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Ballard utilizza il termine ‘uncanny’ – perturbante - in The Kindness of Women, a proposito
del racconto di quando l’autore stesso si trovava a Shepperton sul set del film di Spielberg tratto da
Empire of the Sun, in una ricostruzione più vera del vero della sua casa di Shanghai. In
quell’occasione gli venne presentato l’allora giovanissimo Christian Bale, l’attore che interpretava il
ruolo del protagonista. In tal modo Shanghai Jim e lo scrittore J. G. si trovarono uno di fronte
all’altro, in una perturbante manifestazione del doppelgänger - il doppio -. Inoltre, la presenza di
una troupe intenta a girare un documentario sul film aggiungeva un’ulteriore dimensione a questo
gioco di specchi, a questa fiction all’ennesima potenza 297 . Analogamente, Jeannette Baxter parla di
‘uncanny’ a proposito delle reazioni suscitate nel lettore di The Atrocity Exhibition: «[…] a
significant effect of reading these texts is the feeling of uncanniness, recognition of familiarity
which is at once unfamiliar and estranging» 298 . Hal Foster sottolinea come il romanticismo anticipi,
con Hoffmann e Poe in particolare, alcune tematiche connotanti del surrealismo; ‘uncanny’ erano
senza dubbio gli artisti scelti dai surrealisti come pionieri del fantastico, specialmente agli occhi
della maggior parte dell’opinione pubblica dei primi del Novecento 299 . In questa prospettiva Poe,
citato dai fratelli Goncourt, figura in una nota a margine di The Atrocity Exhibition:
After reading Edgar Allan Poe. Something the critics have not noticed: a new literary world pointing
to the literature of the 20 th century. Scientific miracles, fables on the pattern A+B; a clear-sighted, sickly
literature. No more poetry but analytic fantasy. Something monomaniacal. Things playing a more important
part than people; love giving way to deductions and other sources of ideas, style, subject and interest. The
potential of the Gothic genre (Ernst admired the Gothic visions of Friedrich, Poe, Hugo), Ballard reconfigures the topos
of the haunted house in order to alert the reader to embedded psychic histories of trauma and guilt. A smouldering
wound on an otherwise immaculate landscape, the Hollinger mansion is the repository of a repressed historical
unconscious, it is a mausoleum of concealed knowledges and unquiet ghosts which encourages the reader to look
differently at the elusive topography of Estrella de Mar.» Jeannette Baxter, J. G. Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination, op.
cit., pp. 190-192.
297 «Everything is doubled and re-doubled: filmed in Shepperton, his home town, the sense of a re-staged suburbia,
surrounded as it is by the sound stages of the film studios, becomes re-re-staged; his neighbours are recruited as the
extras they had always been. Discovering a virtual simulacra of his childhood home just outside Shepperton and
reflecting that the film team was “working to construct a more convincing reality than the original I had known as a
child” [275], Jim's response is that this is “uncanny”. This is itself being filmed, within the film, by a documentary
crew.» R. Luckhurst, op. cit. (1997), pp. 491-492.
298 Jeannette Baxter, J. G. Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination, op. cit., p. 80.
299 «Most of these enthusiasms hardly appear radical today: they revise the canon within given definitions of art,
literature, and philosophy that are broadened but not breached, and they do not contest it at all in the name of oppressed
subjects. Nevertheless, these lists surely struck contemporaries of surrealism as perverse historical fixations. The two
principal lists are “Eruttaretil” (or Littérature backwards) published in Littérature 11-12 (October 1923) and “Lisez/Ne
Lizes Pas” printed on a 1931 catalogue of José Corti publications. Other examples include the inquiry “Qui sont les
meilleurs romanciers et poets méconnus de 1895 à 1914?” in L’éclair (September 23, 1923), the list published by Ernst
in Beyond Painting, as well as the pantheon noted in “Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924). Some of the elect are to be
expected: Sade, Hegel, Marx, Freud (who is sometimes replaced by Charcot), etc. More suggestive are the literary
favorites, in particular the romantics, English gothics (e.g., Mathew Gregory Lewis, Ann Radcliffe, Edward Young),
Poe, Baudelaire, Nerval and, above all, Lautréamont and Rimbaud. Like the preferred artists of the surrealists (e.g.,
Bosch, Grünewald, Piranesi, Uccello, Fuseli, Goya, Moreau, Böcklin), most of these figures are taken as precursors of
the fantastic, i.e., of a project to which (as noted) surrealism is committed: the reenchantment of a rationalized world.»
H. Foster, op. cit., pp. 280-281.
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