Fantasy worlds are trotted out in lectures, at conferences, in hopes we can get students to read a book or two.
BUT PERHAPS the main interest that novels offer, their fundamental or perhaps only reason for existence, is that in them, worlds that have long since been swept away live on. Or worlds that will soon be swept away. For that sole reason, realistic novelists have an advantage over purely fanciful ones—if such a thing still exists, that is—since the world of the latter, never having actually existed, cannot disappear, and is therefore indestructible, which, while it may seem like a good thing in terms of durability, nevertheless deprives that text of the heartbreaking splendor that emanates from an endangered, vanishing universe.
What is truly marvelous is that which no longer exists.
Every great novel becomes incomprehensible.
And it is this very state of incomprehensibility that sucks us in.
5
WHAT ELSE CAN WE DO with them now?
Nothing.
We’ve already done everything we could think of to them.
You don’t waste a speck of the hog, from snout to tail.
They’re turning cold.
I can’t think of a single thing.
They’re no good to us anymore.
They just disgust me.
They were disgusting before.
Well, that’s not true. They’re kind of cute.
Not anymore.
And they really weren’t at first, either.
We didn’t take them because they were cute.
There are thousands more just like these two. Rome is full of girls just like them.
That’s why they’re perfect, because there are plenty more just like them. We’re not done with them. We can start over again tomorrow.
From scratch.
From scratch?!
Don’t you feel like it?
I don’t think I really like them all that much.
Who don’t you like, these two?
Women. Women in general.
Oh well, why don’t you just go ahead and like the fact that you don’t like them?
If we liked them, then we wouldn’t treat them like this.
We treat them like this because we like to.
If we didn’t like them, we wouldn’t be going out looking for them . . .
We aren’t looking for them: we’re hunting them.
How is that different?
When I see them like this, I’d like to choke the life out of them.
Today that’s what you did.
Why choke them?
To make them shut up.
But even if they shut up, it’s as if they were still talking.
They whine. Or else they’re arrogant. Arrogant and whiny.
And stupid!
So stupid.
All of them?
All of them. Do you think you know any who aren’t?
Mmm . . . your mother?
My mother? My mother isn’t stupid, my mother is deranged.
If she could hear you say that!
Trust me, she hears me. I say it to her, what do you think? I say it to her face.
What a bastard!
Like, what do you say, sorry? What do you say to her?
“You’re just a pathetic mess. A slut. A deranged lunatic.”
You tell your mother she’s a slut? I don’t believe you.
Neither do I.
All right, okay, I don’t say it to her face, outright. But I make sure she knows it, I let her know what I think.
What do you think?
Oh, lord.
What’s wrong?
I feel full . . . And when I feel full, I have to explode.
6
PRACTICALLY ALL FAMILIES have become bourgeois families, the model has spread like an infection. With no reference to their actual income, nowadays every family is bourgeois in the broadest sense, or rather, perhaps, we ought to say that the very effort involved in creating a family, running it and protecting it, is bourgeois, just as the methods used to dissolve a family are also bourgeois.
In any case, the pure and simple duration of the conjugal bond remains synonymous with its success. If it lasts, then it was meant to be; if it doesn’t, then it wasn’t. In order to complete the tasks that pertain to marriage, whatever they may be, years are required; and confirmations, the lapse of time, the repeating of things, latencies, growing accustomed, seasons that come and go, the slow construction of a past, endless variations on a beloved theme, obstacles, sicknesses, recoveries—in other words, diachrony. Faithfulness, if we choose to use the word not in the sense of exclusivity but of persistence. If someone by any chance wishes for happiness, they will have to wait, they must be patient, not that they’re necessarily unhappy in the meantime, that’s not what I’m saying, but they may eventually understand their happiness, that is, how happy they really were, only some time later. Unhappiness, on the other hand, can be detected immediately, there’s no need to let it decant: it’s there, today, right in front of you. Time gives a retrospective gleam and glow, the instant burns with absolute pain. But today we wish, in fact, we demand happiness, we have a right to it now, not on some random day in the future, when, looking back . . .
THERE IS NO TOPIC like the family capable of inspiring and unleashing the virulence of writers, thinkers, ideologues: it’s as if there was a reckoning awaiting. It seems as if they are taking vengeance on their own families by writing against families in general. A more-or-less veiled autobiographism veins and drives the more ideological attacks. There is no theme better suited to poisoning the language: against fathers, mothers, spouses, siblings, and even one’s children, that’s right, one’s children, we talk very seldom about the hatred that parents feel toward their children and prefer to give voice to the less surprising revolt of the children against their parents; even though the myth of Chronos is far older than the myth of Oedipus.
Modernity consists of this overflow of resentment, and its legitimation, when the right to murder the adjoining generation is overturned: there was a time when fathers held the unquestioned right of life and death over their children (“you clothed these wretched meats, / and you undressed them . . .”), but from the revolutionary era on, it is the opposite that rings sacrosanct, that the children have the right to rid themselves of their fathers. More than anything else, though, it is precisely the family as a structure that prompts scorn and irony among writers. Novelists, philosophers, psychoanalysts have all enjoyed good sport in mocking the abstract principles and concrete sins upon which the family rests, and in the course of just a couple of centuries, they have succeeded with the force of their arguments, but to an even greater extent, with the sweep of their style (normally tinged with cruelty, a satirical spirit, subtlety, but above all, resentment), in overturning millennia’s worth of celebrations of the virtues and serenity of that notorious institution. The nest of vipers, in other words, needed to have its lid torn off, and there may be not a single worthwhile book or short story from Romanticism on that hasn’t echoed as a specific j’accuse. The absolute masterpiece of the genre is Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, the story of a young man transformed into a cockroach, even though we are inclined to think that he already was a cockroach before the transformation because of the simple fact that he lived in the narrow tunnel of a bourgeois family. The story begins after the metamorphosis has already taken place, but it must have followed a lengthy incubation. A stroke of genius to have written no prologue, and just begin like that, because it’s already all clear . . .
WE BELONG TO OUR OWN TIME from head to foot: by rejecting it, we belong to it. We are distinctive products, exclusive property of a given time, which guards us jealously.
At the time when this story took place, the bourgeois family was still standing, even though the campaign to liquidate it was well advanced. The death of the family was being prophesied as something inevitable and preached as something just. The best way of demolishing an institution is t
o ascertain its advanced state of crisis, with instruments thought to be neutral. A body that has already decomposed cannot be preserved—unless you wish to hold on to the rot, the stench. Under the form of sociological and statistical observation, one is able to accelerate the very processes you are studying. If the term “death” might have seemed melodramatic, suggesting a hint of regret and remorse at the loss, because no one likes to see corpses lying around, especially when you consider that there were millions of those corpses of families still lying around—in that case the euphemistic “outmoded” was used instead of “dead.” To a historical-clinical glance, the family was outmoded. There was very little likelihood of being able to fight against obsolescence, pointless to kick back: when your black-and-white TV, your nonflat screen, your cell phone that doesn’t take pictures or really do anything, your PC with little if any memory are all “outmoded,” then there is nothing to do but replace them. For that matter, the old models will be promptly taken off the market, and even if someone wished to wallow in retrograde attitudes, they would no longer be able to find them. After all, let’s admit, there is nothing that could be snootier and more snobbish than this digging-in of feet. If something new comes along with a very clear identity and specific creators, then you can resist it and fight against it; but if it is presented as an impersonal force that acts according to fate, then you feel as if you are already possessed, in short, we have already made the choice without realizing it, or rather, it is we who have been selected, called, commanded. We have been living like sleepwalkers in a condition for some time now, and like sleepwalkers someone finally opens our eyes to our state. It is irresistible to comply with something that washes over all our heads like a wave. If we leaf through it like the page of a newspaper, the last century is dotted with death announcements. “It is with great bereavement . . .” or with a sigh of ill-concealed relief that we proclaim: the death of literature, the death of the novel, the sunset of movies, the fact that we’re running out of petroleum, the collapse of values, the disappearance of communism, the end of history . . . Why shouldn’t the family die, too?
The first exam I took at the university, just a few months after the CR/M, had to do with exactly these topics: the critique of the family. If I remember correctly, the course was in the Department of Moral Philosophy: under that umbrella, various seminars were held on all manner of topics, ranging from flower power to the language of schizophrenics. Schizophrenics were very widely studied, at the time, beloved of one and all, practically revered: in their feverish minds a revolutionary formula lay hidden. As I drew up my plan of studies, I’d opted out of philosophy courses that focused on such figures as Plato or Leibniz, whom I had already trudged through unhappily under the tutelage of Brother Gildo. They struck me as largely out-of-date and irrelevant compared with the ones we’d be studying in the Moral Philosophy course; all of them belonged to the so-called school of antipsychiatry, nearly all of them in agreement in their determination to liquidate that inconvenient, vicious, discriminatory, pathogenic, and unproductive institution: the family. The founder of the movement was the famous R. D. Laing, author of The Divided Self and Knots, books that I would go and read every morning on Piazza di Siena. I carefully underlined as I read. A great deal of my youthful interest was devoted to topics that were fashionable at the time: South American literature, progressive rock, conceptual art . . . It is these days, sadly, that I can no longer easily identify fields of interest to pursue, perhaps a sign of my own declining interest in life. I can remember the delightful vintage sound of those books as if they were so many songs by Pink Floyd: for example, Cooper, the legendary David Cooper, who apologized for being obliged to use in his writings such archaic and reactionary terms as “father” and “mother.” The idea that these figures were agents of a treacherous and powerful repressive apparatus. Our parents: useful idiots or enthusiastic executioners. The maternal instinct, rhetorical and deceitful; the paternal impulse, intrinsically authoritarian. Or the notion that the insane were simply misfits that the bourgeoisie (there you go again! the usual suspect!) had hustled out of the way, creating insane asylums and locking them up, so that they could go about their business in blessed peace. Anyone who opposes the accumulation of capital will be interned. Anyone who stands in the way will be shoved aside. Anyone who disturbs the family peace will be sent away and confined: that is the nature of “the cure.” In fact, back then it was a commonly held belief that peace was desired only by profiteers and oppressors, and that in any case peace constituted in and of itself a hypocritical concept, a conciliatory mask worn in order to better look after one’s own interests. I rejected peace on general principle and I despised peacemakers, or rather, I considered them to be sly dogs, like the ones at Giulio Cesare High School who weighed in, trying to separate the warring sides during the brawls that broke out, uttering words full of good sense (fuck them and their moderation, one of them became a cabinet minister, and here I am, still teaching the object complement and the agent complement to convicts in prison . . . strange, isn’t? Agent complement, the grammatical form expressed in: “the thief was caught by the police” . . .).
Families were death-dealing organisms, as soon as a child was born its family would saddle it with the name of a dead person. A ballast to lug after oneself in life. Upon baptism, a dead person was tied to a living one, the way the Nazis did before tossing Jews into the Danube, and the metal wire was the family tradition . . . to hell with that, too, if in order to respect that tradition I would have had to be named GERVASO! It’s a good thing my parents showed me that clemency, it’s just a good thing that in my ancestry, the Albinati clan, descended from Alba Longa, they were sufficiently uncertain of their karma that they changed their own names: there was a cousin of my grandfather’s who was named Mario in the legal registry (a perfectly normal name, right?), but instead he chose to be called Luigi—why on earth?!
You’re born hand in hand with a corpse. So during the course of your upbringing and education your parents will a thousand times prefer a docile zombie to a rambunctious child: a little boy who is basically already dead will be heaped with praise, while the one with a spark of life will be given regular punishments. “There are no bad children . . . there are only constipated children!” ran the ad for a laxative pill “with the sweet flavor of prunes.” Wickedness, as a moral concept, was the target of humor, and even more roundly mocked was its opposite number, goodness. The wicked were celebrated. Rehabilitated. Publicly acclaimed. When I was a boy, lots of things happened, to me and to the others. Things worth trying, or believing in, or fighting against.
As in any revolutionary era, the praise of infamy was dutifully sung.
AT MY FIRST EXAM, I met a young man who had gotten the highest possible grade, an A-plus-plus. Our conversation began with a perfectly ordinary question from me: “Are you studying philosophy?” and it ended a short while later.
“Yes, but philosophy only interests me somewhat. I want to be a psychiatrist, even though I’m not sure how much I like the term.”
“What term?”
“‘Psychiatry.’”
“Why, what would you call it instead?”
“I wouldn’t call it anything. To give things or people names is to do them violence.”
“Do them . . . violence?!”
THE LASTING SUCCESS of the family is due primarily to an absence of workable alternatives. Like the Settimana Enigmistica, Italy’s popular weekly puzzler, it boasts countless attempts at imitation, and in defiance of them all, it continues to sell better than the competition, that is, all the surrogates, parodies, or applications of the same principles with accompanying vices and virtues, on a different scale. Once you’d abolished the family, its problems were bound to resurface intact, often without even being able to enjoy the advantages of the old model, much less the new ones created by its demolition. The imagination of philosophers and politicians, of radical reformers and abolitionists, gave rise in the best of cases to a collec
tivization, at first perhaps joyous in spirit but, in time, inevitably forced and unnatural, of the canonical functions performed by the couple—love, sex, responsibility for and education of children, transmission of expertise, and so on.
THE BOURGEOIS WORLD is always a microcosm, and therefore it represents the entire cosmos to perfection. And this is how my quarter is introduced, the Quartiere Trieste, QT, a miniature universe all its own: homogeneous, smooth, devoid of handholds, of any nooks or crannies to hide in, since the quarter is itself a refuge: and how can you hide there if you’re already in a hiding place? How can you hide from the others if they’re curled up hiding in there with you? In the shadows where things are neither invisible nor truly visible . . .
It’s the syndrome of those who feel they’re being held prisoner by their own bodyguards: they’re supposed to be protecting me but, actually, look at this, they’re laying siege to me instead. How many times have I heard matrons complain about the presence in their home of their own housekeeper! “I’d far prefer to do it all myself than to have to find her constantly underfoot!” even though in point of fact they’d last two and a half days, no longer, without a maid, and so, it’s true, they heave a sigh of relief the minute she leaves for her weekly day off, but they heave the same sigh of relief that evening when the key turns in the door and she’s back.
They feel suddenly abandoned and suddenly invaded.
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