Stars of The Atrocity Exhibition: B.Traven

Presumed Portrait of B. Traven

In a Technical Sense. Webster’s hand hesitated on Karen Novotny’s zip. He listened to the last bars of the Mahler symphony playing on the radiogram extension in the warm bedroom. ‘The bomber crashed on landing,’ he explained. ‘Four members of the crew were killed. He was alive when they got him out, but at one point in the operating theatre his heart and vital organs failed. In a technical sense he was dead for about two minutes. Now, all this time, it looks as if something is missing, something that vanished during the short period of his death. Perhaps his soul, the capacity to achieve a state of grace. Nathan would call it the ability to accept the phenomenology of the universe, or the fact of your own consciousness. This is Traven’s hell.’

J.G Ballard-The Assassination Weapon-The Atrocity Exhibition 1966

Talbot. Another face of the central character of The Atrocity Exhibition. The core identity is Traven, a name taken consciously from B.Traven, a writer I’ve always admired for his extreme reclusiveness-so completely at odds with the logic of our own age, when even the concept of privacy is constructed from publicly circulating materials. It is now almost impossible to be ourselves except on the world’s terms.

Annotations-The Atrocity Exhibition 1990