Exploding the open book: The Atrocity Exhibition, Vermilion Sands and the ethics of the short story cycle

In 1989, Robert Luscher distinguished the terms 'short story sequence' and 'short story cycle'. Luscher argued that the term 'cycle', associated with texts such as Joyce's Dubliners (1914), presupposes a totality. Instead, Luscher proposed the term 'sequence' to denote collections in which the text does not arrive at a unity, but with each successive story opens and expands. The individual meanings are not subsumed within the whole but instead grow within, what Luscher calls an 'open book'.

Luscher's account is a revisionary exercise that substitutes 'sequence' for 'cycle'. He does not consider their respective differences in terms of the modernist/postmodern paradigm. Instead, Luscher's use of linear and binary thinking places his critique not only on the side of modernism but also on definitions of the short story that emphasize its impressionistic and epiphanic qualities. The openness of the sequence is, in practice, far less liberated than Luscher claims.

While the stories assembled to form Vermilion Sands (1971) can be described as late modernist pieces, the avant-garde design of The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) effectively explodes Luscher's 'open book' by refusing to be reconciled within any meaningful structure. In so doing, Ballard calls into question the academic tendency to define the short story.