ILX Book Club: J.G. Ballard - Crash

Sorry this ws late, but lets have a go now.

I read Crash myself years ago - my first by him, and possibly my favourite (I know everyone else keeps going about the greatness of the short stories so I am going to try and correct this sometime).

This film has Ballard talking about some of the ideas underpinning the book. I guess I would love to talk about how well the ideas hold up today, whether they hang together with the characters he writes up, and the episodes he conjures up. I remember loving the whole concept and then sorta losing it with the whole celebrity stuff -- not bcz I was 'alienated' by the relentless pontification surrounding celebrity culture; it was more to do with not really being that aware of the celebrities they were having fantasies about.

I'm doing a lot of remembering because, well, I thought I had a copy but I don't. So I hope to come back.

Thread for noms, for spring: ILX Book Club Nominations (Rolling thread)

Good work xyz, I forgot all about this with the outage. I'm cracking on with The Art of Fielding right now, but will get into the antithesis afterwards.

i just picked my copy up from the hall downstairs. I haven't seen the films. I have become increasingly convinced recently that urban driving is the result of sexually-rooted psychopathologies, even tho I'm not sure I'd recognise one of those if it came through the door whistling Dixie.

Film. Not films.

there are, in fact, two Crash films:

Crash (1996) dir. David Cronenberg
Crash! (1971) dir. Harley Cokliss

xyzzzz__ I think I've maybe got a spare - I'll check - if I do, I can mail it to you or we can have a micro-fap handover.

Cool, do check and we can have a micro-fap handover. Think I have yr email somewhere..

there's an 'atrocity exhibition' film too:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0197256/

found that spare copy - let's do it - webmail should work & London Bridge area early evenings good for me this week.

Thanks. webmail sent.

So, three chapters in ... and yes, it's grotesque and disturbing, but nearly four decades of subsequent exploration of similar themes in arts and other literature mean that it can't be particularly shocking. These are things you're allowed to think and say today, if not do, which perhaps wasn't so in 1973. Transgression happens elsewhere now.

One surprise is the slight imprecision of language. I'd been expecting everything very clinical, all technical terms and brand names - a kind of consumer-minimal lexicon - whereas instead there's some surplus of adjectives and a not-insignificant prettifying imagery ('in the fading evening light, rainbows began to circle her weak ankles'). Just as well, because any more starkness would be unbearable.

Similarly, I'd been expecting little characterisation but it's been fine so far. There are two relationships set up for exploration, neither pleasant as such both intriguing. And hints at a few others. We shall see how they develop; I hope they do, I can enjoy a formal exercise for a chapter or two, or a short story, but if that's what the book is to become I'll be disappointed.

Two more chapters, our main character developing 'nicely' - his accident has been an effective inciting incident; we see his wife's attitude to him change, he sees the world differently too. It's not plot as such, except insofar as character is plot, it's more milling around and reflection. The stalking thing which has just occurred promises action of a sort, though I dare say it will be psychological - if this turns into pulpy chase scenes and shoot-outs I will be surprised.

He has a nice eye for detail, and employs it economically. I notice particularly with the other people, who get perhaps one physical feature each - blondeness, a red plastic raincoat, some scarring. It feels almost like this is a concession made reluctantly in order that the whole thing not he entirely in the mind.

it can't be particularly shocking

Okay, so that wasn't true. I took the book to the canteen at work. I eat my soup neatly with one hand while propping the book open in the other; the narrator masturbates furtively while steering his victim's widow into a reënactment of the accident. What's more inappropriate? All I can think is 'what if some knows what I'm doing?!'. I'll forego tomorrow's chapter, I think.

pubis pubis pubis natal cleft pubis.

loins

Basically. I'm really enjoying this now. I'm getting a very DeLillovian mood from it now, all the floodlit, empty modernist architecture. As I mentioned, the colour details are essential for me; Seagrave's blond ponytail this morning. I wish there were more of them. The Northolt Stadium section was great, birthdate something about the lack of detail that anaesthetises - however well it reflects the narrator's state of mind, it does make me wonder to what extent the vivid imagery is my own work rather than his.

There's certainly a drinking game here, although I think you'd get hammered pretty quickly if "pubis" were a trigger. I suggest:

one shot for apex used of the body - "the left apex of her mouth", "the apex of her mouth", "the apex of her vulva";
one shot for a strange throwaway reference to disability - "her small son's defective hearing aid", "mental defectives drowning together stoically in roadside industrial canals", "as if two cripples had committed rape on each other";
two shots for "instrument binnacle".

Five chapters in and I don't find the prose shocking at all, although I have all but lolled a couple of times. It's because its only pornography in the barest of senses, there's no erotic charge in the collision of medical and vehicular terminology. And despite what the narrator says there's no sense that the characters are really getting any excitment out of it either - they seem like thrill seekers, not thrill finders. There is a sense of flat affect about the whole thing, only occasionally in the lists of imagined collisions do the descriptions blossom into a manic burroughsian fever dream. There's another sense of remove in the references to "the actress Elizabeth Taylor", as though we don't know who she is and must constantly be informed in cold newspaper prose.

None of that is a criticism, however. Although the prose is far more auto than it is erotic, it seems to fit the subject perfectly, I can't really imagine it being written any other way.

Seagrave's boorishness did make me laugh - casually dragging on a joint; 'What do you do for a brunette Seagrave?' 'Shove it up her arse.'. Anything unclinical I'm loving.

Haven't watched the film linked in the first post but I have the embarrassing film tie-in edition, with an intro by Ballard where he says he uses the car "not only as a sexual image, but as a total metaphor for man's life in today's society." I just wonder, how does that work? I mean it's easy to say man is a DEADLY MACHINE, wielding OUTRAGEOUS POWER far beyond his ability to control it. It's a somewhat unsubtle and uninformative though.

in the novel, he seems to be turning the characters INTO cars - they're always leaking and going in for a service

I've just passed the climax; they have nothing left to do now but die, or be cured. I'm tempted to finish it during my drive home tonight; there'd be a certain romance to it, the book propped forever open at the last page by the undercarriage of an articulated lorry.

I'm enjoying the fantastical events in mundane settings later in the book. Not the endless scenes around the airport, which have always been otherworldly, but the acid trip along the Northolt expressway, or the steering a cripple around the Earl's Court motorshow to the attendant's embarrassment.

the book propped forever open at the last page by the undercarriage of an articulated lorry.

you forgot to mention the globes of semen scattered across the instrument binnacle.

pours 'stiff' drink

the long acid trip sequence is some of the best drug writing i know of - really captures that overwhelming, simulanteous rush of pleasure and panic - which i guess is a sensation that car drivers can also feel, along certain stretches of endless highway

Bye bye, Crash, it was fun spending time with you.

The book's marvellous, and was a little surprising to me in that the characters did develop, did have hidden internal lives, did have normal human interactions, etc. I feel like I should put inverted commas round every word there, because obviously these things all occur within extremely restricted, stylised parameters, but I got no sense that this was because of limitations in the author's ability, purely that it's what the story demanded. And it's a proper story too, with a clear and inevitable narrative unfolding. Of sorts.

I do like the world he's created, it's always his strength, and the ambiance from airport terminals, all-night supermarkets, multi-storey car parks, flyover decks, plastic-and-chrome furniture, breakers' yards and deserted reservoirs is extremely evocative. And not a little DeLillwegian, as I noted already. I long to cruise Hayes and Feltham tonight, to view them with new eyes.

Really enjoyed reading the posts.

Thx to woof for the bk. Think I'm suffering from a reading block at the moment tho'. Never had one before but I'd read a few sentences, enjoy and then somehow find it a complete struggle to keep going. Now I just stare out of windows in trains :-(

Hope I'll weather this out soon, in which case I'll come back to the thread.

I liked this piece by Iain Sinclair on the Abel Ferrara film, employs the hallucinatory style that Ballard uses. And Sinclair did write a book on the Cronenberg version of Crash...

Or at least that's what it reminded me of when I read it two months ago, can't make through this at the moment :-(

I really enjoyed reading this again, but I have nothing to say about it. Sort of feels like I'm just walking round a total object - it knows what it is, what it's doing, it's an amazing construction, I slide off it if I try to engage. (all that spunk on the binnacle). Like it's such perfect flat Ballard, I sort of veer between it giving me this unsettling, deep sense that we live in an insane world that he gets uniquely well, & then laughter at this superfamiliar but brilliant ice prose describing extremity & running through Ballard-bingo tropes (many mentioned above, plus media-career man moves into ambit of charismatic stranger). I love it but I feel like we're just there staring at one another.

smegma.

swollen breasts spurting liquid faeces

Strange geometries of flesh and chrome.

Enjoyed it also and I suppose I have similar thoughts. Re: the insane world though, i didn't get that quite so much. I mean it is, of course, but it's described so naturally and honestly that I just accepted it on its own terms. It also seemed like a thing-in-itself, not a parody or extrapolation of this terrible awful modern world we live in, so in terms of its political pretensions it didn't really work for me. (However it did seem like a whole world - I had this vague memory, perhaps from my first reading but probably from when I saw the film, that it was just Vaughan's small coterie who were afflicted by this deviancy; this time I definitely got the sense that the whole world was involved, only a few policemen and ambulance attendants holding out against the madness.)

acid trip is obv the highlight, too.

it's been weirdly difficult to get a copy. i read this a long time ago & have no memory of an acid trip! i think also the film has eclipsed my memory of the book. little late to the game but looking forward to rereading

i've only just started as well, rayuela. enjoying it. fuckin binnacles tho. ar, cap'n, fine bit a smegma on ye binnacle, thar.

also "vestibule of her vulva". when objectifying metaphors go wrong. "If you'd just like to insert yourself into the vestibule, sir, someone will attend to you shortly, thanking you."

it's described so naturally and honestly that I just accepted it on its own terms. It also seemed like a thing-in-itself, not a parody or extrapolation of this terrible awful modern world we live in, so in terms of its political pretensions it didn't really work for me

Yeah, I feel like as an argument it's not really there - it works for me more as a kind of overlay - like you stare into this coherent, precise, psychotic world & then it jars or shoves the logic of 'sane' world out of the way for a while, and makes cars/roads/bodies look a lot stranger.

I never really feel like I'm being hectored by Ballard, or that he's telling me anything about politics - he doesn't really offer much alternative to urban psychopathology + permanent apocalypse + surrealist fractures. It's the normal state of the world (or occult truth of the world) for him maybe.

In the introduction to my edition he does say it's a political novel, though (as well as a pornographic one). But yes it's difficult to read in that way, it's certainly not a polemic, and you can't really take it seriously as a direct metaphor or analogy.

Ok, time to write up some impressions so far. I'm about half way through. Hadn't read Crash before, have read a fair bit of Ballard. Apologies for being such a fuckin Cliff's Notes reader:

what woof said about him and the work just staring at each other. I assume that comes from having read it once, knowing its impact, and therefore it's become a thing, rather than the original experience. But that statement worked in another way for me as well, because fairly early on I felt that what I was reading was predominantly a collage, almost pictorial in its juxtapositions of oil, human secretions of urine, sperm, mucus, intersections of chrome and human contours, lines of wounds. Apart from the development of this to an extreme, there is no real change in what's being presented. It exists in a single space, and is there to be looked at, as much as to be experienced over the time of a narrative. Think I'll go into this a bit more later in relation to something else.

At first I wrote that I liked his forced metaphors "the crashed bodies of package tourists, like a haemorrhage of the sun", wounds like flowers etc, apartment like an upended glass coffin, the way he'll work the material into rather crunching similes that draw attention to themselves. I'm not sure I'd put it like that now. I'd probably prefer to say that these metaphors are not actually metaphors, but transformations. I know, I know, there's an argument to say that's the case for all metaphors, but the terms of the metaphors provide the landscape, the metaphors are not subsidiary to the terms of the originating reality.

Yep, what Ward said above about humans being mechanised, people have chrome smiles, or hard facial carapaces etc. ('I outstared Karen with an effort. She watched me like a predatory animal behind the silver bars of her mouth'). It also works the other way round - with Ballard the character thinking his sperm can bring a car to life - the mechanical is made organic. Or is it? Because this is a specific fantasy, it isn't real, and I think the question of whether this is a two-way process wrt to cars and humans, or one-way (just humans becoming assimilated and written upon by cars) is reasonably crucial, although not a moral question. That is to say, Ballard doesn't suggest that retaining the human is somehow more worthwhile than it being totally assimilated - the question is interpretative.

As always with Ballard, the whole thing is incredibly single-minded - it's one of the things I like best about him. An accumulation and intensifying of iterated language - an insistent tribal drumbeat (doesn't he always get the sun to drum in The Drowned World?). Get rid of all tradition, sentiment and history. Just recalibrate humans according to this world I have derived from our world - this is a common, but in this case intensified to a totally transformative level, form of science fiction. Again, by just having three or four elements (humans, death, sex, cars), he can slough off all the irrelevant stuff: parades of conventional anger and emotion are totally meaningless (as Ballard the character realises at one point).

What is the nature of this recalibration? Is it just something subjective, in this case a perversion? Clearly not in terms of the novel (it doesn't allow any other terms - that single-mindedness). The question is then whether we see the characters as deviating from something that can sensibly termed human. The answer again is clearly no, right? There is no sense of what it means to be human. This is why the external perception of the camera and film is so important - this is the objective representation. And the objective representation (not our self-defining sentimental weight of narrative memory) is of car and human mutual definition. I was reading an article by Ian Hacking, where he wrote 'I sometimes encourage the idea that memory itself is more relational than solipsistically individual' - this fits here.

This is not merely a psychic experience, or rather the psychic is predominant and defines the physical. Wounds and contusions as flowers and living things are symbols of this, but also presumably intended to show what a fecund and Edenic landscape this is (Eden Park in SuperCannes another version of this?). The unscathed human is meaningless because pre-developed. Crash victims are hyper developed creatures, as presented by Ballard - 'the scars on his mouth carried his face beyond ordinary feeling'.

So yeah, i think it's definitely asking to be taken on its own terms.

The book's single minded in other ways. It just takes pretty much on the A40, which leads to an airport (at where I presume RAF Northolt is now), with an apartment and a couple of other floating locations, never far from the main ones, chucked in. Similarly, there is only one sort of accident - the car accident - and only one death - the death by car.

Think it's fair to say that I probably disagree, Ismael, with the sense that these characters have 'inner lives'. In fact the destruction of an inner narrative (we can only have a narrative of wounding and intermingling with a car, and this must be recorded so it is our objective reality), makes this book unusually anti-Romantic I think. There is no alienation from nature, and as I've said already I think that memory, self-definition, is more relational or contextual than individual. As a consequence, to go back to an earlier strand, the narrative of the novel is more or less meaningless as an expression of time. As with his other novels, time kind of dissolves as the human psyche under extreme circumstances is drilled down into. There is no development of the self as such, just an alienation from our convention. Again, it's one of the things I like about Ballard, he's so non-complacent: the extension of his ideas will affect everything, including the vehicle of those ideas. It's why one slightly counter-productive feeling I can have when I read non-short story Ballard is 'yeah, yeah, I get it already!'. This in a sense is why Crash the novel, that ultimate Romantic concept, doesn't work as a novel. He can be a bit boring in that respect, but as I say, this insistence is impressively non-complacent. That you get it doesn't matter, that you are made to keep on getting it to greater and greater extremes. In a sense the philosophy of the subject doesn't really matter to me when I read Ballard, what matters is the insistence on the extreme. PUSH IT FURTHER PUSH IT FURTHER. And he pretty much always obliges.

Anything else? Yeah, I guess the insistent repetition of car and human anatomy helps give the feeling of an instruction manual, a dissection (which is what it is - The Kindness of Women by Ballard is great here). And I love the way the notion of the car accident is so inclusive, and thus a genuine method of armageddon. Right at the beginning he includes tourists, children in cars, all passengers and drivers, a global phenomenon.

Apologies for the length. Been storing up. Will now finish. Looking fwd to the acid trip.

incidentally, any political significance escapes me as well, other than as a phatic expression of the work in general.

Very much liked the analysis of the slow motion replay of the test crash - where by minute analysis of the impact motions a dummy produces "a pose of almost aristocratic disdain"" to its head. Or images like "his decapitated wife, hands raised prettily in front of her neck".

those are great posts, fizzles.

v. much agree that this isn't a novel of character or interior lives, and that ballard is def pushing an anti-romantic and anti-humanist rhetoric - some of the language reminds me of foucault's, things like "As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end."

absolutely, great posts, & re this:

fairly early on I felt that what I was reading was predominantly a collage, almost pictorial in its juxtapositions of oil, human secretions of urine, sperm, mucus, intersections of chrome and human contours, lines of wounds. Apart from the development of this to an extreme, there is no real change in what's being presented. It exists in a single space, and is there to be looked at, as much as to be experienced over the time of a narrative.

yes, I did have the idea in my mind that it's like walking round a sculpture - seeing the same elements from lots of different angles (which puts it close to The Atrocity Exhibition, I guess) (and the sculpture's staring back at you. offering a challenge at the same time as not caring. Though that's not really what scultpures do i guess).

Politics of crash - possibly just part of campaign for compulsory seatbelts in the UK? Ballard's kids still quite young at this point, may have felt moved to write something to tie in with clunk-click adverts & J Saville's death/injury erotics. Dunno, haven't thought that one through.

it's no secret that ballard felt great kinship w/ the surrealists, so ye,s this sense of the novel as an artwork/artefact/collage/scuplture def makes sense - and also ties in w/ the actual crash exhibition that he staged a cpl of years before publishing Crash.

Eh, what was this?

http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/001/001/articles/13_sford/index.php

Fascinating!

yes, the exhibition must have been rattling around my mind too.

Fizzles's Kindness of Women ref reminded me as well that the Crash section is one of the strangest parts of that book - remapping Crash back on to his own life.

I know it isn't strictly speaking relevant, at all, but I am just going to link to Ballard on CSI because I like it.

Vaughan as suggested by automated police composite sketch software:

http://thecomposites.tumblr.com/post/17275656447/vaughn-crash-jg-ballard-his-exhausted-face-with

automated