The Atrocity Exhibition

by J. G. Ballard

  Pentax Zoom. In these equations, the gestures and postures of the young woman, Trabert explored the faulty dimensions of the space capsule, the lost geometry and volumetric time of the dead astronauts.

  (1) Lateral section through the left axillary fossa of Karen Novotny, the elbow raised in a gesture of pique: the transliterated pudenda of Ralph Nader.

  (2) A series of paintings of imaginary sexual organs. As he walked around the exhibition, conscious of Karen's hand gripping his wrist, Trabert searched for some valid point of junction. These obscene images, the headless creatures of nightmare, grimaced at him like the exposed corpses in the Apollo capsule, the victims of a thousand auto-crashes.

  (3) ‘The Stolen Mirror’ (Max Ernst). In the eroded causeways and porous rock towers of this spinal landscape Trabert saw the blistered epithelium of the astronauts, the time-invaded skin of Karen Novotny.

  A Cosmogonic Venus. Dr Nathan followed the young man in the laminated suit across the forecourt of the deserted air terminal. The metalled light shivered across the white steps like the defective image in a huge kinetic artifact. Unhurried, Dr Nathan stopped by the sculpture fountain to light a cigarette. He had been following the young man all morning, intrigued by the dialogue of motion and perspective played out in complete silence against the background of the air terminal. The young man looked back at Dr Nathan, as if waiting for him. A half-formed smile crossed his bruised mouth, revealing the scars of an automobile accident barely hidden by the pale beard. Dr Nathan gazed round at the forecourt. Someone had drained the ornamental pool. Like an immense uterus, its neck pointing towards the departure bays, it lay drying in the sunlight. The young man climbed the rim and walked down the sloping bowl to the centre. Dr Nathan laughed briefly into his gold-tipped cigarette. ‘What a woman!’ Perhaps Trabert would become her lover, tend her as she gave birth to the sky?

  The Abandoned Motorcade. Walking through the deserted streets with Kline and Coma, Trabert found the motorcade abandoned in the sunlight. They moved along the rows of smashed cars, seating themselves at random beside the mannequins. Images of the Zapruder film hung on the fractured windshields, fusing with his dreams of Oswald and Nader. Somewhere the moving figure of a young man formed a plane of intersection. Later, by the drained swimming pool, he played with the life-sized plaster replicas of his wife and Karen Novotny. All week, to please Coma, he had studied the Zapruder frames, imitating the hairstyle of the President's widow. As the helicopter flew overhead its down-draught whirled at the matted wigs, driving into a cloud the photographs of Marina Oswald, Madame Chiang and Mrs Kennedy which Trabert had laid out like a hand of patience on the floor of the pool.

  Operating Formulae. Gesturing Catherine Austin into the chair beside his desk, Dr Nathan studied the elegant and mysterious advertisements which had appeared that afternoon in the copies of Vogue and Paris-Match. In sequence they advertised: (1) The left orbit and zygomatic arch of Marina Oswald. (2) The angle between two walls. (3) A ‘neural interval’ – a balcony unit on the twenty-seventh floor of the Hilton Hotel, London. (4) A pause in an unreported conversation outside an exhibition of photographs of automobile accidents. (5) The time, 11:47 a.m., June 23rd, 1975. (6) A gesture – a supine forearm extended across a candlewick bedspread. (7) A moment of recognition – a young woman's buccal pout and dilated eyes.

  ‘what exactly is he trying to sell?’ Ignoring Catherine Austin, Dr Nathan walked over to the photographs of the isolation volunteers on the enamel wall beside the window. The question revealed either astonishing ignorance or a complicity in dial conspiracy of the unconscious he had only now begun to unravel. He turned to face the young woman, irritated as always by her strong, quizzical gaze, an overlay of her own potent sexuality. ‘You, Dr Austin. These advertisements constitute an explicit portrait of yourself, a contour map of your own body, an obscene newsreel of yourself during intercourse.’ He rapped the magazines with his gold cigarette case. ‘These images are fragments in a terminal moraine left behind by your passage through consciousness.’

  ‘Planes Intersect.’ Dr Nathan pointed to the photograph of a young man with a pale beard, the cast in his left eye displacing one side of his face. ‘Planes intersect on one level, the tragedies of Cape Kennedy and Vietnam serialized on billboards, random deaths mimetized in the experimental auto-disasters of Nader and his co-workers. Their precise role in the unconscious merits closer scrutiny, by the way; they may in fact play very different parts from the ones we assign them. On another level, the immediate personal environment, the volumes of space enclosed by your opposed hands, the geometry of your postures, the time-values contained in this office, the angles between these walls. On a third level, the inner world of the psyche. Where these planes intersect, images are born, some kind of valid reality begins to assert itself.’

  The Soft Quasars.

  Pre-uterine Claims – Kline.

  ‘Young virgin auto-sodomized by her own chastity’ - Coma.

  Time-zones: Ralph Nader, Claude Eatherly, Abraham Zapruder.

  The Departure Platform. Closer to this presiding trinity, Trabert waited among the departure bays in the deserted terminal. From the observation deck above the drained sculpture fountain, Coma watched him with her rune-filled eyes. Her broad cheekbones, reminiscent now of the President's widow, seemed to contain an immense glacial silence. On the roof terrace, Kline walked among the mannequins. The plaster models of Marina Oswald, Ralph Nader and the young man in the laminated suit stood by the railing. Xero, meanwhile, moved with galvanic energy across the runways, assembling an immense motorcade of wrecked cars. Behind the advance car, the Presidential limousine waited in the sunlight. The silence before a million auto deaths hung in the morning air.

  A Mere Modulus. As Margaret Trabert hesitated among the passengers in the crowded departure building, Dr Nathan stepped behind her. His small face was dwarfed by the vast mural of a satellite capsule still drying on the wall above the escalators, the artist's trestles like a huge gantry that would carry the entire building into orbit. ‘Mrs Trabert – don't you understand? This young woman with him is a mere modulus. His real target is yourself.’ Irritated as always by Nathan, she brushed past the police detective who tried to block her way and ran into the forecourt. Among the thousands of cars in the parking lot she could see the white Pontiac. All week the young woman in the white car had been following her husband like some animal in rut.

  The Target Vehicle. Dr Nathan pointed through the windshield with his cigarette. Two hundred yards ahead Margaret Trabert's car had turned out of a motel driveway. It set off along the deserted street, a white integer beneath the unravelling ciphers of the overhead wires. ‘This motorcade,’ Dr Nathan explained, ‘we may interpret as a huge environmental tableau, a mobile psycho-drama which recapitulates the Apollo disaster in terms of both Dealey Plaza and the experimental car crashes examined so obsessively by Nader. In some way, presumably by a cathartic collision, Trabert will try to reintegrate space and so liberate the three men in the capsule. For him they still wait there on their contour couches.’ As Catherine Austin touched his elbow he realized that he had lost sight of the white car.

  The Command Module. Watched by Kline and Coma, Trabert moved behind the steering wheel of the open limousine. Behind the empty jump seats the plastic mannequins of the President and his wife sat in the rear of the car. As the motorcade moved off, Trabert peered through the frosted windshield. An immense target disc had been painted at the conjunction of the runways. From the departure area a white car turned on to the next runway and accelerated on a collision course towards the motorcade.

  Zapruder Frame 235. Trabert waited until the audience had left the basement cinema. Holding in his hand the commercial replica of agent Greer's driving licence he had bought in the arcade near the overpass, he walked towards the young man sitting in the back row. Already his identity had begun to fade, the choreography of his hands tracing a last cipher across the blunted air.

  Epiphany of these
Deaths. The bodies of his wife and Karen Novotny lay on the floor of the empty swimming pool. In the carport Coma and Kline had taken their seats in the white Pontiac. Trabert watched them prepare to leave. At the last moment Coma seemed to hesitate, her broad mouth showing the scars on her lower lip. When they had gone, the helicopters rose from their waiting grounds along the highway. Trabert looked up as the sky was filled with these insane machines. Yet in the contours of his wife's thighs, in the dune-filled eyes of Karen Novotny, he saw the assuaged time of the astronauts, the serene face of the President's widow.

  The Serial Angels. Undisturbed now, the vaporizing figures of the dead astronauts diffused across the launching grounds, recreated in the leg stances of a hundred starlets, in a thousand bent auto fenders, in the million instalment deaths of the serial magazines.

  The Impact Zone.

  Little information has been released about the psychological effects of space travel, both on the astronauts and the public at large. Over the years NASA spokesmen have even denied that the astronauts dream at all during their space flights. But it is clear from the subsequently troubled careers of many of the astronauts (Armstrong, probably the only man for whom the 20th century will be remembered 50,000 years from now, refuses to discuss the moon-landing) that they suffered severe psychological damage. What did they dream about, how were their imaginations affected, their emotions and need for privacy, their perception of time and death? The Space Age lasted barely fifteen years, from Gagarin's first flight in 1961 to the first Apollo splashdown not shown live on TV in 1975, a consequence of the public's loss of interest – the brute-force ballistic technology is basically 19th century, as people realize, while advanced late-20th-century technologies are invisible and electronic-computers, microwave data links, faxes and VDUs are the stuff of which our dreams are made. Perhaps space travel is forever doomed because it inevitably recapitulates primitive stages in the growth of our nervous systems, before the development of our sense of balance and upright posture – a forced return to infantile dependency. Only intelligent machines may one day grasp the joys of space travel, seeing the motion sculpture of the space flights as immense geometric symphonies.

  The Transition Area.

  Here I see the disaster on the launch-pad at Cape Kennedy in terms of the most common dislocation of time and space the rest of us ever know – the car crash, and in particular the most extreme auto-disaster of our age, the motorcade assassination of JFK.

  Algebra of the Sty.

  ‘Neuronic icons on the spinal highway.’ Here, as throughout The Atrocity Exhibition, the nervous systems of the characters have been externalized, as part of the reversal of the interior and exterior worlds. Highways, office blocks, faces and street signs are perceived as if they were elements in a malfunctioning central nervous system.

  A Watching Trinity.

  The Chilean painter, Roberto Matta, one of the last of the surrealists, asked this as yet unanswerable question. All disasters – earthquakes, plane or car crashes – seem to reveal for a brief moment the secret formulae of the world around us, but a disaster in space rewrites the rules of the continuum itself.

  Pentax Zoom.

  The flattening effect of the zoom lens reduces everything to a two-dimensional world, eliminating the sense of time. Years ago, while on holiday in Greece, I would borrow my son's telescope and gaze at the town across the Bay of Argos. People were clearly visible, but none of them seemed to move, although the resort was in fact a hive of holiday-makers and busy traffic.

  Operating Formulae.

  At the time of writing I was publishing my series of paid advertisements in Ambit and other magazines (see Re/Search #8/9, pages 148-52). One of these, ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’, actually appeared as the second of the series, a still from Steve Dwoskin's film Alone, about a woman masturbating. Sadly, I ran out of cash, and my half-serious application to the Arts Council for a grant (I asked for funds to pay for ads in Time and the American Vogue) was turned down. I can't remember the significance of I 1:47 a.m. on a June day in 1975, then some eight years ahead. As it happens I was probably reading the International Herald-Trib on a Spanish beach and wondering how to escape from England altogether.

  The Soft Quasars.

  Young virgin auto-sodomised by her own chastity.’ One of Dali's most original paintings. The notion of an attractive woman being ravished by her own beauty is familiar to us all, but here Dali convinces us purely in terms of the body's geometry.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE GREAT AMERICAN NUDE

  The Skin Area. Each morning, during this last phase of Talbert's work at the Institute, Catherine Austin was conscious of the increasing dissociation of the events around her. As she entered the projection theatre the noise of the soundtrack reverberated across the sculpture garden, a melancholy tocsin modulated by Talbert's less and less coherent commentary. In the darkness she could see the group of paretic patients sitting between their nurses in the front row. All week they had watched the montaged sequences of commercial pornographic films, listening without response to Talbert's analysis of each posture and junction. Catherine Austin stared at the giant frames. Fossilized into the screen, the terraced images of breast and buttock had ceased to carry any meaning. His face and suit dappled by the projector, Talbert leaned against the screen, as if bored by his own exposition. Every evening he examined the barely legible questionnaires, apparently searching for a pointer to his own behaviour, the key to a new sexuality. As the lights came on she buttoned her white coat, suddenly conscious of her body.

  The New Eros. From the window of his office, Dr Nathan watched Talbert standing on the roof of the multi-storey car park. The deserted deck was a favourite perch. The inclined floors seemed a model of Talbert's oblique personality, forever meeting the events of time and space at an invisible angle. Aware of Catherine Austin fidgeting beside him, Dr Nathan lit a gold-tipped cigarette. A young woman in a white tennis dress was walking towards the sculpture garden. Talbert's eyes followed her like a voyeur's. Already he had built up a substantial collection of erotica. What new junction would he find in the sex act?

  A Diagram of Bones. Talbert stopped at the entrance to the sculpture garden. Programmes in hand, the students wandered among the exhibits, staring at the truncated segments of coloured plastic tubing, the geometry of a Disney. From the smiling young woman at the open-air desk he accepted a programme. On its cover was printed a fragment of a half-familiar face, an enlarged detail of the left orbit of a film actress. Here and there on the lawn the students were fitting together the frames. Where would the pubis lie? The young woman in the white dress walked among the fractured profiles of Mia Farrow and Elizabeth Taylor.

  The See-Through Brain. Throwing away her programme, Karen Novotny hurried towards the entrance of the car park. The white American car had followed her around the perimeter of the sculpture garden, always fifty yards behind. She turned on to the ramp leading to the first floor. As the car stopped at the pay kiosk she recognized the man behind the wheel. All week this hunched figure with his high forehead and insane sunglasses had been photographing her with his cine camera. To her annoyance he had even inserted zooms from the film in his little festival of dirty movies – no doubt his psychotic patients had ejaculated into their strait-jackets. When she reached the roof the white car cruised towards her. Out of breath, she leaned against the parapet. Talbert gazed at her with an almost benign curiosity, his eyes exploring the templates of her face. One arm hung over the driving door, as if about to touch her thighs. He was holding her discarded programme. He raised me fragment against her left breast, matching the diameters of cleavage and nipple.

  Profane Marriage. As they left the projection theatre a dark-bearded young man stood by a truck outside. He was supervising the unloading of a large tableau sculpture, a Segal showing a man and woman during intercourse in a bath. Karen seized his arm. ‘Talbert – they're you and I…’ Irritated by yet another of the research student's ominous prank
s, Talbert walked over to Koester. His eyes were like those of a nervous priest about to officiate at a profane marriage.

  A History of Nothing. Narrative elements: a week of hunting the overpasses, the exploration of countless apartments. With stove and sleeping-bag, they camped like explorers on the sitting-room floors. ‘They're exhibits, Karen – this conception will be immaculate.’ Later they raced around the city, examining a dozen architectures. Talbert pushed her against walls and parapets, draped her along balustrades. In the rear seat the textbooks of erotica formed an encyclopedia of postures – blueprints for her own imminent marriage with a seventh-floor balcony unit of the Hilton Hotel.

  Amatory elements: nil. The act of love became a vector in an applied geometry. She could barely touch his shoulders without galvanizing him into a spasm of activity. Some scanning device in his brain had lost a bolt. Later, in the dashboard locker she found a set of maps of the Pripet Marshes, a contour photogram of an armpit, and a hundred publicity stills of the screen actress.

  Landscapes of the Dream. Various landscapes preoccupied Talbert during this period: (1) The melancholy back of the Yangtse, a boom of sunken freighters off the Shanghai Bund. As a child he rowed out to the rusting ships, waded through saloons awash with water. Through the portholes, a regatta of corpses sailed past Woosung Pier. (2) The contours of his mother's body, landscape of so many psychic capitulations. (3) His son's face at the moment of birth, its phantom-like profile older than Pharaoh. (4) The death-rictus of a young woman. (5) The breasts of the screen actress. In these landscapes lay a key.