Crash

J.G. Ballard – 1973

 

This is a heady and unnerving novel by J.G. Ballard that some readers mistakenly remember as science-fiction because of its psychotic and almost inhuman portrayal of aberrant sexuality.  It seems as though taking place in an alternate universe even though nothing impossible actually occurs.  Ballard further confuses the situation by casting a version of himself as the hero of the book to suggest that it is something like an autobiography.  In truth, this is really more of a horror novel than science-fiction or confessional autobiography; filled with endless pages of lurid and often nauseating descriptions of perverse actions and imaginings.  I’m not an expert on such things, but I’m not aware of an existing sexual fetish surrounding car crashes, and I assume that Ballard invented it as a metaphor for the soulless hunger for sensation in humanity in the fin-de-siècle.  The plot that surfaces amid the cesspool of cold violence and pornography from time to time concerns Ballard and his wife being systematically seduced into a subculture led by Vaughn, who is a magnetic cross between cult leader and existential revolutionary.  His life’s ambition is to stage a crash that will kill not only himself but the biggest movie star in the world, Elizabeth Taylor, along with him.  Ballard has stated that his purpose with the novel was indeed to viscerally disgust readers and, in a sense, rub their noses in the filth of their own insipid lives.  This is a misanthropic and non-artistic and anti-erotic objective that I can’t get behind, despite my admiration for Ballard’s characters and his compelling ideas and style.  His method is not unlike that of William S. Burroughs, whose books are also comprised of long passages describing sexual abominations intended to shock far more than titillate.  Burroughs’ and Ballard’s crippling anxiety about sex is sad and foreign to me, however much I’m intrigued by their literary premises.  (As a big fan of David Cronenberg’s film adaptation of Crash, it’s worth pointing out that Cronenberg opted against trying to replicate the ugliness of Ballard’s scenarios and instead presented the strong sexuality of the story in a seductive light.  It’s interesting that Cronenberg adapted Burroughs’ Naked Lunch too; these were two extremely controversial novels that were long thought unfilmable because of their graphic material and inscrutable plots.)