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

Capitolo IV
ROMANTICISMO, PSICHE, ARTE
1. Romanticismo: Il doppio
Ballard ha sempre rivendicato il suo legame a livello di poetica col surrealismo, come
abbiamo già chiarito. All’interno di quest’ambito, è possibile identificare ulteriori legami con
fenomeni che rientrano nell’episteme romantica: qui ci limitiamo alla concezione del ‘meraviglioso’
attraverso il perturbante 293 freudiano - Das Unheimliche, saggio del 1919 - e al filone goticofantastico
294 . Tale legame emerge nei romanzi The Unlimited Dream Company, che contiene un
riferimento esplicito a William Blake già nel nome del protagonista, dotato del singolare potere di
creare la vita in modi non ortodossi, e The Crystal World, dove invece piante, animali e uomini si
mutano, attraverso un processo di cristallizzazione, in creature meravigliose, ingioiellate e
iridescenti. Per quanto concerne il gotico, esso emerge dove a prima vista non lo si crederebbe,
come in High-Rise, dove non sono gli oscuri anfratti di tetri castelli di epoche lontane ad ospitare
eventi sinistri, benchè scarsamente affini all’horror, ma un moderno grattacielo 295 . E come in un
testo distante da poetiche di questo tipo, come Cocaine Nights, dove il topos della ‘casa
posseduta/haunted house’ si attualizza, a partire dalla rilettura del gotico in alcune opere di Max
Ernst, nel paradosso di una residenza nel clima assolato di una località turistica come Estrella de
Mar 296 .
293 «[…] [C]rucial surrealist definitions and practices revolve around the uncanny [das Unheimlich] as so many signs of
a confusion between life and death, a compulsion to repeat, a return of repressed desires or fantasmatic scenes. These
marvelous confusions blur distinctions between inside and outside, the psychic and the social: the one is nor seen as
prior or causal to the other (one of many insights offered official Marxism but rejected by it).» H. Foster, op. cit., p.
125.
294 «As a medieval term the marvelous signaled a rupture in the natural order, one, unlike the miraculous, not
necessarily divine in origin. This challenge to rational causality is essential to the medievalist aspect of surrealism, its
fascination with magic and alchemy, with mad love and analogical thought. It is also fundamental to its spiritualist
aspect, its attraction to mediumistic practices and gothic tales (e.g., Matthew Gregory Lewis, Ann Radcliffe, Edward
Young) where the marvellous is again in play. Concerned with taboo and transgression, the repressed and its return,
gothic literature addressed the uncanny long before Freud.» Ivi, p. 19.
295 «Harking back to the past, to historical sites of human habitation that have fallen into desuetude, gothic projects
inner anxiety onto physical space and spells the doom of enlightenment in the rubble of ancient ruins. High-Rise draws
on this tradition but reverses its trajectory: it is the contemporary tower-blocks, the symbol of a rationally planned
existence and the blueprint for a self-sufficient communal life, that harbours the gothic nightmare. As in Kubrick’s The
Shining, which reverses the horror genre’s traditional reliance on shadows and darkness, the destructive mini-history
that unfolds within its clean-cut steel and concrete walls takes place in the light, marking a return of the repressed that
is called forth by the building itself, which is “a model of all that technology had done to make possible the expression
of a truly ‘free’ psychopathology ([High-Rise,] p. 36).» A. Gasiorek, op. cit., pp. 124-125.
296 «Ballard’s imposing architecture draws intertextually on Max Ernst’s The Ruin (1922) […]. The Hollinger mansion
is a metaphor for the death of contemporary Europe, only this is not a Europe ravaged by war, but by a colonising
psychopathology of leisure and consumer capitalism. […] Following Ernst’s appropriation of the counter-rational
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