The Atrocity Exhibition

by J. G. Ballard

  A Shabby Voyeur. As she parked the car, Karen Novotny could see the silver bowls of the three radio telescopes above the trees. The tall man in the shabby flying jacket walked towards the perimeter fence, bars of sunlight crossing his face. Why had she followed him here? She had picked him up in the empty hotel cinema after the conference on space medicine, then taken him back to her apartment. All week he had been watching the telescopes with the same fixity of expression, an optical rigor like that of a disappointed voyeur. Who was he? – some fugitive from time and space, clearly moving now into his own landscape. His room was filled with grotesque magazine photographs: the obsessive geometry of overpasses, like fragments of her own body; X-rays of unborn children; a series of genital deformations; a hundred close-ups of hands. She stepped from the car, the coil hanging in her womb like a steel foetus, 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.

  The Image Maze. Talbot followed the helicopter pilot across the rain-washed concrete. For the first time, as he wandered along the embankment, one of the aircraft had landed. The slim figure of the pilot left no reflections in the silver pools. The exhibition hall was deserted. Beyond a tableau sculpture of a Saigon street execution stood a maze constructed from photographic billboards. The pilot stepped through a doorway cut into an image of Talbot's face. He looked up at the photograph of himself, snapped with a lapel camera during his last seminar. Over the exhausted eyes presided the invisible hierarchies of the quasars. Reading the maze, Talbot made his way among the corridors. Details of his hands and mouth signposted its significant junctions.

  Spinal Levels. 'Sixties iconography: the nasal prepuce of LBJ, crashed helicopters, the pudenda of Ralph Nader, Eichmann in drag, the climax of a New York happening: a dead child. In the patio at the centre of the maze a young woman in a flowered white dress sat behind a desk covered with catalogues. Her blanched skin exposed the hollow planes of her face. Like the pilot, Talbot recognized her as a student at his seminar. Her nervous smile revealed the wound that disfigured the inside of her mouth.

  Towards the D.M.Z. Later, as he sat in the cabin of the helicopter, Talbot looked down at the motorway below them. The speeding cars wound through the cloverleaves. The concrete causeways formed an immense cipher, the templates of an unseen posture. The young woman in the white dress sat beside him. Her breasts and shoulders recapitulated the forgotten contours of Karen Novotny's body, the motion-sculpture of the highways. Afraid to smile at him, she stared at his hands as if they held some invisible weapon. The flowering tissue of her mouth reminded him of the porous esplanades of Ernst's ‘Silence,’ the pumice-like beaches of a dead sea. His committal into the authority of these two couriers had at last freed him from his memories of Koester and Catherine Austin. The erosion of that waking landscape continued. Meanwhile the quasars burned dimly from the dark peaks of the universe, sections of his brain reborn in the island galaxies.

  Mimetized Disasters. The helicopter banked abruptly, pulled round in a gesture of impatience by the pilot. They plunged towards the underpass, the huge fans of the Sikorsky sliding through the air like the wings of a crippled archangel. A multiple collision had occurred in the approach to the underpass. After the police had left they walked for an hour among the cars, staring through the steam at the bodies propped against the fractured windshields. Here he would find his alternate death, the mimetized disasters of Vietnam and the Congo recapitulated in the contours of these broken fenders and radiator assemblies. As they circled overhead the shells of the vehicles lay in the dusk like the crushed wings of an aerial armada.

  No U-Turn. ‘Above all, the notion of conceptual auto-disaster has preoccupied Talbot during the final stages of his breakdown,’ Dr Nathan wrote. ‘But even more disturbing is Talbot's deliberate self-involvement in the narrative of the scenario. Far from the students making an exhibition of an overwrought instructor, transforming him into a kind of ur-Christ of the communications landscape, Talbot has in fact exploited them. This has altered the entire direction of the scenario, turning it from an exercise on the theme of “the end of the world” into a psycho-drama of increasingly tragic perspectives.’

  The Persistence of Memory. An empty beach with its fused sand. Here clock time is no longer valid. Even the embryo, symbol of secret growth and possibility, is drained and limp. These images are the residues of a remembered moment of time. For Talbot the most disturbing elements are the rectilinear sections of the beach and sea. The displacement of these two images through time, and their marriage with his own continuum, has warped diem into the rigid and unyielding structures of his own consciousness. Later, walking along the overpass, he realized that the rectilinear forms of his conscious reality were warped elements from some placid and harmonious future.

  Arrival at the Zone. They sat in the unfading sunlight on the sloping concrete. The abandoned motorway ran off into the haze, silver firs growing through its sections. Shivering in the cold air, Talbot looked out over the landscape of broken overpasses and crushed underpasses. The pilot walked down the slope to a rusting grader surrounded by tyres and fuel drums. Beyond it a quonset tilted into a pool of mud. Talbot waited for the young woman to speak to him, but she stared at her hands, lips clenched against her teeth. Against the drab concrete the white fabric of her dress shone with an almost luminescent intensity. How long had they sat there?

  The Plaza. Later, when his two couriers had moved to the ridge of the embankment, Talbot began to explore the terrain. Covered by the same even light, the landscape of derelict roadways spread to the horizon. On the ridge the pilot squatted under the tail of the helicopter, the young woman behind him. Their impassive, unlit faces seemed an extension of the landscape. Talbot followed the concrete beach. Here and there sections of the banking had fallen, revealing the steel buttresses below. An orchard of miniature fruit trees grew from the sutures between the concrete slabs. Three hundred yards from the helicopter he entered a sunken plaza where two convergent highways moved below an underpass. The shells of long-abandoned automobiles lay below the arches. Talbot brought the young woman and guided her down the embankment For several hours they waited on the concrete slope. The geometry of the plaza exercised a unique fascination upon Talbot's mind.

  The Annunciation. Partly veiled by the afternoon clouds, the enormous image of a woman's hands moved across the sky. Talbot stood up, for a moment losing his balance on the sloping concrete. Raised as if to form an arch over an invisible child, the hands passed through the air above the plaza. They hung in the sunlight like immense doves. Talbot climbed the slope, following this spectre along the embankment. He had witnessed the annunciation of a unique event. Looking down at the plaza, he murmured without thinking, ‘Ralph Nader.’

  The Geometry of Her Face. In the perspectives of the plaza, the junctions of the underpass and embankment, Talbot at last recognized a modulus dial could be multiplied into the landscape of his consciousness. The descending triangle of the plaza was repeated in the facial geometry of the young woman. The diagram of her bones formed a key to his own postures and musculature, and to the scenario that had preoccupied him at the Institute. He began to prepare for departure. The pilot and the young woman now deferred to him. The fans of the helicopter turned in the dark air, casting elongated ciphers on the dying concrete.

  Transliterated Pudenda. Dr Nathan showed his pass to the guard at the gatehouse. As they drove towards the testing area he was aware of Catherine Austin peering through the windshield, her sexuality keening now that Talbot was within range. Nathan glanced down at her broad thighs, calculating the jut and rake of her pubis. ‘Talbot's belief – and this is confirmed by the logic of the scenario – is that automobile crashes play very different roles from the ones we assign them. Apart from its manifest function, redefining the elements of space and time in terms of our most potent consumer durable, the car crash may be perceived
unconsciously as a fertilizing rather than a destructive event – a liberation of sexual energy – mediating the sexuality of those who have died with an intensity impossible in any other form: James Dean and Miss Mansfield, Camus and the late President. In the eucharist of the simulated auto-disaster we see the transliterated pudenda of Ralph Nader, our nearest image of the blood and body of Christ.’ They stopped by the test course. A group of engineers watched a crushed Lincoln dragged away through the morning air. The hairless plastic mannequin of a woman sat propped on the grass, injury sites marked on her legs and thorax.

  Journeys to an Interior. Waiting in Karen Novotny's apartment, Talbot made certain transits: (1) Spinal: ‘The Eye of Silence’ – these porous rock towers, with the luminosity of exposed organs, contained an immense planetary silence. Moving across the iodine water of these corroded lagoons, Talbot followed the solitary nymph through the causeways of rock, the palaces of his own flesh and bone. (2) Media: montage landscapes of war – webbing heaped in pits beside the Shanghai-Nanking railway; bargirls' cabins built out of tyres and fuel drums; dead Japanese stacked like firewood in L.C.T.S off Woosung pier. (3) Contour: the unique parameters of Karen's body - beckoning vents of mouth and vulva, the soft hypogeum of the anus. (4) Astral: segments of his posture mimetized in the processions of space. These transits contained an image of the geometry assembling itself in the musculature of the young woman, in their postures during intercourse, in the angles between the walls of the apartment.

  Stochastic Analysis. Karen Novotny paused over the wet stockings in the handbasin. As his fingers touched her armpits she stared into the sculpture garden between the apartment blocks. The sallow-faced young man in the fascist overcoat who had followed her all week was sitting on the bench beside the Paolozzi. His paranoid eyes, with their fusion of passion and duplicity, had watched her like a rapist's across the café tables. Talbot's bruised hands were lifting her breasts, as if weighing their heavy curvatures against some more plausible alternative. The landscape of highways obsessed him, the rear mouldings of automobiles. All day he had been building his bizarre antenna on the roof of the apartment block, staring into the sky as if trying to force a corridor to the sun. Searching in his suitcase, she found clippings of his face taken from as yet unpublished news stories in Oggi and Newsweek. In the evening, while she bathed, waiting for him to enter the bathroom as she powdered her body, he crouched over the blueprints spread between the sofas in the lounge, calculating a stochastic analysis of the Pentagon car park.

  Crash Magazine. Catherine Austin moved through the exhibits towards the dark-skinned young man in the black coat. He leaned against one of the cars, his face covered by the rainbows reflected from a frosted windshield. Who was Koester: a student in Talbot's class; Judas in this scenario; a rabbi serving a sinister novitiate? Why had he organized this exhibition of crashed cars? The truncated vehicles, with their ruptured radiator grilles, were arranged in lines down the showroom floor. His warped sexuality, of which she had been aware since his arrival at the first semester, had something of the same quality as these maimed vehicles. He had even produced a magazine devoted solely to car accidents: Crash! The dismembered bodies of Jayne Mansfield, Camus and Dean presided over its pages, epiphanies of violence and desire.

  A Cosmetic Problem. The star of the show was JFK, victim of the first conceptual car crash. A damaged Lincoln had been given the place of honour, plastic models of the late President and his wife in the rear seat. An elaborate attempt had been made to represent cosmetically the expressed brain tissue of the President. As she touched the white acrylic smears across the trunk Koester swung himself aggressively out of the driver's seat. While he lit her cigarette she leaned against the fender of a white Pontiac, their thighs almost touching. Koester took her arm with a nervous gesture. ‘Ah, Dr Austin …’ The flow of small talk modulated their sexual encounter.‘… surely Christ's crucifixion could be regarded as the first traffic accident – certainly if we accept Jarry's happy piece of and-clericalism …’

  The Sixty-Minute Zoom. As they moved from apartment to apartment along the motorway, Karen Novotny was conscious of the continuing dissociation of the events around her. Talbot followed her about the apartment, drawing chalk outlines on the floor around her chair, around the cups and utensils on the breakfast table as she drank her coffee, and lastly around herself: (1) sitting, in the posture of Rodin's ‘Thinker’, on the edge of the bidet, (2) watching from the balcony as she waited for Koester to find them again, (3) making love to Talbot on the bed. He worked silently at the chalk outlines, now and then rearranging her limbs. The noise of the helicopters had become incessant. One morning she awoke in complete silence to find that Talbot had gone.

  A Question of Definition. The multiplying outlines covered the walls and floors, a frieze of priapic dances – crash victims, a crucified man, children in intercourse. The outline of a helicopter covered the cinder surface of the tennis court like the profile of an archangel. She returned after a fruitless search among the cafés to find the furniture removed from the apartment. Koester and his student gang were photographing the chalk outlines. Her own name had been written into the silhouette of herself in the bath. ‘“Novotny, masturbating,”’ she read out aloud. ‘Are you writing me into your scenario, Mr Koester?’ she asked with an attempt at irony. His irritated eyes compared her figure with the outline in the bath. ‘We know where he is. Miss Novotny.’ She stared at the outline of her breasts on the black tiles of the shower stall, Talbot's hands traced around them. Hands multiplied around the rooms, soundlessly clapping, a welcoming host.

  The Unidentified Female Orifice. These leg stances preoccupied Talbot - Karen Novotny (1) stepping from the driving seat of the Pontiac, median surface of thighs exposed, (2) squatting on the bathroom floor, knees laterally displaced, fingers searching for the diaphragm lip, (3) in the a tergo posture, thighs pressing against Talbot, (4) collision: crushed right tibia against the instrument console, left patella impacted by the handbrake.

  The Optimum Wound Profile. ‘One must bear in mind that roll-over followed by a head-on collision produces complex occupant movements and injuries from unknown sources,’ Dr Nathan explained to Captain Webster. He held up the montage photograph he had found in Koester's cubicle, the figure of a man with itemized wound areas. ‘However, here we have a wholly uncharacteristic emphasis on palm, ankle, and abdominal injuries. Even allowing for the excessive crushing movements in a severe impact it is difficult to reconstruct the likely accident mode. In this case, taken from Koester's scenario of Talbot's death, the injuries seem to have been sustained in an optimized auto-fatality, conceived by the driver as some kind of bizarre crucifixion. He would be mounted in the crash vehicle in an obscene position as if taking part in some grotesque act of intercourse – Christ crucified on the sodomized body of his own mother.’

  The Impact Zone. At dusk Talbot drove around the deserted circuit of the research laboratory test track. Grass grew waist high through the untended concrete, wheel-less cars rusted in the undergrowth along the verge. Overhead the helicopter moved across the trees, its fans churning up a storm of leaves and cigarette cartons. Talbot steered the car among the broken tyres and oil drums. Beside him the young woman leaned against his shoulder, her grey eyes surveying Talbot with an almost minatory calm. He turned on to a concrete track between the trees. The collision course ran forwards through the dim light, crushed cars shackled to steel gondolas above a catapult. Plastic mannequins spilled through the burst doors and panels. As they walked along the catapult rails Talbot was aware of the young woman pacing out the triangle of approach roads. Her face contained the geometry of the plaza. He worked until dawn, towing the wrecks into the semblance of a motorcade.

  Talbot: False Deaths. (1) The flesh impact: Karen Novotny's beckoning figure in the shower stall, open thighs and exposed pubis – traffic fatalities screamed in this soft collision. (2) The overpass below the apartment: the angles between the concrete buttresses conta
ined for Talbot an immense anguish. (3) A crushed fender: in its broken geometry Talbot saw the dismembered body of Karen Novotny, the alternate death of Ralph Nader.

  Unusual Poses. ‘You'll see why we're worried, Captain.’ Dr Nathan beckoned Webster towards the photographs pinned to the walls of Talbot's office. ‘We can regard them in all cases as “poses”. They show (1) the left orbit and zygomatic arch of President Kennedy magnified from Zapruder frame 230, (2) X-ray plates of the hands of Lee Harvey Oswald, (3) a sequence of corridor angles at the Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane, (4) Miss Karen Novotny, an intimate of Talbot's, in a series of unusual amatory positions. In fact, it is hard to tell whether the positions are those of Miss Novotny in intercourse or as an auto-crash fatality – to a large extent the difference is now meaningless.’ Captain Webster studied the exhibits. He fingered the shaving scar on his heavy jaw, envying Talbot the franchises of this young woman's body. ‘And together they make up a portrait of this American safety fellow – Nader?’

  ‘In Death, Yes.’ Nathan nodded sagely over his cigarette smoke. ‘In death, yes. That is, an alternate or “false” death. These images of angles and postures constitute not so much a private gallery as a conceptual equation, a fusing device by which Talbot hopes to bring his scenario to a climax. The danger of an assassination attempt seems evident, one hypotenuse in this geometry of a murder. As to the figure of Nader – one must remember that Talbot is here distinguishing between the manifest content of reality and its latent content. Nader's true role is clearly very different from his apparent one, to be deciphered in terms of the postures we assume, our anxieties mimetized in the junction between wall and ceiling. 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 a conceptual auto-disaster.’