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

of a remembered moment of time. For Talbot the most disturbing elements are the rectilinear sections of the
beach and sea. The displacement of these two images through time, and their marriage with his own
continuum, has warped them into the rigid and unyielding structures of his own consciousness. Later,
walking along the overpass, he realized that the rectilinear forms of his conscious reality were warped
elements from some placid and harmonious future 214 .
Altre opere pittoriche vengono citate esplicitamente in The Atrocity Exhibition: The Robing
of the Bride di Max Ernst, The Bride Stripped Bare of Her Bachelors, Even di Marcel Duchamp,
The Dream of the Poet di Giorgio de Chirico. In due dei titoli dei paragrafi delle ‘condensed novels’
che costituiscono il libro, il riferimento è a due romanzi di un altro autore legato al surrealismo,
Raymond Roussel: ‘Locus Solus’ e ‘Impressions of Africa’. Lo stesso Ballard sottolinea la presenza
di altri dipinti di Ernst in quest’opera: The Eye of Silence e Europe After the Rain:
Their clinker-like rocks resemble skeletons from which all organic matter has been leached, all sense
of time. Looking at these landscapes, it’s impossible to imagine anything ever happening within them. The
neural counterparts of these images must exist within our brains, though it’s difficult to guess what purpose
they serve 215 .
Il racconto “The Day of Forever” (1965) contiene diversi riferimenti a pittori e quadri
surrealisti, tra cui The Echo (1943) di Delvaux:
In the students’ gallery hung the fading reproductions of a dozen schools of painting, for the most
part images of worlds without meaning. However, grouped together in a small alcove Halliday found the
surrealists Delvaux, Chirico and Ernst. These strange landscapes, inspired by dreams that his own could no
longer echo, filled Halliday with a profound sense of nostalgia. One above all, Delvaux’s ‘The Echo’, which
depicted a naked Junoesque woman walking among immaculate ruins under a midnight sky, reminded him
of his own recurrent fantasy. The infinite longing contained in the picture, the synthetic time created by the
receding images of the woman, belonged to the landscape of his unseen night 216 .
Come nel romanzo precedente con Kerans e Strangman, anche qui troviamo una coppia
protagonista-deuteragonista, con Ransom e Lomax, in cui il primo personaggio rappresenta la
tensione, positiva, verso l’inconscio e la trascendenza, mentre il secondo (come Hardoon in The
Wind from Nowhere) incarna l’io cosciente, egoista, limitato e negativo.
Interessante la proposta di lettura di Luckhurst in chiave esistenzialista di The Drought,
attraverso Albert Camus: «The most obvious connection to Ballard's work is Camus' theorisation of
absurdity» 217 . Come in Ballard, anche nelle opere dell’autore francese hanno più importanza i
214
J. G. Ballard, a cura di V. Vale e A. Juno, op. cit., p. 22.
215
Ivi, p. 21.
216
J.G. Ballard, The Day of Forever, London, Panther, 1967, p. 12.
217
R. Luckhurst, op. cit., p. 362. Il legame con l’esistenzialismo è tuttavia piuttosto tenue, poiché, come afferma poco
oltre lo stesso Luckhurst citando Cooper, Camus non ne sarebbe una figura centrale. Questo perché il suo rapporto con
l’essere nel mondo si basa sul mantenimento dell’alienazione, non sul suo superamento.
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