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

In un’intervista del 1990 David Pringle chiede a Ballard se si considera un autore di
narrativa ‘horror’. Ci si potrebbe aspettare che la risposta sia un semplice no, invece lo scrittore si
esprime in maniera più articolata, facendo riferimento a Crash nell’esprimere il suo punto di vista
sul genere, dalle origini ai nostri giorni:
You could say Crash is on the edges of horror fiction. I take it that, in horror fiction, the horrific
effects are the object of the exercise. In the Gothic novel the clanking chains and creaking drawbridges and
whistling pendulums are the object; the chill of terror and fear is the whole purpose. Whereas in a book like
Crash I'm not out to make the blood run cold: I'm trying to look at the eroticism of the car crash and the way
modern technology has infiltrated our minds, taken over a large part of our imaginations and created a world
of very different values. I've never thought of myself as a writer of horror. When you're dealing with a
sensational subject matter, where you're showing radical changes with people making sudden discoveries
about the reality of their lives in dramatic circumstances, where people are being plagued by intense mental
crises (as they are in a lot of my fiction), you're getting into an area close to horror fiction. The main props of
the classic tale of terror were haunted castles and alike. The present day equivalents of haunted castles are
psychiatric hospitals; the blade-tipped pendulum has given way to the scalpel in the neurosurgeon's fingers.
It's not the evil potion in a dusty bell-jar that frightens us now, it's the contents of the hypodermic syringe,
and the needle that may not be too clean. The props have changed. There are sudden glimpses of the
shocking and unspeakable in my fiction too, so there is a certain overlap 366 .
Queste parole confermano il legame di Ballard con alcuni aspetti del romanticismo, ancora
presenti anche nel gotico contemporaneo, e tra questi in particolare la fascinazione per gli oscuri
abissi dell’inconscio 367 .
were really training the good doctors to lose all interest in sex, just as computerised diagnostic machines, where patients
press buttons in reply to stock questions, are inadvertently training them to develop duodenal ulcers or varicose veins.»
J. G. Ballard, Atrocity, a cura di V. Vale e A. Juno, op. cit., p. 19.
366 D. Pringle, Fear n. 14, febbraio 1990.
367 «Unencumbered by the conventions and restrictions of realism, the prose romance cultivates the power of the
imagination in its most heightened mode, while, correspondingly, its concerns are not the commonplace themes of the
familiar world, but the terrors and wonders of the human mind. In its chief manifestation as the Gothic novel, during the
period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the prose romance reintroduced to literature the dark realm
of the irrational, the world of the unconscious, traditionally neglected or slighted by the novel proper.» G. Stephenson,
op. cit., pp. 160-161.
- 112 -