Crash by J.G. Ballard: Chapters 1-4 Response

Being the first novel I’ve read by J.G. Ballard, I was taken back by the explicitness and rawness of the writing in Crash. The specific descriptions Ballard uses in depicting the gruesome injuries sustained by car accident victims is staggering in its variety; ‘I think of […] schizophrenics colliding head-on into stalled laundry vans […] luckless paranoids driving at full speed into the brick walls at the ends of culs-de-sac; of sadistic charge nurses decapitated in inverted crashes on complex interchanges […]’ (pg. 15). However, it was not the gruesome depictions of car crashes that interest me the most, but the relationship between the narrator, James Ballard, and his wife, Catherine.  Despite the constant infidelity of Catherine, the couple deeply knows each other, to the point that James immediately knows when his wife has a new lover; ‘For years I had been able to spot Catherine’s affairs within almost a few hours of her first sex act simply by glancing over any new physical or mental furniture […]’ (pg. 31). Mixed into the middle of their infidelity, especially from Catherine, is technology.

James integrates the element of technology into all the aspects of his life, most notably in his relation with Catherine. His body gets fused with his car during the crash; ‘As I looked down at myself I realized that the precise make and model-year of my car could have been reconstructed by an automobile engineer from the pattern of my wounds (pg. 28). Having marveled at technology, cars in particular, James feels bonded to his car accomplishing part of the thrill and excitement he seeks when fantasizing the crashes of complete stranger. As a response to his own bondage with technology, James finds the mechanical features in Catherine; ‘where the metal claps of her brassiere had left a medallion of impressed skin […]’ (pg. 34).  It seems as though James is unable to function in any form of social life without thinking of either a sexual or a crash interaction. 

Nabokov's Natasha

            In Nabokov’s Natasha, there are three distinct realities, that of Natasha, Baron Wolfe, and Khrenov, which converge at the end of the short story to reveal the death of the father, and old man, Khrenov. In their misery, each character imagines a different reality in which their worries are gone and their dreams have been fulfilled.

            Natasha encapsulates herself in a dream world where she is constantly on the move either by “floating, like the deck of a ship, into the black night” or floating “as if someone were blowing hot air onto the back of her head.” She forms a reality which allows her to escape the dreariness of nursing her father, and task she has undertaken for quite a while given that “under her eyes were adorable blue shadows.” On her day-trip to the country side with Wolfe, Natasha reveals “I feel like I’m floating somewhere, and I understand everything – life, death, everything…” She ha found meaning in her own reality of floating around. Perhaps she believes herself to be a ghost, able to have “very little visions” as she floats by unperceived. She has developed this alternate reality as a means to cope with the loneliness attached to nursing her father.

            Wolfe has created a whole second life for himself as a travelling man, having voyaged across the globe, notable Africa and India. Despite having never travelled apart to “two or three Russian towns and a dozen villages”, Wolfe is enthralled by the larger world but has been unable to travel and so imagines foreign cities based simply by their names. For example, from the name Bombay alone, he divulges the thought that the city must contain “something gigantic, bombs of sunlight, drums.” He has a romantic point of view of the world as opposed to his friend who actually lived in Bombay and only remembers “work-related squabbles, the heat, the fevers, and the wife of some British colonel.” Wolfe enjoys immersing himself in a foreign culture and world yet falters without the significant income necessary for such travels. As a consequence, he creates himself a second reality in which he has voyaged the seven seas and the exotic lands of Africa and India.

            Khrenov appears to be the character set in the most plausible of realities, with his bodies’ aches and pains are his primary centers of attention. He appears to be honest with the other characters about his condition as it fluctuates. On the last page of the short story, Khrenov is depicted as going out to buy a newspaper with the explanation of “there’s something fabulous in the paper today.” Is the fabulous content in the newspaper his obituary? Natasha’s personal reality now breaks down as she returns to the apartment to grab money for her waiting father, only to realize that he is lying on the bed dead. The Khrenov that Natasha sees before returning to the apartment and seeing her dead father is in fact her reality's version of Khrenov in the state of life that Natasha would ideally see him.

Cut-Up Poetry

The Con Men

In fear of maggoty shelves

A major replacement was required

With the local carpenter unavailable

A lower east side vet came to help

Due to the larva infestation

An increasingly raring circulation bioengineering technique needed to be used

Unfortunately for the test bungalows

The processes was too brutal

The silt ingates were architectural weak points

Causing a collapse as the waning floor eventually disappeared

And from the disaster came joy

A sheen church was built in the newly destructed bungalows’ foundations

Neighborhood relations rippled “Hallelujah!” together in the streets

A new pastor with glossy syntax arrived in town

He’s a woodworker’s and vet’s brother

One of my favorite bands ever, The Clash, despite their unpopularity in the mainstream music scene, were at the center of civil unrest in the UK and even predicted the Brixton riots of 1981 with the following song...