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The only truly alien planet is Earth. - UniCA Eprints - Università degli ...

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Various landscapes preoccupied Talbert during th<strong>is</strong> period: (1) <strong>The</strong> melancholy back of the Yangtse,<br />

a boom of sunken freighters off the Shanghai Bund. […] (2) <strong>The</strong> contours of h<strong>is</strong> mother’s body, landscape of<br />

so many psychic capitulations. (3) H<strong>is</strong> son’s face at the moment of birth, its phantom-like profile older than<br />

Pharoah. (4) <strong>The</strong> death-rictus of a young woman. (5) <strong>The</strong> breasts of the screen actress 330 .<br />

Nel testo compaiono altre l<strong>is</strong>te, tra le quali quella del paragrafo ‘<strong>The</strong> Sex Kit’ 331 , che<br />

enumera 16 elementi di cui si compone il kit stesso, con il quale è possibile ricomporre il corpo di<br />

Karen Novotny, come se si trattasse di una delle bambole di Bellmer. Come sottolinea la Baxter, la<br />

tecnica surreal<strong>is</strong>ta del collage e il modello modern<strong>is</strong>ta dell’enciclopedia qui vengono a convergere:<br />

la l<strong>is</strong>ta eterogenea di oggetti va a comporre un quadro d’insieme che come nella Encyclopédie di<br />

Diderot o nel Manuale di zoologia fantastica di Borges, per fare una l<strong>is</strong>ta minimale ed eterogenea a<br />

sua volta di autori, svolge una funzione descrittiva del mondo del quale fa parte, reale o fantastico<br />

che sia 332 . È il caso di sottolineare che la coazione a ripetere freudiana è uno <strong>degli</strong> elementi<br />

costitutIvi di <strong>The</strong> Atrocity Exhibition, che scompone e ricompone i diversi frammenti della stessa<br />

storia attraverso le ‘condensed novels’ in cui si articola, come abbiamo v<strong>is</strong>to.<br />

330 «<strong>The</strong> many l<strong>is</strong>ts in <strong>The</strong> Atrocity Exhibition were in effect free association tests. What I find surpr<strong>is</strong>ing after so many<br />

years <strong>is</strong> how they anticipate the future themes of my fiction.» J. G. Ballard, Atrocity, a cura di V. Vale e A. Juno, op.<br />

cit., p. 53.<br />

331 Ivi, p. 54.<br />

332 «At the heart of th<strong>is</strong> difficult text, […] lies a structural tension between the Surreal<strong>is</strong>t methodology of collage<br />

(prophetic, apocalyptic) and the modern<strong>is</strong>t model of the encyclopaedia (mock-real<strong>is</strong>t, anti-linear). […] As Foucault<br />

d<strong>is</strong>covered in h<strong>is</strong> reading of Borges’ Chinese Encyclopaedia, however, the threat of d<strong>is</strong>cursive contamination <strong>is</strong> an<br />

inevitable consequence of Western H<strong>is</strong>tory’s obsession with the implementation of coherence and order. […] Ballard<br />

cuts up various texts and documents from a m<strong>is</strong>cellany of d<strong>is</strong>courses (geology, physics, biology, physiology,<br />

architecture, Surreal<strong>is</strong>t art, nuclear fusion) and h<strong>is</strong>torical contexts (Pre-Cambrian, late nineteenth century, twentieth<br />

century) in order to suture them back together and generate a set of contingent h<strong>is</strong>tories which will counter conventional<br />

patterns of h<strong>is</strong>torical interpretation. Through the unsolicited pairing of items each object or h<strong>is</strong>torical context will be<br />

decontextual<strong>is</strong>ed, <strong>only</strong> to be recontextual<strong>is</strong>ed and reh<strong>is</strong>toric<strong>is</strong>ed within an alternative narrative which will rapture the<br />

homogeneous surface of our official narratives of post-war h<strong>is</strong>tory and reality.» Jeannette Baxter, J. G. Ballard’s<br />

Surreal<strong>is</strong>t Imagination, op. cit., pp. 82-83.<br />

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