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.