The Atrocity Exhibition

by J. G. Ballard

  Imaginary Diseases. By contrast, for Catherine Austin these activities were evidence of an ever widening despair, a deliberate summoning of the random and grotesque. After their meeting at the exhibition Travers grasped her arm so tightly that his fingers bruised a nerve. To calm him, she read through the catalogue introduction: ‘Bernouli's Encyclopedia of Imaginary Diseases was compiled during his period as a privat-dozent in Frankfurt. Beginning with the imaginary diseases of the larynx, he proceeded to a number of fictional malfunctions of the respiratory and cardiovascular systems. Within a few years, as he added the cerebrospinal system to his encyclopedia, a substantial invented pathology had been catalogued. Bernouli's monographs on imaginary defects of speech are a classic of their period, equalled only by his series of imaginary diseases of the bladder and anus. His greatest work without doubt is his exhaustive “imaginary diseases of the genitalia” – his concept of the imaginary venereal disease represents a tour de force of extraordinary persuasion. A curious aspect of Bernouli's work, and one that must not be overlooked, is the way in which the most bizarre of his imaginary diseases, those which stand at the summit of his art and imagination, in fact closely approximate to conditions of natural pathology …’

  Marriage of Freud and Euclid. These embraces of Travers's were gestures of displaced affections, a deformed marriage of Freud and Euclid. Catherine Austin sat on the edge of the bed, waiting as his hands moved across her left armpit, exploring the parameters of a speculative geometry. In a film magazine on the floor were a series of photographs of a young woman's death postures, stills from Koester's unsavoury documentary. These peculiar geometric elements contained within them the possibilities of an ugly violence. Why had Travers invited her to this apartment above the zoo? The traces of a young woman's body clung to its furniture – the scent on the bedspread, the crushed contraceptive wallet in the desk drawer, the intimate algebra of pillow arrangements. He worked away endlessly on his obscene photographs: left breasts, the grimaces of filling station personnel, wound areas, catalogues of Japanese erode films: ‘targeting areas’, as he described them. He seemed to turn everything into its inherent pornographic possibilities. She grimaced as he grasped her left nipple between thumb and forefinger; an obscene manual hold, part of a new grammar of callousness and aggression. Koester's eyes had moved across her body in the same transits when she blundered into the film crew outside the multi-storey car park. Vaughan had stood on the parapet beside the crashed car, staring down at her with cold and stylized rapacity.

  Death Games (a) Conceptual. Looking back at his wife's death, Travers now reconceived it as a series of conceptual games: (1) a stage show, entitled ‘Crash’; (2) a volume curve in a new transfinite geometry; (3) an inflatable kapok sculpture two hundred yards long; (4) a slide show of rectal cancers; (5) six advertisements placed in Vogue and Harper's Bazaar; (6) a board game; (7) a child's paper-doll books, cut-out tabs mounted around the wound areas; (8) the notional ‘pudenda’ of Ralph Nader; (9) a set of noise levels; (10) a random collection of dialogue samples, preserved on videotape, from ambulance attendants and police engineers.

  Death Gaines (b) Vietnam. Dr Nathan gestured at the war newsreels transmitted from the television set. Catherine Austin watched from the radiator panel, arms folded across her breasts. ‘Any great human tragedy – Vietnam, let us say – can be considered experimentally as a larger model of a mental crisis mimetized in faulty stair angles or skin junctions, breakdowns in the perception of environment and consciousness. In terms of television and the news magazines the war in Vietnam has a latent significance very different from its manifest content. Far from repelling us, it appeals to us by virtue of its complex of polyperverse acts. We must bear in mind, however sadly, that psychopathology is no longer the exclusive preserve of the degenerate and perverse. The Congo, Vietnam, Biafra – these are games that anyone can play. Their violence, and all violence for that matter, reflects the neutral exploration of sensation that is taking place now, within sex as elsewhere, and the sense that the perversions are valuable precisely because they provide a readily accessible anthology of exploratory techniques. Where all this leads one can only speculate – why not, for example, use our own children for all kinds of obscene games? Given that we can only make contact with each other through the new alphabet of sensation and violence, the death of a child or, on a larger scale, the war in Vietnam, should be regarded as for the public good.’ Dr Nathan stopped to light a cigarette. ‘Sex, of course, remains our continuing preoccupation. As you and I know, the act of intercourse is now always a model for something else. What will follow is the psychopathology of sex, relationships so lunar and abstract that people will become mere extensions of the geometries of situations. This will allow the exploration, without any taint of guilt, of every aspect of sexual psychopathology. Travers, for example, has composed a series of new sexual deviations, of a wholly conceptual character, in an attempt to surmount this death of affect. In many ways he is the first of the new naives, a Douanier Rousseau of the sexual perversions. However consoling, it seems likely that our familiar perversions will soon come to an end, if only because their equivalents are too readily available in strange stair angles, in the mysterious eroticism of overpasses, in distortions of gesture and posture. At the logic of fashion, such once-popular perversions as paedophilia and sodomy will become derided clichés, as amusing as pottery ducks on suburban walls.’

  Chase Sequence. As the helicopter roared over their heads again, Travers and Karen Novotny ran towards the shelter of the overpass. Karen stumbled over a wooden trestle, falling across the concrete. She held her bloodied left palm up to Travers, her face in a grimace of stupidity. Travers took her arm and pulled her on to the unset cement between the pillars of the overpass. The cleats of Vaughan's tennis shoes had left a line of imprints ahead of them, tracks which they were helplessly following. Vaughan was stalking diem like the nemesis of some over-lit dream, always in front of diem as they tried to escape from the motorway. Travers stopped and pushed Karen to the ground. The helicopter was coming after them below the deck of the overpass, blades almost touching the pillars, like an express train through a tunnel. Through the bubble canopy he could see Koester crouched between the pilot and cameraman.

  Che as Pre-Pubertal Figure. Travers stood awkwardly in front of the student volunteers. With an effort, he began: ‘The imaginary sex-death of Che Guevara – very little is known about Guevara's sexual behaviour. Psychotic patients, and panels of housewives and filling station personnel were asked to construct six alternate sex-deaths. Each of these takes place within some kind of perversion – for example, bondage and concentration camp fantasies, auto-deaths, the obsessive geometry of walls and ceilings. Some suggestions have been made for considering Che as a pre-pubertal figure. Patients have been asked to consider the notional “child-rape” of Che Guevara…’ Travers stopped, aware for the first time of the young man sitting in the back row. Soon he would have to break with Vaughan. In his dreams each night Karen Novotny would appear, showing her wounds to him.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ Travers walked along the embankment of the overpass. The concrete slope ran on into the afternoon haze. Karen Novotny followed a few steps behind him, absently picking at the spurs of grass in her skirt ‘An erode film - of a special kind.’ Somewhere in the margins of his mind a helicopter circled, vector in a scenario of violence and desire. He counted the materials of the landscape: the curvilinear perspectives of the concrete causeways, the symmetry of car fenders, the contours of Karen's thighs and pelvis, her uncertain smile. What new algebra would make sense of these elements? As the haze cleared he saw the profile of the multi-storey car park rising above diem. A familiar figure in a shabby flying jacket watched from the roof. Travers let Karen walk past him. As she sauntered along the verge he became aware of a sudden erotic conjunction, the module formed by Vaughan, the inclined concrete decks and Karen's body. Above all, the multi-storey car park was a model for her rape.
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br />   Treblinka. Cement dust rose from the wheels of the approaching car. Travers held Karen's arm. He pointed to the ramp. ‘Go up to the roof. I'll see you there later.’ As she set off he ran into the road, signalling to the driver. Through the windshield he could see Catherine Austin's knuckles on the steering wheel, Dr Nathan cupping his ears for the sounds of the helicopter. As Catherine Austin reversed and drove the heavy sedan down the slip road Travers walked back to the car park. After a pause he strolled towards the stairway.

  The Film of Her Death. Dr Nathan pushed back the metal door of the elevator head. Before stepping into the overheated sunlight on the roof he nursed the bruise on his left ankle. Vaughan had burst from the elevator doors like an ugly animal sprung from a trap. The noise of the helicopter's engine had faded fractionally. Shielding his head from the down-draught, he stepped on to the roof. The aircraft was rising vertically, its camera trained on the body of a young woman lying in the centre of the deck. The black bilateral parking lines formed a complex diagonal structure around her. Holding his throat with one hand, Dr Nathan stared at the body. He turned to look behind him. Travers was standing by the elevator head, gazing at the body on the white concrete slope, jetsam of this terminal beach. Nodding to Nathan, he walked to the elevator.

  Last Summer. For Travers, these afternoons in the deserted cinema were periods of calm and rest, of a reappraisal of the events which had brought him to the multi-storey car park. Above all, these images from Koester's film reminded him of his affection for the young woman, discovered after so many disappointments within the darkness of this projection theatre. At the conclusion of the film he would go out into the crowded streets. The noisy traffic mediated an exquisite and undying eroticism.

  Tolerances of the Human Face.

  The resonant title of this chapter I owe entirely to my girlfriend Claire Churchill (who formed the subject of my first advertisement – see Re/Search #8/9, page 148). Working at a London publisher's office in the late 19605, she came across a scientific paper, ‘Tolerances of the Human Face in Crash Impacts’, and realized that here was a title waiting for its rendezvous with a Ballard fiction.

  Fake Newsreels.

  Bizarre experiments are now a commonplace of scientific research, moving ever closer to that junction where science and pornography will eventually meet and fuse. Conceivably, the day will come when science is itself the greatest producer of pornography. The weird perversions of human behaviour triggered by psychologists testing the effects of pain, isolation, anger, etc., will play the same role that the bare breasts of Polynesian islanders performed in 1940s wildlife documentary films.

  From the Casualty Word.

  A first appearance of Vaughan, who was later to appear as the ‘hoodlum scientist’ in Crash.

  Actual Size.

  Jacopetti's Mondo Cane series of documentary films enjoyed a huge vogue in the 1960s. They cunningly mixed genuine film of atrocities, religious cults and ‘Believe-it-or-not’ examples of human oddity with carefully faked footage. The fake war newsreel (and most war newsreels are faked to some extent usually filmed on manoeuvres) has always intrigued me – my version of Platoon, Full Metal jacket or All Quiet on the Western From would be a newsreel compilation so artfully faked as to convince the audience that it was real, while at the same time reminding them that it might be wholly contrived. The great Italian neo-realist Roberto Rossellini, drew close to this in Often City and Paisa.

  Tolerances of the Human Face in Crash Impacts.

  In the 1890s the most fashionable surgeons in London did indeed have their claques of society ladies present in the operating theatre.

  The Six-Second Epic.

  In the early 1950s a part-time prostitute who occupied the room next to mine in a Notting Hill hotel would dress her little daughter in a Marie Antoinette costume, along with gilded hat and silk umbrella. She was always present when the clients climbed the high staircase, and I nearly alerted the police, assuming these gloomy, middle-aged men had sex with the child. But a woman neighbour assured me that all was well - during sex with the mother they were merely watched by the child. Before I could do anything they had moved. This was Christie-land.

  A New Algebra.

  The Russian astronaut Col. Komarov was the first man to the in space, though earlier fatalities had been rumoured, Komarov is reported to have panicked when his space-craft began to tumble uncontrollably, but the transcripts of his final transmissions have never been released. I'm sceptical of what may be NASA-inspired disinformation. The courage of professional flight-crews under extreme pressure is clearly shown in Tide Slack Box, edited by Malcolm MacPherson, which contains cockpit voice-recorder transcripts in the last moments before airliner crashes. The supreme courage and stoicism shown by these men and women in the final seconds running up to their deaths, as they wrestle with the collapsing systems of their stricken aircraft, is a fine memorial to them, and a powerful argument for equal frankness in other areas.

  Cinecity.

  Our TV sets provided an endless background of frightening and challenging images – the Kennedy assassination. Vietnam, the Congo civil war, the space programme – each seeming to catalyse the others, and all raising huge questions which have never been answered. Together they paved the landscape of the present day, and provide the ambiguous materials of this book, in which I have tried to identify what I see as the hidden agendas. Also, clearly, my younger self was hoping to understand his wife's meaningless death. Nature's betrayal of this young woman seemed to be mimicked in the larger ambiguities to which the modem world was so eager to give birth, and its finish line was that death of affect the lack of feeling, which seemed inseparable from the communications landscape.

  Too Bad

  ‘The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction. It may be that in this respect precisely the present time deserves a special interest Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unease, their unhappiness and mood of anxiety. And now it is to be expected that the other of the two “Heavenly Powers”, eternal Eros, will make an effort to assert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary. But who can foresee with what success and with what result?’ – Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents.

  ‘Homage to Abraham Zapruder.’

  The violent newsreel footage shown on TV in the 1960s has now been censored from our screens, though a certain sexual frankness struggles on. Housewives strip on Italian game shows, sections of French television seem to be permanently topless, while call-girls star in thirty-second amateur versions of Blue velvet on New York's Channel 23, The last must be among the most reductive of all films, featuring a bed, a woman, and an incitement to lust usually filmed in a weird and glaucous blue, an individual's entire reason for existence compressed into these desperate moments. By contrast the professionally produced ads for the large escort agencies are as inspiring as commercials for a new hotel chain. Needless to say. I believe there should be more sex and violence on TV, not less. Both are powerful catalysts for change, in areas where change is urgent and overdue.

  Conceptual Games.

  ‘After reading Edgar Allan Poe. Something the critics have not noticed: a new literary world pointing to the literature of the 20th century. Scientific miracles, fables on the pattern A + B; a clear-sighted, sickly literature. No more poetry but analytic fantasy. Something mono-maniacal. Things playing a more important part than people; love giving way to deductions and other sources of ideas, style, subject and interest The basis of the novel transferred from the heart to the head, from the passion to the idea from the drama to the denouement’

  The Goncourt Brothers' Journal, July 16, 1856.
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br />   Imaginary Diseases.

  ‘Bernouli's Encyclopedia of imaginary Diseases.’ My own invention, but some deranged pathologist might already have anticipated me. Physicians are capable of far more eccentricity than their patients realize, as Dr Benway, William Burroughs's brilliant creation, illustrates in Naked Lunch. Given their generally phlegmatic nature, this seems surprising. As a medical student dissecting cadavers, I remember thinking; ‘These rather dull men and women will have reached the summit of their profession forty years from now, just when I start to need their help.’ Presumably the unequalled richness of their source material propels their imaginations along unexpected paths. Doctors have remarkably high suicide rates, perhaps a consequence of long-term imposed depression and easy access to lethal drugs, Psychiatrists, unsurprisingly, show the highest rate, paediatricians and surgeons (the latter the most worldly and ambitious of all) the lowest The bizarre Bulletin of Suicidology in an early 1970s issue analysed US physicians' favourite methods that year, from the most popular, lethal injection, to the rarest two deaths by deliberately crashed light aircraft.

  Death Games (o) Conceptual.

  Nader again. His assault on the automobile clearly had me worried. Living in grey England, what I most treasured of my Shanghai childhood were my memories of American cars, a passion I've retained to this day. Looking back, one can see that Nader was the first of the ecopuritans, who proliferate now, convinced that everything is bad for us. In fact too few things are bad for us, and one fears an indefinite future of pious bourgeois certitudes. It's curious that these puritans strike such a chord – there is a deep underlying unease about the rate of social change, but little apparent change is actually taking place. Most superficial change belongs in the context of the word ‘new’, as applied to refrigerator or lawn-mower design. Real change is largely invisible, as befits this age of invisible technology – and people have embraced VCRs, fax machines, word processors without a thought, along with the new social habits that have sprung up around them. They have also accepted the unique vocabulary and grammar of late-20th-century life (whose psychology I have tried to describe in the present book), though most would deny it vehemently if asked.