Chapter Six, Part I:


'The elaborately figured landscape': Crash



I think the 20th century reaches just about its highest expression on the highway. Everything is there, the speed and violence of our age, its love of stylization, fashion, the organizational side of things – what I call the elaborately signalled landscape. J. G. Ballard, (1970) [1]

Part I. Introduction: ‘Sex times technology equals the future.’ [2]

The car embodies humankind’s relation to technology in the middle and late twentieth century. It has entered all aspects of our lives, from the trivial to the ‘most dramatic’. It can be used as a key to memory, desire, death and sex. The whole landscape is refigured to accommodate it, and the architectonics of its material presence, its speed and manner of movement, and its relations to the space around it, can all be investigated to discover the near future and the effects that technology has upon the identity of the subject. In writing Crash, Ballard brings the effect of technology on contemporary quotidian experience into full focus. An analysis of this novel can reveal how his writing is able to achieve this.

For Ballard the car is not only ‘a handy means of transport’, but also ‘satisfies one basic human requirement — our need to understand as much as possible of the world around us’.[3] Its shape, its speed, its relation to the body and to other bodies, and to the space of the highway, allows it to be used as an instrument of investigation and discovery. It is this quality that Ballard critically exploits in Crash.

In an interview with Dr Chris Evans in Penthouse magazine, Ballard lists the potential for ‘fulfilment’ that he sees the car to offer. This includes the ‘superficial’ pleasure obtained from the glamour of something ‘quite beautifully sculpted in steel and all sorts of built in conceptual motifs’, then, ‘at a deeper level’ the ‘dramatic role one can experience when in charge of a powerful vehicle driving across the landscape of the world we live in.’ It can be ‘an extension of one’s own personality’, an ‘outlet for repressed sexuality or aggression’. It also ‘represents all kinds of positive freedoms’:

When one is driving a car, there exists, on a second-by-second basis, the absolute freedom to involve oneself in the most dramatic event of one’s life, barring birth, which is one’s death. One could go on indefinitely, pointing out how the motorcar is the one focus of so many currents of the era, and so many conscious and unconscious pressures. [4]

Ballard is an acute observer of many of the facts of existence that are usually elided in modern discourse and he includes his own memories and obsessions among these facts. By 1973, and after conducting ‘trials’ that seemed to confirm his hypothesis about the car, he published Crash, which he calls ‘the first pornographic novel based on technology’.[5] The work Ballard did before writing the novel indicates his method. He looks at the relations between people and objects, and observes particular effects of this set of relations. He writes about his observations or arranges some other action to investigate his hypothesis. Having satisfied himself that the hypothesis is borne out by the testing process, he shifts around the objects that he has recorded, images, characters or events, and repeats the experiment to find new results. From these investigations patterns take shape, which further inform his writing.

To perform each experiment he gathers the materials, objects, images, and characters from his troupe of experimental subjects, and sets them up in a mental landscape, a fictional version of outer reality, which may be used as a site of revelation. Ballard’s mental landscapes come from a number of places: television, the topographies of Shepperton, the south of France or the Costa del Sol, from his own memory and experience and from the ‘media landscape’. The mental landscape of Crash is furnished by the outer reality of the motorways of London and Heathrow airport, before the building of the M25.

For the same reasons that Ballard sees the car to function as a key to an understanding of modern life, it is for him also a model of technological fetishization. It is one of the means by which technology controls time, and orders the arrangement of objects within time. Temporal beings, humans are necessarily subject to this order, unless they can find a way out of it. Furthermore, the severance of meaning that produces fetishization is the same process that leads to the death of affect. The car is for Ballard not something external to humans, but a constitutive fact. An examination of its effects cannot be achieved by reflection, or conventional psychoanalysis, nor are its secrets able to be articulated through literature, as the effects of the industrial revolution were in the realism of George Eliot or Charles Dickens.

In order to use the instrument of the car in an investigation into technology’s effects, Ballard had to adopt a particular style and intention, that of pornography, not to shock or arouse but as the only available method that would enable him to approach the death of affect. Allowing him to abstract himself from morality, disgust or scandal, it gave him the means to discover the meanings afforded by the car.

Ballard sets up a mental landscape of motorways, bars, off and on ramps, flyovers and apartment blocks, into which he places his characters, and other objects and images from his obsessional toolkit. He looks at time through the speed of the automobile, since it is speed that gives it the power to fulfil its psychic and social roles, and it is through speed — including that of mechanical reproduction — that the death of affect is sustained by technology.



Part II. Crash as experiment

Ballard exposes the intersection of technology and flesh, the violent impact of technologies on the human body, in his writing about cars. In his experiments with the technology of the automobile (the technologies of speed, roads, engines and instrument panels) he uses the car crash as an exemplary frottage.

A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinaesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status — all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing). [6]

To make his mental landscape for Crash he reveals a correspondence between the motorway landscape and the ‘dark causeways of our spinal columns’. This correspondence defines the characters in Ballard’s writing, metaphorically ‘recapitulating’ the (also metaphorical) central nervous system, the anatomical conduit of human fantasies, drives and desires. It is the place where his protagonists are made. Inside this landscape the car is an inner shell, its instruments operated by the driver. To drive is to manipulate the levers of a technology that is a complex system linked to the broader technological landscape of the modern world. For Ballard driving is the activity that most emphatically constitutes the modern subject:

really, it’s not the car that’s important: it’s driving. One spends a substantial part of one’s life in the motorcar and the experience of driving condenses many of the experiences of being a human being in 1970, the marriage of physical aspects of ourselves with the imaginative and technological aspects of our lives. [7]

Less marvelous than aircraft, but nonetheless part of the same technological system, cars are their domesticated version. Ballard presents the car crash as the most common and likely form of disaster to be encountered personally by the modern western individual. It is the personal version of the air disaster, the assassination of a public figure, or more recently, a terrorist bombing. His treatment of human relations with cars reveals another connection between the technologies of military menace and modern consumerism. He rejects, however, the Godardian vision of the auto-disaster Week-end (1967), in which, he says in a 1991 interview:

Godard’s got it wrong. He sees the car as a symbol of American capitalism, and the car crash as one of the wounds inflicted by capitalism on the docile purchasers of motor cars; people whose lives are completely modified by Wall Street… That’s the wrong approach. He’s missed the point. He doesn’t see that the car is, in fact, a powerful force for good in its perverse way. And even the car crash can be conceived of – in imaginative terms – as a powerful link in the nexus of sex, love, eroticism and death. With its heart wired into the central nervous system of all human beings. [8]

Ballard’s approach is not to satirize modern dependence on, and fetishization of, the car, but to explore this very fetishization — ‘the nexus of sex, love, eroticism and death’. For Ballard, the car provides the means of analysing the invisible, and ‘a powerful force for good’ in ‘the submission of the impulses and fantasies of our inner lives to the rigours of time and space’.[9] He defends the car crash by elaborating its imaginative textual possibilities. The openness of his treatment of the car crash event comes from its experimental quality. He first introduces the ‘crash’ motif in The Atrocity Exhibition, where he experiments with effects of simulated newsreels of car accidents, and in the term ‘Autogeddon’ which is used in one of the running headers for ‘The Assassination Weapon’.[10] It is latent in other stories in the collection, in ‘The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’ (1966), and in Ballard’s Ambit collages. As pseudo advertisements, the latter are traces of, or signposts to, something that does not yet exist, and like the novel Crash, they are experiments in figuring the conditions of desire in the media landscape. The idea of the car as a human exoskeleton appears as early as The Drought (1964), where the cars that crowd the roads to the coast become burial capsules for the dead.[11]

The story ‘Crash’, brings the latent content of technology into view through experimental magnification. That is to say, he uses the car as a specimen of western culture, because of its familiarity and ubiquity. The story provides an extreme close-up view of disaster, metonymically magnified in its parts, or documented in a long shot of the whole scene. This is analogous to the way that biologists use insects with rapidly repeated reproductive cycles to hypothesize about animal behaviour and biology. The car is for Ballard the drosophilus of the technological ‘kingdom’. He examines the ‘DNA’ encoded in the form of the car to report on the nature of technology and its operations. He uses the running headings of ‘Crash’ to repeat a passage from earlier in the text, and moves the reader backwards and forwards in time, zooming in and out, viewing up close and from a distance.

‘Crash’ collages accounts of sexual arousal in various fictional experimental groups, and juxtaposes these with Tallis’ affective response, which is one of distress, to similar stimulus. He re-enters Dealey Plaza and redefines it as a mental landscape, a crash site. Among other things, the experiments find that:

Freud’s classic distinction between the manifest and latent content of the inner world of the psyche now has to be applied to the outer world of reality. A dominant element in this reality is technology and its instrument, the machine. In most roles the machine assumes a benign or passive posture — telephone exchanges, engineering hardware, etc. The twentieth century has also given birth to a vast range of machines — computers, pilotless planes, thermonuclear weapons — where the latent identity of the machine is ambiguous even to the skilled investigator. An understanding of this identity can be found in the automobile, which dominates the vectors of speed, aggression, violence and desire. In particular the automobile crash contains a crucial image of the machine as conceptualized psychopathology. Tests on a wide range of subjects indicate that the automobile, and in particular the automobile crash, provides a focus for the conceptualizing of a wide range of impulses involving the elements of psychopathology, sexuality and self-sacrifice. [12]

Ballard restates the ideas in this passage in a leaflet handed to guests at his ‘Crashed Cars’ exhibition,[13] confirming the mimetic or experimental nature of the writing, and of the exhibition itself. It also emphasizes his interest in the ‘latent content’ of the ‘outer world of reality’, and in particular, the significance of technology as ‘a dominant element in this reality’. Furthermore, the machine as an instrument of technology must be viewed in terms of this distinction between its manifest and latent content. Ballard investigates the car, an exemplar of twentieth century machine power which ‘dominates the vectors of speed, aggression, violence and desire’, as a scientist examines a community of symptoms, without either disgust or favour.

Ballard is interested in the potential of cars, in the ways in which their own destruction is inscribed in their intact material presence. His protagonist in Crash, for example, buys a car to replace the one wrecked in his accident:

Sitting here in the exact replica of the vehicle in which I had nearly killed myself, I visualized the crushed fenders and radiator grille, the precise deformation of the hood trim, the angular displacement of the windshield pillars. [14]

The human corollary of this explosive potential is suggested in ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, when Dr Nathan comments on the mental state of one of Ballard’s ‘T’ characters in The Atrocity Exhibition:

In his mind World War III represents the final self-destruction and imbalance of an asymmetric world, the last suicidal spasm of the dextro-rotatory helix, DNA. The human organism is an atrocity exhibition at which he is an unwilling spectator… [15]

Travis’s anxiety arises from his awareness of the ‘lost symmetry’ of the human body and a desire to return to the mythic ‘lost symmetry of the blastosphere’, (the fantasy of the ‘lost unitary subject’ that Jean Baudrillard identifies as absent from Crash). In this passage from ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ Nathan diagnoses Travis’ condition, surmising that his environment recapitulates the structures of ‘the biological kingdom’, and that, in particular, ‘the jutting balconies of the Hilton Hotel have become identified with the lost gill-slits of the ‘dying” film actress, Elizabeth Taylor’.[16] Ballard’s plan for Crash may thus be seen in this account of the body as asymmetrical, but haunted by its mythic symmetry, and his treatment of the car as potential explosion. The violent encounter between the two is signalled in ‘Tolerances of the Human Face’ (1969), in The Atrocity Exhibition, where the character of Vaughan first appears. He is a patient at ‘the Institute’, described as a damaged and menacing potential assassin. ‘The dented plates of his forehead and the sallow jaw were features as anonymous as any police suspect’s’ and ‘The musculature of his mouth was clamped together in a rictus of aggression, as if he were about to commit a crude and unsavoury crime’.[17] He drives with Travers in an experiment that is another of Ballard’s preliminary trials for Crash:

Veteran of the Private Evacuations. Ahead, stalled traffic blocked three lanes. Oxyacetylene flared over the roofs of the police cars and ambulances in a corral at the mouth of the underpass. Travers rested his head against the mud-caked quarter-window. He had spent the past days in a nexus of endless highways, a terrain of billboards, car marts and undisclosed destinations. Deliberately he had allowed Vaughan to take command, curious to see where they would go, what junction points they would cross on the spinal causeways. Together they set off on a grotesque itinerary: a radio observatory, stock car races, war graves, multi-story car parks. Two teenage girls whom they picked up Vaughan had almost raped, grappling with them in a series of stylized holds. During this exercise in the back seat his morose eyes had stared at Travers through the driving mirror with a deliberate irony imitated from the newsreels of Oswald and Sirhan. Once, as they walked along the half embankment of a new motorway, Travers had turned to find Vaughan watching him with an expression of almost insane lucidity. His presence sounded a tocsin of danger and violence. Soon after, Travers became bored with the experiment. At the next filling station, while Vaughan was in the urinal, he drove off alone. [18]

In these excursions Ballard traces out the main experiment beforehand, hypothesizing the effects of certain configurations and accidents. A car crash is the perfect model for this experiment, but is more than this; it is the event in which the logic of technology is played out in the quotidian. For Ballard the car is an object loaded with psychosexual possibility, and yet it is accepted and domesticated by a society which gets anxious about excessive sex and violence on television. The sexual nature of the car is not a new idea, as can be clearly seen in the persistence of advertising that centres masculine desire and power in cars, but Ballard takes this idea further than the consumerist cliché would wish to travel. He uses this chapter to outline such experiments as the exhibition of crashed cars he held in 1970, two years after this piece was written. Again, he makes obvious the connections between the deaths of public figures, especially Hollywood celebrities, and the fantasies of ‘ordinary’ people. The car, or at least the crashed car, is the element that unites them. This is again shown by Ballard’s use of implosion and explosion, where the image of the car crash is at the centre of the telescopic focus. The mise en abyme is again counteracted by an outward movement, and implosion is counteracted by explosion. Crash is menacing, and the car is presented as the domestic ‘personal use’ version of its military-industrial correspondents. It embodies the even more banal, everyday version of the violence of the swimming pool execution scene from Godard’s Alphaville. In Crash car accidents are similarly performances, for which every car journey is a rehearsal.



Part III. New Arts Lab: The Test Drive

Ballard followed ‘Crash’ in The Atrocity Exhibition with an exhibition at the New Arts Lab in Camden, 4-28 April, 1970. This event is another that demonstrated Ballard’s interest in experimental method, in particular in experiments in the here and now. They were to satisfy his own inquiries in the subject but also show Ballard’s close engagement with contemporary methods of investigation into culture.

The idea of the car as an instrument of aggression is a familiar one, as is the idea of the car as a register of sexuality, or as one of the means by which ‘the interior design of our sexual fantasies’ is shaped. The car is both phallus and womb, and the imitation of the human body in much car design is obvious. The converse case, that we imitate, or are shaped by the car, and by freeways, auto routes, motorways, is less often discussed.

Ballard described his exhibition of crashed cars as ‘not so much an exhibition of sculpture as almost of experimental psychology’. It was an enquiry into the relationship between humans and technology, and was the event for which both The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash were kinds of exhibition catalogue. The violence that occurred at the event was anticipated in ‘Crash’:

The volunteer panels were shown fake safety propaganda movies in which implausible accidents were staged. Far from eliciting a humorous or sardonic response from the audience, marked feelings of hostility were shown towards the film and medical support staff. Subsequent films of genuine accidents exerted a notably calming effect. From this and similar work it is clear that Freud’s classic distinction between the manifest and latent content of the inner world of the psyche now has to be applied to the outer world of reality. A dominant element in this reality is technology and its instrument, the machine. [19]

The New Arts Lab event was not an end in itself, but a speculative excursion, like those of The Atrocity Exhibition. Ballard gathered a small number of crashed cars (‘crashed Pontiac, crashed Mini, crashed Morris Oxford’[20]) and displayed them for a month with little mediation, except a handout and an opening with a topless waitress. It was an experiment from which the novel Crash developed:

Now all this was designed to provoke the audience. The whole thing was a psychological experiment – to see if my basic hunch about the latent, hidden psychology, the depth psychology of the car crash, was on the right track. Whether my hypothesis was accurate. It was a test. I was lab testing Crash.

Curiously, there’s a scene in one of the Atrocity Exhibition stories where the “T” character puts on an exhibition of crashed cars. One of which is a Lincoln, a crashed Lincoln Continental. So I was staging a scene from Atrocity Exhibition and monitoring it as a psychological experiment to testdrive Crash….

In the month the cars were on show to the public, they were constantly attacked. People poured white paint all over them. They were upended. This Pontiac had a huge front-end collision, but, being a massively strong car, most of the rear windows, the passenger windows, survived. They were intact. But people smashed the windows, venting all this hostility.

“It’s the green light, Ballard,” I said. “You can get straight down to work.” That was when Crash really begun: the lab experiment, the test drive, had proved my point. Had people been bored, I might have had different thoughts. [21]

This exhibition was also a consequence of Ballard’s friendship and collaboration with Eduardo Paolozzi. Like the novel Crash, it is a Paolozzian museum display of quotidian objects whose experimental location reveals the relationships between the human and the technological in their culture. Like Paolozzi, Ballard uses the instruments of scientific classification and display to say something about the culture of his time, and in so doing, demonstrates the intersection between technology and human experience. Ballard’s few cars are a taxonomy and a provocation, in the sense that they call for a resolution of the tension that open display generates. The release of David Cronenberg’s 1996 film version of Crash provoked similar hostility. This was partly generated by media speculation about the film’s supposed subject matter (as being about people who get sexual pleasure from car accidents); its sex and violence quotient is low. The apparent ‘analytical’ or ‘cold’ qualities of the film and the novel were also presented as disturbing. That is to say, the experimental or ‘scientific’ approach to the subject had a potential to provoke in the same way as the New Arts Lab experiment. Ballard writes his fictional version of such an experiment in the Atrocity Exhibition ‘Crash’:

In particular the automobile crash contains a crucial image of the machine as conceptualized psychopathology. Tests on a wide range of subjects indicate that the automobile, and in particular the automobile crash, provides a focus for the conceptualizing of a wide range of impulses involving the elements of psychopathology, sexuality and self-sacrifice. [22]

According to his account of the New Arts Lab exhibition Ballard achieves precisely this conceptualization, which he then develops in the novel. This constant reworking, in and out of the work itself, from the early Atrocity Exhibition pieces through the exhibition, to a film by Harley Cokliss and the novel, and then over twenty years later through the Cronenberg film, exemplifies Ballard’s method in all his work. This explosive, or telescopic method records like frottage the interrelationships of his art and responses to it as it does the relationships between technology and human experience. It is the repetition, the endless production and reproduction of the images and events of this fiction until origins and motivations are lost, that makes it the frottage of its time.



Part IV. BBC Monitor: Film of ‘Crash’ (1971)

In 1971 Harley Cokliss directed a short film for the BBC in which Ballard narrated some passages from the Atrocity Exhibition version of ‘Crash’. Ballard appeared alongside the actress Gabrielle Drake, after whom Ballard names one of the characters in the novel Crash.[23] Drake later became a television soap star. The link between the car crash and the media landscape is apparent in the short film. Its images, a montage of Ballard and Drake driving and some scenes of crash testing, are reminiscent of sixties feature films such as Get Carter or even the television series The Avengers and The Sweeney. Drake appears as the dolly girl sales room sex interest, and Ballard as a rather seedy looking character, something like the British expatriate Shanghai nightclub devotees of Ballard’s youth described in Empire of the Sun. The Englishness of Ballard’s work is emphasized in this film, as is its televisual compression. In contrast, Cronenberg’s film, despite its claustrophobic intimacy, loses its English origins. It is precisely its television form that makes it an appropriate next step in the series of experiments that lead to the novel. Ballard recasts the experiment in the dominant media, the very domestic electronic parallel to the car. Television compresses and confines, but also cranks up the reproduction of images to a bewildering speed, at least this was the case in the late 1960s and the 1970s. This trajectory can be compared with the speed of cars and their design. In an annotation to the The Atrocity Exhibition ‘Crash’, Ballard comments on the difference between streamlining and styling, and argues that it is in the latter that we see ‘the attempt to escape from time and space altogether’:

The ultimate concept car will move so fast, even at rest, as to be invisible. [24]

The history of these works reveals a process in which Ballard lays down ideas, waits, and returns to develop them. The imaginative possibilities of the car crash are observed (in events in the media landscape such as the Kennedy assassination), then explored textually in The Atrocity Exhibition. The scenes from these explorations are given the pseudo flesh of the television image, and the results are then let loose in the next experiment, the novel, Crash.



Part V.  Crash and Jean Baudrillard

Much of the critical discussion about Crash centres on Baudrillard’s essays, ‘Simulacra and Science Fiction’ and ‘Ballard’s Crash’. In these essays Baudrillard argues that Crash ‘constitutes without doubt the contemporary model for this SF which is no longer SF’, that ‘in Crash, there is neither fiction nor reality –- a kind of hyperreality has abolished both’.[25] He sees Crash as an account of the logical development of hybridization of the body and technology:

Inversely, in its baroque and apocalyptic treatment in Crash, technology is the deadly deconstruction of the body – no longer a functional medium, but an extension of death: dismemberment and mutilation, not in the pejorative vision of a lost unity of subject (which is still the perspective of psychoanalysis) but in the explosive vision of a body given over to ‘symbolic wounds,’ a body commixed with technology’s capacity for violation and violence and in the brutal surgery that it continually performs in creating incisions, excisions, scar tissue, gaping body holes–of which sexual wounds and sensual pleasures are only a case in point (and the mechanical servitude in the workplace, the palliated caricature) – a body with neither organs nor organ pleasures, entirely dominated by gash marks, excisions, and technical scars–all under the gleaming sign of a sexuality that is without referentiality and without limits. [26]

In response, N. Katherine Hayles argues that Baudrillard ‘rightly sees that Crash articulates a new kind of sexuality emerging from the technological transformation of the body into an eroticized surface capable of merging at any point with other artifacts.’[27] This transformation is textual, however. Hayles observes, ‘In fiction it is possible to elide the materiality of the world and thus to erase the gap between simulation and reality.’[28] She challenges Baudrillard’s assertion that there ‘is no affectivity behind all this: no psychology, no ambivalence or desire, no libido or death drive.’ On the contrary, she argues, discussing the scene where the character James Ballard and the accident victim Gabrielle have a sexual encounter facilitated by her wounds and the car instruments:

Desire returns when he and Gabrielle circulate within a sexual economy based on an exchange of signifiers with the technology. Contrary to Baudrillard’s assertion, desire is not absent. Rather it is reconfigured and intensified… [29]

Desire for what? Baudrillard’s elision of desire reinforces his larger claim that this new economy of sexuality is not driven by a desire for death. Crash is unlike sado-masochistic texts, he argues, because death is here an unavoidable byproduct rather than the goal. Hence he arrives at the ‘miracle of Crash’—its hyperrealism that also makes it ‘hypercritical,’ untouched by the ‘moral gaze.’ Hence also his claim that the drive toward transcendence has nothing to do with Crash, and implicitly with hyperrealism. [30]

Hayles questions Baudrillard’s placement of this hyperreality at the novel’s centre, however. She refers to the novel’s insistence on the motif of flight:

Dominated by signs of flight, the landscape of Crash indicates otherwise. Most of the action takes place on the concrete ‘flyovers’ that surround the airport; planes roar overhead constantly; the narrator’s wife takes flying lessons. The drive to transcend physical limitations, to cast them off as a plane seems to cast off the shackles of gravity when it lifts into the air, imprints its signature everywhere in the text. Indeed, the landscape is comprised of little else but this imprint. Vaughan dies when his car, after a brief moment of flight, crashes into the roof of an airport shuttle bus. It is difficult to miss the point that the erotic transformations are expressions precisely of a drive toward transcendence that does in fact culminate in flight, a flight to death. Only by ignoring this riot of signification could one argue that there is no moral point to Crash, no warning in the borders it draws around its characters. [31]

Like other respondents to Baudrillard’s essays, Hayles quotes Ballard’s judgement about Crash in his conclusion to his frequently reprinted introduction to the French edition:

Needless to say, the ultimate role of Crash is cautionary, a warning against that brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape. [32]

Other critics argue as to whether Crash is ‘cautionary’ or, as Ballard also suggests in his introduction, an account of technology’s provision of ‘hitherto undreamed-of means for tapping our own psychopathologies’. The latter view is taken by Iain Sinclair, who comments that Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women helped to ‘domesticate’ Ballard and his work, but that Crash resists this. Sinclair also quotes Cronenberg on Crash, ‘“It has to be a cautionary tale,” Cronenberg remarked. “If not, it’s a psychopathic statement”.’[33]

Ballard is sometimes circumspect about the limits of Crash:

In Crash my position hasn’t been clarified, since I’m content to supply a cluster of probabilities. It’s the reader’s reactions that assure the functioning of the book: in the course of the story, everyone has to reach a limiting position beyond which he is not able to accept what is proposed to him. [34]

Elsewhere he rejects the idea of his work as moral:

My fiction is investigative, exploratory, and comes to no moral conclusions whatever. Crash is a clear case of that; so is Atrocity Exhibition. [35]

Ballard’s comment here would appear to support Baudrillard. He sees Crash as a novel in which the opposition between the real and the simulated is dissolved, but only to be replaced by the hyperreal. It is a novel that achieves an ‘absence of all finality and critical negativity’.[36] Yes, Crash is a warning against the seduction of the ‘overlit realm’, but this is only enabled by its hyperreality. For Baudrillard, Crash as a fiction of the third order of simulacra, ‘simulation simulacra: based on information, the model, cybernetic play. Their aim is maximum operationality, hyperreality, total control.’ The novel is an exposure of the ‘hyperreal’:

the first great novel of the universe of simulation, the world that we will be dealing with from now on: a non-symbolic universe but one which, by a kind of reversal of its mass-mediated substance (neon, concrete, cars, mechanical eroticism), seems truly saturated with an intense initiatory power. [37]

In his argument towards an account of Crash as ‘virtual hyperreality’ Baudrillard comments on its use of the photograph:

But in fact, the photo here is neither a medium nor an order of representation. It is neither a ‘supplementary’ abstraction of the image, nor a compulsion for spectacle, and the position of Vaughan is never that of a voyeur or a pervert. The roll of film (like transistorized music in cars and apartments) is part of the universal film of life, hyperreal, metallic, and corporal, made up of movement and flux. The photo is no more a medium than is the technology or the body — all are simultaneous in this universe where the anticipation of an event coincides with its reproduction, and even with its ‘real’ occurrence. Depth of time is abolished as well: much like the past, the future ceases to exist. Actually, it is the camera-eye which replaces time, along with all other expressions of depth like affectivity, space, language. It is not an alternate dimension; it simply signifies that this universe is without secrets. [38]

The trace motif of the photograph, like the scars and wounds that make the body an exhibition of the material presence of technology, has become coterminous with its effects. Ballard’s protagonist in Crash imagines this as the image of ‘speed, violence and aggression… caught, like a photographic plate or the still from a newsreel, in the dark bruises of my body and the physical outline of the steering wheel’.[39] Baudrillard argues that everything is deprived of depth in this hyperreality. The novel is ‘hypercritical, in the sense of being beyond the critical’, as Baudrillard claims, in that Ballard’s simple method is to remove the prohibitions that normally limit the imagination, ‘and experience the true excitement of the universe’.[40]

Ballard joined the debate about Crash, the postmodern and the ‘hyper-real’ in 1991 with a disingenuous but amusing admonishment:

Vast theories and pseudo-theories are elaborated by people with not an idea in their bones. Needless to say, I totally exclude Baudrillard (whose essay on Crash I have not really wanted to understand) — I read it for the first time some years ago. Of course, his Amerique is an absolutely brilliant piece of writing, probably the most sharply clever piece of writing since Swift — brilliancies and jewels of insight in every paragraph — an intellectual Aladdin’s cave. But your whole ‘postmodernism’ view of SF strikes me as doubly sinister. SF was ALWAYS modern, but now it is ‘postmodern’ — bourgeoisification in the form of an over-professionalized academia with nowhere to take its girlfriend for a bottle of wine and a dance is now rolling its jaws over an innocent and naive fiction that desperately needs to be left alone. You are killing us! Stay your hand! Leave us be! Turn your ‘intelligence’ to the iconography of filling stations, cash machines, or whatever nonsense your entertainment culture deems to be the flavor of the day. [41]

Crash is not cautionary in the usual sense of the term, neither is it a post-modern conduct book, nor an objective observational account of late-twentieth century western culture. It is a false novel, where correspondences and patterns emerge from the use of trace motifs, and the play of violence and desire is allowed full expression in the provisional textual space of a mental landscape. The novel is another taxonomic dispersal of everything that attaches itself to the car, or a frottage of its effects.




[1] Interview by Lyn Barber, Penthouse, Vol 5, September 1970, excerpt quoted in ‘Quotations by Ballard’, in V. Vale and A. Juno, J. G. Ballard, 154-164, 156.

[2]. ‘J. G. Ballard’, interview by Alan Burns, in The Imagination on Trial, ed. Alan Burns and Charles Sugnet, (London: Allison and Busby, 1981), 14-30, 23.

[3] ‘The Car, The Future’, Drive, Autumn, 1971, excerpt quoted in ‘Quotations by Ballard’, V. Vale and A. Juno, 154-164, 161.

[4] Interview by Dr Chris Evans, excerpt quoted in ‘Quotations by Ballard’, in V. Vale and A. Juno, J. G. Ballard, 154-164, 157.

[5] Introduction to the French edition of Crash, (1974), in original English in Foundation, No. 9, November, 1975, repr. in V. Vale and A. Juno, J. G. Ballard, 96-98, 96.

[6] Interview by Lyn Barber, ‘Quotations by Ballard’, 156.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Interview by Iain Sinclair in Crash: David Cronenberg’s Post-mortem on J.G. Ballard’s ‘Trajectory of Fate’ (London: BFI Modern Classics, 1991), 80.

[9] ‘The Coming of the Unconscious’, A User’s Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews, (London: HarperCollins, 1996), 84-88, 84.

[10] The Atrocity Exhibition, 31.

[11] The Kennedy assassination in 1963, represented by Ballard in The Atrocity Exhibition as a car crash, was a significant catalyst inspiring Ballard’s interest in cars.

[12] ‘Crash’, ‘The Atrocity Exhibition, 98-9.

[13] Called ‘new sculpture’ or Crashed Cars, New Arts Lab, Roberts St, Camden, 4-28 April, 1970.

[14] Crash, (London: Jonathon Cape, 1973; London: Vintage, 1995). 66.

[15] ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, The Atrocity Exhibition, 14.

[16] Ibid.

[17] ‘Tolerances of the Human Face’, The Atrocity Exhibition, 68.

[18] Ibid. 69.

[19] ‘Crash’, The Atrocity Exhibition, 98-99.

[20] Interview by Iain Sinclair in Crash: David Cronenberg’s Post-mortem on J.G. Ballard’s ‘Trajectory of Fate’, 97.

[21] Ibid.

[22] ‘Crash’, The Atrocity Exhibition, 99.

[23] Iain Sinclair, Crash: David Cronenberg’s Post-mortem on J.G. Ballard’s ‘Trajectory of Fate’ 30.

[24] Note to ‘Crash’, The Atrocity Exhibition, 98.

[25] Jean Baudrillard, ‘Ballard’s Crash’, (1976), trans Arthur B. Evans, Science Fiction Studies, Number 55, Volume 18, Part 3, November 1991, 313-30, 319.

[26] Ibid. 313.

[27] N. Katherine Hayles, ‘The Borders of Madness’, In Response to Jean Baudrillard, Science Fiction Studies, 18:3, 1991, 321-29, 322.

[28] Ibid. 321.

[29] Ibid. 322.

[30] Ibid. 322-3.

[31] Ibid. 323.

[32] Introduction to Crash, (London: Vintage, 1995), 6.

[33] Ian Sinclair, Crash: David Cronenberg’s Post-mortem on J.G. Ballard’s ‘Trajectory of Fate’, 18.

[34] Interview with Robert Louit, Magazine Littéraire, no. 87, April 1974 (retranslated by Peter Nicholls), Foundation no. 9, November 1975, excerpt quoted in ‘Quotations by Ballard’, V. Vale and A. Juno, 154-164, 158.

[35] ‘Interview by Graeme Revell’, V. Vale and A. Juno, 42-52, 43. He also comments: ‘… there’s nothing moral about shouting: “Careful, there’s a car coming,” In respect to all these things like pollution and over-population and so on, one is pointing out ambiguities in our attitudes toward these things.’ Interview by Alan Burns, Burns and Sugnet, ‘J. G. Ballard’, in The Imagination on Trial, 14-30, 21. While this may be so, to warn of a car coming is a moral act. This is how we might distinguish Ballard’s work from that of a moralist.

[36] Baudrillard, 319.

[37] Ibid. 319.

[38] Ibid. 317-8.

[39] Crash, 45.

[40] Interview by Dr Chris Evans, excerpt quoted in ‘Quotations by Ballard’, V. Vale and A. Juno, 154-164, 161.

[41] ‘A Response to the Invitation to Respond’, Science Fiction Studies, 18:3, 1991, 329.