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

ientrando invece nel postmoderno, se nella sua lettura si dà maggior risalto agli elementi di
carattere ironico e parodico che concorrono a costituirlo. La sua collocazione, pertanto, è nella
citata brisure derridiana 54 .
The Atrocity Exhibition è un’opera dalla struttura non lineare, quindici brevi capitoli o
‘condensed novels’, assemblate in maniera simile alla tecnica del cut-up utilizzata da William
Burroughs e dall’artista multimediale Brion Gysin. La forma stessa del testo è quella del testo
medico, scientifico, ne richiama parodicamente la struttura 55 . È una sorta di prosa poetica 56 , un
patchwork costituito da elementi eterogenei, un collage influenzato dalle tecniche del frottage e
della decalcomania, utilizzate da artisti figurativi surrealisti quali Max Ernst e Oscar Dominguez 57 .
Con i surrealisti Ballard condivide l’obiettivo di “entrare nell’ignoto”, come scrisse Apollinaire nel
1917 58 e, come i suoi predecessori, lo fa ponendo in relazione fenomeni che nella vita di tutti i
giorni non sono collegati 59 . Così come le scelte tematiche dell’autore delineano un percorso non
54
«[..] [I]ts [avant-garde] two main theorists - Bürger and Adorno – completely contradict each other on its definition,
the one stressing ‘sublation’ of art and life, the other insisting on the autonomy of art. […] For Bürger, the avant-garde
is not a left or right politics within art, but a politics opposed to the very notion of ‘Art’. P. 78 […] Adorno’s conception
of the avant-garde is very different; briefly, Art’s negation can only be operable as it evades instrumental rationality (refunctioning
for use) and so autonomy must be maintained. Any breach into social effectivity thus erases the avant-garde
partition, since it risks its useless use being processed into instrumentality, swept into the relativism of the exchange
economy. P. 79 […] For Adorno […] the avant-garde and autonomy are never coincident, and the high and low are
never ‘purely’ opposed. […] It is precisely ambivalence [corsivo dell’autore], the indeterminability of affirmation or
negation, that is central to positive or negative evaluations of postmodernist art. Despite ‘pure’ negation being
questioned by the collapse of modernism’s ‘self-constituted’ divide from the ‘mass’, it is negation that remains the
measure of critical art. P. 81 […] Atrocity is a ‘punctual’ text of its moment. If it has been seen as both modernist (Pfeil)
and postmodernist (McHale), it is not a question of deciding one or the other, but of marking its oscillation. [p. 85] […]
Atrocity begins to re-cite ‘Cubism’ or ‘Surrealism’ as themselves open to re-contextualization and re-combination. This
is neither posited identity with the ‘historical avant-garde’ (Ballard as ‘modernist’) nor a hollow and savagely ironic
repetition of it (Ballard as ‘postmodernist’) [p. 94] […].” Ivi, pp. 78-94.
55
«[…] [T]he form of the text (or texts), with its brief paragraphs titled in bold type, parodies the structure of scientific
papers.» Ivi, p. 74.
56
«The images are sharp, the language spare. The result is a kind of hard prose poetry – ‘hard’, because so much of the
imagery is technical, medical, architectural, or cinematic. The narratives appear to move on a number of different
levels, reflecting the actual media landscapes of our present society. An objective, outer environment of motorways, TV
screens, advertising hoardings, hospitals, and car-parks becomes ‘internalized’ - a terrain of codes and latent meanings,
like that of a dream.» David Pringle, Earth is the Alien Planet: J.G. Ballard’s Four-Dimensional Nightmare, San
Bernardino, CA, Borgo Press, 1979, p. 11.
57
«[The text is a literary collage, a Surrealist potpourri assembled out of found objects taken from popular culture,
images culled from elusive art-works, fantasies woven round representative political events, obsessions drawn from the
fragmented psyche of its unstable central protagonist, and conceptual extrapolations from the hidden meanings of
everyday events. […]] The juxtapositional approach is fundamental to the practice of collage, but The Atrocity
Exhibition is equally indebted to the example of frottage and decalcomania, the techniques that Max Ernst and Oscar
Dominguez deployed so effectively. Decalcomania is especially relevant here, since it gave rise to defamiliarised artworks
in which a strange, mineral-like world is revealed. These haunting paintings not only distance human beings from
the world they inhabit but also evoke a pre-human past, with the result that an entirely different kind of reality is
disclosed. This transformation of one order of being into another is central both to the Surrealist project and to Ballard’s
The Atrocity Exhibition, which draws repeatedly on the Surrealist legacy.» A. Gasiorek, op. cit., pp. 58-59.
58
Jacqueline Risset, “Politica e Poesia. La nozione di poesia nel percorso di André Breton”, in Germana Orlandi
Cerenza (a cura di) Traiettorie della modernità. Il Surrealismo all’alba del Terzo Millennio, Torino, Lindau, 2003, p.
40.
59
«Influenced by the Surrealists’ insistence that the prosaic world concealed realities that were inaccessible to the
fettered rational mind, Ballard shared their conviction that one of art’s appointed tasks was the revelation of hidden
links between ostensibly unconnected phenomena.» A. Gasiorek, op. cit., p. 8.
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