James Ballard - Crash

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Crash: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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This powerful and often terrifying novel, the fruit of J.G. Ballard’s obsession with the motor-car, will shock and disturb many readers. Few products of modern technology excite as much fascination and interest as the automobile, but each year hundreds of thousands of people die in car crashes throughout the world, millions are injured. Yet attempts to regulate the motor-car and reduce this slaughter constantly meet with strong and almost unthinking resistance. Ballard believes that the key to this paradox is to be found in the car crash itself, which contains an image of all our fantasies of speed, power, violence and sexuality. ‘Three years ago, I held an exhibition of crashed cars at the New Arts Laboratory in London,’ he says. ‘People were fascinated by the cars but I was surprised that these damaged vehicles were continually attacked and abused during the month they were on show—watching this, I decided to write
.’
The novel opens with the narrator recovering in hospital after a serious car crash in which he has killed the husband of a young woman doctor. In his pain-filled dreams he finds himself dominated by strange sexual fantasies, and he determines to find the real meaning of this horrific experience. When he leaves hospital he revisits the scene of the crash, and meets the woman doctor. During their affair they begin an exploration of the motor-car in all its forms, attending stock-car races, watching test vehicles being crashed, conducting a variety of sexual experiments on London motorways. They meet a violent and aggressive figure called Vaughan, a ‘hoodlum scientist’ who seems determined to die in a car crash with a famous film actress. Terrified of Vaughan, and yet under his spell, the narrator is carried closer to the sinister climax of the novel, a disquieting vision of the future in which sex and technology form a nightmare marriage.
Violent and frightening, but always true to its subject,
is above all a cautionary tale, a warning against the brutal, erotic and overlit future that beckons us, ever more powerfully, from the margins of the technological landscape. The book was filmed by Canadian director David Cronenberg in 1996; the movie
provoked fierce debates over censorship and obscenity.
Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2006

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For Vaughan the smallest styling details contained an organic life as meaningful as the limbs and sense organs of the human beings who drove these vehicles. He would stop me at traffic lights and stare for minutes at the junction of a wiper-blade mounting and windshield assembly in a parked car. The body contours of American saloons and European sports cars, with their subordination of function to gesture, delighted Vaughan. We would follow a new Buick or Ferrari for half an hour, as he studied every detail of body trim and rear deck moulding. Several times we were stopped by police for hanging about a parked Lamborghini owned by a well-to-do Shepperton publican as Vaughan obsessively photographed the exact rake of the windshield pillars, the jut of a headlamp visor, the flare of a wheel housing. He was obsessed with the design of chromium accents on fender louvres, stainless-steel body-sill mouldings, windshield-wiper cowl panels, hood locks and door latches.

He would saunter through the parking lots of the Western Avenue supermarkets as if strolling around a beach colony, fascinated by the high-rise fenders of a Corvette being reversed out by a young housewife. The front and rear air spoilers plunged Vaughan into a trance of recognition, as if he were seeing again some paradise bird. Often, as we drove along the motorways, Vaughan gestured me across the lane marker lines, positioning the Lincoln so that the exact profile of a passing coupe roofline shone in the speeding sunlight in front of us, savouring the perfect proportions of an abbreviated rear deck assembly. The equations between the styling of a motor-car and the organic elements of his body Vaughan mimed continually in his own behaviour. Following an Italian concept car with truncated rear fenders Vaughan’s gestures towards the airport whore sitting between us became stylized and exaggerated, mystifying this bored woman with his surging talk and shoulder movements.

For Vaughan, the colour-keyed interiors of the Lincoln and the other cars which he began to steal for an hour or so each evening exactly simulated the skin areas of the young whores whom he undressed as I drove along the darkened expressways. Their bare thighs modulated the panels of pastel vinyl; the deep-cone speakers recapitulated the contours of their sharp breasts.

I saw the interior of the motor-car as a kaleidoscope of illuminated pieces of the bodies of women. This anthology of wrists and elbow, thigh and pubis formed ever-changing marriages with the contours of the automobile. Once Vaughan and I drove along the perimeter highway to the south of the airport; I held the car carefully on the apex of the high-cambered surface, celebrating with Vaughan the exposed breast of a schoolgirl he had accosted near the studios. The two of us isolated the perfect geometry of this white pear drawn from her tunic in the motion of the car along the curved road surface.

Vaughan’s body, with its unsavoury skin and greasy pallor, took on a hard, mutilated beauty within the elaborately signalled landscape of the motorway. The concrete buttresses along the base of the Western Avenue overpass, angular shoulders spaced at fifty-yard intervals, brought together the sections of Vaughan’s scarred physique.

During the many weeks in which I acted as Vaughan’s chauffeur, giving him money to pay the prostitutes and part-time whores who hung about the airport and its hotels, I watched Vaughan explore every byway of sex and the automobile. For Vaughan the motor-car was the sexual act’s greatest and only true locus. With each of these women Vaughan explored a different sex act, inserting his penis in vagina, anus and mouth almost in reponse to the road along which we moved, the traffic density, the style of my driving.

At the same time it seemed to me that Vaughan was selecting certain sexual acts and positions in his mind for future use, the maximum sex act within the automobile. 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? During the mornings and early afternoons he followed her from her hotel to the film studios. I did not tell him that our negotiations to feature the actress in our projected automobile commercial had fallen through. Vaughan’s hands moved through small contortions as he waited for her to appear, fretting around the rear seat, almost as if his body was unconsciously miming in fast motion hundreds of acts of intercourse with her. I realized that he was assembling in disjointed form the elements of a conceptual sexual act involving the actress and the route she would take from the studios at Shepperton. His self-conscious gestures, the grotesque way in which he hung his arm out of the car, as if about to unscrew it and toss the bloody limb under the wheels of the car following us, the rictus of his mouth as he framed his lips around a nipple, seemed to be private rehearsals for a terrifying drama unfolding in his mind, the sex act he saw as the climax of his own death-collision.

During these last weeks Vaughan was determined to touch with his own sexuality the places of a secret itinerary, mapping with his semen the corridors of this future drama. Gradually, we came nearer to an open confrontation with the police. During the rush-hour one evening, Vaughan signalled me to wait at green traffic lights, deliberately blocking the line of cars behind us. Headlamps flashing, a police car pulled alongside us, the co-driver assuming from Vaughan’s contorted position that we had been involved in a major accident. Covering the face of the girl beside him, a teenage supermarket cashier, Vaughan held himself in the posture of the injured ambassador we had seen taken from his crashed limousine. At the last moment, as the policeman stepped from his car, I ignored Vaughan’s protest and accelerated forwards.

Tired of the Lincoln, Vaughan borrowed other cars from the airport parking lots, using a set of trade passkeys which Vera Seagrave had given him. We let ourselves in and out of these day-parked vehicles, whose owners were in Paris, Stuttgart or Amsterdam, driving them back to their parking places in the evening when we had finished with them. By this time I was unable to rally myself and make an effort to stop Vaughan. As obsessed with his hard body as he himself was with the bodies of automobiles, I found myself locked into a system of beckoning violence and excitement, made up of the motorway and traffic jams, the cars we stole and Vaughan’s discharging sexuality.

During this last period with Vaughan I saw that the women he brought to the car each evening had begun to resemble more and more closely the colouring and figure of the film actress. The dark-haired schoolgirl resembled the young Elizabeth Taylor, while the other women represented her at successively older stages.

Chapter 19

Vaughan, Gabrielle and myself visited the motor show at Earls Court. Calm and gallant, Vaughan steered Gabrielle through the crowd, parading his scarred face as if these wounds were a sympathetic response to Gabrielle’s crippled legs. Gabrielle swung herself among the hundreds of cars displayed on their stands, their chromium and cellulosed bodies gleaming like the coronation armour of an archangelic host. Pivoting about on her heels, Gabrielle seemed to take immense pleasure from these immaculate vehicles, placing her scarred hands on their paintwork, rolling her injured hips against them like an unpleasant cat. She provoked a young salesman on the Mercedes stand to ask her to inspect a white sports car, relishing his embarrassment when he helped her shackled legs into the front seat. Vaughan whistled in admiration at this.

We moved through the stands and revolving cars, Gabrielle heeling and toeing herself among the motor industry executives and show-girls. My eyes were fixed on her leg brace, on her deformed thighs and knees, her swinging left shoulder, these portions of her body that seemed to beckon towards the immaculate machines on their revolving stands, inviting them to confront her wounds. As she climbed into the cabin of a small Japan-17 ese sedan her bland eyes saw my uninjured body in the same glaucous light as these geometrically perfect machines. Vaughan guided her from one car to the next, helping her on to the stands, into the cockpits of styling department exercises, specialist concept cars, carriage-trade limousines in whose rear seats she sat like the hostile queen of this overactive technarchy.

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