Crash: first reactions

Just as we discussed the first week of class, transgressive authors do not give the reader a moral or ethical standing to believe in, which does not allow the reader to protect themselves with the accepted morals in society from the reality of the story. J.G. Ballard is definitely one of those novelists. This story starts off with a bang introducing the themes of violence, extreme sexuality and self-mutilation. I certainly did not know how to feel about these seemingly contradictory concepts. It became apparent while reading the first four chapters that the sexual descriptions usually began with the wounds and how they look on the main character, then the nurses and how he imagines their life (what they are thinking about, the things they need to deal with) which he then inserts his own hyper-sexuality into, believing that they are often turned on by the destroyed people they need to take care of in an airport hospital, and then going into explicit explanations of his previous sexual engagements with his wife and their violent fantasies. The sexual descriptions in the story are extremely clinical, which creates a contrasting experience for the reader. On page 40 Ballard is talking about the X-ray technician, saying, "Her left breast rose inside the jacket of her white coat, the chest wall swelling below the collar bone. Somewhere within that complex of nylon and starched cotton lay a large inert nipple, its pink face crushed by scented fabric." This description does not read with the overtly sexual language that you would expect in an erotic passage, but rather it is more like a report. Ballard uses all of the medical terms for the body parts, which keeps the reader from becoming too entranced with the eroticism in order for them to remember the context in which the passage has arisen. These clinically described fantasies then read less perverted, but at the same time more disturbing.

Nonsense

The rhymed hirudins stubbed
Upwards
toward the
side vet within
the sheen church.
ripple relation
Hallelujah.
Some glossy syntax
from the replacement
major:
grown rectitude, he want
editorialize
raring circulation
bioengineering.
Test bungalows of
ingate silt and
the waning floor
of a 
maggoty shelf
fear. 

Natasha

From the very start Nabokov creates an interesting dynamic between the three characters within the story where they are all constantly lying to each other, or at lease unwilling to recognize the truth. He is very heavy handed, dropping hints about what is real in the characters life, which contradicts the things the characters are claiming as truth. This is especially evident with Natasha's character as she quickly says that her father is doing better. The fact that the excitement is left out of the statement make it clear that her father may in fact not be doing well at all, despite the fact that the reader is in the dark about her father's condition. The only character that is proven to have told the truth is the fever-riden father, whom is constantly in the midst of a wild fever dream or delusion. On the first page of the reading he claims that he is going to die the next day, but Natasha and Wolfe both write it off as sickly depression, when they are the ones deluded by their own visions of grandeur.