J. G. Ballard, Crash (© 1973, Vintage Books 2005)
tl;dr: Yuk!
Having seen Crash on Tim Walters’ list of must-read science fiction / fantasy novels about 15 years ago, I got hold of a copy via Bookmooch, and it has been sitting on my To Be Read shelf ever since. I knew a David Cronenberg movie was based on it, and that it was about car accident survivors who share a sexual fetish for cars and car crashes.
Not an attractive proposition. But it’s a slim paperback, so I overrode my reluctance and packed it to read on the plane on my recent trip.
The Vintage Books edition has an Introduction written by J. G. Ballard in 1995, which includes this:
Throughout Crash I have used the car not only as a sexual image, but as a total metaphor for man’s life in today’s society. As such the novel has a political role quite apart from its sexual content, but I would still like to think that Crash is the first pornographic novel based on technology.
If pornography is something that feels you leaving just a bit less than fully human, he succeeds. If it’s something that makes you feel sexy, not so much. I’m a long way from being a connoisseur of porn, but the book this reminded me of was the one in the podcast My Dad Wrote a Porno. It has the same obsession with genitalia and sex-related bodily fluids – which in this book means pretty much all bodily fluids – but it’s not funny, even unintentionally. The patriarchal world view is overwhelming, and the sex is somehow tangled up with, or smeared or squirted on, car dashboards, crumpled metal, and terribly scarred bodies. The book is not for the faint-hearted, and I include myself in that category. In case that makes it sound titillating, I should add that it’s not for the easily ignored either: it goes on and on with unerotic sex scenes that are described in clinical, mechanical language (I won’t inflict examples on you) but still manage to be anatomically/mechanically confusing..
It’s not that I was clutching my pearls. I read the whole thing in the hope that it would deliver on the ‘total metaphor for man’s life’ etc. There’s a whiff of a promise that it would shed light on our society’s widespread fascination with car crashes, or the frisson produced by famous road deaths (Jane Mansfield, Albert Camus and James Dean are mentioned). But no more than a whiff. The opening paragraph foreshadows a near escape by ‘the film actress Elizabeth Taylor’ (whose Cleopatra appeared in the year the book was published), but she pretty much remains an abstraction.
Suffice to say I’m not rushing out to see the movie.
I wrote this blog post on the unceded land of the Gadigal and Wangal clans of the Eora Nation, where the earth has been reshaped over the last century to accommodate the needs of motor vehicles. I acknowledge their Elders past and present, with gratitude for their care of the land over millennia, and hope that the rest of us can learn from them in time.
Me fail? I fly! 