Moodboard: J.G. Ballard's 1998 BBC interview, in regards to his 1968 book "The atrocity Exhibition". Book cover art for the 1985 reprint.

 

"I mean, another conventional view of the genesis of psychopathy would lay the originating incidence at the door of the family. But you don't seem to write about that much, you seem to think we have a pathogenic media culture that is as powerful if not more powerful than anything your parents could do to you."

"I think that's true, I mean I take the view that... the environment today is itself so filled with pressures of every conceivable kind - the pressures to conform, the pressures to amuse oneself, the pressures to find oneself - and the constant bombardment of everyday life by advertising, the media landscape, together represent a continuing kind of challenge to one's sanity. And, of course, many of my characters are wilting under the pressure; they don't want to buy any more refrigerators or electric toothbrushes, you know, they want to find some truth about themselves, so they embark, generally speaking in my fiction, on some sort of voyage of discovery.

If you look at a book of mine like 'The Atrocity Exhibition', there you have this psychiatrist who's having a mental breakdown, who is obsessed with what he sees as the great tragedies of the mid-20th Century, above all the assassination of Kennedy, and he sets up a whole series of psychodramas in which Kennedy is, as it were, assassinated again, Marilyn Monroe commits suicide again, and so on. But as he himself says, he wants to kill Kennedy, but in a way that makes sense. He's trying to re-mythologise these terrible tragedies in order to lay them to rest. And outwardly some of his behaviour in 'The Atrocity exhibition' might seem very bizarre, but in fact it's all logically constructed. They're constructing their own logical alternative universe to what they see as a sort of poisoned realm. Which is a fair description of the world today..."

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1998 BBC Radio 3 interview with the late J.G. Ballard (d2009)

Full interview:  jgballard.ca