Ballard/"Crash"/Baudrillard Author(s) : Nicholas Ruddick

SF-TH Inc
Ballard/"Crash"/Baudrillard
Author(s): Nicholas Ruddick
Source: Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Nov., 1992), pp. 354-360
Published by: SF-TH Inc
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4240182
Accessed: 10-09-2019 23:13 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
SF-TH Inc is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Science
Fiction Studies
This content downloaded from 188.252.199.135 on Tue, 10 Sep 2019 23:13:28 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
354 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 19 (1992)
Nicholas Ruddick
Baliard/Crash/Baudrillard
Ballard's novel Crash (1973), in its author's words the "first pornographic
novel based on technology" ("Some Words" 49), is an extreme fiction.1
Ballard tells a prepublication anecdote about it that is both credible and
revealing:
One of the publisher's readers was either a psychiatrist or the wife of a

psychiatrist, and she wrote the most damning and vituperative reader's re
[the publisher] ever received. It included the statement: 'The author is beyond
psychiatric help." (Burns 22)
This reader's reaction, based on a confusion between fiction and reality-

between the narrator and the author-might be dismissed as naive, were it
not for the fact that Ballard invites such confusion. The narrator-protagonist
of Crash is named "James Ballard," although this is not finally confirmed
until the beginnling of Chapter 8. This investiture of the narrator with the
authority of the author through the name of the author strongly suggests that
Crash is autobiographical-a personal statement that from the point of view
of an unsympathetic critic may be read as an indulgence in an unfortunate
and grotesque sexual fetishism, perhaps (given that Crash originates in
Ballard's earlier controversial fiction, 7he Atrocity Exhibition [1970]), as a
piece of atrocious exhibitionism.
Jean Baudrillard's essay, "Ballard's Crash," was first published in 1976,
first summarized in English by Jonathan Benison in the November 1984
issue of Foundation, and recently reproduced in translation in SFS's special
issue on "Science Fiction and Postmodernism" (#55, November 1991). It is
upon Baudrillard's essay, together with the critical responses to it by Ballard
and others in SFS, that I wish to focus. For what we have here between
Baudrillard and Ballard is, if not a head-on collision over Crash, then at
least an awkward fender-bender. This is unexpected because we probably
assumed that the critic and the novelist, whose sympathy for one another's
work is well known, were traveling harmoniously in the same direction.
The special issue of SFS begins with an editorial introduction entitled
"Postmodernism's SF/SFs Postmodernism" by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.
This is followed by two essays by Baudrillard, "Simulacra and Science
Fiction" (1980) and "Ballard's Crash" (1976).2 Baudrillard's pieces are
followed by five short essays, under the combined heading "In Response to
Jean Baudrillard," by N. Katherine Hayles, David Porush, Brooks Landon,
Vivian Sobchack, and Ballard himself. Ballard's piece, the shortest, consists
of one paragraph entitled "A Response to the Invitation to Respond."
BALLARD/CRASH/BAUDRILLARD 355
In his piece, Ballard is absolutely scathing about postm

of science fiction. He believes that an "over-professionalized academia" has
turned its capacity for theorizing onto "an innocent and naive fiction that
desperately needs to be left alone" ("A Response" 329). This leads to what
he calls "the apotheosis of the hamburger" (329). However, Ballard claims
that he "totally exclude[s] Baudrillard" from his attack (329). In an interview
published earlier in Science Fiction Eye, Ballard spoke favorably of Bau-
drillard's America (Di Filippo 72). Now Ballard speaks of the same work as
"an absolutely brilliant piece of writing, probably the most sharply clever
piece of writing since Swift...an intellectual Aladdin's cave" ("A Response"
329). As for Baudrillard's essay on Crash, however, which is presumably the
specific text to which he is currently responding, Ballard claims enigmatically
that "I have not really wanted to understand [it]" (329).
So what is it, then, that Ballard is objecting to? It cannot be Csicsery-
Ronay's introduction, because this was clearly written after Ballard's re-
sponse was received. In it, Csicsery-Ronay expresses bewilderment at Bal-
lard's attack, but he rationalizes it as the novelist's defense of territory:
Ballard's "tirade against academic criticism and the concept of postmoder-
nism is, I believe, an attempt to protect a border: not between SF and
mainstream fiction, but between the fields of art and the locusts of ratio-
nalistic analysis" (307).
It might appear that Ballard is objecting to the other four responses by
academics to Baudrillard's article (but see Note 3 below). Hayles's piece,
"The Borders of Madness," attacks Baudrillard for having missed the desire
for transcendence she reads in Crash, and chastises him for nihilistically
iporing the "moral point" (323) that Ballard has explicitly stated as his
intention in the novel. Porush's piece, "The Architextuality of Transcen-
dence," doesn't mention Ballard at all, but attacks the Baudrillard of
"Simulacra and Science Fiction" as a high priest of the temple of the text
who can only bemoan his dispossession. Brooks Landon's "Responding to
the Killer B's" is a celebration of the power of Crash and an expression of
pleasure that Baudrillard, "our first master of digital criticism," seems to
have matched Ballard as one of the masters of "digital narrative" (327).
Vivian Sobchack in "Baudrillard's Obscenity" returns us to Hayles's idea
that Baudrillard has dangerously missed the moral point of Crash-which is
not, however, Hayles's transcendence but the literal "dead end" that the
"techno-body" of postmodern culture is driving us toward (328).
It is very hard to see what in these four short academic responses Ballard
might find objectionable. Three out of four unreservedly celebrate Crash as
a major work. Two out of four elevate Ballard above Baudrillard himself,
claiming the critic has misread the novelist. One ignores Ballard, concen-
trating on the weaknesses of Baudrillard. There seems little evidence here
that postmodern critics tend in Ballard's case to, say, elevate a fashionable
theorist over the creative artist. Surely Ballard cannot be suggesting that his
own fiction is "innocent and naive" ("A Response" 329), and not worth
serious critical examination? Was there ever a work of fiction that is less
"innocent and naive" than Crash? What, then, is motivating Ballard's anger
in his "Response"?
I think that Ballard's anger is directed not so much against postmodernist
criticism in general, but specifically against Baudrillard's piece on Crash. I
view Baudrillard's essay as a serious misreading, possibly even a shameless
distortion, of Crash's themes. In this I am in agreement with two of the SFS
responders, although not necessarily for the same reasons. I do not know for
certain why Ballard directs his anger against postmodernist criticism rather
than against Baudrillard, who is in my view the real object of his attack. I
will speculate, however, about this in my conclusion. But first I will deal with
what I see as Baudrillard's misinterpretation of Crash.
Baudrillard's reading of Crash is summarized in the following passage in
the penultimate paragraph of his article:
In Crash, there is neither fiction nor reality-a kind of hyper-reality has abolished
both. Even critical regression is no longer possible. This mutating and
commutating world of simulation and death, this violently sexualized world tot
lacking in desire, full of violent and violated bodies but curiously neutered
chromatic and intensely metallic world empty of the sensorial, a world of hyper-
technology without finality-is it good or bad? We can't say. It is simply
fascinating, without this fascination implying any kind of value judgment
whatsoever. And this is the miracle of Crash. The moral gaze-the critical
judgmentalism that is still a part of the old world's functionality-cannot touch
it. Crash is hypercritical, in the sense of being beyond the critical. ("Ballard's
Crash" 319)
Baudrillard goes on to note that the text is actually beyond the reach of its
author, who in his introduction to the French edition speaks of Crash as a
cautionary work. Baudrillard also praises the novel for achieving a "level of
absence of all finality and critical negativity" unmatched save in Nashville
and A Clockwork Orange (319).4
This is not exactly a naive reading, but it is a highly impressionistic one.
Ballard's intention vis-a-vis Crash has been clearly, frequently, and lengthily
expressed. He has stated, for example, that the novel was a logical outgrowth
of his ongoing project to expose the internal nature of catastrophe at both
the cultural and individual level:
Crash! [sic] takes up its position as a cataclysmic novel of the present-day in line
with my previous novels of world cataclysm set in the near or immediate
future-The Drowned World, The Drought, and The Crystal Wodd.
Crash!, of course, is not concerned with an imaginary disaster, however
imminent, but with a pandemic cataclysm institutionalised in all industrial
societies that kills hundreds of thousands of people each year and injures
millions. Do we see, in the car crash, a sinister portent of a nightmare marriag
between sex and technology? ("Some Words" 49)
The genealogy of the novel implied here is supported by Ballard's own

oeuvre. The novel has its seed in the chapter of The Atrocity Exhibition
called "Crash!" (with an exclamation point) (121-25). This short fiction
offers itself as a meditation on "the latent sexual content of the automobile
crash" (121). The story concludes that for crash victims, "the car crash is
seen as a fertilizing rather than a destructive experience, a liberation of
sexual and machine libido" (125). In Ballard's recent novel, The Kindness
of Women (1991), the section called "The Exhibition" clarifies the signifi-
cance of what has long been an important motif in Ballard's fiction (208-29).
Baudrillard's strategy is to suggest that the text has escaped its author's
intention. There is certainly nothing theoretically wrong with dismissing the
author's stated intentions, even when these are clearly stated, as in the case
of Ballard's comments on Crash. But such a dismissal ought to be supported
by evidence derived from analysis of the text, context, and intertext, and this
has been where Baudrillard's reading has been lacking.
For Baudrillard, Crash seems to confirm his own insights into the super-
session of the real by the hyperreal (I am using Baudrillard's definition of
hyperreality from his "The Precession of Simulacra").5 But though the
concept of the real is at stake in Crash, it is not in my view at stake in the
way Baudrillard imagines. In Crash, as everywhere in Ballard's so-called
disaster fiction from The Drowned World (1962) to High-Rise (1976), the real
has not been nor is it in the process of being abolished. Far from it: the
catastrophe, whatever form it takes, actually signifies the liberation of a
"deep" real (associated with the unconscious), that has been until then latent
in a "shallow" manifest reality (held in place by mechanisms of repression).
"Ballard," the narrator of Crash, is involved in a car crash that has the
consequence of transforming his awareness about his own real desires.
These are congruent with the desires of the late 20th-century technological
culture that he embodies. The car "accident" is no accident, but the product
of a psychopathology operating at the cultural level that is worked out
according to a post-Freudian logic. Sexuality is, as Baudrillard himself notes,
"no more than the rarefaction of a drive called desire" ("Ballard's Crash"
316). Baudrillard reads the "violently sexualized world" in Crash as one at
the same time "totally lacking in desire," sexuality having become absorbed
by the "universe of simulation" (319). However, the sexualization of the
automobile for the narrator after his crash surely functions as a metaphor
of revelation of the real object of his desire, namely death and reunification
with the organic realm. Far from being abolished, this is desire intensified
and freed; but it is a desire beyond the pleasure principle, absolutely
unamenable to reason and hostile to consciousness. The violent, perverse,
graphically-depicted death-oriented sexuality in Crash is an extended
metaphor for this insatiable cultural death-lust.6
In spite of this, there are two aspects of Crash that seem strongly to
support Baudrillard's reading of the text. The first is the way in which the
name of the protagonist seems to obliterate the gap between the fictional
and the real worlds, so that a new hyperreal synthesis emerges. The second
is the way in which the protagonist's perceptions of the totally artificial,
totally mediated landscape of Crash are rendered in a manner that makes
them seem to partake of a Baudrillardian hyperreality-as in this passage, for
example:
The flashing lances of afternoon light deflected from the chromium panel tore
at my skin. The hard jazz of radiator grilles, the motion of cars moving towards
London Airport along the sunlit oncoming lanes, the street furniture and route
indicators-all these seemed threatening and super-real, as exciting as the accele-
rating pintables of a sinister amusement arcade released onto these highways.
(49)
As far as the first aspect is concerned, both author and text provide clear
evidence that the primary function of the protagonist's name is not to
confuse fiction and fact, nor to hyperrealize the real. When asked in an
interview, for example, whether he finds the scarring in Crash sexually
arousing, Ballard replied: "Me personally, or the writer? Well the man
Ballard doesn't find them a turn-on at all. If I see someone deeply mutilated
or scarred, I don't feel aroused in any way" (Vale 48). In the text, the
narrator is not a science-fiction writer and the West London landscape is
depicted with a heightened realism found frequently in the ominous near-
future landscapes of Ballard's fiction of the 1970s.7
Crash exists in a textual vacuum only for the naive reader, such as the
publisher's reader mentioned earlier. For those aware of Crash's intertextual
relation with Ballard's other fiction, the author's superimposition of his
name upon his protagonist is metaphorical, offering a provocative analogy
with the way that latent reality, freed of repression, superimposes itself upon
manifest reality in the fictional world of the text. It does not have to do with
Baudrillard's idea that the closure of the gap between fiction and fact at the
textual level is an analogue of the hyperrealization of empirical or social
reality.
As for the hyperrealization of the protagonist's perception, this too has
little to do with Baudrillardian hyperreality. The post-traumatic narrator
glimpses here not a Baudrillardian universe of simulation but a manifest
world tinged with latent desire, a conscious world into which the unconscious
is leaking, rendering it dreamlike, but at the same time paradoxically more
real. Baudrillard finds the novel "truly saturated with an intense initiatory
power" (319), ushering in a world beyond the reach of the moral gaze. But
surely Crash's vision of incipient "autogeddon" (106) is threatening and
admonitory? Any urge to transcend the moral-or the real-falters (to quote
the paragraph preceeding the one above) "before the solid reality of the
motorway embankments, with their constant and unswerving geometry, and
before the finite areas of the car-park aprons" (49).
A passage from a 1983 interview clarifies the quite differing agendas of
Ballard the novelist and Baudrillard the sociologist:
[Re/Search]: Baudrillard said that in modern society, the only way man can
approximate the idea of sacrifice, or a social will rather than a privatized life, is
in the idea of the violent or accidental death; for example, the car crash. Do you
see your treatment of violence in that sense?
JGB: Maybe I'm at heart rather anti-social. Or rather, let's say, an extreme
solitary-I think that's probably true. The social dimension isn't really what I'm
interested in. (Vale 47)
In the rest of his long answer, Ballard goes on to speak

"liberating effect" of trauma, while at the same time i
"sentimental delusion about violence" (47). In essence, Ballard's interest in
car crashes is psychological, with the idea that there is a direct connection
between the individual unconscious and apparently external sociological
phenomena. Ballard uses individual character to represent aspects of human
desire, the expression of which is the external landscape, and the power of
which is attested to by the fact that in the late twentieth century the land-
scape which Western civilization inhabits is increasingly artificial. As desire
has both conscious and unconscious levels, so does the landscape. The
catastrophic interactions between individual and landscape in Ballard's
fiction are expressions of the disjunctions between conscious and uncon-
scious desire at the psychic level. The unconscious level respresents real
desire, the intractable ground of being, and it is Ballard's project to make
this reality manifest, with the very Freudian-and ultimately moral-idea of
bringing to light what is dark.
As he gazes at the contemporary scene, Baudrillard notices the same
cultural symptoms that Ballard does-affectlessness, apparently meaningless
circulation, the sense of impending catastrophe. It is no wonder that Ballard
celebrates Baudrillard's brilliant reading of American culture in America
(1986). But whereas Baudrillard celebrates-even if ironically-the "marvel-
ously affectless succession of signs, images, faces, and ritual acts" on
American roads (Amenica 5), or America's orgiastic and ecstatic indifference
as a "radical modernity" attained (96-97), for Ballard there remains the
project of exposing the real (unconscious) desire beneath the debauch of
fiction. Baudrillard the hyperrealist is at his best consciously a poet of the
surface of things. In this he is a postmodernist par excellence, and this is, it
seems to me, why Ballard, for whom such surfaces are equally fascinating
but also terrifying for what they conceal, is so ambivalent toward him. It is
surely this ambivalence that causes Ballard to attack, in his "Response to the
Invitation to Respond" to Baudrillard's essays, not Baudrillard, but postmod-
ernism itself.
NOTES
1. "Atrocity Ehibition and Crash!, in which I equate the crash with sexuality
both extreme hypotheses, extreme metaphors to describe an extreme situation"
(Bums 22).
2. No indication is given in SFS of when the essays were first published. This did
not affect Ballard's response, however, as he makes it clear that he had read
Baudrillard on Crash "some years ago" ("A Response" 329).
3. Since concluding this essay, I have learned that Ballard's piece is a transcript
of a letter dated 19 April 1991 from Ballard to Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., in
response to Csicsery-Ronay's request for Ballard's reaction to Baudrillard's essays.
Ballard had not read the other critics' responses when he replied, though he knew
the identities of some of them. I am grateful to the editors of SFS for making this
correspondence available to me.
4. It is not clear in the latter case whether he means the movie or the novel.
5. "Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the
concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a
substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality. a
hyperreal" ('The Precession of Simulacra" 2).
6. Freud, in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" (1920), seems to me to have already
diagnosed the problem with Crash's narrator: "The mechanical violence of the
trauma would liberate a quantity of sexual excitation which, owing to the lack of
preparation for anxiety, would have a traumatic effect" (33).
7. As in the very similar West London-based landscapes in Concrte Island (1976)
and High-Rise (1976), and the Shepperton studios in The Unlimited Dream Company
(1979).
WORKS CITED
Ballard, J.G. The Atrocity Erhibition. 1970. London: Triad/Panther, 1979.

- Crash. 1973. New York: Pinnacle, 1974.
. "Some Words About Crash!" Foundation 9:45-54, Nov 1975.
. The Kindness of Women. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1991.
. "A Response to the Invitation to Respond." SFS 18:329, #55, Nov 1991.
Baudrillard, Jean. "Ballard's Crash." 1976. Trans. Arthur B. Evans. SFS 18:313-20,
#55, Nov 1991.
. 'The Precession of Simulacra." Simulations. By Baudrillard. Trans. Paul
Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. NY: Semiotext(e), 1983. 1-79.
. Amenca. 1986. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 1989.
Benison, Jonathan. "Jean Baudrillard on the Current State of SF." Foundation 32:25-
42, Nov 1984.
Burns, Alan, & Charles Sugnet. "[Interview with] J.G. BaHard." The Imagination
on Tial: Bntish andAmenican Wniters Discuss Their Working Methods. Eds. Burns
& Sugnet. London: Allison, 1981. 15-30.
Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Istvan. [Editorial Introduction:] "Postmodernism's SF/SFs
Postmodernism." SFS 18:305-08, #55, Nov 1991.
Di Filippo, Paul. "Ballard's Anatomy: An Interview." Science Fiction Eye 8:66-75,
Winter 1991.
Freud, Sigmund. "Beyond the Pleasure Principle." 1920. The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. XVIII (1920-1922). Ed.
& trans. James Strachey et al. London: Hogarth, 1955. 7-64.
Hayles, N. Katherine. "The Borders of Madness." SFS 18:321-23, #55, Nov 1991.
Landon, Brooks. "Responding to the Killer B's." SFS 18:326-27, #55, Nov 1991.
Sobchack, Vivian. "Baudrillard's Obscenity." SFS 18:327-29, #55, Nov 1991.
Vale & Andrea Juno, ed. Re/Search: J.G. Ballard. San Francisco: Re/Search, 1984.
Abstract.-J.G. Ballard's vehement general attack on postmodem criticism of

science fiction in a recent issue of SFS seems curiously unmotivated. However,
it might perhaps be explained by Ballard's anger at Jean Baudrillard's mis-
reading of Ballard's novel Crash, mitigated by Ballard's admiration for Bau-
drillard's other writings. (NR)

Ballard/"Crash"/Baudrillard Author(s) : Nicholas Ruddick

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Ballard/"Crash"/Baudrillard Author(s) : Nicholas Ruddick

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

SF-TH Inc

One of the publisher's readers was either a psychiatrist or the wife of a

This reader's reaction, based on a confusion between fiction and reality-

In his piece, Ballard is absolutely scathing about postm

The genealogy of the novel implied here is supported by Ballard's own

In the rest of his long answer, Ballard goes on to speak

Ballard, J.G. The Atrocity Erhibition. 1970. London: Triad/Panther, 1979.

Abstract.-J.G. Ballard's vehement general attack on postmodem criticism of

You might also like