In 1970 Ballard published a collection of fifteen “condensed novels” under the title of The Atrocity Exhibition. One of the pieces, written in 1967 and published for the first time in the literary magazine Ambit, bears the title Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy. The text describes with clinical rigor the procedures of a focus group study whose members are shown multiple images of female celebrities they must take apart and reassemble until achieving the ideal victim profile:
Assassination fantasies in tabes dorsalis (general paralysis of the insane). The choice of victim in these fantasies was taken as the most significant yardstick. All considerations of motive and responsibility were eliminated from the questionnaire. The patients were deliberately restricted in their choice to female victims. Results (percentile of 272 patients): Jacqueline Kennedy 62 percent, Madame Chiang 14 percent, Jeanne Moreau 13 percent, Princess Margaret 11 percent. A montage photograph was constructed on the basis of these replies which showed an ‘optimum’ victim. (Left orbit and zygomatic arch of Mrs Kennedy, exposed nasal septum of Miss Moreau, etc.) This photograph was subsequently shown to disturbed children with positive results. Choice of assassination site varied from Dealey Plaza 49 percent to Isle du Levant 2 percent. The weapon of preference was the Mannlicher-Carcano. A motorcade was selected in the overwhelming majority of cases as the ideal target mode with the Lincoln Continental as the vehicle of preference. On the basis of these studies a model of the most effective assassination-complex was devised. The presence of Madame Chiang in Dealey Plaza was an unresolved element.1
According to Ballard, “the simple substitution of the anonymous ‘patient’ with the name of a public figure… constitutes a vast dormant pornography waiting to be woken by the magic of fame.”2 In fact, it is science’s obsession with analysis and dissection which leads to this new form of porn. But this short story operates on yet another, deeper level: by using celebrities as ‘research subjects’ Ballard managed to put flesh on the media landscape that had gotten hold of the Western psyche. A landscape that members of the Manson Family like Lynette Fromme would later fulfill by attempting to assassinate political celebrities like President Gerald Ford (3.3.3). In fact, the celebrity turned into a victim of the system—a sacrificial offering—points once again towards the dialectic that ties together sovereign and homo sacer (0.12). JFK’s murder awakened and stirred some of the atrocities we continue to live with down to our days.
Ballard’s narrative raises an incisive matter that he elaborates upon in the footnotes:
What actually happens on the level of our unconscious minds when, within minutes on the same TV screen, a prime minister is assassinated, an actress makes love, an injured child is carried from a car crash? Faced with these charged events, prepackaged emotions already in place, we can only stitch together a set of emergency scenarios, just as our sleeping minds extemporize a narrative from the unrelated memories that veer through the cortical night. In the waking dream that now constitutes everyday reality, images of a blood-spattered widow, the chromium trim of a limousine windshield, the stylised glamour of a motorcade, fuse together to provide a secondary narrative with very different meanings.3
“The waking dream that now constitutes everyday reality” is the sign of the mediatized dreams that have taken over the world’s exterior and now inhabit its surface like a nightmare that persists after we have awakened. In the hands of Ballard the outside world becomes a projection of the unconscious and vice versa, his fictions describe a threshold, an authentic terrible place, which is neither outside nor inside of us.
Randolph Churchill, son of the former Prime Minister and friend of the Kennedy family, somehow found out about the story and demanded that the arts council that financed Ambit withdrew its grant. He called the piece “an outrageous slur on the memory of the dead president,”4 but did not comment anything about the image of his widow or the other actresses and celebrities mentioned therein, who were its true “targets,” so to speak. What can one say? everyone cares for their own.
In his introduction to the 2014 edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, British novelist Hari Kunzru comments that in 1970 North American publishing house Doubleday agreed to print an edition of the work. However, a few weeks before its release John Turner Sargent, president of the company and friend of Jackie Kennedy, chanced upon a batch of copies of the novel. He had the entire print pulped on the spot. Luckily the British edition went ahead and two years later a North American edition appeared under Grove Press, known for having published D.H. Lawrence, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett and William Burroughs.
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