anatomy of disgust

its protagonists become sexually aroused by staging and participating in real car-crashes. The novel was written in a highly-sensationalized manner.


Seduction/disgust 


This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do Not Publish.

The book explores themes such as the transformation of human psychology by modern technology, and consumer culture's fascination with celebrities and technological commodities. The human characters in the novel are cold and passionless, unable to become sexually excited unless some kind of technology is involved (typically architecture and cars). The gruesome damage inflicted on car-crash victims is not seen as shocking, but as the liberation of new sexual possibilities that have yet to be explored, such as in one scene where a man and a woman have sex in a car that was involved in an accident, but rather than havevaginal sex, he penetrates a wound on her thigh that she received in the crash.

Finally, the book asks why we, as an enlightened society, accept such a “perverse technology” – that kills a vast number of people yearly – as such an integral part of our culture.

Ballard writes in the foreword: “Do we see, in the car-crash, the portents of a nightmare marriage between technology, and our own sexuality? … Is there some deviant logic unfolding here, more powerful than that provided by reason?”

“After having … been constantly bombarded by road-safety propaganda, it was almost a relief to find myself in a real accident.”

“Trying to exhaust himself, Vaughan devised an endless almanac of terrifying wounds and insane collisions: The lungs of elderly men punctured by door-handles; the chests of young women impaled on steering-columns; the cheek of handsome youths torn on the chromium latches of quarter-lights. To Vaughan, these wounds formed the key to a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology. The images of these wounds hung in the gallery of his mind, like exhibits in the museum of a slaughterhouse.”

I began to understand the sexual excitements of the car-crash for myself when I first met Vaughan shortly after coming out of hospital. I had been admitted with multiple fractures to my legs after my car had hit the central reservation of the Western Avenue and hit a saloon travelling in the opposite direction, instantly propelling the driver through the windscreen and into the path of a lorry which crushed his torso under its wheels, leaving his wife catatonic by the wayside.