L'Homme-sans-organes : Crash (J. G. Ballard)

J.G. Ballard’s Crash is characterized by repetition, as if its purpose were not so much to build a plot as to draw up a catalogue, so that the various rehearsals and repetitions preclude the positioning of the self. This pattern is but the consequence of an economic context in which the self becomes a customized arrangement of flesh and metal. The structure of the novel mirrors this concern by relying on accumulation, so that the organic structure gives way to a principle of «piling-up». The novel aims at sketching out a new logic which is not so scandalous in narrative contents as in narrative form and metaphoricity. The end of humanity, as Ballard sees it, is not the destruction of man, but the elimination of the organic metaphor which governs our representations of man. The eventual pileup is but the metaphor of this narrative «piling-up» which tends to do away with all organic representations of the human body and psyché.