A Benevolent Psychopathology
I recently had the dubious "pleasure" of listening to an audio of the novel Crash by the late J.G. Ballard, the New Wave science fiction author who turned, in the latter half of his career, to a close, obsessive examination of the increasingly mutated and deformed "neural landscape" of modern, post-atomic, late Twentieth Century society. Ballard, interested chiefly in how media and technology push human experience into the terminal postures of a pre-apocalyptic evolutionary step—he intones, in the scientific, nearly fetishistic language of flat affect and psychological detachment, the "benevolent psychopathology" of the modern zeitgeist—the "spirit of the age," he suggests, is "Caliban" atop a "mirror streaked with vomit." Indeed, in writing Crash (and its heavily surrealistic sister novel The Atrocity Exhibition) Ballard redefines the ugly and banal, pressing glamour and sadism, brutality and beauty, the artificial and constructed, against the geometry of pelvis and thigh; the quantifying of wound patterns, medical profiles and, in the psychoanalytic web of associations woven by dreams and psychological imprinting—replicates the external landscape as a powerful, horrifying, and ultimately terminal inner experience.