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Катастрофа
Над нашите животи властват двата големи лайтмотива на това столетие – сексът и параноята.
Възможно ли е автомобилните катастрофи да представляват зловеща поличба за кошмарния брак между секса и машините? Ще ни предоставят ли модерните технологии невъобразими досега средства за досег със собствените ни психопатологии?
Не ще и дума, че крайното послание на „Катастрофа“ е предупредително – предупреждение срещу онази брутална, еротична, яркоосветена територия, която ни мами все по-настойчиво от границите на технологичния пейзаж.
„Изключително въздействаща и оригинална творба. Балард е сред най-добрите ни писатели.“
Антъни Бърджес
„Един от малкото гениални сюрреалисти, които имаме – едновременно плашещ и вълнуващ.“
Гардиън
„Литературният еквивалент на Салвадор Дали и Макс Ернст.“
Уошингтън Поуст
„Култов роман“
Върайъти
Една от най-скандалните книги на 20-ти век, за първи път на български език!
Възможно ли е автомобилните катастрофи да представляват зловеща поличба за кошмарния брак между секса и машините? Ще ни предоставят ли модерните технологии невъобразими досега средства за досег със собствените ни психопатологии?
Не ще и дума, че крайното послание на „Катастрофа“ е предупредително – предупреждение срещу онази брутална, еротична, яркоосветена територия, която ни мами все по-настойчиво от границите на технологичния пейзаж.
„Изключително въздействаща и оригинална творба. Балард е сред най-добрите ни писатели.“
Антъни Бърджес
„Един от малкото гениални сюрреалисти, които имаме – едновременно плашещ и вълнуващ.“
Гардиън
„Литературният еквивалент на Салвадор Дали и Макс Ернст.“
Уошингтън Поуст
„Култов роман“
Върайъти
Една от най-скандалните книги на 20-ти век, за първи път на български език!
248 pages, Paperback
First published June 28, 1973
About the author
J.G. Ballard
409 books3,815 followersJames Graham "J. G." Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) was an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Ballard came to be associated with the New Wave of science fiction early in his career with apocalyptic (or post-apocalyptic) novels such as The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1964), and The Crystal World (1966). In the late 1960s and early 1970s Ballard focused on an eclectic variety of short stories (or "condensed novels") such as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which drew closer comparison with the work of postmodernist writers such as William S. Burroughs. In 1973 the highly controversial novel Crash was published, a story about symphorophilia and car crash fetishism; the protagonist becomes sexually aroused by staging and participating in real car crashes. The story was later adapted into a film of the same name by Canadian director David Cronenberg.
While many of Ballard's stories are thematically and narratively unusual, he is perhaps best known for his relatively conventional war novel, Empire of the Sun (1984), a semi-autobiographical account of a young boy's experiences in Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War as it came to be occupied by the Japanese Imperial Army. Described as "The best British novel about the Second World War" by The Guardian, the story was adapted into a 1987 film by Steven Spielberg.
The literary distinctiveness of Ballard's work has given rise to the adjective "Ballardian", defined by the Collins English Dictionary as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments." The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry describes Ballard's work as being occupied with "eros, thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies".
While many of Ballard's stories are thematically and narratively unusual, he is perhaps best known for his relatively conventional war novel, Empire of the Sun (1984), a semi-autobiographical account of a young boy's experiences in Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War as it came to be occupied by the Japanese Imperial Army. Described as "The best British novel about the Second World War" by The Guardian, the story was adapted into a 1987 film by Steven Spielberg.
The literary distinctiveness of Ballard's work has given rise to the adjective "Ballardian", defined by the Collins English Dictionary as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments." The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry describes Ballard's work as being occupied with "eros, thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies".
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 2,253 reviews
November 19, 2020
*****WARNING THIS IS A GRAPHIC ADULT REVIEW NO KIDDIES PLEASE.*****
”I knew that Vaughan could never really die in a car-crash, but would in some way be re-born through those twisted radiator grilles and cascading windshield glass. I thought of the scarred white skin over his abdomen, the heavy pubic hair that started on the upper slopes of his thighs, his tacky navel and unsavoury armpits, his crude handling of women and automobiles, and his submissive tenderness towards myself. Even as I had placed my penis in his rectum Vaughan had known he would try to kill me, in a final display of his casual love for me.”
Albert Camus was tragically killed in a car crash in 1960. A crash of particular interest to Vaughan.
I can see how a writer would need to immerse himself into this writing experience. He needs to stay close enough to get splattered with semen and blood, and drink the erotic cocktail of sex, cars, and pain. J. G. Ballard certainly added an extra kink to the perversity of this novel when he elected to give the narrator his own name.
Vaughan a “former TV-scientist, turned nightmare angel of the expressways” is obsessively planning a head on collision with the actress Elizabeth Taylor. He has a police scanner in his car and every time there is an accident he appears on the scene with his cameras whirring and his penis stirring.
He is there when Ballard has his own accident. A head on crash that kills the driver of the other car putting both Ballard and the wife of the dead man in the hospital for a lengthy recovery. Ballard has always had symphorophilia or car-crashsexual fetishism, but after his crash and meeting Vaughan it becomes more than just an obsession, but a full time addiction.
When someone suffers from a depraved obsession they quickly learn to hide those tendencies from everyone around them, but when they meet someone with the same affliction it fuels the fire. The synergy of mutual interest escalates the need to go further, to do more, to cross all boundaries.
”Vaughan excited some latent homosexual impulse only within the cabin of his car or driving along the highway. His attraction lay not so much in a complex of familiar anatomical triggers--a curve of exposed breast, the soft cushion of a buttock, the hair-lined arch of a damp perineum--but in the stylization of posture achieved between Vaughan and the car.”
The emergence of a new sexuality born from perverse technology.
Jackson Pollock was tragically killed in a car crash in 1956.
I wrecked once.
I was checking the map and looked up just as a deer stepped out into the road in front of me as casually as if he were John Steed going for a walk in a London park lacking only the hat and a fine walking stick.
I made several tactical errors.
I was on a dirt road recently coated with pea size gravel so it was still loose and slick.
I hit the brakes and swerved to avoid the deer who just watched me fly past him as casually as if this was an everyday occurrence. Maybe he did this regularly for entertainment.
I went into this rather elegant spin slewing sideways up the road. I tried a steering correction to keep myself on the road, but I still had too much speed.
As I’m writing this my heartbeat is speeding up.
My back tire went off into the ditch which unfortunately was not at the most convenient place in the road. In fact it was right beside a very steep ravine. I tilted off the road.
Everything slowed down.
I’m one of those guys that has to have his eyes open on a roller coaster. I’m fine as long as I can see what is coming.
A tree branch went through the side door window behind my head. I can remember thinking close your eyes for just a second because there is going to be glass. I rolled completely over once and then twice. Debris was rolling around in the car like clothes in a dryer. The Jeep Cherokee came to a stop on the driver’s side.
Seatbelts are very difficult to get off when adrenaline is doing a tap dance with your hands.
I crawled up the seats and opened the passenger door, not really a door anymore, but more of a hatch. I felt like I’d just wrecked a dune buggy on the moon. The back wheel was still spinning.
I can remember thinking this could have been worse, lots worse.
The slope was steep enough that I had to angle my ascent sideways to climb it. I stood on the road. The deer seemed to have had better things to do. He was gone. Two cars with Kansas tags slowed down to look at me, but didn’t stop. One guy in a truck with Kansas tags sped up when he saw me. Finally a little guy in a small Toyota pickup with a camper on the back with Minnesota tags stopped to see if I was alright. Thank goodness there was someone from out of state.
He walked back down the slope with me and between the two of us we tilted the Jeep back up on it’s wheels. (Adrenaline was more useful for that task.) There was not a single panel that did not have a dent and the tree limbs had scraped some red paint off in lurid grooves as if a wild animal had attacked.
We stood and looked at it for a moment. “I’m going to try and start it.” I remember saying.
He shook his head, but didn’t say anything. I could tell he didn’t think there was even a chance.
It started on the first turn of the key. I drove out of the pasture until I found a gate. I then drove it home, about a hundred miles, keeping an eye locked on the gauges waiting for, expecting, some kind of trouble. As I drove down the road looking like I’d just escaped from a demolition derby I did receive some long stares. I’m sure there were many discussions about that fool driving that junker. The Jeep was totalled. It was the first vehicle I had ever bought brand new. :-(
James Dean was tragically killed when he crashed his Porsche Spyder in 1955.
They reach a point where sex is only good in a car. Vaughan has sex with Ballard’s wife an experience more intense than she expected. Ballard has sex with the wife of the man he killed in his accident. They find places close to where the accident happened to consummate their mutual need. ”I knew that she was about to enter that period of unthinking promiscuity through which most people pass after a bereavement. The collision of our two cars, and the death of her husband, had become the key to a new sexuality.” Vaughan gathers an entourage of car crash survivors, all of them unable to get past the traumatic event and many of them desiring another crash. They worship their scars, the calligraphy left behind by the steering wheel, dashboard, glass, and objects of impalement.
They pick up hookers and have sex with them in the positions of famous car crashes. ”Vaughan’s semen ran down her left thigh on to the black vinyl of the seat. The ivory globes searched for the steepest gradient to the central sulcus of the seat.”
This is a madness that becomes all consuming. Ballard starts to see Vaughan as someone out of control, but at the same time he wants to remain a spectator for the final gruesome scene. Vaughan is the Mad Hatter incapable of escaping his own self-imposed deranged destiny, but for it to be truly beautiful his final exit must involve Elizabeth Taylor the most alluring, most desirable woman on the planet.
This is a very disturbing book. I have been contemplating if I’ve ever read a book more disturbing. Henry Miller was a thought because of the detailed sexual situations, but really he is pretty tame in comparison. The only one to compete is Naked Lunch , but there is something inaccessible about the Burroughs book. One can still hold it all at arms length. The way this book is written the reader is in it. I could feel it altering my view, skewing my vision of what is prudent and what I desire. An obsession with automobiles and sex are twisted together liked conjoined twins and all of it is laced with a steady dose of pain.
I finished reading this book a few days ago and I am finally starting to feel like myself again. Though I do wonder if this book left behind a few nuggets of unhealthy desires in the corners of my brain. They might be waiting like hidden sleeper cells for a vulnerable moment to waken. David Cronenberg made a film back in 1996 which I plan to rewatch in the near future. I wouldn’t really recommend this book to anyone, but at the same time I have to admit it is probably a masterpiece.
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
”I knew that Vaughan could never really die in a car-crash, but would in some way be re-born through those twisted radiator grilles and cascading windshield glass. I thought of the scarred white skin over his abdomen, the heavy pubic hair that started on the upper slopes of his thighs, his tacky navel and unsavoury armpits, his crude handling of women and automobiles, and his submissive tenderness towards myself. Even as I had placed my penis in his rectum Vaughan had known he would try to kill me, in a final display of his casual love for me.”
Albert Camus was tragically killed in a car crash in 1960. A crash of particular interest to Vaughan.
I can see how a writer would need to immerse himself into this writing experience. He needs to stay close enough to get splattered with semen and blood, and drink the erotic cocktail of sex, cars, and pain. J. G. Ballard certainly added an extra kink to the perversity of this novel when he elected to give the narrator his own name.
Vaughan a “former TV-scientist, turned nightmare angel of the expressways” is obsessively planning a head on collision with the actress Elizabeth Taylor. He has a police scanner in his car and every time there is an accident he appears on the scene with his cameras whirring and his penis stirring.
He is there when Ballard has his own accident. A head on crash that kills the driver of the other car putting both Ballard and the wife of the dead man in the hospital for a lengthy recovery. Ballard has always had symphorophilia or car-crashsexual fetishism, but after his crash and meeting Vaughan it becomes more than just an obsession, but a full time addiction.
When someone suffers from a depraved obsession they quickly learn to hide those tendencies from everyone around them, but when they meet someone with the same affliction it fuels the fire. The synergy of mutual interest escalates the need to go further, to do more, to cross all boundaries.
”Vaughan excited some latent homosexual impulse only within the cabin of his car or driving along the highway. His attraction lay not so much in a complex of familiar anatomical triggers--a curve of exposed breast, the soft cushion of a buttock, the hair-lined arch of a damp perineum--but in the stylization of posture achieved between Vaughan and the car.”
The emergence of a new sexuality born from perverse technology.
Jackson Pollock was tragically killed in a car crash in 1956.
I wrecked once.
I was checking the map and looked up just as a deer stepped out into the road in front of me as casually as if he were John Steed going for a walk in a London park lacking only the hat and a fine walking stick.
I made several tactical errors.
I was on a dirt road recently coated with pea size gravel so it was still loose and slick.
I hit the brakes and swerved to avoid the deer who just watched me fly past him as casually as if this was an everyday occurrence. Maybe he did this regularly for entertainment.
I went into this rather elegant spin slewing sideways up the road. I tried a steering correction to keep myself on the road, but I still had too much speed.
As I’m writing this my heartbeat is speeding up.
My back tire went off into the ditch which unfortunately was not at the most convenient place in the road. In fact it was right beside a very steep ravine. I tilted off the road.
Everything slowed down.
I’m one of those guys that has to have his eyes open on a roller coaster. I’m fine as long as I can see what is coming.
A tree branch went through the side door window behind my head. I can remember thinking close your eyes for just a second because there is going to be glass. I rolled completely over once and then twice. Debris was rolling around in the car like clothes in a dryer. The Jeep Cherokee came to a stop on the driver’s side.
Seatbelts are very difficult to get off when adrenaline is doing a tap dance with your hands.
I crawled up the seats and opened the passenger door, not really a door anymore, but more of a hatch. I felt like I’d just wrecked a dune buggy on the moon. The back wheel was still spinning.
I can remember thinking this could have been worse, lots worse.
The slope was steep enough that I had to angle my ascent sideways to climb it. I stood on the road. The deer seemed to have had better things to do. He was gone. Two cars with Kansas tags slowed down to look at me, but didn’t stop. One guy in a truck with Kansas tags sped up when he saw me. Finally a little guy in a small Toyota pickup with a camper on the back with Minnesota tags stopped to see if I was alright. Thank goodness there was someone from out of state.
He walked back down the slope with me and between the two of us we tilted the Jeep back up on it’s wheels. (Adrenaline was more useful for that task.) There was not a single panel that did not have a dent and the tree limbs had scraped some red paint off in lurid grooves as if a wild animal had attacked.
We stood and looked at it for a moment. “I’m going to try and start it.” I remember saying.
He shook his head, but didn’t say anything. I could tell he didn’t think there was even a chance.
It started on the first turn of the key. I drove out of the pasture until I found a gate. I then drove it home, about a hundred miles, keeping an eye locked on the gauges waiting for, expecting, some kind of trouble. As I drove down the road looking like I’d just escaped from a demolition derby I did receive some long stares. I’m sure there were many discussions about that fool driving that junker. The Jeep was totalled. It was the first vehicle I had ever bought brand new. :-(
James Dean was tragically killed when he crashed his Porsche Spyder in 1955.
They reach a point where sex is only good in a car. Vaughan has sex with Ballard’s wife an experience more intense than she expected. Ballard has sex with the wife of the man he killed in his accident. They find places close to where the accident happened to consummate their mutual need. ”I knew that she was about to enter that period of unthinking promiscuity through which most people pass after a bereavement. The collision of our two cars, and the death of her husband, had become the key to a new sexuality.” Vaughan gathers an entourage of car crash survivors, all of them unable to get past the traumatic event and many of them desiring another crash. They worship their scars, the calligraphy left behind by the steering wheel, dashboard, glass, and objects of impalement.
They pick up hookers and have sex with them in the positions of famous car crashes. ”Vaughan’s semen ran down her left thigh on to the black vinyl of the seat. The ivory globes searched for the steepest gradient to the central sulcus of the seat.”
This is a madness that becomes all consuming. Ballard starts to see Vaughan as someone out of control, but at the same time he wants to remain a spectator for the final gruesome scene. Vaughan is the Mad Hatter incapable of escaping his own self-imposed deranged destiny, but for it to be truly beautiful his final exit must involve Elizabeth Taylor the most alluring, most desirable woman on the planet.
This is a very disturbing book. I have been contemplating if I’ve ever read a book more disturbing. Henry Miller was a thought because of the detailed sexual situations, but really he is pretty tame in comparison. The only one to compete is Naked Lunch , but there is something inaccessible about the Burroughs book. One can still hold it all at arms length. The way this book is written the reader is in it. I could feel it altering my view, skewing my vision of what is prudent and what I desire. An obsession with automobiles and sex are twisted together liked conjoined twins and all of it is laced with a steady dose of pain.
I finished reading this book a few days ago and I am finally starting to feel like myself again. Though I do wonder if this book left behind a few nuggets of unhealthy desires in the corners of my brain. They might be waiting like hidden sleeper cells for a vulnerable moment to waken. David Cronenberg made a film back in 1996 which I plan to rewatch in the near future. I wouldn’t really recommend this book to anyone, but at the same time I have to admit it is probably a masterpiece.
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
December 31, 2019
Not a "novel" really—see it as an extended erotic poem instead. It’s one pretty cool experience, & fantastically odd; it’s a journey of infatuation into the erotic element inherent in all car crashes. Like a dada experiment with clashing ideas and absurd pop symbols, everything is sensuous, even human defects are seen through a wholly unique filter, in sharp contrast with the immaculate beauty of the automobile. Sex, like driving, has plenty of potential energy that's stored up—the want for a release is, then, the only viable option. A madman wrote this, it’s inexplicable—as if some alien entity tabulated, like the great Marquis himself, acts of perversion and undoubted sin, an tells us these snippits of porn, the hidden truths, in explicit detail. Death is seen as the ultimate goal, as the final & most amazing of all orgasms. “Crash” seems to have been written by one of M. de Sade’s devious, more artistically postmodern, cousins.
The danse macabre: all the hallucinations culminate in acid trips, in wreckage, in homosexual liaisons, naturally. Truly a tremendous, astute piece of contempo art. It is the ultimate fetishist novel.
The danse macabre: all the hallucinations culminate in acid trips, in wreckage, in homosexual liaisons, naturally. Truly a tremendous, astute piece of contempo art. It is the ultimate fetishist novel.
Read
August 27, 2023This was recommended to me as a good time, but I'm not sure who it would be a good time for. Probably not for women or for cars, both of whom have a pretty rough go of it in these pages.
December 1, 2012
This book is a sausage made out of roadkill...and glass shards. And forced similes and metaphors strewn about the highway, ugly as a car wreck.
So much semen is spurted and wiped on the dashboard instrument panels that I ceased after awhile to wonder or care how our motorists could even read the dials.
So many commas and clauses litter the paragraphs like so many slashed half-moon rubber tires lining the interstate that one hopes Ballard did not race past the tollbooths and rob the inventors of commas and clauses of their rightful royalties.
Page after page, Ballard serves up the same slices of this tainted roadkill sausage meat, belaboring for another 200 pages all the main points about technology, sexuality and violent death that he had already made by about, oh, page 12, that I kept waiting for the gamey taste to become an acquired one. It didn't happen. Apparently, a lot of you ate this amalgam and declared it delicious. If so, brush your teeth really really hard...
Before I get into some particulars, a few points...
First, I've never met anyone in my life who got their sexual rocks off from car crashes, and yet, somehow--this book would have you believe--in a little section of London near the airport the neighborhood is crawling with people who do! And they all happen to find each other and hook up! I mean, way before the internet, even.
Crash deserves a high place in the pantheon of campy, bad literature. I'm choosing to believe that Ballard wrote this as a big joke, but fear that he didn't. Apart from the fact that I couldn't help laughing as Ballard piled on ever-increasingly disgusting perversities and situations involving bodily fluids within the confines of the auto, I began to think the following passage might be clueing me into the possibility that this was an intentional satire. It describes the tendency of the story's main car-cash fetishist weirdo, Vaughan, to repeat, obsess and raise the (roll)bar of kink on his over-the-top fantasies: "Always he deliberately sidestepped into self-parody."
This is the kind of book that spawns tiresome academic dissertations on alienation, sexuality and technology in the modern/postmodern world and the evolutionary merger of the biological and the inorganic and such, and no doubt causes the Ballard cultists to circle the wagons; so me pointing out its ludicrousness probably steps on some sacred cows and brands me a Philistine. So be it.
Let's be like Vaughan and race white-knuckle fashion into the weird world of this book. I promise you, like Ballard's tome, it will not be pretty...
Yes, I understand about fetishes. I understand that this is a book about them in general and about one fairly inscrutable one in particular. And I understand that in looking at this world of fetishes and fetishists this book examines and pores over and builds-upon itself with the dedication of a fetishist. I understand about the sexualizing of the auto in our culture and our pseudo-sexual relations to it, etc. etc. I get all that.
I also get that, since I do not share this particular fetish, this book will find its most enthusiastic admirers among those who do share it. Since I do not share it, I have to grit my teeth and bear it as the proceedings grow ever more outlandishly vile.
There's something hard and staccato and inelegant about the way Ballard writes. I sometimes find his segues of thought confusing; sometimes find myself a little off balance or disoriented by his descriptive style that confuses details of place and action; the storytelling often takes a back seat (pun intended) to his eagerness to repeat minute graphic perverse details. The constant use of sentences that contain "like" similes gets annoying. I always feel there's a better way to write comparisons. Ballard's relentless attempts to equate gore and sexuality are as often as not crude and honed by a sledgehammer, as if by mentioning both in the same sentence that somehow their merger makes sense. For instance, he writes of two young nurses rendering care..."their burgeoning sexualities presiding over the most terrifying facial and genital injuries." I mean, talk about forcing the issue...
Reading this book, though, I couldn't decide if the hamfisted similes, tortured metaphors and illogical comparisons were meant to reflect the irrational mind of fetishists who manage to twist the ordinary into their skewed fantasies, or if it reflected Ballard's inability to write good metaphors.
I've never encountered a novel that makes pretty much the same points, only in slight variations at best, over and over on practically every page. Ballard's admirers call this a strength, as though he is some precise jeweler examining and reexamining every angle and cut of a large diamond, or a clinician dispassionately examining something disturbing. If the latter is true then I'd like to nominate the Chilton's Auto Manual and my doctor's clinical diagnosis of my peripheral neuropathy for Nobel Prizes.
In actuality the effect of this constant repetition is not one of a sense of clinical precision, but one of unwieldiness and largesse. It seemed like the thematic impact of this material, with its razor-thin narrative, might have been stronger in short story form. As it is, I think this is a great short story pumped up like an airbag into one big nasty ready-to-explode testicle. (Hey, we can all write shitty metaphors, JG)...
The book is a catalog of sick ruminations on every possible way human body parts and fluids can interact with cars. Sometimes it feels like listening to a little boy who insists on burping and farting well after his friends' laughs have subsided. The shock value is long gone, replaced by nausea and annoyance.
A prude I am not, but I do have an aversion to an apparent revelling in blood and guts and feces and brain matter and semen that goes well beyond the amount required to make the thematic point. Suffice it to say, it's not my cup of motor oil, but I suppose it had to be done. One man's car crash is another man's orgasm, I guess.
I struggled with how to rate this. I toyed for awhile with three stars because after a certain point Ballard's over-the-top conceits and constant repetition of disgusting imagery and dichotomies earned a begrudging admiration from me for his commitment, outrageousness and stubbornness for sticking with them. But ultimately I just had to concede it to be fodder for the crusher. May it rest in peace next to the Pontiac Grand Am that I totaled in 2006...
(I had written tons more, including a couple of parodies of the book, but as I don't know how to fit them in here, let's just keep things short.)
I know it's considered cool to like this writer, but based on this I don't.
Crash and burn...
So much semen is spurted and wiped on the dashboard instrument panels that I ceased after awhile to wonder or care how our motorists could even read the dials.
So many commas and clauses litter the paragraphs like so many slashed half-moon rubber tires lining the interstate that one hopes Ballard did not race past the tollbooths and rob the inventors of commas and clauses of their rightful royalties.
Page after page, Ballard serves up the same slices of this tainted roadkill sausage meat, belaboring for another 200 pages all the main points about technology, sexuality and violent death that he had already made by about, oh, page 12, that I kept waiting for the gamey taste to become an acquired one. It didn't happen. Apparently, a lot of you ate this amalgam and declared it delicious. If so, brush your teeth really really hard...
Before I get into some particulars, a few points...
First, I've never met anyone in my life who got their sexual rocks off from car crashes, and yet, somehow--this book would have you believe--in a little section of London near the airport the neighborhood is crawling with people who do! And they all happen to find each other and hook up! I mean, way before the internet, even.
Crash deserves a high place in the pantheon of campy, bad literature. I'm choosing to believe that Ballard wrote this as a big joke, but fear that he didn't. Apart from the fact that I couldn't help laughing as Ballard piled on ever-increasingly disgusting perversities and situations involving bodily fluids within the confines of the auto, I began to think the following passage might be clueing me into the possibility that this was an intentional satire. It describes the tendency of the story's main car-cash fetishist weirdo, Vaughan, to repeat, obsess and raise the (roll)bar of kink on his over-the-top fantasies: "Always he deliberately sidestepped into self-parody."
This is the kind of book that spawns tiresome academic dissertations on alienation, sexuality and technology in the modern/postmodern world and the evolutionary merger of the biological and the inorganic and such, and no doubt causes the Ballard cultists to circle the wagons; so me pointing out its ludicrousness probably steps on some sacred cows and brands me a Philistine. So be it.
Let's be like Vaughan and race white-knuckle fashion into the weird world of this book. I promise you, like Ballard's tome, it will not be pretty...
Yes, I understand about fetishes. I understand that this is a book about them in general and about one fairly inscrutable one in particular. And I understand that in looking at this world of fetishes and fetishists this book examines and pores over and builds-upon itself with the dedication of a fetishist. I understand about the sexualizing of the auto in our culture and our pseudo-sexual relations to it, etc. etc. I get all that.
I also get that, since I do not share this particular fetish, this book will find its most enthusiastic admirers among those who do share it. Since I do not share it, I have to grit my teeth and bear it as the proceedings grow ever more outlandishly vile.
There's something hard and staccato and inelegant about the way Ballard writes. I sometimes find his segues of thought confusing; sometimes find myself a little off balance or disoriented by his descriptive style that confuses details of place and action; the storytelling often takes a back seat (pun intended) to his eagerness to repeat minute graphic perverse details. The constant use of sentences that contain "like" similes gets annoying. I always feel there's a better way to write comparisons. Ballard's relentless attempts to equate gore and sexuality are as often as not crude and honed by a sledgehammer, as if by mentioning both in the same sentence that somehow their merger makes sense. For instance, he writes of two young nurses rendering care..."their burgeoning sexualities presiding over the most terrifying facial and genital injuries." I mean, talk about forcing the issue...
Reading this book, though, I couldn't decide if the hamfisted similes, tortured metaphors and illogical comparisons were meant to reflect the irrational mind of fetishists who manage to twist the ordinary into their skewed fantasies, or if it reflected Ballard's inability to write good metaphors.
I've never encountered a novel that makes pretty much the same points, only in slight variations at best, over and over on practically every page. Ballard's admirers call this a strength, as though he is some precise jeweler examining and reexamining every angle and cut of a large diamond, or a clinician dispassionately examining something disturbing. If the latter is true then I'd like to nominate the Chilton's Auto Manual and my doctor's clinical diagnosis of my peripheral neuropathy for Nobel Prizes.
In actuality the effect of this constant repetition is not one of a sense of clinical precision, but one of unwieldiness and largesse. It seemed like the thematic impact of this material, with its razor-thin narrative, might have been stronger in short story form. As it is, I think this is a great short story pumped up like an airbag into one big nasty ready-to-explode testicle. (Hey, we can all write shitty metaphors, JG)...
The book is a catalog of sick ruminations on every possible way human body parts and fluids can interact with cars. Sometimes it feels like listening to a little boy who insists on burping and farting well after his friends' laughs have subsided. The shock value is long gone, replaced by nausea and annoyance.
A prude I am not, but I do have an aversion to an apparent revelling in blood and guts and feces and brain matter and semen that goes well beyond the amount required to make the thematic point. Suffice it to say, it's not my cup of motor oil, but I suppose it had to be done. One man's car crash is another man's orgasm, I guess.
I struggled with how to rate this. I toyed for awhile with three stars because after a certain point Ballard's over-the-top conceits and constant repetition of disgusting imagery and dichotomies earned a begrudging admiration from me for his commitment, outrageousness and stubbornness for sticking with them. But ultimately I just had to concede it to be fodder for the crusher. May it rest in peace next to the Pontiac Grand Am that I totaled in 2006...
(I had written tons more, including a couple of parodies of the book, but as I don't know how to fit them in here, let's just keep things short.)
I know it's considered cool to like this writer, but based on this I don't.
Crash and burn...
June 3, 2019
Before reading this book, I thought I was worldly, weary, and wise. I thought I had seen all the perversity and sex that modern novels could deliver. I thought I understood fetish.
I understood nothing.
This is a wild poem in novel format drawing out the most sexual visualizations. I could compare it with Anaïs Nin with her absolute poetry of sex, but to do so would ignore the absolute grotesquerie of Ballard's coupling with mangled machinery.
This is a novel of car crash survivors being unable to get off unless they remembered the "real" moment of utter release. Always chasing that high. Spying on car crashes, haunting crash test dummies, getting off in the seats of cars near the sites of your crash... or other's crashes. Of preparing the most lurid fantasies, drawing much more than solace from other victims, of fetishizing and tempting the ONE FINAL RELEASE.
This is death and violence and sex written in a nightmarish orgy of utter fixation... without most of the people actually, you know, taking it in a usual psychopathic thriller mode. This isn't about murdering your victims for that high. This is all about including our cars in on the very act that defines our lives. A third sexual partner.
And you know what? This novel RUINED ME for watching any kind of car-chase movie. If you find yourself wanting to swear off yet another Fast and Furious movie or an endless stream of Dukes of Hazard lookalikes, then look no further. This is your CURE. :) :)
I understood nothing.
This is a wild poem in novel format drawing out the most sexual visualizations. I could compare it with Anaïs Nin with her absolute poetry of sex, but to do so would ignore the absolute grotesquerie of Ballard's coupling with mangled machinery.
This is a novel of car crash survivors being unable to get off unless they remembered the "real" moment of utter release. Always chasing that high. Spying on car crashes, haunting crash test dummies, getting off in the seats of cars near the sites of your crash... or other's crashes. Of preparing the most lurid fantasies, drawing much more than solace from other victims, of fetishizing and tempting the ONE FINAL RELEASE.
This is death and violence and sex written in a nightmarish orgy of utter fixation... without most of the people actually, you know, taking it in a usual psychopathic thriller mode. This isn't about murdering your victims for that high. This is all about including our cars in on the very act that defines our lives. A third sexual partner.
And you know what? This novel RUINED ME for watching any kind of car-chase movie. If you find yourself wanting to swear off yet another Fast and Furious movie or an endless stream of Dukes of Hazard lookalikes, then look no further. This is your CURE. :) :)
May 4, 2024
Meter, vinyl, petroleum, bodywork, engine, crystal, chrome. Every word in this novel becomes erotic. There is sperm, desire, tooth, areola, curvature, wound, and scar. Each attack of the flesh by the metal signs the man's victory. Rockets, planes, and cars may well melt on us, hoping to reduce us to heaps of crushed guts and disfigured faces. Yet, despite the injuries inflicted, they do not have this burning desire that helps man compose a consistently successful future.
Deviance is not a gratuitous perversity. Here, offered the gift of the survivors to those whom progress and speed have deceived without mercy.
"With the help of scars, we celebrated the rebirth of the road massacred, the death and injuries of all those we had seen dying on a shoulder, the fictitious wounds and the attitudes of the millions who would still die."
Deviance is not a gratuitous perversity. Here, offered the gift of the survivors to those whom progress and speed have deceived without mercy.
"With the help of scars, we celebrated the rebirth of the road massacred, the death and injuries of all those we had seen dying on a shoulder, the fictitious wounds and the attitudes of the millions who would still die."
June 2, 2017
Uh, I’m pretty sure it’s a metaphor.
Just kidding.
I never read reviews of a book I’m about to gobble or have just finished, lest they unduly influence my perception. Last night, however, I did make the mistake of looking at my friends’ reviews of this (you’re all good) and accidentally glanced at the opinion of the Goodreadersphere-at-large. Holy moly, talk about divisive! The few I read indicated that the vox populi of GR place Crash somewhere next to cancer and the Holocaust on the list of world evils. To which I have two responses: 1) the problem is not the book, but the audience it found in you; and 2) you’ve never really fucked, have you? The human body and its liquids really aren’t that bad, and this is coming from a red-blooded Catholic-American boy (unilaterally regarded as the subgroup with the most prominent super-aversion to the sexual 'humours' of the flesh).
Crash is brilliant—a hammering, cold meditation on death strung around the leitmotif of auto-erotica (literally; cars and sex). Ballard’s arpeggiated sentences and intense repetition intentionally drive the book’s thesis straight into your lobe, the allegorical car/commentary destroying your gray matter. Lazy critics call this a lack of variety on Ballard's part. I call it a calculated numbing agent. If I’m onto anything, it’s that Crash uses the symbol of the car less as commentary on technology (as every book blurb ever will insist) than as a ‘vehicle’ to analyze the human peculiarity of the death-fixation.
The characters in the book are all deeply-damaged people, nominally due to car crashes. Their insatiable lust for every permutation of sexual congress is then a confirmation not of Life, but of non-Death. Or, to quote the great philosopher of the 14th-C, Peaches: they’re trying to fuck the pain away. The cataloguing of bodily ephemera—glans, cleft, node, et. al—is as dispassionate as the inventory of, wait for it, a car’s countless bobbles and binnacles. But don't just stop there, that's still surface. To see or judge these people—as so many do on GR—as depraved, aberrant perverts is to deny them their humanity. They have passed through death in horrid wrecks that have left them void, and all they want is to feel something. This isn’t a fight club—it’s an Alcoholic’s Anonymous meeting with lots of spittle-flecked blowjobs and sperm of Moby-ian proportions.
I could go on, but why? Who cares what I think? I’ll say that Crash doesn’t have a ding on its flawless chassis, an ounce of fat anywhere on its constellationally-scarred belly. It might not be your thing, but it is its own thing. Originality used to be quite appreciated, you know.
OR
I suspect that many male readers were fine with the lesbianism but decided they HATED this book when homosexual anal sex occurred. A bridge too far! Why’d he have to do that? I was kinda turned on till now! Seriously guys, if you thought that chapter was about The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name, all I can say is—well, you know those weird tingles you get in the shower at the gym? Yeah, we might need to talk, honey. I’m going to speak your language: two bros can totally fuck and the world doesn’t have to end. By God, you can even allow yourself to enjoy the voyeurism without suspicion. Hi-five and see you in the locker room, all-star!
OR
I’m still pretty sure it’s a metaphor.
Just kidding.
I never read reviews of a book I’m about to gobble or have just finished, lest they unduly influence my perception. Last night, however, I did make the mistake of looking at my friends’ reviews of this (you’re all good) and accidentally glanced at the opinion of the Goodreadersphere-at-large. Holy moly, talk about divisive! The few I read indicated that the vox populi of GR place Crash somewhere next to cancer and the Holocaust on the list of world evils. To which I have two responses: 1) the problem is not the book, but the audience it found in you; and 2) you’ve never really fucked, have you? The human body and its liquids really aren’t that bad, and this is coming from a red-blooded Catholic-American boy (unilaterally regarded as the subgroup with the most prominent super-aversion to the sexual 'humours' of the flesh).
Crash is brilliant—a hammering, cold meditation on death strung around the leitmotif of auto-erotica (literally; cars and sex). Ballard’s arpeggiated sentences and intense repetition intentionally drive the book’s thesis straight into your lobe, the allegorical car/commentary destroying your gray matter. Lazy critics call this a lack of variety on Ballard's part. I call it a calculated numbing agent. If I’m onto anything, it’s that Crash uses the symbol of the car less as commentary on technology (as every book blurb ever will insist) than as a ‘vehicle’ to analyze the human peculiarity of the death-fixation.
The characters in the book are all deeply-damaged people, nominally due to car crashes. Their insatiable lust for every permutation of sexual congress is then a confirmation not of Life, but of non-Death. Or, to quote the great philosopher of the 14th-C, Peaches: they’re trying to fuck the pain away. The cataloguing of bodily ephemera—glans, cleft, node, et. al—is as dispassionate as the inventory of, wait for it, a car’s countless bobbles and binnacles. But don't just stop there, that's still surface. To see or judge these people—as so many do on GR—as depraved, aberrant perverts is to deny them their humanity. They have passed through death in horrid wrecks that have left them void, and all they want is to feel something. This isn’t a fight club—it’s an Alcoholic’s Anonymous meeting with lots of spittle-flecked blowjobs and sperm of Moby-ian proportions.
I could go on, but why? Who cares what I think? I’ll say that Crash doesn’t have a ding on its flawless chassis, an ounce of fat anywhere on its constellationally-scarred belly. It might not be your thing, but it is its own thing. Originality used to be quite appreciated, you know.
OR
I suspect that many male readers were fine with the lesbianism but decided they HATED this book when homosexual anal sex occurred. A bridge too far! Why’d he have to do that? I was kinda turned on till now! Seriously guys, if you thought that chapter was about The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name, all I can say is—well, you know those weird tingles you get in the shower at the gym? Yeah, we might need to talk, honey. I’m going to speak your language: two bros can totally fuck and the world doesn’t have to end. By God, you can even allow yourself to enjoy the voyeurism without suspicion. Hi-five and see you in the locker room, all-star!
OR
I’m still pretty sure it’s a metaphor.
Read
October 14, 2018The edition I read came with an introduction by the author in which he wrote:
...we live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind - mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.
In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us has represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realms of fantasy and the imagination. These roles, it seems to me, have been reversed...
A few years ago a group of young men deliberately piloted aeroplanes into a number of buildings in the USA killing all in all 2,996 people. Aside from the considerable political fallout from this, a more everyday result of this was that people in the USA were understandably more jittery than usual about air travel and an increasing number turned to travel by road instead. However in that same year of 2011 a total of 32,479 people died on US roads in accidents, a death toll that had no political consequences what so ever. Deaths by homicide, which from time to time appears to bring out a burst of soul searching in the USA, come to only about half the number of people killed in road deaths. This mass slaughter on the roads was, is, in fact a phenomenon that is tacitly accepted as a completely normal part of everyday life in all countries. No army is mobilised, no mass public campaign, no presidential blue ribbon committee of Nobel prize winners and boxing champions. And of course even the number of road deaths are nothing compared to how effectively and efficiently we kill ourselves through the diets we pursue and the lifestyles we adopt.
This to my mind is an illustration of what Ballard is writing about. Our daily reality is deeply weird, and weirdest of all we never notice it unless jolted by a sudden crash, forcing us to see life from a different perspective.
In Ballard's case this came from his wartime experience in Shanghai described in Empire of the Sun when a middle class, colonial childhood was turned upside down by a war which revealed the artificiality of daily life. How we play out our scripted roles in a theatre wilfully blind to the props and flimsy stage sets that we mistake for a solid, unchanging bedrock to everyday life.
This is a book in which you feel the alien nature of the cars, planes and ever growing networks of multi-lane roads that are so typical of our everyday existence and more to the point the alien influences that they have on our lives. The flyovers overlaid one another like copulating giants, immense legs straddling each other's backs (p59). Of course this is a man made and hence an artificial landscape but that misses the point, almost all the landscapes in Britain are man (and women) made, the camber of the fields, where trees are and where they aren't, the sunken stony paths, the line of the rivers and the absence of marsh is all unnatural. The difference is that the London that Ballard describes in Crash is a roadscape designed for cars not people. A scaled up child's playmat, a mega toy garage, our squidgy human lives simply the figurines inside the cars that we exist to decorate, everything reduced to objects to be toyed with. In this game the only interest, the only lasting, intense contact comes from the crash which alone penetrates and abrades.
In line with the whole perspective of the novel people and machines parallel each other, slide in and out of each other and come to represent a continuum of existence rather than separate states. Bodily fluids and mechanical lubricants mix together. The scarred, damaged cars and the battered, scraped people who drive them. The two seek a union, sex between people is an approximation of that union that increasingly doesn't satisfy the characters. The complete release, of course, can only be achieved in the fatal car crash.
Given how the book is about the unleashing of new sexualities based on car accidents - the combination of human and machine in an accident, the new geographies of injured bodies etc - this isn't a book I'd recommend to those with innocent and sweet hearts or a tender disposition. The sex in the book, and there is a lot of it, is described from the narrator’s point of view, clinically, with a curious lack of passion as if describing cars parking and reversing as though the new sexualities have come at the cost of some deeper disengagement.
If you have sat in the communion of our time in a modern cathedral, that is to say in a traffic jam on a major concrete intersection at the edge of a great city, then you can recognise the reality in Ballard's story.
Recently I noticed someone reading Homo Faber on this site and that brought this book back to me with a different sharpness, there in Frisch's work we have < i>technology..the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it. Ballard hears that and responds: yes, but. In this book to live is to experience. Closing off via technology one way of experiencing the world, in fact necessitates that people will seek to experience the world in new ways through technology, will we like it, probably not, are we in the end succeeding only in achieving alienation from ourselves and from our own potential for happiness? Probably, types someone sitting indoors interacting with different people via a keyboard and a screen!
...we live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind - mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.
In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us has represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realms of fantasy and the imagination. These roles, it seems to me, have been reversed...
A few years ago a group of young men deliberately piloted aeroplanes into a number of buildings in the USA killing all in all 2,996 people. Aside from the considerable political fallout from this, a more everyday result of this was that people in the USA were understandably more jittery than usual about air travel and an increasing number turned to travel by road instead. However in that same year of 2011 a total of 32,479 people died on US roads in accidents, a death toll that had no political consequences what so ever. Deaths by homicide, which from time to time appears to bring out a burst of soul searching in the USA, come to only about half the number of people killed in road deaths. This mass slaughter on the roads was, is, in fact a phenomenon that is tacitly accepted as a completely normal part of everyday life in all countries. No army is mobilised, no mass public campaign, no presidential blue ribbon committee of Nobel prize winners and boxing champions. And of course even the number of road deaths are nothing compared to how effectively and efficiently we kill ourselves through the diets we pursue and the lifestyles we adopt.
This to my mind is an illustration of what Ballard is writing about. Our daily reality is deeply weird, and weirdest of all we never notice it unless jolted by a sudden crash, forcing us to see life from a different perspective.
In Ballard's case this came from his wartime experience in Shanghai described in Empire of the Sun when a middle class, colonial childhood was turned upside down by a war which revealed the artificiality of daily life. How we play out our scripted roles in a theatre wilfully blind to the props and flimsy stage sets that we mistake for a solid, unchanging bedrock to everyday life.
This is a book in which you feel the alien nature of the cars, planes and ever growing networks of multi-lane roads that are so typical of our everyday existence and more to the point the alien influences that they have on our lives. The flyovers overlaid one another like copulating giants, immense legs straddling each other's backs (p59). Of course this is a man made and hence an artificial landscape but that misses the point, almost all the landscapes in Britain are man (and women) made, the camber of the fields, where trees are and where they aren't, the sunken stony paths, the line of the rivers and the absence of marsh is all unnatural. The difference is that the London that Ballard describes in Crash is a roadscape designed for cars not people. A scaled up child's playmat, a mega toy garage, our squidgy human lives simply the figurines inside the cars that we exist to decorate, everything reduced to objects to be toyed with. In this game the only interest, the only lasting, intense contact comes from the crash which alone penetrates and abrades.
In line with the whole perspective of the novel people and machines parallel each other, slide in and out of each other and come to represent a continuum of existence rather than separate states. Bodily fluids and mechanical lubricants mix together. The scarred, damaged cars and the battered, scraped people who drive them. The two seek a union, sex between people is an approximation of that union that increasingly doesn't satisfy the characters. The complete release, of course, can only be achieved in the fatal car crash.
Given how the book is about the unleashing of new sexualities based on car accidents - the combination of human and machine in an accident, the new geographies of injured bodies etc - this isn't a book I'd recommend to those with innocent and sweet hearts or a tender disposition. The sex in the book, and there is a lot of it, is described from the narrator’s point of view, clinically, with a curious lack of passion as if describing cars parking and reversing as though the new sexualities have come at the cost of some deeper disengagement.
If you have sat in the communion of our time in a modern cathedral, that is to say in a traffic jam on a major concrete intersection at the edge of a great city, then you can recognise the reality in Ballard's story.
Recently I noticed someone reading Homo Faber on this site and that brought this book back to me with a different sharpness, there in Frisch's work we have < i>technology..the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it. Ballard hears that and responds: yes, but. In this book to live is to experience. Closing off via technology one way of experiencing the world, in fact necessitates that people will seek to experience the world in new ways through technology, will we like it, probably not, are we in the end succeeding only in achieving alienation from ourselves and from our own potential for happiness? Probably, types someone sitting indoors interacting with different people via a keyboard and a screen!
December 23, 2021
When you imagine JG Ballard at work at his desk, you picture him holding not a pen but a scalpel. There's a sentence early on in this book, where someone fantasising about Elizabeth Taylor obsesses over ‘the exquisite transits of the screen actress's pubis across the vinyl seat covers of hired limousines’, and this is such a perfect Ballardian sentence. Human sexuality seen as a kind of astronomical phenomenon; the personal made coldly scientific.
The amazement of Crash is how convincingly its form recapitulates its content – it's not just about sexual pathology, it feels like something pathological in itself. The repetition and the complete dedication to its central thesis seem unhinged. Like pornography, the same elements are recombined in innumerable ways to stimulating yet wearying effect, except that here these are not just body parts (‘penis’, ‘vulva’, ‘semen’ etc. recur ad infinitum) but also aspects of modern technology – instrument binnacles, motorway embankments, central reservations, engine coolant.
The intent is not just to talk about some people who find car-crashes sexy (which is what everyone knows the book is about). It's to turn sex itself into a kind of car-crash, a collision of strange technologies. Everywhere people and machines are elided. A driver's seat is described anatomically, as a ‘central sulcus’; reference is made to ‘the soft technology of Catherine's breasts’. The novel builds up a series of eerie ‘conjunctions between elbow and chromium window-sill, vulva and instrument binnacle’.
This mechanised perversity doesn't appear in complete isolation: it's not just cars, it's the whole world. Ballard, as narrator, lives in ‘an immense metallized landscape’, bounded by ‘a continuous artificial horizon, formed by the raised parapets and embankments of the motorways and their access roads and interchanges’. He looks out to ‘the distant causeways of the northern circular motorway’, the skies peopled by ‘metallized creatures’ from the nearby airport.
What does sex look like, within this vision of a late twentieth century dominated by technology and looming mass destruction? (That's one way to frame the novel.) Ballard sees (or foresees) ‘a new sexuality born from a perverse technology’, one ‘divorced from any possible physical expression’. In such an environment, sex becomes something like IT – ‘an exact analogue of the other skills created by the multiplying technologies of the twentieth century’.
One of the things underlying this thought-experiment is a grotesque hyperawareness of how dangerous driving is. Ballard has talked about how baffling it is to see people carry on as though it isn't the most dangerous thing they will do every day, with their family happily on board. Here, that wilful ignorance is reversed: the danger, the injury and eventual death, becomes the whole point. Sexual orifices are elided with trauma wounds. And this is just the beginning – Ballard chillingly pauses to imagine how future developments will cause further perversions:
All this makes it sound as though Crash is a novel with an argument, a monitory fable about our unhealthy dependence on technology. And it is, maybe. But it doesn't feel like that when you're reading it – there's something fetishistic and masturbatory to its tone of complete belief, as though it's all a fantasy written by one of its characters (an impression stressed by the fact that the protagonist and narrator is also ‘JG Ballard’).
I wish I'd read this in my thirties. In my twenties it would have shocked me, and now, in my forties, I'm a bit too liable to find it faintly silly. But five or ten years ago I think it would have blown me away. It contains words and ideas that have been put next to each other for the very first time. Though its characters are unreal and its themes repetitive, on a micro scale, sentence by sentence, and on a macro scale, in terms of its themes, it's completely extraordinary.
The amazement of Crash is how convincingly its form recapitulates its content – it's not just about sexual pathology, it feels like something pathological in itself. The repetition and the complete dedication to its central thesis seem unhinged. Like pornography, the same elements are recombined in innumerable ways to stimulating yet wearying effect, except that here these are not just body parts (‘penis’, ‘vulva’, ‘semen’ etc. recur ad infinitum) but also aspects of modern technology – instrument binnacles, motorway embankments, central reservations, engine coolant.
The intent is not just to talk about some people who find car-crashes sexy (which is what everyone knows the book is about). It's to turn sex itself into a kind of car-crash, a collision of strange technologies. Everywhere people and machines are elided. A driver's seat is described anatomically, as a ‘central sulcus’; reference is made to ‘the soft technology of Catherine's breasts’. The novel builds up a series of eerie ‘conjunctions between elbow and chromium window-sill, vulva and instrument binnacle’.
The passenger compartment enclosed us like a machine generating from our sexual act an homunculus of blood, semen and engine coolant.
This mechanised perversity doesn't appear in complete isolation: it's not just cars, it's the whole world. Ballard, as narrator, lives in ‘an immense metallized landscape’, bounded by ‘a continuous artificial horizon, formed by the raised parapets and embankments of the motorways and their access roads and interchanges’. He looks out to ‘the distant causeways of the northern circular motorway’, the skies peopled by ‘metallized creatures’ from the nearby airport.
What does sex look like, within this vision of a late twentieth century dominated by technology and looming mass destruction? (That's one way to frame the novel.) Ballard sees (or foresees) ‘a new sexuality born from a perverse technology’, one ‘divorced from any possible physical expression’. In such an environment, sex becomes something like IT – ‘an exact analogue of the other skills created by the multiplying technologies of the twentieth century’.
One of the things underlying this thought-experiment is a grotesque hyperawareness of how dangerous driving is. Ballard has talked about how baffling it is to see people carry on as though it isn't the most dangerous thing they will do every day, with their family happily on board. Here, that wilful ignorance is reversed: the danger, the injury and eventual death, becomes the whole point. Sexual orifices are elided with trauma wounds. And this is just the beginning – Ballard chillingly pauses to imagine how future developments will cause further perversions:
What wounds would create the sexual possibilities of the invisible technologies of thermonuclear reaction chambers, white-tiled control rooms, the mysterious scenarios of computer circuitry?
All this makes it sound as though Crash is a novel with an argument, a monitory fable about our unhealthy dependence on technology. And it is, maybe. But it doesn't feel like that when you're reading it – there's something fetishistic and masturbatory to its tone of complete belief, as though it's all a fantasy written by one of its characters (an impression stressed by the fact that the protagonist and narrator is also ‘JG Ballard’).
I wish I'd read this in my thirties. In my twenties it would have shocked me, and now, in my forties, I'm a bit too liable to find it faintly silly. But five or ten years ago I think it would have blown me away. It contains words and ideas that have been put next to each other for the very first time. Though its characters are unreal and its themes repetitive, on a micro scale, sentence by sentence, and on a macro scale, in terms of its themes, it's completely extraordinary.
August 15, 2016
A non-erotic, shocking and deeply disturbing auto wreck of perverted sexual carnage that just about stayed within the limitations of what my poor self could bare. Credit to J.G. though for having the balls, guts and all the rest of it to write something of this nature where many would look at this as a piece of attention seeking soft porn, I am not one of them, as believe it or not look beyond the car parts, body parts, twisted minds, and there is a deep underlying message concerning the human psyche, our need for experimentation and those who choose to engage in experiencing alternative ways to find the ultimate high. Liked or loathed it's not easy to forget.
July 10, 2019
Crash is a wondrous symphony of amorality, sex and self-destruction. The juxtaposition of depraved, compulsive sex acts alongside twisted scenes of automotive horror is relentless, excessive, and taken to outrageous, darkly comical extremes. The novel is a mockery, pointing towards societal excess and general alienation, through which the blind amorality of sexual desire seems a natural driving force. The concept of the novel is ridiculous on its face, but the author is complicitly self-aware, even going so far as to name himself protagonist of the farce. The novel is filled with misanthropy, misogyny, and an uninhibited and unrestrained sexual pathology. It is a relic, with no place in the carefully moderated modern world. It is an ugly, dirty allegory, though its appeal is not metaphorical, but located in the visceral pull of its poetry. This is, understandably, not everyone’s cup of tea. I’m grateful that not every book is like this one. Still, you need something like this to slap you in the face every now and then, and remind you how ludicrous it is to find yourself alive, walking upon the face of this earth.
August 25, 2008
Reading this book wore me out. I like Ballard, I think he's a writer who really gets technology, modernity, isolation, etc., and I'm pretty non-judgmental about even sort of far-out fetishes, but what kept flashing through my brain was GRATUITOUS GRATUITOUS WHEN WILL THIS BOOK END ARRGH. And I don't even mean that it was gratuitous with the sex-and-accidents stuff (although it was)--the blunt, increasingly inelegant repetition of Ballard's arguments made a compelling idea, after a certain point, just tedious. In much the same way that there are only so many words for various parts of the human anatomy (and, dear lord, if I see the words "groin" or "pubis" again in my lifetime it will be too soon), maybe there are only a fixed number of ways of looking at a car crash.
March 21, 2008
There are very few movies even remotely interesting enough to warrant reading the book it was adapted from; but back in the glorious years of the late 1990’s, when I saw David Cronenberg’s masterful adaptation of “Crash”, I knew there was absolutely no way I could go wrong with the book. Let’s face it, there is absolutely no way that you can sit through the entirety of the film and not get it on with whoever happens to be in close proximity, but just make sure there is someone there, even if it’s a she-male, because if you dare watch this alone, at some point you will accost your car, and you’ll wake up in an uncomfortable daze, reeking of grease, gasoline, wiper fluid, and engine coolant. Despite whatever indicators might be misleading you on the dashboard, your car does not need to be ‘serviced’ like that. Only two things ever happen in Crash; two or more ill-omened vehicles are pulverizing one another, or people are getting their freak on in ways I don’t have the vocabulary to describe. Usually these two common elements are occurring simultaneously. I figured this would be a great read on a flight to Seattle back at the time, seeing as the purpose of my trip was basically to reenact the book, minus the car wrecks. I wasn’t ready for it.
Now, having re-read it almost exactly a decade later, I had finally come to believe I was ready for it having broadened my horizons and added unspoken volumes to my life experiences. What a fool I am.
Before going any further, I need to note that I love the way Ballard writes; while the end of the book somewhat tails off in my opinion, the sh!t this guy comes up with and the way he works each word to his own unfathomable ends is a delight to read. Considering that a great deal of this book centers almost exclusively on esoteric automobile components and body parts you’ve never heard your mother mention, Ballard finds a way to pick it up and put it to bed without the least difficulty, somehow leaving the reader anxious to discover how the characters are going to copulate with/in a vehicle and indelibly mark it with their own vile secretions during their next perverse endeavor. As an added bonus, after a single reading you’ll also have the ability to keep of your half of the most twisted and flagrantly homosexual conversation going on at the ‘Manhole’. You may never need to, but the fact you can is reassuring; there’s a slight sense of accomplishment even in seldom-employed skill sets.
Now for the warning. Do not read this while taking mass transit, especially the part where Ballard intricately describes Catherine Ballard’s grooming habits. You’ll be looking at that weird, large, muttering woman on the train with the huge sunglasses, disgustingly wondering if she goes through the same routine, and you’ll be spending the rest of the ride knowing you’ve just swallowed back a little of your own vomit, something we can all do without.
Anyway, the story centers on James Ballard (where the author gets his ideas for his characters monikers is beyond my reasoning), a well-to-do commercial director who has an apparently open marriage to his wife, Catherine, and seems like quite a space-cadet to begin with. There’s no benefit to his physical or mental condition when he f*cks up while driving and ends up in a head-on collision, which leaves the driver of the other car dead and the passenger a widow. James winds up maimed, and spends a good deal of time recovering from the wounds he’s sustained, and upen being released from the hospital, finds he’s been under the surveillance of Vaughan, a heavily-scarred maniac and patron saint of those deformed in auto crashes. Immediately, Ballard is drawn into Vaughan’s lifestyle and inner circle of car-wreck-enthusiasts; Seagrave, an oft-concussed crossdresser and stuntman, Gabrielle, a hot piece of deformed ass (for a lesbian opium-addict), and Helen Remington, the heavily-bruised widow of Ballard’s victim. What can such a group of malcontents get up to? I’ll spare the details of mutual masturbation while watching filmed automobile collisions, visiting wreckage sites to photograph the gruesome aftermath while working themselves into a sexual frenzy, and fulfilling those desires savagely by engaging in some ridiculous and completely insane all-orifice buggery in either a moving or completely totaled car, involving every possible pairing of characters at one point or another. Ballard covers all the bases; gay sex, straight sex, even people vigorously rubbing their aching loins against a front-quarter-panel while inspecting a mangled car for a little satisfaction.
The point of the book? I don’t see one. Luckily, J.G. Ballard does, so I’ll let his introduction address that. According to Ballard, “Crash” is ‘an extreme metaphor for an extreme situation’, in which he has ‘used the car not only as a sexual image, but as a total metaphor for man’s life in today’s society’. He goes so far as to explain that ‘the ultimate role of Crash is cautionary, a warning against that brutal, erotic, and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape.’ I’ll be honest; I have no clue what this f*cking lunatic is talking about; the message I got from Crash was that I’m hanging out with all the wrong people: I should be devoting my time looking for companionship amongst the edge-walking dare-devils of the world, those unafraid to take that toke over the line and lay it all on the line, the type of decadent folk that don’t even consider you might be referring to a seatbelt when you mention ‘wearing protection’ during a collision.
Now, having re-read it almost exactly a decade later, I had finally come to believe I was ready for it having broadened my horizons and added unspoken volumes to my life experiences. What a fool I am.
Before going any further, I need to note that I love the way Ballard writes; while the end of the book somewhat tails off in my opinion, the sh!t this guy comes up with and the way he works each word to his own unfathomable ends is a delight to read. Considering that a great deal of this book centers almost exclusively on esoteric automobile components and body parts you’ve never heard your mother mention, Ballard finds a way to pick it up and put it to bed without the least difficulty, somehow leaving the reader anxious to discover how the characters are going to copulate with/in a vehicle and indelibly mark it with their own vile secretions during their next perverse endeavor. As an added bonus, after a single reading you’ll also have the ability to keep of your half of the most twisted and flagrantly homosexual conversation going on at the ‘Manhole’. You may never need to, but the fact you can is reassuring; there’s a slight sense of accomplishment even in seldom-employed skill sets.
Now for the warning. Do not read this while taking mass transit, especially the part where Ballard intricately describes Catherine Ballard’s grooming habits. You’ll be looking at that weird, large, muttering woman on the train with the huge sunglasses, disgustingly wondering if she goes through the same routine, and you’ll be spending the rest of the ride knowing you’ve just swallowed back a little of your own vomit, something we can all do without.
Anyway, the story centers on James Ballard (where the author gets his ideas for his characters monikers is beyond my reasoning), a well-to-do commercial director who has an apparently open marriage to his wife, Catherine, and seems like quite a space-cadet to begin with. There’s no benefit to his physical or mental condition when he f*cks up while driving and ends up in a head-on collision, which leaves the driver of the other car dead and the passenger a widow. James winds up maimed, and spends a good deal of time recovering from the wounds he’s sustained, and upen being released from the hospital, finds he’s been under the surveillance of Vaughan, a heavily-scarred maniac and patron saint of those deformed in auto crashes. Immediately, Ballard is drawn into Vaughan’s lifestyle and inner circle of car-wreck-enthusiasts; Seagrave, an oft-concussed crossdresser and stuntman, Gabrielle, a hot piece of deformed ass (for a lesbian opium-addict), and Helen Remington, the heavily-bruised widow of Ballard’s victim. What can such a group of malcontents get up to? I’ll spare the details of mutual masturbation while watching filmed automobile collisions, visiting wreckage sites to photograph the gruesome aftermath while working themselves into a sexual frenzy, and fulfilling those desires savagely by engaging in some ridiculous and completely insane all-orifice buggery in either a moving or completely totaled car, involving every possible pairing of characters at one point or another. Ballard covers all the bases; gay sex, straight sex, even people vigorously rubbing their aching loins against a front-quarter-panel while inspecting a mangled car for a little satisfaction.
The point of the book? I don’t see one. Luckily, J.G. Ballard does, so I’ll let his introduction address that. According to Ballard, “Crash” is ‘an extreme metaphor for an extreme situation’, in which he has ‘used the car not only as a sexual image, but as a total metaphor for man’s life in today’s society’. He goes so far as to explain that ‘the ultimate role of Crash is cautionary, a warning against that brutal, erotic, and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape.’ I’ll be honest; I have no clue what this f*cking lunatic is talking about; the message I got from Crash was that I’m hanging out with all the wrong people: I should be devoting my time looking for companionship amongst the edge-walking dare-devils of the world, those unafraid to take that toke over the line and lay it all on the line, the type of decadent folk that don’t even consider you might be referring to a seatbelt when you mention ‘wearing protection’ during a collision.
July 3, 2022
Right, I appreciate this guys talent.
He's an incredible writer and I also appreciate the fact that he's written something unique here.
But..
This is repetitive.
It's basically about guys blowing their loads in car crashes and having a fetishism in such things such as attending crash sites etc.
Like I said, this guy is a great writer but he gets repetitive here.
One thing I found delightful though is that it's set where I now live in England.
He's an incredible writer and I also appreciate the fact that he's written something unique here.
But..
This is repetitive.
It's basically about guys blowing their loads in car crashes and having a fetishism in such things such as attending crash sites etc.
Like I said, this guy is a great writer but he gets repetitive here.
One thing I found delightful though is that it's set where I now live in England.
June 15, 2015
Driving is such a pain in the ass. I always imagine myself crashing the car, colliding with a truck full of chickens, or running over a demented pedestrian whenever I’m holding a steering wheel. Not that I’m a bad driver, actually I’m an excellent driver which really means I drive like a sloth. Also, I don’t really aim sexual fulfillment whenever I get into a car. Unlike most people in this novel, a car, for me, is actually something I use to get somewhere. And as opposed to Ballard’s autoperverts the closest I’ve actually come to getting a boner in the car is when I strap on my seatbelt. Yeah, safety. For me the first time I discovered I could actually die driving was the very first time I sat on the driver’s seat and I turned on the ignition of the car. It felt like a thousand possible deaths pouring from the floodgates of the highway to hell. It ruined that every boy’s dream of being Speed Racer, Knight Rider or OJ Simpson. Well, of course, I never really wanted to be any of these daredevil drivers. Closest car wanker I’ve looked up to and considered a role model is probably Jeremy Clarkson. Despite popular belief he’s actually a pretty skittish driver, albeit he’s a wry comedian, and also a British asshole which gives him a check in my book. Although, he did just get suspended by BBC for being a racist and a cunt, something about socking a producer and racism and being an asshole to PWDs. Speaking of Jeremy Clarkson, I’ve always had this strong suspicion that Top Gear is actually a porno show and a porno magazine for automaniacs like Ballard. My dad always buys the magazine and there’s a good amount of women wearing skimpy outfits doing weird postures. Aside from that there’s an insane quantity of car pictures showing different angles to them. From the rear end of luxury cars to the rack of the wilder trucks, it seems like an autopervert’s wetdream, might as well call it Fifty Shades of Gear. Of course it’s still nothing compared to J.G. Ballard’s Crash. But I still question the morality of people who subscribe to both forms of Top Gear media. Anyway, a porno novel on car boners and women and sodomy must be pretty cool, huh? Well, I dunno. I felt really funny about this one. Know that term auto-fellatio which really means sucking one’s own cock? Well, it kinda sounds like a blowjob for cars, if cars had penises. Which reminds of the internet community called Cars fucking Dragons. That’s right, it is a real thing. Here’s the link: reddit.com/r/carsfuckingdragons. Some people might contemplate on the meaning of life and sexuality in this subreddit. Hey, I don’t judge. Whatever floats your boat, mate. I mean you know Fifty Shades of Grey and all that limp literorgy designed for bibliopervs and so far I’m all respect towards them. Heh. Heh. Foppish bastards. Now uhhh for the uhmmm we come to the err most statutory part of this pseudo-review: Why read this? Or if I may say so, should you even read it? The answer is a resounding: vrovrvrvrooooooommmmmm which I don’t really understand. If you’re looking for sex, better go for the real thing or watch pornography. If you’re looking for cars, better to google “cars”. If you’re looking for a combination of the two, better to buy a car-shaped vibrator. But if you're looking for a rather cheeky way to piss of your Prius this is the answer I guess. But really, why would you?
September 23, 2015
I know this avant-garde novel is supposed have opened up brave new vistas in dystopian fiction, by "boldly going where no man has gone before". The courage of J. G. Ballard has to be admired the way he links violent death with sex: his narrative structuring is exemplary. However, I simply could not get into the book even after three or four tries. The characters were extremely unlikeable: the main premise was bizarre: and the story failed to hold my interest. I did not finish it.
So I will have to give this a miserable one-star rating. I cannot honestly recommend it to anyone. The only thing is, the reactions these type of novels create are highly subjective: so should it prove to be your cup of tea, it may even come up with five stars.
So I will have to give this a miserable one-star rating. I cannot honestly recommend it to anyone. The only thing is, the reactions these type of novels create are highly subjective: so should it prove to be your cup of tea, it may even come up with five stars.
May 5, 2018
motorway/cleft/instrument panel/wound/windshield glass/vulva/chromium/flesh/bonnet/anus/grills/scars/flyover/nipple/collision/orgasm
Reassemble the above as needed with growing tension, increasing pace, and obsessive circular repetition. A sense of intimacy being separated from humanity; an insertion of clinical sterility into the most personal and social; a disconnection; a speeding carnival of horrors and depravity. A voyeuristic, sado-masochistic de-evolution. A mind jolted askew and accelerated towards a self-destructive culmination of consuming fanaticism.
The star-structure doesn't really apply here, I did not "really like it", but I really appreciate it. Reading this put me in mind of William S. Burroughs and Chuck Palahniuk, as well as perhaps Bret Easton Ellis, but while Naked Lunch could likely have been influential, and both Fight Club and American Psycho might have been influenced by Crash in one way or another, none really hit the same chord. Ballard's writing is precise, every word seems chosen with purpose, with great intention, while Burroughs especially tended more to messiness and an organic style spilling forth. BEE may be the closest in it's combination of shocking material with clinical exactness, and I might add that for me both have a numbing effect when they continually assault the reader. With this book you get a sense of unraveling and a journey towards chaos, but at the same time it is an unavoidable destiny, not the helter-skelter hellish meandering of the aforementioned Naked Lunch. They do all seem to point towards ugliness in culture, but the styles of revealing the under side of the rock, or the truth in the mirror, point to very different mind-sets and perspectives. Ballard is showing a disconnection and callousness between people with the intertwining of our lives with technology, in this way perhaps his book, being published in 1973, was prophetic. Does not the tragic scene of Princess Diana's own death seem like the natural scene predicted by this book?
Reassemble the above as needed with growing tension, increasing pace, and obsessive circular repetition. A sense of intimacy being separated from humanity; an insertion of clinical sterility into the most personal and social; a disconnection; a speeding carnival of horrors and depravity. A voyeuristic, sado-masochistic de-evolution. A mind jolted askew and accelerated towards a self-destructive culmination of consuming fanaticism.
The star-structure doesn't really apply here, I did not "really like it", but I really appreciate it. Reading this put me in mind of William S. Burroughs and Chuck Palahniuk, as well as perhaps Bret Easton Ellis, but while Naked Lunch could likely have been influential, and both Fight Club and American Psycho might have been influenced by Crash in one way or another, none really hit the same chord. Ballard's writing is precise, every word seems chosen with purpose, with great intention, while Burroughs especially tended more to messiness and an organic style spilling forth. BEE may be the closest in it's combination of shocking material with clinical exactness, and I might add that for me both have a numbing effect when they continually assault the reader. With this book you get a sense of unraveling and a journey towards chaos, but at the same time it is an unavoidable destiny, not the helter-skelter hellish meandering of the aforementioned Naked Lunch. They do all seem to point towards ugliness in culture, but the styles of revealing the under side of the rock, or the truth in the mirror, point to very different mind-sets and perspectives. Ballard is showing a disconnection and callousness between people with the intertwining of our lives with technology, in this way perhaps his book, being published in 1973, was prophetic. Does not the tragic scene of Princess Diana's own death seem like the natural scene predicted by this book?
September 25, 2019
Turns out reading this "auto-erotic" novel in a moving car does not actually heighten the experience. In a twist of irony, the car makes me infinitely more sick than this sly book ever could alone. Reading while driving does make the "crash" part a lot easier, however.
I saw the Cronenberg adaptation before reading the book, and the film left a deep impression on me. Here you have pure science fiction at its wonkiest: the role technology plays in human life, both individual and societal, taken to its most psychosexual extreme. This story unprecedentedly melds technology with the human body by inventing a fetish so extreme no human being is known to actually possess it. By taking things to such a satirical extreme, the story shows us that no matter how far we take our sexuality as humans, it alone will never be enough to satisfy us. The characters in this book step up the sexual heights time and time again and immediately afterwards only ever look for a greater kick, a deeper thrill. Largely the reason they can't quench their sexual thirst is because they attempt to use technology to supplant what should be a person-to-person experience, instead of merely using technology to help; yet also, the characters fail to search for satisfaction outside of a sexual context.
No amount of perversion or adrenaline or testosterone will do it. To find satiation, we must look outside mere sexuality to broader concepts; but we can't ignore the human connection in sexuality in said pursuit.
I saw the Cronenberg adaptation before reading the book, and the film left a deep impression on me. Here you have pure science fiction at its wonkiest: the role technology plays in human life, both individual and societal, taken to its most psychosexual extreme. This story unprecedentedly melds technology with the human body by inventing a fetish so extreme no human being is known to actually possess it. By taking things to such a satirical extreme, the story shows us that no matter how far we take our sexuality as humans, it alone will never be enough to satisfy us. The characters in this book step up the sexual heights time and time again and immediately afterwards only ever look for a greater kick, a deeper thrill. Largely the reason they can't quench their sexual thirst is because they attempt to use technology to supplant what should be a person-to-person experience, instead of merely using technology to help; yet also, the characters fail to search for satisfaction outside of a sexual context.
No amount of perversion or adrenaline or testosterone will do it. To find satiation, we must look outside mere sexuality to broader concepts; but we can't ignore the human connection in sexuality in said pursuit.
November 6, 2016
Martin Amis calls JG Ballard "a cult writer, the genuine article: extreme, exclusive, almost a one-man genre," and Crash is like nothing else. Its characters - its lead just has Ballard's name, like he can't be bothered to fake anything - are unapologetically amoral, sociopathic, almost automatic: they're into what they're into and they just go after it. Robert Vaughan, "nightmare angel of the expressways," wants to murder Elizabeth Taylor. No one mentions that murder is bad. It's an interesting project. They wonder if he'll pull it off. Humans are disgusting, all fluids and anuses, contrasted with numbing repetitiveness to the gleaming chromium of cars. The book is about their union: it's about smashing them together, human and car, again and again. It's completely mad. The words chromium, anus, diagonal, vulva, mucal, vent, binnacle appear many times; Ballard has created his own vocabulary to describe a fetishistic world that absolutely doesn't exist anywhere except in his head, where it's fully realized and internally consistent. It's like Wuthering Heights in this way: logical in its batshittery.
This is one of the most unique books I've ever read. It's interesting and easy to read, as long as you have the stomach for "elderly pederasts easing their tongues into the simulated anuses of colostomized juveniles." Here is a binnacle:
It goes in your body.
This is one of the most unique books I've ever read. It's interesting and easy to read, as long as you have the stomach for "elderly pederasts easing their tongues into the simulated anuses of colostomized juveniles." Here is a binnacle:
It goes in your body.
January 23, 2015
“The long triangular grooves on the car had been formed within the death of an unknown creature, its vanished identity abstracted in terms of the geometry of this vehicle. How much more mysterious would be our own deaths, and those of the famous and powerful?”
Sexual dystopia? Sure. But Crash is much wider than this – it is a sinister obsession with death and desire. And J.G. Ballard is Marquis de Sade of the motorized century.
The novel seemed to me a bit too pathological.
“Their bare thighs modulated the panels of pastel vinyl; the deep-cone speakers recapitulated the contours of their sharp breasts. I saw the interior of the motor-car as a kaleidoscope of illuminated pieces of the bodies of women. This anthology of wrists and elbow, thigh and pubis formed ever-changing marriages with the contours of the automobile.”
Starting with an apple of paradise with the progress of civilization forbidden fruits are turning yet stranger with every new century.
Sexual dystopia? Sure. But Crash is much wider than this – it is a sinister obsession with death and desire. And J.G. Ballard is Marquis de Sade of the motorized century.
The novel seemed to me a bit too pathological.
“Their bare thighs modulated the panels of pastel vinyl; the deep-cone speakers recapitulated the contours of their sharp breasts. I saw the interior of the motor-car as a kaleidoscope of illuminated pieces of the bodies of women. This anthology of wrists and elbow, thigh and pubis formed ever-changing marriages with the contours of the automobile.”
Starting with an apple of paradise with the progress of civilization forbidden fruits are turning yet stranger with every new century.
July 21, 2015
If you've never read Ballard, and you're curious, this is the book you want to start with. I won't get into the plot or the antiseptic, yet haunting, prose. I'll just say that all the motifs of Ballard are here, and they are presented with crystal clear precision, with touches of what I'd call industrial surrealism.
Some people find the book a little cold and detached -- but that's the whole point -- Ballard is not a Garcia Marquez, he's not painting a romantic picture full of pastels(I'm not knocking magical surrealism, nor pastels). Let me put it this way: if van Gogh & Garcia Marquez have similar styles - bright colors, rustic locales, than Ballard & Dali have similar styles - mechanical eroticisms, strange juxtapositions.
To understand Ballard you can't approach him thinking you're going to read something in the traditional "belles-lettres" sense... don't get me wrong, his word's are beautiful, but they are beautiful in the way a neon sign reflected in a puddle of rain on a darkened city street can be beautiful.
That's my best shot at conveying the sense of style that awaits you within this book...
Some people find the book a little cold and detached -- but that's the whole point -- Ballard is not a Garcia Marquez, he's not painting a romantic picture full of pastels(I'm not knocking magical surrealism, nor pastels). Let me put it this way: if van Gogh & Garcia Marquez have similar styles - bright colors, rustic locales, than Ballard & Dali have similar styles - mechanical eroticisms, strange juxtapositions.
To understand Ballard you can't approach him thinking you're going to read something in the traditional "belles-lettres" sense... don't get me wrong, his word's are beautiful, but they are beautiful in the way a neon sign reflected in a puddle of rain on a darkened city street can be beautiful.
That's my best shot at conveying the sense of style that awaits you within this book...
December 15, 2019
Crash was a very 1990s book, if you were young in Britain and into a certain strain of indie culture. I bought my first copy nearly 25 years ago, probably just before the film was out, and didn't get round to reading that, nor the replacement I bought around 10 years ago. Nearing the end of 2019, I figured I didn't want to carry the novel over into yet another decade unread - and these days it seems ubiquitous in libraries (in an edition embellished with essays by Zadie Smith and non-fiction writer Travis Elborough, and far more Americanisms than seems appropriate to an author who eschewed US influences). Plus, I felt I might be getting a bit old for shock fiction like this - though Ballard was himself in his early 40s when he wrote it - and it's really out of tune with the current cultural climate. So it was high time - overdue - to get it out of the way.
Years ago, before we were on Goodreads, several friends and I concluded that 1994 was, for us, the best year ever for music. Two of our top albums from that year have short quotes from Crash hidden among their lyrics, the Manic Street Preachers' The Holy Bible (a nihilistic record rather in keeping with the spirit of Ballard), and The Divine Comedy's Promenade (ostentatiously aesthetic, playful, lushly orchestral and rather not). One could also arguably hear its echoes in 'Joyriders' on Pulp's His N Hers (though to be fair, actual joyriders were massive in the news); in some of the darker lyrics on Parklife (band interviews said they'd been inspired by Martin Amis' London Fields, which I was deeply smug to have, coincidentally, read shortly before the album was out - but Amis' sleazeworlds and self-insertions are a lot like, and surely themselves inspired by, Ballard). And Suede's entire 90s discography was about seedy alienation in the dull satellite towns of south-east England.
I can't remember when Crash was featured in Will Self's Cult Book slot on Mark Radcliffe's 10pm Radio 1 show, whether it was before or after these albums. (Will Self probably can't remember either, what with the amount of drugs he was on.) But that was just one more thing that made this then-twenty-year-old book so present for the Britpop generation, as if it had been a hyped new publication. And all this was before the 1996 film (how *sad* it would have been to have only heard of it for the first time then! thought certain teenagers and students), and 1997, when edgier media people pointed out the similarities between scenes in Crash and Princess Diana's death.
The turnaround in the literary world's attitudes to themes like those found in Crash, sex narrated by men, violence and kinks, between the mid 90s and the late 2010s seems far more drastic than any shifts between the early 70s and the mid 90s. (By the 90s a few things from the 70s were starting to be straightened out - young groupies had become considerably less acceptable - but it was, in a lot of ways, still the world of the 1960s sexual revolution and its mores. And there was hardly anything less cool than being offended.) Now, those of us late Gen X-ers who took all that on board have found everything is shifting already, before we became anything like what we thought was old. This wasn't supposed to happen this soon. (It must have been similar for late Silent Generation people in the 60s, the ones who were basically normie but also attentive to culture - whilst those inclined to fashionable sorts of weirdness, like Ballard, were more at home in the Boomers' social revolution.)
I wasn't sure how I'd react to Crash now; I half-wished I could stick it in a time machine with a note to myself around the time I read American Psycho, saying, "Read this ASAP!" I would have the minimum of reactions to it (and it would also do away with any apprehension about being seen to have read it, or even perhaps rate it highly, in 2019, by people likely to judge negatively, people whom I also like and want to stay on good terms with. It would just be another book tagged "1997-99" with no rating, added to GR back in 2012.) Whilst I did feel some echoes of somatic empathy in the first couple of chapters of Crash - and worried marginally that the book might exhaust me with that - the way Ballard writes chimes so closely with something in my own mind, that I rapidly found myself back in the same state of detachment with which, many years ago, I used to read history and watch wars and famines on the news - not feeling anything really, they were simply things that happened, like the weather - and read other transgressive novels.
I don't think I knew until this month that Ballard had studied medicine. (He dropped out before graduation.) This must be why his writing, despite its alienated, savage themes, feels so strangely like home, to me who grew up reading the medical journals that were lying around the house. Medical study must also be why his descriptions, especially of the placement and posture of the body, are so accurate. Unlike with most authors' work, I never had to make any effort to imagine how even the most elaborate scene was physically arranged - it was obvious straight off the page.
I often look back on books, films and other content I consumed when young as having influenced me. And with works I meant to read or watch then, but didn't get round to, I think about how I might have been different if I had got to them earlier. Crash, though, is singular and strange, because I don't think it would have made any difference. If I *had* read it in the 90s and was re-reading it now, I would have wondered if it had contributed to the person who once had a tendency to glorify beautiful men who cut themselves (instead, at nearly 30, I traced that back to a meshing of Catholic Jesus, via Joan Windham's saint stories and Madonna, and images of Richey Edwards - himself a big fan of the novel - and stopped it because the relationships were messy and stressful for everyone concerned); I'd have thought the novel likely the seed of the meditative and mesmerising beauty I found in watching the gyratory system beside an office where I once worked; and about how reading this long text about other people's perversions I didn't share, but which was often highly compelling, had been echoed in all the time spent, especially in my late twenties, reading postings on kink social networks on which, I eventually accepted, 90% of people were too hardcore for me anyway. I suspect Crash was so influential on other culture I consumed that I absorbed its ethos by osmosis.
Even its setting was almost part of me, a time and place when my parents were normie passers-by on some of the same roads, the early 1970s in that commuterland where West and South West London, Middlesex and Surrey converge? (Or is it set earlier? Is it "London Airport" in this HarperCollins edition because it's set before the name changed to Heathrow in 1966, or because it uses a text edited for the US market?) Reginald Perrin-land, an area I also know mostly from the interior of a car, as a small child safely looking out of the back window, some years after most of Crash's characters would have killed themselves off in "accidents". Having been moved out of the area when I was still a kid, I went back in my twenties to have a look round. It felt so insulated and sterile, the archetype of affluent suburbia, going on for miles in a way it can only stretch from a very big city. It seemed no wonder that stereotypes developed like suburban key parties or sky-clad wiccans gathering in semi-detacheds, and that a story of extreme kinks like Crash (the car crash disrupts or destroys the manufactured bubble whilst still being created by and part of it) would be set there. The feel of the place is about as far from extreme or natural or "real" as one can get and still have gardens and free movement; it was obvious that, for some, it would provoke a thirst for the different and intense, consciously or unconsciously.
Crash may have been a 90s book for a few of us, but it was also, of course, of its own time, the early 1970s (and late 1960s). Critical awareness of consumerism, and the seductions and perils of manufactured objects and the new mass affluence, was a strand in in 1960s literature, for example in Georges Perec's Things and Simone de Beauvoir's Les Belles Images. Unapologetically transgressive literary fiction, no longer subject to bans in countries like Britain and the US, was getting more notice in the press, and was fashionable in some circles. I read Crash just after Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge (1968); these two novels, both with first-person narrators to bring the shocking action as close as possible, share preoccupations with sexual fluidity (whilst not naming or defining it) and extreme kinks, with TV advertising (Myra believes it is the great new art form; Ballard's narrator works in it), and their characters are obsessed with visible and glamorous technologies - the cinema and the car respectively - which arose in the late 19th to early 20th centuries and which became central to Western mass affluence in the mid-20th century.
Like many 20th century transgressive works, Crash looks, from the viewpoint of 2019 intersectionality, like a weird combination of the still radical and the emphatically hegemonic, (especially patriarchal). One could say that it's about a group of polymorphously perverse, pansexual friends and acquaintances with scars, disabilities and trauma histories exploring their kinks together. Because they do, and there is something still radical in showing some of these people (especially Gabrielle) as active agents of their own sexualities, *with* sexualities and what's more, kinks, daring to connect medical experiences of pain with fetishes, in a way that calls to mind figures like performance artist Bob Flanagan. It is noticeable how, as described by Ballard's eponymous narrator, the women are all actively desiring subjects with agency he respects; he also defines them continually via their occupations, both relatively unusual in literary fiction of this age by men. His wife Catherine is described once as 'passive' but she almost never actually seems it. They seem of the same ilk as women in kink communities who are active participants of their own volition, and bring to mind the oft-cited statistic that it's more frequently women than men who instigate poly relationships. But if someone young and radical picked up the novel because of these points, they would likely be disappointed by the male perspective throughout the novel - and disgusted by, among other things, some of the vocabulary used in describing characters disabled by injuries, by the way Vaughan talks about women (a chauvinist contrast with the narrator), by the way the two men treat prostitutes (basically as products and services), by Seagrave's casual child abuse, and by characters' non-consensually drawing others into their dangerous kinks when they instigate crashes.
I may be opposed to cars and their use in a lot of circumstances, but didn't think I disliked them enough to be able to analyse some aspects of Crash usefully. As a child I memorised car makes, models and shapes when walking past them and could recognise any halfway common car model on British roads. I enjoyed driving, I was just ill too often to do a decent course of lessons and take my test, and neurological problems are definitely not something you should try and push through to drive. I was a fan of Top Gear in my teens and twenties (votes Green + doesn't own a car + likes Top Gear was a combination I found more than once in the 00s to lead to men who shared my politics and sense of humour). And I'd always understood the allure of speeding, since I was a kid on a bike or who went rogue on a skiing holiday to go as fast as I possibly could. Despite never having owned a car, I was still too much within the standard modern car culture to really look at this novel from the outside.
The GR friend whose high rating for Crash most surprised me (though I probably shouldn't be surprised given how many other times friends, on and off GR, have turned out to be Ballard fans), when I asked her about it, replied with an extremely perceptive comment which led to an epiphany. "the weird nexus of violence and emotional attachment associated with cars". But exactly! If society were seen entirely from outside - you know, as if humans were narrated like a wildlife documentary - the characters' fetishes would seem a fairly logical extension of the strange relationship people have with cars - continuing to use them regardless of all the associated dangers and some of them enjoying some of the danger - and their visbility and ubiquity. Likewise, quoting from the same post, "apocalyptic danger in the mundane" sums up cars and countless other overused products of industrialism that have incrementally contributed to massive environmental problems, which eventually - though only much later - come back to bite the people who benefited from them.
"Crash - Ballard" has been a feature of my lists of unread books for such a long time (the wording echoes the game Crash Bandicoot, but started as a deliberate differentiation from the Paul Haggis film, which, for years, was what most people, especially online and especially Americans, meant when they just said the title Crash) and it is dreamlike that I've actually, finally read it.
(December 2019)
Years ago, before we were on Goodreads, several friends and I concluded that 1994 was, for us, the best year ever for music. Two of our top albums from that year have short quotes from Crash hidden among their lyrics, the Manic Street Preachers' The Holy Bible (a nihilistic record rather in keeping with the spirit of Ballard), and The Divine Comedy's Promenade (ostentatiously aesthetic, playful, lushly orchestral and rather not). One could also arguably hear its echoes in 'Joyriders' on Pulp's His N Hers (though to be fair, actual joyriders were massive in the news); in some of the darker lyrics on Parklife (band interviews said they'd been inspired by Martin Amis' London Fields, which I was deeply smug to have, coincidentally, read shortly before the album was out - but Amis' sleazeworlds and self-insertions are a lot like, and surely themselves inspired by, Ballard). And Suede's entire 90s discography was about seedy alienation in the dull satellite towns of south-east England.
I can't remember when Crash was featured in Will Self's Cult Book slot on Mark Radcliffe's 10pm Radio 1 show, whether it was before or after these albums. (Will Self probably can't remember either, what with the amount of drugs he was on.) But that was just one more thing that made this then-twenty-year-old book so present for the Britpop generation, as if it had been a hyped new publication. And all this was before the 1996 film (how *sad* it would have been to have only heard of it for the first time then! thought certain teenagers and students), and 1997, when edgier media people pointed out the similarities between scenes in Crash and Princess Diana's death.
The turnaround in the literary world's attitudes to themes like those found in Crash, sex narrated by men, violence and kinks, between the mid 90s and the late 2010s seems far more drastic than any shifts between the early 70s and the mid 90s. (By the 90s a few things from the 70s were starting to be straightened out - young groupies had become considerably less acceptable - but it was, in a lot of ways, still the world of the 1960s sexual revolution and its mores. And there was hardly anything less cool than being offended.) Now, those of us late Gen X-ers who took all that on board have found everything is shifting already, before we became anything like what we thought was old. This wasn't supposed to happen this soon. (It must have been similar for late Silent Generation people in the 60s, the ones who were basically normie but also attentive to culture - whilst those inclined to fashionable sorts of weirdness, like Ballard, were more at home in the Boomers' social revolution.)
I wasn't sure how I'd react to Crash now; I half-wished I could stick it in a time machine with a note to myself around the time I read American Psycho, saying, "Read this ASAP!" I would have the minimum of reactions to it (and it would also do away with any apprehension about being seen to have read it, or even perhaps rate it highly, in 2019, by people likely to judge negatively, people whom I also like and want to stay on good terms with. It would just be another book tagged "1997-99" with no rating, added to GR back in 2012.) Whilst I did feel some echoes of somatic empathy in the first couple of chapters of Crash - and worried marginally that the book might exhaust me with that - the way Ballard writes chimes so closely with something in my own mind, that I rapidly found myself back in the same state of detachment with which, many years ago, I used to read history and watch wars and famines on the news - not feeling anything really, they were simply things that happened, like the weather - and read other transgressive novels.
I don't think I knew until this month that Ballard had studied medicine. (He dropped out before graduation.) This must be why his writing, despite its alienated, savage themes, feels so strangely like home, to me who grew up reading the medical journals that were lying around the house. Medical study must also be why his descriptions, especially of the placement and posture of the body, are so accurate. Unlike with most authors' work, I never had to make any effort to imagine how even the most elaborate scene was physically arranged - it was obvious straight off the page.
I often look back on books, films and other content I consumed when young as having influenced me. And with works I meant to read or watch then, but didn't get round to, I think about how I might have been different if I had got to them earlier. Crash, though, is singular and strange, because I don't think it would have made any difference. If I *had* read it in the 90s and was re-reading it now, I would have wondered if it had contributed to the person who once had a tendency to glorify beautiful men who cut themselves (instead, at nearly 30, I traced that back to a meshing of Catholic Jesus, via Joan Windham's saint stories and Madonna, and images of Richey Edwards - himself a big fan of the novel - and stopped it because the relationships were messy and stressful for everyone concerned); I'd have thought the novel likely the seed of the meditative and mesmerising beauty I found in watching the gyratory system beside an office where I once worked; and about how reading this long text about other people's perversions I didn't share, but which was often highly compelling, had been echoed in all the time spent, especially in my late twenties, reading postings on kink social networks on which, I eventually accepted, 90% of people were too hardcore for me anyway. I suspect Crash was so influential on other culture I consumed that I absorbed its ethos by osmosis.
Even its setting was almost part of me, a time and place when my parents were normie passers-by on some of the same roads, the early 1970s in that commuterland where West and South West London, Middlesex and Surrey converge? (Or is it set earlier? Is it "London Airport" in this HarperCollins edition because it's set before the name changed to Heathrow in 1966, or because it uses a text edited for the US market?) Reginald Perrin-land, an area I also know mostly from the interior of a car, as a small child safely looking out of the back window, some years after most of Crash's characters would have killed themselves off in "accidents". Having been moved out of the area when I was still a kid, I went back in my twenties to have a look round. It felt so insulated and sterile, the archetype of affluent suburbia, going on for miles in a way it can only stretch from a very big city. It seemed no wonder that stereotypes developed like suburban key parties or sky-clad wiccans gathering in semi-detacheds, and that a story of extreme kinks like Crash (the car crash disrupts or destroys the manufactured bubble whilst still being created by and part of it) would be set there. The feel of the place is about as far from extreme or natural or "real" as one can get and still have gardens and free movement; it was obvious that, for some, it would provoke a thirst for the different and intense, consciously or unconsciously.
Crash may have been a 90s book for a few of us, but it was also, of course, of its own time, the early 1970s (and late 1960s). Critical awareness of consumerism, and the seductions and perils of manufactured objects and the new mass affluence, was a strand in in 1960s literature, for example in Georges Perec's Things and Simone de Beauvoir's Les Belles Images. Unapologetically transgressive literary fiction, no longer subject to bans in countries like Britain and the US, was getting more notice in the press, and was fashionable in some circles. I read Crash just after Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge (1968); these two novels, both with first-person narrators to bring the shocking action as close as possible, share preoccupations with sexual fluidity (whilst not naming or defining it) and extreme kinks, with TV advertising (Myra believes it is the great new art form; Ballard's narrator works in it), and their characters are obsessed with visible and glamorous technologies - the cinema and the car respectively - which arose in the late 19th to early 20th centuries and which became central to Western mass affluence in the mid-20th century.
Like many 20th century transgressive works, Crash looks, from the viewpoint of 2019 intersectionality, like a weird combination of the still radical and the emphatically hegemonic, (especially patriarchal). One could say that it's about a group of polymorphously perverse, pansexual friends and acquaintances with scars, disabilities and trauma histories exploring their kinks together. Because they do, and there is something still radical in showing some of these people (especially Gabrielle) as active agents of their own sexualities, *with* sexualities and what's more, kinks, daring to connect medical experiences of pain with fetishes, in a way that calls to mind figures like performance artist Bob Flanagan. It is noticeable how, as described by Ballard's eponymous narrator, the women are all actively desiring subjects with agency he respects; he also defines them continually via their occupations, both relatively unusual in literary fiction of this age by men. His wife Catherine is described once as 'passive' but she almost never actually seems it. They seem of the same ilk as women in kink communities who are active participants of their own volition, and bring to mind the oft-cited statistic that it's more frequently women than men who instigate poly relationships. But if someone young and radical picked up the novel because of these points, they would likely be disappointed by the male perspective throughout the novel - and disgusted by, among other things, some of the vocabulary used in describing characters disabled by injuries, by the way Vaughan talks about women (a chauvinist contrast with the narrator), by the way the two men treat prostitutes (basically as products and services), by Seagrave's casual child abuse, and by characters' non-consensually drawing others into their dangerous kinks when they instigate crashes.
I may be opposed to cars and their use in a lot of circumstances, but didn't think I disliked them enough to be able to analyse some aspects of Crash usefully. As a child I memorised car makes, models and shapes when walking past them and could recognise any halfway common car model on British roads. I enjoyed driving, I was just ill too often to do a decent course of lessons and take my test, and neurological problems are definitely not something you should try and push through to drive. I was a fan of Top Gear in my teens and twenties (votes Green + doesn't own a car + likes Top Gear was a combination I found more than once in the 00s to lead to men who shared my politics and sense of humour). And I'd always understood the allure of speeding, since I was a kid on a bike or who went rogue on a skiing holiday to go as fast as I possibly could. Despite never having owned a car, I was still too much within the standard modern car culture to really look at this novel from the outside.
The GR friend whose high rating for Crash most surprised me (though I probably shouldn't be surprised given how many other times friends, on and off GR, have turned out to be Ballard fans), when I asked her about it, replied with an extremely perceptive comment which led to an epiphany. "the weird nexus of violence and emotional attachment associated with cars". But exactly! If society were seen entirely from outside - you know, as if humans were narrated like a wildlife documentary - the characters' fetishes would seem a fairly logical extension of the strange relationship people have with cars - continuing to use them regardless of all the associated dangers and some of them enjoying some of the danger - and their visbility and ubiquity. Likewise, quoting from the same post, "apocalyptic danger in the mundane" sums up cars and countless other overused products of industrialism that have incrementally contributed to massive environmental problems, which eventually - though only much later - come back to bite the people who benefited from them.
"Crash - Ballard" has been a feature of my lists of unread books for such a long time (the wording echoes the game Crash Bandicoot, but started as a deliberate differentiation from the Paul Haggis film, which, for years, was what most people, especially online and especially Americans, meant when they just said the title Crash) and it is dreamlike that I've actually, finally read it.
(December 2019)
July 5, 2020
A 2008 interview with Vice quoted infamous mangaka, Shintaro Kago, saying: “Shit and sex are merely the starting points, and unless you can tick those off you can’t even begin thinking about a narrative.”
Grotesque literature has its paramours, and Ballard sits in the ranks of William S. Burroughs and Georges Bataille. Examining Ballard’s literary output, you have to wonder what this unbashful bloke was thinking behind those puffy, doughy features. His innocuous, austere sci-fi worlds glisten with post-human despair. His crystal alligators frozen in time are reminiscent of hard-edged fantasy, and the dozen novels about urban ennui amid thinly veiled warlike conditions read like historical poetry from the amber-thick mind of a slathering autocrat.
In Crash, Ballard occupies the headspace of an obsessive narrator, inconsequentially, also named James Ballard. This is not an autobiography, neither is it autofiction. It is a novel about automobiles having sex with people, or is it the other way around?
In a gallery of fractured dreams, Ballard immortalizes the destruction of innocence, the disharmony of vehicular manslaughter recast as moral epiphany, the elegance of chrome fixtures reflecting dark insecurities, the cruel inhumanity of inflatable HOV-lane partners, the fallacy of the crosswalk’s imagined, scintillating security blanket, the tragicomic splendor of careening into a parked ice-cream vendor with your head jutting from the window, jowls jostling like a jolly St. Bernard, the salacious out-of-body experience of Cro-magnon-level rutting in apocalyptic parking lot Twilight zones, the tabloid-fumes wafting through the hot, sticky ventilator, the secret pock-marked underbelly of the depraved masses spasming toward the perfect societal thousand-car-pile-up of a newly evolved symphonic mutilation of the planet.
I was reminded of two unassuming short stories, one by Vonnegut, the other by Bradbury. The first depicts Earth as a world inhabited by cars. People are mere organs within these mechanical beasts as they roam endlessly and without purpose, toward their ultimate disintegration. The second tells of car-crash enthusiasts, gathering around the bloody craters of crash-sites, always the same eerie faces, staring down, gaping into the maw of the twisted, excruciating pleasures of death. The group gathers innately, like an atmospheric anomaly.
The “formula of death” prescribed by Ballard in what some have called his greatest work is a pure expression of mankind’s technological dependencies, which taps into our mental gas-holes to inject them with sugary, straight-faced dementia. It is an examination of the fascinating nature of accidents, the unexplainable collision of particles, the spontaneous idol-worship that occurs on the side of the freeway four to eight times per day along your routine commute. What you think about on your daily drive, the perverse morbidity that comes bubbling out of your psyche as you stroke the worn leather of the grease-imbued steering wheel. There is of course an obsession with wounds, as separate from the death fixation, but involved with the involuntary compulsion lurking in every passenger’s mind, that sick daydream crash that always happens between meaningless conversations, if only subconsciously. Not to mention the animalistic instincts, the macabre voyeurism of driving by those apartment complexes at night, slowing down, turning off the headlights, sinking deeply into the well-stained driver’s seat…
Love, in this novel, is ungendered. Vaughn’s masculinity is supplanted by other factors – the presence of forehead grease for one, or the sickly sweet odors secreted by the human body, and much, much more. He is the accomplice lover, a being composed of concrete, asphalt, tar, heat and smoke, grit and slime, the personification of the machineries of joy, connoisseur of the soul-enlivening destruction of binge-frolics in the multi-story car-parks, the seedy airport terminals, erecting frozen testaments to forbidden pleasures, tweaking out psychotic musings mid-sentence, obscene snapshots tumbling out of his day-planner, erotic tenderness oozing from his pores. Get ready for discomfiting juxtapositions, deliberate, depraved behavior, and a flaunting of the artistry of fate. Ballard’s creepy poetic sensibilities have their roots in Nabokovian lyricism. He paints a “lacework of blood,” mosaics of shattered bone, all while preserving an awkward confessional quality. What could be misplaced desires leads to rehearsals of death, strange coagulations of reality and imagination, superimpositions, mythic ur-lusts, unparalleled vanity, palimpsest upon palimpsest, dripping with blood and sex, and endlessly beguiling repetition. What are the correct symbols of violence? Could not a surgery be a warzone? What clinical thrills go unacknowledged amid the reeking bedpans and crusty sheets? Sociopathic neuroses manifest like tummy aches. The savors of slo-mo, heart-stopping artistic doom punctuate this egotistical monstrosity.
Imagine what this character would say in the confessional. Would any number of Hail Marys absolve his behavior? Instead we are given a sodium-lit romance of twisted steel, Polaroid pornography, freaks courting disaster, children lost in the wild foreplay of undiscovered vistas of lust and ecstasy, head-on, roll-over, whiplash, pulsing horrid, motorized phalanxes distilled from the marriage of sexuality and a satirical hellscape. The sweet tingle of tinkling glass, the glorification of scars as status symbols, those quiet gas puddle rainbows gleaming in the driveway. What are our bodily fluids but gas driving us toward the various fender-benders of fate?
We are desensitized crash test dummies, which objects, Ballard believes, were originally designed as sex toys. Our recalibrated brains are nightmare-machines, our lives are described as serene sculptures in motion, awaiting the beautification of death, corpse-painted traffic lines, jewel-studded windshield-powder pavements are the backdrops of our carefully controlled environments. The petrol-explosions, the geometric, weaponized pleasure, the psychological horror of transcendental spectatorship, the poetry of excess, the charnel-house back room discussions, the taboo fatuations of inveterate recluses, the relentless rhythm of our boring-as-parked-cars lives, all add up to a pulsing hamburger meat roadkill-fest, a maiming mad scientist, Ballard deploys the stylized assassinations of propriety and our hallowed securities beneath the insensate heavy mass of molded plastic that is our cloistered civilization, with cinematic exuberance, and not sparing us the intricate descriptions of vomit clotted between the seats - in this, Ballard has not been equalled.
Lastly I am reminded of the odd film by Shin'ya Tsukamoto titled Tetsuo, The Iron Man, which I watched at 1 AM one night years ago on a fuzzy, miniature television – I never bothered with the Cronenberg adaptation. This transgressive s-f may be an untapped literary grove. This is not Grimdark, it can only be called Kago or Ballard. Even Burroughs never fully concentrated his literary pretensions. These works speak of our aimless destinations as a surrogate for our purposeless existences and the unrestrained attractions and misconstrued emotions inherent in our lives lived in cars, between places, the car as a second body and the total prosthetic, our true bodies in which our souls are no more tangible than the wings of angels. This book is a celebration of human frailty, a lucid rite of passage, haunted by the pressures of our impending demise, a cathedral composed of smegma and mucosa, the ultimate expression of anthropomorphic literature, which reveals the true purpose of car magazines. Even with its ceaseless, Sysiphean copulation, its hollywoodized disregard for sacred human rights and logic, its anarchism and religious imagery, the fossilized rictuses of weird WASP botox-faces, the absurd accumulation of details, and the immense stark, uncompromising vision all combine to provide a salacious and enigmatic masterwork.
I appreciated the parallels with bullfighting, probably misinterpreted the ritualized cruelty, the executions, but feasted on the meditation these pages offered, pervaded by euphoria, a pervasive unease, and improvisational streamlined distortions of reality, immense cerebral dislocation, immeasurable cognitive dissonance, found in the Darwinian confidence of these theatric method actors. Is it possible to go too far in consumerist desecration, in recording the private, unspeakable thoughts bred in solo exertion of literotic muscular spasms, in partaking in arousal prolonged to torturous heights, in self-immolating furies, in feverish, palpitating prose-serenades, in gory frenzies of flesh-toned bumper cars? As all this percolates uncomfortably into your brain, ask yourself if this soiled purity, these syphoned veins, this chaotic exhausting manifold transliteration of homo erectus prutid journalism is what you actually wish to read.
Will you share in the gross weight of secret knowledge, will you also come to regard car dealerships as brothels? A collide-o-scope of horror, for the most jaded literary enthusiasts, who don't mind a page-by-page instant replay of the suggestions of coitus in the mere act of driving with the main character’s automobile mistresses. Anatomical contortions, lacerations, toxic relationships, the significance of partnership, illicit amatory forceful enemas, viscerally uncouth seduction, trance-like precision, squealing tyres, infinite corruption, mannequin-like waxy uncanny valley characters all sliding down the greased slope of post-modern wingeing, toward a pallid, comatose climax. If you were not bothered by Burroughs’ fictive suicidal asphyxiations, witness the driver’s seat become Ballard’s orgone accumulator. I have not used the word ‘fetishistic,’ but don’t forget ‘brave, bold, and un-subtle.' It is a waterfall of metamorphic imagery, a scatological haunted house pantomime, a pareidoliac encyclopedia of orifices and mechanical architecture. Reckless but not wreckless. Also, the fictions imposed on reality by television should not go without mentioning, and cinema’s effect on our perception of reality seeps into the thin plot. The synthetic narrative distance it provides is paramount to nurturing the transgressive nature of the animals we have become. If the vivid vortex of exterior description is not too repetitive for you, the melancholy people in their nakedness will leave your tank on E.
Grotesque literature has its paramours, and Ballard sits in the ranks of William S. Burroughs and Georges Bataille. Examining Ballard’s literary output, you have to wonder what this unbashful bloke was thinking behind those puffy, doughy features. His innocuous, austere sci-fi worlds glisten with post-human despair. His crystal alligators frozen in time are reminiscent of hard-edged fantasy, and the dozen novels about urban ennui amid thinly veiled warlike conditions read like historical poetry from the amber-thick mind of a slathering autocrat.
In Crash, Ballard occupies the headspace of an obsessive narrator, inconsequentially, also named James Ballard. This is not an autobiography, neither is it autofiction. It is a novel about automobiles having sex with people, or is it the other way around?
In a gallery of fractured dreams, Ballard immortalizes the destruction of innocence, the disharmony of vehicular manslaughter recast as moral epiphany, the elegance of chrome fixtures reflecting dark insecurities, the cruel inhumanity of inflatable HOV-lane partners, the fallacy of the crosswalk’s imagined, scintillating security blanket, the tragicomic splendor of careening into a parked ice-cream vendor with your head jutting from the window, jowls jostling like a jolly St. Bernard, the salacious out-of-body experience of Cro-magnon-level rutting in apocalyptic parking lot Twilight zones, the tabloid-fumes wafting through the hot, sticky ventilator, the secret pock-marked underbelly of the depraved masses spasming toward the perfect societal thousand-car-pile-up of a newly evolved symphonic mutilation of the planet.
I was reminded of two unassuming short stories, one by Vonnegut, the other by Bradbury. The first depicts Earth as a world inhabited by cars. People are mere organs within these mechanical beasts as they roam endlessly and without purpose, toward their ultimate disintegration. The second tells of car-crash enthusiasts, gathering around the bloody craters of crash-sites, always the same eerie faces, staring down, gaping into the maw of the twisted, excruciating pleasures of death. The group gathers innately, like an atmospheric anomaly.
The “formula of death” prescribed by Ballard in what some have called his greatest work is a pure expression of mankind’s technological dependencies, which taps into our mental gas-holes to inject them with sugary, straight-faced dementia. It is an examination of the fascinating nature of accidents, the unexplainable collision of particles, the spontaneous idol-worship that occurs on the side of the freeway four to eight times per day along your routine commute. What you think about on your daily drive, the perverse morbidity that comes bubbling out of your psyche as you stroke the worn leather of the grease-imbued steering wheel. There is of course an obsession with wounds, as separate from the death fixation, but involved with the involuntary compulsion lurking in every passenger’s mind, that sick daydream crash that always happens between meaningless conversations, if only subconsciously. Not to mention the animalistic instincts, the macabre voyeurism of driving by those apartment complexes at night, slowing down, turning off the headlights, sinking deeply into the well-stained driver’s seat…
Love, in this novel, is ungendered. Vaughn’s masculinity is supplanted by other factors – the presence of forehead grease for one, or the sickly sweet odors secreted by the human body, and much, much more. He is the accomplice lover, a being composed of concrete, asphalt, tar, heat and smoke, grit and slime, the personification of the machineries of joy, connoisseur of the soul-enlivening destruction of binge-frolics in the multi-story car-parks, the seedy airport terminals, erecting frozen testaments to forbidden pleasures, tweaking out psychotic musings mid-sentence, obscene snapshots tumbling out of his day-planner, erotic tenderness oozing from his pores. Get ready for discomfiting juxtapositions, deliberate, depraved behavior, and a flaunting of the artistry of fate. Ballard’s creepy poetic sensibilities have their roots in Nabokovian lyricism. He paints a “lacework of blood,” mosaics of shattered bone, all while preserving an awkward confessional quality. What could be misplaced desires leads to rehearsals of death, strange coagulations of reality and imagination, superimpositions, mythic ur-lusts, unparalleled vanity, palimpsest upon palimpsest, dripping with blood and sex, and endlessly beguiling repetition. What are the correct symbols of violence? Could not a surgery be a warzone? What clinical thrills go unacknowledged amid the reeking bedpans and crusty sheets? Sociopathic neuroses manifest like tummy aches. The savors of slo-mo, heart-stopping artistic doom punctuate this egotistical monstrosity.
Imagine what this character would say in the confessional. Would any number of Hail Marys absolve his behavior? Instead we are given a sodium-lit romance of twisted steel, Polaroid pornography, freaks courting disaster, children lost in the wild foreplay of undiscovered vistas of lust and ecstasy, head-on, roll-over, whiplash, pulsing horrid, motorized phalanxes distilled from the marriage of sexuality and a satirical hellscape. The sweet tingle of tinkling glass, the glorification of scars as status symbols, those quiet gas puddle rainbows gleaming in the driveway. What are our bodily fluids but gas driving us toward the various fender-benders of fate?
We are desensitized crash test dummies, which objects, Ballard believes, were originally designed as sex toys. Our recalibrated brains are nightmare-machines, our lives are described as serene sculptures in motion, awaiting the beautification of death, corpse-painted traffic lines, jewel-studded windshield-powder pavements are the backdrops of our carefully controlled environments. The petrol-explosions, the geometric, weaponized pleasure, the psychological horror of transcendental spectatorship, the poetry of excess, the charnel-house back room discussions, the taboo fatuations of inveterate recluses, the relentless rhythm of our boring-as-parked-cars lives, all add up to a pulsing hamburger meat roadkill-fest, a maiming mad scientist, Ballard deploys the stylized assassinations of propriety and our hallowed securities beneath the insensate heavy mass of molded plastic that is our cloistered civilization, with cinematic exuberance, and not sparing us the intricate descriptions of vomit clotted between the seats - in this, Ballard has not been equalled.
Lastly I am reminded of the odd film by Shin'ya Tsukamoto titled Tetsuo, The Iron Man, which I watched at 1 AM one night years ago on a fuzzy, miniature television – I never bothered with the Cronenberg adaptation. This transgressive s-f may be an untapped literary grove. This is not Grimdark, it can only be called Kago or Ballard. Even Burroughs never fully concentrated his literary pretensions. These works speak of our aimless destinations as a surrogate for our purposeless existences and the unrestrained attractions and misconstrued emotions inherent in our lives lived in cars, between places, the car as a second body and the total prosthetic, our true bodies in which our souls are no more tangible than the wings of angels. This book is a celebration of human frailty, a lucid rite of passage, haunted by the pressures of our impending demise, a cathedral composed of smegma and mucosa, the ultimate expression of anthropomorphic literature, which reveals the true purpose of car magazines. Even with its ceaseless, Sysiphean copulation, its hollywoodized disregard for sacred human rights and logic, its anarchism and religious imagery, the fossilized rictuses of weird WASP botox-faces, the absurd accumulation of details, and the immense stark, uncompromising vision all combine to provide a salacious and enigmatic masterwork.
I appreciated the parallels with bullfighting, probably misinterpreted the ritualized cruelty, the executions, but feasted on the meditation these pages offered, pervaded by euphoria, a pervasive unease, and improvisational streamlined distortions of reality, immense cerebral dislocation, immeasurable cognitive dissonance, found in the Darwinian confidence of these theatric method actors. Is it possible to go too far in consumerist desecration, in recording the private, unspeakable thoughts bred in solo exertion of literotic muscular spasms, in partaking in arousal prolonged to torturous heights, in self-immolating furies, in feverish, palpitating prose-serenades, in gory frenzies of flesh-toned bumper cars? As all this percolates uncomfortably into your brain, ask yourself if this soiled purity, these syphoned veins, this chaotic exhausting manifold transliteration of homo erectus prutid journalism is what you actually wish to read.
Will you share in the gross weight of secret knowledge, will you also come to regard car dealerships as brothels? A collide-o-scope of horror, for the most jaded literary enthusiasts, who don't mind a page-by-page instant replay of the suggestions of coitus in the mere act of driving with the main character’s automobile mistresses. Anatomical contortions, lacerations, toxic relationships, the significance of partnership, illicit amatory forceful enemas, viscerally uncouth seduction, trance-like precision, squealing tyres, infinite corruption, mannequin-like waxy uncanny valley characters all sliding down the greased slope of post-modern wingeing, toward a pallid, comatose climax. If you were not bothered by Burroughs’ fictive suicidal asphyxiations, witness the driver’s seat become Ballard’s orgone accumulator. I have not used the word ‘fetishistic,’ but don’t forget ‘brave, bold, and un-subtle.' It is a waterfall of metamorphic imagery, a scatological haunted house pantomime, a pareidoliac encyclopedia of orifices and mechanical architecture. Reckless but not wreckless. Also, the fictions imposed on reality by television should not go without mentioning, and cinema’s effect on our perception of reality seeps into the thin plot. The synthetic narrative distance it provides is paramount to nurturing the transgressive nature of the animals we have become. If the vivid vortex of exterior description is not too repetitive for you, the melancholy people in their nakedness will leave your tank on E.
May 7, 2012
Butt on the leather interior. Make that the hard seat vinyl sticking to the fart sound rubbing flesh like sweaty underwear that has crawled up sun don't shine places and worn for far too long and far too worn down. Ass in the seat of humanity. Hand on the wheel and the other masturbating a Johnson. Not Lyndon Johnson. Gotta be Ronald Reagan. I admit I haven't thought about wounded Ronald Reagan much since just say no to drugs! kindergarten sticker days to come up with any euphemisms in his honor. Fortunately for me, Ballard swapped out auto erotic cum vehicular slaughter fixation on the former president (short story "Why I want to fuck Ronald Reagan". I'm not being crazy) for film stars and prostitutes who you can anything you want to call them, baby. Since I have read City of Nets by Otto Friedrich I have a lot of secondhand knowledge about the film career of Reagan should I ever need football field room to run. Never mind. no one wants to go down that road with you, Mar. I wasn't thinking about Ronald Reagan in his various positions, honest. Eyes on the road kill road. The ass on the photo copy machine and stand apart and spread 'em, perp! Full body cavity search. Ballard is the hard ass female guard who could stick her hand all the way up there. I'm just doing my job, ma'am. If you read Crash you'll be all the way up there in the orifices is exactly what the book jacket blurb says, honest. My mouth hurts after all of that all the way up there, actually. I may be bruised and eating ice cream for a while. What did I have to hide? Pictures from the x-ray machine says Halloween costume for next year (if you plan these things in advance) and this is what I would look like if I were a smushed bug on your grill. The medical instruments are cold on the naked ass hanging out of the window for the passerby. She doesn't have a bed side manner. The hands are fucking cold. Clinical hands on the flesh equipment and contrasting assured movements on the machines that could be made to do the ass on the photocopy machine effect of I know exactly what I want it to expose and let's reenact this until it's all the way up in there.
The problem with reenacting and trying to get some desired effect is it can be too actor moving stage right to stage left. I know there was something about our relationship to the material world in place of one with the other cogs, I mean bodies - whoops I mean machines. No, I mean people. If the ritual doesn't mean anything to you but habit it could be like sitting in traffic for the 24-7 jam. Married sex. This used to get me off of marriage to getting off. Ballard hardened me out like a used car. Sex like a body rolled into a morgue. Eleven o'clock news every day and same old shit. Scab healed over too many times. Am I trying to say I was numb by too much sex? No, I hope I'm not saying that. It was the injury as sexual as functional. The perfunctory let's stage car crashes, fuck like electric bunnies (they dream of electric sex) and stare at the blood droplets rising to the surface. I used to lock myself in my car and give myself heat stroke on purpose. I would do it on regular life work days. Personal hell sauna thing. I am on scar back of the hand intimate with feeling vessels by letting out the various bodily vessels. Mine was different than theirs. It doesn't feel like message speaking to society's problems with coldness. It feels more like just trying to push off the what you can't use pain off the cliff (and it ain't Freudian phallic). I don't know if I felt connected to them about all of this. It just doesn't feel like that to me. I guess I'm the ghost that doesn't know its dead in those horror stories.
I would not like it at all to be submissive to anyone. Their retreat into these body crime scenes and giving up their ghost to the higher (?) authority of chance? I might be too different to understand the feel-something-different side of it. It's a whole different kind of release. No, I wouldn't like it at all. Pinocchio is too real a boy now. I don't think Ballard wanted a flesh and blood relinquishing to the sweet, sweet void anyway. I kind of wish it was. He would take apart the machine to see how it worked, I think. It's rare to get that out of Ballard, actually. He's so high concept for possibilities sometimes that I get to feeling frustrated. He's not always like that. His short stories The Drowned Giant and The Garden of Time are two of my favorite that I have ever read. If this were a robot that has dreams of bunnies it would be one of those Blade Runner machines that is a real person in a crowd of faces that look like his but could be another species for all he knows. Memories of them would just have to be made up. Realize you are standing on the ear of a felled big beast and think about what you are treading on all of the time to get to where you go without thinking about it every day (I stare at the ground too much).
In our wounds we celebrated the re-birth of the traffic-slain dead, the deaths and injuries of those we had seen dying by the roadside and the imaginary wounds and postures of the millions yet to die.
I like Ballard. I like that he thought about this stuff and tried to work it out some place that meant something to him (stories). It's not pushing it way, way down in the trunk, right? But I am Mariel and I haven't thought about Vaughn or Ballard (the Crash Ballard character) or Caroline or the others since reading until now when I'm writing my book review and if I don't think about them then they aren't ghosts. I guess I'm not a statement kind of girl. They were, though. They did nothing but try to make statements and beat up the words until it said what they thought it wanted to say. (They could have done something other than have sex where the bad thing happened. Ghosts only come to where it meant something to you so they were doing that wrong.) Did Ballard say what he wanted to say? I'm Mariel so I was looking for something else. I do think about how Ballard (character Ballard) looked to Vaughn to show him what to do. Luke Skywalker's machine hand has been veined to feed someone else.
Now, a personal story to make all who read it weep. When... This is hard.... When I was a young girl I had to.... Maybe I should lie down in the back seat first. So my mother and older sister had a "thing" for actor James Spader. Yes, I am well aware that he is practically the devil! I watched the movies down to the Don Johnson socks and white suits. "There's no dust in this dust buster!" still passes my lips in my most apocalyptic memories. What would you have done? (It's so easy to sit there and judge some person who reviews these books out of nothing but the purest generosity of her book loving heart, isn't it?) So I sat right there and watched the damned movies. They didn't have any interest in the Cronenberg film of Crash, though (we watched plenty of his other films so this I cannot account for). I haven't seen it since high school. I don't remember it being like the book. It's hard to tell when I am trying to side step the haunting specter of Spader trying to steal Jack Nicholson's Michelle Pfieffer candy from a baby in Wolf. You would just love for all the shit to come down, wouldn't you? I could review the movie of Crash just for you and then Spader would make me eat three peas and a scoop of ice cream (from the film Secretary don't I just know it. Never mind that came out in my adulthood). It was like some acting out the horrors in a Lifetime getting off on abuse movie. They even made a movie about this (not Lifetime. Spike! This was male interest. Christina Ricci played me with all my pleases and q's). Well, I won't do it!
The problem with reenacting and trying to get some desired effect is it can be too actor moving stage right to stage left. I know there was something about our relationship to the material world in place of one with the other cogs, I mean bodies - whoops I mean machines. No, I mean people. If the ritual doesn't mean anything to you but habit it could be like sitting in traffic for the 24-7 jam. Married sex. This used to get me off of marriage to getting off. Ballard hardened me out like a used car. Sex like a body rolled into a morgue. Eleven o'clock news every day and same old shit. Scab healed over too many times. Am I trying to say I was numb by too much sex? No, I hope I'm not saying that. It was the injury as sexual as functional. The perfunctory let's stage car crashes, fuck like electric bunnies (they dream of electric sex) and stare at the blood droplets rising to the surface. I used to lock myself in my car and give myself heat stroke on purpose. I would do it on regular life work days. Personal hell sauna thing. I am on scar back of the hand intimate with feeling vessels by letting out the various bodily vessels. Mine was different than theirs. It doesn't feel like message speaking to society's problems with coldness. It feels more like just trying to push off the what you can't use pain off the cliff (and it ain't Freudian phallic). I don't know if I felt connected to them about all of this. It just doesn't feel like that to me. I guess I'm the ghost that doesn't know its dead in those horror stories.
I would not like it at all to be submissive to anyone. Their retreat into these body crime scenes and giving up their ghost to the higher (?) authority of chance? I might be too different to understand the feel-something-different side of it. It's a whole different kind of release. No, I wouldn't like it at all. Pinocchio is too real a boy now. I don't think Ballard wanted a flesh and blood relinquishing to the sweet, sweet void anyway. I kind of wish it was. He would take apart the machine to see how it worked, I think. It's rare to get that out of Ballard, actually. He's so high concept for possibilities sometimes that I get to feeling frustrated. He's not always like that. His short stories The Drowned Giant and The Garden of Time are two of my favorite that I have ever read. If this were a robot that has dreams of bunnies it would be one of those Blade Runner machines that is a real person in a crowd of faces that look like his but could be another species for all he knows. Memories of them would just have to be made up. Realize you are standing on the ear of a felled big beast and think about what you are treading on all of the time to get to where you go without thinking about it every day (I stare at the ground too much).
In our wounds we celebrated the re-birth of the traffic-slain dead, the deaths and injuries of those we had seen dying by the roadside and the imaginary wounds and postures of the millions yet to die.
I like Ballard. I like that he thought about this stuff and tried to work it out some place that meant something to him (stories). It's not pushing it way, way down in the trunk, right? But I am Mariel and I haven't thought about Vaughn or Ballard (the Crash Ballard character) or Caroline or the others since reading until now when I'm writing my book review and if I don't think about them then they aren't ghosts. I guess I'm not a statement kind of girl. They were, though. They did nothing but try to make statements and beat up the words until it said what they thought it wanted to say. (They could have done something other than have sex where the bad thing happened. Ghosts only come to where it meant something to you so they were doing that wrong.) Did Ballard say what he wanted to say? I'm Mariel so I was looking for something else. I do think about how Ballard (character Ballard) looked to Vaughn to show him what to do. Luke Skywalker's machine hand has been veined to feed someone else.
Now, a personal story to make all who read it weep. When... This is hard.... When I was a young girl I had to.... Maybe I should lie down in the back seat first. So my mother and older sister had a "thing" for actor James Spader. Yes, I am well aware that he is practically the devil! I watched the movies down to the Don Johnson socks and white suits. "There's no dust in this dust buster!" still passes my lips in my most apocalyptic memories. What would you have done? (It's so easy to sit there and judge some person who reviews these books out of nothing but the purest generosity of her book loving heart, isn't it?) So I sat right there and watched the damned movies. They didn't have any interest in the Cronenberg film of Crash, though (we watched plenty of his other films so this I cannot account for). I haven't seen it since high school. I don't remember it being like the book. It's hard to tell when I am trying to side step the haunting specter of Spader trying to steal Jack Nicholson's Michelle Pfieffer candy from a baby in Wolf. You would just love for all the shit to come down, wouldn't you? I could review the movie of Crash just for you and then Spader would make me eat three peas and a scoop of ice cream (from the film Secretary don't I just know it. Never mind that came out in my adulthood). It was like some acting out the horrors in a Lifetime getting off on abuse movie. They even made a movie about this (not Lifetime. Spike! This was male interest. Christina Ricci played me with all my pleases and q's). Well, I won't do it!
July 9, 2024
Ah, it's been a while, but now I have another book to add to my self-curated canon of "Dick Lit". Crash belongs there at the top of the heap, along with Portnoy's Complaint and Couples. Stick with me, I'll explain.
First though, I want to say that I read and loved J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World. It was one of those singular reading experiences for me, where the book teaches you how to read it, and how to love it. Ballard is an original, and his descriptive powers are on steroids, and he has a way of drawing you into a world of his creation almost unlike any other writer I've read before. I'm pleased to say he employed the same rigour, the same immersive commitment to the subject as in The Drowned World. The same completely over-the-top-ness. The same idea-based story, with little regard for character (except in this one, the characters are all vile sex maniacs).
Crash explores dark material: the intersection of sex and death brought about by machinery. People who only connect via twisted metal, presumably a statement about the idea of technology as middle-man between human beings, something that is more true now than ever.
However dark and prescient the subject matter, I found myself bursting into inappropriate laughter several times as I made my way through the novel. I mean, it's just so ridiculously pornographic that at some point I struggled to take it seriously. I mean, there's sooooo much penis talk, more than I would have ever believed possible (see: Dick Lit), and so much semen being ejaculated onto car dashes that it's actually funny.
Hey, I have a question! Tell me, how does one's penis actually press up against the steering wheel of a car? Is the penis 18 inches long? Is the wheel at crotch level? Or is the driver sitting on several substantial pillows, with his seat moved forward as far as it will allow? Ballard's and other penises seem to be frequently in this predicament.
These are the types of things that I found myself pondering while reading this great/awful 1973 unicorn of a novel. That, and how beautiful James Spader was in the film adaptation. That, and how strange and repulsive and fascinating the concept, and how miraculous it is that J.G. Ballard made Dick Lit something you could call a true work of art.
First though, I want to say that I read and loved J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World. It was one of those singular reading experiences for me, where the book teaches you how to read it, and how to love it. Ballard is an original, and his descriptive powers are on steroids, and he has a way of drawing you into a world of his creation almost unlike any other writer I've read before. I'm pleased to say he employed the same rigour, the same immersive commitment to the subject as in The Drowned World. The same completely over-the-top-ness. The same idea-based story, with little regard for character (except in this one, the characters are all vile sex maniacs).
Crash explores dark material: the intersection of sex and death brought about by machinery. People who only connect via twisted metal, presumably a statement about the idea of technology as middle-man between human beings, something that is more true now than ever.
However dark and prescient the subject matter, I found myself bursting into inappropriate laughter several times as I made my way through the novel. I mean, it's just so ridiculously pornographic that at some point I struggled to take it seriously. I mean, there's sooooo much penis talk, more than I would have ever believed possible (see: Dick Lit), and so much semen being ejaculated onto car dashes that it's actually funny.
Hey, I have a question! Tell me, how does one's penis actually press up against the steering wheel of a car? Is the penis 18 inches long? Is the wheel at crotch level? Or is the driver sitting on several substantial pillows, with his seat moved forward as far as it will allow? Ballard's and other penises seem to be frequently in this predicament.
These are the types of things that I found myself pondering while reading this great/awful 1973 unicorn of a novel. That, and how beautiful James Spader was in the film adaptation. That, and how strange and repulsive and fascinating the concept, and how miraculous it is that J.G. Ballard made Dick Lit something you could call a true work of art.
September 12, 2016
This and The Atrocity Exhibition are two of my favourite books, precisely because of their weirdness, because they showed the teenage me that something surprising and original could be done with the novel form beyond the staid and traditional forms foisted upon us as A level English students. (My less fortunate peers in the soft South had to make do with Hermann Hesse.)
Both Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition belong very much to their time, of course, but they do encapsulate a sort of postmodern masculine sociopathy as it is mediated through contemporary culture and geography. In addition, the clinical descriptions and the absence of affect in the narrator (partly, I think, the fortuitous result of Ballard's medical training) lend the books an eerie detachment, a reductio ad absurdum of the blasé attitude identified by Georg Simmel as a psychological by-product/coping mechanism of modernity. Ballard demonstrates beautifully how this blasé attitude, when taken to its logical conclusion - as required by postmodernity (or hypermodernity) - ultimately results in nihilism.
Having said all that, as in the case of de Sade, many many readers fail to appreciate just how funny Ballard is. Maybe the dry English sense of humour isn't so readily apparent on paper. Just try to imagine him writing it with a wry smile.
Both Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition belong very much to their time, of course, but they do encapsulate a sort of postmodern masculine sociopathy as it is mediated through contemporary culture and geography. In addition, the clinical descriptions and the absence of affect in the narrator (partly, I think, the fortuitous result of Ballard's medical training) lend the books an eerie detachment, a reductio ad absurdum of the blasé attitude identified by Georg Simmel as a psychological by-product/coping mechanism of modernity. Ballard demonstrates beautifully how this blasé attitude, when taken to its logical conclusion - as required by postmodernity (or hypermodernity) - ultimately results in nihilism.
Having said all that, as in the case of de Sade, many many readers fail to appreciate just how funny Ballard is. Maybe the dry English sense of humour isn't so readily apparent on paper. Just try to imagine him writing it with a wry smile.
February 1, 2021
What’s art?
And what’s its meaning?
Why do human beings feel the urge to create? Where does the inspiration come from? Are we all artists? And what makes a good artist?
Even though these questions cross my mind on a daily basis, I’m as far from finding an answer now as I ever have been.
But then, as I start to think I’m never going to find those answers, I come across a novel like Crash and feel like I’m very close to finally finding the answers I’ve been longing for.
Because, ladies and gentlemen, I believe Crash is a work of art.
Fuelled by unconventionality, it crosses boundaries, shatters beliefs and breaks taboos. It does exactly what I believe a work of art is supposed to do; it challenges us to see beyond the often ordinary course of our lives.
Here, in this hallucinatory novel, fiction and reality collide in such a powerful way that it becomes extremely hard for the reader to draw a line between one and the other. Obsession, addiction and paranoia become as imbedded in the readers’ mind as it does for the characters.
The fact that this is a novel written from the point of view of a first person’s narrator named James Ballard definitely makes it harder not to believe that there isn’t at least some autobiographical elements in it.
Also, I’ll have to say that there’s quite a bit of repetition (driving around, sex, drugs, more driving around, sex, drugs) but to me it all added to the obsessive and hallucinatory nature of this novel. Some of its imagery is going to stay with me for a long time. Perhaps for all my life.
The writing is clear, precise and completely effective. So effective that all the sexual descriptions (and there’s a lot of them) are borderline pornography. Some would even claim that those scenes are plain, ordinary and cheap pornography and I’d be tempted to agree if it wasn’t for the fact that it all led to a final and very anticipated orgasmic thrill.
To read Crash is like cruising the highways in a dream of violence and sexuality behind an unwashed windshield and I wouldn’t dare recommend it to anyone.
And what’s its meaning?
Why do human beings feel the urge to create? Where does the inspiration come from? Are we all artists? And what makes a good artist?
Even though these questions cross my mind on a daily basis, I’m as far from finding an answer now as I ever have been.
But then, as I start to think I’m never going to find those answers, I come across a novel like Crash and feel like I’m very close to finally finding the answers I’ve been longing for.
Because, ladies and gentlemen, I believe Crash is a work of art.
Fuelled by unconventionality, it crosses boundaries, shatters beliefs and breaks taboos. It does exactly what I believe a work of art is supposed to do; it challenges us to see beyond the often ordinary course of our lives.
Here, in this hallucinatory novel, fiction and reality collide in such a powerful way that it becomes extremely hard for the reader to draw a line between one and the other. Obsession, addiction and paranoia become as imbedded in the readers’ mind as it does for the characters.
The fact that this is a novel written from the point of view of a first person’s narrator named James Ballard definitely makes it harder not to believe that there isn’t at least some autobiographical elements in it.
Also, I’ll have to say that there’s quite a bit of repetition (driving around, sex, drugs, more driving around, sex, drugs) but to me it all added to the obsessive and hallucinatory nature of this novel. Some of its imagery is going to stay with me for a long time. Perhaps for all my life.
The writing is clear, precise and completely effective. So effective that all the sexual descriptions (and there’s a lot of them) are borderline pornography. Some would even claim that those scenes are plain, ordinary and cheap pornography and I’d be tempted to agree if it wasn’t for the fact that it all led to a final and very anticipated orgasmic thrill.
To read Crash is like cruising the highways in a dream of violence and sexuality behind an unwashed windshield and I wouldn’t dare recommend it to anyone.
March 3, 2008
Less of a conventional narrative arc-based novel and more of an exercise in rhythm and repetition of key phrases and imagery, Crash is not pleasurable reading. Nor, I figure, is it intended to be. It is extremely challenging, primarily owing to the graphic sex and violence, but also due to the clinical language Ballard employs to disengage the reader from the characters and their actions. The injuries are as distant as an anatomy textbook's illustrations. The sex is robotic. The word "mucus" seems to appear on nearly every page. Although its litanic abjection at times reminded me of Bataille's L'Histoire De l'Oeil, Crash reads less like a work of fiction and more like a commission report.
There is also a third factor lending to the book's dificulty: it's really boring. After the initial novelty of the exercise wore off, my inability to engage with the text left me needing to dare myself to finish it, not because I was shocked, but because it's the literary equivalent of a dial tone.
There is also a third factor lending to the book's dificulty: it's really boring. After the initial novelty of the exercise wore off, my inability to engage with the text left me needing to dare myself to finish it, not because I was shocked, but because it's the literary equivalent of a dial tone.
June 5, 2018
I wanted something wild and unpredictable and I was served.
While I still believe HIGH-RISE is J.G Ballard's immortal novel, mixing sex and car crashes wasn't a bad idea at all. It's extremely pornographic for 2018's literary standards, so I can only imagine catholic priests running after Ballard with blow torches when it came out, so they could let the devil out of him. Yes, it was prescient of modernity and the commodification of relationships, but... you know... that's... what it was. That and a lot of dirty, dirty sex.
Great. Doesn't overstay its welcome at 205 pages, but requires a strong stomach.
While I still believe HIGH-RISE is J.G Ballard's immortal novel, mixing sex and car crashes wasn't a bad idea at all. It's extremely pornographic for 2018's literary standards, so I can only imagine catholic priests running after Ballard with blow torches when it came out, so they could let the devil out of him. Yes, it was prescient of modernity and the commodification of relationships, but... you know... that's... what it was. That and a lot of dirty, dirty sex.
Great. Doesn't overstay its welcome at 205 pages, but requires a strong stomach.
September 25, 2015
“Two months before my accident, during a journey to Paris, I had become so excited by the conjunction of an air hostess's fawn gaberdine skirt on the escalator in front of me and the distant fuselages of the aircraft, each inclined like a silver penis towards her natal cleft, that I had involuntarily touched her left buttock.”Say whaaat??!! Honestly, what the hell is this book I just read? What was the author smoking when he was writing it? (And where can I get some?). I have to say this is one of the most interesting books I have ever read, and also one of the most boring. If that makes no sense then I have just summed up the book from my perspective.
According to Wikipedia Crash is about “symphorophilia”, basically getting turned on by watching disasters like fire and traffic accidents. More specifically the characters in this book find car accidents "hot". Yes, this is a thing! (at least in the context of this novel). This is almost sufficient to synopsize the whole book as there is very little in the way of plot to speak of.
Considering the “erotic” nature of the story, the narrative tone is oddly detached and clinical. Something I notice with J.G. Ballard’s writing style while reading The Drowned World. None of the characters seem to feel any strong emotion (unless “sudden boner” counts as an emotion). I suspect it is not Ballard’s intention that the readers should identify with his characters (at least I hope not). That is all very well but it makes it very hard to be invested in the narrative and reading the book is something of a slog in spite of the interesting ideas. According to some of the erudite professional reviews I have read the main theme of Crash is “Modern Technology in Human Relationships” and here I thought it was just about people shagging in damaged cars.
The characters are all unsavory deviants, the first-person narrative is by “James Ballard”. What the hell? Well, apparently it is to blur the line between fiction and reality. If you say so Mr. B (start backing away slowly). The central character is actually not Ballard but Dr. Robert Vaughan who spends the whole book walking around with semen stains on his trousers. For all his numerous scars and lack of hygiene he is apparently very sexy, a man the happily married Mr. Ballard would definitely go gay for. Anyone looking for a bit of titillation better look elsewhere as the sex scenes often involve orifices which are… oh never mind!
Should you read this book? I have no idea, I am off to take a bath and have a lie-down.
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