The marriage of reason and nightmare that has
dominated the 20th Century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world.
Across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies
and the dreams that money can buy. Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and
soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and
pseudo-events, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin
leitmotifs of the 20th century - sex and paranoia.
Increasingly, our concepts of past, present and
future are being forced to revise themselves. Just as the past, in social and
psychological terms, became a casualty of Hiroshima and the nuclear age, so in
its turn the future is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all-voracious present.
We have annexed the future into the present, as merely one of those manifold
alternatives open to us. Options multiply around us, and we live in an almost
infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles,
travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly.
In addition, I feel that the balance between
fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decades. Increasingly
their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind -
mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising,
the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television
screen. We live inside an enormous novel. It is now less and less necessary for
the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already
there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.
In the past we have always assumed that the
external world around us has represented reality, however confusing or
uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions,
represented the realm of fantasy and the imagination. These roles, it seems to
me, have been reversed. The most prudent and effective method of dealing with
the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction - conversely,
the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads. Freud's
classic distinction between the latent and manifest content of the dream,
between the apparent and the real, now needs to be applied to the external
world of so-called reality.
Given these transformations, what is the main task
facing the writer? Can he, any longer, make use of the techniques and
perspectives of the traditional 19th century novel, with its linear narrative,
its measured chronology, its consular characters grandly inhabiting their
domains within an ample time and space? Is his subject matter the sources of
character and personality sunk deep in the past, the unhurried inspection of
roots, the examination of the most subtle nuances of social behaviour and
personal relationships? Has the writer still the moral authority to invent a
self-sufficient and self-enclosed world, to preside over his characters like an
examiner, knowing all the questions in advance? Can he leave out anything he
prefers not to understand, including his own motives, prejudices and
psychopathology?
I feel myself that the writer's role, his authority
and licence to act, have changed radically. I feel that, in a sense, the writer
knows nothing any longer. He has no moral stance. He offers the reader the
contents of his own head, a set of options and imaginative alternatives. His
role is that of the scientist, whether on safari or in his laboratory, faced
with an unknown terrain or subject. All he can do is to devise various
hypotheses and test them against the facts.
Crash is such a book, an extreme metaphor for an
extreme situation, a kit of desperate measures only for use in an extreme
crisis. Crash, of course, is not concerned with an imaginary disaster, however
imminent, but with a pandemic cataclysm that kills hundreds of thousands of
people each year and injures millions. Do we see, in the car crash, a sinister
portent of a nightmare marriage between sex and technology? Will modern
technology provide us with hitherto undreamed-of means for tapping our own
psychopathologies? Is this harnessing of our innate perversity conceivably of
benefit to us? Is there some deviant logic unfolding more powerful than that
provided by reason?
Throughout Crash I have used the car not only as a
sexual image, but as a total metaphor for man's life in today's society. As
such the novel has a political role quite apart from its sexual content, but I
would still like to think that Crash is the first pornographic novel based on
technology. In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction,
dealing with how we use and exploit each other, in the most urgent and ruthless
way. Needless to say, the ultimate role of Crash is cautionary, a warning
against that brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons more and more
persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape.
JG Ballard on Crash, 1995
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