ABSTRACT
Unshakeable Confidence towers over the valley. Its peak offers an excellent view of the Essence ofThings. (Wislawa Szymborska, 'Utopia')
1973 or the Hypermodern Narcissus
Vaughan's fantasy was to kill Elizabeth Taylor in a head-on collision at Heathrow airport. With a fervent devotion he observed her daily routine (from a Lincoln identical to the one in which John F. Kennedy was killed) so that he would know exactly where the impact would need to occur if he was to realize this fantasy of celebrity martyrdom, where their bodies would be entwined with the harsh chrome of the automobiles and their bodily fluids - semen, blood and tissue - would be mixed in an offertory preparation for erotic sanctification. Such is the desire of a central character in J.G. Ballard's (in)famous novel Crash, a book that includes, in its 1995 reprint - the book was first published in 1973 - an 'introduction' that places the narrative's significance in the realm of prophetic warning: 'Do we see, in a car crash,' asks Ballard, 'a sinister portent of a nightmare marriage between sex and technology?' (Ballard, 1995, p. 6) The psychopathologies of everyday life in a Ballardian universe can be read in terms of the symptom that is the fantasy life of atomistic characters and the unrealizability of the promise of these fantasies, a promise mirrored by the insatiable thirst and destruction of technology.
