Postmodernism Literature the Novel \"Crash\"

Postmodernism Literature

The novel "Crash" by J.G. Ballard is one of the postmodernist literary works that manages to put together a wide array of notions and feelings that the postmodern society breeds, such as alienation, technological dependency (and all deriving from this), grotesque fetishes and the overall feeling of loneliness that derives that the perception that the lack of moral coordinates permits you to experiment anything.

The story analyzes a car-crash sexual fetishism that the main characters practice and which involves being aroused (as well as connected sexual acts) when real car crashes occur. For the category of individuals that become involved in this fetishism group, the sexual satisfaction comes only when technology is involved and, at the same time, when the injuries that accidents result in new sexual fantasies.

Apparently, the plot of the book indicates only a gruesome account that includes scenes such as a sexual intercourse where the penetration is done in a wound that the woman had received during an accident. However, beyond these experimentations that the writer likes to use in order to vividly shock his readers and, as such, attract the attention the artist desires, there are some interesting ideas worth analyzing, based on some of the general motifs identified in the first paragraph here.

The interesting recurrent motive is that of the role of modern technology in present-day society. At the end of the book, the writer rhetorically asks himself why society has become so dependent on technology. On the surface, technology causes death, in different forms, not only physical death. Technology causes spiritual death through excessive dependency which leads the individual to alienate himself from other humans. It is also partially a creative death, because much of the activities involving human creativity are now transferred to technological instruments.

Certainly, technology also has many positive aspects (in the case of cars, the capacity to get you from one place to another much quicker), but these aspects are not of concern for the writer: he is set to writing a bleak novel in which he condemns the technological interference in our lives. Tacitly, he implies that even a basic biological activity, such as sexual intercourse, will eventually depend on technology, in this case in the form of technology fetishism.

On the other hand, another important theme is violence as a distinct and omnipresent element in modern culture. The book dates from 1973, when this phenomenon is only beginning to be felt, but it would be very relevant today, where violence on TV, in movies and in everyday society seems to be the common denominator of most leisure activities, dominating the cultural environment.

Violence should best be seen in the context of an individual alienation caused, most likely, both by the apparent lack of moral norms and, at the same time, by the continuous development of the individual, in a constant quest for the absolute (and this can be the absolute feeling, the absolute perception, the absolute manifestations and sensations etc.).

With the underlying belief that everything is permitted, the modern or the postmodern individual is willing to go along with all types of experiments that are likely to help in his quest for continuous development. The sexual fetish presented here is clearly abnormal, especially since it is not a remote sexual practice, but the individual permissiveness allows for this to happen. At the same time, it almost becomes a new normality for the group, a normality which is accepted as such (or rather not discussed) by the group. This new normality accepts all things that are seen as abnormalities by the other members of society. This could be a thesis that Ballard supports throughout the novel: the relativism of normality, the incapacity of accepting a basic set of clearly valid and generally accepted moral norms.

Further more, the novel seems to imply that the postmodern individual will eventually resume his existence to a single important objective during his lifetime: feeling good. In order to reach this objective, the postmodern man will resort to any type of instruments that will help him reach that particular stage of development. However, a society where the only primary objective of its members is to physically 'feel good' in any conditions and without any other values is definitely a corrupt and reduced society.