1970 collection of stories by J. G. Ballard
The Atrocity Exhibition is an experimental novel of linked stories or "condensed novels" by British writer J. G. Ballard.
The book was originally published in the UK in 1970 by Jonathan Cape. After a 1970 edition by Doubleday & Company had already been printed, Nelson Doubleday Jr. personally cancelled the publication and had the copies destroyed, fearing legal action from some of the celebrities depicted in the book. Thus, the first US edition was published in 1972 by Grove Press under the title Love and Napalm: Export USA.[1] It was made into a film by Jonathan Weiss in 1998.[2][3]
A revised large format paperback edition, with annotations by the author and illustrations by Phoebe Gloeckner, was issued by RE/Search in 1990.[4] The edition with annotations is now standard.
All of the 1970 book originally appeared as stories in magazines before being collected. There is some debate on whether the book is an experimental novel with chapters or a collection of linked stories. With titles such as "Plans for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy", "Love and Napalm: Export USA", and "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan", and by constantly associating the Kennedy assassination with a sexual or sporting event, the work has maintained controversy, especially in the United States, where some considered it a slur on John F. Kennedy's image. Ballard said "it was an attempt for me to make sense of that tragic event."
Conception
The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard admitted in 2007, originated in large part from the sudden death of his first wife Mary from pneumonia:[5]
I was terribly wounded by my wife's death. 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.
Ballard's short story "The Assassination Weapon" (later to appear as the third chapter of The Atrocity Exhibition) was first published in 1966 in New Worlds and was edited by Ballard's genre fiction colleague and friend Michael Moorcock.[5] As editor of New Worlds, Moorcock aimed to marry the science fiction genre with an avant-garde, speculative tenor. Ballard's experimental stories "delighted" Moorcock: "['The Assassination Weapon'] was exactly what I'd been looking for [...] For me it was exemplary, a flag to wave for authors and readers."[5] Later that same year, New Worlds published the title story-chapter, "The Atrocity Exhibition". Ambit went on to publish "You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe" and "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race", also in 1966.[5] Ballard became Ambit's prose editor in 1967.[5]
Content and composition
The Atrocity Exhibition is split up into sections, similar to the style of William S. Burroughs, a writer whom Ballard admired.[6] Burroughs wrote the preface to the book.[7] Though often called a "novel" by critics, such a definition is disputed, because all its parts had an independent life. "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan," for example, had three prior incarnations: in the International Times, in Ronald Reagan: The Magazine of Poetry, and as a freestanding booklet from Unicorn Bookshop, Brighton, all in 1968. All 15 pieces had been printed and some even reprinted before The Atrocity Exhibition was published.
Each chapter or story is split up into smaller sections, some of them labelled by part of a continuing sentence; Ballard has called these sections "condensed novels". There is no clear beginning or end to the book, and it does not follow any of the conventional novelistic standards: the protagonist changes name with each chapter or story (Talbert, Traven, Travis, Talbot, etc.),[8] just as his role and his visions of the world around him seem to change constantly. (Ballard explains in the 1990 annotated edition that the character's name was inspired by reclusive novelist B. Traven, whose identity is still not known with certainty.)
The stories describe how the mass media landscape inadvertently invades and splinters the private mind of the individual. Suffering from a mental breakdown, the protagonist – a Dr Nathan who works at a mental hospital – surrenders to a world of psychosis. Traven tries to make sense of the many public events that dominate his world (the death of Marilyn Monroe, the Space Race, Elizabeth Taylor's much-publicized tracheotomy, and especially the assassination of John F. Kennedy), by restaging them in ways that, to his psychotic mind, gives them a more personal meaning. It is never quite clear how much of the novel "really" takes place, and how much only occurs inside the protagonist's own head. Characters whom he kills return again in later chapters (his wife seems to die several times). He travels with a Marilyn Monroe scorched by radiation burns, and with a bomber-pilot of whom he notes that "the planes of his face did not seem to intersect correctly."
Inner and outer landscapes seem to merge as the ultimate goal of the protagonist is to start World War III, "though not in any conventional sense" – a war that will be fought entirely within his own mind. Bodies and landscapes are constantly confused ("Dr Nathan found himself looking at what seemed a dune top, but was in fact an immensely magnified portion of the skin area over the iliac crest", "he found himself walking between the corroding breasts of the film-actress", and "these cliff-towers revealed the first spinal landscapes"). At other times the protagonist seems to see the entire world, and life around him, as nothing more than a vast geometrical equation, such as when he observes a woman pacing around the apartment he has rented: "This ... woman was a modulus ... by multiplying her into the space/time of the apartment, he could obtain a valid unit for his own existence."
