitors whilst she was naked, said, after seeing the exhibits, that she would only do it topless.
Too far
Much of this is challenging and controversial. For example, saying in the notes that "Pornography is a powerful catalyst for social change, and its periods of greatest availability have frequently coincided with times of greatest economic and scientific advance", but fearing a new puritanism in the 1990s. Personally, I think it's more complicated: our society is simultaneously very sexualised (sexy underwear for pre-schoolers) and also paranoid about child abuse to the point that the damaging effects of that exaggerated fear may outweigh the risks.
In the end, Ballard sometimes goes too far for me and I stopped reading just over half way through. Sexual tastes that I don't share are one thing, but rape is referred to several times, often with an apologist slant, "Her strong stride... carried within its rhythm a calculated invitation to her own sexuality" and although I know there are valid debates about the nature of paedophilia and whether there are grey areas, it's not something I choose to explore in any detail.
See also
For an even more gruesome look at sexuality and death, there's Yukio Mishima's short story, Patriotism, which I reviewed HERE. It's the most unpleasant fiction I’ve ever read - although it did make me laugh in places. show less
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J. G. Ballard was born to British parents in Shanghai, China on November 15, 1930. While a child during World War II, he spent four years in a Japanese POW camp. This experience was the basis for the emotionally moving novel Empire of the Sun, which he adapted into a successful movie, directed by Steven Spielberg. Before becoming a full-time show more writer, he studied medicine at Cambridge University and served as a pilot in the British Royal Air Force. Ballard is best known for his science fiction writings. His early works were heavily influenced by surrealism. Most of his novels deal with death and destruction of the human spirit. Novels such as Crash, Concrete Island, and High Rise portray a society that is devolving into barbaric chaos. Crash was made into a movie by David Cronenberg in 1996. The Drowned World describes an apocalyptic society, with a hero that ushers in the destruction of the world. His novel Empire of the Sun was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize and James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. Empire of the Sun was filmed by Steven Spielberg in 1987, starring a young Christian Bale as Jim (Ballard). Ballard moved away from science fiction, but he is still considered one of the leading authors of the genre. He died on April 19, 2009 at the age of 78. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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- Canonical title
- The Atrocity Exhibition
- Original title
- The Atrocity Exhibition
- Alternate titles
- Love and Napalm: Export USA
- Original publication date
- 1970; 1990 (noted edition) (noted edition)
- Related movies
- The Atrocity Exhibition (2000 | IMDb)
- First words
- A disquieting feature of this annual exhibition - to which the patients themselves were not invited - was the marked preoccupation of the paintings with the theme of world cataclysm, as if these long-incarcerated patients had... (show all) sensed some seismic upheaval within the minds of their doctors and nurses.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)But one question still remains unanswered: who loaded the starting gun?
- Original language
- English
- Canonical DDC/MDS
- 823.914
- Disambiguation notice
- The first US edition of this book was pulped in 1970 following legal advice. It was published in 1972 under the title Love and Napalm: Export USA
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