CRASH (1973 NOVEL)

'''Crash''' is a novel by English author J. G. Ballard, first published in 1973. It is a story about car-crash sexual fetishism: its protagonists become sexually aroused by staging and participating in very real car-crashes, often with very real consequences. Ballard uses a cold and detached language, giving some the impression of an engineering report or a medical journal.
It was a highly controversial novel: famously one publisher's reader returned the verdict "This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do Not Publish." The novel was adapted and made into a film in 1996, also called ''Crash''.

Contents

Plot summary

Analysis

Quotes

Plot summary

The story is told through the eyes of a narrator named Ballard after the writer himself, but it centres on the sinister figure of Vaughan, a “former TV-scientist, turned nightmare angel of the expressways”. Gathering around Vaughan is a group of alienated people, all of them former crash-victims, who follow him in his pursuit to re-enact the crashes of celebrities, and experience what the narrator calls "a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology". Vaughan’s ultimate fantasy is to die in a head-on collision with movie star Elizabeth Taylor, who was at the height of her popularity at the time the novel was written in 1971.

Analysis

The book explores themes such as the transformation of human psychology by modern technology, and consumer culture's fascination with celebrities, disaster media and technological commodities. The human characters in the novel are cold and passionless, unable to become sexually excited unless some kind of technology is involved (typically architecture and cars). The gruesome damage inflicted on car-crash victims is not seen as shocking, but as the liberation of new sexual possibilities, that have yet to be explored, such as in one scene where a man and a woman have sex in a car that was involved in an accident, but rather than have vaginal sex, he penetrates a wound on her thigh that she received in a crash.
Finally, the book asks why we, as an enlightened society, accept such a “perverse technology” – that kills a vast number of people yearly – as such an integral part of our culture.
Ballard writes in the foreword: “Do we see, in the car-crash, the portents of a nightmare marriage between technology, and our own sexuality? … Is there some deviant logic unfolding here, more powerful than that provided by reason?”

Quotes

★ “After having … been constantly bombarded by road-safety propaganda, it was almost a relief to find myself in a real accident.”

★ “Trying to exhaust himself, Vaughan devised an endless almanac of terrifying wounds and insane collisions: The lungs of elderly men punctured by door-handles; the chests of young women impaled on steering-columns; the cheek of handsome youths torn on the chromium latches of quarter-lights. To Vaughan, these wounds formed the key to a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology. The images of these wounds hung in the gallery of his mind, like exhibits in the museum of a slaughterhouse.”

★ "The crushed body of the sportscar had turned her into a being of free and perverse sexuality, releasing within its dying chromium and leaking engine-parts, all the deviant possibilities of her sex."