The Atrocity Exhibition
Encyclopedia
The Atrocity Exhibition is an experimental collection of "condensed novel
s" by British writer J. G. Ballard
.
Originally published in 1970 by Jonathan Cape. A revised large format paperback edition, with annotations by the author and illustrations by Phoebe Gloeckner
, was issued by RE/Search
in 1990 (ISBN 0-940642-18-2). 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 U.S. edition was published in 1972 by Grove Press
under the title Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A. (ISBN 0-394-48277-8). It was made into a film by Jonathan Weiss in 2001.
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 the dead president's image. Ballard claimed that "it was an attempt for me to make sense of that tragic event."
, a writer whom Ballard admired. Burroughs, indeed, wrote the preface to the book. Though often called "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/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
(such as he is) changes name with each chapter/story (Talbert, Traven, Travis, Talbot, etc.), just as his role and his visions of the world around him seems 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 certainly known.)
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 -- ironically, a doctor at a mental hospital -- surrenders to a world of psychosis
. Traven tries to make sense of the many public events that dominate his world (Marilyn Monroe
's suicide, the Space Race
, and especially the assassination of U.S. President 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 that 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 together (a Ballardian specialty), 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."
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
s" by British writer J. G. Ballard
J. G. Ballard
James Graham Ballard was an English novelist, short story writer, and prominent member of the New Wave movement in science fiction...
.
Originally published in 1970 by Jonathan Cape. A revised large format paperback edition, with annotations by the author and illustrations by Phoebe Gloeckner
Phoebe Gloeckner
Phoebe Louise Adams Gloeckner is an American cartoonist, illustrator, painter, and novelist.-Background:Gloeckner was born in 1960 in Philadelphia, and spent most of her later childhood and young adult life in San Francisco, where her family moved in the early 1970s...
, was issued by RE/Search
RE/Search
RE/Search Publications is an American magazine and book publisher, based in San Francisco, founded and edited by Andrea Juno and V. Vale in 1980. It was the successor to Vale's earlier punk rock fanzine Search & Destroy , and was started with $100 from Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti...
in 1990 (ISBN 0-940642-18-2). After a 1970 edition by Doubleday & Company had already been printed, Nelson Doubleday, Jr.
Nelson Doubleday, Jr.
Nelson Doubleday, Jr. was the president of Doubleday. He was instrumental in the company's purchase of the New York Mets in 1980. He served as chairman of the Mets' board during the team's rise to its 1986 World Series title. In 1986, he and Fred Wilpon bought the team from the publishing company...
personally cancelled the publication and had the copies destroyed, fearing legal action from some of the celebrities depicted in the book. Thus, the first U.S. edition was published in 1972 by Grove Press
Grove Press
Grove Press is an American publishing imprint that was founded in 1951. Imprints include: Black Cat, Evergreen, Venus Library, Zebra. Barney Rosset purchased the company in 1951 and turned it into an alternative book press in the United States. The Atlantic Monthly Press, under the aegis of its...
under the title Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A. (ISBN 0-394-48277-8). It was made into a film by Jonathan Weiss in 2001.
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
Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan
Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan is a short work by dystopian English author J.G. Ballard, first published as a pamphlet by the Unicorn Bookshop, Brighton, in 1968....
," 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 the dead president's image. Ballard claimed that "it was an attempt for me to make sense of that tragic event."
Plot
The Atrocity Exhibition is split up into fragments, similar to the style of William S. BurroughsWilliam S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...
, a writer whom Ballard admired. Burroughs, indeed, wrote the preface to the book. Though often called "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/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
Protagonist
A protagonist is the main character of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical narrative, around whom the events of the narrative's plot revolve and with whom the audience is intended to most identify...
(such as he is) changes name with each chapter/story (Talbert, Traven, Travis, Talbot, etc.), just as his role and his visions of the world around him seems to change constantly. (Ballard explains in the 1990 annotated edition that the character's name was inspired by reclusive novelist B. Traven
B. Traven
B. Traven was the pen name of a German novelist, whose real name, nationality, date and place of birth and details of biography are all subject to dispute. A rare certainty is that B...
, whose identity is still not certainly known.)
The stories describe how the mass media
Mass media
Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...
landscape inadvertently invades and splinters the private mind of the individual. Suffering from a mental breakdown, the protagonist -- ironically, a doctor at a mental hospital -- surrenders to a world of psychosis
Psychosis
Psychosis means abnormal condition of the mind, and is a generic psychiatric term for a mental state often described as involving a "loss of contact with reality"...
. Traven tries to make sense of the many public events that dominate his world (Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe was an American actress, singer, model and showgirl who became a major sex symbol, starring in a number of commercially successful motion pictures during the 1950s....
's suicide, the Space Race
Space Race
The Space Race was a mid-to-late 20th century competition between the Soviet Union and the United States for supremacy in space exploration. Between 1957 and 1975, Cold War rivalry between the two nations focused on attaining firsts in space exploration, which were seen as necessary for national...
, and especially the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy assassination
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the thirty-fifth President of the United States, was assassinated at 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time on Friday, November 22, 1963, in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas...
), 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 that he kills return again in later chapters (his wife seems to die several times). He travels with a Marilyn Monroe scorched by radiation
Radiation
In physics, radiation is a process in which energetic particles or energetic waves travel through a medium or space. There are two distinct types of radiation; ionizing and non-ionizing...
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 together (a Ballardian specialty), as the ultimate goal of the protagonist is to start World War III
World War III
World War III denotes a successor to World War II that would be on a global scale, with common speculation that it would be likely nuclear and devastating in nature....
, "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."
Chapter/story titles
- The Atrocity Exhibition. New WorldsNew Worlds (magazine)New Worlds was a British science fiction magazine which was first published professionally in 1946. For 25 years it was widely considered the leading science fiction magazine in Britain, publishing 201 issues up to 1971...
, Vol. 50, # 166, September 1966 (excerpt). - The University of Death. Transatlantic Review, No. 29, London, Summer 1968.
- The Assassination Weapon. New Worlds,Vol. 50, # 161, April 1966.
- You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe. AmbitAmbit (magazine)Ambit is a literary periodical published in the United Kingdom. It was founded in 1959 by Dr Martin Bax, a London paediatrician.Uniting art, prose, poetry and reviews, the magazine appears quarterly and is distributed internationally. Notable Ambit contributors have included J. G. Ballard, Eduardo...
# 27, Spring 1966. - Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown. New Worlds July 1967 (excerpt).
- The Great American Nude. Ambit # 36 Summer 1968.
- The Summer Cannibals. New Worlds # 186 January 1969.
- Tolerances of the Human Face. EncounterEncounter (magazine)Encounter was a literary magazine, founded in 1953 by poet Stephen Spender and early neoconservative author Irving Kristol. The magazine ceased publication in 1991...
Vol. 33, No. 3, September 1969. - You and Me and the Continuum. Impulse, Vol. 1, No. 1, March 1966.
- Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy. Ambit # 31, Spring 1967.
- Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A. Circuit #6, June 1968.
- Crash! ICAInstitute of Contemporary ArtsThe Institute of Contemporary Arts is an artistic and cultural centre on The Mall in London, just off Trafalgar Square. It is located within Nash House, part of Carlton House Terrace, near the Duke of York Steps and Admiralty Arch...
-Eventsheet February 1969 (excerpt). - The Generations of America. New Worlds # 183, October 1968.
- Why I Want to Fuck Ronald ReaganWhy I Want to Fuck Ronald ReaganWhy I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan is a short work by dystopian English author J.G. Ballard, first published as a pamphlet by the Unicorn Bookshop, Brighton, in 1968....
. Brighton: Unicorn Bookshop, 1968 - The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race. Ambit # 29, Autumn 1966.
Appendix (added in 1990)
- Princess Margaret's Facelift New Worlds # 199, March 1970.
- Mae West's Reduction Mammoplasty. Ambit # 44, Summer 1970.
- Queen Elizabeth's Rhinoplasty. TriQuarterlyTriQuarterlyTriQuarterly Online is a not-for-profit American literary magazine published twice a year at Northwestern University that features fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, literary essays, reviews, a blog, and graphic art....
No. 35, Winter 1976. - The Secret History of World War 3. Ambit # 114, Autumn 1988.