Flamingo 1993 PB, art by Larry Rostant
A year or so after the Cronenberg film of Crash came out, I went into a branch of Waterstones and bought Ballard’s latest paperback, Cocaine Nights. The man behind the counter asked, with a somewhat puzzled air, what I’d made of Crash, which led me to feel I was going to have to justify this suddenly re-controversialised novel. Unused to unexpected conversations as I am, and certainly on difficult subjects, I had no idea what to say. Now, a little less than thirty years later, I thought (in l’esprit d’un très long escalier) I’d give it a go.
Crash the novel has its origins in “Crash!” the story that formed part of Ballard’s collection of condensed novels, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970). Written in 1968, “Crash!” takes the form of the sort of scientific report that Vaughan, the obsessive character from the novel, would have either written himself, or would have had a supply of xeroxed copies of, to hand out to prospective co-obsessives. It led to an April 1970 exhibition of crashed cars that Ballard arranged at the New Arts Lab, a gallery and former pharmaceutical warehouse in London whose proper name, as if this wasn’t all Ballardian/Cronenbergian enough, was the Institute for Research in Art and Technology. After that, in 1971, BBC2 broadcast a short film also called “Crash!” (at 8:30p.m. on Friday 12 February—just before the watershed), featuring Ballard driving around the sort of roads that would form the backdrop for his novel, perusing cars both new and wrecked, accompanied/haunted by a young woman played by Gabrielle Drake. (Who was best known at the time as the purple-wigged Lt. Gay Ellis in Gerry Anderson’s UFO. She was also the sister of ill-fated folk singer Nick Drake, and may have bonded a little with Ballard as she, too, was born out east—in Lahore—and lived in Burma before coming back to England as a child. She evidently made an impression, as Ballard apparently mentioned her by name in an early draft of the novel, as one of the celebrities the obsessive Vaughan was pursuing. Her name lingered in the published version as one of Vaughan’s clique.)
“Crash!”, the 1971 BBC film, featuring Ballard and Gabrielle Drake
The novel Crash was first published in 1973, though the first draft had apparently been completed towards the end of 1970. It would become the first novel of his “urban disaster triptych”, followed by Concrete Island (1974) and High-Rise (1975), and is, perhaps, his most famous novel nowadays (depending on whether Empire of the Sun is still being read)—and certainly his most infamous.
First UK HB, art by Bill Botten
Its first-person narrator is one James Ballard (to avoid confusion, I’m going to call him James; Ballard will refer to the author). He works at a studio in Shepperton producing TV ads; his wife Catherine works for Pan Am’s foreign tours division. The couple spend their time pursuing a series of affairs, which they talk about openly: “Before my accident,” James says, “our sexual relationship was almost totally abstracted, maintained by a series of imaginary games and perversities.” They live in an apartment near Heathrow (which Ballard refers to as London Airport, as it had been known till 1966), nestled amongst a network of conjoining carriageways, flyovers, turnoffs and roundabouts. One day, James loses control of his car and collides head-on with a married couple in another vehicle, killing the man and injuring the woman, Dr Helen Remington.
Convalescing in nearby Ashton Hospital, James encounters Dr Robert Vaughan, whom he at first assumes is a medical consultant. In fact, Vaughan is—or was—“one of the first of the new-style TV scientists”, currently pursuing with fetishistic intensity an obsessive interest in car accidents. This is no detached scientific study: Vaughan (“this hoodlum scientist”, as the novel calls him), judging by the network of scars on his face and body, has been through a fair number of collisions himself—incidents he seems to actively encourage—and has utterly invested all his energies, intellectual, creative and sexual, in the notion of the car crash as some sort of ultimate meaningful experience, with the road-death of a celebrity (his current target being Elizabeth Taylor) being, for him, the ultimate of ultimates.
Panther PB, art by Chris Foss
Vaughan has a small coterie of followers, including the permanently concussed stunt driver Seagrave, Seagrave’s equally sozzled wife Vera, and Gabrielle, a young woman left permanently disabled by a major road accident. James and Helen soon join this group, as they get drawn in by Vaughan’s domineering obsession.
Vaughan is absolutely a Ballard type, what David Pringle, in his 1979 study Earth is the Alien Planet, has described as “these regal madmen” who make up the third in a Ballardian trinity of Lamia, Jester, and King. I tend to think of the archetype of this figure as Hathaway in Ballard’s short story “The Subliminal Man”, a combined philosopher-scientist and terrorist, with all the mad, nervous energy of Dennis Hopper at the end of Apocalypse Now!, combined with the dark certainty and purpose of Marlon Brando’s Kurtz. (In a way, all of Ballard’s novels could be read as variations on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, being about a character who over-adapts to a new or changed environment.)
Triad PB, art by James Marsh
Here, though, Vaughan starts to show a somewhat different side. Hathaway in “The Subliminal Man” is eloquent about his obsession (the dominating effect of subliminal advertising on modern city-dwellers), but Vaughan, as far as I recall, never justifies or explains his fixation on the car crash. He convinces not with words, but the magnetism of his own obsession. In fact, as the novel progresses, Vaughan speaks less and less, until soon he communicates entirely through his presence and the actions he takes. Combined with his increasingly dishevelled appearance (his stained clothes, multiple minor injuries, and the fact that he basically lives in his beat-up car), he starts to feel less like a “hoodlum scientist” and more like some half-starved feral child forced to come up with his own highly individual response to what can only have been a traumatic entry into adolescence. Described as “a strange mixture of personal hauntedness, complete confinement in his own panicky universe, and yet at the same time open to all kinds of experiences from the outer world”, he feels, in fact, rather like the young Jim of Empire of the Sun, but with a (troubled, and fatally warped) adult sexuality. And swapping occupied 1940s Shanghai for the roads, car parks, and hospitals around 1970s Heathrow has made no difference: both, in the eyes of these Ballardian characters, are post-traumatic landscapes, heading towards some transcendent apocalypse indistinguishable from death. (Jim in Empire of the Sun is ultimately freed from the Japanese POW camps by the dropping of the atom bomb; this novel’s hinted “autogeddon” blurs woozily between a world-wide motorway pile-up and some sort of LSD-fuelled ascension into the skies.)
Dr Christopher Evans, looking very un-Vaughan-like
(There’s an element of Ballard’s best friend, the real-life TV scientist Christopher Evans, in Vaughan, as Ballard writes in Miracles of Life: “In appearance he resembled Vaughan, the auto-destructive hero of my novel Crash, though he himself was nothing like that deranged figure.” At one point, Ballard’s exhibition of crashed cars was going to be more of a performance, which Evans was going to narrate—somewhat as Vaughan does in the novel. As well as being a prophet of the microcomputer revolution—in the late 1970s he predicted our lives would be transformed by wristwatch communicators—Evans was also the scientific advisor for The Tomorrow People.)
To me, Crash makes best sense when viewed as an essential next step in the overall movement of Ballard’s oeuvre at the time, a deepening exploration of the theme of modern-life-as-post-traumatic-daze, initially put forward in The Atrocity Exhibition. Ballard at that time pointed out that his fiction was often about isolated individuals, and the car is a particularly potent symbol of modern isolation. People shield themselves in the steel and fibre-glass shells of their vehicles, insulating themselves from the thousands of others they pass on roads and motorways as they head about their daily lives. (Early on, James uses his car’s safety features as a form of distancing from the secretary he’s been having an affair with: “the safety belt I had deliberately fastened to save her the embarrassment of embracing me”.) Within such isolating units, specifically designed to encase and protect, the only way for people to interact as warm, living beings is through collisions violent enough to crack these all-enclosing carapaces. The alternative is to invite someone into your car, but in Crash, at least, driving together is only done in search of sex or car crashes, or some combination of both.
US PB, art by R Shore
There’s a feeling, in the novel, of modern life being so divorced from authentic experience that it’s only in the extremes—the car crash—that the characters reawaken to what it means to be alive. James’s head-on collision becomes “the only real experience I had been through for years”, which to me recalls Bessel van der Kolk on the suddenly reduced range of meaningful experience suffered in PTSD:
“Somehow the very event that caused them so much pain had also become their sole source of meaning. They felt fully alive only when they were revisiting their traumatic past.”
Another van der Kolk quote—“traumatized people have a tendency to superimpose their trauma on everything around them and have trouble deciphering whatever is going on around them”—feels like it comes through in Ballard’s novel in the moments immediately after James’s crash: “the narrow angle between the bonnet and fenders seemed to my exhausted mind to be repeated in everything around me”, as though the world had shattered into a million fragments of reflective glass.
US PB, art by Chris Moore
Vaughan, James, Helen and the others have all had their range of meaningful experience reduced to the ultra-narrow window of the car crash and nothing but the car crash, into which they funnel the entirety of their emotional and physical energies. Squeezed as they are by such a tiny aperture, everything becomes an undistinguished super-heated jumble (“hostility and affection, emotions which had become interchangeable”) instantly drained of all meaning (encounters between human beings—sexual or violent—become “conceptualised acts abstracted from all feeling”).
In Earth is the Alien Planet, David Pringle identifies two of Ballard’s key themes as imprisonment and flight, and, in a way, the car is the perfect combination of the two. Cars are (like Hawkwind’s “Orgone Accumulator”) social isolators, moveable protective boxes, but their speed and smooth movement gives them a hopeful hint of dream-like flight. And towards the end of the novel, James has visions of the many automobiles around London Airport yearning to take to the skies from the flyovers and feeder roads, as though the novel were about to move into some Unlimited Dream Company-style transformation of magical flight.
Brazilian edition, from 2007
For me, the essence of Crash isn’t in its story, but its prose, which is absolutely where its roots in Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition-era fiction show. Encounters between characters are described with a remorseless medical precision, with sex scenes reading more like instructions for assembling some particularly challenging piece of flat-pack furniture, and Ballard’s well-bred dialogue is never used to better (affectless) effect, as it leaches the emotion from all human exchanges. Nevertheless, there are moments of pure Ballardian poetry, as in this transcendent description of a traffic jam:
“The enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this immense motionless pause.”
It’s for this reason I find it so difficult to process David Cronenberg’s film version of Crash, which came out in 1996. There are only hints of the filmic equivalent (obsessive close-ups of car parts) of Ballard’s prose. And as soon as you put Ballard’s dialogue into the mouths of good actors, they can’t help but add more emotion than it should have. (Which is perhaps why James Spader and Deborah Kara Unger, as James Ballard and his wife Catherine, speak so quietly, as though to deaden as much of their humanity as they can. It doesn’t quite work, for me. The adaptation needs crash test dummies, not actors.) The characters who do work, in the film, are the ones who were most defined in the novel by their physical presence: Vaughan, and the disabled Gabrielle (whose mix of human flesh and straps, supports and buckles pushes her the most into Cronenbergian “new flesh” territory).
James Spader and Deborah Kara Unger in Cronenberg’s film of Crash
I’m sure the film works better when viewed purely as part of Cronenberg’s oeuvre, though I see it too much as an adjunct to Ballard’s to do that. (Perhaps a run-up of other Cronenberg films might help.) I have no idea how people who are into neither Ballard nor Cronenberg processed the film, though that may be demonstrated by the controversy around its release back in 1996. (Neither the novel nor the film are as extreme as earlier works from these two creators.)
I don’t know if Crash is the first novel to read if you’re thinking of getting into Ballard’s writings, but perhaps that’s just because I approached it by way of the early environmental disaster novels and short stories. Who knows, an in-at-the-deep-end approach (to this drained concrete swimming pool) might produce different results.
from the Sunday Express, 12 April 1970, accompanying a brief piece on the crashed car exhibition
