ABSTRACT
Bataille’s notion of writing as a provocative act is pertinent for this reading of Crash. Opening on a note of prolepsis – ‘Vaughan died yesterday in his last carcrash’ (C 7) – the reader is thrust into an atrocity exhibition of serial mutilations as the human body and the automobile intersect with excruciating force. Images of pain and suffering overwhelm the reader’s vision; we witness Vaughan drowning in his own blood; the shattered bodies of coach-crash victims as they haemorrhage across the text in a trail of blood, semen and vomit; the pathos of unconscious victims as they lay trapped beside their dead loved ones; the visceral horror of lacerated body parts (C 7-14). Grating violently against the grain of readerly expectation, the narrator’s proleptic announcement, together with its shocking and unrelenting contents, is at once disorientating and unnerving.2 Yet Ballard offers his readers no respite. Unable to avert our eyes from this spectacle of chaos and collision, the reader is compelled to confront the wounded and bloodied landscape of contemporary culture.
