I first saw this ‘book’ at Moes books in Berkeley. It is actually a glossy style magazine reprinted in a series called REsearch which describes itself as ‘fascinated with society’s fringe elements’ and was published in 1990. Originally published in the UK in 1970, It was published as ‘Love and Napalm: Export USA‘ in the United States two years later. The novel, if it can be called that, was written after Ballard’s wife had died and serves notice of his break from the more conventional science fiction he wrote as he got underway in his career.
It is right after this novel, that Ballard wrote his most controversial and arresting work, ‘Crash.’ In fact, he references the erotic possibilities of famous sex symbols getting killed in car crashes which then morphed into the ideas of ordinary people getting off on crashing cars for sexual pleasure.
It is a fascinating failure that is often confusing, incoherent and purposively off-putting. However, it does contain a unique theme that Ballard will explore for the rest of his career. He is always looking at the monuments and achievement of modern society as if they are actually signs and signals of human trauma, fragmentation, extreme loss and basic denial of human’s primitive nature. One of those key monuments is celebrity and Ballard is fixated on Elizabeth Taylor as the ultimate representative. Her breathtaking beauty gets sullied and trashed by the mid-sixties when this is written. She begins to develop an erotic allure like a Lincoln Continental pulverized along its suicide doors because it sat on the track of a commuter train. His other fascination is the Kennedy assassination and particularly how the Zapgruder film defined the reality of that event by capturing the money shot. The way the horror of that moment became, via its vivid capture, ultimately banal via multiple viewing, is perfect Ballard fodder. No other writer captures the kitschy, erotic, dumpster fire ugliness of the modern world.
The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard
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