Ideology and mythopoesis in Giorgio Vasta’s “Il tempo materiale”

Author di David Ward

In his 2008 novel Il tempo materiale, Giorgio Vasta takes his readers on a journey through time and space. Set in 1978, the novel’s opening chapter is dated January, its final one in December. Each of the novel’s thirteen chapters is accurately dated by month and year, and sometimes days[1]. As readers, we encounter many of the historical events of that year ‒ the Acca Larentia killings of neo-fascist militants in January, the kidnap and murder of Aldo Moro between March and May, the football World Cup in June. The novel is full of topical references to television shows, publicity and personalities of the time ‒ Raffaella Carrà, Raimondo Vianello, Sandra Mondaini. As to space, save a short excursion to Rome, the novel is set entirely in a Palermo that Vasta meticulously walks us through. Street map of Palermo at hand, we can follow the movements of the novel’s three preadolescent protagonists as they wend their way through the outskirts and centre of the city. Vasta even gives us the address of Nimbo, his central character and narrator: via Sciuti, 130, a real street and a real number.

Yet, as critics have not failed to note, Vasta’s novel is very far indeed from being a «resa cronachistica» or belonging to a «regime di verosimiglianza»[2].

Starting with the novel’s central characters, three eleven year-old «preadolescenti anomali», who all have a gift for language and sophistication of ideological analysis well beyond their years, Vasta goes out of his way to denaturalize the reading experience through his use of hyperbolic, intense and extreme language. As Stefano Tofani has noted, Vasta offers his readers «parole, suoni, immagini e forme incantando il lettore, straniandolo, avvolgendolo in una lingua che raramente si legge»[3]. This is language as “other.” As Matteo Fontanone has pointed out, borrowing from the «stilemi del surrealismo, del noir e di una certa letteratura espressionista», Vasta’s prose engages in «una ricerca ossessiva dell’esattezza […] microscopica nel digerire la realtà attraverso il filtro deformante dello scrittore»[4]. Any realistic claims the novel may have are further undercut by changes in points of view and by the introduction of implausible elements such as talking animals ‒ a cat («lo storpio naturale»), a mosquito, a pigeon («il piccione preistorico») ‒ an intervention by the prophet Ezekiel, and by a short section of the novel set on Venus.

Vasta is playing contemporaneously on two tables: a mimetic one of recognizable time and space coordinates; and an anti-mimetic one of implausibility. These twin prongs act as a clue to what is perhaps most at stake in the complicated tapestry of Il tempo materiale: that is to say, the perception of temporal and spatial reality by way of cultural representation. As Raffaele Donnarumma has perceptively put it: «Vasta non ha la pretesa di raccontare la Storia: racconta come l’immaginario patisce la Storia»[5].

Vasta, then, pits the distorted time and space of the novel’s non-mimetic elements against the recognizable and mimetic elements of Italy in 1978, although as Vasta points out in an author’s note, some of the chronology is changed to meet the novel’s narrative demands[6]. Indeed, the distortion effected by language as it engages with the extra-textual reality of events like the Moro kidnap and murder by the Red Brigades, two of the text’s specific points of reference, is perhaps the overriding concern of the entire novel. Language is the protagonist of Il tempo materiale as much as its three eleven year-old linguistically dexterous central characters. One of them, above all: Nimbo, described by his school-teacher as «mitopoetico» ‒ a maker of words. This pleases him no end. It is around his mythopoetic status that Nimbo creates his sense of self. Language sets all three boys apart not only from their peers, but also from their elders and from the Palermo and Italy they live in. They despise the social and cultural reality they observe on the streets and on television; they subject it to a withering critique.

Yet, despite their linguistic ability, the boys’ analysis of the world they see before them is heavy-handed and Manichean, based on a series of antagonistic terms, coded either positively or negatively: ideology against irony; language against dialect; Rome against Palermo. The rush to irony is, for Scarmaglia, the leader of the group, one of the flaws of the Italian national character. Irony acts as a self-defense mechanism, a palliative that diverts Italians away from acknowledging the tragedy and horror of their everyday lives, a kind of comic relief that offers reassuring and easily digestible images of the nation and the lives of its citizens. Scarmaglia calls this the «italianizzazione del creato»[7], by which he means the creation of a protective buffer that isolates ordinary people from the potentially disturbing impact of brute reality. He references an adults only film ‒ Ultimo mondo cannibale ‒ he had once sneaked into a cinema to see. This is a real film, which came out in 1977 and was directed by Ruggiero Deodato. It falls under the category of cannibal exploitation film (in the UK, films such as this are known as video nasties). In fact, in the UK, the film was seized and confiscated. The film is genuinely nasty. It shows scenes of the decapitation and skinning of animals, human arms bitten off by crocodiles etc. Insofar as they cause degrees of dislocation and distress, for Scarmaglia such shocks to the viewing public’s system are to be welcomed, but he finds defects in the film. Certain scenes, he says, such as the one in which a westerner captured by cannibals plays a game of “I’ve got your nose” with the children of his captors deep in the jungle, lessen the film’s potential to disturb. Such reassuring scenes are, he says, but one more example of «l’impulso nazionale a tradurre ogni cosa in forme famigliari costringendo tutto a diventare provinciale […] Trasforma una foresta amazzonica nel tinello di casa»[8]. Acting as a distraction, irony makes the horror of life bearable.

Earlier in the novel, Vasta had already offered another illustration of the «italianizzazione del creato», this time with reference to Intervallo, the interlude that once existed between tv programs on Italian state television featuring picture postcard photographs of towns and villages: «il ponte a schiena d’asino d’Apecchio, la valle di Visso sparsa di case chiare»[9]. This, Nimbo says, is: «L’eterna Italia rurale e pastorale […] Il pittoresco, il locale, il premoderno, il genuino. La bella Italia semianalfabeta che per decenza ignora la grammatica»[10]; or the similar photographs of Italian landscapes that used to be on display in the second-class compartments of trains: «altre cartoline, altre mistificazioni nazionali»[11]. This Italy, the one the boys despise, is tepid, «del tutto incapace di assumersi la responsabilità del tragico»[12]; it has been beguiled by television programs into a state of supine, unthinking conformity. Ideology, on the other hand, is serious. It gets to grips with reality; it seeks no solace in irony. It is a no holds barred analysis of social reality, contemporary society and its ills, it forges order and meaning out of apparent chaos. In one of the chapters, set in June during the football World Cup, the boys watch the Italy vs France game. Italy’s equalizing goal is the result of a fortuitous series of rebounds and miskicks, a chaotic goal. The boys set out to tame the chaos of the goal by reproducing the actions that produced it in their local park: a cross from the left, a ball hitting the crossbar, a miskick and finally the goal itself. The boys’ goal, however, is not to celebrate either the goal or the victory. Rather, as Scarmiglia puts it: by repeating «all’infinito un’azione […] stiamo sottraendo un fenomeno al caso. Decidiamo che il caso non esiste, che tutto può essere compreso e dominato»[13]. This is the work to which they put ideology.

Ideology and language go together. A marker of the intelligence needed to carry out ideological analysis, language ability is the preserve of a gifted intellectual elite; dialect that of the amorphous masses unable to go beyond the diet of variety shows that deflect Italians away from serious thought and reflection. Palermo is the city of dialect and irony; Rome, the city of language and ideology. Rome is the city where serious things happen; death, for example. Nimbo watches television news reports from Rome of terrorist attacks. As he learns of the Acca Larentia killings of three neo-fascist militants, Nimbo imagines gathering the dead bodies and placing them in the pastoral locations on display in Intervallo ‒ «li metto nell’Italia che non c’è […] Restituisco i morti al resto d’Italia»[14] ‒ as a gesture to bring the unacknowledged tragedy of life ‒ death ‒ home to those places were tragedy has been replaced by a reassuring and comforting irony.

Rome and the Red Brigades

Rome is an entirely mythopoetic projection, the fruit of Nimbo’s fertile imagination. He knows Rome only through the images of the city he sees on television. These are enough to convince him that in Rome life is lived with greater intensity than it is in Palermo. So besotted is he, that on a short trip to the city with his parents, he imagines quite implausibly that a couple who joins the train he is travelling on with his family are members of a terrorist cell. Rome, for Nimbo, is not only the city of death, it is also the city of the Red Brigades. Like Rome, the Red Brigades are also a mythopoetic projection of Nimbo’s imagination. He admits he knows nothing of them, only «Quello che leggo. Qualcosa. Niente»[15]. They are, then, ripe to be invented. Nevertheless, or perhaps on account of this, the Red Brigades exert an enormous power of attraction on all three boys. On the face of it, the Red Brigades seem to offer an answer to the boys’ demand to be agents of change in society. They are attracted to the language of the Red Brigades’ communiques; they study them in great detail. They think Red Brigade language is performative, turning words into deeds. The boys too crave to leave a mark on the Italy they despise and be elements of disturbance that infect the social order. The boys’ politics is one of infection and contamination, one of the guiding metaphors of Vasta’s entire novel. He makes the metaphor do a lot of work. The boys see themselves as propagators of infection, contaminating the Italy of the late 1970s and disturbing the quiet of the social order: «Ben venga allora il contagio, penso, l’epidemia, un altro dio delle infezioni che imponga forma alle cose, anzi no, che le deformi, le cose, che le deformi e le mescoli tra loro. Se non è il tetano vanno bene i pidocchi e dopo i pidocchi, attraverso questi, verrà la lotta»[16]. Nimbo longs to be infected and early in the novel pricks his finger on a piece of barbed wire he finds in a field hoping that tetanus ‒ «il dio delle infezioni»[17] ‒ will consume his body. For the boys, the fever that infection brings is an excess that allows them to rise above the crowd to a level of enhanced perception and feelings. Wimbow, the girl Nimbo falls hopelessly in love with, is his «infezione più dolce»[18]; in her presence he lives life more intensely. Language too, for the boys, is an excess. It is also an infection, a «colpa»[19], a fever, a «febbre della gola»[20]. Nimbo likens himself to the prophets Ezekiel and Jonas (both referenced in the text). Like them, he has been chosen as a recipient of the gift of language, he too is «colmo della parola»[21]; he has been elected ‒ «il linguaggio che mi elegge»[22]; his mission in life is to spread the word, all the more if it is infectious.

All through the novel, Nimbo leaves literal marks using the barbed wire. He not only scratches and cuts himself, but also objects: his desk at school and, more ambitiously, the Barcaccia in Piazza di Spagna on his trip to Rome. Another mark is left when the boys shave their heads and parade their disturbing new physical appearance at the Fiera del Mediterraneo and on the beaches of Palermo.

The boys’ entry into political militancy comes via the Red Brigades. Scarmiglia is particularly taken by them. Their code becomes the code by which he lives his life. Red Brigade language speaks him. It is, then, a small step before Scarmiglia proposes that the boys create their own local terrorist group, in imitation of everything the boys learn about the Red Brigades: they form a «cellula», they give themselves «nomi di battaglia», they have a «direzione strategic», they carry out «pedinamenti» and a series of preliminary attacks on private property and their school, they decide to «alzare il livello dello scontro» and «colpire il cuore dello Stato», they write communiques, they kidnap a hapless misfit, named Morana ‒ a version of Moro ‒ and hold him prisoner; they take a polaroid photo of him holding a newspaper; and they kill him after horribly mistreating him for several days.

Of the boys, Scarmiglia is the ideologue; the third member of the group Bocca is the follower, while Nimbo, by far the most intellectually curious of the group, is the explorer, the investigator of the potentiality of language. As the novel progresses, differently from Scarmiglia, Nimbo becomes ever more disenchanted with the Red Brigades (although this does not prevent him from remaining part of the terrorist group and participating in the kidnap and murder of Morana). His initial hesitation comes when he examines the language used by the Red Brigades in their communiques. This is the first of two diametrically opposed encounters that convince Nimbo of the failings of language and set him off on a series of investigations into alternative linguistic systems. Reading the communiques, Nimbo finds them heavy and overly simplistic. As a boy with the gift of mythopoesis, he attempts to rewrite them, but ‒ try as he might ‒ he fails. He is trapped in the language of the Red Brigades: «Mio malgrado sono rimasto imprigionato nella fraseologia che intendevo riformare»[23]. Nimbo likens the Red Brigades’ language to death. It is like in the swimming pool when he is told to «fare il morto»: «Le frasi delle BR fanno il morto. Le frasi delle BR sono il morto. Le frasi delle BR fabbricano il mondo a forma di morte facendo finta di immaginare il futuro, la vita che verrà»[24]. In capturing and creating order, the grasp language exerts on reality is mortal. In the analysis the three boys carry out of Paolo Rossi’s goal, what is left is no longer a goal. It is, rather, a dissected corpse of a goal. Nimbo discovers that there is no place for mythopoesis in terrorist discourse.

Wimbow

The second encounter is with Wimbow. Nimbo is smitten with her. When he sees her at a birthday party, she occasions a «precipizio del linguaggio, armonia e barbarie, chiarità e mistero, e ombra e intrico, e fusione, magma, nutrimento, cenere»[25]. Nimbo is here lost for words, a rare occurrence. All he can do is express himself with an act of self-laceration ‒ he cuts his mouth on a glass ‒ symbolically severing his tongue, perhaps. Wimbow defies language; she drains words of any meaning they have: «quando la vedo passare […] sento le parole bella, bellissima percorrere una traiettoria curvilinea, trafiggerle dolcemente la carne e scompare nel suo buio, e so che quelle parole non potrò mai più dirle a nessuno […] dirle a un’altra persona sarebbe una bugia»[26]. Wimbow goes beyond what even the intellect can say about her: «Non conosco il suo nome, non so quanti anni abbia. I miei, credo, a occhio, anche se con lei l’occhio sbaglia, è insufficiente, e anche l’orecchio»[27]. In these two encounters, Nimbo finds that language is too heavy-handed, not light-fingered enough.

Nimbo seeks out alternative language forms in a number of ways. First, he writes letters on the shells of snails before setting them free in the path of Wimbow, in the hope that she will read and understand their message of love; second, he and the other boys invent the alfamuto, a non-verbal language of visual signs they draw on, appropriating visual images from mass culture as an alternative system. New meanings are assigned to each sign: Adriano Celentano’s Yuppi Du pose is repurposed to mean «pericolo incombente»[28], John Travolta’s iconic Saturday Night Fever pose means «imprevisto»[29]; Aldo Moro’s position in the back of the Renault where the Red Brigades left his dead body is death[30]. But neither of these entirely private systems works. Wimbow has no idea what the snails’ message is supposed to be; and when the boys take their terrorist activity to another level by burning their school headmaster’s car, Nimbo attempts to tell a group of passing schoolkids to stay away from the vicinity using the alfamuto. The result is that one of the kids is badly burned as the car explodes and goes up in flames. And in the novel’s final pages, Nimbo’s attempts to establish a channel of communication with Wimbow through the alfamuto also fail miserably.

On other occasions, Nimbo tries out direct contact with the reality around him as if he was attempting to skirt around the mediation of language: he smells, tastes, licks, touches and presses down hard on the surface of the objects he comes across; he punctures his own skin, as well as that of stray cats and hard surfaces both to leave a tangible trace and to access the unknown and deeper mysteries that lay below the surface of things. In the tepid Italy of the late 1970s, where the masses’ perception of reality has been dulled and anaesthetized, by mobilizing all his senses Nimbo seeks out a richer ontological engagement with reality, an enhanced perception of the world around him: «intorno a noi sento la fotosintesi accadere»[31], he tells us. As Walter Benjamin argued in his On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, in order to deal with the sensory bombardment of life in the modern age humanity has created for itself a «screen against stimuli», a dulling or anaesthetization of the senses that is necessary for survival, but which leads to sensory deprivation[32]. But this is not for the mythopoetic Nimbo. Against the anaesthetized mass of the «dialettali», he is the aesthetic hero living life at an intensity unknown to them. If for Benjamin, sensory alienation was a defense mechanism that allowed the modern self to protect itself from the turbulence of twentieth century reality that had been occasioned, Benjamin argued (and Freud before him), by the shell shock of World War 1 and the constant bombardment of perception in the modern era of mass communication; for Vasta, that same deadening of the senses has come from RAI 1, and its sister channels. Nimbo brings all the senses to bear on his investigation of reality. He would agree with Susan Buck-Morss when she writes in an essay on Benjamin that «The original field of aesthetics is not art but reality ‒ corporeal, material nature […] It is a form of cognition, achieved through taste, touch, hearing, smell ‒ the whole corporeal sensorium»[33]. In its original guise, aesthetics was a relationship with reality, a mode of cognition, a way of getting to know the world, a cognitive mapping. It is this original function that Nimbo’s touching, tasting, bringing pressure to bear, smelling of objects and persons seeks to recuperate: «Avvicino la bocca alle nocche e mi sembra, la luce, di berla»[34]; and at the very end of the novel, Nimbo’s encounters with Wimbow culminate in a feast of the senses: «[R]aggiungendo dopo tanto tempo qualcosa che è sorgente e foce, per la prima volta sento il suo odore. Bruno, terrestre, saldo e perenne. La visione che non scompare. In un respiro annuso la sua vita»[35].

In an interview with Marco di Marco for Magazine, Vasta remarks that behind the writing of Il tempo materiale was his desire to explore what he calls «una filigrana, uno strato subliminale […] il rimosso»[36]. Nimbo is Vasta’s agent in this research. Monica Jansen has used the term «realismo sintomatico» to indicate Vasta’s excavations into the «reale che si sottrae alla realtà»[37]. After the experiments with alternative language systems fail, the novel ends in a silent embrace between Nimbo and Wimbow, as if the closeness that the sound of their names suggest, is at last achieved without the mediation of language. Vasta himself indicates as much in an interview with Ilaria Giannini when he says: «Forse alla fine del romanzo Nimbo riesce a trovare un varco, un’alternativa non totale ma parziale al linguaggio, si permette il lusso di qualcosa che non è il linguaggio»[38]. The final pages of the novel suggest that Nimbo has achieved a degree of redemption that has allowed him to leave behind the lure of the Red Brigades and the cycle of everyday violence in which he and the rest of Italy are trapped. Before this though, Nimbo had engaged in several acts of cruelty. He mistreats animals and participates in the torture of Morana. Scenes of violence are everywhere in the novel. In the course of the novel, Nimbo discovers his and the other boys’ «capacità di compiere il male»[39]. Only in the absence of words can Nimbo envisage an alternative existence, a relationship of love and empathy (the alfamuto has no sign for love, for example): «Ed è solo adesso, quando nella fabbricazione della nostra notte le stelle esplodono nel nero, che alla fine delle parole comincia il pianto»[40].

It would be going too far, I think, to see this final scene of rapprochement as illustrating the death of language. Vasta writes, after all, «alla fine delle parole», not “alla fine del linguaggio”; and the night is still fabricated. Rather, what we see in the final pages of the novel is the inkling of a new language, the language of silence, the language of respect, the language of non-intrusion, a language that makes no claim to possess completely the reality with which it engages. Even though he is writing in reference to another book, this view of language is not too far from what Vasta praised in his review of Luca Rastello’s Piove all’insù, which like Il Tempo Materiale is a novel that investigates why so many young Italian men and women were attracted to terrorism. Of Rastello’s novel, Vasta remarks on the way it approaches the «imprendibilità del tempo, di ogni tempo», and how «si confronta con qualcosa di imprendibile, sapendo che rimarrà imprendibile»[41]. Note the use of the verb: “confrontarsi”. Engage with that which is ungraspable. This is not the death of language. Rather, it is a call to arms, a call to mobilize language, to develop new forms so that language can rise to the challenge of narration.

Wimbow is that challenge. Vasta does not seem overly concerned about using a young, dark-skinned and mute immigrant girl as his materialization of an otherness that beggars language; nor that he is hardly original in drawing on an age-old trope of woman as that which escapes the control of the male gaze and language. For the narrative exigencies of the story he is telling, Vasta needs a figure of radical mythopoesis like Wimbow, a young girl whose muteness enables Nimbo to treat her as if she were a blank page, so he can play her off against the aridity of Scarmiglia and the Red Brigades’ ideological claim to know it all. Nimbo’s mythopoetic relationship with Wimbow is contingent on the fact that he knows little about her, a state he seeks to preserve as long as possible. Nimbo does all he can to maintain the separation between Wimbow the girl he sees and meets in everyday life and Wimbow his creature: «Della bambina creola ignoro tutto. Ne sono consapevole, lo faccio apposta»[42]. And even when he does receive more information about her, he transforms the signifiers and the referents to which they point into sound images: «La parola Wimbow che non sembra una parola. Sembra un suono preso da fuori, dai fenomeni»[43].

Scarmiglia, however, goes out of his way to burst Nimbo’s mythopoetic bubble. It is he who quite deliberately feeds Nimbo real world information about Wimbow ‒ that she is from the Antilles, that her name is Wimbow, that she is mute, that she has been adopted, for example ‒ so that his margins for mythopoesis are reduced. Or as Nimbo puts it: «le parole di Scarmiglia […] fanno esistere la bambina creola […] la trasformano in realtà dandole un nome e un’origine. La biografia che fa pressione sulla creatura»[44]. This is what Nimbo doesn’t want. He needs Wimbow to remain «solo un fenomeno. Una creatura. Senza che niente la sporchi, senza l’oltraggio di una storia»[45]. Scarmiglia is deliberate in his attempts to limit Nimbo’s mythopoetic activity. He knows that mythopoesis and terrorism are antithetical and that Nimbo is more mythopoetic than he is a terrorist. Scarmiglia proposes that Wimbow be the group’s second victim. When Bocca asks why, Scarmiglia says he wants to «studiarla […] capire chi è?»[46]. Nimbo wants the opposite: «volevo soltanto godere del puro fenomeno senza sporcarmi con la sua storia»[47]. Scarmiglia «invece cerca la comprensione. La conoscenza. Vuole intrappolarla nell’ambra della nostra celletta. Immobilizzarla. Farne un fossile»[48].

Scarmiglia knows that mythopoesis represents openness, uncertainty; and that terrorism represents closure and certainty. He knows too that the ties Wimbow establishes with others are a danger to Nimbo’s continued commitment to the terrorist cause. It is when Scarmiglia proposes Wimbow as the next designated victim that Nimbo rebels against his former comrades and becomes that most despised of terrorist figures, the “delatore”, a police informer or turncoat.

Nimbo’s terrorism had always been different from Scarmiglia’s. What Nimbo desires in his terrorist activity is the same kind of lightness of touch that he aspires to in his interactions with Wimbow and that he identifies and admires in Rastello’s writing. As Scarmiglia’s leadership of the terrorist project evolves as a carbon copy of the Red Brigade model, the reasons that brought Nimbo to the project fade into the background. At one point in the novel, after the boys’ initial terrorist attacks against school property and the headmaster’s car, the police investigations begin to focus on the school itself and its students. Nimbo is pleased that the police are now investigating an infection that has its origin and point of propagation at a local level: «si accetta che il male possa generarsi dal basso. Da noi. Una progressiva messa a fuoco che invece di preoccuparmi mi fa piacere. Sento la gioia della legittimazione»[49]. Nimbo likes the undefined space between invisibility and visibility that he and other boys inhabit. They are, he says: «percepiti attraverso l’invisibilità. La nostra ambizione originaria»[50]. That original plan has now been betrayed by the heavy-handed leadership of Scarmiglia. Nimbo regrets that the mythopoetic has been supplanted by the ideological and turns his back on the terrorist project.

Vasta’s Il Tempo Materiale is far from being an easy read. At times, his dense, high octane prose approaches a state of delirium, verging on the impenetrable; and the pages that describe acts of violence and cruelty that are spread throughout the text, whether on animals or humans like the poor Morana, make for a harrowing reading experience. As one of the perpetrators of the torture inflicted on Morana, which leads to his death, Nimbo is fully invested in political violence. Yet, as the novel reaches its final pages, we find reason to glimpse a boy taking his first steps on a journey of emancipation, even redemption, that frees Nimbo from what he had called a few pages earlier «l’infezione delle parole»[51]. All through the novel, Nimbo had been associated with a halo, a sign of his mythopoetic exceptionality, and the source of the nickname he has chosen for himself. The moment of release comes when Wimbow removes the halo from Nimbo’s head freeing him from the words that have up to then kept him prisoner:

Wimbow si alza, fa un passo verso di me, mi tocca il collo, le guance, gli zigomi, mi mette le dita a raggiera. Sento il calore dei polpastrelli, sento che mi placa. Poi Wimbow solleva le mani verso l’alto (e il mio nimbo scompare e al mio nimbo, mentre scompare, Non sono io?, domando, Non sei tu, risponde), mi guarda e nel suo sguardo c’è il tempo calmo, poi mi lascia e torna indietro, nella penumbra dietro la sedia a dondolo[52].

It is when Wimbow removes the halo that Nimbo is transformed and released from both the self that he was and the words that had kept him prisoner. He now approaches that state of «il tempo morbido, liquido, il tempo materiale» he had desired for so long and that now replaces «le parole, migliaia di frasi, questa ordinata strage di insetti […] Perché ancora balena il linguaggio quando vorrei solo entrare nel silenzio, nel tuo silenzio, e piangere, smettere di sentirne solo il bisogno e piangere?»[53].

Wimbow, then, is the respite to the violence that has permeated the novel, the violence of language and the violence of ideology. This is the didactic streak that runs through Vasta’s novel, a lesson to be learned. Nimbo comes to realize that blind allegiance to ideology leads to violence and death, what is worse, it leads to the justification of violence and death in the service of a political project. As the text makes clear, 1978 in Italy was what Vasta in an interview with Claudio Martino for the Radiotre program Fahrenheit called a «tempo critico e farriginoso». It was a time ripe for violence, when a generation of Italians was seduced by the myth of Red Brigade violence. This, of course, is Scarmiglia, who buys uncritically into the myth; initially, it is also Nimbo. Scarmiglia remains on the Red Brigade trajectory throughout the novel, even as he is arrested; Nimbo deviates from it; Scarmiglia is unrepentant; Nimbo is «pentito». Upon his arrest, Scarmiglia utters the phrase that he, loyal brigatista, has long yearned to utter, the Red Brigade slogan par excellence, «Mi dichiaro prigioniero politico», «la sua frase magica e maiuscola»[54]; a couple of pages earlier, Nimbo had confessed that while Scarmiglia «lavorava per diventare prigioniero politico, io ho lavorato per potermi dichiarare, adesso, prigioniero mitopoetico. Solo questo. Il piacere di stare nelle frasi»[55]. To be sure, both Scarmaglia and Nimbo remain prisoners of myth. There is no alternative to myth, but not all myths are created equal, one is political, Scarmiglia’s, which leads to rigidity, violence and death; another is mythopoetic, Nimbo’s, which is based on openness, creativity and even redemption. Vasta’s Il tempo materiale is a highly ambitious novel: positing mythopoesis against ideology, he plays two philosophies of language off against each other ‒ one embraced by the communiques of the Red Brigades that claim to possess the truth of reality; the other, that of Nimbo, who comes to realize that reality cannot be grasped by language; but more than that, in seeking to offer insights as to why so many Italian young men and women succumbed, along the lines of Scarmaglia, to the call of the Red Brigades in the 1970s, the novel also goes further by suggesting that a mythopoetic attitude to life, along the lines of Nimbo, acts as an antidote to the seductive charms of terrorist ideology and the robust certainties its language appears to offer[56].

 

  1. As Alice Flemrová (A. Flemrová, Il tempo materiale e lo spazio sensoriale. La Palermo di Giorgio Vasta, in Viaggi minimi e luoghi qualsiasi. In cammino tra cinema, letteratura e arti visive nell’Italia contemporanea, edited by Monica Jansen, Inge Lanslots and Marina Spunta, Firenze, Franco Cesati Editore, 2020, pp. 79-90: 81) notes, «i singoli capitoli seguono l’ordine cronologico dei singoli mesi, ma in totale non sono dodici, bensì tredici, perché il 1978 è stato l’anno delle tredici lune [nuove], ovvero l’anno dello squilibrio e delle crisi emotive». ↑

  2. C. Ghidotti, Giace sul fondo del mio piatto. Deformazioni e riuso di Aldo Moro ne Il tempo materiale di Giorgio Vasta, in Il caso Moro. Memorie e Narrazioni, edited by Ugo Perolino, Leonardo Casalino & Andrea Cedola, Massa, Transeuropa, 2016, p. 83; see: https://www.academia.edu/21871972/_Giace_sul_fondo_del_mio_piatto_Deformazioni_e_riuso_di_Aldo_Moro_ne_Il_tempo_materiale_di_Giorgio_Vasta (last accessed March 27, 2024). See also M. Comitangelo, «un romanzo che sacrifica alla fiction ogni pretesa documentaristica». See: https://www.academia.edu/10030468/_Rendere_concreto_linvisibile_Sul_Tempo_materiale_di_Giorgio_Vasta. ↑

  3. S. Tofani, Giorgio Vasta-Il tempo materiale, in frailibri, September 7, 2009, p. 1; see: https://frailibri.wordpress.com/2009/09/07/giorgio-vasta-il-tempo-materiale/ (last accessed March 27, 2024). ↑

  4. M. Fontanone, Tra nuovi realismi e traumi mancanti: le costellazioni del romanzo italiano contemporaneo, BA Thesis, Università degli studi di Torino, Dipartimento di studi umanistici, p. 133; see: https://www.academia.edu/38229399/Tra_nuovi_realismi_e_traumi_mancanti._Le_costellazioni_del_romanzo_italiano_contemporaneo (last accessed March 27, 2024). ↑

  5. R. Donnarumma, Giorgio Vasta, Il tempo materiale, in «Allegoria», 60, July/December 2009, p. 218; see:

    https://www.allegoriaonline.it/300-giorgio-vasta-qil-tempo-materialeq (last accessed March 27, 2024). ↑

  6. See G. Vasta, Il tempo materiale, Rome, Minimum Fax, 2012, p. 275 (all quotations are from this edition); English translation by Jonathan Hunt, Time on my Hands, London, Faber & Faber, 2013. ↑

  7. Ivi, p. 121. ↑

  8. Ibidem. ↑

  9. Ivi, p. 12. ↑

  10. Ibidem. ↑

  11. Ivi, p. 35. ↑

  12. Ivi, p. 75. ↑

  13. Ivi, p. 90. ↑

  14. Ivi, p. 12. ↑

  15. Ivi, p. 45. ↑

  16. Ivi, p. 75. ↑

  17. Ivi, p. 19. ↑

  18. Ivi, p. 47. ↑

  19. Ivi, p. 56. ↑

  20. Ivi, p. 15. ↑

  21. Ibidem. ↑

  22. Ivi, p. 57. ↑

  23. Ivi, pp. 180-81. ↑

  24. Ivi, p. 73. ↑

  25. Ivi, p. 29. ↑

  26. Ivi, p. 48. ↑

  27. Ivi, p. 47. ↑

  28. Ivi, p. 112. ↑

  29. Ivi, p. 115. ↑

  30. Ivi, p. 122. ↑

  31. Ivi, p. 85. ↑

  32. See W. Benjamin, On some Motifs in Baudelaire, in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Trans Howard Eiland, Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 175-77. Using Benjamin’s terminology, we could say that Nimbo turns away from Erlebnis, the anesthetized encounter with experience and toward Erfahrung, unmediated experience. ↑

  33. S. Buck-Morss, Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered, in «October», 62 (Autumn), 1992, pp. 3-41: 6; see: https://www.jstor.org/stable/778700?seq=1 (last accessed March 27, 2024). ↑

  34. G. Vasta, Il tempo materiale, cited, p. 36. ↑

  35. Ivi, p. 273. ↑

  36. M. Di Marco, Intervista a Giorgio Vasta, in «Magazine», 45 (2008). ↑

  37. M. Jansen, Il ’78 di Verga e di Vasta: Il tempo materiale a prova di ideologia, in Verga innovatore/Innovative Verga – L’opera caleidoscopica di Giovanni Verga in chiave iconica, sinergica e transculturale, edited by Dagmar Reichardt & Lia Fava Guzzetta, Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang, 2016, pp. 297-310: 310. ↑

  38. I. Giannini, Intervista a Giorgio Vasta; see: http://www.mangialibri.com/interviste/intervista-giorgio-vasta. ↑

  39. G. Vasta, Il tempo materiale, cited, p. 221. ↑

  40. Ivi, p. 274. ↑

  41. Interview with Giorgio Vasta conducted by Cecilia Ghidotti, July 28, 2014, quoted in C. Ghidotti, “Gli anni settanta non sono il fine”. Tra rimosso e iper-esposizione: scrittori italiani contemporanei e racconto degli anni settanta, in «Studi culturali», 7, 2 (2015), pp. 228-29. ↑

  42. G. Vasta, Il tempo materiale, cited, p. 47. ↑

  43. Ivi, p. 133. ↑

  44. Ibidem. ↑

  45. Ivi, p. 48. ↑

  46. Ivi, p. 238. ↑

  47. Ibidem. ↑

  48. Ibidem. ↑

  49. Ivi, p. 235. ↑

  50. Ibidem. ↑

  51. Ivi, p. 265. ↑

  52. Ivi, p. 272. ↑

  53. Ivi, p. 270. ↑

  54. Ivi, p. 267. ↑

  55. Ivi, p. 265. ↑

  56. My thanks to the anonymous reader for suggestions as to how to improve this essay. They were much appreciated. ↑

(fasc. 52, 31 luglio 2024)