Nightmare Angels and Dreams of Flight: Transgressive Transcendence in J. G. Ballard’s Crash and The Unlimited Dream Compan y

Abstract

While glimpses of counternormative and potentially utopian radical sex practices abound in J. G. Ballard’s seminal work Crash (1973), the book ends in a miasma of psychopathic violence, thus precluding a utopian reading. However, in Ballard’s later novel The Unlimited Dream Company (1979), the utopian potential implied in the transgressive sexuality of Crash is brought to the forefront of the author’s work. In fusing the Freudian/Lacanian death drive with Herbert Marcuse’s erotic utopian impulses, The Unlimited Dream Company reveals Ballard as a writer more in tune with the possibilities of counternormative sexual utopias than perhaps previously thought.