Like Ubu Roi’s imaginary Poland of (1.18), the flesh of the world of The Atrocity Exhibition is a non-place, a threshold outside of space and time:

The Persistence of Memory.  An empty beach with its fused sand. Here clock time is no longer valid. Even the embryo, symbol of secret growth and possibility, is drained and limp. These images are the residues of a remembered moment of time. For Talbot the most disturbing elements are the rectilinear sections of the beach and sea. The displacement of these two images through time, and their marriage with his own continuum, has warped them into the rigid and unyielding structures of his own consciousness. Later, walking along the overpass, he realized that the rectilinear forms of his conscious reality were warped elements from some placid and harmonious future.

Ballard took his inspiration for these atemporal landscapes from the paintings of surrealists like Salvador Dalí (hence the name of the section), Yves Tanguy and Max Ernst. The “flowering tissue” of a mouth reminds the main character of the porous surfaces of Ernst’s The Eye of Silence; “Marilyn’s pitted skin, breasts of carved pumice, volcanic thighs, a face of ash,”² are parts of a body “from which all organic matter has been leached, all sense of time. Looking at these landscapes, it’s impossible to imagine anything ever happening within them.” Petrified in time, these scenes are pure surface, the absolute lack of interiority; they are the dandy made landscape and space (2.3).

Ballard in the audio commentary to Jonathan Weiss’s film version of The Atrocity Exhibition:

We live in a kind of enormously expanded present, which is just packed like a tenement city with images from the past, and to some extent the future, which have been commandeered, ransacked out of the years past and the years to come, and The Atrocity Exhibition really describes just that world. Traven is making a desperate bid to understand what all these elements that are no longer linked by time mean – if they are not linked by time, what are they linked by?³

A possible answer: the flesh of the world. 

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1. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, 24. ↩︎
2. Ibid., 69 ↩︎
3. The Atrocity Exhibition. Dir: Jonathan Weiss. 2000. ↩︎