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| Roberto
Carvelli |
| LAST
END GOODS
In the last years of the XX century Italian Literature experienced
the end. The end means disillusionment and loss of relaxation in
the tale (even if it?s not generalizable and counter-balanced anyway
by resistances and restartings of the passion of narrative under
the guise of genres); the end means renouncing the extended forms
of romance in favour of narrative segmentation. But not yet its
limit. Italo Calvino says that ?faith in the future of literature
consists in knowing that there are things that only literature can
do with its specific means?: we agree.
At the end of the XX century Italian narrative marries shortness
and silence. As if in a mirror of memories, literature finds the
image of this darkness of the word in the individual conclusions
of its best writers.
Cesare Pavese, some days before his suicide, annoted in his diary
Il Mestiere Di Vivere (The Job Of Living) ?All this disgusts me.
No words. An action. I will not write anymore.? The disillusion
and the silence rhyme with the silence: actions but not narrative
actions.
At the same time Italo Calvino closes the path of many narrations
- even ?illusory and extended? - with the narrative pictures of
Mr. Palomar (Harvest) and with the essays in Una Pietra Sopra (A
Stone Up), which already in the title seems to evocate release.
Then he dies drowning for the future a geometry and an arithmetic
of the narrative measures in the Harvard?s readings Six Memos For
The Next Millennium (Vintage). About quickness he writes: ?However
by temperament I feel myself more at ease in short stories. (...)
In this preference for short literary forms I am only following
the true vocation of Italian literature, which is poor in novelists
but rich in poets who even when they write in prose give of their
best in texts where the highest degree of invention and thought
is contained in a few pages. This is the case in a book unparalleled
in other literatures: Leopardi?s Operette morali.?
Leonardo Sciascia, who also found and pursued a severe ethics by
the writings of the Classics and in the detective story the right
solution between the search of truth and the enchanting art of words,
chooses rather the illuminist essay as a natural epilogue. Or else
he touches upon iconoclasm with the short detective story A Simple
Story in which a commissary and a priest are allies and executioners.
This is the end of the History. Empty sky.
The same could be said for Pier Vittorio Tondelli, the ?spiritual
tutor? of most of our contemporary authors. Those writers have found
in his anthologies Under 25 a posthumous safe-conduct. Tondelli,
precious and cried dead, closes a path opened in the sense of the
reborn passion of tale in Others Libertines, his exordium, with
two books of silence: Notes To Friends, a meeting of self-analysis
and combinatorial spirituality and Separate Rooms, with no dialogue,
thoughtful and confessional. The meeting with ?Himself? is the mark
of the end, the balance of the heritage.
But now let?s speak of today!
I have chosen an author to show the fragmentary character of contemporary
Italian narrative at the end of the century. I want to speak about
Aldo Nove?s Woobinda. This book deals with very short stories (exempla)
with a definitive and exasperated rhythm and assertion like zapping.
Their beginning is already an end, any sentence aims at the exit.
It is organised into lots, like the goods in TV commercials. Aldo
Nove enumerates characters without personality, confused of and
by goods and cults, he shows archeological television at present
or present perfect. They tread the absurd death of news; the most
brutal and the scandalous death or human beings, the quick sex without
feeling. This is a contemporary book and posthumous by definition.
?Posthumous? (I use the word in the sense of Giulio Ferroni?s critical
essays ?After The End: About The Posthumous Condition Of Literature?)
means of course a book published after the death of the author but,
res extensa, writing is in itself declaring posterity.
To start writing is to bend the bow and to shoot an arrow toward
the end of the book and the death. Elsa Morante during an interview
about Menzogna E Sortilegio (Lie And Witchcraft) declared that she
wanted to write the last romance and then kill this genre. Aldo
Nove with his short stories does it. Book and death too. Book and
end.
Every book tells a story, says the concluded, the finished, and
hope to make it eternal. Writing short stories for our authors is
to endlessly repeat the myth of death, to repeat its rites. Writing
short stories is experiencing continuously the passion. An exorcism
for eternity. To finish is to declare one?s own mortality and to
hope for immortality: and that?s why we have so many rearrangements
and unfinished works.
At the same time proliferation - with no comparison in other ages
- of written and published (but not read) books at the end of the
century shows the way in which the personal symbolism exchanged
with death finds the testament-book because of diffuse alphabetisation.
This is the exasperation of logos like a beginning and slackening
of silence.
But, as Paolo Mauri explains in L?opera Imminente (The Imminent
Work), the book industry is looking for authors, needs books, not
necessarily masterpieces, the widespread trend toward the bottom
is present in all products.
Instead of accepting the diffusion of products and the lowering
as a spontaneus autodafé, Aldo Nove becomes eternal in the products
as author. It is telling stories without History and historicism
of an impersonal present.
In Woobinda, Aldo Nove seems to give us a possible way of resistance
and salvation of the author reduction of the book-product as a meeting
and an acceptance (of rythms, stories, impersonality, mass television
language) more than a contraposition. It seems to listen to Lao-Tze:
?To create without owning/ to act without appropriating/ to rise
without forcing/ This is the Way? and ?the docilest in the world/
wins the hardest.?
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