The Atrocity Exhibition [Anglais] [Broché]

Easily one of the 20th century's most visionary writers, J. G. Ballard still lives far ahead of his time. Called his "prophetic masterpiece" by many, The Atrocity Exhibition practically lies outside of any literary tradition. Part science fiction, part eerie historical fiction, part pornography, its characters adhere to no rules of linearity or stability. This reissued edition features an introduction by William S. Burroughs, extensive text commentary by Ballard, and four additional stories. Of specific interest are the illustrations by underground cartoonist and professional medical illustrator Phoebe Gloeckner. Her ultrarealistic images of eroticism and destruction add an important dimension to Ballard's text. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

The Atrocity Exhibition is J.G. Ballard's most complex, disturbing work, with fabulous photos by Ana Barrado and artwork by Phoebe Gloeckner.

When the Atrocity Exhibition was originally printed (1970), Nelson Doubleday saw a copy and was so horrified he ordered the entire press run shredded. Two years later Grove Press brought out a small hardback printing re-titled "Love and Napalm: Export USA." Now Re/Search brings out an illustrated, large-format edition of this notorious work, augmented with four recently written stories, plus extensive annotations--written by the author, never before published--which clarify and illuminate this exhilarating, prophetic masterpiece.

Born in Shanghai in 1930, James Graham Ballard spent the first 15 years of his life in China. Interned in a Japanese camp during World War II, he was repatriated to England at the age of sixteen. After studying medicine at Cambridge, he sold his first "speculative fiction" story to "New Worlds" in 1956 and began writing a series of planetary disaster novels, ultimately focusing on the inner landscape in psychopathological classics such as "Crash" and "High-Rise." In 1987 Steven Spielberg made a movie of his best-selling autobiographical work "Empire of the Sun." For the past 30 years J.G. Ballard has lived in Shepperton, England, home of the famous film studios.

The 20th century is characterized by both visionary dreams of amazing scientific advancement (the Space Race; Astrophysics; the Computer Revolution; organ transplant surgery) and nightmares of barbarism (death camp experiments; Hiroshima; Vietnam; serial killings). Clearly, our astounding technological innovation has not been accompanied by "utopian" social progress or a sweeping elevation of individual clarity. The basic underpinnings of society seem flawed: the structural myths, goals, icons, and values; as well as the information processing/analytic capabilities of its citizens. Just as their myth about the coming of a white messiah prepared the Aztecs for easy takeover and slaughter by a handful of Spanish conquistadors, so our fundamental mythology may be preparing us for what now seems inevitable: the suicide of planet Earth.

"The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time . . . and you can't see it if you refuse to face the possibility." (William S. Burroughs)

For nearly 35 years J.G. Ballard has been systematically identifying and updating the myths and iconography proffered by our media, extrapolating ecological and psychological disaster scenarios whose inevitability derives from pathological defects in our belief and value systems. Ballard's work constitutes a body of prophecy unequaled in accuracy and relevance. Always set in the near future, the Ballardian landscapes describe empty swimming pools, concrete freeways, deserted resorts, decaying cities and abandoned Space launching pads, peopled by media stars such as Charles Manson, Jacqueline Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe and Ronald Reagan. Against a backdrop of television, the Vietnam War, advertising and TV/movie icons, ambiguous characters relentlessly pursue their obsessions, whether it be to assassinate JFK again "in a way that makes sense," or to die in a car crash with Elizabeth Taylor as an act of ultimate sexual fulfillment.

Written from 1967-69, The Atrocity Exhibition is Ballard's most concentrated book-a prophetic masterpiece. Not since James Joyce and William S. Burroughs has the novel's form-a radical departure from traditional linear narrative-been so illuminative of the shifting inner landscapes of its characters; it resembles a flickering video-collage in written form. We enter the schizophrenic psyche of the main character whose name changes (Travis, Travers, Traven, Talbot) mirror the increasing fragmentation of his external environment-a backdrop of splintered mass-cultural icons. As Ballard commented, "Its landscape is compounded of an enormous number of fictions, the fragments of the dream machine that produces our lifestyle right now. I mean fictions like TV, radio, politics, the press and advertising. Life is an enormous novel. Today, when the fictional elements have overwhelmed reality, the main task of the arts seems to be more and more to isolate the real elements in this goulash of fictions from the unreal ones."

In this edition, the deconstruction of the narrative form is taken one step further by the inclusion of recently-written annotations. This amplification of text by the author himself, 20 years later, provides valuable (and poignant) clarification of important figures, events, places and other references which may have faded into undeserved oblivion. The interplay between the "real" author's first-person annotations and the text provides a curious displacement of subject/object, reality and fiction.

Yet another level of "reality" is challenged by Phoebe Gloeckner's precisely-drawn illustrations. Their realism dismantles "pornography" like Ballard's text: as a series of fragmentary, alienated, passionless responses to a set of stimuli. A penis inside a mouth takes on the detached distancing of a medical lecture, its eroticism excised-just as an atrocity on the news is neutralized by the commercial that follows, resulting in deadened emotional response. Implied here is a critique of science as ultimate pornography, capable of reducing the ineffable-unique personal relationships, the source of our greatest delight-to objectified, purely functional commodifications.

As Ballard observes, "I think we're all perhaps innately perverse, capable of enormous cruelty, yet paradoxically our talent for the perverse, the violent, and the obscene may be a good thing. We may have to go through this phase to reach something on the other side. It's a mistake to hold back and refuse to accept one's nature." In The Atrocity Exhibition, the fantasies of our epoch and of its technology lie ruthlessly exposed to light, evoking all the lyrical disenchantment of their failed promise. -V.Vale & Andrea Juno