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A conflict between life-and death-instincts is played out here. […] Buckmaster [Prospero] has bid
farewell to the technophilic vision of social improvement and has abjured its rough magic, but Halloway, the
thrusting young Ferdinand-figure, insists that technology can still forge a brave new world. […] The Tempest
narrative woven in to the story establishes a schematic opposition between a calibanesque aggressive
modernity and a beneficent technology associated with the character Olds, the Ariel-figure who dreams
incessantly of flight […] 512 .
Dominika Oramus sottolinea l’aspetto urbano del racconto, per esemplificare uno degli
elementi costitutivi principali dell’opera ballardiana, quello che definisce con il termine declinato al
plurale ‘cityscapes’. In “The Ultimate City” Garden City è la città di provenienza del protagonista,
una società agricola scientificamente avanzata, vegetariana ed ecologicamente equilibrata. Il suo
contraltare è la città abbandonata, gigantesca metropoli che attira Holloway per le sue automobili, i
grattacieli vuoti e i macchinari lasciati al loro destino. Le auto, come si può immaginare facilmente,
hanno un ruolo di primo piano nella storia, oggetti del desiderio e mezzi di distruzione ancor prima
che di trasporto. Il tentativo di far rivivere la città da parte di Holloway alla fine fallisce in
un’esplosione di atti di violenza distruttiva 513 .
Peraltro, nella lettura della Oramus di Concrete Island, il legame con The Unlimited Dream
Company si fa più stretto, nella misura in cui la parabola di Maitland viene a coincidere con quella
di Blake, svolgendosi nei brevi momenti che vanno dall’occorrere dell’incidente automobilistico
alla sua morte 514 . Anche in questo caso, come accadrà in forme ben più surreali nel romanzo del
1979, coscienza di sé e percezione della realtà da parte del protagonista registrano un’alterazione
tale da dilatare in maniera abnorme lo scorrere del tempo oggettivo. Sempre che vogliamo ritenere
il tempo una categoria oggettiva, misurabile, indipendente dalla percezione soggettiva del singolo
512 A. Gasiorek, op. cit., p. 131.
513 «The city Holloway tries to resurrect is full of cars; approximately five millions vehicles of every kind and model in
surprisingly good condition are there to clean and drive fast – which is what agrarian youths have always dreamt of.
Cars are objects of desire and strange obsessions. Olds, one of the characters, renovates them and creates a museum of
every model of automobile ever produced: other characters heap disused cars to form gigantic monuments of the
bygone twentieth century and it is from the car and by the car that people are killed and injured. Cars prompt a
rediscovery of the psychopathologies of urban life: a Hell’s-Angel-like Stillman, Holloway’s alter ego who does all
Holloway is afraid of thinking about, drives fast along empty streets and purposefully destroys and assaults shopwindow
mannequins resembling the long-departed inhabitants of the city. These acts of random and senseless violence,
“this dream come true of the violent city” ([The Complete Short Stories,] p. 910) appeal to everybody and wake latent
instincts. As soon as the possibility arises Stillman forms a blood-thirsty motorized gang that the teenagers are very
eager to join and, like his true uncanny double – by his double I mean the externalization of the drives and impulses
which Holloway hides and repressed -, soon destroys everything Holloway has built.[…] “The Ultimate City” shows
the most important aspects of life within cityscapes: the way urban car-friendly architecture alters the countryside, the
subliminal influence of life in cities on the human mind, the violence and aggression it triggers and the symbiosis of
motorization and urbanism. Moreover, in discussing societies of the near future Ballard claims that idyllic high-tech
villages where nothing ever happens will breed neuroses and never answer unconscious human needs.» D. Oramus, op.
cit., pp. 146-147.
514 «Trapped in his crashed car he is slowly dying, and during the last few seconds of his life he hallucinates […]. The
island is the I-land in between life and death – between the internal world of the psyche and the external reality that this
psyche is leaving.» Ivi, pp. 123-124.
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