CRASH initial reaction

Crash took me completely by surprise.  While some of the more common adjectives used to describe it have likely been shocking, perverse, and disgusting, I found the premise of the novel – characters who “accept the perverse eroticism of the car crash,” who obsess with the infinity of sexual possibilities and sexualities – to be refreshingly daring, especially when you consider the context in which the piece was written (1970s).  It is gross, but equally fun: novels don’t get more graphic than this.  I give Ballard credit for making the most unusual of sexual acts, and the most horrifying and bloody events, sound poetic.  He is very aware of how the words both look and sound, and of the way his readers will react to them, and thus organizes them in a way that entices the reader to keep going.

I do not think that the novel takes place is “actual” London.  The settings and characters seem like our society, but strange: an exaggeration or dramatization.  I believe the story to be allegorical.  It explores the relationship between modern man and technology in perhaps an exaggerated way, but it is grounded in what, for the most part, appears to be the physical society in which we live.  “For him these wounds were the keys to a new sexuality born from a perverse technology.” (13)

Ballard the author is aware of his initial skepticism.  He writes the piece with his acquired taste for such sexuality, aware that it was also very unusual for him at first.  He does not waste much time, however, for by the second chapter we are well immersed in the world of his and Vaughan’s sexualities. 

I believe that our relationship with technology is ripe for exploration.  It does appeal to a part of the mind not yet discovered, if simply because it describes objects we are so familiar with in such new ways. For example, when Ballard describes a fantasy he has of his wife engaging in sexual acts with another woman, he says: “Now and then I glanced through the curtains and watched them together, their bodies and fingers involved in the soft technology of Catherine’s breasts…” (33)