Although Ballard composed his condensed novels in a pseudo-psychological key—it is with good reason that William Burroughs affirms that his work explores the non-sexual roots of sexuality—its implications surpass a Freudian or Jungian understanding and approach the idea of Merleau-Ponty’s flesh of the world.
The Atrocity Exhibition's main character is a traumatized man (victim of a car accident, psychiatric patient, pilot of the Enola Gay…) who appears by different names (Travis, Travers, Traven, Talbot, Tallis or Talbert) and who leads different versions of an experiment that has spun out of control. These fictions, fragmentary and perverse in their level of detail, in their “clinicity,” configure a psycho-architectural landscape in which our interior images coincide and intersect with the lines, curves and inclinations of highways, parking lots, and apartment buildings, creating a hidden geometry that reveals an artificial and perverse version of the flesh of the world. (4.4). In the novel that gives the collection its title we find one of the most representative images of Ballard’s work.
War-Zone D.. On his way across the car park Dr. Nathan stopped and shielded his eyes from the sun. During the past week a series of enormous signs had been built along the roads surrounding the hospital, almost walling it in from the rest of the world. A group of workmen on a scaffolding truck were pasting up the last of the displays, a hundred-foot-long panel that appeared to represent a section of a sand dune. Looking at it more closely, Dr Nathan realized that in fact it was an immensely magnified portion of the skin over the iliac crest. Glancing at the billboards, Dr Nathan recognized other magnified fragments: a segment of lower lip, a right nostril, a portion of female perineum. Only an anatomist would have identified these fragments, each represented as a formal geometric pattern. At least five hundred of the signs would be needed to contain the whole of this gargantuan woman, terraced here into a quantified sand-sea. A helicopter soared overhead, its pilot supervising the work of the men on the track. Its down-draft ripped away some of the paper panels. They floated across the road, an eddying smile plastered against the radiator grille of a parked car.1
The “gargantuan woman,” which will later be revealed as a celebrity, is the visual representation of the flesh of the world. In its enormous magnitude the curves of her body resemble the dunes of a desert, which are at the same time a reflection of our interior state of mind, of our “intra-corporeality.” Merleau-Ponty’s flesh has become a surface that enshrouds the world.
A couple of sections ahead in the same novel we find a fragment that offers the key to the functioning of these images:
The Enormous Face. 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. The wall on his right, the size of a tennis court, contained little more than the right eye and cheekbone. He recognized the woman from the billboards he had seen near the hospital—the screen actress, Elizabeth Taylor. Yet these designs were more than enormous replicas. They were equations that embodied the fundamental relationship between the identity of the film actress and the millions who were distant reflections of her. The planes of their lives interlocked at oblique angles, fragments of personal myths fusing with the commercial cosmologies. The presiding deity of their lives, the film actress provided a set of operating formulae for their passage through consciousness. Yet Margaret Travis’s role was ambiguous. 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.
This fragment shows a world in which its interior and exterior aspects have ceased to be such and have merged into a specular image that condenses both polarities. Moosbrugger’s rubber bands (4.2) have finally burst and we now live with our exteriorized thoughts, which lurk “in the surroundings, but never very far away from us”
Whereas the frontispiece of Leviathan showed the sovereign as the body of the people (1.9), The Atrocity Exhibition shows the sovereign/celebrity as the body of the world. The third body of the King. (1.14)
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