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INDICE – INDEX – INHALT
Médiation critique & Poétique du regard
Daniel-Henry Pageaux
5
Ricezione e misconoscimento dell’assurdo
Dario Calimani
17
La rosa e il monumento:
i Sonetti shakesperiani e la poesia visiva
Rocco Coronato
27
In/Security and Discursive Appropriation
in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club
Serena Fusco
45
One Last Austrian Cigarette: Italo Svevo and Habsburg Triest
Salvatore Pappalardo
67
Recensioni, Reviews, Rezensionen
89
Note sugli autori, Notices sur les collaborateurs,
Notes on Contributors, Die Autoren
103
3
Médiation critique
& Poétique du regard
Daniel-Henri
Pageaux
Université Sorbonne Nouvelle / Paris III
L’
intermédiaire est un acteur connu en littérature comparée qui s’intéresse tout autant à la comparaison qu’à la relation, au dialogue entre cultures. Le remplacement de la notion d’intermédiaire par celle de “médiateur” et l’adoption du mot “médiation” permet de considérer non plus seulement le passage de l’inconnu au connu, l’acclimatation de l’étranger, les
transferts interculturels, mais aussi la transformation de ce qui est tenu
pour connu en quelque chose de nouveau.
La littérature de médiation commente la vie culturelle, les productions littéraires: c’est l’objet de la critique, littérature “seconde”. Pour Jean
Rousset le critique est un “médiateur” (Forme et signification: XXIII). La
position ancillaire du médiateur suppose l’œil qui examine, analyse, compare. La littérature de médiation devient une forme de “métalittérature” et
le critique un “métalecteur” qui propose au lecteur des données nouvelles
sur une culture, la sienne, ou sur une culture étrangère. Elle procède du
regard curieux qui inventorie, questionne, mais aussi dialogue, suscitant
l’empathie par rapport à son objet.
Distinguons vision et regard, non pour les opposer, mais pour marquer deux niveaux de travail, d’écriture, qui se complètent: création et
médiation critique. La vision est intransitive: elle n’appelle pas le dialogue. Le texte de la vision n’expose pas: il affirme. J’aimerais citer ce que
Besme dit à Coeuvre dans La Ville de Claudel (Théâtre: 428): “Tu n’expliques rien, ô poète, mais toutes choses par toi nous deviennent expli5
cables.” Le critique explique, mais la vision achemine l’homme vers ses
limites et appelle à l’indispensable dépassement de lui-même. L’artiste, le
créateur est un médiateur voyant. Je cite Proust dans une page de la
Prisonnière où il parle des créateurs, Elstir, Vinteuil (258): “Le seul véritable voyage, le seul bain de Jouvence, ce ne serait pas d’aller vers de nouveaux paysages, mais d’avoir d’autres yeux, de voir l’univers avec les
yeux d’un autre, de cent autres […]”
Le critique, le médiateur, lui aussi, aide à voir, à lire. Il est “l’homme-pont”. L’image est d’Octavio Paz, dans un texte repris dans In/mediaciones (1979) où Paz joue sur les mots: médiations et alentours, environs
(inmediaciones). Pour lutter contre “l’isolement” du sous-continent, il faut
des œuvres-pont, des hommes-ponts (obras-puentes, hombres-puentes).
Et il ajoute: “Il nous faut une pensée critique qui, sans ignorer l’individualité de chaque œuvre et son caractère unique, trouve entre celles-ci ces
relations (je souligne) presque toujours secrètes qui constituent une civilisation.”
Dans sa contribution donnée à Faire de l’histoire II. Nouvelles
approches (225-244), Jean Starobinski distingue trois attitudes critiques
face à un texte: ou bien le critique cherche à se faire entendre et “la loquacité de l’essayiste forme barrière”; ou bien il affiche un culte immodéré
pour le texte, cherchant une impossible “restitution”. Une troisième voie
change le critique en “interprète”, non pas producteur d’interprétations ou
herméneute, mais dans le sens musical du terme. C’est aussi la voie fondée sur la “sympathie” et la “communion”. Cette triade revient à plusieurs
reprises pour justifier la tierce voie comme un idéal critique, “la relation
critique”, texte repris dans L’œil vivant II (1970) où la critique devient
“une contemplation compréhensive”.
*****
De même qu’on ne peut opposer trop longtemps vision et regard, de
même n’opposons pas la pensée discursive et le travail de l’imagination.
J’aime placer l’écriture de la médiation sous le signe du rêve, un rêve utile,
et de l’imagination. Dans le travail de la médiation, l’imagination complète, prolonge, parfois supplante la réflexion: elles dialoguent entre elles. Par
imagination il faut entendre l’ars inveniendi du Napolitain Vico, expliqué
par Ernesto Grassi. (Pons, 23). Vico met au premier plan “l’activité inventive” de l’esprit (ingenium), et non “l’activité déductive”. L’imagination,
6
selon Vico, forme des images et leur donne des significations par l’acte de
la métaphore. La métaphore, précise Grassi, est “la forme originaire de
l’acte interprétatif”. Elle nous éloigne de ce que Vico a nommé “la barbarie de la réflexion”. Ajoutons: elle permet, pour reprendre Octavio Paz (Le
singe grammairien, 147), de voir en une chose autre chose (en esto ver
aquello). Elle suppose un travail d’analogie poétique et un lieu où s’articulent expérience personnelle, vécue, et discours sur cette expérience: un
point de vue.
Le point de vue privilégie un espace intime de réflexion, un temps de
pensée où la médiation passera par la méditation. C’est un début d’objectivation, la nécessité de “se déprendre”, comme le note Lévi-Strauss à la
fin de Tristes tropiques. On peut en faire le principe de tout travail critique.
Dans un texte de 1978, “Qu’est-ce que la critique?” (35-63), Michel
Foucault crée la notion de “désassujétissement” pour définir l’activité critique. Mais peut-être faudrait-il distinguer deux mouvements distincts et
complémentaires: la distanciation avec l’objet et l’objectivation de l’observateur, ce que Norbert Elias a nommé “autodistanciation” en précisant
qu’il s’agit “que l’on voie sa propre personne comme une personne parmi
d’autres” (172).
Une certaine critique littéraire a choisi la voie de l’intérieur, chère à
Georges Poulet, et tend à faire coïncider deux consciences: celle d’un
auteur, à travers un texte, et celle du lecteur (La conscience critique,
1971). Mais il a su fort bien définir la position de son ami Jean Starobinski
qui, loin d’aller dans le sens de l’identification, installe une “distance”
fondatrice qui n’exclut pas le mouvement de sympathie (Jean Starobinski,
Cahiers pour un temps, 29-32). La distance tout à la fois “relie” et “libère”. Plus généralement, Starobinski choisit “un lieu surplombant” obtenu
après la “rencontre” et le dialogue avec le texte. Peut-être est-ce un lointain souvenir du “belvédère” de Montaigne, la librairie du château familial (Montaigne en mouvement, 28): “un territoire personnel et privé” qui
offre la possibilité “d’un recul absolu”.
Le regard en surplomb ne renvoie qu’à un temps du travail critique.
N’oublions pas le mouvement inverse qui consiste à s’immerger dans le
texte ou dans le tableau, pour en isoler le détail à partir duquel une relecture, un réexamen sont possibles. Dans le domaine de la critique littéraire, Leo
Spitzer est passé maître dans l’art de retrouver les enjeux les plus larges
d’une poétique à partir d’une étude de détail. Il montre la voie exigeante
d’une lecture critique qui requiert un regard à la fois sélectif et global.
7
Le lieu en surplomb matérialise l’autorité du médiateur qu’il doit
faire accepter au lecteur. Au belvédère critique correspond “l’observatoire” du romancier, lieu là encore construit, nécessaire au déploiement de
son imaginaire. C’est Milan Kundera qui considère, dans son dernier
recueil d’essais, Le rideau (2005), que “le roman nous reste comme le dernier observatoire d’où l’on puisse embrasser la vie humaine comme un
tout.” On pense aussitôt à la phrase avec laquelle le Congolais Sony Labou
Tansi a fait irruption dans le roman, avec La vie et demie (1979):
“J’invente un poste de peur en ce vaste monde qui fout le camp.”
Le médiateur construit un espace original, à la fois central et marginal qui permet à la pensée de se mouvoir. C’est l’espace “entre” du philosophe Michel Serres dans lequel il fait évoluer le Dieu Hermès. C’est l’espace utopique que crée le comparatiste pour installer le tertium quid, le
troisième terme, ni tout à fait le contenu du premier texte, ni non plus celui
du second, et qui tout à la fois rend compte de l’un et de l’autre: ainsi
Louis Marin définissait l’utopie comme le “neutre”, le ne-uter latin, ni
masculin, ni féminin, et au-delà de l’un et de l’autre (Utopiques, 1973). On
pense encore à la notion de “vide médian”, entre Yin et Yang, “le nécessaire espace intermédiaire de rencontre et de circulation” (je
souligne), essentiel à la philosophie et à l’art chinois, comme l’expose le
poète et romancier François Cheng, aussi bien dans son roman Le Dit de
Tianyi, que dans une de ses méditations sur la Beauté, la cinquième (Cinq
méditations sur la beauté).
La recherche du “point de vue” est de fait la délimitation d’un espace dans lequel s’inscrit la “relation”, maître mot chez Starobinski pour
définir l’approche critique. On comprend que la question de l’objectivité
et de la subjectivité devienne vite sans fondement: la médiation critique
est essentiellement un travail subjectif qui vise à objectiver le sujet retenu,
analysé.
*****
La question du regard s’est posée très tôt aux historiens grecs qui
entendaient tout autant élaborer le récit de faits passés que rendre compte
du spectacle que constituait leur enchaînement. L’histoire est “spectacle”
(theama) (Adriana Zangara, 28-56, 301-302). Sans entrer dans l’essentiel
de la problématique, retenons que le spectacle est proposé selon deux stratégies différentes: la sunopsis et l’enargeia. La sunopsis “nous incite à
8
assumer le regard surplombant et olympien de l’historien-Zeus et à
prendre nos distances des acteurs, mêlés aux événements.” L’enargeia, en
revanche, “vise non seulement à inspirer aux lecteurs les sentiments de
stupeur et de trouble éprouvés par ceux qui assistaient aux faits en train de
s’accomplir, mais encore à inviter le spectateur à se transformer en acteur,
à ressembler de plus en plus aux ‘héros’ dont il ‘voit’ l’histoire.” Compréhension et émotion s’opposent: d’un côté “faire voir l’histoire en voyageant au dessus des nuages”; de l’autre, “voir comme si on y était”.
On aura reconnu, dans le premier cas, le “point de vue de Sirius”,
mais aussi le regard “éloigné” de l’anthropologue (Lévi-Strauss) ou de
l’observateur politique (Raymond Aron), mais encore le regard “panoramique”, le survol, que l’on retrouve par exemple chez la Marguerite
Yourcenar essayiste. Elle a un goût évident pour l’Histoire et son regard
critique est volontiers synthétique et rétrospectif, adoptant souvent la
manière du japonisant Ivan Morris dont elle parle avec admiration et
humour, lorsqu’elle définit ainsi sa méthode: “cette espèce d’histoire du
Japon à vol d’aigle (Le temps, ce grand sculpteur, 81). Sa grande culture
lui permet des rapprochements entre les espaces et les siècles. Mais la
rêverie sur le lieu, rétrospective, anime aussi l’invention de la romancière.
Là encore, l’opposition n’est posée que pour s’annuler. C’est peut-être
avec la notion de perspective que l’on peut concilier les deux mouvements
qui viennent d’être distingués.
Il serait tentant de projeter l’histoire de l’art sur l’histoire culturelle
et sur l’évolution des formes pour faire de la perspective l’expression la
plus simple et la plus évidente d’une certaine idée de la modernité: la promotion de l’individu maître et organisateur de l’espace. L’historien de l’art
Ernst Gombrich a mis en relief dans Art and illusion, comme il le rappelle dans ses entretiens avec Didier Eribon (Ce que l’image nous dit, 72-73,
98), le “principe du témoin oculaire” (eye-witness principle) qui crée une
image “convaincante” et introduit “l’illusion” dans l’image. Ce principe
entraîne de nouvelles exigences: “la technique du ‘raccourci’ et toutes les
techniques qui conduisent à la perspective.” Pour Gombrich, le problème très discuté de la perspective se résume au fait que “nous voyons le
long d’une ligne droite”. Et d’ajouter: “S’il y a quelque chose entre la
fenêtre et moi, je ne peux plus la voir.”
Gombrich explique la naissance en Grèce du principe du témoin oculaire en faisant un parallèle avec la “naissance de la tragédie”: le spectateur devient le “témoin” des événements du mythe. Pour lui, l’histoire de
9
la représentation se résume à trois étapes: la première en Grèce antique
avec le principe que l’on sait; puis “le retour de ce principe à la Renaissance”; enfin ce qu’il appelle “la manière” (de Constable aux Impressionnistes) qui repose sur l’impossibilité de “l’œil innocent”.
Le mot “perspective”, qui dérive du latin perspicere, signifie “voir
clairement” (Panofsky, 8, 18, 25). Redécouverte au Quattrocento, elle a
d’abord été considérée comme “un instrument d’illusion naturaliste”.
C’est beaucoup plus tard qu’on en vint à considérer qu’elle pouvait être
aussi “un instrument très efficace de cohésion, d’harmonie et de logique
dans la composition”. De fait, la perspective consacre une séparation du
sujet (le spectateur) et de l’objet (l’histoire, le spectacle), comme dans le
théâtre dit à l’italienne. Les deux mises en scène vont dans le sens d’une
illusion référentielle toujours plus grande. La perspective est une sorte de
dramatisation du point de vue.
*****
Choisir un point de vue est sans doute l’acte premier de la médiation.
Cette décision, ce geste permettent de faire voir autre chose, de voir autrement. Le grand critique portugais, lauréat du Prix Montaigne, Eduardo
Lourenço, rappelle justement que Montaigne “n’apporte rien” de nouveau
à l’ordre de la connaissance: “Il se limite à déplacer le regard qu’on porte
sur tout.” (Montaigne ou la vie écrite, 17). La médiation opère ainsi un
“déplacement” dans l’ordre des choses, introduit d’autres rapports,
d’autres relations. Elle fait bouger la hiérarchie en vigueur dans une culture entre ce qui est tenu pour proche et pour lointain. La distance, dans la
littérature de médiation, est toujours distance créatrice. L’artiste exploite
des ailleurs. Le médiateur travaille sur des décalages, dans l’espace et dans
le temps.
On aura une illustration de la force novatrice du point de vue avec
l’essai L’autre Venise de Predrag Matvejevitch qui allie travail critique et
vision poétique. Il a abordé la Sérénissime venant d’Istrie, il a voulu aussi
oublier tout ce que l’on sait sur cette ville et simplement la regarder: “J’ai
cherché les endroits moins connus, d’où l’on aperçoit les choses sous un
angle différent.” Ainsi s’écrit une nouvelle histoire de la ville. L’attention
portée aux détails l’oriente vers une micro-histoire, voire une intra-histoire, comme l’a fait Carlo Ginzburg. Le promeneur est conduit à s’intéres-
10
ser plus aux détails qu’à l’ensemble, à l’envers du décor plus qu’à la scène
qui brille et éblouit.
Le point de vue oriente et ordonne l’esprit critique qui définit,
comme l’a justement remarqué Ernst Cassirer, le Siècle des Lumières
(275). Il note aussi le renforcement des liens entre littérature et philosophie qui s’était affirmé depuis la Renaissance. Cela signifie que la critique
s’impose plus par la variété des sujets qu’elle aborde, que par de nouvelles
formes d’expression. Ou bien c’est la vue synoptique qui triomphe lorsqu’elle dégage, dans une large perspective diachronique, des “époques” ou
des “périodes” (préface au Siècle de Louis XIV de Voltaire, “Discours préliminaire” à l’Encyclopédie, rédigé par d’Alembert, Esquisse d’un tableau
historique des progrès de l’esprit humain de Condorcet). Ou bien s’affirme, sous de multiples aspects, le principe de l’enargeia, en livrant au lecteur des mises en scène, des ébauches de personnages, des affleurements
d’une écriture fictionnelle, avec des “dialogues” comme Le rêve de
d’Alembert de Diderot sur la conception matérialiste de l’univers, ou du
même le Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville sur les mérites comparées
de la vie sauvage et de la vie civilisée, ou encore le Neveu de Rameau,
texte inclassable aussi bien dans les matières abordées que dans la forme
retenue.
Cassirer veut surtout examiner la question de la philosophie esthétique qui apparaît comme l’une des conquêtes de l’esprit critique. Il oppose à cet effet l’esthétique dite “classique” obéissant à des normes, à des
préceptes, et l’affirmation du “goût”, personnel, subjectif, comme critère
de jugement. Il ne s’agit plus de formuler “quelque chose d’objectif”, mais
au contraire de mettre en avant “un certain accord entre l’objet et les
organes et les facultés de notre esprit.” (301). Ainsi se met en place une
évolution qui fait passer du “rationalisme esthétique” à “l’empirisme
esthétique”, illustré par Diderot. Cassirer souligne l’importance décisive
de la notion de “génie” défendue par Shaftesbury qui aura une influence
certaine sur Diderot, mais aussi le concept de “forme intérieure” (inward
form), qui s’oppose à la théorie mimétique de la création et justifie ce qu’il
appelle “la création prométhéenne” de l’artiste, reprise par Lessing et Kant
(169, 309, 311). Ce sont encore l’idée d’une “esthétique de l’intuition” et
la “pensée géniale” qui nous rapprochent de la question de la critique et de
la médiation, en ce qu’elles favorisent toutes deux la formation d’un point
de vue individuel, personnel qui s’affirmera au long du siècle et surtout au
siècle suivant, devenant le principe premier du discours, du raisonnement,
11
du développement. Sans tomber dans l’anachronisme, rappelons la proposition d’André Malraux, signalée par Gaëtan Picon dans L’écrivain et son
ombre (252): “Il nous faut fonder nos concepts d’art sur notre expérience
de l’art et non subordonner celle-ci à des concepts.”
Les privilèges de la perspective, de la vue synoptique disparaissent
avec le “fragment”. Mais non ceux du point de vue. On distinguera le fragment tel qu’il a été appréhendé par les Romantiques allemands, dans
l’Athenaeum (Ph. Lacoue-Labarthe et Jean-Luc Nancy, L’absolu littéraire) et l’ensemble fragmenté dont on a un exemple emblématique avec “Le
livre des passages” ou Paris capitale du XIXème siècle de Walter Benjamin). La composition fragmentée est une forme susceptible, dans son principe, d’être reproduite, mais elle exclut toute imitation possible. Bien plus:
le singulier travail de marqueterie, le collage de citations, l’intrusion de
textes divers qui jouent en échos, la suite de “blancs”, d’espaces, de
lacunes aboutissent à un livre discontinu, un kaléidoscope qui crée un nouveau type de lecture. Celle-ci tend à rompre avec le principe occidental de
la lecture linéaire. La liberté de lecture crée un texte fondé sur le principe
de l’anamorphose continue. Dans l’ensemble fragmenté l’exposé est
impossible: le texte devient questionnement. Il a été conçu comme tel, il
est reçu comme tel. Le destinataire devient responsable plein, entier, de
l’interprétation, médiateur d’une médiation inachevée, interrompue, en
attente d’une réponse. Conçue comme forme poétique libre, elle appelle le
lecteur à l’exercice de sa propre liberté: de lecture, d’interprétation, de
pensée.
La composition fragmentée peut à bon droit représenter la ruine de
toute entreprise “synoptique”, la contestation de la perspective, de la
“ligne droite” dont parlait Gombrich. Elle est aussi une forme de contestation du principe discursif qui caractérise la littérature de médiation. Elle
introduit une esthétique de la rupture, de la dissonance dans l’harmonie
des genres: ces morceaux de prose sont de fait fort souvent proches du
poème en prose ou de la prose poétique. Enfin, elle oblige la pensée à cheminer selon de nouveaux rythmes et de nouveaux modèles.
La postface que Gilles Deleuze a faite aux Iles enchantées de
Melville fournit un exemple stimulant d’un renouvellement poétique
propre à notre temps. Je suis aussi la relecture faite par Camille Dumoulié
(53-69). L’archipel de Melville offre au philosophe un nouveau type de
regard: le “perspectivisme en archipel” qui “conjugue panoramique et travelling”. Trois termes le définissent: multiplicité, rythme, mobilité. Multi12
plicité spatiale des points de vue, variations des rythmes temporels, mobilité: “elle suppose une variations des points de vue, mais aussi sur place.”
Le point de vue de l’observateur doit lui-même varier. L’archipel est un
lieu par nature “aléatoire”, il est fait “de connexions réelles, d’échanges,
de modifications concrètes de la vision” (je souligne). Le perspectivisme
de l’archipel est “anti-idéaliste” et “pragmatique”, il est un “principe libéral”, il suscite une forme de nomadisme géographique et intellectuel. On
le voit: un certain “point de vue” est remis à l’honneur. Ce qui est effectivement condamné est une sorte de principe hégémonique de la vision:
l’espace pluriel de l’archipel, polycentré, est comme la garantie pour de
nouveaux regards qui se croisent, se répondent.
*****
Survol ou vue perspective, point de vue ou vue panoramique, synoptique, la dynamique du regard assure l’écriture de la médiation. Lorsque le
regard s’arrête, se fige dans la contemplation, la médiation devient impossible, inutile. Jean Starobinski en a fait l’expérience dans une page inédite, fortement introspective, publiée dans Cahiers pour un temps.
Devant “La figure qui fuit”, un dessin de Claude Garache, il s’interroge: “Que me laisse-t-elle à dire?” Devant ce corps de femme crayonné,
il avoue, non sans humour, que “celui qui fait métier d’interprète” doit se
reconnaître vaincu. Pourquoi? “En elle s’est déjà accomplie la tâche de
signifier.” Le critique ne peut maintenir une relation “critique” avec la
figure: il souhaite demeurer dans une relation de contemplation: “s’abandonner” (mot révélateur) aux apparences, à la forme, parce que celle-ci est
en elle-même sens, comme c’est le cas pour une autre production non verbale, la musique.
Pourtant le réflexe de l’interprète joue encore: il cherche une fable
mythologique qui serait une “médiation” (mot significatif) qui viendrait
bloquer la forme, lui assigner un sens. Mais l’interprète reconnaît que c’est
à présent la culture qui devient “obstacle”. La médiation ne joue plus le
jeu de la transparence et l’érudition ne peut rien “là où triomphe la grâce
de l’instant”. L’interprète, “celui qui apporte aux paroles un complément
de paroles” se tait: il est devant ce qu’il nomme “l’évidence”. Il n’a plus
rien à apporter comme savoir: il n’a plus qu’à “apprendre à recevoir.”
Tout discours critique ou tout acte médiateur, parce qu’il est “interprétation”, est aussi “interposition”. La “figure qui fuit” a annulé, par la
13
force de sa présence, toute nécessité de discours critique: il ne reste plus
que la contemplation, le soin impossible de prolonger l’instant d’une rencontre essentielle, d’une révélation. Mais le moment ineffable de la révélation est fait pour disparaître. Dans le silence ou dans la durée éloquente
du discours critique qui analyse et qui explique.
14
A
Opere citate, Œuvres citées,
Zitierte Literatur, Works Cited
B
Benjamin, Walter. Paris capitale du XIXème siècle. Paris: Cerf, 2002.
Cassirer, Ernst. La philosophie des Lumières (1932). Paris: Fayard, 1966.
Cheng, François. Le Dit de Tianyi. Paris: Albin Michel, 1998.
——. Cinq méditations sur la beauté. Paris: Albin Michel, 2006.
Claudel, Paul. La Ville. In Théâtre. I. Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1956.
Deleuze, Gilles. “Postface”. In Melville, Herman. Les Iles enchantées. Paris:
Flammarion, 1989.
Dumoulié, Camille in Voisset, G. éd. L’imaginaire de l’archipel. Paris: Karthala,
2003.
Elias, Norbert. Norbert Elias par lui-même, Agora, 1991.
Foucault, Michel. “Qu’est-ce que la critique?” (Bulletin de la Société française de
Philosophie, LXXXIV, 1990: 35-63.
Gombrich, Ernst. Art and illusion. Oxford, 1960.
Gombrich, Ernst et Eribon, Didier. Ce que l’image nous dit. Paris: Adan Biro éd.,
1991.
Kundera, Milan. Le rideau. Paris: Gallimard, 2005.
Lacoue-Labarthe, Ph. et Nancy, Jean-Luc. L’absolu littéraire. Paris: Seuil, 1985.
Lourenço, Eduardo. Montaigne ou la vie écrite, Chauvigny: L’escampette, 2004.
Marin, Louis. Utopiques. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1973.
Matvejevitch, Predrag. L’autre Venise. Paris: Fayard, 2002.
Panofsky, Erwin. La perspective comme forme symbolique, préface de Marisa
Dalai Emiliani, Ed. de Minuit, 1975.
Paz, Octavio. In/mediaciones. Barcelona: Seix Barral,1979.
——. Le singe grammairien. Paris: Champs/Flammarion, 1982.
Picon, Gaëtan. L’écrivain et son ombre. Paris: Gallimard, TEL, 1996.
Pons, Alain. “Ernesto Grassi lecteur de Vico”. In Présence de Vico, Montpellier:
Université Paul Valéry, 1994.
Poulet, Georges. La conscience critique, Paris: Corti, 1971.
——. “Jean Starobinski et le thème de la distance”. In Jean Starobinski, Cahiers pour
un temps. Paris: Centre Pompidou, 1985.
Proust, Michel. A la recherche du temps perdu. III. Paris: Gallimard, Pleiade,
1957.
Rousset, Jean. Forme et signification, Paris: Corti, 1963.
15
Sony Labou Tansi. La vie et demie. Paris: Seuil, 1979.
Starobinski, Jean. “La littérature: le texte et l’interprète”, In Le Goff, Jacques et
Nora, Pierre. Faire de l’histoire II. Nouvelles approches. Paris:
Gallimard/Folio, 1974
——. L’œil vivant II. Paris: Gallimard, 1970.
——. Montaigne en mouvement. Paris: Gallimard/ Folio, 1993.
Yourcenar, Marguerite. Le temps, ce grand sculpteur. Paris: Gallimard, 1983.
Zangara, Adriana. Voir l’histoire. Théories anciennes du récit historique. Paris:
Vrin, 2007.
16
Ricezione e misconoscimento
dell’assurdo
Dario
Calimani
Università Ca’ Foscari di Venezia
S
e improvvisamente, mentre sta parlando dell’assurdo, un oratore
diventasse completamente afono, e ciò nonostante continuasse a muovere
le labbra nel tentativo di dar forma, se non voce, alle sue parole, questo
ancora non sarebbe l’assurdo. Ma se il pubblico che gli sta di fronte, pur
non gratificato dal muto muoversi delle sue labbra, rimanesse lì, immobile, a cercare di carpire qualche significato da quel silenzio, questo forse
sarebbe un primo esempio di assurdo, anche nel senso più comune e meno
alto del termine.
Ma l’assurdo, quello vero, quello esistenziale, lo percepirebbe con
estrema chiarezza chi fosse invece testimone esterno di quella scena: l’oratore che continuasse a muovere le labbra nel silenzio della sala, il suo
pubblico, caparbiamente incollato alle poltroncine ad ascoltare l’inascoltabile e a recepire l’irrecepibile. Nessuno potrebbe dire perché l’oratore
insistesse a enunciare il silenzio, né perché il suo pubblico rimanesse lì a
guardarlo quel silenzio, ma soprattutto quale patto misterioso tenesse in
equilibrio quel loro insano, insondabile rapporto.
L’assurdo non lo si può spiegare, lo si può solo inscenare e vedere
inscenato. O, se si vuole, lo si può solo vivere e vederlo vivere. L’assurdo,
e forse ci si pensa troppo raramente, e forse non si dovrebbe dirlo, è proprio pretendere di parlare dell’assurdo, cercare di razionalizzarlo con
un’impossibile spiegazione. Perché se l’assurdo è davvero tale non lo si
può dire e non lo si può decifrare. Lo si può soltanto cogliere attraverso il
disorientamento della mente e della coscienza.
17
Se è vero che l’assurdo lo si coglie più facilmente quando se ne è
spettatori, è anche vero che l’assurdo non è una realtà al di fuori di noi, da
osservare e da giudicare dall’esterno; è vero che siamo noi il soggetto che
coglie l’assurdo e lo recepisce, ma ne siamo anche coinvolti direttamente,
siamo sempre noi stessi una parte dell’assurdo, nel rapporto che ci lega
all’esistenza. E tuttavia non ci piace affatto riconoscerlo, perché il nostro
esistere non troverebbe più la sua giustificazione pacificante, e si potrebbe essere tentati di mettere fine alle cose.
La critica, poi – che del commento e della spiegazione fa mestiere e
scopo di vita – non può accettare di zittirsi, e parla anche quando dovrebbe rimanere muta, specialmente quando è invitata a dispensare cultura e
conoscenza. E così, la critica commenta l’irrazionalità universale e la riduce e la traveste con il buon senso, convertendo l’assurdo alla religione del
razionale. Con la conseguenza ovvia che anche la critica inscena così l’assurdo. Perché non vi è nulla di più assurdo di una critica che non si accontenti di un testo che dichiara qualcosa, ma pretenda di spiegarlo e di dare
la sua interpretazione di ciò che quel testo ‘realmente’ dice, anche a costo
di sovvertirlo e di fraintenderlo. Lo frammenta, lo complica; lo schiude e
lo chiude come fosse una fisarmonica, con la pretesa di mostrarne i meccanismi e il loro funzionamento. Esattamente come se fosse possibile mostrare come funzionano la vita di una mente o i moti di una coscienza. Come se fosse possibile fare la fotografia a un’emozione o a un sentimento.
Riconoscere l’assurdo a teatro significa riconoscere che il testo non
si fa riconoscere, e induce alla defamiliarizzazione, al non riconoscimento, mostrando un’assoluta indifferenza alla possibilità di essere compreso.
Il testo non ricerca, compiaciuto e ruffiano, alcuna approvazione o consenso su valori condivisi.
Più difficile è riconoscere l’assurdo nella vita di tutti i giorni, nelle
illogicità e nelle irrazionalità dell’esistenza: e non solo nell’insondabile
mancanza di nessi fra la morte e il senso inafferrabile del vivere, ma anche
nell’eliminazione di un barbone bruciato mentre dorme su una panchina.
E potrebbe essere un qualsiasi Vladimir o un qualsiasi Estragon. Il sentimento dell’assurdo, ha scritto Albert Camus, può cogliere chiunque ad
ogni angolo di strada (14).
Le assurdità della vita le si conosce e le si riconosce, ma le si cancella dalla mente motivandole nei modi più diversi fino a farsene una
ragione, e le si fa rientrare nella “logica della vita”. Perché, evidentemente, la vita la si riesce a vivere solo fingendosi una logica: un’origine e un
18
percorso da seguire, un percorso motivato possibilmente da un obiettivo
da raggiungere che dia senso al percorso e a ogni sua azione. Non volentieri conosciamo l’assurdo, e malvolentieri lo riconosciamo. E questo perché la nostra esistenza si nutre di significato: senza significato ci sembra
che non avrebbe senso viverla, e non avrebbero senso le nostre azioni.
Ma, come scrive Claude Lévi-Strauss, è “impossibile concepire il
significato senza l’ordine” (25). Il significato è nell’armonia formale delle
cose, nel loro presentarsi in forma razionale, mentre ciò che è informe, ciò
che è disarmonico e irregolare, significa e rappresenta il non-senso. Il
nostro anelito razionalizzante si sancisce così in un’estetica dell’ordine, in
una cultura che si fonda per convenzione sul principio di simmetria, in cui
si riconosce facilmente e visibilmente il rapporto ordinato fra le cose.
Quando viene narrata una storia ci si aspetta che essa sia provvista di un
inizio e di una fine, e di un percorso che unisca quei due punti estremi
seguendo uno sviluppo logico. Ci si aspettano storie fittizie che mimino la
completezza di un percorso esistenziale, come se davvero si volesse riconoscere nella storia fittizia l’inizio e la fine della propria storia e un percorso logico fra questi due estremi. Ma chi conosce inizio e fine della propria storia? E chi può dichiarare la logica assoluta del proprio percorso esistenziale?
La continua ricerca di senso da parte dell’uomo sembra un’ammissione palese dell’assenza del senso. Alla crisi del significato segue così,
immancabile, la crisi della forma. La forma delle simmetrie e delle corrispondenze, come l’idea di completezza, sono finzioni a cui la modernità
ha rinunciato, non riuscendo più ad avvalersi di modelli riconosciuti e stabili; le certezze della modernità sembrano fondarsi, anzi, su una realtà
contraddittoria di cose e di parole, una realtà non verificabile, e discontinua all’eccesso. Così il testo, con il suo disordine, con la sua frammentarietà priva di logica, mette il fruitore di fronte all’evidenza di un significato negato o, quanto meno, di un inesauribile e fastidioso “‘eccesso’ di
significato” (Steiner, 84). Il massimo a cui si possa esteticamente aspirare
sono le illusorie simmetrie della paralisi, grottesche e sadiche a un tempo,
della disperazione scenica beckettiana.
Il testo che esprime l’assurdo beckettiano è un fenomeno sconnesso.
Gli eventi e le parole sulla scena non mostrano alcun rapporto fra di loro,
non seguono nessuna logica riconoscibile. O forse una logica ce l’hanno,
ma lo spettatore non ha gli strumenti per individuarla. Josè Ortega y
Gasset potrebbe affermare che la storia è derealizzata, smontata, depoten19
ziata, privata dei suoi tratti distintivi e specifici (192-3). Non è forse il
testo a essere incompleto, è invece lo spettatore a essere inadeguato. I personaggi sono abbozzi, frammentari e contraddittori, privi di qualsiasi tratto psicologico. A volte sono anche abbozzi o frammenti di corporeità,
segni della mutilazione e della paralisi. Il dialogo si costruisce per accumulo, non è più un’ordinata successione di formulazioni compiute del
pensiero, non segue più il modello della consequenzialità logica e razionale. Le parole, anziché riflettere un’azione, anziché esporre un’azione, o
anziché produrre esse stesse un’azione, sembrano ammassate a caso. Il linguaggio non ha alcuna relazione con una storia comprensibile e ri-conoscibile. Anzi, ci si rende conto che anziché veicolare e rappresentare la storia esso cerca di svincolarsene, si rifiuta di mettersi al suo servizio e di
assumere il suo ruolo secondario, si sottrae al dovere di esprimere la
realtà, di spiegarla e di produrla. Il linguaggio perde la sua funzione comunicativa perché, come è stato affermato in più modi e in ogni sede critica,
non c’è proprio nulla da comunicare. Ogni precedente esempio di rappresentazione letteraria è stata una finzione, e non solo nel senso tradizionale; forse l’idea stessa di poter riprodurre il reale attraverso una rappresentazione realistica e ‘fedele’ è stata una demagogica finzione.
L’assurdo non è dunque soltanto una affermazione esistenziale, ma è
anche una scettica affermazione estetica. L’assurdo non crede più alla rappresentazione e, in secondo luogo, non crede più a quel tipo di rappresentazione, anche ammesso che la rappresentazione in sé fosse possibile.
Dunque l’assurdo non ha più una storia da rappresentare perché non c’è
storia ed esso non riconosce la storia; e non riconosce la possibilità di rappresentare un percorso integrale e compiuto di senso secondo le forme
rappresentative tradizionali. L’assurdo è fatto di frammenti di tante storie
e di tanti linguaggi, implosi sulla scena davanti a noi da chissà quale mondo lontano. Forse anche il nostro. Ma è lo stesso termine ‘storia’ a risultare imbarazzante, perché presupporrebbe l’idea che un tempo una storia sia
esistita, e che si sia disfatta a causa di una privazione di dati, di elementi
connettivi allora noti e ora non più noti, o noti a qualcuno (magari
all’Autore), ma non allo spettatore. E già questo sarebbe un preconcetto,
soggettivo e indimostrabile. La ‘storia’ di Beckett è un percorso senza inizio e senza fine, e senza un percorso che definisca l’evoluzione di un evento o anche solo di un dialogo. In Endgame, Hamm narra a più riprese dell’uomo che si rivolse a lui per salvare il proprio figlio, e la sua storia ripropone solo frammenti del passato, brandelli di memoria privi di senso com20
piuto, che non riescono a produrre alcuna ricaduta di senso sul presente. E
del resto come si potrebbe riconoscere l’inizio di una storia che non si fa
riconoscere come storia? E come si potrebbe riconoscerne la fine? È in
particolare questa conclusione assente che lascia perplessi, perché il testo
si ferma inquietante, e si nega di fronte alla fine come di fronte a un baratro. Così ogni punto della storia-non storia è inizio e fine allo stesso tempo, perché inizio e fine non esistono e sono ovunque, come nella circolarità del mito. E in sorprendente analogia con la vita. È curioso, infatti,
osservare quanto questo coincida con la realtà del nostro esistere: come
osserva Ortega y Gasset, l’inizio è un mito, la fine è un racconto che nessuno mai ci potrà narrare; inizio e fine sono entrambi estranei alla vita
(192-3).
In questo contesto di frammentazione, che appare a prima vista
disperato e catastrofico e che assume invece tutti i tratti della commedia,
il linguaggio non può che parlare di se stesso, assumendo, arrogante e narcisistico, un ruolo primario; il linguaggio è costretto a dar senso al proprio
esistere, svincolandosi dal dovere di esprimere altro che non sia il linguaggio in sé, affrancato, quindi, da qualsiasi impegno a significare. “Moron!”
sentenzia Vladimir. “That’s the idea, let’s abuse each other.”, ribatte Estragon. E i due cominciano a scambiarsi offese: “Moron!” – “Vermin!” –
“Abortion!” – “Morpion!” – “Sewer-rat!” – “Curate!” – “Cretin!”– e non
è forse un caso che l’ultimo insulto pronunciato da Estragon sia “Crritic!”
(Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 75), forse con un ironico accenno a chi, per
professione, cerca sempre di caricare le parole di un impossibile significato.
Del resto la stessa mancanza di una storia che è la storia presuppone
che non esista possibilità di significato, perché il significato dovrebbe
derivare proprio dallo sviluppo dell’azione storico/narrativa. Indagare il
senso dell’assurdo è allora un’operazione pretestuosa. Inutilmente si cerca
di riconoscere nel testo il già noto, esattamente come si fa, ingannandosi,
di fronte alle macchie di Rorschach o a un quadro di René Magritte, ma il
testo non è un rebus; nessuna lettura è più attestabile di un’altra, e nessun
interprete è più legittimato di un altro; anzi, il fruitore è spinto a ritrarsi dal
ruolo di interprete per non rischiare di rimanere vittima della sua irrazionalità: leggere Waiting for Godot come attesa di Dio, o attesa della morte,
o attesa di un significato qualsiasi da assegnare alla vita, è rifiutare di riconoscere l’illeggibilità del testo e i propri limiti di spettatori fruitori, oltre
che i propri limiti di uomini. Eppure non dovrebbe essere difficile ricono21
scere che Waiting for Godot è, con evidenza senza pari, il quadro di riferimento di se stesso. Il primo atto pone il proprio modello ideologico-esistenziale, e il secondo si misura unicamente sul primo, che gli fa da modello assoluto. Il primo atto induce nel fruitore disorientamento e disconoscimento, e il secondo atto determina il riconoscimento ingannevole di
nient’altro che del riprodursi variato del primo atto, ossia un riconoscimento prodotto unicamente dal rapporto fra i due atti, reso possibile da
analogie e differenze. Un riconoscimento a cui non corrisponde una maggiore comprensione della realtà ‘rappresentata’ e che nulla chiarisce del
senso del testo. È venuto meno un sistema ideologico dominante dettato
dall’esterno; l’unica legge per questo testo sovversivo è l’inesistenza della
legge. Godot non è un significato presente, ma l’assenza del significato.
Allo stesso modo, ridurre la scena di Endgame a un bunker in uno
scenario esterno da day after, o all’interno di un cranio umano, significa
assegnare al testo un significato, riducendolo a metafora, ossia leggendolo come altro da sé. Ma, bisogna ammetterlo, è difficile accettare l’idea del
disordine in sé come modello originale e primario della propria testualità
esistenziale, l’idea della propria esistenza come caos primordiale. Una
fruizione codarda non accetta lo sbandamento di fronte all’ineffabile, e
non accetta l’idea che il testo sia una domanda che non prevede risposta.
Malgrado i tanti dogmi irrazionali supinamente subiti dall’uomo, l’unico
che non si riesce ad accettare è che il testo sia pura, assoluta presentazione di se stesso; non si riesce ad accettare che il testo non sia un problema
in attesa di una soluzione, una domanda in attesa di una risposta, ma un
segno in sé che rilascia un significato enigmatico, o anche nessun significato, e, per questo, ricco di curiose analogie con la realtà improbabile dell’esistenza: un’esistenza priva di significato. Si è colti dal sospetto che a
essere irrazionale e assurdo sia, più che il testo, il reale e ogni tentativo di
rappresentarlo razionalizzandolo; non si spiegherebbe, altrimenti, il
costante impegno dell’umanità a cambiarlo quel reale, per dar vita alla storia (Rensi, 118-121).
Ma, malgrado ogni sentimento di vuoto e di non senso, riconoscere
l’assurdità del presente è un’impresa impossibile, che se avesse successo
si risolverebbe in una fatale sottrazione di valore, di senso e di scopo per
l’impresa del vivere.
Alla fine, l’assurdo non pretende forse tanto. Forse si accontenta di
affermare il proprio anarchico ritrarsi da ogni regola e da ogni legge, il
proprio rifiuto dei valori costituiti che permettono di riconoscere tragedia
22
e commedia, e di distinguerle; e, come il pittore che ci guarda dall’interno del quadro Las Meninas (1656) di Velazquez, l’assurdo ti guarda dritto negli occhi per spiarti e verificare che tu abbia riconosciuto il tuo stesso disorientamento.
Nessun dolore sopprime il riso; nessuna risata allevia il pianto. Il rapporto fra riso e pianto, fra gioia e dolore è solo una questione di compensazione quantitativa, come dice Pozzo: “The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another
stops. The same is true of the laugh” (Beckett, Waiting for Godot. 33). Una
pura questione di riequilibrio quantitativo e formale.
Non si sa se sia più assurdo chi cerca di spiegare l’assurdo o chi si
aspetta che gli venga spiegato. Certo è che l’assurdo è contagioso: basta
una realtà assurda, prodotta da un testo o dalla vita, per produrre un fruitore assurdo nella sua pretesa di interpretare e di capire, e assurdo nell’incapacità di accettare l’illeggibilità dell’esperienza. L’assurdo allora non
sta nel testo e non sta in chi cerca di fruirne, ma sta nell’impossibilità che
testo e fruitore si relazionino razionalmente. Soltanto nell’assurdo essi
potrebbero convivere armonicamente, ma l’assurdo, come si è detto, è
disarmonico per definizione e per costituzione, e inoltre né testo né fruitore sanno accettare di adeguarsi l’uno all’altro, perché l’assurdo chiede
che venga rispettata la sua assurdità, mentre il fruitore desidera riportarla al rispetto delle regole dell’ordine, della simmetria, dell’armonia, della
logica, e vuole che l’assurdo si ravvii i capelli arruffati, si rassetti, si
imbelletti e profumi di rosa. Mentre l’assurdo, con i suoi tratti irregolari e
inattesi, sgradevoli e aspri, si distanzia e non aspira a produrre alcun effetto di familiarizzazione e di riconoscimento che non sia il riconoscimento
della follia che, sola, accomuna testo e fruitore in un’esperienza primaria,
un’esperienza di vita e non di interpretazione. Perché è la follia il campo
dell’assurdo, si vorrebbe dire “la follia dell’esistere”, ed è illusione pensare che esso sia un’esperienza e un sentimento al di fuori dello spazio e
del tempo dell’uomo; e ciò per quanto difficile sia accettare l’idea che si
stia vivendo una realtà di finzione, regolamentata da convenzioni teatrali,
come quelle che Beckett presenta sulla scena. Eppure deve far pensare
quel cannocchiale che, in Endgame, Clov punta diritto contro il pubblico,
affossato nella depressione di una poltroncina, per osservarlo da spettatore e dichiarare “I see… a multitude… in transports… of joy” (25), con un
effetto di metateatralità e di sarcasmo che sono tratti salienti dell’assurdo.
Chi è l’attore che recita e chi è il pubblico? Chi sta guardando chi? Chi sta
23
giudicando chi? Chi ha pagato il biglietto per assegnarsi il ruolo di spettatore in questa rappresentazione assurda che è la vita, sfuggendo così al
proprio ruolo di attore protagonista? Perché mai si finge di starsene tutti
seduti a guardare una rappresentazione? Perché non si riesce a riconoscere che in quel momento più che mai l’assurdo è sceso fra il pubblico?
Perché non riconoscere che lo si sta vivendo in prima persona anche mentre ci si illude che non sia così? Perché non riconoscere che la vita e la
scena beckettiana sono forse due piani della medesima realtà? Eppure lo
si è sempre saputo. E ci si potrebbe anche chiedere se ciò che si svolge
sulla scena sia davvero più assurdo per il pubblico del suo rimanere lì a
guardare e a completare con il suo ruolo di fruitore il quadro complessivo
dell’assurdo.
È proprio quando non si riconosce la realtà dell’assurdo, quando si
cerca di stravolgerlo e di razionalizzarlo, che si capisce come l’assurdo si
difenda dall’assedio distruttivo della critica rifuggendola costitutivamente, un po’ come accade in Escapando de la critica, un quadro del 1874 del
pittore spagnolo Pere Borrell del Caso.
24
Il testo fugge da se stesso e dalla propria cornice formale, evade
verso l’invisibile ignoto e verso quella realtà esterna (la fruizione critica)
che lo vorrebbe annullare con un giudizio cristallizzante. E il testo porta
con sé l’assurdità della sua fuga, e ne contagia il reale. Dal canto suo la
cornice rimane frenata dal testo, che mostra di volerla lasciare a far da
sfondo nero alla propria solitudine e al vuoto incolmabile dell’assenza.
“When we are born, we cry that we are come / To this great stage of
fools”, dice King Lear, denudando la follia e la finzione del vivere (IV. vv.
178-9). Egli denuncia l’autoinganno dell’uomo che è convinto di vivere la
vita e non riconosce invece di star recitando una parte. La verità di Lear
suona già, a chi lo ascolta, come il vaneggiamento di un folle. Ed è proprio disconoscendo la follia insita nel reale che il razionale occupa abusivamente il proprio spazio di esistenza.
Un conservatore come T. S. Eliot era convinto che il caos riguardasse la storia contemporanea, come a dire che il passato era stato migliore,
un’epoca d’oro degradata dalla modernità e dal progresso. E all’ordine si
sarebbe potuto ritornare, secondo Eliot, recuperando i principi ordinativi
del mito, che in fondo altro non è che una struttura fittizia, che non ha
alcun rapporto rappresentativo diretto con la realtà.
Forse il commento finale al nostro misconoscimento dell’assurdo lo
ha dato da quattro secoli William Shakespeare per bocca di Macbeth:
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. (V. v. 23-27)
In un momento di improvvisa illuminazione metateatrale ed esistenziale, Macbeth prende coscienza dell’inestricabile compenetrarsi dei propri ruoli di uomo, di attore, di personaggio, di marionetta, e si rende conto
che a narrare la sua storia senza senso è un fruitore che non sa narrare e
non sa capire, un fruitore senza senno. A meno che non sia proprio la sua
mancanza di senno a impedirgli, volutamente, di narrare una storia che è
meglio non narrare. E ciò anche se è vero che Shakespeare non ha mai
letto Beckett.
25
A
Opere citate, Œuvres citées,
Zitierte Literatur, Works Cited
B
Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot, London: Faber and Faber, 1975.
——. Endgame, London: Faber and Faber, 1976.
Camus, Albert. Il mito di Sisifo. Milano: Bompiani, 1997.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Mito e significato. Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1980.
Steiner, Gorge. Real Presences, London: Faber and Faber, 1989.
Ortega y Gasset, Jose. “Idea del teatro”. In Meditazioni del Chisciotte. Napoli:
Guida, 1986.
Rensi, Giuseppe. La filosofia dell’assurdo. Milano: Adelphi, 1991.
Shakespeare, William. King Lear. In The Complete Works, S. Wells and G. Taylor
eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
——. Macbeth. In The Complete Works, S. Wells and G. Taylor eds. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1988.
26
La rosa e il monumento:
i Sonetti shakesperiani
e la poesia visiva
Rocco
Coronato
Università di Padova
I
n giro per la Londra shakespeariana, ricca di suoni e rumori, non
dovevano vedersi molte immagini. La spoliazione iconoclasta del già scarso repertorio visivo presente in chiese, monasteri ed abbazie, unita alla
permanenza di una produzione meramente ornamentale e per di più visibile solo nelle dimore nobili (Evett), nonché al basso livello delle riproduzioni tipografiche, limitate a crudi frontespizi di pamphlet e in-quarto,
e alla minore circolazione di emblemi rispetto al continente (Innocenti,
20), dovevano rendere l’esperienza visuale di un londinese medio ben
magra rispetto alla sovrabbondanza di immagini presenti in una qualsiasi
città rinascimentale europea.
Non stupisce pertanto che, a seguire la definizione di poesia figurata
fornita da Giovanni Pozzi come un’entità dove lingua e icona non sono
semplicemente giustapposti ma convivono in una specie di ipostasi, verrebbe da concludere che sotto questo risguardo la produzione inglese tra
Cinque e Seicento appare sporadica, imitativa ed effimera. Anche adottando la definizione più lasca di iconismo occulto, Pozzi cita unicamente
il Paradise Lost di Milton e il suo principio distributivo di bipartizione
secondo un moto di discesa e risalita (25, 81). I risultati non aumentano
nemmeno adottando definizioni più liberali come quelle che circolano in
campo anglosassone, secondo cui il technopeignion secentesco annovera
qualunque sfoggio di virtuosità tecnica, non necessariamente limitato alla
visualità (Higgins 25)1.
27
Tuttavia, con altrettanta evidenza si può argomentare una tesi apparentemente opposta: il maggiore ciclo poetico di quell’epoca, i Sonetti di
Shakespeare, sublime conoscitore e creatore di emblemi e concetti, indagano proprio la natura iconica dell’immaginazione ricorrendo ad immagini precipue della poesia visiva tradizionale quali la rosa e il monumento.
Shakespeare riprende le forme della poesia figurata, col risultato però di
concepire la poesia stessa, intesa come grafia e monumento, quale emblema moderno del pensiero.
*****
Prima di affrontare le poesie figurate vere e proprie, è necessario
chiedersi se gli elisabettiani leggessero coll’occhio o coll’orecchio.
Puttenham, nella Arte of Englishe Poesie (1589, f. Miiijv p. 92), avverte
che se all’inizio le poesie figurate potranno non sembrare piacevoli, col
tempo e l’uso diventeranno sufficientemente accettabili, come accade per
tutte le nuove mode: “time and vsage wil make them acceptable inough,
as it doth in all other new guises, be it for wearing of apparell or other
wise”. Il riferimento all’abbigliamento farebbe pensare all’aspetto visivo:
in realtà Puttenham dice che queste poesie potranno non sembrare piacevoli all’orecchio degli inglesi (“nothing pleasant to an English eare”).
Se ai cultori della poesia figurata interessava proprio la simpatia e
l’affinità tra orecchio ed occhio (Cook 1979, 8), espressioni come questa
di Puttenham spingono a chiedersi con quale dei due organi leggessero gli
elisabettiani. L’occhio parrebbe favorito. Riprendendo l’immagine aristotelica del sigillo impresso sulla cera, i trattatisti inglesi raccomandano
ossessivamente l’uso delle immagini più vivide come luoghi dell’arte della memoria. L’immagine, avverte Thomas Wilson nell’Arte of Rhetorique
(1553), è qualsiasi figura o forma che dichiari una determinata cosa (“An
Image is any picture or shape, to declare some certayne thing therby”); le
immagini scelte devono essere vivide (“liuely”) e capaci quasi di saltare
agli occhi (“stirring”, “raumping”), in modo da creare una forte impressione delle cose sulla nostra mente: “they must be made of things notable,
suche as maye cause earnest impression of thinges in our mind”. Infatti,
conclude Wilson parafrasando Cicerone, se è vero che apprendiamo alcune cose mediante la comprensione, e altre coi sensi, quelle che meglio
ricordiamo sono quelle che abbiamo conosciuto con la vista e che abbiamo ben notato cogli occhi: “For where as we knowe some thinges […]
28
onelie by understandinge, and some by the sence of seynge, those we kepe
best in our mindes which we knowe by sight, & haue marked with our
eyes” (114r-114v). John Willis, autore della Art of Memory (1621), definisce l’idea come una rappresentazione visibile di ciò che si deve ricordare
(“a visible representation of ought to be remembered”, cit. in Bath, 49).
Analogamente Bacon (Advancement on Learning, II. xv. 3) riconosce due
intenzioni nell’arte della memoria: la prenotion, che si occupa della ricerca indefinita di ciò che vogliamo ricordare e ci dirige a cercare in un ambito più ristretto (“in a narrow compass”); e l’emblem, che riduce i concetti
intellettuali in immagini sensibili, che più colpiscono la memoria (cit. in
Bath 48-9). L’arte della memoria, il precetto di Quintiliano circa l’obbligo
per il rétore di mostrare ante oculos i fatti di cui parla e l’insistenza di
Erasmo sulla enargeia formano una triade potente, alla cui luce si ripara il
medesimo Shakespeare, maestro dell’ekphrasis.
Gli elisabettiani, però, leggevano le poesie anche coll’orecchio, come suggerisce il caso degli emblemi, verosimilmente percepiti come
un’altra forma di poesia figurata. Puttenham inserisce un capitolo sugli
emblemi proprio dopo quello dedicato ai carmi figurati. Andrew Willet,
l’autore di una centuria di emblemi sacri (1591 o 1592), ovvia alla mancanza di un’incisione per la regina Elisabetta rappresentandola come un
albero di versi che formano un doppio acrostico (Bath 52). Gli emblemi
ovviamente si rivolgono come dei rebus all’occhio, spiega Thomas
Whitney, autore di una delle non numerose raccolte inglesi di emblemi
(1586): si tratta di figure incise su tavola o sul marmo di pavimenti o muri
per adornare il luogo (“suche figures, or workes, as are wrought in plate,
or in stones in the pauements, or on the waules, or suche like, for the adorning of the place”); l’emblema contiene in generale un ingegnoso espediente espresso con astuta maestria, dove qualcosa di inizialmente oscuro
procura al suo osservatore maggior piacere al momento del riconoscimento: “some wittie deuice expressed with cunning woorkemanship,
something obscure to be perceiued at the first, whereby when with further
consideration it is understood, it maie the greater delighte the behoulder”
(To the Reader). Ma l’emblema è anche un termine retorico da usare in
classe per addestrarsi alla copia, e quindi all’imitazione della natura, alla
scoperta della proprietas mediante l’analogia, come insegna nel 1508
l’Erasmo di Parabolae sive similia (Bath 45-6). È un tropo che indica l’ornamento mediante similitudine di un concetto o di una cosa, secondo i termini usati da Robert Cawdrey nella sua raccolta (letteralmente ‘magazzi29
no’) Treasurie or Storehouse of Similies (1600) per definire le similitudini: “Similes are never set out to confirme or confute, but to adorne, and to
make a matter more plaine; and yet is evermore inferiour to the matter in
hand” (Bath 47).
Gli emblemi, poi, parlano. I primi, ad esempio quelli di Alciati e
Ripa, erano in origine verbali. Francis Quarles, autore degli Hieroglyphickes (1638), definisce l’emblema una parabola silenziosa (“silent parable”), riprendendo il termine erasmiano. Proprio a proposito del più celebre autore di parabole, Gesù, Quarles invita a non temere di esemplificarlo mediante degli emblemi: già nelle Sacre Scritture Egli viene presentato
come un seminatore, un pescatore o un dottore – e allora perché non presentarlo così, tanto all’occhio quanto all’orecchio, “presented so as well to
the eye as to the ear?” (f. A3r, To the Reader). L’illustration secentesca,
poi, non indica l’immagine incisa ma l’epigramma in versi. Il frontespizio
della raccolta di emblemi di George Wither (1635) li descrive come resi
vivi (“quickened”) con illustrazioni metriche (“Metricall illustrations”).
Simili spie hanno indotto alcuni studiosi a pensare che fossero in fondo le
parole, e non le immagini, a dare la rappresentazione più sincera, e che
solo quando le immagini parlavano allora diventavano vive (Bath, 54). Gli
scarsi carmi figurati inglesi non sembrano far molto per scoraggiare questa impressione.
*****
Nell’esordio convenzionale della letteratura anglosassone, il Dream
of the Rood, campeggia la visione del sacro albero su cui è impressa
un’immagine, la scena della Passione. Nonostante questo inizio promettente, la poesia visiva inglese tra Cinque e Seicento mostra un carattere
ripetitivo e privo di ispirazione. La quasi totalità delle forme deriva dai
modelli ellenistici e compare di norma in libri, con l’accompagnamento di
pochi perentori versi d’occasione (Higgins 11, 52, 95-105). I primi esempi, poi, sono in latino: si tratta delle otto forme già note almeno dai tempi
di Simmia e Ottaziano Porfirio (altare, spada, uovo, pera, siringhe, ali,
piramide rovesciata, accetta) che ricompaiono nel Poematum Liber di
Richard Willis (1573). La fonte di ispirazione di Willis, in aggiunta, proveniva dal reticolo gesuita inviso agli inglesi riformati. Dopo aver frequentato il seminario di Mainz tra il 1565 e il 1568, Willis insegnò all’università gesuita di Treviri. Allontanato dalla Società nel 1572, ritornò in
30
Inghilterra e licenziò il testo, accompagnato da una difesa della poesia ove
ricordava che il primo a usare un metro era stato Dio, creatore del mondo
“certa ratione, quasi metro” (f. Aviir, p. 62; Rypson 4-5). Forse deluso dai
gesuiti o dalla poesia figurata, si dedicò poi ad allevare polli.
Nonostante l’esiguità e la ripetitività degli esempi elisabettiani, gli
inglesi disponevano comunque di una buona trattazione teorica dell’argomento. Una sezione dell’Arte of Englishe Poesie (1589) di George
Puttenham è infatti dedicata alla proporzione della figura (“proportion of
figure”). Puttenham cita questo genere di componimenti come una produzione tipicamente orientale (per qualche ragione li assegna ai Tartari), e riferisce di avere incontrato in una locanda italiana un viaggiatore che veniva da
quelle parti e di avergli domandato proprio di cotali “subtillities”, termine a
metà fra ‘sottigliezze’ e ‘astruserie’. La proporzione della figura, specifica
Puttenham accludendo le immagini delle varie configurazioni possibili, è
così chiamata perché fornisce una rappresentazione visiva (“ocular representation”); i versi vengono ridotti con buona simmetria in alcune figure
geometriche, mediante le quali il poeta è costretto a mantenersi entro tali
limiti; ciò non solo mostra maggior arte, ma funziona anche egregiamente
in termini di concisione e sottigliezza dell’espediente: “it yeelds an ocular
representation, your meeters being by good symmetrie reduced into certaine geometricall figures, whereby the maker is restrained to keepe him within
his bounds, and sheweth not onely more art, but serueth also much better for
briefenesse and subtilitie of deuice”. Puttenham aggiunge che, proprio per
queste caratteristiche, la poesia visiva è quanto mai indicata perché i graziosi
amoretti di Corte (“prettie amourets”) intrattengano i servi e facciano passare il tempo, visto che i loro delicati ingegni (“delicate wits”) richiedono
esercizi per non impigrirsi (f. Miiijr, p. 91). Gli esempi citati da Puttenham
sono poi in larga parte traduzioni di componimenti preesistenti o adattamenti di forme note, come la piramide tronca e rovesciata, con forzosa aderenza della lingua inglese alla forma geometrica.
Maggiore fantasia dimostra il primo componimento visivo in inglese, la colonna di Pasquino composta in disprezzo dell’amore da Thomas
Watson (1582). Il carme, composto come una colonna crescente e poi
decrescente per numero di sillabe, retta da un acrostico formante la scritta AmareEstInsanire, e presentata anche nella forma convenzionale di
sonetto mediante una successiva expansio, mostra un pregevole lavoro
artistico, o se non altro un lavorio artigianale (LXXXI-LXXXII, “My
Love is Past”).
31
Uno schema iconico che risponde alla definizione di Pozzi è il componimento anonimo “Man’s Life” (The New Penguin Book of English
Verse, p. 201), comparso in una chiesa del Dorset nello stesso anno in cui
vengono pubblicati i Sonetti shakespeariani (1609). Qui la fragilità della
vita umana viene paragonata visivamente al vetro, a un vaso dalle pareti
sottili pieno di acqua; il peccato procura la morte, la morte rompe il vaso,
e l’acqua fuoriesce, in una strozzatura iconica che determina la finis del
componimento e della vita:
Man’s Life
Man is a Glas: Life is
A water that’s weakly
walled about: sinne bring
es death: death breakes
the Glas: so runnes
the water out
finis
L’austerità di questa poesia anonima non sembra preludere a ciò che
invece succederà poco dopo: l’autentica fioritura secentesca della poesia
figurata, divisa fra il preponderante gusto per il capriccio e il ritorno di un
tema classico dell’antico epigramma, il monumento. Esempi di inventiva
capricciosa sono il carme circolare rappresentato dal “lover’s knot”, quale
quello contenuto in Britannia’s Pastorales (1613-14) di William Browne,
il sospiro amoroso ideato dal prete anglicano Joseph Beaumont (1616-99),
e il più austero fiore i cui petali sono formati dai cerchi dei comandamenti intrecciati fra loro, presente nei Manuscript Examples (1620) di R.
Jackman (Higgins 97, 99, 104). Componimenti simili figuravano in successi editoriali che già dal titolo facevano appello al capriccio, come le
Facetiae: Musarum Deliciae di John Mennes (1658). Come Puttenham
aveva predetto, si trattava di “subtillities”.
Il lato monumentale trionfa in George Herbert e Robert Herrick, due
poeti ricordati non solo come autori di capricci iconici. Le celebri Easter
Wings (1633) del primo sposano felicemente il modello antico con l’espressione della minorità dell’uomo e del poeta, iconicamente presentato
come “most poore” e “most thinne” nei due punti centrali di restringimento delle stanze (si veda Bowler 9-11). Ma è soprattutto il tema epigrammatico del monumento che ritorna in auge. È noto come anticamen32
te, ad esempio nella Anthologia Graeca, la poesia figurata venisse identificata con l’epigramma, ovvero con la scrittura impressa sulla pietra, la
quale, che fosse monumento, urna o colonna funeraria, spesso si rivolgeva direttamente al visitatore2. Un celebre monumento era stato l’altare di
parole comparso in elegia di Sidney nel 1587 per mano di William Gager.
Altri esempi di poesia iconica ispirata al monumento erano comparsi in
Puttenham, il quale presenta ad esempio due colonne (o altari) giustapposti in lode della maestà regale, da leggere quello a sinistra dal basso in alto
e quello a destra in direzione opposta. L’intenzione epigrammatica e monumentale compare anche nella dedica dei sonetti shakespeariani (1609)
al misterioso W.H., nonché nei frontespizi delle prime edizioni complete
delle opere di Jonson (1616) e Shakespeare (1623). Altri noti esempi secenteschi sono l’Altar di Herrick (cfr. Ernst 1991, 100 ss.) e l’iconico
Pillar of Fame, posto orgogliosamente dal poeta alla fine delle Hesperides
(1648) quale riassunto della fama duratura, superiore in durata al marmo,
al bronzo e al giaietto. Componimenti di fattura popolare, in forma di
colonna ed epitaffio, anche burlesco, compaiono nelle Facetiae. William
Drummond, lo scozzese con cui Ben Jonson scambiò delle conversazioni
in tema di poetica, nella pagina finale dei suoi Poems (1616) reca un
poema a forma di piramide (1.39, figura 15), sulla cui sommità troneggia
una corona, e dove si argomenta che non saranno materiali apparentemente duraturi come il porfido, il bianco marmo di Paros o le meraviglie
egizie, ma le lacrime delle muse, di Apollo e di Amore a far sorgere una
“chrystall Tombe”, secondo un tema ovidiano e oraziano che si ritrova nei
sonetti shakespeariani dedicati all’immortalità del poeta. Dopo l’acme
secentesca, la poesia visiva, stroncata da Hobbes come un esempio di concettosità metrica inadatta al predominante genere epico (Cook, “Figured
Poetry”, 8), scompare, per riapparire solo nell’Ottocento come forma
comica minore, ad esempio nel Tale of a Mouse in Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland (Higgins 6).
A fronte di questa eclissi del capriccio e del monumento, e in genere
della marginalità sperimentale e faceta della poesia figurata inglese, la
poesia dichiaratamente iconica interpella da vicino l’immaginazione
moderna del poeta, in particolare di Shakespeare, poeta forse interessato
più al paragone, alla competizione tra modalità verbali e visive, che alla
loro collaborazione emblematica. La curiosa coabitazione tra occhio e
orecchio, tra pictura e scriptura, introduce alla metafora visiva dell’idea e
dell’immaginazione e del suo rapporto colla scrittura, e a una diversa con33
cezione del testo come immagine che i Sonetti di Shakespeare prospettano tra ritratti, penne, rose e monumenti. La modernità della mente poetica
in Shakespeare si coglie anche nella sua rielaborazione dell’iconismo tradizionale: non più capriccio di immagini e artifici, ma l’inabissarsi nella
figura più irrappresentabile e invisibile, il pensiero stesso che agita il
poeta.
*****
Nel 1613 Leonard Digges scriveva su una copia delle Rimas di Lope
de Vega che quel libro di sonetti era onorato dagli spagnoli quanto in
Inghilterra avrebbe dovuto esserlo quello del “nostro William
Shakespeare” (Roberts, 164). L’iscrizione testimonia l’alta fama che i
Sonetti avevano presso i letterati, e insieme la loro scarsa o nulla circolazione al di fuori di quella cerchia. Il noto riferimento del Palladis Tamia
(1598) di Francis Meres al giovane Shakespeare cita in proposito la circolazione dei “sugared Sonnets among his private friends” (Elizabethan
Critical Essays II.317). Dell’edizione del 1609 vennero stampate solo tra
le cinquecento e le ottocento copie, presto sparite. Solo due sonetti (138 e
144, più altri tre tratti da Love’s Labour’s Lost) vennero ripubblicati nell’apocrifo The Passionate Pilgrim (1599, 1612). La successiva riedizione
degli Shakespeare’s Poems (1640) per mano di John Benson, fra le numerose libertà editoriali, spesso li ripresenta o unendoli con altri sonetti
(anche di altri autori), o, all’opposto, smembrandoli in tre stanze seguite
dal distico finale; l’ordine viene modificato (in qualche caso insieme con
i pronomi maschili dei sonetti dedicati al bel giovane) e i sonetti vengono
raggruppati attorno a riflessioni su temi generici (“The glory of beautie”,
“Loves crueltie”) o modelli letterari (“An invocation to his Muse”, “A
Valediction”). Da alcuni marginalia secenteschi si desume inoltre che i
lettori dell’epoca, in costante ricerca dei luoghi comuni, selezionavano i
passi che giudicavano notevoli, li emendavano, ne aggiungevano altri, e
addirittura riscrivevano i titoli – dimostrazione questa, e non unica, che il
libro pubblicato non veniva all’epoca necessariamente considerato come
un oggetto finito, fissato nella stampa (Roberts 161, 167-69). Quand’anche Shakespeare avesse voluto comporre carmi figurati, con simili incertezze tipografiche, culturali ed editoriali non li avrebbe potuti recapitare
contemporaneamente all’occhio e all’orecchio dei suoi pochi lettori.
34
Tuttavia i temi della poesia figurata rispuntano prepotentemente in
Shakespeare. I suoi poemetti narrativi spesso si incentrano su immagini,
siano esse un tema unico come la caccia in Venus and Adonis (Allen, 4257) o icone ricorrenti come il gladio di Tarquinio nel Rape of Lucrece. Per
non parlare del profluvio di concetti dei Sonetti: in un rapidissimo elenco,
vi figurano temi comuni come il giorno d’estate del Sonetto 18 e la stella
polare che guida il vero amore privo di alterazioni nel sonetto 116, e insieme concetti più arditi, quasi impoetici, ad esempio l’immagine, degna di
un abile speculatore immobiliare come Shakespeare, del breve contratto
(“lease”) che regola l’affidamento della bellezza terrena all’uomo (Sonetto
13) – insomma, una infinità di concetti che con verosimiglianza una studiosa della poesia figurata inglese, Elizabeth Cook, riconduce a quella vis
imaginativa della psicologia avicenniana che permette di creare immagini
nuove e inesistenti, come una montagna di smeraldi o un uomo che vola,
partendo da quelle degli oggetti di esperienza comune accumulate nella
memoria. Le immagini usate nei Sonetti sono illuminanti solo se si avverte la possibilità di “immaginarle”, non di riconoscerle come appropriate
(Cook, Studies 12, 22). Proprio a partire dalla capacità dell’immaginazione e della poesia di raffigurare la mente, i sonetti shakespeariani rielaborano il tentativo dell’ipostasi fra parola e immagine, apportandovi il
moderno primato dell’invisibile musicale a scapito delle immagini più tradizionali e concettose.
*****
I sonetti shakespeariani, soprattutto nella parte iniziale del ciclo,
dedicata a cantare la bellezza del giovane, abbondano di immagini convenzionali, quasi emblemi, che vengono sottoposte ad amplificazioni concettose. Un esempio proviene da un simbolo della poesia figurata, la rosa
(Pozzi, 131), presente fin dal sonetto di apertura come convenzionale
similitudine per indicare il giovane che dovrebbe comportarsi come le
creature più belle, di cui desideriamo la moltiplicazione, affinché la rosa
della bellezza possa non morire: “From fairest creatures we desire increase, / That thereby beauty’s rose might never die” (1.1-2). Ma il giovane è
avaro della sua bellezza, narcisisticamente fidanzato solo coi suoi stessi
occhi (“contracted to thine own bright eyes”, 1.5). È come una rosa che,
fresco ornamento del mondo, e unica messaggera della primavera, nasconde il suo content (al contempo, felicità e contenuto, cioè la prole futura)
35
dentro il proprio bocciolo: “Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament,
/ And only herald to the gaudy spring, / Within thine own bud buriest thy
content” (1.9-11). Non volendo moltiplicare se stesso, il giovane promette a se stesso una duplice distruzione, per mano della tomba e di se stesso,
“by the grave and thee” (1.14). Il tema della bellezza che deve sopravvivere al temibile monumento finale, la tomba, è già enunciato.
Il poeta, con fare quasi da nominalista o da iconoclasta del simbolo,
precisa però che queste immagini sono tanto convenzionali quanto pericolose: a forza di seguire l’immagine, la similitudine, si finisce per copiarne i difetti. L’iniziale emblema della rosa si scinde nell’ossessiva opposizione tra rose e canker, la quale ingloba quella tra la rosa curata e quella
canina, parimenti bella ma priva di odore, e quella tra la rosa e una sua
malattia (Duncan-Jones). Nel sonetto 35 il poeta scusa le marachelle del
giovane: è stato lui stesso ad autorizzare il giovane a corrompersi, paragonandolo a una rosa. Ai limiti della banalità, aggiunge che ogni rosa ha
la sua spina, le fontane d’argento nascondono il fango, luna e sole sono
insozzati da nuvole ed eclissi e il male più insidioso, il canker, si nasconde nel bocciolo più delicato:
No more be grieved at that which thou hast done:
Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud,
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.
All men make faults, and even I in this,
Authorizing thy trespass with compare,
Myself corrupting salving thy amiss,
Excusing thy sins more than my sins are (35.1-8)
“Authorizing thy trespass with compare”: Shakespeare è il primo a
usare il verbo authorize, quasi che essere poeta, creatore, colui che “makes
faults”, voglia dire anche creare immagini viziate, imperfette, create solo
per comparare, fare paragoni (Freinkel 188). La bellezza, immagine ed
emblema, è apparenza. In quanto immagine, è falsa e nasconde il male:
l’ornamento della bellezza è il sospetto (70.3), e il canker predilige proprio i boccioli più belli (70.7). Le cose più dolci diventano amare a causa
delle loro azioni, e i gigli che marciscono puzzano peggio delle erbacce,
secondo la chiusa proverbiale del sonetto 94: “sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds, / Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds” (94.1314).
36
La metafora dell’odore comunica ora non un attributo convenzionale della bellezza, quanto la sua evanescenza nel tempo, la sua mutevolezza e di converso l’autentica interiorità, il content che la semplice immagine emblematica non può significare. La contrapposizione tra le rose curate e quelle canine configura nel sonetto 54 una critica della semplice pictura che all’inizio del ciclo tratteggiava l’immagine dolce e armoniosa del
giovane. Il sonetto aggiorna la teoria della bellezza come immagine: lo
“sweet ornament” recato dalla verità rende la bellezza ancor più bella; la
rosa sembra bella, ma ancor più bella ci sembra per quel dolce profumo
che vive in lei:
O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem
By that sweet ornament which truth doth give.
The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem
For that sweet odour which doth in it live. (54.1-4)
Anche i boccioli di canker (da intendersi come rose canine o, più
inverosimilmente, papaveri selvatici) dispiegano una tinta profonda come
quel profumo delle rose che non possiedono (“the canker-blooms have full
as deep a dye / As the perfumed tincture of the roses”, 54.5-6); possiedono uguale, se non più seducente bellezza, ma la loro virtù è solo nel
mostrarsi: “their virtue only is their show” (54.9). Non così le dolci rose,
che grazie alla morte si tramutano in profumi altrettanto dolci. Lo stesso
succederà al giovane, aggiunge il poeta: quando la sua gioventù e la sua
bellezza spariranno, saranno questi versi a distillare la sua verità:
Sweet roses do not so;
Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made:
And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth:
When that shall vade, by verse distils your truth. (54.11-14)
L’immateriale dolce profumo della verità e della virtù, metaforica e
medicinale acqua di rosa che si ottiene per cottura nello zucchero e distillazione fino a restituire il colore, il profumo e le virtù del fiore, può essere colto e reso solo dalla poesia, che distilla la bellezza del giovane che
altrimenti svanisce (“vade”) nell’aria. Vendler nota in questa progressione
un abbandono del linguaggio spettacolarmente visivo della risonanza estetica, espresso con le immagini delle rose, a favore di un linguaggio ridondante e interiore di invisibile dolcezza (Vendler 266). Un altro attento let37
tore dei Sonetti, Joel Fineman, vi legge un passaggio dalla convenzionalità elisabettiana degli schemata petrarchisti della lode visionaria e della
sussistenza degli eidola dell’amata a una nuova autoconsapevolezza, dove
il linguaggio poetico è soprattutto verbale e i sonetti riguardano eminentemente l’orecchio, e non l’occhio, secondo una movenza che richiama la
cattura lacaniana dell’Immaginario per mano del Simbolico. Ma vi è anche un superamento dell’immagine schiacciata, bidimensionale, della pictura, e quindi anche dei tentativi di creare un’ipostasi fra immagine e
parola: in questo paragone tra arti, la poesia eterna l’invisibile virtù dissolvendo (distillando) le immagini emblematiche della bellezza del giovane proprio nel momento in cui questa bellezza apparentemente scompare
e la sua natura iconica ed effimera si confronta con la pretesa della poesia
di poter creare gli unici monumenti duraturi.
Si giunge così ai sonetti raggruppati attorno all’altra principale forma
mimetica della poesia visiva inglese, il monumento. Non solo
Shakespeare rifiuta la forma mimetica e simbolica della poesia visiva, la
poesia in forma di monumento. Gli stessi monumenti che i carmi figurati
cercano iconicamente di imitare sono sottoposti al tempus edax di Ovidio
(Metamorfosi 15.234), al “Devouring Time”, come traduce il poeta nell’incipit del sonetto 19, invitandolo a consumare ogni cosa ma a non incidere le ore sulla bella fronte del giovane con la sua penna antica: “O carve
not with thy hours my love’s fair brow, / Nor draw no lines there with thine
antique pen” (19.9-10). La crudele mano del Tempo sfigura l’inutile sfarzo esteriore dei monumenti funebri (“By Time’s fell hand defaced / The
rich proud cost of outworn buried age”, 64.1-2), e rende perfino il bronzo
eterno schiavo della sua rabbia portatrice di morte (“eternal slave to mortal rage”, 64.4); a questo potere non resistono i materiali o gli elementi più
duri o sconfinati, e le loro immagini – “Since brass, nor stone, nor earth,
nor boundless sea, / But sad mortality o’ersways their power” (65.1-2).
In questo panorama di spoliazione e gravosa incisione sul volto delle
cose e delle persone, il poeta incide con la penna su un materiale che resiste al tempo e alla morte. Sulla scorta di Ovidio (Metamorfosi 15.871-9) e
di Orazio (Odi 3.30.1-9) la poesia, intesa qui non come divina visione ma
come testo inciso, è il monumento che resiste più a lungo del bronzo. Già
nei primi sonetti il poeta aveva paragonato i suoi versi a una tomba incompleta del giovane, che cela la sua vita e mostra neanche la metà delle sue
doti: “it is but as a tombe / Which hides your life, and shewes not halfe
your parts” (17.3-4). Nei sonetti più tardi, che celebrano l’eternità della
38
poesia più che la bellezza del giovane lontano, la poesia diventa iconicamente il monumento che rende immortale il giovane, secondo un gioco di
parole permesso dalla pronuncia elisabettiana (T.W. Herbert): tomba
(tomb), spesso rimato con il grembo (womb) che dà vita, veniva probabilmente pronunciato allo stesso modo di tome (‘tomo’). Il libro è la tomba,
il monumento. La terra, argomenta il poeta, può anche concedergli una
tomba comune, purché il giovane giaccia “entombèd in men’s eyes”
(81.8), nella tomba offerta agli occhi degli uomini (la poesia) e insieme
nella tomba costituita dagli occhi degli uomini. Il suo monumento saranno quei versi gentili, che occhi non ancora creati leggeranno, e lingue future ripeteranno, secondo la shakespeariana ipostasi occhio-orecchio:
The earth can yield me but a common grave
When you entombèd in men’s eyes shall lie:
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o’er-read,
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead (81.7-12)
Il giovane continuerà a vivere “in the mouths of men” (81.14): gli
occhi leggono, e la lingua ricrea acusticamente la poesia nelle bocche
degli uomini. Nel sonetto 107, di fronte alla distruzione dei monumenti
terreni, il poeta addita questi versi, questa poesia, dove anch’egli continuerà a vivere a dispetto della morte, padrona di quei popoli ottusi e senza
loquela, secondo la consueta nota aurale, e dove il giovane continuerà a
trovare il suo monumento anche quando i monumenti ai tiranni e le tombe
di bronzo saranno state consumate:
I’ll live in this poor rhyme,
While he insults o’er dull and speechless tribes.
And thou in this shalt find thy monument,
When tyrants crests and tombs of brasse are spent (107.11-14)
L’altrettanto celebre sonetto 55, immediatamente successivo a quello sull’odore della rosa, ricapitola analogamente il tema della permanenza
di questa potente rima, di questi contenuti, con disprezzo verso gli artefatti
e le immagini che dovrebbero arrestare il tempo. È in questi versi che il
giovane continuerà a splendere, è tramite essi che dimorerà negli occhi
degli amanti:
39
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall out live this pow’rful rhyme,
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time [...]
You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes (55.1-4, 14).
La poesia-monumento di Shakespeare ribalta anche il luogo comune
sulla memoria come cera su cui si imprimono le immagini più vivide, fondamento apparente del primato delle figure e degli emblemi. L’impressione resta, ma cambia il supporto. Il sostrato vivente su cui si registra il
ricordo del giovane è infatti la poesia, unica “living record of your memory” (55.8). Lo prova l’immagine più importante e autentica, quella del
giovane uomo, presente per tradizione dentro gli occhi, la mente e il cuore
del poeta. Questa “true image” compariva in uno dei primi sonetti come
un ritratto da cogliere “perspective”, come a sbirciare dentro (per-spicio)
il cuore del poeta-pittore e gli occhi che lo propagano:
Mine eye hath play’d the painter and hath stelled
Thy beauty’s form in table of my heart;
My body is the frame wherein ‘tis held,
And perspective it is best painter’s art. (24.1-4)
In uno degli ultimi sonetti del ciclo, il poeta risponde al giovane che
gli chiede perché abbia dato ad altri il suo dono, le “tables” (il quaderno),
argomentando che il suo ritratto è scritto (“charactered”) su un sostrato più
duraturo, la sua memoria: “Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain / Full
charactered with lasting memory” (122.1-2). Ecco l’immagine più occulta e ardita fra quelle impiegate da Shakespeare nel suo rigetto dell’antica
e artificiosa poesia visiva: la mente moderna, tradotta dall’inchiostro e dai
caratteri della scrittura. La poesia supera le forme antiche (la convenzione
petrarchista) che ha assunto l’idolo della persona amata da quando la
mente ha appunto cominciato a essere resa con la scrittura, letteralmente
con i caratteri (“since mind at first in character was done”, 59.8). La sua
bellezza verrà scorta ora proprio in queste “black lines” (63.13). È il nero
inchiostro che per miracoloso contrasto dà carattere e figura alla mente del
poeta e al suo lucente amore: “in black ink my love may still shine bright”
(65.4). E cosa c’è nel cervello cui l’inchiostro non possa dare caratteri, che
non abbia già figurato al giovane lo spirito sincero del poeta: “What’s in
the brain that ink may character / Which hath not figured to thee my true
40
spirit?” (18.1-2). L’impressione della scrittura, del “character”, originario
referente per la metafora della memoria come impressione di immagini, è
il nuovo monumento visivo e lapidario. La poesia moderna di Shakespeare
ha per suo emblema la stessa scrittura di cui incessantemente si compone,
alla ricerca dell’invisibile bellezza. La scrittura dà forma e carattere alla
mente: ne è il monumento, l’epigrafe. E non sorprende che lo status iconico e monumentale di due sonetti shakespeariani venisse percepito dai
primi lettori secenteschi. Il sonetto 107 viene intitolato A Monument in un
manoscritto che risale circa al 1660; in una miscellanea di versi compilata attorno al 1650, il sonetto 71, accostato con la consueta libertà a dei
versi licenziosi sull’amore eterosessuale, compare sotto l’iconico The
Altar di Herbert (Roberts 170, 174).
*****
La mente moderna è fonte del character, della scrittura, dell’incisione epigrammatica, lapidaria, simbolica. La scrittura è l’immagine nascosta, impossibile da rappresentare, il carme figurato senza figura attorno a
cui si esercita Shakespeare. Figura di questo carme è lo stesso mezzo
materiale della scrittura, l’inchiostro, che crea i caratteri e insieme denota
il carattere umano. Il testo diventa immagine nel senso letterale del termine, in alternativa al predominio dell’idea intesa etimologicamente come
immagine, all’immaginazione intesa come specchio e riflesso di immagini. In questa progressione si passa dal carme figurato alla poesia aggiunta alla figura (emblema), alla poesia sulla figura (i concetti dei sonetti) e
infine alla poesia come figura, al testo come simbolo dell’invenzione scritta, verbale, e aurale del poeta. Il Timon of Athens, che comincia con una
classica disputa tra un pittore e un poeta, termina con un soldato che chiede ad Alcibiade di leggergli la “leggera impressione” (“soft impression”)
dell’epitaffio inciso sul monumento di Timone che, non potendo leggere,
ha pensato bene di copiarsi con della cera (5.5.66-70), in una inconscia
percezione che il testo, inteso nei suoi caratteri lapidari come “insculpture”, fosse pronto a sua volta a divenire eloquente simbolo ed epigramma
dell’immaginazione.
41
A
1
2
42
Note, Notes, Anmerkungen, Notes
B
Una definizione analoga è quella di Ernst, secondo cui un poema figurato è
“in the broadest sense a lyrical text […] constructed in such a way that the
words-sometimes with the help of purely pictorial means-form a graphic figure in relation to the verbal utterance”, con evidente funzioni mimetiche e
simboliche (The Figured Poem 9).
Sono comunque privi di iconismo tanto il componimento Church Monuments di Herbert quanto la poesia di Crashaw sul sepolcro di Cristo (Upon
Our Saviours Tombe Wherein Never Man Was Laid).
A
Opere citate, Œuvres citées,
Zitierte Literatur, Works Cited
B
Allen, Don Cameron. Image and Meaning: Metaphoric Traditions in Renaissance
Poetry. Baltimore: Hopkins University Press, 1968.
Bath, Michael. Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance
Culture. London-New York: Longman, 1994.
Bowler, Verjouhi. The Word As Image. London: Studio Vista, 1970.
Cook, Elizabeth. “Figured Poetry”. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld
Institutes 42 (1979), 1-15.
——. Studies in the Registration of Mental Images in Poetry from Shakespeare to
Marvell. London: The Warburg Institute, 1991.
The Poetical Works of William Drummond of Hawthornden. A cura di L.E.
Kestner. Manchester: Victoria University, 1913.
Duncan-Jones, Katherine. “Deep-Dyed Canker Blooms: Botanical Reference in
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 54”. The Review of English Studies 46: 184(1995),
521-25.
Elizabethan Critical Essays. A cura di G. Gregory Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1904.
Ernst, Urlich. “The Figured Poem: Towards A Definition of the Genre”, Visible
Language 20: 1(1986), pp. 8-27;
——. Carmen Figuratum. Köln-Weimar-Wien: Boehlan Verlag, 1991.
Evett, David. “Plane Style: The Tudor Art of Surfaces”. In Literature and the
Visual Arts in Tudor England. Athens-London: University of Georgia Press,
1990, 10-46.
Fineman, Joel. “Shakespeare’s ‘Perjur’d Eye’”. Representations 7(1984), 65-71.
Freinkel, Lisa. Reading Shakespeare’s Will: The Theology of Figure from
Augustine to the Sonnets. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
Gager, William. Exequiae Illustrissimi Equitis, D. Philippi Sidnaei. Oxford: 1587.
Herbert, T. Walter. “Shakespeare’s Word-Play on Tombe”. Modern Language
Notes 64: 4(1949), 235-41.
Higgins, Dick. Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature. Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1981.
Hunt, John Dixon. “Pictura, Scriptura, and Theatrum: Shakespeare and the
Emblem”. Poetics Today 10: 1(1989), 15-71.
43
Innocenti, Loretta. Vis Eloquentiae. Emblematica e persuasione. Venezia:
Marsilio, 1983.
The New Penguin Book of English Verse. A cura di Paul Keegan. London: Penguin,
2001.
Pozzi, Giovanni. La parola dipinta. Milano: Adelphi, 20023.
Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie. A cura di G. Doidge Willcock e
A. Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936.
Quarles, Francis. Emblems. Cambridge: 1643 (1639).
Roberts, Sasha. Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England.
Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003.
Rypson, Piotr. “Visual? Emblematic? Poetry?”, Emblematica 10: 1(1996), pp. 1-13.
Shakespeare, William. Timon of Athens. In The Oxford Shakespeare: The
Complete Works. A cura di G. Taylor e S. Wells. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1988 (1998).
——. Complete Sonnets and Poems. A cura di Colin Burrow. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002.
Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 1997.
Watson, Thomas. Ekatompathia. London: 1582.
Willis, Richard. De re poetica (1573). A cura di ADS Fowler. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1958.
Whitney, Geoffrey. A Choice of Emblemes. London, 1586.
Wilson, Thomas. The Arte of Rhetorique (1553). Amsterdam-New York: Da Capo
Press, Theatrum Orbis terrarum, 1969.
44
In/Security and Discursive
Appropriation in Chuck Palahniuk’s
Fight Club
Serena
Fusco
Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”
Space monkey, sign of the time, time
Space monkey, so outta line, line
Space monkey, sort of divine
And he’s mine, mine, all mine.
(Patty Smith)
It’s coming to America first,
the cradle of the best and of the worst.
It’s here they got the range
and the machinery for change
and it’s here they got the spiritual thirst.
It’s here the family’s broken
and it’s here the lonely say
that the heart has got to open
in a fundamental way:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
(Leonard Cohen)
Introduction
While the conscience and sense of America’s vulnerability, with its
global implications, has exploded in all its enormity after the 9/11 attacks,
45
the redeployment of American security policies, parallel to the reorganization of international security, had been going on since at least the late
1980s, assuming more recognizable forms in the 1990s due to the most
general sense of a “new world order” following the end of the Cold War.
International discourse on security has been inevitably transformed as
America has reinvented itself in the global context in different historical
moments1. In this essay I shall attempt to demonstrate that Chuck Palahniuk’s cult novel Fight Club (1996) comments on global discourses on
vulnerability and security, their variable scale, and how the variability of
this scale illuminates spaces that are liminal to the political sphere – ironically questioning the very boundaries of what is political.
Through the concept of scale, I especially refer to how the discourse
of threat and emancipation from threat is played across individual and
communal levels. In Fight Club, discourses articulating vulnerability – its
disempowering consequences, protective reactions against it, and also its
empowering aspects – are produced in the subject by means of direct
address; correspondingly, they are also claimed, disseminated, and appropriated across various communities and various layers of the public
sphere. In my view, Fight Club comments on a shared sense of vulnerability historically emerging next to a crisis of responsibility. On the one
hand, this crisis of responsibility can be interpreted as sliding towards
dystopian nihilism and as a destruction of any possibility for creating a
viable community. On the other hand, I maintain that the novel precisely
comments on the construction of a community-in-insecurity: more specifically, on the unbalance and clash between different degrees of subjective
responsibility in creating, preserving, and/or destroying a collectivity.
In what follows, firstly, I consider Fight Club’s construction of a fictional world predicated on a generalized sense of shared vulnerability, and
explore how this sense results into a problematic re-appropriation of violence and the creation of a liminal community that challenges the mainstream. Fight Club’s liminal community is a system that works alternatively interrogating and distancing, humanizing and de-humanizing, identifying and un-identifying its members; the inclusiveness of this system is
based on the capacity to relinquish empathy the way the mainstream
knows it, and maybe create liminal (underground, or one might say
“cult”?) forms of empathy.
Secondly, I move on to explore the “sociology of knowledge” behind
the construction of Fight Club’s oppositional community, reflected in the
46
novel’s narrative strategies and structure, and speculate on degrees of
responsibility corresponding to various degrees of embeddedness and
awareness on the part of the members of this collectivity. Both fight club
as a community and the globalized American community that is challenged
by the club’s operations are predicated on a combination of emancipatory
rhetoric (being free, exercising one’s power) and strictly hierarchical structures of awareness and access to knowledge (you are only allowed to know,
and do, that much). In both fight club as oppositional community and the
broader community around it, I argue, threat and emancipation from threat
are privatized, made into commodities, and expropriated in a grim, totalitarian public sphere. At the same time, by constructing fight club as a liminal community, the novel offers a possibility to break this cycle of appropriation, turning a scenario of vulnerability into a reflection on the political
constituencies that endorse protection for certain subjects and exclude
other subjects from the same protection.
Subjects and Contexts of In/Security
To the very bones, the plot and structure of Fight Club are as follows:
A nameless narrator – a young man, apparently in his thirties – has a
white-collar job in a big car company, and lives in a well-kept and stylish
condo; despite his apparently well-rounded and successful life, he suffers
from chronic insomnia and suffocates under a social imperative that
makes him, and thousands like him, links in a compulsive chain of production and consumption: “[g]enerations have been working in jobs they
hate, just so they can buy what they don’t really need” (Palahniuk, Fight
Club 149)2. In order to find some degree of relief from his existential pain,
the narrator begins to attend support groups for people with terminal diseases, and thereby meets Marla Singer, a bizarre outcast who entertains a
similar relationship with reality and for whom he gradually develops a
more-or-less covered sexual interest. After his condo is mysteriously
blown up, he moves in with Tyler Durden, an obscure guy who lives in a
semi-abandoned house and works as a part-time projectionist, waiter, and
soap producer. Almost by chance, one night the narrator and Tyler initiate
“fight club” – namely, a gathering of men who physically confront each
other, two at a time, the fights going on for “as long as they have to” (50).
Fight club is empowering to its members: “[a]fter a night in fight club,
47
everything in the real world gets the volume turned down. Nothing can
piss you off” (49). Fight club grows prodigiously in the whole country and
evolves into Project Mayhem (sic), a guerrilla terrorist organization managed by Tyler that sets out to trouble the corporate world that has created
alienation for the so-called functional members of society and has attacked
and undermined the masculinity of its men. In the second part of the novel,
thanks to Marla, the narrator realizes that Tyler is a product of his own
twisted mind. Tyler is revealed to be the narrator’s alter ego, taking over
his body when he falls asleep. Not buying into the extremist development
of Tyler’s agenda, the narrator attempts to undo Project Mayhem and protect Marla, whom he believes to be in danger. In a final confrontation on
top of the “Parker-Morris Building”, the narrator and his alter ego confront
each other and, in order to stop “Tyler”, the narrator shoots himself. The
enigmatic epilogue suggests that he has not died and has instead become
a patient in a mental institution. In his post-trauma, he believes he is in
heaven and wants to go back to the world of the living – who, in turn, want
“Tyler” back.
The novel is told by the nameless narrator and interspersed, as we
shall see, with other voices. Referring to the style employed, Palahniuk
himself describes it as follows: “jump[ing] … from scene to scene … a
mosaic of different moments and details. Giving them all a continuity and
yet showcasing each moment by not ramming it up against the next
moment” (Palahniuk, Afterword 213).
A sense of mounting chaos and vulnerability, which involves living
under a number of impending threats, the forms assumed by these threats,
and the responses to them constitute in many ways the cultural horizon of
the novel, and are among the novel’s main thematic concerns. Diffused
vulnerability spans from individual to global concerns – from the body, illness, masculine integrity, to the nation, the environment, the earth itself.
This obviously responds to a broad, typically postmodern global loss of
references, and a growing sense of fragmentation and alienation accompanying the end of the “grand narratives” or “metanarratives” that characterized modernity3. The novel opens with what would subsequently
become a paradigmatically apocalyptic scene: the tower of the “ParkerMorris building” is about to collapse, bombed in its foundations, and the
nameless narrator is facing Tyler, his mentor in rebellion, who holds a gun
in the narrator’s mouth. Awaiting the explosion, the two are locked in a
cinematic confrontation, about to sacrifice themselves and enter “eternal
48
life” (11)4. In the shadow of the impending apocalypse, and in the “three
minutes” (15) leading to it, the nameless narrator “remember[s] everything” (ibid.) and the story begins to unfold in retrospective.
This apocalyptic scenario is the one that most obviously resonates
with a posteriori implications of 9/11. It has been repeatedly noted that, in
the ineludible shadow of an event so charged with emotional bearing as
the attacks of 9/11, practically all texts presenting scenarios of terror,
including Fight Club, become charged with a power of prescience (Petersen). If, on the other hand, we make an effort to restrict our frame of reference to the 1990s, and to the self-perception and perception of the U.S.
in the global context during the pre-9/11 decade, a text such as Palahniuk’s
still resonates with a profound cultural shift - also reflected in other texts,
such as Don De Lillo’s Mao II and Underworld: “the shift from secure
paranoia of the Cold War to the insecure paranoia of a postnational age in
which everything is connected” (Knight 193-94).
After this apocalyptic intro, chapter two portrays incoming death,
and an overall realization of vulnerability, as suspended between empathic identification and distance. The narrator’s alienation from the trap of his
white-collar job and from his life as a consumer of commodities – a life
that is frightfully perfect, and because of that curbing and ultimately castrating – manifests itself in the form of insomnia: “[e]verything is so far
away, a copy of a copy of a copy. The insomnia distance of everything,
you can’t touch anything and nothing can touch you” (21). Chapter two
follows the narrator attending various support groups for people with terminal diseases. Attendance of these groups appears to him as the only way
to empathize with fellow-humans: “it’s easy to cry when you realize that
everyone you love will reject you or die” (17). “ ‘It will be alright,’ Bob
says. ‘You cry now.’ ” (16). The narrator’s rediscovered sense of vulnerability is what offers him an escape from the isolation and unreality that
characterize his life: “after a support group, I felt more alive than I’d ever
felt” (22). This also applies to Marla: “[Marla] never dreamed she could
feel so marvelous. She actually felt alive. […] All her life, she never saw
a dead person. There was no real sense of life because she had nothing to
contrast it with” (38). Neither the narrator nor Marla, whom he immediately recognizes as a fellow-faker, would, strictly speaking, be entitled to
enter this community of the terminally diseased. Nonetheless, they seek
solace from attending the groups and feel entitled to belong to a community racing towards death because they belong to the same chain of alien49
ating consumption, albeit in different positions. The narrator’s stance is
actually extremely ambiguous, suspended as it is between empathic identification and distancing due to the fact that he is not, strictly speaking, ill
(and neither is Marla). According to Alex E. Blazer, the narrator is a
fetishist in his approach to the people in the support groups, just like he is
a fetishist in his relation to the consumer goods against which he has for a
long time defined himself: “he is still invested in his life of deadly goods
despite its pathological ramifications. When stuff no longer fills him up,
dying people do” (Blazer 185). On the other hand, the narrator discriminates among the ghastly presences around him. While everybody speeds,
inevitably, towards death, not everyone does it in the same way: “Okay in
that brainy brain-food philosophy way, we’re all dying, but Marla isn’t
dying the way Chloe was dying” (37). The novel apparently suggests that
the chain of alienating consumption is both shared and not the same for
everyone. In other words, despite generalized vulnerability, different
forms and levels of vulnerability, insecurity, and pain exist.
While illness threatens survival in its barest form, the novel also
describes threats that are both more culturally specific and more collective. After the nameless narrator has “met” his alter ego Tyler and they
have initiated fight club, the forces that threaten human survival are
played out at increasingly communal levels: “[f]or thousands of years,
human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and
now history expected me to clean up after everyone” (104). “Recycling
and speed-limits are bullshit. They’re like someone who quits smoking on
his deathbed” (125).
With its gruesome evocation of waste, dumpsters, toxicity, and environmental defilement, the novel heavily plays on global dimensions of insecurity and vulnerability. Ironically reversed, those threats turn into empowerment strategies and weapons in the hands of Tyler and his followers.
Bacteria and illness, an almost inevitable byproduct of the healthcare system, are appropriated by those who can use them: “I asked the doctor where
could we get our hands on some of these hepatitis bugs, and he’s drunk
enough to laugh. […] Everything goes to the medical waste dump, he says”
(85). Becoming aware of the fundamental vulnerability of each individual
becomes the indispensable starting point of Tyler’s project: “[s]omeday you
will die and, until you know that, you’re useless to me” (76).
Economic insecurity and a job market that is unable to provide for
the opportunities that are an essential component of the American Dream
50
form another good portion of the novel’s backdrop: “[d]on’t think of this
as rejection. Think of this as downsizing” (113). Economic insecurity also
threatens human survival in its barest forms – for instance, through denial
of care for those who do not have access to the corporate health system.
Marla does not have a health insurance, and ends up in
a clinic where slumped scarecrow mothers sat in plastic chairs […] The children
were sunken and dark around their eyes […] and the mother scratched at mats of
dandruff from scalp yeast infections out of control (108).
The novel darkly prophesies that social inequality might return with
a vengeance and terrorize a corporate world that depends on it without
acknowledging so:
The people you try to step on, we’re everyone you depend on. We’re the people
who do your laundry and cook your food and serve you dinner. We make your bed.
We guard you while you’re asleep. We drive the ambulances. We direct your call.
[…] We process your insurance claims and credit card charges. We control every
part of your life.
We are the middle children of history. […] And we’re just learning this fact [… ].
So don’t fuck with us” (166).
What do issues as various as the ones just mentioned have to do with
an umbrella-concept as broad as “security” – and how does this concept
contribute to contextualize Fight Club in the episteme of the 1990s? From
the 1990s onwards5 the purview of security – that is, the individuation of
threats, their management, and the development of a discourse aimed at
their removal – has expanded, both in the U.S. and globally. For instance,
as noted by Peter Andreas and Richard Price, increasingly after the end of
the Cold War, the American national security apparatus has been massively redeployed and used in handling issues that are both more limited and
broader than State-level ones: from the late 1980s on there has been “an
outward expansion of the portfolio of national security from previous
internal policing domains, and the deployment of the external military
apparatus for ‘operations other than war’, involving a variety of international policing missions” (Andreas and Price 31). Security and protection
as perceived imperatives and diffused discourses, and the very idea of
security, have massively moved away from being exclusively centered on
intrastate conflicts and on the State as the ultimate subject and the privi51
leged organizational structure enforcing security. If the State was previously envisioned as the principal guarantor of its citizens’ safety, entitled
to protect them from external threats, scholars have subsequently challenged this view. It has been argued that the State simply cannot be the
ultimate frame of reference for policies that have much broader implications and for threats that have a global impact. Moreover, as presently
remarked, a number of threats are increasingly listed under security concerns that call for a joint action and collaboration among states and various other political entities. Among these concerns are environmental risks,
unequal development and consequent economic insecurity, the management of health threats, and domestic and international terrorism. This is a
scenario that intertwines with what Emma Rothschild has called “horizontally” and “vertically” extended conceptions of security. In a vertically-extended conception of security, security as an ideal condition is seen
as the very root of human emancipation, and is a matter that is relevant to
the human global community and the individual. In a horizontally-extended conception of security, protection, a traditionally military concern, is
extended to the “civilian” fields of the political, social, and environmental6. In this context of extension, the U.S play a pivotal role as the hegemonic force on the international stage after the end of the Cold War.
Within this context, I find especially meaningful that a novel such as Fight
Club reflects many of the concerns of post-Cold War discourses on security: from poverty and social unrest to environmental issues, from health
to travel safety to terrorism.
The aforementioned extension implies, I would suggest, that the
predicament of security, especially as it has been discussed from the 1990s
on, cuts across several levels of subjectivization: protection is exercised
by various collective subjects, and it is both the condition and the consequence of the emancipation of private individuals. Moreover, especially
from the 1990s on, parallel to its enlargement, security has been an
increasingly contested concept, and this inevitably interrogates both the
constituency of the political and the nature of subjectivity. The very idea
of a “subject of security” is fraught with contradictions. The 1990s are
increasingly the decade when there is growing, global agreement that
security is important, but what is the subject itself of security is contested.
As noted by R. B. J. Walker, the “difficulties of analyzing the meaning of
security […] [largely] derive from […] its derivation from a prior account
of who or what is to be secured” (Walker 68, my emphasis). Not all sub52
jects are entitled to political status in the same way: consequently, not all
subjects are comprised in the terms in which we reflect on security.
Scholars in Critical Security Studies have argued that the main concern of
any reflection on security, insecurity, and threat should be a politically situated interrogation of which subjects are protected and for what reasons,
because neither all individuals nor all communities are immediately subsumed under the umbrella of the political7.
It is my contention that Palahniuk’s Fight Club might also be read as
a novel that comments on a generalized, yet simultaneously diversified
vulnerability, and on the crisis of reference as to who is entitled to security, and which entities are responsible for safeguarding security, precisely
through problematically linking two levels – the communal and the individual. While Fight Club mirrors coeval security concerns – from the individual to the global – at a thematic level, it also reproduces an interrogation of subjectivity (its extension and its limits) with relation to a political
constituency. This interrogation is one of the key features of a critical
reflection on vulnerability and in/security8. What is secured, and under
what conditions? Why should it be? What implications does this bear? The
aforementioned reflections urge me to interrogate community and its construction in the novel, and how this construction bears, in turn, on discourses on vulnerability and in/security – and to what extent, correspondingly, vulnerability and in/security become, in Fight Club, keywords for
reflecting politically on the construction of a collectivity and the role of
the individual in it: “[m]odern accounts of security are precisely about
subjectivity, subjection, and the conditions under which we have been
constructed as subjects subjected to subjection. They tell us who we must
be” (Walker 71).
De-Individualization, Community, Public and Private Violence
Fight club is, in many ways, a novel about the very construction of a
community, and, correspondingly, a reflection on collectivity. Scholars
have repeatedly focused their attention on the misogynist, hyper-masculine character of this collectivity, in some cases intertwining this reflection
with one on its anti-democratic, fundamentally totalitarian character. Fight
club as community and its later development, Project Mayhem, have especially been discussed by scholars and critics who have written on
Fincher’s filmic version, reading it next to other films – especially from
53
the Reagan years – celebrating the tradition of the violent hero, advocate
of self-made justice, “reclaiming American pride and masculine prowess”
(Barker 173)9. Fight Club members, all men, mostly but not exclusively
white, gather around Tyler Durden, and the rhetorical structure of this
gathering is provided by the rules that are repeated like a mantra at the
opening of each fight club meeting. Palahniuk writes that, culturally
speaking, the novel filled a gap, providing, at a time when the book market was mostly occupied by works offering new models of social bonding
and solidarity for women, “a new social model for men to share their
lives” (Palahniuk, Afterword 214).
In their variety and diversity, critical responses to Fight Club – to
Palahniuk’s novel, but also and especially to David Fincher’s cinematic
rendition, that has in turn made the novel and Palahniuk himself into pop
cult icons – bespeak, one might argue, both its liberating and its oppressive potential. They also bespeak the difficulty, and the urge, to pinpoint
Tyler’s political stance. Is Tyler a revolutionary? An anarchist? A fascist?
Is he a liberator of the oppressed, or is he an oppressor? Where is he to be
located in the political spectrum? Generally speaking, readings can be
divided between those who see Fight Club (both the novel and the film)
as the expression of a totalitarian, repressive, and fundamentally regressive political view and those who see it as liberating and iconoclastic –
albeit not necessarily politically progressive or constructive. In Peter
Mathews’s words, the “bulk of the criticism has […] centered on whether
Tyler Durden is a positive or negative role model, particularly in the light
of the political statements that issue from his mouth” (Mathews 82). The
aforementioned simultaneous difficulty and urge to locate Tyler’s stance
politically10 also bespeaks the necessity to discriminate, as Judith Butler
would say, between identifications that grant authority and identifications
that hinder being heard in the public sphere. To many, Tyler’s voice may
be a seductive but ultimately “uninhabitable identification” (Butler xix),
embodying a self-destructive style that cannot result into any articulable
political project shared by a collectivity. In this sense, the end of the novel
is in itself ambiguous. Tyler disappears from the world when the nameless
narrator’s extreme solution “kills” him, but, in a messianic expectation,
his people wait for his return. When the narrator finds himself in what
looks like a psychiatric hospital after shooting himself in his attempt to kill
his alter ego, he is surrounded by signs that the cult of fight club is not
over – only postponed:
54
Because every once in a while, somebody brings me my lunch tray and my meds
and he has a black eye or his forehead is swollen with stitches, and he says:
“We miss you Mr. Durden”.
Or somebody with a broken nose pushes a mop past me and whispers:
“Everything’s going according to the plan.” […]
“We look forward to getting you back.” (208)
The creation of a community in Fight Club is accompanied by
extreme experiences that border on de-individualization, on collectivization as an obliteration of self – a move that can be easily seen as profoundly totalitarian, especially in the context of American culture – one
that notoriously values individualism. In the terms of one of Tyler’s followers – members of “Project Mayhem”, called by the narrator “space
monkeys”:
“You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile.”
The space monkey continues, “Our culture has made us all the same. No one is
truly white or black or rich, anymore. We all want the same. Individually, we are
nothing.” (134)
Lynn M. Ta and Jennifer Barker discuss Fincher’s film version of
Fight Club, pointing out the repressive quality of a project that is only
empowering to Tyler, fight club fighters, and members of Project
Mayhem: in the end, Ta argues, they replicate the same oppressive structure that they discern and criticize in corporate capitalism. According to
Jennifer Barker, Fight Club portrays “a system based on repression”
(Barker 180). After the narrator has realized that he is Tyler, he attempts
to invest Tyler’s authority for canceling both fight club and Project
Mayhem, but he is confronted by a compact group of man and a voice
reading out the legendary rules, and he is mercilessly evicted from the
venue where the men have gathered. His attempt at re-enacting control
and authority clashes with anonymity: “I’m not leaving. I’m not giving up.
[…] I’m in control here. […] Evict fight club member, now!” (180). One
member comes to the point of believing that Tyler has made himself into
“homework” – an exemplification of how the project works. Despite the
iconic, legendary status of Tyler as the founder of fight club, Tyler’s rules
are increasingly depersonalized as the project develops, and the founder
seriously risks becoming – according to a collectivized mechanism of ret55
ribution echoing Maximilien de Robespierre’s fate in the French
Revolution11 – the illustrious victim of the system he has set in motion.
The iron discipline he encounters in the murderous Project Mayhem members is, allegedly, not specifically addressed to him – it is the ecumenical
grip directed at any anonymous infringer of the law: “[n]othing personal,
Mr Durden” (188). The torture he is subjected to is the terror of physical
emasculation, the threat of having his testicles cut off (187-91), replicating the occasion when Tyler had orchestrated this very torture for another
illustrious victim, the Seattle Police Commissioner (164-66).
Critical reactions to Fight Club, just like to a number of other controversial texts of the late 1980s and early-mid 1990s12, partly indict it
(both the novel and Fincher’s film) as an encouragement to gratuitous violence13. Mark Seltzer has discussed America’s “wound culture” as one in
which “death is the theater for the living” (Seltzer 22) – one in which, in
other words, it is the public sphere itself that is seen as pathological: “the
very idea of ‘the public’ has become inseparable from spectacles of bodily and mass violence” (Seltzer 21). Fight Club intensely draws on this
logic. Among Tyler’s objectives is to aestheticize violence, make it iconic: “[t]his isn’t really death […] We’ll be a legend” (11); “[a] real opera of
a death” (203).
Per Serritslev Petersen reads Fight Club (next to Bret Easton Ellis’s
Glamorama) as a “terrorist pretext”, in the sense that Fight Club embodies a typified American terrorist imagery that would be, he argues, exploited by 9/11 terrorists in their recreation of terrorism as spectacle. To a certain extent, Petersen seems to suggest that a text such as Fight Club might
“literally” be a pretext, bearing some degree of “responsibility” in the light
of the tragic events that would follow. This responsibility would reside in
the rhetoric realm, the realm not only of imagination but of the use of
imagery, if this conflation of a moral/legal field with a rhetoric one can
ever make sense. This perspective interestingly echoes and reverses Palahniuk’s own. In the afterword to the UK edition of Fight Club, the author
raises and – maybe hastily – dismisses the issue of accountability in the
public sphere:
Once, a friend worried these stories might prompt people to copycat, and I insisted that we were just blue-collar nobodies living in Oregon with public school educations. There was nothing we could imagine that a million people weren’t already
doing (Palahniuk, Afterword 215).14
56
Extreme Measures: Addressing You
“It’s what you don’t know that matters most.”
(Victor Ward in Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama)
In the previous paragraph I have discussed Palahniuk’s novel as a
problematic reflection on community building, one that stretches the
boundaries and limits of how a speaking position can/should be in order
to assume authority in the public sphere, and what the consequences of
this assumption might be. Fight Club conjures up this reflection by means
of a strategy of depersonalization that can be seen as “totalitarian”. In this
paragraph, I shall elaborate on this and argue that the text also presents a
parallel streak of valorization of the individual, or address. In a sense, the
whole novel, with its structure of narrative personae, amounts to a structure of address, or interrogation. In terms of narrative voice, Fight Club
oscillates between first and second personhood. While the novel is ostensibly told in the first person by the nameless narrator, on several occasions
this voice performs an address through the second-person “you”.
On the one hand, the “you” expresses an estrangement of the narrator from himself15 – justifiable, in diegetic terms, if one takes into account
the distance he experiences with relation to all events – especially in the
first part of the novel, due to his insomnia. On the other hand, if this is (as
repeatedly underlined) an expression of (pathological) alienation and
removal from human feelings, this distance is also a way to handle vulnerability. “You” emerges at the moment of trauma and unbearable pain.
The scene where Tyler pours lye on the narrator’s hand, painfully branding him for life, is in this sense emblematic. Second personhood intervenes, like a voice-over in guided meditation, creating a distance between
the conscience and the pain:
Guided meditation works for cancer, it can work for this.
“Look at your hand”, Tyler says.
Don’t look at your hand.
Don’t think of the word searing or flesh or tissue or charred.
Don’t hear yourself cry. (75)
While it expresses and simultaneously creates distance, the “you” is
the sign of a need for proximity, a call for an experience that vanquishes
alienation: “[d]on’t shut this out,” Tyler says, calling the narrator back to
57
his painful experience exactly when he is attempting to master it by virtue
of removal (75). Especially in chapter two, the “you” also creates a bond
between the alienated (male) subject, his emotion, and his peers. The
“you” shadows and reproduces, in the narrative frame, the outreach of
empathy in a numb, dead world, the outreach the narrator seems to be after
in order to overcome the white-collar alienation that is to him a prefiguration of death.
On the contrary, and reversing this logic of empathy, when the “you”
becomes completely “other”, it can be appropriated. “You” becomes
objectified in death and the possibility of empathy is foreclosed for good:
“the amazing miracle of death. One minute, you’re a person, the next
minute, you’re an object” (153). In a paradigmatically terrorist nightmare,
“you” is a potential target, and anyone might become a “homework
assignment” (187) for a member of Project Mayhem: “Tyler said the goal
of Project Mayhem had nothing to do with other people. Tyler didn’t care
if other people got hurt or not” (122).
As demonstrated by the previous examples, second personhood
works by simultaneously involving and distancing. The narrative “you”
creates bonds and unbinds. If, at the beginning of the novel, the narrator’s
recipe against alienation and vulnerability is a search for human empathy
through a sense of shared vulnerability, Tyler’s invention of fight club first
and Project Mayhem afterwards builds up an empathy that is based on a
sense of shared vulnerability turned against itself, until empathy in the
compassionate sense is no more, and a different form of empathy and
mutual protection emerges – one that I would refer to as answering a
“cult” logic, at the border between restricted circles and mainstream society. “The goal was to teach each man in the project that he had the power
to control history. We, each of us, can take control of the world” (122; my
emphasis). How potentially expansive is that “we”?
This cult logic is mirrored by a specific form of passing on knowledge – one that consists in how-to-instructions, “stuff [that] isn’t in any
history book” (13). While this kind of information – including, for
instance, instructions for preparing homemade explosives – is “not in the
history books”, it circulates in the “cult” societal formations that stretch
the borders of the political. The passing on of information in Fight Club is
a fundamental locus of confrontation and negotiation for the community.
The “you” who is the recipient of lists and instructions can be potentially
extended without limits – a possibility reflected in the Xeroxed copies of
58
fight club rules made by the narrator. The novel’s style replicates this logics of cult extension in several passages, not only through its do-it lists but
also through “philosophical” ready-made aphorisms, Tyler’s favorite
mode of enunciation, replicated by his followers: “[t]he mechanic starts
talking, and it’s pure Tyler Durden” (149).
In the central part of the novel, knowledge and discursive power are
more and more appropriated by Tyler. A sharp division is established
between Tyler, who “knows”, and those who have something we might
define “partial knowledge” and act regardless. Tyler asks for loyalty, and
his role is that of a vehicle of empowerment asking his disciples to act
responsibly on limited information: “the rule in Project Mayhem is you
have to trust Tyler” (130). As Project Mayhem gains momentum, its members are asked to be fully responsible for a tiny extent of communal construction, while simultaneously they must limit their scope of accountability, awareness, and responsibility to that small, unrelated extent:
You do the little job you’re trained to do.
Pull a lever.
Push a button.
You don’t understand any of it, and then you just die. (12)
They all know what to do. It’s part of Project Mayhem. No one guy understands
the whole plan, but each guy is trained to do one simple task perfectly. (130)
The confrontation that emerges in the last part of the novel between
the narrator and Tyler reflects a sociopolitical condition in which the transmission/blockage or the dosage of narrative information is essential.
Tyler’s “political” appeal becomes more and more distanced and ironically framed as the narrator realizes that he is Tyler and attempts to master
him(self). Simultaneously, the narrator gradually rises to Tyler’s level of
awareness, to his knowledge: “I know this because Tyler knows this” (12,
26, 112, 185, 203). The confrontation between the two also appears to be
one around knowledge and its social uses. The personality split can be
seen as allegorizing a crisis of responsibility: while the narrator observes
that everybody do their little job without really understanding much of it
(12, 193), he simultaneously claims full responsibility for his actions: “the
world is going crazy … And I’m responsible for it all” (193). In my view,
the personality split portrayed in the novel allegorizes, to some extent, a
system that ascribes full accountability to the individual, while denying
59
her/him access to full information, offering just “tiny”, “single serving”
(using the novel’s terms) information in the form of do-it lists.
Against the backdrop of vulnerability and generalized insecurity I
have discussed in the first paragraph, the simultaneous evocation, so to
speak, of the individual side of security handling can be ironic but is, in
this frame of individual address, highly significant. The perception of vulnerability, security, and insecurity is by nature subjective. As such, it stems
from the condition of not knowing enough, or, in some cases, knowing too
much. Vulnerability as the state of being in/secure is related to the handling and dosage of information – determining what should be made public and what should not, what should be concealed and what, on the contrary, should be shared. An ironic echo of this is to be found in the novel’s
description of a highly individualized form of safety – flight safety. The
narrator flies a lot for professional reasons, and on one of his flights he
observes an airline safety card:
Life insurance pays off triple if you die on a business trip. I prayed for wind shear
effect. I prayed for pelicans sucked into the turbines and loose bolts and ice on the
wings. […] I prayed for a crash. […]
I study the people on the laminated airline seat card. A woman floats in the ocean,
her brown air spread out behind her, her seat cushion clutched to her chest. The
eyes are wide open, but the woman doesn’t smile or frown. In another picture, people calm as Hindu cows reach up from their seats toward oxygen masks sprung out
of the ceiling.
This must be an emergency.
Oh.
We’ve lost cabin pressure. (26)
The issue of vulnerability and the handling of security as paradoxically and significantly suspended between public and private emerge in
the narrator’s job. The narrator works as a “Recall Campaign Coordinator”
for a car company. His position consists in assessing the costs of court settlements in case of incidents caused by defective vehicles versus the cost
of recalling defective vehicles:
I’ll be there to apply the formula. I’ll keep the secret intact. […]
A times B times C equals X. […]
If X is greater than the cost of a recall, we recall the cars and no one gets hurt.
If X is less than the cost of a recall, then we don’t recall.
60
Everywhere I go, there’s the burned-up wadded-up shell of a car waiting for me. I
know where all the skeletons are. Consider this my job security. (30-31)
As it has been noted by several critics, this passage shows how
authentic human security is disregarded in favor of a calculated, covered,
cynical view of benefits versus losses for the sake of capital. In this context, a widespread threat is provided by corporate capitalism as such, with
its imperative of compulsive commodity consumption. On the other hand,
I would like to emphasize that “keeping the secret intact” reduces security handling to a private issue and silently involves the individual through
a disguised address to “you”. While not revealing full information for the
sake of profit, the narrator’s company indirectly invests (just like airlines
in printing laminated safety cards) individuals with direct, cynical responsibility for handling risk.
It seems to me that the subject of in/security and vulnerability is
located somewhere between being protected by someone else and becoming the active agent of one’s protection, and the reason for this is the fact
that in/security and vulnerability inevitably oscillate between individual
and communal dimensions. We have already seen that an interrogation of
the idea of security also interrogates the constituency of the political and
the nature of subjectivity. R.B.J. Walker notes that theorizations of security (especially dominant ones) are often predicated on a “prior understanding of what we mean by the political” (Walker 68). While discourses on
security have been enlarged to a global dimension, they are also, in my
opinion, increasingly “rooted in the subject” – increasingly articulated at
the level of the individual. This rooting in the subject is manifold. At one
level, it certainly bespeaks the increasing bio-political control16 on the
individual exercised in the name of national/global security, and engenders all the preoccupations related to this increased control. On the other
hand, it also draws on the idea that security (and lack thereof) is a subjective, lived, experienced condition, and that to be secure means to be in the
condition to exercise one’s individual prerogatives with no hindrances or
anxieties – almost a matter of individual freedom. To paraphrase the narrator of Fight Club, the skeletons stay buried, and the secret is kept intact.
Henry Giroux’s approach to Fight Club is relevant here. Giroux has
offered a powerful and highly influential critique of the film version of
Fight Club17. I find especially relevant how Giroux’s argument links individualism and totalitarianism. He stresses choice in Fight Club – choice as
61
individual, privatized, depoliticized – as the key to a “fake” rebellion
staged by the film. This rebellion is, according to Giroux, inauthentic,
exactly because it pertains to the realm of the individual, and is antidemocratic in its core – mirror to a historical period, he maintains, that combines a cult for the individual with a political apparatus that is increasingly pervasive and repressive.
While Giroux has, in my view, a powerful insight here, I would follow up with a question: must a foregrounding of individual free will and
choice inevitably be seen as the expression of a privatized, depoliticized
sense of self? Correspondingly, must, for instance, the representation of
violence and in/security in Fight Club be seen either as the cipher of a
pathological public sphere or as an expression of privatized individualism? Or can the representation of violence and in/security in Palahniuk’s
novel, suspended as it is between private and public, individual and collective dimensions, be of any consequence for a reflection on different
modes of subjectivization, and how they relate to the construction of collectivities? Judith Butler’s reflection seems to point in this direction when
she observes that “one can even experience […] abhorrence, mourning,
anxiety, and fear, and have all of these emotional dispositions […] endeavor to produce another public culture and another public policy in which
suffering unexpected violence and loss and reactive aggression are not
accepted as the norm of political life” (Butler xiv). In Butler’s discourse,
not only anxiety and fear, hence a sense of vulnerability and a lack of security, should become pretexts of critical political reflection, but the very
cycle connecting a breach of security, aggression, and the entitlement to
retaliate appears to be a political construction, not mere private violence
that is not worth discussing. To my mind, it is exactly this oscillation
between public and private discourses that appears to be significant18. To
a certain extent, Giroux’s discussion of Fight Club paradoxically stresses
this significance in linking individual choice to a political context – political, that is, to the extent that it entails a re-articulation of individualism
versus a problematic enlargement (and not a shrinkage) of the public
sphere.
62
A
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
Note, Notes, Anmerkungen, Notes
B
As a seminal reference study that tackles post-Cold War developments of the
concept of security, see Rothschild. One initial question to keep in mind
when confronting the concept of security would be: due the centrality of
America within discourses that revolve around security as an issue of global scope, to what extent is the reinvention of global vulnerability and search
for global protection America-inflected?
This is not to say that America is the force behind all post-1980s discourses on
security: on the other hand, America is an increasingly globalized subject of
discourse and style of discourse, and in that sense the world is heavily
Americanized – and the discourse of security does not constitute an exception.
The novel was originally published in the U.S. in 1996. The edition I shall
quote from was published in the UK in 2006 with an afterword by the author.
From now on, references to this edition of the novel will be included parenthetically in the text.
See Lyotard.
Being held at gunpoint does not make the situation look as self-sacrifice for
the anonymous narrator, unless one keeps in mind that the narrator and Tyler
are actually the same person.
See Andreas and Price; Rothschild; Krause and Williams; Buzan and
Hansen; Williams; Peoples and Vaughan-Williams.
See Rothschild.
See Walker.
See Walker.
Barker refers to Robin Wood, engaging her as follows: “Wood […] argues
that movies like Star Wars (Lucas, 1977) engaged with the fear of fascism
from inside – the anxiety that a capitalist democracy has more in common
with fascism and totalitarianism than can be acknowledged. While these
films establish an American individualist ego as oppositional to a fascistic or
totalitarian system, their plot belies a fundamentally conservative adventure
narrative” (Barker 173).
This reflects an urge to locate the novel itself politically, in many respects
overlapping Tyler’s statements and the ideology behind the book. According
to this view, Tyler’s statements would reflect the author’s political stance.
The French Revolution is openly referred to in the novel (19-20).
63
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
64
Among these controversial works I would list Bret Easton Ellis’s novel
American Psycho and films such as Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and
Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers.
See Ta.
Slavoj Žižek’s has performed a Lacanian reading of Fight Club across several of his works (see Žižek 2002, 2003, and 2004), pointing its “extreme”
potential for a reflection on political change. Petersen refers to Žižek when
he points out the eerie, spectacular and déjà-vu quality of the 9/11 attacks (a
perception to which, in his view, Fight Club itself contributes) and how this
(paradoxically, in my view) pairs with a “passion for the real” (Žižek reading Alain Badiou) that places authenticity in acts of violent transgression.
Second personhood may be seen as suggesting the presence of Tyler as a
veiled second narrator from the very beginning.
The concepts of “biopolitics” and “biopower” have their roots in Michel
Foucault’s work. They have become key concepts in the philosophical debate
of the late twentieth century, and have been appropriated and elaborated by
Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri. My usage of the adjective “biopolitical” here points to the importance of discerning and assessing
individual life choices and habits in order to exercise sociopolitical control –
and articulate a convincing collective representation of security.
Commenting on the filmic version of the nameless narrator, named “Jack”,
Giroux writes that he is “no longer a producer of goods”. In Giroux’s reading, the crisis of (white) masculinity in the 1990s is related, among else, to
the crisis of industrial culture. In other words, the emphasis on consumption
fosters increasing alienation from the process of production and from the
products themselves. See Giroux.
In this sense, former President George W. Bush’s “dead or alive” doctrine is
the public articulation of a “private justice” mentality, but it does not bear
less public value because of that.
In more recent times, the “private execution” of Osama Bin Laden on part of
U.S. military is a case that exemplifies many of the points I have been
attempting to make. The logics implemented have been those of “private justice”. Following Bin Laden’s elimination, President Barack Obama’s statement “the world is a better place” resonates in my ear as a claim for a “collaborative”, globalized, open, public politics on security – a posteriori. This
political act has been performed by US military forces as a “lone ranger”
operation, and has been, with minimal time lag, articulated as allegedly
investing the whole globe with its far-reaching positive effects.
A
Opere citate, Œuvres citées,
Zitierte Literatur, Works Cited
B
Andreas, Peter, and Price, Richard. “From War Fighting to Crime Fighting:
Transforming the American National Security State.” International Studies
Review 3.3 (2001): 31-52.
Barker, Jennifer. “ ‘A Hero Will Rise’: The Myth of the Fascist Man in Fight Club
and Gladiator.” Literature Film Quarterly 36.3 (2008): 171-87.
Blazer, Alex E. “Glamorama, Fight Club, and the Terror of Narcissist Abjection.”
American Fiction of the 1990s: Reflections of History and Culture. Ed. Jay
Prosser. London: Routledge, 2008. 177-89.
Butler, Judith. Preface. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence.
London: Verso, 2004. xi-xxi.
Buzan, Barry and Hansen, Lene, eds. The Evolution of International Security
Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Del Gizzo, Susanne. “The American Dream Unhinged: Romance and Reality in
The Great Gatsby and Fight Club.” The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 6.1
(2007-2008): 69-94.
Giroux, Henry A. “Private Satisfactions and Public Disorders: Fight Club,
Patriarchy, and the Politics of Masculine Violence.” JAC, 21.1 (2001): 1-31.
Knight, Peter. “Beyond the Cold War in Don DeLillo’s Mao II and Underworld.”
American Fiction of the 1990s: Reflections of History and Culture. Ed. Jay
Prosser. London: Routledge, 2008. 193-205.
Krause, Keith, and Michael C. Williams, eds. Critical Security Studies: Concepts
and Cases. London: Routledge, 1997.
Lyotard, Jean-François. La condition postmoderne – Rapport sur le savoir. Paris:
Editions de Minuit, 1979.
Mathews, Peter. “Diagnosing Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.” Stirrings Still: The
International Journal of Existential Literature 2.2 (2005): 81-104.
Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. London: Vintage Books, 2006.
——. Afterword. Fight Club. London: Vintage Books, 2006. 209-18.
Peoples, Columba, and Vaughan-Williams, Nick eds. Critical Security Studies: An
Introduction. London: Routledge, 2010.
Petersen, Per Serritslev. “9/11 and the Problem of Imagination: Fight Club and
Glamorama as Terrorist Pretexts.” Orbis Litterarium 60 (2005): 133-44.
65
Rothschild, Emma. “What is Security?” Daedalus 124.3 (1995): 53-98.
Seltzer, Mark. Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. London:
Routledge, 1998.
Ta, Lynn M. “Hurt so Good: Fight Club, Masculine Violence, and the Crisis of
Capitalism.” The Journal of American Culture 29.3 (2006): 265-77.
Walker, R. B. J. “The Subject of Security.” Critical Security Studies: Concepts and
Cases. Ed. Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams. London: Routlegde,
1997.
Williams, Paul D., ed. Security Studies: An Introduction. London: Routledge,
2008.
Wood, Robin. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan – and Beyond. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2003.
Žižek, Slavoj. “An Ethical Plea for Lies and Masochism.” Lacan and
Contemporary Film. Eds. Todd McGowan and Sheila Kunkle. New York:
Other Press, 2004, 173-86.
——. “The Ambiguity of the Masochist Social Link.” Perversion and the Social
Relation. Ed. Molly Ann Rothenberg, Slavoj Žižek, and Dennis A. Foster.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003, 112-25.
——. “Afterword: Lenin’s Choice.” Revolution at the Gates: Žižek on Lenin, The
1917 Writings. Ed. Slavoj Žižek. London: Verso, 2002, 250-63.
66
One Last Austrian Cigarette:
Italo Svevo and Habsburg Trieste
Salvatore
Pappalardo
Rutgers University, The State University of New Jersey
D
ebates concerning the Svevo affair (“il caso Svevo”) have traditionally been conducted against the background of a Risorgimento-flavored literary historiography, which was invested in representing the modern
history of Habsburg Trieste as a teleological struggle towards unification
with the Italian Kingdom. This approach has left the question of Svevo’s
complex network of cultural identifications largely unexplored. More
recent scholarship has started to investigate Svevo within the contexts of
Trieste’s loyalty to the Habsburg monarchy and, more generally, of the
city’s multiple cultural and political allegiances1. Building on these contributions, I argue that in La Coscienza di Zeno (Zeno’s Conscience) Svevo
purposefully inscribes himself within a Habsburg literary tradition
through Zeno’s association between writing and smoking Austrian cigarettes. By emphasizing Zeno’s indifference to national identification and
his allegiance to the metropolitan identity of Habsburg Trieste, the text
calls attention to Svevo’s liminal status as a Habsburg subject writing in
Italian, rather than placing him in an exclusively Italian national tradition.
I also contend that Zeno challenges the Italian cultural nationalism of
Irredentist Trieste by means of an epistemology of the vernacular. The protagonist’s famous statement, according to which one can only lie in Italian,
introduces an epistemological instability within the narration and exposes
the contingent nature of his linguistic choice. Zeno’s refusal to fully commit to the concept of nation obliquely mirrors Svevo’s own urban patrio67
tism, which was based on two fundamental considerations. First, as a
shrewd businessman, Svevo was well aware of the fact that Trieste’s prosperity depended upon Habsburg economic policy. In addition, like many
other intellectuals of his generation sharing the supranational mentality of
a thriving mercantile bourgeoisie, he attributed to Habsburg Trieste the
unique role of mediator between German, Italian and Slavic cultures.
While Svevo certainly welcomed an increased cultural autonomy for
Italians in the city, he was at the same time very distrustful of the rising
nationalism. This approach to the cultural politics of Svevo’s novel suggests the author’s proximity to the positions of Austro-Marxism and its
Adriatic offshoot, namely Triestine Socialism, whose goal was not a dismantling of the empire, but a constitutional reform that would turn the
state into a federation of all the peoples under Habsburg rule.
In the course of this paper, I shall first discuss the tension between
Italian standard and dialect in Svevo’s earlier novels. I will then continue
with Svevo’s La Coscienza, where the protagonist’s autobiographical
account springs from a seminal Ur-memory: the clandestine smoking of an
Austrian brand of cigarettes that displayed the Habsburg coat of arms.
Subsequently, I will consider how in the novel the confessions are presented to the reader as a diary that the narrator is asked to write by his psychoanalyst. While the genre would suggest a personal and intimate tone
for Zeno’s confessions, the narrator is keenly aware of the fact that his therapeutic autobiography is also a public document. Not only will the doctor read it, but he also publishes it to punish Zeno’s disbelief in psychoanalysis. In this tangle of conceit and lies, Zeno constantly reassures his
readership of his Italian loyalty. A closer reading, I suggest, reveals a set
of rhetorical strategies that aim instead at undermining the very cultural
politics of Italian nationalists to which Zeno allegedly subscribes. Zeno’s
mimicry is a stratagem of resistance aimed at destabilizing Italian cultural
hegemony.
The literary pseudonym that the Triestine businessman and industrialist Aaron Hector Schmitz adopted when he chose to sign his novels
with “Italo Svevo” was an open challenge to the logic of monolithic national identifications. The choice of publishing under a culturally hybrid
name corresponded to a gesture of ostentatious performance exhibiting the
author’s dual cultural citizenship. By emphasizing his double identification with Italian and German-speaking communities, Svevo’s literary
pseudonym testified to the syncretic dynamic of the multicultural
68
Habsburg state. The author perceived the bond between his Italian and
German background not as a hierarchical relationship, but rather as a dialogic exchange, a meeting point of the two literary traditions2.
Svevo’s first language was the local dialect of Habsburg Trieste, a
variation of Venetian with a Friulian substratum. During the turn of the
century, the Italian ethnic group in the Adriatic city was largely dialectophone, to the extent that the local vernacular functioned both as a lingua
franca in the international merchant community, and as a linguistic repository of loan words coming from the many languages spoken in the empire. Consequently, the Tuscan-based Italian standard was perceived as a
closely related, but different and even somewhat alien linguistic system.
Italian was known as the language of the regnicoli3, a term with which
locals identified subjects of the Kingdom of Italy. Svevo’s secondary education took place in the German town of Segnitz, close to Würzburg,
where he acquired a near-native command of German and studied Italian
as a foreign language4. Like many other Triestine intellectuals of his generation, Svevo later decided to undertake a literary pilgrimage to Florence
where he hoped to finally learn proper Italian. What prompted this supplementary effort of Tuscan enculturation was the wish to acquire those
linguistic means that could satisfy Svevo’s literary ambitions. In his
novels, the result of this linguistic variety is a prose rife with semantic and
syntactic calques from German and the Triestine dialect, occasional gallicisms of literary origin, an awkwardly employed business Italian, as well
as archaic Tuscan expressions fished out from a dictionary that reveal
Svevo’s tendency to overcompensate his uneasiness with Italian.
Epitomizing the multifaceted system of cultural allegiances in Trieste,
Svevo positions himself in the literary limbo of a Habsburg novelist writing in Italian.
In Svevo’s La Coscienza, the main character Zeno Cosini, a heavy
smoker and an incorrigible hypochondriac, embarks upon a project of psychoanalytic self-scrutiny. The narration is presented in the form of a diary
that Zeno writes by order of his psychoanalyst. The doctor recommends
his patient to recount the crucial events in his life so that Zeno can recover a lost sense of integrity: “Scriva! Scriva! Vedrà come arriverà a vedersi intero” (Romanzi, 628) [Write it down! And you’ll see yourself whole!
Try it! (Conscience, 7)]. Since Zeno is doubtful of the doctor’s effectiveness and threatens to quit the sessions, the fictional psychoanalyst takes
revenge on his patient by publishing Zeno’s diary.
69
In his own search of lost time Zeno tries to recover long-forgotten
memories. At the very inception of the novel, the narrator claims:
Oggi scopro subito qualche cosa che più non ricordavo. Le prime sigarette ch’io
fumai non esistono più in commercio. Intorno al ’70 se ne avevano in Austria di
quelle che venivano vendute in scatoline di cartone munite del marchio dell’aquila bicipite (628).
[Today, I discover immediately something I had forgotten. The cigarettes I first
smoked are no longer on the market. Around 1870 in Austria there was a brand that
came in cardboard boxes stamped with the two-headed eagle (7)].
Zeno’s memories crystallize around the heraldic image of the
double-headed Habsburg bird of prey. By emphasizing the Austrian cigarettes, Svevo reminds his reader that the cultural politics of the Habsburgs
was largely informed by their political economy. He is smoking the cigarettes produced by the Imperial Austrian Tobacco Monopoly (KaiserlichKönigliche Tabakregie), founded in 1784 by Emperor Joseph II. The monopoly established that only the Austrian state was entitled to raise, manufacture and sell tobacco5. Joseph II is the same monarch who promulgated the Edict of Tolerance, promoting the integration of ethnic minorities
in the empire, allowing the demographic and economic expansion of Trieste and ultimately the prosperity of Habsburg Jews like Svevo himself 6.
The coat of arms of the Austrian Empire on Zeno’s beloved pack of
cigarettes initiates the flow of memories and thus the narration itself. The
doctor forbids him to smoke and the protagonist remembers how as a
young man he already smoked against the wishes of his father. Zeno comments on his clandestine activity: “Ricordo di aver fumato molto, celato in
tutti i luoghi possibili” (631) [I remember I smoked a great deal, hiding in
every possible corner (10)]. Zeno acknowledges the unhealthy habit, and
pledges not to smoke ever again, except for one last, endlessly deferred,
cigarette: “Giacché mi fa male non fumerò mai più, ma prima voglio farlo
per l’ultima volta” (632) [It’s bad for me, so I will never smoke again. But
first, I want to have one last smoke (10)]. Enjoying the intensity of the one
final cigarette, Zeno will smoke countless last cigarettes in the course of
the novel. The doctor attempts to break Zeno’s smoking habit with unconventional methods. One of these techniques consists in putting Zeno in a
prison-like clinic. His prison ward Giovanna, however, is swayed to offer
70
him alcoholic beverages and cigarettes. He likes her because she offers
him company during his therapeutic prison stay, while she appreciates that
Zeno listens to her complaints. After they have drunk heavily, Zeno has
difficulties understanding her slurred speech:
Non saprei ripetere esattamente quello ch’essa mi disse, dopo aver ingoiati varii
bicchierini, nel suo puro dialetto triestino, ma ebbi tutta l’impressione di trovarmi
da canto una persona che, se non fossi stato stornato dalle mie preoccupazioni,
avrei potuto stare a sentire con diletto (647).
[I couldn’t repeat exactly everything she said to me, in her pure Triestine dialect,
after she had drained all those glasses, but I had the profound impression of being
with a person to whom, if I hadn’t been distracted by my own concerns, I could
have listened with pleasure (25)].
The pleasure comes from her pure Triestine dialect, not contaminated
by Italian. She also offers cigarettes, but instead of his beloved Austrian
cigarettes, she offers “Sigarette ordinarie, ungheresi” (650) [Ordinary cigarettes, Hungarian (28)] which Zeno dislikes because they are nauseating.
Preferring Austrian cigarettes to the cheap Hungarian ones carries obvious
political overtones in a novel set in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Zeno’s secret smoking habit bears a striking resemblance to the clandestine writing that accompanied Svevo’s life. This becomes evident when
in the novel Zeno associates smoking with writing. Commenting on another therapeutic method suggested by the doctor, Zeno says: “Impose quel
libretto anche a me, ma io non vi registrai che qualche ultima sigaretta”
(657) [He imposed that notebook method on me, but in mine I jotted down
nothing except a few last cigarettes (35)]. By the same token, Svevo’s
early literary aspirations were kept a secret from his strict father: “Ettore
had already developed a clandestine taste for reading fiction, in the face of
his father’s disapproval. His psychological independence was gradually to
be transferred from reading to writing” (Gatt-Rutter 26). Especially after
the bitter failure of Senilità and his commitment to devote his energies
fully to business activities, Svevo thought of giving up writing, which in
a diary entry of 1902 he defined as “quella ridicola e dannosa cosa che si
chiama letteratura” (Opera Omnia, 818) [that ridiculous and unhealthy
thing they call literature (my translation)]. Svevo is clearly associating
writing with the unhealthy activity of smoking. Zeno’s cigarette thus
71
becomes a “degeneration of the pen” (Vittorini, 91), a symbolic manifestation of Svevo’s literature7. In the way he is forever smoking one “last”
cigarette, he is forever writing a “last” page of literature.
As a result, the act of smoking Austrian cigarettes assumes a crucial
importance not only because it functions as a seminal episode in the narration, but also because it signals the liminality of the novel within the literary landscape of European modernism. Let me suggest that among
Zeno’s multiple confessions, the admission to his clandestine smoking of
Austrian cigarettes stands out as Svevo’s own meta-narrative “confession”
of being an Austrian-Italian novelist. As a ‘”confession”, Svevo’s subscription to a Habsburg literary tradition is not a particularly secretive or
coded message. With the heraldic image of the Austrian double-headed
eagle, he offers his readership an unmistakable key of interpretation.
If we accept this scriptural transfiguration of the protagonist’s
Austrian cigarette, Zeno’s combined smoking and writing becomes the
signature of an écriture habsbourgeoise8, through which Svevo inscribes
himself in a Habsburg literary tradition. This smoky identity, revealing a
subject shrouded in mist, an intangible and impalpable self, is what makes
Svevo a Habsburg novelist writing in Italian. Zeno’s smoking habit is an
embedded commentary on Svevo’s literary activity. Smoking Austrian
cigarettes corresponds to writing with a Habsburg pen. His hybrid Italian,
in fact, is not seen as the language of the Kingdom of Italy, but as one of
the many languages that constitute the Habsburg multilingual monarchy.
This should not come as a surprise if we consider how Svevo constructs
the identity of his protagonist. Zeno’s name not only evokes the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea, but is also one of Svevo’s etymological puns. Zeno comes from the Greek xénos, meaning ‘stranger’. The
Italian-speaking Zeno is a stranger to himself. This description of Zeno
resonates with Svevo’s own dialectophone experience. As already mentioned, the author’s first language was the local dialect that tended to absorb
the many languages spoken in multilingual Habsburg Trieste. For Svevo,
standard Italian almost assumed the features of a foreign language9.
This underlying tension between Italian standard and Triestine dialect is a veritable Leitmotif already in Svevo’s earlier works. In Una Vita,
his first novel published in 1892, Svevo makes a mordant mockery of a
pedantic Italian teacher. Alfonso Nitti, the protagonist, falls in love with
his boss’s daughter Annetta, who is receiving private lessons from a certain Mr. Spalati, an elderly professor of Italian language and literature.
72
Alfonso describes him as follows: “Era un verista a credergli ma viceversa poi, quando si trovava alle prese con uno scrittore italiano, indagava
pedantescamente se usava parole non legittimate dal Petrarca” (Romanzi,
110). [He was a realist, if you believed him, but then every time he read
an Italian author, he would pedantically investigate if the writer had used
words sanctioned by Petrarca (my translation)]. The irony here is that, if
the professor were truly a follower of the Italian verismo (following the
example of Giovanni Verga for instance) he would certainly not look for
literary terms in the Petrarchan tradition, but for everyday expressions and
a literary language that heavily borrows from the dialect. He evidently
subscribes to the literary trends of his time only formally, emphasizing the
need for a unified Tuscan-based Italian.
In the history of the Italian language, Pietro Bembo first codified the
standard by maintaining in his Prose della Volgar Lingua (1525) that the
linguistic model for prose and poetry should respectively be the 14th century Tuscan authors Giovanni Boccaccio and Francesco Petrarca. These
rigid codifications established what terms were proper Italian and what
was an unacceptable influence from the various regional dialects. This
Tuscan linguistic model served as the main identity marker well before the
political unification of Italy and was adopted as the standard when Italy
became an independent and sovereign state in 1861, the year in which
Svevo was born. Describing Spalati’s pedantic corrections and his adhesion to a strict Petrarchan vocabulary, Svevo makes a clear statement
about the politics of the professor. According to an engrained cultural
nationalism, good and acceptable Italian should be devoid of influences
from the dialect. Svevo’s protagonists – Emilio, Alfonso and Zeno – perceive this emphasis on Tuscan purity as an imposition of cultural hegemony with a strong colonial flavor. Paradoxically, the Austrian empire is
much more even-handed in its approach to linguistic matters. Italian is
among the languages that were recognized as official languages of the
empire after the reforms in the 1860s. No Austrian official would think of
correcting a speaker of triestino if their speech did not meet requirements
of Tuscan purity.
The conversations in Svevo’s novels, rendered in Italian direct speech, in reality occur in dialect. Towards the end of Una Vita, Alfonso tries
to console the wife of an English colleague who is desperately trying to
find her husband. Although all direct and indirect speech is rendered in
Italian (in which the novel is written), Alfonso remarks that this English
73
woman speaks the dialect perfectly (Romanzi, 324). This statement
implies that this particular conversation, although rendered in Italian, has
to be imagined as spoken in dialect. Svevo surprises the reader by destabilizing the linguistic frame of his novel, reminding his readers that the
plot is set in dialectophone Trieste.
In 1898 Svevo publishes Senilità, a novel in which the opposition
between Tuscan-based Italian and Triestine dialect is mentioned, even
though marginally. The protagonist, Emilio Brentani, falls in love with the
deceiving Angiolina, the daughter of a well-to-do businessman. She flirts
with the protagonist but ends up eloping with a banker. Emilio falls for the
young woman, but dislikes an affected mannerism in her speech:
Ella toscaneggiava con affettazione e ne risultava un accento piuttosto inglese che
toscano. ‘Prima o poi’ – diceva Emilio, – ‘le leverò tale difetto che m’infastidisce’
(453).
[She used to try and talk the Tuscan dialect, but in such an affected manner that
her accent was more English than Tuscan. ‘Sooner or later,’ said Emilio, ‘I must
cure her of that habit; it is beginning to irritate me’ (As a Man Grows Older, 3435)].
In order to emphasize her social prestige, Angiolina tries during her
salon meetings with the Triestine upper crust to speak Tuscan-based
Italian. According to Emilio, her attempts are rather unsuccessful and fail
because her accent sounds more English than Italian. English, a foreign
language, is closer to Angiolina’s affectation than Italian itself, which is
supposed to be the “national” language of Italians in Trieste. Svevo continues to highlight the differences in quality between Italian and Triestine
dialect. Stefano Balli, Emilio’s friend, flirts with Angiolina by being
impertinent with her. Commenting on Balli’s impudent expressions, the
narrator notes:
Dapprima s’era accontentato di dirgliele in toscano, aspirando e addolcendo, e a
lei erano sembrate carezze, ma anche quando le capitarono addosso in buon triestino, dure e sboccate, ella non se ne adontò (469).
[At first he used to come with them in Tuscan, in such softly breathed accents that
they seemed to her a caress; but even when they came pouring forth in the Triestine
dialect, in all their harsh obscenity, she showed no sign of offence (76)].
74
Here Svevo stages common socio-linguistic perceptions of those
members of the upper class in turn-of-the-century Trieste that were sympathetic to Irredentism. Tuscan is associated with a pleasant inflection,
while the local dialect assumes the features of an unrefined drawl.
In his earlier novels, Svevo framed the opposition between standard
Italian and dialect in terms of social class division and possibly political
allegiances. In La Coscienza the author transfers this linguistic tension
onto an epistemological level, exposing the arbitrary use of Italian as the
language of narration. In this way, Svevo offers his readership interpretative coordinates that radically undermine the centrality of the very language in which the novel is written. His main character Zeno emphasizes
the alterity of Italian, claiming that the language of his confessions is
almost a foreign tongue to him. In an often-quoted passage in the novel,
Zeno makes what appears to be a most startling confession:
Il dottore presta una fede troppo grande anche a quelle mie benedette confessioni
che non vuole restituirmi perché le riveda. Dio mio! Egli non studiò che la medicina e perciò ignora che cosa significhi scrivere in italiano per noi che parliamo e
non sappiamo scrivere il dialetto. Una confessione in iscritto è sempre menzognera. Con ogni nostra parola toscana noi mentiamo! Se egli sapesse come raccontiamo con predilezione tutte le cose per le quali abbiamo pronta la frase e come evitiamo quelle che ci obbligherebbero di ricorrere al vocabolario! È proprio così che
scegliamo dalla nostra vita gli episodi da notarsi. Si capisce che la nostra vita
avrebbe tutt’altro aspetto se fosse detta nel nostro dialetto. (1050)
The doctor puts too much faith also in those damned confessions of mine, which
he won’t return to me so I can revise them. Good heavens! He studied only medicine and therefore doesn’t know what it means to write in Italian for those of us
who speak the dialect but can’t write it. A confession in writing is always a lie.
With our every Tuscan word, we lie! If only he knew how, by predilection, we
recount all the things for which we have the words at hand, and how we avoid
those things that would oblige us to turn to the dictionary! This is exactly how we
choose, from our life, the episodes to underline. Obviously our life would have an
entirely different aspect if it were told in our dialect. (404)
In the novel, Zeno’s paradox becomes a linguistic conundrum10. In
Zeno’s fictional autobiography, written in standard Italian, the assertion
according to which every Italian word presupposes a mendacious statement radically undermines any presumption of truthfulness in the novel.
Near the end of the novel, the reader is told that the entire narration is
75
based on a language that cannot possibly express any truth. What is said
in Italian is a lie, and the truth can only be spoken – and not be written –
in the Triestine dialect.
Zeno’s statement is far more radical than it might appear at first glance. Attributing truthfulness to the spoken language, excluding the written
medium, is particularly significant for a language such as Italian. For
many centuries, Italian was a written language that very few members of
an elite spoke11. It existed as a literary language, as the imitation of medieval models. Zeno’s claim has far-reaching implications, as it casts a retrospective judgment onto the history of an entire literary tradition. The production of texts in Italian is an artificial replica of a linguistic model which
is not spoken by the people who write it. Zeno calls attention to this state
of affairs, and emphasizes the insincere and deceitful nature of his own
literary endeavour in Italian. His autobiography is not much different from
the work of authors who did not speak, but merely imitated, a literary
model of language which was later adopted as the Italian national language. Zeno perceives the language he chooses as artificial for the purposes
of his autobiographical narration, and for him this becomes the most pertinent means to deceive the credulous doctor.
Since dialect is the sole adequate expressive medium, Zeno can grasp
the truth only through an epistemology of the vernacular. The narrator
introduces an epistemological instability into the narrative apparatus,
revealing a profound psycholinguistic dilemma that involves the impossibility of speaking the truth. Zeno cannot be truthful unless a dictionary is
at hand. He can only articulate his story in the same way one speaks a
foreign language, the mastery of which is, in this case, far from being
satisfactory. In addition, Zeno calls into question the unity of the Italian
linguistic community. His reflection not only addresses the synchronic
dimension of the language, its communicative failure in everyday usage,
but also the diachronic aspect: the literary history of Italian, the language
of Dante and Manzoni, upon which Italian cultural and political unity was
substantially constructed. Politically, in fact, Zeno’s statement challenges
the notion of an allegedly univocal front of ethnic Italians in pre-war
Trieste whose loyalties were anything but straightforward.
With Zeno’s confession that the book could have been written in dialect, or German for that matter, Svevo underlines that the book is not
Italian by virtue of an inescapable national destiny. It could have been
written in a different linguistic medium, which would have not been a
76
translation of the Italian version we are reading. A version of La Coscienza
in the Triestine dialect would have told the protagonist’s life from a different perspective. It would have been an autobiography in which other episodes would have determined a different personal profile for Zeno.
Consequently, with the choice of different episodes to narrate changes
determined by the linguistic medium, we would have known a different
Zeno. This is why Zeno’s account does not correspond to an absolute
truth, but to a linguistically and culturally determined account of reality.
Imagining his diary in a multiplicity of versions – for instance in Italian,
Triestine dialect or German – opens up the possibility of parallel universes
which exist simultaneously. This implication is certainly the starkest
contradiction to what his psychoanalyst says at the beginning of the novel,
when he recommends writing the diary so that Zeno can feel “whole”
again. Instead, Zeno writes the diary and discovers exactly the opposite.
His life is fragmented as a result of his different cultural allegiances. Zeno
does not consider this fragmentation, or multiplicity, as a pathological
condition. For him multiculturalism and linguistic border crossing constitute the norm. The pathological insecurity and psychosomatic manifestations of a hypochondriac constitute much of the lack of purpose in this
man without qualities. The reader is invited to accept, together with Zeno,
this alternative and experimental mode of existence12.
Zeno’s admission that with every Italian word he automatically lies
is the most important confession that carries wide-ranging implications for
his entire fictional autobiography. He returns to the notion of linguistic
mendacity later in the text. He reports his failure to mention to the doctor
that there is a lumberyard owned by him and Guido which is close to the
house where he practices his psychoanalytic sessions:
Quest’eliminazione non è che la prova che una confessione fatta da me in italiano
non poteva essere né completa né sincera. In un deposito di legnami ci sono varietà
enormi di qualità che noi a Trieste appelliamo con termini barbari presi dal dialetto,
dal croato, dal tedesco e qualche volta persino dal francese (zapin p.e. non equivale
mica a sapin). Chi m’avrebbe fornito il vero vocabolario? Vecchio come sono avrei
dovuto prendere un impiego da un commerciante in legnami toscano? (1060-61)
This omission is simply the proof that a confession made by me in Italian could be
neither complete nor sincere. In a lumberyard there are enormous varieties of lumber, which we in Trieste call by barbarous names derived from the dialect, from
Croat, from German, and sometimes even from French (zapin, for example, which
77
is by no means the equivalent of sapin). Who could have given me the appropriate vocabulary? Old as I am, should I have found myself a job with a lumber dealer from Tuscany? (414)
Zeno reiterates his idea that an admission in Italian cannot be comprehensive or truthful. He places this idea in the context of transnational
business practices that make Trieste an important economic center in the
empire. The technical terms for the great variety of lumber come from different foreign languages associated with imperial trade. He continues to
indicate that nobody in Trieste has knowledge of the Italian translations
corresponding to this specialized vocabulary. Zeno seems to imply here
that a political annexation to Italy would only slow down or even harm
business practices in Trieste. It is significant, however, that the narrator
uses the term “barbarous,” which has a negative connotation, in lieu of the
more neutral term “foreign” to describe the language of his trade. Faking
a sympathetic attitude towards Italian Irredentism, Zeno raises a point that
even the most fervent nationalist in Trieste could not ignore. With the final
rhetorical question in the passage, Zeno pretends to wonder what economic and financial effects Trieste’s national deliverance would produce. He
certainly knows the answer to the question, but leaves it open in order to
avoid taking a public stance in the matter.
Zeno’s anxiety over correct language use affects his interpersonal
relationships and romantic encounters, and assumes wider, social and political implications in his public interactions. An example of Zeno’s sociolinguistic concerns is the interaction with his mentor Mr. Malfenti, who is
a successful businessman and will later become his father-in-law. At the
beginning of their acquaintance, Zeno meets with him in the Tergesteo
café and attempts to elicit some business secrets from him that might later
be helpful in his own commercial activity. Through this friendship, Zeno
is introduced into the Malfenti household, where he falls in love with Ada.
Once Zeno decides to ask Ada’s father for her hand, he wonders in what
kind of language he should propose: “Bastava dirgli la mia determinazione di sposare sua figlia… Mi preoccupava tuttavia la quistione se in un’occasione simile avrei dovuto parlare in lingua o in dialetto” (723) [I had
only to inform him of my resolve to marry his daughter… Yet I was troubled by the problem of whether, on such an occasion, I should speak to
him in dialect or standard Italian (97)]. Italian is the language that Zeno
would use in a formal and official context, since he associates dialect with
78
lower education and lower class status. It is important to note that in this
particular scene Giovanni Malfenti had gone to the Tergesteo, a historic
café that is still open today, which was also a favorite meeting place for
Irredentists. Speaking Italian there assumes a further meaning, as it would
have been interpreted as indicative of nationalist political leanings.
In a comic turn of events, Zeno ends up marrying Augusta, Malfenti’s other daughter, who falls in love with Zeno. Ada instead will marry
Guido Speier. The scene in which Zeno is first introduced to Guido reveals
much of the identity politics and its underlying social mechanisms that
govern the interactions in the novel. Zeno, who is more at ease with the
dialect, is jealous of Guido’s mastery of Italian and immediately develops
a dislike for his future brother-in-law:
Si chiamava Guido Speier. Il mio sorriso si fece più spontaneo perché subito mi si
presentava l’occasione di dirgli qualche cosa di sgradevole: - Lei è tedesco?
Cortesemente egli mi disse che riconosceva che al nome tutti potevano crederlo
tale. Invece i documenti della sua famiglia provavano ch’essa era italiana da varii
secoli. Egli parlava il toscano con grande naturalezza mentre io e Ada eravamo
condannati al nostro dialettaccio. (735)
His name was Guido Speier. My smile became more spontaneous because I was
immediately offered the opportunity of saying something disagreeable to him:
“You are German?”
He replied politely, admitting that because of his name, one might believe he was.
But family documents proved that they had been Italian for several centuries. He
spoke Tuscan fluently, while Ada and I were condemned to our horrid dialect. (109)
Zeno is fully aware of the anti-Austrian sentiment of the Irredentists
and consequently mimics their social strategies. By asking whether Guido
is of German origin, he intends to insult him. Guido replies to Zeno’s
offensive remark with suspiciously calculated aplomb. His gracious answer sounds as though it has been rehearsed over and over again. While
admitting that it would be reasonable to assume that he is German, he
seeks refuge in an alleged bureaucratic evidence of his century-long Italian character. Without probably realizing it, Guido’s justification is an
implicit admission that his family is from German stock. To compensate
his lack of a pure Italian identity, he has learned perfect Tuscan, and eagerly shows it off. Later, the reader learns that Guido in fact speaks German
very well (283), just as Zeno speaks it, too (429). In narrating the episode,
79
Zeno opposes Guido’s competence with standard Italian to the “horrid”
dialect to which Ada and he are condemned. In denigrating the dialect and
wishing for better competence in Italian, Zeno is adopting a dissimulating
strategy similar to Guido’s. As mentioned earlier, Zeno knows that he is
writing his confessions upon his doctor’s request and that his private diary
is really a public document, subject to the scrutiny of official medical discourse. This explains his circumspect treatment of the nationality question
and his careful avoidance of politics in his dairy. Zeno stages himself as a
self-loathing Triestine, constantly sick, condemned to speak an ugly
drawl, longing to speak better Italian and to implicitly prove his political
allegiance to Italy. Despite Zeno’s antagonistic feelings toward his brother-in-law, he shares with Guido a well-calculated agenda that is on display in their social interactions. Guido’s attempt to hide his German background bears a striking resemblance to Zeno’s own strategy of social assimilation.
One should not, however, make the mistake of uncritically equating
Svevo’s positions with Zeno’s. For all the similarities, Zeno is not Svevo’s
straightforward novelistic double. Rather, the author intersperses bits and
pieces of autobiographic material in the construction of characters and
scenes. Like a great painter who indulges in a gesture of vanity by placing
a small self-portrait in the corner a large canvas, Svevo inscribes into the
novel a fictional projection of the authorial self. He briefly introduces a
minor character, inconsequential for the further development of the plot,
named Nilini whom Zeno meets at the bourse. Nilini takes pleasure in
educating Zeno in the matters of international politics, in which he was
deeply versed thanks to his activity on the stock exchange (358). He introduces Zeno to the politics of the Great Powers, explaining shifts between
peaceful relations and sudden warfare in international diplomacy. Svevo
constructs a character whose ideas about international relations are deeply
informed by economic transactions, an element that suggests an authorial
projection in the character. Nilini’s name is obviously a pun on the Latin
word nihil, meaning “nothing” and a variation on Zeno’s last name Cosini
that indicates “small things.”
Zeno and Nilini share a social ineptness, a profound clumsiness in
matters of interpersonal relationships. More importantly, however, Zeno
befriends Nilini because he smuggles the protagonist’s beloved cigarettes:
“Mi procurava delle sigarette di contrabbando e me le faceva pagare quello che gli costavano, cioè molto poco” (1002) [He procured contraband
80
cigarettes and charged me only what they had cost him, namely very little
(358)].
Here Svevo’s Habsburg aesthetic comes full circle. These illegally
imported cigarettes are reminiscent of Zeno’s clandestine smoking habit,
which he described at the beginning of the novel. Stealing his father’s cigarettes is analogous to illicitly getting cigarettes from the symbolic father
figure represented by the Emperor, who was also called Landesvater in the
imperial propaganda. The references to smoking at the beginning and at
the end of the novel act as a narrative frame that contains Zeno’s life and
encapsulates Svevo’s literary activity at the border between Habsburg
Austrian and Italian traditions. In fact, while Zeno’s Austrian cigarettes at
the beginning of the novel can be read as a metaphor of Svevo’s status as
a Habsburg author, now the contraband cigarettes are again associated
with his status of a transnational writer. With a few, masterly strokes Svevo paints in the brief characterization of Nilini his own self-portrait:
Potei accorgermi ch’egli era un italiano di color dubbio perché gli pareva che per
Trieste fosse meglio di restare austriaca. Adorava la Germania e specialmente i
treni ferroviarii tedeschi che arrivavano con tanta precisione. Era socialista a modo
suo e avrebbe voluto fosse proibito che una singola persona possedesse più di centomila corone. (1003)
I could divine that he was an Italian of suspect coloration because it seemed to him
Trieste would be better off remaining Austrian. He adored Germany and especially German railway cars, which arrived with such precision. He was a socialist in
his own way, and would have liked any individual person to be forbidden to posses more than one thousand crowns. (358-59)
This little vignette reveals Svevo’s peculiar position in the complex
network of allegiances in Habsburg Trieste. In the construction of this
minor character, the author projects his biographic information. Nilini’s
profile reads like a summary of Svevo’s loyalties and beliefs. First,
Nilini’s Italian loyalty is called into question by his economic entanglement with Austria. He represents the common opinion that Trieste’s prosperity is linked to Austrian economic policies and that the city’s unification with Italy would signify its commercial decline. Svevo’s business
activities depended largely on producing and selling anti-corrosive paint
for ships to the Austrian navy. He continued to sell the products of his
company to the Austrian military even after Italy and Austria were for81
mally at war. In addition, Nilini’s sympathy for Germany clearly reflects
Svevo’s attachment to his German background. The third element that
suggests Svevo’s self-portrait here is the character’s personal interpretation of Socialism.
According to the writer Giani Stuparich, before World War I the various ideological positions in Trieste constituted a manifold political spectrum. In his 1948 autobiography Trieste nei miei ricordi Stuparich identifies four main viewpoints. The members of the first group perceived themselves as Austrian subjects and were loyal to the Habsburg monarchy. A
second group saw itself as Italian first and foremost, even though it was
torn between the myth of national deliverance and their economic interests. This frequently undecided mercantile middle class was not always
fully committed to the Irredentist roadmap and was often hesitant to
accept its ultimate goal of breaking with Austria. The Socialists, who were
opposed to joining Italy, made up a third group. Their internationalist
agenda entailed an economic collaboration among the various ethnic
groups in a reformed empire, where every national group could enjoy
more cultural autonomy. Lastly, a small group of fervent nationalists made
up the Irredentist faction. Their boisterously declared goal was unification
with the newly founded Italian Kingdom.
Svevo’s political leanings need to be placed in this diverse context.
In the past, the author’s contact with patriotic associations such as the
Lega Nazionale and the Ginnastica Triestina lead scholars to believe that
Svevo subscribed to their Irredentist agenda. After all, he published
articles in L’Indipendente, the daily newspaper of the Irredentist movement. The consensus today, however, is that Svevo’s membership was dictated by political prudence, and that he preferred to avoid taking a public
stance in the controversial political questions that animated pre-war
Trieste13. Svevo’s parable “La tribù” (1897), published in Filippo Turati’s
magazine Critica Sociale, shows that Svevo at least initially nurtured
Socialist sympathies, by aligning himself with a Socialist tradition in Italy,
strategically avoiding in this way to participate in the local debate. In fact,
it would have been unwise for him to publish in the other Socialist newspaper Il Lavoratore, which in 1895 had officially become the mouthpiece
of the Triestine Socialists, who were opposed to Irredentism, arguing that
Trieste should remain under Habsburg rule in a federal and democratic
reorganization of the Empire.
82
One should not mistake Svevo’s approval of Socialist ideas as a subscription to militant proletarian class struggle. He adhered to a utopian
anti-war Socialism that would eventually predispose him to European
pacifism. By the time he was writing La Coscienza, his positions were closer to the federal and democratic internationalism of the Austro-Marxists.
Immediately after the war, Svevo starts drafting a text entitled Sulla teoria della pace (On the Theory of Peace). Originally intended to be a large
essayistic endeavour, the essay only survives as a fragment, since Svevo
soon abandoned the plan in order to embark upon the novelistic enterprise of La Coscienza. Sharing the concerns of Triestine Socialists, Svevo
feared that the dismemberment of the empire would have disastrous economic consequences for the city. Hence Svevo’s post-war pledge for a
European economic union, envisioned as a single market, and mainly
conceived, in the election of Dante and Kant as inspirational models, as
the synergy of Italian and German intellectual traditions.
Cautious to avoid controversial political proclamations, Svevo
embedded much of his political beliefs in Zeno’s textual strategies. The
author never felt any sympathy for Italian nationalism, and was never an
austriacante, to use the epithet with which Irredentists disparagingly called pro-Austrian Triestines. He saw Trieste as placed in a pre-national
dimension, proud of its specific urban identity that was never completely
Austrian, not entirely Slovene, and never fully Italian. In an age in which
the rhetoric of nationalism gained social and political currency, this prenational logic was highly dubious, since its non-national loyalty possessed
a highly subversive character, a character that later made Trieste suspicious in the eyes of the Fascist regime.
Zeno’s Trieste reflects Svevo’s perception of the Adriatic city as a
microcosm dwelling under a double colonial yoke that however defies
both the imperialism of the Habsburgs and the nationalism of the
Irredentists. At the same time, it does not fully reject Austria or Italy as it
tries to embrace both. His emotional connection to an Italian Habsburg tradition makes Svevo long for a Trieste with greater cultural autonomy for
the Italians, but solidly anchored within the multiculturalism of the
Habsburg monarchy. Economic and religious considerations play an
important role in his writings. His experience as a businessman encouraged a financial pragmatism thanks to which he refused to dogmatically
accept the basic tenets of nationalist rhetoric. Like many others, he was
keenly aware of the fact that the economic prosperity of the Adriatic city
83
depended on imperial economy policy. In addition, the Habsburg imperial
policy of relative tolerance with respects to the Jewish community made
Trieste a location in which a utopian future free of anti-Semitism could be
conceived. Historical events, however, took a different turn. With his
transnational background Svevo became, similarly to his characters Zeno
and Nilini, an “Italian of suspect coloration”. He became suspect to those
contemporaries who saw Trieste as an exclusively Italian city and afterwards to those Italian scholars who read his hybrid prose with uneasiness
and who believed that conformity to a national linguistic standard is the
measure of literary merit.
Svevo best expresses the existential condition of being a foreigner at
home in La Coscienza. In the novel, the origin of Zeno’s chronic anxiety
and social clumsiness has deep psycholinguistic origins. Zeno the foreigner is constantly attempting to protect himself from any suspicion that he
might be insufficiently Italian. His autobiography is therapeutic inasmuch
as it is a shrewd stratagem to ward off any such suspicion and to undermine the colonizing presence of Italian nationalist extremism. In the
novel, Svevo constructs his identity through literary autopoiesis, through
his écriture habsbourgeoise. The cultural practice of writing fiction in
Svevo becomes a strategy of representation as well as a performance of his
transnational cultural identity. In this way, Svevo stages an anti-colonial
cosmopolitanism that did not only confront the nationalist paradigm of his
time, but that even today constitutes a challenge within Italian national
identity, still struggling to come to terms with its colonial legacy outside
and inside its national borders.
84
A
1
2
3
4
Note, Notes, Anmerkungen, Notes
B
Mario Lavagetto has cautioned against reading Svevo as a fervent Irredentist
and stressed the author’s sympathy for socialism that in Trieste was staunchly opposed to the “Redemption” and to the war. Giuseppe Camerino sees
Svevo as an Austrian Jew writing in Italian. In his book he ascribes the traditional image of Svevo to an Italian nationalist historiography and literary
history that offered a distorted image of Habsburg Trieste. He denounces the
“the old and false image of our nationalist historiography that was invested
in finding at all cost a strong and rooted tradition of independence movements in Trieste” insisting that we should, instead, look for the “bond that
linked the city to the world of the Habsburgs” (186, my translation). While
Camerino maintains that Svevo’s work should be read as symptomatic of a
general crisis of Habsburg literature, Enrico Ghidetti dismisses such claims
as questionable arguments (310-11). For a reading of Svevo in the context of
Trieste, see Coda and Schächter. For the relationship between Trieste and the
Habsburg Empire, see Magris and Ara.
Such an act of inclusion and display of multiple transnational attachments
can be, however, far from being a simple gesture of addition, as it may imply
an act of omission as well. The public display of this composite European
identity could at the same time be interpreted as an act of exclusion that
tends to conceal, if not to obliterate completely, Svevo’s Jewish background.
I suggest that Svevo’s pseudonym works like a palimpsest from which the
trace of the Jewish experience and its inherent internationalism cannot be
erased. Moreover, however hidden, Svevo’s Jewish origin performs an adhesive function that facilitates and allows the hybridity emphasized in the
pseudonym. In Svevo’s pseudonym Jewish transnationalism becomes the
necessary premise for his multiple cultural allegiances. For Svevo’s pseudonym see Gatt-Rutter and Minghelli.
The term, coined by the Italians of Austria, literally indicated a person from
the kingdom (regno) of Italy. It also indicated Italian standard, as opposed to
the Triestine dialect.
Camerino maintains that Svevo tended to formulate his thoughts in German,
a fact that would suggest that the Triestine author had a native command of
the language (265).
85
5
6
7
9
10
11
12
13
86
Ernst Marboe provides a history of the Imperial Austrian Tobacco Monopoly
(487). Maureen Healy comments on the symbolic role of cigarettes in Austrian
World War I propaganda, pointing out the popular belief that an army that
smoked well, also fought well. Given the scarcity of supply, the Austrian populace donated cigarettes and other tobacco products to the soldiers in the
trenches (118). Svevo here seems to exploit the association between state-produced cigarettes and constructions of Habsburg masculinity.
For a history of Jews in Trieste see Dubin.
For a discussion of smoking in the novel see Klein.
By écriture habsbourgeoise I mean the literary production of polyglot and
multicultural writers in the empire and their inscription in a Habsburg
transnational literary canon. This writing emphasizes, in the context of a heterogeneous but thematically coherent Habsburg literary culture, diverse and
mixed backgrounds, as well as multiple allegiances to different linguistic,
cultural and religious communities.
Lavagetto has repeatedly emphasized the alterity of Italian in Svevo’s literary production. Italian is an acquired language, learned with difficulty and
never fully mastered. See La Cicatrice di Montaigne (191-92).
The name of Svevo’s protagonist is reminiscent of Zeno of Elea, the preSocratic Greek philosopher famous for his paradoxes concerning Achilles
and the tortoise and the arrow never reaching its target. Svevo’s Zeno is
hence a figure epitomizing paradox.
In 1861, the year in which Svevo was born and Italy became politically unified, only about 2.5% of Italians spoke what could be termed as Italian (De
Mauro, 43). In the same year, analphabetism was as high as 78% (Migliorini,
603). Italian began to be spoken very late in the Italian peninsula. The initial
and slow diffusion of Italian began with a struggling primary education program and with the compulsory military service in the Italian Kingdom.
Italian became a widely spoken language as late as the 20th century with the
gradual spread of radio and television in Italian households.
As Elena Coda puts it “In La Coscienza illness loses its negative connotations and becomes a paradigm for the fluidity and the openness of an existence devoid of pre-established purpose” (219).
For comments on Svevo’s discretion in political matters and his distance
from the Irredentist cause see Ghidetti (162-63), Gatt-Rutter (115) and
McCourt (88).
A
Opere citate, Œuvres citées,
Zitierte Literatur, Works Cited
B
Ara, Angelo. Fra Nazione e Impero. Trieste, gli Absburgo, la Mitteleuropa. Milano: Garzanti, 2010.
Bembo, Pietro. Prose Della Volgar Lingua. Milano: Editori Associati, 1989.
Camerino, Giuseppe Antonio. Italo Svevo e la Crisi della Mitteleuropa. Napoli:
Liguori, 2002.
Coda Elena. Between Borders: Reading Illness in Trieste. Dissertation. Los
Angeles: University of California, 1998.
De Mauro, Tullio. Storia linguistica dell’Italia unita. Bari: Laterza, 1976.
Dubin, Lois C. The Port Jews of Habsburg Trieste: Absolutist Politics and
Enlightenment Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999.
Gatt-Rutter, John. Italo Svevo: a Double Life. Oxford: Clarendon, 1988.
Ghidetti, Enrico. Italo Svevo: La Coscienza di un Borghese Triestino. Roma:
Editori Riuniti, 1992.
Healy, Maureen. Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and
Everyday Life in World War I. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Klein, Richard. Cigarettes are Sublime. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.
Lavagetto, Mario. La Cicatrice Di Montaigne: Sulla Bugia in Letteratura. Torino:
Einaudi, 1992.
——. La Gallina di Saba. Torino: Einaudi, 1974.
Magris, Claudio e Ara, Angelo. Trieste. Un’identità di frontiera. Einaudi: Torino:
1982.
Marboe, Ernst. The Book of Austria. Vienna: Österreichische Staatsdruckerei,
1969.
McCourt, John. The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste, 1904–1920. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2000.
Migliorini, Bruno. Storia della Lingua Italiana. Firenze: Sansoni, 1989.
Minghelli, Giuliana. In the Shadow of the Mammoth: Italo Svevo and the
Emergence of Modernism. Toronto: University of Toronto, 2002.
Schächter, Elizabeth. Origin and Identity: Essays on Svevo and Trieste. Leeds:
Northern Universities, 2000.
Stuparich, Giani. Trieste nei miei ricordi. Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1984.
Svevo, Italo. As a Man Grows Older. Trans. Beryl DeZoete. New York: New York
Review of Books, 2011.
87
——. Opera Omnia. Milano: Dall’Oglio, 1968.
——. Romanzi e Continuazioni. Milano: Mondadori, 2004.
——. Racconti e Scritti Autobiografici. Milano: Mondadori, 2004.
——. Teatro e Saggi. Milano: Mondadori, 2004.
——. Zeno’s Conscience: a Novel. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Vintage,
2003.
Vittorini, Fabio. Svevo: Guida alla Coscienza di Zeno. Roma: Carocci, 2003.
88
Recensioni, Reviews, Rezensionen
Dina Al-Kassim: On Pain of Speech. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2010
Dina Al-Kassim’s book is an investigation of the phenomenon of the “literary rant”, which the author describes as a “complex of address, entreaty,
and attack that characterizes the haphazard and murky speech that only
sometimes gathers itself into a counterdiscourse”(3). Essentially, it is a
rare kind of literary discourse, to be found in texts that belong to the margins of the canon, that defies current notions of intelligibility, flaunts its
absence of “masterful” control, is ambiguous as to who or what it is
addressing and displays a general aggressiveness towards the status quo.
The author regards this phenomenon as politically relevant, drawing on
Michel Foucault’s notion that a “counterdiscourse”, i.e. a discourse that
challenges the current system of power relations by openly “speaking the
truth” (parrhesia) to them, is actually not a threat to said power relations,
but a function of them; because it relies on the same type of language
(“sovereign speech”) in which power expresses itself, counterdiscourse
has no real “revolutionary potential”. The “rant” evades this trap because
of its lack of “control”, which comes to the surface in its refusal of being
“reasonable”: it attacks everybody and everything, and it does so from an
unreal position of enunciation: it “imagines the power to speak in its own
name where no such power is granted”, says the abstract1. Because of this
“madness”, the rant bypasses the sanctioned modes of expression, and is
therefore “revolutionary”.
The book is divided into two parts: the first is a purely theoretical
section, in which the author puts forward a somewhat rambling series of
considerations on various aspects of the “politics of address”, drawing
eclectically on poststructuralist theorisations, especially Judith Butler’s, to
discuss some instances of “rants” from outside the canon, in which the
writers addressed “the Law” itself from marginal positions. The second
part consists of three case studies, arranged in an order that suggests a progression from failure to triumph of this literary form: Oscar Wilde’s The
89
Picture of Dorian Gray and his letter “De Profundis”, Jane Bowles’s novel
Two Serious Ladies and her letters, and the Tunisian writer/cultural theorist Abdelwahab Meddeb’s novel Talismano.
The main interest of this book for English studies lies perhaps in
the discussion of Oscar Wilde’s career, which the author divides into two
halves: his literary production before the trials, which she sees as characterised by the employment of counterdiscourse, underpinned by Wilde’s
illusory belief to be able to criticise power structures from within, and
Wilde’s successive “abjection”, epitomised by the ranting “De Profundis”.
In the first part Al-Kassim analyses mainly The Picture of Dorian Gray,
drawing on Freud as well as on many luminaries of the postmodern canon,
especially Foucault and Butler. She begins by taking issue with Eve
Kosofski-Sedgwick dismissal of the theme of narcissism in the novel as a
mere “camouflage” for homosexual desire, a reading which she indirectly
qualifies as “paranoid”. The pars destruens is fair-minded overall, if overly generous in leaving out of the discussion the fact that the “paranoid”
part is actually Kosofski-Sedgwick’s main argument. She then argues that
there are more suitable ways of analysing the text as an unstable series of
identifications on Dorian’s part, who, she interestingly notes, is reminded
of his own likeness to his mother at the very moment in which Lord
Henry’s speeches open up to him possibilities he had not thought of until
then; the author characteristically assumes that these “possibilities” are invariably (homo)sexual in nature. When it comes to produce her own readings, Al-Kassim fills the greatest part of the chapter with a series of scattered observations on the novel, mainly in a psychoanalytical vein, and
mini-essays on theoretical points, without a clear thread, which weighs
down reading.
Generally speaking, it can be sensed that Al-Kassim has little
patience with the primary texts, and prefers to focus on the theoretical
aspects of her argument. Though she does structure the discussion around
quotations, the relative discussions often have very thin connections with
the “words on the page”. It is often the sign of a thin argument when a discussion is crowded with “shouting” adverbs like “clearly”, “evidently”,
“unquestionably”, which take the place of actual argumentation; AlKassim tends to do this especially where evidence would be most needed.
For example, it is a crucial issue in the history of reception whether or not
contemporary readers did experience Dorian Gray as a “homosexual
novel”: the author’s answer is that there was an “evident recognition”(66),
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and she cites as evidence a reviewer who made a sneering comment to the
effect that Wilde seemed to be writing for “outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys”, alluding to the scandal of the discovery of a male
brothel a few years earlier. Yet, as an inspection of the reviews of the novel
may bring out, the most striking thing about this comment is that its author
was the only one in this array of prudish and prurient reviewers, bent on
looking for scandal, who made anything like a recognisable reference to
homosexuality; to cite this as evidence of a widespread recognition is at
the very least misleading. In the same way, a quick read through The
Picture of Dorian Gray would be enough to show that there is nothing
“obviously homosexual” in it; there are innuendos, applicability, half-allusions, but certainly nothing to justify this very common assumption,
which the author of this study shares, and which is born of an imposition
of later models (Al-Kassim insistent use of the word “gay” is symptomatic) on a cultural situation that was significantly different in this
respect, as has been shown by studies such as Alan Sinfield’s The Wilde
Century. Acknowledging the extent to which our own cultural expectations shape our readings is not the sign of a “reactionary” unwillingness to
cope with the more challenging aspects of a text, but a reminder not to
obliterate differences for the sake of a convenient argument.
The analysis of “De Profundis” follows more (comparatively) traditional lines; the author analyses Wilde’s identification with Christ in terms
of “rebuilding of the subject”, through a model taken from the very centre
of the society that had ruined him, which he “colonises” with a new set of
connotations. Al-Kassim tends to describe Wilde’s attitude in the writing
of this letter as a conscious ideological project, namely that of “free[ing]
the sovereign subject from received ideological forms, to overcome
resentment, and to establish a socially generated sexuality in bonds of
male affiliation”(98). Whether or not Wilde had this in mind as he was
writing his long love/hate letter in the depths of Reading Gaol, the discussion does a fair job of analysing his more general ethical remarks in terms
of a racial rhetoric taken from Darwin, which juxtaposes the “creative
Celtic spirit” to the “absence of imagination of the English race”; this may
plausibly be said to constitute a counterdiscourse with respect to the prevailing models, which were used to justify British domination in Ireland
in terms of racial superiority. Again, it should be noted that the main interest of the discussion lies in its account of the cultural context.
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The second case study revolves around Jane Bowles; the author
briefly concentrates on the “rants” of the two lesbian main characters
when, at the end of Two Serious Ladies, they find themselves defeated and
resigned, but the main part of the discussion deals with Bowles’s own letters, in which the writer analysed the pain of and dissatisfaction with her
partly mercenary relation with a Moroccan woman and expanded on the
frustrations related to her own writer’s block. All these speeches, AlKassim argues, are expressions of humiliation, and do not lead to any kind
of empowerment. Bowles’s fiction and life, taken together without
acknowledging the distinction, are characterised as being “complicit [...]
with colonial and racial narratives”(123). Bowles’s biographical data are
expounded at great length, presumably because they are less widely
known than Wilde’s, and the discussion often takes a decidedly psychoanalytic turn. Bowles’s alleged failure to construct a symbolically adequate
narrative in both her narratives and her life is attributed to her overlapping
of three distinct categories: the primitive, the regressed feminine and the
oriental. In this section, too, it is arduous to identify anything like a clear
thread, with the author often pausing to deliver a lengthy exposition of
theoretical points, such as Freud’s views on fetishism, whose relevance for
the cases in point is not argued clearly.
The third case study concerns Abdelwahab Meddeb’s relationship
with and rewriting of Lacan, which gathers itself into postcolonial critique. The writer infuses the French of his novel with the rhythms of the
Arabic dialects of the area, which is, in postcolonial terms, a kind of
recolonisation which does not seek to impose one literary tradition over
the other, but to propound the idea of a proudly hybridised Maghreb. Of
course, that is not the end of it: Talismano, the author argues, is successful in producing an “intervention” in the politics of address, “by harnessing the rant as symptom and turning it into a source of a poetics of resistant writing that is theorized in the novel under the sign of calligraphesis”
(182) (that is, a relocation of Western concepts into Maghrebin culture,
allowing the latter to shape them in turn, and aiming at a utopian “allography”).This chapter, too, includes a lengthy theoretical section that
attempts to demonstrates that Lacan’s take on Koranic law was vitiated by
his assumption that it was somehow more “primitive” than its Western
counterparts.Meddeb, the author argues, “rants” deliberately and parodically, and thus is able to turn the “symptom” of political “abjection” into
an “intervention”, although she is sceptical about its claims to “subver92
siveness”, as the term does not take into account the postcolonial specificity of the text.
As a series of essays in cultural studies, this book might be of some
significance to those interested in postcolonialism, politics of address,
psychoanalysis. As literary criticism it falls short of the mark, mainly because of its insistence on imposing its theoretical grids on the texts in
order to look for preconceived notions of “discursive radicalism” or its opposite in them. It might be interesting to attempt a thoroughly Foucauldian
analysis of this kind of approach to writing, in order to trace its genealogy in terms of the circulation of discursive power in the academic market;
once one starts thinking about just what dense, difficult books like this
one, packed with jargon and esoteric references, achieve in fact, especially in terms of the exclusion of potentially interested readers, perhaps their
own “politics of address” will not seem so “radical” after all.
Andrea Selleri
University of Warwick
Note
1
Available on http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520259256
Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray. An Annotated, Uncensored
Edition (Nicholas Frankel ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 2011
Readers looking for naughty bits are of course bound to be disappointed
by this latest edition of Wilde’s novel. They may be justified in looking for
them, though, by the pointlessly sensationalistic subtitle of a publication
which is, strictly speaking, the annotated edition of the final draft that
Wilde sent to Lippincott’s Magazine in 1890, and which underwent a few
editorial interventions before being published. It must be stressed that the
subsequently-altered lections that appear in Wilde’s typescript have
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already been published in print, as variants, in the 2005 OUP edition of the
novel (Wilde Picture 41-42). As the editor Nicholas Frankel acknowledges, modification of the authorial drafts was standard fare in magazine
publications at the time, and the number of changes in the case of Wilde’s
story is by no means unusual. The raison d’être of such a publication as
the present one is therefore the claim that the import of these changes is
significant enough to distort the authorial intention.
This is of course completely legitimate, and it is commendable that
this project was undertaken in the first place. However similar this version
may be to the 1890 text, the differences between these two texts on the one
hand and the familiar 1891 text are significant, and of public interest; as a
heavily annotated hardback priced at $35, though, this edition is more
likely to appeal to academic libraries than to the general readership.
Therefore, it seems more appropriate to judge it as an academic edition,
and to evaluate it for the new insights and materials it provides to scholarship. There is a general introduction, a textual introduction, notes at the
margins of the text and many illustrations.
Actually, the title provides a reliable clue as to the original sin of this
edition, namely its disproportionate and methodologically dubious
reliance on homosexuality as an all-purpose interpretive category for
Wilde’s writings. This is especially evident in the general introduction,
three quarters of which are taken up a discussion of the subject, presumably in an attempt to justify the label “uncensored edition”. Actually, as
the appendix (which collects all the variant readings) brings out and as
Frankel himself admits here and there, the ratio that the editors of
Lippincott’s Magazine followed was that of cancelling or mitigating references and allusions to sexual matters, whether homosexual or heterosexual. Nonetheless, the introduction concentrates almost exclusively with the
former, in accordance to the familiar protocol according to which since
Wilde has come down in history primarily as the archetypal homosexual,
then his writings must be considered primarily through that lens.
The consequences of this attitude are far-reaching and, as a rule, they
hardly make for reliable criticism. For one thing, it feeds the tendency to
erase the distinction between Wilde’s life and work. Frankel’s introduction
contains several examples of the resulting sweeping rhetoric, which goes
like: “In his life and writing, Wilde was playing a dangerous game of playing and revealing his sexual orientation” (21, my italics). “Like Dorian,
[Wilde] was harbouring his own secrets.” (11, my italics) Similarly, the
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tension between hedonism and morality in the novel is unwarrantedly personalised into a dialectical tension between Walter Pater and Wilde:
“Wilde seems intent on showing up Pater for his timidity and on pushing
the philosophy of “the new Hedonism” (30). Frankel then denies that the
novel is “a condemnation of aestheticism” because “Wilde never ceased to
be an aesthete in his writings and pronouncements” (31), thus having the
meaning of a text derive, in an unapologetically Victorian fashion, deterministically from its author’s biography.
Secondly, this reliance on biography also tends to smuggle into criticism the assumption that since “we” already know what we are looking
for, we might as well take for granted that it is indeed there. The result is
a hyper-determined reading in which everything can potentially mean the
same thing: “Today we can easily recognize these references to unhealthiness, insanity, uncleanliness, and ‘medico-legal interest’ as coded imputations of homosexuality.” (7). Actually, “construct” may be a better word
than “recognize”: the idea that Wilde’s was an “obviously homosexual”
novel comes from the unwarranted superimposition of current critical
fashions to a different cultural situation. Frankel’s insistent appliance of
the words “code” and “encoding” to describe what most current criticism
sees as “homosexual content” assumes both an authorial intention which
is by definition irrecoverable and a critical recognition for which there is
scant historical evidence, and which would need to be thoroughly argued,
not asserted; it also brings about the mushrooming of more dubious analogies: the painting is “cloaked and locked away”, “similarly” (10-11) to the
way this all-pervasive “homosexuality” is allegedly coded in the language
of the novel.
Thirdly, to read The Picture of Dorian Gray in the light of the Wilde
trials almost invariably entails misrepresentation of both the novel and the
trials. Frankel’s claim that “[t]hat Dorian Gray was used as evidence in
Wilde’s court trials underscores again how incendiary the novel really was
and how much Wilde risked in bringing it before the public” (20) obscures
at least three points: that there is no causal relationship between the novel
(or the critical reactions it got) and the 1895 trials; that during the first trial
the alleged immorality of the novel was used only as a secondary accessory argument by Queensberry’s defence team, which had much stronger
cards to play; that the “literary-jurisprudential” move was largely a failure,
and that Wilde had a relatively easy time countering attorney Edward
Carson’s rough biographism. The basic problem of this type of criticism,
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indeed, is that it employs reading methods that are virtually indistinguishable from the attorney’s own, in particular the assumption that to allude to
something means to depict it, and that to depict it means to endorse it; that
the moral implications Frankel draws are antithetical to Carson’s is irrelevant as far as the method is concerned.
The textual notes, while far from untainted from biographism (it is
not clear how the insistent comparisons between Dorian’s story and
Wilde’s later career are helpful to an understanding of the novel) fare better in terms of reliability and usefulness, and indeed they seem to be the
fruit of a painstaking labour of research. They cover extensively those elements of the cultural context that may not be familiar to modern readers,
give a concise account of the most important of Wilde’s sources and detail
some of the intertextual echoes between this and Wilde’s other works; a
few new elements are brought to light, such as the types of flowers which
were fashionable in the late-Victorian period, references to which are
abundant in the novel, and which were sometimes substantially different
from their modern counterparts of the same name. What really stands out,
though, is the impressive collection of illustrations placed at relevant
points in the text: from trivia such as the “Gladstone bag” that Basil carries, to illustrations for early-20th century editions of the novel, down to a
series of “Pictures of Dorian Gray” painted by actual artists, this edition
provides an excellent visual companion to the novel, which arguably
makes up for the shortcomings of its critical apparatus.
Andrea Selleri
University of Warwick
Works cited
Wilde, Oscar. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 3. The Picture of Dorian
Gray: The 1890 and 1891 Texts, Ed. Joseph Bristow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
——. The Picture of Dorian Gray. An Annotated, Uncensored Edition, Ed.
Nicholas Frankel. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,
2011.
96
MAALEJ, Mohammed, Isabelle Eberhardt, miroir d’une âme et d’une
société. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008, pp.163, Coll. “Espaces littéraires”
L’Autore, professore universitario tunisino, studioso del genere epistolare,
dedica il suo saggio a una nuova interpretazione delle 130 lettere che Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904), viaggiatrice russo-francese nel Sahara tunisino e algerino tra la fine del XIX e l’inizio del XX secolo, personaggio
controverso ed eccentrico, scrive al fratello Augustin de Moerder, all’amico Ali Abdul Wahad, a Slimène Ehnni, prima amante e poi marito, nel
periodo 1997-1904, e che, per la maggior parte inedite, sono state raccolte nell’opera Ecrits intimes. Lettres aux trois hommes les plus aimés, curata da Marie-Odile Delacour e da Jean-René Huleu, (Paris: L’Harmattan,
1991)1. L’intenzione dello studioso, dichiarata già a partire dalla prime
pagine del saggio, è quella di ridare dignità al contenuto all’epistolario,
sottovalutato anche da Edmonde Charles-Roux2, la più famosa dei biografi di Isabelle Eberhardt, la quale non approfondisce l’analisi delle lettere, relegandole a una funzione secondaria rispetto a quella dei Journaliers, dei racconti di viaggio, e delle opere romanzesche, limitandosi così
à una “représentation mythique de la relation qu’a eue la jeune slave avec
le monde arabe et selon laquelle, entre Isabelle et le Maghreb, tout est
fondé sur le coup de foudre, l’amour, la disponibilité, la fascination et bien
d’autres idées qui mythifient ce lien sans chercher vraiment à l’analyser”
(13). Partendo da questo assunto, le lettere della viaggiatrice sono analizzate come dei “textes qui n’ont rien à voir avec son oeuvre. Ce sont des
textes à dominante descriptive, qui […] puisent leur plus grand intérêt
dans cette image qu’ils nous donnent de la vie quotidienne de l’épistolière, ses projets, ses contacts, ses penchants, ses soucis, et ses liens intimes”
(62), e che sono importanti non tanto dal punto di vista sentimentale,
quanto da quello di un rapporto profondo e multiforme con l’alterità araba,
non privo di un aspetto lucrativo, e a tratti contraddittorio (come ricerca
della felicità associata a un miglioramento delle condizioni economiche).
A livello strutturale, il saggio è articolato in tre parti (a loro volta
suddivise ciascuna in più sezioni), precedute da una “Introduction générale” (7-18) in cui viene presentata la figura di Isabelle Eberhardt, sottolineandone l’attualità, e l’approccio tematico scelto, alla confluenza tra la
retorica e la stilistica, e seguite da una “Conclusion générale”, e dalla
“Bibliographie”. Ogni parte presenta, dal punto di vista strutturale, la ripetizione del modello generale adottato per il saggio (“Introduction”, sezio97
ni, “Conclusion”): questa reiterazione, per quanto a tratti un po’ troppo
schematica, costituisce tuttavia un elemento che facilita la lettura e la
comprensione del percorso critico adottato dallo studioso.
La prima parte (“Une Epistolière protéiforme” 19-66), suddivisa in
tre sezioni, è dedicata agli aspetti specifici di quella che l’autore chiama la
“lettre eberhardienne” (20), vista come espressione della “quête d’arabité”
della viaggiatrice: nella prima delle sezioni l’autore esamina l’epistolario
di Isabelle Eberahrdt dal punto di vista del corpus, dei destinatari, delle
dimensioni, della cronologia, e della “signature”, costituita dai vari pseudonimi (tanto maschili quanto femminili) da lei utilizzati nella sua corrispondenza. La seconda sezione precisa la natura e la funzione dei tre pseudonimi più frequentemente adottati dalla viaggiatrice: Nicolas Podolinsky,
Meriem e Mahmoud Saadi. L’ultima sezione è dedicata alla descrizione e
all’analisi dei molti termini arabi presenti nelle lettere, dal registro tanto
letterario quanto colloquiale: la loro presenza, e la loro frequenza sono
indice, secondo l’autore, non solo della perfetta padronanza della lingua
araba da parte di Isabelle, ma anche della sua potente e profonda adesione ai valori culturali del mondo arabo.
La seconda parte (“La lettre d’Isabelle” 67-114), suddivisa ancora
una volta in tre sezioni, analizza dettagliatamente le caratteristiche formali e contenutistiche delle lettere: partendo sempre dalla convinzione che
“la lettre d’Isabelle atteste sa détermination à edifier son identité et son
Moi arabes et musulmans” (67), lo studioso si propone di analizzare nella
prima sezione il concetto di intimità e di applicarlo alle lettere di Isabelle,
per passare poi, nella seconda sezione, all’analisi della natura assai varia
di queste lettere, costruite a volte come “bollettini medici” sul precario
stato di salute della viaggiatrice, più frequentemente come bollettini finanziari dell’altrettanto precaria condizione economica: si tratta di vere e proprie note di spese, o richieste di prestito di denaro, spesso essenziali, e caratterizzate da un pragmatismo sconcertante e da un linguaggio prosaico
che toglie molto al loro valore letterario. Nell’ultima delle sezioni lo studioso descrive le caratteristiche delle lettere-confessione, in cui Isabelle,
abbandonandosi non solo al flusso dei ricordi, esprime considerazioni
amare sulla crisi dei valori del mondo occidentale che ha lasciato, e questo le permette “de se distinguer de ses semblables et d’affirmer ainsi sa
propre éthique, celle de la femme libre qui ne peut se soumettre à une
quelconque norme morale ou religieuse contraire aux principes dont elle
est imbue” (99). Sempre in questa ultima sezione lo studioso descrive le
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caratteristiche delle lettere d’amore che, seppur rare, nella quasi totalità
indirizzate a Slimène Ehnni, e scritte sempre nei momenti di separazione,
testimoniano, attraverso l’utilizzo di iperboli, e di un linguaggio a tratti
criptato, accompagnato da rappresentazioni iconografiche altamente simboliche quali i disegni stilizzati di occhi, la continua ricerca di felicità di
Isabelle Eberhardt, la sua passionalità, il suo bisogno quasi ossessivo di
conferme.
La terza e ultima parte (“Une vision du Maghreb” 115-151), suddivisa in due sezioni, prende in esame l’immagine del mondo nord-africano
quale appare nelle lettere: la prima sezione è dedicata al rapporto di
Isabelle con il Maghreb, considerato negli aspetti di “captive amoureuse”
(116, nota 161 su questo richiamo, peraltro limitato al solo titolo, al saggio di Genet Le captif amoureux), di individuo alla ricerca di una nuova
identità religiosa, di artista in cerca una nuova ispirazione letteraria, e di
donna coloniale che si confronta con l’uomo arabo in quanto stereotipo di
un preciso immaginario erotico. La seconda sezione riprende, analizzandolo più dettagliatamente, il tema della donna coloniale sedotta dalla sensualità dell’uomo arabo: come appare nelle sue opere, ma in particolare
nelle lettere, Isabelle Eberhardt prova una forte attrazione fisica per gli
uomini arabi, ne è sottilmente, ma inevitabilmente sedotta, e tale seduzione si esplica attraverso una seduzione di tipo intellettuale (quella per Ali
Abdulwahab e Abou Naddara) e una seduzione prettamente erotica (quella per Khoudja e per il marito Slimène Ehnni). Il mondo arabo maschile
resta il solo interlocutore epistolare di Isabelle, mentre non c’è traccia di
scambi con il mondo arabo femminile.
Nella “Conclusion générale” (155-158) lo studioso, ricapitolando
quanto detto nelle singole sezioni, sottolinea nuovamente che la scrittura
epistolare “devient une forme de fusion avec l’autre” che permette a Isabelle Eberhardt di “accéder à une sérénité intellectuelle et morale qui a
marqué toute son oeuvre” (158): quest’ultima affermazione, tuttavia, suscita perplessità in quanto non solo nelle lettere, ma anche nelle altre opere
di questa viaggiatrice inquieta e tormentata (journaliers, racconti di viaggio, romanzi) la serenità sembra assente, o solo intravista, piuttosto che
realmente provata.
La “Bibliographie” a chiusura del saggio, è articolata in 6 sezioni,
ma risulta essere incompleta e disomogenea per le sezioni concernenti il
corpus delle opere di Isabelle Eberhardt, i saggi biografici sulla viaggiatrice (ne sono stati citati solo 2, di cui uno senza indicazione dell’anno di
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pubblicazione), i saggi sulla letteratura coloniale in lingua francese e i testi
romanzeschi sulla colonizzazione francese e sul mito dell’Oriente nella
letteratura francese del XIX secolo, mentre risultano ricche di informazioni bibliografiche le sezioni riguardanti gli articoli e le conferenze su
Isabelle Eberhardt e i saggi sulla letteratura epistolare. L’ultima sezione,
dedicata alla scrittura dell’alterità, per quanto anch’essa non completa,
contiene l’indicazione di testi importanti per chiunque si accinga a studi
inerenti le varie forme di tale scrittura. Per questa disomogeneità interna,
e per le lacune rilevate, la bibliografia risulta essere uno strumento incompleto, e solo parzialmente utile, per chi intende approfondire la conoscenza e lo studio della figura e dell’opera della viaggiatrice.
Luisa Benatti
Università di Trieste
Note
1
2
Lo studioso si è servito dell’edizione apparsa nel 2003, sempre per i tipi
della casa editrice Payot
Edmonde Charles-Roux è autrice di una monumentale biografia su Isabelle
Eberhardt, pubblicata dalla casa editrice Grasset prima in due volumi, Un
désir d’Orient. Jeunesse d’Isabelle Eberhardt 1877-1899 (Paris: Grasset,
1988) e Nomade j’étais. Les années africaines d’Isabelle Eberhardt 18991904 (Paris: Grasset, 1995), e poi unificata in un solo volume dal titolo Isabelle du désert (Paris: Grasset, 2003). L’Autore cita nella “Bibliographie”
alla fine del saggio solo il volume pubblicato nel 1988.
FENNICHE-FAKHFAKH, Amel. Fawzia Zouari: l’écriture de l’exil,
Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010, pp. 190
Amel Fenniche-Fakhfakh présente au grand public les aspects les plus intéressants de l’œuvre littéraire de la romancière tunisienne Fawzia Zouari.
Centrale dans les romans de Zouari est la notion d’exil: fascinée par la
thématique de l’entre-deux, la romancière francophone considère le
maghrébin émigré comme un être humain constamment hanté par “la
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recherche d’un juste positionnement vis-à-vis de l’autre” (8). L’étude de
Fenniche-Fakhfakh comprend trois parties: une analyse des lieux littéraires les plus représentatifs de l’œuvre de Zouari, intellectuelle partagée
entre la France et le souvenir de sa terre natale; une réflexion sur les deux
typologies d’émigré nord-africain décrites dans ses romans et enfin une
dernière partie consacrée à la problématique de l’interculturalité, nécessaire pour accepter une condition existentielle “métisse” (180).
Dans son étude, Fenniche-Fakhfakh met en évidence la profonde relation qui lie Zouari à l’écriture: pour l’auteur tunisien “écrire, c’est avancer
dans un brouillard où les mots sont eux-mêmes la lumière sur les vérités”
(14). Écrire en français est “un lieu d’exil” (15), “un Djinn tyrannique”
(16), une pensée adultérine qui pousse l’écrivain au-delà de ses limites
temporelles et spatiales vers “la découverte de soi” (18). Déchirée entre la
réalité et le rêve, le quotidien et le passé filtré par la “fiction narrative”
(38), la romancière tunisienne se réfugie dans l’espace neutre de l’écriture, miroir de sa “schizophrénie” intérieure (30).
La lecture de l’étude de Fenniche-Fakhfakh permet au lecteur de découvrir l’enthousiasme qui anime les luttes pour la défense de la dignité du
maghrébin émigré: intellectuelle engagée, écrivain militant, Zouari utilise
ses romans pour dénoncer le racisme profond qui domine la société française. Marâtre plus que mère bienveillante, la France, nourrie par “un sentiment d’hostilité et de rejet” (96) envers les émigrés, conduit les maghrébins venus de l’Afrique du Nord vers une progressive dépersonnalisation.
Apparemment intégré comme le personnage de Sadek de La deuxième
épouse (2006) ou visiblement écrasé comme Ahmed dans le roman Ce pays
dont je meurs (1999), l’émigré sent la nostalgie du village natal, symbole
métonymique d’un monde arabe “ancestral” (56) hors du temps.
Fenniche-Fakhfakh met en évidence l’objectivité analytique de Fawzia
Zouari, observatrice impartiale des “monstres” (51) qui menacent l’Orient
et l’Occident: si la France semble hostile et raciste, le monde musulman
est violé par les intégristes, “énergumènes avides de sang” (51).
Différents, mais hantés par la même “agressivité” (99), les musulmans et
les occidentaux pourraient résoudre leurs divergences seulement s’ils
écoutaient “une autre voix” (100), une voix féminine, synonyme d’une
“nouvelle version d’humanité” (100).
Fascinée par la richesse identitaire féminine, Fawzia Zouari, comme
souligne Fenniche-Fakhfakh, considère la femme comme un simulacre de
différents exils, une représentation en chair et os d’innombrables “dis101
jonction[s] et dislocation[s]” (113): “la séparation d’avec la mère” (113),
symbole métonymique de la terre et de la langue originaire (voir aussi
Marta Segarra Leur pesant de poudre: romancières francophones du
Maghreb, 1997), le choix souffert de “migrer dans une autre langue” (140)
fortifient la femme, héroïne moderne qui tente “l’expérience de se penser
sans l’homme, indépendamment de l’homme” (115) et qui essaie de favoriser la coexistence de la langue française et de la langue maternelle “bêtes
féroces destinées à se lyncher” (143).
L’étude de Fenniche-Fakhfakh met en évidence l’originalité de l’écriture de la romancière tunisienne: pour éviter de succomber sous le poids
de la lutte intestine entre le français et la langue maternelle, Zouari invente une langue “autre”, autonome par rapport à la langue de l’ancien colonisateur et à celle originaire. Cette langue devient la véritable “maison de
l’être” (150), expression du “dédoublement de la personnalité” (162) qui
caractérise l’écrivain maghrébin. Apparemment conforme au code linguistique français, cette langue nouvelle garde un cœur arabe. Fawzia
Zouari “remodèle” la langue française qu’elle utilise, la manipule et,
comme souligne Amel Fenniche-Fakhfakh, la transforme en instrument
linguistique hybride où l’extériorité formelle française cache une intériorité ancestrale arabe.
Née d’une profonde blessure identitaire, cette nouvelle typologie linguistique devient le symbole d’une mentalité plurielle et transculturelle,
d’une “pensée migrante” (173), vecteur d’un “espace [identitaire] tiers”
(175).
En conclusion, le mérite de l’étude de Amel Fenniche-Fakhfakh est
d’avoir mis en évidence la modernité de l’idéologie littéraire de Fawzia
Zouari: romancière engagée, interprète objective d’un monde qui observe
les conséquences d’une “créolisation” (180) inévitable, Fawzia Zouari est
l’un des modèles les plus représentatifs d’une génération d’intellectuels de
nulle part qui cherche son chemin identitaire à travers “la langue de
l’Autre” (180).
Claudia Mansueto
Università di Bologna
102
Note sugli autori,
Notices sur les collaborateurs,
Notes on Contributors, Die Autoren
Daniel-Henri Pageaux, Professeur émérite à la Sorbonne Nouvelle/ Paris
III, Co-directeur de la Revue de Littérature comparée, Membre correspondant de l’Académie des sciences de Lisbonne. Parmi ses dernières publications, citons: Le scritture di Hermes. Introduzione alla letteratura comparata (Palermo: Sellerio, 2010); Impromptus. Variations. Etudes. Essais de
Littérature générale et comparée (Paris: l’Harmattan, 2010); Cervantes
“raro inventor”. De la poésie au roman (Paris: Jean Maisonneuve éd.,
2011).
Dario Calimani è Professore ordinario di Letteratura inglese all’Università Ca’ Foscari di Venezia. Si occupa di testualità e memoria ebraica:
Torah e letteratura: dal Nome al Testo (2000); Bereshit: la libertà del
canone (2000); e L’ombra lunga dell’esilio. Ebraismo e memoria (2002).
Ha scritto: Radici sepolte. Il teatro di Harold Pinter (1985, 1996), Fuori
dall’Eden. Teatro inglese moderno, (1992, 1996), T.S. Eliot. Geometrie
del disordine (1998), T.S. Eliot: in fuga dalla cornice (2003), William
Shakespeare: i sonetti della menzogna (2009), William Butler Yeats. Il
figlio di Cuchulain (2011).
Rocco Coronato è professore associato di letteratura inglese all’Università
di Padova. Si occupa dei contesti europei della letteratura inglese fra ’500 e
’800 e della teoria della complessità negli studi letterari. È autore di: Theory
103
Matters in the Bard and His Contemporaries (University Press of America,
2001); Jonson Versus Bakhtin: Carnival and the Grotesque (Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2003); La mano invisible: Shakespeare e la conoscenza nascosta
(Pacini, 2011); La linea del serpente: analogia, caos e creazione in
Milton, Sterne e Coleridge (in corso di pubblicazione). Altre monografie
in corso d’opera riguardano Shakespeare e la teoria delle reti, uno studio
comparato di Shakespeare e Caravaggio e una ricerca sulle fonti italiane
di Hamlet.
Serena Fusco holds a PhD in Comparative Literature. She is Adjunct
Professor of English at the University of Naples “l’Orientale”, where she
is also Resident Director for the CIEE (Council on International Educational Exchange) Study Program. She has published on Asian American
photography and queer identity, comparative literature and China and she
is currently completing a book on the construction of “Chineseness” as a
transnational narrative of cultural identification in Chinese American
women’s literature.
Salvatore Pappalardo received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature with
a focus on Austrian, Italian and Irish literature from Rutgers University
New Jersey. His research explores late-Habsburg literature, the idea of
Europe in literature, and the works of Robert Musil, Italo Svevo and James
Joyce. He currently teaches German literature at Rutgers University.
104
Rivista iscritta al n. 880 Reg. Stampa Periodica
dal Tribunale di Trieste in data 1 agosto 1994
ISSN: 1123-2684
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