A
nation's decadence is also reflected in its literature. The Italian novel,
with the usual few and rightful exceptions, is boring, asphyctic, repetitive.
It deals with narcissism, it sails in indifference, it churns out self-pity,
it dozes in intimism. A mean, provincial, sentimental and ideological I
with tears and tremors for an unlucky love, for a political cause that
revealed a disaster, for social injustice is always looming in the background...
Our fiction is not going anywhere. It keeps on imitating itself, it groans,
it grieves... When it deals with sex it is nothing but waste butchery,
when it rediscovers a commitment, it bursts into rhetoric, when it broaches
disengagement it determinedly turns down the street of banality.
In their books our novelists
travel little, and even those who travel a lot actually never leave home.
Whether they go to Central America or Cochin China, there will always be
the Italy of Salvatores or Pieraccioni's movies, the eternal smell of cities
and of the countryside, the eternal unlucky disappointed people fleeing
their being nothing in the past to find themselves being nothing in the
present, the litanies of betrayals, of regrets, of sorrows, the old aunts
and the new pederasts, the mischievousness of never-grown-up high-school
students, the precarious people of life and of well-being...
In everyday life, they probably
travel as much as an average Italian, a lot. But they do not see anything
and nothing remains in their hands. Because when they travel they never
lose sight of Merate or of Signalunga, and they compare what they see with
what they left with a local yardstick, they swallow kilometres but are
always in their courtyards, in their porch, on their stairs... waiting
to wear again the slippers of the thought, to relish in the universe of
their certainties. They lack the dimension of challenges and dreams, they
fear the unknown, they loath adventure because of its “fascist” side that
years of minimal thinking taught them it does bring along. A mediocre country,
with no ambitions, no will of greatness, no aspirations going beyond a
new car or a videocassette recorder, mirrors itself in a mediocre fiction
where horizons are narrow, the protagonists are good for operettas, the
plots are non-existent or worn, the style is stale, and only the ambition
of a career, of appearing and of making money is boundless. It's the Christian-democratic
way applied to the novel... And then Italians are accused of reading too
little.
A couple of years ago the
French writer J.M.G. Le Clézio - little known in Italy but that
our publishing industry should consider in order to carry out its work
properly - was asked what writing meant to him. “Writing is ACTING”, was
his answer, with the latter verb in capital letters. What action is to
Le Clézio is well explained in his last two books, Gens des nuages
(published by Stock) and La fête chantée (Gallimard).
First of all it's getting
off the well-oiled route of modernity, with its only thinking, with the
idea that the western development model is the only judgement criterion
for all cultures, and that the technical, scientific and social progress
is a divinity in itself to which all ideas of diversity, moderation and
balance must be sacrificed. Le Clézio's conception of existence
is spherical, non linear: “Life is round”, there is neither a beginning
nor an end, a continuous progression... One leaves and comes back, we are
mingled in our yesterday that will be our tomorrow too, and understanding
what we were will allow us to tackle what we are and will be with full
knowledge.
An ancient Arabian verse
says: “This world is a mountain. Our actions are a cry whose noise is always
returning to us”.
Travelling, then, is not
necessarily an escape from something: “I am not a deserter. Rather, it
is feeling something attracting you. I am not fleeing from France, I feel
an inspiration towards Mexico”. Le Clézio divides his time more
or less equally between his native and his chosen land. With La fête
chantée he pays homage to the latter, to the stardust left by the
great civilisations that nourished it, a world “that was not founded on
reason, animated by this dance, this rush towards the magic, the supernatural,
based on a different, more primitive perception”.
Both in his novels and in
his essays, Le Clézio is intrigued by the wild spaces, the expanses,
the tie with nature and history, the idea of a common identity and tradition
despite the different human experiences. He is an anti-modern not because
he dreams of impossible returns to the past, but because he does not share
the eager desire to own, the frenzy of rhythms and relationships, the uprooting
and the mad and fast existence that the modern world brings along itself.
Gens des nuages is a fantastic but real journey he made with Jemia, his
Moroccan wife of Aroussiyne descent, to find her past, “unknown image of
herself”. “We wanted to hear again the names her mother had taught her,
as an ancient legend, that received a different meaning, a live sense:
the blue women, the Friday's gathering that had christened Jemia; the Chorfa
tribe (the descendants of the Prophet); the Ahel Jmal, the people of the
camel; the Ahel Mouzna, the people of the clouds searching for the rain”.
It is a journey à
rébours, backwards, that however projects the traveller into a timeless
dimension where planes confuse, the tracks of what it was tie to the present
of what one is, they help to cement what one will be in the future. It
is a journey to find a lost harmony, that is not an empty and mannered
Rousseauism, an age of gold, love and goodness that never existed. The
journey is supported by the conviction that a freedom from need keeps pace
with the freedom from possession, that real values cannot be measured with
the profits yardstick, that exists a time dimension that is fuller and
more suitable for the human being than the one that was finally imposed
on him.
Le Clézio, the enchanted
traveller of the world's enchantment, confirms that writing and action
in his books keep pace with one another in establishing a pluralist and
non dogmatic Weltanschauung that respects differences and where man finds
once more the freedom of being and of creating.
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