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

J.G.B.: «It depends on the perspective one takes. As a therapeutic process, psychoanalysis is a
complete flop, it doesn’t work. But Freud has enormous authority. He has the authority of a great
imaginative writer. If you think of him as a novelist… Thomas Szasz, the anti-psychiatrist, refers to
psychoanalysis as an ideology, and I think that is almost right. If you regard all the aspects of Freud’s view
of the psyche as symbolic structures, as metaphors, then they have enormous power. I don’t think that there
is such a thing as a death-wish wired into our brains, along with all the instinctive apparatus – the need to
reproduce ourselves, the need for physical freedom, the need for food, water, light – I don’t believe that there
is a death instinct. It might have evolved as nature’s way of … there may be an advantage to the gene pool as
a whole if there are genes that predispose the sick and the dying to wander off to some elephant’s graveyard
to keep out of healthy people’s way. Now, that could have evolved as a death instinct, a way in which the
community cleansed itself of potentially dangerous toxins. But that hasn’t happened. Nobody who is close to
death wants to do anything but live. Very few people actually look forward to dying. Very few people will
their own deaths. On the other hand, death has an enormous romantic appeal, there is no doubt about that.
[…] Death has an enormous appeal for the romantic imagination. Obviously it stands for more than just
physical dissolution of the body and the brain. It represents something else» 265 .
Ancora, è una risposta che se da un lato smentisce chiaramente coloro i quali hanno visto in
Ballard un cupo profeta di sventura, dall’altro dimostra come ciò che un autore pensa come persona
non sempre corrisponde completamente a ciò che pensano e fanno i suoi personaggi. Per esempio, il
rapporto con la morte è centrale in un romanzo come The Unlimited Dream Company, in cui il
protagonista Blake si trova costantemente sul confine che separa la vita dalla morte. Ma soprattutto,
come abbiamo visto, altri suoi personaggi sembrano scegliere di andare volontariamente incontro
alla morte, come Kerans in The Drowned World 266 . In questo caso si tratta di un riemergere alla
superficie di pulsioni inconsce profonde, risalenti a un’era primordiale dell’umanità.
In conclusione notiamo come in una nota a margine di The Atrocity Exhibition Ballard si
chieda se gli astronauti sognino quando si trovano in orbita, evocando indirettamente, per
assonanza, l’ormai celebre interrogativo dickiano: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? La
risposta ufficiale sarebbe no, ma è fin troppo facile immaginare che la risposta ufficiosa,
complementare, quella vera, sia sì 267 .
265 Will Self, Junk Mail, London, Bloomsbury Press, 1996, pp. 369-370.
266 «Freud concludes in the utmost pessimistic manner that all life is a mistake […] “If we may assume as an experience
admitting no exception that everything living dies from causes within itself and returns to the inorganic, we can only
say the goal of all life is death, and casting back, the inanimate was there before the animate. […] [T]he first instinct
was present, that to return to lifelessness” [Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920, pp. 70-71]. The idea that within the
psychic apparatus striving for pleasure there exists a tendency towards self-annihilation renders the search for one’s true
self suicidal. In their descent into their inner space Ballardian characters often choose death or mutilation. For the
outsider this is auto-destruction, but for said characters it means finding peace of mind and fulfilling innermost desires.»
D. Oramus, op. cit., p. 54.
267 «Over the years NASA spokesmen have even denied that the astronauts dream at all during their space flights. But it
is clear from the subsequently troubled careers of many of the astronauts (Armstrong […] refuses to discuss the moonlanding)
that they suffered severe psychological damage. What did they dream about, how were their imaginations
affected, their emotions and need for privacy, their perception of time and death? The Space Age lasted barely 25 years,
from Gagarin’s first flight in 1961 to the first Apollo splashdown not [corsivo dell’autore] shown live on TV in 1975, a
consequence of the public’s loss of interest – the brute-force ballistic technology is basically 19 th century, as people
realise, while advanced late 20 th century technologies are invisible and electronic: computers, microwave data links,
faxes and VDTs are the stuff of which our dreams are made” [Può essere interessante notare come quest’espressione dal
sapore shakespeariano venga adoperata nel romanzo The Maltese Falcon (1941) di Dashiell Hammett, pronunciata dal
personaggio di Sam Spade che trionfò al cinema nell’interpretazione di Humphrey Bogart, come parafrasi delle parole
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