Unenjoyable art: J. G. Ballard’s Crash
The novel Crash has haunted me since I read it six or seven months ago. And that’s odd, because I didn’t even like it, in fact dismissed it as a failed experiment. Well, to come to terms with this I wrote something about it yesterday and put it somewhere else online, but now I’ve decided to put it here to see if others have anything to say about it. It’s not exactly a review, since I don’t really discuss anything specific. I guess it’s about what the novel means to me, because despite my initial dislike, it definitely has come to mean something, though I’m not sure what. Here’s what I’m thinking…
Popular fiction, it is said, is entertaining, while literature, on the other hand, is good for you, enjoyment being irrelevant or merely a bonus in the realm of high art. The pizza vs. turnip soup theory of literature. It’s clear to me that this is wrong, not least because I find popular fiction boring, and have the most fun with the unique and challenging works.
This leaves me wondering what to make of Crash, J. G. Ballard’s notorious novel about people who are sexually aroused by car crashes. I read it a few months ago and didn’t enjoy it, and I was quite dismissive of it when I got to the end. But now I find it’s still lodged in my mind like a psychic tumour that may or may not be benign. Thus—I now think—it must be a powerful work of art. What else could do that?
(Incidentally, that wasn’t just an empty metaphor. The sense in which this tumour, this memory of the novel, might be malignant, is that it seems to be reinforcing my turn away from optimism—about life, humanity, and progress—and towards an all-encompassing cynicism.)
What it comes down to is that I no longer believe that the things I didn’t like about it justify a negative judgement on its worth as a work of art. Yes, it is quite amazingly tedious and repetitive. Yes, it is cold, joyless and repugnant. But it turns out these are the things that make it so memorable and, at least in retrospect, stimulating.
I think it follows that at least some excellent works of literature are not entertaining, delightful, or enjoyable.
Of course, it’s obvious that there are great novels that are harrowing, sad, and depressing. That’s not what I’m on about. Those books are often compelling, dramatic, and exciting in their artful exploration of misery, depravity, etc., and are therefore in some sense entertaining. And we care about the characters. But Crash, on the contrary, is boring and alienating. It feels flat, it is unvarying in mood, uninteresting in plot, reliant on what seems to be a gimmick from start to finish, and we don’t care about the characters. It is not suspenseful or particularly compelling, and one reads on with only a mild curiosity about what will happen. And yet, it really does capture something profound.
To say it’s profound looks like hand-waving, a mere gesture towards a proper identification of what makes it good. It is that, but it fits well in my case because I experienced the novel as somehow philosophical. I realized this when, in the days after I read it, I was trying and failing to shake off its lingering presence, and was at the same time becoming preoccupied with philosophy for the first time in many months, specifically social philosophy such as critical theory. If I had to boil it down I’d say the motivating question was something like: how did we get in this mess? It was as if the novel had revealed some deep thing wrong with society, something whose details and causes I wanted to uncover. There was something about the book that felt real, despite its absurdity. So I didn’t go back to fiction for a few months and spent my reading hours with Adorno, Marx, and Nietzsche.
Perhaps, then, Crash is profound in that it is postmodern in more than just the formal literary sense. Its concerns are not with storytelling—with itself—so much as with the postmodern condition, i.e., with the real world we live in today (and have been living in since the seventies). It's possible this makes it a modernist more than a postmodernist novel, and a moral one at that. Shock horror, a story with a message! Not usually my cup of tea, but if it does indeed have a moral point, at least it’s not didactic. It beats us mercilessly into being horrified by the world rather than telling us why we should be.
So what is the moral point? What is it we should be horrified by in the real world, according to Ballard? Since he has written about the book a few times, let us refer to the man’s own words:
[quote=J. G. Ballard’s 1995 introduction]Throughout Crash I have used the car not only as a sexual image, but as a total metaphor for man's life in today's society. As such the novel has a political role quite apart from its sexual content, but I would still like to think that Crash is the first pornographic novel based on technology. In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other in the most urgent and ruthless way. Needless to say, the ultimate role of Crash is cautionary, a warning against that brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape.[/quote]
I relate this to a point made somewhere by the philosopher John Gray, to the effect that science and technology are the only areas of human life that have seen progress, ever. We have not progressed ethically, politically, psychologically, or socially, except insofar as problems have been directly amenable to science and technology, and even that has been patchy.
Setting aside any objections to that, what it means is that we are ill-equipped to deal with the accelerating rate of technical advancement. Rather, that advancement becomes part of a web of exploitation, violence, and alienation, and in fact intensifies the dehumanization of culture and of personal relationships.
So as he says, it’s a cautionary tale. However, I do suspect that this is a post-hoc rationalization of what was at the time a more purely artistic effort. That is, his words from 1995, twenty years after he wrote the novel, amount to an interpretation, with no more or less legitimacy than the interpretations of critics and appreciative readers. I happen to think it’s a good interpretation, but I doubt it’s an explanation of what he set out to do when he wrote the novel. Probably nearer to that intention, or nearer to describing what he was doing, is his comment elsewhere that Crash was a “psychopathic hymn.” He had noticed some social tendencies and extrapolated them into psychopathy.
Anyway, back to whether I like it or not. I have to admit that although its repetitiveness is a counteracting force, the book is in fact impressively, entertainingly, even amusingly perverse. But it wears off quickly (“J. G., if you tell me about a ‘junction’ of wounds and mangled car parts one more time I’m throwing this book out the window”). Maybe that’s another strength: Ballard is not merely a mischief-maker out to shock and titillate; he’s deadly serious and he’s not going to stop when it stops being fun.
But it is in fact sometimes fun:
I doubt I’m the only one to find this funny. And Ballard was a really clever guy, so it seems odd to claim that he was not aware of this humour, which is peppered throughout the book. But the novel is so unremitting, the tone so uncompromising, the approach so single-minded, and the purpose so serious, that I do want to make that claim. I’m imagining he would look down on those who read it for the thrill of absurd perversity. I could well be wrong about that, but it’s a sign of how puzzling the book is, how unique and disturbing it is, that I’m confused about it.
I want to address one more thing. In a few places online I’ve seen reviews of Crash that radically misinterpret it. (But wait! Aren’t all interpretations valid and equally good? Valid, maybe. Equally good? No.) They think it is a sympathetic exploration of a paraphilic sexual preference, which they identify as symphorophilia. Come on people. The whole point of the book is to exaggerate things about society precisely by describing an absurd, impossible perversion. It is a crazy metaphor. If symphorophiliacs do exist, then either Ballard was not aware of them or else he was not interested in them or their condition.
I’m in my fifties. It’s sometimes hard to resist the temptation to grumble about wokeness. But I try, since doing so can be pretty stupid, the whole phenomenon being too complex for either a full embrace or a full rejection. However (and yes, I’m aware I seem to be doing an “I’m not racist but…”), there must be a point at which your well-meaning effort to be inclusive of all sexual preferences blinds you to what is in front of your face: in the case of Crash, what is in front of your face is horrifying, psychopathic perversity described as if it were normal.
Popular fiction, it is said, is entertaining, while literature, on the other hand, is good for you, enjoyment being irrelevant or merely a bonus in the realm of high art. The pizza vs. turnip soup theory of literature. It’s clear to me that this is wrong, not least because I find popular fiction boring, and have the most fun with the unique and challenging works.
This leaves me wondering what to make of Crash, J. G. Ballard’s notorious novel about people who are sexually aroused by car crashes. I read it a few months ago and didn’t enjoy it, and I was quite dismissive of it when I got to the end. But now I find it’s still lodged in my mind like a psychic tumour that may or may not be benign. Thus—I now think—it must be a powerful work of art. What else could do that?
(Incidentally, that wasn’t just an empty metaphor. The sense in which this tumour, this memory of the novel, might be malignant, is that it seems to be reinforcing my turn away from optimism—about life, humanity, and progress—and towards an all-encompassing cynicism.)
What it comes down to is that I no longer believe that the things I didn’t like about it justify a negative judgement on its worth as a work of art. Yes, it is quite amazingly tedious and repetitive. Yes, it is cold, joyless and repugnant. But it turns out these are the things that make it so memorable and, at least in retrospect, stimulating.
I think it follows that at least some excellent works of literature are not entertaining, delightful, or enjoyable.
Of course, it’s obvious that there are great novels that are harrowing, sad, and depressing. That’s not what I’m on about. Those books are often compelling, dramatic, and exciting in their artful exploration of misery, depravity, etc., and are therefore in some sense entertaining. And we care about the characters. But Crash, on the contrary, is boring and alienating. It feels flat, it is unvarying in mood, uninteresting in plot, reliant on what seems to be a gimmick from start to finish, and we don’t care about the characters. It is not suspenseful or particularly compelling, and one reads on with only a mild curiosity about what will happen. And yet, it really does capture something profound.
To say it’s profound looks like hand-waving, a mere gesture towards a proper identification of what makes it good. It is that, but it fits well in my case because I experienced the novel as somehow philosophical. I realized this when, in the days after I read it, I was trying and failing to shake off its lingering presence, and was at the same time becoming preoccupied with philosophy for the first time in many months, specifically social philosophy such as critical theory. If I had to boil it down I’d say the motivating question was something like: how did we get in this mess? It was as if the novel had revealed some deep thing wrong with society, something whose details and causes I wanted to uncover. There was something about the book that felt real, despite its absurdity. So I didn’t go back to fiction for a few months and spent my reading hours with Adorno, Marx, and Nietzsche.
Perhaps, then, Crash is profound in that it is postmodern in more than just the formal literary sense. Its concerns are not with storytelling—with itself—so much as with the postmodern condition, i.e., with the real world we live in today (and have been living in since the seventies). It's possible this makes it a modernist more than a postmodernist novel, and a moral one at that. Shock horror, a story with a message! Not usually my cup of tea, but if it does indeed have a moral point, at least it’s not didactic. It beats us mercilessly into being horrified by the world rather than telling us why we should be.
So what is the moral point? What is it we should be horrified by in the real world, according to Ballard? Since he has written about the book a few times, let us refer to the man’s own words:
[quote=J. G. Ballard’s 1995 introduction]Throughout Crash I have used the car not only as a sexual image, but as a total metaphor for man's life in today's society. As such the novel has a political role quite apart from its sexual content, but I would still like to think that Crash is the first pornographic novel based on technology. In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other in the most urgent and ruthless way. Needless to say, the ultimate role of Crash is cautionary, a warning against that brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape.[/quote]
I relate this to a point made somewhere by the philosopher John Gray, to the effect that science and technology are the only areas of human life that have seen progress, ever. We have not progressed ethically, politically, psychologically, or socially, except insofar as problems have been directly amenable to science and technology, and even that has been patchy.
Setting aside any objections to that, what it means is that we are ill-equipped to deal with the accelerating rate of technical advancement. Rather, that advancement becomes part of a web of exploitation, violence, and alienation, and in fact intensifies the dehumanization of culture and of personal relationships.
So as he says, it’s a cautionary tale. However, I do suspect that this is a post-hoc rationalization of what was at the time a more purely artistic effort. That is, his words from 1995, twenty years after he wrote the novel, amount to an interpretation, with no more or less legitimacy than the interpretations of critics and appreciative readers. I happen to think it’s a good interpretation, but I doubt it’s an explanation of what he set out to do when he wrote the novel. Probably nearer to that intention, or nearer to describing what he was doing, is his comment elsewhere that Crash was a “psychopathic hymn.” He had noticed some social tendencies and extrapolated them into psychopathy.
Anyway, back to whether I like it or not. I have to admit that although its repetitiveness is a counteracting force, the book is in fact impressively, entertainingly, even amusingly perverse. But it wears off quickly (“J. G., if you tell me about a ‘junction’ of wounds and mangled car parts one more time I’m throwing this book out the window”). Maybe that’s another strength: Ballard is not merely a mischief-maker out to shock and titillate; he’s deadly serious and he’s not going to stop when it stops being fun.
But it is in fact sometimes fun:
The elegant aluminized air-vents in the walls of the X-ray department beckoned as invitingly as the warmest organic orifice.
I doubt I’m the only one to find this funny. And Ballard was a really clever guy, so it seems odd to claim that he was not aware of this humour, which is peppered throughout the book. But the novel is so unremitting, the tone so uncompromising, the approach so single-minded, and the purpose so serious, that I do want to make that claim. I’m imagining he would look down on those who read it for the thrill of absurd perversity. I could well be wrong about that, but it’s a sign of how puzzling the book is, how unique and disturbing it is, that I’m confused about it.
I want to address one more thing. In a few places online I’ve seen reviews of Crash that radically misinterpret it. (But wait! Aren’t all interpretations valid and equally good? Valid, maybe. Equally good? No.) They think it is a sympathetic exploration of a paraphilic sexual preference, which they identify as symphorophilia. Come on people. The whole point of the book is to exaggerate things about society precisely by describing an absurd, impossible perversion. It is a crazy metaphor. If symphorophiliacs do exist, then either Ballard was not aware of them or else he was not interested in them or their condition.
I’m in my fifties. It’s sometimes hard to resist the temptation to grumble about wokeness. But I try, since doing so can be pretty stupid, the whole phenomenon being too complex for either a full embrace or a full rejection. However (and yes, I’m aware I seem to be doing an “I’m not racist but…”), there must be a point at which your well-meaning effort to be inclusive of all sexual preferences blinds you to what is in front of your face: in the case of Crash, what is in front of your face is horrifying, psychopathic perversity described as if it were normal.
Comments (72)
I haven't read it, and do not intend to read it. Ballard was one of my least favourite sf writers, and one reason was a sense of misanthropy and moral nihilism that always seemed to come through his writing.
Quoting Jamal
Is It? What are we being warned against that we are in danger of? Have you found something in society and or in your psyche that you were unaware of before? Or are we being shown the dangers of delight in cautionary tales?
Quoting Jamal
I find there is more than enough horror and psychopathic perversity around and within. One does well to acknowledge it, even to confess it perhaps, but one does ill to indulge it. I speak from ignorance, of course, but nothing you have said thus far has given me the least reason to think I ought to read it let alone want to. I haven't read Lolita either.
Intriguement.
Maybe I shouldn’t have. Maybe it traumatized me.
Quoting unenlightened
I see the misanthropy, but—if this isn’t a contradiction—I don’t see the moral nihilism. I mean, he shows moral nihilism precisely because he’s morally concerned or outraged (or merely conservative (which by the way I think he was, politically)).
Quoting unenlightened
This is what I was trying to understand. It seems to be the dehumanizing effects of technology combined with the pornification of relationships, and the psychopathic nature of the suburban landscape (“psychopathic” here meaning anti-social and dehumanizing). I think he effectively, if vaguely, drew attention to it, by exaggeration and cognitive estrangement, allowing the reader to see society anew, in a roundabout way as it really is.
Quoting unenlightened
I don’t think reading Crash is to indulge horror and psychopathic perversity. It’s to face up to it. At least, that’s what I’m thinking of as the “official” assessment of the book; I’m not sure about it myself. Maybe it takes a saint to really appreciate it.
And “there is enough x in the real world as it is; I don’t need to see it in art” (a fair paraphrase, I hope) seems like an argument against all works of art, no? Well, except those that distract us from the real world with alternative visions, I guess.
Anyway, I’m certainly not trying to convince people to read it. It’s not pleasant, and might not even be good for you.
But it’s because of that subject matter that I don’t like it as much his other books, which don’t have that problem. Some of them, unlike probably anything Ballard wrote, are deeply humane (I’m thinking of Pnin and Pale Fire).
I don't think that is a fair representation. Primo Levi records real horror; George Orwell warns against dehumanising ideology. But they don't wallow in depravity. Perhaps that is an unfair characterisation on my side, but it is the impression I get from what you are saying.
Or consider P K Dick's work; an evocation of paranoia, but always with sympathy for the paranoid subject.
Quoting Jamal
All I can say here is that if one has to struggle to understand what one is being cautioned against, the cautionary aspect is not very successful. But there lies the rub: to a misanthrope, dehumanising is a good thing! But that's enough pontificating from my unassailable position of total ignorance, hopefully others who have read it will have more interesting things to say.
I can’t imagine better objections from someone who hasn’t read it. I’ll mull over your comments.
One thing though: wallowing is pleasurable or comfortable, and reading Crash is definitely not like that, and was very clearly not meant to be.
Fair comment. Mind you, that's not to say that writing it wasn't pleasurable.
[quote= Bob Dylan]While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society’s pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole
That he’s in[/quote]
Also a fair comment, but I think what matters is whether it reads like Ballard was wallowing pleasurably in depravity, and I don’t think it does.
The novel was like a lightning rod that collected nebulous elements of your psyche and generated a jolt that you became aware of. Dreams can do that too. There's a link between art and dreams, in that both tell truths through fiction. So this novel found a home in your psyche because you needed it, or something like that.
I just recently had a striking dream about Kripke's skeptical challenge, where I had some kind of sideways vantage point on the way people create meaning. Kripke's work is intellectual. The dream was visceral.
Nicely put, I like it. Yes, it was something like that for sure.
Have you compared it to Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho?
I’m not sure about this. I mean sure, it makes a lot of sense, but I think there’s room for cautionary tales that are only vaguely cautionary, that make us uncomfortable with the world.
But I don’t actually think Crash is all that vague as a cautionary tale. In the real world, crashes are exciting and people slow down to have a look; they are in some sense titillated by it. I reckon that’s pretty obvious. So that’s one side of it. The other is the self-centred seeking of sexual gratification and what I called the pornification of relationships. And then there’s the alienation of suburbia. There might be no explicit lecture in the book but you can see what he’s doing in mixing these together with a consistent internal logic.
I’m glad you brought up misanthropy, because it’s made me think. There is something a bit nasty in Ballard, I think. I already compared him unfavourably on that dimension with Nabokov, a writer not known for his lavish compassion. Another author I can mention is Samuel Beckett. His so-called trilogy that begins with Molloy is disturbing, pessimistic, sordid and difficult. And yet you feel there’s a compassionate heart behind it, and even, maybe, a playful sort of love of life. So, far from feeling nasty, it’s a pleasure to read.
That’s a bunch of vague musings.
I read that years ago and yes, I can see the connection, though I hadn’t thought about it until you mentioned it. American Psycho didn’t hit me so hard though, not sure why.
When you muse on notions such as human depravity as depicted by human authors in dystopian novels? Do you ever get flashes in your mind of scenes from David Attenborough or other nature series you may have watched in the past? Scenes from two, always come to me, 'Animal Cannibal,' and 'Disappearing River.' I wonder if such novels disturb many of us, because they remind us of the 'depraved' ways our ancestors had to be to survive, under jungle rules.
Instinct/survival imperative versus the human goal of 'civilised behavior.'
Many humans have chosen depravity as a way to win 'jungle-style' competition.
Is that what really disturbs any human mind that considers itself civilised?
If you want to restrict this thread, to discussion on the works of Ballard and similar works @Jamal, then I will post no more on this particular 'branch off.'
Well, what you’ve said is a pretty interesting side-issue so don’t worry. I may respond later, after I’ve done some thinking.
:up:
On the topic of unenjoyable art, though: Salo fits for me. I had no idea what I was in for watching that film because it was just a friend who invited me over to watch another Criterion collection he got in the mail through a subscription service. We'd watch pretty much watch anything on the Criterion collection list, and I had no warning going in what the movie was about other than the title, and knowing who Passolini is from other nights like this.
It's so horrible that I recommend people not watch it. But the wiki gives the idea:
I kind of hated the film, but as the affect of it wore off I had to admit that it did the thing a movie has to do: not be boring. It wasn't in an enjoyable way, though.
This is just what came to mind because of your description of your experience of Crash kind of mirrors my experience of Salo. I'm wondering if there are other forms of unenjoyable art than these sort of grotesque depictions. There's something to be said for challenging work which goes over dark themes -- it's not exactly fun, but part of what makes art art is that it's in some sense appealing.
I'd put forward Eraserhead as a possible contender there. Just enough art to give it something more than just the subject matter as is, definitely moody and kind of insane, but it doesn't rely upon open depictions of depravity to do it (though it has its share of strange and grotesque imagery, too)
Yes, I saw the film first, many years ago. I though it was great. Somehow less disturbing than the book, although looking back now I can see it was an excellent adaptation. The cold, clinical detachment is spot-on.
I know of Salo, but I haven’t seen it, and I know enough about it to avoid it. That said, it sounds similar to Crash in that it’s supposed to have a political or social message. It’s anti-fascist, they say.
Quoting Moliere
There are many works that deal with dark stuff which I would say are enjoyable. I don’t mean fun, exactly, but I think “enjoyable” can stretch to cover compelling, fascinating, terrifying, heartbreaking , etc.
I wouldn’t personally put Eraserhead in the class of works that are unenjoyable but also good art, for the simple reason that I find it enjoyable.
So I’m still having trouble thinking of anything else to put in that class alongside Crash.
I’ve just thought of one: Kubrick’s The Shining. Every time I watch it I wish I hadn’t, because it’s such a dark vision of never-ending abusive violence, cold and uncompromising and more disturbing than most horror movies, at least to me (even though they escape in the end). On the other hand, it definitely is entertaining so maybe it’s enjoyable after all. Yeah, not sure.
That's a good point. From my perspective I love it -- I just know I've tried showing it to people and have learned that it's a movie that doesn't appeal very widely. It's too weird for some.
Quoting Jamal
That's a good choice I think. There's entertainment in the movie, but that aspect of it sort of ruins it. I loved The Shining when I first saw it as a horror movie that actually evoked fear in me. But when you start to put together how accurate the portrayal is, and how domestic violence continues on, it really takes out the enjoyment aspect.
That’s exactly what happened with me. As I got older the domestic violence really began to stand out, whereas before it was all about the mystery of the haunted hotel.
I just thought of a better way of putting things, which bypasses the confusions around what counts as enjoyable (or entertaining): what I’m talking about is the experience of a book or film etc. that would lead you to say, just after you’ve finished it, that it was a good experience. Many dark, harrowing and sad works would fit.
But Crash was not a good experience, and Salo was not a good experience for you. And yet later on, in my case Crash showed its power by making me think about stuff.
What's interesting to me is that it's not too frequent - in my experience. That something one has read which one find boring, ends up having much impact. It can happen, and when it does, it's just so very strange.
Not in line with the theme's suggested by Crash but, there's something about very, very dark books that, leave a strong imprint in the mind. I don't know quite what it is - I wouldn't want to reduce it to the usual comments about drama or violence at a distance gives us pleasure because we aren't involved in it. There's such a massive mismatch between living a dramatic event - which are just awful, as opposed to seeing it from a distance in other people, other families. Then it's interesting or even fun. And it's strange.
I suppose I have in mind Kirino's Grotesque, utterly haunting, depressing, not a single like-able character, yet, wow, that thing won't leave my mind. The way hatred can be "gotten" or understood from an intuitive perspective, is kind of surreal.
Sorry if it's not replying to your OP, but, it got me thinking about certain platitudes that sometimes are mystifying. Oh well.
I’ll jump in here just to take it a step further: I didn’t even know who JG Ballard was, and had to Wikipedia him. There, I said it.
But I’ve enjoyed this thread nonetheless. Challenges some beliefs I’ve had for probably too long about “art” and “entertainment.” I confess it’s something like the gourmet meal vs. McDonalds view that @Jamal mentions (I’m paraphrasing), so it’s worth re-examining.
I’m struggling to come up with any example whatever of something I’ve watched or read that I found utterly boring that also stuck with me in some way. I feel that’s almost contradictory. Maybe certain parts of a book or a film that is otherwise a bore will stay with me, or get me to question things, etc— but I’d say those are just that: interesting parts of a generally boring work.
:chin:
Quoting Jamal
I get this. When I'm repulsed at something, it lingers in my mind like.. not as a tumor (a nice metaphor)...but like a grime that needs to be cleansed. I choose what I read now. And it's mostly non-fiction.
Quoting Jamal
If I had read the book, I would use the word "misrepresentation". Probably. Maybe now he wants to be legit, so now he calls it a cautionary tale.
Quoting Mikie
That’s the puzzle.
One possibility that occurred to me is just that because I don’t usually read transgressive fiction, Crash shocked me so much that I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind. If that’s what has happened, maybe it means that anything equally shocking would have had the same effect, even gratuitous trash.
But I don’t think so. It’s the way that Crash was shocking that had the effect, a way that distinguishes it as more than gratuitous trash.
I watched Castle Freak a few months ago [EDIT: the 1995 version]. Like the more famous Re-Animator, it’s a Lovecraftian B movie horror film directed by Stuart Gordon and starring Jeffrey Combs. I thought it was well-made and very enjoyable (a very underrated horror, I reckon), but there’s one particular totally gratuitous and distgustingly violent scene that I was not prepared for, and it’s stuck in my mind in the way @L'éléphant describes:
Quoting L'éléphant
(Nice metaphor)
The thing is, Crash doesn’t feel like that. Its effect feels deeper, more intellectual and more unsettling.
Quoting Mikie
I’m not trying to shame you for your ignorance but it’s worth pointing out that at least three of his books have been adapted into films, one by Steven Spielberg, and that the word Ballardian has made it into a few dictionaries.
Quoting Mikie
But notice that my metaphor (which I disagreed with) was pizza vs. turnip soup. The latter is good for you, but hardly a gourmet meal. I may say more about that later.
Quoting L'éléphant
Thank you.
Quoting L'éléphant
I think that’s a bit unfair. As I said, I think his interpretation was a good one, and he had been legit already for a long time, a doyen of English literature, so he had nothing to prove.
Not really, but decades later I do still clearly remember a scene from one of those documentaries of a wildebeest being eaten alive by a pack of hyenas, starting from the back legs and arse and progressing along the body.
Quoting universeness
Depravity under jungle rules is nothing compared to the depravity of American slavery and the Nazi death camps, so no to that. On the other hand, there is a special—and also fascinating and stimulating—horror for me in folk horror films like the Wicker Man, and religious horror like the Exorcist. When I first watched the Wicker Man I didn’t know anything about it, and I sympathised with the pagan islanders whose behaviour was so shocking to Edward Woodward’s austere Wee Free Christian fundamentalist—until their barbarity became apparent. So there’s something to be said for your idea: what is disturbing in these films is, maybe, the idea of ancient unalloyed evil that hasn’t gone away.
This is a very interesting paragraph to me, for many reasons.
I see so many comparables between the actions of animals in the wild and the actions of human slavers or nazis. The animals have the excuse?? at least, from our moral point of view, that they don't communicate a need for, or a goal of, a standard of moral behavior, that could be comparable, with what humans might label 'civilised,' and when humans don't meet such a perceived standard as 'civilised,' then they are often labeled, 'animals!' which I always recall, when I hear someone exclaim, with deep feelings of empathy and appreciation of natures diversity, how much they love animals. It's an interesting juxtaposition.
Two examples often come to my recall when I think of the kind of depraved torture/terror employed by human slavers or nazis, from the angle of human inhumanity towards other humans.
A group of chimpanzee, very short on resources, very hungry. One of the females suddenly grabs the young of another and throws it from a high tree, to its death. The screams from all involved were very loud indeed. Many of the group then descend to the corpse, and to my utter shock, start to tear it apart and consume it. Its mother runs after those with a bit of its dead offspring, switching its focus from one to the other. Eventually, the mother sits by herself in despair, with a pallor that I can only compare with a tortured human or resident of a nazi death camp. Incredibly, one of the chimps that was just eating a portion of her young, comes over to the mother and puts its arm around her, in an almost apologetic embrace. :scream:
I will spare you my second example for now, unless you see any value in such a second example.
I remember watching all three films in the 'hostel' series. Have you watched them? I found them quite stomach-churning, even though, horror movies tend not to bother me much, as I tend to always envisage the camera people having their lunch and socialising with each other, in between takes, and the director calling for more butcher meat and fake blood.
The human horror and terror depicted in the Hostel films, again reminded me of scenes I had watched from nature series.
Animals certainly do experience fear.
In your opinion, does a novel like Crash, disturb you more, when you imagine yourself as a victim or as a perpetrator of such acts?
Is the notion of total terror, merely part of the survival instinct of fight or flight, which evolved naturally, or do you feel that there is more involved?
I ask these questions, as I believe such ruminations in the human mind, (perhaps best exemplified in Frued's notion of 'id',) is imo, where human notions and creations of 'hell' originate.
Another question I would like to ask you is, do such novels as 'crash,' make you crave more, for a society where the chances of such depicted human behavior happening to you, or because of you, is reduced to as near zero as we can make it?
It sounds like a very simple question, to which the answer 'yes, of course it does,' would seem expected. But, my problem with such a seemingly rational, obvious answer, is that it leaves me wondering why our species seems currently, so f***** up?
Quoting universeness
As a reader of Crash you’re a voyeur at most. It’s not involving and the characters are not relatable. So the idea of putting yourself in their shoes doesn’t occur to you. This was by design. And anyway, a lot of the most shocking stuff in the book is consensual, so it’s not so much about perpetrators and victims, but more about people using each other.
Really you’re asking a more general question unrelated to the book: if I’m more disturbed by the idea of being a perpetrator of (fictional or otherwise) violence, or the victim. I suppose I’d have to say the perpetrator. Being the victim is just something horrific you’d want to avoid, but the thought of being the perpetrator makes me wonder if there are circumstances that could actually make me do it, which is more unsettling.
Quoting universeness
I should point out that what is depicted in the book does not happen in real life. It’s metaphorical. But I get your point. As it happens, the novel did make me explore critical theory with questions in mind such as “how did things go wrong?”
No, I would not watch something like that. I am a total wuss when it comes to horror, although oddly enough I do like a lot of horror films, up to a point.
I agree, considering myself as a perpetrator of terror, disturbs me more than being a victim, but yet I do experience feelings of hatred. Would I choose to torture a nazi like Hitler? or criminal that raped and murdered a loved one, etc? I suppose none of us really know until we are faced with such. I would like to think I would just shoot them in the head, mere execution, rather than prolonged torture.
I always put myself in the shoes of the characters depicted, in anything I watch or read. I have done so since I was a child. When I first saw the exorcist, I wondered if I could be so easily overwhelmed by the demonic invader depicted. It always annoyed me, that Regan, was unable to reject the possession herself. I did consider myself naively indestructible at 18. :yikes:
I am not a fan of Jordan Peterson but I did find some common ground with him, when he challenged his own sense of morality in trying to perceive himself, as a nazi guard in a death camp, who enjoyed his work, or at least had found ways to justify such horrific compliance with the tasks assigned.
A scene that I found very disturbing was Doctor Lecter in Hannibal. A scene between Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) and the late Ray Liotta (who was manipulated, to eat a small part of his own brain, at a dinner table). I found it so disturbing, due to the depiction of the high intelligence of Lecter, revealed as no defense against acting like a depraved madman.
Quoting Jamal
I am sure you agree, real life events are often worse, than the horrors depicted in fiction. I think, sadly, fictional horror, often informs the sick human mind or the nefarious human mind on new ways to inflict terror/impose complete control over others.
Quoting Jamal
Yeah, well, imo, you are definitely not missing out on anything by making that choice.
Then I'd suggest that you weren't actually bored, maybe you were reading it in a disinterested manner. But boredom to me, carries negative connotations that if allowed to continue for too long, is quite exhausting and frustrating.
Unless it's a short book (120 pages or less, for example), then it's doable. But 200 or more pages? That's tough.
I was definitely bored, exhausted and frustrated. I abandoned it a couple of times but went back to it because I wanted to have read it, to know about Ballard’s flavour of avant-garde, to find out what he was doing.
But if it was shocking, how could it have been boring? I think because the shock kind of wears off in the first few chapters, after which it’s tedious repetition.
Thinking about the book afterwards—which I’m obviously still doing—wasn’t boring, but the experience of reading it really was, despite moments of interest and a certain appreciation of the writing. This is why I said at the time that it’s a conceptual piece more suited to analysis than to artistic appreciation.
200 plus goddam pages.
I should point out again that I’ve changed my view, and consider those things that seemed bad at the time as contributing to its effectiveness.
Then that is rare for me.
Actually, the first 240 pages of Gravity's Rainbow were close to being unreadable. One almost has no clue what is going on. But once it takes off, it's nuts.
The topic of boredom itself is hard to speak about in a profound manner. I think David Foster Wallace's last book, The Pale King, tried to speak about boredom - working in a tax office - while attempting not to be too boring. He never finished the book, due to his suicide.
But if you are dealing with dark themes, it may act as a kind of unconscious impulse to know what's going on. :chin:
Edit: na man, I can feel I'm not making any interesting comments. May try again later. :victory:
Damn, for some reason I thought it was the first 50, and after that plain sailing. Well, I’ll get around to it eventually, but it still feels too soon after completing the mammoth Against the Day.
Quoting Manuel
I think one can make boring experiences interesting in the telling, submitting them to the tools of the storyteller. Boredom can be fascinating and funny, in retrospect. Maybe another way that boredom isn’t boring is when the boredomee is not him/herself boring; like Proust, they may have a rich inner life that means that even when they’re bored they’re never boring, if we get inside their mind.
What I’ve been doing in this thread is discussing a boring experience in a quite interesting way. It’s actually pretty easy, and everyone does it, e.g., ranting wittily about how boring a movie was.
Quoting Manuel
Don’t worry, you’re not being boring. So far I haven’t really framed the debate properly to give it clarity (see my struggles to define enjoyment), so we’re all just scrabbling around in the dark.
I've been struggling to come up with a better example. Salo was not a good experience for me, but really all I learned was a lesson I knew and I still tell people "don't bother", so it's not exactly the same as what you mean either.
What makes this difficult to think through is I can almost always find something I enjoy in a work of art, but when I don't I also just move on. There can be a morbid curiosity that pushes me on, but that isn't the frustration you're describing. What you describe is a work of art that more or less invokes aesthetic analogues to pain which you suffer through, dislike, and then come to appreciate.
With literature I'm struggling, though I can think of some examples from philosophy that are a lot like that -- start out frustrating and boring but then, upon pushing through, they become something better -- at the very least, worthwhile to have read. (and it's a curious experience because it's hard to describe to someone why you'd subject yourself to pain for the good of appreciating it, when usually people like creative works not in this sense but because it appeals rather than because it frustrates)
Yeah, and that's what's paradoxical. We usually don't tell boring experiences in the manner we felt them, few people would tell you: I got to work at 8, sat at the desk for 30 minutes, proceeds to detail those 30 minutes, then talks about having coffee, etc.
So, we say these things are boring in a manner that isn't boring, somewhat jumping around it. I'm not saying that we should be boring speaking about boredom as in using bland language and uninspired phrases. To then say nothing about what you are already saying the with the word you are trying to elucidate.
Quoting Jamal
Yes, I think there is something to this. It's a type of experience which occurs privately, even though we can all be in boring meeting or a boring office or whatever. Yet what would be the point of even speaking about it if doing so would only produce boredom? Strange.
Yes, I think that’s a good analogy: it is a bit like the experience of reading profound but badly written or abstruse philosophy (which is not to say that Crash is badly written, since this is just an analogy).
And maybe it’s more than just an analogy. I mentioned before that Crash is some kind of conceptual fiction. In the same way as visual conceptual art is a way of doing philosophy (recalling Deleuze’s characterization of philosophy as the creation of concepts), conceptual fiction is a literary exploration of concepts free of the conventional demands of fiction. You can maybe just boil it down to: you don’t have to like it, it doesn’t have to be beautiful, and it doesn’t have to be executed with traditional skill—it’s just meant to make you think.
And that’s fair enough. Crash then is something along the lines of a bunch of bananas filled with piss, a can of the artist’s shit, or a sheep cut in half.
Another possibility is that I did actually enjoy it in some way, despite how tedious and boring I often found it. The whole premise of the book is crazy, but presented totally deadpan—I mean, that’s just inherently intriguing to me. So maybe I’ve been basically fascinated with it the whole time.
Which means the enjoyment angle is pretty much beside the point. I don’t know where that leaves this discussion :grin:
That’s the thing: nobody is supposed to do this. It’s taken for granted that in telling a story about boredom, you shouldn’t be boring. But Crash is boring while telling a story that is not boring—there’s a lot of crazy shit happening.
Essential to the novel is that it is deadpan, clinical, amoral, and emotionless. One might say I’ve just mistaken this very intentional style for boringness.
I might read it myself, sound intriguing.
:D -- my first thought was "well, I suppose I'd have to read the book at this point, but I'm not sure I should pile yet another project on"
But then today I thought of Videodrome. This is the Cronenberg flick I was thinking of when saying he crosses the lines at times. The movie sits in a very uncomfortable place for me because there are depictions of what I'd call snuff (except that we know we aren't watching real snuff) and so if you think about it at all you're like "this just is snuff" and it's disgusting. But then there are scenes through the movie which bend around the idea of snuff. It's a weird blend of phantasmagoria and this blunt reality of the possibility in human desire.
That's one I might revisit to check my intuitions, at least; it's artistic enough that I'd subject myself to it. There are things I enjoy about it. But then the subject matter and its expression make me uncomfortable and wonder why I'm watching this, of all the things in the world. But then, here I am talking about it. (Deadringers evokes similar feelings in me, but then I don't have a cognitive dislike of what's going on so it's not as bad, it's merely "oogie" to me but not a rational opposition... maybe this feeling is what you're talking about?)
Well I say go for it, but you already know I have mixed feelings about it.
Following is a representative sample to help you make the decision. It’s one of the more imaginative and lyrical passages, dispensing with the technical language in favour of a more fanciful register. I can easily imagine that some people would find it fascinating, while others would roll their eyes.
Right, so good for you but unenjoyable. Like plain broccoli.
Again I think it’s best to think of artworks in terms of parts. Maybe most of it is boring, but certain parts stand out or stick with you. Certain scenes in a movie, certain chapters in a book, certain melodies in music, whatever.
Perhaps that’s a way to square this circle.
I always say I like Cronenburg but I haven’t even seen Videodrome, by most accounts one of his most important and original films. What you say makes me want to see it. Not that I’m into snuff movies, you understand.
Quoting Moliere
Not sure. I do like Dead Ringers though.
Reminds me of some portions of Dhalgren sans the violence. It's difficult for a book to disturb me.
Sounds fine - will add it to my reading list. Thanks for sharing.
I expect to be reading that soon, since I’ve been getting into Delany recently.
I tend to think that if only a few bits of a book or film are great, while the rest of it isn’t great, then the thing has failed. On the other hand I agree that there will always be bits that stick with you more than other bits. I don’t think this gets to the problem with Crash, which is utterly consistent. Ballard doesn’t lose control for a second, except perhaps for the endless repetition of words like “stylized” and “junction”, which he may not have noticed himself doing.
Okay, but something still stands out. Is it really some generalized tone, or certain parts?
My issue is the boring description. I can see something unenjoyable staying with you, but not something boring.
Can something initially boring become interesting? I think so. I felt that way about 2001: A Space Odyssey. So maybe you’ve reassessed what you saw, or enough time had passed to make it interesting.
But maybe I’m losing the plot. You didn’t say “uninteresting,” after all.
David Cronenburg, who adapted it into a film, had a similar experience to me. He couldn’t finish it the first time he read it, and even after he’d finally gone back and read the whole thing, he didn’t like it. But it stayed with him, and he ultimately felt he had to do something about it (turn it into a film, in his case)—the question of like or dislike was irrelevant.
Something like that. But in my case at least, the dislike was not so much about the distasteful subject matter (and I seriously doubt that was the problem for Cronenburg tbh), but about the tedious pretentiousness, repetitiveness, and so on. Which makes it all the more puzzling that I’m now saying it’s an important work of literature. I think I’ve just changed my mind upon realising how powerful an effect it had on me.
Do you think it needed to be unenjoyable to be the art it is, in your view?
I haven't read any of it; I only watched the film a long time ago which left very little impression on me - all I remember is a scene I found very dirty.
I do, however, own a collection of Ballard's short stories and find that he is a great short story writer, both very enjoyable as well as insightful and intelligent. So I wonder if you think Crash needs to be unenjoyable to be its art.
Just as an aside, I haven't really read any other of his works, with the exception of an attempt at Atrocity Exhibition which doesn't really seem like something you would read in a traditional way. Some of the imagery in that book has stayed with me though it hasn't really evoked enough of exploration and thought about the book for me to have an opinion on its merit.
I looked up the synopsis. Not my kind of book. To me an excellent work is engaging (not necessarily entertaining, for others would find gossips entertaining) and the elements of insights and unexpected turns are artfully interwoven into the narrative. It's hard to describe, but I'll know it when I come across one.
To me, there wouldn't be a clash of antagonistic judgments if I find a piece of work engaging. There is a reason why a work is boring -- the author lacked that skill. One wouldn't intentionally write a boring piece.
Good question. It needed to be unenjoyable (to me) to be what it was. What it was was unenjoyable in its bones. I don’t think it would have been the same work of fiction, with the same power to haunt me, had Ballard removed, for example, the endless description of the mergings and juxtapositions of mutilated bodies and broken car parts in purely aesthetic terms, repeating ad nauseum words like “stylized,” “formalized,” “junction,” and of course, “engine coolant.”
And I don’t think it would have made much difference to my enjoyment had he just done a bit of light revision to find some more varied vocabulary.
So I suppose the answer is yes. But that’s not to say that it was the merely the unenjoyableness itself that caused me to think it was a substantial work of art.
Quoting Apustimelogist
I recently read his collection The Terminal Beach and found it very enjoyable, but found the novel The Unlimited Dream Company rather irritating and not anywhere near as powerful as Crash. So yeah, in terms of reading enjoyment his short stories seem better.
I haven’t read The Atrocity Exhibition but probably will one day. The next one of his books for me will likely be Vermilion Sands, which I think is a short story collection.
Quoting L'éléphant
Many people find the book engaging, and not only writers and critics. It’s quite popular and also highly regarded.
What you’re pointing out is that my opinion seems contradictory, and I agree: this is the conundrum.
What might be the case is that in his novels, he is free to let his imagination run wild. That sounds trite, but I think it’s an important fact about Ballard that he is not actually interested in the world except insofar as it shapes the unconscious; what he really likes to do is dredge up dreams and fantasies and develop them in surreality, with little concern to refer back to reality.
So in the novels, we get long descriptions of the surreal, presented—in what seems like a formality or concession—as if they were real. And just like the description of someone else’s dream can be boring, so can Ballard’s imaginings. It is not that the ideas are unengaging, rather that the exhaustive development and description of those ideas wears me down.
This isn’t a problem in the short stories, where the ideas have to take centre stage.
So crazy shit becomes boring when normalised. Maybe the world needed to be appraised of this. Like how porn in general becomes ever more explicit, and ever more extreme, as the breaking of each taboo becomes normalised. Eventually, megadeath, or the vaginal evisceration of a woman is just as dull as another wank. I remember the good old days when playing doctors and nurses was excitingly transgressive.
It's not an Earth shattering insight: when you're tired of Crash, you're tired of death. That's about how good it can possibly be, I think: a demonstration of the banality of evil.
In longer retrospect, 'Empire of the sun' was later an eye-opener to Ballard's imagination, a semi-autobiographical novel of a boy lost in the horrors of the Second World War in 'the far East', forced to confront terrible things before he was old enough to have developed a moral compass. It was also, speaking as someone who was trying to write fiction at the time, a remarkably bold thing for Ballard to do: to try and write a literary heartfelt realist novel, after a lifetime's reputation for doing something quite different.
Last thought: I felt as you did about 'Crash', about the Pinturas Negras[i][/i], the 'Black Paintings' of Goya when I saw them in Madrid. They are images that still sometimes haunt me. I can see 'Saturn devouring his son' or 'Two old men eating soup' clearly now, without having to look them up, and my gorge rises. They are ghastly, and I'm deeply glad I saw them.
That makes sense. Whereas I was dismayed by the relentless elaboration of a single idea, you were expecting it. It was the first of his novels I've read, after all.
Quoting mcdoodle
I haven't read it. It hadn't occurred to me that it would be possible to trace the disturbing surrealism of his other work back to his real experiences, since I seem to remember him saying that life in the internment camp wasn't all that bad, as if he was trying to downplay the attempts at psychologizing him. But that might have been my misinterpretation.
Quoting mcdoodle
Yes indeed. I saw them in Madrid as well, and felt something similar. It's not fun to spend a lot of time with those paintings. Aside from Saturn, the two that stay with me are the fight with clubs, which is brutal, and the dog.
Anyway, thanks. It's great to get some insight from someone familiar with Ballard's work.
Thanks for the reply, and some nice insights! To be honest I deeply respect the idea of someone who is uncompromising to put their stamp on a goal or vision they want to communicate and explore. Those kind of things really are what stick with me in stories or films. Even if a film or story isn't particularly exciting or enjoyable, if I perceive of it as projecting some kind of well-built underlying concept or vision, I often find myelf returning to it again and again, at least in thought, over more enjoyable alternatives. Sometimes though it takes time for those things to click. There have definitely been examples, in particular of films, where my first viewings I didn't find good at all, but once I can construct a picture I find interesting, whatever I found boring or uninteresting or disagreeable with it doesn't really matter anymore, or even accentuates the new way I am viewing it.
Quoting Jamal
Reminds me of the Atrocity Exhibition. I think these two works are probably deeply related on a conceptual level. Might have to take a lok again.
The collection I have is just like his whole collection of short stories I believe so I don't know really know which stories group together in original books. I don't think they are ordered that way, if I am not mistaken.
The wikipedia synopsis of Unlimited Dream Company sounds quite interesting actually.
I know what you mean, although I’m struggling to think of a film I disliked that I later regarded highly. Maybe Eyes Wide Shut, but I’m still at the dislike stage on that one :grin:
Quoting Apustimelogist
Though I did find it a bit irritating, it’s interesting and fun at times. I can imagine myself reading it again. It’s unusual for Ballard in that it feels upbeat and life-affirming—in a psychotic and apocalyptic way.
Totally agree. In fact, I think jaywalking was pretty much an invention of the car industry. They campaigned hard to entrench the idea that streets are primarily for cars. The land of the free, where you can get arrested for crossing the road.
I live in a city clogged with traffic. When I say to a local person that in the future people will look back on this period in disbelief, they look at me like I’m crazy.
So I’m definitely supportive of Ballard’s effort of outrageous defamiliarization, which shines a new light on the world we live in.
Forgot to reply to this. Although I haven’t read it, I’ve heard it said that Crash is indeed a development of some of the ideas in that book.
Internally, Crash normalizes some crazy shit, but the result is to de-normalize what we take to be unremarkable in the real world: the inhuman landscapes of flyovers, car parks, and airport hotels; selfish passionless sex; the love affair with cars; a horrific accident. Ballard wrote about the “death of affect”, referring to the replacement of feeling with mere sensation:
[quote=Ballard interview in Artforum magazine;https://www.artforum.com/features/interviewed-by-andrew-hultkrans-224713/]When I wrote about the death of affect in The Atrocity Exhibition in the late ’60s, I was writing against a background of a sensation-hungry media landscape that seized on all the violent imagery emerging from Vietnam, from the Kennedy assassination, from civil wars in Africa—all that atrocity footage that gave The Atrocity Exhibition its name. I was writing about the way in which sensation had usurped the place previously occupied by some kind of sympathetic engagement with the subject. I mean, one saw blowups of the Kennedy motorcade used as backdrops in fashion magazines. Images that should have elicited pity and concern were drained of any kind of human response, in the way that Warhol demonstrated. His art really was dedicated to just that. I don’t think it is quite so blatant nowadays. It is now incorporated into the way we see the world. In the ’60s one would see fashion models flouncing around in front of a backdrop of the Kennedy assassination, or a napalm explosion. You’d think, “My God, what are they doing?” Now, of course, thirty years later, you don’t even notice it.
I think a large part of the furor created here by Crash has been the desperate response of people who’ve seen a number of appalling atrocities on British television—like the massacre of sixteen five-year-olds in Scotland last March—and are looking for an explanation. You know, something must be behind this appalling event, and people think maybe there’s something wrong with the media world itself.[/quote]
Appraising the world of this is more than just about the banality of evil, I think. It’s a particular kind of banality.
But I want to pull back from the cautionary tale angle somewhat. Crash is an artistic reflection or exaggeration of reality that does not have a clear message, or one that is easy to explicate, but does that mean it’s just an indulgence of depravity?
I guess it is one of those sanctimonious Malcolm Muggeridge type "I'm going into all this in great detail for your education and improvement" type indulgences. But I'm guessing on hearsay, because the whole horror/porn/thriller/gangster/ police /serial-killer/supernatural scene already bores me, so I'm not really concerned to find out either way.
If the horror/porn/thriller/gangster/ police /serial-killer/supernatural scene bores you, allow me to recommend…Crash.
Not sure I’d recommend Crash for excitement, but fair enough.
Thank you for your contribution. Next time I start a topic about a book you haven’t read, be sure to join in. :grin:
Sure, but please try and find a book you somewhat like, next time. :razz:
https://monoskop.org/images/c/c3/Bateson_Gregory_Mind_and_Nature.pdf
I was going to make a thread on "Steps to an Ecology of Mind", but I think I'll try this book instead.
I don’t see what’s unhappy about this thread, and although I keep encountering the name of Bateson and am quite interested, I don’t know what to make of the quotation in the context of this discussion. I’d be interested in reading either an explanation of what you think its relevance is (without worrying that you’re judging Crash without having read it), or a new and exciting thread on Bateson’s Mind and Nature.
If I had to guess, I’d say you kinda want to say something like: Crash seems like a story without a context, a revelling in psychopathy untethered from context and norms; and that if you are going to throw out love, you better make it clear that doing so is not recommended.
But I might be reading too much into your post.
Yes. On my part I was momentarily struck by a superficial connection between my rather feeble involvement here and my more engaging reading matter. But if others are also making the connection, there might be something significant to it.
You telling a story, Ballard telling a story, DNA telling a story, me telling the story of not reading the story of the story your story is about; all of these as cracks in the ineffable beauty of the world, as if the perfect story needs no telling. When one relates a story, one relates it to another, and the interaction is also a relatable story. And the moral of that is — that stories have morals, and are relationships that we morally judge.
But read Bateson. He is one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. Much more important than Ballard, because he moves the whole story of human thought forwards. Like Shakespeare, his writing is littered with cliches of his own invention.
This is interesting, obscure, and either agreeable or disagreeable. :up:
Quoting unenlightened
I’m speeding along a different road right now, but Bateson now appears slightly bigger in the distance.