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inseguono 185 . Essa è funzionale alla logica del processo evolutivo che ha segnato la storia
dell’uomo fin dalle origini e che trova il suo punto di svolta nella catastrofe stessa. Ma attenzione, il
loro obiettivo non è l’autodistruzione, bensì la trascendenza: «The disaster motif in Ballard’s fiction
is thus grounded, not in a nihilistic wish for extinction, but in the desire for transcendence» 186 .
Questa trascendenza verso cui paiono tendere i protagonisti della tetralogia del disastro ballardiana
nella lettura dei diversi critici, da Gregory Stephenson a Warren Wagar a Peter Brigg, si presta a
interpretazioni di natura differente, da quella mistica o addirittura religiosa a quella esistenzialista,
da quella nichilista a quella junghiana. Ciò che appare difficilmente confutabile è che i diversi
disastri in cui si trovano coinvolti i personaggi siano come dei setting cinematografici, come uno
sfondo tridimensionale sul quale vengono proiettate le loro ossessioni. La catastrofe naturale come
cornice e pretesto delle dinamiche psicologiche dei personaggi principali 187 .
Un fenomeno all’orizzonte del percorso di questi personaggi è quello dell’entropia, come
accennato: il termine è mutuato dalla fisica, e indica il grado di dispersione dell'energia nel
passaggio da uno stato di ordine a uno di disordine. L’esaurimento dell’energia porta alla stasi,
ovvero alla morte. Se applichiamo il ragionamento su scala planetaria otteniamo la fine
dell’universo. Nel nostro caso, la tensione verso l’esaurimento energetico è un processo che
riguarda l’interiorità dell’individuo, il suo inner space, che si manifesta nella forma della
trascendenza 188 .
185 «They are passive; worse, they embrace and collude with catastrophe. Ballard’s inversion of the genre is seen in
these terms: “Contrary to most treatments of the theme, the four books are not centred on the frightful destructiveness of
the cataclysm but on its awesome beauty… on the perverse desires, mad ambitions, and suicidal manias of aberrant
personalities now free to fulfil fatal aspirations devoid of any rational motivation. If the traditional catastrophe initiates
some musings about British masochism, Ballard's work goes beyond this into all manner of death-driven perversity”
[“Ballard” entry in Twentieth Century Science Fiction Writers, 2nd edition, ed. Curtis Smith, St. James Press, 1986,
p.32]. […] The only action is towards the psychological acceptance of a “new logic”, embracing catastrophe and,
seemingly, death. […] [These] disaster novels attempt a literal sub-version of the genre, reversing the perceived
surface/depth structure to manifest its latent desires. If this reading is accepted, one can see a certain consonance
between the novels' sub-version and Baudrillard’s claim that the psychoanalytic “private scene” of the modern has been
rendered transparent, ob-scene, in the postmodern.» R. Luckhurst, op. cit., pp. 293-295.
186 G. Stephenson, op. cit., p. 41.
187 «There are, in these commentaries, at least four competing frames of reference for reading the catastrophe: the
Jungian process of annealing a self-divided subjectivity; a specifically religious meaning of Apocalypse as redemption;
an existential process of moving from alienated being toward a transcendent apprehension of Being; and a Camusian
conception of an absurd universe. Apparent in all these readings is also the perhaps most ‘self-evident’ frame: the
Freudian typography of subjectivity. The landscapes of the novels are those of the unconscious, a scenography of the
‘secret’ desires of and for the catastrophe.» R. Luckhurst, op. cit. (1997), p. 47.
188 «[…][A]t least in the context of Ballard’s work, its [entropy’s] cosmological extension designates a hypothetical
tendency of the universe to attain a state of maximum homogeneity in which all matter is at a uniform temperature and
eventually brings about the ‘heat death’ of the universe. Ballard’s concern with entropy allies him not only with other
representatives of the British New Wave but also with a whole line of post-war novelists (many of them American)
whose work displays an equally consistent vision of the universe as regressing to a state of absolute uniformity and
inertness. […] If “The Voices of Time” seems completely devoid of the specific social and political subtext of
[Pynchon’s short story] “Entropy”, Ballard’s use of the entropy metaphor nonetheless shares Pynchon’s vision of
human life releasing energy at an accelerate rate and ready to succumb to a form of emotional and intellectual ‘heat
death’. While Pynchon applies the entropy metaphor to the workings of society as a whole, Ballard is primarily
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