#149 Celebration of wounds: Crash (1973) by J. G. Ballard

A shocking collision of warped sexuality and twisted metal

"I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit - and force it to look in the mirror." With these words, J.G. Ballard described the aim of his 1973 novel Crash. A harrowing descent into a bizarre subculture of damaged outcasts whose sexual fetishes centre on the car crash, the novel is Ballard's disturbing diagnosis of the 20th century. The writer described it as a "deranging book to write", which made him hate himself because he felt he was "dealing in deadly things.. like a sort of arms salesman."

Welcome to a tour of an unsettling vision of the highways and byways of a concrete dystopia, and a novel which is science fiction of a unique kind - a deranged hellscape of the here and now.

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Transcript

“The author is beyond psychiatric help.” This was the famous verdict of a publisher’s reader on first contact with Crash. Written in clinical terms, J. G. Ballard’s sixth novel is a troubling diagnosis of modern civilisation, set in the overlit concrete dystopia of the real-life cityscape. It is a headlong plunge into alienated depravity, a world almost without human emotion but powered instead by bizarre sexual practices and a grim fascination with the destructive spectacle of the car crash.

Set in the contemporary West London of the early 1970s, and focused on severely damaged individuals linked by their sexualised fixation on road accidents, Crash challenges readers to process its unsettling implications. It stretches and complicates the category of science fiction, as it examines with cold precision the disturbing relationship between humanity and machines. For his part, Ballard described the novel as an “extreme metaphor”, and also “an example of a kind of terminal irony, where not even the writer knows where he stands.” 

The moment of impact

Between 1966 and 1969, James Graham Ballard (1930 - 2009) published numerous experimental short stories which he later described as an effort to process the tragic death of his wife Mary, who died of pneumonia in 1964. Several of the stories were published in New Worlds magazine, then edited by Ballard’s friend and colleague Michael Moorcock. The stories represented a key step in the development of New Wave science fiction in the UK. They were collected and published as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), to great controversy. 

One of the inclusions in the collection was “Crash!” It explored Ballard’s ideas about the car as a central image of the 20th century, and the erotic power of the road accident. Originally written in 1968, it was followed by a chaotic event at the New Arts Laboratory in which Ballard exhibited the wrecks of crashed cars in a former chemical factory. In 1971, Ballard collaborated with director Harley Cokeliss and actress Gabrielle Drake on a short film, exploring the car as the nexus of “speed, drama and aggression, the worlds of advertising and consumer goods, engineering and mass manufacture…” The stage was set for the writing of Crash as a novel.

Collision course

The novel centres on a protagonist named James Ballard after the writer himself. A producer of TV advertisements, he has a promiscuous open relationship with his wife Catherine and is well acquainted with local prostitutes. His sex life is complicated further by his involvement in a serious car crash close to Heathrow Airport. Ballard’s car collides with another, and the driver is killed instantly. Ballard is briefly trapped with the dead man’s wife, and immediately processes the deadly crash and his recovery in sexualised terms.

Ballard soon meets Vaughn, once a TV scientist and now a “nightmare angel of the expressways”. Badly scarred by his own multiple car crashes, Vaughn is like a black hole - obviously destructive but with an inescapably attractive force. The “renegade scientist” gathers to him a group of profoundly troubled individuals, their psychologies as irreparably wrecked as the smashed cars that obsess them. Before long, Ballard is caught in this orbit, becoming a pliant Renfield to Vaughn’s unhinged motorway Dracula. 

Plot is a distant secondary focus of Crash. The characters are caught in an implausibly tight spiral of interactions, connected not so much by ordinary causality as by a twisted psychic force. Because of the in media res opening to the novel, its conclusion is largely pre-ordained - it is already clear that Vaughn will die in a horrific final collision. What is less certain is what will become of Ballard, and the other acolytes transfixed by the potential of the eroticised disaster.

Language of detachment

Besides the obviously extreme content, one of the most remarkable aspects of Crash is its use of language. Ballard consistently uses precise mechanical and anatomical terminology, the latter drawn from his own medical training. In the many warped sexual encounters, almost all of which are connected with cars, Ballard freely intermixes these lexicons. This reinforces the characters' fixation on machines, and their reduction of themselves and others to mere objects. In place of emotional feeling, the characters zero in on tactile feeling - the physical sensation of body and chassis, of organ and component, all interchangeable and tantalisingly destructible.

This deployment of practical, clinical language reflects a collapsing border between people and machines. As Zadie Smith has put it, “the distinction between humans and things has become too small to be meaningful.” Dialogue in the book is very minimal, which reinforces the reduction of people to objects, with little capacity to reflect or even to communicate on anything but the most base and physical level.

The terminal roads

The setting of the novel is also crucial. The locations are highly specific, a drab but brightly lit real world of tarmac and concrete centred in and around West London - a dystopia of laybys, airport service roads, and decrepit garages. Ballard knew this area well, having moved to nearby Shepperton in 1960. The characters fill up these dead, liminal spaces with their morbid fantasies and bizarre sexual pathologies. While the psychological element of the novel may seem unlikely, the story is made perversely convincing by its highly real landscape, which is tactile and lived in. 

Heathrow Airport is the dead centre of Ballard’s psychogeographical landscape. As a result, the technology of aviation has a key role in the novel, second only to "the deviant technology of the car-crash". Characters frequently comment on the airliners taking off or landing above them and the protagonist describes these as "systems of excitement and eroticism, punishment and desire waiting to be inflicted on my body."

The dark side of the present

Writing in 1984, David Pringle described Crash as “devastating” and “perhaps the most disturbing piece of fiction to have been written in the last twenty years.” One way of thinking about science fiction is to arrange works on a continuum. At one end is consolation: the wish fulfillment of the superman, the comforting absolute belief in progress through science and technology. At the other end is disturbance: works that interrogate and question our relationship to these forces and suggest unsettling answers. 

Crash is an extraordinary work of science fiction disturbance, a shocking exploration of what Pringle calls “the dark side of the present” [...] “a dystopian nightmare - not projected on to the future, or another planet, but realised here, right now.” Both magnetic and repellent, it is a dizzying expression of Ballard’s conception of “inner space”, and an almost frighteningly warped perspective on modernity. Crash is a brilliant and important book, and one that the science fiction genre is fortunate to claim.