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Editorial Review Product Description
J.G. Ballard's novel Crash has enjoyed a substantial underground reputation for almost three decades. Now, filmmaker David Cronenberg's unique voice and powerful vision combine with Ballard's brilliantly disturbing work. Opening this fall and starring James Spader and Holly Hunter, Cronenberg's Crash is a powerful study of eroticism. Color images from the film enhance this text.Amazon.com Review
J. G. Ballard's graphic, violent novel is controversialwherever it is read, even on Amazon.com's own Web page! The book'scharacters are obsessed with automobile accidents and are determined tonarrate the horrors of the car crash as luridly as possible. In thewords of the novel's protagonist, the wounds caused by automobilecollisions are "the keys to a new sexuality born from a perversetechnology." Read this novel and learn why David Cronenberg, who hadpreviously adapted DeadRingers and Naked Lunch for thescreen, fought to turn it into his latest film. ... Read more Customer Reviews (128) 
Cars can be very bad for your mental health.
This is my first Ballard book. I was told Ballard was anti-tech before I read it. First I read it a third of the way through and than glanced at the rest. I read many of those reviews here and then read it again, speeding through it in a calculated fashion. Then i saw the movie. Crash was anti-tech, but it was really saying that there are two types of people in this modern world: those who are crazy and those who are going to be crazy or want to be crazy. So the story line is people mystified/fascinated by cars and wrecks and these near death or death experiences heighten the libido. It's about fate and that one minute u r here and the next u r not. It's about isolation. Technology/cars isolate people and make them crazy. The key line in the book to me was when after the wreck the character Ballard said he never felt so alive. So we are all excitement junkies and we really need to relax, slow down, walk, and enjoy the sunshine and the merriment of healthy friendships.
I strongly advise those wanting to tackle Crash to view the movie Crash! 1971 (16 minutes) that is floating around the net. It is narrated by Ballard and he explains the concepts he employed in his novel. Now the book makes a lot of sense.
A Review by Dr. Joseph Suglia
"How does it feel / to be driven away from your own steering wheel?"
--Captain Beefheart
"If I can count six steeds,
Is their power not also my own?
I run forward and am a genuine man,
As if I had twenty-four legs."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I
An obsession, unless derailed, may be infinitely protracted. J.G. Ballard's CRASH (1973) is the record of an endlessly self-perpetuating obsession. Its sole, intense preoccupation is with the point at which ****** and automobile wreck merge: a new form of eroticism that would not be based upon, or governed by love, jealousy, passion, or the causality of reproduction. In a consumerist society in which every form of sexual gymnastic has seemingly been exhausted, the automobile disaster is the one orgasmic event that could rupture the everyday and multiply sexual possibilities; it opens up the possibility of a stylized and formalized, violent sexuality, "divorced from any possible physical expression" (35); it gives birth to new conceptualized sex-acts "abstracted from all feeling," from "carrying any ideas or emotions with which we cared to freight them" (129). But this is not to say that the book's focus is exclusively or primarily sexual. Sexuality in Crash serves as a metaphor that exceeds the dimensions of sex: it stands for the pleasures and experiences of the body mediated by automotive technology.
Crash envisions the becoming-body of technology and the becoming-technological of the body. As the obsessive martyr of automotive sexuality (a sexuality that is inseparable from photography and cinematography--in other words, cinematic scopophilia), Dr. Robert Vaughan, former computer scientist and minor television celebrity, charts out the manner in which the automobile reshapes and instrumentalizes the human body. Listening to police broadcasts on the radio to disclose the locations of accident sites, Vaughan moves breathlessly from one scene of metallic destruction to the next, witnessing the aftermath of careening vehicles that have coupled with one another, hoping to unveil the truth of the body in an age of all-embracing technologization. Vaughan sexually experiments with and within automobiles, both "whole" and "distorted," visualizing and staging infinite permutations of the car-collisions that he witnesses. He compiles an almanac of wounds inflicted by automobile accidents, "the keys to a new sexuality born from a perverse technology" (13). Vaughan, a scientist of automotive eroticism, is attracted to the scars, deformities, and disfigurements of car crash victims. Vaughan maniacally follows every car-crash victim in the novel--particularly the narrator and his wife, Catherine--with camera equipment, photographing them. What interests Vaughan, however, is not the historical existences of these characters, but the relationship between anonymous individuals and automobiles. A visionary prophet and pioneer, he heralds an "autogeddon" in which humanity would be simultaneously destroyed in a global car wreck.
His project is not merely to reach the ultimate pinnacle of erotic excitation, but to envisage the "experience" of his own mortality--an event that would presage the destruction of Western civilization--in a spectacular automobile accident. His single-minded fanaticism impels him to rehearse his own death in collisional union with a limousine transporting Elizabeth Taylor, a death that would jaunt him into a spectacular space in which his body would become pure image. Through his death, Vaughan dreams of derealizing and reincarnating himself by merging with the time and space of the image: the counter-world to all lived engagements which the Situationist philosopher Guy Debord described as "the society of the spectacle." All lived experience in contemporary society, Debord argues, exists only to be transformed into an image. A homogeneous stream of images constitutes a world correlative to our own, an autonomous sphere of "objectivity." Vaughan projects himself into the counter-world of the spectacle in order to remerge in it, mediating his dreams of a violent new sexuality.
Vaughan's gospeller is the narrator, James Ballard, whose car collides with that of a woman, Dr. Helen Remington, with whom he later has a sexual liaison. The car-crash jolts the narrator out of his everyday world and transformatively resexualizes his experience of the world: "This obsession with the sexual possibilities of everything around me had been jerked loose from my mind by the crash" (29). Certainly, the crash has released the possibility of new pleasures through its projection of a futural technologized sexuality (boredom weighs heavily on the existences of the characters). But more to the point, the crash frees the narrator up for a vigorous engagement with his own body as an automobile (he effectively "dates" his car experienced as his body). When Ballard claims, unforgettably, that the "crash was the only real experience" that he "had been through for years" (39), he intends an experience of auto-affection that transcends sexuality in the restricted sense of the word. A "new junction" between his "own body and the automobile" [55] is formed.
By presenting this junction, CRASH invites the reader to think of technology not as an instrument exterior to the body, but as a supplementary extension of human flesh: the hyper-sexuality of the automobile disaster expands the dimensions of the human body and widens the self's spheres of activity. The metaphor of extension, however, is ultimately not adequate to describe this expansion. The human body melds with the vehicle that would carry it along and is reconstituted in the process: the vehicle supersedes the authority of the driver.
The world of CRASH is one in which human beings are not the most important landmarks or points of orientation: "I realized that the human inhabitants of this technological landscape no longer provided its sharpest pointers, its keys to the borderzones of identity" (48). Technology reforms the human body, opening up new chains of erotic signification and new avenues of pleasure; technology reappears as the core of human nature, not as "something" divorced from, and appended to nature. New apertures are formed. New flows and fluids spurt. Now the body is reconceptualized in terms of somatic possibilities, a pathology of never-before-imagined sensations and experiences. One may no longer conceive of the wounds that sprout on the car-crash victim as forms of deformation. After Ballard's car collides with and kills the husband of Dr. Helen Remington, the impact of the collision is defined in Ballard's "wounds, like the contours of a woman's body remembered in the responding pressure of one's own skin for a few hours after a sexual act" (28). The instrument panel impresses itself upon his torso; his body is stamped by the car's metallic sheath. We see that the car-crash marks the human body in an essential way, allowing it to expand in all directions.
[I deleted two paragraphs for the sake of moral decency.]
This is the message that is everywhere implicitly articulated in the novel: The logical consequence of inhabiting a culture dominated by technology is the eroticization of this same culture. As fruits of this culture, traditional morality and the psychopathology that serves it can only represent this eroticism under the rubric of perversion.
Dr. Joseph Suglia
At the speed of light, in my car...
Crash is controversial, and Ballard meant it to be, but that should not distract us from noticing that it's incredibly well written. In Crash, people who have survived car crashes deal with their trauma by embracing and sexualizing the very crashes that maimed them (mentally and physically).
Ballard's descriptions of post-traumatic experience ring true. Sexual pleasure is the only thing Jim seems to value, and after his accident he unsurprisingly finds solace in more & more complicated & specific fantasies--he finds in sex the opposite of pain. We are given indications that before his accident, Jim had no human emotional connection beside the shallow consolations of sexual activity. As he recovers, we see (even if he doesn't) how his worldview, full of cold technology and the constant screaming pursuit of pleasure, set the limits of his ability to recover from the emotional and spiritual damage of the accident.
As I moved through Crash, I could feel Jim's superficiality--his desire for sensual escape from reality--inexorably drive him toward Vaughn's messianic fetishism. By obscuring the true existential horrors that should constitute trauma, he is unable to heal in any meaningful way. Vaughn's story ends predictably, and leaves Jim unable to do anything but dwell on it.
The erotic delirium of a car crash
`Crash' is an eminent example of J.G. Ballard's literary invention: `psycho science fiction', SF about the human mind and its dark unconscious pulses.
In `Crash' the obvious link between `car and penis', between `speed, status and sex' isturned into a perverse psychopathic obsession linking car crashes and orgasms.
The view that `(the motor-car is) the sexual act's greatest and only true locus' becomes a morbid delirium: `the crash between our two cars was a model of some ultimate and yet undreamt sexual union.'
The book's main character with his body covered by scars and self-inflicted wounds, sees `the sex act as the climax of his own death-collision'.
Half of the book is filled with explicit descriptions of hetero and homo sex gymnastics and profuse semen ejaculations. Today they are not shocking anymore, but rather boring.
J. G. Ballard's statement that car crashes are `almost the only way in which one can now legally take another person's life' is obviously not true. There exists a far more efficient and murderous `legal' means: war.
In this sense, J.G. Ballard's aggressive and menacing prose resembles in many ways the ecstatic and erotic evocations of war scenes by the German author Ernst Jünger, whose skin was also heavily marked by combat scars. Jünger's prose is a pure glorification of the war scene evocating the delirious excitement of being exposed to its deadly dangers: kill or be killed. However, Jünger's novels don't contain the suicidal component.
J. G. Ballard treats rather sympathetically a man with a sick and morbid mind, who uses his own cars as suicide bombs and those of his victims as coffins, and all that for the sole purpose of having the ultimate delirious erotic sensation.
I prefer by far the author's treatment of the same car crash subject in `Concrete Island'.
Only for the aficionados.
GOVT490-Crash Review-GA
Since I've never read a novel by Ballard before, I have no way of measuring it against any of his other books. Needless to say, Crash by J. G. Ballard is a disturbing novel with a bleak vision of modern life and a fascinating take on the relation between man and technology by means of exploring the eroticism of the automobile.
Ballard writes explicitly about the world of individuals who get off on car crashes, and sexual acts involving, or taking place, in automobiles.The backdrop of the novel is Shepperton on the outskirts of London.The characters, including the protagonist, Ballard, become increasingly obsessed with the violent sexuality of car crashes.The interaction in which car and body leave their marks on each other is narrated as luridly as possible.
A great deal of this book centers almost exclusively on esoteric automobile components and body parts.It is not a pleasurable read, extremely challenging, not just because of the graphic sex and violence, but also due to the clinical language Ballard uses to disengage the reader from the characters and their actions.The injuries are distant, the sex is robotic, and the descriptive phraseology repetitive, such as "mucus" and "chromium".
Ballard definitely takes you on the exhilarating journey that explores sexual fetishisms connected to the car, and if he's aim was to unsettle people, he succeeded quite well.The book describes the relationship between a number of individuals where technology mixed with sexual desire and release can bring like minded people together. The reader experiences the alienation and emptiness that is at the heart of the story, which by no means would be considered erotic.The lives depicted within the pages depend on more and more extreme highs and drugs to keep the sexual tension going.Nowhere does love figure in this universe of motorways, airports, roundabouts and 20th century technology.Simply put, the book is about the dehumanization and depersonalization of the society and the glorification of the machine.
This book is not for the faint of heart or for those who are offended by explicit sex scenes. Worth a read, but only ONCE.
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