Chaos Reading discussion

Couldn't decide what this left me with beyond a weird kind of experiment...
JG Ballard uses Alfred Jarry's "The Crucifixion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race" as inspiration/foundation for his story:
"The Assassination of JFK As a Downhill Motor Race"

Thoughts/reactions?
What does this framing/approach do to the event?
What does it say about the way we experience televised/streamed historical events?

I have to confess I see the point both pieces are going for but I don't feel it works in either case, though I prefer the crucifixion piece out of the two

the Kennedy piece is jarring, glib and shallow. (in my 42 year old curmudgeonly opinion).

I don't feel it adds anything new to the events though it did remind me of The Complete Maus in terms of viewing a major event from an unexpected perspective

I don’t think that Ballard was trying to impart new information about the Kennedy assassination, but rather reexamine it from a unique, internal perspective. Surrealism is a rejection of rationalism and objective reality, and Ballard intentionally riffed off of one of the best-known surrealists. He’s also borrowing from Jarry’s irreverence toward the sacred, perhaps making a commentary on how JFK had been mythologized to the point of sainthood.

This story is frequently reprinted as a stand-alone, but the book from which it came consists of multiple stories involving political and pop-culture icons and their portrayal in the media being reimagined in the mind of someone with questionable sanity.

Found this Ballard quote from an annotated edition of The Atrocity Exhibition:

"The media landscape of the present day is a map in search of a territory. A huge volume of sensational and often toxic imagery inundates our minds, much of it fictional in content. How do we make sense of this ceaseless flow of advertising and publicity, news and entertainment, where presidential campaigns and moon voyages are presented in terms indistinguishable from the launch of a new candy bar or deodorant? What actually happens on the level of our unconscious minds when, within minutes on the same TV screen, a prime minister is assassinated, an actress makes love, an injured child is carried from a car crash? Faced with these charged events, prepackaged emotions already in place, we can only stitch together a set of emergency scenarios, just as our sleeping minds extemporize a narrative from the unrelated memories that veer through the cortical night. In the waking dream that now constitutes everyday reality, images of a blood-spattered widow, the chromium trim of a limousine windshield, the stylized glamour of a motorcade, fuse together to provide a secondary narrative with very different meanings."

Thanks for the broader context, Whitney!

I've read it now about three times and I'm actually wondering if Ballard is not raising the very real possibility of Johnson being behind the assassination (this is probably not new to most of you, but was not a theory I was familiar with--I'm pretty ignorant about the JFK assassination beyond the basic facts, but it looks like more than a few figures, like Jackie Kennedy and Nixon, thought LBJ was behind things). Would this have been a novel or less-accepted theory when Ballard wrote the story? He certainly frames the motorcade as a race between two rivals.

It's not my intention to re-open the JFK case, so much as to get a better handle on where this story would have sat in historical/social context when it actually came out (1973).

I'm not at all convinced that Ballard is pointing the finger at anyone. He seems to be simply recasting the most dramatic events of the day in terms of the motor race. It's only in the last three paragraphs that he brings up some of the questions which resulted in the many conspiracy theories.

The story was actually written in 1965 and published in 1966. I have no idea which of the conspiracy theories was most prevalent at the time, but by the time I was aware of the whole thing the CIA plot was the only one that really still had legs. I also wonder if the theories in Britain were substantially different from the ones on this side of the Atlantic.

Rereading, I am most struck by the comedic horror of the line "Kennedy went downhill rapidly. After the damage to the governor the car shot forward at high speed."

Looks like none of the dates on the Evergreen Review site refer to the original publication! You've got me reading more about The Atrocity Exhibition--this line from Wikipedia caught my attention:

The stories describe how the mass media landscape inadvertently invades and splinters the private mind of the individual. Suffering from a mental breakdown, the protagonist—ironically, a doctor at a mental hospital—surrenders to a world of psychosis. Traven tries to make sense of the many public events that dominate his world (Marilyn Monroe's suicide, the Space Race, and especially the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy), by restaging them in ways that, to his psychotic mind, gives them a more personal meaning.

By using Jarry's story as a model, is Ballard drawing a parallel between Jesus and JFK in terms of deification/martyrdom?