As you imagine you are destroying enemies, you will be satisfying an ancestral impulse that boring civilization will never be able to extinguish, unless it turns you into a neurotic always taking Rorschach tests administered by the company psychologist. But you will find that destroying enemies is a convention of play, a game like so many others, and thus you will learn that it is outside reality, and as you play, you will be aware of the game’s limits. You will work off anger and repressions, and then be ready to receive other messages, which contemplate neither death nor destruction. Indeed, it is important that death and destruction always appear to you as elements of fantasy, like Red Riding Hood’s wolf, whom we all hated, to be sure, but without subsequently harboring an irrational hatred for Alsatians.
But this may not be the whole story, and I will not make it the whole story. I will not allow you to fire your Colts only for nervous release, in ludic purgation of primordial instincts, postponing until later, after catharsis, the pars construens, the communication of values. I will try to give you ideas while you are still hiding behind the armchair, shooting.
First of all, I will teach- you to shoot not at the Indians but at the arms dealers and liquor salesmen who are destroying the Indian reservations. I will teach you to shoot at the Southern slave owners, to shoot in support of Lincoln.
To shoot not at the Congo cannibals but at the ivory traders, and in a weak moment I may even teach you to stew Dr. Livingstone, I presume, in a big pot. We will play Arabs against Lawrence, and if we play ancient Romans, we’ll be on the side of the Gauls, who were Celts like us Piedmontese and a lot cleaner than that Julius Caesar whom you will soon have to learn to regard with suspicion, because it is wrong to deprive a democratic community of its freedom, leaving as a tip, posthumously, gardens where the citizens can stroll. We’ll be on the side of Sitting Bull against that repulsive General Custer.
And on the side of the Boxers, naturally. With Fantomas rather than with Juve, who is too much a slave of duty to refuse, when required, to club an Algerian. But now I am joking: I will teach you, of course, that Fantomas was a bad guy, but I won’t tell you, not in complicity with the corrupt Baroness Orczy, that the Scarlet Pimpernel was a hero. He was a dirty Vendeen who caused trouble for the good guy Danton and the pure Robespierre, and if we play French Revolution, you’ll participate in the taking of the Bastille.
These will be stupendous games. I.magine! And we’ll play them together. Ah, so you wanted to let us eat cake, eh? All right, M. Santerre, let the drums roll! Tricoteuses of the world, unite and let your knitting needles do their worst! Today we’ll play the beheading of Marie Antoinette!
You call this perverse pedagogy? And you, sir, antifascist practically since birth, have you ever played partisans with your son? Have you ever crouched behind the bed, pretending to be in the Langhe valleys, crying, Watch out, the Fascist Black Brigades are coming on the right! It’s a roundup, they’re shooting, return the Nazis’ fire! No, you give your son building blocks and have the maid take him to some racist movie that glorifies the extinction of native Americans.
And so, dear Stefano, I will give you guns. And I will teach you to play extremely complicated wars, where the truth will never be entirely on one side. You will release a lot of energy in your young years, and your ideas may be a bit confused, but slowly you will develop some convictions. Then, when you are grown up, you will believe that it was all a fairy tale: little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, the guns, the cannons, single combat, the witch and the seven dwarfs, armies against armies. But if by chance, when you are grown up, the monstrous characters of your childish dreams persist, witches, trolls, armies, bombs, compulsory military service, perhaps, having gained a critical attitude toward fairy tales, you will learn to live and criticize reality.
1964
Three Eccentric Reviews
Bank of Italy, Fifty Thousand Lire, Italian National Mint, Rome, 1967
Bank of Italy, One Hundred Thousand Lire, Italian National Mint, Rome, 1967
The two works under examination could be described as editions numerotees in folio. Printed on both recto and verso, they also reveal, against the light, a delicate watermarking, a product of the most skilled craftsmanship and a technology rarely achieved by other publishers (and then only with great effort and often at disastrnus economic risk).
Still, while these works possess all the characteristics of a collector’s edition, actually an immense number of copies has been printed. This publishing decision, however, has not resulted in an economic advantage to the collector, for the price is still beyond the reach of many fanciers’ pocketbooks.
The paradox-editions that on the one hand flood the market and on the other can be valued only (forgive the expression) by their weight in goldcauses also the eccentricity of their circulation. Perhaps inspired by the example of municipal libraries, the amateur, to have the pleasure of possessing and admiring these editions, must be prepared to make serious sacrifices, but he will then quickly pass the works on to another reader, so that the edition keeps circulating, going from hand to hand. Inevitably the copies deteriorate through use, yet this wear and tear does not diminish their value. It might even be said that wear and tear makes these works more precious, so that those who wish to possess them redouble their efforts and energy, prepared to pay more than the list price.
These facts underline the ambitious nature of this publication, which has met with the widest approval, though the venture must be justified by the intrinsic
value of the product.
And indeed, when the critic starts examining the actual stylistic merit of the works under review, some doubts about their validity begin to surface, even the suspicion that the reading public’s enthusiasm is due to a misconception or else inspired by speculative aims. First of all, the narrative is in many respects incoherent. For example, in Fifty Thousand Lire the
watermark appears on the recto, symmetrically opposite the head-and-shoulders portrait of Leonardo da Vinci, and this image can be interpreted as Leonardo’s Saint Anne or Virgin of the Rocks; but in One Hundred Thousand Lire it is hard to conceive what relation, if any, exists between the apparently Hellenic woman in the watermark and the portrait of Alessandro Manzoni.
Is the woman perhaps his Lucia interpreted in a neoclassical style, painted or engraved by an earlier artist like Appiani, who had somehow foreseen the creation of Manzoni’s hero
ine? Or could she be-but here we sink to the most obvious and scholastic allegory-the image of an Italy that has some filial connection with the Lombard novelist? An exaggeration of the political activity of the author of Carmagnola or a typical avantgarde device reducing ideology to language (Manzoni father of the Italian language and hence father of the nation, etc., etc. -a dangerous syllogism in the style of Gruppo 63 !). The narrative incoherence can only put the reader off, and in any case it will have a deleterious effect on the taste of the young, so we must hope that at least they and the less educated classes will be kept well away from these pages, in their own best interest.
But the incoherence goes deeper. In the context of such fastidiousness, whether neoclassical or bourgeois-realistic (the portraits of the two artists and the landscapes of the verso seem based on the canons of the cheapest sort of socialist realism: a concession to the policies of our center-left coalition?), it is hard to see any reason for the violent insertion of the exotic motive «Payable to the Bearer,» which evokes the vision of an African safari and a line of blacks laden with bales of merchandise, forming a queue to obtain something in exchange for their extorted labor, a scene right out of Rider Haggard or Kipling and surely inappropriate to the subtext here.
But the incoherence found at the level of content appears. also at the formal level. What is the purpose of the realistic tone of the portraits, when all the surrounding decoration is clearly inspired by psychedelic hallucinations,, presented like the visual diary of a Henry Michaux journey into the realm of mesca line? With vortices, spirals, and undulant textures the work reveals its hallucinatory purpose, its determination to summon to the mind’s eye a universe of fictive values, of perverse invention . . . The obsessive repetition of the mandala motif (every page includes at least four or five radiating symmetries of obvious Buddhist origin) betrays a metaphysics of the Void.
The work as pure sign of itself : this is the end result of contemporary literary theory, and these editions confirm it. Perhaps there are collectors who aspire to gather these pages in a volume, potentially infinite, as happened with Mallarme’s Livre. Vain effort, because the sign that refers to other signs is lost in its own vacuity, behind which, we suspect, no real value exists.
An extreme example of the cultural dissipation of
