We work today in order to be able to laze about tomorrow. Saving up money means saving up time. The generations follow each other in successive waves of hardening and softening.
But the sense of impotence is not only a reference to frustrated ambitions, to the frenzy of possession. It can also have a broader, deeper scope, and ultimately include every aspect of life, extending beyond life itself. It is as if the disappointment caused by one’s awareness that one is no longer influencing things in any substantial way were vented in an obsessive effort to exert control over the external appearance of those same things. Hence the cult of the façade, the propensity to consider the aesthetic exterior, the need to “keep up appearances,” whatever the cost. If a parent can do nothing to control his children’s savage hearts, if he is unable to pilfer their secret thoughts, then that parent will unleash his efforts on the clothes they wear, ensuring those children at least go out into the world clean and tidy, uttering no foul language. This was true thirty years ago, nowadays the children of those children and, to an even greater degree, the daughters of those daughters swear like truck drivers, and are only sporadically reprimanded for being potty mouths. The frustration of indulgent parents is due to the fact that they never wanted or managed to exert power that in the form of educational necessity—directed therefore toward the children’s upbringing, meant for their own good—might in any case afford them a pleasant sensation. Not so much of authority in the traditional sense, but rather of the ability to shepherd the chaos of things into an established form, to master them, at least in their external aspect.
If you can’t get into their heads, you can at least force them to go to the barber.
IF YOUR ULTIMATE GOALS fall short, then retrench to the intermediate ones. Often the values that you have assigned as your objective are so elevated and out of reach that you are forced to fall back on the instrumental aspects that served to attain them: thus, since you are never going to be able to satisfy entirely your aspirations to social prestige or happiness, you’ll settle, normally, on money. A spiderweb of intermediate objectives, of partial successes, of special interests winds up veiling and concealing that which you once thought was the only thing worth living for. You move to the middle, if you can’t reach your ultimate destination, you lull yourself in movement, in transit.
THIS SOCIAL MODEL has a very precise equivalent in aesthetic terms, according to which one’s natural inclinations, idiosyncrasies, and passions must be sacrificed and shaped in order to ensure that they comply with a higher-order schema: in bourgeois life, in fact, that would mean work and the family—in creative pursuits, works of art. Individual drives must be “placed at the service” of an objective that fulfills them but at the same time transcends them. In this sense, marriage, too, after its fashion, is a work of art—a portentous psychological and social artifact. The melancholy bourgeois aestheticism, on the one hand, aspires to and yearns for vitality, pure and simple, while in contrast it also recoils from it or aspires to tame it with the teaching of good manners, with the asceticism of renunciation, precisely as an artist does when, immersed in the array of options and seductions, in order to achieve his work of art, he must stylize with brutality, discarding pages and pages, rough drafts, and in some cases truly outstanding materials. Though they are viewed in common parlance as diametrically opposed and antithetical, the bourgeois and the artist actually turn out to be similar and close, at least in terms of the ruthless and cynical use that they make of life. Neither an artist nor a spouse, if self-aware, expects to claim any right to personal happiness, since that is not the goal to which they aspire: they are at the service of their creation far more than that creation can be said to be in service to them. The effort of the bourgeois, moreover, is twofold, since for various and curious reasons, every story, every adventure that concerns him (sentimental, conjugal, and even commercial) is already at the outset a story of degradation. It’s inevitably a Death in Venice. When the bourgeois protagonist achieves success and becomes wealthy, his advance constitutes nothing more than the prelude to a subsequent ruin, either partial or total. The state of equilibrium so laboriously attained is invariably lost the minute it is achieved. His peace of mind—threatened and disfigured. While he seems to be committed to the struggle to improve his condition in life, the bourgeois is every bit as determined to make an attempt to restore the harmony that he had achieved up to that moment. As he advances inexorably toward the future, his eyes are fixed on a past that he no longer knows where to situate. What is the past for a member of the bourgeoisie, exactly where is it to be found? Life must be redeemed, transformed, if necessary overturned, its polarity reversed: by definition, the existential art is that of transforming the banal into the sublime, the sublime into the familiar. The order that derives from this series of painful acts of censorship will, in the end, prove broader, more complex, and more generous than the possibilities, immense though they might be, that have been excluded.
Similar even in their contradictions, the bourgeois and the artist unite prudence and audacity, method and recklessness, they scrape together their winnings, patiently, day by day, and then, like thieves, they suddenly lay their hands on great riches. But if there hadn’t been a hard and daily routine of preparatory labor, they would have been unable to pull off their capers, their business deals, their brilliant hunches. They achieve dexterity through practice. Both bring to fruition not only their virtues, as is right and self-evident, but also their vices. Their invaluable bad inclinations. It is from their malevolent impulses, appropriately channeled, that they draw the force for renovation. Precisely like a resentful member of the bourgeoisie, or a cunning merchant, an artist finds the strength to outdo himself and his competitors in the shape of the resources that can be drawn from his ignoble side, aspects that stimulate his inventiveness. Dark deposits and veins of ore, glittering with inspiration. The raw material, awaiting refinement. Out of anguish, out of envy, out of desperation, out of remorse, out of perversion, and even out of infamy, he will draw the contents of his works and, most important, the sheer energy needed to shape it. He could not do without vice, which allows him to learn to know and administer himself. Likewise, the artist, every bit as much as, and even more so than the bourgeois, yearns to distinguish himself. To the point that this aspiration to recognition can turn into a delirium. He nourishes himself bitterly on his irony toward the results thus far attained. If he has sold fifty copies of his book, he wishes he’d sold fifty-one. If he has sold five hundred thousand, he still wishes he had sold one more. Otherwise, it is suffering, and suffering is infinite. But we’re not talking about money here. This is not merely a financial frenzy, and numbers are just the most accessible form in which it manifests itself. So simple that it might engender a misunderstanding: “All he ever thinks about is money.” Exactly the same thing that befalls the middle-class man. A comparable disquiet troubles the bourgeois and the artist. They each possess a vulpine spirit that affords them not an instant of true peace. They must prance, delve, roam, stick their nose where it doesn’t belong, sniff at life and then sink their fangs into it or else flee. When he hoists a statuette in one fist, displaying it to an audience of his peers who failed to receive one this time, the gesture is at once an act of acknowledgment and of vendetta. Take this, you stinking assholes, thank you, thank you so much, I owe you everything, I love you. The thirst for money that strikes certain artists in such a morbid fashion can only be explained as a boundless, disconsolate impulse to get even.
An incessant speculator, the artist is normally depicted as a spendthrift with his head in the clouds, incapable of making himself a cup of coffee or doing basic arithmetic, and this may even be true in certain exterior aspects, but within his domain the artist is an entrepreneur who plays his cards with utter ruthlessness. The game of chance cannot spare the most intimate, delicate, and dolorous aspects, the mysteries concealed at the bottom of the heart. Any artist worthy of the name speculates on everything: on the skin of o
thers, on his own flesh, on his innermost pains and sorrows, on his secret loves. He must take misery and make it pay, he must transform it into a work of art, this is his mandate. His wager, his investment. He cannot leave in blessed peace his brother who committed suicide, the young servant girl who died of consumption, his infant child in a Negro land, his father who was driving a buggy when he was murdered. As he celebrates their eternal rest in the grave, with hot, copious, scalding tears, he reawakens those dead. He brings them back to life, only to kill them again, as in a curse for ghosts. His need to give shape is greater than any self-restraint, exactly as is the accumulation of wealth for the bourgeois. There can be no other form of redemption for them, otherwise life would have no meaning. An artist’s patrimony is his works, his purpose is to increase their number and worth. Like the members of the bourgeoisie once they finally managed to get their hands on the large landholdings of the nobility, the artist endows value by fixing it in some formal plane to what lay uncultivated in the depths of the soul of the collective. He reclaims disease-ridden swamps, and with his work he makes them fertile and practicable. Thanks to the artists of the twentieth century, we can journey through the twists and turns of the psyche, and thanks to the bourgeoisie, we can travel the highways of the earth.
IN ORDER TO WRITE OR BRING to completion works of art, the impulse of resentment is not in and of itself sufficient, but it can always come in handy. It acts as a vehicle, as a fuel enabling propulsion, as an energy source from which you can draw renewed vigor when the forces of rational planning begin to fall short. While it may seem rather tawdry to depict the motivation or the very content of the artwork (as is the case for many moralistic and satirical writers, especially when they are working in the format required by newspapers and magazines, creating targets on a daily basis upon which to vent their frustration), it is, in contrast, the act of limiting themselves to providing the necessary energy that proves so very fertile. One of the bare essentials: like the provisions and the medicines that one packs before setting off on a journey. In and of itself quite repugnant, resentment over the long run can become a moral resource. Especially when it’s a matter of toughing it out and completing the artwork or volume, lavishing painful efforts that cannot be deemed justifiable in any other manner, not even to the eyes of those doing the work, much less anybody else’s. A man shut up in a room talking to himself (which in the final analysis is what writing really is), another man who spends months daubing at a picture, neither of them is likely to be met with much understanding by those who are instead motivated by a more evident or less self-centered utility. Since an artwork has no foundation other than itself, those who create it are driven by an impulse that is not only creative but also destructive. Otherwise, it would not be sufficient. The violence of the impulse neither offers nor asks for reasons. There’s a desire to get in a fight, make a clean sweep, make them pay dearly. But make whom pay dearly, and for what? Often, that’s unclear, and this in fact is one of the defining characteristics of resentment: that it rages and aspires and fights against who knows who. You put the worst and most detestable part of yourself into your work. As long as you can make it work, make it flow in the direction of the artwork. Hatred must be productive, otherwise, you might as well love. The secret desire for revenge on the world, or at least for redemption in the eyes of those who looked down on you with contempt, or didn’t bother to look at you at all, is kindled in even the noblest souls, it is the element of resentment that gives the bourgeois writer the urge to write. A true aristocrat would never go to the trouble and effort of finishing a novel.
AH, TASTE. Taste is more distinctive than opinions. It marks an individual in an indelible fashion, without any need to probe his principles. A print hanging on a wall or the choice of restaurant are far more powerful than any profession of creed or faith. Our egos are more deeply offended by disapproval of our tastes than of our ideas, since the former are intrinsic to our person and characterize it in a far more intimate and precise fashion than do the latter. It is easy to change your mind, while it is rare to acquire or lose style. In the years when this story is set, a respectable citizen would suffer far less grievously at the thought that his daughter might be a Communist than the sight of her going out in public dressed like a gypsy, wearing wooden clogs and long, loose flower-print skirts. In the life of any self-respecting family, what remains memorable are the furious lectures about clothing. Certain prohibitions concerning the merely exterior (“You can forget the idea of going out dressed like that, young lady!”) are every bit as neurotically imperative as the chief moral precepts, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not lie, get that makeup off your face, there, that’s where you see true authoritarianism snapping into action, when it comes to matters of taste. At my house, there were no problems of the sort, but I do remember clearly when my eleven-year-old sister, the most morally rigid little girl in the world, asked permission to go with her classmates to the hotel of an actor who was at the time playing the character of Sandokan on TV. Sandokan, the Malaysian pirate. It was nothing more than a matter of waiting outside the hotel to get an autograph. That’s all, an autograph. What are you talking about?! That’s completely out of the question. No way on earth. Have you lost your mind? Are you seriously asking me that? My mother refused to give her permission with, more than indignation, genuine astonishment. At that point, my sister, who never asked for a thing, never a thing at all, dug in her heels and insisted on being given that permission, which all things considered would have cost them nothing; she begged, she teetered on the brink of despair, she burst into tears, incredulous in her turn that she should be denied something that her girlfriends from school were allowed to do without any particular fuss—so why am I the only one who can’t go? Why can’t I but the other girls can? The crisis went on for a whole day, as she lay on her tear-soaked bed. The prohibition remained in place, the time for the stakeout at the hotel where the Tiger of Mompracem was staying came and went, with the tragic solemnity of all those opportunities that will never return in your lifetime, and the entire affair was erased as if it were a sort of family shame, buried deep, even though we, her brothers, went on for years afterward, alluding to it mischievously, every now and then, without warning. My sister would walk into a room, and we’d burst out in chorus: Sandokaaan . . . Sandokaaan . . .
I DON’T REMEMBER if she was ever told the reason. Aside from the generic explanations, such as “Just forget about it,” “That’s not the way,” “We just don’t, and that’s that,” “It’s simply a stupid thing to do,” parents weren’t obligated to explain the reasons for a refusal of that kind, and for that matter, they wouldn’t have known how. I believe that the argument against it was implicit and meant to remain that way: someday my sister would understand on her own, and then she would agree with my mother’s stern attitude; I felt certain that this hurt my mother as much as it hurt my sister, but she could not simply abandon her principles. Both of them, my mother and my sister, Alessandra, suffered a great deal over nothing, but that nothing was as solid as a rock. Insurmountable, impassable. A matter of taste.
So I’ll tell you the reason.
Because waiting for hours in the street for a television star to give you an autograph is not only stupid, it is, far worse . . . something only housekeepers would do.
Fine, nobody has housekeepers anymore, or if they do, they certainly don’t call them housekeepers, and they no longer read magazines like Grand Hotel and the kind of pulp novels housekeepers read, which in the meantime have become the core of modern fiction and literary imprints, with an avalanche of titles in the second person, often in the imperative mood, Let Me Look at You, Take Me, Forget Me, Don’t Move, Carry Me Off, Grab Me, Lay Me Down, Hold Me Tight, Listen to Me, etc.
THE BOURGEOIS VIRTUES ARE ECONOMIC in nature, they administer quantity more than they exalt quality. They are economic virtues: shrewdness, farsightedness, frugality . . . and then there’s punctuality, prudence, circumspection, thrift, hones
ty. I call honesty a strictly economic virtue when it requires no other quality in order to be observed. It’s by no means a despicable quality, let’s not misunderstand, but it ought to go without saying, like giving a customer correct change.
When other human qualities are required, for example, it accompanies courage, in the willingness not to conceal an inconvenient truth, or to reject compromises that violate one’s convictions, or else admitting one’s mistakes, and only then does honesty rise to the rank of the qualities that stand beside it.
RESENTMENT, on the one hand, can lead you to reinforce your honesty, as you proclaim your indignation toward those who, by failing to practice the same virtue, have obtained advantages greater than yours (at my house we referred to such people by the old-fashioned term of “scoundrels”), or on the other hand, it can push you to imitate them. If you can’t fight them, join them. This whispers a sense of impotence into the ear of those who see people less meritorious than themselves nevertheless advancing across the social chessboard. It is difficult to remain calm in the face of scandal. We wish to punish the protagonists and yet, at the same time, we envy them, tempted to do the same thing, even though our conscience depicts it as deeply repugnant, or even better, we’d like to enjoy the advantages without having to pass through the necessary and degrading act. We’d like to become rich without having to steal, in other words, have beautiful women without having to corrupt them or buy them. Which would mean remaining innocent. Without punishment, in the long term, the sense of guilt disappears as well. Just think what Pleasure Island would be without the donkey ears. The cult of legalism among the bourgeoisie is always poised on the verge of being overturned into its opposite, so powerful is the pressure of the resentment that drives it. The ideal equality to which envy aspires produces violent lurches far greater than the gaps it meant to bridge in the first place. Isolation from everyone and homogeneity with everyone. It is in fact leveling that causes the attitude of comparison in the first place and, as a result, an envy honed to razor sharpness on the most trivial of details: when there aren’t immense fortunes, castles, and horse-drawn carriages to eat your heart out over, then envy (and the desire for self-affirmation) focuses on, say, a pair of boots. Perhaps that was truer when I was a kid—nowadays the sheer overabundance of consumer goods has made our appearances roughly indecipherable, and the indicator of the things we buy is no longer a reliable marker of our social affiliation. Consumption has become deceptive. The indicators of wealth, now slippery. The objects that assign status, affordable and interchangeable. A 500-euro cell phone seems to be within reach of anyone who wants it, and even a Lamborghini doesn’t necessarily imply a wealthy heir behind the wheel. It may sound strange, but the objects of our envious resentment are not the incalculable fortunes, the estates of the great financiers. The imagination falters when it tries to grasp what it actually means to be Bill Gates, it can’t scale those heights. Instead, we tend to envy that which is almost within reach. We envy that which we believe we have every right to possess. We envy our neighbors, not people who are radically different from us. Those who are like us in quality, age, social category, similarity of fate.
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