Review: Crash by J.G. Ballard (1973)

A crash is the collision of every event that has happened to you up until a certain point. Everything else is just collateral.

What to make of those fantasies which do not fall neatly into notions of magic and world-building through time? Crash might be one of those, the first I've encountered, not a fantasy proper, but a fantasy still, of what happens at this moment of history when our lives and our bodies are thrusted beyond what we can readily perceive, onwards toward some dark unknown like a rocket ship shooting for outer space. Ballard's Crash draws out passages of breakdown, such as the falling away of the rocket ship's debris as it roars into the ether, the passengers' psychological inability to fathom speed, the flashing lights within the ship malfunctioning due to increased atmospheric pressure from without.

Literally though, Ballard writes of actual car crashes. At face value, the narrative might be about a perverse fetishism concerning industry and technology. Moreover, Crash might be understood to address the failures of both in preserving a common humanism rooted in some universal idea of freedom, the intellect, the arts, etc. Instead, the story seems more like a commemoration to modernism and the contemporary world.

"In their eyes I must have appeared like some nightmarish totem, a domestic idiot suffering from the irreversible brain damage of a motorway accident and now put of each morning to view the scene of his own cerebral death." (p. 106)

James Ballard, the protagonist, recovers from a car accident of his own, with mainly Catherine, his wife, and Vaughn, a severely traumatized man, by his side. All can be said to have deep masochistic tendencies, but it is Vaughn who is the most active in seeking out bodily pain and damage through re-enactments of car accidents as well as his harboring of obsessive desires for seemingly random people, including celebrities such as Elizabeth Taylor. Other characters, such as Dr. Helen Remington, also fill the pages. Together they stand a world apart from the whizzing, zooming, and ongoing whirr of the gargantuan monster that is industrial technology; specifically, cars, motorways, and multi-story car parks. In them Ballard (the author) reveals an unbelievable poignancy with which they stand, sit, have sex, walk, work, drive, eat, and sleep, all having undergone and who undergo horrific blows to their physicality through bruises, concussions, broken bones, gouged out wounds, seeping scar tissue, fractured skeletal structures... it is with these marks of total destruction, these evidences of accidents, that they bear witness and become their own witnesses to the apocalyptic manifestation of a world too far gone, a world severed from the creationism of the natural world.

But Crash, ultimately, might just be far too natural in showing the flourishing emotional terrain of persons so subject to the whims of capital that they become devoid (far removed) from any truly recognizable personal and/or social history. In order to reach a kind of catharsis to process complete trauma, Dr. Helen Remington, whose husband died in a violent car crash, re-enacts that accident with Ballard. Theirs is a sexual, physical catharsis that enables the traumatic event to recur repeatedly to its final climatic end (however frayed, their nerves erupt and settle as they orgasm). For Dr. Helen Remington and James, there is no other outlet for this catharsis. Try as they might, no other space or place but the car on the highway - dangerously teetering towards oncoming traffic - will allow them to come. However twisted and perverse, it happens, again and again, to help heal their sickened desires and their unresolved losses.

"This agreeable young woman, with her pleasant sexual dreams, had been reborn within the breaking contours of her crushed sports car. Three months later, sitting beside her physiotherapy instructor in her new invalid car, she held the chromium treadles in her strong fingers as if they were extensions of her clitoris." (p. 99)

This newfound ability of human motor-skills with which Ballard (author) connects accidents to the bodies that have been caught within it might express an articulation of a clearer, sharper reality by which we might inhabit the world. Rather than a parade or some perfectly fitted jigsaw puzzle of human bodies, their flesh unmarked, well-oiled at the joints, flexible and unpenetrated, Crash opens up a narrative that praises the broken and risks cultural severance through the image of bended mental and dented chromium that merges, uncleanly, with the human body. It is this vulnerability of the two, this exposure, flawed and hemorrhaging, which opens possibilities for the mind and spirit. For Ballard, the wound - that open, painful orfice - is what creates room for creative expression; it is an absolute kind of penetration, one that dips deep into the netherworlds below the skin, through blood, hitting bone and snapping it, freeing routes that were previously impossible and letting our inherent senses fully emerge, heightened and thick with sensitivity.