An old girlfriend once gave me J.G. Ballard’s Crash for my birthday – a sign, perhaps, that all was not well in the kingdom of Denmark. She told me that the cashier put the book in a carrier bag and then said very primly: “You won’t enjoy it.”
Crash is short enough to read in one sitting, but I couldn’t manage it. I was gripped, but had to keep putting it down. I finished Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Hemingway’s collected stories and the shortlist for the Orwell Prize, while taking small shots of Ballard’s most disquieting and transgressive book.
Crash is surrounded by legend. Famously, a proof reader at Jonathan Cape described Ballard as ‘beyond psychiatric help’ and advised against publishing the book. The critical response was predominantly one of disgust. Paul Theroux described it as a ‘stylish anatomy of outrage, and full of specious arguments, phony statistics, a disgusted fascination with movie stars and the sexual conceits of American brand names and paraphernalia.’ Martin Amis branded it ‘foul’ — sarcastically, he later claimed. The Spectator, seemingly overcome by an attack of the vapours, merely described this testament of autoeroticism as ‘sociology’.
Ballard’s response was one of mischievous defiance. He said:
“A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinaesthetic factors, the stylising of motion, consumer goods, status – all of these in one event. I
myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and mature libido (if there is such a thing).”
He later relented. Writing in the introduction of a recent edition, he declared that the book is an ‘extreme’ examination of what he sometimes called ‘inner space’.
This places it squarely in his dystopian canon, but Crash seems to lack the subtle moral underpinnings of a book like Cocaine Nights, although the structure is very similar. In Crash, a character called Ballard succumbs to the perverse charisma of Vaughan; and in Cocaine Nights, Charles Prentice obsesses about Bobby Crawford. Eventually, the weak-willed protagonists are destroyed by their own self-indulgence. But, a sick promise of joy exudes from Ballard’s final admission that he is ‘already planning’ his own death in a Vaughan-esque orgy of smashed dashboards and oozing radiator coolant; there is no such perverse glee in Prentice’s confession to a murder he didn’t commit, only dutiful resignation.
Ballard, the author, has been crowned as a visionary who warned against the dictatorship of technology and consumerism, those crushing benzodiazepines of modernity. But Crash seems to hark back, deep into the heads of man’s darkest sexualities. It recalls Bakunin’s maxim that the ‘lust for destruction is also a creative desire’; that transgression is erotic; and that post-Lapsarianism is latent in mankind. Is there a substantive difference between deliberately crashing cars for kicks and the calculated depravity of, say, Sodom and Gomorrah? As Ballard admitted to Will Self in the early nineties, ‘Crash is a hymn to psychopathy’. Cocaine Nights very definitely isn’t.
The picture above is taken from the Atrocity Exhibition in 1970, put on by Ballard at the Institute for Research in Art and Technology. It later inspired the short story that was the genus the novel.
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