Juhana reviewed The Atrocity Exhibition by J. G. Ballard
Sex and Psychosis
4 stars
Cool post-modern prose that rewrites psychoanalytic academic texts into self-studies of psychosexual psychoses. Each chapter starts anew with the same cast and a new theme that throws a warped scientific light on the many collective traumas and obsessions of the modern era.
It's stylistically clinically detached from the developing sexual perversions it exhibits, presenting them neutrally to the reader like a science paper, with the female form reduced to geographic and anatomic terms, as warm as a cadaver on an autopsy table. This is less sci-fi and more psy-fi: beneath the cold clinical veneer pulses a black heart of primal human behaviour, Freud's love and thanatos freebasing. No wonder the cool kids from art school lapped this stuff up.
However, there is incohesion, even if this is an anthology book of previous works. While there are some classic pieces included like "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan", they feel …
Cool post-modern prose that rewrites psychoanalytic academic texts into self-studies of psychosexual psychoses. Each chapter starts anew with the same cast and a new theme that throws a warped scientific light on the many collective traumas and obsessions of the modern era.
It's stylistically clinically detached from the developing sexual perversions it exhibits, presenting them neutrally to the reader like a science paper, with the female form reduced to geographic and anatomic terms, as warm as a cadaver on an autopsy table. This is less sci-fi and more psy-fi: beneath the cold clinical veneer pulses a black heart of primal human behaviour, Freud's love and thanatos freebasing. No wonder the cool kids from art school lapped this stuff up.
However, there is incohesion, even if this is an anthology book of previous works. While there are some classic pieces included like "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan", they feel out of place to the main "story," as it is. When you have various stylistic changes from dadaist absurdism ("The Generation of America") to later inclusions, like "Princess Margaret's Face Lift" that is, to partly quote Ballard: "reductive scientific text that is on a collision course with the most obsessive pornography", there is a narrative disconnection, even if thematically there are similarities.
It's impressive nonetheless. Structurally, linguistically and artistically it is a cohesive work, which might reward repeated readings. I'll be pulling this out of the bookshelf from time to time, if not for nothing else than just to browse it.