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

seguito, questo rapporto è centrale nel fenomeno descritto in The Crystal World. Stephenson coglie
un’interessante assonanza tra questi due romanzi nei riferimenti al cristallo, che in Crash, opera
successiva, contribuiscono alla nitidezza delle descrizioni ma soprattutto alludono a una forma di
trascendenza, così come nel romanzo precedente:
Images of rainbows and of jewels and crystal are also prominent […]. Vaughan’s face, for example,
is “lit by broken rainbows” (p. 12) after one of his collisions, while an injured woman driver is described as
having “fragments of the tinted windshield set in her forehead like jewels” (p. 14). There [is] […] the
“crystal” of broken safety glass (p. 48), while the instrument panel is imagined as a “jewelled grotto” (p. 66).
When Seagrave kills himself in his carefully orchestrated sex-death collision, he is “covered with shattered
safety glass, as if his body were already crystallizing, at last escaping out of this uneasy set of dimensions
into a more beautiful universe” (p. 142) 72 .
Notando una forma di ritualità negli incidenti automobilistici organizzati dai protagonisti del
romanzo Ricarda Vidal vi individua un insospettabile alone di religiosità, sia pure in senso lato. Una
voce autorevole conferma: «the Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci has hailed it as “a religious
masterpiece”» 73 . Si tratta di veri e propri sacrifici rituali, nell’accezione che troviamo ne L’érotisme
(1957) di Georges Bataille 74 . Pertanto, l’incidente automobilistico viene postulato come fenomeno
catalizzatore dell’esperienza mistica e trascendente. In questo senso Stephenson lo definisce una via
d’accesso a un Eden ontologico 75 . Nonostante a prima vista sesso, violenza e morte possano
sembrare elementi estranei, o perlomeno secondari, al misticismo e alla religione, alla quale
contingencies” [in Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trad. di John Howe, London and
New York, Verso, 1995, p. 60]» Ivi, p. 72.
72 G. Stephenson, op. cit., p. 72.
73 «One of the highlights of the film shows Vaughan in his trademark '63 Lincoln Continental (the make of car JFK was
shot in and the true star of the film) cruising past a car crash site with manically popping camera as if he were authoring
a religious event which had the apotheosis of the sacrificed automobile as its altar-piece. This is one of several moments
where Cronenberg draws out the religious implications of the novel with its messianic rhetoric of “arch-angelic hosts”
and “the rebirth of the traffic-slain dead”. It's one scene in particular which helps to clarify Bertolucci's characterization
of the film as a religious masterpiece.» Steve Beard, “If Something Feels Unnatural And Wrong To Us, That's The
Reason We Should See Where It Takes Us In The Cinema”, i-D Magazine n. 160, gennaio 1997.
74 «In Crash‘s highly technological world, the car crash plays the same role Bataille attributed to sacrifice for the
primitive people. […] The crash victim is the sacrifice paid to Marinetti‘s divine speed, which, despite everything,
continues to beckon to the (wo)man behind the wheel. […] Here we might think of Vaughan‘s night-time re-enactment
of James Dean‘s crash in front of his devout congregation of crash aficionados, or the ritualistic death of Seagrave and
eventually Vaughan‘s own fatal crash. But even where the deaths occur in actual – that is, unprovoked – accidents and
are thus not ritualised in the exact sense of Bataille, they are still witnessed with due reverence by a solemn community
of spectators. More than once Ballard employs religious vocabulary to describe the scene of the accident and the
gathered onlookers. For instance he refers to the crashed car of the stuntman Seagrave as a ‘bloody altar’ [Ballard,
Crash, 1995, p. 187] and describes the masses of spectators to a particularly gruesome crash leaving the scene of the
accident like ‘members of a congregation leaving after a sermon.’ [Ballard, Crash, p. 157; see also p. 188] Driving itself
becomes a daily ritual accompanying death, which might strike at any minute. Death on the road is certain; only the
exact time and place and the victims are unpredictable. Once the fatal crash has happened, the dead attain the status of
sacrifices. Everyone else has survived. Feeling more alive than ever before the drivers return to their cars and the flow
of traffic. “In twentieth-century terms the crucifixion […] would be re-enacted as a conceptual auto-disaster”, Ballard
wrote in The Atrocity Exhibition [Nota 45: Ballard, Atrocity Exhibition, 2001, p. 33].» R. Vidal, “Crash-Desire - The
Post-Erotic Machine Men of J. G. Ballard‘s and David Cronenberg‘s Crash”, in Death and Desire, op. cit., pp. 140-155.
75 «The crash represents an act of transcendence, the gateway to an ontological Eden.» G. Stephenson, op. cit., p.
- 26 -