Crash

[Benjamin]

I'd love to hear any and all thoughts on Crash, which I think is both JGB's best work and one of the most important books of the last 40 years. I think now, when millions of people go on YouTube or other sites every day to watch every detail of the most horrendous things, we can see just how prescient and ahead of its time the book was. Can anything prove Ballard's equation "sex x technology = the future" any better than the Internet?

[Larry]

Well I didnt think much of the film. I just dont think the subject is for me.

[Benjamin]

I liked the film a lot, but it is very different from the book. Cronenberg's approach is detached and cool. The book is much more feverish and intense.

[Larry]

I just felt it was like some fevered dream, no sense to it. A guy wants to recreate some celebrity's death in a car crash. Pointless.

[Benjamin]

I think he was trying to get at an essential truth about the human desire for violence and to witness violence; which is, in some way, a desire to confront our own deaths and our terrors regarding the finite and fragile nature of our physical selves. There's a reason people love watching movies of things blowing up and people being killed in all manner of nasty ways. The car crash and the mythology of the car crash is really an allegorical symbol of this phenomenon.

I think if you look at the media now, you can see that Ballard was well ahead of his time. The type of explicit carnage you saw back in the '70s is nothing compared to a film like Hostel or a TV show like The Sopranos.

But I think Ballard's point was to get beneath the veneer of moral disapproval and confront us with the fact that we watch these things because, on some level, we derive intense pleasure from them, which is where sex comes into the equation. If you agree with Freud that the urge toward sex and the urge toward death are intertwined, then the entire phenomenon begins to make a disturbing sort of sense. That's how I read the book, in any case.

[Larry]

Sex does not make for an interesting subject in a story or film.

[Sérgio]

Larry wrote: "Sex does not make for an interesting subject in a story or film."

Really? How can it not be, it's such an important part of life...

[Larry]

But only as a purely biological standpoint, but in a story it detracts. Totally unnecessary.

[Chris]

I'm a massive Ballard fan and think Crash is influential and a staple of his work. Having said this, it is one of my least favourites of his, I think it's a must-read for any follower of Ballard but not necessarily his best work. The way he analyses the human condition is far more interesting in High Rise, Cocaine Nights and Super Cannes, in my opinion

[Ettore]

I agree with Benjamin. Crash is an intense book that discusses obsessions the modern man has developed with the omnipresence of media: the need to "see" everything, the implicit sharing of images (with their overloaded meaning) in the brains of western citizens, the constant search for sexual stimuli...

I particularly enjoyed how even the most abstract passages become very lyrical and poetic yet maintaining their coldness/dryness. For instance when he describes the roadway and how its geometry meets the mind of the characters... It's like you're "driving" into them, from the physical world into their psyche, observing their fears, desires, need for love.

I don't think I ever read anything like it.

[Benjamin]

You're last comment speaks to why the book is so interesting and enduring: It's an original. There really isn't anything else like it except The Atrocity Exhibition, and even that is very different in format and style. Crash is completely unique.

[Sérgio]

I finally got this and already read most of it.

I have to say most of the comments so far have been spot on in my opinion.

I had been thinking about the same terms to describe the prose like, "feverish and intense" or "fevered dream".

It's a very intense book, and its visions really affected me, even if I can't really relate to what the characters are experiencing (directly at least), Ballard still makes it a really fascinating subject.

It's nice to see a book like this, that has very intense prose but is still obviously prose, and not complacent, idea-less poetic prose, like I had the bad luck of reading recently in some books.

[Sam]

Last night I finished re-reading Crash and I also re-watched the Cronenberg film adaptation. I can't remember being as shocked the first time I read it. Initially I found it fascinatingly bizarre rather than shocking. But I was taken aback with some of the passages this time around, notably the following:

I dreamed of other accidents that might enlarge this repertory of orifices, relating them to more elements of the automobile's engineering, to the ever-more complex technologies of the future. 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? As I embraced Gabrielle I visualized, as Vaughan had taught me, the accidents that might involve the famous and beautiful, the wounds upon which erotic fantasies might be erected, the extraordinary sexual acts celebrating the possibilities of unimagined technologies. In these fantasies I was able at last to visualize those deaths and injuries I had always feared. I visualized my wife injured in a high-impact collision, her mouth and face destroyed, and a new and exciting orifice opened in her perineum by the splintering steering column, neither vagina nor rectum, an orifice we could dress with all our deepest affections. I visualized the injuries of film actresses and television personalities, whose bodies would flower into dozens of auxiliary orifices, points of sexual conjunction with their audiences formed by the swerving technology of the automobile. I visualized the body of my own mother, at various stages of her life, injured in a succession of accidents, fitted with orifices of ever greater abstraction and ingenuity, so that my incest with her might become more and more cerebral, allowing me at last to come to terms with her embraces and postures. I visualized the fantasies of contented paedophiliacs, hiring the deformed bodies of children injured in crashes, assuaging and irrigating their wounds with their own scarred genital organs, of elderly pederasts easing their tongues into the simulated anuses of colostomized juveniles.

I have to admit that passage made me wince when I read it this time around. It is certainly arresting and I think the whole book is something of a gleeful provocation. I suspect Ballard wants to force us to confront the violence of our own primal instinct, refracted in all its ugliness through the central metaphor of the book. But having read it again I am even more convinced of its genius - a word we should handle only with forceps and surgical gloves, but I can't think of another one - and, though it isn't uplifting, it gives a representation and understanding of human violence rarely found in other fiction. If there is something Ballard is qualified to write about it is the inherent violence of human instinct. Of all the books I've read by JG Ballard I still think Crash is his best and most unique work.