Crash by J. G. Ballard (1973)

They say popular fiction is entertaining, while literature on the other hand is good for you, enjoyment being irrelevant or merely a bonus in the realm of high art. The pizza vs. broccoli theory of literature. I’m pretty sure this is wrong, not least because I find popular fiction boring, and have the most fun with unique and challenging works.

This leaves me wondering what to make of Crash, J. G. Ballard’s notorious novel about people who are sexually aroused by car accidents. I read it a few months ago and didn’t enjoy it, and even dismissed it as a failed experiment in conceptual fiction. But now I find that it’s still lodged in my mind like a psychic tumour that may or may not be benign. So I now think it must be a powerful work of literature, because what else can do that?

What it comes down to is that I no longer believe that the things I didn’t like about it justify a negative judgement on its worth as a work of art. Yes, it is tedious and repetitive. Yes, it is joyless and repugnant. But it turns out these are the things that make it so memorable and, at least in retrospect, stimulating.

Just on this basis it looks like excellent works of literary art need not be entertaining, delightful, or enjoyable. Of course, it’s obvious that there are great novels that are harrowing, sad, and depressing. That’s not what I’m on about. Those books are often compelling and dramatic, exciting in their artful construction and involving in their humane exploration of misery, depravity, etc. — and are thus in some sense entertaining. And we often care about the characters, or at least find them interesting. But Crash, on the contrary, is boring and alienating. It feels flat, it is unvarying in mood, uninteresting in plot, reliant on a gimmick from start to finish. The authorial voice is clinical and inhumane, and we don’t care about the characters (but it’s worse than that: the characters are barely even interesting). It is not particularly involving or compelling, and one reads on with only a mild curiosity about what will happen, perhaps because we already know. And yet, possibly for those very reasons, it really does capture something profound.

To say it’s profound looks like hand-waving, a mere gesture towards a proper identification of what makes it good. It is that, but it fits well in my case because I experienced the novel as somehow philosophical. I realized this when, in the days after I read it, I was trying and failing to shake off its lingering presence, and was at the same time becoming preoccupied with philosophy for the first time in many months, specifically social philosophy such as critical theory. If I had to boil it down I’d say the motivating question was something like: how did we get in this mess? It was as if the novel had revealed some deep thing that’s wrong with society, something whose details and causes I wanted to uncover. There was something about the book that felt real, despite its absurdity. The result was that I didn’t go back to fiction for a couple months and spent my reading hours with Adorno, Marx, and Nietzsche.

Perhaps, then, Crash is profound in that it is postmodern in more than just the formal sense. Its concerns are not with storytelling, or metafictionally with itself, so much as with the postmodern condition, i.e., with the real world we live in today (and have been living in since the seventies). The distinctions are fuzzy to me, and might not even matter, but it’s possible this makes it a modernist novel about the post-modern condition. And a moral one at that.

Stories with messages are not usually my cup of tea, but if Crash does indeed have a moral point, at least it’s not didactic. It beats us mercilessly into being horrified by the world instead of telling us why we should be. So what is the moral point? What is it we should be horrified by in the real world, according to Ballard? Since he has written about the book a few times, let us refer to the man’s own words:

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. In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other in the most urgent and ruthless way. 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

— J. G. Ballard’s 1995 introduction to Crash

I relate this to a point made somewhere by the philosopher John Gray, to the effect that science and technology are the only areas of human life that have seen progress, ever. We have not progressed ethically, politically, psychologically, or socially, except insofar as problems have been directly amenable to science and technology, and even that has been patchy.

What this means is that we are ill-equipped to deal with the accelerating rate of technical advancement. Rather, that advancement becomes part of a web of exploitation, violence, and alienation, and actually intensifies the dehumanization of personal relationships, work, and the built environment.

Crash shows this with its own careful logic. Ballard’s raw materials are the following observations:

• The titillation felt by some people when witnessing the aftermath of a car crash.
• The erotic glamour and excitement associated with mechanical speed, sports cars, etc., and the advertising around that.
• The pornification of sexual relationships: in the post-sixties West, sex as masturbation, i.e., mere selfish gratification.
• The objectification of the body with medical language in parallel with the commercial and technical vocabulary of cars.
• Celebrity culture.
• The alienating, antisocial, and inhuman — in a word, psychopathic — built environments of suburban highways, overpasses, slip roads, airports, anonymous office blocks and car parks (an inescapable infrastructure obliterating everything, built for machines rather than for people).

Critic Roger Ebert’s comments about David Cronenburg’s film adaptation could apply equally to the novel:

It’s like a porno movie made by a computer: It downloads gigabytes of information about sex, it discovers our love affair with cars, and it combines them in a mistaken algorithm.

— Roger Ebert

The means by which all this becomes in some sense cautionary is cognitive estrangement, a term coined by Darko Suvin to describe the practice in science fiction of confronting the reader with a different reality, which shines a new light on their actual reality. You could also call it illuminating defamiliarization. It is achieved in Crash with the gathering together of the above elements under the original hypothesis (novum) of car crash fetishism, and with a pervasive affectlessness: a lack of emotion in the narration and in the characters. Natural concerns about suffering are set aside in favour of an imaginative aestheticization of sex and mutilation, in which the chaotic amalgamation of broken bodies and broken car parts is described in terms of a kind of artistic formalism. The result is an estrangement that is disturbing and not merely ridiculous.¹

So it can be read as a cautionary tale of dehumanization by means of sex and technology. However, those words of his from 1995, twenty years after he wrote the novel, might amount to a post-hoc rationalization, or an interpretation, with no more or less legitimacy than the interpretations of critics and appreciative readers. I happen to think it’s an interesting interpretation, but I doubt it’s a description of what he set out to do when he wrote the novel. Probably nearer to describing what he was doing is his comment elsewhere that Crash was a “psychopathic hymn.” He had noticed some things about the world and extrapolated them into psychopathy, but for artistic reasons rather than to send a message. It’s worth noting that he later regretted referring to it as a cautionary tale.

So that interpretation might be a red herring. It is certainly there to be dug out, but it is not central, and it can obscure what is important about the novel: it presents an alternative way of thinking about technology, in which the familiar dichotomy of ethically uncertain human beings making use of neutral technologies that can equally be used for good or ill is undermined. Technology is as pathological as we are.

And seen through a Cronenburgian lens you could even say that in imagining an alternative aesthetics, or a world in which morality gives way to aesthetics — it gives us an amoral vision in which the complex truth of our relationship with technology might, with a suitable twisting of reality, be positively embraced, since it is unavoidable anyway. However, it has to be said that this attitude is quite psychopathic itself.

I think Ballard was giving his dark fanstasies free reign, going beyond good and evil, and it is understandable that he sought to reassure the world later on by saying it was cautionary.

But maybe that leaves us with a mere specimen of the postmodern condition rather than a great work of art. Well, I think that would be going too far, because Crash is in actuality an authentic artistic response to the author’s milieu. We cannot complain that Ballard does not hold our hands and tell us what to think, and we cannot complain that the book has mixed feelings about its subject matter (the loving descriptions of cars are not merely feigned: when it came to cars, Ballard was a lover, not — as some of us might hope — a hater).

Anyway, back to whether I like it or not. I have to admit that although its repetitiveness is a countervailing force, the book is in fact impressively, even amusingly perverse. The trouble is, it does wear off quickly. I was very close to abandoning the book a few times. My thinking was something like, J. G., if you tell me about a ‘junction’ of wounds and mangled car parts one more time I’m throwing this book out the window. Maybe that’s another strength: Ballard — and this goes back to my initial puzzlement — is not an entertainer: he’s deadly serious and he’s not going to stop when it stops being fun.

But it is fun for a while:

The elegant aluminized air-vents in the walls of the X-ray department beckoned as invitingly as the warmest organic orifice.

I doubt I’m the only one to find this funny. And Ballard was a really clever guy, so it seems odd to claim that he was not aware of this humour, which is peppered throughout the book. But the novel is so unremitting, the approach so single-minded, and the purpose so serious, that I am tempted to make that claim.

Probably closer to the truth is that he was well aware of the humour, and did his best to fend it off, since the effectiveness of the work, i.e., the cognitive estrangement described above, depends on making the ridiculous disturbing. We are meant to take it seriously.

In any case, when reading it I clung to every bit of humour I could find so as not to succumb completely to exhaustion and frustration.

I want to address one more thing. In a few places online I’ve seen reviews of Crash that misinterpret it. They seem to think it is a genuine exploration of a real paraphilic sexual preference, which they identify as symphorophilia. I think this is totally wrong. The whole point of the book is to exaggerate things about society precisely by describing an impossible perversion. It is a crazy metaphor. If symphorophiliacs are real, then Ballard was either not aware of them or was simply not interested. What you find in Crash is imaginatively horrifying, psychopathic perversity described as if it were real.

In conclusion, the book is unpleasant, and might not even be good for you. But it’s unique and interesting, and, in some way that I’ve been trying to work out in this review, very powerful. So…

Recommended, with reservation.

(1) Darko Suvin, “Estrangement and Cognition”