Carrying on with Atrocity Exhibition, here's a few thoughts on the next section:
Whereas the previous four AE stories had significant differences from each other, "Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown" has strong similarities to its predecessor, "The Atrocity Exhibition": Trabert is once again a doctor at some sort of institution, the story has numerous characters, and there's the same level of complexity on the surface of the story that characterised "Atrocity Exhibition".
Trabert's ostensible aim in this story is to free the three astronauts who died in a fire inside their capsule on the launch pad at Cape Kennedy; however, his method for achieving this, restaging Kennedy's assassination as a car crash, seems at first sight rather obscure.
Why is Trabert concerned about the dead astronauts? The first few paragraphs provide some clues. First off, their demise is referred to as a "false death", and the media commentaries are said to be "unending"; I'd read this is indicating that Trabert sees the astronauts' deaths as having a mythic (or "false") quality that arises from the way we see them as media events. But the deaths are also described as somehow dislocating our sense of reality ("a faulty union of time and space"); perhaps we can conceive of them as revealing the facade of the equally "mythic" ideas of progress and the triumph of science - ideas that the space programme was seen as representing (at least in its early days), but which are at odds with the charred bodies in the capsule of Apollo 1.
As well as the deaths of the astronauts, there are a number of other themes that weave in and out of the text, one of which is the concept of *isolation*. Whilst at the institute, Trabert designed a series of isolation tests which seem to have had drastic effects on the volunteers (although what these effects were is left largely unsaid). And Trabert wants to isolate himself from what previously constituted his life: "With deliberate caution, he waited in the empty apartment near the airport overpass, disengaging himself from the images of his wife, Catherine Austin and the patients at the Institute."
Also pertinent here is the silent, bearded young man who keeps re-appearing, and who seems to be one of the isolation volunteers. One key scene occurs during a display of films of car crashes, when Jackie Kennedy's face unexpectedly appears on the screen: "A bearded young man ... stood in the brilliant pearl light, his laminated suit bathed in the magnified image of Mrs Kennedy's mouth. As he walked towards Trabert across the broken bodies of the plastic dummies, the screen jerked into a nexus of impacting cars, a soundless concertina of speed and violence." It seems as if the young man, the isolation-test volunteer, is pointing out to Trabert the direction in which he should be going to solve the problem of the astronauts' deaths: towards Kennedy and car crashes. Of course, it's also possible to interpret the young man as another messenger from Trabert's unconscious; the silent isolation-test volunteer represents Trabert's own sense of isolation from the world around him.
Another theme that runs through the story is that of *re-birth*. As well as Trabert's intention of "resurrecting" the dead astronauts, there are two passages that are clearly symbolic of birth or re-birth. In the first, Trabert says to his wife "Kline, Coma, Xero - there was a fourth pilot on board the capsule. You've caught him in your womb" (Trabert seems to be referring here to the silent young man). And a drained swimming pool is described as being like an immense uterus, leading Dr Natahan to exclaim "What a woman! ... Perhaps Trabert would become her lover, tend her as she gave birth to the sky?" There is also a curious passage where Trabert is beside the uterus-shaped pool, playing with plaster replicas of his wife and Karen Novotny, and studying a set of photographs "to please Coma"; is this child-like behaviour indicative of a return to the womb as a prelude to his hoped for re-birth?
Much is made of a "failure of space and time" in connection with the fire that killed the astronauts, for example: "The deaths of the three astronauts in the Apollo capsule were a failure of the code that contained the operating formulae for their passage through consciousness. Many factors confirmed this faulty union of time and space - the dislocated perspectives of the apartment, [Trabert's] isolation from his own and his wife's body ...". Maybe Trabert feels that his isolation has placed him in an everlasting present (i.e. a world without meaning), and that he is trapped like (i) the astronauts, who for Trabert are "still waiting there on their contour couches", and (ii) the isolation victims, who reported seeing "eroded landscapes" - which for Ballard represent landscapes where time has "leached away" and where nothing ever happens. If so, then the resurrection of the astronauts will "re-start" time and their (and Trabert's) passage through consciousness. Trabert sees the dislocation of the "myth of the space race" as a counterpart to the dislocation of the myths that make up his own day-to-day life. So by finding a solution to the former, he presumably hopes to find a solution to the latter - and Trabert will be resurrected along with the astronauts.
And if Kennedy was killed in an automobile, then his death as part of a car crash will *make more sense*; so by re-enacting it as such, Trabert can give a meaning to Kennedy's death and thereby place it "back in time', and hence by analogy free the astronauts from the stasis into which they have fallen. At the end of the story, this enactment appears to have been a success: "[Trabert] saw the assuaged time of the astronauts, the serene face of the President's widow", and the astronauts are free to diffuse and be recreated "in the leg stances of a hundred starlets, in a thousand bent auto fenders, in the million instalment deaths of the serial magazines."
-HANNAH GRACE-
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