Crash

In Crash, Ballard seems to be using the novel as space in which to re-orient the physical spaces that he is familiar with into the forms that they take in his mind. The setting is almost constantly being constructed out of or defined by modes of transportation or communication. That is, the modern technologies which occupy a significant percentage of a person's mental capacity--as transportation is a pressing need, one which must be contended with on a daily basis, it comes to take on a structuring role in the setting of the novel.

Ballard's linking of sexuality and technology appears as an attempt to find a realm of human interaction within technology and transportation. As people spend more and more of their lives involved in the act of transportation, a process where they are constantly in close proximity to other human beings, and yet generate no sense of connection with those they travel near, more of what it means to be human becomes embodied in the act of solitary transportation. Ballard takes this to the extreme, and makes everything in his novel revolve around transportation, so that the goal cannot be to find interaction that occurs despite isolation, but instead must be to turn the isolation of technology into a medium for advanced human interaction. Essentially, if technology heightens human progress, it must also heighten the human experience.

So he resorts to sexuality, and an unvarnished one. He strips down his narrator-counterpart to the point where everything is inevitably reduced to sex. James, the narrator, sees potential sexuality in everything, and every person, around him. Most importantly, even before his first crash, James' sexuality was based heavily on isolation, or disconnectedness: the game he plays with his wife, in which they describe their affairs while having sex, is a demonstration that for James, sex can no longer be about the other that is present, but the other that is intangible at the moment. And so in his search for a stimulating sexuality, he finds it in an incredibly violent act.

By constructing a world of extremes, where the physical space is defined solely by modes of transportation, and the mental space is defined solely by the pursuit of sexuality, Ballard manages to bring together the poles of modern isolation and physical, meaningful, human interaction. In doing so, Ballard is making the point that the only time we even notice that extent of our isolation from our physical nature is when some aspect of the system breaks down--the more isolated we are, the faster the deceleration into reality.