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3. Immagini e pubblicità
The first stage of Ballard’s visual experiment was Project for a New Novel (1957), a collection of
images and collaged texts extracted arbitrarily from scientific journals which Ballard assembled in the late
1950s as specimen pages for a new kind of novel 148 .
Si tratta per l’appunto del primo tentativo sperimentale dell’autore britannico, nel quale testo
e immagini sono assemblati nella forma apparente di annunci pubblicitari 149 . La pubblicità, come
forma di comunicazione, viene posta al servizio del nuovo romanzo adatto al tempo presente, e
presentata provocatoriamente come mezzo di espressione più efficace del romanzo tradizionale, che
Ballard intende superare: «What can Saul Bellow and John Updike do that J. Walter Thompson, the
world’s largest advertising agency and its greater producer of fictions can’t do better?» 150 Project
for a New Novel diventerà The Atrocity Exhibition, testo in cui mass media e pubblicità hanno un
ruolo tutt’altro che secondario.
La tecnica del collage, adoperata in questa operazione sperimentale, fu utilizzata tra gli altri
da Max Ernst, uno dei suoi pittori surrealisti preferiti, che nel caso specifico rivela un collegamento
con il romanticismo 151 . In Al di là della pittura Ernst, citato da Foster, la definisce «the coupling of
two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit them” 152 .
Foster rileva come questa tecnica ponga in questione il “principio di identità” e il concetto stesso di
autore, che il movimento surrealista intendeva a sua volta superare: «[…] collage disturbs the
“principle of identity”, even “abolishes” the concept of “author”» 153 . Nella monografia a lui
dedicata dalla rivista americana Re/Search, Ballard spiega:
148 Jeannette Baxter, J. G. Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination, op. cit., p. 63.
149 «In the late 1950s, Ballard put together a series of collages, which were plans for a putative novel based purely on
typography, on the styles of type and spacing of text, with little concern for meaning. Ballard entertained the notion of
using billboards as the site for this new novel to unfold. Later, he paid for a series of ‘adverts’ having failed to get an
Arts Council grant -- to 'sell' the ideas of his text, the product's name being his own signature.» R. Luckhurst, op. cit., p.
430.
150 J. G. Ballard, “Fictions of every kind”, A User’s Guide to the Millennium, London, Harper Collins, 1996, p. 205.
151 «In Max Ernst’s efforts to pursue the secret pattern in things, we may detect an affinity with the 19 th -century
Romantics. They spoke of nature’s “handwriting”, which can be seen everywhere, on wings, eggshells, in clouds, snow,
ice crystals, and other “strange conjunctions of chance” just as much as in dreams or visions. They saw everything as
the expression of one and the same “pictorial language of nature.” Thus it was a genuinely romantic gesture when Max
Ernst called the pictures produced by his experiments “natural history.” And he was right, for the unconscious (which
had conjured up the pictures in the chance configuration of things) is [corsivo dell’autrice] nature.» A. Jaffé,
“Symbolism in the visual arts”, in C. G. Jung, op. cit., p. 260.
152 Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty, Cambridge (MA), The MIT Press, 1993, p. 81.
153 Ibid. Alla nota 54 spiega: «[…] The dadaist Ernst sought to decenter the authorial subject in several ways:
anonymous collaborations (the Fatagagas with Gruenwald and Arp), the use of found materials and automatist
techniques, etc. Here Ernst derives the term “principle of identity” from Breton, who in turn used it regarding the early
dadaist collages (see Beyond Painting, p. 177). For Breton too these collages “disturb us within our memory”.» Ivi, p.
250.
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