Zadie Smith revisits J.G. Ballard’s controversial 1973 novel Crash, which, like the David Cronenberg movie it inspired, features characters who get off on car crashes. She writes that the “real shock of Crash is not that people have sex in or near cars, but that technology has entered into even our most intimate human relations”:
When Ballard called Crash “the first pornographic novel based on technology,” he referred not only to a certain kind of content but to pornography as an organizing principle, perhaps the purest example of humans “asking for the use.” In Crash, though, the distinction between humans and things has become too small to be meaningful. In effect things are using things. … Crash is an existential book about how everybody uses everything. How everything uses everybody. And yet it is not a hopeless vision:
The silence continued. Here and there a driver shifted behind his steering wheel, trapped uncomfortably in the hot sunlight, and I had the sudden impression that the world had stopped. The wounds on my knees and chest were beacons tuned to a series of beckoning transmitters, carrying the signals, unknown to myself, which would unlock this immense stasis and free these drivers for the real destinations set for their vehicles, the paradises of the electric highway.
In Ballard’s work there is always this mix of futuristic dread and excitement, a sweet spot where dystopia and utopia converge. For we cannot say we haven’t got precisely what we dreamed of, what we always wanted, so badly. The dreams have arrived, all of them: instantaneous, global communication, virtual immersion, biotechnology. These were the dreams. And calm and curious, pointing out every new convergence, Ballard reminds us that dreams are often perverse.
The Dish 