It’s been a little bit since I wrote any thoughts on books. I’ve been reading some non-fiction, which I’m less inclined to write about, and I’ve been reading shakespeare, which I feel less qualified to write about, in relation to the wealth of analysis available. One thing I did just finish was JG Ballard’s Crash. Unlike most books ever written, I don’t think Crash is trying to be pleasant. There is no attempt to keep the conversation in the realm of typical pre 20th century fiction. Crash, instead, feels like conversing with a bulldozer. The prose is violent and materialistic and the subject matter ranges from perverse to vile.
The story is told from the point of a narrator, named after the author, who gets himself in a car crash. He recovers, but kills the husband and injures the wife driving in the other car. After the crash, the narrator, already a sexual deviant, finds automobiles, automobile crashes, and their aesthetics to be a wellspring of sexual energy which he slowly immerses himself in, starting by having an affair with the person who he hit, then getting involved with an ex-TV doctor, Vaughan, who introduces himself and some acquaintances who all feel similarly about automobiles. The book picks off from there and becomes this descent into a circus of human sexuality which struggles to find its logical end outside of death.
The book is one grotesque description of semen, seat leather, and brutal injuries after the next. It’s never without its beauty and cleverness, and Ballard does a good job of exploring a lot of different angles on the same theme, all while stepping toward an ending which both feels deviant and logical. The end scene I’m referring to is (spoilers), when the narrator has sex with Vaughan in the back of the car. There’s something very tender about it, despite everything gruesome about it, and it feels like one of the logical extremes that, at least some, are looking for. It seems to me that Vaughan is more troubled, so death or chasing the next dragon is always top of the list, but the narrator seems to have a different experience. He achieves in this scene a sort of completely asexual sex (or, better, an ahuman sex), void of the lust for flesh and libido and, instead, full of an abstract, symbolic, memory and personality driven hunger which, for one of the only times in the book, is described as love for the other individual. That being said, the book is told from the standpoint of the narrator, so, while most of the events can be taken without suspicion or doubt, the feelings and motivations conveyed should be scrutinized. While the ending does give some kind of resolution for the character of Vaughan, the narrator and the surrounding cast are left with really no real resolution. The resolution for the reader is a completed checklist of all the different psychological angles that Ballard sees reasonable to set up. Beyond that, I don’t think we get resolution. Any resolution would be disingenuous to the new plane of consciousness automobiles have opened up, and the metaphor which Ballard uses to exemplify the high tech human’s mind warp to the point beyond recognition.
I don’t think I totally follow all of Ballard’s leaps to these sexual extremes. For example, in the end, when the narrator’s wife is being followed by Vaughan, the narrator describes his and his wife’s acceptance of Vaughan killing her by crashing into her car. It’s understandable how many of these characters are in the mindframe that they’re in, but places like this seem to be set in an extreme which I don’t think is warranted by its framing; something which I think is one of the major strengths of the book.