Her Body Is A Symbiosis Of Chrome And Flesh, Machine And Human, What Andy

Her body is a symbiosis of chrome and flesh, machine and human, what Andy Sawyer and David Seed in Speaking Science Fiction: Dialogues and Interpretations call a fractured and displaced technological identity (Sawyer and Seed, 2000: 221). She is a concrete representation of the desire to be more than human, a desire that is, perhaps, as old as humanity itself.

Crash, then, becomes not merely concerned with the technological but also the primal, the very constituents of existence; psychologically, biologically and phylogenetically. By viewing the book's images and themes through Lacanian psychology we can assert that Crash becomes a novel concerned with age-old psychological themes such as desire, loss of self, fear and death. Whereas we can endorse, to some extent, Ballard's summation of his novel as being a warning from a technological space, it is also possible to see it as a warning from a distant past, the past of the Freudian Id or the Lacanian Real. It is, however the mixture of these two, the animal and the machine, the past and the future, the body and the automobile that lends to Ballard's narrative a disturbing and unsettling tone, one that, like the characters, the reader is drawn into with both fascination and repulsion.
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