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del doppio in questo romanzo così come in Cocaine Nights (1996) e Millennium People (2003),
testi accomunati dall’essere della detective stories, anche se non ci sono colpevoli da scoprire. In
essi il doppio viene utilizzato con l’introduzione di un terzo elemento che funge da figura di
mediazione. 327
Un altro modo in cui il doppio si manifesta è attraverso la ripetizione, come accade
nell’opera ballardiana in The Atrocity Exhibition e in The Kindness of Women 328 , ma anche in
Crash, dove l’incidente automobilistico viene replicato più volte, come un perverso rituale.
Secondo Freud la ripetizione di un gesto, un fatto, un comportamento, può divenire perturbante in
quanto evocatore di idee rimosse dall'adulto, presenti in età infantile e nella condizione dell’umanità
primitiva, quali il pensiero magico onnipotente animistico che comanderebbe le azioni eseguite
automaticamente, ma il cui fine è ignoto al soggetto di tali azioni 329 . Il concetto surrealista di ‘caso
oggettivo’ ha in questo le sue radici. Ecco quindi che l’automa antropomorfo, doppio dell’essere
umano, è di per sé un elemento perturbante.
L’enumerazione è una variante della ripetizione, che si presenta sotto forma di elencazione,
applicabile agli oggetti più disparati. In un recente saggio, Vertigine della lista, Umberto Eco ne
discute con la consueta maestria, fornendo un repertorio di esempi estrapolati dai contesti più
disparati, sia storicamente che culturalmente. Perfino Ballard non si sottrae al fascino della lista,
come in questo passaggio di The Atrocity Exhibition:
physical territory; the stress on an aestheticised sculpting of the body that exceeds any simple notion of replication in
order to embrace a promethean dream of technological self-fashioning. The body is little more than inert matter to be
remoulded. [...] Commenting on Kleist, Aura Satz suggests that the “maimed body is the possible human equivalent of
the marionette, where puppet-ness has already developed in a limb, and might gradually advance into the rest of the
body, replaced bit by bit by the same craftsman who made the first limb”, and she notes a general “mimesis in the
direction of object-hood” here [“Puppets and prosthesis”, in The Prosthetic Aesthetic, New Formations, 46, Spring
2002: 103-18, p. 111]. In Super-Cannes the prosthetic subject is more of a bio-robot than a marionette, but it discloses a
similar logic.» A. Gasiorek, op. cit., pp. 184-185.
327 «Each novel enacts a process of self-questioning. However, it is not the psychology of the criminal that is primarily
at stake in these texts but rather the nature of the society in which he was encouraged to commit his crimes. [...] It is not
the people of the abyss who are under scrutiny, however, but the narrator’s own class; thus he is implicated in the scene
he depicts and is forced to recognise himself in the events he recounts. The classic technique deployed by novelists to
bring such recognition about is of course that of the uncanny double, and doubling is central to these late Ballard works.
But they do not just rely on straight one-to-one doubling –which revolves around a self/other dynamic – but establish
triangulated relationships in which three figures are locked together, a mediating third presence facilitating the
homosocial bond between the original (male) doubles.» Ivi, pp. 171-172.
328 «The text [The Kindness of Women] ends with the launch of Heyerdahl’s papyrus ship on the Pacific. This is not a
replica ship, but a fibreglass replica of the original replica, which had sunk in the Atlantic. The doubles, the repetitions
multiply in a Baudrillardian spiral.» R. Luckhurst, op. cit., p. 492.
329 «Trauma and repetition are fundamental to both modernist art and psychoanalytical theory; surrealism describes this
commonality, but it extends far beyond this one movement. In “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1939) Benjamin draws
directly on Beyond the Pleasure Principle to think the significance of modern shock for the aesthetic of “involuntary
memory” from Baudelaire to Proust, an aesthetic that surrealism develops (in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans.
Harry Zohn [New York, 1969]). And in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis Lacan discusses trauma
and repetition in terms of tuché and automaton, Aristotelian terms that he uses respectively to think trauma as “the
encounter with the real” and repetition as “the return, the coming-back, the insistence of the signs” (pp.53-54). This
encounter, this trauma, is both always ‘missed’ and ever repeated because it is never recognized by the subject as such:
“What is repeated, in fact, is always something that occurs – the expression tells us quite a lot about its relation to the
tuché – as if by chance:” This is precisely the formula of objective chance.» H. Foster, op. cit., pp. 238-239.
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