Nearly all his statements in every field or sector, even in matters that had nothing to do with money, were always completed and sealed by the same turn of phrase: “And you can all trust someone like me, who’s made a bundle of cash!” There are those who claim that his continual harping on money is due to his incurable fear of death. Others think it’s the parvenu’s revenge, the need to lord it over those he’s overtaken and outstripped in terms of wealth. Others think that he mentions it constantly in order to arouse admiration and the desire to identify with him, because, in their view, the Italians now have money as their sole and exclusive value. Others still believe that it’s simply an imitation of the manners of American businessmen, who show no false modesty in declaring the size of their fortunes, “Last year wasn’t a particularly good one, I only made thirty-five million dollars . . .” even though I doubt that they do it with such ostentation, just as I doubt that a retiree trying to make his pension last until the end of the month can be induced to identify with a man who’s delighted to boast so shamelessly of his wealth, and admire him rather than hating him. I, personally, would be heartily sick and tired of hearing someone constantly say, “Look at me, take me for a model . . .!” the way this man does. What the hell kind of model, a model of what? Enjoy your millions and shut up about it, mutters the grouchy old man deep inside my heart, into whom I’ll be transformed physically, as well, in the fullness of time, waving a cane. Other people’s outrageous good fortune generally doesn’t arouse our finest feelings, our empathy or our benevolence. Quite the opposite.
Others still have built a theory about this incredibly successful entrepreneur and politician, namely that he actually represents the average Italian raised to a power, as it were, an ordinary Italian cubed, the sum and amplification of both fine qualities and defects, but especially of the common traits, neither good nor bad, that make up the Italian character: a sort of turbo-Italian, in other words, to use the phrasing employed during the war in the former Yugoslavia to describe the most vociferous nationalists of the various ethnic groups, turbo-Serbs and turbo-Croats. He, then, would be in fact a turbo-Italian, a faithful scale projection of the image that the Italians like to present of themselves, endowed with repulsive and undeniable vices and shortcomings, in some cases with impressive virtues. This opinion is expressed with the faintly disgusted tone, a note of commiseration, generally used to talk about Italy. What else can you expect, ladies and gentlemen, this is what an Italian is like . . . there’s nothing to be done about it. Lazy and hardworking, wise and utterly brainless, skeptical and fanatical, afflicted at the same time with an inferiority complex and a superiority complex, it seems that his amphibious character lends itself perfectly to the experiments of politicians and the fiery declamations of moralists, to both of whom he remains, deep down, completely indifferent. Let them write what they please. The scandal of his mobility and versatility cannot be solved by opinion pieces brandishing indignant prose or broadsheets of civic poetry. For that matter, when a national conscience is based almost entirely on rhetorical proclamations and crystallizations of legendary figures as saints and bandits, all it takes is a well-thrown rock to shatter it, and once the stained-glass windows that tell of their exploits have been smashed to smithereens, you plunge straight into the darkness of a lack of identity. Indistinctness remains the sole alternative to lies. Either the Italian is a half-true myth or else he doesn’t exist at all. From exaltation we go straight to a lynching. Even our bourgeoisie must be begged on bended knee to behave like a bourgeoisie, at least a little, what the devil, at least like others do in the rest of the civilized world, toward whom we have always nourished a profound envy mixed with scorn—the emotion that a sly servant feels toward a foolish master. Impossible to put ourselves on the same level as the others, we always have a special destiny, we Italians, a supremacy to boast of or a shame to conceal. The philanthropist turns out to be a pedophile, the hero that everyone adored actually broke into the offerings box, confirming the sensation that it was all just a trick, a well-devised deception that lay at the origin of their positive image. Theater, in other words, all on stage, and so we see the reason for our unyielding love of grand opera, not as an artistic genre, but rather as a social posture.
Periodically, and often at the hands of their illustrious compatriots, the Italians are scolded for not being French, or English, or Scandinavian, but rather, what they are, namely Italians. Already a century before the character in question, the great corruptor, entered onto the scene, there were already those who accused the Italians of worshipping the Golden Calf. Of having sold their souls. Which soul? With how many souls do we come equipped? We hadn’t yet even acquired a shred of identity and already we were complaining about having lost it.
NOW WE’VE COME TO THE POINT. Perhaps he, whose obvious name I will refrain from stating, is the only bourgeois who has ever had the impudence to manifest his own resentment, to vent it without restraint or inhibitions. Along with that resentment, his otherwise inconfessable ambitions: boundless aspirations. I am capable of; I am sufficiently wealthy to; I possess; I can do—everything. My purchasing power is limitless. I’m a friend and a father. As a well-known comedian likes to say about him, at a wedding he wants to be the groom, at a funeral he wants to be the corpse. The hundreds of jokes that circulate about him, making fun of his megalomania and his frenzy to be Napoleon, Jesus Christ, or, worst case, pope (with the name of Pio Tutto, an Italian pun on the name Pius and a phrase in Roman dialect that translates to “I take it all”), don’t fall far from the truth. What we can see in him is the extreme immoderation typical of an era that has overflowed its banks, where everyone is acknowledged the sacrosanct right to aspire to anything. In the bourgeoisie, grand ambitions are either lacking entirely or else they manifest themselves to a catastrophic extent. In a world divided into castes, the lives of individuals were assigned rigid tasks and horizons, from which it was impossible to escape, and greatness was measured precisely in the acceptance of those impositions of status and role, whatever they might be. In the world of the present day, the constraints have been loosened to such an extent that one can imagine, either with a dollop of anguish or boundless delight, that one has no destiny, no limitation marked in advance. You can never settle for what you’ve achieved and attained, and the boundary between mediocrity and glory becomes so blurred that people are constantly taking one for the other and vice versa, so that it becomes necessary to raise the ante for fear one might have set one’s sights too low. Hence the torment of having chosen the wrong path, both in the sense of having chosen the wrong objective and of having taken the wrong path to get to it, or else of lacking the pace needed to beat the others to the destination, getting there too late to keep them from taking the prize in your place. If the first error, choosing the wrong path, reveals an existential uncertainty, the second and third, following the wrong path or being too slow, are perhaps even more humiliating, because they mean you’ll find yourself outstripped in your lane by other competitors with greater skills or gifts, or who are perhaps simply more ruthless. Since no one is precluded from the outset from any objective (at least in theory), any goal that is attained proves frustrating because it might promptly be rendered vain by some other daring exploit.
There remained, in fact, on this same line, sex. Sex is the new frontier upon which commodification and merchandising and global saturation proceed: and it was in fact sex, a virtually uninterrupted bacchanal, it was that euphoric orgy of the thoroughgoing possession of everything, from the intimate body parts of young women dressed as candy stripers to the titillated minds of the fellow diners witnessing the group sex, it is no accident that sex was the triumphal apex as well as the beginning of the decline of the bourgeois champion I was talking about earlier. It is a physiological curve: the ultimate utilization, the extreme conversion of cash cannot be anything other than to buy the body, or multiple bodies, to reacquire the corporeal dimension from which it originates, its first provenance, to r
eincarnate. From the primitive force of the hand that hammers or scythes, to the rounded curve of two ass cheeks spreading to reveal a pussy and an asshole. It all returns to there. And after making that choice—to begin necessarily to grow old and die. It’s no longer economics or politics, it’s physiology.
But will the bourgeoisie ever manage to become entirely pornographic?
14
THE STAGES THEN WENT AS FOLLOWS: from an absolute ethic of sacrifice to be attained whatever the cost, to a morality of sacrifice for a cause considered rationally just, to the rejection of sacrifice for a cause considered rationally unjust, to the rejection in any case, whatever the considerations, of any sacrifice whatsoever. I don’t mean to imply that each of these ideas doesn’t have its own degree of truth and justification, nor that it’s impossible to survive with the ethics of the preceding phase in the following one.
ARE YOU STILL LISTENING TO ME? You are? Or are you getting tired? Do you want to put down the book and go to sleep, return it to whoever gave it to you as a gift, go to the bookstore and demand your money back? Well, I’m certainly sorry. It’s too late for me, but not for you. I could recommend skipping a few chapters and go directly to Part V, which is titled “Collective M.” That’s right, M, like the monster of Düsseldorf. In the meantime, I’ll go on for a while longer, observing the middle class under a magnifying glass. Who knows if I’ll manage to winkle out the little insects I’m looking for. Their sting can cause surprising effects. I myself was stung by them, and infected, and driven to this obsessive inquest.
IF SOMEONE TELLS ME, “Stop!” I go on.
THE GRAVEST THREAT to the middle class comes not from below, as it always believed, but from its own innovative spirit. It is for this very reason that there exists a fraction of the middle class that remains conservative to the verge of sheer obtuseness, that struggles to hold tight, with tooth and nail, to the old ways in order to avoid being swept away by the velocity at which the world is spinning, after the shove it was given by the other fraction. The world spins, whirls, and as it whirls it flicks out of their orbits all those who failed to sink strong roots, or at least that’s the anguished sensation from which they flee headlong, hastily erecting anchorages that create at least the semblance of a continuity, of a tradition. The patrimony—in appearance the one thing for which the bourgeois are willing to fight, even if that means fighting against members of their own family—is the symbol or the equivalent of what must be defended from erosion, namely, life itself, with its values, its meaning, which appears every bit as ephemeral and at risk. The danger that capital runs on a daily basis shows just how precarious all the rest is: and the success or failure of a business proposition goes well beyond the simple economic outcome—that is why these operations must either be celebrated in a triumphal manner or alternatively cause abysmal dismay, given that they are the only indicators that can establish whether or not progress has been made in the correct direction. It’s not that the bourgeois are so grimy-hearted that they can think of nothing other than money: but what other parameter ought they to measure themselves against? Their hearts, like everyone’s, are swollen with desires, confused dreams, delicate ideals or violently romantic ones. The unit of measurement, however, remains cash. The admirable and pathetic efforts with which they often seek to emancipate themselves from the dictatorship of the economic principle (for example, by treading the paths of cultural reparations, attending exhibitions and concerts, becoming collectors, patrons of the arts, connoisseurs of taste of style) do nothing but confirm the supremacy of that principle and its almost irresistible magnetism, and I say “almost” because there can be no doubt that it’s possible to break away from it, with an act of pure will, or else as a result of a distinctive psychological inclination—let’s go ahead and call it a perversion. I confess that I feel a sense of solidarity by and large with those old-school professionals, be they functionaries or industrialists, who trembled at the thought of seeing their sons manifest artistic ambitions: it’s inevitable to consider such aspirations a form of degeneration, a self-deceit, a betrayal, or even worse, the hightoned claim to be spiritually superior to their fathers. You want to be the conductor of a symphony orchestra instead of running the woolen mill? Good boy, that way you’ll feel that you’re better than me . . . There is always something healthy about anti-intellectualism, something almost naïve, creatural, a sort of intuitive realism that knows how to identify the levers that move the world and seize them unhesitatingly. With the same nonchalance displayed in handling money. It’s only logical then that the well-to-do should be worried if a son of theirs displays a vocation that might lead him astray from the principle of utility, even if in this new role he were to be kissed by fame and success. However illustrious, he would remain forever subalternate, strictly decorative.
Intellectuals: the dominated portion of the dominant class.
That’s the real point. Allowing yourself to be swept away by the sublime execution of a piano piece does not, unfortunately, redeem the soul from original sin; rather it indicates that the flame of suffering for that sin will never die out. A love of the beautiful often springs from an inability to produce it. Or even understand it. There is no school of thought more mercilessly bourgeois than Marxist thought, in the version that reduces and consigns all phenomena to the economic sphere. Determinism only produces more determinism, just as money produces more money. That which is denounced or unmasked, by that very fact triumphs. Like fate in a Greek tragedy, the more you hurl yourself against it, the more ineluctable it becomes, the more gigantic it looms. Marx’s thought is a form of bourgeois thought, stripped of all hypocritical decorum, and from this brutal stripping bare comes the clear-eyed, humorous nature of certain of his pages, and the reason that they now lie abandoned—leaving aside the fact that they failed in political terms. Too cynical, too brilliantly simplistic to appear credible. Denuded of its ideological and aesthetic ornaments, the dominion of the economic factor becomes truly grotesque or slides toward the Jewish joke, like the one about Isaac the shopkeeper, who on his deathbed, by now almost blind, wanted all his children gathered around him: “David, are you here?” “Yes, Father, I’m here.” “And you, Rebecca, are you here, too? And Sarah and Myriam? And Daniel?” “Yes, Father, we’re all here.” “And Benjamin? Where is my little Benjamin?” “I’m here, too, we’re all at your side.” “Oh, really, you’re all here? Then who the hell is looking after the store?!?”
The key term is “sharp-eyed,” which is to say, having a keen eye on everything: eyes to monitor, calculate, weigh, measure, and compare everything.
Like the eye of God, watching over every material and spiritual activity, is the economic spirit, which scrutinizes and gauges from on high, or perhaps we ought to say, from down below, since it underlies every initiative or thought. Even the incommensurable and the sublime can be quantified, by calculating the worth of a canvas, its present-day quotation with a view to its future value. The art collector perfectly represents this almost mystical abandonment to the apparition of the aesthetic event, yoked without inhibition to the calculation of self-interest. Will it be a good investment? While one eye grows languidly moist at the beauty in which it is being bathed, the other eye studies the price list. And the impressive thing is that this does nothing to induce cross-eyedness, no, the aesthetic eye and the economic eye are actually both looking in the same direction. It is along this parallel that the bourgeois identity travels, always teetering and in tension lest its paths diverge. It holds itself together thanks to diligence and application. It has none of the natural arrogance of the aristocrat, none of the wild spontaneity of the working class, but it is capable of affecting both the former and the latter, and when necessary making use in an instrumental fashion of things that do not inherently belong to it, be they style or ignorance. It is, in short, a modular identity, which can be assembled as desired, and as such demands incessant updating and feedback. How far can I go with the means at my disposal? How can I f
ield more effective tools in order to obtain more resources than the means I currently lack? If the objective were clear and established once and for all, you could simply accept the challenge or decide to throw in the towel from the outset: the problem is that the middle class never explicitly declares its objectives, such as for instance personal enrichment, because if it were to do so, it would lose all decorum, in its own eyes first and foremost, but it also can’t agree to declare itself satisfied with its current status, which would amount to admitting that it sets itself no objectives, and therefore lives a pointless existence. Between a looming sense of uselessness and the concealment of its own unconfessable objectives, the gamut of existential solutions opens out. Certainly, the minimum objective remains that of defending a certain status, of preserving a tradition: even if it’s difficult to claim that a little holiday villa at Ansedonia constitutes in and of itself a solid tradition, there is no question that being forced to sell it due to emerging financial difficulties can constitute a harsh blow from which more than a few have never recovered. The way it was for my aged grandmother, when she was forced to move from Parioli to the outskirts of Vigna Clara, to an apartment half the size of the previous one, and as a renter, not an owner.
The Catholic School Page 65
