Disaffection and Abjection in J. G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash

Abstract

In the 1974 introduction to the French edition of Crash (1973), J. G. Ballard locates science fiction as a ‘casualty of the changing world it anticipated and helped to create. The future envisaged by the science fiction of the 1940s and 1950s is already our past’.¹ Ballard describes an all-voracious present, which has produced an ‘almost infantile world’ in which ‘any demand, any possibility … can be satisfied instantly’ and even the future, he argues, is ‘merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us’ (8). The result is stagnation, inertia and a pervasive ’death of affect’ (5). If everything is perpetually available, what remains to aim towards and to inspire any passion? He speaks of his own consequent intention to move away from the themes of earlier science fiction writing — ‘outer space, and the far future’ — towards a ‘new terrain’ yet to be colonized. Ballard calls this terrain ‘inner space’: ‘that psychological domain … where the inner world of the mind and the outer world of reality meet and fuse’ (7) to produce ‘a heightened or alternate reality beyond and above those familiar to either our sight or our senses’.² In ‘inner space’, that is, new crossings and intersections reveal the presence of undiscovered, latent energies and meanings that should revitalize the disaffected, aimless and sterile world and this, for Ballard, confers upon inner space a ‘redemptive and therapeutic power’.³