Questo articolo è apparso sul Manifesto.

di Luca Briasco

Finzioni DOPO LA FINE
Una messa a fuoco delle espressioni più recenti che la letteratura ha dato alle nostre paure, tra fantascienza e nostalgie del presente. Fredric Jameson ha parlato di «un millenarismo invertito» e James Berger ha osservato come alla fine del XX secolo alcuni romanzi ci abbiano fornito «una retrospettiva prospettica».
«Sono finito, pensa Bunny Munro in quell’attimo improvviso di consapevolezza riservato a chi ha i giorni contati. Ha la sensazione di aver commesso un grave errore, ma è una sensazione che passa in un lampo terribile e sparisce, lasciandolo in una stanza del Grenville Hotel in mutande, solo con se stesso e la sua fame». In questo incipit c’è già tutta la strana grandezza che fa di La morte di Bunny Munro, secondo romanzo del musicista e compositore rock Nick Cave, forse l’opera narrativa più importante del 2009. L’inconsapevolezza e il senso della fine, una fine in qualche modo sempre già avvenuta, sono i due perni intorno ai quali Cave allestisce una sorta di Everyman postmoderno, molto più vicino allo spirito del morality play medievale di quanto non abbia saputo o voluto esserlo il romanzo di Philip Roth che ne mutuava il nome. Ed è probabilmente nel quadro di una letteratura ossessionata dalla fine come dato di fatto epocale e già compiuto che il romanzo di Cave va misurato, per scoprirne l’originalità e la capacità di tracciare scenari nuovi e inediti.

Un millenarismo invertito
Dieci anni fa, James Berger intitolava After the End un saggio interamente dedicato al post-apocalittico, che spaziava dalla letteratura al cinema, ai media. Concentrandosi in particolar modo sulla scena americana tra la fantascienza – punto di riferimento quasi ovvio – e la fiction postmoderna, Berger osserva come «nella fase finale del ventesimo secolo abbiamo avuto l’opportunità, prima accessibile solo attraverso la teologia o la finzione narrativa, di vedere oltre la fine della nostra civiltà, di scorgere, in una strana sorta di retrospettiva prospettica, come si presenterebbe la fine: come un campo di sterminio nazista, o un’esplosione atomica, o una wasteland ecologica o urbana. E se siamo stati in grado di vedere queste cose è solo perché esse sono già accadute». Le visioni distopiche della grande fantascienza degli anni Sessanta, da Dick a Ballard, non possono fare altro che replicare le vere catastrofi storiche del ventesimo secolo. «Si dice spesso», conclude Berger, «che la modernità è preoccupata da un senso di crisi e vede sempre come imminente, o addirittura arriva ad agognare, una catastrofe finale. Questo senso di crisi non è scomparso, ma coesiste con un’altra sensazione, quella secondo cui la catastrofe finale è già avvenuta (forse non sappiamo esattamente quando) e l’attività incessante dei nostri tempi – l’informazione, con la sua processione quasi indistinta di disastri – è solo una forma complessa di stasi».
Il quadro disegnato da Berger porta quasi naturalmente a tracciare una distinzione tra una narrazione apocalittica e una post-apocalittica; tra una modalità di racconto (spesso cinematografica più che letteraria, tradotta nella visibilità quasi «oscena» degli effetti speciali) che si concentra nel declinare all’infinito una «processione indistinta di disastri» e un’altra che tenta di individuare gli scenari possibili di un mondo che è già post-apocalittico, e che più che del disastro (dato come acquisito e sempre già avvenuto) intende parlare di ciò che a esso fa seguito, di cosa significhi vivere e raccontare «dopo la fine».
La tendenza a teorizzare una condizione «postuma» della letteratura, dell’arte, del pensiero, è uno degli elementi portanti della riflessione sul postmoderno: per usare le parole di quello che rimane forse il suo più grande teorico, Fredric Jameson, nel definire la narrazione postmoderna esemplare si potrebbe parlare di «un millenarismo invertito, nel quale le premonizioni del futuro, che si presentino sotto forma di catastrofe o di redenzione, sono state sostituite dal senso della fine».
Naturalmente, è sempre possibile e del tutto ragionevole criticare il postmoderno prima di tutto a partire dal paradosso che lo fonda: dare la fine come fatto acquisito o addirittura già avvenuto. Le conseguenze che ne possono derivare sono di due tipi, entrambi perniciosi. Se parte dall’assunto che la fine sta per arrivare e non vi è modo di evitarla, la narrazione apocalittica tenderà a concentrarsi esclusivamente sul quando e il come, replicando all’infinito un ennesimo modello catastrofista la cui ultima incarnazione, nelle sale proprio in questi giorni, è 2012 dello specialista Ronald Emmerich. Se invece si dà la fine come già avvenuta, è concreto il rischio di ripiegare su un modello narrativo fondato su quella che lo stesso Jameson ha definito «nostalgia del presente». Rievocato a partire da un futuro in cui la catastrofe si è già verificata, il nostro oggi acquista un valore, se non altro residuale, che si rischia di dare come acriticamente acquisito. È quanto in fondo accade in La strada, l’ultimo romanzo di Cormac McCarthy, del quale La morte di Bunny Munro rappresenta un (probabilmente voluto) controcanto.
Nel mondo post-apocalittico in cui un padre e un figlio sono condannati a errare, la sopravvivenza prima di tutto morale è legata all’elemento più antico e fondante di ogni consesso civile: il nucleo famigliare e i legami di sangue come cinghia di trasmissione dei valori che ci rendono umani. Un messaggio che McCarthy aveva già cominciato a declinare in Non è un paese per vecchi, incanalandolo nel conflitto tra l’antica etica western, incarnata nell’anziano sceriffo Bell, e l’assoluto disinteresse per la vita umana dell’uomo-macchina Chigurrh. Un messaggio che reagisce alla condizione postuma teorizzata dal postmoderno non negandola o dialettizzandola, ma ripiegando nostalgicamente verso ciò che la precede e pre-esiste a essa, in cerca di un nucleo incontaminato che torni a farci sentire «umani».
Attingendo ai temi e all’immaginario della fantascienza, McCarthy ne fa un uso deliberatamente retro, che ci riporta agli scenari degli anni Cinquanta e della grande paura atomica. Scenari dai quali i maestri della science fiction postmoderna, da Dick a Ballard, avevano preso le distanze proprio rifiutando quella «nostalgia del presente» che Jameson aveva teorizzato (con un’accezione negativa) e McCarthy torna a fare propria. In Cronache del dopobomba, l’unico romanzo in cui affronta in modo diretto il tema della catastrofe nucleare, Philip K. Dick proietta gli effetti del disastro su una comunità piccola e chiusa, illustrando la continuità degli atteggiamenti e degli stili di vita, la difesa ostinata di un sistema di valori che è però tutto residuale, e che tenta vanamente di nascondere gli effetti di un’apocalissi ben più profonda e duratura: lo sfaldamento dei rapporti sociali e di un modello di vita comune, travolto dalla brama di profitto, dalla tecnologia, dal razzismo ancor più insidioso perché ridotto allo stato latente. Il dopobomba di Dick è il nostro presente, e nient’altro: la retrospettiva prospettica di cui parla Berger nel suo saggio è un gesto d’astuzia attraverso il quale la narrazione può parlarci, dalla giusta distanza, esattamente di ciò che siamo. Un processo che trova la sua estremizzazione e il suo compimento negli ultimi romanzi di Ballard (forse, l’autore più vicino a Cave): Cocaine Nights, Super Cannes, Millennium People, con la loro parata di luoghi futuri che invadono il nostro presente perché ne sono, in fondo, l’incarnazione e la visualizzazione più compiuta.

Senza inseguire un riscatto
In La morte di Bunny Munro, la fantascienza postmoderna di Dick e Ballard torna a essere il vero orizzonte di riferimento, ben più della «operazione nostalgia» tentata da McCarthy. La scommessa mirabilmente vinta da Cave consiste nello scavare a fondo dentro l’umanità degradata e terminale del protagonista, senza cercare facili riscatti, portando alla luce il dolore che cova sordo dietro il suo stupore di erotomane alcolista, di eterno bambino in fuga dalle responsabilità. E nel proiettare la vita errabonda di Bunny e di suo figlio, Bunny Junior, sullo sfondo di un mondo marchiato a fuoco dalle catastrofi quotidiane, popolato di assassini che si esibiscono davanti alle telecamere a circuito chiuso dei centri commerciali, di famiglie distrutte, di moli che bruciano quasi per autocombustione, di locali squallidi e alberghi in disarmo.
Il romanzo di Cave è in fondo il perfetto compimento della frase che lo apre: la storia di un uomo in mutande in un albergo di quart’ordine, immerso in un perenne stupore alcolico; un Mefistofele degradato che vende l’eterna giovinezza sotto forma di creme per il corpo, e che solo a tratti, per lampi terribili come quello che finirà per ucciderlo, intuisce la misura dei suoi errori. E di un bambino che accompagna il padre nella sua vita errabonda, perdendo gradualmente la vista, aggrappandosi al fantasma della madre morta e a un’enciclopedia dalla quale, per vie del tutto arbitrarie, distilla un residuato di saggezza. Nella storia di Bunny e Bunny jr., l’apocalisse torna ad assumere il suo significato più autentico: non una catastrofe, ma un lampo che, in pochi momenti di bruciante fulgore, illumina a pieno giorno il dolore del mondo.

Mike Thompson has designed a lamp that is powered by human blood.

There’s something deeply strange about a premeditated act of violence being conducted in silence. The sequence unrolls like a snuff movie: she sits at the table like a priest at the altar, smashes a glass, cuts herself on it, drains her blood into the liquid in it, and is suffused in an electric blue light.

Thompson, an English designer based in the Netherlands, designed the lamp having discovered how the chemical luminol is used in forensic science to mark traces of blood left at crime scenes.

“It kind of triggered this thought in my mind, that if energy somehow came at a cost to us, then maybe it would make us think differently about the way we use it,” Thompson told LiveScience. The lamp is intended to “challenge people’s preconceived notions about where our energy comes from,” he said, and it forces the user “to rethink how wasteful they are with energy, and how precious it is.”

Having just finished reading Super-Cannes, it’s hard not to find the invention of a blood lamp deeply Ballardian. There’s an obvious sado-maschistic edge to the sensibilities behind the concept, and an undercurrent of vampiric eroticism to the video, that resonate with the sort of ideas Ballard frames in his writing.

Firstly, the novel: set into the hills above Cannes, in the bleaching light, Eden-Olympia is an executive-class, ‘intelligent’ business park, which has been touched by madness. An apparently sane doctor has killed ten people in a storm of violence that cannot be explained. Paul Sinclair, husband of the doctor’s eventual replacement, feels compelled to investigate and gradually uncovers a subculture of crime and engineered psychopathy that threatens to spill outside the mirrored walls of the park.

In Eden-Olympia, we discover, the executives are restless. They have slipped moorings, are adrift in an environment in which work is the only familiar landmark. In an enclosed, disconnected world, they have become inured to whatever normal society expects of us; the market sets its own morality. Dr Wilder Penrose is employed to manage volatile minds: “our amiable Prospero, the psychopomp who steered our darkest dreams towards the daylight”. Without wishing to give the game away, we soon learn that he has prescribed a particularly depraved brand of catharsis.

Essentially, Super-Cannes is a stylised thriller, a tightly twisted coil of  narrative  which flashes the disquieting, prescient ideas for which Ballard (who died this year) became renowned. In fact, the Collins English Dictionary now carries a definition for ‘ballardian’:

“adj. resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard’s novels and stories, esp dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments”

The novel’s chief weakness is that at times it feels too much a set piece, the writing merely facilitating the enaction of the author’s ideas. Ballard sometimes over-tells in a clunky, hammy way: the narrator, Paul, introduces his wife as “spunky but insecure”, and she never really provides anything other than a rather wooden cameo.

But in a sense these blips are no more than perculiarities of the genre, Chandleresque affectations, and even serve to heighten the strangeness of the narrative. I found Super-Cannes an overwhelmingly intruiging, unsettling novel to read. It is filled with an oppressive brightness; the glare of white buildings, the fusing heat of a exposed rooftop, the vulgar shimmer of neon in alleys. Ballard shoots off images like rogue fireworks:

“Cannes lay beneath us, a furnace of light where the Croisette touched the sea, as if an immense lava flow was moving down the hills and igniting at the water’s edge.”

His writing is charged throughout with a forensic energy and all the blank hostility of an operating theatre – turning the page sometimes feels like making the first cut at an autopsy. Super Cannes reveals itself in the white light that a dentist uses to direct the drill; the light of the blood lamp.

J. G. Ballard’s 2000 novel Super-Cannes posits a curious view of the nature of crime. In a gated community called Eden-Olympia, a sort of European Silicon Valley, just outside of Cannes, France, the future is already here. In an attempt to “hothouse the future” (15), psychiatrist Wilder Penrose, an “amiable Prospero” or “the psychopomp who steered our darkest dreams towards the daylight” (3) supplements the system of modern living with ubiquitous security and technology with “healthy” doses of programmed violence and psychopathology. Within Penrose’s therapy program, some acts of violence are needed to preserve the mental sanity of the executives at Eden-Olympia. In order to foster a truly sane and healthy society, these “small” deviations must be allowed, not constituting in any way crimes but safe outlets for repressed emotions that might hamper a balanced life. The pediatrician David Greenwood, however, set out to expose the perverse scheme, and ended up being executed as the author of the biggest crime in the history of the community. Greenwood, the man who tried to kill Penrose and his associates, hovers in the narrative like a ghost, a man who the protagonist, Paul Sinclair, is made to step on his shoes from the very beginning.

The novel is well-set in the genre of detective or crime fiction, wearing the influence of Raymond Chandler on its sleeve with the obligatory femme fatale – played by Greenwood’s former lover, Frances Baring – and the gradual uncovering of the moral degradation of a specific group, as well as the detective getting himself tangled up in the mystery as he tries to solve it. The fateful events with Greenwood have already taken place when Sinclair and his wife Jane arrive at Eden-Olympia. Whereas Jane occupies the pediatrician position left by Greenwood, Sinclair, recovering from a plane crash, spends most of the day alone in Greenwood’s house, where they now live. Without work in a world where work is all there is, Sinclair finds himself fascinated with the mystery of Greenwood and his motives, who effectively haunts the exterior space of his house and the interior space of his mind: “It occurred to me that three of us would sleep together in this large and comfortable bed, until I could persuade David to step out of my mind and disappear for ever down the white staircase of this dreaming villa” (Ballard 35). Greenwood having also been a former lover of Jane, a dimension of competitive sexuality is added to his obsession, as he questions the reasons of his own interest with the dead man.

The atmosphere of Eden-Olympia is governed by the rhythms of work, and nothing else. The demands and pleasures of the body have no place in it, and is, as Penrose describes, “an obedient coolie, to be fed and hosed down, and given just enough sexual freedom to sedate itself” (17), akin to what Michel Foucault described as the “docile body,” bodies that not only do what we want but do it precisely in the way that we want (Foucault 138). Here technology has taken the place of any kind of social exchange, rendering it unnecessary and counterproductive.

Intimacy and neighborliness were not features of everyday life at Eden-Olympia. An invisible infrastructure took the place of traditional civic virtues. At Eden-Olympia there ware no parking problems, no fear of burglars or purse-snatchers, no rapes or muggings. The top-drawer professionals no longer needed to devote a moment’s thought to each other, and had dispensed with the checks and balances of community life. There were no town councils or magistrates’ courts, no citizens’ advice bureaux. Civility and polity were designed into Eden-Olympia, in the same way that mathematics, aesthetics and an entire geopolitical world-view were designed into the Parthenon and the Boeing 747. Representative democracy had been replaced by the surveillance camera and the private police force. (38)

Ethical issues play no part in the citizen’s notions of civility at all, it is “designed,” or even enforced in the inhabitants by the way their space is organized. This kind of diffuse and wide control embedded in space is typical of prisons rather than paradisiacal residential areas, akin to what Michel Foucault described in Discipline and Punish. Total control is enforced not by brutal physical punishment, he argues, but the much more intrusive psychological control, demanding inner transformation and conversion to a new way of thinking, conditioning minds and bodies to conform with the dictum that “the soul is the prison of the body” (Foucault 30). The inhabitants’ identity is also normalized, effacing their particular characteristics and making them to behave as behaviorist puppets or cogs in a machine. There is no need for representative democracy or town councils, as Ballard puts it, because there is no common identity, as there is no sense of community. All that remains is a skewed sense of individuality, but which is geared towards the professional life.

Left to his own devices, clearly a fish out of water, Sinclair becomes obsessed with Greenwood and with the help of a security officer, Halder, sets to find out the obscured details of Greenwood’s breakdown. In the course of his investigation, he learns that the official account of the events have been manipulated by the Eden-Olympia management. What seemed clearly an act of madness on the part of Greenwood, as Penrose pointed out, “a deep psychosis … a profound crisis going back to his childhood” (28) with no clear motivation, starts to become meaningful for Sinclair, as if Greenwood rebelled against the establishment of Eden-Olympia. This comes at the realization of a number of gaps in official account of the facts when compared to Sinclair’s own investigation with Halder and interrogation of people with whom Greenwood had contact outside Eden-Olympia.

An editorial in Le Monde speculated that the contrast between the worldly power of Eden-Olympia and the deprived lives of the Arab immigrants in Cannes La Bocca had driven Greenwood into a frenzy of frustration, a blind rage at inequalities between the first and third worlds. The murders were part political manifesto, so the newspaper believed, and part existential scream. (11)

This version of the truth is only partly right, a facile interpretation of the facts to serve the political interests of Eden-Olympia and France and to protect Greenwood’s reputation. By acknowledging the social inequity in the area and Greenwood’s preoccupation with it, the editorial elects him as a martyr for politically-correct cause, not even as the madman he is believed to be inside the gates of Eden-Olympia.

This distorted vision of reality is a central theme in the novel, with its numerous allusions to Lewis Carroll and the Alice books, which Greenwood had a library of. Many times Sinclair imagines himself going “down the rabbit-hole” or “through the looking-glass” into the unreal and simulated world of Eden-Olympia, as out of touch with reality as Carroll’s fantasies. Part of it involves the fact that many of its elements, including security (and its police force) are only for show, creating an illusion. Pascal Zander, the head of security, assures Sinclair that there is “no crime at Eden-Olympia [. . .] the whole concept of criminality is unknown here. At Eden-Olympia we are self-policing [. . .] Honesty is a designed-in feature, along with free parking and clean air. Our guards are for show, like the guides at Euro-Disney” (83). Real crime is to be found nearby, however, in Nice, Cannes La Bocca, where these acts of “robbery, prostitution, drug-dealing … seem [to them] almost folkloric, subsidized by the municipality for the entertainment of tourists” (84). People feel safe as long as there are security cameras and guards around, even if they are not turned on or properly trained. The appearance of orderliness counts more than its effectiveness upon contingency, especially if no contingent situation ever occurs. Greenwood, of course, put these to the test and proved that the simulacrum of security of Eden-Olympia did not work, and that is why he partly succeeded.

In the course of his investigation, Sinclair observes that in some photos taken of the bodies Greenwood’s victims, they were taking part in clumsy and obvious illegal activities, such as drug dealing and consumption. These, he later finds out, are part of the same illusion of Eden-Olympia, as these executives were playing the parts of flamboyant drug dealers and sexual victims, enacting B-movies for the security cameras and unseen ones. This, along with the so-called ratissages in which groups of executives dressed in bowling jackets attack Arab immigrants in the outskirts of Eden-Olympia or steal fur coats from the set of a filming Japanese commercial, are part of the same illusion. These are sometimes even enacted for the benefit of Sinclair, who observes them in vantage points, and their videos are played back to him by Penrose. Later he learns this is all part of a therapy program envisioned by Penrose, who explains that “the health of Eden-Olympia is under constant threat” (251). Without his therapy program, the executives find themselves developing small illnesses and debilitating amounts of stress described as “an inability to rest the mind, to find time for reflection and recreation,” made the more apparent because of the very characteristics that make Eden-Olympia such an “intelligent city” (3). Where a detached and machine-like behavior is the norm, madness becomes a sort of cure. “Our problem is not that many people are insane, but too few [. . .] Small doses of insanity are the only solution. Their own psychopathy is all that can rescue these people” (251), explains Penrose, whose discourse is so enticing and persuasive it manages to involve Sinclair, who, while morally disgusted by the ratissages, is intellectually interested in Penrose’s ideas and what they do to his own psyche.

The display of brutality had unsettled me [. . .] A dormant part of my mind had been aroused – not by the cruelty, which I detested, but by the discovery that Eden-Olympia offered more to its residents than what met the visitor’s gaze. Over the swimming pools and manicured lawns seemed to hover a dream of violence. (75)

Part of the fascination Ballard’s text holds to the reader is this realization that in a benumbed existence, the “dream of violence” that hovers just beyond the surface of everyday life promises elation and excitement. Much of the allure of detective fiction, and all fiction in general, is their capability to transport the reader “down the rabbit-hole” into a world of vicarious experience of forbidden sensations and feelings. This idea is taken to an extreme in its technological application in the reality of Eden-Olympia and problematized when it is not just an intellectual exercise but involves real moral questions, such as in the ratissages.

Crime, according to Émile Durkheim, is a perfectly normal aspect of social life, an integral art of all healthy societies (45). A society possesses a “collective conscience,” consisting of a number of social values, and an act is criminal when it breaks deeply held aspects of this “collective conscience.” If an act does not “shock” the conscience, it is not a crime (51). This implicates that an act may not be criminal, even if goes against moral values, if it escapes the conscience — something that happens in communities such as Eden-Olympia where crime has lost its power to subvert and shock and has effectively become invisible. When ideology has the power to make such acts imperceptible, it can control the population at will, because they will be unaware of any kind of manipulation.

The administrative headquarters of Eden-Olympia displayed an almost imperial grandeur, with its classical pilasters rising to a stylized post-modern pediment. This was the first office building to be constructed at the business park, but after a bombastic overture the architecture that followed was late modernist in the most minimal and self-effacing way, a machine above all for thinking in. (191)

Here Eden-Olympia reveals its fascist tendencies at its core: the first building and moral center betrays the tacit domination of the rest of the city. Penrose also slips a few fascist ideas when explaining his program: “Psychopathy is its own most potent cure, and has been throughout history. At times it grips entire nations in a vast therapeutic spasm. No drug has ever been more potent” (251). Ultimately, this is what a state-wide, invisible manipulation — even one dictated by capitalism — will turn into, a totalitarian state in which the moral order is inverted, the madmen involved in random acts of violence, drug and sex trafficking do it to preserve their sanity. The freaks are Greenwood and his follower Sinclair in their “crazed” rebellion.

Eden-Olympia, an “ideas laboratory for the new millennium” is a place beyond morality, explains Penrose. In his rationale, the old morality

belonged to a cruder stage of human development. It had to cope with packs of hunter-scavengers who’d only just left the Serengeti plain. The first religions were forced to deal with barely socialized primates who’d tear each other’s arms off given half a chance. Since they couldn’t rely on self-control they needed ethical taboos to do it for them. (95)

What Penrose sought to create with the therapy program is to discover this new morality, one dictated not by the rules of jungle, atavistic impulses or ancient religions but by the gaze of the security camera and the speed limits of superhighways. “Unless you own a Ferrari, pressing the accelerator is not a moral decision [. . .] We can rely on their judgment, and that leaves us free to get on with the rest of our lives. We’ve achieved real freedom, the freedom from morality” (ibid). It is no wonder, therefore, that it turns out that Sinclair has been inserted into Eden-Olympia in Greenwood’s house precisely to make him obsessed with its previous occupant. To put him in Greenwood’s space, infusing him with his preoccupations is their way of using Sinclair as a behaviorist puppet, their way of conducting an experiment to find out why Greenwood broke down in the first place. Sinclair’s detective work and awakening to the moral corruption of Eden-Olympia is not an act of self, but part of the system, proving once and for all that there is no escaping the networks of control. The book closes with Sinclair planning to continue Greenwood’s plan to assassinate Penrose and expose Eden-Olympia, but it is clear that he has gone way too deep into the rabbit-hole and the system has engulfed him: he had partaken of the ratissages and had become close to Penrose. Moreover, his rebellion would be a crime, just as Greenwood’s, and Eden-Olympia would do anything to cover it up as another madman on the loose.

Super-Cannes is an indictment of projects of modern living that efface identity, social exchanges and moral decisions. In Eden-Olympia morality is designed and embedded in the landscape, spaces projected for an invisible control of people, such as airports, highways, shopping malls and other sites of extreme neutrality. Ballard warns us that their neutrality is only apparent and hides “a dream of violence” and the seed for a new, more insidious form of totalitarianism. It is important to be aware of the mechanisms of control to see beyond the illusion and prevent such a dire future from taking place.

Works Cited

Ballard, J. G. Super-Cannes. London: Harper, 2006.

Durkheim, Émile. The Division of Labour in Society. Trad. George Simpson. London: Collier-Macmillan, 1964.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Vintage, 2000.

J.G. Ballard, who made it his life’s work to “picture the psychology of the future”, has passed away, aged 78. 

I recently drew a link between some of Ballard’s later work (Super Cannes and Kingdom Come) and the Guardian picture of plainclothes policemen, armed with batons, joining their uniformed colleagues at the G20 protests. 

I wonder if Ballard saw that picture and recognised how prescient his thinking has been ?

My article is here.  The AFP story announcing Ballard’s passing is here.

Etre jumelée à Beverly Hills n’a pas suffit à calmer les ardeurs de Cannes, il lui fallait la Californie toute entière. Aussitôt dit aussitôt fait : le quartier de Super Cannes qui abrite les plus somptueuses villas et qui s’offre en prime le luxe d’avoir une vue idyllique sur la baie est également connu sous le nom de Californie. Dans ce petit coin de paradis, par delà le ciel et la mer des villas de rêve plus belles et plus grandes les unes que les autres cohabitent.

Piscine à débordement et vue imprenable sur toute la côte cannoise, tel est la douloureuse routine des propriétaires de ces lieux.

Ces petits bijoux font office de demeures, souvent secondaires aux milliardaires du monde entier.

Si vous n’avez pas assez économisé pour vous offrir un de ces pieds à terre, pas de panique, vous pouvez toujours venir vous en mettre plein la vue à l’Observatoire. Si une star montante sommeille en vous, réveillez-là ! A quelques mois du festival de Cannes, c’est le moment idéal pour se faire remarquer et espérer voir son nom inscrit sur la « guess liste » des soirées « super » privées de l’une des immenses baraques de Super Cannes. Si vous êtes hostile à la vip attitude, il vous reste encore une raison de traverser la Californie : De l’autre côté de la colline se trouve la petite ville de Vallauris. Un léger détour qui vaut le détour, et avec à la clef les fabuleuses porcelaines de Vallauris.

Si votre folie des grandeurs n’est toujours pas assouvie, il est un autre coin appelé « La Croix des Gardes », où la vue est « plus panoramique tu meurs » ! Résidences et villas luxueuses, forêt de mimosas, parcours de santé, et rendez-vous des connaisseurs qui viennent apprécier le festival pyrotechnique (qui a lieu à Cannes chaque été) dans tout son ensemble.

]]> http://desprendimientos.wordpress.com/2008/04/02/lo-normal/ Wed, 02 Apr 2008 14:12:44 +0000 mellamopersona http://desprendimientos.wordpress.com/2008/04/02/lo-normal/

Lo normal no existe. No hay una realidad unívoca y universal con la que nos podamos vestir e interpretar los significados de cada cosa. Lo normal somos nosotros, porque lo que quiera que estimemos como ‘normal’ está en nuestras cabezas, y no es otra cosa que un estado de la mente que puede desmantelarse en cualquier momento. Cuestión diferente es hasta qué punto cada cual se puede o se quiere aferrar a sus puntos cardinales; porque da demasiado miedo pensar que el mundo no es como lo pensamos.

J. G. Ballard ha sabido detectar esta tendencia humana, analizarla y explotarla a través de su obra, dando lugar a algunas de las “pesadillas de lo posible” más pavorosas y seductoras que se han creado. Historias que trascienden el presuntamente reducido marco de lo que se viene a llamar “ciencia ficción” y que se alojan en el único universal posible: el miedo. Porque todos tenemos miedos. Y cuando analizamos todos y cada uno de estos miedos, llegamos a la conclusión de que en su raíz estamos nosotros mismos.

El miedo a uno mismo y al semejante. Porque, insistiendo en la misma idea con la que comenzaba este post, es en nosotros donde nace la realidad y es en nosotros donde se rompen las condiciones de habitabilidad del mundo que nos rodea. Y Ballard nos ha hecho ver, dentro de todas las posibles rupturas, la peor de todas: la degeneración paulatina, mostrada magistralmente a través de la evolución psicológica de sus escenarios y de sus personajes, tanto individuales (Crash) como colectivos (Rascacielos), bañándonos de desconcierto en piscinas vacías (Hola América), tiñéndonos de líquenes en planes de vuelo imposibles (Compañía de sueños ilimitada), llenándonos los bolsillos de drogas inútiles y sexo desviado (SuperCannes), haciéndonos huir por carreteras híper transitadas de donde nadie nos recoge (La isla de cemento)…

Si otros autores han sabido sacarle partido al vacío, la soledad, el silencio… la poética de Ballard se nutre de masificación, de tráfico en hora punta, de cercanía a elementos y personas que resultan no ser como habíamos creído. Porque no somos, ninguno, y en definitiva, como los demás creen que somos. Ni siquiera como nosotros creemos que somos. Dicho así suena a topicazo, pero se necesita una mirada distinta, privilegiada (o desviada, o pervertida) para apreciarlo con determinado punto macabro.

Es el retrato gótico del “cada día”, donde se han hecho románticos los coches accidentados y las gafas de sol rotas, los carros de la compra oxidados y todas las máquinas de volar que el hombre ha inventado y está aún por inventar.

Ballard nos ha dado todo esto: nos ha dado a nosotros mismos. Y ahora espera a que se le termine de comer el cáncer, quizá triste por no poder escribir más cuentos… O quizá tranquilo por abandonar este parque de infecciones y reunirse con Mary y su bondad de mujer, para sobrevolarnos por siempre a los mandos de un Cessna que ya jamás se estrellará en ninguna parte.

Goo Goo Dolls – We are the normal