Introduction to the French Edition of "Crash"
J.G.Ballard, 1974
The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century
has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications
landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that
money can buy. Thermonuclear weapons systems and soft drink commercials
coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudoevents, science
and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the
20th century - sex and paranoia. Despite McLuhan's delight in high-speed
information mosaics we are still reminded of Freud's profound pessimism in
"Civilization and its Discontents". Voyeurism, self-disgust, the infantile
basis of our dreams and longings - these diseases of the psyche have now
culminated in the most terrifying casualty of the century: The death of
affect.
This demise of feeling and emotion has paved the way for all our most real
and tender pleasures - in the excitements of pain and mutilation; in sex
as the perfect arena, like a culture bed of sterile pus, for all the
veronicas of our own perversions; in our moral freedom to pursue our own
psychopathology as a game; and in our apparently limitless powers for
conceptualization - what our children have to fear is not the cars on the
highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant
parameters of their deaths.
To document the uneasy pleasures of living within this glaucous paradise
has more and more become the role of science fiction. I firmly believe
that science fiction, far from being an unimportant minor offshoot, in fact
represents the main literary tradition of the 20th century, and certainly
its oldest - a tradition of imaginative response to science and technology
that runs in an intact line through H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, the writers
of modern American science fiction, to such present-day innovators as
William Burroughs.
The main "fact" of the 20th century is the concept of the unlimited
possibility. This predicate of science and technology enshrines the notion
of a moratorium on the past - the irrelevancy and even death of the past -
and the limitless alternatives available to the present. What links the
first flight of the Wright brothers to the invention of the Pill is the
social and sexual philosophy of the ejector seat.
Given this immense continent of possibility, few literatures would seem
better equipped to deal with their subject matter than science fiction.
No other form of fiction has the vocabulary of ideas and images to deal
with the present, let alone the future. The dominant characteristic of
the modern mainstream novel is its sense of individual isolation, its mood
of introspection and alienation, a state of mind always assumed to be the
hallmark of the 20th century consciousness.
Far from it. On the contrary, it seems to me that this is a psychology
that belongs entirely to the 19th century, part of a reaction against the
monolithic character of Victorianism and the tyranny of the paterfamilias,
secure in his financial and sexual authority. Apart from its marked
retrospective bias and its obsession with the subjective nature of
experience, its real subject matter is the rationalization of guilt and
estrangement. Its elements are introspection, pessimism and sophistication.
Yet if anything befits the 20th century it is optimism, the iconography of
mass merchandising, naivety and a guilt-free enjoyment of all the mind's
possibilities.
The kind of imagination that now manifests itself in science fiction is not
something new. Homer, Shakespeare and Milton all invented new worlds to
comment on this one. The split of science fiction into a separate and
somewhat disreputable genre is a recent development. It is connected with
the near disappearance of dramatic and philosophical poetry and the slow
shrinking of the traditional novel as it concerns itself more and more
exclusively with the nuances of human relationships. Among those areas
neglected by the traditional novel are, above all, the dynamics of human
societies (the traditional novel tends to depict society as static), and
man's place in the universe. However crudely or naively, science fiction
at least attempts to place a philosophical and metaphysical frame around
the most important events within our lives and consciousness.
If I make this general defense of science fiction it is, obviously, because
my own career as a writer has been involved with it for almost 20 years.
>From the very start, when I first turned to science fiction, I was convinced
that the future was a better key to the present than the past. At the time,
however, I was dissatisfied with science fiction's obsession with its two
principal themes - outer space and the far future. As much for emblematic
purposes as any theoretical or programmatic ones, I christened the new
terrain I wishred to explore INNER SPACE, that psychological domain
(manifest, for example, in surrealist painting) where the inner world of the
mind and the outer world of reality meet and fuse.
Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they
dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those
languages, or we remain mute.
Yet, by an ironic paradox, modern science fiction became the first casualty
of the changing world it anticipated and helped to create. The future
envisioned by the science fiction of the 1940s and 1950s is already our past.
Its dominant images, not merely of the first Moon flights and interplanetary
voyages, but of our changing social and political relationships in a world
governed by technology, now resemble huge pieces of discarded stage scenery.
For me, this could be seen most touchingly in the film "2001: A Space
Odyssey", which signified the end of the heroic period of modern science
fiction - its lovingly imagined panoramas and costumes, its huge set pieces,
remind me of "Gone With the Wind", a scientific pageant that became a kind
of historical romance in reverse, a sealed world into which the hard light
of contemporary reality was never allowed to penetrate.
Increasingly, our concepts of past, present and future are being forced to
revise themselves. Just as the past itself, in social and psychological
terms, became a casualty of Hiroshima and the nuclear age (almost by
definition a period where we were all forced to think prospectively), so
in its turn the future is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all-voracious
present, as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us. Options
multiply around us, we live in an almost infantile world where any demand,
any possibility, whether for lifestyles, 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 decade. Increasingly their roles are reversed.
We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind - mass merchandising,
advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant
translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing
blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods,
the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by
the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in
particular it is less and less necessary for him 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 too, 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 cronology, 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 behavior 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 myuself that the writer's role, his authority and license to act, has
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, he offers a set of options and imaginative alternatives. His role
is that of the scientist, whether on safari or in his laboratory, faced with
a completely unknown terrain or subject. All he can do is to devise
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. If I am right, and
what I have done over the past few years is to rediscover the present for
myself, "Crash" takes up its position as a cataclysmic novel of the present
day in line with my previous novels of world cataclysm set in the near or
immediate future - "The Drowned World", "The Drought" and "The Crystal
World".
"Crash", of course, is not concerned with an imaginary disaster, however
imminent, but with a pandemic cataclysm institutionalized in all industrial
societies 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.
J.G.Ballard, 1974
