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.