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

Reagan, la principessa Margaret, Marylin Monroe e altri personaggi pubblici prendono parte
a quella commistione postmoderna 375 di realtà e finzione alla base di The Atrocity Exhibition. Il
presupposto di fondo dell’opera ballardiana è che il vero pianeta alieno è la Terra 376 , e quindi il
compito dello scrittore è studiarne la realtà a partire dal ‘villaggio globale’ che è diventata e dal
rapporto tra realtà psichica e realtà esterna alla mente 377 . Di più: lo scrittore non ha più il bisogno di
creare il contenuto narrativo delle sue opere, deve piuttosto ‘inventare la realtà’:
We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind — mass merchandising, advertising, politics
conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery,
the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of
any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous
novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his
novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality. 378
The Atrocity Exhibition e Crash costituiscono l’apice dello sperimentalismo ballardiano che
Gasiorek, citando Schiller, definisce una forma di ‘sublime’ fantascientifico, in cui impulso creativo
e compulsione distruttiva sono inestricabilmente legati 379 . Luckhurst, citando McHale, sottolinea
l’appartenenza alla sfera del postmoderno di The Atrocity Exhibition, che «with its ontological
concerns, is a “postmodernist text based on science fiction topoi” [Postmodernist Fiction, p. 69]» 380 .
Inoltre esso ha anche una doppia valenza, parodica e auto parodica, che emergono o si perdono a
seconda della distanza dalla quale lo si osserva, come nota lo stesso Luckhurst 381 .
375 «The postmodernists have, in fact, been fascinated precisely by this whole ‘degraded’ landscape of schlock and
kitsch, of TV series and Reader’s Digest culture, of advertising and motels, of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood
film, of so-called paraliterature, with its airport paperback categories of the gothic and the romance, the popular
biography, the murder mystery, and the science fiction or fantasy novel: materials they no longer simply ‘quote’, as a
Joyce or a Mahler might have done, but incorporate into their very substance.» F. Jameson, op. cit., pp. 2-3.
376 «The only truly alien planet is Earth.» J. G. Ballard, “Which Way to Inner Space?”, “New Worlds”, May 1962.
377 «At the root of his attitude towards the function of modern writing is his favorite Salvador Dalì statement: “After
Freud’s explorations within the psyche it is now the outer world of reality which will have to be quantified and
eroticized” [“Notes from Nowhere: Comments on Work in Progress”, New Worlds Science Fiction, n. 167, ottobre
1966, pp. 147-151]. The writer’s task is no longer the creation of images as metaphors for experience. It is the selection
and organization of bits of the exceptionally apropos, shocking, and already shared common instant heritage of the
global village where images expand with the matchless ease of those in medieval Christian iconography. In a
materialistically oriented world, Ballard grasps the essential point that things [corsivo dell’autore] – objects, events,
landscapes, backgrounds, details, data, and frozen human icons – are already so laden with meaning that the lightest
touch in arranging them in sequence or array is the artist’s task. His readers will take the necessary steps to mold the
signs into their own mental worlds, to make the rest of the contact between inner and outer universes. » P. Brigg, op.
cit., p. 12.
378 Dall’introduzione all’edizione francese di Crash, cit. in Re/Search n. 8/9.
379 «For Schiller, the contradiction between reason and sensuousness gave rise to the magic of the sublime.
Extrapolating from this insight, we can see in Ballard’s hybrid interzones a science-fiction sublime in which the creative
impulse is inseparable from an awful compulsion to destruction, and this fateful union will become his great subject in
The Atrocity Exhibition and in Crash.» A. Gasiorek, op. cit., p. 56.
380 R. Luckhurst, op. cit., p. 227.
381 «[…] yet it is impossible to mark a line where parody lurches towards self-parody. Ballard’s text is frequently
hilarious in its clash of registers. […] An impossible demand is requested of the reader: too close misses the parodic
element, but too far makes the text collapse into self-parody.» Ivi, pp. 430-431.
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