Voci dal mare di sabbia: "Vermilion Sands" di J.G. Ballard

"Vermilion Sands" (1971), the title J.G. Ballard ascribed to one of his collections of short stories, stands out as a powerful visual marker for its equally vivid setting: a once popular seaside resort now turned, as its name suggests, into a gloomy, red-shaded desert, peopled by eccentric aristocrats and lethargic artists, by mysteriously charming women and seductively spellbound men with their trail of private illusions, unspeakable secrets and unfathomable obsessions. Often seen as a specimen of quintessential Ballard science fiction, the book has been read as a critical reworking of conventional formulas: the barren Martian soil paradoxically relocated to Earth, Ballard himself having warned that “the only truly alien planet is Earth”.
A crucial feature that seems to have eluded the attention of critics so far is, however, the notion of “extremity”, meant as an invaluable hermeneutical tool for analysing space and subjectivity in the stories. Ballard’s writings have often been described as “visual narratives”, where landscape becomes psychologically relevant as it serves to externalize otherwise elusive, and often dangerously unsettled, individual identities. The experience of extreme spaces always leads characters to tackle personal boundaries, both on the physical and on the psychical level. Landscape is a key to understanding mind, and vice versa; ultimately, both are conjured up as extreme spaces inviting an exploration, a voyage, a reading: in other words, a visually intense and truly transformative experience.