Between the Natural and the Artificial: The Subline Sexual Sensation of Car Crashes in J.G. Ballard's Crash

At a time when technology progressively pushes back nature, the sexual act runs the risk of denaturalisation. The notion of the sublime, which I argue is how humans react to the machine as a surrogate for nature and as a sexual stimulus in Crash (1973), is therefore of central interest in this article. Ballard himself has described Crash as ‘the first pornographic novel based on technology’ (1973, 6). This engagement with a technologised sexuality is explored as a subjective narrative stance granting authenticity to the fictive alter ego, who can probe alternatives to an extra-textual reality. This narrative mode is notably potent in relation to the narrator’s estimation of the merge between sexuality and technology in the form of car crashes uniting Eros and Thanatos. I, therefore, suggest that Crash can be read as an attempt to localise the natural and human in a world dictated by artificiality and technology.