Lets At Least Admire The Beauty of Our Demise

As the story progresses, there is indeed a sense that Vaughn is unreal. Not necessarily that he does not exist, but as we come to know him through the eyes of the main character there is a prevailing aura surrounding Vaughn that one might read as mystic in nature. He seems to embody a hypersexual nihilistic and futuristic Rasputin, bound by the fates for tragic infamy. I think it would be too simple to reduce Vaughn’s demeanor to some hyperbolic character foil dreamt up by Ballard’s main character. The nature of the work is satire and therefore I would argue that it is essential to explore what Vaughn means to humanity. Ballard appears to be suggesting something about the nature of human progress. More specifically, about the limits to what we create. In a sense, ideas that are earth shattering like the wheel for instance, transgress what is accepted to be normative. These are the transgressions that inspire progress and they can be understood more simply as creations. Simultaneously, there is also this very visceral desire to create by ramming one’s genitals into the appropriate and corresponding(or not) genitals of another. These two functions have brought us to the world of Ballard, which is the pinnacle of technology, or transgressive creations, and transgressive sexuality. (And perhaps more relevantly in discussing satire, the modern world with all its capabilities and still huge deficiencies.)These two things are realized in Vaughn’s character as he represents the future of humanity and moreover the inability for the world to continue upon such a trajectory. His popularity within the world constructed by Ballard is due not only to how he arouses this truth about the nature of things in the other characters, but moreover how he stoically accepts the truth he bestows to the degree that he does. That is, Vaughn realizes, and helps others realize how the next step is the last step, the marriage of man and machine, an unnatural and doomed relationship. Therefore, in order to truly transgress he must die with his transgression. Not to stray from the topic at hand, but in 1972 MIT published a groundbreaking study about the actuality of human progress on a global scale. The studies significance is self-evident in its title: The Limits To Growth. Perhaps Ballard is suggesting then that ultimately the drive to create, to transgress, must at some point be reconciled with the baseness of our more visceral tendencies such as violence and sex or else the human race is bound for a crashh.