QUOTE OF THE WEEK: February 22, 2015

Although I've already included a sample of text from Ballard's provocative 1973 novel, Crash, I feel compelled to include example of his remarkable prose. Another equally unsettling work from Ballard is his 1970 release, The Atrocity Exhibition. The work is often regarded as "experimental fiction" and rightfully so. Seemingly  random, there is a thin thread of perversity that connects all of the passages of his text and forms an impressive body of work. The piece is divided into labeled fragments with jarring titles such as, "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan." In fact, a condensed version of Crash! appeared in The Atrocity Exhibition and subsequently went on to become a full-fledged independent work of fiction.

One of my favorite passages from Ballard's text is as follows:

“Travers’s problem is how to come to terms with the violence that has pursued his life - not merely the violence of accident and bereavement, or the horrors of war, but the biomorphic horrors of our own bodies. Travers has at last realized that the real significance of these acts of violence lies elsewhere, in what we might term “the death of affect”. Consider our most real and tender pleasures - in the excitements of pain and mutilation; in sex as the perfect arena, like a culture-bed of sterile pus, for all the veronicas of our own perversions, in voyeurism and self-disgust, in our moral freedom to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game, and in our ever greater powers of abstraction. What our children have to fear are not the cars on the freeways of tomorrow, but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths. The only way we can make contact with each other is in terms of conceptualizations. Violence is the conceptualization of pain. By the same token psychopathology is the conceptual system of sex.”

Ballard's prose is uncompromising in his delivery of gut-wrenching visceral content. To read Ballard is to willingly disintegrate the moral fiber of reality and excuse oneself into a hallucinatory dimension of perverse proportions where nothing is off limits.