from Crash

J. G. BALLARD

Maybe you saw the movie; I hope you didn’t. Crash the movie is dreck; Crash the novel is pure butter. Written in 1973, Ballard’s novel traces the psychopathology of a modern world we are still emerging into. It’s as if he sat the adolescent version of late-century Western culture on his therapist’s couch and flawlessly predicted the neuroses of its adulthood. Through Ballard we see that the merging of technology and eros always involves a prosthetic interface, some augmentation or externalization of the body, be it an automobile or a computer monitor, through which we are forced to cathect in order to feel our own bodies. This is fetish in its true sense: the need for an external trigger, a gateway to the self that exists outside of the self. Desire emerges in a circuit, a passage, a trip, giving extra meaning to the word drive. If the threat of technology is that we become ever more onanistic, the greater threat is that we become onanists alienated from the very selves that are meant to give us pleasure.

This is the world already inhabited by the characters of Crash. Each is the victim, willing or not, of a series of car wrecks, and their individual and collective libidos grow increasingly dependent on the automobile, and the collision of automobiles, to facilitate their sexual response. In the excerpted scene that follows, in the backseat of a paraplegic crashvictim’s specially equipped vehicle, Ballard’s protagonist realizes that his old set of erotic triggers have been replaced by a new one. We, meanwhile, get a window on the fallout of a full-bore techno-fetish.

She lifted her left foot so that the leg brace rested against my knee. In the inner surface of her thigh the straps formed marked impressions, troughs of reddened skin hollowed out in the form of buckles and clasps. As I unshackled the left leg brace and ran my fingers along the deep buckle groove, the corrugated skin felt hot and tender, more exciting than the membrane of a vagina. This depraved orifice, the invagination of a sexual organ still in the embryonic stages of its evolution, reminded me of the wounds on my own body, which still carried the contours of the instrument panel and controls. I felt this depression on her thigh, the groove worn below her breast under her right armpit by the spinal brace, the red marking on the inside of her right upper arm—these were the templates for new genital organs, the molds of sexual possibilities yet to be created in a hundred experimental car crashes. Behind my right arm the unfamiliar contours of the seat pressed against my skin as I slipped my hand towards the cleft between her buttocks. The interior of the car was in shadow, concealing Gabrielle’s face, and I avoided her mouth as she lay back against the head-rest. I lifted her breast in my palm and began to kiss the cold nipple, from which a sweet odour rose, a blend of my own mucus and some pleasant pharmaceutical compound. I let my tongue rest against the lengthening teat, and then moved away and examined the breast carefully. For some reason I had expected it to be a detachable latex structure, fitted on each morning along with her spinal brace and leg supports, and I felt vaguely disappointed that it should be made of her own flesh. Gabrielle was sitting forward against my shoulder, a forefinger feeling along the inside of my lower lip, her nail against my teeth. The exposed portions of her body were joined together by the loosened braces and straps. I played with her bony pubis, feeling through the scanty hair over her crotch. As she sat passively in my arms, lips moving in minimal response, I realized this bored and crippled young woman found that the nominal junction points of the sexual act—breast and penis, anus and vulva, nipple and clitoris—failed to provide any excitement for us.

Through the fading afternoon light the airliners moved across our heads along the east-west runways of the airport. The pleasant surgical odour from Gabrielle’s body, the tang of the mustard leatherette, hung in the air. The chromium controls reared in the shadows like the heads of silver snakes, the fauna of a metal dream. Gabrielle placed a drop of spit on my right nipple and stroked it mechanically, keeping up the small pretence of this nominal sexual link. In return, I stroked her pubis, feeling for the inert nub of her clitoris. Around us the silver controls of the car seemed a tour de force of technology and kinaesthetic systems. Gabrielle’s hand moved across my chest. Her fingers found the small scars below my left collar bone, the imprint of the outer quadrant of the instrument binnacle. As she began to explore this circular crevice with her lips I for the first time felt my penis thickening. She took it from my trousers, then began to explore the other wound-scars on my chest and abdomen, running the tip of her tongue into each one. In turn, one by one, she endorsed each of these signatures, inscribed on my body by the dashboard and surfaces of my car. As she stroked my penis I moved my hand from her pubis to the scars on her thighs, feeling the tender causeways driven through her flesh by the handbrake of the car in which she had crashed. My right arm held her shoulders, feeling the impress of the contoured leather, the meeting points of hemispherical and rectilinear geometries. I explored the scars on her thighs and arms, feeling for the wound areas under her left breast as she in turn explored mine, deciphering together these codes of sexuality made possible by our two car crashes.

My first orgasm, within the deep wound on her thigh, jolted my semen along this channel, irrigating its corrugated ditch. Holding the semen in her hand, she wiped it against the silver controls of the clutch treadle. My mouth was fastened on the scar below her left breast, exploring its sickle-shaped trough. Gabrielle turned in her seat, revolving her body around me, so that I could explore the wounds of her right hip. For the first time I felt no trace of pity for this crippled woman . . .