Fractured Bodies and Social Wounds: The Simulation of Trauma in J.G. Ballard’s Crash

Abstract

J.G. Ballard’s sci-fi novel Crash is a powerful – albeit highly controversial – depiction of man’s destiny in late industrial culture, “the destiny of [his] human body in a world of automotive disaster” and proliferating technology (Youngquist). It traumatically “crashes” the boundaries between bodies and machines, interior states of subjectivity and the external world, even the boundaries between fiction and reality, and depicts a ghastly marriage between sex and technology through the mediation of the metallic car-body – which, as Ballard points out in his “Introduction” to the French edition of the text, is portrayed in Crash “not only as a sexual image, but as a total metaphor for man’s life in today’s society” (Ballard 6).