Traversing the Body-Landscape of Elizabeth Taylor

An insomniac’s reading of J. G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, (1-17)

A question: In what way can Ballard’s 1970 experimental novel be considered pornology¹? First of all, the question postulates in many ways that Ballard’s counter-prose is either (a.) sadistic or (b.) masochistic. If the former is true, then Ballard’s phantasmagorical non-descriptions² serve a demonstrative end, that is, to impersonalize personal violence in the name of pure reason (MCC, 1967/1989, 18-22). However, if the latter is true, his non-descriptions merely serve an edifying end. According to Baudrillard, Crash (1973) prefigured a new species of SF that is characterized by “[a] complete abandonment of any moral or political/critical stance.”³ It seems that Ballard and Sade are similar in this respect; even so, how does Ballard’s World War III (6-7) resemble the self-legitimation of violence in Sade’s Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome? The expanded 2014 edition of TAE, which includes Ballard’s own annotations, further complicates the question. (Where does autofiction begin?) But let us put that problematic aspect aside for now and focus on what Deleuze calls the mathematical spirit of Spinoza (MCC, 20). To understand how this sort of “unspoken eroticism” is connected to the kind of impersonalized violence exercised in the book, one need look no further than the engraftment of Elizabeth Taylor’s disassembled body; the apocalyptic landscapes are nothing but a theater of war in which Nam is already in the process of traumatic reenactment, doubly infused with the geometrical/geographical pervasiveness of Elizabeth Taylor’s free-floating body parts. “The billboards multiplied around them, walling the streets with giant replicas of napalm bombings in Vietnam, the serial deaths of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe terraced in the landscapes of Dien Bien Phu and the Mekong Delta.” (4) In the first few pages of the book, we see the necessary combination of sexuality and violence, personified by “the beautiful young woman with radiation burns” and “the bomber pilot” respectively; thus, the sexuality/violence cannot be divided into two distinct entities, but it can only be recognized through traumatic repetition which keeps on magnifying itself with mathematical precision. (“Dr Nathan limped along the drainage culvert, peering at the huge figure of a dark-haired woman painted on the sloping walls of the blockhouse. The magnification was enormous.” [12-13]) In other words, the sexuality/violence is precisely the mimetization of the war atrocities in the alternate death of Elizabeth Taylor (12). For Deleuze, the sadistic demonstration and intensification of violence is carried out in geographical and mathematical patterns⁴, and so is the sexuality/violence that is repeated time and again, becoming a reenactive topography that can be chronogrammatically reverted (6). First, The sexuality/violence is mathematical in its elusive nature because Elizabeth Taylor (along with other female celebrities mentioned throughout the first chapter) assumes a geometrical form of expression: “In some way Travis would attempt to relate his wife’s body, with its familiar geometry, to that of the film actress, quantifying their identities to the point where they became fused with the elements of time and landscape.” (13) Second, although the body-landscape is out of time, it is nevertheless stuck in time and cannot progress past the ambiguous territory of the imminent spinal battlefields (7) and the wars that had already happened. The techniques of chronophotography as pioneered by Étienne-Jules Marey can only display the building-up of body movements and its cessation. In this sense, it presupposes a teleological history that is subjected to a (traumatic) reversal and/or an ambiguous termination (14). Death, of course, is presented as serial (4), but only in the form of a movie reel. One may read Ballard’s “condensed novels” in a manner similar to the way they read Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch (1963) or William S. Burroughs’s Nova Express (1964), i.e., to read fiction dyschronously, but the reader has to keep in mind that, despite the disorganization of appearances, there is a latent synchronous force hidden in the chaos (no matter how fragmentary the quasi-structure is), if they want to discard the notion of traditional narrative altogether:

“What we are concerned with now are the implications—in particular, the complex of ideas and events represented by World War III. Not the political and military possibility, but the inner identity of such a notion. For us, perhaps, World War III is now little more than a sinister pop art display, but for your husband it has become an expression of the failure of his psyche to accept the fact of its own consciousness, and of his revolt against the present continuum of time and space.” (6-7)

To revolt against the present continuum of time and space is to talk about the possibility of an alternative reading, to talk about a new kind of temporality as a way to stop reliving past trauma and ground oneself against the allure of dissociation (3). Ballard’s use of counter-prose is his attempt at inventing a combative language that can resist narrativization and the cinematic image mediated by the body-landscape. By beginning to read the 2014 edition that contains the author’s annotations, the reader is made aware that Ballard has already inserted himself into the story. (This process of authorial self-insertion is more prominent in his Empire of the Sun [1984] and The Kindness of Women [1991].) This conjecture sounds even less implausible if the reader notices how the annotations are placed at the end of the chapter (14-17)⁵; there is no indicative line that is usually placed horizontally to signify where fiction ends and commentary begins. Moreover, some of the annotations are so enigmatic to the extent that it becomes a difficult task to make certain whether they are meant to explain parts of the chapter and give general information about them or are part and parcel of the story itself.⁶ The impersonalized kind of violence, which is at once sexual, is directly inflicted upon the reader, not just Travis. In other words, it acts directly upon the senses by way of subjecting the reader to traumatic repetition: the book’s descriptions of corpses, body organs, disfigured celebrities, war atrocities, sexual obscenity, the adulterated and “scorched and fucked” Pontiac (xv), and so forth.⁷ Again, we need to remember how repetition cultivates violence in the book; it even figures in the non-communicative language utilized by Ballard himself. (Notice how many times Ballard uses the word “fade” and the word “tableau”.) To resist the imagery mediated by the body-landscape and the overwhelming sense of imposed chronogramatism that would lead us right back to traumatic repetition, then, is to try to restore the lost symmetry of the blastosphere:

“In conclusion, it seems that Travis's extreme sensitivity to the volumes and geometry of the world around him, and their immediate translation into psychological terms, may reflect a belated attempt to return to a symmetrical world, one that will recapture the perfect symmetry of the blastosphere, and the acceptance of the 'Mythology of the Amniotic Return.' In his mind World War III represents the final self-destruction and imbalance of an asymmetric world, the last suicidal spasm of the dextro-rotatory helix, DNA. The human organism is an atrocity exhibition at which he is an unwilling spectator . . . '” (8-9)

Cinematic language (9-10) is pervaded by images. Recall the section in which Travis takes refuge from the “forbidding figure of the bomber pilot”, a brief interval of mental and physical excursion to escape war trauma; there appears to be a middle-aged, cancer-ridden lady watching Travis from the other side of the fence. It is interesting, at least to me, that here Ballard uses the word “clapboard” to describe the material quality of the fence. The word “clapboard” is similar to the word “clapperboard”, which is another term for the dumb slate. The slate is used in filmmaking to demarcate where a scene starts and ends. It is no coincidence, to paraphrase Ballard’s own assertion (16), that the word clapboard figures in a scene where we see, for the first time, the mention of a projection screen: “Her handsome face, veiled by the laced curtains, resembled that of a skull. All day she would pace around the small bedroom. At the end of the second month, when the doctor's visits became more frequent, she undressed by the window, exposing her emaciated body through the veiled curtains.” (8) Not only is Ballard obsessed with photography (15) but also the way in which humans become mediated by technological entanglement; how humans are ‘captured’ and become photographically ambered replicas of themselves. Again, the theme of temporal paralysis is very prominent here. (“Dr Nathan stopped. Reluctantly, his eyes turned across the room to the portrait camera mounted on its tripod by the consulting couch.” [7]) The image-saturated (or media-saturated, whatever you prefer) world culminates in mediatory disorder, i.e., a state of perpetual psychosis induced by self-amputation⁸ in which elements of the real are gradually supplanted by representation. Nothing is ever really real once everything is projected onto the screen: reenacted already-happened wars, the gradual decline of the body in relation to the breakdown of society, &c. Of course, once the trauma has gone away, everybody is already dead (14). But that does not mean that repetition ceases to exist.

1. Deleuze: “Pornological literature is aimed above all at confronting language with its own limits, with what is in a sense a "nonlanguage" [...] However this task can only be accomplished by an internal splitting of language: the imperative and descriptive function must transcend itself toward a higher function, the personal element turning by reflection upon itself into the impersonal.” (MCC, 1967/1989, 22-23)

2. Deleuze, again, reminds us that in Sade’s work, there exists “[a] transcendence of the imperative and the descriptive toward a higher function.” (MCC, 20) Sadistic repetition is rooted in its relentless pursuit of universality: “The idea of that which is not, the idea of the No or of negation which is not given and cannot be given in experience must necessarily be the object of a demonstration (in the sense that a mathematical truth holds good even when we are asleep and even if it does not exist in nature). Hence the rage and despair of the sadistic hero when he realizes how paltry his own crimes are in relation to the idea which he can only reach through the omnipotence of reasoning. He dreams of a universal, impersonal crime…” (28)

3. Fisher, Flatline Constructs : Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction, 1999, 21. It is worth noting, however, that Baudrillard’s view is different from Ballard’s view on his own fiction. See Fisher’s thesis for more explanation.

4. Deleuze: “In Sade we discover a surprising affinity with Spinoza - a naturalistic and mechanistic approach imbued with the mathematical spirit. This accounts for the endless repetitions, the reiterated quantitative process of multiplying illustrations and adding victim upon victim, again and again retracing the thousand circles of an irreducibly solitary argument.” (MCC, 20)

5. In the 1990 edition, the annotations are placed alongside the text itself.

6. Take for example: “Weapons ranges have a special magic, all that destructive technology concentrated on the production of nothing, the closest we can get to certain obsessional states of mind. Even more strange are the bunkers of the Nazi Atlantic Wall, most of which are still standing, and are far larger than one expects. Space-age cathedrals, they threaten the surrounding landscape like lines of Teutonic knights, and are examples of cryptic architecture, where form no longer reveals function. They seem to contain the codes of some mysterious mental process. At Utah Beach, the most deserted stretch of the Normandy coast, they stare out over the washed sand, older than the planet. On visits with my agent and his wife, I used to photograph them compulsively.” (15)

7. Deleuze: “…it is through the intermediary of description and the accelerating and condensing effect of repetition that the demonstrative function achieves its strongest impact.” (MCC, 30)

8. See Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), specifically the chapter entitled “The Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis”.