Auto Erotic: Crash by J.G. Ballard

What can I say about Crash by J.G. Ballard? Where to begin?

This 1973 novel is about a group of Londoners who gain sexual pleasure in car crashes and the punishment they give to the human body. James Ballard is a TV producer and one day is involved in an auto accident. He loses control with his car skidding into the other lane and crashing into that of the Remingtons. Mr. Remington is killed while his wife, Helen, survives with mostly minor injuries. While recovering from his own rather serious wounds, Ballard realizes that the crash let loose his "obsession with the sexual possibilities of everything around" him. From his bed he ponders the curve of his wife Catherine's thighs, casts eyes at the nurses, and imagines their thoughts as they look at Mrs. Ballard. He also feels an erotic attachment to Helen - "...almost as if I unconsciously wished to re-conceive her dead husband in her womb."

One day after leaving the hospital, Ballard is cruising around with his mistress Renata. They pull over to fool around. Well, he does, anyway, as Renata is too busy thumbing the pages of a magazine for photographic evidence of human misery. Ballard finds himself preoccupied with her thighs and the wetness between her legs when a car approaches theirs and flashes its headlights at them. A man steps out and begins taking photographs. This is Ballard's introduction to Vaughn.

Vaughn is also obsessed with the erotic potential of car crashes and the destruction they impose upon the human body. He is the ringleader of a small cadre of similarly inclined people which includes Seagrave, a stunt driver, and Gabrielle, a woman whose fetish for automotive destruction has left her wearing a myriad of braces. James, Catherine, and Helen fall into this group.

The book is narrated in the first person by Ballard and mainly concerns their relationship. Vaughn has a masterplan in which he dies in a head-on collision with a car containing Elizabeth Taylor. Ballard is producing a TV commercial in which she has a part and Seagrave is doing the stunt driving as her character and it occurs to Ballard that Vaughn is basically using everyone around him to bring his plan to fruition. For Vaughn, his death via car crash would basically ring in erotic apotheosis. At first Ballard is in awe of Vaughn but he finds that he is unable to commit himself as deeply as his mentor. Vaughn wants to use Ballard out of selfishness but he resists.

Crash is unusual, if not downright disturbing. The sexuality of the characters is mediated through the car as well as its attendant crashes. Things go from comparisons of a woman's anatomy to the design of a car to intimacy taking on an extra special patina when done in a car by people who can caress the marks left by the dashboard on someone's chest to the inability to be sexually around outside of a car. This hyperbolic progression comments on one's humanity being lost via a dependence on technology with the ultimate outcome being death as both Seagrave and Vaughn go out in a blaze of auto-erotic glory and the book ends with Ballard having taken their place and begun plotting a crash of his own. In addition to actions taken by the characters, the dehumanizing potential of technology is emphasized by Ballard's narration. It seems like every non-organic thing is made of chromium, adorned with chromium, or meant to work with something involving chromium in some way while people are often reduced to their orifices and mucus membranes.

Ballard seems to be saying that once you concede your humanity to technology, you're dead. Once technology becomes an end in itself instead of a means, eros is displaced by thanatos.

There were times when I reading the book that I was reminded of the days when I spent time hanging out with some members of Madison's kink community. The gatherings at Seagrave's home was reminiscent of some of the get-togethers I attended. On the minus side, just as the characters in the book found themselves in orbit around Vaughn, it seemed like many people were in the same position with regards to a particular figure in the Madison kink scene. On the plus side, the Madison kinksters I knew had a wonderful attitude towards sex. It was about pleasure, bonding with fellow humans, learning about oneself, breaking down stereotypes, etc. There are moments in Crash that are similar, where I wanted to praise its portrayal of sexuality as being positive, complex, and more like a spectrum than a set of fixed points, but they are offset by things going too far.

In the former category we have Ballard's feelings for Vaughn becoming sexual. It's a rare instance of attraction in the book that is about more than technology ruining eros. Sex can be part of a game about power and control and I interpreted this as being about the two men's power struggle and about Ballard's transformation. Having sex with Vaughn is like his final farewell. He's not going to be a pawn in the man's game. Instead it's almost an act of regicide. Ballard will take Vaughn's place.

On the other hand we have Seagrave who engages in low-grade sexual play with his young son. "Seagrave flicked at his son's miniscule penis." "...as Seagrave unbuttoned his shirt and placed the child's mouth on his nipple, squeezing the hard skin into the parody of a breast." I don't think that incest/paedophilia is really the issue here but rather this behavior signifies that Seagrave is past the point of no return – he's beyond help and totally consumed by his obsession. His death warrant has been signed.

Now I am going to have to watch David Cronenberg's film adaptation which I haven't watched in ages.