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

Anche in questo caso, come altrove in Ballard, non si può fare a meno di notare come la
descrizione del paesaggio rimandi alla sua esperienza cinese, come uno degli aspetti ad essa
indelebilmente legati 193 . L’atmosfera è descritta attraverso due quadri surrealisti:
Over the mantelpiece was a huge painting by the early 20th-century Surrealist, Delvaux, in which
ashen-faced women danced naked to the waist with dandified skeletons in tuxedos against a spectral bonelike
landscape. On another wall one of Max Ernst’s self-devouring phantasmagoric jungles screamed silently
to itself, like the sump of some insane unconscious 194 .
En passant possiamo ricordare che la passione di Ballard per le opere di Delvaux lo spinse a
una piccola correzione - surrealista? - della realtà dei fatti: i due quadri “La violazione” e “Lo
specchio”, del 1936, andarono distrutti a Londra durante i bombardamenti del 1940. Dopo il
successo del film tratto da L’impero del sole, che gli procurò i fondi necessari, Ballard incaricò la
pittrice americana Brigid Marlin di riprodurli sulla base di alcune fotografie in bianco e nero ancora
esistenti, salvandoli così dall’oblio 195 . Fu deciso che la loro collocazione sarebbe stata all’interno
della sua casa di Shepperton, dove restarono poggiate sul pavimento, poiché le loro grandi
dimensioni non permettevano di appenderle alle pareti come accade di norma 196 . È opportuno
ricordare ancora come l’ambientazione di questo romanzo abbia radici nell’esperienza personale di
Ballard a Shanghai:
[…] a lot of the images I use - drained swimming-pools, abandoned hotels, empty apartment blocks,
that sort of stuff - date from that period. I think The Drowned World, my first novel [sic], where I have a
tropical London partly submerged by water, was inspired by the view from our camp eight miles from
Shanghai, across the flooded paddy fields, a green world of reflections, of canals and creeks, and then the
apartment houses rising on the horizon. I can see them in my eyes now. This was an area inundated by the
Yangtse, saturated with water 197 .
193 «[…] [T]he landscape of The Drowned World finds its generation in the Shanghai skyline reflected on the paddy
fields beyond the Lunghua camp.» R. Luckhurst, op. cit., p. 479.
194 J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World, London, Victor Gollancz, 2001, p. 29.
195 «I've always been a great admirer of the Belgium surrealist Paul Delvaux, and about six or seven years ago, thanks
to Empire of the Sun [the film of Ballard's novel], I had a little spare cash. My first thought was to buy a Delvaux, but I
discovered, sadly, that his prices had moved into the stratosphere. Anything up to a million pounds each. So it then
occurred to me that, rather than try to buy an existing Delvaux, what I would do was to pay an artist to reconstruct two
Delvaux paintings which were destroyed during the Second World War, from the black-and-white photographs that
exist of them. And that I did. I heard of an American artist, Brigid Marlin, and I asked her, “Would you be prepared to
accept a commission to paint these, to reconstruct these lost paintings?” She agreed, and they're now my proudest
possession. The originals of the two paintings were destroyed in London during the Blitz in 1940. Both were painted in
1936, and had obviously been brought to London by a British collector. Brigid, with a little interference from myself,
had to choose the right colours for the paintings. Fortunately, Delvaux uses a limited palette - for instance, his buxom
women tend to wear burgundy dresses - and we picked colours consonant with the colours in existing Delvaux
paintings. So I think we’ve got it just about right. One of the paintings is called The Violation and the other is called
The Mirror.» “J G Ballard on his personalised Surrealist paintings”, The Independent, 29/01/1994.
196 «The trouble is they are both so huge he has to keep them standing on the floor and mantelpiece because they would
bring the walls down if he tried to hang them, and his sitting room is so small you can't get far enough away to see them
properly.» Lynn Barber, Sunday Express Magazine, 06/10/1987.
197 J.G. Ballard, intervista di Christopher Tookey, Books & Bookmen, settembre 1984.
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