J.G. Ballard's Crash Course and the Year 1973

Nineteen seventy-three saw the close of the Vietnam War, soon followed by revelations of President Nixon's Watergate scandal. Disillusion and disorientation filled the political atmosphere of the early 70s, even as we gradually became unable to live without the spectacles, pseudo-events and sexual effects produced by media technology (as theoreticians like Daniel Boorstin and Guy Debord have explained lucidly). From this viewpoint, the coincidental literary "crash" mentioned above is highly symptomatic, since the British champion of New Wave describes an idiosyncratic hero, Dr Robert Vaughan, obsessed with committing double-suicide with Elizabeth Taylor in a car crash, while the American representative of postmodern metafiction characterizes the innocent protagonist Tyron Slothrop as techno-sexually intertwined with the very mechanics of the V2 rocket. The more we look into both texts, the more apparent what they share becomes: that is, techno-sexual politics. In order to further investigate the crash-course between technology and sexuality in the 70s, Ballard reorganized what he had conceived as non-linear condensed novels in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) into the linear narrative Crash; and Pynchon completed the encyclopedic novel Grauity's Rainbow. It seems natural that the techno-sexual zeitgeist of the 70s inspired both writers and their innovative literary forms. Historically, one could claim, it is this coincidence between Ballard and Pynchon in 1973 that later gave rise to the Cyberpunk movement in the 1980s.

In retrospect, however, it seems that it was not only the Cyberpunks but also Ballard himself who felt it necessary to reconstruct the central topic of Crash in the 80s. Read again his mainstream bestseller Empire of the Sun ( 1984), which was published in the same year as William Gibson's canonical cyberpunk Neuromancer, and you will notice that this Booker Prize nominee shares something with Crash.

Firstly, both novels are exceptionally autobiographical for they share a main character called "James," created in the image of James Graham Ballard himself. Secondly, whereas Crash deals with a scientist obsessed with heterosexual double-suicide in a car crash, Empire of the Sun depicts a boy obsessed with international double-suicide in a kamikaze crash: "The fliers fascinated Jim, far more than Private Kimura and his Kendo armour.... Above all, Jim admired the kamikaze pilots.... Neither Private Kimura nor the other guards in the camp paid the least attention to the suicide pilots, and Basie and the American seamen in E Block referred to them as 'hashi-crashies' or 'screwsiders.'... But Jim identified himself with these kamikaze pilots and was always moved by the threadbare ceremonies that took place beside the runway" (Empire of the Sun, Chapter 23, "The Air Raid," Pocket Books, pages 198-199). Furthermore, Jim's deepest admiration for the bravery of kamikaze pilots makes him feel like "joining the Japanese Air Force" (Chapter 26, "The Cemetery Garden," page 216).

This episode carries us to our third point, thatthe analogy between the car crash and kamikaze crash was already predicated in the text of Crash. After his own car-crash experience, the narrator Ballard speculates on the disjunction between "my own body, the assumptions of skin, and the engineering structure which supported it," and recollects staring at the cockpit of a World War II Japanese Zero fighter aircraft at the Imperial War Museum: "The blurring perspex of the cockpit canopy contained a small segment of the Pacific sky, the roar of aircraft warming up on a carrier deck thirty years before" (Crash, Chapter Seven, Granada, page 58). Whenever we come across dead or failed pilots and astronauts in Ballard's fiction, we are tempted to take them as representing his anti-outer space and therefore anti-American sensibility. But, rereading Crash together with Empire of the Sun will give us a chance to reconsider the status of dead pilots as not only ideological but also deeply erotic.