126. Crash by JG Ballard

Crash by JG Ballard, the book that later became the David Cronenberg film, and which explored, as Ballard put it, ‘the latent sexual content of the automobile crash’, had some rather personal origins. It started life as a short story, ‘Crash!’ in 1968, then became an exhibition of real crashed cars curated by Ballard (accompanied by a topless hostess) in 1969. Then, about a year prior to the publication of the novel in 1973, it manifested itself as a real automobile accident. Ballard suffered a tyre blow-out while travelling at speed in his Ford Zephyr, crossed the central reservation, flipped over and careered upside-down into the oncoming traffic. Luckily he escaped uninjured. His brush with death happened just as he completed the book, and for so personal a subject it is perhaps unsurprising that the narrator of Crash is called — James Ballard.

Ballard loved cars but wished at the same time to make explicit their connection with death. In the context of the so-called ‘pandemic’ that is sweeping the world at the moment it is interesting to read Ballard’s own definition of a pandemic:

Crash, of course, is not concerned with an imaginary disaster, however imminent, but with a pandemic cataclysm that kills hundred of thousands of people each year and injures millions. Do we see, in the car crash, a sinister portent of a nightmare marriage between sex and technology? Will modern technology provide us with hitherto undreamed-of means for tapping our own psychopathologies?

Consulted:
Ballard, JG: introduction to Crash (1973)
Ballard, JG: The Atrocity Exhibition (1970)