The Atrocity Repetition

Abstract

The Atrocity Repetition Davis Schneiderman J. G. Ballard: Quotes Edited by V. Vale and Mike Ryan RE; Search Publications http://researchpubs.com 415 pages; paper, $19.99 The signature obsessions of J. G. Ballard's long career—the elucidation of linkages between modernity and atrocity, the exteriorization of the human consciousness through the development of the technological, the extemporization of a popular culture seemingly unaware of its own implications —not only predominate the new RE/Search volume, J. G. Ballard: Quotes, but they populate its four-hundred-plus pages to such an extent that the effect is similarto finding oneselfinside the unsteady cylinder of a Ballard novel. Of course, this book is neither Empire ofthe Sun (1984) nor Crash (1973), but the position of Jim in the former, or Vaughan in the latter, is replicated in Quotes as the necessity of an almost surrealist de-realization of the world. First, there are the sudden delights, as when it is asserted that the American President "bears about as much relationship to the real business of running America as does Colonel Sanders to the business of frying chicken." Then, the clever metaphors: "If the sun is the ultimate TV station, then the beach is its most popular program, and life at a holiday resort resembles a chaotic rehearsal for the last great sitcom, a fusion of Baywatch and Armageddon." Before long, we reach the more sinisterjuxtaposition of man and machine, science and imagination, the place where "the ultimate Surrealist act would be to take a revolver and fire at random into a crowd." In the stranger moments of Quotes, Ballard's readers will indeed find the chance meeting on a dissecting table comprised ofa sewing machine and an umbrella (Breton through Lautréamont) that not only characterizes the surrealism he admires so much, but the enhancements he has made to its technique: "The ragged skyline of the city resembled the disturbed encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis... ," or "Working in an office for a great many years can be one of the most crucifying experiences. You are forcedto repress your biological needto kill everyone around you." If we look more closely at this quotation, the repetition of labor tasks that die office worker performs presumably deadens the "soul" of the individual, and would thus be responsible for the repression ofthis interior killer instinct; accordingly, repetition becomes one of the means by which this book critiques and contributes to its own milieu. At its most successful, Quotes (as in the section, "JGB's Art Show") uses serial quotations from the publications Heavy Metal, Artforum, Blitz, Spike, and Evergreen Review to construct the narrative of Ballard's exhibition ofcrashed cars (held at the New Arts Laboratory in London, 1969) as an "experiment " or a "confrontation" between the bourgeois art consumer and this display of atrocity. This test case for the novel Crash offered guests prodigious amounts of alcohol, the chance to be interviewed on closed-circuit TV by a topless woman, and an opening night that had guests "breaking the bottles of red wine over the cars, smashing the glasses, grabbing the topless girl and dragging her into the back of one of the cars." The multiple quotations that tell this story never feel repetitive, and the structure is more like a slightly skewed Rashômon than the filing and collating of a bored secretary. Still, several sections tend toward the latter, as when the opening division ("The Future") describes totalitarianism in one quotation as "ingratiating and subservient, rather than using the jackboot," only to be followed, in the next quotation, by a characterization that the system will be "subservient and ingratiating, the false smile ofthe bored waiter rather than the jackboot." Yes, of course, this is part of the point, and that such repetitions do not go unnoticed is owing in part to the book's easy-to-use format. Topics are conveniently grouped together, extractions from novels and interviews and short stories and essays are freely interwoven —and astute readers will no doubt discover enough personally instructive meta-commentary hidden throughout the text to stay entertained, as for instance: "Having been a reviewer myself, I can always tell when somebody has stopped...