Final Post on "Crash"

     

            Ballard is being disruptive in a Swiftian manner.  He creates a world in which the relationship between humans and machines is exaggerated and confused: a world that resembles our society, but one that must be understood metaphorically by the reader in order to grasp Ballard’s message.  He wrote Crash to provoke, and provocation was a part of his formula for satire.  He is critiquing contemporary societies by reproducing one that ostensibly bends the rules and logic of the former.  “The enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this immense motionless pause.” (151) I guess we are forced to ask the question: how different is Ballard’s London from our cities? and how different are we from Ballard or Vaughan? Does Vaughan exist in all of us?

            Building off that last point: does Vaughan exist or is he a character that Ballard (the character) creates after his car crash with Helen?  One of the many clues that suggests Vaughan’s artificial existence is his relationship with Ballard.  It’s as if the stronger Ballard gets, the weaker Vaughan gets: “…accepting now his own failure and my authority over him.” (195) This inverse relationship may suggest that Vaughan was a part of Ballard personality, and that as Ballard began to regain his own strengths and confidence, the weaker Vaughan became.  Ballard says, “Increasingly I was convinced that Vaughan was a project of my own fantasies and obsessions, and that in some way I had let him down.” (220) Also, I kept asking myself the question: how does Ballard (the character and not the narrator) know Vaughan's thoughts?  Especially as the novel develops Ballard becomes more and more omniscient in his relationship with Vaughan.  

In addition, time is confused purposely to create a disorienting affect.  At the end of chapter 19, Ballard is with Catherine in their apartment, or so we think.  He watches her as she moves about the apartment, and then she is suddenly in bed with him.  Although this transition is abrupt, the two moments are contained within the same room.  Then suddenly, as if the latter moments were imagined, Ballard is suddenly in his car with Catherine speeding “along the motorway together.” (181) This technique of confusing time to confuse the stories logic and chronology suggests that Ballard may have been imagining certain, if not all of the events that transpire in Crash.