La mostra delle atrocità: differenze tra le versioni

Versione delle 15:53, 3 set 2006

Versione delle 16:01, 3 set 2006

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==Mass-media e follia==

Si può dire che tutti i racconti/capitoli del libro descrivono come il paesaggio dei [[mass-media]] invada inavvertitamente e frammenti la mente degli individui nell'epoca tardomoderna. Se accettiamo l'idea che anche il dottor Nathan, ironicamente, soffra di un esaurimento nervoso, il suo tentativo di trovare un senso ai vari eventi storici del suo tempo, dal suicidio di [[Marilyn Monroe]] alle imprese spaziali, dall'assassinio di [[J.F. Kennedy]] alla guerra in [[Vietnam]], hanno qualcosa di psicotico: e rimettendo in scena quegli eventi, veicolati dai mass-media, Nathan, come il misterioso internato T. attribuisce loro un significato più personale, che gli consente di entrare in relazione con essi. Non è mai del tutto chiaro cosa avvenga veramente nel libro e cosa accada solo nella testa dei protagonisti. Personaggi che vengono uccisi in un capitolo tornano in quelli successivi (sua moglie sembra morire più volte). Viaggia con una [[Marilyn Monroe]] ustionata dalle [[radiazion]] e un pilota di bombardiere del quale nota che i piani del suo volto non parevano intersecarsi correttamente.

The theme of the story describes how the [[Mass media|media]]-landscape inadvertently invades and splinters the private mind of the individual. Suffering from a mental breakdown, the protagonist -- ironically, a doctor at a mental hospital -- surrenders to a world of [[psychosis]], in which he tries to make sense of the many public events that dominate his world: [[Marilyn Monroe]]'s suicide, the [[Space Race]], and especially the [[Kennedy Assassination]], by restaging them in ways that, to his psychotic mind, gives them a more personal meaning, allowing him to relate to them. It is never quite clear how much of the novel really takes place, and how much only occurs inside the protagonist's own head. Characters that he kills return again in later chapters (his wife seems to die several times). He travels with a Marilyn Monroe scorched by [[radiation]] burns and a bomber-pilot of whom he notes that "the planes of his face did not seem to intersect correctly."

Inner and outer landscapes seem to merge together (a Ballardian specialty), as the ultimate goal of the protagonist is to start [[World War III]], "though not in any conventional sense" - a war that will be fought entirely within his own mind. Bodies and landscapes are constantly confused ("Dr. Nathan found himself looking at what seemed a dune top, but was in fact an immensely magnified portion of the skin area over the Iliac-crest", "he found himself walking between the corroding breasts of the film-actress", and "these cliff-towers revealed the first spinal landscapes"). At other times the protagonist seems to see the entire world, and life around him, as nothing more than a vast geometrical equation, such as when he observes a woman pacing around the apartment he has rented: "This ... woman was a [[modulus]] ... by multiplying her into the space/time of the apartment, he could obtain a valid unit for his own existence.";

As should be obvious, it makes little sense to try and read this book as a conventional novel, but nor was it intended as such.

==Un testo scandaloso==