Crash...

I googled images for this novel and I found this tacky cover to be the most appropriate.  And I like the tagline :  'a brutal, erotic novel'.  I would agree with the 'brutal' - not so much the 'erotic'.  In fact it's almost anti-erotic , if anything.


Anyway, I just finished reading this novel - which was originally published in 1973.  This was my first Ballard.


It's pretty amazing that a novel like this was published 37 years ago - it is still very shocking and graphic.  The whole thing is, pretty much literally, drenched in blood and semen.  The two fluids appear together throughout the whole book - one of its motifs, along with scars being handholds, the airport roads and terminals and the fusion of technology and our bodies into some kind of new, unprecedented sexuality.


It's about a man who is involved in a serious car accident and, when he is somewhat recovered begins an affair with the wife of the man he killed.  Was ever woman in such humour wooed?


Then he meets a nutjob scientist called Vaughn who is turned on by car crashes and wants to cause them, recreate them and ultimately die in one - preferably along with Elizabeth Taylor.  There is an uneasy relationship between his bizarre lust and the cult of celebrity, you see.


The main character, who is called James Ballard (...) starts to get turned on by the same weird shit and ultimately ends up encouraging his wife to fuck Vaughn before fucking Vaughn himself - all in the back seat of cars.  Sex only has meaning for the characters when performed in a car.


'Does he only come in a volvo?'  asked Brett Anderson in the song 'Breakdown'.  Probably read 'Crash'.


This was the second most disturbing novel I have read - it wasn't quite up to American Psycho for shock value - but then was published much earlier, when people were that much easier to shock.


And they were shocked - apparently an agent stuck a note to Ballard's manuscript saying 'the author is beyond psychiatric help, do not publish'.


Good that they did publish though because we need novels like this.  This kind of Art tests morality - and one of the functions of Art is as a laboratory where different moralities can be tested through the playing out and illustrating of scenarios.  ANY scenarios you can possibly imagine.  It must be all - chemistry wouldn't work if one of the elements were removed from all experimentation.


To have your morality questioned need not provoke a moral lapse. Rather your morality is often confirmed by this anti-matter agent.  I certainly found 'Crash' to be a depiction of the repulsive and obsessive character of some male sexuality - and these fantasies are, I think, predominantly male.  The car crash  seems to be a metaphor for penetration itself, surely.


On a personal note, it's odd I should have read this novel when my own sexuality is depleting because of the medication I take.  Also odd that my body is being modified, and will continue to be modified, in a somewhat Ballardian way...


Ballardian.  That has become a term now - like 'Kafkaesque'.  These words, and the concepts they allow us to play with, are perhaps why we need probing, testing, slightly depraved novels like 'Crash'.


But one ride was enough for me, thanks.  I don't think I'll be going there again.