Gianni Celati: The Craft of Everyday Storytelling 9781442675339

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GIANNI CELATI: THE CRAFT OF EVERYDAY STORYTELLING

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REBECCA J. WEST

Gianni Celati The Craft of Everyday Storytelling

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2000 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-4772-6

Printed on acid-free paper Toronto Italian Studies

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data West, Rebecca }., 1946Gianni Celati: the craft of everyday storytelling (Toronto Italian studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-4772-6 i. Celati, Gianni, 1937II. Series. FQ4863.E36z88 2000

- Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. 853'-9i4

099-932869-7

This book has won the Modern Language Association of America's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies. It has been published with this financial assistance, and with the financial assistance of the Division of the Humanities, the University of Chicago. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

To Bill, Gemma, and G.T.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Gianni Celati: A Bio-Bibliographical Sketch

xi

Introduction: Meeting Gianni Celati 3 1 Bartleby: Preferring Not To 18 2 The Antimonumental: Redefining Minimalism

60

3 The Permeable Gaze 91 4 A Family of Voices: Celati's 'Parents/ 'Siblings/ and 'Children' 138 5 Celati's Body Language: Orality, Voice, and the Theater of Ephemeral Mortality 181 6 Africa, Gamuna, and Other Travels: Moving Narratives 221 Provisional Conclusions: Venturing into the New Millennium 270 Notes

287

Bibliography Index

323

303

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Acknowledgments

My thanks to all those who gave me inspiration; moral, intellectual, and material support; and encouragement. My colleagues in the Italian program at the University of Chicago, Elissa Weaver, Franco Nasi, and especially Paolo Cherchi, believed in my ability to write this book, and Paolo told me many times just to sit down and do it; for all of their care I am most grateful. My graduate students and research assistants, Sarah Hill and Davide Papotti, generously shared their own work on Celati and related matters and gave me invaluable material help in getting the manuscript into final shape. Barbara Naess of Chicago did a wonderful job of translating a needed source from German to English. Philip Gossett, dean of the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago, provided both collegial and financial support, for which I am most indebted to him. Colleagues farther afield also lent their ears and critical acumen to various aspects of this adventure. I warmly thank Victoria Kirkham for our many stimulating discussions; Penny Marcus for her terrific brainstorming on possible titles for the book; Anthony Tamburri, Robert Dombroski, Lino Fertile, Robert Lumley, Michael Hanne, and the lamented Gian Paolo Biasin for their specific suggestions and general support; Franco Ricci and Albert Mancini for providing articles; Francesco Muzzioli, Marco Belpoliti, Marianne Schneider, Daniele Benati, Gillian Haley, and Vincenzo Cottinelli for obtaining and sending needed materials from Europe. I aired some of my work on Celati at Purdue University, Berkeley, the University of Virginia, and the University of Pennsylvania; thanks to colleagues who invited me to speak and to audiences for listening. Ron Schoeffel and Anne Forte at the University of Toronto Press were unfailingly cordial, kind, and efficient, and I thank them greatly.

x Acknowledgments Gianni Celati is owed an enormous debt of gratitude for his diffidence regarding my desire to write a book on his work. When he modestly said that I surely had better things to do with my time, I was irrevocably convinced that I did not. To my intimate circle - my sister, my closest friends, my companion Bill, the cats - I can only say that, without you, my everyday life of work and play would not have been and would not continue to be the ongoing adventure in love and learning that it is.

Gianni Celati:

A Bio-Bibliographical Sketch

Gianni Celati was born in Sondrio, in northern Italy, in 1937. He studied at the University of Bologna, where he wrote a thesis on James Joyce. Subsequently he taught Anglo-American literature at that university for many years, and he had visiting professorships at Cornell University and at the University of Caen in the 19705 and early 19808. In the mid-igSos Celati left his teaching post at Bologna and moved permanently to Brighton, England, where he continues to write fiction and essays and to translate works from the French and English. A great peripatetic, Celati has traveled extensively throughout Europe and North America, where he has done many public readings of his works; most recently, his wanderlust has taken him to West Africa. Celati began to publish essays in the 19605 on Joyce, Celine, Bakhtin, and other writers and theorists, many of which centered on a critique of institutional forms of language and literature. These essays appeared in journals associated with the Italian neoavant-garde, such as // Verri and Quindici. His first published fictional work, the 1971 Comiche (Slapstick silent films), with an introduction by Italo Calvino, was included in an Einaudi Publishing House series oriented towards experimental writing by young voices. In the 19705 Celati also pursued his interest in translation, and he produced Italian versions of works by Swift, Gerhardie, and Celine. A collection of his critical essays appeared in 1975 under the title Finzioni occidental!: Fabulazione, comicitd e scrittura (Western fictions: Fabulation, comicality, and writing). Meanwhile, Celati continued to write fiction and three works appeared in the 19705: Le avventure di Guizzardi (The adventures of Guizzardi, 1973); La banda dei sospiri (The gang [or soundtrack] of sighs, 1976); and Lunario del paradiso (Paradise almanac, 1978). Later described as a tril-

xii Gianni Celati: A Bio-Bibliographical Sketch ogy made up of 'racconti comuni/ or everyday tales, these three books were published in one volume, with a completely rewritten version of Lunario del paradiso, under the title Parlamenti buffi (Funny chatter) in 1989. These semi-autobiographical works, in which anarchical young protagonists seek to make their way in a world dominated by repressive families and frightening authority figures, reflect the rebellious mood of the late sixties and precede by almost two decades the recent trend in Italy of youth-oriented fiction. They also show Celati at his most linguistically experimental, varying as they do from the comically grotesque agrammaticalities of Guizzardi's speech to the colloquial spoken style of La banda del sospiri and Lunario del paradiso. Having received some positive critical response to his first fictions (especially to Le avventure di Guizzardi, which won the coveted Bagutta literary prize in 1974), by the late 19705 Celati nonetheless felt the need to withdraw from the literary scene in order to rethink his approach to writing. He published some essays and translations after the 1978 Lunario del paradiso, but remained essentially absent from the mainstream publishing world until 1985, when his collection of minimalist stories, Narratori delle pianure (Narrators of the plains), appeared and was received with great critical enthusiasm. Since then Celati has published many works, including Quattro novelle sulle apparenze (Four stories on appearances, 1987); the above-mentioned Parlamenti buffi, 1989; Verso la foce (Towards the river mouth, 1989); L'Orlando innamorato raccontato in prosa (The 'Orlando innamorato' [of Boiardo] told in prose, 1994); Recita dell'attore Vecchiatto nel teatro di Rio Saliceto (Performance of the actor Vecchiatto in the theater of Rio Saliceto, 1996); and Avventure in Africa (Adventures in Africa, 1998). In 1991 his translation, with an introduction and annotated bibliography, of Melville's 'Bartleby' appeared, and he has also recently published Italian versions of Jack London's The Call of the Wild and Stendhal's La Chartreuse de Parme. Among Celati's many activities of the last decade are the cofounding and coediting of the journal // Semplice: Almanacco della prosa and the direction of two video films, Strada provinciale delle anime (Provincial road of souls) and II mondo di Luigi Ghirri (The world of Luigi Ghirri), the latter an homage to the work of the late photographer Ghirri, with whom Celati closely collaborated in the early and mid-1980s, when he was exploring the geographic and literary spaces of the Po valley and writing the stories that now make up Narratori delle pianure. Celati's fiction has been recognized with several literary prizes, including the Premio Bagutta for Le avventure di Guizzardi, the Premio

Gianni Celati: A Bio-Bibliographical Sketch

xiii

Scole and Premio Grinzane-Cavour for Narratori delle pianure, the Premio Mondello for Parlamenti buffi, and the Premio Feronia (from the city of Fano) for Recita dell'attore Vecchiatto. His Avventure in Africa won the first Zerilli-Marimo Prize in 1998; this prize was awarded by a jury made up of non-native, English-speaking specialists of Italian literature (primarily graduate students from North America and the United Kingdom) and included support for the translation into English and publication of the book. Although many of Celati's works have been translated into French, Spanish, and German, only two books have appeared to date in English (Narratori delle pianure [Voices from the Plains] and Quattro novelle sulle apparenze [Appearances]), both published by the Serpent's Tail Press in England. With the projected publication of an English-language version of Avventure in Africa by the University of Chicago Press Celati will find a new audience of readers, who will discover in him a contemporary Italian writer of great originality and Calvino-like appeal. At least, that is this reader's hope. A comprehensive listing of Celati's production, including essays, translations, videos, and fictional works, is provided in the Bibliography. Italian quotations throughout the text have been translated into English.

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GIANNI CELATI: THE CRAFT OF EVERYDAY STORYTELLING

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Introduction: Meeting Gianni Celati

'The odd ones, the eccentrics, the atypicals end up proving to be the most representative figures of their time.' Italo-Calvino1

From the heyday of the neoavant-garde, in the early and mid-1960s, to the more recent fiction of Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, and today's younger generation of writers, Italian fictional modes and critical responses to them have tended to privilege the epistemological underpinnings of narrative prose. As past experimentalism gave way to today's postmodernism, the widespread 'crisis of reason' has conditioned both poetics and practice, and current fiction in Italy grapples with the same impossibility of representation and of foundational knowledge that vexes (or inspires) writers elsewhere. The problem of the referent plagued Calvino, for example, especially in his last years, as his phenomenologically oriented Palomar attests, while Eco appears to enjoy the game of literary self-referentiality and the 'hall of mirrors' effect that self-conscious texts such as his can so masterfully produce. The crisis of authorial consciousness in modern literature explored by Roland Barthes in his now classic 1968 essay, 'The Death of the Author,' permeates postmodern texts both creative and critical, as writing itself, rather than the 'human person' behind the text, takes center stage. While foundationlessness may be the plight of language and textuality, however, the Author is anything but 'dead' in contemporary Italian culture. As Foucault wrote in his essay, 'What Is an Author?' we need an author's name on a text in order to show that the writing 'is not everyday ordinary speech,' and that it 'must be received

4 Gianni Celati in a certain mode ... and must receive a certain status' (in Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader; 107). Thus, in today's Italy, individual names, rather than statusless 'everyday' writing, continue to rule supreme, with the same tenacious strength as they have throughout the canonical construction known as the 'history of Italian literature.' There are, however, some writers (not Authors) in Italy who are part of a different line, one that veers away from the mainstream highlighting of names and status and that views writing more as a shareable craft than a solitary art. Gianni Celati belongs to this latter line, and is indeed by now its most eminent contemporary representative. Celati is, I believe, one of those 'odd, eccentric, atypical ones' whom Calvino thought of as ending up being most representative of their age. In its totality, Celati's work over the last thirty years represents what could be called 'artisanal' or 'workshop' postmodernism that, while in no way completely distinct from the more dominant line, nonetheless differs from that line in its orientation to ontology (being) rather than epistemology (knowing), and in its dedication to writing as a lifelong apprenticeship and an ideally 'nameless' pursuit. Like anonymous storytellers of yore, Celati is less interested in being an Author of Artful Texts that reveal consolidated knowledge (or, conversely, debunk the possibility of knowing) than in being the practictioner of a craft that might permit him to create fictions of some value in exploring our shared humanity and in living within our world of everyday contingencies. This artisanal approach to writing should not be seen as naive, however, for it is the result of years of the most serious study, of complete immersion in the debates and texts of modern and postmodern literature and criticism alike, and of a ceaseless journeying through thought and creative activity. Following that journey means moving through a literary and critical landscape that extends far beyond the work of one writer. The itinerary takes us from the period of intense questioning and theorization of the Italian neoavant-garde of the sixties, when the concepts of capturable reality and transparently representational language were both held in serious doubt, through the attacks launched in the 19705 on 'grand narratives' and on traditional instruments for seeking knowledge in many disciplines, from philosophy to historiography to literary criticism, to today's millennial, postmodern search for ways out of the impasse of foundationlessness. Celati has been intensely involved in all of these phases of recent thought and practice, and he has come to ask the same questions that haunt other contemporary thinkers and artists: Where do we go for imaginative, ethical, and spir-

Introduction 5 itual sustenance when foundations have been razed, when art has become in great part a self-enclosed, self-referential game, and when the society of the spectacle has all but cancelled age-old traditions and ancient ways of being? His long voyage has brought him to an understanding of the necessity of belief to our age; not, however, belief as dogma or as something handed down to us from past generations, but rather as something we ourselves must construct and sustain. As a writer, Celati's focus is on the belief-giving potential of everyday stories, or what he calls 'fictions in which to believe/ a concept that I shall explore in some depth in this study. Before beginning to follow the journey through Celatian postmodernism that is both ethically and aesthetically motivated, and which I am convinced takes us into a landscape little seen in the sketchy glimpses of contemporary Italian literary and critical culture currently available to foreign observers, I want to tell my own small story of discovery and eventual belief. Meeting Gianni Celati was and remains for me the entry into a creative and critical realm that exceeds by far the work of this one man. This book is my attempt at exploring that realm, with Celati as guide and companion. First, however, let me tell the story of a meeting. Rome, Spring 1979 I am a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, where I am writing a book on Eugenio Montale's poetry. Some months before, while still in the United States, I had written a 'fan letter' to Gianni Celati occasioned by my discovery of his 1973 novel, Le avventure di Guizzardi (The adventures of Guizzardi). As I think back to that discovery, I feel again the sense of delight that invaded me and that made me want to read more of this writer's work. What struck me was the book's radically comic effect, the richness of its linguistic, tonal, and structural inventiveness, and, above all, its delightful strangeness. I had never before encountered Italian such as this, nor a character anything like the sad clown Guizzardi. In my enthusiasm, I wrote to Celati that I loved his book and that I would be honored to meet him when I came to Italy, perhaps by going to Bologna, where I knew he lived and taught at the university. I received no answer, and in fact more or less forgot about my letter in the busy move from Chicago to Rome. Then, many months later, I was called to the hall phone on my floor of the Academy. 'Pronto?'

6 Gianni Celati I heard in response a soft, hesitant voice: 'Pronto, sono Gianni Celati/ I literally could not believe my ears! A writer was calling me? (This was many years before I began to have the courage to contact various writers on whom I worked, before I began to understand that they were people, not 'divinities' inhabiting some untouchable universe of the printed word.) The soft voice continued: 'I got your letter. Thanks/ I stammered out a reply, mixing French and English with my stuttering Italian. As always in moments of intense emotion, my linguistic competence was short-circuited. 'You're welcome, sir. Sending the letter was a little 'ose,' un po' 'daring,' what is the Italian word? Excuse me, I'm very excited. Might we meet? Obviously, whenever it's convenient for you, wherever ...' There was a brief silence, then the soft, hesitant, tenuous voice once more: 'But, but, in fact, I'm calling from here/ 'You're here, in Rome!?' 'What I mean is that I'm calling from here, from this place, here downstairs/ I felt lightning-struck. 'Oh my God, I'm coming, I'm coming down, I'll just be a minute, just a second, prego, prego/ Thus began our acquaintance, in a way that has continued to seem to me both intensely unreal and yet viscerally lived: 'filmic/ and heightened as few moments in life are. Celati and I spent that afternoon walking in a park on the Janiculum near the Academy, talking and talking as we walked and walked. I later came to know that he is an indefatigable walker, someone for whom moving through space is as necessary as breathing. As we watched the people passing by us, Celati commented on the comical sight of a very small jogger with a 'monumental' dog. He also used the word 'monumental' to describe a kind of literature that he did not like: the so-called romanzo ben fatto or 'wellmade novel' of realist proportions, with an omniscient, paternalistic, and controllingly 'pedagogical' narrator. As we chatted, we realized an odd fact: we had already met, seven or eight years before, in New Haven, Connecticut, when I was a graduate student at Yale and he was a visiting professor at Cornell. There had been a party at the home of one of my professors - who was a friend of a Cornell professor - and thus Celati had found himself at the gathering. We had been introduced, but in the party din I didn't quite catch his name and I really didn't know who that quiet, rather melancholy fellow sitting on the

Introduction 7 floor in a dark corner of the living room might be. We certainly didn't have any conversation. After hours of walking and talking, the Roman afternoon drew to a close, and Celati said he had to go back to Bologna. We said goodbye in front of the Academy. Turning around briefly as he pushed back the hair on his forehead, and with a wave of the hand, Celati disappeared into the twilight. As I stood there, still feeling dazed and as if I were waking up from a dream or coming down off the screen at the end of a film in which I had just watched myself playing an unexpected role, words from a poem by Montale, on which I had been working that morning before getting the fateful phone call, came into my mind. In the poem, 'La bufera' (The storm), the poet writes of the beloved lady as he watches her depart: 'ti rivolgesti e con la mano, sgombra / la fronte dalla nube dei capelli, / mi salutasti - per entrar nel buio' (you turned around and with your hand, pushing aside / the cloud of hair on your forehead, / you saluted me - then to go into the darkness). I felt at that moment all the weight, and all the strangeness, of coincidences, of connections made across time and space, and of what I can only now call the 'literariness' of life and the 'life' of great literature that can put its signature, so to speak, on certain lived moments, thereby highlighting and crystallizing a feeling, an emotion, an otherwise inexpressible sentiment. Several years after that meeting in Rome, I entered into a phase of work that concentrated on contemporary Italian prose fiction. In conjunction with that work, I was writing an article on Celati's 1985 collection of stories, Narratori delle pianure (Narrators of the plains), in which I was seeking to explore the use of space in the overall meaning of the volume. In the intervening years Celati and I had kept in touch, and I had read all of his fiction and much of his critical writing. Yet I hadn't thought back to that Roman encounter until I began work on the article, in which I analyzed, among others, a story called 'L'isola in mezzo all'Atlantico' (The island in the middle of the Atlantic). In support of my reading, I cited a 1984 essay by Celati, 'Finzioni a cui credere' (Fictions in which to believe), in which he wrote: 'Siamo gia da sempre e per sempre nella rappresentazione' (We have already always been and shall always be within representation; 13). And I realized that my memory of that afternoon in Rome made these words clear, and was deeply conditioning my reading of the tale in question. In the story, an Italian amateur ham radio enthusiast begins an

8 Gianni Celati exchange across the waves (both radio and oceanic) with a certain Archie, who lives on an isolated island in the middle of the Atlantic. Archie speaks only English, a language that the Italian does not know very well. With the help of an English friend, the Italian begins to translate and to understand Archie's transmissions, which are centered on the physical ambience of the island on which he lives. After some time has passed, the Italian and his English girlfriend travel to the island to find Archie, but they discover that he is no longer there. Instead, they meet a friend of Archie, whose name is also Archie, and who tells them the 'true story' of the unfindable first Archie. The layered narrative of Celati's tale underlines the 'already told' and 'represented' nature of any 'reality' or 'true story': everything we come to know is, in the end, a translation, a re-presentation (like the words in English of the first Archie translated by the girlfriend, or the story of the first Archie told by the second Archie). Moreover, when the Italian and his girlfriend travel to the island, their experience even of its physical reality has already been conditioned by the first Archie's previously sent descriptions. They go there looking for direct contact with Archie and with the island - for the 'originals' of a man and a place known indirectly through radio transmissions - but they find instead a second Archie who mediates their knowledge of the first Archie through words and an island that is unavoidably shaped through prior description. They are, in short, 'always and ever within representation.' As I wrote in my article, Tl mondo "reale" e dunque esso stesso un mondo narrato e non esiste una realta pre-narrativa accessibile in quanto vi si abita' (The 'real' world is itself, therefore, also a narrated world, for there is no pre-narrational reality that is accessible merely by being inhabited).2 This may be a conclusion conditioned by the postmodern 'era of "hyper-representation"' in which we live, and in which 'reality itself begins to be experienced as an endless network of representations.' W.J.T. Mitchell further comments that 'categories such as "the thing itself," the "authentic," and the "real" which were formerly considered the objects of representation (or as the presence achieved by formal purity) now become themselves representations' ('Representation/ in Lentricchia and McLaughlin, eds.; 16-17). Or it may be that dwelling within language has always meant that the 'real' is ineluctable except insofar as we represent it to ourselves and others linguistically. Literature is, of course, one of the means by which our shared human habitat in the realm of language is most 'brought home' to us (or that we are 'brought home').

Introduction

9

The 'true' and 'real' meeting with Celati in Rome was for me an experience that shed light on this 'represented' quality of so-called reality. My feeling then of being in a film or in a story, which I had attributed to the surprise and intensity of the meeting, was, upon retrospective meditation, what I came to think of as an epiphany of estrangement. Estrangement is formalistically understood as a literary or filmic device that, if successful, makes us see the 'real' as somehow more 'real.' Yet my epiphany had to do with a more or less opposite effect: the 'real' revealed itself not as immediacy, but as representation. In an entirely different context and to different critical ends, Lauren Berlant notes that 'experience' can be understood as 'something produced in the moment when an activity becomes framed as an event, such that the subject enters the empire of quotation marks, anecdote, self-reflection, memory. More than a category of authenticity, "experience" in this context refers to something someone "has," in aggregate moments of self-estrangement' (note 31; 288). Literary representation is one of the important 'territories' of this 'empire,' for it recreates, for the writer as well as for us, the readers, that 'selfestrangement' that can illuminate the generally murky flow of unconsidered experience, finding in it meanings that are widely shareable. Celati's farewell wave was most truly lived by me as the wave of Montale's poem. I was in and of representation, not because the meeting was not intensely and vitally lived, but because its meaning was and is mediated by language. Retelling the 'true story' of my first meeting with Celati here and now, again by means of language, convinces me yet again of the absolutely fundamental necessity of expressive form to lived life, of telling to living and knowing, and, conversely, of lived life to meaningful narration. This credo informs much of Celati's work, as he has sought over the past quarter of a century to craft 'fictions in which to believe.' In his essay of that title, he wrote: 'Crediamo che tutto cio che la gente fa dalla mattina alia sera sia uno sforzo per trovare un possibile racconto dell'esterno, che sia almeno un po' vivibile. Pensiamo anche che questa sia una finzione, ma una finzione a cui e necessario credere' (We believe that everything people do from morning to night is an effort to find some possible story about the external world that might be at least a little liveable. We also think that this is a fiction, but it is a fiction in which it is necessary to believe; 'Finzioni a cui credere'; 13). This emphasis on Tiveability,' on inhabiting the world through stories we tell ourselves and others, reveals the ontological preoccupations

10 Gianni Celati underlying much of Celati's writing, especially that of the last decade. As already mentioned above, scholarship on recent, post-Calvino narrative in Italy has for the most part emphasized instead the epistemological concerns of writers working under the sign of the 'crisis of reason' that permeates the so-called postmodern in its many guises. (Lyotard's early text on the postmodern was subtitled 'A Report on Knowledge' [emphasis added].) Writers such as Carlo Emilio Gadda, Umberto Eco, Leonardo Sciascia, and Luigi Malerba, as well as Calvino himself, have probed what JoAnn Cannon calls, using Elio Vittorini's term, the 'conoscibilita' or 'possibility of knowing' the world. She further asserts that such writers' works 'reflect in varying degrees what Umberto Eco has called "una crisi della Ragione" (a crisis of Reason)' (10). Unlike Celati, then, this strain of narrative presumably emphasizes the creation of fictions that might make the world 'at least a little knowable (rather than Celati's 'liveable'). Yet, as Hay den White has stated, The words "narrative," "narration," "to narrate," and so on derive via the Latin gnarus ("knowing," "acquainted with," "expert," "skilful," and so forth) and narro ("relate," "tell") from the Sanskrit root gna ("know")' (in Mitchell, ed., On Narrative; i). The terms - and the concepts - of knowing and telling are, therefore, profoundly related. Nor does Celati's move from the more expected 'knowability' of the world to its possibly enhanced 'liveability' through 'believable fictions' mean that his work is entirely disjoined from the more mainstream epistemological underpinnings of postmodern writing. Knowing is, however, suspect for him, for it is deeply allied with the aggression and dominance implied in the term 'mastery.' Celati abhors the 'monumental,' as well as what he calls 'ogni interpretazione complessiva del mondo' (every comprehensive interpretation of the world), preferring more and more explicitly to search for a mode of expression, a narrative positioning that 'non spia un bottino da catturare, che non va in giro per approvare o condannare cio che vede, ma scopre che tutto puo avere interesse perche fa parte dell'esistente' (does not search for booty to capture, does not go about in order to approve or condemn what it sees, but instead discovers that everything can have some interest because it is part of the existent) ('Finzioni a cui credere'; 13). The world is infinitely narratable when approached from this point of view, for the issue is no longer the radical limits of our ability to know it, but rather the discovery and refinement of linguistic and structural tools of the writing trade that might succeed in conveying and rendering more liveable even some small 'part of the existent.' That discovery and that

Introduction 11 refinement are artisanal activities, carried out in a long apprenticeship in the workshop of tradition, innovation, and language itself. Why a study dedicated to Gianni Celati? In Italy, the self-evident appropriateness of such an undertaking would obviate the question. There, Celati is by now recognized as one of the most respected of the so-called post-Calvino generation, although inclusion among the 'younger' writers of the last twenty years is due more to Celati's nonestablishment proclivities and his restless self-remaking than to an actual chronological membership in that group (he was born in 1937). In spite of his~very intermittent involvement in the mainstream Italian literary scene and his disdain for both the Institution of Literature and the academic culture that to a great extent supports that institution, he is nonetheless seen in his native country as a serious artist whose body of work is worthy of critical attention.3 In a 1997 poll of the mostadmired and most-studied (by both Italian and non-Italian scholars) contemporary Italian writers, Celati came in sixth, after Eco, Tabucchi, Claudio Magris, Vincenzo Consolo, and Guido Ceronetti ('I professori amano Eco e Tabucchi/ in La Repubblica). Yet no Italian (or other) critic has written a book-length study of Celati's production; his works tend instead to be discussed and briefly analyzed in journalistic or anthological venues (see Almansi, Tani, or La Porta, for example). Some of the most respected Italian literary critics have reviewed and commented on Celati's work over the years, from Renato Barilli to Guido Fink to Francesco Muzzioli, and Calvino himself very early on, in the late sixties, championed the then young writer's cause.4 Celati has also received some serious critical attention in England, especially since his move there in the 19805 and the translation into English of two of his collections of short stories (see Voices from the Plains, 1989, and Appearances, 1991). Michael Caesar and Robert Lumley are two English scholars who have written on Celati, the former in, among other places, the 1986 issue of Nuova Corrente dedicated to Celati's fiction, and the latter, translator of Narratori delle pianure, in the volume of essays edited by Zygmunt Baranski and Lino Fertile, entitled The New Italian Novel (1993). Celati's work has stimulated interest in New Zealand as well, mainly because of the attention paid him by the scholar Michael Hanne, who, in addition to publishing on Celati himself, has directed several Masters' theses on the writer. On this side of the ocean, Celati is now well known among specialists of contemporary Italian literature, although this was not the case some fifteen or twenty years ago, when I first began to read his fiction. Unlike his mentor Calvino or the arch-

12 Gianni Celati famous Umberto Eco, Celati is not, however, known to a broad American reading public. His books have not been translated in the United States and his name has seldom been raised in the few considerations of contemporary Italian fiction written for the general American reader in the New York Review of Books or the New Yorker, for instance, which have in recent years paid some attention to little-known Italian voices. Yet, as a writer, critic, translator, and original thinker about the meaning and function of creative writing, Gianni Celati is to my mind one of the pre-eminent Italian voices of the second half of this century. Furthermore, to know more about his work over the last three decades is to know more about a vast range of topics and issues of pertinence to postmodern literary and critical culture. Celati's work, which is like an apprenticeship in its continued investigation of the potential and limits of the act of writing, succeeds, moreover, in making the world more liveable, for it consistently seeks to bring everyday life and literature closer together, rather than emphasizing the gulf between lived experience and language, as much self-consciously literary writing ends up doing with its citational pastiches, its extreme effects, and its constant search for 'originality.' My study begins with an analysis of a figure emblematic of Celati's very particular negative preference: Melville's Bartleby. Bartleby's refrain - 'I would prefer not to' - could well be Celati's own motto regarding, among other things, the game of Literature as Institution, a game he has consistently refused to play. I seek to uncover and explore the constellation of literary, philosophical, and ideological issues that whirl about this primary figure within the Celatian universe before moving on to the questions raised .by the label 'literary minimalism,' which I argue is applicable, albeit with a somewhat eccentric definitional twist, to Celati's writing of the 19805 as well as to certain constants throughout his production. The role of visual media photography and cinema - in Celati's writing is then considered. Subsequently, 'his' writers, those with whom he especially feels the affinity of a shared craft, those whom he has translated, and on whose works he has written, become the subject of inquiry. I then consider the role of orality, voice, and performance in Celati's work, from the first fictions of the 19705 to his recent work over the last few years. A final chapter is dedicated to a discussion of his latest book, Avventure in Africa and, more generally, to the relation of errancy and writing in Celati's works. In an open-ended Conclusion, I briefly discuss the concept of 'willed failure' as seen in Melville and in a recent Celatian tale and conclude

Introduction 13 with a provisional assessment of Celati's overall contribution to Italian letters. Fundamental to an understanding of Celati's poetics and to the meaning of his writing is his very particular definition of the term 'preference/ which is in turn linked to his preoccupation with writing as an activity closely tied to being in the world. How Melville's Bartleby serves as an emblematic figure for a contemporary Italian writer is a question that lies at the heart of my study. In spite of many shifts in perspective and changes in writing style over the last three decades, Celati's fundamental modesty ('pudore' in Italian, a term that has been theorized in significant ways by contemporary Italian philosophers of the school of so-called pensiero debole or weak thought, and about which I have more to say later) and even something akin to shame in being known by the title of 'author' remain constant, adding up not only to a unique style but also to an ethical stance of deep resonance.5 Celati published his translation with commentary of Melville's 'Bartleby' in 1991. Beginning my study with Bartleby seems, therefore, to reverse the usual order employed in a monographic consideration of a writer, which usually proceeds chronologically from the early works to the most recent, a critical procedure faithful to a progressive, teleological vision of a fictional corpus. Indeed, the very word corpus reveals the biological metaphor underlying such a methodology: the 'body' of work is looked at from its 'birth' to its youthful 'development' and finally to its full-fledged 'maturity' and eventual closure or 'death.' I have chosen instead to follow a non-linear, erratic, and 'zigzagging' path through Celati's work, for I am convinced that such a critical mode can be as legitimate and perhaps even more successful in drawing out the primary articulations of a writer's themes and style.6 Anthony Tamburri has proposed a related mode in his concept of the 'retro-lector/ with which he argues that 'in the case of many writings that we consider anti-canonical, problems relevant to interpretation cannot be resolved simply through the employment of a reading of the chronological type vis-a-vis the other works of the same author' (i). In Celati's case, I believe that critical errancy is without a doubt more suitable. The already standardized view of his work as dividing rather neatly between the 'young' or early essays and fictions of the 19605 and 19705 and the 'mature' or later production of the 19805 and 19905 (a view I must admit to having adopted myself in some essays dedicated to his fiction) is heuristically useful but not, upon reconsideration, the most accurate portrait of the 'body' known as 'Celati.' This body is more unruly than a neat dissection into 'youthful' and 'mature'

14 Gianni Celati might suggest; the ways in which it has grown and come into something like a describable form are linearly and circularly conditioned, as quite old concerns and goals and new directions continually mingle throughout the critical and fictional texts written over the last thirty years. As in the case of a human body, so in Gelati's body of work are the 'young' contours palimpsestically present under the more 'mature' lines of the most recent production. Celati was, for example, already talking about his fascination with the figure of Bartleby when I first met him that fateful day in Rome in 1979. That it took another twelve years for him to translate and publish his version of Melville's story is not surprising to me, since I have incubated this study for at least as long. Errancy and modesty are qualities characteristic of Celati's style, both human and literary. My further meetings with him since 1979 have for the most part been marked by his propensity simply to show up unannounced, without fanfare, as if stopping to chat were just a casual moment of respite from his more or less constant travels through life. Our second meeting occurred in the summer of 1983, when I was teaching on a Program Abroad for American students and living in the villa of Byron's last mistress outside of Florence. A setting of faded glory, the musty villa, with its library of forgotten, odd books and its unkempt grounds, was ghostly and perfectly suited to the apparition of Gianni Celati, who knocked on the door one morning, only to disappear the next day after an all-night session of grappa-induced hilarity, fortune-telling (via the reading of palms), and shared, easy conviviality with me and my villa-mates. Subsequent meetings have taken place in modest trattorias in the countryside; on the steps of Bologna's San Petronio; in Florence's Santa Croce piazza at twilight; in a car driving along the small, winding roads outside Siena; in my kitchen, with my cat Gemma sitting at our feet; in Celati's apartment in Bologna where, on one unforgettable day, he read to me some of his rewritten first book, Comiche, and had me laughing until I cried. There have been some more formal meetings, as when he came to the Purdue University Annual Conference on Romance Languages, Literatures, and Film as an invited keynote speaker; when he did a reading from his prose version of Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato at my university; or when he read the stories of others from the 'almanac of prose/ II Semplice, which he coedited, to an audience of fascinated listeners at the Chicago Italian Cultural Institute. But it is the unplanned, informal sort of encoun-

Introduction 15 ter that I associate with Celati's innate 'style/ which is deeply allied with a conception of both life and art as constant searching, unexpected connections, and 'feminine' permeability. Encounters happen, as books happen; life and thought come to us, perhaps especially when we are least involved in seeking them out. Errant modesty; modest errancy: these are a modus vivendi and a modus scribendi that form an ethics and a poetics, the meanings of which the words that follow look to trace and to unfold. I offer a final introductory comment. I have mentioned the importance of the figure of Bartleby to Celati's poetics, so it can reasonably be assumed that there is an implied identification between the literary character and the Italian writer. Indeed, so strong is the identification that I had originally thought of calling my study Celati the Scrivener. There are, however, other deeper reasons for which I call Celati a 'scrivener,' and which I want briefly to explain. The 'founding father' of Italian literature, Dante Alighieri, proposed the definition of 'scribe' for himself, both in his first work, the Vita nuova, and in his masterwork, the Divine Comedy. In the great poem, he is 'God's secretary, taking down reality as dictation' (Barolini, 90), as his use of the words 'scriba' (in Paradiso X) and 'noto' (I copy; in Purgatorio XXIV) make explicit. There are, of course, strong theological implications in his use of the term: the poet is one who 'copies' God's 'Book/ which is the created world, made to be read by us humans in order to understand the Divine Plan.7 But there are implications, even in Dante, that I believe can be seen as not strictly theological, and that instead have primarily to do with literary creation and the poet's relation to language. As a 'scribe' or 'scrivener/ a writer sees language as anterior to individual will, and himself as one who ultimately 'copies/ whether what is copied is a 'Divine Plan' as written in the created world or multiple 'books' that have no foundational status, but rather simply emerge from the anteriority of language. Noumenal or nominal, there is implied a pre-text of and for writing, into which each individual act of writing taps. In Dante's view, this pre-text is fundamentally historical, literary, and theological in nature, and involves the unfolding of events over time, the classical literary heritage and the more immediate background of the place and meaning of vernacular poetry for him and his contemporaries, and the 'Book' of the created universe. For contemporary writers, it is something quite different. The postmodern exasperation of the long history of the concept of writing as copying, and of the one who writes as a scribe or scrivener -

16 Gianni Celati now fully divested of any theological or transcendental resonances is seen, among other places, in Roland Barthes's conceptualization of the 'death of the author/ In his eponymous essay, Barthes writes that 'the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text'; furthermore, 'the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture/ and the scriptor can only copy from 'a readyformed dictionary/ Barthes mentions Bouvard and Pecuchet, 'those eternal copyists, at once sublime and comic and whose profound ridiculousness indicates precisely the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original' ('The Death of the Author'; 146). For Barthes, Derrida, and other 'post-theological' thinkers, this foundationlessness can be both limiting and liberating. It limits drastically any authoritative positioning of discourse, any philosophical or ideological claims to 'Truth' that might be located outside of discourse itself, yet it also liberates thought and creativity alike, as they are folded into what Barthes called 'an art of living' and a 'floating' state (like the signifier itself) 'which would not destroy anything but would be content simply to disorientate the Law' ('Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers'; 215). Such a benevolent view of foundationlessness can be questioned (witness the many debates over the last twenty-five years or so, since Barthes wrote the above words and Derridean ideas began to make incursions into American theory), and the working out of the ideas regarding writing to which I have merely and superficially alluded, is a complex process. But it is nonetheless true that throughout the history of literary creation the concepts of authoritative 'authorship' and more modest 'scribal' activity have generated and been maintained in an unresolved tension for both writers and critics. Gianni Celati is a self-described 'scribe' rather than an 'author/ In interviews and essays over the years, he has time and again referred to himself as 'someone who writes' and to the results of this activity as 'scritti' (written things) rather than 'novels,' 'essays,' or even 'texts/ His aversion to the title of 'author' is linked to his aversion to expressions and forms in which some implication - no matter how hidden or transformed - of a claim to authority is at the basis of literary elaboration. In much of his work, he appears to accept the sheer anteriority of language, yet it also seems that he reaches towards some transcendent realm. This apparently contradictory view is reflected in his belief that the shared human search for narratives that might make sense of existence is a 'fiction' in which, however, it is necessary to 'believe/ His 'workshop' approach to writing has sustained a rich and long career of

Introduction 17 dedication to the powerful potential of carefully crafted words: a potential that is never perfectly fulfilled but that fuels the imagination and its amazing products. There is a Leopardian quality to this poetics of illusory faith; the world is illumined, if at all, by moonlight, by the lunatic fantasies of imaginative aperceptions, rather than by the sunlight of rational concepts. A modest scrivener who 'prefers not to' may tell us more about inhabiting this sublunar world than any confident 'author'; how and why this may be so are questions, among others, by which the following study is motivated. Chicago, Summer 1997 The first meeting in Rome is long ago and far away, but Celati's words are closer than ever. I write about them for him, for his readers, for his future readers - and for myself, in order to clarify why I too have come to love 'preferring not to/

1

Bartleby: Preferring Not To

'Bartleby is not a metaphor of the writer, nor the symbol of any other thing. It is a violently comic text, and the comic is always literal. It is like a short story by Kleist, Dostoevsky, Kafka, or Beckett, with which it shares a subterranean and prestigious lineage. It means only what it literally says. And what it says and repeats is i WOULD PREFER NOT TO.' Gilles Deleuze1

'I would prefer not to/ With these simple words Melville's Bartleby brings into being a compellingly mysterious world of unexplained motivations, which readers have tried to decipher for more than a century. Translated and commented upon by many of this century's writers, from Borges and Beckett to Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, 'Bartleby/ written in the winter of 1852-3 and published in 1856 in the collection The Piazza Tales, is a haunting story. It is also, as Celati's reading of it convincingly and surprisingly argues, deeply funny, Violently comic/ to use the words of Deleuze. Critical analyses of the story in the earlier decades of this century tended to concentrate instead on such unqualifiedly unfunny issues as the emargination and silencing of artists in capitalist society, the limits of utilitarian philosophy, and the battle between predestination and free will.2 Many other interpretations - from the psychologistic to the biographical to the theological have been advanced. In the annotated bibliography included in the edition of Celati's translation and introduction of the story, Bartleby lo scrivano (1991) he mentions Dan McCall's 1989 volume The Silence of Bartleby, which outlines in some detail the many methodologies and critical conclusions applied to and drawn from the tale. Describing McCall's

Bartleby: Preferring Not To 19 book, Celati writes: 'this is the first book entirely dedicated to the figure of B. It examines the various deliriums or fixed ideas upon which the "Bartleby industry" - that is, the non-stop "industrial-strength" production of academic articles on our story - has been based ... However, the explanations of the story that the author introduces in the second part [of his book] still seem to be victims of the academic mirage: that is, the mirage of being able to explain, by means of documentation, something that is destined to remain unthinkable unless one changes one's very habits of thought, or habits of life' (no). Celati's own reading, which I shall discuss in detail later on, is a clear reflection of his absolute commitment to an approach that demands that sea change. Bartleby's silent and passive existence has long fascinated Celati, and it might even be said that there is a sort of identification with 'the scrivener who gives up writing and remains immobile, looking at a wall, imperturbable and laconic, deaf to every reasonable persuasion, unshakeably mild' ('Introduction'; vii). The writer who is attracted to silence is not solely of our postmodern era, of course, but such an attraction does seem particularly appropriate to these times of a loss of faith in foundations and in effectual correspondences between signs and things. Yet more than the refusal or inability to communicate his motives, it is Bartleby's undeniable 'thereness' that most captures Celati's attention. Celati defines this unshakeable, inertial presence of Bartleby as his 'preference,' the very word (in its verb form 'prefer') that the scrivener uses in response to all solicitations of action or explanation, and which Celati emphasizes even more by translating 'I would prefer not to' with the nominal 'Avrei preferenza di no' (I would have a preference not to). 'Preference' for Celati signifies, with reference to the term's etymology, an a priori disposition (prae-ferre, to carry before), a predilection that all of us have as an 'absolute anteriority,' an 'elementary destiny/ a 'way of being,' like the bodies and faces we are born with, and to which great comic figures remain true with 'saintly devotion' ('Introduction'; xii, xiii). Bartleby, like Popeye, might say 'I yam what I yam'; like the absurdist character, Chance the gardener, his essence is in 'being there,' beyond whatever interpretations and responses others might have of or to him. But what do we do with 'thereness' when we cannot interpret its meaning or meanings, and when every attempt at establishing a shared space of intentionality is blocked by inertia and passivity? And why do the attributes of a figure who is unalterably and solely what is there before our eyes often simultaneously appear to us tragic and comic, deep and shallow?

20 Gianni Celati In order to get closer to some possible answers, it is useful, I think, to go back to one of Celati's earliest sources of inspiration: the very Bartleby-like character, Buster Keaton (whom Celati called his 'favorite philosopher' in an interview with Franco Marcoaldi, included in Marcoaldi's review-article of Quattro novelle sulle apparenze, 'Sentimenti Celati/ L'Espresso, 1987, 155), as well as to the concept of the comic greatly conditioned by silent film characters like Keaton, Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and Harry Langdon - that informs Celati's first fictions, especially Le avventure di Guizzardi. In a reading of Beckett, 'Su Beckett, 1'interpolazione e il gag' (On Beckett, interpolation and the gag), included in Celati's 1975 volume of critical essays, Finzioni occidentali: Fabulazione comicita e scrittura (Occidental fictions: Tabulation, comicality, and writing), the writer emphasizes the central role played in many of Beckett's texts by a dialogic recognition of a 'you' to whom the narrator is directing his words. This recognition of the reader is coupled with self-conscious interpolations that reflect 'all that which turns the impersonality of the written norm toward the less solemn moment of its production, toward the idiosyncrasies of the act of writing.' Instead of a form of writing that pretends to capture some pre-comprehended external and referential sense, this writing infused with interpolations orients us towards ' the precariousness of the act of its production' and shows the writer as a 'scribe' instead of an 'author,' one who 'with great difficulty [plucks] the word from a silence that proceeds and generates it' (57).3 Writing filled with interpolations, deviations, as it were, from linear narrative transparency, is, in Beckett, comic in that it is no longer a 'fixed monument of an authoritative expressivity, but instead [is] entirely resolved in the lunatic virtuosity of recitation' (60), and is made up, therefore, of verbal gags, which are very similar to those of cinematic slapstick comedy. As we know, Beckett's Waiting for Godot was inspired by the exchanges of Laurel and Hardy, and he cast Buster Keaton in the leading role of his magnificent venture into film-making, Film. Celati proceeds to discuss the gags used by his beloved Beckett, which run the gamut from self-canceling assertions such as those dear to Groucho Marx,4 to those based on the problem of the balance or positioning of the body such as are seen in Chaplin's or Keaton's drunken walks, to those having to do with the individual's relation to an object or objects such as are common to music hall and silent film both. However, the two types of gags most pertinent to Celati's own early fiction as well as to his interpretation of Bartleby are, in my opinion, those based either on slowed-down or absent comprehension

Bartleby: Preferring Not To 21 between two individuals, and those rooted in the expulsion of a character. The first is best exemplified in the classic exchanges between Laurel and Hardy, and the second is, in Celati's view, a typical element of Buster Keaton's art. These gags have to do respectively with incomprehensibility and sheer presence or 'thereness/ both of which condition much of Celati's work over the years. Taking up the gag originating in expulsion, it may appear at first that such a movement has more to do with absence than presti ice, but Celati's discussion of this motif - based in large part on Jean-Pierre Coursodon's study entitled Keaton et C.ie (Paris, 1964) - emphasizes its 'presentifying' function. Keaton is often thrown out of a place, and this leit-motif can be linked to more general themes of abandonment, exclusion, and the like. Coursodon notes that High Sign, Keaton's first short feature, begins with this image of expulsion, which is accompanied by a written message: 'Our hero came from nowhere. He wasn't going anywhere, and he got kicked out of somewhere.' The French critic comments that these words present the initial expulsion as a kind of birth: a coming into the world. Celati quotes further: Tn film after film, the Keatonesque character is put into the world in spite of himself, and afterward he tries to return to the lost paradise of the matrix' (70). Both Keaton and many of Beckett's characters often then find themselves in an oneiric, estranging dimension, not knowing how they got there or where they are going. What follows, in cinema and texts alike, are wanderings through space, casual adventures, and absolutely nonteleological structures. The characters are kicked out and into absolute 'thereness.' Furthermore, characters who are expelled or abandoned are 'poor lost souls/ as much outside of societal controls and normative, goal-oriented behavioral patterns as the narratives that contain them are outside of more traditional narrational techniques. Celati therefore sees expulsion as an extremely important conditioning motif in that the interpolations, digressions, and errancy that make up this antilinear kind of comedic effect are its 'logical' result. The gag based on incomprehension, perfected by Laurel and Hardy, depends not on the solitude of the expelled type, but in great part on the interaction of a 'catatonic' individual and an 'hysterical' one. The less the passive partner responds, the more the active partner becomes agitated. Time is slowed down as the lack of response is underlined by the ever increasing and often loudly vocal furor of the 'hysteric.' Although Buster Keaton did not perform as a member of a partnership, his 'catatonic/ unchanging expression sets up a relationship

22 Gianni Celati between him and all of us who are watching him that inevitably puts us in the role of the 'hysteric/ In an essay published in The New Yorker Anthony Lane writes: 'Viewed from the side, [Keaton] has always reminded me of the solemn, grieving, figures in Giotto's frescoes' (72). The beautiful, pictorial quality of his unpenetrable expression evokes in us a sense of some deep sadness beneath, which we would want to reach and to comprehend. Yet there is also the sense of a complete lack of depth, a blankness that covers nothing but more blankness. This latter quality is emphasized in the less sculptural, less handsome, and much more dopey inexpressivity of the uncomprehending and incomprehensible Laurel, for example. In both cases, however, the impenetrability of their inarticulate presence invites a sheer delirium of frustration from others, who want to uncover some intentionality in their overwhelming, mute 'thereness.' As Melville's narrator comments regarding the scrivener's behavior: 'Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance' (28). Thus, both expulsion and incomprehensibility emphasize sheer beingness, which is unreachable by the logical norms of social and verbal interaction. The connection perceived by Celati between Bartleby and comic characters such as those played by Laurel and Keaton becomes clearer when the motifs of 'expulsion-birth' and 'catatonic impenetrability' are put into play. As is evident from the criticism discussed above, years before Celati's translation of and commentary on Melville's story appeared he was already exploring these elements of comic writing which, I believe, later reappear, if within a changed critical and philosophical context, in his analysis of the scrivener. Not only did Celati write critically about comic writing (primarily although not exclusively regarding the works of Beckett), he also wrote fiction that clearly embodies many of the techniques outlined in the critical work. His Guizzardi, of the 1973 Le avventure di Guizzardi, is a close relative of Keaton and Bartleby both, and he is deeply tied to a Beckettian comicality. Guizzardi begins his erratic itinerary through multiple adventures after having been expelled from his place of origin: 'Quindi dover partire dalla citta della mia giovinezza abbandonando 1'una e 1'altra verso avventure che ancora non sapevo quanto spiacevoli potessero sembrarmi' (Thus having to leave the city of my youth abandoning both toward adventures that I as yet did not know how unpleasant they would seem to me; 13).5 This departure is preceded by Guizzardi's sole experience of pleasure and consolation: foreign language lessons given by the 'untiringly' admired Signorina Frizzi. His parents,

Bartleby: Preferring Not To 23 instead of showing the same 'grande comprensione [di] spirito' (great understanding of spirit) as the patient Signorina, harass him constantly, insisting that he must find work: 'devi lavorare Danci!' Guizzardi, or Danci, as his mother calls him, has a most particular style of self-expression, an almost dementially garbled and agrammatical language that blocks rather than facilitates communication. His parents react to his attempts at self-explanation with the hysteria and furor typical of the aggressive figure in the 'catatonic-hysterical' partnership; his mother is instantly capable of creating hysterical scenes, 'dimostrandosi in un attimo capacissima di scena isterica con roteamenti di occhi impressionanti e rotolii per terra di finta svenuta' (with impressive eye-rolling and rolling around on the floor in a fake swoon). His father screams at him, chases him with his belt in order to beat him, and threatens: Ti faccio prendere!' (I'll get you caught!) (10-11). After his expulsion from this unhappy home, Guizzardi darts from adventure to adventure (as his name implies, for 'guizzare' means 'to dart'), a prisoner of chance and his own radical inarticulateness. Although his continuous, astonishingly garbled stream of words, which make up the narrative we read, would seem to distinguish him from the 'catatonic,' mute form of passive resistance seen in comics like Keaton and Laurel, as well as in the laconic Bartleby, he is their brother in his stubborn devotion to his 'preference not to,' that is, his perdurability as Guizzardi and only Guizzardi. Nothing changes him, elevates him, enlightens him or, ultimately, does him in. (In this last quality of endurance, he is much more akin to Keaton than to Bartleby.) Pursued, battered, sexually used, plunged into excrement and inclement weather, Guizzardi goes on and on, and his proliferating narrative ends with his defiant cry: 'Me 1'hanno fatta me 1'hanno fatta! ... Pero non me la fanno phi!' (They've screwed me over they've screwed me over! ... But they won't screw me over any more!; 167). A summary of Buster Keaton's real misadventures equals or maybe even surpasses the unlikely catastrophes of Celati's protagonist: 'Before Keaton was three, he had fallen down a flight of stairs, nearly smothered in a costume trunk, had been alone in a burning building, lost the better part of a finger in a clothes ringer, was almost blinded by a rock which he had thrown in the air, and, in an episode that sounds like a scene from one of his films, was sucked out of a window by a cyclone that took him sailing over a small Kansas town landing him gently in the middle of a deserted Main Street' (Banner; 4). Expelled into the world, the misfit, as if in a dream, goes on, but never toward, and his very endurance is both deeply

24 Gianni Celati comic and compellingly mysterious, especially for those whose lives seek order, logic, and explainable teleologies. In 1987, more than a decade after the publication of Finzioni occidental! and Le avventure di Guizzardi, Celati put into print the story of Baratto, another Bartleby-like character. In the story of Guizzardi, the comic effects of expulsion, incomprehensibility, and endurance are highlighted, while in 'Baratto' (included in the volume of stories entitled Quattro novelle sulle apparenze [Appearances]), silence and the refusal to enter into the pact of communicative intentionality come to the fore. As Robert Lumley notes: 'Baratto has regularly been likened to Bartleby the Scrivener [sic], the obvious model for his mute refusal of the social obligation to speak' (in Baranski and Fertile; 54). The character Baratto, who shares the first three letters of his sole name with Bartleby, is a gym teacher and rugby player who one day is left 'without thoughts' and then becomes mute. Similarly, between the late seventies and mideighties, a 'mute' Celati had virtually ceased publishing and his reappearance in 1985 with the collection of stories Narratori delle pianure (Voices from the Plains) seemed to manifest a radical break with his earlier comic style. If we focus on the emblematic figure of Bartleby and, above all, on the constellation of textual, linguistic, technical, and philosophical issues that attach to him, however, I believe that there is more continuity over time among Celati's superficially diverse writing projects than might first seem to be the case. The pared-down prose of Narratori and the strongly philosophical orientation of the four stories in Apparenze led critics to judge this writing to be indicative of a completely new direction, yet at least in the case of 'Baratto/ such a developmental sequentiality is not applicable, for Celati sent a version of this story to me in 1983, commenting in the accompanying letter that he had recuperated it from 'old notebooks of years ago, when [he] was living in Paris.' He called the story 'a little heavy' (un po' pesante) and 'painful' for him (e per me penoso). Nonetheless, it is also comic, in much the same way that 'Bartleby' is a conceptually comic tale, for Baratto's refusal to speak, like Bartleby's reiterated and opaque response, T would prefer not to/ touches the depths of absurdity into which the search for interpretability plunges us.6 Baratto's name signifies 'exchange' or 'barter/ and the verb form 'barattare' can, by extension, mean 'discorrere con qualcuno del phi e del meno' (chat with someone about this and that). Baratto, untrue to his name, we might say, refuses to enter into the ceremony of linguistic

Bartleby: Preferring Not To 25 exchange, for he one day suddenly feels that 'there is nothing to discuss!' ('non c'e niente da discutere!' 'Baratto/ in Quattro novelle sulk apparenze [1987]; 9). On the day that inaugurates his period of muteness, some vague thoughts enter his head as he rides home on his motorcycle from a rugby match that he has abruptly abandoned; they are stimulated by the landscape he observes, and come together in the phrase 'C'e del fumo in questo paesaggio' (there's smoke in this landscape; 11). He stops to observe better the smoke or vapor, but realizes after a bit that he is no longer thinking that phrase because the air is clear and he can see the cultivated fields right up to the horizon. Upon his arrival home, his neighbor, an old pensioner, is watering his pot of azaleas on the landing, and remarks to Baratto: The days are getting longer/ but Baratto responds, 'adesso non posso rispondere' (I can't respond now; 11), in a wonderfully paradoxical locution (he 'responds' that he 'can't respond') that shows the distance between the signified and the signifier.7 After eating a sandwich while standing up in the kitchen - part of a daily routine that includes clearing the table that his wife sets every morning - Baratto watches the screen and listens to the buzz of the television, which he has turned on to an empty channel, all the while fanning his head. Phrases from television commercials enter his mind, and he walks back and forth, fanning his head and listening to the phrases, until he realizes they have gone away. He then performs other routine actions - washing the edges of the kitchen sink where ants tend to crawl, brushing his teeth, climbing the circular staircase to the bedroom, undressing - and, as he looks at himself nude in the wardrobe mirror, he thinks: 'A cosa potrei pensare adesso?' (what might I think about now?). He observes the clicks of the second hand of the alarm clock 'without understanding what they might wish to indicate to him personally' and, as no idea comes to mind, he takes his penis in his hand and thinks: 'Sono rimasto senza pensieri' (I'm left without thoughts).8 Thus his silence of many months starts, after which 'a poco a poco e cominciata la sua guarigione' (slowly, bit by bit, his recovery begins; 12). In these opening paragraphs two elements of Baratto's silence are emphasized: first, he stops speaking after he is 'left without thoughts'; second, his entry into silence is accompanied by routine or automatic actions. Although we do not know for sure that Bartleby is 'without thoughts/ we do know that his work as a copyist is of the most automatic, mechanical sort, and that he dies when he has stopped all routine activity, including copying and eating. Just as the scrivener takes

26 Gianni Celati to standing silently and looking at a brick wall, Baratto also begins to stand and look, first at the blank television screen, then at his own image in the mirror, then at the left corner of an abandoned country house, known as a 'house of ghosts/ He 'closes one eye in order to observe [the corner] better. He raises a leg, scratching the calf of his other leg with his foot, and he remains thus balanced, tottering (a vacillare),with a meditative air and one closed eye/ The verb 'to vacillate' is used here to indicate a physically precarious state - standing on one foot - but it has already appeared twice in the description of Baratto's day of entry into muteness, first, when Baratto looks at himself in the mirror and thinks, 'What might I think about now?' only to remain 'a vacillare davanti allo specchio' (vacillating in front of the mirror) as no phrase comes into his mind, and then, when wondering what the alarm clock's clicks 'might want to indicate to him personally/ he 'resta a chiederselo per un po/ ancora vacillando, ma non gli viene in mente nessuna idea' (continues to ask himself this question for a bit, still vacillating, but no idea comes to his mind; 12). In the earlier version of the story that Celati sent to me in 1983, the phrases containing the word Vacillare' are absent, as is the entire episode of the abandoned house, so that it is perhaps correct to place some emphasis on the repetitions of the term later added to the published version. It reappears once more in the published version in place of another recurrent word, 'ondeggiare' (to waver) that is used in the earlier version, so that the two terms would seem to be synonymous for Celati, or at least very close in meaning.9 Both terms indicate physical and mental hesitation, a stance vis-a-vis subjectivity, the external world, and writing that Celati will later explicitly theorize in his critical writing on 'narrative reserve' (which I shall discuss in some detail in another chapter). A related term, 'oscillare,' is used repeatedly by Pier Aldo Rovatti in his essay, 'Elogio del pudore' (In praise of modesty), where it indicates a philosophical and ethical 'weakening' of the subject, in order that identity might constantly construct itself in the uncertain space of shifting, oscillating experience. Baratto's subjectivity is clearly in this 'weakened' space, yet he is fully capable of action, although not yet of speech, as long as he performs routinely and mechanically (shopping, preparing food, jogging, brushing his teeth, undressing, etc.); nonetheless, he 'vacillates' and 'wavers' when stationary, seemingly unable to pull himself out of his observing stance. His other typical modes of being are either 'catatonic,' as when he closes his eyes and falls into an apnea-like, breath-holding state, or 'errant/ as when he rides about on

Bartleby: Preferring Not To 27 his motorcycle without any apparent direction. Unlike his predecessor Bartleby, he thus manages to remain minimally functional, although similarly closed off from any exchange with those around him. The first words of the story, I'll tell the story of how Baratto, returning home one evening, remained without thoughts, and then the consequences of his living as a mute for a long time/ seem to suggest a cause and effect relation between lack of thoughts and lack of speech. Interestingly, in the earlier, much shorter, version, the opening sentence does not include the second clause, thus leaving aside the issue of muteness. In the earlier version, after the first part of the story in which the first day of Baratto's silence is described, the narrator passes immediately to the following: 'During the months of silence, one should not believe that Baratto had stopped thinking/ so that a cause and effect relation is disavowed. In the published version, several pages of additional narration intervene between the description of the first day and the assertion above, and these pages have to do with the reaction of others to Baratto's muteness, as well as with their attempts at interpreting it. Baratto is described as continuing to perform his daily, automatic actions, as falling into his 'apnea' or into actual sleep, and, above all, as observing the world around him and listening to sounds. The attempts to interpret his behavior range from his wife's conviction that he is angry at her because of her extramarital indiscretions; to a local bartender's contention that Baratto is probably just tired of responding when people talk to him; to three nurses who work with patients released from the insane asylum and who think he is behaving irrationally; to an ex-school companion, now a lawyer and a Jehovah's Witness, who thinks Baratto has suffered a grave disappointment and must forget worldly disappointments and turn his thoughts to the second coming of Christ. In all of these cases, people are simply projecting their own preoccupations onto Baratto, much as Melville's Wall Street lawyer projects his interpretations onto the recalcitrant Bartleby. The exceptions in Baratto's case are the old pensioner and his wife, who simply welcome the mute into their home (for seven months!), so pleased are they to have someone to tell their life stories to, and the principal of the school where Baratto is a gym teacher, who is deeply moved and upset by Baratto's silence, and thinks to himself: 'E uno che non si da pensieri, ne pensiero per i pensieri degli altri su di lui' (He's someone who doesn't give himself thoughts (doesn't worry), nor does he give himself thought about the thoughts of others concerning him). The principal concludes that Baratto perhaps 'has been

28 Gianni Celati touched by grace' (23). After Baratto is barred from the school because of his odd behavior, he tries several times to follow routine and to return, and the principal watches these attempts 'hidden behind a window,' fascinated by this 'shadow who goes by without worrying about being a shadow. An apparition that is already a disappearance. As if nothing in him were excited about affirming anything.' These words seem to be the closest to Celati's own views, but he ironically undercuts their potential quality as an authorial 'declaration of meaning' by writing that the school secretary answers that 'she sincerely did not understand even half of what the principal meant/ and even the principal himself wonders 'what the sentences he had just pronounced might mean' (25). The connection between speech and thought is consistently questioned, therefore, not only in Baratto but also in all of those around him. Voicing thoughts or opinions does not make them any more true or consonant either with our subjective intentions or with the sheer externality of others and of the world. If Baratto is presented as one who typically Vacillates/ there are other terms that are repeatedly applied to him, which have to do with observation and listening. Throughout the period of muteness, while others are seeking to interpret his intentions, Baratto looks at elements in the external world, beginning with the corner of the 'house of ghosts' ('Baratto s'e fermato ad osservare quello spigolo'), moving on to the neck and breasts of the wife of one of his rugby team-mates, who is attracted to men who don't talk, and who comes to his home to offer herself to him ('Baratto 1'ha esaminata, soffermandosi ad osservarle il collo e il seno'), to anything and everything in his sights:'... vagando in tranquillo silenzio per le strade del centro cittadino, spesso gli accade di perdersi in giro ad osservare tutto quello che viene ai suoi occhi. Si ferma ad osservare la gente, le case, gli spigoli, il cielo e le grondaie' (wandering in peaceful silence through the streets of center city, often it happens that he loses himself as he goes around in observing everything that comes to his eyes. He stops to observe people, houses, corners, the sky and the gutters; 15-19). He listens as well: to the old couple ('Baratto si siede. A partire da quel momento resta in casa dei due pensionati per circa sette mesi, quasi sempre seduto nella stessa poltrona a guardare la televisione assieme a loro, oppure ad ascoltarli parlare' [Baratto sits down. From that moment he stays in the two pensioners' house for around seven months, almost always seated in the same armchair watching television with them, or listening to them speak]), or to the sounds made as his students play basketball ('lui

Bartleby: Preferring Not To 29 ascolta assorto i rumori della palla sul linoleum, il rimbombo dei passi, 1'eco delle grida dei ragazzi' [he absorbedly listens to the noise of the ball on the linoleum, the boom of steps, the echo of the boys' shouts]; 21). His looking and listening come to a culmination when he and fellow gym teacher Berte go on a motorcycle trip together and Baratto begins to follow some Japanese tourists around as they visit various spots of interest. They end up following the bus on which the tourists are traveling as far as Heidelberg, and Baratto, who has already taken to bowing back to the polite bows of the Japanese tourists, seems to feel very well: 'si direbbe che lui abbia finalmente trovato il suo popolo, e che si senta simile a quegli stranieri condotti in giro a branchi, amministrati da guide che recitano strane lintanie di nomi, persi nel grande mistero turistico del mondo' (one could say that he had finally found his people, and that he felt himself to be similar to those foreigners led around in herds, taken care of by guides who recite strange litanies of names, lost in the great touristic mystery of the world; 27). Baratto is introduced to a tiny Japanese widow by the Japanese tourist couple who first attracted his attention, and he spends an entire afternoon seated across from her in a restaurant, listening to her non-stop and very fast Japanese. His friend Berte watches them and notes that from time to time Baratto opens his eyes wide, or shakes his head or reaches out to pat her arm, and that the widow seems very flattered by his attention. How could it be that Baratto feels so at home with someone whose language he does not know? The narrator answers that 'it shouldn't amaze us' that Baratto understands her so well, for 'by now he is getting better, and beginning to think only the thoughts of others' (28-9). As his subjectively conditioned dominance of the external world has receded, he has become 'permeable' (to use a word used by Celati in an interview with me when discussing the type of subjectivity congenial to him), an observer and listener who can interact without the need of language or the imposition of his own thoughts or opinions. It is at this point in the published version of the story that the assertion concerning Baratto's thinking, which disavows a cause and effect relation between silence and lack of thoughts, is now inserted. We are told that instead he has merely stopped having thoughts 'that oppress him' (che gli gravano nella testa). He knows that when he meets someone he should shake hands or make some salutational gesture, or that he should nod his head or smile when someone talks to him, but 'such things don't require thoughts that are his thoughts exactly, and he gets

3O Gianni Celati along by thinking the thoughts of others' (cose del genere non richiedono pensieri che siano proprio suoi pensieri, e se la cava pensando i pensieri degli altri'; 29). In the following, extremely tragicomic episode, in which Baratto, now back home again, makes the acquaintance of a doctor who lives across the hall from the old pensioner and his wife, the conventions that make language and linguistic exchange possible are further explored. The doctor is a lonely soul, who says that 'the more people one knows in this city the more one feels oneself to be a stranger, and since he knows almost everyone he feels as if he were an Eskimo.' Moreover, he has recently been abandoned by his girlfriend who has told him that living with him was 'like being dead.' As Baratto sits listening to the doctor's laments, the phone rings and the doctor returns only after having talked for three hours with his exgirlfriend, who phoned to tell him that 'he had only made her lose time, during the best years of her life.' The wonderful idiocy of a threehour conversation dedicated to the topic of wasting time is more or less lost on Baratto, who has fallen asleep halfway through the doctor's story. He wakes up in the night to find the doctor standing before him; after turning on some lights (because 'with a little light things are better, things are really better'), the doctor sits down next to Baratto and deliberates, prefacing his meditations with the observation that he knows that he seems to be a loser, but that's not surprising since his parents also seemed to be losers and his grown son 'also seems to be a loser, he has the face of a refrigerated eel/ Having thus thoroughly deflated any serious 'authoritative' quality that might attach to the doctor's following words (much as the principal's 'serious' observations about Baratto's apparent lack of desire to prove anything were deflated), Celati puts into the 'loser's' mouth what can be seen as the main, highly philosophically conditioned, point of the entire story: 'Ma io dico: che non sia tutta una messinscena? Ad esempio, questa citta una messinscena, le donne che fanno soffrire una messinscena, il lavoro una messinscena, il nostro aspetto da deficienti un'altra messinscena. Che non sia tutta una grande montatura,un sogno da cui non riusciamo a svegliarci? Ma le dico di piu: che non sia anche la luce una messinscena? E i suoni che sentiamo, le cose che tocchiamo, e il buio e la notte, non potrebbe essere tutta una grandissima messinscena? Tutta una commedia delle apparenze,che ci fanno credere chissa cosa e invece non e vero niente? (31).10 The reiterated word, 'messinscena,' refers to a theatrical or filmic production, a 'show/ a mise en scene, that implies that we are all 'actors' who must play established roles. And,

Bartleby: Preferring Not To 31 as the doctor and Baratto watch the sun come up and observe the sights and sounds of the new day (lights going on behind lowered blinds, bells ringing, the telephone booth on the corner, the sound of a car engine), they both think 'that the comedy of appearances goes on all the time out there, it never stops.' The doctor realizes that he is sharing the same thoughts with Baratto, not because he has magically penetrated into Baratto's mind, but because 'Baratto doesn't have real and true thoughts that are his. They are instead the thoughts of others that come to mind, those of someone passing along the street, of someone raising a blind, of someone starting up a car in the distance.' And it is 'thanks to so many people thinking the same things [that] the phrase "it's dawn" really means that it is dawn with all its various appearances.' So even the sceptical doctor can accept that this 'mise en scene of a dawn is real' (all quotations in this paragraph are from pp. 30-2). There are traces of many literary and philosophical sources for the ideas on language and on the subject's relation to the external world that infuse this story. From Kafka, whose Die Baume is cited as the epigraph to the volume, to Melville, whose scrivener is a close model for Baratto, to Wittgenstein's insights into the conventions of language, to Heidegger's investigations into the inhabitability of the world, to the Italian philosophers of 'weak thought': all and more, including Shakespeare's 'the world is a stage' and Calderon's 'la vida es sueno/ inform this tale. Because it was written many years before its publication in 1987 and substantially revised and expanded from its first early version, 'Baratto' reflects many layers of diverse interests: Celati's penchant for the comic mode evident in his fictions of the early seventies; his studies in the late seventies and early eighties of sociolinguistics and especially of the 'ceremonies' of conversational exchange and written narration alike; his orientation to the visual and to externality, reflected in his work with photographer Luigi Ghirri and in the resultant stories, Narratori delle pianure of 1985; his sustained meditations on Bartleby that resulted in the translation with commentary of 1991. The description of the world as a mise en scene adumbrates his involvement in the visual medium of video and the creation of the visual story Strada provinciale delle anime, also in 1991, as well as his even more recent interest in the overtly theatrical and performative, as evidenced in his rendering into prose of Boiardo's Orlando innamorato, which Celati has read aloud, replete with gestures, in many public performances, and in his 1996 book, Recita dell'attore Vecchiatto nel teatro di Rio Saliceto (Performance of the actor Vecchiatto in the theater of Rio Saliceto), which is written in the form of

32 Gianni Celati a theatrical piece. This palimpsestic quality of 'Baratto' is evidence, I believe, of the continuities in Celati's work, critical and creative alike, which can be understood as ongoing, open-ended 'research' rather than a series of finalized masteries of ideas, techniques, or visions of the world. In the remaining pages of this chapter, I want to continue, therefore, to zigzag through Celati, using as my anchor the apparently immoveable figure of Bartleby, but keeping in mind the words of Kafka that serve as epigraph to the tales of appearances in which the story of Baratto is found: 'For we are like tree trunks in the snow. Apparently they, quite smooth, adhere to the surface, and with a shake one should be able to push them aside. No, one cannot, because they are solidly fixed to the ground. However, look, even this is only an appearance.' In his 1993 essay on Celati, Robert Lumley makes the important point that 'Celati's articulateness about writing has encouraged others to read him on his own terms' (in Baranski and Fertile; 44). This assertion is, to my mind, a fundamental insight both into Celati's work and the typical critical reactions to that work, as is evident from my approach to various of his texts in the preceding pages. Before moving on to an analysis of Celati's reading of 'Bartleby,' I want now to try to read certain fundamental aspects of his 'preferring not to' in terms that are not (or at least not explicitly) his, not because I do not find his terms deeply engaging, but because they usually do not tend to illuminate certain aspects of his work and of his position in contemporary narrative that I believe are significant. I hope to avoid a psychologizing approach, for I am looking for a way into a number of broader literary and critical issues rather than into Celati's head. I shall limit these issues to two. First, is there something that we can legitimately call 'contemporary Italian narrative,' as opposed to 'contemporary narrative' tout court? Second, do highly elaborated poetics play an inevitable role in our readerly and critical reception of narrative as it has been created over the last thirty years? In other words, do contemporary writers, many of them articulate theorizers about writing, still want, even need, us to 'read them in their own terms,' or is this tendency, as seen so clearly in Celati, now an exception rather than the rule? In response to my first question, I shall begin by asserting my belief that there is indeed something very 'Italian' about contemporary narrative in Italy, in spite of the partially correct and widely held view of today's prose fiction as transcending national boundaries (at least in the Western, American-European context). Celati can be seen as an Ital-

Bartleby: Preferring Not To 33 ian writer not only because he writes in Italian, but, more importantly, because his writing reflects a tradition and conception of narrative that are deeply rooted in Italy. This 'Italianness' might appear to be submerged, even willfully hidden, under the typically non-Italian sources and models to which the writer most often makes reference: Beckett, Melville, Kafka, American and English silent films, to repeat those already discussed, but to which could be added Patricia Highsmith, Angela Carter, Milan Kundera, John Berger, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and many others (many of whom I consider in a later chapter). It is as if the Italian literary context - with the notable exception of Calvino - is 'repressed' in favor of a more cosmopolitan contingent of fellow writers. This preference is explainable, at least in part, by Celati's academic literary orientation. From the beginning it lay in the direction of French and Anglo-American texts and traditions, as his university thesis on Joyce, his early translations of Beckett and Celine, and later of Swift, Melville, Jack London, and others attest. Nor can we forget that for years he taught Anglo-American literature at the University of Bologna. This extra-Italian orientation is also due, I believe, to a horror of provincialism that characterizes not only Celati but in many ways the collective literary enterprise of this century's (and perhaps not only this century's) Italy. From the historical avant-gardes of the first decades of the twentieth century to the neoavant-gardes of the late fifties and sixties to today's postmodern literary culture, Italian writers have frequently been torn between the inherently provincial nature of their tenuously unified nation and its locally conditioned linguistic diversity (evidenced most clearly in dialects) and a model of historical, political, and linguistic unity that Manzoni, among others, upheld and promoted in his immensely influential novel / promessi sposi. Nations whose identity as such was older, more solidified, and much less preoccupied with the ever present 'questione della lingua,' which accompanies Italian literature from Dante to contemporary writers, provided a wider European context to which Italy sought to join its literary culture. France in particular but also Germany, Spain, and England were looked to as highly nonprovincial cultures that had succeeded in escaping radical social, political, and linguistic fragmentation. Of course historically Italian letters have had great resonance outside of Italy, especially during the age of Humanism, and certain authors of genius - Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Machiavelli, Vico, Leopardi, Pirandello - have consistently played important roles in the broader Western canon. Yet, because of centuries of foreign domination

34 Gianni Celati and the enduring reality of local, regional, and, precisely, provincial alliances, customs, and dialects, within its own confines Italy has posed many difficult problems of identity to its writers. To use a gendered metaphor, Italy has over the centuries absorbed into its penetrable body - like a woman - the cultural and specifically literary influences of its dominators, yet has at the same time sought - like a man - to proclaim itself as 'impenetrable' in its inherent 'Italianness.' The basic raw material of the writer - language - was no more 'naturally' given as a collectively shared inheritance than was unified nationhood, as the centuries-old 'questione della lingua' makes abundantly clear. The effects of this 'identity crisis' on this century's Italian literature have been complex, but in terms of prose fiction it was the Manzonian model - humanist, linguistically 'purified' of residual dialectal elements, and dedicated to a vision of Italy as religiously, socially, and politically unified - that fundamentally conditioned subsequent writers' choices and goals. Until, that is, Manzoni and other high-cultural models began to seem too limiting, too stifling, too 'literary' in essence, as can be seen, for example, in Celati's turn in recent years to the 'provincial' heritage of Ferrarese literary culture, as well as to more local forms of orality. But by the late fifties, a collective effort to rethink and reorient the institution of Italian literature had begun. The two labels most commonly evoked in descriptions of Italian prose fiction of the last fifty years are 'neorealism' and 'neoavantgardism.' The first pertains to the immediate post-Second World War period, when writers self-consciously sought new linguistic, stylistic, and structural means to write about a radically changed reality; the second refers primarily to another moment of open theorization and experimentalism from the mid-fifties through to the late sixties, when Italian writers once more actively engaged in a search for new directions. Maria Corti has rightly asserted in her reading of what she calls the three prevalent 'fields of tension' of post-war Italian literary culture - neorealism, the neoavant-garde, and neoexperimentalism - that it is more historically accurate when analyzing the neoavant-garde to speak of three distinct, if ultimately interrelated, moments. From 1956 to 1959, the neoavant-garde as a cultural movement did not exist, according to Corti; rather, 'its antecedents ... are clearly characterizable, from the contributions of "II Verri," an important journal created by [Luciano] Anceschi in 1956, to the creative contributions of [Edoardo] Sanguineti (Laborintus is from 1956) and those of [Elio] Pagliarani even earlier' (// viaggio testuale; 114). This preliminary moment is followed

Bartleby: Preferring Not To 35 by a second phase, represented most clearly by the work of the 'Novissimi/ a group of poets including Alfredo Giuliani, Pagliarani, Antonio Porta, and Luigi Balestrini, who 'signposted ... the category of the "end" of then prevailing literary models at both a thematic and formal level, and also [signaled] the category of "beginning" even if the former was signaled more strongly than the second in analogy with that which happens in all avantgardes' (ibid.; 115). The third moment is that of the Gruppo 63 and the journal Quindici (1967-9), 'whose specific sociocultural and political physiognomy requires a rather different approach than the one that is pertinent to the Gruppo 63' (ibid.; 114). It is generally correct, then, to speak of a 'neoavant-garde' present from the mid-fifties to the late sixties, but it is more accurate to distinguish its various phases. This renewal of literary culture was characterized by an extremely self-conscious theorizing bent, as writers and critics sought to redefine the role and meaning of literature within Italian society. Umberto Eco has called this tendency to theorize 'the prevalence of poetics over the work' (in Russo; 99), which is a quality of all avant-gardes. Corti as well writes of the 'enormous theoretical-critical activity' of the writers of the neoavant-garde, which she sees as indicating its 'prevalently rational nature' (// viaggio testuale; 111). Thus, what becomes most 'Italian' about fiction written in Italy during this critical stage is precisely an emphasis on explicit poetics that explain the creative work and direct the reader in deciphering its meanings. Celati came of age in this period, and subsequently published his first critical essays in the late sixties and early seventies in journals such as Quindici and // Verri, aligning himself in this way with a neoavant-garde preference for open theorizing and self-explication, both of which continue to mark his work. The neoavant-garde sought a radical problematization of both content and form, as representational art and the very concept of 'reality' were put into question. There was also a strong sense that literature, and especially the novel, had become 'merce' or 'goods' within the context of rapid capitalistic growth such as the economic boom of the fifties had brought to Italian society. The majority of the writers and critics involved in the neoavant-garde projects were on the political Left, and saw their contestations of the placidly consumeristic bourgeois literary industry as socially and politically relevant as well as artistically motivated. Yet, in a retrospective consideration of the period of the Gruppo 63 and other neoavant-gardistic activities of the sixties, Calvino (among others, such as Alberto Arbasino and Alfredo

36 Gianni Celati Giuliani, who, unlike Calvino, were active participants in the Gruppo, all of whom commented in short articles in the newspaper La Repubblica on 9 October 1984 under the rubric 'Rivochiamo la vicenda e il significato del Gruppo 63' [Let's re-evoke the affair and the meaning of the Gruppo 63] ) specified politics as one of the factors in the demise of an effective militant cultural renewal, and attributed the dissolution of much of the neoavant-garde's force to 'the hegemony of politics within Italian culture, or better: the hegemony of political language over every other dimension of language. It has already been said many times that the neoavant-garde entered into a crisis because the ambience that should have furnished its potential public was caught up in the years around 1968 in a devouring politicization to the exclusion of any other kind of discourse ... The poverty and groundlessness of political discourse, in short, once more dominated the potentiality, polyphony, and prehensile flexibility of literary discourse.' In fact, by the late sixties most 'members' of the movements of the sixties had retreated from any collective cultural or theoretical activity and, in 1977, the important militant organ for the publication of experimental texts, the Cooperativa Scrittori, which had been founded and run by several ex-members of the Gruppo 63, essentially collapsed and, what's worse, did so without distributing rights or revenues to its members. Moreover, literal terrorism, in the form of the Brigate Rosse and neo-fascist groups alike, had replaced intellectual and cultural 'terrorism' by the late seventies, and the old dichotomy of the protective 'center' versus the dangerous 'margins' rose up with renewed force. Celati's earliest essays and fiction (Comiche of 1971, Le avventure di Guizzardi of 1973) emerged out of a shared, collective sense of 'preferring not to' accept the modes and models of mainstream literary cultural production; his fiction of the later seventies (La banda dei sospiri of 1976 and Lunario del paradiso of 1978), and his volume of essays Finzioni occidentali (1975) and other theoretical essays of that period, reflect a continued desire to investigate the new parameters opened up by prior neoavant-garde activity. His retreat into virtual silence from the late seventies to the mid-eighties signified, among other things, his awareness that 'preferring not to' was no longer a shared attitude nor a viable stance within a literary industry no longer deeply involved in selfquestioning and the pushing of limits. Many of the 'survivors' of this intense period of theoretical and creative investigation and experimentation have gone on to achieve success as prose writers (Malerba, Vassalli, Manganelli, Eco). Eco is one of

Bartleby: Preferring Not To 37 the few who has continued to explore his own poetics and to theorize widely about diverse aspects of literary activity within, of course, the context of a spectacular internationally conditioned fame that marks him as an exception rather than as 'typical' of his generation's writers and thinkers. The fact that ex-militant cultural figures, writers and academics alike, continue to review fiction in daily newspapers (Giuliani of the ex-'Novissimi' or Pietro Citati come to mind) means that writers' poetics, whether implicit or explicit, continue to play some role in the reception of their work, but the rampant theorizing of the sixties has for the most part disappeared in favor of the superficial touting of new talents and the ceremonial valorizing of tried and true older writers. Celati is, therefore, an exception in the current context, for he has never stopped exploring and transforming his poetics, discussing diverse hypotheses regarding the function of narrative, and probing the validity of issues, models, and modes brought to the fore in neoavant-garde debates. One of the very few studies of the neoavant-garde to go beyond either nostalgic reminiscence or ideologically motivated bitter recriminations is Francesco Muzzioli's 1982 book entitled Teoria e critica della letteratura delle avanguardie italiane degli anni sessanta (Theory and criticism of the literature of the Italian avant-gardes of the sixties). Unlike Gian Carlo Ferretti's 1979 study, // mercato delle lettere (The market of letters), which emphasizes the failure of the neoavant-garde to radicalize the instruments of cultural dissemination - especially publishing houses - and to escape its 'fundamental elitism' (133), or Nello Ajello's 1974 Lo scrittore e il potere (The writer and power), in which the title word 'power' serves to define the dynamics of the neoavant-garde's 'game/ Muzzioli aspires to avoid politics in favor of a detailed examination of the theories of literature that animated Italian debates in the sixties. His conviction that there is a 'residual validity' to many of the hypotheses advanced during that period, so that 'the theoretical bases for elaborating a new idea of literature are still to be looked for in the cruxes and the problems discussed and left open by the voices of the sixties' (6), leads him to analyze in rigorous detail the criticial and theoretical thought of, among others, Giorgio Manganelli, Sanguineti, and Celati. This revitalization of still useful ideas about literary elaboration and meanings, while seeking to transcend politically conditioned polemics and nostalgia, is consonant with much of Celati's work, as it manifests an unbroken line of commitment to that 'potentiality, polyphony, and prehensile flexibility of literary discourse' whose dis-

38 Gianni Celati appearance in the late sixties Calvino so lamented. This is not to suggest that Celati has remained dedicated to the openly 'progressive' and even revolutionary spirit that characterized the neoavant-garde, for he understood as well or better than others involved in that collective moment that projectual collectivities and shared programs of cultural renovation were already in the seventies a thing of the past. Rather, he has built on his early, 'neoavant-gardist' interests - in linguistics, philosophy, formalism and structuralism, and their 'post' forms, in a process of deepening that has resulted in the layered, palimpsestic quality of his production. When Calvino was asked, in the 1984 article referred to above, to consider what might have remained of the avant-garde and neoavantgarde experiences of this century, he responded: 'The legacy of the historical avantgardes [that is, those of the early decades of this century] consists above all of archives of scattered texts, curious documents, rare little journals and publications, all of which give back to us a certain potential of energy that was typical of that era.' As for the more recent neoavant-garde of the sixties, he suggests that we can best answer the question of what remains of it by 'examining a list of books that are considered significant in the last twenty years - of any author, an ex-member of the neoavant-garde or not - in order to see in which of them might be present some trace of the seismic movements that acted on the world of literary forms (in Italy and in Europe) at the beginning of the sixties. An examination of this kind can reserve some surprises, giving their just due to those indirect effects that in literature are always those that count the most/ It is undeniable, I think, that Celati's Guizzardi can be considered one of those significant books, and it is equally undeniable that it contains many traces of the 'seismic movements' of the early sixties, such as the reactivation of issues pertaining to the comic (from extraliterary sources such as the cinema, but also from the analyses of the carnivalesque most evident in Bakhtin's work), to orality, and to linguistic and philosophical investigations of the relation between signified and signifier. Celati's continued interest in the basic mechanisms of narrative, in the 'ceremony' of linguistic exchange, and in the necessity of avoiding any facile codification either of one's own writing or of the institution of literature makes of him a writer whose work has gone on reserving surprises and bearing traces of many of the more recent 'seismic' transformations in theory, criticism, and philosophically informed literary thought. In sum, he is a thoroughly Italian writer, profoundly shaped by the context in which

Bartleby: Preferring Not To 39 he came of age, yet thoroughly de-provincialized in both his poetics and his creative work. Celati goes on 'preferring not to/ staying clear of trends and fashions, up-to-date styles and forms of debate, and the currency of market-driven art. The seriousness with which his critical and creative work continues to be taken within today's Italian literary milieu is, I think, one of the most significant signs that he is in fact one of those 'atypicals' who, as Calvino noted, 'end up being most representative of their age.' In my Introduction, I referred to a 'zigzagging' approach to my analyses of Celati's work. The preceding discussion of the broader context of literary debates over the last thirty years or so reinforces, I hope, the particular validity of such an approach in the case of this writer, whose neoavant-garde precedents and postmodern developments intertwine in highly non-linear ways. As I turn to Celati's recent, 'postmodern' commentary on Melville's 'Bartleby/ I want first further to gloss my critical metaphor of the zigzag with reference to an essay by one of the proponents of contemporary philosophical (postmetaphysical) 'pensiero debole' or 'weak thought/ a piece called 'Elogio del pudore' (In praise of modesty) by Pier Aldo Rovatti. This strain of theoretical thinking is pertinent to Celati's reading of the Melville story as well, and to the emblematic figure of the scrivener in his most contemporary guise of meaning, which is connected to but also distinct from the meanings he brought to earlier texts such as Guizzardi and 'Baratto.' Rovatti's essay appeared in a 1990 collection of the same name, which he coedited and cowrote with Alessandro Dal Lago; in it the philosopher seeks to defend and to explain further the project of those thinkers who had come to be known as 'debolisti' from the appearance of work by Gianni Vattimo and others in the mid- and late eighties.11 Taking up the issue of the ethical component of postmetaphysical weakness, Rovatti writes: '... with the name of "ethics" we can try to mark an edge or a line that might identify the comprehensive attitude with which these philosophies (Husserl's phenomenology, Heideggerian thought) leave behind the traditional idea of truth and knowledge. Ethics thus comes to indicate a dominant tonality, a shift in the way of thinking.' This tonality or shift is characterized as a refusal of a search for 'concepts, rules, Man, Morality/ in favor of 'a movement of thought within and also against itself/ Searching for a figurative definition of this movement of thought, Rovatti suggests a series of terms, first negative then positive: This image or figure can no longer be that of a

40 Gianni Celati push: a push onward, a progressing, a programizing, a projecting ... nor is it any longer or only a going beyond, an enlarging, a transcending: nor is it only a crossing, a proceeding, a taking, a taking possession of. But neither is it only an approximation, an attempt to adhere to things. If anything it is a figure of withdrawal (ritiro), of drawing back: diminution, suspension, the step backwards, checking oneself, inhabiting distance/ In giving oneself over to this mode of thought, it is possible to remain 'in a continual, oscillating (altalenante) movement, in the ambivalent and uncertain place that is the place of our experience.' But this 'place' is not in fact a place in the sense of something fixed; rather, it is itself 'a movement, a going and coming, a pendulum; and its language, finally, will no longer be able to be a code, a rigid exchange between things and words, but will have to open itself in its turn to mobility and oscillation' (43-4). Zigzagging, as I have so far done, among Celati's works of criticism and fiction best reflects Celati's own 'oscillating' mode, and allows me the critical mobility that I believe is essential to my task. The zigzag provides as well a spatial image for the poetics, themes, and narrative modes evident throughout Celati's work: his recourse back to certain neoavant-gardistic preoccupations intertwined with his reworking of them in the light of postmodern concerns; the waning and waxing of linguistic experimentalism; the preference for highlighting the twilight figures of the marginalized; the mixture of tragic and comic themes. Ideologically, the zigzag represents the play between engagement and disengagement so profoundly typical of Celati, and lastly, it is a figure for what might be called 'weak projectuality,' in which process is emphasized much more than 'end,' even though 'end' in both senses (termination and goal) looms large, especially in his work of the nineties. Zigzagging indicates movement forward, but attenuated, deflecting movement. There is also something innately exhilarating and liberating about it: movement for movement's sake, and thought for thought's sake, freed of any predetermined, linearly argued, and finalizing 'truths.' As Lumley writes: '... the searches and researches made by the restless characters of Celati's fiction are never concluded' (57). And these 'searches and researches' are spatially rather than temporally conditioned, for time does not allow us to zigzag. Writing about Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag asserts that 'Benjamin's recurrent themes are, characteristically, means of spacializing the world: for example, his notion of ideas and experiences as ruins' (Under the Sign of Saturn; 116). These words are equally applicable to

Bartleby: Preferring Not To 41 Celati's preference for zigzagging spatialization, as are the following: Tor the character born under the sign of Saturn, time is the medium of constraint, inadequacy, repetition, mere fulfillment. In time, one is only what one is: what one has always been. In space, one can be another person ... Time does not give one much leeway: it thrusts us forward from behind, blows us through the narrow funnel of the present into the future. But space is broad, teeming with possibilities, positions, intersections, passages, detours, U-turns, dead ends, one-way streets' (116-17). It is immediately clear that much of what is called 'postmodern' in today's critical, theoretical, and creative positionings seeks to escape the linearity of historical time in favor of the 'teeming possibilities' of spatial imaginings. It is in this sense that Celati might be called a 'postmodern' writer, although his preferred literary and critical models derive as much from the modernist as the postmodernist tradition, and his devotion to writing as an artisanal activity finds its roots in ancient, premodern models. Celati's reading of Melville's 'Bartleby the Scrivener' reveals signs of having been influenced by (or of being at least close to) the postmodern, postmetaphysical 'weak thought' alluded to above (as well as the theoretical writing of postmodernists Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes, and Giorgio Agamben), but it also resonates with the thought of the great modernists, Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka, and the postFreudian but decidedly non-Lacanian work of the late Italian psychoanalyst Elvio Fachinelli. In a recent rewriting of the first part of the introduction (for inclusion in a forthcoming collection of essays on diverse writers entitled Studi di affezione), Celati alludes as well to the thought of Spinoza (one of Deleuze's preferred thinkers). Before investigating these connections, however, I want to give a straightforwardly descriptive account of Celati's introduction, using both the published version and the slightly expanded revised notes. (Because I quote extensively from the essay, I do not give specific page numbers for each citation; it appears on pages vii-xxvi of Bartleby lo scrivano, 1991). In these writings, Celati gives us the results of a very long and extensive meditation on the haunting figure of the scrivener and, more broadly, on Melville's thought as expressed not only in this story but in other narratives as well. From the story and its author, Celati moves into a sweeping consideration of language, writing, and being, as the implications of the scrivener's tale are unfolded in all of their ontological resonance.

42 Gianni Celati Melville's fictional scrivener Bartleby, employed by a Wall Street lawyer, eventually begins to respond to all requests with a disturbing 'I would prefer not to/ In spite of the many attempts of his employer, the narrator, to understand his refusal to work, Bartleby persists in his passive resistance, to the point of remaining in the offices all the time, saying nothing about his past or his present motives. He is eventually carried off to prison, where he dies from starvation. Described as 'resolutely mild' (inespugnabilmente mite) in the first lines of Celati's introduction, Bartleby is first defined as a 'figure of that which cannot be saved.' However, Celati glosses his 'unsaveability' by adding that 'it could be thought that he is a figure of someone who has no desire to let himself be saved, as if the salvation that others propose were just as irremediable as the desolation toward which he goes.' His story takes place at a time when Wall Street was becoming the center of American finance, which had 'already expanded into the entire world with various business activities.' Against this 'historically monumental, if entirely implied, background,' the scrivener's story is so irrelevant as to be almost unparaphraseable. The 'monumentality' of everything Wall Street evokes is replaced by 'limits,' 'small spaces,' 'minimal acts/ 'trifles/ as if under the sign of 'an abandonment of aspirations to greatness, and a mourning for the titanic anxieties of expansion/ Bartleby is the 'incarnation of this mourning/ for he is poor and immobile, in exact contrast to the riches and mobility that sustain capitalistic expansion. His poverty and immobility are expressed in the scarcity and repetitiveness of his speech, his emblematic 'I would prefer not to/ Celati sees the source of our fascination with this story in that repeated phrase, which makes us want to know what 'secret' is hidden under it, what thoughts are in the head of such a character. Yet Melville's 'narrative game' consists precisely in blocking our interpretations and instead making us smile at the way this phrase upsets the assumption that dialogue and reasonable agreement lead to understanding others. Because Celati sees Bartleby's refrain as the key to the story's hold on us, he proceeds to investigate the refrain itself, rather than what might be 'behind' it. He notes that it is not a 'true refusal/ but rather a 'slightly mannered way of refusing an invitation' and of 'keeping oneself between a yes and a no in order to preserve distances and equilibrium/ Because it is mannered and emphasizes distance rather than directness, it seems more 'British' than 'American/ Such language, however, is entirely inappropriate to Bartleby's circumstances; he is not being 'invited' to do something, he is being given orders by his boss. It is as if

Bartleby: Preferring Not To 43 the scrivener had heard the phrase somewhere else and is now using it in a new, if unsuitable, way. Thus, it comes out as an 'eccentric mannerism that makes [us] laugh.' (Here Celati implicitly defends his 'eccentric' translation of it as 'avrei preferenza di no' instead of the expected 'preferirei di no/ the latter of which is neither funny nor surprising in Italian.) There is also a 'haughtiness' about the usage, and the lawyer in fact notes in Bartleby a kind of haughtiness or cold reserve. Celati further states that the phrase is spoken mildly, inexpressively, mechanically, like the sounds of acquiescence we mechanically make during a conversation simply in order to signal that we are present. But one could just as well be talking to a wall when these sounds are all the response one gets; in the story the lawyer notes that talking to the scrivener is like talking to the bust of Cicero on his desk. Celati concludes, therefore, that the lack of understanding between the lawyer and the scrivener is not dependent on something that the latter is hiding, 'like a secret to discover.' Instead, Bartleby has the air of 'someone who has nothing to say, except for the mechanical phrase in which he concentrates his way of being.' Celati also suggests that it is possible to think of him as 'an extreme figure of resignation, who has eliminated any and every superfluous behavior and shows only that which he finds himself to be in the world, just an "any old" presence (una presenza qualsiasi), without aspiring to anything else.' This 'presenza qualsiasi' will take on strong philosophical resonance, as Celati's discussion later develops the implications of 'mere' presence. In Celati's reading of the phrase T would prefer not to/ there is a lack of intentions underlying it. Intentional speech always makes us seek an agreement with others, which is precisely what Bartleby does not do. He 'acts as if resignation had cancelled in him the delirium of intentions, rendering him unrealistically self-sufficient.' Nor does the priority of his 'preference' seem to stem from some personal intention; rather, he gives himself over to it as if it were ineluctable. His behavior is 'purely inertial' in as much as it is ineluctable, just as our daily habits are ruled by a kind of inertia. Celati next connects 'preference' to 'inertia'; a preference is, in his definition, an 'anteriority/ a 'pre-existing signal' that derives from our 'way of being' and has nothing to do with intentions or agreements with others. This 'priority of an inertial tendency' characterizes comic characters, who show it 'with their tics, mannerisms or idiosyncrasies.' Moreover, such Very dear figures' (like Don Quixote and Bartleby) entrust themselves to their preferences 'in a state of devotion like that of saints.' Celati concludes that all of us have

44 Gianni Celati this 'absolute anteriority' in our given individuality, our faces that we did not choose, our mannerisms that 'give us over to a social representation that we did not ourselves decide upon.' Kierkegaard, Celati remarks, called this a 'destiny of anomaly7; it is 'the terrible experience of being individuals/ an experience that Bartleby and other comic figures seem to accept 'with active resignation, with irresistible devotion, and in fact as "preference," or a loving transport/ Celati thus seems to see intentions and agreements with others as ways in which we seek an escape from the anomaly of our unique individuality and way of being. Generalities and typologies function in this way too, as does language; presence, however, is not reducible to 'types/ so that literary characters who are coherent in their actions and intentions do not touch the way of being of actual individuals, only the generalities applied to Being. Bartleby is in this sense a representation of the ultimately 'incommensurate singularity' of every individual and every presence in the world, and Celati thus sees in Melville's thought 'an extreme form of Spinozism.' The philosophy of Spinoza is brought into the discussion of Bartleby only in the revised version of the introduction. Celati sees Melville's thought as taking off in the direction of Spinoza's concept of 'divine inertia'; every individual and every presence in the world is 'an incommensurable singularity, that expresses in its attributes the anteriority of an infinite essence about which one can say nothing.' Melville's development of this concept brings him to speak of an 'unconditional democracy of all things/ on the one hand; on the other, it is implied that 'thought must suspend itself before states of presence, before phenomenological manifestations, which are divine because [they are] ineluctable, and as such they absolve thought from the necessity of giving answers regarding the general inertia of bodies and things.' It is therefore futile to seek some 'secret' by trying to plumb the depths of a way of being, because manifested presence is 'absolute in being simply what it is.' There is only the nameless silence of anteriority, there where we seek instead to find a secret, and we can only suspend thought in the face of this silence, from which no answer will come. Celati next refers to a letter by Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne, in which Melville underlines the fact that in subordination to a political power 'there always comes into play the idea of something hidden and frightening, held like a secret by a 'symbolic order.' Thus a political system can become crushing in its power, for it implies by its 'big words' that it holds the answer to the 'secret' which others seek to possess, but can

Bartleby: Preferring Not To 45 never possess (because there is no secret). In Celati's view, Melville saw 'the weight of this supposed secret... at the basis of that oppressive lie which is social consensus.' Instead, Melville wants to reach 'visible truth/ which is 'learning the absolute condition of present things, just as they strike the eye of those who are not afraid to look at them/ Bartleby is Melville's most perfected representation of this 'visible truth' towards which his writing strives, according to Celati's reading. In the next section of his introduction, Celati concentrates on the way in which Bartleby is rendered an unreachable presence, an 'apparition.' He is not described in any detail; the external spaces in which the scrivener is placed are conveyed to us from the perspective of the lawyer, who is a 'watchman/ so that the spaces become 'frames of surveillance' (inquadrature di sorveglianza). Celati mentions Kafka at this point as an author who expressed well the 'vivid and animalesque' quality of 'creatures installed in their territory and the extraneous one to be watched' (like a cat in its space that watches a bird that has entered the cat's territory). As in old photographs of unknown people, who appear in the frame of the picture as distant and inaccessible, their exclusion from any territoriality, nameable group, or 'symbolic affiliation' accentuates their undeniable and absolute 'presence.' Bartleby is similarly framed in the story; he is extraneous, isolated, and thereby all the more unconditionally present. The 'territory' into which he comes - and whose static, mechanical, habitual aspect is troubled by his arrival - is the lawyer's office, which in Celati's reading is more Dickensian than airily and expansively representative of 'the great American financial epic' of Wall Street. The office and its inhabitants function in a 'static economy, inside a shell, like life inside a family, where human styles or mannerisms can still be released in a useless way, with strange devices of habits regulated by their eccentricities.' This 'animalesque' static quality, highlighted by the 'animalesque' nicknames of the other copyists Turkey, Ginger Nut and Nippers, is intruded upon and radically disturbed by the appearance of Bartleby. The remaining pages of Celati's introduction are dedicated to explaining in what exactly consists the 'disturbance' brought by Bartleby. The 'obvious' explanation - that the scrivener refuses to do any copying and instead spends his time contemplating a blank wall - is, Celati concedes, 'quite a good reason for surprise.' However, he asserts that he does not believe that 'the facts themselves are determinant - the so-called "facts" of a story are only a signpost for attracting our attention toward a knot of emotional tonalities.' Instead, Bartleby brings

46 Gianni Celati with him 'a desert wind' that perturbs the 'enchantment of life in the shell.' The lawyer's speech is soon affected by this 'desert wind/ in such a way that his eloquence, seen in his 'beautiful syntax full of subordinates, adversatives, concessives, correlatives/ turns into a dry and laconic style of speech, like that of Bartleby. Thus Celati sees the disturbance brought by Bartleby as upsetting not only the bureaucratic life of the office but also 'the activity carried on there, the activity of writing, the use of words.' Bartleby's renunciation of writing is therefore 'emblematic.' In Melville's writing in general, Celati sees 'an inertial and always dispersive [way of] proceeding, writing that... opens itself in all directions, as if in a piercing vacillation in the face of distance, the uncapturability of the presences in the world.' In Moby Dick 'the problem of writing is how to hold everything together, the very long descriptions of whaling, the metaphysics and the dialect, the Elizabethan dialogue and the tale of the sailor.' In stories such as 'Cock-ADoodle-Do/ written in the same period as 'Bartleby/ or 'The Encantadas/ written right after 'Bartleby/ Celati sees a kind of writing that 'makes its way toward something distant and uncapturable, without a goal, by means of listings in every direction.' In the figure of Bartleby, Melville's writing finally opens itself up to 'an inert stranger, deprived of real "facts" that have to do with him, and who in addition knows how to answer with a sole phrase.' Suddenly, it is as if Melville's 'inertial' and directionless manner of writing, and 'having little to say, nothing of importance of which to inform the reader, revealed an unimagined power.' Celati sees this 'extreme reduction of the superfluous' as the 'summit of all of Melville's research.' The answer, then, as to what sort of 'disturbance' Bartleby introduces into writing is that it makes explicit 'the little, the nothing, on which one can always survive, and [the] aridity that the soul's voices have to confront at one time or another.' In getting rid of all superfluity, writing that 'experiences the aridity of the desert' can no longer 'use a beautiful rhetoric of familiarity [which has] a protective intent, like a border of words.' Celati notes that the lawyer's language, which upon the arrival of Bartleby loses its 'familiar rhetoric/ reveals the aridity that he too must confront. Unlike those critics who see the lawyer as a Pharisee unable to understand Bartleby, Celati believes that it is precisely the lawyer who conveys to us the transcendent sense of profane immanence brought on the 'desert wind' of the scrivener's appearance: 'With the loss of a feeling of familiarity, by means of the separateness and dispersion of bodies in deserts of abandonment, another experience seems to

Bartleby: Preferring Not To 47 be born, about which the lawyer talks to us at length.' That other experience is the feeling of 'infinite fraternity' with all otherness, as Melville called it in a letter to his friend Hawthorne: The Divinity has been torn apart like the bread of the last supper, and we are its crumbs. From here [comes] this feeling of infinite fraternity/ Celati ends his introduction with a brief discussion of the 'potency' (potenza) of the scrivener. The term 'potenza' in Celati's usage in fact means both 'potency' and 'potential/ and is defined as 'something that rests in itself without actualizing itself, the capacity to think nothing a way of being that resolves itself in that which it does, not in that which it thinks.' In Pierre, Melville writes of 'the state of repose of things, like the repose in itself of a sleeping face'; he comments that in this state of repose there is neither 'any urgency of expansion toward the external' nor 'any [sense of] being overwhelmed internally,' only 'passive suspension.' This suspension is, in Celati's reading, a state of 'potenza' or power-potential, for it is that which is kept in reserve that creates real strength. Against utilitarian precepts of action and decisive, assertive speech, which are dedicated to the 'expansive motions of the Ego,' there is offered in Melville the idea of 'potenza' or reserved potential, which is the 'inertia that characterizes states of presence.' Celati ends by asserting that this is true of writing also, the power of which 'is not found in this or that thing to say, but in little or nothing to say, in a condition in which the duty of writing is annulled.' Writing should be without 'expectations/ and its power will reveal itself if it remains 'suspended only as a "preference/" With this conclusion, it is not difficult to understand why Bartleby should have become an emblematic figure for this writer: someone, that is, for whom writing as preference is carried out in that 'extraterritorial space' in which 'visible truth/ beyond the protective cliches of the familiar territories of social consensus and belonging, might be reached. Celati's introduction to 'Bartleby' is an attempt to avoid yet another 'definitive' interpretation of the story, but it is, in the end, interpretative, even if the meanings found in the figure of the scrivener and in the story overall are anchored squarely in the words of Melville, rather than in some externally applied methodological or ideological 'grid/ This is a reading deeply conditioned by ontological concerns, which in turn are inextricably bound up with the function and meaning of human language, especially as it subsumes its user in the process of writing 'without expectations/ In his reading of the story, Celati seeks

48 Gianni Celati to reveal the normative 'habits of thought' and 'habits of life' that are radically questioned by the figure of Bartleby; rather than attempting to interpret the story objectively, Celati's words reflect how his own 'habits' have been deeply altered by contemplating the scrivener's tale. I mentioned above several possible 'influences' or associated sources that may have fed into Celati's reading. It is more accurate, I think, to speak instead of ideas and modes of writing that have deeply conditioned Celati's 'habits of thought' and 'habits of life,' which he says must be implicated in an understanding of Bartleby. If one believes that it is possible to explain the story 'with documents to hand,' one is still a 'victim of the academic mirage' (note 88, Celati's commentary of McCall's The Silence of Bartleby; no). Similarly, an attempt to 'explain' Celati's reading 'with documents to hand' strikes me as a 'mirage,' in that such an attempt would go entirely counter to the very meanings his introduction seeks to reach. I therefore want simply to allude to other writers and thinkers whose words resonate, in what I find to be significant ways, with Celati's, in order better to position the Italian writer's transformed habits of thought and life in a broader context of literary, critical, and philosophical attitudes. In the preceding discussion of the comedic elements relating to Bartleby as seen in Celati's 'Baratto/ I alluded to the importance of Beckett in the formation of Celati's analysis and application of certain linguistic techniques for producing comedy, such as interpolation and gags based on expulsion and incomprehensibility. Another modernist writer of great relevance to Celati's theory and art is Franz Kafka, with whom he has fairly often been compared. Guido Almansi's exceptionally perceptive - one could almost say unsurpassable - reading of the 'early' Celati (Comiche, Le avventure di Guizzardi, and La banda dei sospiri) rightly reminds us that Kakfa, along with Beckett and silent film comics, was one of Celati's 'admitted masters' (maestri confessati) during the period in the seventies when his first fictions were written. Almansi sees Kafka's The Trial as an important model for Guizzardi. The critic tells us Kafka himself considered The Trial 'comic-grotesque' and that he 'would read aloud to his friends with great bursts of laughter and much enjoyment of himself (che lo scrittore stesso leggeva agli amici fra grandi risate divertendosi un mondo) ('II letamaio di Babele'; 56). If Guizzardi partakes of that 'comic-grotesque' quality, the Kafka who haunts the figure of Bartleby - as read by Celati - is, however, more the creator of The Metamorphosis,' 'A Hunger Artist,' and the aphoristic pieces of Meditation. In the first story, the plight of Gregor

Bartleby: Preferring Not To 49 Samsa, while admittedly much more 'internally' recounted, so that we share in the 'dung beetle's' inarticulate misery, is similar to Bartleby's positioning in Melville's story as one who is 'extraterritorial,' spied upon by the members of the 'familial clan/ and as a messenger of disturbance, that 'desert wind' that carries a desolate and permanent aura of unfamiliarity. From a life dedicated to commerce, to the industry and 'busy-ness' of a utilitarian and capitalist social economy, Gregor moves to a life of solitude, silence, and eventual total stasis: 'Soon he made the discovery that he was now unable to stir a limb ... the decision that he must disappear was one that he held to even more strongly than his sister ... in this state of vacant and peaceful meditation he remained until the tower clock struck three in the morning' (Metamorphosis; 127). Both Bartleby and Gregor gradually cease all action, and their shut-down from life is emphasized in their respective stories by their refusal of food: '"I'm hungry enough," said Gregor sadly to himself, "but not for that kind of food"' ('Metamorphosis'; 119); '"I prefer not to dine today," said Bartleby, turning away. "It would disagree with me; I am unused to dinners'" ('Bartleby'; 151). The ingestion, digestion, and elimination of food and the waste it produces are natural processes that the unnatural 'machine' of a society based on production and consumption replicates, of course. Gregor and Bartleby come to find that even natural consumption is 'disagreeable/ however, for it is implied that these extraneous beings need a world in which other kinds of nourishment sustain existence. Kafka's hunger artist also makes clear his need for another kind of food: "T couldn't find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else"' (The Hunger Artist'; 255). Celati does not discuss consumption, either natural or social, in his reading of 'Bartleby/ for he clearly wants to arrive at conclusions that are far from those conditioned by materialist or generally socio-political perspectives.12 Yet in his analysis, centered on the alienation, separateness, and aridity of the level of experience opened up by Bartleby's arrival into the familiarly social, Celati has recourse to Melville's words to Hawthorne: 'the Divinity has crumbled like the bread of the last supper, and we are its crumbs. From this [comes] this feeling of infinite fraternity' ('Introduzione'; xxiv). It is possible to infer that, for Celati, the 'food' sought by Melville's and Kafka's characters would be 'infinite fraternity/ or the 'crumbs of divine bread' that we all are: that which neither others individually nor societies collectively can ever give them, as long as physical hunger (the body) and industri-

50 Gianni Celati ally produced 'hungers' (the psyche) are what drive human action. What is missing is the spirit or soul, which is not nourished either by purely materialist or purely libido-driven acts of consumption. I believe that the aphoristic pieces included in Kafka's Meditation are also sources of Celati's 'habits of thought/ which deeply inform his reading of 'Bartleby' (it is not by chance that a quotation from 'The Trees/ included in Meditation, serves as an epigraph for the collection in which the Bartleby-like 'Baratto' appears, the volume Quattro novelle sulle apparenze, published in 1987. The brief pieces of Meditation come from a voice that is, for the most part, positioned in that extraterritorial space of unreachable, individual being emblematized in the figure of the scrivener. In 'Resolutions/ for example, the narrator describes an effort to 'lift [oneself] out of a miserable mood': 'I force myself out of my chair, stride round the table, exercise my head and neck, make my eyes sparkle, tighten the muscles around them. Defy my own feelings, welcome A ... amiably tolerate B. in my room, swallow all that is said at C.'s, whatever pain and trouble it may cost me, in long draughts.' But this willed effort towards sociability can be stopped by 'one single slip/ and so 'perhaps the best resource is to meet everything passively, to make yourself an inert mass, ... to throttle down whatever ghostly life remains in you, that is, to enlarge the final peace of the graveyard and let nothing survive save that.' How 'Bartleby-like/ this selfsuspension, this 'inertia'! And how much like the manneristic 'preference' of the scrivener is Kafka's concluding image: 'A characteristic movement in such a condition is to run your little finger along your eyebrows' (28-9). In 'Bachelor's 111 Luck/ the 'extraterritorial' state is embodied in the figure of the bachelor, who must 'beg for an invitation whenever [he] wants to spend an evening in company/ must suffer alone if ill, must 'say goodnight at the front door, never to run upstairs beside one's wife/ must eat alone and must 'admire other people's children.' These generalities of the condition of bachelorhood, which are fairly unaffecting, are stunningly illuminated in the final lines of the piece: That's how it will be, except that in reality, both today and later, one will stand there with a palpable body and a real head, a real forehead, that is, for smiting on with one's hand' (30). 'A palpable body/ 'a real head/ 'a real forehead/ and that 'hand' that 'smites' that forehead: seldom has the 'anomaly' of individual being that Celati discusses in his introduction been so unforgettably evoked. Finally, in 'On the Tram/ the narrative voice begins: 'I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this

Bartleby: Preferring Not To 51 town, in my family. Not even casually could I indicate any claims that I might rightly advance in any direction' (35). The Kierkegaardian sense of 'the terrible experience of being an individual' mentioned by Celati in his introduction comes to mind here as well, and is intensified by the appearance of another individual, a girl, who is 'as distinct to [the narrator] as if [he] had run [his] hands over her.' He describes her clothes and her looks in detail, concluding with her ear, which is 'small' and 'close-set'; he goes on: 'Since I am near her I can see the whole ridge of the whorl of her right ear and the shadow at the root of it. At that point I asked myself: How is it that she is not amazed at herself, that she keeps her lips closed and makes no such remark?' (36). The 'terrible,' 'anomalous/ and necessarily silent ontic dimension of individual existence of which Celati writes at some length in his discussion of Bartleby is masterfully and piercingly captured in Kafka's words. Walter Benjamin - another of Celati's 'masters' - wrote in his amazing essay, 'Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death': 'There are two ways to miss the point of Kafka's works. One is to interpret them naturally, the other is the supernatural interpretation. Both the psychoanalytic and the theological interpretations equally miss the essential points' (in Illuminations; 127). Celati's reading of 'Bartleby' similarly avoids interpreting the story according to explicitly psychoanalytic and theological models, although there is a reaching towards an anti-materialist conception of both writing and experience that indirectly alludes to psyche and soul. Robert Lumley sees a 'mystical dimension' in Celati's more recent attitudes concerning writing, which is tied to 'the transitoriness of both human and natural phenomena'; moreover, in his writings, especially those of more or less the same period as the Bartleby translation and commentary (late 19805, early 19905), Lumley detects that 'losing oneself (one's way, one's selfpossession) is presented as a path to wisdom' (in Baranski and Fertile; 57). Death has also become a foregrounded topic, linked in its ineluctability to the ultimate unknowability of presence and being. Two thinkers have played particularly central roles in the shaping of Celati's 'habits of thought' pertaining to the so-called mystical realm: philosopher Giorgio Agamben and psychoanalyst Elvio Fachinelli. In the case of the former, it is difficult to say who has acquired what from whom, so close are their shared concerns on a number of issues. (They are friends, so that mutual 'influence' is no doubt the result of informal conversations and exchanges of thought rather than the impersonal reading of one another's work.) Agamben, who participated in Hei-

52 Gianni Celati degger's seminars at Thor in 1966 and 1968, has edited the complete works of Benjamin in Italian, and has written many books from the early seventies to the present, several of which have been translated into English (Language and Death: The Place of Negativity [1991]; The Coming Community [1993]; Idea of Prose [1995]). In his 1990 La comunita che viene (The Coming Community), there is a chapter entitled 'Bartleby/ and in 1993 an essay, 'Bartleby o della contingenza' (Bartleby or contingency), was published along with Deleuze's 'Bartleby o la formula' (Bartleby or the formula) in a small volume called Bartleby: La formula della creazione (Bartleby or the formula of creation). In the former, much shorter piece, Agamben uses the figure of Bartleby as representative of the 'qualsiasi' or 'whatever' (quodlibet) quality that 'inheres in potentiality and possibility' (The Coming Community; 34). His larger goal in the book is to describe a future human community that would be founded on singularities that refuse any category of belonging, and that would remain, instead, in the suspended state of sheer potentiality to be found in 'whatever' identity. Agamben explains this potentiality by turning to Aristotelian thought; in the De anima, Aristotle argues, according to Agamben, that 'thought, in its essence, is pure potentiality; in other words, it is also the potentiality not to think, and, as such, as possible or material intellect, Aristotle compares it to a writing tablet on which nothing is written.' Because of this potentiality to notthink, to not-actualize itself, 'thought can turn back to itself ... and be, at its apex, the thought of thought.' The writing tablet on which nothing is written is called tabula rasa, although Agamben reminds us that the ancient commentators of Aristotle noted that it would be better to speak of a rasum tabulae, 'that is, of the layer of wax covering the tablet that the stylus engraves.' When thought thinks itself, it thinks of that rasum tabulae 'that is nothing but its own passivity, its own pure potentiality (to not think).' Thus, 'the writing table writes by itself or, rather writes its own passivity.' Agamben concludes therefore that 'the perfect act of writing comes not from a power to write, but from an impotence that turns back on itself and in this way comes to itself as a pure act (which Aristotle calls agent intellect).' In the Arabic tradition agent intellect is represented as 'an angel whose name is Qalam, Pen'; Bartleby is, in this context, 'the extreme image of this angel that writes nothing but its potentiality to not-write' (all quotations from the Coming Community; 35-6). The similarity of this argument to Celati's is, I think, evident. Celati writes of Bartleby's 'potenza,' which is Agamben's 'pure potentiality'; he also comments on writing's power, which

Bartleby: Preferring Not To 53 resides 'not in having this or that thing to say, but in having little or nothing to say/ and in 'remaining suspended only as a "preference"' ('Introduction'; xxvi). In both Agamben and Celati, thought and writing are most 'powerful' when they express only themselves and their endless potential, rather than when they actualize themselves in this or that intentional content. In his longer essay, 'Bartleby o della contingenza/ Agamben develops his meditation on potentiality in an extremely dense and complex argument, which draws on Islamic thought, the sceptical tradition, medieval theological commentary, Leibnitz, and beyond, in order to arrive at the proposition that Bartleby represents the transcendence of the basic principals of truth and of contradiction at the basis of the Western philosophical tradition. Agamben writes: 'A being that can be and, at the same time, not be, is called, in essential philosophy, contingent. The experiment, into which Bartleby makes us hazard, is an experiment de contingentia absoluta' (76). His suspension in a preference not to is between what is - and might not have been - and what is not and might have been. Agamben reads Melville's inclusion of the 'rumor' concerning Bartleby's prior employment in the Dead Letter Office as yet another sign of the state of absolute contingency that the scrivener is meant to represent, for 'letters never delivered are the sign of joyous events that might have been able to be, but were not realized.' Agamben notes that the phrase, 'on errands of life these letters speed to death/ is 'a barely concealed quotation from Romans 7.10 ... "And the commandment, which was ordained to life I found to be unto death'"; he further comments that the term 'commandment' (entole) is better translated as 'errand' or 'mandate.' Paul is here comparing the 'deathly' essence of the Letter of the Law and the lifebringing essence of the Spirit or, as it is stated in Corinthians 3.6, 'the letter killeth, but the spirit bringeth life.' Bartleby is a kind of Messiah, then, who brings a new message, but it is not one, like that of Christ, that redeems that which has been, but rather one that saves that which has not been: precisely the non-actualized potential that his suspended being emblematizes. Agamben reads this as a sign of 'palingenesis' whereby the 'new creature' (and, by extension, all of creation) 'reaches the unverifiable center of his "self-verification or non-self-verification'" (92). In this perspective, all that which has been created has within itself its potential not to have been created; conversely, all that which has not been created has within itself its potential to have been created. Everything is thus in a state of suspension, an unresolved

54 Gianni Celati oscillation between being and nonbeing, like a 'dead letter' that contains the potential for life while 'speeding toward death.' Celati's reiteration of the term 'oscillation' in his tale of Baratto takes on deeper significance when read in the context of Agamben's theorizing, just as his reading of Bartleby's 'potenza' is more brightly illuminated. Celati's conception of writing as an activity that remains suspended merely as a preference points to this 'palingenesis/ which can be understood also as a kind of infinite rebirth or transmigration of the 'soul' of language in its endless potential. The one who writes taps into this potential not by having something to say, but by having nothing to say: by a completely nonproprietary relation to both thought and language. The self is, therefore, set aside, for 'expressing oneself is antithetical to this belief. An enraptured state is implicit in this mode of relating to language, a state in some ways similar to, although not identical with, a mystical raptus. Here, the late psychoanalyst Elvio Fachinelli's work becomes pertinent, especially as seen in his 1989 study La mente estatica (The ecstatic mind). In the brief Tremessa' or preliminary clarification of the intent of the study to follow, Fachinelli writes that he will 'search around (frugare) in a perceptual, emotional and cognitive stratum, that has been received for the most part as a border area, dangerous as far as the affirmation of a well individuated, personal "I" is concerned' (11). This stratum is that of ecstatic experience, which Fachinelli sees as a 'disconoscimento' or 'unknowing' that opens up many experiences, including 'probably the most creative experiences of human life.' Mysticism is 'only one of its forms' (Fachinelli's italics), and he believes that investigating the many other forms of ecstatic experience is 'an anthropological exigency (his italics again) that we should neither lose nor waste.' In answer to those who would see this research as 'an attempt to destroy or weaken Reason, or perhaps even the "I" itself,' he counters that ecstatic experience might instead contribute to 'saving the "I" from the urgent risk of being absorbed into technical, scientific, and bureaucratic Reason' (12). The volume that follows contains chapters dedicated to Fachinelli's own personal experience of the 'oceanic'; to Meister Eckhart, Dante, Proust and Bataille, Poincare and Proust, Saul Bellow; to Freud's relationship with Fleiss; and to the Lacanian concept of the Thing.' In his general comments on ecstasy included in the section entitled 'Zerografie' (Zerowritings), Fachinelli emphasizes ecstasy's oxymoronic qualities, which are similar to Agamben's characterization of the state of pure potentiality as what both 'is' and 'is not': 'At the point at which the

Bartleby: Preferring Not To 55 limit between the subject and the object disappears, there emerges a sense of an all that is also nothing. Experience of the allnothing, of the fullempty' (33). He also quotes Hegel, who wrote in his Science of Logic that '"in the passage from nothingness to being there is a point at which being and nothingness coincide and their difference disappears." It is in this coincidence of being and nothingness, a "pure emptiness," laden with tension, that the ecstatic one lives for an unquantifiable period of time' (37). In Celati's view of writing as a state of 'suspension' without 'expectations/ it is possible to see a relation with the 'ecstatic mind' of Fachinelli. Writing understood in this way is not 'expression/ a 'pressing forth' (ex-premere) of an individually conditioned interiority, but rather 'ecstasy/ a loss of self in the oxymoronic silence of the great sea of language from which and to which writing comes to the surface only to sink back, in an endless suspension between pure potential and activated manifestation. I think it significant that Fachinelli refers to Romans 7 in order to explain the Lacanian connection between the Thing' and the 'Law': the same passage used by Agamben in order to get at the meaning of Bartleby's 'dead letters.' Fachinelli defines Lacan's term, das Ding, as 'the central place of desire/ which is identified with the 'primordial mother.' Even though this 'primordial matrix of desire' is in and of itself unreachable, it (or, better, its incarnation in the real mother) is nonetheless also prohibited in the form of the incest tabu. Lacan reads Romans 7 ('I knew sin only by means of the Law. I would not have known concupiscence if the Law had not said: "Do not desire."') as explaining well the relation between the Thing and the Law; he merely substitutes for the word 'sin' the term Thing.' But Fachinelli points out that Lacan omits Paul's main point, which is that Paul has a new relation with the Law, one based on the spirit, not the letter. This new relation is, of course, the basis for a radical 'jump' or 'shift' not only within the individual Paul, but also within an entire culture. Fachinelli concludes that 'Lacan's omission stands out as the symptom of an incapacity to go beyond the order of obedience and transgression' (194). The ecstatic, 'mystical/ relation with the Law, based on an embrace of the spirit (or, in nontheological terms, the figurative or poetic aspect of experience and its representation in language) opens out onto 'excessive joy/ which is repressed or circumscribed by an order based on either obedience or transgression; mystical ecstasy thus goes beyond the barrier of incest into 'an anthropological aspect [that has been] up to now refused or feared or simply assimilated into a reli-

56 Gianni Celati gious contextualization' (195). I think it possible to say that Bartleby is himself beyond obedience or transgression, and his ineluctable presence sends us glimmers of a realm of experience that could (although certainly Melville's story does not directly imply this) be profoundly liberating, both as regards concepts of the individual self and those that have been at the basis of our organization and understanding of collective human existence. If writing can tap into this liberating potential, so to speak, then it partakes of the sacred, understood not as an aspect of organized religion, but as an integral element of being: that spiritual element that an exclusively rational concept of human meaning has drastically marginalized, and maybe even sought to suppress entirely, for fear not of suffering, but of 'excessive joy.' It is perhaps in this sense that Bartleby's tale is comic, for it can be read as the story of a liberation from the tragic tyranny of the Law into the 'Divine Comedy' of a subjectivity lived as the joy of the infinitely suspended sheer potential of mere Being. My zigzagging journey through some of the writers and thinkers of importance to the shaping of Celati's thought and practice may seem to have carried me far from the laconic scrivener who gives the title to this chapter. I believe, however, that no matter how distant the echoes of these diverse writings might appear to be in the words that Celati writes about Bartleby, they nonetheless resonate with a kind of oblique, 'weak' power, like whispered phrases that haunt us. One final digression, then, before leaving behind the beloved figure who silently stares at a blank wall, seeks a kind of nourishment the world cannot give to him, and goes on 'preferring not to' until he no longer exists. In a number of essays dedicated to diverse writers, Celati has continued to develop his ideas about what writing is or could be. I want to refer now to his reading of one of those writers, Antonio Delfini, because I think that the ideas put forth in this essay are of special pertinence to the concept of writing adumbrated in the introduction to 'Bartleby.' Delfini is typically presented (when considered at all) as a radically 'eccentric' writer; he had little success while alive (he was born in Modena in 1907 and died in 1963), but critics have dedicated more attention to his writings in recent years, especially with the 1982 publication of his Diari (Diaries) and the republication of other works such as Poesie della fine del mondo (Poems of the end of the world). Celati begins his essay, 'Antonio Delfini ad alta voce' (Antonio Delfini out loud), by quoting extensively from 'Racconto che non scrivero' (A

Bartleby: Preferring Not To 57 story I shall not write), which dates from 1960 and is included in Delfini's Diaries. The extract begins: 'After all the harm they've done to my mama, to my sister and to me, I: with my heart in a tumult, sick, horribly frightened by the systems of the bourgeoisie of my city ... I: left without land and without belongings, left without affections, tortured for a joke even by the doctor of P. who has reduced me [to a state in which] my jaws are swollen and my ears almost deaf, robbed by a faithless, very rich fiancee ...: I have quite decided to write a story, an enormous, boundless, fully terrible, vindictive, and condemnatory story: a story that should have become a novel; a novel that should have turned into the reality of a Resolute History' (quoted in Celati's 'Antonio Delfini ad alta voce'). Celati argues that it is not the autobiographical element of this outpouring that interests him; rather, it is the 'generosity of [Delfini's] errors,' and the 'energy of a raptus that is quite without defenses, being completely open and exposed to the offenses of the world.' Delfini writes not according to the rules of grammar, but 'by ear/ and his 'deformed syntax' and 'swollen sentences' imply a 'flurry of enunciative possibilities that open out at every turn of phrase.' Celati writes that we can easily assume that Delfini had no idea where he was going as he 'followed the momentary wave of his syntax/ Furthermore, Delfini typically did not get very far along as he rode the waves of his errant writing. He himself wrote in his Diaries that he had begun various books hundreds of times, all left unfinished. Celati writes that we can see a Tack of will' or even a kind of 'laziness' in this inability to conclude, but Delfini in fact explains it as a basic incapacity to decide among various possibilities, a sense of suffering caused by the necessity of 'having to say' and 'having to do' one thing or another. This lack of decisiveness can be considered 'a misfortune' (una disgrazia), but Celati instead points out that too many writers write novel after novel, 'simply because they must say and must do, since they are writers/ The results are not often very illuminating, for writing done because one feels that one must write is, in Celati's opinion, worth little. He therefore admires Delfini's 'wisdom' in having understood, very early on in his life, that, in Delfini's own words, '"every sign (words) [is] different from that which one means ... the individual claims to give to his expression the exact sign that corresponds to it, [but] given that signs are incredibly far from that which the individual means, the result easily becomes a greater confusion"' (Diari; 108). Delfini instead begins with an admission of 'defeat'; he 'intends' nothing, because he knows before he starts to write that his

58 Gianni Celati words cannot capture his meanings. Celati notes that one of Delfini's 'little tricks of language in order to go forward' is the hypothetical past mode - 'I would have done, I would have said, I would have been, etc/ - which writer and critic Ginevra Bompiani calls the 'eventual past' (passato eventuale). Delfini can then give himself over to the pleasure of 'momentary contingency/ as a non-existent past creates itself in the present of his non-intentional writing. Whether fuelled by happiness or desperation, Delfini often succeeds in abandoning himself to writing. Celati does not want to accept that this is 'ingenuousness/ as critics are wont to say, for he comments: 'This is like imputing to someone who is happy the fact that he sees nothing beyond his happiness. Happiness can only be a momentary state to which one abandons oneself, and as soon as it is seen from outside it collapses in disenchantment/ Instead, he finds a wonderful 'music' in Delfini's prose, such as the passage cited from the 'Story I Shall Not Write/ in which there is no separation between a 'major' and a 'minor' key, and we don't know if we should laugh or cry, if this 'is a drama or a lunatic comedy/ When words 'take off as they do in this passage, there is no clear distinction between desperation and happiness, only the contingency of the moment, beyond history, and beyond any finalizing outcome. In order to hear this music, Celati writes that Delfini should be read aloud, so that the 'momentary' and 'contingent' nature of his prose can 'resound in our ears/ Presumably (Celati does not write this), we readers or listeners might also then be carried along on the waves of language, beyond desperation and happiness, beyond the strictures of intentionality, or, in Lacanian terms, beyond 'obedience' or 'transgression/ Celati admires Delfini's way of writing, which is more allied to 'humming' (canticchiare) or 'grumbling' (brontolare) than to the 'neutral' language of 'those who "know how to talk/" the language of social or literary eloquence that excludes 'the stutterers, the timid, and also the happy people who love to say silly things/ Those who speak knowing what they mean are those who make up 'culture': 'intellectuals who claim a clarity without clouds in the sky of their ideas/ The admiration shown for Delfini's non-intentional mode of writing implies an admiration for a mode of being as well, one that is not entrapped in project-oriented, ideologically conditioned actions, but which instead admits to the fundamental errancy and contingency of existence. We are thus brought back one last time to the scrivener, whose 'preference not to' signals, like Delfini's writing, a withdrawal from the

Bartleby: Preferring Not To 59 games of intentionality and mastery that condition our world of actions and words, making us blind to the 'excessive happiness' possible in sheer existence and deaf to the music inherent in language. In Celati's view, the 'comedy' of Bartleby's tale is not incidental to whatever meaning it conveys; rather, the scrivener is 'comic' in the strongest sense of the word, as he triumphs over the adversity of individual, anomalous existence by giving himself over to it entirely, even unto death. In the light of Celati's long and deep meditation on the 'ineluctably mild' scrivener, it is possible, I believe, to view the Italian writer's work, both creative and critical, as aspiring to nothing other than the continuation of a craft that is refined in the workshop of existence, and that might nourish others with a deepened awareness of our 'infinite fraternity': with a crumb of the bread of laconic messengers who briefly float, like all of us, on the desert wind of ultimately unknowable life.

2

The Antimonumental: Redefining Minimalism1

'I don't know if it is an excess or a lack of sensibility, but it's a fact that great tragedies leave me almost indifferent. There are subtle pains, certain situations and relationships, that move me quite a bit more than a city destroyed by fire.' Silvio d'Arzo2

Celati disliked having the term 'minimalist' applied to his writing of the 19805, for it suggested membership in a literary school or participation in a trend that critics had defined in reference to several different art forms (architecture, music) of the recent past, and had 'reactivated' in order to describe the works of younger writers who began to publish in the eighties. From Celati's perspective, therefore, the term could be seen as the result of the typical critical 'endeavor of quickly consulting a code and explaining by means of it/ rendering it impossible to adhere to 'the taste of the thing ... [to have] any involvement in that taste' ('Oggetti soffici/ [Soft objects]; 14).3 It is undeniably true that literary minimalism, in the United States as well as in Italy, has been more negatively defined and criticized than positively or neutrally received, that, in short, many critics do not seem to have a taste for it. Having first come into use in the Italian context in the early 19805, minimalism was a critical term borrowed from the United States at a time when there were few clearly discernible lines or directions in the socalled new Italian fiction, and critics tended to go on about the 'emptiness' and 'chaos' of the current literary scene. Lino Fertile has proposed that one of the reasons for the often negative quality of critical assessments of the directions of eighties' Italian fiction is that 'the unexpected ways in which Italian society has evolved since 1968 have

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called into question the very foundations of contemporary literary historiography, with the consequence that the literary universe appears now fragmented, confused, contradictory, and empty' (in Baranski and Fertile, eds.; 17) Given the Italian critical penchant for the creation of detailed and clearly definable taxonomies, schools, and 'isms' of all sorts - from the 'stilnovismo' of Dante's era to the 'decadentismo,' 'crepuscolarismo/ 'futurismo,' 'neorealismo,' and 'neoavangardismo' of more recent periods, it is not surprising that new labels, new terms, new categorizations were sought for what was happening in literature in the 'post-neo' era of the last twenty or so years. Minimalism was one of those new terms, applied to a number of younger writers whose work was, in fact, quite diverse, as if calling them by the same name would insure that a 'school' would be conjured into being. Celati found himself dropped into this pool and associated with writers such as Pier Vittorio Tondelli, Andrea De Carlo, and Daniele Del Giudice, all of whom began to publish fiction in the 19805, and all of whom were born in the 19505, that is, almost two decades after Celati. It is little wonder that he disliked being called a 'younger writer' in the early and mid-1980s, with all of the implications of novelty, immaturity, and 'up-to-dateness' that such a label implies. His inclusion in this 'school' was due in great part to his reappearance on the literary scene in 1985 with the collection of short stories, Narratori delle pianure, after a relatively long (seven years) 'disappearance'; he thus seemed to be a 'new' voice, and a 'minimalist' one at that, given his turn to the short narrative form and the pared-down quality of his style. That critics wrote of a 'minimalist' Celati was not entirely perverse, therefore, but neither was Celati's rejection of this label, on what are, I believe, infinitely more convincing and even more historically accurate grounds. As a critical catchword, 'minimalism' has been used to describe a multitude of creative endeavors, from Bauhaus architecture to certain forms of modern music, from trends in pictorial art of the sixties and beyond to the fiction of American writers such as Raymond Carver, Anne Beattie, and Bret Ellis. In his succinct and very useful discussion of literary minimalism in the Italian context, Stefano Tani rightly notes that American literary minimalism actually came on the scene later than its Italian analogue: 'American minimalism is in reality an even more recent phenomenon than our young narrative, given that it was only in 1984 that David Leavitt's first book, family Dancing, had the catalyzing function in the States for the success and reorientation of the market toward the new recruits that in Italy Andrea De Carlo's Treno di

62 Gianni Celati panna had in 1981' (140-1; my translation). Nonetheless, young Italian writers such as De Carlo were 'legitimated by American parallels' (Fertile; 17); furthermore, the term served as an identifying mark by means of which Italian fiction of the eighties could more easily be drawn into discussions of fiction in the American context directed towards a broad readership. An example of this kind of coverage is Sergio Perosa's The Heirs of Calvino and the Eco Effect/ which appeared on the front page of the New York Times Book Review of 16 August 1987. In this piece, Perosa surveys Italian fiction two years after Calvino's death, and writes that 'the very young are active and rampant, even if in a subdued, "minimalist" tone/ He emphasizes the American-Italian connection by mentioning the anthology of new, 'young' narrative edited in 1986 by Tondelli, whose title, Sotto i 25 Anni (Under 25) 'is obviously meant as the Italian equivalent of the American anthology 20 Under 30, edited by Debra Spark' (25). This is one of the very rare times when Celati is mentioned in a nonacademic venue (Perosa cites his Narratori delle pianure as one of the several examples of a return to the short story form). Yet most critics who have written on the new Italian narrative as it took shape in the 19805 are careful to highlight the differences between American and Italian minimalism. Perosa comments, regarding comparisons, that 'qualifications are of course needed, and distinctions must be made.' His way of distinguishing between Italian and American minimalists, true to the simplistic generalizing typical of such surveys for a general readership, is to assert that writers such as Tondelli, Celati, Tabucchi, and Parise do not appear to be 'interested, as their American contemporaries seem to be, in giving a close view of family life and family relations; nor do we find in them a phantasmagoric presentation of city life and city landscapes as, for instance, in Jay Mclnerney's New York in Bright Lights, Big City, or in Bret Easton Ellis's Los Angeles in Less Than Zero' (25). Fertile also writes that the term minimalism must be 'qualified' when applied to Italian fiction, and he points out that 'Italy has its own indigenous tradition of minimalist writing/ whose 'most recent and accomplished representative this century was perhaps Carlo Cassola/ in whose sixties' novels 'the social and political dimensions of experience were utterly rejected in favour of the calligraphic description of a banal, humble, and insignificant domesticity' (17). Nor does Tani make an exception to this critical tendency to 'distinguish'; he emphasizes the important role played by the standardization of Italian - via a more universal educational system and especially via the medium of television - in the shaping of Italian

The Antimonumental: Redefining Minimalism 63 minimalists. More than shared thematic or genre-related elements (the prevalence of the short story, for example), it is the consolidation of a 'linguistic koine, of a generation of writers who in great part grew up with television ... far from any dialectal influence' (145-6; my translation) that characterizes Italian minimalism. For the first time, young writers truly do speak the same language and are thus assured a larger audience for their works: an audience made up of television watchers like themselves, who have lost all ties with a dialectally inflected reality. Whether seen as a kind of writing allied to the short fiction form, thematically reflective of unexceptional quotidian life, or embodied in standardized, flat, and uninflected Italian, 'minimalism' was summarily used in an attempt to taxonomize the so-called new fiction of the 19805 and to define a 'young generation' of Italian writers who began to publish around the time of Calvino's death. That Celati was included in this 'group' (rather than recognized as a model for a much more specific direction among some younger writers, including Ermanno Cavazzoni and Daniele Benati) reflects the superficiality that can result from an excess of terminological zeal. This brief discussion of the recent history of the term minimalism reveals, I hope, how approximate and instrumentalized the term was when it was 'quickly' pulled out of the American critical 'code,' as Celati would put it, and applied fairly willy-nilly to the 'new Italian narrators' of the 19805, which ostensibly included Celati redux. I would like instead to concentrate some attention on the term itself, first as it was (negatively) defined in the American context, and, next, as it might be (positively) redefined, and reactivated as a more legitimate and accurate way of understanding some aspects of Celati's work not only of the eighties but also earlier and later. In fact, I must admit that I am not convinced that 'minimalism' should be used at all in defining that work, because the term has more or less solidified into a certain denotative and connotative field of critical meaning that does not apply to Celati. Yet I am attracted to the effort of redefining the term, perhaps precisely because I remain unconvinced that it has been done justice. Like so many other widely used critical terms - postmodernism, for example - it exists almost in spite of the lack of consensus as to what precisely it means, and exploring its heuristic usefulness as well as its limits seems to me to be a potentially clarifying undertaking. What 'minimalist' designates, in a very general sense, is obvious enough: a stripping down (structurally, stylistically, thematically, tonally); an avoidance of decoration or ornament; a desire, as Mark

64 Gianni Celati Twain put it, to 'eschew surplusage.' A dictionary definition of the term defines it as 'being or offering no more than what is required or essential. This definition, so placidly transparent on the surface, provokes rebellion against its appeal to common sense, however, for how does one ever determine what constitutes 'no more than what is required or essential' in the realm of art? Creativity seems to be an ally of the ever-unquiet human desire for 'more' rather than the implied satisfaction of 'enough. Why would writers wish to attain just 'enough/ to 'offer no more than what is required or essential/ no matter what form that offering took? Or, on the other hand, is this not what art always aspires to? And, if so, what distinguishes the 'essentiality' of minimalism from basic artistic essentiality and creative economy? Leaving aside these ahistorical questions, and turning to the temporally determined critical context in which terms are born and live, it is clear that literary and other kinds of minimalism have been defined in great part by what they react to and against (as is the case with most historically conditioned taxonomic terms). Just as 'romanticism' is understood as a reaction to 'neoclassicism/ or 'neoavantgardism' as a rejection of 'neorealism/ so literary minimalism is seen at least in part as an oppositional countering of mimetic maximalism. The radical limits of such definitional strategies are evident. It may be true to say that 'small' is 'not big/ but we are still left to grapple with what smallness in fact is. Frederick Barthelme, whose writing was called minimalist, highlighted the fundamental inadequacy of defining minimalism by what it is not in a 1988 piece in the New York Times Book Review wittily entitled 'On Being Wrong: Convicted Minimalist Spills Bean.' He listed the basic 'charges against so-called "minimalist" fiction/ which are, he believes, based 'on some ideas of what fiction used to be, or is thought to have been. The main failings attributed to minimalist writing are '(A) omission of big "philosophical" ideas, (B) not enough history or historical sense, (C) lack of (or wrong) political posture, (D) insufficient "depth" of character, (E) commonplace description too reliant on brand names, (F) drabness of style, (G) moral poverty.' Barthelme comments that 'the charges are typically framed in the negative because these are criticisms of what this fiction isn't, not of what it is' (all quotations from page i). To define or to criticize something in terms of what it is not is an ancient and honored rhetorical strategy, in theology, politics, literature, and life, but to be ancient and honored is not necessarily always to be adequate or right. My interest is in considering what a positive approach

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to defining 'minimalism' might yield, one that might get beyond the most obvious and self-evident generalities such as 'spareness' or 'essentiality/ John Barm, another writer who 'stood accused' of minimalist writing in the recent past, commented on a different failing of the criticism dedicated to minimalism: the lumping together of writers of quite different styles and poetics under this vaguely defined term. He wrote in a 1986 essay called 'A Few Words About Minimalism' that 'like any clutch of artists collectively labeled, the writers just mentioned [Barthelme, Beattie, Carver, Mason, Robinson, Wolff] are at least as different from one another as they are similar' (2). In the piece quoted above, Barthelme also writes of the many works that have 'been colored with this broad, if single-haired, brush.' But he says that he will nonetheless use the collective 'we' when discussing minimalism: 'I have been charged [with being a minimalist] and, even though I don't feel a special kinship with others similarly charged - say, Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, Mary Robinson - I do feel the kinship of appreciating their work, thinking it serious and compelling, worthy of attention' (25). This tendency to put many writers together in the same boat was equally widespread in Italian critical assessments of the new fiction of the 19803, and Celati thus found himself afloat with a number of much younger and extremely different writers, some of whose work he also found 'worthy of attention/ if certainly not directly modeled on or analogous to his own. It is clear that many American writers were on the defensive when it came to being called 'minimalists'; they felt it as an 'accusation' rather than a definition of their work. The 'new' generation of Italian writers were not as defensive about the term, perhaps because it is so much an aspect of Italian critical assessments to label and historicize, and perhaps also because it implied (or said outright) that their fiction shared attributes of a Zeitgeist that was 'American/ that is, 'cutting-edge/ 'up-to-date/ and fashionably 'young' in much the same way as Nike shoes, fast food, and blockbuster movies were. Again, it is not difficult to understand Celati's aversion to being painted with this 'brush' of youthful contemporaneity. In the following attempt to redefine minimalism as the term might pertain to aspects of Celati's work, I want first to use it in a nontechnical sense, as something like a synonym for 'subdued' or 'understated.' Other words that come to mind are 'modest' and 'antimonumental/ although this last term is guilty of the crime of defining by means of opposition or negation. I begin with some general observations, then

66 Gianni Celati move towards a more detailed and specific redefinition of what in Celati's writing over the years might be called 'minimalist/ First, throughout his career as teacher, theorist, essayist, and writer, Celati has consistently distanced himself from the monumental machines known as the Institutions of Literature and Academia, opting instead for a constant but minimal involvement - on the sidelines, so to speak - in the games of these powerful public spheres. Next, his so-called production over the last thirty years might be seen as minimal, compared with that of writers such as Calvino, or multimedial creators such as Pasolini. And, until relatively recently, it seemed that his influence on younger generations of writers was minimal, again unlike Calvino or, before him, Carlo Emilio Gadda. In spite of the ostensibly negative connotations of such a characterization, Celati's voice has been heard over the past several decades by those who have been able to listen to the resonances of understatement as much as to the louder tones of ever-present and more imposing 'music.' There have been some exceptionally good listeners, among them Calvino, who heard Celati very early on and discerned a talent worth following. Calvino in fact introduced Celati's first novel, Comiche, in 1971. Although Celati published only four novels in the 19705, he wrote many theoretical essays and translated several texts from the French (Beckett, Celine) and English (Swift, Conrad). He also published the volume of essays, Finzioni occidental! (Western fictions), in 1975. Even during his period of ostensible silence, from the late seventies to the mid-eighties, Celati continued to write and publish essays in somewhat out-of-the-way journals such as Iterarte and Quindi, and, in the context of his teaching of Anglo-American literature at Bologna, he produced an insightful and useful manual on narrative techniques entitled Frasi per narratori (Sentences for narrators) in 1983. In 1985, he 'reappeared' with the collection of stories, Narratori delle pianure, and has published fiction, essays, and translations steadily since then. Yet Celati continued to be true to his 'minimalizing' public style when, in 1987, in an interview by Antonietta Lapenna published in the journal Gradiva, he refused to speak of 'forthcoming' work, stating instead that for him writing was not some current 'work-in-progress,' but rather 'a much more fragmentary and casual thing, an accumulation from which something suddenly comes forth, something that is almost always a failure' ('Conversazione con Gianni Celati'; 56). In spite of his higher level of visibility on the literary scene in this decade, then, his involvement with the literary establishment remains minimal and fun-

The Antimonumental: Redefining Minimalism 67 damentally antagonistic. Celati has consistently refused the role of 'author/ which in Italy typically means playing a highly public role: intervening in literary debates pronouncing on the present and future not only of literature but of all manner of social and political issues, and so forth. In sum, his dedication to writing has been 'maximal/ while his involvement in institutionalized letters has been willfully 'minimal.' The characterization of Celati offered above has to do with an extratextual style of being rather than with style as seen in written texts. Turning to the issue of style in the textual sense, it would first appear that to call Celati's earlier fictions 'minimalist' would be to distort out of all recognizable shape the usual meaning of the term. Better, then, to speak of a 'minimalizing tendency/ which pertains to poetics and practice both. As for Celati's poetics - his basic orientation to and idea of writing, his narrative choices, his literary 'ideology/ if you will - from the very beginning of his work as a writer, he has consistently rejected the model of what he called 'il racconto monumentale' or the 'monumental tale/ that is, the 'maximalist' fiction described so well in Barthelme's list of attributes lacking in minimalist fiction. The Manzonian model - so determinant for modern Italian fiction - in which an omniscient narrator projects a scenic, coherent, and instructional interpretation of characters and events onto the screen of a highly polished and carefully articulated narrative, is refused by Celati in favor of a panoramic, non-linear, and antididactic narrative mode closer in origin to the picaresque romance that to the full-blown realist bourgeois novel. In his fictions written in the 19705, Celati adopts the point of view of emarginated types (insane people in Comiche, idiots in Le avventure di Guizzardi, adolescents and exiles in La banda del sospiri and Lunario del paradiso), thus eroding the sanctity of the normative family and the dominance of rationality inherent in more traditional novelistic visions of experience in which marriage, personal growth, and mastery of the 'art of living' play such foundational roles. Celati's characters in these texts are instead unprotected by normative social institutions, lost in futile searches or caught up in absurd 'adventures' that do not lead anywhere, least of all to illumination. More significantly, Celati does not write about these characters from the standpoint of a 'rational/ fully integrated, and normatively adjusted narrator; he writes through them, using a first-person voice that speaks directly in a highly eccentric, stylistically 'incontinent' (the term is Celati's own) language in Comiche and Guizzardi, and in the groping, confused language of

68 Gianni Celati adolescence and love-befuddled early maturity in La banda and Lunario. One of the sources of inspiration for the first two books was the writing of Celati's high school and college students who, in trying to imitate the contours of correct, polished expression, produced instead what Celati called 'masterpieces of dissent' in writing that 'followed the curve of spoken speech and extended itself extraordinarily through a kind of fabulatory incontinence' (quoted by Calvino in his blurb on Comiche included in the 1971 edition). The extraliterary models behind these early fictions (college essays, silent films), the concentration on eccentric protagonists, and the refusal to emulate anything even remotely resembling the 156110 stile' or high style of traditional Italian literary language all distanced Celati from the 'maximalist' Italian tradition that began with Manzoni and continued through the mainstream realist novels of this century. In these fictions written in the 19705, Celati also avoided well-made themes; his content as well as his language was 'improper,' consisting of 'fatti deboli' or weak facts. In place of the strong causalities and historically resonant content of the 'maximalist' tradition, he substituted a proliferation of basically unrelated, trivial events, strung together on the crooked thread of the protagonists' wanderings. For example, the poor lost soul Guizzardi experiences a haphazard series of mainly negative 'adventures' before ending up on a park bench where, in the final lines of the book, he decides to rest. His adventures end at this point only because he stops moving and not because any resolution or logical 'end' has been reached. Celati's third novel, La banda dei sospiri, concerns an adolescent boy nicknamed Garibaldi who seeks to escape the oppressive limits of the middle-class family into which he has been born. Celati explicitly designates the book (in the cover blurb) a 'racconto comune' (an ordinary or mediocre story) in clear contrast to the 'racconto monumentale' that reflects momentous historical events or spectacular spiritual epiphanies. He further comments that the book was born not of the desire to present us with 'penetrating interpretations of History' but with the world of 'quotidian causality and repetition. Similarly, the fourth novel, Lunario del paradiso, recounts the 'everyday' adventures of Giovanni as he pursues his beloved Antje in her native Germany; the book ends with Giovanni's return to Italy and the actual scene of writing of the book we have just read: 'We're now in April, says my typewriter, and we've finished.' An imagined 'spy' next door whispers to the writer that the book is 'a complete falsification/ to which the narrator replies in the final words of the novel: 'you too

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try to write yourself some stories and you'll see that this is the goddamned truth' (184-5). The book maintains throughout the casual and antiliterary tone of a spoken remembrance that constructs itself as it goes, rather than according to some pre-established order or meaning.4 In what sense, then, are these fictions of the 19705 'minimalist'? On the level of what critic Maria Corti calls 'the form of the expression'5 (contrasted to 'the form of the content'), they are anything but; the language of Comiche and Guizzardi especially is, as Guido Almansi wrote, 'expansive, noisy, comic, acrobatic, aggressive, carnal, violent, ungrammatical, ribald' ( 'Gli idilli padani'; 14). If Guizzardi is at all categorizeable, for example, it would best be placed under the rubric of 'expressionism/ understood in the Italian critical context, in Maria Corti's words, as that 'stylistic current that runs through the history of all of our literature, from its origins right up to the present/ and which is made up of works by '"irregular" writers who give special importance to the linguistic problematic' (Viaggio ml '900; 695). Almansi offers the genial term 'gut novel' to describe these experimental texts, and makes a clear-cut distinction between them and the more 'cerebral' writings of the 19805 and 19905. In comparing the 'early' to the 'later' Celati, Almansi (who clearly vastly prefers the early version) used the image of the proverbial thin man inside every fat one; Celati's first fictions were written by a 'fat' writer who wallowed in linguistic 'carnality' and excess, but inside lurked 'a thin writer who pushed him toward the heaths of minimalism, there where Beckett elaborates his version of laconic literature, and the Kafka of the short parables condenses the anguish of the universe into minimalist formulations of very dry writing' ('Gli idilli padani'; 14). I agree that Celati's writing in the 19705 is not expressively minimalist, and can easily be seen as radically different, in its linguistic and stylistic traits, from the pared-down stories he began to write in the 19803. Where, then, might be that continuity, that 'minimalist tendency' which I believe is to be found throughout Celati's writing? Long before the 'new' eighties' generation of Italian writers 'discovered' the thematics of banal quotidian life and sought inspiration in extraliterary models such as the cinema or everyday spoken language, Celati had not only made these 'discoveries/ but had written both critically and creatively about and by means of them. In his fiction of the 19705, he did not opt for the 'commonplace description' and 'drabness of style' listed by Barthelme as qualities typically ascribed to minimalist writing, but I think it possible to use the rest of that list for an oper-

jo Gianni Celati ation I now want to attempt, an operation not of applying the (negative) definitions of minimalism's shortcomings, but rather of reversing those definitions, with the goal of 'positifying' the term, of delving into what minimalism might be rather than what it fails to be. It is possible that by considering Celati's work specifically, some light might be shed on the category of minimalism itself, in which so many writers, both here and abroad, have recently been included. My goal is, therefore, twofold: first, to propose some positive definitions of minimalist tendencies and, second, to highlight Celati's particular contribution when viewed under the sign of the minimal. Barthelme's list opens with the charge of 'omission of big "philosophical" ideas.' Reversing this negative definition, I propose instead that minimalist fiction has 'small' philosophical ideas or, more radically, has no philosophical ideas (since, traditionally, 'philosophical ideas' are always 'big,' and cannot be associated with 'smallness' in any way). Minimalism could then be a term used to describe a type of narrative that implicitly or explicitly rejects the dominant perception and practice of philosophy as the realm of Trig ideas.' Rather than being criticized as a form of narrative expression that 'lacks' philosophical resonance, minimalist writing could be understood as itself pointing to a deficiency or radical limitation within traditional Western philosophical and literary cultural orientations, which are often blind to the presumption of mastery and power contained within their own rhetorical and analytical strategies. Celati's seventies' fiction clearly reflects this challenge to metaphysical, self-privileging Thought and Literature based on the acceptance of the superiority of 'big' ideas over 'small' ones. His writing opts instead to concentrate on the 'local' (the commonplace, unexceptional story) the 'physical' (corporeally conditioned humor), and casual rather than linear, progressive structures of discourse, the latter of which presuppose the existence of locatable and fixable 'ends' and philosophical or narrational 'Truths.' His stories and essays written since the mid-eighties similarly highlight a postmetaphysical perspective, albeit with very different techniques, as seen in the Bartleby-like, laconic character Baratto, or in the quiet tonality and pared-down prose style of the stories in Narmtori delle pianure. The directions that Celati explored in his fictions of the seventies were, in fact, prophetic in many ways of certain current postmetaphysical, postmodern emphases on localized knowledge, weakened subjectivity, and the fractured status of foundational 'grand narratives,' the Italian version of which culminated in the pensiero debole or 'weak thought' school

The Antimonumental: Redefining Minimalism 71 headed up by Gianni Vattimo. That Celati explored these concepts in extravagantly 'carnal' prose meant that the term minimalist never came into play, yet in terms of his poetics and of his choice of marginalized characters and unexceptional, 'mediocre' stories, he was in fact writing in a way that was to a great extent subsequently 'discovered' by much younger writers and philosopher-critics working in a decidedly minimalist manner within a decidedly postmodern context. Moving on to Barthelme's second negative definition, 'not enough history or historical sense,' and reversing this to assert positively that minimalism often questions the assumptions at the basis of historically conditioned narrative, the issue of history and especially of historicgraphic projects emerges. One of the fundamental queries raised by the suggestion that minimalist fiction does not contain 'enough history or historical sense' is: Precisely what is history? More to the point, what is historical representation, either fictional or factual, and what forms does it take? In considering these questions, Hayden White has written that 'the official wisdom of the modern historiographical establishment has it that there are three basic kinds of historical representation, the imperfect "historicality" of two of which is evidenced in their failure to attain to full narrativity of the events of which they treat. These three kinds are the annals, the chronicle, and the history proper.' The two 'imperfect' kinds - the annals and the chronicle - fail to reveal themselves 'as possessing a structure, an order of meaning'; instead, the annals form 'completely lacks this narrative component, consisting only of a list of events ordered in chronological sequence,' while the chronicle 'often seems to wish to tell a story, aspires to narrativity, but typically fails to achieve it. More specifically, the chronicle usually is marked by a failure to achieve narrative closure.' White summarizes: 'While annals represent historical reality as if real events did not display the form of story, the chronicle represents it as if real events appeared to human consciousness in the form of unfinished stories' ('The Value of Narrativity'; 5). He then proceeds to question the assumptions that claim the superiority of fully narrativized historical representation over the 'failed' narrativizing modes of annals and chronicle forms. Minimalist fiction, criticized for its Tack' of history or historical consciousness, might be seen as not so much lacking in history as displacing a mode of historical representation that is, like traditional realist fictional and historical representation, fully plotted, narrativized, and conclusive. Instead, minimalist fictions tend to use the 'flawed' techniques of annals or chronicle representation, 'mere

72 Gianni Celati sequence without beginning or end' or 'sequences of beginnings that only terminate and never conclude/ as White describes them. These fictions, accused of a 'lack of historical consciousness/ may instead be contributing to a different 'history/ made up of the common locales, unimportant individuals, and unexceptional experiences of quotidian life in our times. In the late 19605 and early 19705 Celati was meditating seriously on the meaning of history and historiographic writing in the context of conversations with his colleague at Bologna, historian Carlo Ginzburg and with his friend and mentor Calvino; all three were rethinking modernism and modernity, making use of the thought of Benjamin, Deleuze and Guattari, Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Derrida, and others. Their interest centered on an archeological conception of historical knowledge - elaborated most rigorously by Foucault - and some of the results of this work are available in Celati's essay 'II bazar archeologico' (The archeological bazaar), a complex piece that is best read, as Celati himself told me, in conjunction with Calvino's 'Lo sguardo archeologico' (The archeological glance), given that the essays were the result of collaboration between the two. I shall return to a detailed discussion of this work further on; for now, I simply quote the following from Celati's essay: 'History is always history of the leaders and of monuments, while archeology is instead the tale by Ruzante "che iera vegnu de campo" [who had returned from the field]' ('II bazar archeologico'; 20); '... [archeology] always works on local and molecular wholes, not being able to achieve the leap from quantity to quality, to choose an abstract axiom that might take account of the totality of events by means of a focal point' (21-2). There is no reason to make of history a temporal rather than a spatial field, when in place of the search for individual identity there is noted pure exteriority in relation to us and to our origins. It is exactly in those spaces [that] are marginalized or simply ignored by memory-tradition, that resides that difference without which history is tautology' (32). 'History is always the physical world, with its monuments and its streets, the streets that lead to the monuments, the monuments that line up the streets, the cities that rise up around monuments, the streets that join cities with important monuments and leave others outside. Archeology, if it is a science, is the science of margins. It is the science of that which is left outside the city, or is buried in the city, behind the grand facades, or on the dark side of vistas' (32). Minimalist fictions' concentration on often spatialized visions of the 'local' and the 'molecular' - such as is seen in

The Antimonumental: Redefining Minimalism 73 Celati's own Narratori delle pianure - is reflective of this revised 'historical sense/ rather than of some simple 'lack' of it. Moral as well as factual value is connoted by the phrase 'conclusive evidence.' Another negative quality of minimalist writing indicated in Barthelme's list is 'moral poverty.' I think that it is significant that minimalist writings seldom contain overt 'morals' in the stories they tell. To positivize this definition, I would say that minimalism expresses 'moral inconclusiveness'; that it typically leaves the drawing of conclusions to the reader rather than incorporating a necessary moral within the logical and structural emphases of the stories themselves. The current debate regarding the validity of using experiential data as representing conclusive evidence in a legal sense serves to underline the complexities inherent in the very concept of 'evidence/ and the related problem (The 'Rashamon' effect, if you will) of moralizing based on any single given narrative of experience.6 Here again, White's approach is useful. His interest is finally in 'the value attached to narrativity itself, especially in representations of reality of the sort which historical discourse embodies.' He argues that 'narrativizing discourse serves the purpose of moralizing judgements/ and that the ostensible failure of annals and chronicles to do justice to history is less ascribable to the shortcoming of the modes of perception they imply than to 'their failure to represent the moral under the aspect of the aesthetic.' White's final question - 'Could we ever narrativize without moralizing?' - is, of course, highly pertinent to fictional as well as historiographic modes of representation (all quotations from White, The Value of Narrativity'; 22-3). I think it absurdly reductive to state that minimalist fiction actively seeks to avoid or is innocently unaware of moral questions (as is implied in the accusation of 'moral poverty'); what this mode of narration tends to avoid is, instead, an overt 'moral' to the stories told. In his 1975 essay quoted above, Celati writes: 'History, be it as historiography or as a literary adaptation, an epic or a novel, tends always to resolve the meaning of great gatherings of facts by means of the artifice of agnition: that point, original scene or declaration of a truth, at which discontinuities are annulled through the revelation of their direction ... this is the moral of the story, the denouement, which pre-modern narrative could not do without. Now, agnition is by its nature anagogic, that is, it "carries upward," renders sublime or lifts the brute mass of events from the materiality of pure experience, in order to transfigure it into signs, symbols, acquisitions of knowledge of a comprehensible destiny ...' (21). Minimalist writing tends to emphasize the antisublime

74 Gianni Celati quality of modernist writing by remaining squarely fixed in the realm of materiality, the literal, and the directionless. Celati's Guizzardi, for example, can be seen as a 'symbol' of the emarginated types of modern society - the homeless, the inarticulate -, as, in short, an incarnated, 'sublime' indictment of contemporary society. We readers are completely free to choose to see him as such. But we are also free to see him as the fictional sum of a stylistic practice dedicated to recreating corporeal, cinematic humor in language; as 'representative' of nothing beyond language's remarkable flexibility and inventiveness, or of the errant contingency of everyday events. There is no authorial narrating voice in the book that directs us towards a clear 'moral,' nor is there any structural conclusiveness, by means of a denouement, that reveals to us an end (in the double sense of termination and goal) that was inherent - and therefore inevitable - in both the etiology and development of the narrative events themselves. There is a 'moral of no clear moral,' on the other hand; we are left to consider fundamental questions of decidability, evidentiary knowledge, justice, 'final' meaning. I would therefore argue that the so-called moral poverty of much minimalist writing is instead moral complexity, and that, in this sense, it is a narrative mode much more reflective of real, lived experience than many moralizing tales still told to us by literature and other, more potentially 'dangerous' forms of discourse in the social and political spheres. This brings me to the last two items on Barthelme's list of minimalism's 'negative attributes': 'lack of (or wrong) political posture,' and 'insufficient "depth" of character.' In the case of the first accusation, it is clear that minimalism's challenge to traditional representational techniques in which experience is recreated mimetically and teleologically can be seen as a broader 'political' challenge to the ostensible permanency of values connected with transparent and moralizing narratives. In Italy, the 'younger' writers identified with minimalism in the 19805 tended to reflect the generalized confusion and exhaustion felt throughout the political sphere, whether left or right. Certainly, their writing revealed more cynicism than active engagement, more soft-pedaling of identifiable ideological convictions than propositions of a 'strong/ project-oriented political mentality. In the United States, John Earth suggested in his 1986 essay that a sort of 'hangover' of depression produced by the aftermath of the Vietnam debacle may have had something to do with the development of a minimalist mode, or what he called a T don't want to or cannot talk about it' attitude. He also suggests that the energy crisis of the 19805 may have militated

The Antimonumental: Redefining Minimalism 75 against profligacy of any sort, including the narrational. The question of 'lack of (or wrong) political posture' is, to my mind, too vaguely posed to be of much worth in redefining minimalism ('wrong' according to whose version of what view of politics?), and I would say only that minimalist preferences regarding philosophical thought, history, and morality do not so much lack political resonance as they challenge 'strong' political and ideological discourses by obliquely putting into doubt the foundational bases of any and all master narratives, no matter in which realm they are deployed. I find more useful the charge of 'insufficient "depth" of character' in my operation of 'positifying' minimalism. Minimalist fiction does indeed tend to eschew the creation of fully rounded, psychologically complex, and 'deep' characters whose thoughts, motivations, and feelings are set forth in detailed scenes ('showing') or extended authorial interventions ('telling'). Instead, the minimalist mode gives us barebones exposition, little description of 'inwardness,' and desultory dialogue of the unrevealing, everyday sort We the readers are again left with the task of deciding what kind of 'people' these characters are, and what their motivations might in fact be. Rather than branding this style as insufficient it is possible to read it positively as partaking in the broader uncertainties of our era regarding identity and the categories of 'deep' and 'shallow, 'inner' and 'outer.' In my discussion of Bartleby and of the concepts regarding identity attaching to this figure, I highlighted how Celati's work since the eighties has explored the realm of 'visible truth' and 'appearances' rather than that of 'hidden' essences. Yet even in his most early fiction, it is possible to see a rejection of psychologically conditioned characterization; characters such as Guizzardi, Garibaldi, and Giovanni do not themselves have any inkling of their 'innermost' motives for action and thought, and they move through the external world - skim the 'surface,' so to speak - in an errancy that is linguistic as well as spatial. Like his fiction from the 1985 Narratori delle pianure and continuing through the subsequent collections of stories, Quattro novelle sulle apparenze and Verso la face, as well as the very recent Recita dell'attore Vecchiatto nel teatro di Rio Saliceto, in which Celati's interests in the significance of appearances, sheer externality, and the theatricality of self-presentation through language are explicitly shown, his early fictions already manifested a preference for surface, and 'shallow' embodiments of character. As in the case of Barthelme's other ostensible deficiencies so too in this case do we see at work the assumption that 'depth' is good and desirable and 'superfi-

76 Gianni Celati cial' is bad and dangerous, a critical view that, at least with regard to Celati's work, does not do justice to the complexities of his underlying poetics and the resultant stylistic and structural elements of his fictions. From this fairly linear exercise of reversing the 'negative' attributes of minimalism, I return now to the zigzagging mode most congenial to my view of Celati's work. I have attempted to make the point that Celati did not rise up as a 'reborn minimalist' in the mid-eighties; his earliest fictions and essays show a fundamental minimalizing tendency and a related poetics of antimonumentalism that are continuously part of his research, if in different theoretical guises and variously transformed narrative styles, over the last several decades. Two essays published in the 19705 and one published in the early 19805 testify in diverse ways to this basic antimonumentalism, all of which I want to discuss in the pages that follow. Before doing so, however, remaining faithful to the zigzag, I turn first to the volume Parlamenti buffi, published in 1989. In this volume Celati includes Le avventure di Guizzardi (1973), La banda del sospiri (1976), and Lunario del paradise (1978), the last novel having been completely rewritten. This volume is not simply a new edition of old works, not only because of the rewriting of Lunario, but also because of the way in which Celati now characterizes them in his introductory piece, 'Congedo dell'autore al suo libro' (The author's farewell to his book). The comic, 'carnal' effects that were so much at the heart of these fictions when they were first written are not denied, but they are radically downplayed in the new characterization of them as 'parlamenti/ a term that Celati appropriates to his own writing and which he tells us was used in the past to designate a 'gathering dedicated to discussions and story-telling, like those ancient meetings on love, of men and women brought together in a pleasant place.' Celati also notes that 'parlamento' was also used simply to mean a 'conversation' or a 'simple discourse, such as the one that our excellent story-teller Masuccio Salernitano writes for his book of tales "Discourse of the author on his book."' The term can be extended to allude to 'the taste of moving one's tongue, that is, of speaking for the pleasure of speaking, with empty and nonsensical chit-chat.' This is what the term 'parlamento' means in the lexicon of Folengo - 'our great comic poet' - and in 'a famous funny dialogue by Angelo Beolco, known as Ruzante.' This meaning - casual and insignificant speaking for the pleasure of it - is the one that he wants to apply to his own fictions, in which there are 'three characters who

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recite their stories, something that happens not without a great waste of breath, and with quite minimal benefit, except for blessed laughter that does some good' (all quotations from 'Congedo'; 7). Rather than being presented as having their origin in the context of the neoavantgarde experimentalism of the late sixties and early seventies, these writings are now situated within a much older Italian literary tradition, which includes medieval and Renaissance conversations on love and ancient modes of storytelling. There is also the fairly self-conscious reference to Folengo and Ruzante as models for these modern comic texts. The emphasis has shifted from the comic materiality of language to the 'vanity' of language understood as 'wasted breath/ from the embodied fullness of linguistic inventiveness to the dematerialized emptiness of any and all linguistic elaboration. The second brief section of the 'Congedo' speaks directly to these 'parlamenti' from Celati's past; in a rhetorical move, an apostrophe, which is more typical of the lyric tradition, Celati has his book ask 'Non e vanita tutto quello che ho detto?' (Isn't everything I've said mere emptiness?), to which the author of them replies: 'Si, libro, questo certamente tu sei, fiato perso e tempo perduto' (Yes, book, this you surely are, wasted breath and lost time). This exchange is followed by a harsh critique of the contemporary Italian literary scene, in which 'prizes and public recognition' are the desperate goal of those who seek to guarantee that their own 'wasted breath and lost time' have some value: all the institutions and trappings of public glory 'calm them a bit, puffing them up and raising them above terraferma afterward only to make them still more anxious, at that moment when each has his own prize, each very fearful that the lost breath of another might be less lost than his own.' Celati calls these signs of public valorization of writing 'parlamenti dell'avarizia' (gatherings or chatter of avarice) that exist only in order that others recognize one's own worth; they are also 'patetici sotterfugi per scansare 1'estremo giudizio che ci aspetta' (pathetic subterfuges for dodging the final great judgment that waits for us). (This 'grumbling' mode is reminiscent of Delfini's 'scrittura brontolante' and will emerge centrally in Celati's 1996 Recita dell'attore Vecchiatto al teatro di Rio Saliceto, which I discuss at length in a later chapter.) Celati thus concludes that being forgotten is the best thing that can happen to a book ('niente e migliore dell'oblio'), and he tells his own book to 'go tranquilly into the world, for the very little time that has been given to you,' repeating that his writing is made up of nothing more than 'recite e sciocchezze' (recitations and nonsense) in which breath is 'abundantly' wasted, as is nee-

78 Gianni Celati essary in order to speak, that is, to practice the 'art of lost breath' (all quotations from 'Congedo'; 8-9). Celati's antirnonumentalism, shown in the earlier characterization of these fictions of the seventies as 'commonplace stories/ is here intensified by means of an even more radical denial of any lasting meaning or significance that might attach not only to these works but to any written elaboration of language, any text. Although written, the fictions are 'wasted breath/ as ephemeral and unfixable as spoken speech. With this new frame to his earlier works, Celati seeks, I believe, to bring them into the realm of 'appearances' and 'ephemera' in which his more explicitly minimalist fictions of the eighties reside, or, at the very least, to suggest that there is less of a divide between the view of writing that conditioned the early comic texts and the later, less comic ones than might seem to be the case. The new presentation of these fictions is not, to my mind, entirely successful, for it is as if we are to forget the attitudes towards comic fiction that Celati had at the time he wrote these 'commonplace stories' in favor of seeing them solely as linked to the Vanity' of orality, which is an attitude underlying his short fictions of the eighties and beyond. Nonetheless, I think that it is significant that Celati presents his early work under the sign of radical antirnonumentalism and highlights once more the modest and minimal claims that he makes regarding their lasting status as 'Literature.' Nor is it insignificant, as I hope to make clear in the following discussion, that Parlamenti buffi is dedicated to the memory of Celati's great friend, mentor, and collaborator Italo Calvino, a writer and thinker who provided an outstanding model of modesty and who engaged in a constant reconsideration of the potential as well as the limits of literary writing, even though he himself had become something like a 'monument' within Italian letters. Calvino's essay, 'Lo sguardo dell'archeologo' (The archeologist's glance) was first published in his 1980 collection of essays entitled Una pietra sopra: Discorsi di letteratura e societa (Bygones: Discourses on literature and society). The essays range from those written in the mid- and late fifties to those written in the late seventies, and are, as Calvino explains in his two-page presentation of them, 'declarations of poetics/ general programs that he often tended to elaborate and just as often tended then to forget. He notes that he began his career with the 'youthful ambition ... of a project for the construction of a new literature that would serve in the construction of a new society' (clearly an allusion to the post-war period in which so-called neorealist ideals

The Antimonumental: Redefining Minimalism 79 dominated). As he writes these words in 1980, however, Calvino says that 'the world I have under my eyes couldn't be more opposite to the image that those good intentions projected onto the future/ The society of 1980 shows itself to be 'like a collapse, like a landslide, like a cancer ... and literature survives dispersed in the fissures and disconnections/ thus revealing what was no doubt already present within him in the optimistic period of the 19505, that is, 'the sense of the complexity, multiplicity, relativity, and multifacetedness that determines an attitude of systematic perplexity' (all quotations, in my translation, from Una pietra sopra; vii-viii). The collaboration with Celati and others took place, then, in a time (the late sixties and early seventies) when the role of the 'intellettuale impegnato' or engage intellectual with which Calvino began more than twenty years before had already disappeared under a 'landslide' of complexity, and writers and thinkers from many disciplines were struggling to deal with their 'systematic perplexity' in order to forge some feasible idea of the future. Calvino attaches a. note to 'Lo sguardo dell'archeologo' in which he specifies that the brief piece had never been published before, although it had been written in 1972 , and that it was a sort of program statement for a journal that he, Celati, Guido Neri, Carlo Ginzburg, and 'other friends' were thinking of founding (they never did; I discuss this project in a later chapter).7 He further states that these pages were written in order to be discussed among these friends, and that the essay contains some ideas that they had all agreed on already, and others that reflect more 'personal orientations/ In his use throughout of the plural 'we/ Calvino makes clear that this piece is intended as a collective statement; in its brevity, it is obvious that what we are reading is an outline, a 'working document/ so to speak, rather than a polished essay. The main thrust of Calvino's essay is in the direction of much that has since come to be associated with full-blown postmodern and postcolonial critical thought. He writes that all of the methods that have been used over centuries to define a unified 'Subject' - 'L'Uomo' (Man) - and which can be brought together into a 'general methodology' called 'History/ have by now been revealed as having too many cracks and fault lines to be able to claim any longer that they are workable. 'Man' is still the operative category, but it now functions as antagonist to the historical 'protagonist/ the unified Subject, 'Man/ The human 'Subject' has changed into 'the human race of great number in exponential growth on the planet, the explosion of the metropolis, the end of economic-ideological Eurocentrism, [and] the refusal on the part of

8o Gianni Celati the excluded ones, the inarticulate ones, the omitted ones, to accept a history [that ] for them is founded on expulsion, obliteration, cancellation from any role/ Moreover, Calvino asserts that 'all parameters, categories, and antitheses that had been used in imagining and classifying and projecting the world have been put into discussion/ including 'the rational and the mythic, work and existence, male and female/ and even more elementary categories are in doubt: 'affirmation and negation, high and low, me living and the thing/ Because 'we' (Calvino, Celati, and the other collaborators) are 'dissatisfied' with a world that has become less and less 'habitable/ and because these intellectuals are convinced that the world cannot be changed before new tools for conceptualizing it are found, they are happy to undertake the work of rethinking everything; that is, all the knowledge that they thought they had mastered as 'a point of arrival, a consolidated acquisition, a certainty/ Calvino offers the warning that going back over and rethinking what I would call 'cultural capital' is, however, dangerous, 'a precise, already experienced danger/ if this form of regression is in any way 'fetishized' or 'ideologized' (idoleggiare, ideologizzare) They want to use the 'archeologist's glance or look' (sguardo), rather than the historian's, and to remain on the side 'of the outside, of objects, of mechanisms, of languages/ in order to point out and describe detailed elements of the present, and not in order to explain it, at least not quickly, thus avoiding a fall back into the teleological perspective of history. Nor do they wish to enjoy a 'complacency of the inexplicable/ for the subject is still at the center of such a perspective. They are attracted by the linguistic, structural, and semiotic methods employed by several schools of that time (early seventies) and wish to employ them, but in a 'different research space' in which what matters is the 'extraction of objects' (content) with the concurrent 'estrangement of meaning/ Calvino then comes to the culminating declaration: it is literature that is 'the field of energies that supports and motivates this convergence and comparison of research and operations in diverse fields, even if those fields appear to be distant or unrelated/ He and his collaborators consider literature and literary poetics as a 'space of meanings and forms that have value not just for literature. We believe that literary poetics can lead to a poetics of making; more: of selfmaking' (italics Calvino's). The essay ends by stating that if a 'new project' or 'new atlas' of literary nature results, it will not be the foundation, but the result, of their collaborative work, which seeks to be 'a mutual enlargement of horizons/ based on research into that which

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they hold most dear' (quel che ci sta a cuore), which is 'the context in which literature takes on meaning' (all quotations from Una pietra sopra; 263-6). This is a remarkable document, a prophetic one, in fact, for it expresses perspectives on traditional forms of knowledge and an embrace of a form of interdisciplinarity, primarily between humanistic and social-scientific disciplines, that will come widely to shape current research only in the last decade or so. But it is decidedly not prophetic with respect to the role of literature in this research. The faith implicit in Calvino's words in the great potential of the literary as a space for truly important developments of the social, political, epistemological, and ontological kinds seems almost quaintly antique, given today's academic (and nonacademic) emargination of literature in favor of other forms of cultural production such as visual media and popular culture 'texts' of all sorts except the standardly literary. I have quoted from Calvino's piece fairly extensively because I think that it provides the necessary context from which Celati's 1975 essay, 'II bazar archeologico' emerged, and also because it reveals the fundamental role played by literary elaboration in their shared research of the early seventies. In order to understand Celati's writing, not only in the era of self-consciously theoretical neoavant-gardism, but also in subsequent periods, it is essential, I think, to see how unremitting his commitment to the realm of literary creativity is, no matter how far he has roamed over other areas of thought and creativity, such as the historiographic, the philosophical, the visual, and the socio-political. His move into the 'archeological' mode described by Calvino is in the service of fictional elaboration as much as, if not more than, more broadly defined cultural and social interests. His highly detailed and complexly argued piece, Tl bazar archeologico,' makes this orientation to the particular potential of literary writing abundantly clear. Celati begins with a consideration of 'that syndrome that is being modern/ by returning to a 'beginning point' that is made up of Rimbaud, Dada, and the Surrealists, then moving on to Kafka, Benjamin, Deleuze and Guattari, Bakhtin, Foucault, and Derrida. Celati's reading of the 'modern' is centered on the fall of the monuments that represented premodernity, as the fragmentary, the unimportant detail, the 'nonsensical,' and the formerly marginalized and excluded zones of human experience emerge as sites of modern interest and potential meaning. Already in this essay of 1975 (obviously it contains ideas elaborated at least as early as the beginning of the seventies along with Calvino and others), Celati writes of the need for a fiction that would be peripatetic

82 Gianni Celati and represent 'a search without a goal, spatialization and flanerie, an uninterrupted visit to the molecular places of a heterotopic city where infinitely float the remains of extraneity, objects and traces of that which has been lost and that no museum is prepared to preserve/ In the 'new/ ostensibly 'minimalist' fictions of the mid-eighties, by writers such as Del Giudice, De Carlo, and Tabucchi, critics immediately noted the emphasis on unexceptional details and non-linear, spatially conditioned representations as novel and highly innovative aspects of their writing; yet Celati, Calvino and a few others had been investigating the modernist bases for these tendencies years before, a fact that went relatively unnoticed by the critical establishment. In his period of 'silence/ from the late seventies to the mid-eighties, Celati published some essays and gave some interviews that reveal his ongoing research into ways of continuing to be committed to creative literary work, and it is to three of these pieces, mentioned earlier, that I now wish to turn. First, Celati published an essay, 'Oggetti soffici' (Soft objects), in the June 1979 issue of an out-of-the-way journal edited by the 'Circolo artistico di Bologna/ entitled Iterarte, dedicated to the topic of 'Arte Affettuosa' (Affectionate art). He also gave a brief interview on this 'affectionate art' that is included in the same issue. After the fall of the neoavant-garde around the time of the student movements of 1968 when, as Calvino noted years later, everything became caught up in the language of politicization, leaving little room for the 'flexibility' of literary discourses ('Rievochiamo la vicenda'; 1984), there was an aftermath lasting throughout the seventies (the so-called anni di piombo or years of lead, dominated by explicit terrorism) during which many artists and writers who had been strongly involved in political activism withdrew into themselves in order to rethink their positions vis-a-vis engage activities. At more or less the same time as the Iterarte issue on 'Arte Affettuosa' appeared (1979), a group of younger poets had come together under the rubric of Toesia Innamorata' (Enamored poetry), a tendency similar to that of 'affectionate or loving art/ as clearly reflected in their chosen adjective. In the introduction to the 1978 anthology, La parola innamorata, the editors Giancarlo Pontiggia and Enzo Di Mauro explain aspects of the shared poetics that have shaped the volume; poetry is seen as 'a futile game/ a 'light form/ a 'superfluous grace/ and it must abandon all claims to be a form of knowledge. Critic John Picchione summarizes this mode of writing well in a 1993 essay on poets of that generation: 'Rejecting a critical perspective on historical problematics and, at the same time, a critical language capa-

The Antimonumental: Redefining Minimalism 83 ble of arousing tension, their poetry advocates the seductive poetic word, a word essentially in love only with itself.' He points out that this poetry emerged in a cultural context 'characterized by the Nietzschean "Renaissance," Heideggerian philosophy, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and the explosion of Deconstruction,' at a time - as is clear in the Calvino-Celati 'archeological project' as well - when 'there is no ground for truth, for the "self," or for a collective sociopolitical project/ and when the ideas of 'a unitary, ultimate meaning in history' and 'referentiality' itself are deeply in question (Picchione, in Picchione and Smith; 490). The concept of 'arte affettuosa' arises out of the same context, and is defined in the opening essay 'Arte affettuosa?' by Carlo Gajani as 'una nuvola, qualcosa a carattere dispersive, che si trova un po' ovunque' (a cloud, something with a dispersive character, that is found a little bit everywhere; 5). Rather than 'Art' in the traditional sense, it is 'an art' in the sense of a super fare or a 'know-how' that can be expressed in phenomena as diverse as graffiti, clothing, personal letters, handmade belts (that is, more or less those items related to 'hippie culture') as well as more traditionally 'artistic' forms such as assemblage and pastiche as seen in the works of Rauschenberg, Jim Dine, and Oldenburg. 'Affectionate art' has to do with Barthes's concepts of 'pleasure' and 'fascination' that have been 'suppressed by the ideologies of artistic production'; it has also to do with the retrieval of affectionate social relations, posing as it does the question 'per chi si parla?' (for whom does one speak?) (Iterarte; 5-6). In all of these directions in poetry, art, and critical thinking about literature, there is a clear 'minimalizing tendency/ a lowering of tonality and a weakening of subjectivity, in which Celati's thought and practice can similarly be situated. In spite of the fact that Celati's essay on 'soft objects' fits well into the issue dedicated to 'affectionate art/ the writer makes it clear in the brief interview included in the same issue that he is not a 'member' of this 'movement'; he thus remains true to his preference for avoiding all rubrics and labels, no matter how congenial to his work and thought. When asked if 'this kind of thing we've called affectionate art' interests him, Celati responds: 'Mi interessa quasi tutto, purche non sia una cosa di stato' (I'm interested in almost everything, as long as it isn't a State [institutional] thing). He calls doing or making something in a noninstitutionally determined way 'an art' (italics mine), and says that when we engage in an art, we perforce use expressive means, even if it is merely a question of moving our hands. We engage in an art - no matter what the expressive means used - in order to Took for someone

84 Gianni Celati who wants [us]' (se si fa una cosa che non sia per lo stato, si fa qualcosa per andare a cercare qualcuno che ti desidera). Celati believes that when a creative person works according to an 'official' concept of art and is satisfied by having a 'patente d'artista' (the official licence or stamp of approval given by the title of 'artist'), that person tends to make some sort of distinction between 'imaginary desires' and 'real life/ rather than recognizing that our desires are 'real and imaginary at the same time.' In his by-now typical manner, Celati criticizes 'official art' and its 'official critics,' who look to point out 'the most advanced forms' of art (Celati comments, 'ma chi se ne frega' [but who gives a damn]), or else act as if they were 'judges in a court. He concludes: 'Mai che anche lui cerchi chi lo desidera. E scemo e cadaverico: invece di pensare alia sua separatezza pensa ai destini dell'arte' ([the critic never thinks that] he too is looking for someone to want him. It is stupid and deathly: instead of thinking about his separateness, he thinks about the fortunes of art). Celati's interest is instead in making use of the 'stili del mondo' (styles of the world) as a 'tramite affettuoso' (affectionate medium) between his separateness and others, by 'stealing a little from here and there and without any particular project' (all quotations above from Iterarte; 20). Although Celati's emphasis on 'wanting to be wanted by others' will disappear in later declarations in which any form of 'desire' is seen as potentially dangerous and harmful, the highlighting of artistic (or what Celati will later call 'artisanal') activity as an affectionate medium for connecting with others will reappear in comments made many years later in relation to the concept of 'narratives of the reserves.' In both moments, that is, in his seventies' work with Calvino and others centered on archeological knowledge and his essays such as 'Oggetti soffici' of the same decade, as well as in his critical and creative writing of the eighties and beyond, a poetics of modesty is sustained and 'Art' is toned down to 'an art' of minimal pretensions. The 1979 essay, 'Oggetti soffici' can be read, I think, as a culmination of Celati's involvement with various 'counter-cultural' tendencies from the late sixties to the late seventies. It looks back over a period of activism and subsequent disillusionment with political programs, and is both more rooted in these experiences and more 'dated' in its topics and examples than his other theoretical and literary-critical essays of more or less the same era. Celati criticizes the 'utopie calde' or 'hot Utopias' of the recent past, based on a 'politica calda' (hot politics) that forces its advocates always 'to repeat exactly the message, the order of

The Antimonumental: Redefining Minimalism 85 the program: struggle (lotta), engagement, democracy, participation, maschilism, emargination, movement, workers, socialism.' He proposes instead 'cold Utopias' and 'tranquil, minimally declarative enthusiasms' that are like the 'soft dissonances of cool jazz.' The criterion for judging one's enthusiasms would be 'mi piace/non mi piace' (I like it, I don't like it), rather than those provided by critical taxonomies of good or bad taste. The writer is, therefore, attracted by the 'soft art' of Claes Oldenburg, which the artist himself described in Store Days of 1967 as, among other things, 'art that doesn't just sit warming its ass in a museum'; 'art that children lick'; 'art that you put on and take off like trousers'; 'art of lost and thrown-away things.' Celati likes the 'quotidian' nature of this view of art, for it privileges nothing, and defines art as that which deals with the non-exemplary and the unexceptional. In a discussion of historically conditioned modes of considering art (and experience) that is reminiscent of the views expressed in the earlier essay, Tl bazar archeologico/ Celati writes: 'It is only in relation to a supposed exemplarity of certain facts that one can speak of historical advancement ... "advanced" would be something that is placed on a line of development, and "remains" like a monument for the centuries. There is no possibility of historical selection without this idea of the exemplary monument that "remains," hard and lasting (duro e duraturo), in the midst of the infinity of anonymous happenings.' A number of 'antimonumental,' and therefore 'likeable,' artifacts are then mentioned (all very reflective of counter-cultural tastes of the sixties and seventies): Krazy Kat comics, Warhol's seriographs of Elvis, the plastic statues of George Segal, and, above all, the food sculptures of Oldenburg. Celati proposes that the entire 'cosmology' of middleclass society - which this sort of 'minor art' reflects - is reducible to 'corporeal sensuality' and has nothing to do with the categories of looking (lo sguardo) or of contemplation, which are 'official' epistemological instruments for capturing and knowing reality. Because 'soft objects' absorb and dissolve the 'codes for sorting out' differences ('ancient/modern, reactionary/progressive, well made/badly made, opaque/understandable'), they solicit reactions rather than judgments, the latter of which are of the realm of aesthetics based on the evaluative look and distant contemplation. The essay ends with the assertion that 'mass culture' cannot be genuinely experienced or judged according to the 'neoclassical' techniques of distant contemplation and evaluation, for mass culture is by now the 'production of reality in a general sense (not works "by artists," "by writers," etc.)'; we are all in this real-

86 Gianni Celati ity and no one can claim to enjoy the privilege of not being a 'mass subject' (soggetto-massa) (all quotations above from Iterarte; 10-15). Celati will not remain committed to this 'sensual' perspective for very long; nonetheless, even in its rather glaringly 'dated' counter-cultural quality, this essay can be read as yet another expression of the 'minimalizing tendency' discernible throughout Celati's work. Against the monumentality of historicized and High Art views of experience and cultural production, he offers the soft objects and permeable subjectivity of unexceptional quotidian experience. By 1982-3, when the essay, 'L'Avventura non deve finire: Conversazione attraverso gli occhi' (The adventure must not end: Conversation through the eyes), appeared in the Modenese journal Quindi, Celati had moved away from the bodily and sensual 'minimalism' of the seventies towards a more contemplative involvement with externality that would come to dominate his writing of the mid- and late eighties. In this piece, he defines an 'adventure' as the opposite of a search for the fulfillment of a 'tangible and localizable desire'; instead, it is like the characters of myth and certain literary texts who 'must fulfill a necessary journey' although they have no specific goal or predefined desire to be satisfied. Celati describes this 'journey' as the search for the 'Other' or otherness in general. When, as in the historical or realist novel, dates and geographic places are put into play, however, the 'Other' is replaced by simply another geographic, historical, or touristic horizon. Conversely, 'otherness' is not dateable or localizable, but eternal, mythic, and cyclically perdurable, according to Celati. When asked what it means to tell a story in our era, Celati suggests that it is to tell 'the story of the Other' (raccontare la storia dell'Altro), which means to attempt to capture in words 'the suffering of becoming "human" and of remaining "human"' which we all experience, if in infinitely different ways.' And he states that our 'adventures' as 'generic humans' take place 'only in common routine, in that which is the same for everyone, and it is that which no one notices because it is not sensational. [These adventures] have to do with the minor or infinitesimal aspects of [our] adaptation to the world.' The 'obvious/ which we tend not to notice, looking instead for epiphanies, illuminations, and extraordinary experiences, is, according to Celati, 'perhaps our only kingdom' (1'unico nostro regno), and he therefore wants to write stories that capture something of the 'obviousness' and 'ordinariness' of shared humanness. He dares to use what for many is 'an ugly word' - 'nostalgia' - to define what he lacks and is looking to regain:

The Antimonumental: Redefining Minimalism 87 'a narrative tone that might unite me with others, because everything I know how to write are things that are separate from the life of others.' A topic that the writer believes he is capable of writing about as a 'true and strong feeling/ and a widely shared one, is that of 'being lost.' Celati notices this 'state of affairs' everywhere he goes, so he does not view it as merely a personal sensation. He quotes Sartre: 'solo gli sporcaccioni non si sentono perduti' (only despicable people do not feel lost). The essay ends with yet another typically Celatian critique of the literary establishment, which is made up of 'books, successes, gossip about newness, the artifices of criticism, [all of which] are worth nothing' (all quotations above from Quindi, 8-11). Stories that convey instead something of the sensation of being lost, of lack of domination and mastery of experience and self both, are those that Celati wants to write, in a toned-down voice and simple style, and with unexceptional themes drawn from the 'common routines' of living. It is not surprising, then, that the short stories subsequently published in Narratori delle pianure, Quattro novelle sulle apparenze, and the 'stories of observation' in Verso lafoce can all, to one degree or another, be included in the category of 'minimalist' writing, given the directions followed by Celati in these preceding years of ongoing research into the liveability and narratability of the world. In addition to the many areas of critical, theoretical, and artistic thought and production studied by Celati throughout the seventies and eighties, he also developed a particular interest in sociolinguistics and the philosophy of language; he dedicated much study to the work of Dell Hymes and William Labov in the former field, and to that of Wittgenstein in the latter. In an unpublished taped interview I did with him in 1985, during which we discussed the motives and motifs subtending his then recently published Narratori delle pianure, Celati remarked: T was very interested in the ceremony of the story. It's not that there exist popular narrators, but rather that everyone is a narrator. I was interested in this elementary cultural ceremony, when we succeed in recognizing that, in a series of facts, that is a story: we have "made the point." All this year I've greatly studied Labov and Wittgenstein; I put to myself very elementary problems of language: What is a description? What is a descriptive form? How do we succeed in speaking together about experience? And the conclusion in its most elementary form is: When we recognize a story, we recognize a moment in which experience is organized.' The 'elementary ceremony' of narration - oral or written - is thus now seen as a cognitive and

88 Gianni Celati organizational mode that transcends literature and informs lived and shared experiences of the world. Various elements of Celati's poetics as developed over many years come together to condition his overtly 'minimalist' style of the eighties, therefore: his antihistoricist antimonumentalism; his desire to find a 'narrative tone' that might tie his sense of 'being lost' with the 'lostness' of others; his preference for unexceptional, quotidian themes; and his interest in the 'elementary ceremony' of narration in which we all share as we seek to organize our experience. Commenting on his pared-down narrative style in Narmtori, he said (in the 1985 interview): 'In novels usually the problem is to have "strong facts" and then "strong causalities." I instead was working according to a very different principle. In order to highlight "weak facts" and weak causalities I had to augment the transparency of words. The transparency grew if I was more limpid in my writing, if I was as simple as possible in my writing. So it was a problem of simplifying form to the maximum, to get to the simplest form I could.' In order to allow the 'weak' or insignificant everyday facts to take on their full value, a value allied to what Celati called their 'minimo silenzio' (minimum silence) and their 'twilight' quality, he sought to bring out the empty spaces between words, the 'punti meditativi' (meditative points) of that which is left unsaid. His techniques for creating transparency included the use of the most basic descriptive and temporal indicators (who, when, where, how), and the creation of a 'panoramic' diegetic style (as contrasted to a 'scenic' style in which direct discourse and setting are mimetically and theatrically constructed). Celati also sought to capture a 'deferential' as opposed to a 'contractual' mode of narration; he went back to very early forms of narration such as are found in the medieval Novellino and in popular, oral tales, in order to find examples of this 'deferential' mode, whereby the reader is not assumed to be in a position of pre- or co-knowledge with the narrator, but rather is allowed the maximum freedom to bring to bear his/her imagination and personal situatedness on the story being recounted. A small illustration of how this works is to be found in the use of the indefinite article rather than the definite; in writing 'a woman' instead of 'the woman/ the narrator permits the readers to choose a type of woman suitable to the story from their individual perspectives, rather than imposing 'the' particular woman of the narrator's choice, who may or may not capture the readers' interest. Celati preferred this deferential mode because he saw it as rendering storytelling more anonymous and flexible (more akin to the

The Antimonumental: Redefining Minimalism 89 'once upon a time' style of fables or folktales), and as emphasizing the shared and collective nature of narration. The writer is not an 'authorial' (or authoritative) presence, therefore, but a permeable, receptive, and anonymous 'scrivener' or copyist of stories that he merely passes on to others. Celati's 'minimalist' stories of the eighties reveal several interests that he will develop further over succeeding years: orality, the visual, the social ceremony of narration by which we organize experience. As I have already discussed in the preceding chapter, his interest in silences and 'spaces for meditation' is revealed in the somewhat 'mystical' turn that his work around the figure of Bartleby takes. The recitational aspect of storytelling will be developed in his rewriting of Boiardo's Orlando innamorato and his theatrical Recita dell'attore Vecchiatto, both written in order to be read aloud and performed replete with gestures. Celati's concentration on the externalities of experience, as seen in his collaboration with the photographer Luigi Ghirri and the writing that results from that work, will culminate in a 'videoracconto/ or video-story, Strada provinciale delle anime (Provincial road of souls). The label of 'minimalism' is, therefore, inadequate to the complexities of Celati's poetics and practice, both of which are manifestations of ongoing, never-ending research into how to live and how to write in a 'maximal' world. I prefer my term 'antimonumentalism/ for I think that it captures better the salient aspects and qualities of Celati's literary and ethical styles. In his short fictions written in the eighties, Celati did not put on the fashionable clothes of the minimalist in order to be seen as 'up-to-date/ 'contemporary/ or a member of Italy's 'new generation' of younger writers. A more appropriate metaphor would perhaps be one relating, again, to the 'monuments' in which he does not believe: his is a long and patient process of chipping away, as he unendingly subjected the ostensibly solid foundations of historically and rationally determined literary narrative forms to dismantlement, arriving finally to the skeletal, essential, yet infinitely complex question that was stated as: 'What is a narrative?' Celati's answer is modest, minimal even: a narrative is a way of organizing experience. This conclusion is very close to that expressed by his fellow traveler, Calvino, who wrote in his essay on 'Exactitude' in Six Memos for the Next Millennium: The universe disintegrates into a cloud of heat, it falls inevitably into a vortex of entropy, but within this irreversible process there may be areas of order, portions of the existent that tend

9O Gianni Celati toward a form, privileged points in which we seem to discern a design or perspective. A work of literature is one of these minimal portions in which the existent crystallizes into a form, acquires a meaning - not fixed, not definitive, not hardened into a mineral immobility, but alive as an organism' (70-1, italics mine). Both writers express a fundamentally antimonumental view of literary creation, and both sought over the years to keep the living, organic quality of meaning as captured in literary writing as far from a 'mineral immobility' as possible. Celati cannot and should not be read as a 'card-carrying' minimalist at any point in his work, yet there is no doubt that the minimalist credo, 'less is more/ is supremely applicable to his writing, whether it is a 'less' embodied in the comic carnality of his first fictions, in the 'everyday stories' of his third and fourth books, or in the spare prose of his more recent short tales. In all of these modes, it is that 'minimal portion of the existent,' which might be crystallized into a meaningful form, that he pursues, in order to make life more liveable and art still allied to the never-ending task of being human. Stories are one of the fundamental aspects of shared humanness; as Ursula Le Guin put it in her wonderfully and wittily entitled meditation on the why, how, and wherefore of storytelling, 'It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: or, Why Are We Huddling About the Campfire?': 'In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood ... we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning; living, as we do, in the middle.' Or, as Celati might agree to put it, 'zigzagging, as we do, through the middle, without any monumental design.'

3 The Permeable Gaze1

'Neither the optical explanation of visual perception nor the evolutionist theory of the slow, hazardous development of the eye in response to the stimulus of light - neither of these dissolve the enigma which surrounds the fact that, at a certain moment, the visible was born ... As a response to this enigma, the first faculty accredited to the most important gods was that of sight: an eye, often an all-seeing eye. Then it could be said: The visible exists because it has already been seen.' John Berger2

The visual and the verbal: what a long and rocky road these two basic elements of human experience and representation have traveled together. W.J.T. Mitchell reminds us that 'the riddles of language and imagery' are no closer to a solution now than they were centuries ago: The situation is precisely the reverse: language and imagery are no longer what they promised to be for critics and philosophers of the Enlightenment - perfect, transparent media through which reality may be represented to the understanding. For modern criticism, language and imagery have become enigmas, problems to be explained, prisonhouses which lock the understanding away from the world' (Iconology; 8). The 'father of Italian literature/ Dante Alighieri, included his own contribution to the 'enigma' of these elementary modes in the tenth Canto of the Purgatorio, in which he wrote of 'visibile parlare' or Visible speech' in the form of sculpted stories of exemplary humility carved on the first terrace of the purgatorial mountain where the sin of pride is purged. The poet writes that 'He who never beheld any new thing / wrought this visible speech, / new to us because here it is not

92 Gianni Celati found' (lines 94-6). The 'here' to which he refers is our terrestrial sphere, where such miracles of visible and animatedly material stories, of a perfect union between the image and language, do not exist. Dante also dramatizes another fundamental question with his creation of Visibile parlare': If sculptures made by God are so lifelike and animated as to put 'not only [the Greek sculptor] Polycletus but also nature herself to shame' (lines 32-3), where does the real end and imitation or representation begin? In the context of Dante's work as a poet, the distinction between divine 'making' and human 'finding' is extremely important; God is the Tattore' or 'Maker' of all that which is real, while human creativity can only 'find/ and poets are 'trovatori' (finders), not makers in the ultimate sense. But this distinction is blurred and elided in innumerable ways throughout the Divine Comedy, and it is not for nothing that the issue is played up on the terrace where the sin of pride - the origin of elemental human trespass - is purged. And it is also not for nothing that Dante problematizes not only language, but also the image: that which is seen. The canto in question is filled with terms referring to sight: some form of verbs of seeing - 'vedere' (to see), 'guardare' (to look at), 'mirare' (to gaze at) are used over half a dozen times, and terms such as 'occhi' (eyes) and 'vista' (sight) equally as much. Nothing regarding the 'enigma' of the relation between language and image is 'solved' in the canto, yet there is a sense in which Dante 'verifies/ so to speak, Berger's view quoted above as epigraph, when the medieval poet writes that God is 'He who never saw any new thing.' 'The visible exists because it has already been seen/ as Berger puts it, whether we continue to believe along with Dante that it is a Divine Eye that has 'already seen' or 'the stimulus of light' that slowly formed the human eye, which in turn brought the visible to light. The implication in both cases is that, analogously, language exists because 'it has already been spoken.' There is perhaps some sort of absolute anteriority to both language and the visible, but neither human experience nor human art can reach it, and thus we remain in the realm of the finding of language and the visible, rather than that of origination. For the last hundred years, a version of 'visibile parlare' has in fact existed, however, in the form of cinematic representations, Visible narrations' whose language is the syntax of juxtaposed images and whose main target is the human eye. Photography has also been associated with language, either in the sense that it has its own 'language/ or that it is inevitably 'invaded by language in the very moment it is looked at'

The Permeable Gaze 93 (Victor Burgin, 'Seeing Sense/ quoted by Mitchell in Picture Theory; 282). Yet both the cinema and the photograph have also been described as fundamentally different from the linguistic realm, as materially representing reality in ways that language cannot. In the Italian context, we need only think of Pier Paolo Pasolini's complex theoretical meditations on the 'realism' of cinematic representation, which folds back over itself to reveal the 'natural cinema' that is reality3 or, as I shall discuss later, the writings on photography of Luigi Ghirri, in which he similarly emphasizes the inherently 'seen' nature of reality that photography and its many uses make us better understand. Celati too has long accompanied the pair - visual and verbal - on his own journey in the country of stories, and the role of the 'eye/ more than the role of the 'I/ has always been of fundamental concern to him.4 Like Pasolini and Ghirri, Celati's research and practice can be assimilated into a kind of generically 'postmodern' sensibility, which refuses a naive, prerepresentational real out there beyond language and images both; yet, also like them, he is motivated by something like a spiritualized ontological sense that does not simply stop at the level of the 'society of the spectacle/ but ventures into the 'prerational' and quasi-mystical areas of thought explored by, among others, Deleuze (in his writings on cinema, but also, as has been seen, in relation to the philosophical issues raised by Bartleby's presence). In this chapter, Celati's work will be viewed, then, from the perspective of issues pertaining to the visual, the visible, and the spatial, including the more specific questions of how photography and the cinema have entered into his poetics and practices of writing. Celati's perspectives - geographic, creative, and critical; the visible; visual media; the spaces seen by his eyes and explored by his mind and heart - these are the topics I hope to put into focus in the pages that follow. In the preceding chapter, I touched on Celati's, Calvino's and others' interest in 'lo sguardo.' This is a complicated term in Italian, for it means many things that are expressed in English by several different words. It includes the meanings of a 'glance or look/ as in 'giving a glance at' (dare uno sguardo); an 'expression' in the eyes, as in 'a sweet expression' (un dolce sguardo); a 'gaze/ as in 'a penetrating gaze' (uno sguardo penetrante); and simply 'eyes/ as in 'to lower one's eyes' (abbassare lo sguardo). In Calvino's use of the word in his essay, 'Lo sguardo archeologico/ it means something like 'the perspective' or 'orientation' of the archeologist, as it does in Celati's piece, 'Oggetti

94 Gianni Celati soffici/ in which he writes of 'lo sguardo' of the aestheticizing or contemplative kind, which is the 'look' or 'perspective' that is motivated by an epistemological search for codifiable meanings, distinctions, and the like. Seeing has historically been associated with knowing, of course; in Italian as in English, 'to see' can also mean 'to understand/ as in 'I see your point.' Our Western tradition has long supported the idea that we look precisely in order to come to know and to comprehend the object of our gaze. But with knowing comes 'mastery/ and the metaphors of 'domination/ 'penetration/ and 'possession' that typically have accompanied epistemologically oriented operations of the eyes and the mind render decidedly unneutral not only the semantic fields in question but the very operations themselves. My use of the word 'gaze' in the title of this chapter implicitly contains within it the multiple resonances of the Italian 'sguardo/ and I want to keep these various meanings in play as I look with my 'sguardo' at Celati's 'sguardo.' Celati's preference (in the sense with which he endows the word in his discussion of Bartleby) for spatial rather than temporal conceptions of experience and writing is followed by him with that 'devotion' Melville's scrivener dedicates to his ineluctable anteriority. Although I do not wish to enter into a lengthy consideration of the many important implications of such a preference at this place in my discussion, I do think it helpful to what follows at least to allude to the genre- and gender-related resonances of that preference. As Mitchell argues in his wonderfully insightful rereading of Lessing's Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Poetry and Painting, the 'oppositions that regulate Lessing's discourse' (basically, painting and poetry) activate a whole series of oppositional terms relating respectively to the former and the latter: 'space-time'; 'body-mind'; 'external-internal'; 'feminine-masculine.' Space is thus a category tied to the 'silence' and the 'narrow sphere of external display' of the feminine sphere, an association that has been maintained and instrumentalized in a myriad of contexts both before and after the eighteenth-century context in which Lessing was carrying out his debate (Iconology; no). In anticipation of some of the conclusions I seek to draw further on in my discussions of Celati's 'permeable gaze/ I shall say now that over the years Celati's writing moves more and more explicitly into a 'feminine economy/ although such a tendency was there from the beginning of his published career. Space is also traditionally associated with blurred genres, such as certain tendencies in the history of painting in which the narrational

The Permeable Gaze 95 and the pictorial overlap; Celati's writing is similarly 'blurred/ especially the short story mode he begins to use in the eighties. Are these stories diaristic or documentaristic or purely fictional? There is no way that these writing modes can easily be sorted out one from the other. Already in his early fictions in which his characters meander through space, and we have no sense that time affects or touches them in any way there are 'autobiographical' elements that blur the strict line between genres. In his later short fictions there are more allusions to passing time, yet space remains the fundamental structuring device of the stories. In Celati's essay on the emergence of the modern, 'II bazar archeologico/ discussed in the preceding chapter, he explores the (very Benjaminian and Foucauldian) archeological idea of history as ruins, traces, objects scattered in space: an idea antithetical to a temporal and therefore progressive - view of historical knowledge. Space, therefore, is endowed with diverse functions and meanings in Celati's poetics and practice in the earlier years of his work: it is a narrative structuring device, an idea of history, and it is both imaginatively and critically employed according to the particular issues or projects in question. There is nothing 'local' about this interest in and deployment of spatial concepts during the sixties and seventies for they remain an abstraction for the most part. In the short fictions that Celati began to publish in the mid-eighties the category of the 'spatial' still functions abstractly, but there is a decided shift to a localizing mode by means of which critical ideas are anchored to geographic specificity: the Po river and the 'valle padana,' or plains spreading out around it. This shift was occasioned in great part by Celati's involvement with photographer Luigi Ghirri and by their mutual exploration of the Po region. Ghirri's photographic poetics and practice were deeply influential, and stimulated much writing by Celati, both essayistic and creative. Consequently I want to begin this discussion of Celatian space with those of his writings most directly tied to Ghirri's work, and then move on to a close consideration of two exemplary works of this period: the collection of stories Narratori delle pianure and the video, Strada provincials delle anime. Celati's travels along the Po valley with Ghirri produced a flurry of writing activity after several years of very intermittent creative and critical work (from the late seventies to the mid-eighties).5 He has himself acknowledged the tremendous debt of inspiration owed to Ghirri, whose approaches to his own work and beliefs regarding creative engagement with the world around us coincided in important ways

96 Gianni Celati with Celati's. Before the 1985 publication of Narratori delle pianure, the volume of stories that marked Celati's 'reappearance' on the Italian literary scene after several years of relative silence, two 'previews' by Celati of the modified significance of spatial issues to his new fictions appeared, both directly tied to Ghirri. One was, 'Verso la foce: Reportage, per un amico fotografo' (Towards the river mouth: Reportage, for a photographer friend), published in the 1984 volume of photographs by diverse photographers, including Ghirri, Viaggio in Italia (Voyage in Italy); the other was the declaration of new poetics already alluded to, the 1984 'Finzioni a cui credere' (Fictions in which to believe), published in the December issue of the journal Alfabeta as part of the 'Acts' of the Palermo convention on The Meaning of Literature' held in November 1984. Although 'Verso la foce' was published first, in the early part of 1984, it no doubt would not have found as wide a readership as 'Finzioni a cui credere,' because of the former's inclusion in a photographic collection; that is, a book directed to a less generally literary-critical, more 'specialized' sector. Thus, 'Finzioni' had an important public function in resituating Celati within the context of debates regarding the meaning of literature, and it is all the more notable that it is entirely shaped around Ghirri's work. The essay opens with a basic question: 'quali finzioni sono possibili, a quali finzioni e possibile credere?' (which fictions are possible, in which fictions is it possible to believe?). Celati writes that he finds no 'examples in recent Italian fiction for developing this point,' and - in his typically scathing critical mode when it comes to the establishment - he clarifies: 'because the men of culture whom we have underfoot think only of the opposite: to unmask brilliantly every possible fiction, traveling to conventions in order to dictate comprehensive interpretations of the world.' (I should point out that Celati did not attend the Palermo convention, although he sent this piece in as his contribution to the debates.) He says that he will therefore turn to the work of Luigi Ghirri, in which there is no trace of the 'cultural ostentation by which we are asphyxiated.' The writer immediately connects Ghirri to a specific locale, the town of Formiggine near Modena, where the late photographer lived. Although the particular resonance of the EmiliaRomagna region for Celati is not made explicit, it is, in fact, an extremely important aspect of the closeness he developed with Ghirri. Celati was born in Sondrio in northern Lombardy, but his family was originally from Ferrara, and he spent his university years and several decades after that in Bologna; Ghirri was born in Scandiano and grew

The Permeable Gaze 97 up in Sassuolo, near Modena. As Sarah Hill writes: Tor both of them, working in the Po valley was a multi-layered experience which involved an exploration of their own personal and family narratives, as well as the wider narratives of the place itself/ In an interview that Hill conducted with Celati in 1995, he affirmed the significance of their shared region of origin, commenting that when he and Ghirri tried to work on projects in Tuscany and Switzerland, '"sono venuti malissimi perche non c'era lo studio. Cioe, sono venuti male perche qui (the Po valley) avevamo la possibilita di studiare per anni lo stesso luogo. Mentre li siamo andati un po' come turisti... ecco la differenza"' (they turned out very badly because there was no [background of] study. That is, they turned out badly because here we had had the possibility of studying the same locale for years. While we had gone there a little like tourists ... that's the difference) (Hill; 75-6). There is a kind of 'homecoming' in Celati's turn to Ghirri, then, that is particularly notable in comparison with his earlier, highly 'unprovincial' topics of interest, and his tendency to look to non-Italian writers and theorists for inspiration and creative sustenance. The very closeness and ordinariness of lived-in, quotidian external locales provided both Ghirri and Celati with precisely the kind of inherently unexceptional raw material they sought to give some form in their creative representations of contemporary human existence, much as the everyday (but unlocalized) realities of family life had fuelled Celati's 'ordinary tales,' La banda del sospiri and Lunario del paradiso. In the nineties, Celati would explore as well the culturally 'familial' inheritance of the literature of the region, and especially Ferrarese literary culture in the form of Boiardo's great epic, Orlando innamorato. For now, though, in explaining his new poetics of 'believable fictions/ he does not make explicit the significance of this particular regional orientation; rather, Celati directs our attention to Ghirri's ability to 'raccontare lo spazio vuoto' (recount the empty space) of asphalt-covered lots surrounded by uniform little houses, and the emptiness of a solitary, almost always deserted bar nearby, all of which make up the local scene outside of Ghirri's home. Ghirri has photographed such lots, such houses, such a bar in a manner that suggests neither approval nor condemnation, but instead 'discovers that everything can be of interest because it is part of the existent/ Celati calls this achievement 'una radicale pulizia negli intenti o scopi dello sguardo' (a radical cleansing regarding the intentions or goals of the gaze or look), and this 'cleansing' is what might sustain written fictions as well.

98 Gianni Celati It is made clear in Celati's explanation of Ghirri's accomplishment that the avoidance of exceptional objects of the gaze or exceptional effects imposed upon objects in order to render them 'interesting' is at the basis of his photographic work. Celati notes that the little uniform houses that Ghirri has photographed, for example, houses lined up like those in American suburbs, 'wouldn't have attracted any photographer, [and] would have horrified any person of letters' because they normally represent 'la noia del guardare, il mondo senza interesse' (the boredom of looking, the world without interest). However, Ghirri succeeds in seeing in their uniform geometry, their regular lines and symmetries, and their colors, an attempt at 'furnishing quotidian emptiness as best as one can.' In observing them frontally, Ghirri captures 'perspectives similar to those of the Quattrocento, symmetries of a neoclassical kind, and colors that recall Piero della Francesca.' Celati sums up: 'In breve, ha scoperto in quelle noiose villette una forma di vita, un esempio di cultura del vuoto' (In brief, he has discovered in those boring little houses a form of life, an example of the culture of emptiness). He calls this sort of operation a 'story' that is neither 'dark' nor 'gray' but rather one that tells us about the myriad of such places that surround us and in which we 'feel ourselves to be dispersed.' This is a view of the external that shows to us the interest to be found in the ordinary 'appearances' in the midst of which we live, and of which we are ourselves an integral part, rather than a view of the external world as fundamentally different and separate from us because represented primarily with 'exceptional,' 'noteworthy,' or 'artistic' images or stories that have nothing to do with the way daily life is actually experienced, no matter where or by whom.6 Celati believes that Ghirri's ability to 'lower the threshold of intensity' in his photographs allows him to bring out 'subtleties' and to 'suture appearances dispersed in empty spaces': in short, to 'organize experience' and thus to 'give relief to our shared sense of separateness and insignificance. This is what fictions in which to believe should seek to do as well: to organize experience; to give relief - Celati writes that 'there exists no story worth the trouble of being made, if it doesn't give relief (even tragedy gives relief, the brilliant unmaskings of every fiction, instead, do not)' -; to see the 'worlds of stories' that are out there in 'every point in space'; and to follow a way of thinking and imagining 'that doesn't become paralyzed in a disdain for all that is around us' (all quotations from Tinzioni a cui credere'; 13). Implicit in this short essay is Celati's long aversion to the search for original 'artistic' effects merely for the sake of originality or

The Permeable Gaze 99 exceptionality, yet there is something quite different in his 'take' on writing. Rather than concentrating on the act of writing itself or on what is ultimately a kind of dismantling of subjectivity by means of the sheer materiality of language (as seen in his earlier works), now he quite literally looks to - and at - externality as the origin and locus of writing, containing, as the spaces around us do, infinitely potential stories if we only can learn how to see (rather than immediately to try to interpret) them. Space is, therefore, still a fundamentally conditioning element for Celati's fictions, but it is localized and specific space: the landscapes and towns of the Po valley. Space itself is 'pared down,' localized, and explored not so much as a broad epistemological category, but as an inhabited locus of contemporary life. To see this localized space differently is to enter into a series of more theoretical considerations, however, for there is nothing 'natural' about the familiar for Celati, anymore than are natural the abstract categories of 'history,' 'knowledge,' or 'writing.' Celati enters into the collaboration with Ghirri with the same critical spirit that animates all of his work; and he theorizes the experience of seeing as much as he theorized earlier experiences of the family, vagabondage, history, and the materiality of language. The other piece centering on Ghirri and published during Celati's period of collaboration with him is 'Verso la foce: Reportage per un amico fotografo' (Towards the river mouth: Reportage for a photographer friend), a diaristic record of a trip through the Po valley region in which the new way of seeing - and thus of writing - is evident. This important piece is included in a volume of photographs by diverse photographers, Viaggio in Italia (Voyage in Italy), along with an essay by Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, 'Appunti' (Notes), that offers a rich minihistory of photography in Italy and makes explicit the innovative aspect of the approach to and results of the work included in the volume. Quintavalle, a distinguished art historian and critic who was an important mentor of and commentator on Ghirri's work, emphasizes, among other qualities, the 'monumentality' of so-called art photography that to a great extent has dominated representations of Italy and determined the idea of Italian culture available not only to non-Italians but to the Italian people themselves. In his concise yet dense survey of the Italian photographic tradition, Quintavalle recalls the close link between painting and early photography: 'The work of Anderson, Alinari and their imitators, the work of photographic documentation of Italy [relating to] its "monuments" is done as a system of reflections of

ioo Gianni Celati the graphic, etched, drawn image, for which reason the points of view of photographs are those of eighteenth-century etchings, and they don't change/ Later, postcard photography, especially under the Fascist Regime, continues the orientation to monuments - cathedrals, public edifices, churches - and ignores the spaces of everyday life and people. After Fascism a 'realist' photography emerges, but Quintavalle states that it constructs a 'myth of the genuineness of the countryside [and] of ancient habits' (mainly centered on the south of Italy) more or less at the same time as Italy is in fact becoming heavily industrialized; this photographic mode is, therefore, deeply conservative rather than truly reflective of lived reality. Thus, there are two dominant traditions in Italian photography - monumentalist and pictorialist - and both are strongly tied to authoritarian, institutionalized, and fundamentally conservative cultural and political agendas. If Italian cinema, especially neorealist cinema, discovered a new and different space that contradicted the 'official' Italian spatial 'reality' forwarded by Fascism (Quintavalle specifically mentions Visconti's discovery in Ossessione of 'another landscape ... a dimension of the countryside, of the earth, of people and above all a space that is new/ which was, in fact, the antimonumentality of the voile padana), post-war photographers were more Crocean in their aestheticized approach to landscape, indulging in research that was 'loaded with ecstatic contemplation' and 'Artistic' attitudes regarding the representation of a looked-for 'pictorial' reality. Cinema and photography in Italy, it is implied, developed along quite different lines, with the result that the conservative, aestheticizing point of view continued to condition photographic work until two other models began to emerge: the 'neo-American' and the Bressonian. Quintavalle sees Bresson as having been most 'adaptable to the profoundly Crocean bases of [Italian] photographic culture' in the fifties and sixties, with the result that a 'mythic' view of Italy, made up of 'sunset on the Arno and on the Tiber, on the lagunas or on the canals, on the Po or in the Maremma/ gave little room for photographic realism of any sort. We are left today with an Italy made up of a pictorially 'ancient' south, of (mainly northern) monuments, of beaches with fake blue skies that sing the praises of mass vacations, and of lovely dawns and sunsets - with a few cute dogs and young lovers thrown in for good measure. Old models (the monumentality of Rome beloved of travelers to Italy for centuries, nineteenth-century landscape painting, and Bressonian 'Art,' among others) have not relinquished their hold on Italian photographic culture, with the result that vast portions

The Permeable Gaze 101 of Italian geographic and human realities have been obliterated or flattened. (All quotations in this paragraph are from Quintavalle, 'Appunti/ Viaggio in Italia; 7-14.) Those portions of the existent that have been effaced by 'monumentality' or by 'art' are precisely what the photographers of the volume in question are looking to represent (just as Celati had always been looking to ways of writing that also escaped these categories, and the idea of culture subtending them). Quintavalle highlights the importance of Ghirri's work in rethinking the Italian idea of photography from the bottom up, inspired in part by the photographer's study of American New Photography and especially Walker Evans, but also indebted to other conceptual artists and photographers at work in the early seventies when Ghirri began to dedicate himself more or less exclusively to photography. This is, of course, the period when Celati is also deeply involved in reconceptualizing writing and looking for a different 'idea of literature' that might move beyond the 'monumental,' high art mode that had shaped Italian literary culture from its beginnings. Even though Ghirri and Celati did not meet and begin to collaborate until the early eighties, they came together already prepared to find significant, mutually stimulating, and fundamentally shared convictions about what they were searching for as creative and critical thinkers. They also had a region in common - Emilia-Romagna - and it is thus all the more understandable that their meeting resonated with an almost miraculous heightening of creativity and a new depth of thought for both. In the late seventies, Celati had made a trip to the United States during which he had hoped to involve himself in film-making. It was not a happy trip, nor was this a period generally of positive work for the writer. (When I first met him in Rome in early 1979, he said he was 'sickened' by Italian society and literary culture and had no real desire to try to write fiction any longer.) Years later, in an interview conducted by Manuela Teatini for a 1991 issue of the journal Cinema e Cinema after the completion of his video-story, Strada provincial delle anime, Celati was asked how his interest in the Po valley landscapes of the video had begun. He responded that when he returned from America in 1979, he decided one day 'to go to see the little town where [his] mother was born.' He continued: T believe that it all started from there, my rethinking of the provinces, and then I gave myself over to these explorations of the Delta of the Po that lasted for several years' (Tl sentimento dello spazio'; 25). I think it significant that Celati went

102 Gianni Celati in search of his origins, of his matrix, so to speak, precisely at a time when the 'paternal' institutions to which he had looked for support and inspiration (in spite of his fundamental lack of belief in such institutions) - that is, the Italian literary establishment and the American film-making industry - had 'let him down.' His 1978 Lunario del paradiso had not been well received, and his experiences in California (later fictionalized in a story, 'Storia di un apprendistato' [Story of an apprenticeship], included in Narratori delle pianure) were alienating and disappointing. After turning quite literally to the 'margins/ that is, to the provincial Italy of his mother's origin, he was invited by Ghirri to work on the project that resulted in the photographic show and subsequent volume, Viaggio in Italia. The first substantial result of this literal, geographic reorientation and metaphorical, creative, and critical 'conversion' - in the etymological sense of a 'turning around' that has a natural, cyclic, seasonal quality to it, a turn that was also a return to a matrix - was the writing contained in the essay published in Viaggio in Italia, 'Verso la foce' (subsequently radically revised for inclusion in the volume of 'stories of observation' of the same name published in 1989). What I alluded to above as the 'feminine' symbolic quality of Celati's long-standing preference for a spatial orientation was now reinforced by a 'maternal' symbolic potential that I believe infuses his work of this period and beyond. The Italian provinces have long carried with them a maternal significance, related to the perdurability of local mother tongues - dialects - and to strong ties with 'mother earth/ that is less visible in urban centers of institutionalized culture and industrialization. Celati's journey to his actual mother's place of birth was, therefore, also a journey into a different symbolic space than he had heretofore inhabited. 'Verso la foce' is called a piece of 'reportage/ and it shares some of the characteristics of this writing mode. As the genre dictates, Celati writes from direct observation, and he recounts real events that occurred in real places. But it is also different from 'reportage' in that he is not seeking objectively to transmit newsworthy events, nor does he avoid mixing the 'real' and the 'imaginary/ the latter in the form of little stories that have the quality of fables or parables, or allusions to books of fiction he reads while on the road that provide oblique commentary on his own writing. One of the most notable changes from his earlier ways of writing, which tended to divide fairly traditionally between the fictional and the essayistic modes, is evident in this hybrid of genres; furthermore, he writes primarily in the present tense, thus

The Permeable Gaze 103 making clear that what we are reading was created on the move and on the spot. Celati even mentions at one point that he feels dizzy as he stands writing in his notebook. The most salient feature of the piece is its emphasis on description: of landscapes, architecture, people; in sum, on external elements observed by Celati. The choice of what exactly to describe, not to speak of how, parallels the task of the photographer, who must pick out and frame only part of the seen, then deciding from which angle and with what sort of usage of light the portion of the existent in question will be shot. Celati is, in one sense, an 'eye' that frames and 'captures' the seen; in this role, he is like the lens of a camera, an 'obiettivo' in Italian: a term that underscores objectivity. But he is also the subjective, observing human presence who understands and represents the seen 'in a certain light' and from a particular 'angle/ just as all thought is conveyed. His goal (like Ghirri's), however, is to avoid both the ostensibly detached 'objectivity' of the documentaristic 'reportage' model, and the engulfing 'subjectivity' of the aestheticizing model, by means of a 'permeable gaze' whereby externality conditions the choices of the subject as much as the subject conditions the meanings found in the outside world. Mario Moroni calls this Celati's 'paradigm of observation/ which is based on a 'centrifugal' mode by means of which 'the narrating subject constantly distances from himself the referents towards which he is directing his own observation or reflection, thus avoiding that [subjectively determined] centering that would be provoked if the writer kept his own perceptions and observations tied to himself... Instead Celati seems to give room to descriptive/reflective processes that have the capacity to open themselves toward externality, creating in turn spaces for a possible perception/meditation on the part of the reader' (Moroni; 308). The writer 'vacillates' (a word, as I've mentioned in the discussion of 'Baratto/ that later takes on important significance) between subjectivity and objectivity, in his search for a form of writing that might activate new perceptual and meditative possibilities for others. If the 'objective' element of this form of writing is tied to the visibly external (as the opening line with its reference to light shows),7 the writer's subjectivity is expressed through the little fables he imbeds in his 'reportage/ the allusions to the books he is reading as he travels through the Po landscapes, and the references to his desire to see his mother's birthplace. The first two elements are of the realm of the imagination, while the third is openly autobiographical. Yet they are all united under the sign of a 'feminine symbolic/ in the sense that they

104 Gianni Celati contribute to the 'permeability' of the writer as he searches for a relation with the external world different from one based on mastery, domination, or codification. Here, Ghirri's idea of photography is also relevant; he calls it a 'journey,' but it is not a linear, teleological one. Instead, photography is 'un itinerario tracciato, ma con molti scarti e ritorni, casualita ed improvvisazione, una linea a zig-zag ... credo che la fotografia sia semplicemente la rappresentazione di come si percepisce la realta, il mondo esterno, ma questa percezione non e mai univoca o codificabile, e piuttosto un vedere e un sentire "a strati"' (a mapped-out itinerary, but with many swerves and returns, chance and improvisation, a zigzag line ... I believe that photography is simply the representation of how one perceives reality, the external world, but this perception is never univocal or codifiable, it is instead a seeing and a feeling 'in layers') ('II sentimento dello spazio'; 49) The 'layers' of perception that Celati's writing reveals include the spaces opened up by others' writing, his retracing of his mother's travels through space, and the intertwining contours of his little tales and the immediate spaces of his own trip. He specifically mentions Flaubert's Bouvard et Pecuchet, Malcolm Lowry's October ferry to Gabriola, and H.G. Wells's The Country of the Blind as books he is reading during his zigzagging journey. He comments explicitly only on the last, but if we, his readers, know these texts, we (or I should say T) can experience our (my) own imagined, oblique connections between Celati's words and those of these other writers, thus 'deviating' into our (my) own layers of thoughts and perceptions. For me, the reference to Flaubert's last book relates to Celati's lack of faith in the codification of experience, to his desire to revalorize the cliches by which we live, and to the concept of writing as copying rather than origination. Lowry's book conveyed to me a strong sense of exile, and an unquiet, journeying subjectivity similar to Celati's. Wells's Country of the Blind, is a text that - perhaps unlike Flaubert's and Lowry's (I say 'perhaps' since nothing is said about how these books specifically interrelate for Celati) - makes the reader think about the metaphorical resonances of blindness and sight, the unseen and the seen. Wells's story is imbricated with one of Celati's little 'fables' about a man who once 'dreamed that he was in an unknown place in the mountains.' His guide was explaining to him that 'in those mountains lived many other populations, but each population is invisible to all the others.' The man then asked how the guide knows that they exist if they are invisible; the reply is: Terche me lo sento addosso' (because I

The Permeable Gaze 105 feel them up close: literally, I feel them on my back). Wells's story, instead, according to Celati's reading of it, has a tone that makes us believe that the blind people were wrong to beat the sighted man whose descriptions of the seen world they cannot accept, a tone that 'doesn't give up [offering] judgements and opinions that we have on something we don't know' ('Verso la foce'; 32). It is highly significant, I think, that Celati includes these stories about the unseen (the invisible populations, the world according to the blind) within his 'reportage' on the seen, for they subtly emphasize the equally important role of the imagination (that which is materially unseeable) in the formation of our perceptions of experience. Imagination is described, in the 1989 volume Verso la foce, as the 'uneliminable goddess who guides every gaze' (ineliminabile dea che guida ogni sguardo; 103); as Moroni comments: The primary force seems precisely to be the imagination, presented here as a feminine presence who guides the gaze' (italics mine; Moroni; 308). Celati's insistence on wanting to visit his mother's birthplace can be understood as related to - even as an emblematic sign of - his 'permeable/ 'feminine' journey into imaginative as well as physical space. When Celati finally gets to her town, Sandolo, after walking for around an hour along the road, he sits down on the guard rail on the side of the highway, 'in order to try to imagine' the town. He has 'only generic images, a piazza, bars, a church with the clock in the tower. Also images of barns, buses from the past, gravel roads.' He also has a 'vision of a little church with a terracotta facade' ('Verso la foce'; 26). After a bit, the writer gets up and turns back towards another town, without even paying a short visit to his mother's actual town. In searching for his mother's past experience, the visible, present town cannot give him what he wants, nor does his imagination provide him with particularly illuminating visions. There is no epiphany, either from the external or the internal realms, but it is their intermingling that characterizes his arrival to the matrix. The actual physical journey back to his mother's town is co-existent with his faint imaginings of the town. Neither is valorized in any absolute or conclusive sense, however; both are simply presented as parts of the existent that the writer's words share with us. The external, the internal, and the words themselves are all traces that, moment to moment, allude to something beyond them that cannot be captured, explained, or dominated. It is the sheer ordinariness of Celati's trip, of his thoughts once he arrives, and of his unemphatic, plain prose that reveals to us, his readers, the

106 Gianni Celati vast complexities of experience and representation, be they real, imaginative, or some hybrid mixture of both. After the publication in 1984 of these two 'previews' of Celati's new perspectives on the role of the external and visual in his writing, over the next six or so years appeared several texts that reflected his continuing involvement in approaches that were deeply influenced by the collaboration with Ghirri. Before moving on to analyses of Narratori delle pianure and Strada provinciate delle anime, both of which show the influence of photographic issues as theorized by Ghirri, I want to discuss an essay by Celati on Ghirri's photography, included in the 1989 volume of the latter's photographs entitled // profile delle nuvole: immagini di un paesaggio italiano (The profile of clouds: Images of an Italian landscape), as well as an unpublished piece on Ghirri which Celati co-authored with Giorgio Messori, entitled 'Luigi Ghirri, leggere e pensare per immagini' (Luigi Ghirri, reading and thinking through images). To complete the bibliography of writings related to Celati's work with Ghirri I should mention the 1986 anthology, Esplorazioni sulla Via Emilia: Scritture nel paesaggio (Explorations of the Via Emilia: Writings in the landscape) and its companion volume of photographs, Esplorazioni sulla Via Emilia: Vedute nel paesaggio (Explorations of the Via Emilia: Views in the landscape); the 1989 volume, Verso lafoce (Towards the river mouth), in which are included radically reworked parts of the essay 'Verso la foce' discussed above, as well as new material, all of which Celati called 'racconti d'osservazione' (tales of observation); and the 1987 collection of stories, Quattro novelle sulle apparenze, which includes 'Baratto' and other stories (especially 'Luci sulla Via Emilia' [Lights on the Via Emilia], which appeared in the Via Emilia volume mentioned above) that are more or less tied to this phase of Celati's research into the visible. All in all, almost a decade - from the early eighties to the early nineties - is characterized by an intense involvement with theories and practices conditioned by meditations on the external world, perspective, space: all in turn tied to shared problematics of photography and narration. The essay that accompanies Ghirri's II profile delle nuvole, 'Commenti su un teatro naturale delle immagini' (Comments on a natural theater of images) is, in a certain sense, the culmination of Celati's thought on Ghirri's photography. It is made up of commentary on the specific photographs in the volume and general remarks on Ghirri's work, and Celati takes actively into account his friend's own thoughts and

The Permeable Gaze 107 approaches to his art. The essay, which is printed before the photographs, appears in dated segments that extend from May to October, thus maintaining the diaristic and immediate quality of his writing in 'Verso la foce.' The photographs that follow are not dated, however, so there is no direct connection to be made between the time frame of Celati's comments and the moments when the photographs were made. The relation between text and image is further complicated by the placement of phrases, taken from here and there in Celati's essay, under some of the photographs, although the phrases are not specific to those particular photographs. As W.J.T. Mitchell has noted in his The Ethics of Form in the Photographic Essay/ the photographic essay is 'the ideal place to study the interaction of photography and language/ but the questions raised by this genre are not easily answered. If, as Mitchell reminds us, the traditional 'formal requirements of the photographic essay' are that it and the photographs be understood as 'coequal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative/ according to James Agee's introduction to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which includes the photography of Walker Evans, this equality, independence, and collaboration are not achieved by simple means (The Ethics of Form'; 9). In fact, while Celati's essay emphasizes collaboration it does not assert 'mutual independence' or 'coequality'; rather, the points of contact between photographic and narrational perspectives, and between his and Ghirri's poetics, are highlighted. The first section of Celati's essay, dated 10 May, begins with an indirect quotation from Ghirri: 'Ghirri ha spesso parlato della fotografia come una specie di racconto di fantascienza' (Ghirri has often spoken of photography as a kind of science fiction story). (This and subsequent quotations are all from 'Commenti su un teatro naturale delle immagini'; 20-35.) Celati explains that Ghirri says that the seen world is not the same as the photographed world, just as 'the world of a man who is crying is not the same as that of a man who is laughing, and the world of someone who lives in a place cannot be the same as that of the learned man who manipulates models in which no one can live.' Ghirri's description of this difference is illustrated by reference to the science fiction of J.G. Ballard, in which everything seems normal at the beginning, but this normalcy is broken by a Tittle swerve' (piccolo scarto) that produces an altered perception of normalcy, thus making us see a completely different and basically unnatural world. This is the formalist concept of 'estrangement/ of course, that both makes the real more 'real' and yet renders it new, uncanny, as if never before seen. For

io8 Gianni Celati Ghirri, according to Celati, this 'swerve' can almost always be brought back to a question of light, which changes constantly and thus makes it impossible that the same photograph can be taken in two different moments. Celati calls this the 'state of contingency' that is inherent in the photographic act. The writer notes that Barthes saw this contingency as an indication of the death adhering to all that which is photographed, but further notes that Ghirri prefers to see contingency as a renewing element, in that perception itself is thus perpetually renewed. Celati then makes the analogy with writing: a story is also made up of 'states of contingency, passages from one moment to another. However, if every moment is a swerve, in respect to the preceding one, that renews expectations, then every moment renews the perception of the entire story/ Photography, seen in this light, is the opposite of the 'eternity' sought by art, and Ghirri wants precisely to highlight the positivity of its radical contingency. Celati quotes Ghirri as saying that 'photos are only images for remembering something, notes to put in an album. In the end this is a use of photography close to everyday use, and different both from [the use] of the art photo and from that of the documentary photo.' Although Celati does not make the connection explicit, it is clear that he now sees his writing in a similar light: as neither 'Art' nor document, but rather as a way to remember something and to pass that remembrance on to others. In an interview published in the same year (1989) as the essay in question, Celati speaks of narration as a ceremony that 'forms images that are transmitted without power games, in their space of preservation. Only thus can they then become memory, reminiscence for others' ('II transito mite delle parole'; 15). Photographs and stories refer us back to others already made and forward to those to be made in the future, reminding us of the contingent nature of all that which is or has been existent, a contingency in which we all share with something akin to that 'infinite fraternity' sensed by Melville and expressed in his 'Bartleby.' In the next section of Celati's essay, dated 12 May, he again begins by quoting Ghirri: '"You are in a room, the light through the blinds projects shadows on the ceiling. A car passes by on the street, and you see its silhouette on the ceiling. That's photography, its beginning is here. Then film and lenses come, but, before anything, there is this experience of images reflected by means of the effect of a passage of light."' Perspective is introduced in terms of the way in which passing light is focalized through a small opening, as in the castle of Fontanellato near Parma, where there is a dark room the size of a human being.

The Permeable Gaze 109 There, a small hole exists in the wall through which light projects onto the wall an upside-down image of the piazza outside. Looking at the piazza in this way is like 'spying' on the world and seeing it as a 'double'; this view also narrows down and makes more precise that which is seen. Celati comments: Thus it seems to me that a point of view can be understood, also in literature and in philosophy. Whoever looks from a point of view that is more precise because more limited, finds himself spying on the world as if it were an estranged thing.' Ghirri sees this reduction and precision as a 'way of making you look [at externality] better/ but not as a way of seeing everything with complete clarity. He (and Celati) wish to avoid seeking the 'utopia of seeing completely clearly/ however, preferring instead to capture in their work something of the 'enveloping embrace' of common vision, which does not narrow and reduce the seen into precise elements. To achieve this, Ghirri typically uses wide-angle shots in which the foreground is often a bit out of focus 'because [it takes in] many diffused appearances in the landscape.' Again, although Celati does not make the analogy explicit, it is possible to read his fiction of this period as looking to avoid a 'spying/ dominating point of view that makes everything recounted completely clear and masterfully interpreted. Celati next discusses the way in which Ghirri's photographs are ordered in the volume in question (in a section dated 27 June). He sees it as a kind of analogical game, according to Ghirri's belief that a montage is always created by a group of photographs, like the 'narration' that appears as one leafs through a family album. If a photograph (like a painting) is generally presented in our time as having a unique value in and of itself, as being detached from contingency, this convention (which was born and flourished between the end of the sixteenth century and the eighteenth century) is simply that: a convention. Ghirri instead thinks back to the great narrative cycles of Giotto and of Beato Angelico, and to the altars of Sassetta - to pre-Renaissance images, in short - in which, as Celati puts it, 'one image carries you to another, and the overall sense of what you see does not depend upon an aesthetic evaluation, but on the comprehension of a story that speaks of events to be remembered' (akin to Dante's sculptures of 'visibile parlare' referred to above, which recall for our edification stories of acts of great humility). Celati once more makes the distinction between the 'eternity of Art' and 'events to be remembered'; in the first case, an impossible 'fixity of contemplation' is implied, while in the second 'all the surroundings and movements' that bring us to look at a photo-

no

Gianni Celati

graph (or, it is implied, a painting, or a story) are valorized. We approach things in order to look at them 'by means of rhythms ... perception participates in a musical involvement, like a dance.' Celati notes that his friend is happy to hear it put in this way because he often thinks of his photographs as 'bits of songs.' (With this comment, Celati brings out the deeply collaborative nature of their work, as he and Ghirri actively exchange thoughts and ideas that are the very immediate basis of the essay we are reading.) The connection between Ghirri's 'montage' of photographs and Celati's grouping of stories in the various collections he published from the mid-eighties to the early nineties is evident; in both, the goal is to avoid the contemplative fixity of High Art and to honor the contingency both within the photos and the stories and outside of them in the spaces where we, the viewers and readers, dwell along with the photographer and the writer. In the next several sections of the essay (dated 3, 4, and 5 September), Celati explores the issue of perspective, emphasizing the fact that 'there is always a way of looking already foreseen, or guided, by the thing that one looks at/ This concept sounds quasi-mystical at first hearing, yet Celati explains it in terms of elements in the landscape and architecture of the Po valley that Ghirri photographs, which orient the eye to the horizon or to frontal symmetries typical of the area. Celati notes that 'all of this is part of an ambience, where perspectives spring up like mushrooms/ By following the 'plot' created by various analogies of symmetries and perspectives, Ghirri weaves together 'an album of things that can be seen, indicated in the way in which they ask to be seen'; this weave is much like the 'intreccio' or plot based on the intertwining of narrative threads, such as was used by Ariosto in his epic poem, whereby the reader's 'look' is dislocated and divided among many different stories that go forward simultaneously. There are also 'affective resonances' that Ghirri tries to bring out in his work, such as the 'theatricality' of some forms of Italian architecture or the 'diffused illusionism' so much a part of the geography and villas of the Po valley. In his photographs of piazzas and streets and walls of old Po valley towns, taken at night, Ghirri brings to our eyes the artificiality of their colors and lights, which is entirely modern (due to electricity), thus revealing the 'fairy tale' quality of contemporary scenes. The atemporality of these representations of what in fact surrounds us every day and night in our cities and towns is like that of a fable or fairy tale, but Celati writes that 'one can also say that time that passes away every day along with us is suspended time, like the clouds that float, chang-

The Permeable Gaze ill ing their forms in a strange suspension.' Ghirri's photographs, like Celati's fictions, are 'antimonumental'; they guide us to an understanding of the radical contingency and atemporality of everyday, lived experience (as well as its 'fairy tale' quality), rather than to a documentaristic or historical mastery of experience as abstraction. On 11 September, Celati writes of the difficulty he sometimes had as he traveled through the Po valley with Ghirri in avoiding a sense of the monotony and predictability of certain ambiences, such as those found in suburban environments where there are always the same street signs, geometrically placed houses, and prefabricated gardens. Ghirri's response was that 'monotony is nothing other than the disappointed feeling of someone who always expects new illusionisms, as if one needed to be seduced even in order to take one step.' With this attitude is born 'the strange idea that there is "something to be seen," like an absolute quality of locales'; instead, 'there is never anything to be seen, there are only things that we happen to see with more or less enthusiasm, independently from their quality. A sadness attenuates all the colors of a landscape, and being in love revivifies them.' When one is blocked by a sense of monotony, Ghirri advises looking to the horizon, which displaces the glance toward openness and can give back to us a sense of the ''story' of all the phenomena that embrace us. Celati notes that this is particularly difficult in a country like Italy, where a kind of architectonic and cultural 'illusionism' dominates that makes it seem as if 'the perception of openness can only be this: a glimpse between two monuments.' In the next section, dated 15 September, Celati pursues this idea of 'opening out the gaze' towards all the objects around us without the usual evaluative process of deciding whether they are 'interesting' or not. As we take in the colors and tonalities of the external world, things seem to be 'a kind of warehouse of remembrances, where everything goes on having a meaning even if it has no use.' From this attitude can come a sense that the so-called exotic and the socalled familiar are not so different, and that 'there is no longer any great voyage that is more stirring than a stroll in order to see the colors of the world.' This embrace of the obvious and the 'banal' is very much a part of Celati's writing, as can be seen in both his early 'everyday stories' and in his later, more overtly 'minimalist' tales. There is no disdain or irony in this approach to the existent and to its representation in images and words, for, as Ghirri comments in the section dated i October, he has no desire to 'unmask the obvious,' instead seeking to find 'shared affective elements' in the seen world around us. Celati

112 Gianni Celati adds that this commonality has to do with the fact that 'the observed world is not that which appears through the point of view of a sole individual. It is that which, before him, is already common to various observations and representations, because it belongs to a form of life/ The writer sees in Ghirri's photographs something like a challenge to the usual prejudices regarding the common or 'trite/ for he often takes photos of what could be called 'stereotypes of this country of melodrama/ for example, Verdi's theater in Busseto, which is so rosy red and ordered as to appear to be itself a set; or a confessional that looks like a trompe-l'oeil, which makes Celati think of Stendhal's idea of Italian melodrama. It seems that Celati is here highlighting Ghirri's acceptance of certain stereotypically Italian scenes, the 'obviousness' of which recalls habits and modes of seeing that are a shared tradition. In the next section, dated 2 October, Celati elaborates on Ghirri's attraction to so-called 'stereotypical' scenes, specifying that the photographer transforms them into phenomena of colors that are similar to the atmospheric colors his photos present to the eye. Thus, internal scenes and objects are 'pulled toward the open' and presented 'in a great theater that opens out toward the external.' This effect of openness is achieved by means of the use of light 'that is always enveloping and never indicated as a partial source.' But Celati sees the effect as depending on something less material as well, which he calls Ghirri's 'appetite of the gaze.' We are then drawn into a sort of 'contagion' that stimulates our own 'appetite' to see, which Celati calls 'attention to the splendor of all things enveloped in light.' Disenchanted or unhappy people cannot see in this way, but those who 'have a good rapport with the horizon and with the sky' (called 'the two final borders of the great natural theater of images') can take in this splendor. Celati maintains throughout his essay an exquisite balance between concrete description and abstract interpretation of Ghirri's photographs. The final three sections of the essay, dated 3, 4, and 6 October are, however, increasingly lyrical, achieving what might be called an almost miraculous form of 'poetical analysis' that is as beautiful as it is illuminating. He writes of Ghirri's 'laborious construction of a duree' in many of his photographs, which gives us a sense of the 'works and days' made and lived by common artisans as well as by great artists like Giorgio Morandi. There are also photographs of the 'celebrations' that follow work, such as local fairs. Of these, Celati writes that 'they give [me] a sense of nostalgia for a film that I'll never be able to see and that doesn't exist, calling [me] back to moments of enchantment that

The Permeable Gaze 113 I've perhaps only dreamed of.' This feeling of impossible nostalgia for the nonexistent reminds the writer of an anecdote told by Robert Walser about a dedicated reader of Gottfried Keller's tales, who one day begins to cry while she laments: The world is not like this.' It seems to Celati that it is only through a 'laborious exercise in order to use well the inauthenticity and artificiality of all words and images that each moment in the world might be redeemed and freed' (riscattare). All of the contingent and passing moments of existence can thus be transformed into 'phenomena of the great natural theater, limited only by the horizon and the tent of the sky/ and artifice in this sense can be seen above all as a sign of 'good will.' Celati concludes: 'The weeping of the woman of whom Walser speaks is nothing other than the affective basis of all of this: [a sense of] compassion for the world' (la pieta per il mondo). Artifice is explained here in what I see as a fundamentally novel and enormously stimulating manner: according to this view, the craft and craftiness of art are not used in order to create effects for the sake of effects, but rather in order to bring us to a felt understanding of the 'impossible' beauty of the existent. Among the last photographs included in the volume are a series of landscapes leading towards the mouth of the Po river. Celati calls them the 'crowning achievement' of Ghirri's 'plot of images/ in that they give us images of zones that are 'almost unapproachable photographically, because where there is only sky and horizon photography finds itself uneasy' (a disagio). It is precisely this difficulty that makes the images so exceptional, for Ghirri manages to gather 'all those extremely tenuous resonances' of infinitely diffused space that make it 'lookable.' Celati recalls the eighth elegy of Rilke ('We never have, before us, not even for a day/ pure space ... There is always world/ and never that nowhere without negations'), commenting that Rilke means with the word 'world' the 'obviousness of things and appearances, already given in order to be called in a certain way, in order to be seen in a certain manner, and on which all of our self-possession or normalcy depends.' For the writer, the photographer's craft, maybe more than any other work of our time, 'seems to testify to this limit of the representations that give sense to our normalcy and selfpossession.' And the 'limit' is not social or historical, but spatial: 'it is the horizon as the ultimate stage of all possible apparitions, and the sky as the ultimate background of colors and tones that give an affective quality to the phenomena around us.' Celati finds in Ghirri's photography the crowning achievement of bringing appearances back to

H4 Gianni Celati this stage and to this background, thus presenting 'all the appearances of the world as suspended phenomena, and therefore no longer as "facts" to be documented/ This achievement is tied to the concept of 'vaghezza/ which Celati defines as 'the feeling we have about phenomena'; the photographs of horizon and sky call us to 'an elementary attention to phenomena of color and light [that are] so indefinite, indefinable, so as to undermine the very idea that there might really exist documentable "facts."' Ghirri succeeds by using the 'artifices of "vaghezza": this ancient term of Italian art, in order to say something that resembles the phenomena of the clouds, the sky, and the horizons/ I purposely did not translate the word "vaghezza," for it is not translatable by one sole term in English. It is indeed an 'ancient term/ used in its nominal, adjectival ('vago') and verb ('vagheggiare') forms by Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Cellini, Leopardi, and many others throughout the centuries, in order to signify many things: indeterminacy; loveliness; errancy; a loving gaze; desire; grace. Leopardi saw 'vaghezza' as the essence of the poetic, and sought to create its effects by means of words that he believed were intrinsically 'vaghe/ such as 'luna' (moon) and 'dolce' (sweet). In using this word, Celati seems to be reaching towards this complex and rich semantic field both in order to define Ghirri's 'crowning achievement' and to express something of the effect produced by his images of sky and horizon. Although the writer does not speak here of the 'lunar' quality of 'vaghezza,' I think that the enchantment before the visible that he describes can be associated with the poetic effects of moonlight, as contrasted to the 'harder/ more rationally determined concept of perception when deployed under the sign of the sun. (I'll discuss below the important role played by the Leopardian moon in Celati's own video-story.) The moon is, of course, 'feminine' in our symbolic order, allied as it is to the soft, the attenuated, the irrational, the cyclic. Just so is Celati's 'preference' for approaches to the visible such as Ghirri's, in which the affective and undocumentable essence of the seen conditions and guides his eye, which seeks to 'caress' rather than to 'capture' the seen world. In the final section of the essay, dated 6 October, Celati writes that in rereading what he has written, he finds that he has behaved like someone 'too lost in interpretations, knowing well that all interpretation is suspended in air, and nothing will ever be able to bring it back to earth/ To counter this, he is suddenly seized by the opposite mania, which is to 'ask only technical questions, to search for precise facts alone/ He therefore asks Ghirri how it is that a photographer can

The Permeable Gaze 11.5 achieve all these artifices; Ghirri answers that 'as someone who writes can only entrust himself to words and sentences, so a photographer can only entrust himself to the manner of framing things/ But how can one know how things 'ask' to be framed in landscapes, like those at the mouth of the Po, which are not in any way constructed architecturally? Again, Ghirri can respond precisely, saying that even in these flat, open spaces there are ways of seeing that are determined by the openings of valleys or the longitudinal vistas across cultivated fields. But most important is to find 'points of the gaze that may be comprehensible to others. It is necessary to give up one's own point of view, otherwise one spies rather than looking. Working on the framing one can find certain approximations that might recall a common vision and a spontaneous gaze.' Just as Celati began the essay with recourse directly to Ghirri's words, he ends with a quote from his friend: 'Everything that you see, lives only in the framing. Even the sea, how can I photograph it if not by putting it in a frame like a painting? If you like, it is like a window from which you look at phenomena, and you are like a child who must do an essay, writing about that which he saw. You look out of the window, but who is it who is looking? I remember that story by Calvino, who says: "it's the world that looks at the world/" Implicit in Celati's comments on Ghirri is the idea that writing, like photography, can also aspire to a permeable gaze rather than a masterful point of view, and such writing might thus result in texts that emerge from something like an 'eye' that is attuned to commonality, not an T that clings to its singularity. Thus ends a remarkable meditation on the work of one photographer, on photography generally considered, and on representation whether through words or images. The relationship between the photographs and the essay is based on a series of shared issues regarding our ways of perceiving and representing the existent, that which is both separate from us and that of which we are a part. The question is not how or whether the writing and the image are 'coequal' or 'mutually independent,' but rather how they are both ways of framing and communicating shared and shareable human experience. In this essay, Celati conveys how much he has learned about the role of perception and representation through his collaboration with Ghirri, but it is equally evident that, in asking the questions and having the responses he did to the work of Ghirri, the writer in turn stimulated an explanatory eloquence on the part of the photographer that perhaps would not have been born without Celati's intense engagement with the issues at

n6 Gianni Celati stake. Thus, the 'fully collaborative' nature of the photographic essay, as defined by Agee and quoted by Mitchell, comes to the fore as the primary quality of this stupendous volume. The last piece of writing relating directly to Ghirri to which I want briefly to allude is an unpublished essay written by Celati and Giorgio Messori entitled 'Luigi Ghirri, Leggere e pensare per immagini' (Luigi Ghirri, reading and thinking through images). In this piece, the relevance of Ghirri's photographic work to the craft of writing narratives is made more explicit. Many points already made in the essay discussed above are repeated: the ways in which Ghirri's photography brings out the 'already seen' nature of the visible by often including people shot from behind -who are looking at something; his highlighting of the common uses of photography as a mode of remembrance by, for example, taking pictures of photo albums and of shop windows in which wedding and family photos are displayed; his emphasis of the ways in which people order the space around them, seen in his photographs of suburban houses and gardens; his desire to valorize the partial and contingent nature of the framed image; his wish to avoid a 'conquering' and 'spying' gaze, instead looking to underscore his complicity with the given and the habitual qualities of the seen as shared by all those who live within the spaces being observed. Now, however, Celati and Messori define observation as understood by Ghirri as a form of 'reading.' If we can learn to 'read' as Ghirri observes the seen, they claim, then we can stop trying to 'define the unique and original character of a certain author, because we realize that [the author] is using a language common to everyone, and that his great resource is to be found precisely in the use of this common faculty that binds us and permits us to understand one another.' Ghirri has helped Celati and Messori to understand that 'the world is already given, it already has a sense, and has ways of organizing experience, and it is only because of this that it is livable.' As in the case of Bartleby, here too it is asserted that there is no 'secret' to be unveiled, but only representational modes that permeate existence and make it shareable if not comprehensively understandable. We can find our way 'home' again if we understand that the world is a 'book' that has already been read by others before us, and is thus filled with representations to which we should seek to join our own, while alluding to all that which is beyond our own 'frame.' Celati and Messori write: '[This is] the end of secrets to be seized, of the mania to reveal something, of the tricks of intellectual pride that would want to explain the world to us from the top of a

The Permeable Gaze 117 tower of Babel. Everything becomes already seen, already said, but precisely for this reason we recognize better the digressions and surprises relating to the already seen and the already said/ As a photograph frames a portion of the existent, it becomes 'a measure of our seeing, a measure of our experience/ and it also reminds us of all that is cancelled out by the act of framing, thus drawing us into a recognition of the 'rest of the non-represented real/ Although this essay does not refer to Celati's stories of the mid-eighties and beyond, I believe that it is possible, especially in the case of Narmtori delle pianure, to see put into language these principles of observation, framing, and ordering. In this volume, Celati recounts the 'narratives' or alreadyobserved worlds of others, rather than writing from his own singular, authorial perspective; he also works to create a sense in his readers of the untold stories and external spaces beyond the tales included in his 'frame/ It is to a closer look at how spatial elements condition this collection that I therefore now turn. From the cover photograph (by Ghirri) of a snowy road leading towards a misty, indistinct 'elsewhere' - which includes a back view of Celati looking towards that 'elsewhere' - to the map of the plains that serves as visual preface and, finally, to the locales of the stories themselves, Narratori delle pianure involves us in a meditation on space and externality. The space evoked by the volume's paratextual elements (title, cover photo, map) seems, at first glance, if not highly specific, at least somewhat delimited: the 'plains' of the title. The prefatory map shows us the Via Emilia as it more or less follows the river Po from its source near Gallarate northwest of Milan to its mouth into the Adriatic; it is also doted with the names of cities and towns in the Po valley region. Even if readers do not personally know this area of Italy, they can associate certain qualities with the space of plains country: flatness, openness, simplicity. Gaston Bachelard wrote in his The Poetics of Space that 'there would always be nuances, too, between dreamers who are calmed by plain country and those who are made uneasy by it, nuances that are all the more interesting to study since the plains are often thought of as representing a simplified world' (204). We thus enter into this 'plain country' already calmed or uneasy, depending on the associations it evokes in us. In approaching Celati's plains, I want to discuss certain techniques of spatial representation by which these stories are shaped. The basic building blocks of any story are spatial and temporal in nature, means by which we recognize what we read or hear as a story. Celati's use of

n8 Gianni Celati spatial building blocks results not only in effective stories but also in an implicit meditation on the narrative process itself, as well as on traditional modes of organizing and interpreting experience. Rather than imposing an interpretative grid on these stories from without, I want to try to show that their 'meanings' are literally imbedded in and indissolubly linked to the narrational constructs Celati uses, rather than to external ideologies or value judgments by which content is more commonly evaluated. I take my departure for the reading that follows from Celati's own words on the acts of reading and analyzing narrative fictions: 'Una narrazione scritta e un'esperienza solitaria come il sogno, non spartibile con nessuno, se non nei suoi aspetti tecnici' (a written narration is a solitary experience like a dream, not shareable with anyone, except in its technical aspects) (Frasi per narratori [1984]; 67). Whether we are 'calmed' or 'made uneasy' by our individual, solitary journeys through these plains has finally to do with our singular points of view, rather than with a perspective provided by a paternalistic interpreter of his own writing, that is, an 'author' in the traditional sense. Celati's use of space opens out perspectives that allow for many responses; my own, merely one of those many, follows. The real world to which these stories refer - the Po valley - is, in the prefatory map, represented as a number of place names connected by dark lines, presumably roads or itineraries followed. Printed across two pages, the map invites a reading from left to right (or west to east), the usual direction of the eye's movement as we read. The map is schematic: black and white, without any indications of distances, it does little more than evoke, in a rudimentary way, a real geographic space. The stories repeat the 'direction' of the map. The first story names Gallarate, the place name farthest left on the map; then follow references in subsequent stories to Bollate, Codogno, Milan, Piacenza, Cremona, and so on, finishing at the end of the book on the right-hand, eastern side of the map in Chioggia. There is thus a mirroring of the actual space in the textual space, and in the movement from left to right, west to east, that both delineate. We 'travel' through the stories (as through any book) on a trajectory schematized by the map, which is metaphorically representative of the reading (and writing) process itself. The basic spatiality of writing is highlighted, and its reliance on temporal elements is greatly downplayed in the volume's paratextual modes of presentation. Just as the map is starkly minimalist, so too is the prose of the stories. Both are wide open spaces that refuse the embellishments of topo-

The Permeable Gaze 119 graphical or rhetorical 'color.' Along with the narrator, we the readers must fill up these spaces through an imaginative effort that transcends the emptiness of the map, rather than relying on precise images or imbedded interpretations that are completely and decisively drawn. The opening story, which I discussed briefly in the Introduction to this study, tells us of just such an imaginative effort/ as the Italian ham radio operator and his English girlfriend receive Archie's messages from a far-off island and the Italian radio correspondent begins 'to imagine that island as if he had seen it with his own eyes' (12). The spatial coordinates of the story (Italy - the far-off island) suggest, as does the prefatory map, abstract notions about space that pertain to writing and reading. The difficulties of meaningful exchange via language and its reception are clearly outlined by means of this setting: distance, lack of a fully common language, reticence, physical absence, Yet, on the other hand, the power of even approximate communications is evidenced as well, for the Italian is able to imagine a space beyond him 'come se la vedesse la fuori' (as if he saw it there outside). He must work at this 'seeing,' however, by enlisting the help of his girlfriend, who can translate English for him, and by giving himself over to imagination. Later, when the couple visit the island, they recognize the locales described to them by Archie: They recognized almost everything and were able to orient themselves as if they had already been there' (13). Celati thus pulls his characters out of an imaginary space into a 'real' space, albeit one that is still accessible to us, his readers, only through words. Nonetheless, this movement outward is important to an understanding of the basic impetus of the volume, which, like Ghirri's photographs, seeks to pull our perception towards the external rather than to fix it onto a self-referential, aesthetic artifact. We, like the Italian ham radio operator and his friend, first 'see' the island as an imaginative reconstruction; we then 'see' it along with them as it 'really' is. Within the spatial frame of the story (first Gallarate, then the far-off island), an extratextual 'there' or 'elsewhere' is brought in, with the result that the frame itself is dilated and eventually broken through. An analogous effect might be imagined as seeing a landscape on a film screen and then, the screen having been removed, seeing before our eyes that very landscape. But, of course, this is in fact not possible in written representation, for the 'realness' of the island, deeply conditioned by its preceding represented status, is belied by its strongly mediated essence. Archie is in fact absent and a second Archie tells the first Archie's story to the couple, thus emphasizing even more the inaccessibility of a

120 Gianni Celati 'pure' presence. The 'real' world is, therefore, an already narrated world, for there is no prenarrational reality that is accessible merely by being inhabited. The doubling effect, emphasized in the repeated name of the two Archies and in the unseen, imagined island and the subsequently seen one, shows that 'here' and 'there/ 'in' and 'out/ 'real' and 'represented/ are conceptual categories of great complexity. As Celati wrote elsewhere, 'we are already and shall always be within representation' (Tinzioni a cui credere'; 14). In Eccentric Spaces, Robert Harbison wrote: 'A map reader's exhilaration comes from the sensation of not being tied to Place, of having broken the bonds of the local, and when this point of view enters painting in the sixteenth century, preeminently with Bruegel, what a sense of freedom it gives!' (126). This Bruegelesque plenitude is implied in the first story discussed above, when the couple 'break the bonds of the local' and discover that 'there are worlds of stories in every point of space, appearances that require ever new stories' (Tinzioni a cui credere'). In his review of Narratari delle pianure, published in the magazine Panorama shortly after the volume's appearance, Ghirri wrote: 'Mi vengono in mente, a proposito di questi racconti, soprattutto alcuni quadri di Bruegel, brulicanti di personaggi che si muovono in ogni direzione nello spazio che li contiene, tanto da riempirlo: cosi sono i personaggi che affollano le pagine di questo libro, sullo sfondo di un paesaggio anch'esso in movimento e in continua mutazione' (Regarding these stories, there come to my mind above all certain of Bruegel's paintings, swarming with characters who are moving about in every direction in the space that contains them, so much so that they fill it up: thus are the characters who crowd the pages of this book, on the background of a landscape itself in movement and constant mutation ('Una carezza al mondo'; 24-5). Ghirri's review (a noteworthy reversal of roles, in that typically photographic insights are not employed to comment on written narratives, but rather photographs are themselves more commonly 'explained' by language) also underscores the 'magic-mysterious aspect of the existent' that Celati's stories convey, as they open out onto 'places in which every trace is at the same time recognizable and unrecognizable' (Ibid. 24). The spatial configurations referred to by Ghirri as a filling up of empty space, and a continual movement and mutation within space, are fundamental to the volume's 'meaning/ as well as to the 'magic-mysterious' quality it conveys. The spatial metaphors of in and out, empty and full, static and dynamic, not only serve to structure the volume; as Juri Lotman has noted, 'the language of

The Permeable Gaze 121 spatial relations turns out to be one of the fundamental means for the comprehension of reality/ and, further, spatial concepts 'are material for the construction of cultural models with a content [that is] absolutely not spatial' (The Structure of the Poetic Text; 262). Thus we move, with Celati, from spatial settings to metatextual commentary to cultural models, as space emerges as a bearer of meanings quite beyond its basic role within the textual, narrational weave. Behind these extended meanings are the meditations on perception, space, and representation that the writer shared with Ghirri, as well as his earlier theorizing on narration and history, all of which I have commented on in some detail in preceding pages. In Narratori delle pianure, we see the putting into fictional form of many of these meditations. Regarding the concept of the filling up of a simplified world such as is represented by the plains country according to Bachelard, the stories with their always diverse characters and events make of the 'simple/ 'empty' spaces of the Po valley a world filled to the brim with complexity and plenitude. What is assumed to be 'empty/ that is, in terms of value, without worthwhile artistic content, substance, or significance, is, in fact, 'full/ that is, substantive and meaningful. As in Bruegel's paintings, the characters and events are not monumental or historically significant, however; rather, they are essentially quotidian, marginal, dispersed, and 'weak/ outside, that is, of the superstructure of 'that homogeneous and totalizing continuity that is called history' (Tl bazar archeologico'; 14). These are people and events of the realm of the contingent, of the 'empty' spaces ignored by history, the diversity, uniqueness, and fullness of which are revealed. Turning to the issue of constant movement through space that these stories highlights, it is possible to read in this emphasis a radical reconceptualizing of narrative itself. If we think of narrative as 'spatialized time/ then traditional fictional or historical narratives have storylines that are conditioned by a progressive, teleological idea of space, a Tine' that is in fact profoundly temporal in nature. That is, we get from 'here' (beginning) to 'there' (end) in linear narratives, but we perceive this motion as though it were exclusively through time leading to something, rather than through dilatory space that fans out in all directions. If, however, we substitute a more purely spatial concept of motion (as does Celati in these stories), value judgments based on progress and totalizing closural conclusions become much harder to impose on the material being narrated. Space can be framed, moved through, expanded, contracted, but it, in and of itself, is neither progressive nor

122 Gianni Celati linear. Space has been defined as 'the field available for the disposition of the objects of reality'; Celati's characters move through this available expanse in circular, reiterative, non-linear itineraries that bring to mind the flaneurs of the modern sensibility as well as the web-surfers of postmodernity. They are not necessarily going somewhere; they are simply going. That is, they are involved in process rather than in end. And, as Ghirri notes, the spaces through which they move are also constantly mutating, so that there is an intensification of the effect of diversity and openness of perspective. In addition, Celati consistently uses a 'panoramic' mode of narration (which depends on grammatical indices such as the imperfect tense, on generic temporal references such as 'once upon a time/ 'one fine day/ and on the avoidance of direct discourse).8 This mode is characteristic of ancient, popular, and oral traditions of storytelling in which analytical and interpretative precision is suppressed in favor of narrational dynamism. The dynamism of constant motion by which both the characters and the narration itself are propelled is seldom broken by static, 'scenic' modes of narration in which events are summarized or explicit judgments or morals drawn.9 There are many examples of erratic or wandering motion in the stories of Narratori; I give here just a few specific examples. In the second story, 'Ragazza giapponese' (Japanese girl), the homonymous protagonist first moves from New York to Los Angeles on the advice of her astrologer. She then moves to the 'northern edge of the city' because her astrologer tells her that 'it would be more suitable [for her] to live in a hilly area' (17). She then moves to Milan and later to Bollate, where she stays. The girl believes in predestination and in the necessity of following one's 'predestined road/ but her movements, as logical and fated as they may be to her, can also be seen as arbitrary, aimless, and literally erratic. The 'bambini pendolari' (commuting children) of the third story fulfil the meaning of their title through their movements, for 'pendolare' means not only 'commuting' but also 'oscillating.' Their reason for wandering about Milan is that they are looking for someone who is not boring. They follow various promising individuals, but are always disappointed. One foggy December Sunday, they meet a woman who is lost and, in following her, they too end up lost in a cold, unfamiliar place. The final sentence of the story tells us that, having gone so far and ending up so cold, sad, and lost, 'the suspicion came to them that all of life might be this way' (25). In the tale entitled 'Storia d'un apprendistato' (Story of an apprenticeship), the narrator is himself the protagonist. He moves from Los Angeles to the small town of Alden,

The Permeable Gaze 123 Kansas, in order to visit his friends Bill and Edith. He then goes to see the daughters of Alden's mayor, who live in Hudson, New York, subsequently moving on to New York City where 'he wanders around the streets/ After a meal with an Italian family in Queens, he returns to Italy where, in Piacenza, 'everything by now being far off, he even succeeded in writing the story of his apprenticeship with Bill and Edith, that is, this [story] (37).10 In the final story, 'Giovani umani in fuga' (Young humans in flight), four boys flee the police, have no idea where to go, and end up in a place they have heard about along the way called la sacca dei morti' (the bay of the dead) where they get into a small boat. Since they have nowhere else to go, 'they continued to row; they had the idea that, continuing to row, they might get somewhere' (146). In these, and other, stories, the movements through space result in diverse outcomes: staying put; ending up lost; writing; continuing to row. No one outcome is privileged, however, as a conclusive or illuminating denouement. Just as the first story leads to a place 'out there/ the final story orients us to that 'somewhere' the boys are seeking, which is also a 'somewhere' beyond the frame of the book in which ever new stories are available for the telling and the listening. As poet and critic Alfredo Giuliani put it: 'In the fleeing horizon the book fixes provisional boundaries. For this reason this is a wise book: its parts make up a whole that in reality resonates as [itself] a part of a whole that extends beyond the book, into the great plains' ('II trentanovelle'). With the constant wanderings of his characters, Celati creates a sense of labyrinthine space. The 'breaking of the frame/ exemplified in the first and last stories, ironically also contributes to a 'no-exit' sensation, for 'outside' is no more directly accessible or interpretable than 'inside'; in fact, there may well be no difference between them, since we are all within representation. The 'simplified world' represented by the open spaces of the plains can bring us face to face with the inescapable limits of our mortality and of our access into the heart of meaning and being. Whether this conclusion 'calms' us or makes us 'uneasy/ and whether we are ultimately heartened or discouraged by this erratic voyage through the non-linear space of the existent, depends on our own individual and unique assumptions about 'here' and 'there/ experience and its representations, process and end. In this last section of the chapter, I turn to Celati's work as a video maker. As is evident in the influence of silent-film comics on his early writing, Celati has long been drawn to cinema as a source of inspira-

124 Gianni Celati tion for his prose works. In the early 19905, after many years of collaborative work with Ghirri, he more or less reversed the process, turning to film-making as an art form suited to the elaboration of his narrative visions. The mediatory factor between writing and making videos was photography specifically, and, behind both prose fiction and filmmaking, the more general issues pertaining to visibility, perspective, space, and the host of technical and philosophical concerns he explored while working with Ghirri and other photographers. Moving into a visual medium, Celati both explored the inherent limitations of purely verbal expression and revealed the deep connections between verbal and non-verbal modes of creativity. We can 'read' his video, Strada provinciate delle anime (Provincial road of souls), for example, as if it were one of his written works dedicated to the visible world, for it has strong affinities with those texts. In fact, it has been called a 'videoracconto' or 'video-story' (in the interview, 'II sentimento dello spazio' [The feeling of space]). In her rich meditation on such crossovers, Text/image border tensions' (in The Politics of Postmodernism), Linda Hutcheon focuses on photography as a particularly suitable site for analyzing what she calls 'fringe interference'; she writes 'My particular interest in this chapter is in those photographic "fringe" constructions that combine the visual and the verbal, mass media and high art, artistic practice and aesthetic theory, and, in particular, in the spots where these apparent opposites overlap and interfere both with each other and with mainstream notions of "art"' (118-19). These 'fringe effects' are, in fact, at the heart of much art that we call 'postmodern,' and are central to the complexities which Celati's recent written and video works (both very influenced by photographic theoretical concerns) in particular explore and embrace. I want to begin to explore Celati's not unexpected move into filmmaking and the creation of a video film, the heart of which is human motion through space, by referring back briefly to the collection Narratori delle pianure, which, as I have discussed, includes as frontispiece a map of the plains in the title. In Calvino's 'Ipotesi di descrizione di un paesaggio' (Hypothesis of description of a landscape), included as opening piece to the Via Emilia collection of stories, he makes the connection, as Celati's map implicitly does, between moving through a landscape and writing, seeing both as fundamentally spatial in essence: 'Anche se adesso che sono seduto qui a scrivere sembro fermo, sono gli occhi a muoversi, gli occhi esteriori che corrono avanti e indietro seguendo le lettere che corre da un margine all'altro del foglio, e

The Permeable Gaze 125 gli occhi interior! che anche loro corrono avanti e indietro tra le cose sparpagliate nella memoria' (Even if now when I am seated here in order to write I seem fixed, my eyes move, my external eyes that run back and forth following the letters that run from one margin of the sheet of paper to the other, and my interior eyes that also run back and forth between the things scattered in my memory; 11). We might think of writing as a kind of 'mapping' of space, as the outer and inner eyes follow a trajectory that is the movement of words over the page, and the motions of the remembering and creating mind. But it is to Celati's map itself that I want to direct some further attention - or I should say not only to this map, but to the thoughts on the external world and our relation to representations of it that maps generically stimulate. These thoughts in turn will lead into a consideration of Celati's video, which is, among other things, a map come alive through moving images and peopled spaces. Maps are basically graphic, pictorial representations of real space, but they are themselves, oxymoronically, concrete abstractions. They are highly referential and mimetic of the material world they depict, and yet they are so minimalist, so lacking in what is really there in those places named and placed, as to be mere ghosts or shadowy traces of the world. (I am not speaking of topographic maps that are highly marked by diverse coloration and that mimic the swell of mountains, for example, but rather of everyday black-and-white maps of countries and cities to which we most commonly refer.) One of the best meditations on maps I have read is contained in Robert Harbison's Eccentric Spaces; he writes: 'From cities of brick to cities in books to cities on maps is a path of increasing conceptualization' (124). Mapping, whether real or metaphorical, has great resonance in the realm of postmodern theorizing, perhaps because it is precisely one of the most conceptual of activities. We are deeply engaged in reconceptualizing our world, in discovering just where we are, just what our relation to space is, just how humankind can preserve collective habitations and individual homes in a world more and more made up of ungrounded subjectivities, migrations, shifting boundaries, and literally homeless people. If our sense of place is radicalized, however, our maps are, as Harbison eloquently argues, 'all old-fashioned ... with their easy continuities between near and far, seeing to the end of every prospect, a concept at ease with its field. The maps in daily use represent a prenineteenth century, a medieval, agrarian world, and only choose to distinguish between country and town. In Europe today not much of

126 Gianni Celati either remains' (139). Maps stimulate nostalgia, then, not only for the places on them which we have visited, but also for their calm containment and ordering of the world. They stimulate restlessness as well, for maps are associated with 'being on the road/ speaking to the nomadic impulse, the attraction to the ever-different, the not-yetexperienced, which continues to lure us even in this 'global village' of a world where little is farther away than a television screen or a fax. Nostalgia and restlessness or nomadism are aspects of contemporaneity in the industrialized, technologized West on which a tremendous amount of media production and consumer goods depend. Nostalgic, comforting trips, and so-called adventures for the restless or bored are marketed according to what might be called 'aestheticizing' and 'documentarizing' techniques; the former emphasizes the beauty, calm, and warm corporeal appeal of some 'long ago and far away' (a la Baudelairian 'Invitation au voyage': 'La, tout n'est qu'ordre et beaute, / luxe, calme et volupte'), while the latter takes a stark 'you are there and this is what it's really like' approach. Commercial photography and mainstream films play a huge role in packaging and selling such views of the world. In advertising and entertainment of all sorts - television commercials, magazines, travel brochures - photographs and moving pictures lure us with their gauzey, lovely scenes or their 'realistic' depictions of far-off places and promised 'adventures.' As I've emphasized above, Ghirri avoids either aestheticizing or documentarizing. In discussing Ghirri's appeal to him in an informal interview with me in 1985, Celati spoke of this avoidance, which he saw as 'cleansing the gaze/ allowing for a less manipulated and manipulating vision. He also spoke of the 'lowering of the threshold' of representational intensity; that is, Ghirri's ability to eschew beautifying the scenes he shot (as so much of the photography of 'scenic Italy' does in what I have called the nostalgic mode) or, conversely, uglifying the seen, emphasizing the warts on the face of the world, so to speak, in the name of documentaristic 'realism/ 'starkness/ and the like. Instead, Ghirri tries to find a frame for what is photographed that does the least violence to the seen, a kind of 'natural' frame or orientation that 'caresses' rather than 'possesses.' The horizon itself most often provides this 'take' on the world: the line where sky and earth meet, and where verticality emerges out of horizontality in a balance provided by landscape rather than by a strong imposition of the viewer's expectations or predispositions. If nostalgia can be seen as a longing for an irretrievable 'home/ and restlessness as a desire to escape the boundaries of the homey and familiar,

The Permeable Gaze 127 then Ghirri's (and Celati's) work can be seen as attempts to reach the more genuine 'home' embodied in the horizon. Art critic, writer, and screenwriter John Berger refers to Mircea Eliade's work on the ontology of the concept of 'home' as 'the place from which the world could be founded.' He continues: 'Home was the center of the world because it was the place where a vertical line crossed with a horizontal one.' Verticality established ties with the gods above and the dead below, while horizontality represented the 'traffic of the world ... thus, at home, one was nearest to the gods in the sky and the dead in the underworld ... and at the same time, one was at the starting point and, hopefully, the returning point of all terrestrial journeys' (And our faces, my heart, brief as photos; 56). Something of this founding, spiritual nature of 'home' is captured in Ghirri's photographs and in Celati's writing of this period. Celati's narrative 'mapping/ like Ghirri's landscape photography, avoids aestheticizing (turning experience into 'high art') and documentarizing (seeking a mimetic replication of the real in language); instead, the contingent essence of both the nonverbal world and the verbal expression of it in stories and diaristic writings is sought, and this contingency in turn is related to the concept of a true human space of habitation. Celati's stories and diaries all reflect this poetics of the contingent. There is an open-endedness to these writings in distinct opposition to closural narratives, created by means of an emphasis on constant movement through space, shifting perspectives, multiple points of view, and a highlighting of written language's limitations in capturing experience. There is also a strongly philosophical orientation, which could be called both phenomenological and ontological, as Celati seeks, through observation and description of the external, to arrive at some sense of the meaning and place of being. The storyteller does not dominate the stories he recounts; rather, he transmits them in as unadorned a manner as he can, mindful always that he himself is as much a part of the disorienting spaces as is that which he recounts. His task is to organize and thereby to 'dare sollievo' (give relief), in Celati's words, not by constructing deluding myths of comprehensibility, closure, or absolute existential security, but by showing in his tales that the world is always narratable, even if not ultimately knowable. Narration thus reassumes its ancient role of consolation, by showing us that our contingency is our humanity, that a story (even our own) is only one in an infinite number of possible stories, past, present, and future, and that - to put it in an unfortunately cliched (unfortunately consid-

128 Gianni Celati ered so, since it is an importantly true) phrase - we are all in it together, and are all destined for the same end. As Guido Fink says in his blurb to Quattro novelle sulk apparenze: 'Di fatto tutto questo libro e un gioco per abbassare le pretese dell'io, rendendolo perduto o disperse tra le altre apparenze' (In fact all of this book is a game for attenuating the pretenses of the 'I/ rendering it lost and dispersed among other appearances). Celati writes in his brief 'Note' that prefaces the volume Verso la face that 'ogni osservazione ha bisogno di liberarsi dai codici familiari che porta con se, ha bisogno di andare alia deriva in mezzo a tutto cio che non capisce, per poter arrivare ad una foce, dove dovra sentirsi smarrita. Come una tendenza naturale che ci assorbe, ogni osservazione intensa del mondo esterno forse ci porta piu vicino alia nostra morte; ossia, ci porta ad essere meno separati da noi stessi' (every observation needs to be liberated from the familiar codes it carries along with itself, it needs to drift in the midst of all that which it doesn't understand, in order to get to a mouth, where it will have to feel itself to be lost. Like a natural tendency that absorbs us, every intense observation of the external world will perhaps bring us closer to our own death; that is, it will bring us to being less separated from ourselves. Verso la foce; 9-10). This assertion may appear to bring us back to Barthes's sense of death inherent in photography, but for Celati 'being closer to our death' has the positive valence of 'being less separate from ourselves,' and thus better able to live in a world that is not oppositionally hostile, but rather companionably caducous. These emphases reappear in the video film, Strada provinciale delle anime, to which I now turn. First, some background information on the making of the film. Celati had spoken for some time about his wish to make what he called a 'pseudo-documentary.' That is, the 'realism' of the documentary would be maintained in terms of shooting scenes and conversations as they occurred, but the film would be constructed according to a highly self-conscious artistic vision. In a recent interview by Manuela Teatini, Celati was asked what aspects of the documentary interest him the most, and he responded: 'Non credo molto ai documentari, perche 1'idea che le immagini ti mostrino davvero come e fatta la realta appartiene a un modo di pensare che non e il mio. A me sembra che i documentari siano racconti come tutti gli altri. Pero mi piace poco anche 1'idea di "fiction" in cui il cinema e irrimediabilmente incastrato' (I don't believe much in documentaries, because the idea that images really show you how reality is made belongs to a way of thinking that isn't mine. To me it seems that documentaries are sto-

The Permeable Gaze 129 ries like all other stories. However, I also don't much like the idea of 'fiction' in which the cinema is irremediably caught (11 sentimento dello spazio'; 25-6). Clearly, the mixing of 'real' documentary and 'fictional' art film forms acts on both, blurring the boundaries between life and art, internal and external. With the financial support of RAI 3, Celati was finally able to produce the film, which was shown once shortly after its completion on television, to what sort of audience response it is hard to imagine. When I saw Celati in Italy in the summer of 1992, he lamented the treatment accorded his film: it was shown very late at night and at least one part of the sound-track mix was missing. He asked that it be shown properly, but so far no reshowing has been scheduled. Celati also mentioned, as a visual reference point, the importance of Edward Hopper's painting to his takes, as he and Ghirri (and the 'tourist-group' cast, made up of thirty relatives and friends) traveled through the Po Delta region gathering many hours of shots that were eventually edited down into the film of around one hour. Let me begin with a bare-bones description of the video. A group of tourists takes a bus tour through the landscapes and towns of the Po Delta. That is, in a sense, it. There is no plot as such; there are no 'meaningful' human interactions or extraordinary occurrences. The film is, quite consciously I believe, about 'nothing.' And, although I have called it a 'silent movie' in the title of the essay that is the basis of these remarks, I should say that it is not literally silent, but rather reaches after the silent, seeks to 'ascoltare il silenzio' (listen to silence), to apply Paolo Valesio's wonderful phrase.11 Celati uses various sounds - music, human voices - as well as actual silences to great effect throughout. The video-story brings together many threads that run through the recent writing: the locales are, of course, those also found in Narratori delle pianure and Verso la face; the dialogues and monologues are often 'mini-stories' which, in being seen and heard on screen, remind us of the basic corporeal orality and presence of storytelling, just as the written texts seek to do; the constant emphasis on seeing and being seen harks back to the interest in appearances as in Quattro novelle sulk apparenze. This film works on our imaginative capacities much more than on a rational apperception of the world. In her excellent study, The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema, Angela Dalle Vacche uses Vico (among others) as a starting point for her consideration of cinematic representation. She reminds us that 'Vico believed that human

130 Gianni Celati beings acquire knowledge only by representing themselves, and by translating mental processes into visible, anthropomorphic forms.' The earliest forms of these self-representations were, however, much more image-oriented than abstractly verbal, as 'this early language was without sound. The visual dimension played a crucial role in this mute language because primitive people had no speculative skills, only imaginative ones ... Vico's sense that the first language of humankind was mute, visual, and corporeal may very well have been preserved in the cinema' (10-11). These three adjectives can be applied as well to Celati's art, both verbal and visual, in which he seeks to transcend the limits of traditional linguistic representations by heightening our awareness of the eloquence of silence, of seeing and being seen, and of the body's role in imagining and reasoning alike. Strada provinciate delle anime uses several means to stimulate our imaginative skills, relying more on the understated and the suggestive than on the straightforwardly expository presentation of scenes. As the film opens, Celati's voice-over tells us that thirty people took off in a 'corriera azzurra' (blue bus) on a trip through the Po Delta 'per vedere in un altro modo' (in order to see in another way). Another voice tells us, 'Non abbiamo visto niente di speciale' (we saw nothing special), simply 'tante case' (so many houses) and 'tanta gente come noi' (so many people like us). As they start out, the tour group's bus comes to a signpost indicating that the road ahead is called 'la strada provinciale delle anime' (the provincial road of souls). In the interview with Teatini, Celati says that the road and its name provided 'a logic for our story' (28). The voice-over commentary tells us that the road 'non porta da nessuna parte' (doesn't lead anywhere). Throughout the video, a varied musical soundtrack accompanies the movement through space, sometimes classical and soaring, sometimes jazzy and dissonant. Diverse voices provide a 'human soundtrack' as well.12 The initial moment at the signpost serves to highlight the literally 'provincial' locales that the group will visit (no well-known or major cities will be stops on this itinerary), but the reference to 'souls' ('delle anime') immediately takes us out of the realm of the solely literal, and into that of imaginative and spiritual journeys. (Parenthetically, one of my students consistently referred to the film as Strada provinciale delle anime perse, (lost souls), thus showing the tenacious influence of a Dantesque perspective generated by the word 'anime.') The provinces in which the film will wander also take on the metaphorical sense of the place of art as described by Fellini (quoted by John Berger in his essay 'Ev'ry

The Permeable Gaze 131 Time We Say Goodbye/ in Keeping a Rendezvous): 'What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one ... it's this in-between that I'm calling a province, this frontier-country between the tangible world and the intangible - which is really the realm of the artist' (18-19). When asked in the interview with Teatini if the provinces can be more inspirational than urban environments, Celati answered: 'L'idea di recuperare la provincia non mi dice niente, perche mi sembra solo una trovata sociologica e d'attualita. lo penso che la provincia sia prima di tutto una categoria dello spirito' (The idea of recuperating the province doesn't appeal to me, because it seems to be only a sociological or timely finding. I think that the province is above all a category of the spirit; 28). As I suggested above, it is possible, then, to see the provinces as presented in the video as a different, more 'feminine' symbolic order, which valorizes imaginative, spiritual 'reality' in contrast to the hierarchies and institutions of the order of the Father. The members of the tour group - now associated with the 'souls' of the road marker - are quite 'normal'; they are old and young, men and women, couples and single people, Italian and non-Italian. They travel comfortably in a typical tour bus, where we see them talking to each other, looking out of the windows, dozing, reading, writing, looking sometimes interested in their surroundings, sometimes supremely bored. The various legs of the journey are identified by means of interpolated written commentaries in the style of silent-film dialogue boxes, scrolls and all. These are not well-known spots, for this is not a part of Italy that has been developed by the tourist industry either for its own citizens or for foreign visitors. As they move 'verso la foce' of the Po, roughly between Rovigo to the North and Ferrara to the South, they stop at little-known places like Goro, Codigoro, Argine Agosta, and Comacchio. They also stop in many unidentified landscapes, where marshy plains stretch out to the horizon and no towns are visible. For the most part, the weather is overcast, misty, and rainy, adding to the sense of being nowhere in particular. When they arrive at a town, they get off the bus, walk around, chat with local citizens, look at their surroundings, and generally show the sort of mild befuddlement that tour groups often show when not being strongly 'orchestrated' by a leader. In fact, it is precisely to this aimlessness that Celati directs attention. As we gradually stop waiting for 'something to happen/ we too become caught up in a sense of aimless motion through space, which can be either pleasant or disturbing, depending on individual expectations.

132 Gianni Celati The sense of solitude in company is also quite strong, for even the couples seem unable to help each other to break through the state of mild disorientation brought on by this trip (and perhaps all trips, especially those not clearly goal-oriented or highly choreographed by an authoritative leader). Although both Celati and Ghirri are in the film, neither actively directs the action, instead more commonly merging themselves into the desultory conversations and casual strolls of the group. As comic counterpoint, there is an 'organizer/ a man with a microphone and a gruff manner of speaking, who throughout the trip tries to round up the errant group, arranges for hotel and restaurant accommodations, and generally does his best to give some order and form to their wanderings. In spite of his efforts, the group members more often than not look slightly bewildered and a bit lost. At a certain point, a voiceover muses: 'E meglio sentirsi persi o guardare solo quello che ti hanno detto di guardare?' (Is it better to feel lost or to look only at what they tell you to look at?). Celati's preference is clear. We, the spectators, thus join the travelers - who are themselves spectators - in having to construct meanings for what we see that depend much more on something like errancy and daydreaming (individual imagination) than on linearity and logic ('grand narratives'). In spite of its unemphatic, understated tone, the film reveals a strong underlying composition. The oblique shots of landscapes, the music, and the voice-over commentaries and casual conversations all work in subtle accord to bring out the main 'topics': life as errancy; genuine seeing as opposed to media-produced images; the basic solitude of individual existence. There are moments in the film that stand out, however, in spite of the overall lack of emphatic highlighting. One of them is profoundly lyrical. The group is gathered around a campfire, obviously enjoying an evening of drinking and chatting. The camera pans to the moon shining down on them, and various members of the group (including Celati) recite Leopardi's 'Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell'Asia' (Nocturnal song of a wandering shepherd of Asia). As the quiet voice begins 'Che fai tu, luna, in ciel? dimmi, che fai, / silenziosa luna?' (What are you doing, moon, in the sky? Tell me, what are you doing / silent moon?), we are drawn into the spell cast not only by the recitation but by the entire film which, like the poem, asks 'ove tende / Questo vagar mio breve?' (where tends / this my short wandering?). The commonality of the group in this scene (and, by extension, our general commonality in the human condition) also resonates deeply with the lines 'tu forse intendi, / Questo viver

The Permeable Gaze 133 terreno, / II patir nostro, il sospirar, che sia; / che sia questo morir, questo supremo / scolorar del sembiante, / E perir dalla terra, e venir meno / Ad ogni usata, amante compagnia' (you [the moon] perhaps understand / this terrestrial existence, / what might be our suffering, sighing; / what this death might be, this ultimate / paleness of the face, / and vanishing from the earth, and losing / every known, beloved company). Existence as spiritual nomadism, as the 'errar' of which the film's itinerary is made up, is similarly highlighted in the lines 'Ed io pur seggo sovra 1'erbe, all'ombra, / E un fastidio m'ingombra / La mente, ed uno spron quasi mi punge / Si che, sedendo, piu che mai son lunge / Da trovar pace o loco' (And still I sit on the grass, in shadow, / and a dis-ease weighs upon / my mind, and a spur almost stings me / so that, sitting, more than ever I am far / from finding peace or habitation). This scene is surely one of the most effective - and affecting - uses of poetry as self-gloss to be found in cinema. During this nocturnal scene, we also see interspersed shots of the earth taken from outer space, and the Leopardian sense of 'solitudine immensa' (immense solitude) is thus visually underlined. The basic errancy of life is also once more underscored as the group arrives next to the town of Contarina, and a silent film type of written comment appears on the screen: 'Certe volte non si sa piu dove andare' (sometimes you don't know where to go anymore). As the group waits for arrangements to be made at a local restaurant and hotel, the vacuity of so much of human speech is summed up in the soundtrack overlay of droning voices of newscasters whose 'blah-blah' is in painful contrast to the 'silences' of the film. The group ends up, appropriately enough, at a desolate little beach bar named 'Bar Ultima Spiaggia' (The Last Beach Bar), where a paltry, rundown amusement park is another painful contrast to the natural beauty we have seen throughout the trip. As the film moves towards its close, Celati thus brings out those aspects of human-made, commercial 'reality' most in opposition to his vision. A story is told (again, in the form of a voice-over) as the group leaves the bar for the last bus ride; the story implicitly speaks to the issue of the falsity of media images and the harm they do to real human beings. A woman has a husband who watches variety shows all the time on television. He especially watches 'le donne mezzo nude' (half-naked women) and the wife feels like an old rag - 'uno straccio' - in contrast. Finally, she tells her husband, 'O me, o la televisione' (me or television), but he thinks she is overreacting and takes her to a doctor who prescribes tranquilizers. Her husband continues to watch the half-

134 Gianni Celati nude women on television each evening, and the drugged-up woman takes to wandering 'da sola per gli argini' (alone around the embankments). The woman recounting the story says she has seen the socalled crazy wife wandering about 'come un'anima in pena' (like a soul in pain). Are we also 'anime in pena/ alone, unseen, invisible in a world of hyped-up, false images? There is a leit-motif that runs throughout the film: the group photos shot by Ghirri at almost every locale. At the end of the film, these photos are displayed in an abandoned villa, used as a German command post during the Second World War, while a story about invisible people is recounted. The group has felt their collective 'invisibility' as they moved through the diverse spaces of the trip, their lack of impact or effect on the places they arrived at, saw, and left. Yet the story, told by Celati as a dream he had (more or less the same story recounted in his 'Verso la foce'~ discussed above), speaks of the tenacity of the invisible, the 'phantom effect' that the past presences of people produce on landscape and human-made places alike. He says that he dreamed of 'posti spopolati' (unpopulated places) containing 'popolazioni invisibili' (invisible populations). When he is asked in the dream how he knows that these invisible people are there, he answers: 'Me le sento addosso' (I feel them weighing on me). The setting itself is rife with such 'phantoms/ filled with signs of the Germans' presence, just as the photographs capture the past presence of the group in the many places they visited. As I have indicated in preceding discussions, Celati has written of history as precisely these spatial traces, countering the more traditional view of history as 'una successione ininterrotta di eventi collocabili in un continuum cronologico' (an uninterrupted succession of events [that can be] ordered into a chronological continuum). If historical writing is to preserve the absolute alterity and 'pure externality' of that which is past, then we need a spatial concept because 'e proprio in quegli spazi emarginati o semplicemente ignorati della memoriatradizione che risiede il diverso senza il quale la storia e tautologia' (it is precisely in those spaces [that are] marginalized or simply ignored by memory-tradition that difference resides, without which history is tautology) ('II bazar archeologico'; 14). In an earlier scene with a mayor interested in developing a saleable, commodified image of his town and the natural areas around it, Celati speaks animatedly of the wrong-mindedness of such a desire, as if packaging an image robs it of its invisible soul, just as photography is viewed as soul-robbing by certain peoples. In what is no doubt the film's most

The Permeable Gaze 135 assertive scene (which comes just before the 'Leopardi' scene), Celati rails against this 'Americanization' (read commodification), while the mayor insists that tourism is needed to bring money into the depressed area, and that poetry cannot save the world. Celati's film seems to suggest that a 'poetic' emphasis on the invisible soul of the world, which we can catch glimpses of only if we surrender completely to a disempowerment of assertive subjectivity, may not 'save the world/ but late capitalistic approaches have certainly gone far in ruining it. The ecological concerns subtending the film are thus subtly brought out; these 'underdeveloped' marshes and unvisited towns of the Po Delta are obviously loved by Celati precisely for their invisible resonance and their lack of 'tourist appeal/ even while they are lamented as being on the verge of losing their soul to commercial visibility. My comments have underlined the thematic and philosophical similarities, the shared stylistic preference for understatement - verbal and visual - and the structural errancy of both texts and film. What further brings these works together is their creation of a mode of reception among readers and viewers that depends on openness to categories of experience that counter more traditional categories activated by literary 'high art' and mass media alike. Where literature and the media commonly have a sort of horror vacui, Celati embraces voids: silences, empty spaces, 'vacuous' speech and scenes. Seeing and being seen are most often allied to a concept of the self - be it author or consumer - as dominant and self-assertive subjectivity; Celati looks instead for the invisible in the visible, and for the shareable, and the permeable, whether natural or human. In 1998, Celati's second video appeared. Entitled Tl mondo di Luigi Ghirri/ it is a moving visual tribute to his late friend. This very personal documentary includes both family members and other fellow travelers of the photographer, who explore the landscapes so dear to him as they celebrate his art. There is a delicacy of tone and vision in this video that is difficult to capture in words; everything is understated, and sweetly, even at times comically elegiac, while maintaining a supremely poetic quality. The pamphlet that accompanies the video tells us that it 'was developed with the way of seeing that Ghirri himself suggested, and taught with his photographs: the development of a vision of the ambience that is an affectionate way of looking at things.'13 Friends and admirers of Ghirri were invited to various places dear to him: the castle of Fontanellato in the province of Parma where

136 Gianni Celati there is a camera oscura dating from the early nineteenth century (a room from which, through a small hole, one can view the piazza and see its projection upside down, as if through the lens of a camera, and which for Ghirri showed that photography is not only a modern technical invention but also a very old idea of vision); the plains and architectural constructions around Reggio Emilia; the banks of the Po river. People close to Ghirri provide a running commentary on these places, which were loved and photographed so often by their late friend, and the video ends with an open-air banquet, held on the Po riverbank on a spring evening, at which photographs by Ghirri are projected onto a fluttering cloth screen whose ripples in the light wind capture a beautiful sense of evanescence, much as Ghirri's art sought to do. Celati could not have found a more fitting way of remembering and honoring Ghirri than by means of this video made up of the locales and landscapes of the photographer's life and work, commented on by those who were closest to him and to his vision. The places and landscapes we see as we view the video are also being seen within the video by the affectionate gazes of Ghirri's companions in life and art, so that the mediated and 'already seen' nature of the world is implicitly highlighted. Celati manages to bring out the existential and philosophical nuances of Ghirri's work not by overtly stating them, but by making them come alive to our sight through the everyday locales and simple words of the video's participants. If this video is ultimately very moving, it is precisely because it avoids the traditional rhetoric and structure of memorials (eulogies; solemn remembrances of Ghirri's art; tearful farewells), opting instead for a companionable little journey through the spaces that inspired Ghirri and, through his work, which led others to see those spaces 'as they wish to be seen.' Near the end of the video, as we watch old footage of Ghirri himself at work in the landscape until he disappears out of the camera's view, and the slides of his photographs shimmering on the wind-blown cloth screen, a sense of celebration intermingled with a sense of profound loss leaves us both elated and contemplative. (I saw the video with a group of my graduate students and use the plural 'we' to describe our collective response.) There is no better tribute to a mentor than showing how well his 'lessons' have been internalized, and Celati's video does just that, with extraordinary grace and palpable affection. In conclusion, I want to comment briefly on the ethical as well as aesthetic implications of Celati's poetics of the contingent, based on a

The Permeable Gaze 137 'permeable gaze/ In doing so, I hope to begin to counter some views of ontological postmodernist thought that see 'weakened' approaches to being and creating such as Celati's as resigned or irresponsible, and bereft of ethical or political force. The external world, like us, is embodied in materiality, and we living humans share in what Celati might call the absolute condition of presence. The best, perhaps, that we can ever do with things, places, and people is to recognize what Melville named the 'unconditional democracy of all things' and what Celati explores in his writings and video work as the 'state of potential' of silent things. In the last words of the introduction to 'Bartleby,' Celati writes: 'La potenza sta in cio che viene tenuto in riserbo, sta nel riserbo che tiene sospese le forze e i moti espansivi dell'io' (Power is found in that which is held in reserve, it is found in the reserve that maintains in suspension forces and expansive motions of the T; xxvi). Learning to respond to the external appearances of things and places - not to speak of other people - with full respect for their separate beingness. means shedding expectations of systematizable 'meanings' and ultimately clarifying revelations. A permeable subjectivity is not resigned to inaction or to being passively overwhelmed by otherness and by that which is external to the self. Rather, one's subjectivity is open to the difference of other subjectivities, not only those in the present, but also those of the past that have contributed to our habits of ways of seeing and understanding. This is not indifference, this is not irresponsibility; this, I think, is attuning ourselves to literal conviviality. For if Being is truly recognized as democratic - everything and everyone equally are then violent pre-emption and dominance of things and others will perhaps diminish. Celati's 'silent movie about nothing/ with its refusal of a masterful mentality, its 'caress to the world' in shots of the external made with a respectful gaze, and its implicit valorization of being, as well as his Po valley writings and his video tribute to Ghirri are, I think, significant contributions to the creation of another way of looking, both for the creator and for the audience. This phase of his work quietly posits modes of seeing and being that have philosophical and ethical resonance far beyond the dominant aestheticizing and documentarizing tendencies of so many of the contemporary literary and media-orchestrated representations of experience to which we are more accustomed.

4

A Family of Voices: Celati's 'Parents/ 'Siblings/ and 'Children7

'We are always using the words which come from everybody else - stories, anecdotes, descriptions - so we are always mixed up with other people, and that's why this idea of the author who is the owner of his own words, his own style, is something like a natural catastrophe if you consider that language is a natural thing.' Gianni Celati1

'Writing, as defined by the literary industry, is all about individuals. I own my writing; that is copyright... [But] to write is to write to another. Not for another, as if one could take away that other's otherness, but to another ... The loss of friendship, the giving over of friendship to business based on individualism, has caused loss of energy in the literary world. Think, for a moment, with how much more energy one does something for a lover or for a close friend than when one acts only in the service of oneself.' Kathy Acker2

We first learn that 'we are always mixed up with other people' from our experiences as members of a family. It is a common reaction, however, to be annoyed or even insulted if we are told that we look or sound much like our parents or our siblings, for this kind of observation seems to imply that we are not uniquely 'ourselves/ but rather are determined in some fundamental way by our origins, our shared genes, our relations. Celati, on the other hand, not only accepts the idea that we are always replicating elements that come from a wide web of connections, he actively embraces this commonality, especially as it

A Family of Voices 139 pertains to the use of language. His relation to other writers is revealing in this regard; he has translated many works, especially from the English, American, and French traditions, and he has written widely on many writers, living and dead, with whom he has felt an affinity. I therefore employ the metaphor of the family in my title as a way of organizing the discussions of some of these works that follow, as well as in order to put into focus the connective approach that Celati takes to the writing of others. As one of my epigraphs, taken from Kathy Acker, shows, however, I also thought of using the metaphor of 'friendship/ deciding against it in the end because I wanted to make certain 'genealogical' distinctions that do not work well in the context of relations based on friendship, which tends to transcend the generational and chronological differences implicit in families. Nonetheless, the metaphor of friendship does apply as well, as seen in the fact that Celati has written on and translated mainly those other 'scriveners' whose voices speak to him in companionable ways, for he has stated that it is a question of Voice' for him: 'Our problem with language concerns rhythms and voices and tonalities ... voices in the sense that nobody can read a text without hearing a voice - some kind of voice or different voices' (Lumley interview, The Novella and the New Italian Landscape'; 45). I'll investigate more fully the issue of Voice' in the following chapter (where I tie it in with related topics such as orality and theatricality in Celati's writing); in this chapter, I want instead to give names to some of the voices that make up a sort of system of kinship with Celati, studying both his work on them and elements in their work in common with his writing that I have discerned. This 'family' is composed of living and dead writers, Italians and non-Italians, women and men, those who came before Celati as 'parents,' those with whom he has a 'sibling' status, and those who are like 'children' to him. Many of the family members will merely be mentioned, for there are too many to be able to fit them all into the confines of a chapter. Unlike real families, this (very extensive) one is based on elective affinities, preferences, choice; in this sense, it is of an 'ideal,' even Utopian 'family home' in language that I write. I begin by listing some of the voices that enter into this family romance. Of the many fathers to whom Celati has paid homage by means of translations or essays on their writings, three of the most important - Melville, Beckett, and Kafka - have already been discussed in an earlier chapter.3 Calvino's shaping presence has also been alluded to, and I shall have more to say about this 'father' below. Celati

140 Gianni Celati has also translated and written commentary on works by Swift, Stendhal, Celine, and Jack London, among others. He has commented on Delfini, Imbriani, Manganelli, Tomaso Garzoni, Ariosto, Boiardo, Flann O'Brien, Joseph Conrad, and Milan Kundera, all of whose writing has resonated in his own work in a variety of ways, some as 'fathers/ some more as 'brothers.' The 'siblings/ on whom for the most part Celati has not written, but to whom he has referred in formal interviews or informal conversations, include Angela Carter, John Berger, Patricia Highsmith, and Susan Sontag (here we see that the sisters outnumber the brothers). The younger writers who could be called 'children' in some sense include Ermanno Cavazzoni, Marco Belpoliti, and Daniele Benati, as well as others who contributed to the volume Narratori delle riserve and to the almanac, // Semplice. Looking at this admittedly highly constructed - genealogy, it is not without interest to note certain immediately discernible contours that shape the 'line' of the Celatian family. The Italian literary tradition is well represented by many writers from past centuries, but, with the salient exception of Calvino, there are very few other writers of this century or, particularly, of Celati's own generation to whom he has dedicated overt attention. It is equally clear that his early academic interest in French and Anglo-American literature has continued to determine to a fair extent his preference for writers in these traditions. There are few women writers about whom Celati has expressed either formal or informal interest, apparently feeling more affinities with other, often less mainstream male writers such as Imbriani, Delfini, and Flann O'Brien. The women writers most often mentioned to me (and I presume to others) have been Patricia Highsmith, Susan Sontag, and Angela Carter, all of whom are considered 'eccentric' to one degree or another: they are certainly not easily inscribed into mainstream or traditionalist fictional modes. It is also evident that Celati has written most often about other prose writers or narrative, epic poets; lyric poets and playwrights are not generally included in his published meditations on the writing of others (in spite of the fact that he moves into these genres in his recent book, Recita dell'attore Vecchiatto, thus manifesting a strong interest in poetry and theater). The obvious exception to this rule is the poetry of Leopardi, another of Celati's important 'voices' throughout his career. Generalizations such as I am making here are approximate and partial, of course; they do not acknowledge the vast depth and breadth of Celati's literary erudition, nor do they indicate that writers from other traditions - for example, German and Austrian writers such as Peter

A Family of Voices 141 Handke, Robert Walser, Bertold Brecht, or writers from Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, the Ukraine, and other Eastern European countries whom, as Celati wrote to me in the fall of 1997, he had occasion to meet at a recent conference in Finland - also find some space in the family 'home/ No simple limit can be placed on the extent of Celati's interest in the writing of others, nor on his readiness to enter into collaborative work, whether it be on a specific project, such as with Ghirri or with those involved in the almanac, // Semplice, or in less formal exchanges, such as those he had with Calvino and Carlo Ginzburg in the late 19605 and early 19705 or with Benati and Cavazzoni later on in the context of the 'Narratori delle riserve' rubric in // Manifesto and subsequently in the volume of the same name. When he has taught in France and the United States, Celati has given seminars on a wide variety of literary topics, genres, and eras, including the Renaissance epic, Leopardi, and French literature. In listing specific writers, my goal is merely to highlight those voices to whom Celati has dedicated concentrated and extended attention, rather than to suggest that these are the only writers for whose works he feels affinities or to whom he has directed his critical interest. The following pages will follow the 'family line' only in regard to a very few of the members of what is, finally, a remarkably extended and diverse family. 'Fathers' Calvino, the Cogitator Italo Calvino was perhaps the most obvious mentor figure for Celati, a writer who promoted Celati when he began his published career, and one with whom Celati continued to carry on critical and creative dialogues until Calvino's death in 1985. In actual age, Calvino is chronologically more an older 'brother' to Celati than a father (he was born in 1923, Celati in 1937), yet his position as an already quite famous writer at the time of Celati's debut in the early seventies, as well as his wealth of literary experience in earlier contexts, such as neorealism, which Celati was too young to have been a part of, meant, I believe, that he played more of a parental than a sibling role. Celati did not in any way directly model his writing on Calvino's; indeed, he tended more often than not to disagree with his mentor's choices and directions as a fiction writer. Yet they shared a critical bent, a need to theorize on literary topics, and a drive constantly to renew their own writing and to inter-

142 Gianni Celati rogate the directions of contemporary Italian literary culture. Calvino's postface to Celati's first published fiction, Comiche, reveals his admiration for Celati's talents as a thinker about literature, and his words could just as well have been applied to Calvino himself: 'Celati... has revealed himself as an extraordinary personality, [that ] of the elaborator of literary theories and [that] of the polemicist, [who is] inexhaustible in his proposals and in the richness of [his] references and suggestions.' Calvino was equally 'extraordinary' as a critical thinker about and theorist of literature; the richness of his own thought is seen in collections of his essays such as Una pietra sopra, Lezioni americane, and La strada di San Giovanni, in which we find theoretical elaborations extending from the fifties up to the last year of his life. I have already briefly discussed Calvino's and Celati's collaboration, along with Ginzburg and others, on topics relating to historical representation and archeological approaches to knowledge, as well as on the creation of a literary journal; they also collaborated in later years, although less formally, on the problematics of literary description, phenomenological approaches, and other issues of concern to both. Celati's writings on Calvino are not extensive, but there exist a few pieces and some informal commentary, on which I want now to focus my attention. These date mainly from the period shortly before Calvino's premature demise in 1985 to the late eighties, and are in great part tied to the writers' mutual interest in moving writing into the space of the external, the visible, and the describable; in short, the period of Palomar for Calvino and that of the collaboration with Ghirri and the resultant works discussed in the preceding chapter for Celati. In my unpublished 1985 interview with Celati he spoke at some length about Calvino and this conversation serves as my starting point. I then move first to his 1984 essay on Palomar and subsequently to a brief consideration of Calvino's involvement in the Po valley volume, Esplorazioni sulla Via Emilia, before returning to their collaboration on the proposed journal, All Baba, and concluding with Celati's piece in the journal Riga on Calvino's death. In the taped interview I did with Celati in 1985, shortly after the appearance of Narratori delle pianure and the death of Calvino, he spoke both about his work with Ghirri and the writing that resulted and about more general problems relating to contemporary Italian literary culture. 'Permeability/ and 'soft monumentality' were terms that again entered into his description of what he was trying to do in his recent writing, and he spoke of liking writers who have no pretensions of pre-

A Family of Voices 143 senting a 'meaning' in their works, but who instead 'succeed in dissolving the pretense of calling the other toward a meaning.' Moving into a wider discussion of contemporary Italian culture, Celati noted the fairly recent disappearance of a strong, shared, humanistic education and, along with it, of a space for literary creation and reception based on more or less universally shared humanistic culture, the place of which had been taken over in great part by the cinema and then by industrialized literature. Italy had until the last half of this century a firmly fixed Institution of Letters based in large part on the strong concept of the Author and a literary language distinctly separate from the language of everyday life. Literature tended to occupy an elite zone of high cultural, academic discourses. Celati saw the renewing work of the sixties' avant-garde (Gruppo 63 and others) as concentrating primarily on a critique of dominant narrational modes, rather than on finding 'credible narratives' and a new 'dignity for narrative' in a context that was increasingly being taken over by the commodification of literature (according to the American model, Celati believes). He spoke of the 'colonizing' of Italian literary-critical work in those years by Trench metalanguages' (which was reflected in his and Calvino's cases by many years of work on figures such as Foucault, Derrida, Barthes, and other French theorists, as we have seen), and he called this tendency a desire to maintain in Italy an 'esprit de finesse' that, he asserts, in the end 'ha bloccato molto' (blocked a great deal) of what might have been work directed towards finding some 'space of habitability' (dimora) for Italian narrative in the radically changed context of contemporary Italian society. In the immediate post-war period during which writers such as Vittorini and Pavese (and the very young Calvino) were writing, the Crocean concept of 'poetry' still dominated and narrative prose could find dignity 'only in its more or less direct reflection of immediate realities.' Somewhat later, according to Celati, Calvino succeeded in making a clear and incisive 'clean break' (taglio) with what had come before, not only by means of his 'natural talents as a narrator' (which Celati says he had more than Pavese, and, indeed, more than any others who wrote in the late forties and into the fifties), but also by 'recuperating a space of narrativity' for Italian storytelling through his work on Italian fables: 'If my hypothesis is true, that one of the tasks of this culture has been to recuperate a space of narrativity that might be legitimated, then from this point of view the break that Calvino makes in our culture, both with his first books and with the [collection of] Italian fables, is very decisive. Because the essence of his

144 Gianni Celati importance is there, [deriving from] the fact that starting with him a free space opens up/ Celati analogized the effect of Calvino's work to that produced by the Grimm brothers in German literary culture (he called using this analogy a way of 'grasping the question in an archeological manner'). Calvino (and Manganelli, another important reference point in this discussion) refused to 'take as a given the institution of Italian literature ... instead they continually kept it in play in order to clear out a little free terrain, something that, by the way, is not done in the academic setting/ Celati again uses an analogy from the Englishlanguage tradition, which, at the time of Henry James and Joseph Conrad, 'was frozen by a language that had become specialized. [I ] think that this is the problem of the literary institution/ The American James and the Polish Conrad 'unblocked' the English language and aided in rearticulating a 'lingua franca' that had a liberating effect on English prose. (It should be recalled that Calvino wrote his university thesis on Conrad, and it may well be that his thoughts on the Polish writer were important for Celati's view of the latter.)4 Similarly, Celati sees the problem that Calvino's work affected positively as 'on the order of language that we possess for describing a world there where it might be, not for reflecting [a fictionalized world]/ Heidegger's comment on Holderlin, that is, that we look for language that helps us 'to inhabit the world poetically,' is directly related to the search for this 'lingua franca/ In Celati's view, Italian literary culture has not yet (by the mideighties, the time of the interview) found this 'dimora' or space of habitation for literary language that might aid us in 'adapting ourselves to the [contemporary] world/ although he sees Calvino as one of the most significant figures in redirecting the search in this direction. One of the ways in which Calvino, Manganelli, Sanguineti, and other writers actively rethought Italian literature, especially during the period of neoavant-garde and experimental literary movements of the sixties (Celati likes neither adjective, which he says were 'categories imposed from without' by journalistic and academic critics) was to put into play metaphors and themes having to do with 'the end': of the world, of the author, of literature itself. In fictions by Manganelli and those by Calvino from Le citta invisibili onward (excluding Palomar, which Celati sees as taking a new turn towards the observable world), Celati specifies a positioning of narrative in a sort of separate 'afterworld' to which come echoes of the 'real' world that has died or is made up of nothing but incomprehensible and unrepresentable traces. Celati comments: 'I must say that this is the thing from which I had to

A Family of Voices 145 free myself, and I struggled a lot to liberate myself from this point of departure, which was that of my Comiche and also Guizzardi.' (In these early fictions, we do indeed see the influence of an idea of the 'end' of reality and thus of any form of 'natural' representation of it, as language is radically estranged and distorted in the alienated spaces through which Celati's characters move.) Yet Celati sees this sort of writing - his own and that of a certain Calvino - as having been a 'work of cleansing, of recleansing a space in order to open up a possibility of a "lingua franca," in the service of an adaptation [to reality]'). However, Celati makes it clear that he does not think it accurate to see this sort of 'experimental' literature as a manifestation of the 'margins' rising up to attack the 'center,' dichotomous terms that he attributes to an instrumentalized (leftist) use of cultural discourse that is, in his opinion, highly conservative in the end, in that such ('ferociously aestheticizing') dichotomizing 'evokes all the narcissism of the White Subject, that is, an ecstasy in the face of all that which He is not.' Instead, he believes that the work that he, Carlo Ginzburg, Calvino, and some others did in the sixties and seventies was directed towards 'dismantling this dichotomy/ highlighting instead the fact that all knowledge and all representational modes are now nothing more or less than 'traces,' the contours of which we can only follow and the effects of which we can only inhabit both existentially and in language. Celati acknowledges, however, that Calvino attained the status of 'a kind of monument/ because the so-called center of institutionalized culture valorized him, even if his work could more validly be seen as being carried out in and on 'marginalized' literary-cultural spaces. He recounted during our interview an anecdote that makes clear Calvino's own awareness of this fact: 'One time we were at the seashore, at Forte dei Marmi, and Le citta invisibili had come out and it was selling very well. And Calvino said: "My God!, I wrote something that very few will understand" [ho scritto una cosa che capiscono pochissimi] ... but it's the name of the author that sells, and there's nothing to be done."' Our interview ended with my question of what Calvino might have gone on to do after the last book to be published before his death, Polomar. Celati responded that he is really not sure, although their last conversations had to do with the problem of description, and the last thing Calvino gave him were four short descriptive pieces based on paintings by Domenico Gnoli (more on these below). Celati also said that they continued up to the end to argue about the problem of what Barthes called 'the illusion of the referent.' For Celati, the issue was not

146 Gianni Celati that of an 'illusion/ but rather that of 'the mechanism of common sense [that] makes it such that I hope that you [his reader] imagine something that is there, that exists, if not, then there is the whole problem of narrational "credibility."' Calvino continued to be preoccupied with the problem of the illusion of the referent, as is evident in the stories of Palomar, but found there a way to stop trying to solve it by means of a 'full-proof cognitive grid. Celati ended the interview by telling me Calvino's final words before he went into his predeath coma: 'Vanni di Marsio, fenomenologo ... le rette ... le parallele' (Vanni di Marsio, phenomenologist ... straight lines ... parallels). This was in the context of my question about Calvino's interest in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and Husserl, as reflected in Palomar. Celati's comment on this was that the strict line between philosophical and fictional writing was being broken down, as is evident in the work of Giorgio Agamben and Aldo Gargani, philosophers of 'weak thought' who use language poetically and fictionally in order to express philosophical ideas. I believe that he implied by these comments that it was not a question of applying philosophical ideas to an analysis of Palomar, but rather of reading it as fictionalized philosophy, or philosophical fiction. Much of what Celati had to say in this 1985 interview had already been put into print in his article, 'Palomar, la prosa del mondo/ which appeared in Alfabeta in its April 1984 issue; this essay is the basis for the revised version, 'Palomar nella prosa del mondo,' published in 1987 in the two-volumed number of Nuova Corrente on Calvino, to which I shall also refer. Georges Perec's Especes d'espaces and an essay by Lino Gabellone, 'Gioco del mondo senza giocatori' (Game of the world without players), are also considered in .the Alfabeta piece, in which Celati emphasizes that Palomar is a 'rare example of Italian prose in which socalled knowledge is not used in order to sell judgments on the world, but in order to construct a story about the fragility of every explanation of the external world that we have at our disposition.' Celati reads the book as 'a long goodbye' (un lungo congedo) directed towards the things of this world, which are 'no longer objects of knowledge, themes of life or authorial tricks, but finally ... points of silence, on which we have no obligation to pronounce.' Like Perec, Calvino no longer tries to explain 'how the world is made/ nor does he try to 'reinvent the external by means of fantastic or aesthetic forms.' Descriptions are used in order to 'inventory' and 'organize' the seen, not in order to tell us what they might ultimately be or mean. Mr Palomar's cogitations 'don't get anywhere, luckily/ and Calvino seems to be confessing 'the vanity of

A Family of Voices 147 his [character's] cogito, and of the cogito itself, [that] famous apparatus for demonstrating the foundations of our thoughts/ Celati sees as new in this work a salutary 'grain of madness' that has its origins in Palomar's realization that all of his 'presuppositions' about the foundations of assertions and actions are useless in the face of 'solitude/ 'the power of silence and the implicit/ and 'the limits of the [human] race.' Gabellone's essay, dedicated to Calvino's Se una notte d'inverno, leads Celati into a brief discussion of the topic, which he also brought up in our interview, of 'literature of the end of the world/ He again includes Perec - as well as Queneau - in his comments on Calvino, calling them all narrators who in certain of their works were willing to embrace the inconclusiveness and obviousness of stories. Calvino played on this fact in Se una notte by frustrating our expectation of conclusive stories, instead weaving together a number of beginnings of narratives without any end, apart from the 'obvious' happy ending of a marriage in the frame story. The parodic approach used by Calvino in this book shows, however, that he is still 'inside a modern thematic of the incapacity of confronting the great obstacle, the alienation of narrating/ but in Palomar, he gets beyond this obstacle by having a protagonist who is nothing more than 'an instrument of observation/ thus accepting 'the somewhat comic and unavoidable opacity of the means used in order to capture the external: eyes, images, words, categories/ The external world is 'opaque' to our sight, and our means of 'capturing' reality and sense - must rely on the 'obviousness' of words, systems of organizing experience, and categories, while nonetheless appreciating 'the grain of the weave of words or of lines that veil our gaze/ much as the stories of Palomar succeed in doing. In the re-elaboration of this essay for Nuova Corrente, Celati writes of Mr Palomar's inability to stop cogitating, even when he decides to do so by simply describing every moment of his life, instant by instant, in order to stave off death. He wants, in other words, to put himself 'outside of time' by placing himself at an Archimedean point from which he can play dead, and counting off the instants of his life, but at the very moment that he decides this, he dies. Cogitation thus comes up against its ultimate limits. It is significant, I believe, that Celati, who is an addicted cogitator, sees the step taken in Palomar by another indefatigable cogitator, Calvino, as a positive acknowledgment of the radical limits of the cogito, as both writers move towards forms of narration that respect the ultimately unreachable 'thereness' of externality, beyond whatever cogitations they or we might apply to it.

148 Gianni Celati In the 1990 interview with Bob Lumley, Celati refers to Calvino in explaining why he gave up writing for several years after his work in the seventies: The real reason I gave up writing was that I didn't believe that there was any credibility in normal literature, which is industrial literature, in the sense that you have to accept and take for granted that you are reading a fiction ... [which] then implies that you are in a fictionalized position vis-a-vis your everyday life, which implies you're in a separate position vis-a-vis your own experience. I wasn't satisfied with this idea of fiction and this is why I didn't agree with Calvino. I wasn't on his line because Calvino, on the other hand, was pushing towards a kind of literature which was totally separate from what could be everyday experience, except in his last book Polomar' (The Novella and the New Italian Landscape'; 43). As I tried to make clear in the preceding chapter, Celati's turn to the external world and his work on seeing and describing it 'as it wants to be seen' were ways for him of positioning literature more in line with everyday experience and with the common communicative pacts that we enter into when seeking to reach others. Similarly, this interest in description and spatial perspectives is seen not only in Palomar but also in a brief piece by Calvino included in the 1986 collection, Esplorazioni sulla Via Emilia, entitled 'Ipotesi di descrizione di un paesaggio' (Hypothesis of description of a landscape), as well as in pieces he wrote on four paintings by Domenico Gnoli: 'La scarpa da donna' (The lady's shoe); 'La camicia da uomo' (The man's shirt); 'II bottone' (The button); and '"II guanciale" (The pillow).5 These latter pieces are descriptions of paintings done in the sixties by Gnoli, but they go far beyond 'mere' description, becoming meditations on the meanings we can attribute to these everyday objects by focusing our eyes and our signifying systems on them. (A certain Barthes comes to mind in these exercises.) The task of describing a landscape also becomes a brief meditation on method: 'Ogni volta che ho provato a descrivere un paesaggio, il metodo da seguire nella descrizione diventa altrettanto importante che il paesaggio descritto' (Every time I have tried to describe a landscape, the method to be followed becomes as important as the described landscape' ('Ipotesi'; 11). Calvino remarks that if he chooses to move around in the space he is seeking to describe in order to see it from different points of view, this movement is like the movement of writing itself (as the quotation I used from this essay in the preceding chapter, which emphasizes the spatial and temporal nature of writing, makes clear), and it is therefore 'natural that a written description is an opera-

A Family of Voices 149 tion that distends space into time, unlike a painting or even more a photograph that concentrates time in a fraction of a second to the point of making it disappear, as if space could exist by itself and be sufficient unto itself/ Calvino concludes that, as he moves around spatially in order to describe a landscape from several perspectives, time, of course, is also changing, so that 'a description of a landscape, being filled with temporality, is always a story: there is an I in motion who describes a landscape in motion, and each element of the landscape is filled with its temporality, that is, with the possibility of being described in another present or future moment' (12). Impossible, I think, not to hear echoes of Ghirri's and Celati's views in this piece, so that it might be fair to conclude that Calvino, the 'father,' whose attitudes concerning literary creation so influenced Celati when he began to write in the late sixties, was in turn influenced in his final work by the 'son' whose central goal in the eighties was to find 'fictions in which to believe,' which were in turn tied to a new emphasis on credible descriptions of the visible that might organize the spaces and times in which contemporary life is lived.6 The intensity of Celati's and Calvino's collaboration is nowhere more evident than in their epistolary exchanges regarding the proposed journal All Baba, a project that engaged their energies for several years off and on at the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies. Due to the hard work of Riga editors Mario Barenghi and Marco Belpoliti, we now have available in print a detailed record of the phases of this project: letters by Calvino, Guido Neri, Celati, and Carlo Ginzburg; essays by these writers and by Enzo Melandri; and a recent letter to the editors by Celati, in which he recounts his memories of their work of thirty years ago. (Parenthetically: Celati cowrote, with Ivan Levrini, a wonderful piece, 'In memoria di Enzo Melandri,' which appeared in the third issue of // Semplice [1996], in which the late philosopher's influence on Celati's forma mentis is clear. Celati and Levrini note that Melandri taught them that philosophy can be considered a 'genere immaginativo che fa bene allo spirito' [an imaginative genre that does good to the spirit; 177]). This is the period from which emerged Calvino's 'Lo sguardo dell'archeologo'; Celati's 'II bazar archeologico'; Ginzburg's 'Spie: Radici di un paradigma indiziario' (Spies: roots of a presumptive paradigm); Melandri's La linea e il circolo; and other subsequently highly important revisionist literary critical, philosophical, and historiographical directions. Calvino assiduously critiques Celati's ideas and writings in his letters to his young col-

150 Gianni Celati league, while Celati continues to propose directions and titles for the journal in intermittent correspondence, even when he goes to the United States to teach. The collaborators are all voracious consumers of critical texts, with an especially huge appetite for French thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes; ideas fly furiously between and among them with an enthusiasm rarely seen since. Celati's 1997 letter to the editors of this issue of Riga is an invaluable document, for it contextualizes and explains the origins of the project while giving a very personal glimpse into his close relationship with Calvino. Celati makes it clear that it was Calvino who especially wished to 'ask something more of literature above and beyond the usual routine of successful books' ('II progetto "Ali Baba" trent'anni dopo' [The 'Ali Baba' Project Thirty Years Afterward]; 313). Celati also writes that Calvino's books written after this period are 'unthinkable' without this 'long debate' behind them. Celati and Calvino first met at a convention in Urbino in 1968, where the latter spoke with 'extraordinary enthusiasm' about the events in Paris that May, which made the older writer feel a great sense of liberation, 'as if a weight had been lifted' (313-14). Calvino also spoke of Einaudi's proposal that he reactivate Vittorini's journal, II Menabo, which had been suspended after Vittorini's death, saying that he wanted to do something different, however, which would involve people outside of official cultural circles. Celati notes that Calvino seemed to prefer the company of younger people during this period, and so he sought out Celati, Ginzburg, Paolo Fabbri, Paolo Valesio, and others born ten or more years after him. Thus began the project of AH Baba and the long friendship between Celati and Calvino. Their mutual attraction to the most abstruse flights of theory and to endless cogitation bound them together, although Celati writes that in retrospect he now sees a 'disastrous intellectualism' in his critical and theoretical writings for the project, while he believes that Calvino's 'theoretical flights' were seen by the older writer 'more than anything else as an imaginative adventure' (315). Most striking in Celati's letter is the repetition of phrases such as 'we talked for hours'; 'we chatted for days on end'; and so on. The fervor of these long informal exchanges is captured somewhat in the letters that survived and that are now available in Riga. The complexity, richness, and importance of this project are such that an entire chapter, at the very least, would need to be dedicated to its full analysis. The letters and essays reveal the lineaments of a crucial moment in Italian critical and theoretical work, a moment that can

A Family of Voices 151 be thought of as marking the decisive move from the modern to the postmodern. Calvino and Celati were deeply involved in this seismic shift and, indeed, in some very real sense forwarded it. They traced the fall of 'grand narratives' and the emergence of 'foundationlessness' with all of the intensity, confusion, exhilaration, and sense of promise that colored the late sixties throughout Europe and America. Looking back to this period of fervent work, Celati sums up: Se le grand! costruzioni in ferro ottocentesche erano i segni d'una certezza scientifica senza debolezze - una certezza che si reggeva sull'ossessione dell'acciaio, del duro e del duraturo, dell'esperienza non deperibile, della cosa che rimane e non passa via - negli anni di lavoro assieme a Calvino mi sembra che abbiamo assistito al tramonto di queste ossessioni. II modello teorico-scientifico, il modello del modelli, adesso non ti aiutava piu a vivere e forse neanche a pensare. La routine quotidiana, irrisoria e banale, la parzialita del sintomi che ci legano ai luoghi, la casualita d'ogni espressione e d'ogni passione, la variability d'ogni soggetto umano, tutto cio non riusciva piu a diventare conoscenza, modello, insegnamento storico, per mancanza di un quadro di omogeneita e completezza. Cosi noi abbiamo imparato ad accettare la deperibilita e 1'instabilita profonda di qualsiasi forma di sapere. (If the great constructions in iron of the nineteenth century were the signs of a scientific certainty without any weaknesses - a certainty that was held up by the obsession with steel, with the hard and the lasting, with imperishable experience, with the thing that remains and does not pass away - in the years of work with Calvino it seems to me that we were present at the decline of these obsessions. The theoretical-scientific model, the model of all models, now no longer helped you to live and maybe not even to think. Daily routine, trivial and banal, the partiality of symptoms that bind us to places, the chance nature of every expression and every passion, the variability of every human subject, all that no longer could succeed in becoming knowledge, model, historical lesson, due to a lack of a picture of homogeneity and completeness. Thus we learned to accept the profound perishability and instability of any form of knowledge.) Tl progetto All Baba'; 321

These words may speak more to Celati's current view than to that of Calvino at the end of his life, for the latter went on looking for conceptual and structural grids by which his writing might capture and order the lived world.7 Nonetheless, it is true that Palomar reveals a turn to parody in relation to the limits of cognitive models, and an

152 Gianni Celati ability to show the 'craziness' of a character who, like his creator, would still wish to overcome the chaos, instability, and fragility of human experience. Celati's public 'congedo' or goodbye to Calvino took the form of a piece called 'Morte di Italo' (Italo's Death), which appeared in the journal Riga (9, November 1995). Celati's tells us that the piece is based on notes he wrote down a few days after Calvino's funeral 'only in order to remind myself of the situation and the feelings of the moment.' (All quotations that follow in the discussion of this essay are from 'Morte di Italo'; 204-8.) Calvino died in a hospital in Siena, and Celati - with other friends and family members - got there shortly before his death, but did not see him alive. Calvino's wife Chichita told them of her husband's last words, which he spoke 'as if he were still ruminating about something to be written, and at a certain point he said this phrase: "The eyeglasses are the judge." Then a pataphysical comment, in French: "Je suis un abatjour allume" (I'm a lighted lampshade), this, according to Chichita, because the aneurism had made him feel a tremendous burning in his head.' Calvino woke up at one moment and asked if he had had an accident, then told the doctors that he was thirty years old and lived on the Boulevard Saint Germain (Celati comments, 'where he went for a walk almost every evening, when I was in Paris'). The last words, which I already quoted above, were spoken as if he were reading a book, that is, the words were Very clearly articulated.' Celati comments regarding these last words ('Vanni di Marsio, fenomenologo ... le rette ... le parallele') that for Calvino 'geometry was an idea of clarity, and he had little love for the hole in our soul, the dark that we have inside of us. He refused, he refused these things. He liked [instead] I'esprit de geometric, like an upside-down Pascal. In most recent times, he had begun to study Husserl's phenomenology. Vanni di Marsio is a name that doesn't exist: his last utterance says it all.' Perhaps the quality that most distanced Celati and Calvino from each other was the embrace of that 'dark hole' by the former, and the search for geometric clarity by the latter. Calvino was positioned in a coffin in a 'very big room of the hospital,' but 'in a ridiculous way, it seems, [for they had put] lace all around his head.' When Celati went to see him, Calvino seemed 'all shrunken down, and his face was disfigured by a big bump on his forehead, where they had opened it up in order to operate on him.' But, although he was changed in these ways and also because his hair had been cut,

A Family of Voices 153 Celati nonetheless saw 'a trace of his old wry smirk on his lips. People of all sorts began to arrive to view the body, from the prefect of Siena (who was 'rigid as a cod') to the commanding officer of the Carabinieri (who greeted the widow 'in a more human way, almost excusing himself, and then, moved, he went away'); from housewives on their way to the market, to school children (who 'went up on tiptoe to see the dead man'), priests, nuns, sick people, nurses. Celati notes that Natalia Ginzburg was the person he most loved in all that human traffic; Francois Wahl instead seemed 'a tortured man: he grumbled that his mother had died a year ago, then Foucault, now Italo. Sic transit gloria mundi, I wanted to answer him.' Celati obviously has no patience for self-pitying reactions to the loss of beloved others. Celati next recounts a dream he had that night when he and Carlo and Luisa Ginzburg went back to their hotel. In it, Calvino was seated on a tractor that was throwing gravel off to two sides, in preparation for the laying of an asphalt road. The road being constructed 'joined two far-off cities, and Italo had something to do with its construction, as if he were a supervisor of the works'; Celati adds: 'I thought a lot about this dream, in the sense of this road that joins far-off places.' The next day, when he returns to the hospital, 'the atmosphere of mourning still pleased [him]/ for there was nothing organized about it as people of all kinds continued to arrive and 'timidly look at the dead man.' But a drastic change in atmosphere occurred that night, when Celati saw arriving on the main piazza 'four figures of high culture, looking like big parasites who were ashamed of being there, who were ashamed of death. They seemed to be dogs with their tails between their legs, not because of pain or sadness, but because mourning embarrassed them. One of them even said these precise words to me: "You know, death seems to me a dirty thing, undignified and anti-aesthetic."' The next morning things had gone from bad to worse, as newspapers began to report the death of Calvino, 'but there wasn't one single article worth reading/ This was so, according to Celati, because his friend had become 'the symbol of a privilege, the symbol of literature as a worldly privilege, a mirage that was beginning to be put back into circulation for the first time since D'Annunzio's era/ The comments that follow are, I think, worthy of being cited at some length: [Calvino] who for so many years had derided the mania of 'becoming a writer/ who had tortured himself so as not to give in to the ease of the 'famous name/ now had become himself a trap. There is a return to

154 Gianni Celati D'Annunzian mythologies in an industrial form, literature officially figures among the advertised products for consumers, from now on there will only be this mounting of 'names of renown' that are waved about in the newspapers. And all those aspiring to the worldly privilege of the role of 'writer' now pop out like mice in search of cheese ... I saw that now Italo was completely in the hands of [our men of culture, the haute bourgeoisie, the great parasites], he was a dead man of the Great Caste ... They spoke only of books, of their books, of their successes, of their superior knowledge, of articles in the newspapers, of the things that one should be reading, that one should not be reading. They were so absorbed in their trafficking that the context of mourning didn't even graze them one little bit.

Celati went with the Ginzburgs to the little seaside cemetery in Castiglione della Pescaia, on the Ligurian coast not far from Calvino's childhood city of Rapallo, but even there, in spite of flyers produced by order of the mayor of the town that spoke of Calvino as a 'local author/ nothing was in the least like 'a small-town rite, [instead] everything stank of publicity and worldliness.' Nothing was left but to escape from it all, which Celati and the Ginzburgs in fact did. Celati ends by explaining that, if he cried that evening, it was because 'everything had passed away, there was nothing to be done, one must abandon this cynical and swindling country.' Yet he still remembers Calvino's 'boyish smirks by means of which he often showed that he was not at all at ease in life, and that he could play the fool when he wanted to. These are things that are not written about in the newspapers, nor do they interest university professors: because our black side, that sometimes becomes our most radiant side, is not discussable in the terms of the famous cultural "lure/" So ends what is, finally, not so much a lament for Calvino's demise as a lament for the way in which he was immediately instrumentalized in the construction of a posthumous symbolism built around his 'Great Author' status, when Celati instead sees him as a writer who consistently sought to escape the limits and the privileges of this so-called status, and to go on seriously interrogating literature's potential both for himself and for the Italian tradition. In spite of his renown, Calvino was, for Celati, an exceptional example of what a great writer is: an indefatigable thinker about and self-renewing creator of meaningful and shareable fictions. That Calvino was one of Celati's 'fathers,' as well as a brotherly 'fellow traveler' is, I think, indisputable; that Celati did not

A Family of Voices 155 and does not simply 'imitate' and model his writing on Calvino's, however, is equally indisputable. They seemed to have had a relationship that real fathers and sons would no doubt envy, made up as it was of mutual intellectual support, engaging disagreement and debate, and unsentimental, yet genuine affection. I detect no 'anxiety of influence' at work in Celati's connection with Calvino; instead, as with Ghirri and perhaps some rare others, Celati gave as good as he got, in an exchange that had little or nothing to do with an avid search for success or official 'validation.' Maybe the best way to say what I mean is this: they cogitated together as well as, if not better than, apart, and the unfinished, open-ended, ongoing quality of their shared cogitations at the time of Calvino's death is the best indication of the fundamental meaning of their interactions over the years, which were ceaseless attempts at exploring the infinitely flexible and complex field of human endeavor known as literature. Garzoni, the Magician of the World Made Words

If Calvino shared with his 'son' Celati a tenacious tendency to cogitate, and to elaborate theoretical and critical ideas about literary creation (as well as a restless and ever-changing creativity as seen in both of their shifting fictional voices over the years), Tomaso Garzoni (1549?1589) might be seen as fulfilling a very different sort of need: the need to traverse, by means of the imagination, the infinite and magical expanses of the world made words. I do not want to suggest that there is a clear-cut distinction between thought and fantasy, nor that such a distinction, if it can be made at all, relegates Calvino solely to the realm of the rational, thinking mind. My point is, instead, that Celati's relation with Calvino is characterized more by their mutual theoretical bent than by their imaginative fictional elaborations; while Garzoni is beloved not so much for his encyclopedic 'rage to order,' but rather for the ways in which his works open up possibilities for 'fantasticating on the incredible variety of the world' (in Celati's unfinished, unpublished essay, 'La piazza universale di tutti i mestieri' [The universal square of all professions] to which I refer throughout this discussion).8 The long-standing importance that Garzoni has had for Celati is evident in his assertion that 'as a young man I read [La piazza universale] ... [and] through the years as I traveled, I often went to look for it in Italian and foreign libraries, because that unfindable book was like fuel for me.' Why a sixteenth-century text of over a thousand erudite pages

156 Gianni Celati should be so beloved of a contemporary writer is a question that lies at the heart of the discussion that follows. Tomaso Garzoni's La piazza universale di tutte le profession! del mondo e nobili e ignobili, nuovamente formata et posta in luce da Thomaso Garzoni da Bagnacavallo was published in Venice in 1585. It is an encyclopedic work that speaks 'of the professions of everyday life, from the most noble to the most vile/ and Celati sees it as 'a mine of words, because there are so many unknown Italian words, from the arts, from science/ even though much of the work is almost impossible to decipher in its 'amassed erudition/ As a young reader, Celati was especially taken with the descriptions of scenes on the public piazza: 'of the spectacles of traveling actors, charlatans and salesmen of "smoke and mirrors"; of acrobats, clowns, mimes, and buffoons; of whores, pimps, thieves, swindlers, and pilgrims who recount shameless lies about their travels. It was a world entirely made of masks, nothing and no-one that wasn't a mask' (in Celati's unpublished essay). The occasion that prompted the writing of this essay was the 1996 publication by Einaudi of a critical edition of this enormous work, edited by Paolo Cherchi and Beatrice Collina: Celati explains: 'I'm writing this article now in order to announce that [the book] has finally been re-published after three centuries, and I hope that my enthusiasm is shared by at least fifty or so people/ He also thanks the recently deceased scholar, Piero Camporesi, who first suggested the undertaking, and whose studies first put Garzoni's work back into favor. Celati describes Garzoni's Piazza as a kind of 'ethnographic work/ in that it includes 'all the habits by means of which a community of humans coheres/ but it is also something like 'an encyclopedic atlas: those great volumes filled with illustrations and information of all kinds, into which we stuck our noses as children in order to fantasize about the incredible variety of the world/ There is 'a fantastic flavor' and 'a sense of the marvelous' in this work, as Garzoni uses the 'tone of a carnival barker, who speaks and speaks at breakneck speed in order to attract the public/ The work is presented by its author as a 'monstrous edifice' (edificio mostruoso), and Celati notes that the adjective 'mostruoso' is used in its etymological sense, as that which is shown (monstrare), as the author 'makes certain rare things appear, in the manner of magicians/ And it is by means of an 'open-minded faith in the power of words' that Garzoni, like Ariosto before him, shows the marvels of the world, which itself can in turn be magically transformed by words that have the power to 'do miracles, alter the course

A Family of Voices 157 of events, and create great enchantments that amaze everyone/ Celati cites a passage that he holds especially dear, and which exemplifies Garzoni's view of the world as word: The thirty-seventh discourse of the Piazza universale is dedicated to the profession of cartographers and cosmographers, therefore Garzoni feels that he must describe the geographic maps of his time, according to the four parts of the world then known. Thus a tangle of geographic names emerges, that for a normal modern reader have no meaning whatsoever, being names attributed by cartographers to often unknown regions, and moreover [names] that are often badly transcribed, wrong, imagined, useless. But when he gets to Italy, and in particular to Romagna, it is important to him to indicate also the little town of Bagnacavallo: that is, the place where Tomaso Garzoni, by profession a churchman, was born and died.' Celati delights in imagining Garzoni as he writes in his little hilltop town, while the immense and unknown spaces of the world spread out beyond him: 'But for him the world is made only of names, which signify only as magic words ... and he sits there writing, not in the midst of the infinite and frightening spaces of which Pascal speaks, but in the midst of names and words that cover all possible spaces.' Words are, finally, Garzoni's 'mask' and, like someone playing his fixed role, this 'mask' allows him to perform 'the recitation that gives him the right to exist in the world, his recitation of existence.' Garzoni's world is not 'the world of facts,' but one made entirely of words, of 'si dice' (it is said), so that all of space and time are filled, and there is no horror vacui whatsoever. Celati notes that this is what occurred once 'on the piazza of a town, where the "it is said" of collective life embraced all things and functioned as a universal intellect.' Thus, the contemporary writer implies that he finds a comforting sense of human collectivity in the vast and erudite collection of words and names put together by Garzoni, for it is finally a work that 'dresses up' (travestire) the world in words, the world that 'will forever remain unknown, forever a fable that people tell to one another in a hundred thousand manners.' Anyone who writes with such a passion for words, no matter what he writes, makes of his words 'a fantastic figuration and vision of the cosmos: because to recount (favellare) means to create fables (fabulare).' I think that, for Celati, reading this vast repertory of professions, names, and unknown and even imaginary places on early maps of the world, is another way of traveling, of moving through space that, as in his Narratori delle pianure, is filled in a Brueghelesque way with teeming figures of life, and is also space in constant motion and transformation.

158 Gianni Celati Garzoni's is also a work that appeals strongly to Celati's idea of experience as that which is always recounted ('si dice'), so that the external world itself is nothing other than the endless 'stories' that we humans tell about it. The world is, in this sense, 'monstrous/ but in the positive sense of that which is revealed and shown (monstrare), and a passion for words can render it magical and 'spectacular/ as, in fact, all externality inevitably is, according to Celati's permeable gaze. In the second part of the essay on Garzoni, Celati brings the Piazza into the realm of this century's fictional modes, and compares the encyclopedic style of writing found in La piazza universale, which creates a 'city of words/ to Joyce's Ulysses and Perec's La vie, mode d'emploi, the latter of which he sees as perhaps 'closer to Garzoni's model/ because of the way in which the material to be recounted in both is divided up and distributed. One of the editors of the recent edition of La piazza, Paolo Cherchi, also highlights the similarity of the text to much modern literature, so that Garzoni has a great appeal for today's reader who is 'educate dai pastiches gaddiani o malerbiani, dalle citazioni erudite e rare di Borges, dal funambolismo verbale di certa prosa baroccheggiante moderna, daH'automatismo di certe scritture d'avanguardia' (educated by Gadda's and Malerba's pastiches, by the rare and erudite citations of Borges, by the verbal acrobatics of a certain neobaroque modern prose, and by the automatisms of certain writings of the avant-garde) ('Invito alia lettura della Piazza'; Ixv-lxvi). Garzoni divides up his 'public square' according to the professions that are practiced on it, and, according to Celati, this 'is similar to Perec's idea of designing a Parisian apartment building, subdividing his chapters by the floors and apartments that make it up.' Celati notes that the building is 'eminently imaginary' because, for one thing, television doesn't exist in these apartments, and he calls it something like 'an old Wunderkammer' or chamber of marvels. Most contemporary novels lack this quality of 'eidetismo' or visually conditioned knowledge, because while being Very visual and cinematographic, they tend toward the typical blindness of the "world of facts": they must use words as positive data, and are blind to the miracle of words.' Celati insists that language is not positivistic, and always has its basis in the imaginary: 'nothing has ever been said that didn't have an imaginative foundation/ The contemporary view of the novel as having to do with the 'world of facts/ and as moving through these facts linearly, 'subordinating the use of words to the thread of facts to be recounted/ in order then to arrive at a 'logical conclusion/ results in fictions that are

A Family of Voices 159 much more 'monological, monotonal, and monoschizoid' than the fairly uncategorizable writings of Garzoni in which there is instead 'a game of limitless accumulation' as seen also in Joyce's characters' wanderings through the streets of Dublin, in Gadda's 'unresolvable tangle/ and in Perec's 'zones [created] in order to be filled with words.' These are all modes of writing in which we can enjoy strolling in a zigzagging manner, without being concerned about getting to a 'logical' conclusion, enjoying what Celati calls 'the illegal essence of life.' The non-linear quality of the Piazza, in coeditor Beatrice Collina's words, gives us 'una prospettiva che non contempla la verticalita e la gerarchia, ma solo la circolarita nella quale gli estremi si incontrano' (a perspective that does not contemplate verticality and hierarchy, but only circularity in which extremes meet; 'Un "cervello" universale'; cvi). Thus can be seen again Celati's preference for errancy, understood as directionless, circular, and nonhierarchical movement through space, and as the acceptance of error as one of the basic attributes of human existence. Many elements in Celati's work over the years are implicitly glossed by his words on Garzoni: avoidance of the linear and logical; dedication to the 'magical' quality of the rich repository of language at our disposal; emphasis on the 'masks' or roles that we play according to our 'preferences' and to the social conventions that label us; the thematic of 'life as voyage' through the ultimately unknown and unknowable ineluctability of human existence. Celati finally calls Garzoni's work 'a picaresque novel,' in the sense that it is a rare example in the Italian tradition of a 'novel about existence as a perpetual swindle, which renders moral judgments useless.' He came to understand, after years of trying to master Garzoni's vast work, that the 'sensation of ignorance' it stimulated in him as a young man 'depended on a most beautiful fraud [made up of] the words into which I was pulled.' The implication is, of course, that this 'fraud' is what we have; words are what the world is for us, and, if we cannot logically 'master' existence, we can nonetheless wander through its endless spectacle with a sense of wonderment, eyes wide open, like those of a child who gazes at a fearful but fascinating monster that might even reveal itself to be loveable in the end. These two 'fathers,' one a seeker of order and a tireless thinker about the task of writing, and the other a gatherer of 'magical' words and a dedicated appropriator of erudite materials, both speak to aspects of Celati's search for 'fictions in which to believe,' and they continue to inform his own work in important ways.

160 Gianni Celati 'Siblings' Unlike the 'fathers' discussed above, the 'siblings' of Celati are often writers about whom he has not written formal essays. It may even be erroneous to call many of these writers 'siblings/ for they are not all necessarily sharply distinguishable from his 'fathers/ in that he also considers them writers from whom he has learned much. I think that the difference may be found perhaps in the more obvious points of similarity between Celati's and these writers' actual writing styles, more than in implicit or explicit poetics. I want, therefore, to dedicate some space to Angela Carter, Patricia Highsmith, and John Berger, while simply noting that Susan Sontag has been more of a 'sibling' in the realm of critical writing, where the interest in Modernism (Benjamin, Kakfa, etc.), for example, has been strongly shared. Carter, Highsmith, and Berger are names that often came up in conversations I have had with Celati over the years, when he would not typically say more than that such and such a book was 'wonderful/ or that I would surely enjoy reading one of their recent publications. Furthermore, with these writers the concept of 'friendship' comes back into play, not only because Celati had (and has, in the case of Berger) actual friendships with some of them, but also because they all share in what Adriana Cavarero calls the feminine symbolic mode of 'narrative friendship/ in which recounting stories is a way of getting at the particularized and unique 'who' rather than the universalized 'what' of human identities. Cavarero explains: 'The self, in the degree to which it is a who and not a what, in fact has a reality [that is] completely external and relational. The self [as] exhibited in action as much as the narratable self are completely given over to others. In this total giving over there is therefore no identity that reserves protected spaces or intimate rooms of impenetrable refuge for self-contemplation. There is no interiority that might invent itself as an inexpressible value' (Tu che mi guardi, tu che mi racconti; 86). The 'externality' and 'relationality' of the narratable self are qualities emphasized in the fictions of Carter, Highsmith, and Berger (and, of course, Celati) in a variety of ways, so that I think it can be said that for all of them the 'neuter/ universalizing realm of patriarchal modes of discourse is fundamentally antithetical to their critical and creative conceptions of fictional narration. This basic rejection of totalizing 'exemplarity' and, on the other hand, their embrace of the ultimate unknowability of individual 'who-ness' or particularity (akin to the Kierkegaardian 'destiny of anomaly' to which I referred in

A Family of Voices 161 the discussion of Bartleby) unite these quite different writers in a bond of 'narrative friendship' that is also, in terms of a 'feminine' symbolic logic, 'sisterly' because outside of the historically and traditionally (i.e., patriarchally) conditioned Western idea of writing as a search for the Authorial expression of a generalizable 'humanness' (the Subject). Angela Carter, the Spectacular Woman Carter's voice is quite literally unlike any other, while at the same time it draws on, 'recycles/ parodies, and 'steals' (in Cavarero's sense of taking from the dominant tradition in order to revise it [see her Nonostante Platone]) a multitude of other voices. Mary Russo quotes Linda Hutcheon's description of Nights at the Circus, for example, in which the latter writes that 'the novel's parodic echoes of Pericles, Hamlet, and Gulliver's Travels ... are all ironic feminizations of traditional or canonical male representations of the so-called generic human-Man' (Russo, 'Revamping Spectacle,' in The Female Grotesque; 161). Because Carter's writing is filled with allusions to 'intertexts from high and low culture' (Russo; 161), it might seem that she is an exquisitely 'postmodern' writer, whose works mirror above anything else an all-consuming textuality, with little reference to extratextual reality. Yet her stories are moving in a way that cold parodies are not; moreover, their very literariness somehow solicits exhilaration, consternation, and joy at the sheer abundance of verbal inventiveness and lived experience both. Carter has been called a 'feminist writer' as well as a 'political writer,' whose revisions of canonical representations of women seek to revolutionize not only literature but also society. These critical views of her work are doubtless useful in the context of literary-theoretical approaches in which creative writing is seen primarily as a source of ideas, themes, and/or 'programs.' In my brief consideration of Carter, I want instead to emphasize her visual imagination, which, in its connections with spectacle and the spectacular, in turn connects her with the 'eidetic' quality found by Celati in Garzoni's world made word. To write the world as spectacle is to embrace its externality, its surface; to write characters who are spectacular is to see them in their 'masks/ by means of which they enter into relational identities, rather than to probe their ostensibly inexpressible interiors. Carter's women characters are unavoidably seeable: they are big, eccentrically striking in physical appearance, decked out in all manner of showy dress and makeup. They are absolutely present in their 'who-ness/ for they can-

162 Gianni Celati not easily be categorized as 'whats' (typical wives, mothers, sweethearts, nurturers, intellectuals, voluptuaries). Their identities are fully external and relational, as they themselves or other characters attempt to 'recount' them, to get some hold on their ineluctable and unique beings. They fly or slither or otherwise escape from the generalizing categories of 'whamess,' tied as they are to their uniquely spectacular and spectacularized 'destinies of anomaly/ If Carter often recreated the spectacular nature of individual identity and of the visible world by means of a richly ornamental, baroque prose style that spectacularized language itself (this approach is akin to Celati's extreme expressionism as seen in Guizzardi, for example), she also used the 'alien' setting of Japan as a staging ground for the wonders of surface by means of which we recount ourselves and are, in turn, recounted.9 In the story 'A Souvenir of Japan' (in Burning Your Boats; 2734), she tells a tale, in the first person and in relatively unornamental prose, of a love affair with a Japanese man, who 'sometimes ... seemed to possess a curiously unearthly quality,' like that of a 'pixie' or a 'goblin.' His lover says, 'I should like to have had him embalmed and been able to keep him beside me in a glass coffin, so that I could watch him all the time and he would not have been able to get away from me.' As unknowable as he was in his surface, exotic beauty ('his elegant body which had such curious, androgynous grace'; his hair 'so heavy his neck drooped under its weight'; his mouth 'purplish and his blunt, bee-stung lips like those of Gauguin's Tahitians'; his skin 'as smooth as water as it flows through the fingers'), she felt herself to be equally unknowable, 'so absolutely the mysterious other. I had become a kind of phoenix, a fabulous beast; I was an outlandish jewel. He found me, I think, inexpressibly exotic.' She had the sensation of being 'a female impersonator'; with her 'pink cheeks, blue eyes and blatant yellow hair,' she was a blaring, alien instrument in a landscape of monotonal dark hair and brown eyes that created 'a sober harmony of subtle plucked instruments and wistful flutes/ Her lover was so physically delicate that she feared she might smash him: 'He told me that when he was in bed with me, he felt like a small boat upon a wide, stormy sea/ Her summation of their intense relationship tells us that she 'was suffering from love and I knew him as intimately as I knew my own image in a mirror. In other words, I knew him only in relation to myself/ The entire city in which they lived seemed 'a cold hall of mirrors which continually proliferated whole galleries of constantly changing appearances, all marvelous but none tangible/ In a culture based on appearances - one that 'has elevated

A Family of Voices 163 hypocrisy to the level of the highest style' - gestures and rituals made it seem that 'if we believe in something hard enough, it will come true and, lo and behold! they had and it did.' As they lived in 'images of evanescence/ she found that the 'most moving' were 'the intangible reflections of ourselves we saw in one another's eyes, reflections of nothing but appearances, in a city dedicated to seeming, and, try as we might to possess the essence of each other's otherness, we would inevitably fail.' Although this story can be read as a meditation on the distance created by deep cultural differences, I read it instead as a revelation of the externality of relations between two 'who's' who cannot escape the limits of 'whatness' (diminutive, masculinist Japanese man; large, physically spectacular, 'liberated' English woman), thereby of necessity bound to fail in 'possessing each other's otherness.' Ceremony; gesture; mutual instrumentalization: these are the bases of relationality, since the 'destiny of anomaly' into which each of us is born makes it impossible for us to be anything other than mirrors to each other, or else reciters of socially and culturally coded roles that permit harmonious co-existence. This is a view of human interaction that is quite similar to that represented by Celati in his stories on appearances, such as 'Baratto,' as well as in his interpretation of Bartleby as a symbol of unreadable, unique 'who-ness.' In another story about the love affair in Japan, 'Flesh and the Mirror/ in Burning Your Boats; 68-74, Carter again writes in the first person about the woman of 'A Souvenir of Japan/ who has returned to Yokohama in order to find her Japanese lover once more. The writer mercilessly dissects her own 'game/ which consisted in looking for 'a climate with enough anguish and hysteria in it' to satisfy her belief that 'unpleasure' was a sign of 'real life/ She found what she sought, for her lover did not meet her upon her arrival, although he was expected. She then took a train to Tokyo, and there, in the midnight rain, she walked about looking for the face of her lover. In retrospect, she thinks she knows what she was trying to do: 'to subdue the city by turning it into a projection of my own growing pains/ She exclaims: 'What solipsistic arrogance!' Deep into what she calls her 'Bovary syndrome/ she imagined some more intense level of 'real' experience, permeated with romantic pain. She watched herself 'experiencing' rather than giving herself over to experience. Yet her image of herself as a suffering, spurned lover is turned upside down by a casual sexual encounter with a young man whom she meets as she wanders about: 'My sensibility foundered under the assault on my senses. My imagination had been preempted/ As she lay in bed with the stranger after they had

164 Gianni Celati made love, she looked at herself in the mirror above her, and notes: The mirror distilled the essence of all the encounters of strangers whose perceptions of one another existed only in the medium of the chance embrace, the accidental. During the durationless time we spent making love, we were not ourselves, whoever that might have been, but in some sense the ghost of ourselves. But the selves we were not, the selves of our own habitual perceptions of ourselves, had a far more insubstantial substance than the reflections we were.' When she finally meets up with her lover the next day, they quarrel immediately, and spend the night in a squalid room that is 'a parody' of the room shared with the casual lover. She felt 'out of character,' but couldn't decide if she felt this way when feeling guilty about the casual encounter, or when not feeling guilty about it. The woman realizes now that her desperately sought lover was really only 'an object created in the mode of fantasy,' and that 'his self, and, by his self, I mean the thing he was to himself, was quite unknown to me.' They soon part, and 'then the city vanished; it ceased, almost immediately, to be a magic and appalling place.' It had become 'home/ and the woman says that, although she continues to 'turn up [her] coat collar in a lonely way and [is] always looking at [herself] in mirrors, they're only habits and give no clue at all to [her] character, whatever that is.' She concludes The most difficult performance in the world is acting naturally, isn't it? Everything else is artful/ Once more, Carter powerfully puts before us the externality of relations with others, and the unknowability of our own 'inner' selves, which our actions belie more often than not. The 'perceptions' that strangers have of one another are conditioned by 'chance' and the 'accidental': by the radical contingency of experience, in short. Like Celati, Carter does not suggest that 'innerness' doesn't exist, only that we are already from the moment of birth materially enmeshed in the externality of the visible world even before 'accident' puts us into relations with others. Through the stories that others tell us about ourselves - implicitly through our interactions with them, or explicitly in their verbal characterizations of us - we learn that we are all 'spectacles' for each other (in the sense of that which is shown and seen, and in the sense of an instrument of focalization). The self is thus 'external' and 'relational,' and Carter's fictions heighten the 'spectacularity' of which we are all part, sometimes by means of literally 'spectacular' or 'grotesque' female characterizations, and sometimes, as in the stories discussed above, by bringing out the estranging effects of cultural, sexual, and uniquely private experiences of difference and

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otherness. That many of her fictions are located in the world of the theater, the circus, or the openly 'unrealistic' realm of the fairy tale or fable is not at all surprising, given her belief in the performative, external nature of existence, as contrasted to the ostensibly fixed, internal nature of essences. Carter's imagination results in works that are often like the Wunderkammer mentioned by Celati in conjunction with his comments on Garzoni's spectacular 'public square'; like her protagonists, we are enthralled by the spectacle revealed to us, and no more so than the spectacle of ourselves on the stage of the 'great theater of images,' which, as Celati would also have it, is our infinitely narratable world, and our only 'reality.' I think it fair to say that Carter's writing appeals to Celati for other reasons as well (and perhaps not at all for the reasons I've suggested above). She was first and foremost a storyteller, rather than an author of some theoretical notion of the 'contemporary novel.' She loved fables, the carnivalesque, verbal wit, and 'eccentric' characters, as Celati does. And, as Salman Rushdie puts it, 'Angela Carter was a thumber of noses, a defiler of sacred cows. She loved nothing so much as cussed but also blithe - nonconformity' ('Angela Carter, 1940-1992'; 5). All of this would have endeared her to the anti-establishment Celati. Moreover, she created a marvelously engaging voice in her fictions, one that is as 'heard' as it is read. Her work lends itself to being read aloud, to being performed, so performative and spectacular it is in its almost carnal immediacy. For me, she is one of those rare writers for whom I feel a sense of lived companiability, as if she herself were bursting through the printed page straight into my own messy room, my own confusions, my own joys and sorrows. I cannot say that Celati was 'influenced' by her, or she by him; nor does such a coldly abstract notion apply, in any case. But I do think that he mentioned her work to me as he did for reasons that help to shed light on his own idea of what writing is and should be: fictions in which to believe, even when they tell us about puppets, vampires, winged women, monsters, and all varieties of 'unrealistic' experience. Carter's courageously outrageous imagination, her inventiveness, and her earthy grounding in the abundant unlikeliness of life make of her a likely 'sister' for Celati, however one tries to define their connection. Patricia Highsmith, Mistress of the Mundane and Monstrous Patricia Highsmith is more appreciated as a 'serious' writer in Europe

i66 Gianni Celati (where she lived for most of her adult life) than in the United States, so it is not surprising that Celati saw her as something other than a 'mystery writer/ Although she is known in North America at least as the author of Strangers on a Train, on which the famous Hitchcock film was based, and perhaps also as the creator of the unforgettable Tom Ripley, I had not read any of her work until Celati mentioned her to me during our 1985 interview. I read her first in Italian (she is widely translated there), having found a very complete section dedicated to her books in a feminist bookstore in Rome. In the interview, Celati called Highsmith's Edith's Diary 'one of the most beautiful books of this century.' He continued: 'It is one of the most beautiful things ever written. I believe that Patricia Highsmith has a precise and clear sensation of the "ontic" dimension ... then, I very much like her use of the panoramic mode of narration ... I think that the best modern narrators are women. Given the problems of our culture, of the sort of life we are living, it is feminine narration that is the most important thing there is. Henry James, for example, is also a great feminine narrator.' These, to me, fascinating if somewhat cryptic remarks, in addition to the tremendous praise lavished on Edith's Diary, made of Highsmith a writer I very much wanted to get to know, if only in order to understand Celati better. What I in fact gained was a genuine and tenacious new love for a writer whose books are among the very few that I have read and reread with always intense pleasure. Patricia Highsmith was born in 1921 in Fort Worth, Texas. Her parents divorced when she was very young and she did not meet her father, Jay Bernard Plangman, until she was twelve years old. Her stepfather's name was Highsmith, and she used his name for years before he legally adopted her, on the occasion of her need to obtain a passport, when her name had to be legalized. She was raised primarily by her grandmother, with whom she lived in Greenwich Village. Highsmith attended Barnard College, where she majored in English literature, but she soon emigrated to Europe and settled eventually in Switzerland's Ticino region near the Italian border, in a town of 250 inhabitants. She died in 1995, having never married. The Chicago Tribune obituary noted that 'Miss Highsmith had no known survivors.' Given the lesbian relationship at the basis of an early novel, it is now assumed that she was gay. It seems that Highsmith is one of those Tove them or hate them' kind of writers. Julian Symons, the British crime writer and expert on the genre, is one of the Tovers,' but he tells us in his study of the crime

A Family of Voices 167 novel, Bloody Murder, that his friend, editor Victor Gollancz, read Highsmith's The Two Faces of January on the advice of Symons, and told him later that he 'intensely disliked' the book. On the other hand, Gore Vidal has called her 'one of our greatest modernist writers/ and 'certainly one of the most interesting writers of this dismal century.' Auberon Waugh sees her as 'something more than a first-class novelist. She represents a hope for the future of civilization' (quotations from Joan Dupont, 'Criminal Pursuits'; 61-6). Whence such strong praise, which seconds Celati's view of her work? It may be that a great deal of the power of Highsmith's fiction derives from her trademark use of the 'double/ and her particularly intense and original variations on this ancient and archetypal device. Examples include Bruno and Guy of Strangers on a Train, the former a psychopath who murders Guy's estranged wife and then expects Guy to reciprocate by murdering his, Bruno's, domineering father. In The Blunderer, Mel kills his wife, while elsewhere, Walter, trapped in a miserable marriage, imagines how liberating it would be if his wife were to die. He eventually does kill his wife, by pushing her over a cliff just as Mel had done; Mel then becomes obsessed with proving Walter's guilt. There are variations on this mirror-image doubling in Those Who Walk Away, The Two Faces of January, and the Tom Ripley books. The intermingling and blurring of the categories of 'good' and 'evil' that result are much more compelling, and more philosophically resonant, than the typical crime writer's strict separation of the realm of wrongdoing from the realm of the Law. Tom Ripley is an especially fascinating character because he contains within himself the two sides of good and bad that are more often explored through the use of male couples. He is a murderer, a blackmailer, a fraud, yet he is capable of generous and loving acts; looked at in one light, he is simply a 'monster/ but in another he is a multifaceted and deeply complex human being. Symons comments on this aspect of Highsmith's writing that 'there are no more genuine agonies in modern literature than those endured by the couples in her books, who are locked together in a dislike and even hatred that often strangely contains love.' One of the most striking aspects of Highsmith's doubles is their ultimate opacity; their creator does not give us any sign that she can interpret and judge their actions, nor does she shed any light on their 'essence/ for descriptions of actions and interactions are her focus. Highsmith's refusal to judge and fix her characters, preferring instead to portray them in all of their ambiguity, is very much akin to Celati's avoidance of psychologizing and moralizing narratives.

168 Gianni Celati Another aspect of Highsmith's fictions that is similar to Celati's emphasis on descriptive and externalizing narrative is her great talent for evoking specific locales in believable and even minute detail. Many European film directors have been drawn to her books, perhaps in part because of the basic dramatic interest to be found in her reverse mirrorimage male couples, but also perhaps because of her representations of spaces that are both highly visual and yet ultimately replete with symbolic allusiveness. Rene Clement, Wim Wenders, Hans Geissendorfer, and Claude Chabrol - in addition to Alfred Hitchcock, of course - have all adapted Highsmith novels to the screen.10 Because of her own travels throughout Europe, the writer is easily able to shift around the locales of her books among many different countries; she has also set some books in the United States, most notably in small town milieus. Her exceptional powers of observation result in descriptions of people, conversational styles, specific places, food and drink, and so forth that are completely believable and often immediately recognizable as highly accurate representations of mundane realities. Within these mundane, known spaces, however, monstrous acts of violence occur, but there is nothing 'sensationalistic' about their descriptions either. Indeed, it is their very understated, prosaic presentation, against the backdrop of an everyday scene, that renders the criminal acts, and, by a sort of 'bleeding into effect/ the locales themselves, eerie and alienating. This may be what Celati meant by the 'ontic' dimension in Highsmith, whereby events are 'appearances' on the surface of given spatial grounds; they simply are, rather than mean this or that definable significance. More than Highsmith's themes, plots, characters, or locales, it is her remarkable narrative style that is most striking. She said herself that 'style' as such did not interest her; in the interview folded into Dupont's 1988 article quoted above, she commented, 'I retype my books two-and-a-half times. I like retyping for neatness and polish, not style - style does not interest me in the least. Emotion is worth more than the intellect.' She mentioned liking Francis Bacon's paintings, perhaps as an implicit analogy with her writing, seeing him as an artist who 'represents what is really happening in our times.' Her prose is unadorned, and the stories are told linearly and without any structural or rhetorical embellishments. More importantly, according to Celati's perspective, they are told 'panoramically' rather than 'scenically.' This means that actions, dialogues, and characters are 'looked at' as they flow, as if from some external vantage point, rather than stopped, staged, 'explained' or 'penetrated into' by a pedagogical narrator. In

A Family of Voices 169 his guide to studying narrative techniques, Frasi per narratori, Celati writes: 'With the panoramic mode of narrating, events flow without much specification, only as a becoming, the line of the story that goes on. With the scenic mode of narrating, events are specified, taken apart in various gestures, points of view, or in various pieces of direct discourse ... and they become a consequence of little acts' (19). According to him, 'showing,' which is allied to a scenic mode, 'is analytical, and immobilizes the line of the story/ while 'telling/ which is allied to a panoramic mode, 'passes with few words from one point of the line of the story to another' (33). He further explained in the interview with Lumley: 'normally when we tell stories in everyday life we don't use the scenic organization very much, that is we don't tell a story scene by scene. Normally there is a scene which is the climax of a story, but instead, in most literature - which is standardized literature, Americanized literature, you are supposed or obliged to narrate scene by scene because it's more like the movies, and has a stronger grip on the reader. Instead, with the Italian novella, Boccaccio for instance, the scene is only the climax of the story; otherwise you have the repetitive experience of life that you have to organize' ('The Novella and the New Italian Landscape'; 42). In Highsmith, the result of her panoramic style is a kind of 'surface' recounting, as events flow by in a predominantly uninflected manner, much as events in daily life do. In Edith's Diary, this daily, quotidian quality is brought out even more than in her other novels precisely by the use of a diary as the primary structuring device of the plot. The fascination lies in the absolutely equal weight that is given to Edith's made-up, happy 'reality' as elaborated in her diary, and to the misery, drab quality, and loneliness of her 'actual' existence. No strict line is drawn between fantasy and real life and, in fact, her daily written version is much more real to Edith than the people and events surrounding her in the 'real' world. Her diary 'reality' eventually takes over her extratextual reality, and she ends up falling down her living room stairs to her death as she carries down an idealized sculpted head of her shiftless son Cliffie for a psychiatrist (brought in by her ex-husband who had left her years before for a younger woman) to admire (this would be the 'scenic climax' described above by Celati). Edith is, by all logical judgment, crazy, yet Highsmith's dispassionate narration instead convinces us of the monstrous craziness of everything around her, of a reality made up of faithless husbands, worthless sons, and, in terms of the broader reality, the Vietnam War, perhaps the greatest craziness of all. Early in the

170 Gianni Celati book, Edith thinks about her diary (before she begins making up her alternate reality) and the narrator states: 'She seldom looked back at what she'd written in her diary. It was simply there, and an entry helped her sometimes to organize and analyze her life-in-progress.' Edith does, however, remember certain entries, such as one written eight years before: '"Isn't it safer, even wiser, to believe that life has no meaning at all?" ... Such an attitude wasn't phony armor, she thought, it was a fact that life had no meaning. One simply went on and on, worked on, and did one's best. The joy of life was in movement, in action itself (10-11). This entry could be read as Highsmith's apologia pro arte sua, and as an implicit allusion to the very style (or lack thereof) of the book, which 'goes on and on/ finding its and our sense of life in sheer imaginative movement and narrational flow. The dynamism of Highsmith's writing, which pushes the narrative forward without authorial intervention, is a basic quality of storytelling as contrasted to the dominantly scenic or staged strategies of modern novelistic modes; Highsmith can be seen, then, as a teller of tales rather than a selfconscious stylist: an approach in harmony with Celati's preference for narration that implicitly or explicitly taps into the great wealth of 'natural' stories that experience provides, and which all of us are capable of recounting as we organize and analyze our 'lives-in-progress.' John Berger: A Voice of the Visible and the Invisible

Berger is well known as an art critic, a screenwriter, and a prolific fiction and non-fiction writer. His books and essays on photography and painting are numerous (About Looking, Ways of Seeing, The Sense of Sight, Another Way of Telling, among others), and his more recent fictions, especially the trilogy Into Their Labours, were highly praised. Interested in the visible and the invisible, in both appearance and existence, Berger is also, like Celati, dedicated to pursuing a limpid, direct narrative and critical voice that eschews trendy theoretical embellishment or self-consciously 'artistic' effects. In his attention to the details of vanishing peasant culture and his long fascination with the ways in which we have access to the seen world he is very much like a 'brother' to the more recent Celati, himself having turned to externality and issues pertaining to elemental communal ceremonies such as 'natural/ everyday narratives of existence. Another quality in common between the two is their avoidance of a concentration on the subjective, specifically on their own subjectivities, preferring rather to seek out shared historical

A Family of Voices 171 and contemporary modes of being and of representing the existent. In my brief consideration of Berger, I discuss only one recent essay, Toward a Small Theory of the Visible/ which Celati read in manuscript form some time before its publication in the Winter 1996 issue of The Threepenny Review. The ideas presented in this piece are very similar to those expressed in recent interviews and essays by Celati in which the visible is his primary topic. It is also not without pertinence to note that Berger is, like the Italian writer, an expatriate, an Englishman who decided to live in a small French peasant community: in short, a self-willed exile from mainstream urban life. Celati similarly left his teaching position at the University of Bologna several years ago and has spent long periods of time in travels to places off the beaten track of 'culture/ such as the Hebrides islands, the French provinces, and, most recently, Western Africa. Both writers are entirely aware of the most contemporary directions in theoretical and critical thought pertaining to their interests, but both prefer to work in settings that are distinctly separate from the institutional centers that generate and sustain such thought within socially and academically validated structures. This chosen ex-centricity is, therefore, one of the salient aspects of their 'brotherly' connection. In his essay, Berger distinguishes between appearances and the existent (All quotations are from 'A Small Theory of the Visible'; 30-1). He argues that today's technologies, which surround us with images, have 'turned appearances into refractions, like mirages: refractions not of light but of appetite, in fact a single appetite, the appetite for more.' Appearances are now 'volatile/ disembodied, unconnected from the physicality of the body and of its real appetite, and, most importantly, from what Berger calls 'Necessity [which] is the condition of the existent.' Instead, late capitalist society 'requires only the not-yet-real, the virtual, the next purchase/ with the result that we, the spectators, do not have a greater sense of freedom but 'a profound isolation/ Berger further argues that until recent times 'all the accounts people gave of their lives, all proverbs, fables, parables, confronted the same thing: the everlasting, fearsome, and occasionally beautiful struggle of living with Necessity, which is the enigma of existence/ Now, existence is no longer communicated in reference to Necessity; we share instead 'the spectacle, the game that nobody plays and everybody can watch/ People are left having to attempt to find the place of their existence 'singlehandedly/ which only deepens the sense of profound isolation in which we live.

172 Gianni Celati Berger next recounts a dream he once had, in which he was 'a dealer in looks or appearances.' He discovered the secret for getting inside whatever he was looking at in order 'to arrange its appearances for the better/ But 'for the better' did not mean making the seen more beautiful or more a representative type of something, but rather 'making it more itself ... more evidently unique.' He believes that painting, more than any other art, 'is an affirmation of the existent, of the physical world into which mankind has been thrown/ and it succeeds when it confirms 'a magical "companionship" ... between the existent and human ingenuity.' This affirmation is the result not of observation, but of an encounter, a collaboration between the seeing and the seen; and the artist is therefore not a 'creator,' but a 'receiver': 'What seems like creation is the act of giving form to what he has received.' I think that it is clear that Celati's belief in necessary permeability is deeply allied to the view of painting expressed here; mutatis mutandis, it could be said that the writer is a receiver, who gives form to what he has received. As in Berger's dream, the goal is neither to 'aestheticize' nor to 'documentarize' the seen (and the heard, when it comes to language), but to find forms of representation whereby the 'itselfness' of the existent can be captured and transmitted. It is equally clear that concepts such as 'expression of the self/ and 'mastery of externality' are radically antithetical to receptivity understood in this way. I best approach the idea of artistic receptivity as described by both Berger and Celati by thinking of it not, however, as self-cancellation or selfabnegation, but as the reaching after a participatory self, an enmeshed subjectivity: the 'infinite fraternity' of Melville or the encircling wheel of all creation in which Dante's own desire and will are caught up at the end of his journey. The self then considers the existent, in the etymological sense of co-existing with the stars (cum sidera), rather than in the sense of either aggressively conquering or passively acquiescing to its ultimate mysteries. If the artist is to be receptive to the 'will-to-be-seen' of the visible, it is also necessary that the invisibility of the likeness be recognized. Berger describes his efforts to draw the face of a friend, Bogena, which he calls 'very mobile' and beautiful, both attributes that add to his difficulties. He cannot draw her well when she is present before his eyes, but after she leaves he finds that she has left behind her 'likeness' in his head, which he only has to draw out. He finally succeeds, and is elated by Bogena's face's appearing, because the face 'had made a present of what it could leave behind of itself (Berger's italics). He generalizes from this

A Family of Voices 173 experience, stating that 'when a person dies, they leave behind, for those who knew them, an emptiness, a space: the space has contours and is different for each person mourned. This space with its contours is a person's likeness and is what the artist searches for when making a living portrait. A likeness is something left behind invisibly/ (This idea is captured beautifully in a poem by the Italian poet Antonia Pozzi, who committed suicide in 1938 at the age of twenty-six: 'E poi - se accadra ch'io me ne vada - / restera qualche cosa / di me / nel mio mondo - / restera un'esile scia di silenzio / in mezzo alle voci -' [And then - if it will happen that I go away - something of me will remain in my world - a thin streak of silence in the midst of voices will remain].) It is possible, I think, to say that 'likeness' is another word for 'representation/ and it can, therefore, again be transferred to the realm of language. If the visible representation of an absent and now invisible past presence is a 'likeness/ then the verbal representation of the silent anteriority of past words is also a 'likeness/ which depends equally on a search for what is left behind. Celati makes this point in the interview with Lumley, when he says: 'Language is a memory, or, better still, a form of recollection ... you don't have or possess a language; you recollect it as a certain possibility for adapting yourself to a flow. It flows and you are in it. In this sense, you get into language, if I can say that, only when you have the feeling that it is something passing by, something that you have lost and you remember' (The Novella and the New Italian Landscape'; 49). Both Berger and Celati seem to be speaking of something akin to the idea of the 'trace/ which for them is not a mystical concept, but rather a fact of the existent as it includes its history (and continuity), its disappearances as well as its appearances. In today's society of the spectacle, the historical commonality of fundamental aspects of the shared existent is lost, so that we are left with neither the visible nor the invisible, but only the isolating simulacra of the virtual. Berger's conclusion is that 'to paint now is an act of resistance which answers a widespread need and may instigate hope/ as, I think it fair to say, for Celati, to write now can be another act of resistance, against the solitude of today's dominant profit-driven idea of human existence that must perforce suppress and disregard the existent in favor of constant 'turnover' and a single appetite for 'more.' These 'siblings/ writers admired and even loved by Celati, tell us much about his own work as it has been 'permeated' by theirs. Carter's exuberant and often outrageous embrace of the spectacular; Highsmith's 'styleless' recounting of the mundane and monstrous in every-

174 Gianni Celati day life; Berger's delicate meditations on the visible and the invisible: all of these qualities are to be found in Celati's versions of likenesses of the existent, not as imitations of given models, but as shared resonances that bring very disparate writers together into a family of voices whose individual members are as different as they are alike, as is true of all kinship. 'Children' Celati played the role of 'parent' in his work of gathering together generally younger writers under his rubric of 'Narrators of the Reserves' in the newspaper il manifesto and subsequently in the 1992 volume of the same name. The term 'riserva' means several things: reserve or understatement; preservation; and reservations or hesitancies. The underlying idea - of a protected space, like an animal preserve or reserve - is akin to the idea of 'family' that I have applied in this chapter, for in both there is a quality of shared and mutually supportive habitation in a congenial space that sustains and forwards existence. Celati uses a quotation from writer Anna Maria Ortese as epigraph for the volume Narratori delle riserve, in which 'home' is a central metaphor for writing: 'Scrivere e cercare la calma, e qualche volta trovarla. E tornare a casa. Lo stesso che leggere. Chi scrive e legge realmente, cioe solo per se, rientra a casa; sta bene. Chi non scrive o non legge mai, o solo su comando - per ragioni pratiche - e sempre fuori casa, anche se ne ha molte. E un povero, e rende la vita piu povera' (To write is to search for calm, and at times to find it. It is to return home. The same as to read. Whoever really writes and reads, that is, only for him/herself, returns home; is well. Whoever never writes or reads, or only on command for practical reasons - is always homeless, even if he/she possesses many. That person is poor, and makes life more poor). Celati gathers his 'children' (although I doubt that he would ever think of them as such) into a 'home' of 'real writing,' while he implicitly seeks to gather us, his readers, into a home of 'real reading.' He informs us in his brief introduction to the volume that 'in this book each writer goes along his/her own road, no category can unite so many diverse vocations, and therefore the totality should be seen as an album of particular cases.' (The concept of an 'album' is reminiscent of Ghirri's characterization of the structure of his volumes of photographs.) The only recurrent element that Celati sees is the fact that in all of them 'writing can be sufficient unto itself, in the sense that it doesn't need to have

A Family of Voices 175 recourse to external stimulation, social or contemporary problems, or some kind of expertise or exciting revelations/ Celati also notes that many of these writers emphasize the 'already written' nature of all writing, which is in turn based on an 'already given and observed' world; he reiterates: 'the visible is always the already seen, and the sayable is always the already said.' His conclusion is that 'writing brings us closer to the reserves of things that were already there on our horizon, before us. And from now on, we can live without new visions of the world.' We have heard these same views expressed elsewhere in reference to his own writing, so that it seems fair to conclude that, like a father, he appreciates traits in these writers that are similar to his own, while nonetheless recognizing how different they all are not only from him but from each other. Younger and lesser-known writers who are tied, like Celati, to an Emilian-Romagnole background, are among those whom we might legitimately call his 'children,' at least in the sense of geographic affinities with the better-known Celati. The two I have specifically in mind are Ermanno Cavazzoni and Daniele Benati, both born in Reggio Emilia. But I think that their link to Celati is more than merely geographical, for the older writer has actively fostered their careers, having found in them a certain consonance of poetics and practice that can, I think, fairly be called 'Celatian.' Both have stories included in the volume Narmtori delle riserve, but this is not a debut for either; Cavazzoni had already published two books (the 1987 // poema dei lunatici and the 1991 le tentazioni di Girolamo, followed later by Vite brevi di idioti}, and Benati had published, among other work, a translation of Flann O'Brien's The Poor Mouth (La miseria in bocca) for which Celati wrote the preface; since the appearance of Narratori delle riserve he has published a collection of stories entitled Silenzio in Emilia.11 Cavazzoni attained some prominence when Fellini adapted his // poema dei lunatici to the screen as what turned out to be the great director's last project, while Benati is less directly present on the Italian cultural scene, having moved to Boston as a lettore or state-appointed lecturer at the University of Massachusetts. Both Cavazzoni and Benati were on the editorial board of the relatively short-lived 'Almanac of Prose,' // Semplice, and published several short pieces in it. All three writers thus have moved in shared geographic and literary-cultural spaces, and the writing of all three reflects a kind of To valley' line, made up of an interest in 'quirky' subjects (O'Brien; inmates of insane asylums [the 'idioti' of Cavazzoni's book]; narrative modes unconnected to institu-

176 Gianni Celati tionalized literature). All three shun rhetorical embellishments in favor of an orally based tonality, which is, in each case, quite distinctive. In his introductory blurbs on each writer included in Narratori delle riserve, Celati presents a short characterization of what for him is the most recognizable quality of the writing in question. Of Cavazzoni, he says that his books seem to belong to 'a literature unto itself... founded on the taste for verbal ravings/ Celati tells us that he first met Cavazzoni in the Ariostesque Mauriziano Hall of Reggio Emilia, where the latter was speaking about his research into the archives of the mental asylum there. These clinical records of the inmates' 'stupifying stories/ written or told by them, are the basis of the stories he writes in Vite brevi di idioti, which Cavazzoni told Celati were absolutely not invented by him. It turns out that the phrase used by Celati in his own writings (and in his video) - 'populazioni invisibili' or 'invisible populations' - comes from Cavazzoni, who used it to describe the people in the inmates' stories. Celati calls Cavazzoni's writing 'an entrustment to words that is subdued, constant, rhythmic and without any anxiousness,' and he calls this entrustment like that of 'someone who stays apart, like a monk, or an asylum inmate, or like a decadent and rather fanciful nobleman, and in sum someone who belongs to an "invisible population" (which is certainly not the population of so-called "writers," a lugubrious tribe on which [Cavazzoni] has written a beautiful parable).' Celati had many years ago tried to capture something like the voice of a madman, in his first book, Comiche, and he too has used such documents of ranting or simply naturally flowing orality (such as that of tales told by peasants) in his own work. We also saw Celati's preference for 'raving' tonalities in his admiration of Delfini's voice, based as it is often on fits of 'grumbling.' The oral quality of Cavazzoni's writing would naturally appeal to Celati, as would its unanxious, rhythmic, and quite naturally comic essence. In Benati, Celati finds instead a tonality that is very much allied to the 'narrative slope of his places' (of origin; i.e., Reggio Emilia). Celati hears in his spoken and written language 'a world of sounds that is self-sufficient, already ready to tell stories,' and he remarks that this may be why Benati got along so well with the Irish, l^ecause they don't fool around either, as to a world of sounds for telling stories' (anche loro non scherzano mica, come mondo di suoni per raccontare storie). Celati says that reading a story by Benati like the one he has included in the volume seems to him 'to correspond to an experience [that is] not very literary [but] a little theatrical. It's like listening to someone

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177

who speaks all by himself for an entire evening, in the locality of Masone, on the Via Emilia, where Benati was born and lived.' Again, it is the natural and oral quality of Benati's writing that appeals to Celati, as the younger writer draws on the reserves of tonalities and rhythms with which he grew up in order to recount stories. Furthermore, Celati's long interest in Beckett (and O'Brien) takes on an even more layered significance when considered in the light of his and Benati's perspectives on Irish literature, in which what Benati has called 'a strong propensity for narration' has been one of its constant characteristics over the centuries, from the cycles of Celtic sagas to oral Gaelic tales and on through to writers born in Dublin such as Swift, Sterne, and Beckett. In a brief but extremely illuminating piece on the recently renewed interest in Irish writers, 'Gente d'Irlanda' (People of Ireland), Benati points out that Joyce's stranglehold on successive generations of Irish writers has been broken by today's young voices; furthermore, the exhortation by Joyce that Ireland throw off the yoke of Roman Catholicism (when ironically he himself produced another kind of yoke for Irish letters) is countered by Beckett's response to a question of why such a poor country had produced so many writers: '"All due to the priests and the English. They screwed us over so royally that they brought us back to life. After all, when you're at the most fuckedup last beach, all you can do is sing"' (28). Reading Celati's words on Benati, and Benati's on Irish writers, a web of affinities between these two writers, and among them and others of long-standing importance to Celati (Swift, Beckett, Joyce, O'Brien), begins to stretch its threads out and around a 'familial' space that is as multilayered and rich as any genealogical map. The 'father' Celati and the 'son' Benati have in turn shared 'fathers' and 'brothers' and even 'children' (as translators, they have both 'given life' within the Italian context to writers from other languages and traditions), so that the interrelationships are even more complex. Of Family, Friends, and Critical Metaphors And so the metaphor of a family of voices, which extends over time and space, takes on concrete contours when Celati's 'kin' are explored. Yet I cannot quite give up on the other metaphor with which I began friendship - for friends are what these voices can be for us, the readers: outside of the immediate family, perhaps, but able to join in a commonality of fictions in which to believe. My dominant metaphor of 'family'

178 Gianni Celati and kinship implies a kind of 'anthropological' critical view of relations between and among diverse writers and texts, while 'friendship' tends more in the direction of a kind of 'ethical' approach. I have not brought up the terms 'influence' or 'intertextuality/ although they inevitably hover around any consideration of relations between a writer and his preferred writers. In this final, brief section, I want to comment further on both the terms I have chosen and those I have not, in order to clarify what I see as Celati's positioning vis-a-vis other writers whom he admires, whose texts he has translated, on whose work he has written, and from whom he has learned about the craft of narrating. At this current juncture of critical and theoretical thought pertaining to literary creativity, the concept of 'influence' is for all intents and purposes defunct, for it presupposes a textual stability and traceable origins that are no longer seen as acceptable views of written language. In the place of 'influence,' the concept of 'intertextuality' has risen up, whereby the foundationlessness and inherent unoriginality of all writing are emphasized. While recognizing the valuable perspectives on literature that both concepts have provided, I have wished to bypass both in the above discussions, for I find them fundamentally antithetical to the idea of literal interdependence and commonality that subtends Celati's work. Certainly, the latter and more recent term intertextuality - is more congenial to Celati, given the literary-critical, theoretical, and cultural moment in which he was shaped and works, and the contemporary perspectives of which are deeply imbricated in his own perspectives. Thus, the way in which intertextuality displaces or cancels out an originating 'author'; its opening out onto other discursive practices, such as philosophy, history, anthropology, and psychoanalysis; and its emphasis on the fragmentary and open-ended nature of textuality are all discernible in his poetics and practice. Yet, on the other hand, the concept of intertextuality is not congenial to the existential, communicative, and ethical (humanistic) goals to which Celati is oriented, for it concentrates heavily on the purely linguistic, non-referential essence of linguistic expression. As is clear in many of Celati's comments, and specifically in those having to do with Calvino's perspective, he wants to get beyond the problem of the 'illusion of the referent' by turning to what he himself calls a sort of 'common sense' view about the organizational and communicative functions of narrative. His interest is in finding ways of narrating that do not simply reflect the existent (in what would be a naively mimetic approach), but rather ones that simultaneously draw upon and assist

A Family of Voices 179 our actual perceptual and explanatory modes collectively used in inhabiting the existent. Again, the idea of 'fictions in which to believe' emerges as one of central importance to this perspective; these fictions are sought not because they are fixable and verifiable truths about existence, but because they are 'credible/ and provide us with a sense of orientation and, possibly, meaning, even if these latter are also illusory, just as direct imitations of the real would be. Celati writes stories not in order to underscore what is perhaps (as he implicitly recognizes) the infinitely self-echoing and self-mirroring essence of endless intertextuality, but in order to tap into narrative's potential to make life more livable. He is, in a very real sense, poised between a profoundly humanistic faith in the communicative and meaning-making role of language and a profoundly postmodern awareness of the fundamental opacity and self-referentiality of language that block communication and defy fixable meanings. In the terms of my metaphors, it could be said that Celati recognizes that familial ties and bonds of friendship may be 'fictions' about the shareability of existence, and that the essentially unshareable and separate existence of each person is the 'reality'; yet family and friendship are 'fictions in which to believe/ historically as well as currently, while a concentration on our essential separateness (which death brings home to each of us in its unavoidable realness) does not in any sense make life more livable. Family and kinship structures are basic to all social orders, and, no matter their diverse particularities from culture to culture, they share in a foundation based on the concepts of organization and bonds. Narrativizing modes, and the stories that result, are, according to Celati (and not only him), also based on the virtually universal human need to organize and to share existence. When literary writing taps into this 'anthropological' quality of narration, as it does in a wide variety of ways in the writing of Celati's 'family' by elective affinity, then he finds a sense of commonality and a wealth of techniques that serve his own writing. Narration also plays a 'comforting' role (the sense of 'sollievo' that Celati has said he finds in 'credible' fictions, and which is destroyed in willfully 'aestheticizing' fiction), and is, therefore, similar as well to genuine friendships. In this case, it is not so much the social as the interpersonal level of ties that is emphasized. In The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, Wayne Booth has written: 'As Aristotle says, a true friendship is a relation of virtue with virtue, or as we might translate - remembering again that "virtue" was for him a much broader, less moralistic term than it is for us - a relation of strength with

180 Gianni Celati strength and aspiration with aspiration' (174). The 'comfort' that Celati mentions is, I think, something like this relation of virtue with virtue, in the ancient sense of the Italian term virtu, which meant both a natural bent towards goodness and a potentiality (as in 'virtual' in English). (We also inevitably think of Machiavellii's insistence on the need for both Virtu' and 'fortuna' for success.) Writing in which is shown a genuine passion for the goodness and potentiality of human language is writing that has an ethical valence, not in the overt morals it conveys, but in its very con-viviality or friendly co-existence with the language of others before and after us. Celati has a 'relation of aspiration with aspiration' in his connection with other writers; a connection describable neither as fixed lines, of influence nor floating circles of intertextuality, but rather as infinite and immeasurable spaces that teem with a family of voices.

5

Celati's Body Language: Orality, Voice, and the Theater of Ephemeral Mortality

'And during the seventies Celati will give himself over to experimenting in his texts with the possibilities of inserting "uncultured" spoken [language]; indeed with the possibilities of translating onto the page a discourse based on tones of the voice, or even on the movement of the character's entire body ... Writing and orality seem inextricably tied one to the other.' Francesco Muzzioli1

Palimpsestic Meditations on the Oral and the Spoken: Celati's Theoretical Writings from the Sixties to the Nineties In Nanni Moretti's 1993 film, Caro Diario (Dear Diary), one of the episodes follows Moretti himself through the maze of medical diagnoses and treatments he must undergo in his attempt to re-find his lost good health. Moretti has appeared as protagonist in the majority of his films, but there is a significant shift in the meaning of his presence in Caro Diario, in which he moves, as Millicent Marcus states, from '"uomosimbolo" [man-symbol] whose body stood for the collective body of the Ecce Bombo world' to his own singular body 'in all its material specificity.' Moretti now emphasizes the radical limits of his own body, which is vulnerable to disease, thus establishing 'a new pact with his audience, forging a link which is no longer generational, sociopolitical, or meta-cinematic, but which implicates us in the most universal of all human struggles' (that is, the struggle to go on living) (Marcus; 244-5). In some of his post-Po valley work, Celati similarly has attempted to forge a link with his readers that is based on a recognition of our mortal limits and our universally shared corporeal needs,

182 Gianni Celati pleasures, and pains. Specifically, in his involvement in the creation of the 'almanac of prose/ 17 Semplice, and in his 1996 performance piece, Recita dell'attore Vecchiatto nel teatro di Rio Saliceto (Performance of the actor Vecchiatto in the theater of Rio Saliceto), we see that the material body, as the seat of speech, emotions, ailments, and inevitable aging and death, is highlighted. In the almanac, the title of which refers to the ancient medicamentum simplex or medicinal herbs grown in il giardino dei semplici (the garden of herbs), the underlying metaphor is that of writing and reading as 'cure/ In Vecchiatto, the protagonist is the old actor Attilio Vecchiatto, who rails on stage against his fate as the real 'final curtain' threatens to fall. Furthermore, in Celati's active attention to orality, as seen in his prose rewriting and public readings of Boiardo's Orlando innamorato as well as in the openly theatrical nature of Vecchiatto, which he also performs in public readings, his own body and voice are implemented in the conveyance of his words. Yet behind these recent projects there is, once again, a very long history of critical work and creative practice pertaining to the role of materiality in literature. Orality, voice, and performance are topics of fundamental importance to Celati's writing from the very beginning of his career; they return in his post-Po valley work in new, but nonetheless retrospectively conditioned, forms. And I therefore go back to my critical zigzagging in what I believe to be the most suitable way of approaching the directions that Celati's writing has taken since his own path veered away from the extraordinarily rich collaboration with Ghirri which, as we have seen, was centered on the visible and the external. I say 'veered' because there is no clean break with the issues explored in that work, but rather a shift in focus that nonetheless keeps in play aspects of those issues, such as the essential theatricality of representations of the existent and the fundamentally oral nature of storytelling as contrasted to the primarily written nature of mainstream prose fiction. Nor, in fact, is the most recent writing a strict change in direction from the overall emphases discernible in the last thirty years of Celati's work, since, as I discuss further on, some of his earliest theoretical essays of the sixties as well as his first published fictions of the seventies speak very clearly to the problematic of writing's relation to orality and bodily materiality. It would be wrong to speak of a seamless continuity or of a linear development of a set of themes and concerns, however, for Celati's work is instead a palimpsest and, at times, a pentimento, wherein he revisits issues from entirely new perspectives, sometimes to alter his view entirely, sometimes to revalidate the rele-

Celati's Body Language 183 vance of very old preoccupations. I seek to avoid a linear and progressive analysis, therefore, instead preferring to investigate this set of concerns as one would approach a text or a painting in which partially cancelled words and images emerge from behind the most recent version, thus enriching and complicating it. Celati's recent turn to public recitations of his prose version of Boiardo's Orlando innamorato and of the openly theatrical Vecchiatto is not so much a new direction as an intensification of his very early orientation to the spoken word. He has always insisted that reading aloud is the best way to hear not only his narrative voice but also the voice of any narration. Hearing a voice is different from looking for a specific content or meaning; the former is allied to an orally conditioned receptivity of something or someone external to and other than ourselves, while the latter is tied to a mentally conditioned desire or need to master that something or someone. But hearing a narrative voice goes beyond the strictly aural, for it ideally stimulates an imaginative capacity for recreating the full, material presence of that which the written word seeks to communicate. Thus, hearing a voice implies seeing, by means of a 'mind picture/ both the one who is narrating in the text and the events that are being narrated. A performance or public reading of a text can aid the process whereby we see as well as hear, and an overtly theatrical performance literally materializes the word pictures through the body or bodies of the performer[s]. It is not surprising, then, that a trajectory that goes from reading aloud for oneself, to public readings of nontheatrical texts (such as his short stories or the Boiardo), to performances of a theatrical recitation (such as Vecchiatto) is traceable in Celati's work, for all of these orally oriented modes have to do, for him, with the evocation of the material presence of otherness that is textually represented in the written word. In an essay entitled 'Le posizioni narrative rispetto all'altro' (Narrative positions in respect to the other), published in 1996, Celati argues that naturalist and realist modes of narration (such as are found in Zola, Sartre, Iris Murdoch, or Moravia, indeed in the majority of texts that form what has become the dominant realist mode in the modern Western novelistic tradition) tend to be based primarily on descriptions and authorial explanations of the kind that imply that factual data are being communicated from some 'scientific/ objectifiable standpoint (the well-known claim to 'omniscience' or 'impersonality'). As a result, 'not only is it the narrator who withdraws from the scene, making

184 Gianni Celati him/herself hidden and detached like a god, but in reality it is also the "other-than-the-narrator" who withdraws from the scene, the other who might see things in a very different way. The other disappears, [that one] who in respect to each of us exists precisely as someone with feelings and sensations different from ours, which can be understood only by means of our imaginative and affective capabilities' ('Le posizioni narrative'; 7-8). We are now thoroughly conditioned to read narratives, according to Celati, as if they were 'impersonal models of knowledge' in which we might find 'scientific' or 'ideological' or 'sociological' explanations of reality, and we read them in an attempt to 'grasp the author's so-called important message.' What is lost in this mode of narrating and reading (and what brings me back to the topic at hand - orality) is 'the most complex question for us humans, but also the essential basis of our sensibility: ... the other-than-us together with whom we must live, the other who has thoughts and fantasies different from ours, the other, listening to whom we begin from infancy to learn the subtleties of language' (9). The 'matter-of-factness' and correctness of the dominant language of today's fictional narratives 'does not evoke any human voice, any specific tonality of a way of speaking of the "others-than-us"' (10). Celati sees this orientation in terms of the way in which today's 'industrial' or market-oriented fiction has replaced the narrator with the figure of the 'so-called writer/ who feels called upon to impersonate the official role of the 'writer' understood as a highly specialized and socially sanctioned profession. Instead, a genuine ('vero e proprio') narrator is not a 'professional/ but 'at the most someone who occasionally practices a trade' ('mestiere'), just as in the past tellers of fables, balladeers, and 'even those old characters who told their life stories for the pure joy of telling' were genuine narrators (10-11). It is immediately noticeable that, with these examples, Celati identifies narration with orality, in the same way that he identifies the very acquisition of speech with listening to the voices of others. And, of course, writing understood as a trade or craft is placed in contrast to the more dominant view of writing as a profession; the former is carried out by 'artisans' of words, while the latter is typically related to concepts such as 'mastery' and 'social position.' Before discussing the elaboration of these views as presented in the rest of the 1996 essay, I want to 'veer' back to another essay, Tarlato come spettacolo' (Spoken language as spectacle), first published in 1968 in an issue of the journal // Verri dedicated to Celine and then republished in the 1976 volume, Gruppo 63: Critica e teoria (I shall

Celati's Body Language 185 quote from the latter). Celati's very first publications were theoretical essays, which he published from the early sixties in journals such as // Marcatre, Quindici, and // Verri, all identified to one degree or another with the neoavant-garde. // Verri, edited by philosopher Luciano Anceschi, was founded in Milan in 1956 and had as its primary goal the publication of new voices in literature and criticism; it maintained a phenomenological orientation, due in great part to Anceschi's interests, although it was open to a wide variety of methodologies and disciplinary emphases, including psychoanalysis, linguistics, anthropology, and structuralism. With its embrace of an anti-idealistic and antidogmatic perspective, the journal sought to communicate the in fieri, evolving aspects of critical and creative activity of the period, and it was quite receptive to non-Italian writers and perspectives (thus the issue on Celine). Even before 1968, however, the young Celati had already published a number of essays in which he entered into debates about literary language, stimulated in great part by Saussurian linguistics, structuralism, and Russian Formalism, especially the work of Sklovski and Propp. From the early sixties, Italian critics and writers of a neoavant-garde bent (Eco, Alberto Arbasino, Edoardo Sanguineti, Calvino, and others) had emphasized the autonomy and artificial, linguistic constructedness of literary texts, in direct opposition to a realist conception of representation; influenced by work on the signifier and the signified, on 'deep' narrative structures (a la Propp), and on the purely formal aspects of literary structures, the Italian neoavant-garde of the sixties produced a veritable mountain of theoretical essays (in the etymological sense of 'attempts'), to which Celati added his not inconsiderable share. For example, in 1965, in Marcatre, a journal founded in Genoa in 1963 and dedicated to the transmission and discussion of the most current developments in literature, art, and music, Celati published a piece entitled 'Salvazione e silenzio dei significati' (Salvation and silence of signifies), in which he emphasized the greater role of langue, in contrast to what he saw as an excessive emphasis on the innovatory capacities of an individual author's parole. Already he was highlighting the shared linguistic inheritance (langue), stating that 'no author "creates" a language, at the most he/she accentuates its expressive tendencies' (quoted in Muzzioli; 137). As he moved away from an approach dominated by Saussurian linguistics and formalist proposals regarding the structures and mechanisms of narrative, Celati became more and more interested in the transgressive potential of literary language, an interest that, by the end of the sixties, was strongly

186 Gianni Celati influenced by the work of Bakhtin on the carnivalesque. As Muzzioli writes: 'It should be said first of all that Celati is one of the first Italian commentators of Bakhtin's ideas on carnivalesque laughter ... from [these ideas] he derives a faith in the comic, as an alternative tradition and force [capable of] eroding "high Western culture," which is [instead] based on the "dramatic model" of tragedy' (237). Celati's essay on Celine therefore falls after the early, more structuralist work and shortly before his overt embrace of Bakhtinian ideas. Celati will in fact later designate Celine as the modern 'heir' of Rabelais in his 1975 Finzioni occidentali, in which he argues that the original Rabelaisian laugh, 'that of "good humors," purgative and diuretic, could no longer find today the ties that it had with the community and with the earth,' so that the early modern 'gigantesque clowns' described by Bakhtin return, but 'in the "excessive delirium," [which is] psychotic and schizophrenic, [and] in the body of the persecuted and hounded fool' (quoted in Muzzioli; 238), such as is seen in Celine. The body and the material realm thus emerge as primary sites for Celati's theoretical and creative work from the late sixties through the early seventies, when Comiche and Guizzardi appear, both fictions obviously influenced by concepts of corporeal notions of comedy. In the 1968 article, Tarlato come spettacolo,' Celati begins by highlighting the role of both orality and the gestural body in reading a written text. He states that we often mentally reproduce the sound of certain passages as we seek to decipher them, even when reading silently: 'we use our experience as speaking beings in order to figure out a text, creating a form of cinesthesic analogy that might give us the message.' We also often have recourse to a mental reproduction - even if vague - of a gesture-based representation, that is, of the gestural style of the character whose Voice' we read. Celati emphasizes that he distinguishes between 'gestural' and Visual,' because the former is inextricably bound to the aural aspects of the spoken, such as pitch, accent, and emotional intonation, while the latter refers primarily, if not exclusively, to observable positions and movements of the seen body. By defining the 'spoken' aspect of a written text in this way, Celati seeks to avoid identifying it either with 'low or popular linguistic usages' or, especially, with 'their written imitations that are presented to us in old and new realist texts' (in Gruppo 63: Critica e teoria; 226-7). He wants, then, to distance his perspective from those that approach orality as part of popular or folk culture, as well as from those that employ strictly formalist and structuralist categories such as

Celati's Body Language 187 the mimetic and the diegetic aspects of a narrative text. Thus, he distinguishes among the written word, which can be melodic but not gestural; the oralized written word, such as is found in dialogues; and the spoken written word, which is spectacularized in the sense that our understanding of it requires an actual or imagined 'spectacle' made up of gesture, emotional intonations, pauses, emphases, and other nuances. This last kind of writing solicits a 'participatory' response akin to that which is stimulated by a theatrical representation. We could also add that it is in some sense related to other forms of performance art, such as John Cage's 'silent pieces,' which reject the idea of 'the self-contained, self-sustaining "object" and redraw the work of art as an occasion or event marked out by a self-reflexive attention or receptivity' (in Nick Kaye, Postmodernism and Performance; 93).2 Celati sees Celine as one of the very few 'highbrow writers of our time who have taken note of the decline of the participatory function of the literature of the elite' (Celati's italics; in Gruppo 63; 228); instead of exasperating the self-referential, non-participatory essence of the purely written word, as many modern writers have done to the point of illegibility, Celine and some others have adopted expressive forms that reactivate the spoken and gestural aspects of written literary language, thus tapping into its participatory potential. Celati himself will follow this direction in his earliest fictions, wherein his protagonists (like Guizzardi) speak to us directly, not in 'oralized' dialogue, but in 'spoken' voices that rely heavily on an implied spectacle of their bodies' movements, emphases, tonalities, and the like. This orientation to spectacle will resurface in his work of the nineties, albeit with different emphases and in different forms, as eccentric, 'deformed/ and strongly spectacularized writing will be replaced by epic and theatrical genres, written in order actually to be performed by Celati himself. As in his essay on interpolation and gag in Beckett, which I discussed in an earlier chapter, so too in this analysis of Celine's 'spectacularized' writing Celati provides very specific examples of the techniques employed by the French writer. He emphasizes that such techniques are in the service of providing that 'supplement of communication' that gestures, glances, intonations, and other bodily aspects of a present speaking subject provide in life. Celati notes that in a culture like that of the Elizabethan period, when 'the institution of the spectacle included all forms of literary production,' when, in other words, everything written was destined to be recited, 'the [written] word was naturally gestural or spoken, because it was born condi-

188 Gianni Celati tioned by the necessities of perfomance and of acting conventions' (228-9). But as this culture disappeared, and as the literary institution of the written word came to dominate, published texts solicited the reader's immersion in the facts described, facts transmitted by an impersonal authorial narration, and these texts did not attract the reader's attention to the performative, spoken, and gestural aspects earlier inscribed in written texts. According to Celati, writers such as Richardson, Dickens, and especially Sterne succeeded in retrieving something of the 'spoken' qualities of the texts of preceding eras, and Celine can be seen as a writer who has connections with this AngloSaxon tradition, in that 'the characteristic aspect of [his writing] is not a bizarre typographical styleme, but rather the carrying out of research directed toward restoring to the word its spectacularizing qualities, and thus reactivating the participatory function in the literature of the elite' (230). As Celati enters into a detailed examination of the techniques employed by Celine, he notes that analogy is at the basis of these operations, for it is the 'mechanism that permits our silent gestural reading' (231). The techniques are categorized as 'signals of duration' (segnali di durata), which are analogous to signals of diction or voice in actual spoken speech, and as 'signals of intonation' (segnali d'intonazione), which are analogous to gestural signals. The former (of duration) can be broken down into 'pauses of resumption' and 'pauses of drifting/ both of which are reproduced on the page by means of very specific punctuation (commas, periods of suspension, exclamation points, question marks, and various combinations of these signs), which Celati assiduously exemplifies with illustrative passages. He concludes his analysis by suggesting that further investigation could concentrate on the many combinations of these techniques according to categories such as 'the level of emphasis, rhythm, type of gesturality suggested, and so on' (234), such that a system of conventions based on extralinguistic elements could be brought to light. Celati's concluding analogy is that which exists between 'spoken' written language and music, 'musicality' being the essential quality of a 'spoken,' gestural text, as the quotation from Celine that ends the piece makes clear: 'Regardez Shakespeare, lyceen! 3/4 de flute, 1/4 de sang' (235). 'Written language as spectacle' is thus visually and aurally conditioned, as we read stylemes that ask for an activation of an imagined presence that is both seen and heard. From this attention to the gestural aspect in Celine's writing to a theoretical concentration on Bakhtinian ideas of the carnivalesque is not

Celati's Body Language 189 surprising, for the transgressive aspects of carnival (attention to the lower bodily stratum, to excrement, to blasphemy, to sexuality, etc.) are all useable in the creation of a 'participatory' narrative style whereby readers are drawn towards the material body from which language issues, in contradistinction to writing that 'immaterializes' the narrated 'facts' that appeal primarily to an intellective, transcendentalizing reception.3 Many years later, when performing his prose version of Boiardo's Orlando innamorato, Celati will refer to the very particular 'sound' of the original, which he tried to capture in his rewriting of it. Similarly, his many recent references to 'voice' in various interviews and essays can be seen as deeply related to this early interest in the 'parlato' as a mode of written language distinguishable from both the dominant mode of nongestural literary writing and from the popular or 'folk' mode of orality. His recent Vecchiatto is ostensibly overtly theatrical; called a 'recitation' or a performance (una recita), the text is written in the form of a monologue by the old actor, with comments from time to time by his faithful consort Carlotta, in which Celati makes abundant use of the gestural punctuation he saw in Celine many years before (exclamation points, question marks, periods of suspension, etc.). It actively solicits its readers' participation in the 'material' presence of the couple as they gesticulate, modulate tonalities, and speed up or slow down their words, all of which is inscribed into the stylemes used rather than in authorial stage directions or description. I shall return to a more detailed analysis of this text below, but for now I want simply to note the accuracy of Marco Belpoliti's insight into the overall production of Celati when considered in the light of 'spoken' written narration, which, as I hope to have shown, is one of those many recurring critical and creative elements sustaining his work over the last thirty years. Belpoliti writes: The card that Celati had played in Lunario, but also in preceding books [Comiche, Le awe nt lire di Guizzardi, La banda del sospiri] and that now suddenly is manifested in Recita dell'attore Vecchiatto nel teatro di Rio Saliceto, was that of theatricality. In his first books there is always a theater staged by one sole voice, often lying, paranoid, obsessive ... the theater is the place of the voice, of its dispersion ... [in Vecchiatto there is] again a monologue - of the imaginary or quasi-real actor Attilio Vecchiatto - [who] bitterly concludes his rambling recitation: 'Life is something that happens, you don't know what it is, it is only a state of mind.' ... Celati therefore makes theater without wanting to, as in the past he made 'new-

190 Gianni Celati generation literature' while actually not making it (just as he wrote a travel book, Verso la foce, that does not belong to [the category of] travel literature). (In 'L'attore Vecchiatto porta in scena la lingua jazz di Celati') [The actor Vecchiatto brings to the stage the jazz language of Celati']; 3.'

Celati's turn to a theatrical mode in Vecchiatto, like what was defined as his turn to minimalism in Narratori delle pianure, or what was seen as his turn to travel literature in Verso la foce (and no doubt will be seen as such in his Avventure in Africa, which I consider in the next chapter), is not, therefore, the adoption of a new 'artistic' style that might proclaim the writer's versatility or 'growth/ but rather an organically conditioned development of long-standing preoccupations as they are re-elaborated in different critical contexts and offered to readers in need of different forms of fictions in which to believe. Celati's work of the sixties and seventies is, however, finally not so different from his work of the eighties and nineties, in the sense that from the beginning of his career he has focused on what might be called the humanized and humanizing elements of 'postmodernity/ thus consistently refusing to enter into a conception of literary and more general cultural production as a mere reflection of our alienating, technological, cynical, commodified, and game-playing global reality. His mode is that of a 'soft militancy,' which has dared to talk of and, more importantly; to generate through his writing a sense of participation, of belief, and of the unavoidably shared quality of materiality and mortality. This he has done in the second half of a century that instead has moved ever more rapidly towards solipsism, isolating virtual realities, and a universalized 'society of the spectacle,' which has nothing to do with Celati's concept of the spectacle, but which instead silences unique voices, cancels out individual bodies, and makes of the living a faceless mass of zombie-like 'walking dead/ rather than animated mortals for whom death is a convivial inevitability. Nowhere is Celati's stake in the human and humanistic potential of late twentieth-century narrative more evident than in his continuing work on orality, voice, and the great 'theater' of the prose of the world, some further theoretical aspects of which I now want to consider. In the sixties Celati based his theoretical work on the 'oral' aspects of narrative primarily on methodologies developed in the fields of linguistics, formalist analysis, and structuralist approaches. In the subsequent decade, he turned to sociological and socio-linguistic studies pertaining to the communicative realm of the 'everyday/ such as

Celati's Body Language 191 Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Dell Hymes's ethnographies of communication, and William Labov's studies of nonstandard English. Thus, years before the now widespread 'postmodern' theoretical emphasis on socio-political, ethnographic, and anthropological analyses of quotidian life and the local, Celati was already seeing these lived realms as among the most appropriate focal points of late twentieth-century theoretical investigation. As the seventies began, Celati had added Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, de Certeau, and many other 'postmodern' thinkers to his ever-growing list of sources, as his long-standing meditations on language and social interaction were deepened and rendered always more complex. His recent creative writing indirectly reflects, at the conceptual as well as the formal level, these extensive critical and theoretical investigations, as my analyses of them will later seek to show. Returning, then, to the 1996 essay, 'Le posizioni narrative rispetto all'altro/ with which I began my specific consideration of Celati's writings on orality and voice, it is clear that it, like so many of Celati's recent pieces, implicitly resonates with the echoes of many layers of earlier critical work, as well as the music of new perspectives. Having asserted that a 'true' narrator is not a professional, Celati elaborates on the idea of 'natural narration/ asserting that 'just as there is a natural talking that we do effortlessly in our language, so too there is also a natural narrating by means of which all the speakers of a language imaginatively understand one another without need of lots of explanations' (11). According to this view, we are all constantly narrating, telling our stories to others, referring to our states of mind, our travels, and so on, and we are almost all quite capable of recognizing a boring narrator in life, unless, that is, we have lost this capacity by becoming 'people of culture' who believe in coded 'messages' and privileged explanations of the world. This perspective is heavily indebted, I believe, to the socio-linguistic work of William Labov, among others, whose research into the nonstandard English of black ghetto children strongly interested Celati in the late seventies and early eighties. Labov emphasized that much research into the language skills of these children - which often concluded that they were severely deprived and used substandard language - was, in fact, based on 'power relationships' [between educated adults and the children] that were 'too asymmetrical' (The Logic of Nonstandard English/ in Language and Social Context; 191). Labov instead sees the social situation in which the children live as the 'most powerful determinant of verbal behavior' and

192 Gianni Celati asserts that 'an adult must enter into the right social relation with a child if he wants to find out what a child can do' (191). When Labov approached his assessment of the language skills of black children on their 'turf/ so to speak, he discovered that they were 'bathed in verbal stimulation from morning to night/ and that they in fact engaged in a great deal of 'competitive exhibition of verbal skills: sounding, singing, toasts, rifting, louding/ by means of which they sought to 'gain status through the use of language' (191-2). They were, in fact, 'natural narrators' who avoided as much as possible a 'boring' style by means of imaginative, witty, and entertaining elaborations through which they gained a certain status vis-a-vis their peers. This analysis predates the current critical work on 'rap/ but it certainly shares in its validation of alternative modes of expressivity, and of verbal as well as musical creativity that emerge out of the context of black culture. Labov not only reorients us to the positive aspects of an ostensibly 'substandard' verbal style; he also points out that his work in the black speech community 'makes it painfully obvious that in many ways working-class speakers are more effective narrators, reasoners and debaters than many middle-class speakers who temporize, qualify, and lose their argument in a mass of irrelevant detail.' He further criticizes specifically 'cultured' or learned language - 'in every learned journal one can find examples of jargon and empty elaboration' - and asks if this verbal code is really 'so flexible, detailed and subtle as some psychologists believe/ suggesting instead that it is simply 'an elaborated style (Labov's italics) rather than a superior code or system' (192-3). He concedes that many academics seek to rid their writing of 'that part of middle-class style that is empty pretension' and try to keep 'that part that is needed for precision/ but he concludes that the average middleclass speaker does not do so, and ends up 'enmeshed in verbiage, a victim of sociolinguistic factors beyond his control' (193). Interested in the extent to which white middle-class standards of proper language should be imposed upon children from other racial and socioeconomic groups, Labov insists that we must first perform a critique of those standards in order to determine how truly useful they are for 'the main work of analyzing and generalizing' and to what extent they are instead 'merely stylistic - or even dysfunctional' (192). His own analysis and critique clearly conclude that 'all too often "standard English" is represented by a style that is simultaneously over-particular and vague. The accumulating flow of words buries rather than strikes the target. It is this verbosity that is most easily taught and most easily

Celati's Body Language 193 learned, so that words take the place of thought, and nothing can be found behind them' (202). The connections of Labov's work with Celati's views of 'natural' narration and 'artificial/ high-cultural narration are, I think, clear; in both, middle-class standards, enforced by educational and broader cultural assumptions regarding proper linguistic modes, result in the repression of expressive forms that are deeply embedded in everyday contexts of exchange, sharing, competition, and sheer entertainment. To whom one is narrating is of supreme importance, as is the broader social community in which one-on-one verbal exchanges take place. Thus, both the individual listener and the shared communal background play essential roles in effective and humanly meaningful narration, while standardized, professionalized styles, whether oral or written, support a cancellation of those 'effective narrators' who are validated by Labov's work. Celati identifies writers of the past, like Pinocchio's creator, Carlo Collodi, and the narrative epic poet Ariosto, as among those, like the 'natural' narrators observed by Labov, whose accents and tones took into account 'the immediate public to whom the narration was directed/ a public made up of individuals who were capable of imagining 'the worth of the voices evoked and the special taste for narrating certain things in a certain ambience.' Contemporary, 'industrialized' writers instead tend to think only of an amorphous and undifferentiated 'great public/ defined in great part by the mass media according to statistical and sociological categories, with the result that 'the other is only an anonymous thing onto which one must impose oneself, a generic figure to be persuaded, a certain number to make things add up well.' Celati laments that in this current context of the generalized anonymity of the 'public/ it is more and more difficult for any of us to conceive of writing and reading as a 'deep collaboration/ or of the other to whom we speak as 'precisely the source of [our] speaking' ('le posizioni narrative rispetto all'altro'; 12-13). Both those who narrate and those who listen to and read narratives are adversely affected by the current massmedialogical, educational, and professionalized environment in which an idea of narration as 'an imaginative way to speak to one another in a circle and in friendship' has been substituted with an idea of narration as 'explanations of the world, products for a general public, and material for "people of culture"' (13). We can begin to get out of this prison of deafness and achromatism first by recognizing that we have indeed lost certain abilities of perceiving the subtleties of language, and then by learning to read well. For Celati, learning to read well means having

194 Gianni Celati the benefit of an example or model of reading that 'succeeds in making [us] hear variations of tone, of rhythm, of pitch, sentence by sentence, in such a way that each word of the narration might have a specific and changing sense - also the commas, also the different pauses suggested by conventional punctuation, or the implicit pauses that conventional punctuation does not succeed in indicating' (15). Here we can see the continuity between Celati's early analyses of Beckett and Celine, and his recent interest in public readings, for attention to the built-in 'spoken' tonalities, pauses, and changing modulations of written texts is at the basis of both. And the implied relation with the specific 'other' is also a foundational principle that has conditioned Celati's critical and creative work from the beginning, as writing and reading follow 'the variations of the expressions of another, just as it would happen also in a natural situation' (15). His readings are not theatrical in any traditional sense of the word, therefore; rather, they avoid the coded styles and techniques of actors' speech modes in favor of the recreation of 'natural,' everyday oral modulation. As Celati moves towards the end of his essay, he remarks that 'it is quite strange that an entire academic civilization has forgotten that words have a sound, and that every sound of words is accompanied by infinite other expressive phenomena' (16). For him, to narrate is to give oneself over to the variations of voices in a given language 'like water that flows without any moment of fixity'; both narrator and reader (listener) reach an accord when they succeed in activating 'a capacity to perceive an infinite mobility in others/ and when they recognize 'our shared capacity to adhere imaginatively to that infinite mobility, with no need of definitions, explanations, or other manifestations of competence' (16). Instead, it is now more common to address others by means of explanations, fixed definitions, and given phrases, a practice due, in Celati's opinion, to a view of the other as a 'judge/ Thus, in professional and generally social relations, when the other is viewed as 'a threatening authority,' we feel that we must defend ourselves by showing that we 'have all of our papers [documents] in order' (le carte in regola), but this 'debt' that we feel we owe to authority, embodied symbolically in the abstract 'Other,' is infinite, and can never be paid. The infinite 'debt' nullifies our sense of 'the loving gift or the sign of affective devotion' that linguistic exchange could (and should) be. Celati writes that Nietzsche spoke of this 'infinite debt' and of the necessity of getting rid of it by subsuming the other into oneself: 'liberation from the infinite debt with the other ... consists, that is, in giving

Celati's Body Language 195 [the other] a place among our emotions - with the love or the hate that is due him/her - but removing [the other] from that frontal position, similar to that of a judge: removing his/her symbolic threat' (17). As the other is taken into ourselves, the 'weight of the symbolic' that attaches to the generalized 'Other' is removed, replaced instead by 'the infinite mobility [of the other] that is not fixed in any one definition.' Celati thus seeks to write without any fixed definitions, given phrases, or cultural quotations, and to give himself over to 'the contingency of changing moments without any guarantees,... to the incomprehensible flow of life just as it is' (17-18). (Celati's Avventure in Africa, which I discuss in the following chapter, is an excellent example of writing that captures this 'incomprehensible flow of life just as it is.') Dwelling and writing within the variable movement of the contingent means that language 'returns to being made up only of changing voices, and not of hard and definitive things like [the language of] scientific, historical, and sociological data, or current events; thus one rediscovers blessed common sense, that is, the instinct or sensibility that ties us to others.' Celati concludes that common sense is at the heart of the many questions we ask ourselves as we read a narration: 'How do I imagine this sentence in this particular instant? How do I imagine this character in this wandering of his thoughts? How do I imagine the pause that should be made between this moment and the other? How do I imagine all this flow of things that nothing can reduce to objectivity?' (18). As in his Po valley work on the representation of the external world, here too the 'goddess Imagination' guides us through the infinitely rich and constantly mutating maze of the great theater of the existent. There are many Voices' that echo throughout this essay, assimilated into Celati's (deceptively) simple critical prose. Bakhtin is here, but now it is the Bakhtin of 'dialogism' rather than of the carnivalesque; Merleau-Ponty is here as author of The Prose of the World, the very title of which Celati appropriated for his essay on Calvino's Palomar; and Wittgenstein is here as the most important philosopher of ordinary language. The ethical thrust of Celati's view of narration is supported by all of these thinkers. In a rich and subtle critique of de Man's refusal of the ethical, intersubjective implications of writing, Adam Zachary Newton uses Bakhtinian thought, among others, to explain his (Newton's) idea of 'narrative ethics' (the title of his book). Newton's emphases are applicable to Celati's view as well, I believe; he writes, for example, of Bakhtin's conception of meaning as 'bestowal' and 'gift,' and elaborates: 'Since the very fact of alterity obliges a constant inter-

196 Gianni Celati play across the borders of self and other, ... narrative is ethics in the sense of the mediating and authorial role each takes up toward another's story. The "gift-giving, consummating potential" (as Bakhtin puts it) that one bears another is most meaningfully bestowed narratively - across time, and through a call of/for stories' (Newton; 48). Celati would not agree that narrating from within a sense of the individual other has a 'consummating' potential, however, for he shuns all such elements of completion in favor of the highlighting of mutable contingency that finally brings his thought closer to Merleau-Ponty's concept of 'the prose of the world' and Wittgenstein's reintroduction of 'ordinary language' into philosophy as the conditioning element of all discourse, including the scientific and philosophic. De Certeau explicates these views well when he writes about Wittgenstein: 'We are subject to, but not identified with, ordinary language. As in the ship of fools, we are embarked, without the possibility of an aerial view or any sort of totalization. That is the "prose of the world" Merleau-Ponty spoke of. It encompasses every discourse, even if human experiences cannot be reduced to what it can say about them/ Scientific methods allow themselves a kind of 'forgetting' of this fact in order to constitute themselves, while philosophers 'think they dominate it so that they can authorize themselves to deal with it' (de Certeau's italics; The Practice of Everyday Life; 11). When Celati rails against totalizing 'explanations of the world' and the coded language of professionalized discourses and 'industrial' fiction, he would appear to have in mind the dominant pull of these modes of willful forgetfulness and ostensible domination, which take us farther and farther away from an acknowledgment and a practice (a la Wittgenstein) based on our shared passage on the 'ship of fools.' And, like Wittgenstein, Celati concentrates on linguistic behavior and uses, because, in de Certeau's words, 'to discuss language "within" ordinary language, without being able "to command a clear view" of it, without being able to see it from a distance, is to grasp it as an ensemble of practices in which one is implicated and through which the prose of the world is at work' (11-12). The ethical implications are to be found in the realization that, because we are in the same boat when it comes to language, 'since in short there is no way out, the fact remains that we are foreigners on the inside - but there is no outside' (de Certeau; 13-14). The 'aerial view' upon which pretensions to domination and mastery must perforce be founded gives way to a basic and shared alterity, and to what I would call a 'horizontal' attention to the practices of the 'ordinary' in which we are all implicated. I think that

Celati's Body Language 197 this is what Celati means by 'natural' narration, wherein certain ordinary practices and uses of language are employed as reflections of the 'inside' (that always and ever 'representation' in which we all already are implicated), rather than as authoritative, privileged expressions of an individual point of view. To give oneself over to this participatory mode of narration is to admit, perhaps, to a kind of defeat of epistemological claims, but, on the other hand, it is to embrace forms of being - the ontological aspect - on which depend shared and shareable linguistic practices. Writing that captures something of the infinite modulations of contingent voices is what Celati aspires to in his recent narratives, and his public readings of those writings are given as 'gifts' and as 'mini-lessons' on how to learn again to listen to those tonalities that are ignored or cancelled out by message-oriented searches for fixable meanings. In short, belief in the 'gift' substitutes for anxious judgments; consolation for consolidated assertions; affection for mastery.4 In Jessica Benjamin's psychoanalytical approach to the problem of interpersonal (and, in her study, male-female) patterns of domination and submission to power, she uses the term 'intersubjectivity' to argue that we need to embrace the paradox of relations with others wherein the other 'is outside our control and yet we need him. To embrace this paradox is the first step toward unraveling the bonds of love. This means not to undo our ties to others but rather to disentangle them; to make of them not shackles but circuits of recognition' (The Bonds of Love; 221). Benjamin's feminist revision of psychoanalytical approaches to the problem of domination is relatable to Adriana Cavarero's feminist revision of philosophically conditioned approaches to narrative, wherein the latter emphasizes the ways in which we are given our own sense of identity and self through the 'circuits of recognition' of others' narrations of our lives (Tu che mi guardi, tu che mi racconti). Although Celati himself does not refer to feminist work in his own recent theoretical elaborations regarding narration, it is possible to see his work as implicitly 'feminist' in its concerted search for ways out of Oedipally conditioned, death-oriented anxieties of mastery and, conversely, into ways of life-oriented intersubjectivities, firmly anchored in the immanence of everyday lived life. Celati innamorato: Boiardo in Prose More than twenty-five years ago, Calvino and Celati discussed the idea of rewriting in prose the great epic poems of the Renaissance. Calvino

198 Gianni Celati in fact pursued this idea in 1970 with his beloved Ariosto's Orlando furioso, producing a condensed and annotated version directed towards the general reader. As Kathryn Hume writes: 'Calvino reanimates the tradition of Italian literature for the post-war age. Not only does he "recycle" Marco Polo, Ariosto, Galileo, and folk-tales in his own stories, he also edited a condensed version of Ariosto and encouraged other such projects to make the classics more accessible to a popular audience' (Calvino's Fictions; 10). Calvino's desire to recuperate the great literary and popular traditions of Italian culture went hand-in-hand with his desire to involve readers of all types, whether specialized or general. Celati did not take up the idea of rewriting a classic until the nineties, however, at which time he had become very involved with the Viva Voce (Out Loud) project, founded in 1992 by the Fondazione San Carlo of Modena and the Emilia Romagna Theater, and which sponsored public readings, public discussions on vocality, and periodic encounters during which writers read their works to one another. This project in fact led to the founding of the 'Almanac of Prose,' // Semplice, which in its six issues from 1995 to 1997 continued to promote attention to orally conditioned modes of writing. Celati's 1994 publication of L'Orlando innamorato raccontato in prosa is dedicated to 'those who love to read books out loud,' and, unlike Calvino's version of Ariosto's great continuation of Boiardo's poem, it is a complete retelling in prose rather than a condensation and summary of the original. Before the stimulus of the Viva Voce project, Celati's collaboration with photographer Luigi Ghirri had already brought him 'home,' not only to a geographic region (the Emilia-Romagna), but also to a Po valley literary tradition to which he had not dedicated much explicit attention in the first decades of his career. As the writer reconnected with the spaces and the texts of the Emilia-Romagna region, he began to feel a strong tie to Ferrarese culture especially (Ferrara is the city of origin of his family), and to believe that there is something quite specific and magical about Po valley culture, which continues into the present day (he expressed these views to me during a 1995 visit to Chicago). In his introductory remarks to his Boiardo in prose, Celati formulates this perspective in reference to the great poems of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Teofilo Folengo (the Baldus): 'Questi tre poemi sono forse i massimi capolavori di tutto il genere cavalleresco, e formano anche 1'orizzonte d'una letteratura padana ancora da scoprire, cioe una letteratura dotata di caratteri autonomi e molto diversi rispetto a tutte le altre letterature europee' (These three poems are perhaps the greatest

Celati's Body Language 199 masterpieces of the entire chivalric genre, and they also form the horizon of a Po valley literature still to be discovered, that is, a literature endowed with autonomous characteristics that are very different in respect to all the other European literatures) ('Premessa'; ix). Boiardo's poem is a homecoming for Celati in many ways; it brings him home to imagination and a renewed desire to narrate (Tiu di qualsiasi altro poema, {'Orlando innamomto di Boiardo mi sembra che accenda la mia passione immaginativa e stimoli il mio desiderio di raccontare' [More than any other poem, Boiardo's Orlando innamorato seems to me to ignite my imaginative passion and to stimulate my desire to narrate]) (Tremessa'; ix); it brings him home to the literary culture of his family's city of origin, and it brings him home to a literary tradition strongly conditioned by orality and by the participatory quality of texts written in order to be recited. Years ago, when Calvino first suggested to Celati that rewriting the great epics would be a good project, the younger writer was seeking to escape the limitations of 'home,' as all young people do. In the nineties, he was more than ready to go home again, and to build on both the affective and the literary ties to his region of origin. In the introductory remarks to his prose Boiardo, Celati expresses it thus: 'in Boiardo we find that sense of native language that we had as children, when there was no difference for us between Italian and dialect, and all words adhered to the occasion with a most common or a most odd, a most trivial or a most refined sound, but always according to our ear and not according to an academic rule.' It is not just the sound of Boiardo's dialectally inflected language that is 'comforting/ however; it is also the fact that, coming back to the poem in a non-Italian context where Celati has now long lived (England and elsewhere), he finds that in the poem there is 'something that always carries me back to the emotions of family life. Those crazy knights or ladies of his poem have impulses and heartfelt rushes that I seem to know very well, because I remember them as being exactly that way in my family members or acquaintances of childhood' (ix-x). He calls this return from afar to something known and familiar 'like the search for a small homeland,' and specifies that this 'homeland' is 'mental/ and that it has to do with 'survival' (sopravvivenza) by means of imagination and a renewed conviction in the need to 'run after enchantments and illusions' (x). If we try to turn everything into 'critical consciousness' (consapevolezza critica), as Celati himself clearly was driven to do in his earlier critical work, we lose the ability to be ingenuous readers, swept up in the magical and imaginatively

200 Gianni Celati liberating adventures of love-crazed knights and exquisite ladies. In short, there is something of Pascoli's or Elsa Morante's faith in the 'fanciullino' (little child) in Celati's homecoming. We become as children again, caught up in the sheer joy of imaginative elaboration, play, and shared enjoyment in the magic of stories.5 Celati situates his version of Boiardo in a long line of retellings, be they in verse, in prose, in Sicilian puppet theater, or in painted images of both the academic and the popular tradition. Interconnected as they are, these diverse versions form a 'spider's web' (ragnatela) of echoes, remembered figures and episodes, and past narrators; the poem also connects with Berni's rifacimento of it, with the versions of anonymous cantari, with Andrea da Barberino's prose summaries, and on to 'the most important poems like Luigi Pulci's Morgante, ... and Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso' ('Premessa'; viii). In today's context, Celati suggests that" the poems of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Folengo 'perhaps should all be completely retold in prose, in order to keep the memory of a tradition alive, and in order to give space to a narrative instinct that industrial literature risks suffocating entirely' (ix). His own prose retelling of Boiardo was written in order to be recited aloud, and Celati specifies that 'it is a recital in 43 parts, to be performed over 43 weeks: or at least slowing the reading down as much as possible, a reading done for a group of pleasant and non-pedantic people' (xi). This is precisely what Celati has done; he has given many public readings of his version in Europe and in the United States, seeking always to reach Boiardo's own declared and 'very noble' goal: ' to chase ennui and bad thoughts away' (scacciare la noia e i cattivi pensieri; xi). When Celati read to a group of students and faculty at my university (a wonderful event that is now preserved on videotape), it was clear that even the youngest beginning students of Italian were thoroughly engrossed in the far-flung adventures of knights and ladies, and thoroughly amazed at how genuinely entertaining the public reading of an old classic could be. Celati thus goes on spinning the spider's web, capturing in its gossamer threads the hearts and minds of audiences who are much more used to ephemeral blockbuster spectacle than to historically resonant 'childish' storytelling. This is a form of pedagogical engagement that is, to my mind, vastly more effective than a hundred lectures on the 'joys of reading' or on the 'importance of a historical perspective' could ever be. If much of the enchanting effect of Celati's Boiardo is due to his great talents as a public reader of texts, it is also true that much is due to the

Celati's Body Language 201 written version itself, which uses various techniques of orality to draw readers into its flow and 'sound/ A comfortable rhythm of reading is established, first, by means of the book's division into forty-three relatively short chapters, the main topics of which are indicated with titles ('Angelica's appearance,' 'Carlo Magno saved by Ranaldo/ 'Ruggero and Bradamante meet/ etc.). Next, the narrator's 'voice' on the page guides us through the complex events, reminding us often that he is basing his version on an already existing poem that has established who the characters are, what they are like, and what the unfolding events are. One of the recurring phrases used to emphasize this pretextuality is 'come dice il poema' (as the poem says), employed many times throughout the chapters. Celati also helps us through the maze of interlaced episodes by subtly highlighting the spatiality of the text; he sets a scene, introduces the necessary characters, and then writes 'lasciamo' (let's leave) such and such a place and characters, going on to another setting and cast of characters. When returning to earlier scenes, he writes 'torniamo' (let's return) to that scene, thus giving his readers a sense of reading as a voyage - a zigzagging trip - that, while non-linear, is nonetheless carried out over an imaginable space made up of diverse places and filled with recognizable characters. In Chapter 5, 'II viaggio di Orlando' (Orlando's voyage), Celati explicitly writes of the spatial metaphor, comparing the knights' wanderings to the swarming of ants over a map: 'Often these knights set out to look for someone thus, without knowing where they are going, vaguely attracted to one direction, like ants that come from far off to find a little uncovered food. In fact, the knights' voyages seem like those of ant swarms on a map; and, like in our childhood fantasies, the map is an infinite terrain of adventures that arrives to the ends of the earth, but without any precise length in the crossings' (29-30).6 Next, characters are described according to their salient qualities, their characteristic costumes and looks, and they are, therefore, always reliably who they are, no matter how long we have 'left' them in order to follow others. Celati makes some use of direct speech, but never interrupts the narrative flow of the story for long, with the result that we hear the characters' voices yet are never drawn away from the all-encompassing dynamism of their non-stop adventures, which are told panoramically from a panoptical point of view. Lastly, the endings of the chapters are both closural and open-ended, simultaneously providing a satisfying sense of a pause or a 'rest-stop' after each episode, and at the same time luring us on with a promise of wonders to come. These tech-

202 Gianni Celati niques all add up to a participatory solicitation, even if we are reading silently and by ourselves. The first chapter, 'Apparizione di Angelica' (Angelica's appearance) provides examples of several of the above-outlined narrative techniques. A compact chapter of a little over six printed pages, it opens with a direct reference to the source text ('II poema del conte Matteo Maria Boiardo da Scandiano incomincia dicendo ai signori che ascoltano di stare bene attenti e fare silenzio' [Count Boiardo of Scandiano's poem begins by saying to the people who are listening to be very attentive and to remain quiet]), followed shortly by the repeated phrase 'dice il poema' (says the poem). The scene is briefly set with the starting place and first character of the story, the King of Sericana in India, Gradasso, who 'wanted to come to France in order to defeat Charlemagne.' The chapter then shifts scenes to Charlemagne's court with the recurrent 'lasciamo' (Ma adesso lasciamo andare Gradasso e veniamo in terra d'Occidente [But now let's leave Gradasso to go on his way and let's come to the West]), and later, after a short explanatory interpolation, uses the equally recurrent 'torniamo' (let's return). The characters are endowed with their essential characteristics in a few swift descriptive strokes: Charlemagne's weakness for believing in the treacherous Gano, 'who made him see black for white and who wanted to chase Orlando and Ranaldo from court'; Angelica's extreme loveliness, ' una fanciulla, dice il poema, che sembrava una mattutina Stella, e sembrava un giglio, e sembrava una rosa dei verzieri, e faceva sfigurare tutte le gran bellezze di donne alia corte di re Carlo' (a maiden, says the poem, who seemed a morning star, and seemed a lily, and seemed a rose of the garden, and made ugly all of the great beauties of the ladies at the king's court); the magician Malagise's suspicious nature and his immediate recourse to his book of incantations; Orlando's unease in the face of such loveliness. It is, in fact, Orlando's voice which first interrupts the narrative flow, as he ruminates to himself: 'Ahi, pazzo Orlando, come ti lasci dalla voglia trascinare! Non capisci che stai andando fuori dalla strada guista di Dio? Ah, io che stimavo tutto il mondo un niente, eccomi qua che sono vinto senza armi da una fanciulla' (Oh, mad Orlando, how you are letting yourself be carried away by desire! Don't you understand that you are going outside the righteous path of God? Ah, I who considered the entire world a trifle, here I am conquered and weaponless before a maiden). The spotlight is thus brought to shine on the title's central character, as his enamored state is established as his dominant feature by his very own

Celati's Body Language 203 first words, just as the title has fixed him as 'innamorato.' At the end of the chapter, Celati connects imaginative thought with the adventures about to unfold, writing of the magician Malagise's flying devils who carry him to Angelica's homeland of Cathay or China: 'Come si vede i diavoli vanno veloce come i pensieri, che in un attimo portano la testa lontanissimo, per un incanto inspiegabile delle parole. Dunque con questo incanto noi possiamo attraversare in un attimo il terreno d'avventure del nostro poema' (As we see, the devils move quickly like thoughts, which in an instant take our heads very far away, by means of an unexplainable spell of words. Therefore with this spell we can in an instant cover the [vast] terrain of adventures of our poem). With this tantalizing promise, the chapter ends with an invitation to go on reading: 'E adesso, come dice il poema, altri bei fatti potrete sentire se 1'altro canto tornerete a udire' (And now, as the poem says, other beautiful things you will be able to hear if you return to listen to the next canto) (all quotations from 'Apparizione di Angelica'; 3-9). This chapter, like all subsequent ones, is thus extremely engaging, as the narrative voice invites us into the amazing adventures about to unfold, tells us of great passions and magic spells, gives us the information we need in order to know who these characters are and what motivates them, and, above all, sweeps us up into a narrative dynamism that is very like the exciting movement through space of a wonderful voyage. Love, competition, strengths, weaknesses, wiles, and tricks: the basic building blocks of Boiardo's poem are those of our shared histories and of our own lives, acted out on the great 'map' of imagination's territories no less engagingly than on the streets of our own lived lives. How could we resist coming back for more? According to Fernando Savater, we do in fact resist or are indifferent to storytelling's function of transmitting remembered and repeated common human experiences and emotions, for the 'transmissibility of experience' and the 'general validity of the foundation of things' are, in today's era of foundationlessness, 'bogged down in the pure innovation that invalidates the entire past and compromises the entire future.' We are afflicted with a 'general fidgetiness ... so that the aspirations of storytelling are more and more alien to us even when they are not suspect' (Childhood Regained; 12). Savater suggests that we perhaps dislike or are suspicious of the fundamental role of memory and repetition inherent in storytelling because those tales of 'the despotic power of feudal lords, the obscurantism of magicians and bishops, the periods when mace and sword were the only guarantees of survival/ when retold, remind

204 Gianni Celati us that history may reveal that, instead of progress, merely versions of more of the same make up our contemporary reality. But he insists that it is not history as repetition that storytelling brings, but rather 'poetry, creation. In storytelling what return are the pillars of our human condition: the encounter with sea and forest, a definition of ourselves with respect to animals, the adolescent's initiation into love and war, the triumph of cunning over strength, the reinvention of solidarity, the rewards of boldness and mercy. And also the marks of time's claws, the separation of those who love each other, exploitation and usury, feeble senility, death' (12-13). M it is true that such foundational and essentialist perspectives on human experience can and have been challenged in recent times, it is also nonetheless true that the universally shared experience of mortality itself is not to be challenged. The human life span, shorter or longer as the case may be, has limits; within those limits we all (or most) love, fight, run after illusions and dreams. These 'pillars of our human condition' hold up Boiardo's great edifice, and in Celati's retelling we are being encouraged to recognize and cherish the constructions they build, rather than to deconstruct them in the name of particular interest groups, separatist politics, or fact-based searches for 'important messages.' In the final chapter, 'Un amore di Fiordespina' (A love of Fiordespina), Charlemagne's Paris is under fierce attack, and the horrible scenes of death and destruction are vividly recounted. At this climax of action, a great storm breaks out, which interrupts the battle and sends all the soldiers running for shelter. The many brave knights whose adventures we have followed over the zigzagging course of the poem are enveloped in fog and darkness, disappearing from our sight: 'E adesso la nella nebbia e nel buio vediamo sparire i campioni che abbiamo seguito in tante battaglie ... Li vediamo svanire nelle tenebre come fantasmi, e mai piu li incontreremo in avventure e in battaglie, fino a quando il grande poeta Ludovico Ariosto non verra a resuscitarli nel suo poema' (And now there in the fog and the darkness we the champions whom we have followed in so many battles disappear ... We see them fade into the dark shadows like ghosts, and never more shall we meet up with them in adventures and battles, not until the great poet Ariosto will come to resuscitate them in his poem; 333). This hauntingly evocative image of the disappearance of such robustly alive figures, who turn into 'ghosts' as they fade into the dark fog, captures the ephemeral essence of the great theater of mortality; like Boiardo's 'champions,' we too act out our passions and follow our

Celati's Body Language 205 illusions on the stage of life, only to disappear into the mists unless some great poet brings us back to life with the revivifying power of art.7 But the story does not end on this elegiac note, for Fiordespina's story of budding love for Bradamante is next recounted. Not knowing that Bradamante is a woman (because of her short hair and male dress), Fiordespina's passion is lit for the 'bel viso' (beautiful visage) of the sleeping 'knight/ Celati emphasizes the delicate lunacy of the situation, in which 'one was burning with desire for the other, but the other lacked that which the former one desired'; he tells us that 'the two girls on the lovely meadow were about to make some upsetting discoveries/ but we never get to experience 'meraviglia' and 'sorpresa' (amazement and surprise) along with them because 'il poema e arrivato alia fine' (the poem has arrived to its end). The elegaic tone returns as Boiardo tells us that, as he recounted the vain love of Fiordespina, Italy was under attack by foreign troupes 'which came to depopulate every place, bringing desolation wherever they passed.' Thus, wars, calamities, sadness, and, a few months later, the death of the poet made any further storytelling impossible. Real destruction and death have taken the place of the imagined scenes of battle, and the final elegy is sung for us. (As Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in 'Spring and Fall/ 'It is the blight man was born for, / It is Margaret you mourn for.') To counter the heavy burden of mortality, Celati retells the wondrous adventures of knights and ladies, hoping at the end of his recitation that his listeners will 'not have your heads full of opinions and prejudices, rules and formulas, judgments and pat phrases, so that this poem might be a comfort in life, lightening a little your thoughts. And more than this one cannot hope for any mortal, while we all go along, raving, toward our end' (all quotations from 'Un amore di Fiordespina/ chap. 43; 329-37). For Celati, the spider's web extends not only to all the fictional versions of chivalric adventures, but also to our shared mortality, our own passions and illusions, and our own adventures of lunacy and love. In the 'Epilogue' to his version in prose, Celati returns to the local map of Boiardo's region, focusing our attention on the actual locales in which the poet lived and through which he passed as he elaborated the global adventures of his characters from 1476 to 1494. Boiardo lived in Scandiano, located in the hills that descend into the valley of the Secchia, surrounded by plains that go towards Modena on the right and Reggio Emilia on the left. There is a road, we are told, that then as now crosses the plains towards Ferrara, and Celati imagines that Boiardo

206 Gianni Celati must have gone along this road thousands of times when he visited the Ferrarese court in order to read his poem to his 'great friend/ Duke Ercole d'Este. Celati further imagines that he must have been thinking often about the strange adventures of his knights as he traveled this road, and the poet might even have thought that this local terrain was the very terrain of those adventures, that 'toward Ferrara, between Cento and Bondeno, there were all the bridges and rivers and groves and fountains and paths and woods encountered by his knights' (338). Because 'the world [is] there where one lives, on the roads one travels, on the horizon that you have before your eyes when you wake up/ Celati further believes that, as Boiardo looked out over the plains from the hills of Scandiano, he 'saw' the far-off lands of his characters, and that these very characters perhaps are still there, 'on the road between Cento and Bondeno, hidden in a bush, Gradasso, Rinaldo, Angelica, Fiordelisa, Ruggero, Bradamante, Orlando, Marfisa, and the others: perhaps they have remained there, invisible inside a bush, but audible if you go and listen to them from close up.' They must be quite confused, Celati writes, wondering where they are, why their great adventures have been blocked, whether they are prisoners in an enchanted garden, and they 'therefore are waiting for someone to come and liberate them, someone passing by those parts/ He concludes: 'I believe that if you pass by close to that bush and listen carefully, you'll hear a buzzing like that of a power station.' This is because the constant agitation of the knights has created a kind of electrical current, a power that 'shakes us, and invades us like a current; something that gives us emotional palpitations, and makes us boil with fantasies; something that puts into motion an alacrity of the heart and the head, and even sometimes becomes quite tiring' (339). The very landscape of today is permeated with the presence of these exciting characters, so that it is both a real landscape and a poetic landscape - an imaginative territory that can be 'heard' and 'felt' by anyone who is willing to lend an ear and open affective channels. In his highly original study, Geografie della scrittura (Geographies of writing), in which are combined the expertise of the geographer with that of the literary critic, Davide Papotti analyzes the literary landscapes of the middle Po region, noting that 'the existence of a tradition with a notable temporal weight influences writers, both in the perception of spaces and in the consideration of their own work' (48). He further suggests that a regional orientation can result in 'the idea of a spontaneous generation of characters and stories from the ambience,

Celati's Body Language 207 and the narrator becomes similar to a peasant who harvests the crops produced from the fertility of the earth' (57). Particular attention to one's native region gives the writer a sense of territoriality and of knowing the terrain, so to speak, so that he/she understands almost instinctively where, when, and how to listen and to observe in order to discover the riches to be harvested. Another kind of 'permeability' is at work here, as the writer is 'naturally' attuned to both the observable nuances of the known landscape, and to the hidden resources of regional cultural production, past traditions, and subtle linguistic inflections. Celati alludes to the treasures to be found in and around Ferrara; hidden in bushes, penetrating into the very hills and roads of the area, the chivalric poetry of Boiardo and others is waiting to be reexcavated, brought back to life, and shared once more with contemporary people who may well have forgotten or simply not noticed the natural resources of their own cultural inheritance. In his work with Ghirri and other photographers, Celati emphasized the visual elements of this treasury, while in his retelling of Boiardo's poem, as in so much of his past critical and creative work, he underlines its aural qualities. As Papotti writes: The sonorous dimension is a fundamental component of our immersion in an ambience' (99). Sometimes writers emphasize natural sounds associated with a particular locale; at others, they underscore noise, such as that produced by modern life (traffic, industry, etc.). Metaphors associated with the domain of music can be utilized to bring out the 'tonalities' of a region, or of a mood produced by certain landscapes (much as film scores function as commentary or support of visual images). Silences are equally eloquent; they can endow a landscape with 'a suspended atmosphere of stupefied repose,' they can function as a 'sign of desolate human absence,' or they can remind us of the passing of time, which itself 'seems to possess an [impalpable] sound all its own' (Papotti; 102-8). The very 'sound' created by a poet's language can capture this music in landscapes, but can also create Keatsian 'unheard' and therefore sweeter melodies that take us from real landscapes into the territories of the imagination. Celati hears these fantastic melodies in the 'buzzing' that comes forth from hidden characters, and he seeks to bring them to our ears through his retelling of their magical adventures. The question of whether our contemporary ears can any longer hear all that a voice such as his wishes to transmit to us is unresolved, but Celati's hope, if not something as strong as belief, remains undaunted as we all move into the new millennium.

208 Gianni Celati A Voice of Old Age: Vecchiatto against the 'Cannibals' How might Celati's long-standing interest in orality and voice be seen as an instrument for championing the humanity of the old? By 'old/ I mean precisely old people, not tradition, the 'good old days/ or any other generic category of the so-called venerable. First, the writer's respect and affection for the storytelling talents of old people are well known. In the story, 'Baratto/ for example, it is the old couple next door who contribute importantly to the title character's cure, by taking him into their home and allowing him to sit and silently to absorb the stories of their long lives. In his essay, 'Le posizioni narrative rispetto all'altro/ which I discussed above, Celati refers to the 'often extraordinary way' in which old people, following their natural 'taste for narrating/ succeed in telling wonderful life stories (11). And in his videostory, Strada provinciate delle anime, old people are often highlighted both visually and in terms of the words they speak: the old woman, who tells the group that asks why her town shows signs of many departures that 'when we're old, we all go away'; the old tailor, who responds to the question of which clients are the most difficult to fit, that 'hunchbacks are the most difficult because they have humps'; another old man, who stands amidst a group of younger fellow travelers and gazes silently and benevolently beyond the camera's eye. These and many other moments throughout his fictions reveal Celati's genuine love for the old; in his most recent book, Avventure in Africa, he is clearly thrilled when an African guide shows amazed amusement at Celati's own status as a sixty-year-old 'old man.' The writer has said to me in conversation that growing old is for him the greatest adventure, one that he feels himself privileged to be experiencing. What broader implications are to be found in this perspective, and how do they connect with the topics of orality and voice - besides the more obvious tie with the issue of mortality - to which this chapter is dedicated? And to what specific ends does Celati create an old character, Vecchiatto (whose very name signifies 'old' or vecchio), as the voice of his recent work? In the context of today's literary scene in Italy, Celati's choice to write a book about an old man places him in an implicitly oppositional relation to the dominant current trend of youth-oriented writing. In his cover commentary on Vecchiatto, the writer makes his position explicit: 'Come molti vecchi coniugi, i due attori Attilio e Carlotta Vecchiatto parlano quasi sempre assieme, hanno gli stessi pensieri, in una recita

Celati's Body Language 209 che ormai nessuno ascolta. Interpretano il dramma della vecchiaia in un'epoca che crede solo alia pubblicita per giovani' (Like many old couples, the two actors Attilio and Carlotta Vecchiatto almost always speak as one, they have the same thoughts, in a recitation that by now no-one listens to. They interpret the drama of old age in an era that believes only in publicity for the young). One of the most highly touted versions of this youth orientation is the writing of the so-called cannibali (cannibals), very young writers whose works are variously associated with the film genre of 'splatter/ hard metal rock or aggressive rap, and violent mystery and fantasy stories a la Stephen King. The name of the group may be an allusion to the twenties' avant-garde critic and poet Osvaldo de Andrade's manifesto entitled Antropofago as well as to his wife Tarsila do Amaral's 'cannibal' paintings, both of which reflected the central tenet of the movement, Anthropophagy, which was that Brazilian artists needed to devour all outside influences, digest them, and make them into something completely new. In any case, the transgressive and shocking aspects of art are emphasized in both the avant-gardists of yesterday and the young Italian writers of today. Some of the best known are Niccolo Ammaniti, Aldo Nove, and Tiziano Scarpa, although Andrea Pinketts, Luisa Brancaccio, and others could be included in the category known also as 'i pulpisti,' a direct allusion to Quentin Tarantino's film, Pulp Fiction. None of these writers is over forty years of age; most are in their early to mid-thirties, some even younger. The 'cannibals' have been taken up by the media and by critics, both journalistic and academic, as the 'school', of the moment. An anthology of short stories by the 'cannibals/ edited by Daniele Brolli, was published in 1996 in the 'Stile Libero' (Free Style) series of Einaudi; entitled Gioventii cannibale (Cannibal youth), it is described on the cover as Ta prima antologia italiana dell'orrore estremo' (the first Italian anthology of extreme horror), and contains ten short stories under the rubrics of 'Daily Atrocities/ 'Ferocious Adolescence/ and 'Melancholies of Blood/ Some titles of novels or collections of stories by the individual writers give a further idea of their emphases: Fango (Mud) by Ammaniti; Gin nel delirio (Down in delirium) by Alda Teodorani; Va' dove ti porta il clito (Go where your clit takes you) by Daniele Luttazzi (this last a 'desecrating' echo of Susanna Tamaro's best-selling 'sentimental' novel, Va' dove ti porta il cuore (Go where your heart takes you). Wellknown academic critic Cesare Garboli held a public discussion with Ammaniti, Nove, and Scarpa in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome in

2io Gianni Celati July 1997 (as one of the series of public conversations called 'Libri in Campo' [Books in the square]); a short interview with Garboli announcing the evening's event appeared in the cultural insert, Tuttolibri, of the newspaper La Stampa the day of the discussion, 10 July 1997. In the piece, entitled 'Garboli makes a dare to the cannibals' (Garboli sfida i cannibali), the critic, known for his critical work on Antonio Delfini, Sandro Penna, Giovanni Pascoli, and Elsa Morante - writers, that is, by now highly respected by canonical critics - is asked why he has let himself be seduced by the 'splatter fiction' of these young writers. Garboli explains that he was at a dinner with Vargas Llosa one evening in Rome, and Ammaniti was also at his table. Garboli was most interested in what these so-called cannibals read, and he found Ammaniti's affection for nineteenth-century literature intriguing. The critic also found it interesting that these young writers felt themselves to be very far from the preceding generation of writers like Andrea De Carlo, whom they consider already 'dead' (trapassato); he notes that they give him the impression of 'having consumed literature, even that literature that ended up discussing itself: that of Calvino or of Manganelli.' Their idea of literature is a 'unidimensional literature, willfully without depth,' and Garboli sees them as allied to Godard and RobbeGrillet for their interest in 'looking' (called a 'rinascita dello sguardo,' a rebirth of the gaze) as they survey all aspects of contemporary culture and reality, use it, and throw it away in order to move on. He defines them as a product of the 'culture industry,' constructed as a 'school' precisely in order that they might make 'a jolting impact, a collective impression,' but he is not sure of the length of the life of this new 'trend/ for the talents and interests of the individual writers who ostensibly make it up are quite different. Lasting or not, the cannibals are the flavor of the moment, so to say, and critical attention (not only Garboli's) is focused on their innovations, their youthful vitality, and their desire to capture the intensity of contemporary existence as it is permeated with violence, perversions, and the 'sex appeal' of thingness, virtuality, and the random (quotations from Orengo, 'Garboli sfida i cannibali,' Tuttolibri; 3). The desired liquidation of the past, even the immediate past as represented in writers like De Carlo or Tondelli, not to speak of the 'faroff past made up of writers like Calvino and Manganelli (with whom Celati would presumably be placed), is yet another manifestation of a persisting avant-gardist approach to cultural production in Italy, which implies a very different kind of attachment to today's reality

Celati's Body Language 211 than Celati's. As they look to the ever new, the cannibals immerse themselves in an immediacy consisting of inexplicable impulses, repellent randomness, 'cool' violence, and completely meaningless sex. Their young characters wander in confused errancy, looking for something intense to make them feel alive, or they take drugs in order to escape their overwhelming sense of nullity. Daniel Brolli writes in his introduction to the anthology, Gioventu cannibale, that in this writing is seen 'the end of every kind of social contract/ which in turn leads these new authors 'to act outside of classical literary conventions/ with the result of 'an experimental writing that mixes substances [that are] far from one another ... scholastic humor, advertising slogans, popular melodies, consumer products ... everything often smeared with much, much blood' ('Le favole cambiano' [Fables are changing]; viii). Their language is that which 'constantly pushes itself beyond and which in this "going beyond" frees itself from the past while discovering new territories that sweep the public arena clean of the last remains of "literature."' It is therefore against both correct literary models and traditional notions of morality that they work, and the anthology is thus presented as having the ambition of 'being a sign of a change in the [collective] Imaginary, [one] which gets out of the limbo of culture controlled by moralism in order to appropriate for itself a language without compromises' (ix-x). It is difficult not to see this attitude as a latetwentieth-century attempt yet again to 'epater les bourgeois/ to shake up the 'fathers/ and to take up the banner of youthful contemporaneity much as the historical avant-gardes of the beginning of this century did. That these young writers are being strongly backed as a 'school' by the official channels of cultural promulgation is also a recognizable continuance of the Italian practice of labeling and categorizing into 'isms' whatever new style of writing appears on the literary horizon. My goal is not to discredit entirely the work of the individual writers known as 'cannibals' or 'pulpists/ for some of them (in my opinion, Andrea Pinketts above all) are talented narrators who succeed in writing genuinely imaginative and engaging fictions. Rather, I have discussed their recent fame as the literary backdrop upon which Celati's Vecchiatto should, I think, be discussed, for it then becomes clear that Celati's book about an old couple is quite willfully oppositional, and as far away from the intensities of cyberpunk, splatter, and pulp as possible. It might be thought that Celati's long-standing interest in ordinary language and lived quotidian experience makes of him a sort of natural 'ally' or model for these younger writers, who also openly disdain

212 Gianni Celati the Insitution of Literature and high cultural modes of producing literary texts. But in fact this is not the case, for Celati's work is in the direction of finding and reactivating through credible narratives some possibly positive and shareable aspects of contemporary existence, not in highlighting the ostensibly inevitable cyber-age solitude and disillusionment shown in the cannibals' portraits of today's amorality and anomie. Nor is their goal of writing about sensational acts of bloody violence in the name of desperate 'intensity' congenial to Celati, whose search for the last many years has been precisely in the direction of lowering the threshold of intensity and of the exceptional in favor of common unexceptionality. His Vecchiatto is, among other things, an explicit solicitation to readers to consider the place of portraits of the old and the forgotten in a literary context that tends fairly exclusively to valorize the young and the currently fashionable. Vecchiatto is not merely a reactive text. In addition to countering a generalized emphasis on youth and mass-medial contemporary life, it also adds a different tonality to Celati's 'spoken' language: that of complaint. In place of the comic tones of Guizzardi, the subdued, meditative tones of Narratori delle pianure and Verso la face, or the shifting but always exuberant tones of Boiardo raccontato in prosa, there is now the grumbling tone of an old man, who sometimes explodes into outright anger. Forwarding his critique of literature and language seen as disembodied social institutions, Celati quite emphatically puts the 'tongue' back in 'lingua,' and the 'flavor' back in 'gusto' with the ranting of the cantankerous old actor. In a previous chapter, I discussed Celati's admiration for Antonio Delfini's writing, which he associates with the directionless flow of humming or grumbling. Vecchiatto's erratic speech is very similar to the errancy of grumbling, as he wanders from topic to topic without any obvious point except that of expressing his irritation and dissatisfaction. This recourse to the nonlinear, improvisational quality of sustained complaint is distantly related to an ancient form in Provencal poetry: the enueg (ennui or annoyance). One of the best poets of complaint was the so-called Monge de Montaudon, a nameless monk who wrote at the end of the twelfth century. His enuegs, like most, are characterized by simple language and rhyme schemes, and both plazers (poems about likes) and enuegs (about dislikes) 'like the cigales [grasshoppers] of their native underbrush, hop from topic to topic ... Humankind being what it is, the enueg was the more popular form.'8 These poems, like Celati's text, draw on daily and current realities, and are extraordinarily 'spoken' in

Celati's Body Language 213 their tonalities. Although a stylized poetic form, the variety of complaints has the sound of genuine and personal dislikes that reveal much about both lived life in that long-ago era and individual personalities of the diverse poets who wrote enuegs. And, as Richardson, who is quoted above, rightly notes: 'One can imagine calls for encores and sly interpolations/ They solicit participation, in short, much as Celati's recent writing aims to call forth his readers' active involvement in the world that is conjured up through words. Like mortality, we all share in our propensity to dislike certain things and to complain about them; there is something both widely recognizable and deeply cathartic, then, about the mode of complaint that Celati taps into through Vecchiatto. Marco Belpoliti wrote concerning Celati's latest work that 'today as before the problem is that of language, a language that is not only a means of expression, but an end in and of itself, and at the same time, a symptom of something else. Of what? Of an uneasiness' ('L'attore Vecchiatto porta in scena la lingua jazz di Celati'; 3). Like his earlier characters, according to Belpoliti, Vecchiatto serves as an 'alter-ego' for Celati, one who gives the writer a language with which to recount his own story, which is also the story of and by others. The falsity of all names is ironically highlighted in the insistence on Vecchiatto's realness, and Celati can rid himself of any autobiographical tinge to this litany of complaints precisely by attributing it to an actual person. He dons a verbal 'mask' from behind which he can play with tonalities that are not necessarily his, but that transmit 'genuine' expressions of dismay regarding a variety of topics, from the marginalization of the old to the commodification of experience in the mass media. Angelo Guglielmi further develops this idea of the mask in his review, 'II Celati furioso: II testamento di un attore' (Celatifurioso: An actor's testament), published in La Repubblica's cultural section in 1996 shortly after the appearance of the book. The critic points out that Celati could not have said directly what he has his character say - or at least not as effectively. Vecchiatto, as a Shakespearean actor and an old man, can make use of the 'classical theme of the evil of existence/ which is associated with canonical writers such as Dante, Shakespeare, and Leopardi; further, he can make some claim to wisdom because of his advanced age and extensive experience, references and claims not suitable to Celati, who is neither 'a writer with the position of a classical [writer] nor "an old grumbler/" Guglielmi identifies four characteristics of Vecchiatto that serve Celati's purposes well: he is 'an Italian

214 Gianni Celati actor trained on Shakespeare's texts; a complaining old man close to death; [one] who really existed; [one] who is famous abroad and forsaken in Italy/ Vecchiatto as a Voice' for Celati thus has many advantages: 'being an Italian actor renders his preachy, trumpeting language tolerable; being moribund confers authority and worthiness of being listened to; being a "real" person has the quality of liberating Celati, who limits himself to reporting things said by others, from every stylistic or thematic responsibility; being famous constitutes an objective guarantee of quality ... and discourages every kind of contestation and intolerance.' Setting up his text as he does, Celati provides himself with an excuse to show that he is what Guglielmi calls a 'total writer, ready to prove himself in the language of prose, of the theater, and of poetry.' He does this, in the case of prose, by donning the masks of several 'critics,' who have 'written' the blurbs on Vecchiatto that open the volume; in the case of theater, by making the body of the book a 'transcription' of Vecchiatto's last stage performance; and in the case of poetry, by publishing the heretofore 'unpublished sonnets of Vecchiatto': all, of course, written by Celati himself. The masks are many, then, and they are all masks that permit forays into varying voices and tonalities, as well as into implicit and explicit critiques of various aspects of contemporary life. If Celati is not quite a 'grumbling old man,' his own season of life is closer to winter than to spring (he turned sixty in 1997). In contrast to the more spring like preoccupations of his early works, or the summery, middle-aged mellowness of the period of the Po projects, his main character or alter ego is now an embittered, cantankerous old man rather than a love-crazed youth (as in Lunario del paradiso) or an eternal adolescent (as in Guizzardi). The book (with a wonderful cover photograph by Luigi Ghirri of what looks to be a provincial theater) tells us on the cover blurb that Vecchiatto (1910-93) was an actor of international renown, admired by Laurence Olivier, Jean-Louis Barrault, Jeanne Moreau, and many other greats of the stage and screen. We are further informed that after thirty years of tournees in South America, Vecchiatto arrived in New York in 1965, where he created a small Shakespearean theater in the Italian neighborhood of the Bronx, specifically at 1237 Decatur Avenue. He was invited to France in 1976 and, after performing at the Vieux Colombier Theater in Paris he traveled to many European cities, where he presented his adaptations of Shakespeare to enthusiastic audiences. But when Vecchiatto returned to Italy in 1988, he sadly could find no work, except for what was to be his last

Celati's Body Language 215 performance in the small provincial theater of the town of Rio Saliceto, in the province of Reggio Emilia. The blurb states that this is the only Italian performance 'of a glorious classical actor, also an author of dramas, essays, poetry (among which the sonnets published here)/ and the performance is here 'reconstructed by means of a monologue in two voices' (those of Attilio and his wife Carlotta). The 'ruse' continues on the back flap, where we read an excerpt from 'critic' Eliane Deschamps-Pria's Presentazione ai sonetti di Attilio Vecchiatto, 'published' in the Bouillon de Culture of Caen in September of 1994. Here is reiterated the sad fate of Attilio in his native country; after 'fifty years of theatrical vagabondage/ in 1988 he begins to try to find work in Italy, but nothing comes through except for Milan's famous theatrical figure Giorgio Strehler's failed attempt to bring him to the Piccolo Teatro of that city, and the humiliating gig in Rio Saliceto. The book's paratextual material thus orients us to expect a genuine transcription of an actual event, even if we may already suspect that there is a game afoot, first because of the series, 'I Narratori' of Feltrinelli, in which the book appears and, second, because of our prior knowledge of Celati's never quite transparent 'sincerity' (as seen already in his Narratori delle pianure, made up of ostensibly 'transcribed' stories told by others). Nonetheless, given Celati's interest in preserving and transmitting unknown or ignored texts - as seen most recently in some of the materials included in the journal // Semplice, for example - this book seems to be perfectly consonant with that interest, and therefore possibly truly what it purports to be. We open the book to find a number of excerpts from reviews and critical pieces dedicated to Vecchiatto's career, written by such well-known figures as Susan Sontag, John Berger, and Professor Franco Fido, an expert on Italian classical theater. A reader unfamiliar with Celati's work might find these 'objective' critical texts further evidence of the realness of Vecchiatto, but anyone who knows something of the writer immediately realizes that these commentators are close acquaintances and respected colleagues of Celati, and the excerpts themselves are very Celati-esque in their emphases and tonalities, even if often convincingly like something these individuals might have written. For example, Fido, a Venetianborn scholar and one who has dedicated himself to Venetian culture and to its greatest theatrical figure, Goldoni, 'naturally' writes of Vecchiatto's origins in Venice and emphasizes his 'recognizable Venetian intonation even when he performed in foreign languages' (6). Or Berger, true to his predilection for the 'invisible' aspects of the seen,

216 Gianni Celati writes that Vecchiatto never wanted any recordings made of his performances because 'to his mind the spectators absolutely should not see on the stage a theatrical representation, but [instead] they should imagine by means of the words a drama that remains invisible. Thus he succeeded in reducing the theater to the naked scene, to the naked stage of poverty, as he often would say, and he made us rediscover it as the zone of our agonizing struggle with the shadow' (8). Or Sontag, a New Yorker to the bones, writes about Vecchiatto's Bronx theater, which was located in the back of a barber shop, and to which 'on Thursdays and Saturdays flocked the Italians of the neighborhood, but also many people who came from Manhattan' (7). These and the other blurbs add up to a complete biography of Vecchiatto, detailing his travels in South America and Europe, his origins, his family, his diverse experiences. They end with an excerpt from Vecchiatto's 'diary/ dated September 1991, in which he had written: The dear theme of death, only this attracts me. I would wish that whoever remembers me might begin to consider my name a funny sound from times past, a joke recited by someone who is not I. In the total death to which I aspire, I never want to appear as a name tied to a certain success: much better the false that renders us uncertain and redeems us, because a name is only a falsity' (9). Knowing how strongly Celati detests the emphasis on having a 'name' (as seen, for example, in his comments on the official responses to Calvino's death in the preceding chapter), it is impossible not to read this as coming straight from Celati. The mask is in place, but alter ego and writer merge completely in this declaration. There can be no doubt that the book is Celati's version of the 'lost manuscript' trick of distinguished lineage (Cervantes, Manzoni), as he puts on the mask of 'transcriber' and humble scrivener of his character's last recitation and unknown poetry. As a Shakespearean actor, Vecchiatto quite naturally uses the great figures of the Bard when he turns from his vociferation against contemporary life and the media to a reading of his 'operetta morale,' which he has composed as an exemplary story about the trajectory of a man's life. The title given to his piece, 'Operetta morale/ is Leopardian, and it emphasizes the importance of this great poet and moralist as another fundamental source of inspiration for the book. A quotation from the Pensieri, which capped the 'blurbs' of the introductory section, and which was supposedly found in Vecchiatto's diaries, had already tipped us off to Leopardi's role. The quotation speaks to the theatrical nature of existence, which is verified by the fact that 'the

Celati's Body Language 217 world always speaks in one way, and operates in another. Since today we are all actors in this comedy, and hardly anyone is a spectator, because the empty language of the world fools only children and idiots, it follows from this that such a performance has become inept, boring and labored without any motive' (10). Leopardian cosmic pessimism infuses Vecchiatto's 'Operetta/ recited in snippets interspersed with various diversions, as it moves from youth to old age, using Shakespearean characters as types signifying basic aspects of a man's life experiences. According to Attilio, first the young man 'is drawn blindly towards love like any old Romeo who runs after the beautiful Giulietta'; then comes maturity, when he recognizes death 'like Hamlet before his father's ghost'; then he marries and has children, and is consumed with ambition - 'like Macbeth he would butcher even his king in order to get ahead of others' -; finally, he is old and, like Lear, he 'goes on dragging through the blind tunnel of his fixations, listening only to those who agree with him.' Throughout life, however, the thoughtful man is haunted by the intimation of its nullity, and Vecchiatto exclaims: 'It is pallid thought that turns us into succubi, it is the light of consciousness that transforms us into sheep groping about in the dark ... the terrible thing is only to think think think ... like prince Hamlet, like king Lear!' (44-71). In spite of the tragic vision being expounded, the recitation is comically presented, for there are only three spectators as it begins (including an old lady with her shopping bag, and a young fellow holding a Coca Cola and wearing a motorcycle outfit), and a few others drift in as Vecchiatto speaks, interrupting his flow and occasioning more grumbling. His faithful consort Carlotta continually interrupts as well, trying to calm her husband down, making comments to the audience about her husband's past glories, glossing when and where certain parts of the 'Operetta' were written. The effect is of a fragmented discourse that is almost lost in the digressions, as the following excerpt shows: Attilio: I was saying that the young boy looks for the maternal breast in every woman ... and the young male animal is blindly dragged toward love, like any old Romeo who runs after the beautiful Giulietta ... Carlotta: We met each other performing Romeo and Giulietta in Buenos Aires ... Attilio: But what does that have to do with anything? Carlotta: Forty-five years ago, lady ... It's to explain, Attilio, see how they're listening?

218 Gianni Celati Attilio: Ah, talk talk talk! I feel the weight of nauseating phrases that press down on me always more ... Carlotta: Don't think about it Attilio! Attilio: Cold, cold this world is! ... Don't you all feel how everything is frozen by numbers, advertising, earnings? ... We shouldn't say anymore that a man comes into the world, we should say that he comes into cosmic cold, he comes into the desert of the night of the soul, he comes into the earnings of users of passive people ... Listen, listen! (44-5)

The fictional audience is drawn into the performance as Attilio and Carlotta direct their reminiscences and rambling thoughts to them, begging them to understand what is being said. We, the external audience, are also thus drawn into the immediacy of the recitation, as if we too had wandered into the little provincial theater along with the lady with her shopping bag and the young man in motorcycle gear. Everything feels improvised and unrehearsed as the old couple give themselves over to an extemporized 'performance' that is made up more of grumbling and memories than of a rehearsed and fixed piece. One of Carlotta's urgent interruptions is the story of a recent incident in a supermarket, and she tells it to the inattentive, restless, and even mocking audience, which by now has swelled to six people. She and Attilio had gone into the store and there they saw a photography booth, 'one of those little machines for making photos quickly.' An old woman had just had her photo taken, and was looking at it, saying: 'Ah I'm not like that! No, no, I was never like that.' She was showing it to passersby and asking 'But does it seem to you that I look like that? But how is it possible that I've become like that? I'm not so old! I don't have all the wrinkles that show in this photograph!' No one pays any attention to the old lady except for Attilio, who 'came forward to speak a comforting word/ telling her: 'Madam, you are certainly not the person whom you see in this ugly photo ... Madam, don't believe in the exteriority of these machines that destroy the lineaments of the soul! You are certainly not this horrible image of modern technology.' The audience's response is to laugh, to which Carlotta responds: 'Go ahead and laugh! But you must learn that we get old, and as we age the body collapses, shrivels, becomes fat or wrinkled, becomes like wax, already like dead flesh, have you understood? ... Yes, even you will become old, and you'll see yourselves someday like that poor lady ... Because you must know, young people, that what we think of ourselves is more than anything else a memory of how we once were. And thus at a cer-

Celati's Body Language 219 tain age we find that we are all caricatures of ourselves, even you young people who are laughing!' (quotations from 51-2). Attilio ends up getting thrown out of the supermarket after he went to lodge a complaint with the manager about the photo machine that upsets sensitive people by destroying the lineaments of their soul, and he suffers the further indignity of having his own umbrella broken over his head. The story makes no impression on the audience, however, and Attilio sadly goes on telling his 'Operetta morale' as they one by one leave the theater, until only the old woman with the shopping bag remains. The last performance of Attilio Vecchiatto is a spectacular failure. Even the old woman with the shopping bag loses interest, falls asleep, and then quietly leaves without saying a farewell to the couple on the stage. The lights have gone off, and they must grope their way out of the theater, back out into the inhospitable world filled with advertisements, 'asses, breasts, underpants, bras, expensive cars, a world of crazy rich people with televisions radio telephones [that serve] only to exchange fashionable idiocies' (73). Attilio and Carlotta wonder if they might go and perform for the geese in the countryside - 'at least they would listen to us' - and they hope for death, but in the end Attilio gathers his courage and tells his faithful consort: 'Forward, blindly forward ... There is no return, only going forward! Forward until the end ...' As they step out into the night, their last laconic exchange is filled with courageous resignation: Carlotta: Are you still thinking? Attilio: To hell with cursed thinking! No more cold, blindly forward ... Carlotta: What are you saying? Attilio: Come on! They won't get us ... Carlotta: Here, I'm coming, it's dark ... Attilio: We need to disappear ... Carlotta: But Attilio, can you see me? Attilio: No, no, for God's sake, come on, don't be afraid. There's no need to be afraid of anything, enough with anxiety that ruins everything ... Carlotta: Attilio, where are we? Attilio: We're outside ... Carlotta: I feel so much air, the wind is blowing ... Attilio: There was so much air, the wind was blowing. Carlotta: Attilio. Attilio: Carlotta. (76-7)

220 Gianni Celati The tragicomic, blustery tone of the 'performance' has modulated into a quiet melancholy key, as the old couple wind down and stand in the dark windy night, facing their inevitable end. (Distinguished actor Mario Scaccia recently brought Vecchiatto to life in over one hundred stage performances throughout Italy.) The sonnets of Vecchiatto explore the same themes as the 'recita': the vanity of worldly pursuits; the ephemeral nature of carnal desire; the lack of justice in today's dog-eat-dog society; the worthlessness of old people in our youth-oriented consumer culture. The poems are reminiscent of Antonio Delfini's Poesie dellafine del mondo (Poems of the end of the world), ferocious denunciations of the hypocrisies of human existence by another of Celati's preferred authors. These fifty-seven compositions - all in the form of Shakespearean sonnets - maintain the 'spoken' tonality of the book, as if their author were talking to himself, using a poetic form as a kind of sottovoce or hummed base note on which he creates variations. In all of the diverse literary echoes, themes, genres, registers, and voices that make up the volume, the constant emphasis on the inevitable decline of the mortal body stands out. I thus return to the topic with which I began this chapter: the individual body in all its material specificity. Recita dell'attore Vecchiatto is a memento mori, a tragicomic reminder of the inherent limits of our bodies; it is, as well, a plea for mutual understanding and solidarity as mortals, in place of the cold search for power, be it in the form of money, fame, or social standing. A genuinely original book in its 'spoken' language, its mix of the tragic and the comic, and of prose, theatrical writing, and poetry, Vecchiatto is Celati's bittersweet message to the world, and specifically to contemporary Italy, a society so deeply entangled in power games as to be deaf to such messages. Perhaps, in Italy as elsewhere, we shall listen to such "body language' only when the frailty of our own bodies begins to speak to us, only when our own hearts flutteringly move towards the final beat.

6

Africa, Gamuna, and Other Travels: Moving Narratives

'... but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects: and, indeed, the sundry contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness.' Shakespeare, As You Like It (Act IV, Scene i)

Is it sadness that pushes us to travel, or travel that makes us sad? Bruce Chatwin reminds us that 'Pascal, in one of his gloomier pensees, gave it as his opinion that all our miseries stemmed from a single cause: our inability to remain quietly in a room' (The Songlines; 161). Although travel can bring a joyful sense of freedom from ourselves, it can make us miserable and, like lovemaking, can result in a profound post-voyage tristesse, a 'most humorous sadness,' that has as much to do with the return to ourselves as to our daily routines. The word 'travel' is itself indicative etymologically of suffering and hard labor, and being on the road typically produces longings for home, nostalgia for some other (younger) self, or simple loneliness.1 And, like amorous feelings (eros and voyages into strange territories often being brought together in the literary imaginary), travel is notoriously difficult to write about effectively and with originality. Celati has spent much of his existence traveling about, and he has written many works that fall loosely into the categories of 'road stories' or 'travel writing,' from his early Avventure di Guizzardi to Lunario del pamdiso, up to his more recent Po valley stories such as the 'racconti d'osservazione/ Verso la face. His latest writing is explicitly tied to literal travel; Avventure in Africa is made up of diary jottings produced during a trip to Mali, Senegal, and Mauritania in January 1997, and is organized in 'Notebooks' kept while on the road, rather than

222 Gianni Celati in chapters. He has also recently written short 'ethnographic' pieces on the land and people of Gamuna, an imaginary territory of strange customs, linguistic practices, and landscapes. In this chapter I want to focus attention on Celati's so-called travel writing, in order to investigate the deep connection in his work between the act of writing and errancy, a topic already highlighted in earlier chapters, but to which I now wish to dedicate some further, more elaborated analysis. Celati's apparently innate 'preference' for constant displacement and his Conradian thirst for elsewhere lead him neither to the final silence of Bartleby nor to the heart of darkness, however, but rather to a 'melancholy of his own'; or perhaps it is the other way around. His deeply ruminative and contemplative forma mentis - a kind of constitutional sadness - stimulates his need for movement through space: travel as antidote to Hamletian paralysis, or what the old actor Vecchiatto calls 'cursed thought.' Yet travel ironically stimulates ever more rumination both during and after the trip and, in Celati's case, ever more writing. In Calvino's essay on 'Leggerezza' (Lightness) in Lezioni americane (Six Memosfor the Next Millennium), he quoted the same lines from As You Like It that I have used as epigraph for this chapter, commenting that they reveal that particularly Hamletian melancholy, which is not 'compatta e opaca ... ma un velo di particelle minutissime d'umori e sensazioni' (not ... compact and opaque ... but a veil of very minute particles of humors and sensations (Lezioni americane; 21). This brand of melancholy is eminently applicable to Celati as well. Travel is always filled with writerly travail for this errant scrivener as he is bombarded with 'particles of humors and sensations' whether moving through the more local spaces of the Po valley or wandering through the 'exotica' of Northwest Africa. He has long followed the crooked lines of his own itineraries in search of 'adventures,' which are then transformed into the lines of stories at once complete and open-ended. Celati is one of contemporary Italy's best examples of a quite literal embodiment of the ancient metaphors of human existence as voyage, and of text as trip. Maria Corti's critical phrase, 'il viaggio testuale' (the textual voyage), is reflected on many levels in Celati's work; his errant pen moves across the page, which is in turn filled with hybrid forms of narration, changing landscapes, and characters on the move, so that thematically, formally, and metatextually his fictions repeatedly give shape to real and imaginative voyages in which we, the readers, are invited actively to participate. As seen in my analyses of Celati's writing in preceding chapters, notions pertaining to non-linear movement, errancy, and adventuring

Moving Narratives 223 permeate his fictional and critical work. The term 'adventure' holds a particular appeal to his imaginative and theoretical mindset; he uses it twice in titles of fictions (Le avventure di Guizzardi and Avventure in Africa), and it often appears in essays as well as in other fictional pieces. By using this term, Celati links his writing to a long tradition in Italian letters, from early prose narratives of adventure to the chivalric tradition in which knights embark on military and amorous adventures to Collodi's Le avventure di Pinocchio. The word in Italian has an interesting history of usage. According to the Zanichelli Dizionario etimologico, it appears in the thirteenth-century collection of tales, // Novellino, where it means Vicenda impensata o inconsueta' (unimagined or unusual event); again in thirteenth-century Egidio Romano's locution, 'per avventura/ where it means 'per caso' (by chance); and later in Leopardi, where it means 'relazione amorosa breve e non impegnativa' (brief and casual amorous relation). The term in its verb form, 'avventurare/ in medieval times meant 'to entrust to fate or to expose to a risk/ and in the reflexive form meant 'to put oneself in danger, to dedicate oneself to an uncertain or difficult undertaking.' An 'avventuriero' was a person who 'went around the world looking for any and all means to make his fortune/ whom Tasso called a 'soldato di fortuna' (soldier of fortune), and Marino called a 'persona senza scrupoli' (a person without scruples). The word 'avventura' comes, of course, from the Latin term advenire, signifying 'to come in the future/ so that adventures are basically unknown future events. Within its broad and wide semantic field, therefore, are included notions pertaining to chance, danger, sex, surprise, and immorality, all linked to the potential as well as the threat of futurity. When we embark on adventures, we turn our back on the known past, and move towards the unknown future, the wide-open spaces in which we might lose our way and ourselves - or we might find both way and self. Celati's writing is itself an 'adventure/ stimulated by curiosity, sustained not by a present clarity but by a future-oriented search. It reflects constant risktaking, as the writer - a contemporary 'avventuriero' - quite literally travels about the world looking not to amass a monetary 'fortune/ but instead to find the wealth freely there for the taking: potential stories, of which, for Celati, human experience is fundamentally made. Ethnographic Excursions into Unseen Territories: The World Told If Tomaso Garzoni's Piazza universale was one of Celati's 'founding'

224 Gianni Celati texts, in which as a young man Celati discovered a verbally constructed world in which infinitely to roam and from which to learn about ways of life and forms of livelihood at all levels of a past society, there were other ethnographically oriented studies that equally fascinated him in his youth. In an unpublished and incomplete essay sent to me by the writer in the autumn of 1997, 'Rituali di racconto' (Rituals of the tale), Celati provides a (rare) direct autobiographical sketch of his early student years, when at twenty he began work in modern languages and literatures at the University of Bologna. It is clear in reading these few pages that from the beginning Celati was drawn to anthropological and ethnographic representations of human experience and language; conversely, he was repelled by the realist literature that dominated Italian prose fictions in that period (the 19505). He tells us that he began by studying linguistics primarily, in spite of his ostensible 'major' in literary studies, and he singles out a book by Luigi Heilman on the dialects of the Val di Fassa, which he calls 'a revelation: to study how people speak in a small territory, to reconstruct the invisible nets that bind people.' When he went on to read Levi-Strauss for the first time, he writes that he understood nothing, 'but it seemed to me that I had in my hand a key that opened all the doors. Reading about far-off populations, primitive rituals, pathological cases, dialectal usage, uncommon ways of speaking, fables and folklore, all this excited me.' Celati began to look for something similar in authors of contemporary literary texts, but he found the realist novels then in vogue unreadable and 'false.' As he went through the university and on into the period of military service, the young man 'ruminated on these things' (ho rimuginato su queste cose), read philosophers he did not understand, and wrote 'very awful stories.' Another breakthrough occurred when a friend who worked in a psychiatric hospital in Pesaro sent him things written by mental patients, 'in particular a newspaper edited by an old patient, on inexpensive paper and in a beautiful calligraphy, with autobiographical pieces, news of the asylum, delirious ravings of persecution, weather reports.' Celati was amazed at how wonderfully the old patient wrote and later, when he was isolated for forty days due to viral hepatitis, he one day suddenly sat down and wrote a piece in the same style, 'hearing [the mental patient's] voice quite well in my ear.' He explains: 'Almost without realizing it, all of a sudden I was succeeding in writing precisely as he did, with his syntax, his strange adjectives, and all those symptoms of persecution that overflowed from every sentence. It was like putting myself in someone else's place, someone I saw and under-

Moving Narratives 225 stood in all of his moods, it was like getting outside of myself with more fluid sensations than [I usually had]. It was a question of falling into a kind of sleep as I was writing, completely forgetting myself, like when one falls asleep.' Celati notes that this anecdote has a long follow-up, as indeed it did. In fact, his first fiction, Comiche, is modeled precisely on the maniacal flow of words from the mouth of a paranoid character, and subsequent books of the 19705 (Guizzardi, La banda dei sospiri, and Lunario del paradise) all have something of this fluid, verbally obsessive quality about them. What is emphasized in 'Rituali di racconto' is that there was a period of seven years when the writer tried to find this vein again, and could not, with the result that 'everything on the page became only absurd and unusable/ The lesson he learned from that long-ago experience of writing 'outside of himself was 'that when one writes forgetting oneself, one goes a little on a trip into space like shamans, and one hears voices that bring news, commands, inexplicable suggestions, and sometimes even words that one does not know at all, but later one discovers that they do exist' (emphasis mine). Writing is a voyage into unknown territories of language, then, with something magical and unexplainable about it, as the writing subject gives himself over to a quite literally ex-static experience. He is seated at his table, fixed in a place, but he is nonetheless traveling, through and by means of language, into the territory of otherness. Before discussing the remainder of 'Rituali di racconto/ I want to veer off into a brief consideration of a piece by Lino Gabellone (Celati's critic friend with whom he created the 'Bottega dei mimi' in the midseventies), in which I believe there is an insightful (and poetic) portrayal of Celati as an 'armchair traveler' for whom thought and writing, from the very beginning of his career, have been voyages into the seen and, especially, the unseen, narrated existent. The essay-story by Gabellone is included in the 1986 issue of Nuova Corrente dedicated to Celati's work, entitled 'Quello che sta fermo, quello che cammina' (The one who remains in place, the one who walks), and with the dedication 'Apologo, per Gianni Celati' (Apology, for Gianni Celati). This hybrid piece, somewhere between a tale and a critical essay, tells of a writer who 'dreams' diverse understandings of his relation to the existent. (All of the quotations that follow are from Nuova Corrente 33, no. 97; 27-31.) The 'man who remains in place' is described as seated at his writing desk, surrounded by the usual objects of the writer; he is also surrounded by a garden outside his window and 'the unwashed windows send images of the world that seem true/ Gabellone describes

226 Gianni Celati this setting as one in which it seems that 'things were ordered in concentric circles at different distances' around 'quello che sta fermo.' For this writer, things form a sort of 'dark space' (spazio oscuro) inside the house, in which float seen and 'above all, waited-for' things, for the one who remains in place is 'one who waits.' In this 'dream/ the writer remains fixed inside his own habitation, surrounded by known objects and potentially knowable images of the outside world, which will come to him only if he waits patiently for them. Gabellone writes next of a shift in perspective: 'But one day he dreamed, with his eyes open, something that was not an image: ephemeral forms, first, that instead of oscillating and then suddenly recomposing themselves, like the tops of trees and leaves, were gradually dispersing into a kind of far-off haze and then disappearing.' In order to understand this process of dispersion and disappearance of forms and images 'one would have needed a sophisticated mechanism like that of the cinema, a visual system that might recompose the glimpsed forms in another, not yet imaginable place.' This 'process of disappearance' paradoxically went on somewhere else 'according to a rhythm that imposed on the eye a continual adaptation.' The man 'who remained in place' was still taking refuge in the idea of the world's consistency, however, a world that he saw as a 'depth from which all words poured forth.' It occurred to him nonetheless that perhaps even he had 'disappeared' for someone, that he himself might be part of that labile process of disappearance that he had sensed, yet this thought 'had for some time been reabsorbed back into his current position [of the one who remains in place], in which everything seemed already played out, and guaranteed by an already reached immobility.' I think it is possible to read this 'position' as that of an egocentric subjectivity, which relates the existent to itself, and needs everything that is not itself to be fixed and immobile in order to be brought back to the self's definition of it. Gabellone describes this subjective positioning as made up of 'passi circolari che non scoprivano una strada ma ne cercavano sempre 1'origine, anche se tutti sapevano ormai che essa era intoccabile' (circular steps that did not find a road but instead looked for its origin, even if everyone by now knew that [the origin] was untouchable). The glimpse or intuition of a dispersed, labile, and disappearing-reappearing world of shifting forms - 'so different from his' - haunted the meditative writer's thoughts, however: 'The brief, rhythmic movement, so different from his, which he had glimpsed, remained in him and in his enclosed space like a light torment, a nos-

Moving Narratives 227 talgia for his future: something that crossed a landscape and in it was lost, tracing a line that went somewhere, not necessarily a straight line: instead, broken, zigzagging, sometimes curving, it was a line that did not return, and for this [reason] it seemed to take on a new lightness, uprooted from any dwelling place (dimora) whatsoever.' As the phrase 'nostalgia for his future' - in the original, 'nostalgia del suo avvenire' (emphasis mine) - makes clear, a connection can be made between a new relationship of the self to externality, and an 'adventure/ understood in its etymological sense of a sought-for, future experience of and in the existent. Gabellone describes the next step as a result of 'lateral vision, rapid and light, that had a more precise sense not only of displacement that was no longer an entry into space but a going along with it, accompanying him in his development, but also [a sense] of its truth.' In this sideways glimpse of the world in its continual movement and transformation, 'there was ... a precise, undeniable sensation of a road that was a true path, and like all true paths, it brought that man across the world.' Still intent on discovering that which existed near and next to him, the one who remained in place became 'the one who walks' (quello che cammina), as he began to move across 'the face of the unknown' (il volto dello sconosciuto) with 'a gaze that was a little lost among things' (uno sguardo un po' perso fra le cose). It is possible, I believe, to associate this sideways, lost gaze to what Celati himself has called 'permeability/ and to see the shift from an identity 'in place' to one 'on the path' as both an epistemologically and ontologically profound transformation. The 'one who walks' is now a constant 'traveler' through the existent, and through the 'face' and the language of otherness, with no pretensions to fixing either himself or otherness within origins or foundations pre-elaborated from an egocentric point of departure. In Heideggerian terms, the writer is beginning to 'dwell poetically' in the existent as it shows itself in its 'happening' (Ereignis), and he is thus coming closer to finding the true essence of Being.2 Gabellone next brings his tale back to the issue of writing with which he began. Like 'the one who remains in place/ the man whose new identity is as 'one who walks' is also in search of words, but now it seemed that 'one could read in his face the humility of one who considered words [to be] deposits left there by time in the places where they had been born: towns, cities, villages, riverbanks.' These word deposits do not walk about; rather they, not the writer, are what 'waits' for 'an attentive ear' to awaken them. The writer calls them, appropriating Husserl, 'il parlar del mondo/ the world's speech, but he is wor-

228 Gianni Celati ried that it is hypocrisy to try to transfer these deposits into his domain of words fixed on the page, for the world's speech is part of what is made in order not to be fixed; that is, it is made to live the life of 'that which changes and finally is lost/ that realm of disappearance which he had glimpsed and to which he himself also belonged. Filled with 'unspeakable anguish and almost overwhelming fears/ the writer dug deep into these questions in his guise of 'the one who remains in place/ slowly coming to the conclusion that 'the essential is in disappearance, and that every being is there in the world in order to be lost, along with every one of his words/ Thus, whether remaining in place or walking, the writer was 'lost within the visible/ for there was nowhere in particular to go, and his sole desire, therefore, was for a 'forgetfulness' (oblio) of which words were winged messengers, 'almost as if they had come from the other shore of the future (avvenire).' Gabellone's tale suggests that in accepting the fate of inevitable disappearance, a writer like Celati must live within the territory of what is already lost if he is to 'find' anything. To inhabit the speech of the world is to have no fixed or foundational home, to be always 'on the road/ so to say, and to be negotiating always the delicate balance between the self and alterity. Gabellone's tale-essay ends with a final 'dream/ at which time the writer is on the point of dying. He writes that it is perhaps 'a thought or a message from the gods coming from the beginning of the world.' This dream or vision releases the writer from 'all of his old errancies, and gives to him almost an absentminded smile.' The dream is of an ancient tree, with roots immersed deeply into the earth's sleep, creating a design against the clear sky. The tree has 'all the force that consists in remaining erect and each of its leaves is a word.' It grows on the banks of a river that 'flows unconsciously, like a song/ Both tree and river carry thought along to oblivion. As the 'one who remains in place' is about to die, he tells himself once more 'that it was enough to remain where he was, in order that one day or another the world might come there/ It is implied that persistence is all; one goes on, like a tree or a river, not in order to reach ultimate clarification, but to reach the state of disappearance inherent in all of the existent. Writing is thus a tapping into oblivion rather than a domination and fixing of experience; it 'flows/ like the river, and it 'persists/ like the tree, in order to partake of the essence of ephemeral life. Life and writing both are journeys without concrete goals, and both leave traces that are themselves destined to ultimate disappearance and oblivion. Thought cannot but

Moving Narratives 229 travel, although its destination is its inevitable disappearance. The trip itself is what matters and, if this view is stark, it is nonetheless enough to sustain life's and writing's dynamism, and to provoke perhaps a 'smile' for the writer and for us, his readers, who will also eventually be enveloped in the haze of all that passes. Gabellone's poetic-philosophic description of the 'one who remains in place' and the 'one who walks' suggests that, fixed or on the move, the writer seeks a connection, through words, to the alterity of the existent. Celati's experience of writing while 'forgetting himself brings him closer to this goal, but does not in any sense end his search. If anything, it inaugurates a life-long search still in progress. In the last few pages of 'Rituali di racconto,' he describes his continuing consumption as a young writer of ethnographically and anthropologically oriented studies, works by Frazer, Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, Margaret Mead, and Ernesto de Martino, in which he found 'an infinity of little tales' that took advantage of 'the normal fascination of narrations/ with, of course, differing styles and voices ('literarily mythological' in Frazer or 'extremely erudite' in Tylor, for example). Celati concluded that the 'data' of ethnographic accounts were 'nothing other than tales made by some narrator, summed up and organized like factual data.' He gives as example Rasmussen's writings on the shamanistic practices of Eskimos: 'Rasmussen's summaries of the shamanic practices of Eskimos seemed to me, in those times, beautiful, detailed, praiseworthy, but not for nothing did I read them together with Robinson Crusoe, which I was studying as the form of the modern proto-novel, and it even seemed to me that the two books had a similar foundation.' Celati explains that he does not accuse Rasmussen of novelizing his observations too much, nor can he judge what the anthropologist might have understood about the life of Eskimos, but 'independently of the adherence of his reports to so-called reality, his narratives are in and of themselves a "cultural datum." That is, they are based on a ritual of the tale that an Eskimo anthropologist might study like our ethnologists study the rituals of New Guinea.' Celati is here touching on the problematic of the 'anthropologist as author,' which is so well set forth and analyzed in Clifford Geertz's Works and Lives, and which has come to permeate and erode the past assumption of 'scientific transparency' that kept at bay the discursive, tale-building element of ethnographic writing until fairly recently. While Celati, as a writer of stories, is not ultimately interested in the 'adherence to so-called reality' of ethnographic texts, but rather in the

230 Gianni Celati ways in which they too partake of the 'ritual of the tale/ Geertz has the different perspective of the ethnographer, whose very field is now deeply threatened by today's widespread and explicit awareness of what he calls the 'author function.' Geertz sees as essential an open acknowledgment that ethnography is 'a work of the imagination/ which 'involves telling stories, making pictures, concocting symbolisms, and deploying tropes/ yet he understands that this acknowledgment is 'commonly resisted' among ethnographers themselves 'because of a common confusion, endemic in the West since Plato at least, of the imagined with the imaginary, the fictional with the false/ and because of 'the even stranger idea that, if literalism is lost, so is fact' (Works and Lives; 140). Geertz does not accept the idea that all factuality is impossible simply because facts must be presented through an authorial perspective and through language, and he sees 'dangers' in the postmodern view of the anthropological vocation as fundamentally a literary vocation. His claim is that, in spite of the complexities introduced by the explicit acknowledgment of the discursive element in ethnography, the task of the ethnographer is 'to inscribe a present to convey in words "what it is like" to be somewhere specific in the lifeline of the world: Here, as Pascal famously said, rather than There; Now rather than Then. Whatever else ethnography may be ... it is above all a rendering of the actual, a vitality phrased' (141). This definition of the ethnographic project is remarkably similar to Celati's idea of writing narratives, which he has come to see as a way of reaching the existent, and of touching a here and now in all of its contingency and ephemeral essence. Language itself is the 'field' in which Celati's 'fieldwork' is carried out; actual traveling is an instrument by means of which 'deposits' of the prose of the world, waiting for the attentive ear and eye, can be mined.3 The 'adventure' or 'future event' towards which Celati's writing tends is nothing less than, simultaneously, an idea of literature and an idea of the existent world, both inextricably bound up in human speech. In a profound reconsideration of Calvino's work, 'Antropologia ed etica della scrittura in Italo Calvino' (Anthropology and ethics of writing in Calvino), Massimo Lollini points out fundamental aspects of this famous author's poetics and writing that I believe are very similar to his less famous fellow traveler, Celati. For example, Lollini cites a passage from Lezioni americane (Six Memos for the Next Millennium) in which Calvino writes: 'La funzione della letteratura e la comunicazione tra cio che e diverse in quanto e diverso, non ottundendone bensi

Moving Narratives 231 esaltandone la differenza, secondo la vocazione propria del linguaggio scritto' (The function of literature is communication among differences as such, not dulling but instead exalting difference, according to the very vocation of written language) (quoted in Lollini; 285). Lollini comments that here as elsewhere in Calvino we see a view of literature as 'much more than a simple literary art/ and a sense of the writer as someone who would want to be 'an anthropologist, would want finally to grasp the blood of authentic life with his creative and imaginative capacities' (285). Furthermore, the 'coexistence of self and world' is at the basis of Calvino's work, as it is in Celati, and, for both, the writer's own individual perspective (his 'sguardo') cannot be done away with 'by means of an emphatic effort of will,' no matter how much he may wish to enter into and merge with 'the sea of objectivity' (294). What is, for my purposes here, particularly fascinating about these and other similarities between Calvino's and Celati's views on the writer's task is the fact that both can be classified as 'errant' writers, if with significant differences in their status within canonical literature. In a piece entitled 'Solitudine ed erranza dei letterati' (Solitude and errancy of literati) Asor Rosa writes that it seems to him that 'Italian literature from unification on has fostered a very high grade of resistance and marginalization of figures - and not just a few - of transgression and difference' (in Lettemtura italiana: Storia e geografia, vol. 3; 68). He names Dino Campana and Carlo Michelstaedter as examples of marginalized figures earlier in this century who, in a particularly extreme form, 'lived an experience that is typical of many other Italian writers of the Novecento: that of the voyage, of "errancy," and, in some cases, of exile.' He mentions Calvino as a more recent example: 'Calvino ligure-torinese-parigino-romano' (Calvino LigurianTurinese-Parisian-Roman), and concludes that whether 'isolated' or 'wandering/ Italian writers like these reveal 'the sense of an unease, of a restlessness, that continues to assail Italian writers throughout the Novecento' (70). We could easily add Celati's name to the list of 'erranti': Celati Emilian-Romagnole, Celati Parisian, Celati English, Celati American. Yet, unlike Calvino, the younger writer has tended to remain in that space of dominant Italian literary culture's 'resistance' to difference, rather than attaining the great stature, fame, and stamp of approval endowed upon his older semblable by the Institution of Western Letters. There are many reasons for this, and I do not want to indulge in invidious comparisons; it is true, however, that Calvino's centrality is, paradoxically, linked to his 'errancy' among many arenas

232 Gianni Celati of cultural, literary, and theoretical production and dissemination (the Turin of Einaudi Publishing, the Paris of Oulipo and then of deconstructionism, the Rome of fifties' and sixties' establishment and experimental activity both), while Celati's relative 'marginalization' is also linked to his errancy, but in spaces less powerful and determinant (the real and figurative 'provinces' of the Anglo-American tradition, which were not 'in style' in the sixties and seventies as they were in the thirties and forties, and, later, the culture of the Po valley, for example). It is undeniable, also, that Celati's attitude towards the industry of letters has always been more openly anti-institutional, and that his long selfimposed 'exile' from the mainstream publishing scene, from the late seventies to the mid-eighties, reinforced his profile as an 'eccentric.' The immense readability of Calvino must also be taken in account. Celati's work is not reflective of the same 'natural' narrative talents as Calvino's, remaining more overtly conceptual, and therefore less immediately engaging for general as well as specialized readers. Despite the differences in their positions and reception within mainstream Italian literature, however, Calvino and Celati are both deeply tied to an 'anthropological' view of writing, whereby the differences inherent in human spaces, times, and voices are tapped into, brought to light, and made, through their words, a 'rendering of the actual, a vitality phrased.'4 Gamuna: Utopia or Dystopia? The 'Almanac of Prose,' // Semplice, of which Celati was one of the founding editors, published its first issue in September 1995. The introductory 'Catalogue of prose according to types' listed fifty-three of a potentially 'limitless' inventory of prose types, of which the very first was 'Etnografie e popolazioni immaginate' (Ethnographies and imagined populations). In the January 1996 second issue, Celati's story, 'Fata Morgana,' appeared under this rubric. Part of a longer work-inprogress entitled Fata Morgana: Notizie sul popolo del Gamuna (Fata Morgana: News on the Gamuna people), a second part was published under this title in Altofragile: Foglio di scrittura in February 1997. These stories are made-up ethnographic portraits of the land, language, and customs of the fictional 'Gamuna/ written as if from the objective point of view of the anthropological researcher dedicated to providing as complete a description as possible of a virtually unknown culture. What we learn of these people is, however, anything but prosaic, for

Moving Narratives 233 their world is filled with amazing and disturbing elements that cumulatively add up to a powerfully destabilizing reverse reflection of our own contemporary Western practices and beliefs. Celati has 'traveled' to this far-off land while seated at his writing desk, and he 'brings back' to us a report that is as detailed and concrete as it is fantastical and poetical. Tata Morgana' is divided into six parts; the first, 'Le allucinazioni del deserto' (Hallucinations of the desert) begins with a description of the geography of Gamuna: 'At four hundred kilometers from the sea toward the North-East, a basalt massif closes off the Gamuna territory from the influences of the coast populations. On the opposite side, a moor edged by an immense sandy desert separates it from the roads that lead to the three large cities of the inner regions. The immense desert can be crossed only with special means of transport, because here and there it is formed by vast plates of dry and cracked clay that are capable of turning from one minute to the next into large quagmires similar to those which Arabs called "wadi," and dangerous like "wadi" in springtime' (Tata Morgana'; 15). Quite specific in detail, this description does not, however, tell us where exactly this landscape is to be found, although we (Europeans or Americans) would commonly surmise that it is not part of our known Western spaces, for 'massifs/ 'immense deserts/ and 'wadi' immediately conjure up 'Somewhere Else.' The 'report' tells us next that the Gamunas often venture out to the edges of the moor, but that they rarely have the courage to climb even the lowest sections of the massif, for 'they fear heights like no other people in the world, and they are seized by upsetting vertigo if they so much as contemplate the world from the top of a hill' (15). The explanation of this extreme fear of heights leads into a retelling of the foundational myth of the Gamuna, centered on the hero Eber Eber. The Gamuna feel dizzy when they look at the world from an elevated position because it seems to them that 'everything below is a sole, continual illusion (fenomeno di fata morgana) and that every form of life on earth is nothing other than this kind of mirage.' The myth of Eber Eber supports this idea of the world, for this hero came from the sea in the guise of a laughing mosquito who could 'use the phenomena of desert hallucinations against his enemies' by making everything 'buzz' and 'tremble in desert uncertainty like apparitions of a Morgan le Fey' (16). (In the story 'Com'e cominciato tutto quanto esiste' [How everything that exists began], included in Nanatori delle pianure, Celati recounts another myth of the world's foundation. However, there, also, mosqui-

234 Gianni Celati toes are important, for they are 'the dead who come back.') The conclusion of this myth was reconstructed by one Augustin Bonetti, an Argentine colonel and pilot, who was in his time considered to be the leading expert on Gamuna life. According to Bonetti's account, Eber Eber lived to an advanced age in the form of a mosquito but, having no more enemies to confound, he became quite bored. He flew up to the highest clouds on the wings of a migratory bird in order to look over the world below; when he got high up, however, 'an overwhelming vertigo made him plummet to his death on earth/ He was resuscitated as a young bearded man who now wished to have a banquet with his dead enemies, whom he called to himself with his powerful laugh. The enemies came running and as they arrived they said, '"Gamuna!" which means "We are here!" (The same word, however, if pronounced with an evening intonation, means: "We who live here!")/ After the banquet, Eber Eber went off towards the desert 'with his belly full and his eyes dancing with laughter, saying that he was going to dissolve himself into the air like fine, iridescent dust/ This dust and the air's heat produced in the hero's dead enemies the illusion that they were alive, and that they had a world full of phantasmagoric visions before their eyes: 'And this is the illusion from which, according to the Gamuna, life on earth was born, [life] which is destined to last only for that very brief moment when the sun's rays make some tiny grain of desert dust shine in the air/ In spite of the long-ago past when the sensible world was born and the far-off future when this mirage will disappear, for the Gamuna there is only a very brief period of time that they call 'scintilla d'iridescenza' (scintilla of iridescence), and 'all the sensible images of any era whatsoever are therefore magical reflections of this momentary iridescence' (quotations above from 'Fata Morgana'; 16-17). Celati gives us a vision of a culture founded on evanescence and illusion; recognizing this, the Gamuna avoid aerial views of the world (gazes of dominance and mastery, we might say), for such views only produce distressing vertigo. By contrast, it is implied that our Western cultures seek out high positions from which to look at and define the world, unable or unwilling to remain within the low spaces of ephemera that appear and disappear: the spaces of the visible, of light and shadow, of contingent, ever-changing shapes, and of eventual death. The next section of the story, 'Origine dei Gamuna' (Origin of the Gamuna), tells us of the 'very particular' language spoken by these mysterious people. The narrator-ethnographer informs us that no-one

Moving Narratives 235 knows where they came from, nor can it be said to which ethnic group they belong. Studies of their dialect have helped little in ascertaining anything definite about their origins and ethnicity, but, once more, a detailed description of it is offered. The language is tonal, like Chinese, and outsiders often have the sense that the Gamuna people 'do not know what they are talking about, that is, they seem only to listen to the melody of phrases without attempting to understand what others might be trying to express/ This impression is due in large part to the fact that when a Gamuna listens to another person speaking, the former 'hums a motif that is in tune with the vocalic harmonies of the latter, a motif that underlines the speaker's state of mind and the musical tempo being used/ We are told that every conversation essentially depends on these things, and every sentence is a little musical piece that the listener already knows or 'that he can very well pretend to know' (quotations above from 'Fata Morgana'; 17). For a writer like Celati, who has always been extremely attuned to the aural aspect of language (the 'sound' or 'music' produced by certain tonalities), the language of the Gamuna people is, in some sense, utopic. It is basically a sound, received by others who are attuned to distinguish the affective component of different tones and who get themselves 'in tune' with their co-speakers without worrying about 'meaning' or 'content/ We are thus brought back to one of Celati's major preoccupations as a writer: that his readers hear and attune themselves to his texts rather than look in them for messages or fixed interpretations of the world. In addition to the conventionality of linguistic exchange of which we are all a part (the Wittgensteinian perspective seen in Celati's work on Bartleby, for example), here there is also a continued emphasis on the sheer 'music' of speech, such as can be seen in so much of Celati's work on the oral and spoken aspects of literary writing.5 This 'report' on the Gamuna, ostensibly objective reportage, is, in fact, an implicit metatextual meditation on the limits of any such 'factual' documentation, and, in its own matter-of-fact tonality, which clashes with the fantastic elements that make up Gamuna life, it is a parodistic exercise in the very ethnographic genre it imitates. It is also a portrait of our 'here and now' by means of the representation of the Gamuna's radical 'thereness/ The apparently dystopic quality of their (and, by analogy, our) everyday life is introduced in the third section, called 'L'incanto greve' (The oppressive enchantment), in which we learn that the capital city of Gamuna is much like 'a bit of displaced periphery of any old European or American city/ The city is filled with crumbling

236 Gianni Celati buildings, abandoned vehicles, and old light posts with dangling wires; above all, it produces an intense sense of desolation and oppressiveness, as if it were located in a place 'of a very intense magnetic field.' Everything 'seems to undergo an irresistible attraction downward ... so that even birds often fall to earth as they chirp.' This effect is due in large part to the vast plains and desert spaces that stretch out around the city in all directions: an 'excessive space that enfolds everything/ and produces strange optical effects, which underscore the 'lost' quality of buildings such as the 'little station there in the middle of the dunes [that] makes visitors feel a great sadness, because of how it appears to be incurably banal, stupidly lost in the limitless emptiness.' The sense of sadness is greatly heightened at twilight when 'one sees groups of young Gamunas wandering about not knowing where to go as they wait for night to fall.' This scene of urban desolation is recorded, using the Gamunas' own phrase, as 'the oppressive enchantment' by a Vietnamese nun named Sister Tran, who has lived on the edge of the moor for many years and has kept a detailed diary of her impressions of Gamuna life. (As in some other fictions, here Celati also uses the device of reporting the 'already said or written' by means of the characters Bonetti and Tran.) Sister Tran is fascinated by the 'power of desolate places' (la potenza dei luoghi desolati), such as is found in Gamuna Valley, where 'a fine and iridescent dust' comes from the surrounding desert, covering everything and everyone, endowing all with an 'obtuse and insignificant appearance.' Although this dust can entrap one and enter into the eyes if doors and windows are not left open in order to let it float where it will, and although it can bring 'disturbances that not even medicinal chats can cure/ such as 'the intense desire never to have been born, the melancholy of days that go by, and the desire to kill someone in order to feel stronger than others/ if left to disperse itself freely about, the dust 'spreads a fundamental property onto all things ... also onto people and animals/ This is the 'very great property of ignoring oneself: that is, to ignore oneself as the earth ignores itself, to entrust oneself to the oppressive enchantment that drags everything downward, without ever having anything to say and anything to complain about.' (quotations above from Tata Morgana'; 19-21). Thus, what first seems to be negative (insignificance; melancholy; aimlessness) becomes instead endowed with positive qualities: forgetfulness of self; acceptance of caducity; silence. The stories of the Po valley gave us a similarly open, flat, presumably 'empty' landscape. Is Gamuna Valley really a far-off 'There'? Is this strange people's exist-

Moving Narratives 237 ence - so much like our Western lives lived out in postindustrial wastelands - utopic or dystopic? The term 'potenza/ used by Sister Iran to describe that which fascinates her ('la potenza dei luoghi desolati'), is one that we have encountered before, in Celati's essay on Bartleby. Here as there, the word means both 'power' and 'potential/ and points to a passive quality, a non-activated 'reserve' of the existent. In the desolate spaces of the Gamuna's world, there is a potentiality brought in on the desert wind; similarly Celati sees Bartleby's presence as akin to a desert wind that blows away conventions and stimulates a sense of 'universal fraternity.' The Gamuna people thus seem to be relatives of the scrivener; like him, they give themselves over to the inherent gravity of sheer presence and the acceptance of having nothing to say. While their communal life and the setting in which they live it out have aspects of a miserable dystopia - a decrepit capital city, an inhospitable landscape, the dust that covers all - there is in fact something utopic about their There/ in contrast to our 'Here.' First, they have absolutely no pretensions to creating universalizing and dominating systems of meaning, and they are content to find comfort in one another's company: 'in certain streets of Gamuna Valley there are old abandoned Pullmans or railroad cars that are fixed up as meeting places for adults who might wish to chat... especially when they most intensely perceive the sense of stupidity that invades everything' (21). In the fourth section of the 'report/ called Tl grande Wadi' (The great Wadi), we learn, moreover, that the Gamuna have a spatially conditioned concept of time, which releases them from any idea of linearity or progress, and thus from any desire to master anyone or anything. Time is imagined by them as a great wadi, a 'stagnant pool' in which nothing ever happens except for 'the turning of the seasons.' Life is felt as a fluidity, like the little currents stirred up in the wadi in springtime, such that they have virtually no clear idea of coordinates either temporal or spatial. Many scholars as well as military personnel who have parachuted into Gamuna Valley have tried unsuccessfully to enlist the natives' help in mapping out the vast terrain, but they soon realize that not only do the Gamuna have vague concepts about where they are, they also have 'an absolutely aberrant idea of the world in general, [thinking of it as] a bog or quagmire as useless as it is immobile, in which nothing remarkable ever happens' (quotations from Tata Morgana'; 22). The Gamuna people are thus similar to Bartleby in another way: they passively resist all attempts at interpretation, thereby stimulating ever more intense and

238 Gianni Celati anxious probing by scholarly outsiders (in a relation that recalls the comic 'catatonic-hysteric' couple discussed in an earlier chapter). Their world, in its unknowability, holds a great 'power' over seekers of knowledge, for it is seen as containing some mystery, some potential, the key to which might open doors onto important meanings. Yet, because the very concept of 'meaning' does not appear to be a part of their linguistic exchanges or of their overall relation to themselves and to the existent, they do not offer the needed key. For them, it simply does not exist. As the 'report' on the Gamuna people goes on, it becomes more and more evident that Celati has written not only a sort of parody of the traditionally objective claims and goals of ethnography, but also yet another version of his critique of fixed critical codes and scientifically conditioned views of human existence and of alterity. In his description of the language and the modes of discourse and narration of the Gamuna, the writer also tells us again about his own ideas regarding the realm of linguistic exchange and creation. The Gamuna, for example, 'if they must tell a story, never speak of events that go by in time, but only of various places in which someone found himself embraced by images and mirages' (22). And when they vocalize 'in their nocturnal, closed-mouth babble, listening to the arcane vocalic harmony produced by them according to a very slow tempo, the adult Gamuna often have a vision of the researchers and other people who come from the cities inland.' They see these visitors as susceptible also to the 'oppressive enchantment,' but filled with 'inexplicable agitation, as if they were always waiting for something, as if something had happened or should happen, and as if they were always anxious and impatient to witness something new.' Because the idea of 'something happening' is so alien to the Gamuna, they gently ridicule the researchers, calling them 'those who believe that something happened' (23). The Gamuna population are particularly ill at ease with attempts to map their valley, for 'they think of maps as gazes (sguardi) from on high by someone who is no-one, and who therefore dominates places from outside the spirit of ia, that is, from outside the oppressive enchantment that moves humans' feet and pulls them downward.' Like language, the existent is not something to be dominated; rather, both are a flow into which one enters, as Celati's work has consistently attempted to show, as he avoids gazes of mastery and fixed meanings. The fifth section of the piece, 'Studi sui Gamuna' (Studies on the Gamuna) shows the cruelty that can result from a dominating,

Moving Narratives 239 knowledge-seeking orientation to those who are different from us. Scholars who want to understand 'how the Gamuna might live so tranquilly their wretched and stupid life/ even though these researchers do not know one word of their dialect and understand nothing about them, have even gone so far as to capture some adult Gamuna, bring them back to 'civilization/ and implant electrodes connected to a huge university computer into their cerebral cortex. The goal was to try to understand the role of the hypothalamus in the Gamuna's lack of desire to change or to better their lives, but the actual result was that eight young Gamuna died of heart palpitations; some others escaped by levitating out of a window, 'a magic trick that the Gamuna use only when they are really desperate/ Another twenty or so Gamuna people ended up in an asylum for the insane, where they were subjected to visual stimulation tests with pictures of cattle (to which they responded most), cultivated fields, and objects of Western contemporary life such as cars, ships, airplanes, motorcycles, juke boxes, and dirigibles (to which they responded not at all). Other researchers criticized the 'backward methods' of these experiments, proposing instead that a contingent of parachutists should be sent into Gamuna territory in order to gather information. The parachutists, upon arrival, took all houses into their possession, rounded up people on the streets, and kicked anyone who strayed onto their path. They then proceeded to use handkerchiefs to suspend several Gamuna on a huge tree on the central square of Gamuna Valley, to shout at them, and to point bazookas at them, hoping to intimidate them into giving information. The mysterious result of this was that the Gamuna began to laugh and 'to speak very closely among themselves as if they were in a bar.' Their musical, humming language produced a soporific effect in the soldiers, who one by one fell asleep, only to wake up many days later in the middle of the desert. Upon their return to 'civilization/ the soldiers too were subjected to tests with electrodes in their brains connected to the university computer, but no conclusion could be reached as to why this strange effect occurred. Thus, every attempt, peaceful or otherwise, to gain knowledge about the Gamuna world was a failure. One scholar arrived at a possible explanation of the Gamuna's strange response to the parachutists' inquisition. It seems that these people do not believe in the idea of justice, and they therefore have no courts for deciding questions of guilt and innocence. But in the past there existed a kind of theatrical representation during which they would stage a fake trial for the entertainment of their people, consist-

240 Gianni Celati ing precisely in hanging individuals from the tree and having them interrogated by a fake judge. Celati concludes the section: E possibile che i Gamuna appesi abbiano creduto d'essere stati assunti come attori per uno spettacolo del genere, offerto dai paracadutisti a beneficio della cittadinanza? Questa e la domanda dello studioso. Ma, come fa notare la sorella Tran nei suoi diari, cosa significa 'abbiano creduto'? II vento che li scuoteva, 1'ora del giorno, le chiacchiere medicinali, 1'incertezza luminosa del crepuscolo: tutto cio in quel momento era parte dell'incanto greve che riporta ogni cosa a terra, e ti fa essere cio che sei, secondo il punto dove sei. Dice un vecchio canto gamuna tradotto dalla sorella Tran: Tu sei cio che sei, non voler essere altro. Ridi di cio che sei, se non vuoi essere altro.' (Is it possible that the hanging Gamuna believed that they had been taken on as actors for a spectacle of this kind, offered by the parachutists for the benefit of the citizenry? This is the scholar's question. But, as Sister Tran points out in her diaries, what does 'believed' mean? The wind that shook them, the hour of the day, the medicinal chats, the luminous uncertainty of the dusk: all in that moment was part of the oppressive enchantment that brings everything back to earth, and makes you what you are, according to the place where you are. An old Gamuna song translated by Sister Tran says: 'You are what you are, do not wish to be other. Laugh at what you are, if you do not wish to be other.') (Quotations above from part 5, 'Fata Morgana'; 24-7)

Once again Celati thus underlines the absolute contingency and theatricality of existence, and the impossibility of endowing specific events with universal meaning. The Argentine colonel, Augustin Bonetti, evidently was one of the very few investigators of the Gamuna to understand this world-view, as the last section, 'II caso Bonetti' (The Bonetti case) makes clear. The pilot Bonetti had crashed his airplane forty years previously at the edge of the moor, and there he died. He published some twenty articles on the Gamuna, in which he pointed out that one needed only to adapt to their quite unusual habits, the most important of which is 'to get used to living like a ghost among ghosts/ In fact, Bonetti insisted in his articles that he had died and entered into the ta of the Gamuna world, a term indicating a 'kind of sleep or perpetual catalepsy.' Respectable researchers protested and it was decided, at the Ninth World Convention dedicated to littlestudied races and populations, that Bonetti must never be quoted in

Moving Narratives 241 any university courses or future scientific publications. Nonetheless, it is to Bonetti that we owe the name 'Gamuna Valley/ in spite of his own attempts to explain that, according to the Gamuna themselves (whom he gradually came to understand), 'gamuna ta' actually only means 'we who are here in the ta.' Ta is neither a philosophical concept, nor a religious doctrine, nor a physiological state, but rather a very common word signifying 'this/ so that 'gamuna ta' simply means 'we who are here in this.' Because the Gamuna used the term when referring to the valley (among many other places in which they might find themselves), Bonetti at first mistakenly assumed it meant 'valley/ and so the 'official' name for the territory stuck. Bonetti elaborated a 'painful congerie of interpretations that showed a decidedly altered mental state' in his effort to explain this ambiguous phrase, but the best explanation was found in Sister Iran's diaries. She came to understand that one merely moves through space from one 'this' or presently occupied place, to another, guided by the oppressive enchantment. She concludes: 'Now I know that there only exist the "this," the here, the now, the moment and the place in which I am. Now I know that all the rest is the inconsistent cloud of phantasms that enfold every moment of our life.' The narrator ends with a return to Bonetti's 'ravings/ in which the colonel proposed that for the Gamuna 'nothing exists outside of the ta, outside of the empty space of the "this," which is filled up with our presence; nothing exists outside of the desert emptiness that is always before their eyes.' To the resounding disdain of the scientific community, Bonetti concluded that the term gamuna should thus properly be rendered as: 'we who are here to take up a place in the emptiness like desert mirages.' Celati's 'report' terminates with the following: 'One can well understand the disdain of the scientific and academic world ... above all [because Bonetti] perhaps wished to suggest that the Gamuna territory was a kind of realm of the dead, populated with ephemeral souls who raved in the emptiness. But who any longer believes in such fantasies?' (quotations above from part 6 of Tata Morgana' ['II caso Bonetti']; 27-30). Celati travels far in his writing about the Gamuna, arriving in the end at a world-view that is neither positively utopic nor negatively dystopic, but rather potentially quite accurate, at least insofar as Western technologized global reality is concerned. Although we are told that this view is not conditioned by philosophy, religion, or even physiology, it in fact partakes of concepts and elements from all of these realms, and it adds up to both a description of and a prescription

242 Gianni Celati for living in today's foundationless, 'placeless' times. The Gamuna world is disturbing to researchers because it resists placement and naming, remaining instead a blank space, a 'nonplace.' At first reading, it may seem that the ta, the 'oppressive enchantment/ and other 'strange' elements of Gamuna life could not be farther removed from contemporary life in Western society (the life lived in Europe and the United States, for example, and which most of Celati's readers live), but, upon reconsideration, Gamuna life and late-twentieth-century, late capitalist, 'postmodern' existence have a compellingly specular relation. As Peter Kuon has insightfully pointed out in his recent essay on Celati's Narmtori delle pianure, 'La vita naturale, cosa sarebbe: Modernitat und Identitat in Gianni Celatis Narratori delle pianure' (Natural life, what would it be: Modernity and Identity in Celati's Narmtori), 'Celati tries to do with narrative means what a movement that is gaining ground especially in French sociology does under the headings of "ethnologic des societes contemporaries," "anthropologie du proche," or "invention du quotidien"' (28; translation from the German by B. Naess). In these approaches, Western postindustrial society is studied, as remote, so-called primitive societies have been subjected in the past to the scrutiny of anthropologists and ethnographers, in order to arrive at some understanding of the 'proche' (near) of the 'quotidien,' of the everyday here and now in which those doing the research are themselves living. One of the salient aspects of postmodern contemporary existence is precisely the 'non-lieu' or nonplace: transitional spaces such as waiting rooms, hotel rooms, train compartments, and the like, where 'people meet temporarily, without being connected by tradition or identity' (Kuon refers to the work of Marc Auge, Non-Lieux: Introduction a une anthropologie de la surmodernite, and discusses the concept of the 'non-lieu' in part V of his essay; 28-9). The 'placelessness' of our so-called advanced societies' everyday life is inescapable, for modernity has done its work in bringing us to it. The question is how to deal with it. The Gamuna accept it, indeed they have no desire to fix their coordinates or to dominate their contingency from on high, while the avid researchers from outside are incapable of recognizing that they themselves are also implicated in the foundationless, 'nonplace' nature of Western late-capitalist, postmodern existence. As Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe writes in his essay, 'Blankness as a Signifier/ 'the condition of placelessness is that of the ultimate mobility, which is capitalism's central theme' (171). We might substitute the term 'evanescence' for Gilbert-Rolfe's 'mobility' as far as the

Moving Narratives 243 Gamuna are concerned, but the similarity to contemporary Western reality still holds. Celati's modest proposals for dealing with contemporary First World postmodern existence that is filled with, even dominated by, 'nonspaces' such as cyberspace, are to be found in the stories of everyday life in the Po valley as well as in the Gamuna piece. These proposals are similar to his view of writing as a search for 'fictions in which to believe.' In Narmtori delle pianure, as Kuon rightly notes, 'only a few of Celati's characters become desperate or commit suicide. Most of them come to an arrangement with modernity, in a strange mixture of exact observation, odd philosophizing, and awkward storytelling' (29). The Gamuna people's 'medicinal chats' are moments of communality, and their stories about the researchers are ways for them to share some understanding of the incomprehensible. Moreover, they immerse themselves completely in the ephemeral, downward pull of life, living as if they were in some sense already dead, and accepting that the 'this' is all they have or will ever have. The affective component of speech and of shared storytelling is particularly important in the context of societies in which foundations, traditions, and myths have been replaced by rapid change, radical skepticism, and resultant isolation, for stories can 'create continuity in the confusion of contingent everyday experience and of modes of communication that mediate reality by means of impersonal signs and billboards' (Kuon; 29). Celati's work, from the early eighties to today, has been directed towards resuscitating both the organizational and the affective power (and potential) of storytelling, as he has cast himself in the role of the keeper of the narrative ritual, one of the few elemental ceremonies remaining to postindustrial civilization that might be of help in living in these bewildering times. Storytelling counters individual solitude by emphasizing what we share with past generations (in this it is related to the epic mode rather than to the modern lyrical mode that sings singularity), and it can thus generate a sense of 'place' and a certain foundational quality that might make us more able to bear our shared 'home' in mortality. In Celati's stories of the eighties and nineties, as I have suggested in earlier discussions, the limits of mortality are at the basis of a possible approach to and continuance of both writing and living. His Gamuna world, like many stories in Narratori, is imbued with a sense of the inevitable 'downward' pull of life and of eventual disappearance. Often readers and critics of the post-Guizzardi Celati have talked of the 'depressing' quality of his more recent fictions, but Celati's reply (in the

244 Gianni Celati 1990 interview with Bob Lumley) is animatedly clear: 'One thing I can't stand is when people say "Oh, your stories are so melancholy, so depressing." But I say "Well, look at you, you're so depressing, all of you, this society is so depressing, but you are depressing exactly because you refuse melancholy, you refuse death, you refuse this feeling of finitude, the limits, and that's why you're so depressing, you are very depressing." From my point of view, melancholy is nothing depressing, it's a very important feeling. It's something vital' (The Novella and the New Italian Landscape'; 47). Like Benjamin, Celati is fully convinced that melancholy is the main emotion by means of which we might understand something of human history and of our own lived lives, and it is heightened by travel, the Shakespearean 'sundry contemplation' of which produces a vital sadness, as one moves through the spaces and traces of past as well as present life. This 'philosophy of melancholy' obviously conditions the creation of the Gamuna world and, in addition to the abstract idea of vital melancholy, in the second part of the annals of the Gamuna there is added the concrete physiological component already seen very clearly in the figure of the old actor Vecchiatto: the decay of the body as it ages and moves toward death. (Here, too, we might think of Shakespeare's Jaques in As You Like it who, in addition to his 'most humorous sadness,' also is known for the 'All the world's a stage' speech, in which the seven ages of man are recounted and end with old age and death: 'mere oblivion: sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything'; Act II, Scene vii). This ineluctable process is connected to the theme of glory, in a story that could be subtitled 'Sic passit gloria mundi.' The Gamuna people, we are told, believe that 'the strange desire to attain glory' does not depend on the individual, but on the same force that pulls everything downward: the 'oppressive enchantment.' One cannot resist this force until one becomes old; it is only at an advanced age that 'stories told to glorify oneself (called "stories of the dog that has mistaken vision") begin to appear to be things about which one can laugh publicly, and many old people go about cackling uproariously among themselves' ('Notizie sul popolo dei Gamuna'; all quotations above and below from this story in Altofragile; 7). As old age assails the body, making the bones thin out, the body more fragile, the flesh more flabby, and the blood circulate less, the Gamuna come to see the ridiculousness of all pretensions to self-glorification, especially those having to do with physical or sexual appeal. In fact, the search for glory is primarily a male preoccupation, related to 'the call of the erect penis/ while, for women, their physical

Moving Narratives 245 beauty makes them most prized in the business of matrimony' and their attractiveness 'serves only to increase the public glory of the male, but has no other use.' After marriage, however, men and women both soon lose interest in one another's market appeal, and begin to look for ways of glorifying themselves outside of the family circle, such as 'assiduous work, or vain chattering, or seductive flirting, until they become boring and unbearable.' This is why, from middle age on, the Gamuna people begin to pray every day to 'the Being of Great Repose, so that It will bring them as quickly as possible to repentance and the abandonment of youthful impulses.' This repentance is not easily attained; only a few very old people reach it, and only when their hearts no longer seek validation from anyone whomsoever. This parable of the vanity of normative heterosexual, matrimonially oriented sexual congress (in every sense of the word) can be read as a retelling of Celati's own trajectory (at least his fictional one), from the sex-saturated amorous spasms of his early protagonists, especially 'Giovanni' of Lunario del paradiso, who takes off for Germany in quest of his desired Antje, to his version of Boiardo's Orlando innamorato, in which all the knights are motivated by their 'erect penises' to pursue the beauty of Angelica, to the more recent stories in Narratori and Quattro novelle, in which Baratto and many other characters are, in middle age, moving towards the 'Great Repose.' Erotic love is portrayed as one of life's greatest adventures, but it is finally ephemeral, fundamentally comic, and even dangerous in its power to make us seek to dominate and possess desired others. Being in love is, quite literally as well as figuratively, a 'trip,' but one that is destined to end up in the inevitable demystification of old age and death. It is perhaps for this reason that even the most 'carnal' of Celati's writings are imbued with a distancing self-irony, a raucous comedy, or a mild sadness, and now, with his Gamuna, Celati openly declares the nullity of 'voglie carnali' (carnal desires) and of the 'bollore del sangue' (boiling of the blood) to which we are all at some point subjected. If there is for Celati a pathetic, if very human, silliness to the search for self-glorification and the urges of the flesh, the abandonment of such pretensions and needs has a movingly tragicomic aspect. Celati paints an unforgettable word picture of the last phase of life, when the Gamuna people renounce all that they have sought in order to 'reduce the results of years and years of work to the so-called substance of "lost time.'" This they do in a public ceremony under the huge portico on the main square of Gamuna Valley:

246

Gianni Celati

The oldest and richest inhabitants gather. And there one can often note someone who, with exhausting negotiations, tries to rid himself of his own patrimony, or of his renown as a great businessman. He pretends to make mistakes, he lets himself be deceived, he answers inappropriately, dissipating in the confusion and bewilderment of these exchanges all his glory ... Around the portico, women with motley dresses sell [the essence of the substance known as 'lost time'] in little ampoules, which many old people buy in order to cure themselves of headaches. Because it is assumed that 'the essence of lost time' (considered magical) can refresh the mind and the blood, and thus orient the businessman who might wish to lose his entire patrimony in a few minutes. The best deals, in this sense, are those that transform a rich and respected citizen into a total nullity, so shabby [misero] that when dead he will not even be remembered by those still alive. With a wonderful reverse twist on the common function of deal making - that is, gain - here are a people whose oldest, richest, and most savvy businessmen use all of their skill at bargaining to rid themselves of their prior gains. Certain of these aged citizens are then seen at dusk going about 'leaping in the mud, dirtied with cow dung, wearing sheep skins and emitting pitiable bleats.' Others with the ridiculous horns of a cow on their heads go about exhibiting their shriveled genitals in public, 'cackling as if they [genitals] were the most ridiculous thing in the world/ These wretched creatures are, Celati tells us, 'old people who are repenting, by now well on the way to sanctity.' When, after several months of such public humiliations, their presence produces 'a special sneer or grimace typical of onlookers/ it means that these old people can never again find glory and that their entire lives are summed up as a pure waste of time 'according to the will of the Being of Great Repose who always toys with us.' This description tends primarily in the direction of comedy, but the final paragraph of the story is much less comic, much more delicately sad and poetic. I quote it in the original: Soltanto a questo punto si potra avere la certezza che la propria vita sia stata soltanto un piccolo bagliore d'iridescenza, uno spettacolo a vuoto come tanti altri, come un'ombra su un muro o come il riverbero dei raggi del sole su una duna di sabbia. II raggiungimento di tale certezza ispira canzoni melodiose, che spesso si sentono levarsi di notte ai margini della brughiera. Quelle canzoni, bellissime ma senza parole comprensibili, sono

Moving Narratives 247 fatte in modo che ascoltandole non si sa mai se ridere o commuoversi o buttarsi per terra. Lo sguardo serale di certi anziani macilenti esprime questa particolare incertezza, ed e un segno sicuro di santita. (Only at this point will one be sure that one's own life has been only a little glimmer of iridescence, an empty spectacle like so many others, like a shadow on a wall or the sun's rays bouncing off a sand dune. The attainment of such certainty inspires melodious songs, that are often heard rising up at night on the edges of the moor. Those songs, very beautiful but without understandable words, are made in such a way that, listening to them, one does not know whether to laugh or to be moved or to throw oneself onto the ground. The evening gaze of certain emaciated old people expresses this particular uncertainty, and it is a sure sign of sanctity.)

Thus ends the story of the Gamuna people, who renounce worldly gain, glory, and self-importance at the end of their lives, accepting that their existences have been one with the ephemera of the natural world. Analogously, writing itself is seen in the later Celati as ephemeral; as Lumley comments, 'it is not that writing should be abandoned ... but that it should free itself of the literary aura, accepting its own mortality and ordinariness' (in Baranski and Fertile, 56). In the 'reports' on the Gamuna, as in much of the Po valley writing and in the essay on Bartleby, there is a reaching towards the external world, understood as our shared 'Here/ our human dwelling place. Raffaele Manica, in an essay entitled 'Celati, la follia serena' (Celati, serene madness), points out the similarity among all these recent writings, and even sees the Gamuna stories as self-gloss on the Po valley tales that 'ci fa guardare un racconto con un altro racconto' (make us see a story with another story; 618). Manica also refers to Fachinelli's writings on mysticism - which I discussed in reference to Bartleby in Chapter i - as pertinent to these tales that propose 'staying on ground level, running toward silence, trying to cancel out time, being the space that surrounds us' (618). If there is a 'mystical' or 'religious' quality to these fictions, it is to be found in the cultivation of certain attitudes - rather than a sure faith in doctrinal beliefs - such as humility, gentleness, humor, and acceptance of even the most radical forms of otherness. Lumley again provides an excellent summary: 'Many of the lessons in living that can be drawn from Celati's writings seem indebted to religious sources - the need for humility, awareness of the finitude of human existence, awe before nature and the cosmos, doubt about the claims of science, exaltation of ecstatic experience' ('The Novella and the New Italian Landscape'; 57).

248 Gianni Celati But there is nothing preachy or sanctimonious about Celati's writing, for he relies on a kind of quirky humor, a soft skepticism, and a decidedly postmodern perspective that refuses all direct moralizing. Another word that applies to Celati's approach to living as portrayed in his recent fictions is kindness, which Heidegger points out as a term of fundamental importance in Holderlin's poem about 'dwelling poetically' in this world. The philosopher writes: '"Kindness" - what is it? A harmless word, but described by Holderlin with the capitalized epithet "the Pure." "Kindness" - this word, if we take it literally, is Holderlin's magnificent translation for the Greek word charis ... As long as this arrival of kindness endures, so long does man succeed in measuring himself not unhappily against the godhead' ('Poetically Man Dwells,' in Poetry, Language, Thought; 228-9). Above and beyond the call to kindness or caritas, however, it is, finally, the deep restlessness and loneliness captured in Celati's fictions that I believe hold most resonance and appeal for our age, indeed, are symptomatic of our era. Conversely, his emphasis on the inescapable limits of mortality are no doubt less appealing, for ours are not times when aging, decline, and death are aspects of life most wish to confront. Never to settle down; never to root himself in any one system of thought; never to declare mastery of the self or the world; never to elaborate fictions of immortality: these are Celati's most typical qualities, which are those of the eternal wanderer, the itinerant artisan of words: our late twentiethcentury's version of the gentle earthly traveler on a pilgrimage towards disappearance. Italian Adventures into Otherness Consisting of nine Taccuini' or Notebooks, Celati's most recent book, Avventure in Africa, opens with a prefatory notice that informs us that Celati left on a trip to West Africa in January 1997 in order to accompany his filmmaker friend Jean Talon.6 They went from Mali to Senegal and Mauritania; initially Talon's intention was 'to study the possibility of a documentary on the methods of the Dogon healers used in the Center of Traditional Medicine in Bandiagara, in North Mali/ but these plans were soon derailed. Celati writes that he is publishing this book, made up of diaries, 'just as [I] wrote them along the way, with revisions and adaptations in order to make them readable.' He dedicates them 'to the friends who want to know where we were, and to those whom we met along the way.' This straightforward, simple presenta-

Moving Narratives 249 tion of what follows is in marked contrast to the elaborately metatextual quality of the recent Vecchiatto, and it reveals a zigzag back to the diaristic 'reportage' mode seen in the 'stories of observation' Verso lafoce of the Po valley period, as well as to an openly autobiographical approach as seen (if more obliquely) in the early Lunario del paradiso and La banda del sospiri, in which Celati's family and friends, and his own youthful experiences, were at the basis of his fictional reelaboration. Here, however, there is not to be found any explicit 'literariness' or fictionalization whatsoever; the Notebooks recount events, encounters, reactions, thoughts, feelings, and Celati presents himself as neither a novelistic author nor even a storyteller, but instead as a filtering voice that carries this record of happenings to us. Obviously, the happenings are shaped by the narration of them, and Celati's subjectivity is on center stage inasmuch as his eyes and his words are the sole controlling instruments by means of which this 'Africa' is given to us, the readers. Yet, as will be seen in the following discussion, this is not a text about 'what Africa means to me,' nor about 'how Africa transformed me,' or any such ego-centered portrait; nor is it in any sense an attempt at an 'objective' report on the conditions of life, the politics, or the social realities of West Africa. My goal, then, in the pages that follow, is to try to capture something of what in fact this book is, and to argue for why and how it contributes importantly to the continuation and renewal of Italian prose letters in these final years of the twentieth century. Trips of Others into Otherness Many Italian writers of this century have written about their trips to far-off lands (including the United States); Pasolini and Moravia are two writers, for example, for whom Africa was a subject of particular importance. What is most significant for my purposes here, however, is the related fact that the modern Italian novel as such does not have as distinguished a record of production and lasting achievement as in other European countries, but that Italian writers - like Moravia and Pasolini, as well as many others of this century who did in fact write novels - very often wrote as well some form of travel literature. Taking the issue of Italian travel writing well beyond the confines of the current century, Theodore J. Cachey, Jr has recently argued that 'Italian literature, since Marco Polo and Dante, has always displayed the greatest mobility across time and space in both geographical and literary

250 Gianni Celati terms/ with the result that 'the Italian is arguably the most "well traveled" of the Western European literary traditions' ('An Italian Literary History of Travel'; 55). Cachey contends that the lack of a special category for and of particular critical attention to the genre of travel writing in Italian literary historiography is due to the fact that 'the entire tradition comprises a literature of travel, and more precisely a literature of exile/pilgrimage, into which the attachments of its authors to regional place have been sublimated' (56) in order to sustain a deterritorialized and ideally unified Italian literary identity: an idea of 'Italy/ in short. The 'industrial novel' of standardized language and themes against which Celati rails in so many of his essays can be seen as a contemporary manifestation of an age-old phenomenon in the Italian context, then; this sort of novelistic writing is within the precincts of the linguistic and literary ideals of 'national identity' by which the Italian canon has been built up and maintained, and reflects a desire for a 'territorial' notion of literature that the actual, highly heterogeneous Italian linguistic and cultural tradition belies. Cachey's goal of showing the ways in which travel literature is in fact constitutive of all of Italian literature is not mine, however. My point is more modest, and has to do with the fact that, at least in this century, the best prose writing is perhaps to be found in forms other than the strictly novelistic: hybrid and ostensibly secondary forms such as the autobiographical, the diary genre, reportage, and travel writing all employ more flexible narrative techniques and broader linguistic registers than the 'well-made novel/ and they thus add up to a richer, more authentic reflection of the heterogeneity of Italian culture as well as of its regional linguistic diversity. Travel writing in particular has also provided a means of auto-analysis and critique of Italian national identity, as journeys into other territories have allowed for the drawing of analogies with and differences from the Italian social, political, and cultural scenes. We see this kind of displaced self-critique in recent Italian film as well; for example, in Bertolucci's Last Emperor or, earlier, in Rossellini's Germany Year Zero and in Pasolini's Notes for an African Orestes. Real or imagined trips into spaces of radical otherness - China, India, and Africa having been the preferred territories of such alterity for contemporary Italian writers have been the source in this century of a great quantity of important artistic creativity in many fields, including writing, film-making, and design, to name but a few. Celati's writings on the world of the Gamuna and his Avventure in Africa thus have affinities with a wide area of Italian cultural production that dates back at least as far as

Moving Narratives 251 Marco Polo and which has intensified in the latter half of the waning twentieth century, especially with the new 'multicultural' reality of an Italy now imbued with the presence of immigrants from Africa, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere.7 In order better to understand the ways in which Celati's African book differs from some other contemporary writers' deployment of the trope of travel, as well as the ways in which it shares certain of the directions and results of yet other writers, I want to consider briefly four texts: Moravia's Un'idea dell'India (An Idea of India) and Malerba's Cina Cina (China China), from which Celati's book differs in fundamental ways; and Pasolini's L'Odore dell'India (The Odor of India) and Manganelli's Esperimento con I'India (Experience [and Experiment] with India), with which Celati's work shares some important aspects. I am not suggesting that Celati had these particular texts in mind as he wrote Avventure in Africa; rather, they are used here as examples and counter-examples from within the same general category of literary travelogues in order to reveal the originality of Celati's work and the ways in which it transforms an already well-established genre of prose writing that has appealed to many Italian writers across the Novecento. I might add parenthetically that books about travels within Italy (like Celati's Po valley texts) have also flourished in very recent times, in texts such as Guido Ceronetti's Viaggio in Italia (1983), Pier Vittorio Tondelli's Un weekend postmoderno (1990), and Alberto Arbasino's Fratelli d'ltalia (most recent version published in 1993). Regarding these 'at-home' travel texts, Davide Papotti has written that the traditional Grand Tour diary genre has been replaced by a lucidly self-conscious form of writing: that of the Italian journeying in his own homeland as if it were a foreign space. These texts take on the 'dare' of finding alternatives to the repetition of codified touristic and literary modes of representing Italy - to itself and to outsiders - in order to 'create alternative models for revitalizing a genre' ('II libro in valigia: eredita odeporiche nel romanzo italiano contemporaneo' [The book in a suitcase: hodeoporic inheritances in the contemporary Italian novel]; 362). The same can be said about recent travel narratives of journeys beyond the confines of Italy, in which, as in ethnographic writing, the 'author function' has come to the fore in all of its strong (and problematic) self-consciousness. Alberto Moravia's Un'idea dell'India, published in 1962, is the account of a 1960 trip to India that he made with Pasolini and Elsa Morante, then Moravia's wife. Pasolini's L'Odore dell'India, also published in 1962, is his record of the same trip. First appearing as a series

252 Gianni Celati of newspaper articles, Moravia's text is, according to Patrick Rumble, 'driven by a sincere and overwhelming desire to understand India, its economic plight, its cultural and linguistic diversity, its religious and caste stratifications from a responsible marxist perspective' ('Ideas vs. Odors of India: Third Worlds in Moravia and Pasolini, with a Postscript on Manganelli'; 195). The wish to capture an 'idea' of India, to master its historical, political, and cultural complexities, results in a text filled with facts, data, detailed information; the Marxist hope of finding a progressive story that leads towards a just society dominates Moravia's narrative and enables him to see a connection between India's national formation and independence and that of Italy. The text is 'self-conscious/ then, at least as regards analogies of national identity formations. However, as Rumble rightly notes, Moravia's 'own perspective or narrating point of view is never brought into focus. Throughout the text, he avoids any mentioning of his own physical comfort, or of the circumstances of the voyage. He will never mention his traveling companions, Pasolini or Morante' (196). Moravia maintains a 'from-on-high,' intellectualizing perspective (what, Rumble reminds us, Mary Louise Pratt calls the '"monarch-of-all-I-see" perspective ... reminiscent of Victorian travelogues' [198]) that must perforce exclude any and all references to his own bodily frailties or to the possible limits of his conceptualizing powers. It is wrong to see in Moravia's text a lack of sincere sympathy for the tribulations of Indians both past and present, yet his 'colonizing gaze' holds dangers of which he appears to be unaware. The T and the 'eye' are both universalized, according to the ostensibly neutral, phallocentric, Eurocentric white male model, and the narrative voice is that of the unassailable pedagogue and disembodied, 'objective' mind. Luigi Malerba's Cina Cina, published in 1985, originated in a 1980 trip he took to China as part of a delegation of Italian writers, including the poets Vittorio Sereni and Mario Luzi and the writer and critic Alberto Arbasino. In his introductory 'Author's Note,' Malerba reminds us that he has already published a book of stories set in China (the 1974 collection, Le rose imperiali), although at that time he had never been to China, and the country was above all 'Oriente, 1'altra meta del mondo, ma soprattutto un Altrove Letterario dove potevano depositarsi le mie invenzioni, favole e mitologie inevase' (the Orient, the other half of the world, but above all a Literary Elsewhere where my current inventions, fables and mythologies could be deposited; 13). Malerba goes on to tell us that, before leaving for the trip, he wrote in a

Moving Narratives 253 short article published in the Corners della Sera that he did not want to write a book about China upon his return and, in fact, Cina Cina is not a book but rather 'a series of minuscule investigations and conjectures that have neither the structure nor the physical dimension of a book.' He further declares that he did not want the trip to lead him to deny in any way his already existing 'mental, literary and emotional relationship' with the then unseen China, which he calls 'a relationship already acquired, a closed, far-off chapter' (17). Malerba does acquire some knowledge about real historical and current post-Mao China as a result of the trip, but Cina Cina remains above all a China of metatextual space in which the usual Malerbian literary techniques of irony, humor, paradox, and questioning of the very concept of 'reality' reign supreme. The text consists of seventy-seven brief prose pieces in which some aspect of Chinese history, current practice, or belief is considered, most often through the lens of the author's thought-provoking humor. Malerba also includes epigrams, short poetical compositions that, again, rely mainly on paradox and humor. For example, there is an epigram entitled 'Banane come uomini' (Bananas like people) that goes: 'Le banane di Canton / sono corte / sono gialle / si producono a milion' (The bananas of Canton / are little / are yellow / are produced by the millions); another, 'Davanti al mausoleo di Mao' (In front of Mao's mausoleum) reads: 'Corre voce che Xiao / Vuole sfrattare Mao / Dal suo mausoleo / e Mao per dispetto / Si e mezzo putrefatto' (There's a rumor that Xiao / wants to throw Mao out / of his mausoleum / and Mao for spite / has half putrified himself). Cina Cina is, as Romano Luperini writes in his introductory note, finally a portrait of China as an 'allegory of ... alterity, of the abyss that has opened up between "name" and "thing"' (8). The book has more to do with Malerba's typical preoccupation with the difficulties of representing any reality (reality is itself always in question), his penchant for paradox and humor, and his preference for linguistic play than with China as a real territory; it is, in short, a supremely literary text. Celati's Avventure in Africa is, as might be expected, far removed from Moravia's goal of putting into words his masterful, basically politically driven 'idea' of India, and it is also distant from Malerba's fundamentally self-conscious literary approach to an 'idea' of China that he wishes to preserve as a metatextual space - although Avventure in Africa has some affinities with this latter approach that I shall comment on when considering Manganelli's book on India, a metatextual tour deforce. To conclude this rapid glance at other examples of recent

254 Gianni Celati travel writing, let me turn briefly to Pasolini's L'Odore dell'lndia. Originating in the same trip as Moravia's, it is a very different kind of travelogue, heavily conditioned by Pasolini's emphasis on his own body and his sense-oriented absorption of India (hence the 'odor' of the title). Rumble again provides a good description of the goals of the project: The travelogue reader's horizon of expectations, his voyeuristic desires for a keyhole through which to peer, from a safe and unseen location, onto the "primal scene" of the Third World ... are simultaneously raised and denied. In the place of observation is a constant documentation of the status of the observer: descriptions of Pasolini's own discomfort with his role, and constant references to the material and emotional circumstances of his journey' (195). Pasolini's love for spaces and people as yet untouched and untainted by First World 'progress' in the form of highly developed capitalistic systems (seen in his written and cinematic portraits of sub-proletarian Rome as well) is evident not only in this book, but also in his film work dealing with Africa and India, in which the 'primitive,' sensual opacity and innocence of the Third World are represented as having a positive value lost to First World society. In spite of the great differences in Moravia's and Pasolini's portraits of their shared trip to India, both are ultimately politically motivated and explicitly or implicitly they argue for a historicist perspective on a 'prehistorical' reality. Both therefore pose all of the problems inherent in such an orientation to otherness: the assumption of 'backwardness' versus 'progress'; of 'primitive' them versus 'advanced' us; of a strict division between the 'bodily' and the 'rational.' The message rather than the narrative form itself is the main focus for both writers, in spite of Pasolini's self-consciousness as an observing outsider. What Pasolini's text does have in common with Celati's are the emphasis on the permeable body as it is touched by everchanging sights, sounds, and smells, and the writer's refusal to shape his experiences into a linear, logically driven story. Giorgio Manganelli's Esperimento con I'lndia was written shortly after his 1975 trip to India but not published until 1992, two years after the author's death. The introductory pages establish the metaliterary orientation of the writer (who, after all, insisted throughout his career that literature is solely about itself and uniquely ruled by the 'God' of rhetoric) in an imagined dialogue with an alter ego who is about to depart for a trip to India. This constitutionally lugubrious chap has been reading the Bhagavadgita, has probably read Hesse's Siddhartha, and he states that he could 'tear up his ticket... and still have a trip to recount,'

Moving Narratives 255 so assiduously has he immersed himself in the literary lore of India (11-12). Manganelli's narrative proper assumes the first-person voice and opens with a description of his thoughts while still on the airplane. He ruminates about his preconceptions of India, all founded on books. Siddhartha is 'a book full of poetry and of an elegant profundity/ but is the spiritualized, luminous portrait of India that it paints true? The narrator asks himself: 'Will India be like that? Reading Hesse's book, one forgets that excrement exists. This seems noble but, in the long run, is it honest?' (16-17). As he continues to 'leaf mentally through [his] modest library [on India]/ stereotypical images dance before his eyes, of a country made up of reincarnations, the perfume of sandalwood, lepers, gods, and the immortal Absolute. More and more upset, he realizes that he wants 'India, not ambiguous, perhaps mediocre literature/ and, in a mood now of defiance, he thinks: 'All we Europeans die, my dear Absolute' (20-1). With this thought in mind, he feels the plane descending and sees the first lights of Bombay. A writer who always plays on the oxymoronic juxtaposition of the 'high' and the 'low' (we remember that his first fictional work is entitled Hilarotragoedia or 'comic-tragedy'), Manganelli is invaded by an awareness of the dense, excremental quality of Bombay, which is carried on the 'tropical, watery, soft ... urine-embittered air' that assails him immediately when he walks out of the airport. This portrait of a corporeal, lower-body ambience stimulates an ever more abstract, mental response, however, as Manganelli writes of his sense that hygienic 'Europe sinks back behind [his] back' as he penetrates into and is penetrated by 'this world so superbly invaded by its own terrestrial essence' (25). He both revels in and is made anxious by the literally overwhelming materiality of India, which clashes with the bookish abstractions by which he has formerly 'known' the country. Like Pasolini, Manganelli is a body permeated by insinuating odors, more specifically by an all-enveloping air that actively enfolds him, while he struggles to remain a mind capable of processing and narrating his sensations and his thoughts. Significantly, this close, inescapable contact with externality in all of its sensual presence results in a clear, light prose style; this in an author - the Manganelli best known as an author of 'literature about itself - who is famous for his baroque convolutions and an almost ponderous tendency towards extreme stylization. The prose of Esperimento con I'India flows, carried on the current, with an 'airborne' quality that reaches a transparency seldom found in this master of rhetorical complication. This transparency is in

256 Gianni Celati striking contrast to the opacity of his subject, India itself, which remains radically and seductively unknowable. In the end, Manganelli abandons his literary (and metaliterary) pretensions in favor of descriptions both of sights and sounds and of his own state of being, which is primarily one of deep anxiety brought on by India's power to upset all of his Western (and literary) views on it. When asked by an Italian friend if he loves India (presumably upon his return), he writes in response at the very end of the book: 'I do not know what to answer. In India I met a fear close to death; I met an agile and impossible seduction; I saw eyes wide-open and without pupils, gods on swings, I saw monsters and lepers, I brushed up against the warehouse of souls. Everything fluctuates between madness and revelation. Everything is easy and untouchable. Innumerable times I met with traces of Siva, the multiple god, who creates and destroys, the millenarian dancer enclosed in the magic wheel. "I am poor," says an ancient poem for Siva, "my legs are his columns, my head is a golden dome. Solid and immobile things fall to ruin, that which has no remains goes on intact." Perhaps it is now time to begin to deal with India' (104). It is true that, as Rumble writes, 'Bombay, Calcutta, Goa, Madras, all become the backdrop for the spectacle of his "anxiety": "Sono a Madras e sto male ... La mia competenza in angosce si trova di fronte a qualcosa di inedito/" As Lyotard might say, this anxiety is the 'product of contact with the "inhuman," a sensation of the presence of something unsayable' (2O2).8 Yet it is also true that, 'unsayable' as India might be, Manganelli writes an uncommonly lucid account of a trip through the real and material oxymoron of an ungraspable country ('low-high/ 'sensual-abstract,' 'body-soul'), a living oxymoron that rivals the immaterial figure of speech that is so pervasive in his body of fictional work. More than the emphasis on the body (as seen in Pasolini), it is, therefore, the clarity and lightness of his prose that provide a point of similarity with Celati's book, which is also a flowing prose record of a trip through a transforming, utterly absorbing externality. In addition, Manganelli's recourse to the poem for Siva as a summation of his experience, in which the ephemeral nature of 'solid and immobile things' - monuments, in short - is contrasted to the persistence of unfixable, disappearing phenomena, takes us squarely into a Celatian perspective, which will be reiterated in Avventure in Africa. These diverse travel books are only a minimal sampling of the wealth of such texts by this century's Italian writers. They provide a backdrop and a by-now well-established tradition against which Celati's latest

Moving Narratives 257 book can be placed for the purpose of comparison and contrast. The contemporary travelogue is typically both about other lands and not about them, but rather about an idea of Italian national identity and history, or narrative subjectivity, or political and/or philosophical ideas. The contemporary proliferation of such texts confirms our postmodern fascination with space, and with spatial metaphors and contextualizations of thought, in contrast to the temporal, historicizing tendencies of earlier eras. Yet they also reflect a fascination with travel, displacement, and errancy that is at least as old as the expulsion from the 'home' of Eden into the alterity of 'East of Eden/ It is not at all surprising that critic and fiction writer Maria Corti has dedicated much study to the figure of Ulysses and is greatly attached to the critical metaphor of the 'textual voyage/ which she elaborates upon in her study of the same name, as well as in her manuals // cammino della lettura (The path of reading) and Viaggio ml '900 (Voyage in the Twentieth Century). The great classical figure of heroic wandering and the writer's valiant voyage in the territory of words both lend themselves to infinite imaginative, creative, and theoretical trips. Ulysses and the contemporary writer alike may choose an itinerary, but multitudinous 'adventures' intervene to modify those choices; as Corti writes: 'one chooses a route, but not the adventures that occur during a voyage' (// viaggio testuale; 5). Celati's version of a travel book records an actual, chosen trip that is soon changed into a quite different series of adventures; it is characterized by its author as a gift given to 'friends who want to know where we were, and to those whom we met along the way/ It is thus a means of sharing not the unfolding of a preplanned itinerary but rather the unexpected adventures, bringing them to others who were not there or recording them for those who participated in them. It is, therefore, a written trace of lived adventures, a 'textual voyage' the words of which faithfully follow the physical spaces of a part of the existent world through which the writer actually meandered. And it asks us, finally, again to ponder the questions: Do texts make the world according to an intentional 'travel plan/ or does the world control our representations of it by means of unforeseen 'adventures'? Do we write ourselves into the world, or are we ourselves 'written' by existence? In Search of Lost Grace: African Adventures

In Celati's unpublished essay discussed above, 'Rituali di racconto/ he writes of the enormous sense of liberation he found when he sue-

258 Gianni Celati ceeded in writing in a state of self-forgetfulness. This 'involuntary' state is, as critic Carla Benedetti has pointed out in 'Celati e le poetiche della grazia' (Celati and the poetics of grace), comparable to Benjamin's definition of Robert Walser's writing as 'the most perfect fusion of the involuntary, and supreme intention/ as well as to Schiller's concept of grace as 'the union of the voluntary and the involuntary' (quoted in Benedetti, 'Celati e le poetiche della grazia'; 19). In invoking the term 'grace,' Benedetti is aware that she is undertaking to explore a concept that has all but disappeared in contemporary critical and theoretical debates: 'Of the three fundamental aesthetic concepts, beauty, the sublime and grace, only the last would seem to have definitively disappeared from modern theories of art' (7). She wishes to explore the concept, however, because some contemporary writers have brought it back to our attention, and among these none so insistently as Gianni Celati.9 A term of complex semantic range, 'grace' pops up in Celati's recent essays and fiction and is implicit in much of his writing of the last decade, including the most recent Avventure in Africa, so that the idea of a Celatian 'poetics of grace' that Benedetti identifies and analyzes is not only accurate but indeed essential to understanding what he is attempting to do in this latest work. Why should the concept of 'grace' be allied to a travel book? If understood as a naturalness that flows out of a perfect union between the voluntary and the involuntary, grace in writing is forwarded by being immersed in the flow of happenings that make up a trip, especially one that does not stick to a planned trajectory and instead gives itself over to adventures - advenire or 'what comes next.' We have already seen Celati's preference for writing while literally on the road in his Po valley Verso la foce, as well as his delight in texts such as Boiardo's Orlando innamorato, in which writing follows the zigzagging lines of ever-surprising and diverse adventures. The aim in Celati's recent writing is to reach a state in which the self is virtually entirely forgotten and the world 'recounts itself/ so to speak, a state that is greatly enhanced by movement through spaces filled with happenings beyond the control of the observer/writer. For Benjamin, boredom or relaxation could produce the same effect; for Peter Handke, fatigue brings about a loosening of intentions and a subsequently freer, more 'graceful' writing. Clearly, both boredom and fatigue are common effects of being on the road in a sustained manner. However, it is Celati's desire to resuscitate the figure of the storyteller, as opposed to the contemporary 'industrial' novelist, that most motivates him; the

Moving Narratives 259 storyteller understood in Walter Benjamin's terms (which are implicit in Celati's) was imagined by the people to whom he told his tales as a traveler, 'someone who has come from afar' (The Storyteller'; 84), bearing his gift of experiences made into tales told by others before him whom he has encountered in the wide world, and by himself in his own versions. If the past societal structures of trade that flourished in the Middle Ages, according to Benjamin, whereby journeymen traveled about before settling down to become resident master craftsmen, created the ideal environment for the flourishing of the storyteller, modern society has all but destroyed the possibility of continuing life for this essential figure of primarily oral culture. Celati and some few others who seek to revivify storytelling today no longer find a 'natural' humus out of which it might grow, and must instead elaborate writing strategies and create situations for themselves by means of which they might tap back into a storytelling 'reserve' that has not yet entirely been made extinct. Celati's search for the lost 'grace' of the natural storyteller has led him to become more assiduously a 'journeyman,' this, in a curious reversal, after having already developed his skills as a 'resident master craftsman' through his dedication to learning the artisanal work of writing over many long years of more sedentary study and practice. Thus, travel and writing are intimately bound up one in the other, and it is the lost 'grace' of a 'natural' form of narration, not the mastery of a particular foreign space, that is sought and expressed in Avventure in Africa. The aesthetic concept of 'grace,' which is in the recent Celati a poetics and a mode of writing, is not entirely without traces of its traditional religious meaning in his work. Nor is it without a more broadly cultural and socio-political potential. In theological doctrine, grace is a gift freely given by God and it serves to bring us to salvation in spite of our fallen nature. Bartleby and Celati's own Baratto are figures 'touched by grace'; in the first case, the scrivener opens out a vision of the 'infinite fraternity' of all existing things for the lawyer (and through him for us), while in the second the gym teacher succeeds in forming a sense of solidarity with other human beings such as his lonely neighbors and the Japanese widow. Ultimate salvation in a dogmatic sense is not a part of Celati's 'religiosity,' then; rather, his writing seeks to forward a faith in the positive effects of communality and of shared mortality, which might 'save' us from the terrors of living and the anguish of an ever more insidious loneliness in a global reality dominated by cold technologies and even colder faithlessness. Next,

260 Gianni Celati the cultural and socio-political implications of texts based on a 'poetics of grace' are many-fold. In terms of the Italian literary and academic culture industry, such writing is clearly transgressive and even 'scandalous' in its muting of the importance of the Author figure, its refusal of 'relevant' themes or 'incisive' portraits of reality, and its equally strong rejection of academic critical approaches that seek out and apply methods of analysis focused on literary strategies, literaryhistorical facts, ideas of culture, and textuality. Celati's critique of institutions, be they the powerful instruments of cultural dissemination such as publishing houses, magazines, television, and newspapers (for all of which 'newsworthy' and, simply, 'new' products are essential) or the university Academy, one of the primary functions of which is to generate and disseminate new knowledge about literature (and about everything else), is obviously an implicit rejection of those institutions and, more broadly, of their fundamentally economically driven bases and raison d'etre. Celati could be seen as a David taking pot-shots at the Goliath of entrenched First World structures and perspectives, but his attack is not for that any less sincerely motivated. Of course, there is the continuing irony of Celati's necessary use of these institutional instruments in order that his writing be read and its ideas and results promulgated. The writer's constant attention to academic discourses coupled with his undisguised disdain for literary critics and professors, for example, is but one sign of this irony, while his own copious critical writing makes it an irony to the second degree, for Celati can 'out-professor' us professors! Moreover, his fiction is published by the important publishing house of Feltrinelli rather than lying unread in a dusty drawer or merely recited to some few friends for their private entertainment, as, to give but one famous example, large portions of Kafka's writings were. Yet, at least in partial response to this paradox (some might say 'hypocrisy') of the 'rebel' caught in the very net from which he seeks to escape, we remember that Foucault wrote that 'resistances are all the more real and effective because they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised ... resistance exists all the more by being in the same place as power' (in Power/Knowledge: Interviews and Other Writings 1972-77; 142). If a one-time rebel and 'undesirable' (he was barred from entry into the United States for several years due to his strong leftist politics), Dario Fo, can be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature not for the literary excellence of his written texts but for the power and significance of his theatrical performances based in large part on an ancient oral tradition, then it is not

Moving Narratives 261 impossible to imagine a time when some version of Celati's poetics of grace may be validated and, more importantly, may have some concrete effect on the ways in which fiction is made and received - and given a humanly meaningful place in the dominantly technological culture of our postmodern world - as we move into the new millennium. As Benedetti comments, Celati's approach to the continuation of literature's possibilities in both his critical and creative writing is not to refer constantly to the specific limits and failures of past and current trends, poetics, or final products, either those of others or his own; instead, he 'goes decidedly into a sphere that is simultaneously epistemological and ethical, philosophical and anthropological. He does not tell us, for example, that he is returning to pure and simple narration after decades of the anti-novel, ... he does not tell us which languages turn out to be the most innovative, or things of this nature: his focus is an analysis of social communication in our era. Even the degeneration of the narrative art and the loss of its therapeutic function are described by him in terms of a global attitude, that of modern man toward the world' ('Celati e le poetiche della grazia'; 31). Another paradox thus emerges: that of a writer for whom the best writing is an unambitious, modest errancy through language, but whose goal is nothing short of a global reorientation to the grace (in all senses) of shared storytelling that we have all but lost. In spite of the metatextual (and even metaphysical) background for Avventure in Africa that I have set forth above, it is still a book, like most travel books, the reading of which tells us an enormous amount about the actual spaces through which Celati and Talon voyaged. If we did not already know that Mali is a poor country, where the average life expectancy is forty-five years; that Mauritania 'is one of the emptiest countries in the world' with an average life expectancy of forty-seven years; or that griots or musician-storytellers still roam about Senegal passing on age-old stories (and that Senegal is 'wealthy compared to other countries in this region' because of tourism, although average life expectancy is only slightly better at forty-nine years [data from Adams et al., The DK Geography of the World]), we come to know these and other facts about these countries as we read Avventure. But we come to know them incidentally, through people and occurrences met and experienced by the two travelers, and not through a fact-oriented exposition of data. We also learn about what has become virtually a separate 'ethnic group/ that is, contemporary tourists, whose behavior, appearance, and speech are all carefully (and humorously) recorded by Celati,

262 Gianni Celati himself characterized as one of this ultimately risible 'tribe.' In addition, Celati elaborates a sort of parallel narrative concerning the adventures in Africa of fictional characters called Cevenini and Ridolfi, whom he thinks up at one point in the trip. In the fourth Notebook, part 12, Celati describes the old Italian provincial pair to his friend Talon: 'Cevenini is half deaf, Ridolfi is blind in one eye and the other eye is myopic' (80). Back home in their provincial town, Ridolfi had the habit of regularly going mad every three months, and would break up all the furniture in his house. His friend Cevenini reads a newspaper article one day about a famous professor Paponio who has built a Center of Medicine in Africa where madness is cured using the magical methods of African healers. So they take off for Africa, just as Talon and Celati have taken off with a specific goal in mind, Talon to make a documentary film about Dogon healers, Celati to assist him in this project and to learn as well more about the storytelling traditions of West Africa. What in fact occurs is a comedy of errors, delays, misinformation, and wandering about: precisely the sort of trip most beloved of Celati. Moreover, given the concomitant discomforts (heat, dust, thirst, exhaustion), this graceful book truly embodies the definition of 'adventures' quoted to me from an unknown source by my friend and colleague, Slavicist Lisa Crone: 'adventures are hardships seen from an aesthetic point of view.' Their meandering route provides them with many encounters with different individuals who become 'main characters' in the book, and who are sources of fascination, bewilderment, and affection for Celati. No 'plot,' therefore, provides the motor for this text; instead, it, like Celati and Talon, zigzags through the existent, propelled by its own momentum that ends up propelling us readers as well, as we too soon become enmeshed in the proliferation of sights, people, and the simple yet compelling moment-by-moment happenings. As I read the book for the first time (before I had even printed it out from the computer diskette Celati sent to me, and I thought I would read just the beginning on my computer screen), I literally lost track of time and space, and I ended up scrolling through the entire book, so caught up in the text's flow was I; a process of reading that took several hours and gave me eyestrain (although I had no awareness of any discomfort as I read). This is one of Celati's most fluent and readable books; it is imbued with grace and, I believe, can put its readers into something like a 'state of grace' understood as pure readerly pleasure and self-forgetfulness as we swim in the sea of this portion of

Moving Narratives 263 the existent. Benedetti rightly notes that when reading some of Celati's recent stories we 'sometimes notice the artificiality of this lack of artifice, the artificiality of this secondary simplicity that asks us to digest even the fiction of a narrative suddenly brought back, in the age of mass media, to its oral and epic sources' ('Celati e le poetiche della grazia'; 31). I agree, but I think that Avventure in Africa succeeds in transcending (or at least in hiding completely) any sign of the 'artificiality of the lack of artifice' that might mar some recent stories (in Narratori delle pianure, for example, a collection in which Celati gave us the first results of his new orientation to simple storytelling). This 'state of readerly grace' was what drew me to Celati's writing in the first place, when I read Le avventure di Guizzardi over twenty years ago. Like this new book of 'avventure,' that early book succeeds in entering into its own flow and sound (which is very different from that of Avventure in Africa) so completely that its enormous artifice (the inimitably crazy and completely invented language of Guizzardi) is utterly hidden. Perhaps the title that Celati has given to his latest work is an explicit sign on his part that he himself feels that he has succeeded after many years in recapturing the 'grace' that fueled Guizzardi's adventures, albeit in a form of narration that is, in its simplicity and lack of self-conscious literariness, light years away from that early masterpiece. If my experience of its captivating readability is any indication, this is without a doubt the book in which Celati has succeeded in freeing himself from any conceptually driven residue, and it is, therefore, not only a culmination of his research into and practice of ancient modes of storytelling beginning with the Po valley work of the early eighties, but also a recapturing of that state of self-forgetfulness that he briefly found as a very young man and subsequently lost.10 The trip to Africa was 'transforming/ as trips can be, not primarily because of any factual knowledge it brought, but because of what it helped Celati to stop actively seeking, so that it might be given to him: the perfect union of the voluntary and the involuntary known as grace. Like the Renaissance ideal of 'sprezzatura/ however, grace-filled writing is attained by an arduous process of internalization, cultivation, and discipline. In the case of the courtier, the entire self was shaped into a 'naturally' elegant, well-spoken, and 'spontaneous' specimen of courtliness, while in the case of Celati, it is the craft of writing that is honed by constant artisanal work so that eventually it takes on a naturalness and a spontaneity internal to its practitioner. In an interview, Celati commented that 'discipline is the search for a condition of grace, and it

264 Gianni Celati is this that counts in the end' (quoted in Benedetti, 7, from a July 1991 piece in the journal TIndice dei libri del mese' entitled 'Non fatti, ma parole! Gianni Celati risponde a Franco Marenco' [Not facts, but words! Celati responds to Franco Marenco]). As 'undisciplined' and disorganized as the trip itself is, the record of it, now shaped into Avventure in Africa, is the end result of a writerly discipline sustained'over the last three decades and essential to the grace-filled writing we now have. Because I see the primary achievement of this book in its wonderfully flowing, 'naturally' simple prose and in its overall graceful momentum, I believe that it is especially difficult to perform a detailed analysis upon it, taking apart its fluency, so to speak, and thus going against the very essence of flow, which is its continuous, precisely unanalyzable nature. In conclusion I choose, therefore, simply to highlight some of the recurring themes and to quote a few passages in which Celati's graceful writing and benevolent perspective are clear. I use the term 'benevolence' as a kind of synonym of 'grace/ in the sense that both can mean 'good will,' and not as an indication of any manner of charitable condescension towards others.11 First, there is the theme of writing itself (the metatextual element), introduced in Part 2 of the first Notebook: 'In order not to consider myself on vacation I must write every day, as if I were at home, working therefore as usual, but temporarily dislocated to a concentration camp for tourists.' Throughout the Notebooks, there are references to his writing while on a bus, while seated under a tree waiting for his friend Talon, while on a train; there are as well references to the interest it stimulates in observers, who want to know what he is doing and why, who he is, if he is famous. Because much of the book is written in the present tense, the events of the trip and the text itself are practically coterminous, thus creating a strong sense of immediacy and immersion: a kind of 'you are there' quality that is essential to the readerly appeal of the book. The Notebooks take on the aspect of a running 'conversation' with Celati as he makes observations, ruminates on diverse topics, fantasizes; all in a narrative voice that is as close to a spoken voice as possible. Another running theme is that of the life of tourists, who in these areas of Africa for the most part stand out as a minority of whites in a world of blacks. The reference to a 'concentration camp for tourists' quoted above is followed by this passage: Siamo nell'albergo intitolato hotel de 1'Amitie e mi chiedo di che razza d'amitie si tratta. I turisti qui sequestrati si capisce al volo che non hanno

Moving Narratives 265 nessuna voglia di parlarsi e neanche di vedersi 1'un con 1'altro. In ascensore non sanno dove mettere gli occhi, fare amicizie sembra proibito ... Ma piu di tutto ci prende alia sprovvista il fatto d'essere bianchi. Perche siamo qui a rappresentare non quello che siamo o crediamo d'essere, ma quello che dovremmo essere in quanto bianchi (ricchi, potenti, moderni, compratori di tutto). E portiamo in giro questa rappresentazione come uno scafandro, ognuno nel suo scafandro che lo isola dal mondo esterno. A Jean e venuta quasi una fissazione, e appena vede dei turisti comincia a ripetermi una parola che s'e inventata: 'Guarda i pingoni bianchi, noi siamo cosi.' Ha anche scoperto che la regola dei pingoni e di far finta di non vedersi quando si incrociano per strada, precisamente come fanno i clienti nell'hotel de 1'Amitie (Notebook I, part 2; 10-11). (We are in the hotel entitled hotel de 1'Amitie [hotel of friendship] and I ask myself what possible kind of amitie it might be. The tourists sequestered here, one understands right away, have no desire whatsoever to speak to one another and not even to see one another. In the elevator they don't know where to put their eyes, getting friendly seems prohibited ... But above all the fact of being white grabs us by surprise. Because we are here to represent not what we are or believe ourselves to be, but what we ought to be as whites (rich, powerful, modern, buyers of everything). And we carry this representation around with us like a diving suit, each in his diving suit that isolates him from the external world. Jean has taken on a quasi-obsession, and as soon as he sees some tourists he begins to repeat a word to me that he has invented for himself: 'Look at the white "pingoni," we're like that.' He has also discovered that the rule of the 'pingoni' is to pretend not to see one another when they cross paths on the street, precisely as the clients of the hotel de 1'Amitie do.) Throughout the book the rigid protection of privacy and the selfenclosing unfriendliness of tourists (the opposite of presumed 'good will') are contrasted with the at least apparently friendly openness of the native people the travelers meet up with. Celati is not unaware of the fact that a good deal of the behavior of the Africans is motivated by a desire to 'milk the "pingoni'" of their assumed white wealth, but he sees this as perfectly consonant with the roles that both the whites and the blacks have been assigned in the tourist universe. In part 10 of Notebook I, he writes: 'In the life of a tourist who goes somewhat far away, I believe that at a certain point rises up of necessity the question: "But what did I come here to do?" A question that puts into motion the great cinema of self-justifications, in order not to say to himself seri-

266 Gianni Celati ously: "I came here to do nothing." Boys like Moussah and Mohammed are well aware of this, and they must capture their tourist in order to help him in the work of doing nothing from morning to night. Because in all the places of the world people always have something to do, and this is the greatest marvel of the world, the harmony of habits that no-one has decided, the confused beauty of animation in the cities. Instead a tourist is a ghost who dangles, estranged outside of that sole harmonic dream, exactly because he is transported to a place to do nothing at all, except to spend money' (17). Being 'milked' for money is, therefore, precisely what tourists should expect - indeed, what they need if they are to fulfill their 'role,' while the boys who swarm about trying to sell things to them are fulfilling their role within the 'doing nothing' universe of tourism. Celati later notes the resentment of some tourists at being hounded by street vendors of souvenirs, and their disdain for the implacable insistence of these sellers of unwanted items, but he sees it all as yet another 'ceremony' that should be acted out with good will and humor, even if in his view tourism clearly perpetuates a 'colonial' structure that has ostensibly disappeared. In part 13 of Notebook I, filled with 'ponderous discourse' because Celati can find nothing else to write about on this day of cloudy skies and great heat, he thinks: 'That a colonial regime no longer exists here perhaps is an abstraction like so many others, which in any case counts little in the dealings between white visitors and black population.' The tourist hotels are like 'tourist trenches/ protective and air-conditioned places where there are only native vendors with patents, huge breakfasts, and prostitutes in the bars. In general, the state has simply taken over the role of the former colonial administration 'in order to put the lid of all of its abstractions on these people, who live and carry on their commerce as they have always done' (19-20). In the next section Celati defines that commerce as 'the same thing as living,' in that the goal of making money is not separate from chatting in a cloud of dust, and reaching a friendly agreement (like in a family, 'comme en famille') seems to be as important as selling something. As he wanders about with various native self-appointed 'guides,' he experiences this atmosphere of exchange that is in decided contrast to the European 'passion for business/ which Celati and Talon agree feels more like a means to an end, and 'the end is only profit that allows you to do what you want inside the walls of your privacy.' As he enters more and more into the spirit of 'business' for the sake of human contact and friendly exchange, he

Moving Narratives 267 finds that even when he refuses to buy anything the sellers seem to take pleasure in the process, as one might take pleasure in exchanging meaningless chat with a passerby or a neighbor. The tourists' orchestrated lives are, by contrast, coldly ceremonial, and the assumption of a Western model of business cancels out the possibility for what Celati sees as the beauty of aimlessness and desultory, living exchanges such as the populace seem to enjoy, and into which he benevolently enters. In the writer's comments on his preference for this sort of 'benevolent exchange/ Celati implicitly refers to past ethnographic (Mauss, Bataille, etc.) as well as current philosophical (primarily Agamben in the Italian context) work on societies based on gift-exchange, which are in distinct contrast to First World Western societies structured according to utility, profit, and rigid supply and demand models of exchange. Like other travel narratives, Celati's book is filled with these and other contrastive observations on 'his' Western world and this other reality in which Westerners are the foreign element. It is also filled with a myriad of descriptions of landscapes, conversations, and individuals, like a continuous cinematic unrolling before our eyes of a documentary of everyday, unexceptional existence filmed and shown in real time. In the final section of the last Notebook, Celati and Talon are on the plane from Dakar heading towards home when the passengers are shown a tourist documentary on Senegal; noting that they are seeing the same places and things they have just seen during their trip ('the colorful marketplaces, the usual salesladies, the usual carts pulled by donkeys, the usual villages on the Savana, the cormorants and the pelicans'), Talon half-seriously says: 'We have been inside a tourist documentary/12 Celati then muses: 'Yes, but, getting off the plane in Europe, here too it's like being in a perpetual documentary, where you see everything clean, ordered, polished, glossy, flashing, newly remade, not even one too obvious oversight, one too shabby car, one person truly toothless, one outfit really out of fashion, one store that has remained as it was five years ago, one store window with books that aren't absolutely new.' As the two wander around Paris they see only this 'other documentary of total newness,' a 'totally inescapable fullproof documentary' ('totally inescapable full-proof are in English in the original, as are the words 'glossy' and 'flashing' in the above passage, as if to underline the Americanized essence of this global up-todateness). The postmodern plenitude of the contemporary French capital assails us as we try to hide behind our 'glass shields' of privacy (like the tourists who hide within their 'diving suits'), but, as Celati

268 Gianni Celati writes in his concluding paragraph, living behind glass shields as we do and in spite of the fact that we have everything, we begin to feel that something is missing: 'Ma poi si sa che quando uno e lasciato dietro un vetro, tende a sentire che gli manca qualcosa, anche se ha tutto e non gli manca niente, e questa mancanza di niente forse conta qualcosa, perche uno potrebbe anche accorgersi di non aver bisogno davvero di niente, tranne del niente che gli manca davvero, del niente che non si pud comprare, del niente che non corrisponde a niente, il niente del cielo e deH'universo, o il niente che hanno gli altri che non hanno niente/ (But then it's known that when you're left behind a glass, you tend to feel that you're missing something, even if you have everything and nothing is missing, and this lack of nothing perhaps counts for something, because you could also realize that you really have need of nothing, except of that nothing that is really missing, that nothing tha,t you can't buy, that nothing that corresponds to nothing, that nothing of the sky and the universe, or that nothing that others who have nothing have; 178-9). With this play on the word 'nothing,' which is transformed from a negative lack to a positive quality of union with the freely given sky and world around us (similar to the old song 'I've got plenty of nothing and nothing's plenty for me') Celati closes his Notebooks, written in the state of grace that aimless wandering can sustain and money cannot buy. Travel is a shedding - of possessions, of self, of pretensions, of preconceptions - and writing is a light trace of the blessed 'nothing' that remains.13 In Celati's travel writings, it is possible to see more clearly than in any of his other work his dedication to an idea of writing understood as immersion rather than expression. He seeks to go into the prose of the world rather than to speak out from a self in possession of its own unique language. Indeed, as I have discussed in a preceding chapter, the very concept of owning language is alien to Celati's perspective. In the Gamuna tales as well as in Avventure in Africa, the issue of mastery is highlighted in a variety of ways, in the former by means of explicit parody of scientific truth-seeking, and in the latter through notes on a trip in which plans and intentions time and again come to naught. Nothing is mastered because nothing is masterable; the Gamuna accept and even embrace the contingency of existence, and the travelers in Africa accept their role as actors in a 'documentary' the events of which happened beyond any preconceived plot they might have had in mind. Writing practiced as a submission to adventures or that which 'comes to us' - whether imagined or real - is freed from subjective

Moving Narratives 269 intentions, fixable meanings, and cultural codification: or at least this is Celati's hope. Traveling in imaginative and geographic spaces is also traveling within the world's prose, which is a telling of our shared humanity.

Provisional Conclusions: Venturing into the New Millennium

'The page is worth something only when you turn it and there is life behind it that pushes and disarranges all the leaves of the book ... From recounting in the past tense, and from the present that guided my hand in the exciting passages, here I am, oh future, I have climbed into the saddle of your steed.' Italo Calvino1

My own adventure in writing is drawing to its close, and it is now that conclusions are traditionally drawn concerning what it all adds up to. I shall, therefore, dutifully indulge in some summary comments - but only some. For it is the present of Celati's odyssey that still guides my hand, and it is the unknown future, both of his writing to come and of other critical responses to the many facets of his work, that holds the wonderful possibility of disarranging all I have proposed and that belies anything other than provisional conclusions. This is the blessing (some might call it the curse), particularly intense when writing about a living author, that falls on literary theories and on critical readings of fictional texts, for creative works have lives and destinies far less predictable than our time-bound academic perspectives can touch. Writers greatly revered and works widely admired can and do recede into the darkest and dustiest corners of libraries, or become objects of negative and disdainful analyses. Conversely, forgotten voices can and do speak to readers with an eloquence unheard by earlier generations. It is therefore impossible to predict the fate of Gianni Celati's writings in the new millennium upon us; my hope rather than my prediction is that they continue to be read as sources of entertainment, comfort, and stimulus to thought, and as traces of the humanly important talent for

Provisional Conclusions 271 errant, risk-taking imagining. Nor can I say what turns his future writing might take - or even if he will continue to write. The continually adventurous and exploratory nature of his work suggests, however, that surprises may well be in store as we cross from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. Celatian Convalescence In reading Celati's stories, a 'melancholy of his own' emerges as one of the primary characteristics of his narratives, particularly those of the last two decades. This melancholy is like that of the convalescent who has passed through the delirious trauma of a dire illness, and is now positioned in its interstitial after-state. As central themes of modern literature - in the Italian context D'Annunzio, Svevo, and Pirandello are the salient examples - illness and convalescence are deployed as tropes of modernity itself, as well as of modern subjectivity as it struggles with an acute awareness of its own traumatized, destabilized essence. In one of the most stimulating recent studies of the topos of sickness in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century European literature, Barbara Spackman argues that 'the convalescent is socially and topographically dislocated and occupies a liminal position ... Eviration and a death of desire occur upon passage into the state of convalescence' (Decadent Genealogies; ix). In her gender-oriented reading of Baudelaire and D'Annunzio, Spackman posits that the woman is expelled from the scene of male convalescence only in order that her qualities might be abstracted and applied to the man. The 'death of desire' is thus in fact a symbolic castration whereby thefallo (phallus), understood as an emblem of the virile member as well as of all that which the phallic order represents (Reason, Mastery, Domination), is replaced by the/a//o, understood as a failing, an error, a lack ('woman,' in short). These divergent meanings of the Italian term 'fallo' (although the two terms derive from different etymologies, the first from the Greek, the second from the Latin) are, I believe, particularly resonant in the context of a consideration of metaphorical convalescence as it is seen in both modern and postmodern texts, for they help us to genderize our century's literary and philosophical representations of 'sickness/ and to understand better the processes that have been called, in various theoretical sites, the 'feminization' of Western postindustrial culture. Specifically, in the context of certain strains of postmodern thought and creative writing and, most specifically, in the case of

272 Gianni Celati Celati, writing can be understood as reflective of an apparently unending state of convalescence as the writer recovers from the 'phallic' discourses of domination and linear progress that infused modernity. Celati's own experience in the sixties with the last period of collective modernist literary aspirations known in Italy as the neoavant-garde, convinced him of the necessity of finding some other approach to literary creativity, one that would not be invested in newness, overcoming the past tradition, or pure literariness. Nonetheless, I have tried to show how fundamental that period was for Celati's work, especially in his dedication to theoretical research and experimentation. If he has divested his writing of certain underlying assumptions that were formed in the sixties, he has also gone on investigating and refining some of their implications, in a search for answers to basic questions regarding language, communication, narration, and the relation of words to things, all of which were highlighted in the heyday of emergent challenges to the Institution of mainstream modernist literature. Much of the early twentieth-century historical avant-gardes' art can be (and has been) seen as an expression of trauma and a search for ways of wrestling with the shock of the new, not in the liminallity of the convalescent state but in the still intense agonies of dis-ease. Neoavant-garde art had absorbed much of the shock but still reflected a preoccupation with newness. Certain forms of postneoavant-garde writing, seen in this light, are indeed a convalescence - 'lunga a volte come tutta una vita' (as long at times as an entire life), as stated in the introductory pages of the journal // Semplice - that is made up of something like an a priori resignation to failure, an intrinsic impossibility of triumphant overcoming, a permanent interstices. Celati is heir to the failures of modernity's progressive and projectual dream of a forwardmoving, constant ascension in art as in life, and in this sense he is a fully postmodern writer and thinker. In spite of my historicizing perspective, I believe that the roots of Celati's 'poetics of grace' and his 'fictions in which to believe' also reach down into the ground of a concept of writing that can be seen in many diverse writers of many different historical periods: and nowhere so clearly as in Celati's beloved Melville, whose 'Bartleby/ as I have discussed, is praised by the Italian writer as a crowning achievement in the expression of positive resignation and willed failure. I do not seek in what follows entirely to dehistoricize the issue of what might be called 'anti-phallic' writing, and Melville certainly belongs to a period of an ever stronger imposition of modernity's ideal of

Provisional Conclusions 273 progress and spirit of optimism against which his perspective can be contrasted. Yet I think that the craft and discipline of writing itself, which entail constantly confronting the radical limits of language and thus of one's own limits, have brought multitudes of 'scriveners' through the ages to an implicit or explicit acknowledgment of intrinsic lack and inevitable failure. Thematized more or less openly depending on the individual writer and on the traditions of his/her era, the specter of a priori failure haunts literary texts, becoming an overt feature of modern and postmodern writing, but nonetheless perceptible in earlier periods in the works of those writers particularly attuned to the radical gap between the world and its expression in words. If I am running the risk of essentialism, so be it; for there are, after all, certain essential elements of human existence that I believe cannot be denied, including the limits of mortality and the imperfectabiity of linguistic expression, both of which permeate literature throughout time. Even if not an essential feature of literature (and no doubt of all artistic striving, although I would not dare to plunge into such deep waters), the concepts of impossibility and failure are at the very least overtly thematized within the long Western literary tradition stretching from classical tales of disastrous hubris to Kafka, Beckett, and so many other emblematic voices of our modern age. Pulling out but one example from the vast number of declarations on writing seen from this perspective upon which it is possible to draw, I quote from Joseph Conrad's 'Author's Note' to his novel Chance: 'From the minds whose business it is precisely to criticize such attempts to please [i.e., to please a broad readership], this book received an amount of discussion and of a rather searching analysis which not only satisfied that personal vanity I share with the rest of mankind but reached my deeper feelings and aroused my gratified interest. The undoubted sympathy [of criticism] ... was, I love to think, a recognition of my good faith in my pursuit of my art - the art of the novelist which a distinguished French writer at the end of a successful career complained of as being: Trop difficile! It is indeed too arduous in the sense that the effort must be invariably so much greater than the possible achievement. In that sort of foredoomed task which is in its nature very lonely also, sympathy is a precious thing ('Author's Note' to Chance; 10; italics from 'the effort' onward are mine). A 'foredoomed task/ writing can never reach the plenitude of perfected signification and form it seeks, so it is not surprising that the theme of failure is prominent, especially in an age such as ours that has shattered earlier humanistic assumptions of human perfectability.

274 Gianni Celati In John Updike's introduction to the Everyman's Library edition of Melville's Complete Shorter Fiction, he quotes an 1849 letter written by Melville to his father-in-law, in which we find: 'So far as I am individually concerned & independent of my pocket, it is my earnest desire to write those sorts of books which are said to "fail" - Pardon this egotism' ('Introduction'; xi). On the same page, in a decided understatement, Updike comments that 'Melville rather disdained the commercial aspect of his profession.' In much of Melville's writing can be seen a thematizing of his 'earnest desire' to write so-called failed books; sometimes it is the figure of a writer, as in Pierre, which 'contains a nightmarish description of a writer scribbling himself into nearmadness' ('Introduction'; xiii), or, indirectly, in 'Bartleby/ in which a scrivener gives up his livelihood of writing. Sometimes, the desire to fail is transferred to figures involved in other forms of invention and creativity, as-in The Happy Failure' (250-7 in the Everyman's Library edition, from which I quote). In this allegorical tale, the narrator's elderly uncle has spent years making his 'Great Hydraulic-Hydrostatic Apparatus/ a machine intended to be used to drain swampland in order to convert it into fertile fields. If successful, the apparatus will endow the old man with 'immortal renown,' and will be a source of pride for his nephew's children and children's children. The uncle believes that his invention potentially might allow him to surpass even the 'Roman emperor' who 'tried to drain the Pontine march, but failed,' for the 'present enlightened age' is capable of amazing achievements unheard of by past generations. With 'poor old Yorpy/ his faithful black servant who carries the heavy machine on his back (the racist implications.of which I shall not explore), and his young nephew, the uncle heads out in a skiff to a remote area, 'Quash Isle,' in order to test the apparatus far from the prying eyes of others. When they arrive, the old man fiddles and fusses with the machine's positioning, for 'all depends on a proper adjustment,' and so the three tip it to one side and another, always according to the uncle's anxious command of 'a leetle more ... just a leetle, very leetle bit more.' The inventor is nonetheless frustrated in his desire to find the perfect position for the apparatus, and he ends up losing patience, kicking in one side of the machine, and disemboweling the whole thing. His dream of having come to 'the hour which for ten long years has, in the prospect, sustained me through all my pains-taking obscurity,' and his hope of tasting 'fame [that] will be the sweeter because it comes at the last; the truer, because it comes to an old man/ are all but destroyed; only upon the insistence

Provisional Conclusions 275 of his nephew does the old man try to put the apparatus back together again, as 'the stubborn stump of hope, plowed at and uprooted in vain, put forth one last miraculous green sprout.' The attempt is to no avail, however, and seeing the uncle's face, 'pinched, shriveled into mouldy whiteness, like a mildewed grape/ his nephew and Yorpy pull the old man into the skiff and depart from 'Quash Isle' where dreams - along with the Apparatus - have indeed been quashed. The narrator then comments: 'How swiftly the current now swept us down! How hardly before had we striven to stem it! I thought of my poor uncle's saying, not an hour gone by, about the universal drift of the mass of humanity toward utter oblivion.' But as they move along on the current, the inventor at last lifts his head in order to utter unexpected words: 'Boy, there's not much left in an old world for an old man to invent ... Boy, take my advice, and never try to invent any thing but - happiness.' He then explains his change of heart: 'Boy, I'm glad I've failed, I say, boy, failure has made a good old man of me. It was horrible at first, but I'm glad I've failed. Praise be to God for the failure!' The example of his uncle made of the nephew 'a wise young [man]' who, years later, as he watched his dying uncle's 'pale resigned lips' move, thought he heard again 'his deep, fervent cry - "Praise be to God for the failure!"' In the title of the story, as well as by means of the reiteration of the word 'failure' in the final passages quoted here, Melville emphasizes - almost overemphasizes to the point of obsession - his point, which has ethical and even metaphysical resonance that goes beyond a simple allegory of a fundamental artistic dilemma. I believe that we can hear echoes of this story and of others by Melville in which 'failure' is praised in many of Celati's recent writings, including old Vecchiatto's last recitation, the reports on the Gamuna people, and the aimless adventures in Africa. The painstaking tinkering with the Apparatus in Melville's tale can be read as an allegory of a mode of writing that seeks formal 'perfection,' and the old man's dreams of glory as representative of the writer's ambition to attain immortal glory through his works. Only when he gives up on the search for perfection and glory does the inventor believe that he has become a 'good old man' (italics mine) and has thus passed on 'wisdom' to his young nephew. And, by extension, only when writing is a part of the 'downward current' and the 'universal drift of the mass of humanity toward oblivion' can it be a positive example of 'wisdom' for others, according to Celati's view. Beyond the allegory of the imperfectability of writing, there is as well a broader implication, which is that 'good-

276 Gianni Celati ness' is attainable only when the search for immortalizing glory is relinquished. This view of both life and writing is clear in Celati's work, which is not, however, a silent acquiescence to the futility of human endeavor, but rather a graceful, benevolent, and ongoing apprenticeship in learning how to be a mortal and a writer. For Celati, convalescing from the dis-ease of ambitious striving, glory-seeking, and the delirium of intentions is not passive, negative resignation. It is a neverending discipline that is carried out in a mental and imaginative space freed of either defeating 'sickness' or triumphant 'health/ an interim territory known as mortality in which we are all 'convalescing/ and into which Celati's 'fictions in which to believe' flowingly adventure. A Parable of 'Preferring To' An emblematic tale will be the subject of my final comments on Celati's continuing research into and writing of what might be called 'narratives for daily living.' 'Parabola del paralitico nel deserto' (Parable of the paralytic in the desert; all quotations from a version sent to me on diskette by Celati; another version, 'II paralitico del deserto/ was published in 1987 in Dolcevita; 19-23) is the story of Bugli, a male nurse, who like so many of Celati's recent characters is looking for a way of existing in contemporary reality.2 With three friends, also male nurses, Bugli 'passava la vita tra una baldoria e 1'altra' (passed his life between one spree and another), going out to eat and drink in cheery company and, above all, organizing weekly orgies with various women from the town including 'the wives of important people at the hospital [where Bugli and the others worked].' The narrator informs us that the town where the four pals live is 'un posto noioso, un posto di gente arricchita e poco divertente, dove tutti facevano gli stessi discorsi, e tutti conoscevano tutti, e tutti sparlavano degli altri come se fosse 1'unico gusto della vita' (a boring place, a place of rich and not very amusing people, where everyone would say the same things, and everyone knew everyone else, and everyone spoke badly of others as if this were the only pleasure in life). There follows a list of the usual activities of the townspeople ('vacations, shopping, politics, new cars, somebody who was restoring an old house, somebody else who was opening a shop, somebody who was moving to the nearby metropolis, and then marriages, separations, fights, friends' and acquaintances' careers, [all] occasions for chattering'). Nothing exceptional about this ambience, which is much like that of our contemporary everyday lives

Provisional Conclusions 277 in First World towns, yet it is clear that, when observed in their evening strolls, these people are Very bored in their nouveaux riches outfits/ Being 'robust and athletic' types, Bugli and his friends, exswimming champions all, tried as hard as they could not to be bored, and 'they had invented for themselves an art of quick seduction that in their town was quite successful ('dava molti frutti'). Their tactic was to approach the wives of important people with 'witty quips' and then invite the women to their orgies, which they described to the wives as 'a method of remaining young and happy, a modern remedy that they had seen in a film. Nothing strange, nothing abnormal: like inviting someone on a secret vacation in order to recover from the boredom of everyday existence/ Bugli was particularly good at seducing women because of his superior boldness, athleticism, and talent for witty repartee, this last due to reading many books. In a little rented house near a river the men set up a veritable den for orgies, sticking posters of famous paintings up on the walls, bringing in a huge stereo system with a mass of recordings for all tastes, and stocking up on food and drink that they called 'aphrodisiacal/ All seemed well for, in spite of some gossip about the goings-on in the house, none of the husbands seemed to know anything about the orgies and the women themselves didn't talk about them since they enjoyed them and wanted to keep going back for more. In sum, the practice of inviting women to have fun 'had become a bizarre legend, but not really too scandalous/ So we might conclude that Bugli and his friends had indeed found a solution to the boredom of everyday life, one that did not appear to harm anyone and, in fact, increased enjoyment for all of the participants. Into this apparently unproblematic scenario comes one day a problem, however, in the form of Bugli himself. He begins to have 'strange thoughts' and confides in his nurse friend Brizzi: 'I don't understand something, Brizzi. Every time a women gives it to me, I feel like a special guy. Then afterward I see in her only a piece of raw meat, but meanwhile I feel like a special guy only because she gave it to me. What does this mean?' Brizzi answers with a saying that has become a sort of motto for the orgy participants: 'Dove c'e gusto non c'e perdenza' (Where there is enjoyment there is no harm [or loss]; 'perdenza' is an archaic term). He further responds that the feeling of being special comes from being able to tell others about all the women one has had, and Bugli is even more special in that he has had the wife of the chief of staff at the hospital. Bugli is unconvinced, though, and continues to have strange thoughts; he and Brizzi agree that they seduce

278 Gianni Celati women in order not to feel like the 'nothings' that they are, but Brizzi doesn't know what else he might do, and a third nurse friend, having joined in the conversation, calls them both idiots for thinking about such stupid things. For him, there is no problem in bragging about conquests to others, thus feeling special, and he concludes: 'What more do you want?' Bugli is not satisfied with these practical responses to his strange thoughts, and he goes on elaborating some philosophical ideas (perhaps as a result of having read so many books!) that leave his friends unconvinced and irritated. Bugli's proposal that he is nothing more than a 'reflection on the water' and that his 'specialness' is only an illusion meets with a worried response from Brizzi, who protests 'But no, you're Bugli!' and then he is so perplexed that he has nothing more to offer. The other friend is openly irritated, saying that Bugli's comments are getting on his nerves: 'I don't know where you read [these ideas], but I don't want to hear them. Because we really did enjoy those women, I enjoyed them and you enjoyed them, anything but a reflection in the water! Let's get on with it and do what we do without such ball-breaking crap, say I!' And so they in fact do go on with their usual orgies and dinners out, and it appears that Bugli has forgotten all about his strange thoughts even though he is a bit more reserved than before and a little less active in approaching women. This comic tale of contemporary life in a small town takes an unexpected turn at this juncture. The fours friends are avid for 'other adventures,' and decide to buy a van in order to take off for Tunisia. They do the usual tourist things there - visits to markets, meals in restaurants, excursions to houses of pleasure - and then drive to the desert, where we meet up with them again as they are eating, drinking, and happily conversing in a Bedouin encampment. Bugli has eaten or drunk something that has made him sick, however, and he is laid out on his bed in the van 'as if in a cataleptic state,' thus missing the awesome sight of the mirages of water and oases on the horizon. As the pals see these mirages 'each time they remain amazed as they realize that they [the mirages] correspond to nothing,' and Brizzi remarks that it is best that Bugli is asleep, for he would surely note that everything seems to be an illusion and then 'he would begin to say that we too are illusions, reflections and all the rest.' The happy friends have no patience for such attitudes, and remain true to their motto, 'where there is enjoyment there is no harm.' As they proceed through the desert, they imagine all the wonderful tales they'll have to tell their friends and their orgy-partners back home. And, indeed, an amazing

Provisional Conclusions 279 sight rises up before them: the mirage of a huge American hotel right in the middle of the empty desert. They soon discover that the hotel is not a mirage, but a hotel for oilmen who came to buy oil in nearby areas, and the 'midgets dressed in old-style clothes' who so merrily greet them upon their arrival are descendents of ancient court buffoons, now employees of an American firm. 'Curiouser and curiouser/ as Carroll wrote; we begin to wonder how many more odd adventures are in store for the small-town male nurses. In spite of the unlikely turns of the plot, Celati's clear, flowing narrative style sweeps us along, much as fables and fairy tales do, creating in us an ever increasing desire to know what comes next and how it will all turn out. Encasing a serious 'philosophical' issue (the real versus the illusory) in a highly comic mode adds to the appeal of the tale; we the readers are drawn almost unaware into a number of considerations of potentially 'heavy' import, all the while that we are entertained by the story's funny twists. Described as they are, neither Bugli nor his merry band is presented as a reliable authorial voice; in fact, we may well feel that Bugli's existential doubts and incipient angst are nothing other than superficial annoyances, given his willingness to go on with his amoral and silly lifestyle. Like Baratto, however, Bugli ultimately distinguishes himself from the herd if only in his withdrawal from everyday life; like Baratto, Bugli becomes catatonic and unresponsive, entering thus into a state of suspension from which he may emerge transformed and enlightened (or not). As with any adventure tale, we can only read (or listen) on, unable to predict the next development. Bugli is endowed with his new sobriquet of 'paralytic of the desert' by the head midget at the large American hotel, who exclaims upon seeing the silent figure: 'Oh, il est paralyse!/ an assertion seen by the pals as 'witty' and which they appropriate in order to name their silent friend from then on. They next decide to take Bugli to a nearby town in the desert called Tozeur, a small place lost in the midst of the sands; and there they leave him in the care of a local doctor, then proceeding on their way to Algeria. After a few days Bugli finally wakes up, and becomes friendly with a group of local children who become 'a permanent entourage' as he goes about. The children take him to see the oasis on the outskirts of town; having noted how 'extremely beautiful, calm, green, shady, [and] reassuring' the place is, Bugli decides to move there in order to pursue the strange thoughts that had begun to assail him back home: 'He wanted finally to rid his head of all illusions that always pushed him to give himself airs, to make conquests solely so

280 Gianni Celati that he could believe himself to be an individual of some importance, while he was nothing other than one of so many ants wandering about in the world/ Bugli's goal is to convince himself that he is truly a nothing or 'something not very different from a mouse or a dog or a tree. He wished to succeed in feeling like a simple piece of raw meat, just as he used to see the women after conquering them.' Thus begins a period of several months' meditation, as Bugli, 'always seated and staring/ thinks about being a nothing, sustained by the food that the children periodically bring to him. The locals are highly suspicious of this odd character and 'it did not seem right to them that a European had come to live nearby, eating what the children brought to him, and perhaps even sodomizing the children as the frequenters of the bar on main street suspected.' They begin throwing maledictions his way, calling him a dog, the son of a dog, and someone born from a damned uterus. But Bugli welcomed this treatment, for he believed that it helped him in his goal of believing himself to be a nothing; when asked by some passerby what his name was, he would humbly respond: 'I am the paralytic of the desert.' Bugli's martyrdom in the desert would appear to be having the desired effect, but the narrator next tells us that this is not the case. In fact, the 'paralytic of the desert' is now even more convinced that he is truly 'a special guy/ for he alone is experiencing these humiliations that set him apart from the common herd. The culmination of his martyrdom arrives in the person of one Habib, a gigolo who always brags about his ability to seduce any and every male tourist who might pass through the town. Habib gets it into his head that he will seduce the stranger in the oasis, and begins assiduously to court Bugli, spending all of his evenings with the 'paralytic' and doing his best to 'palpate' and 'caress' him. To add to the humiliation, the townspeople spy on their evening encounters, eagerly awaiting the moment when Bugli will give in to Habib. In this situation, Bugli 'was very ashamed, and every evening he would have liked to flee or to bury himself, terrorized by the idea that his Italian friends might come to know something and might believe that Bugli had become gay.' But he goes on meeting with Habib and enduring his fleeting caresses as well as the spying of the townspeople, 'exactly in order to humiliate himself.' Bugli tries to convince himself that he should give in to Habib: 'Now, Bugli, you are in the position of those piled-up women on whom you jumped in the orgies. This disgusting Habib is like you were, one who wants to impose himself in order to feel like a great man. If you give in to him,

Provisional Conclusions 281 afterward he'll consider you to be a piece of raw meat that has no importance for anyone ... After such an experience, you'll have the right to feel like a very humble thing in the universe, like a piece of wood, a clod of earth, a slab of meat that means nothing.' But Bugli cannot bring himself to give in to Habib and, being stronger than the gigolo, he begins using physical force to counter Habib's advances. Finally, the town gigolo must concede that he has lost the battle, and he stops using his wiles to seduce Bugli, instead using every means available to get revenge. Habib stops the children from bringing food to Bugli, and he comes to the oasis with a group of friends each evening to spit on Bugli and to throw mice, iguanas, and garbage onto the Italian while hurling insults. Bugli, 'under his date tree that had become his house/ responds calmly and modestly with his by-now sole utterance: 'Je suis le paralytique du desert.' He has now passed through an even more challenging test of humiliation; we therefore wonder if he has succeeded in his goal of considering himself nothing, if, that is, he has truly become a kind of Zen master similar to the completely selfdenying Bartleby. The last pages of the story recount a very different outcome. Bugli does not passively fade into nothing, as does his prototype Bartleby, for 'all of [his] attempts to humiliate himself and to feel like a nullity in the universe went in the direction of failure.' There are even rumors that Bugli has written postcards in which he announces to the world that he is about to enter into a state of sanctity, and that he returned to his old seductive ways with a blond German tourist who passed by his oasis home. When some tourists from his hometown come to the oasis in order to see the by-now famous male nurse, they find a raggedly dressed, scraggly bearded, very thin man who is eating grass and scratching in the earth for worms and insects to eat. They believe that they are seeing 'a truly special individual,' and with respect they ask him if he is the nurse Bugli, to which he replies 'No, I am a nothing.' Asked further if he needs anything, Bugli says 'Yes, I need to forget myself.' Genuinely respectful and quite struck by these answers, the tourists go away, at which point Bugli is extremely happy 'because thus it was certain that the news of his sanctity would spread throughout Europe, and certainly to his boring hometown, getting even to the ear of the hospital chief's beautiful wife.' Bugli is still convinced that the woman is crazily in love with him, and will run to find him upon his return, perhaps even offering herself to him for life. Bugli's story in the desert ends, therefore, with the result that 'the more he humiliated

282 Gianni Celati himself, the more he wanted his humiliation to be publicly recognized.' In a wonderfully paradoxical summation, we are told that 'he would have wished to brag with everyone about being a nothing, an insignificant particle in the universe, or a saint of international fame.' In short, Bugli fails at failure, for the very insignificance he has sought is now to his mind a source of great significance. There remain a few final surprises in this peripatetic tale. Bugli returns home, accepted unquestioningly by his (heretofore unmentioned) wife. He takes up his work at the hospital where he left off before his desert adventure, and he joins once more in the orgies and the merry evenings with his friends. The difference now is that Bugli has become a loud braggart, annoying and eventually boring everyone with repeated stories about his humiliations, and self-glorifying assertions as to the many women who are his at the least sign from him, including the chief of the hospital's lovely wife. Moreover, Bugli says that he wants to write a book about his adventures by means of which he will become as famous as Lawrence of Arabia. He corners anyone who will listen, at the hospital, at the central bar, at the movies, even on the streets, in order to explain that while in the desert he meditated on profound things such as what time might be, what death is, what the universe is, what God might be, and 'above all, what we are.' His expressed conclusion is that these questions do nothing other than make him melancholic and 'it is much better not to think about them.' Only one sure principle remains: 'Where there is enjoyment there is no harm.' So it appears that Bugli has come full circle, only to end up where he began. Yet in fact something has changed, for he has become the laughingstock of his friends and the beautiful wife of the chief runs away from him, telling him to go to hell. Bugli thus loses his desire to spend time in merriment with his pals, and he starts to go about with his wife whom he considers to be 'an uncommon, beautiful, intelligent, and nice woman who understands him better than all the others.' The narrator comments on this unexpected conversion: 'Why his wife succeeded in understanding him better than all the others, and what she did to get Bugli back on track, this remains the obscure part of the tale.' All that can be said is that Bugli is now taking evening courses in English, for he says that 'if he studies English he feels better, since it is a language that takes your thoughts far off,' and that he is now a nurse in a mobile unit and often goes to remote places in the countryside to pick up sick people in the ambulance. Bugli has often resuscitated dying people, but he says now that he never wonders what death is

Provisional Conclusions 283 because the question doesn't interest him anymore. He has also given up on the idea of writing a book and of becoming a famous personage like Lawrence of Arabia. From a man mindlessly immersed in superficial pleasures, to a man plagued by deep thoughts and motivated by a desire to attain saintly self-cancellation, to a man filled with a sense of his exceptionality and superiority, to a man living a quiet life of marital fidelity and everyday work, Bugli has passed through a series of phases that have, in the end, had little effect on his actual daily existence in the small town. The last paragraphs of the parable suggest an inner transformation, however, that is of some import: A friend of mine who knows him well says that recently [Bugli] has become gray, but above all he speaks with a less arrogant voice and he looks at you differently. It seems also that the more others ridicule him, the more he willingly repeats his story and all the thoughts that came to him in the desert, almost in order to make people laugh behind his back. At times one has the impression that he tells his story as a duty, but when he is openly derided for the fixations that came to him under the date tree, he opens his eyes very wide as if he were extremely surprised. That is, he looks at you in such an enchanted way, with a kind of happy stupor, that he seems a much younger and less cunning person than the old Bugli.

What is the truth about Bugli? Some think that he secretly considers himself a saint; others think that his adventure and his expressed desire to become a nothing were only inventions made up to fool people; yet others think that he is above all a seducer and he made up his story in order to get women. His wife laughs about all of these explanations, and offers a quite different one: 'She says that he still and always considers himself the paralytic of the desert. This is by now the role that he must recite, and he recites it with the resignation that those who believe themselves to be nothing have. In the end, my friend adds, in order truly to feel himself to be a nothing, Bugli had to choose to be someone, as everyone does in order not to attract attention.' Thus ends the peripatetic tale of Bugli, who at last succeeds in feeling like nothing special when he consciously assumes the role of being someone. As long as he seeks actively to be as anonymous and insignificant as a clod of earth or a slab of raw meat, he distinguishes himself from others who play their roles in life and who are thus genuinely anonymous.

284 Gianni Celati This parable takes the lessons of Melville's scrivener a step further, and complicates the issue of failure in important ways. Melville himself called his desire to write failed books 'egotism/ and Celati's tale builds on this apparent paradox, bringing the search for failure into the context of daily lived life in our contemporary world. Bugli's story can be read as an additional gloss on the emblematic scrivener, one that suggests that 'preferring not to' may be, in the end, a much more egotistical and self-important mode of being than 'preferring to.' Playing out a role in life, all the while conscious that it is in fact only a role, might after all be a more efficacious way of expressing one's insignificance than refusing all roles in an avid search for self-cancellation. The issue in Bugli's story seems to revolve around one's attitude to one's role. Complete lack of self-awareness, such as the merry pals exhibit, sustains a life of superficial, material pleasures; complete self-awareness, such as Bugli exhibits while in the throes of his desert experiment with 'sanctity/ leads neither to material pleasure nor to genuine transcendence. Only a sort of gentle self-irony and a modestly resigned acceptance of one's 'role' appear to support the possibility of some level of everyday contentment - or, at the very least, continuation. An exceptional character like Bartleby can provide no model for daily living, although his 'saintly devotion' to his passive essence is clearly admirable in Celati's view. Baratto and Bugli are un-saintly figures of nontranscendence, and in this they are much closer to our own muddled beings within an immanent world. In their crises they are different from those around them who never question the meaning of existence and who do not come to some realization of the role-playing nature of lived life, but they are neither saints nor heroes. Celati's stories are fundamentally comic, not because his characters and their predicaments are laughably distant from us, but precisely because they are so close to us and to our own dilemmas. Celati has long believed in the comforting effect of laughter, and much of his recent writing is a return to his initial comic mode, with the difference that his characters are no longer extreme cases of alienation (as in Comiche and Guizzardi), but rather common types (a gym teacher, a male nurse) living in recognizable small town locales. And here we can see a continued tie to Bartleby, a common scrivener whose amazing story is played out in the context of a typical law firm. At stake in all of these stories, however, are the possibility of transcendence and the abiding challenges of nontranscendence. Celati appears to have reached a view of willed failure as an approach to living (and writing) that mirrors the same pitfalls as

Provisional Conclusions 285 willed success, in that both are attempts at transcending the mundane and essential fact of living and writing, which is continuance. Rather than a mystical bent, then, I think that Celati's current attitude as seen in Bugli's tale is more akin to a stoical perspective that tells us 'go on/ whether our role is as failures or as successes, for all labels are ultimately illusory. Celati's stoicism is not impassive, however; it is tempered with the soft shadows of melancholy and the gentle glimmers of the comic and, above all, with a positive appreciation for life's fundamental unexplainability. My epigraph quotes Calvino's words - 'la pagina ha il suo bene solo quando la volti e c'e la vita dietro che spinge' (the page is worth something only when you turn it and there is life behind it that pushes), and it is with these words that I end. Celati's works, when cumulatively read, give to us this sense of the urgent, never-ending push of life in all of its diversity, inexplicability, and infinite appeal. His writings over the last thirty years and more of the twentieth century reflect a spirit of adventure and a seemingly endless capacity for thought and invention by means of the pen. More than any fixable meanings or absolutely coherent messages, it is his workshop crafting of deeply thoughtful and highly imaginative stories of the everyday that is Gianni Celati's ongoing gift to Italian letters.

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Notes

Introduction 1 Asked by Maria Corti, in his last interview (now available in Autografo 6, 1985) to sum up his idea of the meaning of this century's Italian literature, Calvino responded with these words: 'Gli irregolari, gli eccentrici, gli atipici finiscono per rivelarsi le figure piu rappresentative del loro tempo.' He stated as well that poetry remains the 'bearer of values that prose writers also pursue with different means but the same ends/ and that 'in narrative the short story and other kinds of "prosa d'invenzione" dominate, more than the novel, the successes of which are rare and exceptional.' 2 R. West, 'Lo spazio nei Narratori delle pianure,' 68-9. The mediated nature of both language and experience was underlined over the course of this project, and not only in the stories with which I dealt. My essay, written in English, was translated for the volume, for example, so that reading 'my' words in Italian when the piece appeared in print estranged me, in both positive and negative ways, from my own thought. 3 There is an irony in Celati's avowed dislike of academic criticism, given that he himself taught for many years within the setting of the 'Academy' (the University of Bologna) and especially given his own profuse critical production. His dislike is perhaps more akin to deep ambivalence, just as his relation to his native country is one of 'approach-avoidance.' I discuss this issue in fuller detail in a later chapter. 4 Calvino introduced Celati's first work of fiction, Comiche, published by Einaudi in 1971 in the series called 'la Ricerca Letteraria' (Literary Research) edited by Bonino, Manganelli, and Sanguineti. After detailing the salient qualities of the book, Calvino ends by praising Celati as 'an extra-

288 Notes to pages 11-20 ordinary personality, that of the elaborator of literary theory and polemicist, whose proposals and rich references and suggestions are inexhaustible.' 5 That the term 'pudore' is most commonly associated with the feminine realm is not without pertinence to my use of it in describing Celati. His work, especially over the last decade, embodies what theorist Aldo Gargani has called 'la voce femminile,' a symbolically feminine narrative stance that can be as applicable to texts by men as those by women. Celati himself called this attitude one of 'permeability' in a 1985 unpublished interview with me. I discuss this concept in a later chapter. 6 I owe the concept of critical 'zigzagging' to Marilyn Schneider, who presented a paper several years ago at the MidWest Modern Language Association annual convention entitled 'Zigzagging through Calvino.' Calvino himself made use of this figure of the oblique in many of his stories, as, for example, in those about Marcovaldo, who builds a city of snow by zigzagging. I want to acknowledge here as well the fundamental importance for me of Schneider's work on contemporary Italian writers, which, regarding Luigi Malerba, for example, was genuinely pioneering. 7 This is not the place to enter into the vast bibliography on Dante's Comedy generally and discussions of his self-characterization as a 'scribe' specifically. I will simply mention T. Barolini's excellent Dante's Poets: Textuality and Truth in the 'Comedy' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984) as one of the most lucid critical sources for Dante's ideas on being a poet. i. Bartleby: Preferring Not To 1 'Bartleby non e una metafora dello scrittore, ne il simbolo di qualsiasi altra cosa. E un testo violentemente comico, e il comico e sempre letterale. E come una novella di Kleist, di Dostoevskij o di Beckett, coi quali forma un lignaggio sotterraneo e prestigioso. Non vuole dire che cio che dice. E cio che dice e ripete e PREFERIREI DI NO.' Bartleby: La formula della creazione;

92 In his Bartleby lo scrivano (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1991), Celati includes an introductory reading of the story as well as an annotated bibliography of studies dedicated to it, from 1928 to 1990. 3 The original, fuller argument states: 'Allora tutte le interpolazioni, le emergenze circostanziali, le annotazioni locali che 1'inscrizione traccia su margini vuoti del testo, tutto cio che devia la impersonalita della norma scritta verso il momento meno solenne della sua produzione, verso le idiosincrasie dell'atto di scrittura, costituisce il residue spurio di una forma che solo

Notes to pages 20-5 289

4

5

6

7

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nella sua stabilita finale diviene autorevole presentificazione del logos.' The writer involves us 'nella motricita scomposta e contraddittoria di uno scriba che redige un testo, faticosamente togliendo la parola da un silenzio che la precede e che la genera.' (So all the interpolations, the circumstantial emergences, the local annotations that the inscription traces on the empty margins of the text, all that which turns the impersonality of the written norm towards the less solemn moment of its production, towards the idiosyncrasies of the act of writing, constitute the spurious residual of a form that only in its final stability becomes an authoritative presentification of the logos. [Beckett involves us] in the tangled and contradictory movement of a scribe who drafts a text, laboriously plucking the word from a silence that proceeds and generates it.) Celati's love for the antics of Groucho and his brothers is clear in an odd little book that he originally wrote as a private Christmas gift for friends. Entitled Lafarsa del tre clandestine (The farce of the three hideaways), the book was published in 1987 by Baskerville Press of Bologna. It takes the form of a sort of screenplay based on translations into Italian of parts of several Marx Brothers' films as well as original material by Celati. In the Foreword, Celati mentions a book on the Marx brothers called Harpo's Bazaar, which he had begun to write around 1970-2 but never finished. Michael Caesar's article, 'Caratteri del comico nelle "Avventure di Guizzardi/" makes points similar to mine, especially regarding expulsion and emargination, although his analysis centers primarily on the performative and generally filmic aspects of the book. Lumley distinguishes between the two stories in terms of the ultimately 'tragic' quality of Melville's, in which 'the scrivener dies closed within himself/ and the 'comic' quality of Celati's, in which 'the gym-teacher is cured of his aphasia' (54). I would instead emphasize the mixed, 'tragicomic' quality of both, in spite of the more explicitly 'negative' ending of Bartleby and the apparently 'positive' ending of Baratto. Novero comments on this paradox that Tautore suggerisce al lettore, con sottile ironia, il rapporto mancato tra pensiero e parola, nei termini di mancata adesione del primo alia seconda e di quest'ultima alia realta' (the author suggests with subtle irony to the reader the failed connection between thought and word, in terms of the failed adherence of the former to the latter and of the latter to reality; 315). The offhand (no pun intended!) reference to sexuality when Baratto 'takes his penis in his hand' is not the only allusion to sex in this story. Baratto's wife Marta has many 'corteggiatori' (men who court her), for example, and it is implied that she is a less than faithful consort. The wife of one of

290 Notes to pages 25-49 Baratto's fellow rugby players is 'turned on' by his muteness, and offers herself to him while he 'examined her, stopping to observe her neck and breasts' (17). She later tells Baratto and others about her husband's obsession with a woman who works in a filling station on the highway and always smokes Marlboros. Her husband does nothing but talk about the nameless 'woman who smokes Marlboros/ and one evening a colleague of his says: 'I'd give a good cigarette to that one to smoke, I would!' (A quella le darei io una buona cigaretta da fumare!; 34), at which point the husband Bicchi tries to throttle him, thus losing their friendship, their shared business concern, and his livelihood! Sexuality is typically a 'subterranean' theme in Celati's writing, and one that I shall discuss in some detail in a later chapter. 9 In the earlier version sent to me, Celati writes that Baratto follows the old pensioner and his wife into their living room where he 'resta in piedi ondeggiando' (remains on his feet wavering), whereas in the published version, they see him in the living room 'vacillare guardandosi attorno' (vacillating as he looks around; 20). See Pina Piccolo's essay, 'Celati's Quattro novelle: On Vacillation and Suspense,' for another consideration of these key concepts. 10 (But I say: might it all not be a show? For example, this city a show, women who make us suffer a show, work a show, our idiotic appearance another show. Might it not all be a big trumped-up stunt, a dream from which we cannot awake? But I say more to you: might not light be a show? And the sounds we hear, the things we touch, and the dark and the night, couldn't it all be a big show? A whole comedy of appearances, that makes us believe who knows what and instead it's not true at all?) 11 The label of 'pensiero debole' was first applied to a 1983 collection of essays, edited by Vattimo and Rovatti, published under that title. The volume stimulated great debate, and was seen by many more traditional philosophers as a dangerous mix of 'mere literature' and philosophic theorizing. See the journal Differentia, edited by Peter Carravetta, for the best reflections in English of the stakes of this debate; see also Remo Ceserani, Raccontare il postmoderno (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1997), for a summary of the most salient aspects of Italian postmodernism. 12 In an essay written in 1979, 'Oggetti soffici' (Soft objects), Celati instead writes at some length about consumption, both real and figurative, in a context and at a time when his involvement with a critique of certain assumptions of both the political and cultural right and left was much more explicit. His approach in this essay is that of literalizing the concept of 'consumption,' writing of 'experience' as 'consumption of an object one finds or

Notes to pages 49-69 291 a gesture that one makes, and nothing remains, like on the tongue after having eaten a dessert/ in opposition to a transcendentalizing view of experience, which distinguishes between 'authentic' and 'inauthentic,' and which therefore sees experience as something we 'have' as a 'patrimony [that must be] managed' (12). I'll discuss this view in greater detail in a later chapter dedicated to 'taste,' among other topics. 2. The Antimonumental: Redefining Minimalism 1 This chapter is based in part on my articles 'Gianni Celati and Literary Minimalism' and Toward the Millennium: Update on Malerba, Manganelli, Celati.' 2 'Non so se sia eccesso o mancanza di sensibilita, ma e un fatto che le grandi tragedie mi lasciano quasi indifferente. Ci sono sottili dolori, certe situazioni e rapporti, che mi commuovono assai di piu di una citta distrutta dal fuoco.' From the opening lines of the story 'Due vecchi' (Two old people) in Casa d'altri. 3 In the context of this 1979 essay, Celati is critiquing art critic G.C. Argan's reading of Oldenburg's 'soft objects.' In seeing the sculptures as signs of mass culture, which for Argan represents a 'publicity-oriented falsification of taste/ the critic leads us to a 'distaste' for or dislike of this art, according to Celati, and thus to a negative judgment of its worth. The entire passage from which I quote reads: 'So, when [Argan] sees something, he does not let himself become involved in its effect; his effort is to quickly consult a code and to explain by means of it... the result of this consultation of a code cannot be adherence to the taste of the thing, however, nor any involvement in this taste/ (Allora, quando vede qualcosa, [Argan] non si lascia comvolgere dall'effetto; il suo sforzo e di consultare in fretta il codice e spiegarvi ... il risultato della consultazione di codice non puo essere 1'adesione al gusto della cosa, comunque; ne il coinvolgimento in questo gusto.) This is only one of many examples of Celati's critique of academic criticism, especially of its tendency to use labels, which the writer has carried out over the last thirty years. 4 Celati republished several of his fictions of the 19703, including Lunario, which was completely rewritten, under the title Parlamenti buffi (Turin: Einaudi, 1989). In the new version, manneristic and self-conscious allusions to the writing process are for the most part absent. In his comment printed on the back cover of the 1996 edition of the rewritten Lunario, Celati writes that 'the ordinary is a part of this dream [that] came from far off (his memories of the trip to Germany that he made in the 19503), and he felt that he

292 Notes to pages 69-98 'absolutely had to rewrite' this book because 'we shouldn't throw dreams away just because we haven't succeeded in recounting them well; otherwise we become frustrated people who disdain everything.' 5 Corti defines the 'form of the expression' as 'the organization, at different interacting levels, of all that which "expresses" the material of the text; the totality of expressive solutions and of the levels of the text (linguistic, rhythmic, etc)'; the original Italian text is in her glossary of literary critical terms in Viaggio nel '900,1091. 6 See, for example, the essays contained in J. Chandler, A. Davidson, and H. Harootunian, eds., Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Disciplines (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 7 The journal Riga, edited by Marco Belpoliti, has gathered together a wealth of materials from this project. Riga 14, published in April 1998 and entitled 'Ali Baba: Progetto di una rivista 1968-1972,' includes letters and essays by the collaborators from the period of the project, and a piece by Celati, written expressly for Riga, in which he recalls, from a distance of thirty years, the experiences he shared with Calvino and others. 3. The Permeable Gaze 1 This chapter is based in part on my articles, 'Lo spazio nei Narratori delle pianure' and 'Gianni Celati's La strada provinciale delle anime: A "Silent" film about "Nothing".' 2 John Berger, And our faces, my heart, brief as photos (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984); 50-1. 3 See Maurizio Viano's A Certain Realism: Making Use ofPasolini's Film Theory and Practice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), esp. chaps. 2 and 3, in which Pasolini's theoretical writings on cin. ema are explored in depth. 4 See Eugenia Paulicelli's study, Parola e immagine (Word and image) (Florence: Edizioni Cadmo, 1996) and Marco Belpoliti's L'occhio di Calvino (Calvino's eye) (Turin: Einaudi, 1996) for superb analyses of the interaction of visual and verbal realms in diverse Italian writers. 5 Sarah Hill's unpublished Master's thesis, 'Fictions to Live In: Landscape, Writing and Photography in the Works of Gianni Celati and Luigi Ghirri,' written in 1996 under the direction of Michael Hanne at the University of Auckland, is an exhaustive and invaluable consideration of the connections between Celati and Ghirri. 6 The director Nanni Moretti similarly brings ordinary spaces and buildings to our gaze in his film, Caw Diario. For example, in one part of the film, he

Notes to pages 98-123 293 rides around on his motorbike looking at various neighborhoods of Rome, and comments that it would be wonderful to make an entire movie consisting simply of the facades of diverse houses. 7 The first line is:' Al mattino presto in queste pianure la luce e tutta assorbita dai colori del suolo' (In the early morning on these plains the light is completely absorbed by the colors of the ground) ('Verso la foce'; 20). The entire first paragraph is heavily descriptive, although Celati already underscores the necessity of subjective perspective, even to the most 'objective' description, with the inclusion of his friend Luciano, who is in the act of photographing, much as Ghirri often includes a human figure, shot from behind, who is in the act of observing the scene that Ghirri is photographing. 8 See Roberta Piazza's "The Usual Story": The Narrative Imperfect in Celati as an Indicator of Information Already Familiar to the Reader' for an excellent linguistic study of the effect produced by Celati's use of verb tense in this collection. Piazza's main point is that Celati uses the narrative imperfect tense in order to 'conjure up the idea of an old story which exhibits a predictable plot and an expected denouement' (216); this technical analysis supports my point regarding the old traditions of storytelling that Celati is following in these tales. 9 In his invaluable coursebook, Frasi per narratori, which was written in the context of his teaching of narratology at Bologna, Celati discusses in great detail the 'panoramic' and 'scenic' modes. Many of his terms are taken from the Anglo-American tradition of criticism on narrative, from Henry James to Percy Lubbock to Wayne Booth and beyond, just as many of Celati's concepts about the sociolinguistic ceremonies of storytelling are indebted to Dell Hymes and William Labov's work in that area. For a useful survey of the latter area of study, see Pier Paolo Giglioli, ed., Language and Social Context (Harmondsworth, England and New York: Penguin Books, 1972). 10 In an interview I did with Celati in 1985, he expressed admiration for the panoramic style of Patricia Highsmith's Edith's Diary (Harmondsworth, England and New York: Penguin Books, 1977). I believe that the character Edith, who keeps a diary in Celati's 'Story of an apprenticeship,' is an oblique textual homage to Highsmith. I mention this detail as one small piece of evidence in support of a reading of Narratori that shuns all suggestion of a naively autobiographical or documentaristic-neorealist origin for the volume. The stories are neither 'confession' nor chronicle 'according to a model of literature tied to the world of Zavattini and neorealism,' as Almansi wrote in his 13 August 1995 review of the book in Panorama, but rather re-inventions of the narrative form that are of the most complex theoretical and literary rigor, and deeply influenced by models as diverse as

294 Notes to pages 123-35 Ghirri's photography, Highsmith's (and Peter Handke's) stories of the mundane (yet mysterious and even monstrous), and the research of sociolinguists and narratologists. 11 See Ascoltare il silenzio: La retorica come teoria (Bologna: II Mulino, 1986). For a sensitive summary and discussion of the book's main arguments, see the review of Emilio Speciale in Annali d'ltalianistica 7 (1989): 490-2. Speciale concludes that Valesio seeks, among other goals, to break down the barrier between literary and philosophical texts: 'II tentative molto convincente di Valesio e quello di superare in nome della retorica questa separazione del discorso umano che da secoli attraversa la civilta occidentale. Per questo propone in conclusione di avvicinarsi ai testi e discorsi con un atteggiamento contemplative e simpatetico che definisce come "ascolto," non un atteggiamento passivo, ma iperauditivo, nel senso di essere completamente recettivi perche le cose, i testi, il silenzio ci parlano' (Valesio's very convincing attempt is that of transcending, in the name of rhetoric, this separation of human discourse that for centuries has run through Western civilization. For this reason [Valesio] proposes in conclusion that texts and discourses be approached with a contemplative and empathic attitude that he defines as 'listening,' not a passive attitude, but a hyper-auditory one, in the sense of being completely receptive so that things, texts, and silence speak to us). These words, mutatis mutandi, could be applied to Celati's explorations of new approaches to the external world characterized by 'permeability.' 12 Celati creates a 'new way of hearing' as well as of seeing. The soundtrack is an integral part of the film's effect, as is true of the majority of films. The difference here is that the sounds of the human voice are as much a part of that effect as are musical scores or natural sounds. Visual punctuation of the role of sound is provided in the figure of a soundman in the film who walks about with a large boom microphone, more often than not listening to rustling grass or other 'unimportant' sounds rather than honing in on conversations. In fact, conversations are often muddled or cut short, and there are moments when sound is entirely cancelled. 13 Ghirri wrote short pieces, entitled 'Paesaggi' (Landscapes), three of which were published in the journal, // Semplice in its fifth volume (1997). These little essays reveal his general talent as a writer and his specific ability to capture aspects of his photographic poetics in words. For example, in 'L'omino sul ciglio del burrone' (The little man on the edge of the ravine), Ghirri writes of his boyhood affection for the small figure of a human being often incorporated in old photographs of monumental landscapes included in atlases. Ghirri saw this 'little man' as being in 'a state of continuous contemplation of the world,' and as giving a human measure to the spaces

Notes to pages 135-5l 295 being represented. The little man accompanied him in his youthful, bookish exploration of unknown and fascinating places. But when Ghirri grew up and began to do photography himself, he discovered that the little human figure had disappeared from landscape photography and that spaces had become increasingly 'deserted and incomprehensible.' He concludes: 'L'omino era sparito, se ne era andato via, aveva portato con se la rappresentazione dei luoghi e vi aveva lasciato il loro simulacra' (the little man had vanished, he had gone away, he had taken with him the representation of places and had left instead their simulacrum) (// Semplice n. 5; 44). We might say that Ghirri's work - and Celati's - seeks to put the 'little man' back into representations of the world, so as to give both representations and the world itself some human measure. For another tribute to Ghirri, see the first issue of the journal Transpadana (1997), which includes some of his photographs as well as written memorials to his work. 4. A Family of Voices: Celati's 'Parents/ 'Siblings/ and 'Children' 1 Interview with Bob Lumley, The Novella and The New Italian Landscape: An Interview with Gianni Celati, Edinburgh Review 83 (1990): 45. Celati spoke in English during the interview. 2 'Writing, Identity, and Copyright in the Net Age/ originally presented to the Authors' Guild in Palo Alto, California, in March 1995, and now printed in the journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 28, no. i (Spring 1995): 93-8, 3 See Laura Barile's 'Un ostinato inseguimento: Linguaggio e immagine in Calvino, Celati, Perec, e ('ultimo Beckett/ in Forum Italicum, 26, no. i, Spring 1992; 188-200, for an excellent comparative study of these writers. 4 See Maria J. Calvo Montoro's 'Joseph Conrad/Italo Calvino, o della stesura di una tesi come riflessione sulla scrittura/ in Forum Italicum 31, no. i (Spring 1997): 74-115, for a very detailed discussion of Calvino's thesis, defended in 1946 at the University of Turin. 5 See Franco Ricci's Tmmagini in posa, immagini in prosa. Calvino-Gnoli: Un'arte a parte/ in // Veltro 40, nos. 3-4 (1996): 257-61, for a discussion of these writings and paintings. 6 See Marco Belpoliti's study, L'occhio di Calvino (Turin: Einaudi, 1996), for a sensitive and exhaustive consideration of Calvino's dedication to writing as a way into the observable and describable external world. 7 For a very different view of Calvino, see Carla Benedetti's recent Pasolini contro Calvino: Per una letteratura impura (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1998), a

296 Notes to pages 151-81

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study that stimulated great polemics upon its appearance in early 1998. Benedetti argues that Calvino was perfectly integrated into the official institution's idea of literature as convention, while Pasolini never stopped being in conflict with it, with the result that the latter's 'idea of literature' was and remains much more open and promising than the former's. See Belpoliti's very intelligent review of the book Tasolini-Calvino: Requiem per il libro,' in il manifesto, 22 January 1998, in which, while disagreeing with Benedetti's view, he nonetheless praises her for stimulating a necessary reconsideration of a vast range of questions pertaining to literary thought and practice in this century's Italy. As of now (September 1998), Celati is working on two collections of essays, Studi di affezione I and- II (Affectionate studies), the former of which will contain published and unpublished essays on foreign writers, and the latter of which will contain pieces on Italian writers. I assume that the Garzoni piece, which I have read in an unfinished version on diskette, will be included. The interest in Japan as a metaphor for the aesthetic realm and for cultural codes unites Carter with thinkers such as Barthes, and certain Italian writers, Calvino among them. In L'occhio di Calvino, Belpoliti provides an excellent reading of Calvino's 'Japan' primarily centered on the story, 'La vecchia signora in kimona viola' and on the 'Japanese' novel contained in Se una notte. Clement made Purple Noon based on The Talented Mr. Ripley; Wenders made The American Friend based on Ripley's Game; Chabrol adapted The Cry of the Owl to the screen; and Geissendorfer made films based on The Glass Cell and Edith's Diary. Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train came out in 1951. See Franco Nasi, 'Agiografie della pianura: Vite brevi di idioti di Ermanno Cavazzoni/ Romance Languages Annual 7 (1996): 245-53, f°r an excellent reading of the volume. See also Anthony Cronin's No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times ofFlann O'Brien (New York: Fromm International Publishing Corporation, 1988), the first full-length biography of the Irish writer. For a wonderfully original view of the Irish literary tradition and its living presence in the music and lyrics of a rock group, U2, see Tatiana Pais Becher's L'Irlanda degli U2. Musica, letteratura e radici culturali (Padua: Arcana Editrice, 1998).

5. Celati's Body Language: Orality, Voice, and the Theater of Ephemeral Morality i 'E durante gli anni Settanta Celati si dara a sperimentare nei suoi testi le

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possibilita del parlato "non colto"; anzi le possibilita di tradurre sulla carta un discorso basato sui toni di voce, o addirittura sul movimento di tutto il corpo del personaggio ... Scrittura e oralita sembrano legate indissolubilmente 1'una all'altra/ in Teoria e critica della letteratura nelle avanguardie italiane degli anni sessanta (Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1982); 239. Kaye's book explores the general importance of performance to postmodern art; see also Jessica Prinz's Art Discourse/Discourse in Art (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991), in which she analyzes the role of language philosophy in postmodern art and uses the term 'scripting' to describe the use by many postmodern artists of brief verbal propositions that solicit mental or physical responses from the audience (45). Celati himself signaled these studies to me as pertinent to an understanding of his recent performance-oriented writing. Muzzioli provides an excellent reading of Celati's Bakhtinian period, with particular attention to his 'theoretical tale,' 'La bottega dei mimi' (The workshop of the mimes), first published in Nuovi argomenti in 1976, in which great use is made of 'silly' talk, imprecations, and the like. Muzzioli also emphasizes Celati's concept of the 'mask' of the mime, who repeats a series of given gestures and recites given words, thus highlighting the 'alreadiness' of representations, and the salience of the surface and of appearances: all issues that Celati develops in a variety of subsequent theoretical and creative texts, as we have seen. See Muzzioli, 239-43. The concept of the 'gift,' which is found in Bakhtin, is also fundamental to the idea of the ethics of exchange in archaic and non-Western societies such as it was studied by Malinowski, Mauss, and Bataille. These anthropological perspectives can be seen in modern Italian literary and philosophical works that seek to endow language itself with the 'magic' of a social practice of exchange based on 'gifting/ which is in direct opposition to a society of hard economic supply and demand. Giorgio Agamben is the most famous sustainer of a philosophical idea of the word as the 'gift' that circulates among members of society and thus binds them in a common ethos, which is also a verbal 'commonplace' or luogo comune. See his // linguaggio e la morte (Language and death) (Turin: Einaudi, 1982). I need hardly say that Celati is clearly influenced (once again) by Agamben's thought. Fernando Savater's Childhood Regained: The Art of the Storyteller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), expresses a view of the ethical implications of storytelling enjoyment that is akin to Celati's. He writes, for example, that 'the storyteller must keep alive the most improbable flame, that of hope, [and] hope cannot be played with, though only hope permits free

298 Notes to pages 200-27 play' (7). Hope is, of course, much more allied to poetic imagination than to hard facts, just as storytelling is tied to the maintenance of hope-giving myths rather than the demythologizing task of reason. 6 Celati's reference to the imaginatively stimulating effect of maps recalls Conrad's Marlow, whose youthful infatuation with maps led him not to wondrously positive adventures but instead to the 'heart of darkness': 'Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration' ('Heart of Darkness,' in The Collected Tales; 21). Conrad was one of Calvino's favorite writers, on whom he wrote his thesis, as mentioned in an earlier chapter, and he remains one of Celati's favorites. The essential role of imaginative and real traveling in Celati's work will be the topic of the next chapter. 7 Another great artist of the Po valley, the film director Antonioni, includes a scene of disappearance, which I find to be very similar to Celati's word picture, in his film Deserto Rosso, when a group of people stand near the sea and are gradually enveloped in the swirling mists rising up around them, as the protagonist Giuliana watches in stunned amazement. Antonioni's poetic sensibility, conditioned in no small part by his collaboration with another great poet, screenwriter Tonino Guerra, is akin to Celati's in that both are acutely aware of the fluid boundaries between life and art, experience and imagination, and both are masters of the tremendous symbolic potential of the Italian landscape, especially that of the plains region, the Valle Padana. It should also be noted that fog is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the plains region. 8 From the introduction to Beverly Danuser Richardson's Plazer ed enueg, privately printed in 290 copies (Gurnee, 111.: The Vanishing Press, 1972) and dedicated to T.G. Bergin, who was Ms Richardson's (and my) professor of Provencal poetry at Yale University in the late sixties and early seventies. Her poems are, as far as I know, a very rare example of modern versions of these highly popular verse forms from the Middle Ages. 6. Africa, Gamuna, and Other Travels: Moving Narratives 1 The Anglo-French verb travailler meant both "to travel" and "to torment." It seems to have come from a late Latin form trepalium, an instrument of torture made of three (tres) stakes (poll) or a machine used to tie up horses that were being shoed' (Luigi Monga, 'Travel and Travel Writing: An Historical View of Hodoeporics,' Annali d'ltalianistica 14 (1996): 11). 2 Heidegger took the concept of 'dwelling poetically' from Holderlin, of

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course, and the philosopher developed his ideas regarding this concept in several essays, available in the volume Poetry, Language, Thought. The Italian champions of 'weak thought' (Vattimo, Rovatti, and others) have all worked extensively with Heideggerian ideas in developing their postmetaphysical, 'poetic' response to postmodernity; Gabellone may well have been influenced in the writing of his essay by the 'debolisti.' In 'L'autore come antropologo: Pier Paolo Pasolini e la morte dell'etnos' (The author as anthropologist: Pasolini and the death of ethnos), Massimo Riva writes (in my translation): 'It in fact seems a paradox that, at the heights of an unraveling or a crisis of Western hegemonic culture, literature is turning to anthropology in search of a "new," unifying prospective, exactly when anthropology is turning to literature in order to refine the instruments of its own autocritique ... We feel ourselves authorized (in the "interpretive" prospective inaugurated by Clifford Geertz) to consider literature as the critical conscience of ethnographic discourse: in contemporary critical reflection, we can therefore join the concept of the author as anthropologist to that of the anthropologist as author' ('L'autore come antropologo'; 239-40). Like Pasolini, Celati could be seen in this conceptual light, although he would himself no doubt prefer to be thought of as a 'keeper of the narrative ritual,' rather than as a version of the postmodern ethnographer. Massimo Rizzante's study, // geografo e il viaggiatore: Variazioni su I. Calvino e G. Celati (The geographer and the traveler: Variations on Calvino and Celati) (Fossombrone (Pesaro): Tipografia Metauro, 1993), distinguishes between Calvino's 'geometric' soul and Celati's more formless 'wanderlust.' Rizzante notes the 'furore classificatorio' (the classificatory fervor) of Calvino, even in Palomar, while Celati, 'the archeologist-writer ... does not classify objects nor describe them with that interpretative pathos, still typical instead of Calvino' (15-16). In the first issue of // Semplice, under the rubric 'Discorsi di metodo' (Discourses on method), Celati includes a piece simply entitled 'Modena 18 luglio 1994' (Modena 18 July 1994), in which he discusses various techniques for producing a certain 'sound' in prose writing, including the use of particular kinds of proper names and the handling of direct and indirect discourse. The analogy employed throughout the piece is that of writing with music, and the 'specific experience' of the writer, like that of those who come to understand something about musical composition and reception, has to do with the 'formation of an internal ear' (formazione di un orecchio interno) (142) rather than with rules or grids that are externally generated and critically applied. In the second issue of // Semplice (January 1996), 52-6, Jean Talon published

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a piece called 'Un africano del Fuladu a Bologna/ in which the title's character, Diawne Diamanka, is described as a Teul balladsinger [cantastorie]' who was invited in 1988 to Bologna by a group of European anthropologists so that he could carry out ethnographic observations of the habits and customs of the Western world. The piece is obviously satirical in intent, as Diamanka remarks, among other things, that people in Bologna let their pet dogs defecate all over the streets but get angry if someone drops even one piece of paper and thus litters the sidewalks; that they blow their noses and then carefully wrap up the mucus and put it back in their pocket; that women wear the skins of ferocious beasts; and that knowing how to dance seems to be a fundamental element in Bolognese courting rituals. Although Talon ends by noting that Diamanka wrote a song about all of his observations that he now sings to his people, and that the song is published in an Italian volume called Sguardi venuti da lontano (Views coming from far off), the piece has the feel of fiction. In an article by Alberto Papuzzi, published on 12 April 1997 in La Stampa (23), it is pointed out that 'no other European country hosts such a varied gamut of foreign immigrants [extracomunitari]/ and that the rate of growth of immigrant presence has been 100 per cent in the last ten years alone (around 500,000 in 1987 and over one million in 1997). The largest immigrant population is Moroccan, followed by Albanian, Philippine, U.S. citizens, Tunisian, Serb, Romanian, Senegalese, Chinese, Polish, Peruvian, Egyptian, and so on. 'I am in Madras and I am not well... my competence in anxieties finds itself before something utterly new'; here Manganelli makes allusion to his Hilarotragoedia, in which there is a 'catalogue' of 'angosce' (anxieties, anguishes). Rumble's reference to Lyotard is to his The Inhuman. Benedetti in fact sees a fairly hidden line along which Celati's ideas on grace can be placed, a '"subterranean" line of the literature of this century, that perhaps has never been adequately brought to light; it is a line that goes from Proust to Handke, naturally passing through Walser' (18-19). The book was copiously reviewed when it appeared in January 1998; most reviews were positive, although Vanja Ferretti, writing for Italia Oggi, wonders why this book was published: 'Is it always necessary to publish whatever a successful writer, as Celati is, writes? Even scratchings? To assert that, necessarily, even simple annotations must always and nonetheless express the genius of the author seems to me excessive. But perhaps it works commercially, for the publisher and the author.' It seems to me, instead, that Ferretti likely did not read the book, for it is abundantly clear that these are not 'simple annotations,' but rather 'notebooks' that have

Notes to pages 263-4 301 been thoroughly shaped into book form. The idea of the 'author's genius' on display is thoroughly antithetical to Celati's work as well. I found it interesting too that many reviewers referred to Celati as a very important author, a successful writer, etc., and L'Indice even provided a summary of his career under the title 'Celati chi e?' (Celati, who is he?), in order to fill the lack created by his exclusion from some recent histories and repertories of contemporary literature. The most thoughtful reviews are by Belpoliti in il manifesto, Angelo Guglielmi in Tuttolibri, and Valeric Magrelli in Diario della settimana. Avventure in Africa won the first Zerilli-Marimo literary prize, administered by New York University's Italian program and by the Bellonci Foundation in Italy, the jury for which was made up of Englishspeaking readers with competence in Italian (mainly graduate students in doctoral programs in Italian literature in North America and the United Kingdom). The prize stipulates support for the translation into English and publication of the book in North America. Writer and translator Adria Bernardi has completed a version in English that is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press. 11 As I have noted here and there throughout this study, many of Celati's perspectives on writing can be associated with certain aspects of feminist thought. In a recent book by the philosophical feminist collective, Diotima, the concept of 'partire da se' is discussed, and, in Luisa Muraro's essay, 'benevolence' or 'good will' comes up as a component of 'taking oneself as the starting point' for thought and relations with the world. Instead of a Kantian principle of 'good will,' however, this new type of practical philosophy 'does not base itself on good will; it presupposes it and that is enough ... its support is different, it is the modification of self, which means not having supports, [instead] continuing to negotiate in order to exist' (Muraro, 'Partire da se e non farsi trovare' [Taking oneself as the starting point and not making oneself be sought]; in La sapienza di partire da se (Naples: Liguori, 1996); 10). Muraro also writes that 'taking oneself as the starting point' is a perspective that highlights our dependencies on others, while it also 'situates you, at every moment, on the trajectory of your being that changes, moves, searches/ giving 'a point if view without fixing anything.' In this sense, it is like 'traveling ... which makes you see things as noone can make you see them without that displacement' (8-9). Celati's Avventure in Africa shows throughout a presupposition of good will, a dependency on others, and a refusal of conceptually fixed points of view, all of which indirectly resonate with this feminist idea of practical philosophy (which, interestingly, seeks to refute a deconstructionist approach to contemporaneity, much as Celati's work also does).

302 Notes to pages 267-76 12 In the February 1995 issue of the magazine, Travel and Leisure, there is included a 'tourist documentary' in words and photographs on Mali, called on the cover The Next Place in Africa.' Presumably it is the next 'In' place, and the gorgeous photos of places and people, by Aldo Rossi, certainly make it seductively appealing. The article, called 'The Long, Long Road to Timbuktu/ by Ted Conover, is well written, informative, and engaging, as in it he recounts his experiences on the trip there, done with the Berkeleybased Wilderness Travel outfitters. The tips on outfitters, gear, health precautions, and shopping, included at the end of the article, seek to assure the potential tourist to Mali of a clean and ordered trip, something like the 'glossy,' 'full-proof postmodern experience that Celati is precisely seeking to escape. See Celati's 'Situazioni esotiche sul territorio' for his early (1978) ideas on Western appropriations of the 'exotic.' 13 Philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine took up the word 'nothing' in his Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960) where he wrote, in the section of his book entitled 'Ambiguity of Terms': 'An indefinite singular term whose ambiguity has especially invited confusion, real and feigned, is "nothing" or "nobody"'; 133. Quine goes on to mention Plato, Locke, and Heidegger as among those thinkers who have been 'beguiled' by the term's invitation to confusion, and he even quotes the Gershwin tune that I quote as an example of 'tired humor' based on the ambiguity of 'nothing.' (I thought of it before reading Quine, I might add.) I do not see Celati's play on the term as either 'confusion' or 'tired humor'; rather, his is an attempt to give it a positive ethical and human resonance, just as Bartleby's 'preference not to' is read as positive, in spite of the scrivener's 'sad' end. Provisional Conclusions: Venturing into the New Millennium 1 'La pagina ha il suo bene solo quando la volti e c'e la vita dietro che spinge e scompiglia tutti i fogli del libro ... Dal raccontare al passato, e dal presente che mi prendeva la mano nei tratti concitati, ecco, o future, sono salita in sella al tuo cavallo' (II cavaliere inesistente [The Nonexistent Knight]; 125). 2 Many of Celati's characters have names beginning with the letter 'B': Baratto and his friends Bicchi and Berte; Bugli and his friend Brizzi; the pilot Bonetti of the Gamuna tale. An entirely unscientific explanation for this fact could be that plosives are considered 'funny' sounds (I forget where I read this bit of lore) and the names might therefore forward the humorous effect that Celati seeks when reading stories aloud. It could also be nothing other than a coincidence. In any case, these names do sound 'funny.'

Bibliography

Books and Articles by Gianni Celati Celati, Gianni. 1965. 'Salvazione e silenzio dei significati.' Marcatre 14-15: 112-3. - 1968. Tarlato come spettacolo.' II Verri 26: 80-8 (republished in Gruppo 63. Critica e teoria, ed. Renato Barilli and Angelo Guglielmi, 226-43. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1986). - 1968. 'II sogno senza fondo.' Quindici 9: 6. - 1969. 'Anatomic e sistematiche letterarie/ Libri Nuovi, 5 August (republished in Riga 14, ed. Mario Barenghi and Marco Belpoliti, 84-7. 1998). - 1971. Comiche. Turin: Einaudi. - 1972. 'Al bivio della letteratura fantastica/ Periodo ipotetico 6:10-12. - 1973. 'II racconto di superficie.' // Verri i (March): 93-114. - 1973. Le avventure di Gmzzardi. Turin: Einaudi. (2nd ed. 1994. Milan: Feltrinelli). - 1974. // chiodo in testa. Pollenza-Macerata: La Nuova Foglio. - 1974. 'Finzioni occidental!.' Lingua e stile 2: 289-321. - 1975. Finzioni occidental!: Fabulazione, comicita e scrittura. Turin: Einaudi. 2nd ed.1986. - 1975. 'II bazar archeologico.' // Verri 12: 11-35 (republished in Finzioni occidental!, 1986, with an added note, and in Riga 14 (1998): 200-22, ed. Mario Barenghi and Marco Belpoliti). - 1976. 'II corpo comico nello spazio.' // Verri 3: 22-32. - 1976. La banda dei sospiri. Turin: Einaudi (2nd ed. 1998. Milan: Feltrinelli). - 1976. 'La bottega dei mimi.' Nuovi argomenti 50: 9-20 - 1977. La bottega dei mimi. Pollenza and Macerata: La Nuova Foglio (expanded version of 1976 piece with the same title).

304 Bibliography - 1978. Lunario del paradiso. Turin: Einaudi (2nd ed. 1996. Milan: Feltrinelli). - 1978. 'Situazioni esotiche sul territorio.' In Letteratura esotismo, colonialismo, ed. Anita Licari, Roberta Maccagnani, and Lina Zecchi, 9-26. Bologna: Nuova Casa Editrice. - 1979. 'Oggetti soffici.' Iterarte - Rivista periodica del Circolo Artistico di Bologna 17 (June): 10-15. - 1983. 'L'avventura non deve finire. Conversazione attraverso gli occhi/ Quindi: per I'invenzione del tempo (Dec. 1982-Jan. 1983): 8-11. - 1984. Frasi per narratori. Bologna: C.U.S.L. - 1984. 'Palomar, la prosa del mondo.' Alfabeta 59 (April): 7-8. - 1984. Tinzioni a cui credere.' Alfabeta 67:13. - 1984. 'Verso la foce: Reportage per un amico fotografo.' In Viaggio in Italia, ed. Luigi Ghirri, Gianni Leone and Enzo Velati, 20-35. Alessandria: II Quadrante. - 1985. Narratori delle pianure. Milan: Feltrinelli. - 1985. 'Per rompere il mutismo dell'ovvieta.' il manifesto, 20 September. - 1985. 'Stili, storie, alle foci del Po, quasi come in Patagonia.' L'Unita. 14 April, 15- 1985. 'Tempo che passa.' L'Unita, 14 April, 7. - 1985. 'La telepatia sentimentale di Milan Kundera.' il manifesto, 9 May, 1-2. - 1986. 'Condizioni di luce sulla via Emilia.' In Esplorazioni sulla via Emilia: Scritture nel paesaggio, ed. Giulio Bizzarri, 33-48. Milan: Feltrinelli. - 1986. 'Come capirla. Nella nebbia.' La Repubblica, 23 January, 8. - 1986. 'Un sistema di racconti sul mondo esterno.' Quindi, January: 6-9. - 1986. T lettori di libri sono sempre piu falsi.' Nuova Corrente 33, 97 (Jan-June): 3-26. - 1987. Lafarsa dei ire dandestini: Un adattamento dai Marx Brothers. Bologna: Baskerville. - 1987. Quattro novelle sulle apparenze. Milan: Feltrinelli. - 1987. Tentative di omaggio a Flann O'Brien.' Preface to La miseria in bocca, by Flann O'Brien, trans. Daniele Benati, 9-36. Milan: Feltrinelli. - 1987. 'Palomar, nella prosa del mondo.' Nuova Corrente 34,100 (July-Dec.): 227-42. - 1987. 'II paralitico nel deserto.' Dolcevita: 19-23. - 1987. 'Verso la foce: (estratti da un diario di viaggio).' In Narratori dell'invisibile: Simposio in memoria di Halo Calvino, ed. Beppe Cottafavi and Maurizio Magri, 65-79. Modena: Mucchi Editore. - 1988. 'L'angelo del racconto.' /'/ manifesto, 30-1 October, 7-8. - 1989. Verso la foce. Milan: Feltrinelli. - 1989. 'Commenti su un teatro naturale delle immagini.' In II profile delle nuvole, by Luigi Ghirri, 20-35. Milan: Feltrinelli.

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- 1989. 'Finzioni a cui credere, un esempio/ In Paesaggio italiano, ed. Luigi Ghirri, 32-3. Milan: Electa. - 1989. Parlamenti buffi. Milan: Feltrinelli (Includes the preface: 'Congedo dell'autore dal suo libro/ 7-10, and the three previously published novels: Le avventure di Guizzardi, with the added subtitle Storia d'un senzafamiglia, 1973; La banda del sospiri, with the added subtitle Romanzo d'infanzia, 1976; Lunario del paradiso, with the added subtitle Esperienze d'un ragazzo all'estero 1978). - 1989. 'Lo stregone quotidiano. L'estasi e il Sabba.' il manifesto, 23 April. - 1989. 'Sciamani d'amore. II libro di Carlo Ginzburg.' il manifesto, 30 April. - 1989. Voices from the Plains. London: Serpent's Tail (English trans. Robert Lumley of Narratori delle pianure, 1985). - 1990. 'Una richiesta d'amore/ il manifesto, 11 February. - 1990. 'I confini dell'oasi.' il manifesto, 17 September. - 1991. 'Non fatti, ma parole! G. Celati risponde a Franco Marenco.' L'Indice dei libri del mese 7:17-19. - 1991. Appearances. London: Serpent's Tail (English trans. Stuart Hood of Quattro novelle sulle apparenze, 1987). - 1991. Introduction to Bartleby lo scrivano, by Herman Melville, trans. Gianni Celati, vii-xxvi. Milan: Feltrinelli. - 1992. ed. Narratori delle riserve (With the introduction: 'Note d'avvio/ 9-10). Milan: Feltrinelli. - 1992. 'Soglia per Luigi Ghirri: come pensare per immagini.' In Luigi Ghirri: Vista con camera: 200 Fotografie in Emilia Romagna, ed. Paola Ghirri and Ennery Tamarelli, 186-9. Milan: Federico Motta. - 1994. L'Orlando innamorato raccontato in prosa. Turin: Einaudi. - 1995. 'Morte di Italo/ Riga. 9 (Italo Calvino: Enciclopedia: Arte, scienza e letteratura, ed. Marco Belpoliti) (November): 204-8. - 1995. 'Non c'e piu paradiso.' // Semplice, i (September): 30-46. - 1995. 'Modena 18 luglio 1994.' // Semplice, i (September): 141-6. - 1996. 'Fata Morgana.' // Semplice 2 (January): 15-30. - 1996. 'Le posizioni narrative rispetto all'altro.' Nuova Corrente 43: 3-18. - 1996. Recita dell'attore Vecchiatto nel teatro di Rio Saliceto. Milan: Feltrinelli. - 1997. 'Notizie sul popolo dei Gamuna.' Altofragile: Foglio di scrittura 7 (February): i. - 1998. Avventure in Africa. Milan: Feltrinelli. - 1998. Tl narrare come attivita pratica.' In Seminario sul racconto, ed. Luigi Rustichelli, 13-33. West Lafayette, Indiana: Bordighera. - 1998. Tl progetto Ali Baba trent'anni dopo.' Riga 14: 313-21. - 1999. 'Leggere e scrivere. Presentazione.' In Racconti impensati di ragazzini, ed. Enrico De Vivo, 17-37. Milan: Feltrinelli.

306 Bibliography - (forthcoming). Studi di affezione, (including essays on Ariosto, Delfini, Garzoni, Imbriani, Manganelli, Calvino, Tozzi, Flann O'Brien, Stendhal, Swift, Ghirri, Celine, Melville). Celati, Gianni, and Guido Fink, eds. The Celebrated Art of U.S. Short-story Writing. Modena: Mucchi. 1986. Celati, Gianni, and Ivan Levrini. 1996. 'In memoria di Enzo Melandri.' // Semplice 3 (May): 171-7. Translations by Gianni Celati Celati, Gianni, trans. 1966. Lafavola della botte, by Jonathan Swift. Bologna: Sampietro Editore. - trans. 1969, Futilita, by W. Gerhardie. Turin: Einaudi. - trans. 1969. // linguaggio silenzioso, by Edward T. Hall. Milan: Bompiani. - trans. 1971. Colloqui con il professor Y., by Louis Ferdinand Celine. Turin: Einaudi. - trans. 1971. II ponte di Londra, by Louis Ferdinand Celine. Turin: Einaudi. - trans. 1986 II richiamo della foresta, by Jack London. Turin: Einaudi. - trans. 1991. Bartleby lo scrivano, by Herman Melville. Milan: Feltrinelli. - trans. 1993. La Certosa di Parma, by Stendhal. Milan: Feltrinelli. - trans. 1993. Poesie della tone, by Friedrich Holderlin. Turin: Einaudi. - trans. 1996. Guignol's Band, by Louis Ferdinand Celine. Turin: Einaudi. - trans. 1997. / viaggi di Gulliver, by Jonathan Swift. Turin: Einaudi. Videos by Gianni Celati Strada provinciale delle anime. Directed by Gianni Celati. 58 min. Bologna: Pierrot e La Rosa. 1991. Videocassette. II Mondo di Luigi Ghirri. Directed by Gianni Celati. 52 min. Bologna: Pierrot e La Rosa. 1999. Videocassette. Works on Celati Almansi, Guido. 'Celati uno, due, tre.' Nuovi Argomenti, 59-60 (July- Dec. 1978): 74-90. - 'Gli idilli padani.' Review of Narratori delle pianure, by Gianni Celati. Panorama, 22 September 1985,14-15. - Tl letamaio di Babele,' chap. 3 of La ragion comica, 43-61. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1986. Barberi Squarotti, Giorgio. 'Dalla pianura del Po voci senza tempo/ Review

Bibliography 307 of Narratori delle pianure, by Gianni Celati. La Stampa, Tuttolibri, 3 August 1985, 3. Barboiini, Roberto. 'Ma Celati sta in riserva.' Review of Narratori delle riserve, ed. Gianni Celati. Panorama, July 5 1992, 97. Barile, Laura. 'Un ostinato inseguimento: linguaggio e immagine in Calvino, Celati, Perec, e 1'ultimo Beckett.' Forum Italicum 26, no.i (Spring 1992): 188200. Barilli, Renato. 'Si per tre crescite.' Review of Narratori delle pianure, by Gianni Celati. Alfabeta 78 (November 1985): 4. Belpoliti, Marco. Terribile mitezza di Bartleby, lo scrivano che sa dire di "no/" Review of Bartleby lo scrivano, by Herman Melville, trans. Gianni Celati. il manifesto, La talpa libri, 28 June 1991, 6. - 'Nel delta del Po con Gianni Celati/ Review of Strada provinciale delle anime, video directed by Gianni Celati. il manifesto, 28 December 1991,13. - 'Stendhal a caccia della felicita sull'orizzonte padano/ Review of La Certosa di Parma, by Stendhal, trans. Gianni Celati. il manifesto, La talpa libri, 14 May 1993, 5-6. - 'II ritorno di Danci, Pinocchio lunatico/ Review of Le Avventure di Guizzardi, by Gianni Celati. il manifesto, 5 May 1994. - 'Nell'ipertesto di Orlando e dei paladini, illusioni e abbagli per produrre meraviglia/ Review of Orlando innamorato raccontato in prosa, by Gianni Celati. il manifesto, La talpa libri, 8 December 1994, 3. - 'L'attore Vecchiatto porta in scena la lingua jazz di Celati/ Review of Recita dell'attore Vecchiatto ml teatro di Rio Saliceto, by Gianni Celati. il manifesto, La talpa libri, 28 November 1996, 3. - 'Africa sulla carta/ Review of Avventure in Africa, by Gianni Celati. il manifesto, La talpa libri, 12 February 1998, 3. Benedetti, Carla. 'Celati e le poetiche della grazia/ Rassegna europea di letteratura italiana, i (1993): 7-33. Boselli, Mario. 'Finzioni di superficie/ Nuova Corrente 33, 97 (Jan.-June 1986): 75-88. Caesar, Michael. 'Caratteri del comico nelle Avventure di Guizzardi.' Nuova Corrente 33, 97 (Jan.-June 1986): 33-46. Calvino, Italo. 'Gianni Celati. Comiche.' Postface to Comiche, by Gianni Celati. Turin: Einaudi. 1971. - 'Da Buster Keaton a Peter Handke/ L'Espresso, 30 June 1985, 95. Corti, Maria. 'Sedotti dalle nuvole/ Review of // profile delle nuvole: Immagini di un paesaggio italiano, by Luigi Ghirri, with texts by Gianni Celati. Panorama, 28 January 1990, 25-8. Durante, Francesca. 'Caro Diario/ Review of Avventure in Africa, by Gianni

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316 Bibliography Diotima. La sapienza di partire da se. Naples: Liguori, 1996. Dupont, Joan. 'Criminal Pursuits.' New York Times Magazine, 12 June 1988, 61-6. Fachinelli, Elvio. La mente estatica. Milan: Adelphi, 1989. - La freccia ferma. Tre tentativi di annullare il tempo. Milan: Adelphi, 1992. Ferretti, Gian Carlo. // mercato delle lettere: Industria culturale e lavoro critico in Italia dagli anni cinquanta a oggi. Turin: Einaudi, 1979. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 197277. Ed., and trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Meplam, and Kate Soper. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. - 'What Is an Author?' In The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow, 101-20. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Gajani, Carlo. 'Arte affettuosa.' Iterarte: Rivista periodica del Circolo Artistico di Bologna, June 1979: 6. Gargani, Aldo. 'La voce femminile.' Alfabeta 64 (September 1984): 16. Garzoni, Tomaso. La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo e nobili e ignobili, nuovamente formata et posta in luce da Thomaso Garzoni da Bagnacavallo. Ed. Paolo Cherchi and Beatrice Collina. 2 vols. Turin: Einaudi, 1996. Geertz, Clifford. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. Ghirri, Luigi. 'Un canto della Terra: Intervista a Luigi Ghirri.' Interview by E. Teatini. In Paesaggio italiano, ed. Luigi Ghirri, 49-51. Milan: Electa, 1989. - 'Paesaggi.' // Semplice 5 (1997): 43-51. Giglioli, Pier Paolo, ed. Language and Social Context: Selected Readings. Harmondsworth, England, and New York: Penguin Books, 1972. Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy. 'Blankness as a Signifier.' Critical Inquiry 24, no. i (Autumn 1997): 159-75. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, 1959. Harbison, Robert. Eccentric Spaces. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977. Hardt, Michael. An Apprenticeship in Philosophy: Gilles Deleuze. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Highsmith, Patricia. Edith's Diary. Harmondsworth, England, and New York: Penguin Books, 1977. Hume, Kathryn. Calvino's Fictions: Cogito and Cosmos. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge, 1989.

Bibliography 317 Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Schocken Books, 1995. Kaye, Nick. Postmodernism and Performance. London: MacMillan Press. 1994. Labov, William. The Logic of Nonstandard English.' In Language and Social Context: Selected Readings, ed. Pier Paolo Giglioli, 179-215. Harmondsworth, England, and New York: Penguin Books, 1972. Lane, Anthony. The Fall Guy.' The New Yorker, 23 October 1995, 66-72. La Porta, Filippo. La nuova narrativa italiana: Trasvestimenti e stile difine secolo. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1995. Leed, Eric J. The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism. New York: Basic Books, 1991. Le Guin, Ursula K. 'It Was a Dark and Stormy Night; or, Why Are We Huddling about the Campfire?' In On Narrative, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell, 187-99. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Lentricchia, Frank, and McLaughlin, Thomas, eds. Critical Terms for Literary Studies. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Lollini, Massimo. 'Antropologia ed etica della scrittura in Italo Calvino.' Annali d'ltalianistica 15 (1997: Anthropology and Literature, ed. Dino Cervigni): 283312. Lotman, Juri. The Structure of the Artistic Text. Trans. Ronald Vroon. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977. Luttazzi, Daniele. Va' dove ti porta il clito. Bologna: Comix, 1995. Lyotard, Jean Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Malerba, Luigi. Le rose imperiali. Milan: Bompiani, 1974. - Cina Cina. Lecce: Piero Manni, 1985. Manganelli, Giorgio. Esperimento con I'lndia. Milan: Adelphi, 1992. - Hilarotragoedia. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1964. Marcus, Millicent. 'Caro diario and the Cinematic Body of Nanni Moretti.' Italica 75, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 233-47. McCall, Dan. The Silence ofBartleby. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989. Melville, Herman. Pierre or The Ambiguities. Harmondsworth, England, and New York: Penguin Books, 1996. - The Complete Shorter Fiction. New York and Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. - 'Bartleby the Scrivener.' In The Complete Shorter Fiction, 18-51. New York and Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. - The Happy Failure.' In The Complete Shorter Fiction, 250-7. New York and Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

318 Bibliography Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Prose of the World. Ed. Claude Lefort. Trans. John O'Neill. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Mitchell, W.J.T., ed. On Narrative. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 1981. - Iconology. Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986. - 'The Ethics of Form in the Photographic Essay.' Afterimage January 1994: 8-13. - Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Monga, Luigi. Travel and Travel Writing: An Historical Overview of Oedeporics,' in Annali d'Halianistica 14 (1996: L'odeporica/Hodoeporics: On Travel Literature, ed. Luigi Monga): 6-54. Moravia, Alberto. Un'idea dell'India. Milan: Bompiani, 1962. Muraro, Luisa. 'Partire da se e non farsi trovare.' In La sapienza di partire da se, by Diotima. 5-21. Naples: Liguori, 1996. Muzzioli, Francesco. Teoria e critica della letteratura delle avanguardie italiane degli anni sessanta. Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1982. Nasi, Franco. 'Agiografie della pianura: Vite brevi di idioti di Ermanno Cavazzoni,' Romance Languages Annual 7 (1996): 245-53. - 'Un collezionista di padri: Halo di Marco Belpoliti.' Romance Languages Annual 9 (1997): 271-9. Newton, Adam Zachary. Narrative Ethics. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1995. O'Brien, Flann. La miseria in bocca. Trans. Daniele Benati. Milan: Feltrinelli. 1987. - The Poor Mouth: A Bad Story about the Hard Life. Trans. Patrick Power. Normal, 111.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1996. Oldenberg, Claes. Store Days: Documents from "The Store", 1961, and "Ray Gun Theater," 1962. Selected by Claes Oldenburg and Emmett Williams. New York: Something Else Press, 1967. Orengo, Nico, 'Garboli sfida i cannibali/ La Stampa, 10 July 1997. Papotti, Davide. Geografie della scrittura: Paesaggi letterari del medio Po. Pavia: La Goliardica Pavese, 1996. - 'II libro in valigia: eredita odeporiche nel romanzo italiano contemporaneo.' Annali d'ltalianistica 14 (1996: L'odeporica/Hodoeporics: On Travel Literature, ed. Luigi Monga): 351-62. Papuzzi, Alberto. 'Stranieri, la mappa tricolore.' La Stampa, 12 April 1997,23. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. L'odore dell'India. Milan: Garzanti, 1962. Paulicelli, Eugenia. Parola e immagine: Sentieri della scrittura in Leonardo, Marino, Foscolo, Calvino. Florence: Edizioni Cadmo, 1996.

Bibliography 319 Perosa, Sergio. 'The Heirs of Calvino and the Eco Effect.' New York Times Book Review, 16 August 1987, i, 24-5. Fertile, Lino. 'Introduction: The Italian Novel Today: Politics, Language, Literature.' In The New Italian Novel, ed. Zygmunt Baranski and Lino Fertile, 1-19. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993. Picchione, John, and Lawrence Smith, eds. Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry: An Anthology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. Pontiggia, Giancarlo, and Enzo Di Mauro, eds. La parola innamorata: I poeti nuovi 1976-1978. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. LondonNew York: Routledge, 1992. Prinz, Jessica. Art Discourse /Discourse in Art. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. 1991. 'I professori amano Eco e Tabucchi.' La Repubblica. 1998. Quine, Willard V. Word and Object. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960. Quintavalle, Carlo A. 'Viaggio in Italia: appunti.' In Viaggio in Italia, ed. Luigi Ghirri, Gianni Leone and Enzo Velati. 7-14. Alessandria: II Quadrante, 1984. Re, Lucia. 'The Debate on the Meaning of Literature in Italy Today.' Quaderni d'Halianistica 7, no. i (1986): 96-111. Ricci, Franco. 'Immagini in posa, immagini in prosa. Calvino-Gnoli: Un'arte a parte.' // Veltro 40, nos. 3-4 (1996): 257-61. Richardson, Beverly D. Plazer ed enueg. Gurnee, 111.: The Vanishing Press, 1972. Riva, Massimo, and Sergio Parussa, Sergio. 'L'autore come antropologo: Pier Paolo Pasolini e la morte dell'etnos.' Annali d'ltalianistica 15 (1997: Anthropology and Literature, ed. Dino Cervigni): 237-66. Rovatti, Pier Aldo. 'Elogio del pudore/ In Elogio del pudore: Per un pensiero debole, ed. Alessandro Dal Lago and Pier Aldo Rovatti, 23-47. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1989. Rumble, Patrick. 'Ideas vs. Odors of India: Third Worlds in Moravia and Pasolini, with a Post-script on Manganelli/ In Scrittori, Tendenze letterarie e conflitto delle poetiche in Italia (1960-1990), ed. Rocco Capozzi and Massimo Ciavolella, 193-204. Ravenna: Longo, 1993. Rushdie, Salman. 'Angela Carter, 1940-1992: A Very Good Wizard, a Very Dear Friend.' New York Times Book Review, 8 March 1992, 5. Russo, Mary J. The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, and Modernity. New York: Routledge, 1994. Rustichelli, Luigi, ed. Seminario sul racconto. West Lafayette, Ind.: Bordighera, 1998. Savater, Fernando. Childhood Regained: The Art of the Storyteller. Trans. Frances M. Lopez-Morillas. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

320 Bibliography Schneider, Marilyn. 'Zigzagging through Calvino.' Paper presented at the annual Midwest Modern Language Association Conference, Minneapolis, Minnesota, fall 1989. Sontag, Susan. Under the Sign of Saturn. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1980. - Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Anchor Books; Doubleday, 1990. Spackman, Barbara. Decadent Geneaologies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to D'Annunzio. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989. Speciale, Emilio. Review of La retorica del silenzio, by Paolo Valesio. Annali d'ltalianistica 7 (1989: Women's Voices in Italian Literature, ed. Dino Cervigni and Rebecca West): 490-2. Stabile, Alberto. 'Calvino sepolto di fronte al mare nella terra silenziosa di Palomar.' La Repubblica, 21 September 1985,10. Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History. London: Faber and Faber, 1972. Talon, Jean. 'Un africano del Fuladu a Bologna.' II Semplice 2 (January 1996): 52-6. Tamburri, Anthony J. Per una lettura retrospettiva. Prose giovanili di Aldo Palazzeschi. Stony Brook, N.Y.: Gradiva Books, 1994. Tani, Stefano. // romanzo di ritorno. Dal romanzo media degli anni sessanta alia giovane narrativa degli anni ottanta. Milan: Mursia, 1990.

Taylor, Charles. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1992. Teodorani, Alda. Giii ml delirio. Bologna: Granata Press, 1991. Tondelli, Pier Vittorio. Un weekend postmoderno: Cronache dagli anni ottanta. Milan: Bompiani, 1990. Updike, John. 'Introduction.' In The Complete Shorter Fiction, by Hermann Melville. New York and Toronto: Alfred A. Knops. 1997, xi-xxiv. Valesio, Paolo. Ascoltare il silenzio: La retorica come teoria. Bologna: II Mulino, 1986. Van den Abbeele, Georges. Travel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Vattimo, Gianni, and Pier Aldo Rovatti, eds. // pensiero debole. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1983. Viano, Maurizio Sanzio. A Certain Realism: Making Use ofPasolini's Film Theory and Practice. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993. West, Rebecca. 'Before, Beneath and Around the Text: The Genesis and Construction of Some Postmodern Prose Fictions.' Annali d'ltalianistica 9 (1991: The Modern and the Postmodern, ed. Dino Cervigni): 272-92.

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Index

About Looking (Berger), 170 Acker, Kathy, 138,139 adventure, term, 223 The adventure must not end: Conversation through the eyes. See 'L'Avventura non deve finire: Conversazione attraverso gli occhi' (Celati) The Adventures of Guizzardi. See Le avventure di Guizzardi (Celati) affectionate art, 82-3 Africa, 249; adventures in, 257-69 Agamben, Giorgio, 41, 51-3,54-5, 146, 267 Agee, James, 107,116 agent intellect, 52 Ajello, Nello, 37 album, concept of, 174 Alfabeta, 96,146 All Baba (proposed journal), 142, 149-50 Alinari, 99-100 Almanac of Prose, // Semplice. See // Semplice: Almanacco delta prosa Almansi, Guido, 11,48, 69 Altofragile: Foglio di scrittura, 232 Amaral, Tarsila do, 209

American Academy (Rome), 5 American-Italian connection (minimalism), 62 American New Photography, 101 Ammaniti, Niccolo, 209-10 Anceschi, Luciano, 34,185 Andrade, Osvaldo de, 209 Anglo-American literature, 66, 232 Another Way of Telling (Berger), 170 Anthropology and ethics of writing in Calvino. See 'Antropologia ed etica della scrittura in Italo Calvino' (Lollini) antimonumentalism, 85, 89-90; antihistoricist, 88; of Ghirri's photographs, 111; poetics of, 76; radical, 78 'Antonio Delfini ad alta voce' [Antonio Delfini out loud] (Celati [essay]), 56, 57 Antropofago (Andrade), 209 'Antropologia ed etica della scrittura in Italo Calvino' [Anthropology and ethics of writing in Calvino] (Lollini), 230-1 appearances: in Carter, 162-3; and

324 Index Celati, 75, 78; and the existent, 171-2. See also Baratto Appearances. See Quattro novelle sulle apparenze (Celati) 'Appunti' [Notes] (Quintavalle), 99 Arbasino, Alberto, 35,185, 251-2 'The archeological bazaar.' See 'II bazar archeologico' (Celati) 'The archeological glance.' See 'Lo sguardo archeologico' (Calvino) Ariosto, Ludovico, 110,140,193,198, 200 Aristotle, 52,179 'Arte Affettuosa' [Affectionate art], 82,83 Asor Rosa, Alberto, 231 As You Like It (Shakespeare), 221,222, 244 Auge, Marc, 242 author, in modern literature, 3; as scribe or scrivener, 15-17 The author's farewell to his book. See 'Congedo dell'autore al suo libro' (Celati) avant-garde, 210, 272; Calvino on, 38-9,185 avventura, meaning of, 223 'L'Avventura non deve finire: Conversazione attraverso gli occhi' [The adventure must not end: Conversation through the eyes] (Celati), 86 Le avventure di Guizzardi (Celati), 5, 20,22, 24, 36, 38-9,48, 76,145, 214; comedy in, 186; emarginated types in, 67-8; language of, 69, 162, 225,263; The Trial as model for, 48 Avventure in Africa (Celati), 195, 221-3,248-61; old people in, 208

Bachelard, Gaston, 117,121 'Bachelor's 111 Luck (in Meditation [Kafka]), 50 Bacon, Francis, 168 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 81,186,188-9, 195 Baldus (Folengo), 198 Balestrini, Luigi, 35 Ballard, J.G., 107 'Bambini pendolari' [Commuting children] (Celati), 122 La banda del sospiri (Celati), 36,48,76, 97, 225,249; emarginated types in, 67-8 Baranski, Zygmunt, 11 'Baratto', 24-32, 54,70,106; and Bugli, 284; comparison of versions of, 26-31; connection between speech and thought in, 28-31; and grace, 259-60; name of, 24-5; old people in, 208; significance of his name, 24-5 Barenghi, Mario, 149 Barilli, Renato, 11 Barrault, Jean-Louis, 214 Barth, John, 65, 74 Barthelme, Frederick, 64-5,67, 69-71, 74-6 Barthes, Roland, 3,16,33,41,83,108, 143,145,150,191 'Bartleby', 108,116,274; as apparition, 45; Celati's reading of, 13-15, 19-22, 51, 75, 89,272; comedy of, 59; in La communita die viene (Agamben), 52; Dead Letter Office, 53,55; early critical analyses, 18; and Gamuna people, 237-8; and grace, 259-60; other comic characters and, 22-5; 'potenza', 237. See also preferring not to

Index 325 Bartleby: La formula della creazione (Agamben), 52 Bartleby lo scrivano (Melville [intro. tr. by Celati]), 18, 41-9; postmodernism of, 39 'Bartleby o della contingenza' (Agamben), 53-4 'Bartleby o la formula' [Bartleby or the formula] (Deleuze), 52 'Bartleby the Scrivener' (Melville), 41 Bataille, Felix Henry, 54 Baudelaire, Charles, 271 Die Baume (Kafka), 31 'II bazar archeologico' [The archeological bazaar] (Celati), 72, 81, 85, 95,149 Beattie, Anne, 61, 65 Beckett, Samuel, 18, 33, 66, 69,139, 177, 194, 273; and comic writing, 22; interpolation and gag in, 20,48, 187 Bellow, Saul, 54 Belpoliti, Marco, 140,149,189-90, 213 Benati, Daniele, 63,140,141,175-7 Benedetti, Carla, 258, 261, 263 Benjamin, Jessica, 197 Benjamin, Walter, 33, 40-1, 51-2, 72, 81, 244, 258-9 Beolco, Angelo [Ruzante], 76-7 Berger, John, 33, 91, 92,127,130-1, 140, 160, 215-16; voice of the visible and invisible, 170-4 Berlant, Lauren, 9 Berni, Francesco, 200 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 250 'Blankness as a Signifier' (GilbertRolfe), 242 Bloody Murder (Symons), 167 The Blunderer (Highsmith), 167

Boccaccio, Giovanni, 33,114,169 The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema (Dalle Vacche), 129-30 Bogena (friend of Berger), 172-3 Boiardo, Matteo Maria, 14,31,89,97, 140,182-3,189,198-200, 207,258 Boiardo raccontato in prosa, 197-207, 212 Bompiani, Ginevra, 58 Bonetti case. See 'II caso Bonetti' (Celati) Booth, Wayne, 179-80 Borges, Jorge, 18,158 'Bottega dei mimi' (Celati and Gabellone), 225 'II bottone' [The button] (Calvino), 148 Bouvard et Pecuchet (Flaubert), 16,104 Brancaccio, Luisa, 209 Brecht, Bertold, 141 Bresson Robert, 100 Brigate rosse, 36 Bright Lights, Big City (Mclnerney), 62 Brolli, Daniele, 209, 211 Bruegel Pieter, 120-1 Bugli, story of, 276-85 Burning Your Boats (Carter), 162,163 The button. See 'II bottone' (Calvino) Bygones: Discourses on literature and society. See Una pietra sopra: Discorsi di letteratura e societa (Calvino) Cachey, Theodore J., Jr, 249-50 Caesar, Michael, 11 Cage, John, performance art of, 187 Calderon de la Barca, Pedro, 31 Calvino, Chichita, 152

326 Index Calvino, Italo, 3-4,18, 35-6, 62,66, 72, 78-84,89-90,115,210,230-2, 270; on the avant-garde, 38-9,185; and Celati, 11; death of, 152-5; Lollini on, 230-1; and 'lo sguardo', 93-4; as mentor, 139,141-55 'La camicia da uomo' [The man's shirt] (Calvino), 148 II cammino della lettura [The path of reading] (Corti), 257 Campana, Dino, 231 Camporesi, Piero, 156 Cannibals, youth orientation of, 209-11 Cannon, JoAnn, 10 capitalism, growth of, 35 carnal prose, of Celati, 71 Caw Diario (Moretti [film]), 181 Carter, Angela, 33,140,160; as political writer, 161; spectacular woman, 161-5,173 Carver, Raymond, 61,65 'II caso Bonetti' [The Bonetti case] (Celati), 240-1 Cassola, Carlo, 62 Cavarero, Adriana, 160,197 Cavazzoni, Ermanno, 63,140-1, 175-6 'Celati e le poetiche della grazia' [Celati and the poetics of grace] (Benedetti), 258 'II Celati furioso: II testamento di un attore' [Celati furioso: An actor's testament] (Guglielmi), 213 Celati, Gianni, academic literary orientation of, 33; autobiographical sketch of, 224-5; bio-bibliographical sketch, xi-xiii; birthplace, 96; on Calvino, 142; on comic writing, 22; on documentaries, 128-9; and

friendship, 160; and grace, 258-64; habits of thought, 50-1; on history, 73; interviews, 142-6; and literary establishment, 66-7, 83-4; and 'lo sguardo,' 93-4; meetings with, 5-7; melancholy of, 271; public readings, 182-3,194,200-6; and role of 'author,' 16, 67; seventies' fiction, 66-70; silence of, 82, 96; on the sixties, 151; theoretical writings, 181-97; as translator, 66; in the United States, 101-2; as video maker, 123-37; world-view of, 241-5; and writing, 3,14,32,54-8, 69,222-3,230 'Celati, la follia serena' [Celati, serene madness] (Manica), 247 'Celati and the poetics of grace.' See 'Celati e le poetiche della grazia' Celine, Louis Ferdinand, 33, 66,140, 194; spectacularized writing, 187-8 Cellini, Benvenuto, 114 Ceronetti, Guido, 11, 251 Chabrol, Claude, 168 Chance (Conrad), 273 Chance the gardener, 19 Chaplin, Charlie, 20 characters: of Celati, 122; comic, 22-5; Popeye, 19 Chatwin, Bruce, 221 Cherchi, Paolo, 156,158 Chicago Italian Cultural Institute, 14 Chicago Tribune, 166 'children', of Celati's writings, 139-40,174-7 China, travels in, 251-3 Cina Cina [China China] (Malerba), 251-3 cinema: neorealism, 100; and the

Index 327 photograph, 93; as visible speech, 92 Cinema e Cinema, 101 Circolo artistico di Bologna, 82 Le citta invisibili, 144-5 Clement, Rene, 168 'Cock-A-Doodle-Do' (Melville), 46 Collina, Beatrice, 156,159 Collodi, Carlo, 193, 223 colonialism, and tourism, 266-7 comedy: of Bartleby, 59; cinematic slapstick, 20; concept of, 20,186; corporeal notions of, 186; in Guizzardi, 186 comic effects: in Beckett, 20; of incomprehensibility, 20-1, 24; of tones of Guizzardi, 22-3, 212 Comiche (Celati), 14, 36,48, 66,142, 145,176,186; emarginated types in, 67-8; language of, 69, 225 The Coming Community. See La communita che viene (Agamben) 'Commenti su un teatro naturale delle immagini' [Comments on a natural theater of images] (Celati), 106-17 commodification: of experience, 213; of literature, 143; scene in Strada provincial delle anime, 135 La communita che viene [The Coming Community] (Agamben), 52 Commuting children. See 'Bambini pendolari' [Commuting children] (Celati) The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Booth), 179-80 Complete Shorter Fiction (Melville), 274 'Congedo dell'autore al suo libro' [The author's farewell to his book,

intro. to Parlamenti buffi] (Celati), 76-8 Conrad, Joseph, 66,140,144,273 Consolo, Vincenzo, 11 Cooperativa Scrittori, 36 Corriere della Sera, 253 Corti, Maria, 34-5, 69,222,257 counter culture, 84-6 The Country of the Blind (Wells), 104-5 Coursodon, Jean-Pierre, 21 Crone, Lisa, 262 culture: black, 192; oral, 259 da Barberino, Andrea, 200 Dada, 81 Dal Lago, Alessandro, 39 Dalle Vacche, Angela, 129-30 D'Annunzio, Gabriele, 153-4, 271 Dante Alighieri, 15, 33, 54,91-2,109, 114,172,213 d'Arzo, Silvio, 60 das Ding (Lacan's term), 55 De anima (Aristotle), 52 Dear Diary. See Caro Diario (Moretti [film]) death: of the 'author,' 16; and likeness left behind, 173 'The Death of the Author' (Barthes), 3 De Carlo, Andrea, 61, 82, 210 de Certeau Michel, 191,196 Deconstruction, 83 Deleuze, Gilles, 18,41, 52, 72,81, 93 Delfini, Antonio, 56-8, 77,140,176, 210,212,220 Del Giudice, Daniele, 61, 82 de Martino, Ernesto, 229 Derrida, Jacques, 16, 72, 81,143,150, 191

328 Index desert wind, 49; of Bartleby, 46 Diari [Diaries] (Delfini), 56-7 Dickens, Charles, 188 Di Mauro, Enzo, 82-3 Dine, Jim, 83 Divine Comedy (Dante), 15,92 Dogon healers, 262 Dolcevita (Celati), 276-83 Down in delirium. See Giu nel delirio (Teodorani) Dupont, Joan, 167-8 Eccentric Spaces (Harbison), 120,125 Eckhart, Meister, 54 Eco, Umberto, 3,10-12, 35-7,185 The ecstatic mind. See La mente estatica (Fachinelli) Edith's Diary (Highsmith), 166,169 Eliade, Mircea, 127 elite, literature of, 187-8 elitism, 37 Ellis, Bret Easton, 61-2 'Elogio del pudore' [In praise of modesty] (Rovatti), 26, 39 emarginated types, of Celati, 67 Emilia Romagna Theater, 198 Emilio-Romagna region, 96,101,175, 198 enamored poetry, 82 'The Encantadas' (Melville), 46 endurance, comic effects of, 24 errancy, in Celati's works, 12,14-15 Especes d'espaces (Perec), 146 Esperimento con I 'India [Experience with India] (Manganelli), 251, 253-5 Esplorazioni sulla Via Emilia [Explorations of the Via Emilia], 106,124, 142,148 essentialism, 273

'The Ethics of Form in the Photographic Essay' (Mitchell), 107 ethnography, excursions into unseen territories, 223-32 Evans-Pritchard, Sir Edward, 229 Evans, Walker, 101,107 everyday: importance of, 97; language, 196; narratives, 170; radical contingency of, 111; stories of, 276-7,285. See also quotidian themes 'Exactitude' (Calvino), 89-90 Experience with India. See Esperimento con I'India (Manganelli) Explorations of the Via Emilia. See Esplorazioni sulla Via Emilia expressionism, 69 expulsion, comic effects of, 21, 23-4 externality, 160,170; as origin of writing, 99,106; and others, 164; and space, 117; thereness of, 147; of visible world, 164 Fabbri, Paolo, 150 Fachinelli, Elvio, 41,51, 54-5, 247 failure: issue of, 274-5,284-5; willed, 12-13 family, metaphor of, 138-9,177-9 Family Dancing (Leavitt), 61 Fango [Mud] (Ammaniti), 209 Fascism, realist photography, 100 Fata Morgana: Notizie sul popolo dei Gamuna [Fata Morgana: News on the Gamuna people] (Celati), 232 'Fata Morgana' (Celati), 232-4 'fathers,' of Celati's writings, 139, 141-59,160 Fellini, Federico, 130,175 Feltrinelli publishing house, 260

Index 329 feminine, 271; in Celati, 94,102-5, 160-1 Ferretti, Gian Carlo, 37 'A Few Words About Minimalism' (Earth), 65 fiction: 1970s, 70; of 1980s, 63; industrial, 184, 250, 258; Italian, 34; prose, 32-3,182; in which to believe, 5, 9, 272 Fictions in which to believe. See 'Finzioni a cui credere' (Celati) Fido, Franco, 215 Film (Beckett [film]), 20 films: and Italian national identity, 250; silent, 33 Fink, Guido, 11,128 Tinzioni a cui credere' [Fictions in which to believe] (Celati), 7, 96-9 Finzioni occidental!: Fabulazione comicita e scrittura [Western fictions: Tabulation, comicality, and writing] (Celati), 20, 24, 36, 66,186 Flaubert, Gustave, 104 'Flesh and the Mirror' (Carter), 163 Fo, Dario, 260 Folengo, Teofilo, 76-7,198, 200 Fondazione San Carlo, Modena, 198 formalism, 38,185-6; Russian, 185 Formiggine, 96 Foucault, Michel, 3, 72, 81,143,150, 153,191, 260 'Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death' (Benjamin), 51 Frasi per narmtori [Sentences for narrators] (Celati), 66,169 Fratellid'Italia (Arbasino), 251 Frazer, Sir James, 229 'Free Style' series, 209 Freud, Sigmund, 54 friends, metaphor of, 177-9

Gabellone, Lino, 146,225-9 Gadda, Carlo Emilio, 10, 66,158-9 gags: Beckett and, 20; Laurel and Hardy, 21 Gajani, Carlo, 83 Galileo, 198 Game of the world without players. See 'Gioco del mondo senza giocatori' (Gabellone) Gamuna, Utopia or dystopia, 222, 232-48,268 Garboli, Cesare, 209-10 'Garboli makes a dare to the cannibals,' 210 Gargani, Aldo, 146 Garzoni, Tomaso, 140,155-9, 223^ Geertz, Clifford, 229-30 Geissendorfer, Hans, 168 'Gente d'Irlanda' [People of Ireland] (Benati), 177 Geografie della scrittura [Geographies of writing] (Papotti), 206 Germany Year Zero (Rossellini [film]), 250 Ghirri, Luigi, 31, 89, 214; and Celati, 95-9,102,106-7,126,198; and photography, 93, 98,101,104, 107-9; review otNarratori, 120-1 Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy, 242 Ginzburg, Carlo, 72, 79,141-2,145, 149-50,153 Ginzburg, Luisa, 153 Ginzburg, Natalia, 153 'Gioco del mondo senza giocatori' [Game of the world without players] (Gabellone), 146-7 'Giovani umani in fuga' [Young humans in flight] (Celati), 123 Gioventu cannibale [Cannibal youth] (Brolli [ed.]), 209,211

330 Index Giuliani, Alfredo, 35-6,123 Giii nel delirio [Down in delirium] (Teodorani), 209 Gnoli, Domenico, 145,148 Goffman, Erving, 191 Gollancz, Victor, 167 Go where your clit takes you. See Va' dove ti porta il clito (Luttazzi) Go where your heart takes you. See Va' dove ti porta il cuore (Tamaro) grace, poetics of, 258-64,272 Gradiva, 66 'II grande Wadi' [The great Wadi] (Celati), 237-8 Grimm brothers, 144 Gruppo, 63, 35-6 Critica e teoria, 184-6 'II guanciale' [The pillow] (Calvino), 148 Guattari Felix, 72,81 Guglielmi, Angelo, 213-14 Guizzardi: comic tones of, 22-3, 212; as emarginated type, 74 Guizzardi. See Le avventure di Guizzardi (Celati) Handke, Peter, 140, 258 Hanne, Michael, 11 Harbison, Robert, 120,125 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 44,47,49 Hegel, Georg, 55 Heidegger, Martin, 31, 39, 83,144, 248 Heilman, Luigi, 224 'The Heirs of Calvino and the Eco Effect' (Perosa), 62 Hesse, Hermann, 254-5 High Sign (film), 21 Highsmith, Patricia, 33,140,160;

mundane and monstrous, 165-70, 173-4 Hilarotragoedia (Manganelli), 255 Hill, Sarah, 97 historical representation, in fiction, 71-2 Hitchcock, Alfred, 166,168 Holderlin, Johann, 144,248 home, concept of, 127 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 205 Hopper, Edward, 129 Hume, Kathryn, 198 A Hunger Artist (Kafka), 48 Husserl, Edmund, 39,146,152,227 Hutcheon, Linda, 124,161 Hymes, Dell, 87,191 Hypothesis of description of a landscape. See 'Ipotesi di descrizione di un paesaggio' (Calvino) Un'idea dell'India [An Idea of India] (Moravia), 251-3 illusionism, 111 imagination, 105 Imbriani Vittorio, 140 'L'incanto greve' [The oppressive enchantment] (Celati), 235-7 incomprehensibility, comic effects of, 20-2, 24 India, travels in, 251-4 industrial fiction, 184, 250,258 'In memoria di Enzo Melandri' (Celati and Levrini), 149 In praise of modesty. See 'Elogio del pudore' (Rovatti) Into their Labours (Berger), 170 invisible populations, 176 'Ipotesi di descrizione di un paesaggio' [Hypothesis of description of a landscape] (Calvino), 124,148

Index 331 / promessi sposi (Manzoni), 33 'L'isola in mezzo all'Atlantico' [The island in the middle of the Atlantic] (Celati), 7,119-20 Italian, standardized, 62 Italo's Death. See 'Morte di Italo' (Celati) Italy: American connection, 62; minimalism in, 60, 61-3; mythic view of, 100; problems of identity, 34 Iterarte, 66,82 'It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: or, Why Are We Huddling About the Campfire?' (Le Guin), 90 James, Henry, 144,166 Japanese girl. See 'Ragazza giapponese' (Celati) Joyce, James, 33,158-9,177 Kafka, Franz, 31-3,41, 45, 48-51, 69, 81,139, 260,273 Kaye, Nick, 187 Keaton, Buster, 20-3 Keaton et C.ie (Coursodon), 21 Keeping a Rendezvous (Berger), 130-1 Keller, Gottfried, 113 Kierkegaard Soren, 44,160-1 kindness, of Celati's approach, 248 knowing: and being, 4; and telling, 10 Krazy Kat comics, 85 Kundera, Milan, 33,140 Kuon, Peter, 242-3 Labov, William, 87,191-3 Lacan, Jacques, 54-5, 83 'The lady's shoe.' See 'La scarpa da donna' (Calvino) Lane, Anthony, 22

Langdon, Harry, 20 language: of Celati, 67-8, 230, 268; connections through, 139,179; of the Gamuna, 234-5; of humankind, 130; and image, 92; literary, 185-6; of Melville, 46-7; as memory, 173; ordinary, 196; philosophy of, 87; of politicization, 82; sources of in Baratto, 31; spoken, 186-7; and the visible, 92; written, 188 Language and Social Context (Labov), 191 Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Poetry and Painting (Lessing), 94 Lapenna, Antonietta, 66 La Porta Filippo, 11 Last Emperor (Bertolucci [film]), 250 Laurel and Hardy, 20,22-3; 'thereness' gags, 21 Law: and the Thing, 55; tyranny of, 56 Leavitt, David, 61 Left, political, 35 Le Guin, Ursula K., 90 Leibnitz, Gottfried, 53 Leopardi, Giacomo, 33,114,132,135, 140-1,213,223 Lessing, Gotthold, 94 Less Than Zero (Ellis), 62 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Agee [intro.]), 107 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 72,224 Levrini, Ivan, 149 Lezioni americane [Six Memosfor the Next Millennium] (Calvino), 89-90, 142, 222, 230-1 Lights on the Via Emilia. See 'Luci sulla Via Emilia' likeness: and death, 173; of the existent, 174

332 Index La linea e il circolo (Melandri), 149 linguistics, 38,87; experimentation, 40; Saussurian, 185 literature: author in, 3; commodification of, 143; of the elite, 187-8; as Institution, 11-12, 66; role of, 81; theories of, 37 Lollini, Massimo, 230-1 London, Jack, 33,140 loneliness, in Celati's fictions, 248 Lotman, Juri, 120-1 Lowry, Malcolm, 104 'Luci sulla Via Emilia' [Lights on the Via Emilia] (Celati), 106 'Luigi Ghirri, leggere e pensare per immagini' [Luigi Ghirri, reading and thinking through images] (Celati and Messori), 106, 116-17 Lumley, Robert, 11,24,32,40,51,148, 169,173,244,247 Lunario del paradiso (Celati), 36, 76, 97,102, 214; autobiographical approach of, 249; emarginated types in, 67-8; language of, 225; and sexuality, 245 Luttazzi, Daniele, 209 Luzi, Mario, 252 McCall, Dan, 18 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 33,180 Mclnerney, Jay, 62 Magris, Claudio, 11 Malerba, Luigi, 10, 36,158, 251-3 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 229 Man as Subject, 79-80 Manganelli, Giorgio, 36-7,140,144, 210, 251, 253-6 Manica, Raffaele, 247 il manifesto, 141,174

The man's shirt. See 'La camicia da uomo' (Calvino) Manzoni, Alessandro, 33-4, 67-8 map: frontispiece to Narratori, 124; and place, 120; Po valley, 118-19 mapping, and postmodernism, 124-6 // Marcatre, 185 Marcoaldi, Franco, 20 Marcus, Millicent, 181 Marino Giambattista, 223 Marx, Groucho, 20 mass culture, 85-6 mass media, commodification in, 213 maximalism, 64, 68 Mead, Margaret, 229 Meditation (Kafka), 48,50 meditations, palimpsestic, 181 melancholy, philosophy of, 244 Melandri, Enzo, 149 Melville, Herman, 18,22, 31, 33, 39-49,108,137,139,172, 272, 274-5; willed failure in, 12,275, 284 // Menabo, 150 La mente estatica [The ecstatic mind] (Fachinelli), 54 // mercato delle lettere [The market of letters] (Ferretti), 37 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 146,195-6 Messori, Giorgio, 106,116 'The Metamorphosis' (Kafka), 48 Michelstaedter, Carlo, 231 minimalism, 60-90; American, 60-2; Barthelme on, 64-76; and Celati's work, 60-9,71, 76, 78,86-90,190; as critical term, 63-4; Italian, 60, 61-2; literary, 12; of Po valley stories, 118-19

Index 333 La miseria in bocca [The Poor Mouth] (O'Brien [tr. Benati]), 175 Mitchell, W.J.T., 8, 91, 94,107,116 Moby Dick (Melville), 46 modernism, 41, 72, 81-2,160; move to the postmodern, 151 modernity, 72,272-3 modesty: and Celati's style, 13-15; poetics of, 84 'II mondo di Luigi Ghirri' (Celati [video]), 135-6 Monge de Montaudon, 212 Montale, Eugenic, 5, 7 monumentalism, 100-1; photography, 99-100; soft, 142-3 moral value, 73-4 Morandi, Giorgio, 112 Morante, Elsa, 200, 210, 251-2 Moravia, Alberto, 183, 249, 251-4 Moreau, Jeanne, 214 Moretti, Nanni, 181-2 Morgante (Pulci), 200 Moroni, Mario, 103 mortality, limits of, 243, 248, 273 'Morte di Italo' [Italo's Death] (Celati), 152 Mud. See Fango (Ammaniti) Murdoch, Iris, 183 Muzzioli, Francesco, 11, 37,181, 185-6 mysticism, 51, 54, 89, 93, 247 narration: feminine, 166; natural, 197 narrative: for Celati, 89; contemporary Italian, 32-9; ethics, 195-6; historical, 121; linear, 121; of Melville, 42; participatory, 189; spoken, 189 narrative friendship, of writers, 160-1

Narrative positions in respect to the other. See 'Le posizioni narrative rispetto all'altro' (Celati [essay]) narrative reserve, Celati on, 26, 84 narrative techniques, Celati on, 169 Narratori delle pianure [Narrators of the plains] (Celati), 7,24,31,70,75, 87-8,95-6,102,106,117-24,129, 142; and Gamuna world, 243; and Garzoni's world, 157-8; Ghirri's review of, 120; historical sense in, 73; meditative tones of, 212; and minimalism, 61-2, 66; spatial elements in, 117-20; translation by Lumley, 11 'Narratori delle riserve', 141,176; home as metaphor in, 174 narrators, natural, 192 'Narrators of the Reserves' (in il manifesto), 174 Natural life, what would it be: Modernity and Identity in Celati's Narratori. See 'La vita naturale, cosa sarebbe: Modernitat und Identitat in Celatis Narratori' neo-American cinema, 100 neoavant-gardism, 34-8, 39, 77, 81, 144; fall of, 82; Italian, 4, 272; journals of, 185 neoexperimentalism, 34 neorealism, 34, 78-9,141; cinema, 100 Neri, Guido, 79,149 The New Italian Novel (Baranski and Fertile [eds.]), 11 Newton, Adam Zachary, 195 The New Yorker, 12, 22 New York Review of Books, 12 New York Times Book Review, 62, 64

334 Index Nietzsche, Friedrich, 194-5; philosophy, 83 Nights at the Circus (Carter), 161 Notes for an African Orestes (Pasolini [film]), 250 Nove, Aldo, 209 'The Novella and the New Italian Landscape' (Lumley), 148,169, 173 Novellino, 88 'Novissimi' group, 35 Nuova Corrente, 11,146-7,225 O'Brien, Flann, 140,175-7 October Ferry to Gabriola (Lowry), 104 'L'Odore dell'India [The Odor of India] (Pasolini), 251-2, 254 'Oggetti soffici' [Soft objects] (Celati), 82-5, 93-4 old age: and the body, 244-7; and storytelling talents, 208; voice of, 208-20 Oldenburg, Claes Thure, 83, 85 Olivier, Laurence, 214 'On Beckett, interpolation and the gag.' See 'Su Beckett, 1'interpolazione e il gag' (Celati) 'On Being Wrong: Convicted Minimalist Spills Bean' (Barthelme), 64 The one who remains in place, the one who walks. See 'Quello che sta fermo, quello che cammina' (Gabellone) 'On the Tram' (in Meditation [Kafka]), 50-1 Oppressive enchantment. See 'L'incanto greve' (Celati) oral culture, 259 orality: role of, 12,186; and voice, 139, 208

'Origine dei Gamuna' [Origin of the Gamuna] (Celati), 234-5 Orlando furioso (Ariosto), 198,200 Orlando innamorato (Boiardo), 31, 89, 97,182-3,189,245,258; prose version, 14,197-207 L'Orlando innamorato raccontato in prosa (Celati), 197-207 Ortese, Anna Maria, 174 Other, in storytelling, 86-7,194-5 Otherness, Italian adventures into, 248-69 Others, into Otherness, 249-57 Pagliarani, Elio, 34-5 Palermo convention (1984), 96 palimpsest: Celati's work, 182; meditations, 181 Palomar (Calvino), 3,142,144-8, 151-2 Panorama, 120 Papotti, Davide, 206-7, 251 'Parabola del paralitico nel deserto' [Parable of the paralytic in the desert] (Celati), 276 paradigm of observation, 103 'II paralitico del deserto' (Celati), 276 'parents,' of Celati's writings, 139 Parise, Goffredo, 62 Parlamenti buffi (Celati), 76-8 'Parlato come spettacolo' [Spoken language as spectacle] (Celati), 184-6 La parola innamorata (Pontiggia and Di Mauro [eds.]), 82-3 Pascal, Blaise, 230 Pascoli, Giovanni, 200,210 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 66, 93,249-52, 254,256

Index 335 The path of reading. See // cammino della lettura (Corti) Pavese, Cesare, 143 Penna, Sandro, 210 People of Ireland. See 'Gente d'Irlanda' (Benati) Perec, Georges, 18,146-7,158-9 Performance of the actor Vecchiatto in the theater of Rio Saliceto. See Recita dell'attore Vecchiatto nel teatro di Rio Saliceto (Celati) performance art: of John Cage, 187; Orlando innamorato (Boiardo), 189. See also Recita dell'attore Vecchiatto nel teatro di Rio Saliceto (Celati) permeability: of Celati, 94,104,137, 142-3,172-3, 227; in Pasolini's text, 254 Perosa, Sergio, 62 Pertile, Lino, 11, 60-2 Petrarch, Francesco, 33,114 phallic order, 271-2 photography: and language, 92-3; pictoralist, 100; postcard, 100; realist, 100. See also Luigi Ghirri The Piazza Tales (Melville), 18 'La piazza universale di tutti i mestieri' [The universal square of all professions] (Celati), 155-9 La piazza universale ... (Garzoni), 156, 158-9, 223^ Picchione, John, 82-3 pictorialism, 100 Pierre (Melville), 47,274 The pillow. See 'II guanciale' (Calvino) Pinketts, Andrea, 209, 211 Pinocchio (Collodi), 193, 223 Pirandello, Luigi, 33, 271

Plangman, Jay Bernard, 166 // poema dei lunatici (Cavazzoni), 175 Toesia Innamorata' [Enamored poetry], 82 Poesie della fine del mondo [Poems of the end of the world] (Delfini), 56, 220 poetics: of antimonumentalism, 76; of Celati, 13,67,71,76,88-9; of the contingent, 127,136-7; of grace, 258-64,272; of modesty, 84 The Poetics of Space (Bachelard), 117 political activism, 82 political Left, 35 politicization, language of, 82 The Politics of Postmodernism (Hutcheon), 124 Polo, Marco, 198, 251 Pontiggia, Giancarlo, 82-3 The Poor Mouth (O'Brien [tr. Benati]), 175 Popeye, character, 19 Porta, Antonio, 35 'Le posizioni narrative rispetto all' altro' [Narrative positions in respect to the other] (Celati [essay]), 183-4,191, 208 post-colonialism, 79 postmodernism, 39, 41, 79,122,137, 190; of Celati, 4-5,8,93,137,271-2; and contemporary existence, 242; as critical term, 63-4; and mapping, 124-6; and space, 257 Postmodernism and Performance (Kaye), 187 postneoavant-garde writing, 272 post-neo era, 61 post-war period, 78-9 'potenza' (potency), 47, 52-4, 236-7 Po valley: culture, 198-9,232; exter-

336

Index

nal world of, 195; and Gamuna story, 236-7,247; landscapes of, 99, 101-2,110,113,206-7; post-Po valley work, 181; storytelling, 263; travels of Celati and Ghirri, 95-7, 99,129 Pozzi, Antonia, 173 Pratt, Mary Louise, 252 preference: for Celati, 19; term, 13 preferring not to, 36,58-9, 284; of Bartleby, 12,18-19,24,32,42-3,56; of Celati, 39 preferring to, 276-85 Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Goffman), 191 Presley, Elvis, 85 II profile delle nuvole: immagini di im paesaggio italiano [The profile of clouds: Images of an Italian landscape] (Celati), 106 Propp, Vladimir, 185 The Prose of the World (MerleauPonty), 195 Proust, Marcel, 54 Provincial road of souls. See Strada provinciale delle anime (Celati and Ghirri [video]) Pulci, Luigi, 200 Pulp Fiction (Tarantino [film]), 209 Purdue University, 14 Purgatorio (Dante), 91 Quattro novelle sulle apparenze [Appearances] (Celati), 24-32, 50, 75,87,106,129; Marcoaldi review, 20 'Quello che sta fermo, quello che cammina' [The one who remains in place, the one who walks] (Gabellone), 225-9

Queneau, Raymond, 147 Quindi, 66,86 Quindici, 35,185 Quintavalle, Arturo Carlo, 99-101 quotidian themes, 88, 111, 121,191, 211; in art, 85; of Ghirri, 97-8; in Highsmith, 169-70. See also everyday Rabelais, Francois, 186 'Racconto che non scrivero' [A story I shall not write] (in Delfini's Diari), 56-7 'Ragazza giapponese' [Japanese girl] (Celati), 122 RAI3,129 Rasmussen, Knud, 229 Rauschenberg, Robert, 83 realism: Fascist photography, 100; of Pasolini, 93; Western novels, 183 Recita dell'attore Vecchiatto nel teatro di Rio Saliceto (Celati), 31, 75, 77,89, 140,182-3,220; theatrical mode in, 190 referent, 3; illusion of, 145-6 La Repubblica, 36, 213 'Resolutions' (in Meditation [Kafka]), 50 Richardson, Beverly, 188, 213 Riga, 149-50,152 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 113 Rimbaud, Arthur, 81 'Rituali di racconto' [Rituals of the tale] (Celati [essay]), 224-5, 229, 257-8 Robinson Crusoe, 229 Robinson, Mary, 65 Romano, Egidio, 223 Romans 7, 53, 55 Le rose imperiali (Malerba), 252

Index 337 Rossellini, Roberto, 250 Rovatti, Pier Aldo, 26, 39 Rumble, Patrick, 252,254,256 Rushdie, Salman, 165 Russo, Mary, 161 Ruzante, 76-7 Salernitano, Masuccio, 76 'Salvazione e silenzio dei significati' [Salvation and silence of signifies] (Celati), 185 Samsa, Gregor (character in 'The Metamorphosis'), 48-9 Sandola, Celati's mother's birthplace, 102,105 Sanguineti, Edoardo, 34, 37,144, 185 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 87,183 Savater, Fernando, 203-4 Scandiano, 96 'La scarpa da donna' [The lady's shoe] (Calvino), 148 Scarpa, Tiziano, 209 Schiller, Friedrich von, 258 Sciascia, Leonardo, 10 Science of Logic (Hegel), 55 Lo scrittore e il potere [The writer and power] (Ajello), 37 Segal, George, 85 // Semplice: Almanacco della prosa [Almanac of Prose, // Semplice], 14, 140-1,149,175,182,198, 215, 232, 272 The Sense of Sight (Berger), 170 Sentences for narrators. See Frasi per narratori (Celati) Sereni, Vittorio, 252 Se una notte d'inverno (Calvino), 147 sexuality, 244-5; in Baratto's story, 25, 28; as male preoccupation, 244

'Lo sguardo archeologico' [The archeological glance] (Calvino), 72, 789, 93,149 Shakespeare, William, 31, 213, 221 'siblings,' of Celati's writings, 139-40, 160-74 Siddhartha (Hesse), 254-5 Siena, Calvino's death in, 152-3 The Silence ofBartleby (McCall), 18-19 Silenzio in Emilia (Benati), 175 Six Memosfor the Next Millennium. See Lezioni americane (Calvino) Sklovski, Victor, 185 sociolinguistics, 87 Soft objects. See 'Oggetti soffici' (Celati) 'Solitudine ed erranza dei letterati' [Solitude and errancy of literati] (Asor Rosa), 231 Sondrio, 96 Sontag, Susan, 40,140,160, 215-16 Sotto i 25 Anni anthology (Tondelli [ed.]), 62 'A Souvenir of Japan' (Carter), 162-3 space, 122; and externality, 117 Spackman, Barbara, 271 Spark, Debra, 62 spatial elements: in Celati's fiction, 94-6, 99; in Narratori delle pianure (Celati), 117-22 'Spie: Radici di un paradigma indiziario' [Spies: roots of a presumptive paradigm] (Ginzburg), 149 Spinoza, Baruch, 41, 44 Spoken language as spectacle. See 'Parlato come spettacolo' (Celati) La Stampa, 210 Stendhal, 140 Sterne, Laurence, 177,188 'Stile Libero' (Free Style) series, 209

338 Index Store Days (Oldenburg), 85 'Storia di un apprendistato' [Story of an apprenticeship] (Celati), 102, 122-3 A story I shall not write. See 'Racconto che non scrivero' (in Delfini's Diari) storytelling, 86-90,259, 263; of Carter, 165; Celati's public readings, 200-6; of Highsmith, 170; oral nature of, 182 La strada di San Giovanni (Calvino), 142 Strada provinciale delle anime [Provincial road of souls] (Celati [video]), 31, 89, 95,101,106,114,124, 128-35; old people in, 208 Strangers on a Train (Highsmith), 166-7 structuralism, 38,185-6 Studi d'affezione (Celati), 41 'Studi sui Gamuna' [Studies on the Gamuna] (Celati), 238-40 'Su Beckett, 1'interpolazione e il gag' [On Beckett, interpolation and the gag] (Celati), 20 Surrealists, 81 Svevo, Italo, 271 Swift, Jonathan, 33,66,140,177 Symons, Julian, 166-7 Tabucchi, Antonio, 11,62, 82 Talon, Jean, 248,261-2 Tamaro, Susanna, 209 Tamburri, Anthony, 13 Tani, Stefano, 11,61-3 Tarantino, Quentin, 209 Tasso, Torquato, 223 Teatini, Manuela, 101,128,130-1 television, influence of, 63

Le tentazioni di Girolamo (Cavazzoni), 175 Teodorani, Alda, 209 Teoria e critica della letteratura delle avanguardie italiane degli anni sessanta [Theory and criticism of the literature of the Italian avantgardes of the '60s] (Muzzioli), 37 terrorism, 82; literal, 36 thereness: of externality, 147; Laurel and Hardy gags, 21 Thing: Lacanian concept of, 55; and the Law, 55 Third World, values, 254 Those Who Walk Away (Highsmith), 167 The Threepenny Review, 171 Tondelli, Pier Vittorio, 61-2,210,251 tourists, 266; concentration camp for, 264-5; as ethnic group, 261-2, 264 'Toward a Small Theory of the Visible' (Berger), 171 'Towards the river mouth: Reportage, for a photographer friend' (Celati). See 'Verso la foce: Reportage, per un amico fotografo' (Celati) Towards the river mouth. See Verso la foce (Celati) trace, idea of, 173 travel: about, 221; and writing, 249, 259 travel book, Celati's version, 257 'The Trees' (in Meditation [Kafka]), 50 Treno di panna (De Carlo), 61-2 The Trial (Kafka), 48 Twain, Mark, 64 20 Under 30 anthology (Spark [ed.]), 62

Index 339 The Two Faces of January (Highsmith), 167 Tylor, Sir Edward, 229 Ulysses, 257 Ulysses (Joyce), 158 Una pietra sopra: Discorsi di letteratura e societa [Bygones: Discourses on literature and society] (Calvino), 78-81,142 Under 25. See Sotto i 25 Anni anthology (Tondelli [ed.]) United States: Celati in, 101-2; Italian connection, 62; minimalism in, 60-2 The universal square of all professions. See 'La piazza universale di tutti i mestieri' (Celati) University of Bologna, 33, 66,171 University of Massachusetts, 175 L'Uomo (Man), as Subject, 79-80 Updike, John, 274 Urbino convention (1968), 150 Va' dove ti porta il clito [Go where your clit takes you] (Luttazzi), 209 Va' dove ti porta il cuore [Go where your heart takes you] (Tamaro), 209 'vaghezza,' concept of, 114 Valesio, Paolo, 129,150 'The Value of Narrativity' (White), 73 Vassalli, Sebastiano, 36 Vattimo, Gianni, 39, 71 Vecchiatto, 182; against the cannibals, 208-20; hoax, 214-15 Vecchiatto. See Recita dell'attore Vecchiatto nel teatro di Rio Saliceto (Celati) verbal and the visual, 91,93,175

Verdi's theater (Busseto), 112 'II Verri/ 34-5,184-6 'Verso la foce: Reportage, per un amico fotografo' (Celati), 96,99, 106-7,134; in Viaggio in Italia, 102-3 Verso la foce [Towards the river mouth] (Celati), 75, 87,105-6, 128-9, 212,249,258 Viaggio in Italia (Ceronetti), 251 Viaggio in Italia [Voyage in Italy] (Celati), 96, 99,102 Viaggio nel '900 [Voyage in the Twentieth Century] (Corti), 257 Vico, Giambattista, 33,129-30 Vidal, Gore, 167 video maker, Celati as, 123-37 videos. See 'II mondo di Luigi Ghirri' (Celati [video]); Strada provinciate delle anime (Celati [video]) La vie, mode d'emploi (Perec), 158 Visconti, Luchino, 100 'visibile parlare' (visible speech), 912,109 visible, and the external, 182 visible truth, of Melville, 45, 47 visual media: role of, 12,31, 93. See also 'II mondo di Luigi Ghirri' (Celati [video]); Strada provinciate delle anime (Celati [video]) visual and the verbal, 91, 93,175 'La vita naturale, cosa sarebbe: Modernitat und Identitat in Gianni Celatis Narratori delle painure' [Natural life, what would it be: Modernity and Identity] (Kuon), 242 Vita nuova (Dante), 15 Vite brevi di idioti (Cavazzoni), 175-6 Vittorini, Elio, 10,143,150

340

Index

Viva Voce (Out Loud) project, 198 voice: of Carter, 165; of old age, 208-20; and orality, 139, 208; role of, 12; of the visible and invisible, 170-4 Voices from the Plains, 11. See also Narratori delle pianure Voyage in Italy. See Viaggio in Italia Voyage in the Twentieth Century. See Viaggio ml '900 (Corti) Wahl, Francois, 153 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 20 Walser, Robert, 113,140,258 Warhol, Andy, 85 Waugh, Auberon, 167 Ways of Seeing (Berger), 170 weak thought, 31; philosophers of, 13,146; postmodern, 39,41, 70-1 Un weekend postmoderno (Tondelli), 251 Wells, H.G., 104-5 Wenders, Wim, 168 West Africa, 248-9 Western fictions. See Finzioni occidentali (Celati) Western world, 267

'What is an Author' (Foucault), 3-4 White, Hayden, 10, 71-3 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 31,195-6 working-class speakers, 192 Works and Lives (Geertz), 229 writers: Anglo-American, 140; feminist, 161,197; French, 140; industrialized, 193; Irish, 177; Italian, 3, 11-12,32-3, 209,249-57; narrative friendship of, 160-1; as narrator, 184; women, 140 writing, home as metaphor for, 174 Young humans in flight. See 'Giovani umani in fuga' (Celati) Zanichelli, Dizionario etimologico, 223 'Zerografie' [Zerowritings] (Fachinelli), 54 zigzagging: adventures, 258; in Africa, 249, 262; journeys, 104; of the Piazza, 159; public readings as, 201; through Celati's work, 13, 32, 39-41, 56, 76,182; through the middle, 90 Zola, Emile, 183