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The beauty of the spectacle had turned the keys of memory, and a thousand images of childhood,
forgotten for nearly forty years filled his mind, recalling the paradisal world when everything seemed
illuminated by that prismatic light described so exactly by Wordsworth in his recollections of childhood. The
magical shore in front of him seemed to glow like that brief spring 247 .
Il riferimento è al ricordo di certi stati d’animo dell’infanzia descritto dal poeta romantico in
Ode on intimations of immortality from recollections of early childhood (1804), condizione
dell’esistenza in cui è massima la capacità di recepire ciò che c’è di magico, meraviglioso e sublime
nel mondo. Un paradiso ontologico che emergerà anche altrove nella narrativa ballardiana. È
romantica la concezione, e la nostalgia che ne deriva, secondo cui il legame primigenio con la
natura, ormai perduto, era caratterizzato dalla bellezza, che conferiva all’esistenza umana un’aura
quasi magica 248 .
Il rapporto con il tempo è una delle principali chiavi di lettura di questo gruppo di romanzi.
Elana Gomel afferma che ‘l’apocalisse antiapocalittica’ che essi rappresentano si oppone alle
suggestioni millenariste per concentrarsi piuttosto sull’esperienza corporea e la resistenza psichica
dell’essere umano. In questo contesto i quattro Cavalieri dell’apocalisse non sono dunque quelli
biblici ma i quattro elementi della tradizione classica: aria, acqua, terra, fuoco 249 .
A partire dalla considerazione che la fantascienza istituzionale fallisce, tradendo le proprie
immense potenzialità, nel presentare il futuro in termini lineari, Ballard dichiara che tutta la sua
narrativa può essere considerata come un tentativo di sfuggire al tempo. O meglio, al tempo lineare,
con le ‘condensed novels’ che vanno a comporre The Atrocity Exhibition come punto culminante 250 .
247 J. G. Ballard, The Crystal World, London, Jonathan Cape, 1984, p. 69.
248 «The allusion to Wordsworth introduces the idea that once the world used to be better, more beautiful and magical,
and we felt united with it, belonging in nature. As in Wordsworth’s poem, in Ballard’s story too, the lost splendour of
reality (now regained in the beauty of crystal forests) is rendered in metaphors of light, transparency and clearness. In
romantic poetry the lost paradise is forgotten childhood, while Ballard uses this reference to describe the
psychoanalytical concept of the pre-civilized paradise of the very beginnings of time.» D. Oramus, op. cit., p. 214.
249 «Ballard’s novels both incarnate the death of narrative and question its ethical premises and consequences. In its
combination of violence and beauty, of narrative slowdown and temporal distortion, the Quartet [la tetralogia del
disastro] embodies the postmodern poetics of the sublime. But in its denial of utopian redemption, in its mockery of the
millennium, the Quartet undermines the political appropriation of the sublime in the service of religion and ideology.
By taking to the extreme the spatiality of the postmodern chronotope, Ballard’s novels show that if time is dead, it is
because it has been murdered by the violent excesses of the would-be builders of New Jerusalem. Myth is only a
reification and obfuscation of history. Ballard’s anti-apocalyptic apocalypse opposes millennialism by focusing on
corporeal experience and psychic endurance. His Four Horsemen are not the exceptional disasters of the Book of
Revelation, War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death, but the abused foundations of life — Air, Water, Earth, and Fire.
Against the deadly delusion of a divine emplotment of history Ballard pits the everyday realities of survival in time.» E.
Gomel, op. cit.
250 «Principally, it is this attempt to reproduce the future in linear terms that mars so much science fiction. Partly this is
a result of habit, the sheer inertia of the immense mass of retrospective fictions produced during the 300 years of the
novel - or three thousand, if one cares to go back to the Homeric fables. But it is also a result of failing to look with
complete honesty at one’s subject matter. However much they may deny it, most people are made uneasy by a
prospective view of the world around them - it seems to lack stability, certainty and continuity with the efforts of the
past, and instead to be a place of rapidly changing currencies, bizarre images and apparently random or, far worse,
inexplicable experiences. However, over the last decade or so it seems to me that more and more people have come to
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