Zina Hutton

Professor Kenneth Johnson

LIT 5486
Crash Into You - J.G. Ballard's Crash and the Interconnection Between Suicidal and
Sexual Urges
J.G. Ballard's Crash, like many of his other pieces of work, reveals hidden
sides to humanity and renders human desire in a way that should ring false but
speaks instead of a truth about sexuality and sexual practice. In some of the other
pieces of transgressive fiction read for this course, we have seen the relationship
between death and sexuality. In the Marquis de Sade's Justine, many of the
libertines linked their sexuality with the death of others, seeming innocents. For
much of the work we have read or touched upon, the people dying did not want their
deaths or sexual contact that occurred alongside or bookended expressions of
sexuality that involved these characters these victims. In Crash however, the main
characters literally chase death as part of their sexuality, rejecting normalcy,
stability, and victimhood in order to receive access to a kind of chaos. In this paper,
the goal is to look at how Crash's main characters' sexuality becomes more and more
inextricably linked with death the threat or reality of their individual deaths
throughout the course of the novel, an unexpectedly literal interpretation of Georges
Bataille's writing on the links between eroticism and death wherein one cannot exist
without the other. We will also be looking at the way that Ballard positions
alternative (queer) identities as transgressive within the contexts of the novel both

the mechanophilia/symphorophilia as well as the queer existence of characters like

Vaughan.
Sexuality, in J. G. Ballard's crash, exists outside of normative forms of
sexuality. For these characters, sexual attraction links with adrenaline and with the
characters' fetish for vehicles. In her book A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory,
Nikki Sullivan addresses the fact that, "sexuality is not natural, but rather, it is
discursively constructed"1. She goes on to say that sexuality is developed,
experienced, and understood in specific ways that tie into history and culture 2. What
this means for the cast of characters developed in Ballard's Crash is that none of
them were born into the desires that drive them throughout the book. In fact, early
on in Crash, that notion of a constructed, transgressive sexuality starts to develop.
Part way through the first chapter, Ballard's narrator James 3 thinks back to a
realization about one of his compatriots in kink, Vaughan. Ballard has James say
that, "for him these wounds [caused by car crashes he's imagining] were the keys to a
new sexuality born from a perverse technology"4. The characters that come to
surround Vaughan and who embrace the eroticism inherent both in death and in the
automobile did not begin that way. Their sexuality is not natural or supported by
societal norms. Prior to their respective inciting moments (Vaughan's near-death
1 Sullivan 8
2 Ibid
3 For clarity's sake, I will be referring to the author as Ballard and the narrator as
James throughout this paper.
4 Ballard 16

experience and the crash that James go through), the characters that develop the
paraphilia and sexual identity that binds them together were "normal" 5. The fact that
Vaughan and his compatriots possess an identity that centers around their
simultaneous sexual and suicidal urges is transgressive as they reject societal (here
1970s British culture) norms that center on sex and death in order to both create
and embrace a subculture where the two typically taboo subjects come together.
Crash opens with the aftermath of a death with the narrator James describing
the aftermath of an accident where his compatriot Vaughan, in taking his desires to
their logical conclusion (by attempting to manufacture the death of Elizabeth
Taylor), has killed himself and several tourists. Immediately, the connection with
sexuality and death is made indelible with James' descriptions of violent accidents
juxtaposed with sexual images. When James describes the tableaux of Vaughan's
death, he describes the body in Ballard's usual, almost poetic style right until he
glances down at Vaughan's genitals. Ballard writes that James, "looked down for the
last time at his huge groin, engorged with blood"6. In death (and because of it),
Vaughan is allowed one last moment of sexualization as James' gazes in at the
erection that came from seeing his sexuality and his desires to the same logical
conclusion that Georges Bataille brought up when discussing the Marquis de Sade's
own preoccupation with sexuality in death. Bataille looked at de Sade's use of
eroticized murder and death as what I have previously described as, "an almost
5 Normal referring to "existing in a way that their specific (British) society approves
of"
6 Ballard 9

climactic form of erotic excitement". Death does not necessarily remove the reader
from experiencing eroticism and here, in Ballard's prose, the subject is always
adjacent to and aware of sex-within-death.
Now, the real story in Crash begins after that first chapter. It begins in the
second, with James' first real brush with death in a car crash that occurs several
months prior to the book's first chapter. This is not James' first car crash (that would
have been one that followed an interrupted erotic interlude between him and his
wife that led to him backing into a tree at full speed), but it is the first to end in a
death. The head-on collision injures James and the driver of the other car, Dr. Helen
Remington. It also kills Remington's husband as he is flung through the windshield
onto the hood of James' car. Ballard emphasizes the connection, the awakening that
Remington and James face in this moment that brings them together, writing that:
During my first hours in Ashford Hospital all I could see in my mind
was the image of us locked together face to face in these two cars, the
body of her dying husband lying between us on the bonnet of my car.
We looked at each other through the fractured windshields, neither able
to move.7
The connection forged by the accident is a one that Ballard brings up as integral to
the creation of their community, of Vaughan's little cult of symphorophiliacs. At the
offset, Ballard's focus does not seem sexual. However, Ballard soon eroticizes this
moment, the catalyst for James sexual reawakening and the beginning of his
7 Page 26

relationship with both Remington and Vaughan. As Remington stands beside the
remains of her car, James focuses on the way that her thighs open outward towards
him, her posture sexualized but disturbing8. There is a moment then, as the
firefighters attempt to pill James from the mangled remains of his car where we get
the following piece of internal monologue. As James watches the almost ritualistic
movements of the firefighters, he thinks that, "That same painful bite which I once
received from a tired prostitute irritated by my hesitant erection reminds me of the
stylized gestures of ambulance attendants and filling station personnel, each with
their repertory of private movements"9.
Later, once James is taken to the hospital, we begin to see the effects that the
accident had on his sexuality as well as on his relationships. One of the recurring
themes in Crash is that the characters in the book change significantly (and sexually)
'following their experiences. James points out that while in the hospital, "already
Catherine saw me in a new light,"10. Prior to his accident, James was certainly no
sexual prude. He says that the reason for his survival was that he had fastened his
seatbelt in order to give his secretary a way out of embracing him after ending their
affair11. At the same time, James' wife Catherine had multiple affairs throughout the
years. Prior to his car accident, their relationship was rather reliant on outsiders.

8 Page 30
9 Page 33
10 Page 66
11 Page 26

James even points out that he believes that the affairs his wife had participated in,
"took place merely to provide the raw material for our sexual games"12. One can in
fact interpret James' sexual relationship with his wife Catherine as dependent on
outsider/the aspect of enjoying the thrill of the forbidden in becoming aroused by
infidelity.
Following James' accident and a few moments with her in the hospital, he
winds up having a proper (for some value of the word) meeting with Helen
Remington at the police junkyard where the remains of their cars lie. At first, she
does not recognize him, but soon enough, she does and she walks away after staring
at James with what he calls a "tolerant eye"13. Even before they enter into an affair,
the imagery that Ballard uses turns again to the sexual. Remington stands in such a
way that reminds James of the accident once more, her inner thighs turned outwards
as if in offering14. James references "a powerful sense of eroticism"15 between him
and Remington that is a result of their accident. Despite this eroticism and the link
caused by her husband's death and their accident, they do not have sex after their
meeting in the junkyard, however. Spurred by James' arousal-induced inattention,
he nearly kills them both in a car accident on their way back from the junkyard. The

12 Page 44
13 106
14 106
15 Page 64

adrenaline caused from nearly dying so close to the location of the first accident that
killed Remington's husband arouses James and (it is implied) Remington as well.
Now, I would like to look closely at the idea of sex in the machine and
fetishism as it begins, properly begins, with that second accident. Fetishism and
paraphilias are seen as sexual components that disrupt the norm due to what they
center on and intensity of the attraction to the object fetishized. Ballard's Crash
centers on an automobile fetish. Even before you look at the way that the desire to be
in/cause accidents themselves forms a fetish for several of the characters, the desire
to be at one with the machine is ever present in the work. Most if not all of Crash's
sex scenes take place within the confines of the car.
The idea of becoming one with the car appears in the description of wounds
commonly associated with car crashes, chromium parts breaching the surface of
human skin and rupturing bodies within the space of a moment. James' sex scenes
with Gabrielle, a woman whose body is covered with buckles and casts due to a
previous crash that left her body badly scarred, the text reads as if she has already
achieved that oneness16. With fetishism (via Paul Gebhard's scale), lower levels use
the fetish as an accessory for sexual satisfaction while at higher levels, the fetish's
components become necessary to both arousal and completion 17. In Crash, the
characters quickly move to a level of mechanophilia that renders sexual acts outside
of the confines of a car/unrelated to automobiles, impossible. Of the connection that
16 Page 279
17 Sullivan 172

these characters (most notably Vaughan) have with the cars, Ballard writes that, "All
of us who knew Vaughan accept the perverse eroticism of the car-crash, as painful as
the drawing of an exposed organ through the aperture of a surgical wound," 18. Here
we see that the cult of symphorophiliacs recognizing that eroticism inherent (to
them) in car crashes comes from the promised potential pain of injury and the threat
of death.
With Vaughan and the fetish for car crashes, the fetish develops another layer.
His behavior escalates, from the dog that he hits to the serviceman police suspect
that he killed to his increasing obsession with Elizabeth Taylor. Of this escalation
and its ties to Vaughan's desire for death with Elizabeth Taylor, Ballard writes:
The clear equation he had made between sex and the kinaesthetics of
the highway was in some way related to his obsessions with Elizabeth
Taylor. Did he visualize himself in a sexual act with her, dying together
in some complex car-crash?19
The answer to James' question is a resounding "yes". At this point in the narrative,
perhaps even before that, to be honest, dying in a car crash is the ultimate sex act
that Vaughan can participate in, and the only thing that would make the desire
perfect, would be if Elizabeth Taylor was the (willing or unwilling) star in his
performance. Even the sex workers he brings to James' car start to look at her, as if
Elizabeth Taylor's existence and identity is necessary for Vaughan to have near-total
18 Page 22
19 Page 267

access to the object of his fetish20. There is no other logical conclusion to Vaughan's
fetish/paraphilia outside of sex and death in a car preferably at the same time. He
defines himself by this sexual-suicidal desire to die in a car crash that kills a celebrity
while living on in perpetuity as a result.
Next, I would like to look at the idea of a transgressive sort of queerness
evident amidst the main characters in the book. First, (gender and sexual)
queerness can be inherently transgressive as they push up against societal ideas
about appropriate sexual and gender performances. When we talk about
transgressive queerness as it relates back to Ballard's Crash, the explicit sexuality
that lingers on the combination of sex and death (in that sexual attraction is
triggered by the potential for the subject's death via automobiles) breaks an implied
binary of hetero/homo sexual. There is no definitive definition for "queer theory" or
even "queerness". Two people with similar experiences will still find space to bicker
and differ over what exactly, queerness is. However, Sue-Ellen Case (who Nikki
Sullivan quotes in her queer theory book), focuses more on what queerness does
rather than what it is, writing that, " Striking at its very core, queer desire punctuates
the life/death and generative/destructive bipolarities that enclose the heterosexist
notion of being"21. This punctuation, this decentralization of sexualities viewed as
"typical", absolutely disrupts both heterosexism and heteronormativity. In Crash
however, I see queerness without a specifically gender or genital-based sexual
identity. The automobile fetishism drives the characters into choosing their sexual
20 Page 269
21 Sullivan 52

partners, not straight or queer sexualities commonly linked to preferences for

physical sex and gender. Vaughan's on-screen sexual partners are women, all except
for James. In an encounter near the end of the book that heralds the beginning of the
end, Vaughan and James have sex in the latter's car22. Ballard writes James as
completely unencumbered by any gender/genital-based sexuality. He focuses
instead on Vaughan's "reopened open wounds"23 and scars that he refers to as, "a
zodiac of unforgotten collisions"24. The proof of previous accidents, scars on skin and
shattered bones are framed with erotic and tender language right until the end
where James cradles Vaughan in his sleep. The idea though that sexuality is linked
more to attraction to automobiles rather than sex comes at the end of the chapter
when James muses that, " A profound sense of calm presided over my body,
composed partly of my love for Vaughan, and partly of my feelings of tenderness
towards the metal bower in which we sat,"25. James is attracted both Vaughan's body
and that of the car, the melding of their bodies encircled by the metal body of his
beloved car in a way that blurs expectations of sexuality.
J.G. Ballard's Crash focuses on the impact of the automobile in these
characters' private lives and sexual identities. The car becomes more than a vehicle,
taking on a personality and a personhood that the characters find themselves

22 Page 313
23 Page 314
24 Page 314
25 Page 315

attracted to. Death in the automobile, despite its finality as that last lingering
boundary, is eroticized and accepted amidst the community that James finds himself
drawn into. "Standard" sexualities are subsumed underneath the aspects of
fetishism, erased underneath the drive to be intimate near/in cars. Death, for
Vaughan and Seagrave, becomes not a hurdle that humans are wary of crossing, but
something that they both desired and saw as necessary for their sexual fulfillment.
Out of the many characters focused on in the course of this class, the characters in
Crash rather exemplify the idea of sexual transgression and eroticism as their
outlook of eroticism encircles a sexual desire to relive and embrace near-death
experiences (theirs and others) that leads straight towards death in the instrument
of their desire.

References
Ballard, J. G. (1973). Crash. London.
Bataille, Georges. (1986). Erotism: Death and Sensuality. City Lights Books.
Sullivan, N. (2003). A critical introduction to queer theory. NYU Press.