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

Come in “Chronopolis”, la misurazione del tempo ha un ruolo importante anche in The Drowned
World, dove il colonnello Riggs si preoccupa del corretto funzionamento degli orologi, un’allusione
al concetto bergsoniano di ‘durata’ 251 .
terms with the past, declaring a private moratorium on their own past failures and experiences, and are becoming more
and more fascinated by a future that presents itself in terms of uncertainty, opportunity and the brilliant illumination of
the chance encounter. In the place of probability, possibility with all its magic and meaning, the strange logic of the
chance encounter, the fusion of apparently irreconcilable images that is the stuff of poetry. All my own fiction could be
regarded as an attempt to escape from time - or, more exactly, from linear time, as it seems to me that time is
quantifiable and non-linear in far more aspects, and that the most significant relationships and experiences of our lives
are intelligible only in non-linear terms. (If this seems doubtful, pause for a moment and examine the goulash of ideas,
images, activities, relationships and dreams that make up your own life -- how many of them make sense in linear
terms, how adequately would a framework such as Pride and Prejudice or The Magic Mountain, to take two examples
at random, represent the texture of your own consciousness and behaviour? Far less adequately, I would guess, than a
framework such as that of “You and Me and the Continuum” or “The Atrocity Exhibition.” This is no comparison of
literary merit, I hasten to add.) In my three novels, The Drowned World, The Drought and The Crystal World, I
attempted to construct linear systems that made no use of the sequential elements of time; that is, the events of the
narrative unfold chronologically, but what determines their movement forward (or backward in the case of The
Drowned World and sideways or inwards in The Crystal World) is the mythological element, the attempt - particularly
in the first two novels - to validate the linear element of time by imposing a psychological dynamic and necessity.
However, a series of non-linear elements and images more and more began to force themselves through the texture of
the narrative - the characters found themselves in situations that owed nothing or little to their place in the sequence of
events. Finally, in The Crystal World, this isolation of experience and identity is carried to its ultimate point. In my
latest group of stories, “You and Me and the Continuum”, “The Assassination Weapon”, “You: Coma: Marilyn
Monroe” and “The Atrocity Exhibition”, the linear elements of sequential narrative have been eliminated altogether.
The world of these stories is the nearest I can reach to the matrix of my own consciousness and experience, an
expression of the completely quantified and discontinuous flux of events taking place on both sides of my retina.» J. G.
Ballard, “Images of the future: Comments on some recent experiments”, in David Pringle (a cura di), JGB News n. 19,
gennaio 1993 (http://www.jgballard.ca/pringle_news_from_the_sun/news_from_sun19.html) [ultima visita
01/08/2010].
251 «As “archeopsychic time” runs backwards, Riggs obsessively re-sets municipal clocks to protect the ordered advance
of ‘clock time’; the sympathies are evidently with a return to an almost Bergsonian conception of durée.» R. Luckhurst,
op. cit., p. 346.
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