by Pedro Groppo
J.G. Ballard’s most controversial novel, Crash (1973), embodies his ambiguity toward aesthetics, morals, sex, and violence as it conflates car crashes and sexual desire. The concept of “death of affect,” a distancing stance that keeps morality and affect at bay while appreciating some aesthetic aspects of an event is often used in conjunction with Ballard’s fiction. The critical debate over Crash, according to Andrzej Gasiorek, tends to center around its moral rather than aesthetic values (82), attempting to examine the moral ambiguities of Crash to try to understand and better appreciate this much misunderstood novel from a variety of perspectives. Read the rest of this entry »
